#until he finds the occultist that did this and fix things | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

nouru-vi · 4 years

Photo

Here’s the WIP first chapter of an Allods fic I started working on today - WIP because it lacks a proper intro that I may or may not add later. The fic will star my characters Istharnax (pictured) and Talsa, and will deal with a custom storyline that tells how these two characters met for the first time, as well as loosely tying into the whole canon dealio with the Architects. SCP-flavoured fantasy Sovietpunk horror ahead (though there are not many specifics in this chapter yet).

"This installation is clearly experiencing major and highly concerning issues. Why have you not informed your superiors immediately?" the woman inclined her head slightly to the side, which reminded the nervous supervisor of a predatory animal. It made him even more nervous, and thus it took him just a bit longer to respond than expected.

"We have ran into some unforeseen difficulties during the experiments, and it took all our manpower to... to identify a solution. These difficulties have also caused disturbances in the Astral around us, so we could not even send messages. I was going to file a report as soon as the situation was sta- dealt with! There was no need to send an inspector after us immediately." He managed to work himself up into sounding proper indignant, and he emphasized the word inspector with perceptible distaste. One of the guards standing behind the Arisen woman made a face, shifting his gaze to the side. His expression said, "You're in for it now, buddy." The supervisor caught it, and at long last and way too late, began slowly questioning his life choices.

Istharnax's head returned slowly to its default position from its little incline. There was silence for several seconds as the piercing green points of her gaze tracked the beads of sweat beginning to run down the supervisor's forehead. When she spoke next, it wasn't in her usual way – the words entered the man's brain directly instead.

Her mental voice was in very deep contrast to the reverberating, metallic tone of her vocabulator. It was a voice that, under other circumstances, would have turned this man's legs to jelly. It was a voice that, by sheer virtue of its pitch and timbre, promised to give one the time of their life and then some, making the hearer promptly forget any and all potential concerns about this voice belonging, in fact, to a six foot tall cybernetic undead. However, what this voice now actually said only achieved the effect of burning shame and pants-wetting terror on the supervisor.

"Listen here, you pompous, insolent halfwit. I am an Occultist. I am tuned into the emotions and thoughts of those around me at all times. The amount of raw terror billowing through this installation and unceasingly echoing off the walls is making my skin crawl. I know that something horrendous has transpired, and I know that the personnel have been stumbling over themselves to muster any sort of effective response to it, let alone an appropriate one. And you, my friend, have, for some reason, been more terrified of delivering news of this disaster that transpired under your command, than of what the event may have unleashed. I would like to suggest that you relay to me, in your own words, what has been happening, before I wring it out of your monocellular brain myself like one squeezes the juice out of a fresh, ripe orange."

Through her monologue, the supervisor gradually pursed his lips, his eyes going wide as saucers as he stared at her, transfixed. He was growing aware that the faint, fixed smile of Istharnax's mask and the light of the pair of green photoreceptors drilling right into the core of his guilty soul would most definitely haunt his nightmares. Provided he lives long enough to have any, his treacherous brain added. The Arisen had not moved at all while she spoke, but now she crossed her arms and started drumming her fingers – fingers with such sharp and painful-looking claws, the supervisor noticed – on her elbow joint, the metal on metal going clickity-click-click.

The supervisor leaned back, unable to endure Istharnax's gaze any further and shifting his own to the surface of his desk. One of his hands grabbed onto the other in his lap to stop their shaking, as he slowly began to speak. "I... as you have likely been briefed, our task here is to... explore the possibilities presented by a new avenue of magitechnology... exponential mana splicing. We have determined that it has great potential for energy generation, as well as for weaponisation – it makes for a spectacularly powerful operating principle for weapons of mass destruction, in particular. That is... that was the research team's consensus for months. We have been running experiments in order to measure its exact capabilities, to refine the related technologies... it had all gone wonderfully smoothly, as you surely also know from previous reports that I had been sending very diligently." At this, he lifted his eyes again for a moment to meet the inspector's gaze, clearly hoping to see whether she considered this a mitigating circumstance. If she did, she wasn't showing it, silent and motionless again with her arms still crossed. The man sighed and continued.

"Everything was fine until nine days ago. The experiment we ran that day... suddenly reached critical mass. The system was shut down immediately, we did all we could, but... there was no stopping, and no way to prepare for, what would happen. There was a massive implosion, immediately obliterating everything within the experimental chamber. An anomaly was created. Before we could study it or assess the situation, it started slowly expanding. It consumes everything it touches, and within a few minutes, before we could realise the fact that it expands, it extended to the wall of the observation room for the chamber. The researchers present were sucked into the anomaly."

He paused, taking a deep, shuddering breath. To his surprise and utter bewilderment, an impulse entered his mind, which could only have been sent, judging by process of elimination, by Istharnax. It featured no words – instead, it felt like suddenly standing in a patch of warm spring sunlight, reassuring him and calming him down. He gave the inspector an astonished look, but the woman still did not move or say anything. Eventually, he spoke again, pushing the words out with great effort.

"Those it swallowed did not die, or disappear... we saw them again soon, once the growing anomaly had eaten through the walls into a corridor. They did not die, but... they came out broken. Wrong. In the worst sense you can imagine. Actually, imagine the worst thing you can. Got it? Okay, now put that on a factor of 10."

He leaned forward slightly with an expression of wild horror, digging his nails into the edge of his desk. "This... thing, is a hole in reality. A bottomless hole, where even the most essential rules of our world break down. Imagine the effects of that on people. Most matter gets destroyed by this anomaly, but not living things, for some reason. It's not a pretty sight." He was talking fast now, as if to get all of this out of his system as quickly as possible. "And you know what's even worse? These.. things that these people have become... Once they get a hold of a normal living being, can spread this condition to it. They do it purposely. Our only saving grace is that they don't seem to possess much strength or other ability to affect normal space, so they can only roam as far as we let them... until the anomaly eats its way through our walls and defenses, that is."

He went silent, and his face looked so gray that Istharnax prepared to jump out of the way in case he throws up all over the desk. She observed him silently, and eventually spoke again, with her vocabulator, in a quiet, almost kindly tone. "Why did you not send a messenger as soon as possible?"

"I... I don't... I wasn't thinking straight, none of us were. And I was terrified, okay? That this would be blamed on me, all on me... I... I realise saying this will likely get me into even worse trouble, but at this point, what does it matter? So, you know what? It would not be the first time! Not the first time that the City Council has to place blame, so it makes an example of the most readily available hapless sod involved!" He cut off, breathing heavily, and somehow his face managed to turn even more gray from horror at what he had just said, and to whom. Both guards standing across from him gave him looks one would give to a soldier who's just been shot through the lung.

But the inspector, for the first time, stopped looking at him. Her head tilted downwards slightly as her gaze wandered to the desk, and she stayed motionless and silent for at least half a minute. Then she let out a long sigh, a very strange sound coming from someone who does not actually breathe and speaks via vocabulator.

"I... see." Her eyes met the supervisor's again, and, astonishingly, he felt that the faint but ever-present menace was now gone from them. "Guards. Take him into custody, but do not send him back to Nezebgrad until I say so... or until it's your last opportunity to do so." She stood up, unfolding her long metallic limbs in a way that reminded the supervisor of a strange, bipedal, metallic harvestman. "Do not worry," she addressed him again, "I will make sure you are treated fairly. And I don't mean the usual 'fair trial' bullshit." The swearword was so out of left field and so strange to hear from the mouth of this terrifying, looming undead beanpole that the supervisor almost laughed. "You will receive punishment for the grave error of sending no message, but I will not let the Council put the blame on you for all of this. You could not have known this would happen. I have yet to find out if any surviving specialist staff members could have known, but I doubt it."

With that, she turned and strode out of the room, the supervisor still sitting motionless and staring after her even as one of the guards approached to handcuff him. He only snapped out of his bewilderment once the guard started nudging him to make him stand up, and had to shout "T-thank you, Inspector! Thank you!" to make sure the woman can still hear him, the metallic clangs of her footsteps echoing down the hallway.

#allods online #fan fiction #allods online fan fiction #horror #sovietpunk #arisen #my characters #istharnax #my writing

13 notes · View notes

theonyxpath · 4 years

Link

This week is a real hodgepodge of notes, which is pretty much just like our meeting today. A bunch of folks are under the weather – but still must attend! – and the rest of us tried to hit all the news we had pretty rapidly. So, we went over a lot of things, but there was no main topic.

So that’s what you’re all getting today, too!

Hunter: The Vigil 2e art by Tilen Javornik

We received our OK from WW/Paradox today for the Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Edition Kickstarter! WOOT! Looks like February the 6th at the classic 2pm EST is when our Vigil starts!

A reminder, since we continue to get questions, primarily about V5 Chicago By Night, that we are mostly doing Kickstarters to enable us to do an extra-good quality book and overprint the copies so we can get that game book into stores.

Tell your local retailer! Ask them to order our books from their distributor.

Speaking of Chicago by Night, just a note here to let folks know that, yes, we are aware that our non-US fulfillment shipper made an error and mislabeled a bunch of reward packages as boardgames. James addressed the issue in an Update to backers, so if you find further problems, please let James know via the KS message creator system so he is aware and can work to fix it.

But beyond that, I’ve been told that the backer packages will all be out at latest this week, so that opens the stage for Chicago to appear in stores in February, including the PDF and PoD versions on DTRPG. Next, the Dystopia Rising: Evolution and Geist 2e KS reward packages will go out in February, and should appear in stores in the following months.

Dystopia Rising: Evolution art by Sam Denmark

Veering wildly in a different direction, just a bit of a teaser to let you know that Eddy, Ian, Danielle, and myself are working on a secret Trinity Continuum: Adventure! lead-in project! If you remember, we did an TC: Aberrant webcomic leading up to it’s KS, so we think we’ve found a fun way to do a similar but different lead-in for TC: Adventure!.

For our Storypath Nexus Community Content site, we’re getting tons of submissions, and just ran into a problem we hadn’t anticipated. The Nexus is the first our our community content sites to contain multiple different gamelines (right now it’s Scion and the Trinity Continuum, but soon will include DRE and They Came From Beneath the Sea!), with very different themes and motifs. We realized that we need to be sure our community content creators don’t use material intended for one line in another.

This is a big deal art-wise, as both our illustrations and design elements are very specifically created to create a feel for a particular line, and we need that “brand identity” maintained. So Mighty Matt is going to underline in the Nexus “rules” the importance of creators not pulling images from one line into another.

We talked about being ready to release the first of the Yugman’s Guides to Ghelpad for the Scarred Lands line as the first of six bi-monthly PDF releases. Once these are all released, we’ll combine them into a single book with PDF and PoD versions. We learned a lot from the last couple of years’ worth of monthly Exalted releases (which are now over, and being finished and combined) and are applying that knowledge to this.

Yugman’s Guide art by Aaron Riley

Also, leap-frogging with Yugman’s, will be the Vigil Watch series of PDFs detailing the wild and the weird places around the Scarred Lands. So every month for the next year, we got yer Scarred Lands right here!

We talked about another secret project, but I never mentioned that here.

Discussions are being had for our Twitch 2.0 plans – basically we’re looking at more ways to provide more and cooler content on our wildly successful Twitch channel. Matthew and Travis Legge are forging this new plan, even as you read this! And until that happens, please check out the sched of our current stuff down in the Media section below, now with keen new Graphic! version!

We also talked about They Came From Beneath the Sea! and the next game in the series, They Came From Beyond the Grave!. I think getting TCFBtS! actual plays into streaming is vital, so I’m pushing for more of that in Twitch 2.0. The Terrific Trio of the Onyx Pathcast actually did a deep-dive into They Came From Beneath the Sea! on last week’s Pathcast, so take a listen on Podbean or your favorite podcast venue to find out all the steps Matthew went through in creating the game!

It is surprisingly in-depth (I can vouch for that, having been there for most of the creation process), even when the gang veer off into Vampire vs Twilight heated discussions.

And last but not least important, we discussed continuing to raise the pay rates for our creators, and how to best make that happen as we enter 2020. Hard to believe we are almost through the first month of this year already! But there you go: time flies when you do what you love and are making:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

Kickstarter!

Next on Kickstarter, we are looking at Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Edition for Chronicles of Darkness starting at 2pm EST on February 6th!

Onyx Path Media!

This Friday’s Onyx Pathcast features an interview with famed writer and bon-vivant Leath Sheales! Check it out direct on Podbean, or your favorite podcast venue! https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

A bulging schedule on Twitch this week with Vampire, Chronicles of Darkness, Pugmire, even more Vampire, Aberrant, Scarred Lands, Changeling: The Lost, Changeling: The Dreaming, Mage: The Awakening, and a special Eddy Webb Development Workshop video that will be of interest to fans and writers alike!

Or, in the new Graphics! version:

As ever, subscribe to our channel over on twitch.tv/theonyxpath

Our YouTube channel continues filling up with content, including the Onyx Path News! Do stay subscribed to youtube.com/user/theonyxpath to catch the news when it comes out live!

Occultists Anonymous get a little experimental this week with a how-to guide for building Mage: The Awakening legacies. Level Up Your Game – Making Mage Legacies: https://youtu.be/p7R6nmTzZ_g

The Primogen released a video previewing some of the upcoming content in Chicago Folios, which you can find right here: https://youtu.be/2JMV_VJrjwQ Do give him a subscribe!

Red Moon Roleplaying continue their actual play of V5 Cults of the Blood Gods, on their YouTube channel, Spotify, their website redmoonroleplaying.com and everywhere else good podcasts might be found! https://youtu.be/DeQfWH-EVD0

The Story Told Podcast have concluded the first act of their Exalted: Dragon-Blooded chronicle, the last episode of which can be found right here: http://thestorytold.libsyn.com/fall-of-jiara-23

The excellently-named Keeper of the Archive has assembled a triple bill for Trinity fans, as he has videos right here on the following: The Trinity Core: https://youtu.be/3-MkRv7z37s

ÆON: https://youtu.be/CMRBAEGnHfE

The Storypath System: https://youtu.be/RJgN6sGr0CQ

Do check them out and give them a like and his channel a subscribe!

Please check any of these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games!

Electronic Gaming!

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is awesome! (Seriously, you need to roll 100 dice for Exalted? This app has you covered.)

On Amazon and Barnes & Noble!

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue from which you bought it. Reviews really, really help us get folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these latest fiction books:

Our Sales Partners!

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there! https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost

Scarred Lands (Pathfinder) books are also on sale at Studio2, and they have the 5e version, supplements, and dice as well!: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/scarred-lands

Scion 2e books and other products are available now at Studio2: https://studio2publishing.com/blogs/new-releases/scion-second-edition-book-one-origin-now-available-at-your-local-retailer-or-online

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

And you can order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e at the same link! And NOW Scion Origin and Scion Hero AND Trinity Continuum Core and Trinity Continuum: Aeon are available to order!

As always, you can find Onyx Path’s titles at DriveThruRPG.com!

On Sale This Week!

This Wednesday, we will be releasing the first of our bi-monthly PDF releases of Yugman’s Guide to Ghelspad for the Scarred Lands on DTRPG! Collect them all!

Conventions!

More conventions will be listed for 2020 in the weeks to come-

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

N!ternational Wrestling Entertainment (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Contagion Chronicle Ready-Made Characters (Chronicles of Darkness)

Trinity Continuum: Adventure! core (Trinity Continuum: Adventure!)

Duke Rollo fiction (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

TC: Aberrant Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

RUST (Working Title) (Scarred Lands)

Under Alien Suns (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Mission Statements (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Adversaries of the Righteous (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Hundred Devil’s Night Parade (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Novas Worldwide (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Redlines

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #2 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Second Draft

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Exigents (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Crucible of Legends (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Many-Faced Strangers – Lunars Companion (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Development

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

TC: Aberrant Reference Screen (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Contagion Chronicle: Global Outbreaks (Chronicles of Darkness)

Contagion Chronicle Jumpstart (Chronicles of Darkness)

Manuscript Approval

Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)

Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum Core)

Post-Approval Development

Scion LARP Rules (Scion)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Titanomachy (Scion 2nd Edition)

One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)

Player’s Guide to the Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Editing

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Geist 2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

Mythical Denizens (Creatures of the World Bestiary) (Scion 2nd Edition)

Pirates of Pugmire KS-Added Adventure (Realms of Pugmire)

Yugman’s Guide to Ghelspad (Scarred Lands)

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Terra Firma (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Lunars Novella (Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Buried Bones: Creating in the Realms of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Post-Editing Development

TC: Aeon Ready-Made Characters (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

W20 Shattered Dreams Gift Cards (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th)

TC: Aeon Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Vigil Watch (Scarred Lands)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Wraith20 Fiction Anthology (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

Hunter: The Vigil 2e core (Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Edition)

Let the Streets Run Red (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Indexing

ART DIRECTION FROM MIKE CHANEY!

In Art Direction

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant

Hunter: The Vigil 2e – All KS art is in.

Ex3 Lunars – Art is in.

TCfBtS!: Heroic Land Dwellers – LeBlanc working on finals.

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed – Finals should be in end of month, lining up layout artist.

Cults of the Blood God (KS)

Mummy 2

City of the Towered Tombs – Recontracted.

Let the Streets Run Red

CtL Oak Ash and Thorn – Contracted.

Deviant

Legendlore (KS) – Starting to gather art needs for KS.

Technocracy Reloaded (KS) – KS finals coming in.

Scion Companion – Working on art notes for that with Meredith.

TC: Aeon Terra Firma – Getting that rolling out.

In Layout

Trinity Continuum Aeon: Distant Worlds – Travis doing the layout on this.

Pirates of Pugmire – With Aileen.

Yugman’s Guide to Ghelspad – First installment this week.

Scion Mythical Denizens – In proofing but need some full page art to come in.

Contagion Chronicle – Getting files together for Josh.

Vigil Watch – Going over layout proofs.

Proofing

Dark Eras 2 – Backer PDF out to backers, errata coming in.

Trinity Continuum Aeon Jumpstart

They Came from Beneath the Sea! – Backer PDF out to backers, errata wrapping up.

VtR Spilled Blood – At WW.

Chicago Folio – Awaiting 2nd proof corrections.

Wraith20 Anthology – At WW.

At Press

V5: Chicago – Shipping to backers.

Geist 2e (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition) – At fulfillment shippers.

Geist 2e Screen – Shipping to fulfillment shippers.

DR:E – At fulfillment shippers.

DRE Screen – Shipping to fulfillment shippers.

DR:E Threat Guide – Helnau’s Guide to Wasteland Beasties

Memento Mori – Awaiting errata for input.

Today’s Reason to Celebrate!

Today is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. Ending evil of that magnitude, freeing those who lost so much and were so brutally abused and dehumanized, that is truly something to celebrate. The crimes against humanity committed there and at the other camps will echo through time as a warning that we must listen to; a warning to be aware that people, not supernatural monsters, can do acts of such terrible evil. Never forget.

#Onyx Path Publishing

1 note · View note

bellygunnr · 5 years

Text

No Drinks for Me

Hamlets and Hiers

from the Crusader The sanitarium loomed high above the rest of the Hamlet, overshadowed only by the manor perched upon the hills, its windows casting colored shadows across the wearied streets. Reynauld peered through his steel visor at its heavy hardwood doors, a hand lifted to press them open, when someone grabbed his wrist. He startled, exhaling heavily, and took a moment to find the owner of the hand.

Junia.

"Quarantine," she said simply.

"That bad?"

"Yes. Were you seeking to pray for them?"

Reynauld inhaled, exhaled. He didn't remember what led his feet to the doors of the stern stone structure-- just that there was a pulling in his chest.

"Yes. Light knows that they need it," Reynauld lied. The excuse was easy, but his tongue burned.

"Then come with me. The Abbey has been opened wide so that we may sing and pray, and all may hear our calls."

Just like that, Junia led the armoured knight to the abbey, where his services would be more potent in the gathering of the Light.

in the sanitarium Their flesh had grew warped and distended, bloated with the strain of an invasive force, and movement fled them entirely. The afflicted stared out with glassy, vacant eyes, and mumbled strange things, spitting and heaving up globs of mucus that dried rapidly and became floating dust in the air. Their caretakers, may the Lord bless them, dressed like steel Plague Doctors to protect themselves from the new disease, all while desperately trying to cure them.

None of the Sanitarium's usual concoctions worked. Their serums and potions were merely absorbed into their bodies and coughed out as spores that took to the stale air and clung to wherever they landed. These clumps were later gathered up and burned, for if nothing else, fire destroyed the plant matter readily.

Worse, the staff would not collaborate with the Hamlet's soldiers to find a cure. Plague Doctors and occultists were turned away and promised nothing. Frustration was building within the accursed Hamlet. The Heiress did nothing.

A leper had fallen to the disease and the situation was dire. It was a wonder how the already diseased man was still alive, his bruised and scarred skin ridden with boils, face thick and swollen and falling apart. He was disintegrating. The straps digging into his wrists caused his skin to slough. Any movement- even the most minuscule- threatened to strip apart his muscles. From his scabs and wounds, fleshy stalks were peeking, the burgeoning heads of mushrooms. Brinon, the Leper from the seas, was losing.

Yet beside him lay a man who was entirely emaciated, all gaunt skin and peeking bones and deep scars, the patchwork glowing a sickly green. He had not become as terribly afflicted as his neighbor thanks in no small part to the eldritch blood coursing through his veins. A modicum of consciousness still remained and his eyes were not blank nor glassy, instead they glared out into the room with fury. Immobilized and strapped down, Garrett from the North prisons was rendered useless.

Across the room lay a woman nicknamed a Hellion and she, too, had somewhat resisted the disease. Her eyes glared out through a face malformed with sickly yellow bulges, bright and indignant, entirely self-aware. She, too, was strapped to the beds with leather and chains, for fear that she would try to leave. Sticky spores glued her lips together and floated from her nose, occasionally drifting from the air. Marion, from the wilderness, was losing.

These heroes heard not the praying nor the singing from the abbey. They felt not the power of the Lord and his Light and definitely not the carefully curated hope of their peers. They instead felt intimately the confines of their minds and the insidious birth of a sixth sense. Each beat of one's own heart was doubled, louder, and the intake of their lungs felt like the breaths of many. Somewhere within the disease's progression they had become bonded, acutely aware of not only themselves but each other, and even the Weald so many winding miles away.

Light flooded briefly into their sick-addled ward. Another steel Plague Doctor had arrived to administrate them.

from the highwayman The Heir had remained in her Ancestor's venerable house for as long as Dismas could recall. She rarely ventured outside, communicating purely by letter, or when she summoned soldiers forward to spit them back out again. Now Dismas took the overgrown path from the Hamlet directly to that dilapidated home, his breath loud and roaring in his own ears. He bared his teeth in frustration-- why was it he that approached the heir? What was possessing him? The weight of it all felt like stones settling in his lungs.

Dread built steadily in the recesses of his belly. He tried to focus on the lingering singing of the holy people, led haphazardly by the entire lot of them, unguided now that the priest was dead. His tongue curled in his mouth at the memory-- they had all tried their best. Not even a bullet could have saved him. The music escaped him now, fading to nothingness as he came upon the door with its brass raven-pendant knocker.

It's now... or never, Dismas thought.

He grasped the knocker with his gloved hands and let it drop several times. In fact, he kept dropping the pendant until he detected movement from within, at which he halted and waited somewhat patiently for the door to open.

"What-- could you possibly want? I have summoned no one here. It better be important," came the voice. Haggard, irritated, and exactly feminine.

"It's Dismas, from the Hamlet," he announced.

The door slid open slowly.

"What do you want?"

The Heiress was clad in a heavy, heavy cloak and a thick hood that concealed her face from view. Dismas kept his unease at bay and tugged his mask away from his face.

"Hamlet's plagued," Dismas said roughly. "And no one can fix'em."

"The hamlet's dealt with sickness before. What do you want me to do about it?" The heiress snapped.

Dismas hissed in discomfort. "What the hell do ya mean? I want ya to do something to fix it!" His temper was short and his tongue slipped.

"They'll live or they can die trying. I don't care. Just keep any coach recruits away from the ill and we'll be fine! I have more important things to do right now. Let the Hamlet know they are on their own."

"There's gonna be riots, damn you! What's gotten into you, girl?"

The Heiress lashed out with pale, bloodied hands. She grabbed up the thief's shirt and pulled him so close that he felt her breath raking against his throat.

"I am this close, Dismas, to driving out my father's sins. I just need a few more weeks. I've found the shortcut-- no one will have to enter those corrupted acreages again!"

Light flickered and bounced from the sun, and Dismas saw madness swirling in the lady's eyes. He grit his teeth together with a pained clack. What did she mean? What was she doing up here? If he didn't know any better, he'd say she's gone the way of her father. It must run in the blood, if nothing else.

The Heiress shoved him back out onto the neglected cobblestones. The door slammed with a resounding crack that felt like a branding across his own heart.

There's a plague in the Hamlet. And the Heiress had gone mad.

#darkest dungeon #dismas #darkest dungeon vestal #writers on tumblr #fanfiction

15 notes · View notes

crashdevlin · 5 years

Text

Bottle-14: Safe House

Bottle Masterlist

Author’s Note: Originally posted to ao3 (This is an edited and improved version), I work in info from the comics (Like Hawkeye was married to Mockingbird and Red Skull had a disappointing daughter) and I took a few liberties with what the scepter could do (but not really because the Mind Stone was used to create the Twins so what I did is not that far-fetched). This is a lot more angst than I realized when I wrote it, but it’s compelling angst.

Summary: Cassandra Campbell is a Stark Industries lab tech with dubious genetics and a history with the new Director of SHIELD. She’s been working in New York since right before the Chitauri invasion. What does she have to do with Loki, and what will happen when he returns? Starts post TDW and continues to the end of AoU.

Pairing(s): Phil Coulson x OFC (Past), Loki x OFC (Non-con), Clint Barton x OFC, Steve Rogers x OFC

Word Count: 4810

Story Warnings: So many, worst (to me) are bolded. Younger woman/older man relationship,non-con, mutilation, torture, mind control, PTSD, depression, alcoholism, forced abortions, bad things (non-con) in a church, insomnia, memory manipulation, eventual consensual oral sex (female and male receiving),

Chapter Warnings: canon-compliant violence, 18+, HERE BE SEX, DON’T READ IF YOU’RE A YOUNG’UN, dub-con dream, canon-divergence (I hated the Laura Barton storyline for various reasons, so I fixed it) Bad German from google translate

Cassie woke up alone, but there was a note next to her head. Had to vacate. I made bacon and coffee. Call me when you wake up.

She smiled and dressed in a pair of jeans and a short-sleeved blue turtleneck. As she poured coffee into a travel mug, she put her cell on speaker and dialed Clint. "Good morning, Hawk."

"Not so much," came through the phone. "Uh, so, Natasha knows."

"What? Are you kidding me?" She twisted the cap on the mug and picked up her cell phone.

"No. We're spies. She didn't like my answer of where I spent my night, so she followed me on the camera footage."

Cassie took a drink of her coffee and groaned, walking out of her apartment. "I'm sorry, Agent Barton. Aren't you supposed to be well-versed in keeping shit secret?"

"Hey, I'm great at keeping secrets. I was on my way to delete the video from the cams in your apartment when Nat told me she got there first."

"Great. So, your best friend, who thinks I'm a cocktease, knows you spent the night in my bed? Wonderful. So, what, did she tell you to stay away from me? You gonna listen to her?" she asked, getting into the elevator. She rested her phone between her ear and shoulder and pushed her right hand onto the biometric scanner above the numbered buttons.

"That's a negative. I answer to you." His voice switched to a military tone.

"And someone just walked up on you. One of the bosses. Tell me you deleted that footage."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I'm on my way up," she said, pressing numbers on the screen to send her to the lab level. She heard someone in the background, sounded like Steve.

"I gotta go," Clint said, into the phone.

"See ya in few," Cassie said, hanging up and putting her phone in her back pocket. As she walked into the lab, drinking down her coffee like ambrosia, she noticed everyone around Natasha at the computer. "What'd I miss?"

"Ultron killed your buddy Strucker," Tony answered, handing a tablet to her. 'STRUCKER, BARON VON' and 'DECEASED' shined up at her, over a picture of Strucker, dead in his cell. 'PEACE' was written crudely on the wall in blood.

"This is a smokescreen. Why send a message when you've just given a speech?" Natasha asked.

"Strucker knew something that Ultron wanted us to miss," Steve caught on.

"Yeah, I bet he..." Natasha started, pulling up the file on Strucker. "Yep. Everything we had on Strucker has been erased."

"Not everything," Steve said, with a smile. "I prefer paper."

"You've got analog files," Cassie said, with a grin. "Thank God for the man out of time. Where are they?"

"There's a storage room down the hall. Strucker files will be there."

The team grabbed the boxes and dug in, Clint taking a box over to the window to be by himself. Cassie stuck by the table, going through a box of Strucker's history. A Hydra file caught her eye, one labeled 'Projekt Kind'. She pulled it as Steve dropped a box on the table. "Known associates. Strucker had a lot of friends."

"Well, these people are all horrible," Banner said, flipping through files.

"Wait. I know that guy," Tony said, pointing at a picture. "From back in the day. He operates off the African coast, black market arms."

Steve gave him an accusatory look, so he quickly defended himself as the picture was passed around the table. Cassie tore her eyes away from the 'Kind' file to stand and look over Thor's arm at the picture. The man looked dangerous, covered in tattoos and heavily muscled. "There are conventions, all right? You meet people, I didn't sell him anything. He was talking about finding something new, a game changer, it was all very 'Ahab'."

"This?" Thor asked, pointing to a red symbol on the man's neck.

"Uh, it's a tattoo. I don't think he had it..." Tony answered.

"No, those are tattoos, this is a brand," Thor responded, showing the picture to the table.

"A brand? Like, a voluntary body mod thing, or... 'we want you to be forever remembered as a criminal' kind of thing?" Cassie asked.

"Well, he operates in Africa. There are still tribes that do that. I mean, the ones that don't just kill you," Clint offered from his place behind Stark.

"Let's find out. I'll scan this picture and find the symbol." Banner said, gently taking the picture from Thor's hands and walking to the computer.

As the computer scanned through thousands of symbols, Cassie opened the 'Kind' file. Most of it was numbers and dates. #1: FEHLSCHLAGEN: 23/5/1978-23/5/1978, #5: FEHLSCHLAGEN: 9/6/1978-9/7/1978 ... on and on with failure after failure, until #452: GELINGEN: 12/9/1989-? LEBENDE EXEMPLAR.

"What are you reading?" Natasha asked from over her shoulder. Cassie hadn't realized how close the Russian was to her.

"Projekt Kind. Me. I'm reading about me, and all the failures that came before me. All the brothers and sisters that died in the petri dish."

"Why was that in with Strucker's stuff?" Banner asked from the computer.

"Because Strucker ran the lab where I was made. It was one of his first assignments, back when he was a balding young Hydra agent, instead of a bald asshole." She flipped the folder shut and looked around the room. "They called me 452, but I never really thought they'd failed 451 times before they got it right. The one before me only lasted a month. I... wonder what they did right with me."

"Don't worry about what they did, just be glad they did it," Tony said, looking at the computer.

"Oh, yeah," Bruce said, as a match came up on the screen. "It's a word in an African dialect meaning 'thief', in a much less friendly way."

"What dialect?" Steve asked.

"Wakanada?" Bruce tried, before turning back to the screen to try again. "Wa... wa... Wakanda."

The word hit something in Cassie's mind. Phil had told her about Wakanda. What had he said? "If this guy got out of Wakanda with some of their trade goods..." Stark started, looking completely exasperated.

"I thought your father said he got the last of it?" Steve said.

"I don't follow. What comes out of Wakanda?" Bruce asked, stepping away from the computer.

Steve and Tony turned their heads to look at Steve's beloved shield. "The strongest metal on Earth."

"Where is this guy now?" Steve asked.

"Africa?" Cassie suggested, taking a drink of her coffee and standing.

"Yeah. A shipyard in Richards Bay, South Africa. East coast, about 600 klicks away from Johannesburg," Natasha said, pulling up a location on the computer.

"Suit up? I'm gonna go suit up. Meet you at the jet," Cassie said, grabbing the 'Kind' file and walking out with it and her mug. As she waited for the elevator, Natasha walked up beside her, grabbing the folder. "What are you doing, Romanoff?"

"You don't need this. It's a deep hole. You're already in one of those. Don't dig yourself deeper." She held the file away from the blond next to her.

"I'm already in one? Really? I wasn't aware."

Natasha turned to her, the file safely behind her back. "You still don't know who you are. I understand that. You have an internal fight going on between you and the occultist Hydra princess," she said the words with a mixture of malice and pity. "You're gonna look at this file and see their plans for you. It's Hydra, so they had your whole life planned out. But you, whoever you actually are, you're not who they wanted you to be. You aren't 452, or Junior. You're Joanna and Cassandra... Red Queen. All of those names, SHIELD and its operatives gave you. Like you said, even your dark side has a respect for human life. This file is not you."

"Why do you care how deep I dig myself? I'm just a tease, right? Nobody you want on your team."

"Because Barton cares, and you've chosen. That's all I asked. You chose Clint and he asked me to be nice. I'm willing to do that. I'm willing to try to be your friend. I'm happy to be your teammate. Just so long as we're all clear that you've chosen and last night wasn't a fluke."

Cassie sighed and walked onto the elevator as it opened. "I chose. Yesterday, I chose. Not because I was scared of some robot, not because he showed up in my bedroom while I was vulnerable and sad... but because I like the blunt, forward child of the '70s... the man who knows me, both sides of me, better than I do. And better than you do."

"Then, we're fine. See you at the jet," Natasha turned and walked back toward the lab, putting the file under her arm.

***************

"All right. Heavy hitters, go in first. That's me, Thor and Cap. Red, Hawk and Widow, you pull a stealth entrance and bring up the rear. Banner stays on the jet unless we need a 'Code Green'," Tony ordered.

Everyone nodded and readied themselves to head onto the ship. Cassie nodded to Clint as he started to climb to a vantage height, but she stuck to the shadows on the lower. She could hear the A Team above her, chatting with Ultron and the twins. "I'm glad you asked that, because I wanted to take this time to explain my evil plan!" Ultron shouted, before a series of explosions and hits and thuds were heard above her. She pulled her gun from its holster and snuck to a point still mostly covered, but able to take aim at the Ultronbots suddenly flying above, attacking everyone. Two shots to the head of one put it down a few feet from her, and she managed a bullet into the leg of one of Klaue's men. When Steve knocked the fast enhanced into the boxes she was hiding behind, Cassie came around them. No more hiding.

"Stay down, kid," Steve said, before running off.

Cassie pointed her weapon at the Maximoff. "I know you could be gone before I finished pulling this trigger... and even if I could hit you, I wouldn't want a body on my soul, anyway. So, I'm gonna go this way..." She gestured to her left with the pistol. "...and you can go wherever else you want."

The silver haired enhanced looked up at her, then stood, brushing his clothes off. "You have no bodies on your soul? You are Avenger. Is that not requirement for joining?"

She shook her head. "Sie wissen nicht wovon Sie sprechen. [You don’t know what you’re talking about.] You have a vastly distorted view of the Avengers. Your outdated idea of Tony Stark is the problem. But... me... I'm just one of Strucker's experiments gone right. I'm..." Her head went fuzzy as she spoke, and she turned her head to see the sister and a red mist floating around her head. "Vat did you do?" she whispered, accent heavy on her words as her head went fuzzy.

"Guys, is this a code Green?" came through the comms as Cassie tried to blink away the dizziness in her head.

"Thor! Status?" Steve came through next as Wanda and Pietro disappeared from Cassie's field of vision.

"The girl tried to warp my mind. Take special care, I doubt a human could keep her at bay. Fortunately, I am mighty." Thor's voice was muffled by a louder, seemingly omnipresent voice.

"Joanna." Cassie twisted, the sing-song voice sending fear straight to her gut. The ship had been replaced by the lab she used to work in at Stark Tower. She looked down, her super suit replaced by her old lab coat and a light blue blouse... and there he was, inky black hair, blue-green eyes, green and black armor, sitting on the counter between two Bunsen burners on at their highest level. "Clinton, then? You replace me, Asgardian royalty, the son of King Laufey of Jotunheim, with a circus freak?"

She took a step backward, which prompted Loki to jump down and walk toward her. "Loki, I-"

"Don't worry, Joanna. I'm not angry," he said, grabbing a fistful of her hair and pulling her into a kiss. She melted into it, his cold touch forcing shivers throughout her body. "You are my queen, my Red Queen, and I know you love me. I know you love my touch." His long fingers came to her lab coat, pulling it down her arms to drop on the floor.

"That scepter didn't make you scream my name, did it? It didn't leave you dripping your juices down my chin or make you ride my cock like a wench in heat." He turned her, roughly, pushing her chest into the counter and bringing his hands around to unbutton her black work slacks, pushing them down her legs.

"Loki, don't-"

"I know your mind. I know you miss me, Joanna. You refuse to acknowledge it, but I can smell your lies, even the ones you tell yourself. I know how much you long to be in my arms again, how you miss being impaled upon me." His hand slid down her ass and between her legs, rubbing her lips through the thin satin of her panties. He tore the material away and stood, lining his cock up against her and lifting her hips to improve his angle as he rammed his hips forward. "You... are... mine. Only mine... I know your body... such that... I can make... you cum... without even touching... your little bundle of nerves." He hammered his hips forward, causing Cassie to whimper and claw at the slick granite countertop.

He was right. As his hands grabbed her shoulders to hold her steady, an orgasm rushed over her. "Oh, my god," she moaned.

He continued to fuck her past her orgasm, drawing the sensations out longer. "Yes, I am. Do well to remember it, Joanna."

Cassie was suddenly back on the ship, sprawled out on the floor, her body thrumming with arousal. She shuddered and stood. "Natasha, I could really use a lullaby," Tony's voice came over the comm.

"Well, that's not gonna happen. Not for a while. The whole team is down. You got no backup here," Clint answered.

"I'm out... out of it," Cassie whispered. "I can't provide a Brahm's but, do you need help, Stark?"

"Banner's in Johannesburg, I don't know how you'd get there in time. Help Barton corral the rest of the team. I'm calling in VERONICA."

"Good to hear your voice, Red," Clint came over the comms.

"You got a location on the rest of our team?" She wasn't in the mood for pleasantries.

"Cap was swaying in the stairwell, got no clue on the Thunder God."

"Got him," Cassie said, looking up the stairs to the left. She ran up them, coming to a stop in front of Steve. "Steve... Steve. Hey, come back. Come back," she said, snapping her fingers in front of him.

Steve barely moved, so Cassie bent her knees, putting her shoulder against his abdomen and popping up to throw him over her shoulder. "Cap's still out, I'm taking him back to the jet. Grab Widow and meet me there, Barton. We'll take on Thor together."

As she stomped onto the Quinjet, Steve weighing her down, Clint rushed up beside her. "Here, put him down over here." She dropped Steve unceremoniously on one of the jump seats, then rolled her shoulders back. "I'm impressed. Glad for the super strength, huh?"

"Right. Come on. Let's go wrangle an Asgardian," she said, trudging back down the ramp.

"Hey. Are you okay?" Clint asked, following her. "I know the Maximoff chick hit you."

"Clint, can we not? We've just had our asses completely handed to us. You and I are the only ones intact right now, and we've got a God to put on that jet."

"Okay, well... You're gonna tell me what she made you see, right? Later?"

"Sure," she responded, running back up the ramp onto the ship.

*********************************

Clint powered up the jet and flew out as soon as Banner and Stark made it on board. He tried to beckon Cassie to the copilot seat, but she shook her head and took her place on the floor next to the scientist. She didn't say anything or touch the man, just hung her head and listened to the sounds of the Quinjet, all the while wondering what the hell was wrong with her.

Maria's voice came from the cockpit. "The news is loving you guys. Nobody else is. There's been no official call for Banner's arrest but it's in the air."

"Stark Relief Foundation?" Tony asked.

"Already on the scene. How's the team?"

Cassie could almost feel Tony scan the jet with his eyes. "Everyone's... we took a hit. We'll shake it off."

Well, that sounded optimistic.

"Well, for now, I'd stay in stealth mode and stay away from here."

"So, run and hide?"

"Until we can find Ultron, I don't have a lot else to offer."

"Neither do we." There was a moment where the screen clicked off, then Stark said, "Hey, do you wanna switch out?"

"No, I'm good. If you wanna get some kip, now's a good time, 'cause we're still a few hours out."

"A few hours from where?"

"A safe house."

Cassie watched Stark sit in one of the seats and look down at his phone, so she nodded at him and stood, walking to the cockpit to take the copilot seat. "I don't want to talk about it, now. Maybe never, but definitely not now," she said, quietly. Clint just nodded and reached his right hand out to pat her knee. "Thank you."

"Hey, secret shit is what I do. Speaking of, you remember, in Austria I told you about a farm I go to when I need to get my shit straight?"

Cassie nodded. "That's your safe house?"

"Yeah. And, uh, I'm not the only one who lives there," he whispered.

"What, you got a secret wife or something?" she whispered back, leaning over closer to him.

"No, nothing stupid like that, but... I have a brother, Barney. He's got a wife and kids. He's not always... stable and he's... not around a lot. So, I set her, my niece and nephew up with a stable home. Barney and I never got that, and she's a great woman, deserves it, so... Anyway, only Nat knows, so... Assuming Ultron hasn't found out about it, that's gonna be a surprise."

"Wait... Barney Barton... I know that name... Charles, right? He’s Trick Shot now, right?"

"Uh, yeah. How do you know that?"

Cassie turned away from him and looked out the front of the jet. "Phil brought home files sometimes."

"I... remember seeing you snoop a couple times. You never did anything with them though."

"Curiosity. Always trying to learn."

***********

Cassie fell into a dreamless sleep, which was disturbed only when the Quinjet landed outside a farmhouse situated on a green plot of land. "Wow," she whispered, standing. "Home is green."

"Yeah," Clint said, dropping the ramp to let everyone walk out.

"What is this place?" Thor asked, stepping onto the porch.

"A safe house?" Tony said, questioningly.

"Let's hope," Barton muttered, opening the door for them. "Honey, I'm home," he called.

The brunette woman that walked in from the kitchen was very pregnant. She smiled at them. "Let your brother hear you call me 'honey', you'll have even more issues with each other than you already do."

Clint smiled. "Hi. Company. Sorry I didn't call first."

"Clint, it's your house. Your don't have to call ahead." She smiled brightly at the group. "Hey."

"She's clearly an agent of some kind," Tony mumbled to Thor.

"Gentlemen, Cass, this is my sister-in-law, Laura."

"I know all your names."

"Ooh, incoming," Barton said, pulling away from Laura and kneeling down as a boy and a girl ran into the living room.

"Uncle Clint!" the girl yelled, jumping up into his arms.

"Oh, she's been dying to tell you about this boy at school," Laura said.

The girl nodded, excited. "Do I want to know about the boy at school?" he asked.

The girl jumped down, nodding as Stark said, "These are... smaller agents."

"There's a new boy at school, we share recess, and I'm the only one who can talk to him."

"Why's that?"

"'Cause he's deaf and I'm the only one who knows Sign," she said.

Clint smiled, proudly. "Very cool. Is he cute?" He spoke the words as he signed at her. The girl blushed fiercely and puffed her cheeks out. Clint laughed at her reaction, then signed. "Glad you are getting good practice." At the look of confusion from Cassie, he shrugged. "I was kinda deaf for a while. SHIELD fixed me."

"By 'kinda deaf for a while' he means '80% hearing loss for most of his life'," Laura filled in.

"Did you bring Auntie Nat?" the girl interjected as Cassie gave an impressed look.

"Why don't you hug her and find out?" Natasha said, stepping forward. The girl rushed to her and hugged her tightly.

"Sorry for barging in on you," Steve apologized to Laura.

"Yeah, we would have called ahead, but we were busy not knowing you existed," Stark snarked.

"Yeah, well, Fury helped me set this up when I joined. He kept it off SHIELD's files, I'd like to keep it that way. I figure it's a good place to lay low."

"Well, Clint, we missed you," Laura said, with a smile.

"So, I see Barney made his way home," Natasha said, walking up and putting her hands on the woman's belly.

"Yeah. 'Bout seven months ago."

"So... how's little Natasha, huh?" Natasha asked.

"She's... Nathaniel," Laura answered.

"Traitor," Natasha said, leaning down to speak directly at the baby in the woman's belly.

Cassie turned her head as Thor stalked out of the house and Steve followed. "You're Cassie, aren't you?" Laura asked. Cassie turned back to the woman and nodded. "Clint has told me a lot about you."

"Oh, that can't be good."

Laura laughed. "No, it's good, I promise. He couldn't tell me everything, you know, 'classified'." She did air quotes around the word. "...but when you disappeared, he went crazy with worry. He obsessed about finding you. He had all these maps that me and the kids weren't allowed to look at. He'd spend hours pouring over them."

Clint groaned and pulled a knife from his belt. He offered it to Natasha and tapped the back of his skull. "If you could just, please, right here."

"Oh, come on, Clint. I think it's cute. So, where was it that you actually ended up being?" Laura asked, rubbing her hands over her belly.

"Austria."

"Oh. Pretty."

Cassie smiled, awkwardly as her stomach growled. "You mind if I take over your kitchen, Mrs. Barton? I'm feeling a bit... completely famished."

"Oh, sure. I don't mind."

"I'm gonna grab a shower," Tony said.

"Kids' bathroom is upstairs, second door on the left," Clint informed, before following Cassie into the kitchen. "Hey. You all right?"

She opened the fridge and peered in. It was well stocked with produce and meats, three different kinds of fruit juice on the top shelf and a small drawer filled with Lunchables. A twenty-four pack of beer sat on the bottom shelf next to a case of ginger ale. "I wasn't ever... that pregnant. She... looks huge," she whispered. She shook her head and shut the fridge. "Which way to town?"

"What do you mean? What do you need in town?"

"I'm gonna go buy some beer."

"There's beer in the fridge."

She smiled, slightly. "It's so cute that you think that's beer."

"What, you don't like Coors?" he asked, leaning against the oven.

"I have something against a beer that encourages you to drink it cold." Clint raised his eyebrow. "Come on, you've spent enough time in Europe to know that real beer should be warm or, at least, room temp. Why? Because cold dulls the natural flavors of hops and barley and if a beer wants you to drink it cold, they obviously don't want you to actually taste it."

She shrugged. "Farmland, USA, I might be able to find a sixer of Guinness at the 'Five and Dime'. Just point me in the right direction."

"A: It's a dry town. You'd have to go the next county over for a beer. 2: I've got whiskey in the cabinet if you really need a drink, and Charlie: There are a lot of people out there looking for us. You don't need to be going anywhere."

"I'm not an Avenger, not so far as the world knows, Clint. No one is gonna recognize me."

Clint rolled his eyes and switched on the TV set sitting on the counter. BBC World News flicked to life on the screen. "...mysterious young woman carrying Thor onto the Avengers' jet. We apologize for the poor quality of the video. It's from CCTV. It is not clear who this woman is, but what is clear is that she is definitely not human," a petite British newscaster said.

Her co-anchor nodded. "You have to imagine how heavy Thor is, and you can see on that video, she just carries him around like a sack filled with potatoes or flour or something. It's like it takes no effort fer her," the Scottish man said.

"Video's grainy. You can't tell that's me. Look, I'll put on a hoodie and glasses if it'll make you feel better, but I'm going into town and you can't stop me, Hawk. I mean, you're just a human," she said, before sighing and looking down. "I didn't mean for that to be... so rude. I'm sorry. I just... The Maximoff chick got to me and then that... I don't need reminding of what I am. Your sister has some really nice bell peppers in there and I was gonna get some sausage, bratwurst maybe, make us some good ol' Austrian diner food for dinner. I think a hardy meal would help us a lot." She blinked back her tears and shook her head at herself.

"Can you drive?" Clint asked, softly.

Cassie nodded. "Phil taught me. I, also, know how to fly."

"He let you drive LOLA?"

She chuckled. "There was a time when he loved me more than that Corvette. I thought you were watching me. How'd you miss that?"

Clint shrugged. "I knew you weren't going to be doing any shady Hydra stuff with Phil around, so when he came in, I'd take time off. At the beginning, I went home to Bobbi until I got confirmation that Coulson had a new mission. After she... the divorce, I got a cheap apartment in San Luis Obispo that I went to when Phil was around. Mostly just slept and pigged out on sandwiches. Oh, and played PlayStation."

"So, you missed the crash."

"You crashed LOLA?" He looked a mixture of mortified and amused.

"Yeah. First time I got her in the air. Phil was so angry, he couldn't even speak for like 20 minutes after he inspected the damage. Which wasn't a lot, really, just a cracked headlight." She smiled. "It was... three weeks before he let me behind the wheel again, but I never had any other problems. Got my license a few months before I left Cali... Don't really need it in New York. Anyway, closest beer-mart?"

"Why don't I just drive you?" He reached out and grabbed her hand.

"You need to be here. Natasha needs you. Laura and the kids haven't seen you since I've been back from Austria. I'll be fine and I could probably benefit from a little alone time. I deal better in seclusion, remember?"

"Last time you needed seclusion, I spent two months searching for you," he whispered.

"I promise I'll come back. Today, even." She smiled softly and pulled her hand back. "Come on, Hawkeye. Keys?"

Clint sighed and groped behind him, on the counter, for a set of keys. "Take the van. Laura won't mind."

"And where am I going?" she asked, taking the keys with the Planet Fitness key chain and looping them over her first finger.

"Dirt road, take a left on Sycamore, right onto SR107, 20 miles down there's a Wal-Mart Supercenter. Beer, sausages, all that. You better come back. If you don't, I'm gonna have to room with Stark and that'd be torture."

She nodded, looking toward the living room before going on her tiptoes to press her lips to his cheek. She walked past the Bartons and Natasha out of the house.

KITCHEN SINK TAGS @heyitscam99 @wonderlandfandomkingdom @unlikelysamwinchesteronahunt @mrs-meghan-winchester @henrymorganme @lonely-skys @allykat2108

#cassie writes stuff #avengers fanfiction #ofc #red queen chronicles #clint/ofc

10 notes · View notes

plumbobpost · 6 years

Text

Fanfic Friday: Spotlight on Skell’s Fortune & Romance

Sul sul!

Today Week of Woohoo continues with a very special twist. I have had the opportunity to ask Skell a few questions as part of a new series of posts about storytelling in The Sims community.

Skell’s Fortune & Romance serves as a prequel to the Pleasantview and Strangetown storylines in The Sims 2 from the perspectives of the Caliente sisters, hence the title which references their aspirations. Her story takes place in the time period between the first and second games and fills in the gaps between the contradicting timelines of The Sims, The Sims 2, and The Sims 3. Although the story is largely from Dina’s perspective, it features most of the iconic The Sims 2 characters ranging from Olive Specter to the Tricous to Bella and Mortimer Goth, establishing its own vivid mythology in the process.

In addition to writing, Skell has also created beautiful Maxis-Match content for The Sims 2 and is a frequent contributor to the Totally Maxis Tumblr and the fansite Garden of Shadows.

Without further ado, I’ll let Skell speak for herself.

You’ve said in the past that Fortune & Romance started out as your attempt to make sense of Maxis canon for the premade characters of Neighborhood 1, Pleasantview, and Sunset Valley. How did this evolve from your personal headcanons into a full-fledged story?

“I had played TS2 off and on for years before I was part of the fandom, mostly just goofing around but I had a lot of fun taking pictures and experimenting with posing. One day I discovered Strangetomato’s “Strangetown Here We Come” on TVtropes and was amazed at the way she fleshed out the premade stories from the game. Through her comment section, I discovered the whole fandom and started paying better attention to the premades. Eventually I came up with a backstory for Dina that I really wanted to write and share.”

Why did you choose Nina and Dina Caliente to be your protagonists? Did you ever consider different lead characters?

“It was always gonna be Dina because I was intrigued her backstory with the mysteriously inconsistent Michael Bachelor and the fact that she’s part alien. I wasn’t as interested in Nina until I noticed that she was shy (like me in RL) and also autonomously beating people up all the time. That’s when I realized she was gonna be a co-star and balance to Dina’s antics.”

Instead of ignoring Maxis’ characterization of Dina as a gold digger, you embraced it and made it a focal point of her character. Similarly, you fully acknowledge Nina’s romance aspiration while not making her a heartbreaker. How did you find a balance between their implied “villainy” in The Sims 2 and making them more sympathetic characters?

“I enjoy classic movies where Marilyn Monroe or Thoroughly Modern Millie is like “teehee I’m gonna marry a millionaire,” and it’s quirky rather than villainous. In those stories, she usually falls for a poor guy and chooses love over money (and often he turns out to be secretly rich.) Since Michael didn’t give her a “married a rich sim” memory, I wanted to write Dina the gold-digger as a modern version of that kind of story.”

“Maxis kind of setup Romance sims for “villainy” by not allowing for casual or open relationships, but of course that can be fixed with mods. With Nina, it’s interesting that she doesn’t really fit the “outgoing party girl” type. I think of her as a quiet person with a very intense energy. She needs lots of exercise and woohoo so that she doesn’t explode.”

There are a lot of unconventional relationships in your story. Nina and Servo. Olive and Ichabod. The Tricous. Even Dina and Michael. That being said, there is very definitely a theme of “love conquers all.” What motivated your approach to these relationships? How does that relate back to your attempts at reconciling Maxis canon throughout different games?

“I have a thing for mixed supernatural relationships. Dina and Mike bonding over their hidden supernatural heritages was always key once I figured Michael had a magic side. I knew I wanted to have Nina be intimate with a servo because that’s HAWT, but I didn’t foresee how intimate things would get until I figured out Servo’s character. The Tricous’ happy polyamory was my explanation for all the weirdness going on with their relationships and family tree. And I wanted Olive, Ichabod, and DJ make up this very loving and weirdly “normal” Unholy Family.”

Speaking of reconciling Maxis canon, you created your own version of Michael Bachelor in order to match his appearance in The Sims better and to create a resemblance between him and his famous sister, Bella Goth. Why do you think Michael was depicted so differently throughout the first three games? What did you draw inspiration from in creating “The Ultimate Michael Bachelor?”

“I think it mostly comes down to them wanting to use a familiar name for Bella’s brother/Dina’s husband in TS2, and carrying that forward. In TS3, I saw a boy who had his life all planned out for him by his father. In my headcanon, he screwed that all up and became the graduate of TS1 who had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. His relationship to Bella is the reason why he’s still single by the time he reconnects with Dina, who helps him find direction.”

There is an abundance of strong female characters in F&R, some of which were not originally portrayed that way. Why did you feel that it was important to write them as such?

“Well, because I’m a proud “SJW,” of course! But seriously, it’s less about being strong and more about seeing them as people?”

^Best answer that I could have asked for.

A large portion of Fortune & Romance is dedicated to the mythology of The Sims universe(s) and to supernatural sims. How did you go about the process of world building? Did you draw inspiration from different games in the series and/or from outside sources?

“My biggest worldbuilding is the explanation of where the supernaturals came from. The fairies are sort of fallen angel types who each have an animal form, and their magic rubbed off on human sims to create the supernatural life states.”

“I try to base the worldbuilding off things in game or aspects of game play. The fairy backstory was heavily inspired by fairy tales, in the way they morally test humans for punishment or guidance.”

Aside from premade supernatural sims such as the Smiths, Calientes, and Summerdreams, how did you go about deciding which premade sims were supernatural and which weren’t? How did you decide what life state they were?

“Bella has that awesome bio about being descended from “occultists, decadents, and mystics,” but then in TS3 the Bachelor family is uber-normal, so it eventually became that Jocasta is a squirellier version of Samantha from Betwitched.”

How has Fortune & Romance evolved since you started? Are there things you would do differently if you were to restart it?

“I was such a younger, different person when I started it, and yes there are many things I would do differently. (Michael’s skintone, for example. I tried to split difference between games with a custom skintone in between S2 and S3, but everyone assumes he was whitewashed to S2.)”

“When recreating families for TS4 I came up with a backstory for Dulcinea and Nestor’s relationship as well as a backstory for Don that explains how he got to be the way he is. I still can incorporate these things, but it would have been nice to bring them in earlier.”

With your story having reached a climax, many readers are wondering whether or not F&R will come to an end sooner rather than later. Not to spoil anything, but will the story continue after the party and if so, do you intend for it to last until the events of The Sims 2?

“I never intended for it to last until the events of TS2 because then it would be really depressing. There is more stuff planned for after the party though!”

Aside from writing Fortune & Romance, you have also created a variety of Maxis-match custom content. Why do you prefer working in this aesthetic? How do you feel it complements your writing?

“The game is cartoony, and I like to use that style to tell the story. I prefer to keep things heightened and silly rather than realistic, which very much fits into The Sims aesthetic.”

Speaking of Maxis-match, you have been working on a project for The Sims 2 that involves adapting Maxis-based custom content to blend in better with the game files. Would you mind elaborating a bit on The Maxis Match Repository Project?

“The TS2 repository project is made up of conversions/separates/or otherwise adapted Maxis which pull their textures from the ones that are already in your game, rather than creating new ones. This makes the files much much tinier. I also wanted to create a catalog where you can easily find it all in one place rather than hunt all over the internet. Check it out and don’t miss out on the gems in the back of your catalog!”

You’ve played every main game in The Sims franchise, and you’ve even made some very popular 2t4 recreations of the Calientes and Michael Bachelor. Do you have a favorite game for playing? Creating sims? Making Content? Building?

“I enjoy a lot of things about TS4. The game looks great and CAS and Build Mode are the best of any game. My favorite aspect is making sims, especially that you can share sims with traits/careers/skills so they have their own little story packaged with them. However, it is much more difficult for storytelling since there’s not even a way to pick up sims and move them around.”

“TS2 is still the best as far as premade sims go, and it’s the only one I make content for. I’m a bit of a control freak with my sims, and TS2 has been mastered by fans at this point where you can have ultimate control.”

Why do you continue to play The Sims? Do you feel that the games provide a creative outlet?

“I always loved playing with Barbies as a kid and The Sims really is the ultimate dollhouse. The first time I ever heard about TS1 I knew I HAD to have it. My aunt bought it for me while I was on vacation, but I couldn’t play it until we got home! During the car ride back home and I read that manual from cover to cover multiple times, so many ideas buzzing in my head.”

Any parting comments, teasers, spoilers, public service announcements, etc.?

“I’ve been on hiatus a long while and am just now getting back into the swing of things. I’m currently working on finishing up the chapter I started posting on Tumblr but never finished. It was FreddyAirmail who got me back in the TS2 spirit by asking me to help out with the Crystal Springs neighborhood project. It’s a community hood with houses based on each of the Stuff Packs, and I made the families for Teen Style and Family Fun!”

Thanks again to Skell for answering my questions. To those of you out there who aren’t familiar with her work, go check out her Tumblr and make sure to catch up on Fortune & Romance.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to visit my ask box. If you are interested, give Plumbob Post a follow, and reblog for anyone else who you think would enjoy this blog. Stay tuned for upcoming posts!

Dag dag!

*Photo Credits go to Skell*

125 notes · View notes

pjbehindthesun · 7 years

Text

chapter 1: bears, bourbon, and the boyfriend

Sat, June 9th, 1990

I breathe a sigh of relief as I turn my car off the highway and onto the quiet back road that leads to my favorite hiking trail up in the Northern Cascades. A good hour left on the drive still, but at least this is the peaceful part. Not much relaxes me more than watching civilization recede into the rearview mirror. It’s like dying a little death, seeing the sights and sounds of human disturbance get fewer and farther between, like a heartbeat slowing to a stop on a monitor, until I’m the only person left, with only the wilderness providing background noise like a flatline.

I can’t help but imagine Alex in the passenger seat. Here’s the point in the conversation where he would grumble something about my morbid, misanthropic tendencies, if he were here. Of course, he isn’t here… hiking isn’t really his thing. For what felt like the millionth time, he’d agreed to come along and then bailed on my way out the door. On my way out of town, I’d called him from the lab, where I had a few loose ends from the week to tie up, to try and cajole him one last time. It didn’t go well.

“Are you sure? I can come back and get you, I’m almost done here, I could just swing back home and –”

“– nah, that’s okay, just go.”

“I was just really looking forward to this, Alex.”

“You’ll still have fun! You’ll have more fun out there without me, honestly, you know I hate it.”

“It’s just, I have my trip coming up soon…”

“Right…”

“…and I was just hoping we could spend some time together –”

“– but that’s my fucking point! WHY can’t we do that here?!”

“Hey, don’t you fucking shout at me.”

“Why do I have to drive out to the middle of nowhere and trudge up a fucking hill to spend time with my girlfriend? What the fuck’s wrong with our apartment?”

“Nothing’s wrong with it, but don’t you get bored?”

“Do you? … do you?”

“I mean… not of you, but… Jesus, I just wanted to spend some quality time –”

“– yeah and it only counts if it’s your fucking idea of quality time, not mine.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Just go on your fucking Bataan Death March, I’ll see you tonight.”

He hadn’t slammed the receiver down, but I had still flinched at the click. My idea of quality time, not his. That much was true. His idea of a quality weekend is unplugging the phone from the wall and playing video games around the clock. It’s how he has always wanted to unwind, and I spent countless weekends in college curled up next to him on the little bed in his dorm room with my homework (and the occasional joint out the window) instead of my boyfriend. Since we moved to Seattle after graduation last summer, the room has changed and so have the games – a little less Super Mario, a little more Castlevania – but the rest of the scene has stayed pretty static.

Static. It never bothered me before. For four years, that was my norm. Getting stoned and fucking around in the dorm room felt like what we were supposed to do in college. And I have no objections to getting stoned and fucking around as a theoretical adult, but this particular pastime is wearing thin. Do I even need to be present for his version of quality time?

I’m being a little unfair. I mean, he always turns his attention back to me eventually, and it’s not like I need to be the center of his existence… he’s such a good guy, really. I just wish it wasn’t this difficult to get him to meet me halfway. I can probably count on both hands the number of times I’ve prevailed on him to come camping or hiking with me over our five years together. Maybe even one hand, come to think of it. It just sucks. I love him, and I want so much for him to share in some of the things that make me happy. But I’ve never met anyone more at war with nature than him. I can’t get him to see the beauty of it with me.

I scowl and lean on the gas. The Rabbit does its honest best to keep up, but not without the same precarious wobble it always has at speeds above 60. Bless its heart.

Right before the end of the paved road, I turn into the gravel lot marking the trail head. How long has the car been quiet? Small Change must have run its course in the tape deck a while ago, so there goes my brooding soundtrack. The Rabbit bounces its way over the uneven ground and comes to a halt under the tree I usually park beneath. My jaw clenches at the sight of another car. Shit, please tell me the tourists aren’t coming out here now. I’ve been to this trail a lot over the last year and have never seen anyone else. This, of course, being the basis of its appeal.

I roll up the window and hop out, gathering a wind-tangled mass of hair up into a topknot and pulling on my day pack. I take a deep breath, leave Alex’s ghost in the car, and set off down the dark, dense trail. There have been times over the last year that I’ve missed the mountains back east, all ancient and sleepy and soft, but the comically overgrown plant life and violent skylines of the Pacific Northwest are hard to argue with.

I slowly wind my way up through the forest, gladly losing myself on the walk. Soon, I hit the series of switchbacks that signals the approach of the lookout at the top of the mountain. This is my favorite part of the trail. The trees open up to the left and there’s a partial view of the valley. Down the slope from my spot on the trail, there’s a cluster of burned stumps of giant old trees, the scars of a long-ago forest fire that haven’t yet been overwritten by new growth.

This is just one of those stupid fights every couple has. We’ll fix it when I get home. We always have.

Once I hit the start of the rocky cliff that holds the mountain views I came for, I set down my pack and kneel on the trail to rummage around for my beat-up stainless steel flask of bourbon. No sooner than I lay my hands on it, though, do I spot a tendril of smoke winding up from behind a large rock about twenty feet ahead. Shit, a rocky outcrop is possibly the worst place I could have picked to die in a forest fire – except that isn’t wood smoke I’m smelling.

Furious, I edge around the rock to find a lanky, dark-haired guy stretched out on the ground next to his pack, enjoying the views… and a joint.

“Hey, asshole! You mind not burning the whole place down?”

Well, if we both die out here in an inferno, at least I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I gave the bastard a heart attack first. The guy jumps to his feet and turns to face his attacker, looking very much like a deer in headlights. A very tall deer. I glare daggers up at him.

“What?? Oh…” he chuckles. “no no, girl, I got a system, see?”

I deepen my scowl, not least for being reduced to “girl” as I’m trying to prevent him from destroying my fucking forest. He holds up a small water bottle clouded with ash and makes a big show of carefully dropping the roach in to extinguish it. Then he sets the bottle down, straightens up to his full height, and raises his hand in a Boy Scout salute with mock sincerity on his face.

“Safety first, I always say.” A devilish smirk starts to crack the mask. “Sorry, Smokey Bear, I wish I knew you were coming, I’d have saved you a hit!” He drops his salute and ruffles up his long, unruly mop of black curls, grinning openly at last.

I roll my eyes in aggravation, but if I’m being honest with myself, it takes some willpower not to smile. Irresponsible, maybe, but this guy is also a walking master class in roguish charm. His barely-there pencil mustache lends him a demonic air, like some kind of love child between Errol Flynn and a 19th-century occultist, and the black wardrobe and giant boots don’t do much to dispel the impression. At nearly a foot taller than me, his height is imposing, but his blue eyes are friendly and encouraging. Too bad I’m not having any of it.

“Oh, how considerate of you. I’m sure the weed would really have taken the edge off of my flesh melting off in a fucking wildfire,” I mutter as I scan the ground around his smoking spot for uncontained ashes. There aren’t any. But still. Doesn’t anyone else give a shit? Why are people so irresponsible? This is why I usually avoid them, as a general rule. When I look up, Smoker Guy’s smile has faded into a sheepish wince.

“Ok, ok, you’re right. I was trying to be careful, but yeah, that was an idiotic thing to do. I’m sorry. I don’t even really smoke, ever, I just… I don’t know, I needed to get out of my own head for a bit.” The roguishnes is gone, replaced by a vulnerability so intense and sudden it knocks me back on my heels. He actually seems sincere enough that I feel a tiny bit of pity and embarrassment at having been so colossally rude.

“Ugh. You don’t have to apologize to me,” I hedge, “just… don’t be an asshole out here again.” I offer what I can manage by way of a smile, and his face splits into another wide, warm grin.

“I mean, no promises about being an asshole, but I can swear I won’t burn it down. It’s too beautiful out here!” His voice shakes a couple of birds loose from the tree above our heads.

“It really is,” I muse, scanning the horizon and settling back into some semblance of calm. Smoker Guy senses the opportunity.

“And what did you bring to share with the class, Smokey Bear?” He gestures toward my side with that grin still plastered to his face, and I realize I’m still clutching my flask.

“Bourbon, but, uh… I wasn’t expecting to find anyone else… let alone a class…” I suddenly remember my annoyance at finding any other human, even a charming one, out here in my sanctuary. If it wasn’t going to be Alex, I’m not excited about sharing it with anyone, especially if I’m out here brooding about Alex. I fold my arms, tucking the flask behind my elbow, and fix him with a scowl.

“So, uh, do you come here often?” Oh for fuck’s sake. “No, I didn’t mean it like that…”

Too late. He booms with laughter. “Well now you have to buy me a drink!” He bounds over, snatching the flask out of my hand and dangling it over my head.

The embarrassment’s gotten to me and I can’t help laughing a little now. “Sure, knock yourself out… what’s your name?”

“Chris,” he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and passing the flask back. “And no, this is my first time coming up here. What’s your name? I can’t just keep calling you Smokey…”

“Cora,” I frown. As I take a drink, I dig through my memory for whatever it was about his name that sparked in the back of my mind. “Chris… do I know you from somewhere? You from Seattle?”

“Yeah, I’m from Seattle, you’ve maybe seen me around…” before waiting, utterly unhelpfully, for me to place him, attempting to keep a straight face and failing miserably.

“Hang on, you’re not…” his grin widens. “Chris, like Soundgarden Chris?”

“Soundgarden Chris,” he shakes my hand a little too vigorously, almost knocking me off balance. “Chris Cornell. You know the band?”

“Yeah, I saw you guys at the Moore a few months back, February I want to say?” he nods. “You’re really good.” I’d even picked up a tape at the merch table that night.

“Usually the hair is the giveaway.” He gives his curls a shake for emphasis.

“Maybe to the more typically statured, sure. I have a hard time actually seeing a band on stage from down here.” I rock onto the tiptoes of my hiking boots.

“Fair enough. Bet people recognize you by your hair a lot, too…” he muses, making to tuck an escaped lock of it behind my ear, but I swat his hand away and shoot him a dirty look.

“Hey man, you don’t want to piss off a bear, do you?” I brush the hair off my forehead myself and sit down on one of the rocks with the best view of the valley. Chris follows and sits down next to me.

“No, not even a tiny little bear like you. But seriously, that’s a great color. Is it –”

“Yes, it’s my natural hair color…” I mutter, wary of what almost always comes next.

“Sorry,” he grins, “just don’t spot too many natural redheads in the wild. You’re like an endangered species.”

“Okay asshole if you think I haven’t heard this fucking line before –”

“W-what line?”

“Ha ha, very funny. Endangered redheads, gotta fuck to save the species. You’re hilarious.”

I look away as I spit the words out before fixing him with a toxic glare, expecting to see him wearing the usual smartass smirk that usually accompanies such obnoxious pickup lines. Instead, his face is frozen in the perfect mix of horror and amusement.

“You… you really weren’t using a line, were you?”

“No, I wasn’t,” he says in wide-eyed bewilderment, “I promise, I was not offering to procreate with you. I mean I can, if you want, but…” the demonic smile creeps back onto his face.

I wrinkle my nose with a grin and shake my head, handing him the flask back. I’ve misjudged the poor thing a couple of times now, maybe it’s time to let up.

“Sorry. You just wouldn’t believe…”

“Oh, I bet I would. People are animals. I’d sure as shit hate to put up with a quarter of what women have to listen to,“ he says, nodding somberly over his swig of bourbon, and I feel a surge of affection for him that is mixed with guilt for being so judgmental. We sit quietly for a while, drinking and enjoying the view, before he breaks the silence.

“So what do you do for a living, when you’re not laying waste to suitors or educating the public about the dangers of forest fires?”

“I’m never going to hear the end of that, am I?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Well, I’m not sure if I’d say it’s ‘for a living,’ but I guess if I’m talking to a musician, you know what that’s like. I’m a PhD student down at UW. And I just took a job waiting tables at the Cyclops in the meantime, because science isn’t exactly the best get rich quick scheme.”

Chris raises his eyebrows mid-drink, clearly curious. “Wow. PhD. Egghead, huh? I like it. What are you studying? Please tell me it’s forest fires. Or bears.” He nudges my shoulder with his, almost knocking me off-balance for the second time, and hands me back my flask.

“Hey! No, nothing like that. I am in the forest science department though…”

“I knew it! You really are Smokey Bear.”

“Ugh, no. I’m studying soils.”

“As in dirt?”

“As in dirt.”

“What about it?”

“I want to understand how changing levels of Arctic ice affect carbon storage in permafrost.”

“Come again?”

Aww, the poor thing looks genuinely interested. I take a deep breath and a swig of bourbon, mentally planning my route. The more time I spend in school, the longer and more pedantic my answer to this “what do you do” question seems to get. Maybe one day I’ll wise up and resort to one-word answers, but I have a feeling that won’t work here.

“Okay, well… the whole global warming thing, right?”

“Yeah?”

I raise my eyebrows, pleasantly surprised by how intently he’s listening. “Ok, so the greenhouse effect… we release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which traps heat and warms up the planet?” Chris nods. “So, as it gets warmer, Arctic sea ice is covering less and less land area each summer – see, in the winter the Arctic ice cap is pretty consistent, but we can learn a lot about changes in the climate by measuring how small the ice cap melts down in the summer.”

Chris is still nodding, which either means he’s utterly lost and just humoring me, or he’s actually following. I hate that I’m losing my ability to distinguish between the two.

“Well, as the planet warms up, that melting ice cap exposes progressively more and more bare soil each year -”

“Whoa there Professor, this lecture just got sexy!” He barks a laugh that echoes down the cliff, making me wince sheepishly.

“Ugh, gross. Anyway, the soil’s frozen solid –” Chris struggles to get a grip “– and we don’t know a lot about it because it’s always covered over, but the melting ice gives us the opportunity to study it better. So I’m going up there every summer and drilling holes to collect samples.”

“Wow…” he murmurs, looking genuinely impressed. “You go up there by yourself?”

“Yeah. I went last summer. I’m leaving in a few weeks for another trip.”

“Like, no one goes with you? Your boss or whatever?”

“My advisor? I think he’s a myth. He’s never around. So no, he doesn’t go with me… and what, I’m supposed to need a chaperone?”

“No, not at all, I just… that’s pretty badass, Smokey.”

“Yeah, digging in frozen dirt, it’s a fascinating life.”

“No, really, that’s incredible. People like you are going to save all this –” he gestures out at our view, with snow still visible on the highest peaks “– from the rest of us assholes, I’m sure of it. I’m glad you’re doing what you’re doing.”

I can’t tell whether it’s his sincerity or the bourbon that disarms me and makes me blurt out exactly what’s on my mind. “I’m glad I met you, Chris. Not as glad as I am that you didn’t burn us to death, but still. Normally I hate people, but you’re okay.”

He grins as I pass him the last of the bourbon, which he drains. “Don’t get so effusive, you might strain something. You must really hate people if you literally go to the edge of the earth on purpose every year.”

We sit in silence for a while before Chris makes me jump by shouting, “shit, what time is it?”

“Just about 6:30.”

“Shit,” he says again, “Susan’s going to kill me, I’m going to be late.”

I arch an eyebrow. “Susan? So there’s a Mrs. Cornell? How come she didn’t get invited to your degenerate weed party in the woods?”

He shuffles a boot in the dirt and gives a small chuckle. “Yeah, I’m a newlywed, but she’s not Mrs. She kept her maiden name. Susan’s got no time for stuff like this. She’s a big shot music manager. And anyway, she’s, ah, not the outdoorsy type.”

Although Susan sounds kind of cool and I want to ask him more, the edge in his tone reminds me of this morning’s fight with Alex, so I just stand up in silence to help gather our things and hasten our exit.

We head back down the mountain together, making small talk about school, music, the neighborhood – turns out he and Susan used to live only a few blocks away from where I am now in Lower Queen Anne. I’m surprised at how quickly the time has passed when we arrive back at our cars, but the rapidly fading light confirms it’s gotten late.

Chris hurriedly grabs a pen and a piece of paper from a notebook sticking out of his bag and jots down his number. “Cora, don’t lose this, I want to hang out again soon,” he urges. “You should come to our show! We’re playing at the Off Ramp on the 23rd, kind of a going-away thing before we head out on tour.”

“Yeah, that’s right before I go on my trip, I think I can make it.” I tuck the paper into my pocket. When I look up, Chris is already jogging toward his car.

“Drive safe!” he yells over his shoulder.

I shake my head as I climb into the Rabbit. It’s definitely not every day that one runs into a local rock legend almost burning down a forest. But at least he helped me forget about Alex for a couple of hours. Alex. I sigh as I turn the engine over and start my trip home to deal with the fallout.

#chapter 1 #behind the sun #chris cornell #soundgarden #pearl jam #fanfiction #fanfic

33 notes · View notes

sending-the-message · 7 years

Text

Matchmaker by Ilunibi

After the events with Miranda the RA and her uncontrolled summoning of one of the most powerful Earls of Hell, I won’t lie and say I didn’t have my suspicions about Cereal Girl. She was always just there, always in the right place at the right time, conveniently a witness for every threat Miranda threw at me and each exchange I left pinned back on her door. A sliver of me was convinced that she was the real culprit, framing Miranda to throw me off of her trail and delighting in my misguided attempts to stop her.

Cereal Girl, however, turned out to just be an insomniac, 4/20 enthusiast named Erika Dolores Ellison.

Or “Eddie,” if you will.

She was half my size and stayed camped in the hall’s kitchen, an omnipresent fridge goblin who spent every waking moment functionally baked and cramming food into her mouth. She had a girlfriend attending an art institute in Georgia, came from an affluent family who she figured would be in debt by the end of her already faltering college career, and was accidentally the eyes and ears of our floor. Which, honestly, suited her fine. Freshmen girls were petty, their drama was hilarious, and she couldn’t help but be amused by the weird, metaphysical battle between me and Miranda.

Both of us were still floundering freshmen who never quite pulled out of that awkward loner phase, struggling to make friends we connected with or finding a place where we belonged. Most people avoided her like the plague because she had no filter or shame, just like people avoided me because I’m awkward and unintentionally abrasive. She watched my back when I was out of the building, and I taught her small little tricks here and there that she couldn’t possibly fuck up while high. She even got in good with Dead Coyote, to the point he started selling her some of his weed when she ran out.

My one point of contention with Eddie, though, was that she was a bit more, well, libidinous than I was. Not that I’m a prude--I grew up with Dead Coyote, and he had a library of sex magic notes that I accidentally found when I was ten--but she had a weird obsession with my lack of an active love life. After glancing across a few things about the left-hand path on the internet, she became absolutely convinced that I must be doing something wrong because “evil” spells were powered by the sheer power of dicks. After a week or two of convincing her that hypersexuality really didn’t have anything to do with petitioning demons, she decided it was still a national tragedy that I was a single virgin and made it her solemn mission to hook me up with anyone that had two legs and functioning reproductive organs.

The pool she drew from was shallow. Being an outcast on campus, she basically would invite me out to “parties” with “friends” she made off of school grounds, each and every one of them hauntingly similar to Dead Coyote’s old customers. I could tell that she was a bit annoyed that I’d escort myself out before taking one of her potential Cassanovas to bed, but honestly? They reminded me too much of bad times and I’m a woman with actual standards.

Thankfully, she seemed to have gotten over it by the time spring break rolled around. I’d not heard a crack about needing somebody to keep me warm at night since winter ended, and she hadn’t invited me out to one of her white trash hookah parties in over a month. Most of our conversations usually revolved around what JRPG she had been playing that week, what weird shit I’d experienced over the previous days, and how much we mutually hated our required Gen Eds. Getting me laid seemed to be the last thing on her mind and I was one hundred percent okay with the fact she’d given up since it wasn’t a huge priority for me anyway.

The day that break started, she stood with me outside as I loaded my bags into Dead Coyote’s trunk, asking a thousand questions about why it was him and not my mother that came to pick me up. I didn’t know how to tell a girl who grew up in an actual, functional family that Dead Coyote had practically raised me so I didn’t have to raise myself, so I shrugged it off and told her that we were just really close. There was a knowing spark in her eye, the corner of her mouth curling up in a saucy smile as she tossed a handful of M&Ms into her mouth.

“‘Close.’ Yeah. I get’cha.”

A part of me was offended and wanted to say something. That part of me shut up when Dead Coyote slammed the trunk shut.

“Oh, yeah, Eddie. Didn’t you know? Me and Seymour’re secretly married on the astral plane or some shit.”

“You can do that?” she asked incredulously.

“Fuck no.”

She took being shut down in better stride than most eighteen-year-old girls, nearly choking on candy and snorting a laugh as she hugged me goodbye and told me to give her a call if I needed anything. She didn’t plan on going back home because she liked her independence too much and had one more disc left of Final Fantasy VII before she was finally done, and that game had become a personal quest. Besides, she couldn’t get away with being stoned all the time if she spent the week with her parents.

It felt nice to be back at Dead Coyote’s apartment an hour later, throwing my bags on his living room floor and collapsing on the couch that had been my bed for four years.

For the first couple of days of my spring break, things went pretty swimmingly, as though there had never been a gap in the time that I lived on that sofa. There were trashy talk shows aplenty, gossip on every street corner, and frozen gas station pizzas stacked to the top of an otherwise bare kitchen freezer. Dead Coyote confessed, rather bashfully, that he’d been trying to work with essential oils because he found out the scent of lavender snapped him out of some lesser jitters. He offered me my first beer, and after I downed four of them we mutually decided that essential oils were for pussies and he was getting soft in his old age.

Day three was when things started to get weird.

It began with dreams, weird and slimy dreams that slithered through my mind like serpents and left me awake in a cold sweat, my stomach twisted, and my thighs pressed so tightly together that I’d have made a good mermaid. Sex dreams, wild ones, but wild in a way that was terrifying and scarring. A wet, coppery tongue against my neck, and I could wake up and still smell it in the air. Something rough and cold running down my back, claws digging into my hips, sensations I could feel when I’d snap out of it. The heat was awful, not a warm and sensual heat, but like sticking your face in front of an open oven door.

The first night, I ignored it. You see, occultist or not, I’m always hesitant to blame things on paranormal sources because a lot of the time, your world and your own brain can be ten times more unpredictable and strange. My eyes snapped open on the couch and I sat there, shaking in the dark, until I remembered how stressed out and pissed off Eddie had made me over the course of the semester with her constant attempts to hook me up. I told myself it was probably a combination of being a new drinker and having lingering frustrations about that whole mess. I forced myself back to sleep.

The second night was more intense. No licking, no claws, but I was nine years old and laying on the ground in the alley by Dead Coyote’s apartment, watching a blurry stranger with a knife talk about how tight he thought I’d be. I instantly recognized it as the same goddamn scene with Joseph Shepherd, but when my vision steadied and I looked up to see who was kneeling in front of me, Dead Coyote grinned back at me with eyes like obsidian stone. His teeth weren’t human. It was like somebody took the teeth of a dog and crammed them in a person’s mouth.

I woke up screaming. Loud, baleful howling that I couldn’t even stifle with my pillow. Dead Coyote--real and in the flesh--actually fell down the steps tripping over himself to get to me, though the adrenaline pulsing through me told me to get away from him as fast as possible. I was locked in the bathroom when a concerned neighbor came over to ask what the problem was, Dead Coyote awkwardly trying to convince him that, no, he hadn’t killed anyone and, no, he actually had no idea what was going on either.

When he finally coaxed me out from underneath the sink, I felt nothing but awkward shame explaining my nightmares to him. He didn’t seem scandalized more than concerned, and we spent a good twenty minutes playing armchair psychiatrist while I sniffled into my blanket. He figured it was a mixture of alcohol and hormones. He also conceded that he had no idea what he was talking about, but it made sense logically. Probably. If you squint.

“Either way, princess, if you want, you can sleep up in my room,” he offered with a tired shrug. “Maybe that’ll help.”

So, I followed him upstairs. I knew the offer was just because he was exhausted and didn’t want to deal with me crying anymore, but the idea of having somebody nearby made me feel safe. I curled up on his mattress on the floor, back-to-back with him, swearing up and down that if alcohol was the culprit that I’d just not drink anything the following day. That had to fix the problem, right? I dozed off with wet eyes and a renewed resolve, and I kept to my promise.

I didn’t drink.

But Dead Coyote did, and the more he drank, the more I realized that something was off about the way he was behaving. Mid-conversation, he’d stop and stare, almost like there was something strange or different about me and he couldn’t figure out what it was. Occasionally, if he thought I was distracted, I’d catch him gawking at me like a slack-jawed frat boy at a strip club, but the expression on his face was odd. There was a light on in the attic, a conscious effort he was trying to make not to do what he was doing, but whatever had a hold of him wasn’t going to let him turn away. I was convinced it was because of the fact he’d been downing vodka like a Russian warlord, but after the fifth or sixth time he caught himself, he grabbed a pen, opened his hand, and practically carved a banishing sigil into his palm.

When I asked if he was okay, he flatly told me I’d be sleeping in his room the rest of my stay. When I asked why, he told me he didn’t have a clear answer for me, but he was going to figure it out.

He was the one who didn’t sleep through the night that evening. I was out like a light when I heard him growling profanity just behind my head and felt him sit up and climb off the bed. I listened as he paced and mumbled to himself, as he walked downstairs to get a glass of water. He wandered around the living room a bit, then meandered back upstairs and disappeared in the bathroom. I heard pills rattling around in a bottle and secretly prayed they were legal before he finally laid back down and struggled to go to sleep. His twisting and turning and cussing kept us both awake.

“A bad dream,” he told me the next morning. He paused for a moment, considered his words, then added, “Same dreams you were having. Sort of.”

“Sort of?” I echoed. He ignored me.

“That shit ain’t normal. That shit ain’t natural. Princess, it was like somethin’ was fuckin’ my soul. Or like somethin’ that ain’t got a clue what fuckin’ is was trying to fuck my soul. Bullshit. Pure fuckin’ bullshit.”

He decided that it had to be his fault, somehow, and that maybe he had messed up a ritual and invited something in by accident. With an exhausted sigh, he had me go get his holy water from beneath the kitchen sink and went to dig his leftover sage out of his closet. Our morning was spent cranking the radio up as loud as it could go to keep ourselves awake, smudging every corner, crevasse, and crack in his apartment, and then collapsing on the couch to eat cold fridge pizza and watch Maury. Dead Coyote ended up on my shoulder, asleep and drooling on my hair by the time the show’s host got to the first paternity test result.

No offense to Dead Coyote, but he’s capable of slobbering like his namesake and his spit had the distinct odor of garlic, Listerine, and death. I let him get in a nap, albeit begrudgingly, but the second I could shake him awake without feeling like the world’s biggest bitch, I nudged him off of me and excused myself to take a shower. Hair clung to the side of my neck. I grimaced and hoped there was enough shampoo in the apartment for the both of us.

Now, are you one of those people who gets scared there may be somebody behind the shower curtain while you’re bathing? Like, maybe you’ve seen Psycho one too many times and now you feel the need to check every three seconds to make sure a serial killer isn’t creeping up on you? I used to not be like that because I used to think I wasn’t a coward, but after we cleansed the apartment and I was in the process of cleansing myself, I kept getting this sinking feeling in my stomach like I was being watched. That slight, weird pressure that makes the back of your neck tingle like when somebody is standing directly behind you.

But it was coming from everywhere, and it didn’t stay slight. My face dropped when I realized I could physically feel something beating down on me like the air had become ten times heavier, that I could taste something sour whenever I inhaled, that my brain could pick up on a force, a personality that I couldn’t see. The shower was hot, but the bathroom grew hotter, and my mind raced back to when I was thirteen years old and I fucked up summoning Marchosias. When I opened my eyes when I shouldn’t have.

I peeked out of the shower.

Dead Coyote greeted me. Except not. I knew those eyes and that incorrect smile. I had seen it in my dreams and in that summoning circle all those years ago, and there he was: Not-Coyote, just standing there. Grinning. Strangely enough, he wasn’t very threatening, but he seemed to be enjoying the fact that I was paler than normal and about to piss myself.

I yanked the shower curtain down and nearly brained myself scrambling for the door. I felt something rough drag across my side as Not-Coyote reached out to touch me as I flew, naked and screaming, down the stairs. I had no time for shame or dignity or anything, only enough time to glance up the stairs when I hit the bottom and see Not-Coyote tilt its head and calmly walk from the top of the stairs to Dead Coyote’s bedroom.

Dead Coyote himself, having dozed off again, sat up like Frankenstein’s monster when I hit the bottom landing. He stared at me, nude and dripping with shampoo still in my hair, his brows knitted together in confusion. For a good, long minute he was absolutely silent, stuck in between being puzzled and mortified. When I had yelled myself hoarse and the same good samaritan neighbor from before was banging on the door and threatening to call the police, he finally found his voice.

“Uh, princess? You, uh, you forget what pants were for a minute or, like, is this some kind of weird white girl mating ritual I’m not aware of?”

I ignored him, instead pointing up the stairs and screeching at the top of my lungs, “Glasyalabolas!”

After I was walked back up the stairs to rinse my hair and dress myself (because I sure as hell was not going up there alone), and after Dead Coyote spent thirty minutes trying to convince the police that this wasn’t a case of domestic abuse, we sat outside on the stoop of his apartment staring at cars because I didn’t want to be inside. I hadn’t really realized just how scarred I was from my first tryst with Glasyalabolas until that moment, that very brief moment where I fucked up envisioning his polar opposite and brought forth a monster that got a kick out of stealing Dead Coyote’s face. The dreams couldn’t have been helping, either, with the alley scene replaying over and over and over in my head like a fucking movie trailer.

“Didn’t Miranda threaten you with Glasyalabolas twice?” Dead Coyote asked dryly, practically inhaling his cigarette. I didn’t look at him, instead looking at the neighbor who called the police, watching me from the sidewalk as he dragged his garbage to the curb. He still looked suspicious and I was absolutely humiliated. I thought back to my first, disastrous summoning and how I’d felt so much safer just physically feeling Dead Coyote’s presence in the circle. Like a little girl, I grabbed his hand and gave it a squeeze.

“She did,” I finally answered. My voice was still cracked.

“I seem to remember tellin’ that bitch I’d end her if she fucked with you, yeah? And she ain’t just fucked with you. She messed with me. Ain’t sure which one I’m more mad about.”

He exhaled smoke out of his nose and made a growling sound in his throat.

“It’s been awhile since I’ve ruined someone, princess.”

We barely discussed a plan. I waited outside, clutching a beer in my hand while he went through my belongings to check for any sort of talisman that could have been hidden in my things. When nothing turned up, he quietly walked back out, locked his door, and escorted me to his car.

The car ride was silent. He didn’t even turn the radio on. I stared blankly out the window, angry and embarrassed. How many times had I done rituals and how many times had I called upon spirits and how many times had I proved myself useless in the face of anything more powerful than a disembodied spirit? I couldn’t help with Furfur, I nearly killed a kid with a raccoon bone in sixth grade, and now I was trembling and shaken over a demon I’d actually encountered before. Even though I tried to convince myself it was a reasonable response to the patron demon of murder, I couldn’t help but compared myself to Dead Coyote.

He fought Furfur. He was going to go fight a girl who summoned Glasyalabolas. The man knew no fear. I desperately wanted him to be proud of me, but I felt like trash.

Also, he’d seen me naked, and that shame made it hard to make eye contact with him.

The parking lot in front of the dorm building was mostly empty, save for Eddie’s car and a couple of others. He practically pulled right up to the door and barely waited for the car to stop rolling before he jumped out of his seat. I quickly reached over to throw the car in park and turn it off, tucking the keys in my pocket as I tailed him inside. The lobby was a ghost town, the RA office predictably empty and ninety percent of the denizens having fled the campus for greener pastures. Dead Coyote’s footsteps echoed through the nothing as he stomped up the steps to get to my floor.

He punched in the security code. He entered the dorm hallway. I huddled down as I glanced at the cameras hoping that campus security or a hiding RA wouldn’t come running him down to try to pick a fight because, with Dead Coyote on his warpath, I knew it would end with him arrested. I tried to hide my face as he stopped dead in front of Miranda’s room, glowered at her tacky cork board covered in well-wishes from friends, and punched the door.

Not knock. Punch. As hard as he could. The door rattled, the sound echoed down the hallway. I waited for anyone to poke their head out to see what the fuss was about, but it seemed that the place was entirely abandoned. Except for--

“Miranda’s not here.”

The voice was calm, steady, muffled, and punctuated with crunching. It was a shock, a shock enough that Dead Coyote short circuited for a moment, standing there with a blank expression on his face and his fist still raised to strike. Standing in the middle of the hallway and clutching a bowl was none other than Eddie. She smiled and waved a spoon at us. It was Cocoa Puffs this time.

“She went to Florida, I think? Other RAs are taking her shift or something, but I think they skipped out, too. Fuckin’ assholes, right?”

She chewed, she swallowed.

“What are you guys doing here anyway? You got, like, three days before you gotta be back, Seymour.”

Exhausted, embarrassed, with dark circles ringing under my eyes and my hair a mess, I told her everything. About the dreams, about the weird way Dead Coyote had briefly acted, about the fact I felt so unsafe that I couldn’t sleep in the living room. I told her about the dog-toothed Not-Coyote that chased me out of the shower and that the neighbors called the police and that my only guess was that Miranda had stepped up her game. Dead Coyote had come to wreck her shit, but now we’d driven all that way for nothing and it was going to be a royal bitch to have to go back home and purge the apartment harder than we’ve ever purged anything before.

“It would have been easier to make her fix it herself,” I groaned.

The more I spoke, the more the color drained out of Eddie’s face. She kept shoveling cereal into her mouth, but there was this wide, wild, fearful look in her eyes like a deer standing in a hunter’s crosshairs. Dead Coyote noticed it first; he clapped me on the shoulder and stared her down like he was trying to will her to spontaneously combust. When she drank the final drops of chocolate milk out of her bowl, she wiped off her mouth with her sleeve and shook her head.

“Oh. Fuck. I didn’t know it would do that.”

I said earlier that I taught Eddie how to do small tricks and charms that she couldn’t fuck up while she was high. What I didn’t know was that Eddie had also been doing research of her own, mostly using Wikipedia and New Age websites manned by folks who didn’t really do any hard studying. It wasn’t that she was wanting to do anything malicious more than she thought it would be a nice gesture if she used what I taught her to try to “help” me out since I wasn’t receptive to her more normal attempts. After all, every college girl wants a guy who could make her walk crooked the next day, right?

She was worried, she said, that the reason that I wasn’t actively looking for love is because I was comparing every man I met to Dead Coyote. That there was unrequited love there, and that I was lonely and sad and unfortunately un-laid because I was holding out for the golden trophy that was a thirty-year-old Honduran man with unkempt hair and neck tattoos. And maybe, just maybe, she could surprise and impress me by playing demonic matchmaker with all of the cool stuff she learned to save my love life and keep me from being such a bitter, frigid person.

“I didn’t expect it to fuck up so bad,” she practically whined.

When the door to her dorm swung open, I couldn’t help but be impressed by her set-up. Even Dead Coyote let out a murmur of surprise at the expertly placed and drawn sigils drawn into the carpet with fabric marker, the assortment of candles all in the correct color, the lights dimmed appropriately, and even tokens she’d collected from us: one of Dead Coyote’s cigarette butts and an old tube of lipgloss that I thought I had lost. As angry as I wanted to be, I was actually kind of flattered that she took the art seriously enough to get it right, even if most of her source material was lacking.

Especially in terms of Glasyalabolas. Because Miranda had never drawn the damn sigil right and Eddie herself had the memory of a goldfish, she didn’t associate the threatening notes with her own helpful ritual. She just knew that Wikipedia said that Glasyalabolas was a big, mean dog who could play matchmaker if you asked nicely, and that she vaguely remembered me telling her that I didn’t like the alternative: “Thor Deer.”

“The fuck did you ask him to do, chica?” Dead Coyote finally asked, after a moment to admire her attention to detail. Eddie shook her head in shame, but after some prodding, finally looked up and squeaked a response.

“To have her naked with you, in your bed, and you both up all night.”

There was silence, then Dead Coyote exploded into laughter, laughter so hard that he sank to the ground in tears, snorting like a feral pig. He told her that, why yes, her request had been fulfilled, that Glasyalabolas had done his job, but not in the way she would have hoped. He had kept us up with godawful, painful, terrifying sex dreams. He had left me so scared to be by myself that I slept in his bed. He did scare me out of the shower while I was undressed so Dead Coyote got a look at me that he, quite frankly, wasn’t expecting.

“You have to be literal,” he explained. “Why didn’t you just ask Glasyalabolas to coerce us to fuck or somethin’?”

“I felt awkward saying it that way.”

We spent the next couple of hours helping teach her how to release spirits and dispel hexes, over the top of her apologizing again and again, nearly in tears because she didn’t realize that magic could backfire so badly despite how many times I had told her it could. It was a bit of an ego stroke to hear her tell me that she didn’t actually think it was possible because she never seen me fuck up so badly, but whatever confidence boost I had was marred by Dead Coyote listing off a lengthy series of things I had ruined, destroyed, killed, cursed, and broken over the course of my illustrious career. By the time I got to helping her scrub up marker from the carpet, she was laughing at stories of me making my first animal sacrifice (it was a pigeon, I cried, it escaped inside his apartment). It was as though she thought she hadn’t messed up at all.

It didn’t stop Dead Coyote from giving her a pretty stern warning on the way out. One that involved breaking both of her arms if she ever tried to summon anything ever again. The only reason I was spared from being chided for teaching her how to do anything in the first place is because, even with the knowledge that Glasyalabolas should be gone, I was still secretly shaken, nauseous, and way too embarrassed about being caught in my birthday suit to actually look Dead Coyote in the face.

With three days left of my break, I sucked up my fear and decided to head back home milk my time off with my favorite person for all it was worth. Besides, even if I was going to forgive Eddie, I still needed time to get over how unbelievably stupid she was. The inside of the apartment still smelled faintly of sulfur and I could occasionally still feel the prickle of an unknown presence tingling down my spine, but it was weak enough that it was obviously residual. Dead Coyote even coaxed me into relaxing about my streaking incident, reminding me of the time I found him passed out in his bathtub in high school.

In his words, “We’ll call it even and never speak of it again.”

But even with the awkwardness and even though I knew we cleaned up pretty well, I kept thinking of Glasyalabolas’ face and the dream about when I was nine. It was forgotten during the day--during the times I was actually enjoying myself--but in the dead of night the first day we got back, I found that I couldn’t take being alone in the living room. Shit would just loop in my head, a highlight reel of trauma, again and again until it propelled me to get up, drag myself up the stairs, and knock on Dead Coyote’s door.

I slept back-to-back with him on his ratty floor mattress for the rest of my spring break. It made me feel like I was a four-year-old but it was worth it to sleep soundly, to feel safe. I just knew I could never tell Eddie whenever I finally spoke to her again.

She’d never let me live it down.

#reddit #nosleep #scary #story

1 note · View note

exampleofabadexample · 7 years

Text

Comics: Terror Inc. #1

Terror Inc. was created by Marvel and the character himself started out as a run in their Epic Comics imprint, but was later brought over to Marvel as part of their main comics roster, albeit only for a short time, as they only released 13 issues that was originally supposed to be 15. Terror was created by D.G. Chichester, Margret Clark, and Klaus Johnson. However in this run of the series, only Chichester returned to write for it, with the help of Jorge Iaffino. Steven Buccellato is credited as being the artist.

Terror is an anti-hero whose has the power to attach other people's limbs to himself and in the process gain muscle memory, feelings, and the ability to use the skills associated with whatever body parts he has attached. Honestly, I think this pushes the line of suspending disbelief, especially for a comic that is wanting to be dark and gritty, but I will let it slide. I make this comment now just to get it out of the way. That being said, let's get into the review of Terror Inc. #1.

Starting with the cover, we see an image of Terror seeming to either jump or run towards a group of cops shooting at his leg. There is also a man's face in the lower right-hand side screaming. He also seems to be choking, or maybe punching a guy that is in his way. Honestly this cover is pretty terrible, it's crowded,the art is just barely passable, and it's impossible to figure out what exactly is happening. The only decent part of this cover is Terror himself, who is centered in the middle and you can clearly see him, and honestly he isn't drawn terribly, especially considering some of the crap coming out of the 90's (thanks Liefeld). The same can honestly be said for the artwork throughout the comic.

We start the comic with a shot of a large man in the shadows behind a desk, with Terror stating that he didn't have a problem morally killing the man, whose name is Roger Barbatos. We then go through a few decently drawn panels with Barbatos mockingly saying that he was insulted that Terror had chosen such a boring way to try to kill him after a failed attempt to slit his throat. You see, Barbatos can't be killed, as illustrated by Terror when he says that, "My difficulty rested in keeping the corpulent toad of a weapons merchant dead." It turns out that Barbatos is, although not immortal, impossible to kill by conventional means. We will find out why a bit later.

One bad pun about Terror being a "cutting-edge assassin" later, and Barbatos' thugs rush in, showing off some really bad artwork as Terror fights them off. I mean one panel is really bad here, making one of the goons look like a mud monster. He continues to fight them off before Barbatos grabs a rocket launcher and shoots directly at him, forcing Terror to jump out of the window of the skyscraper and hit the ground hard. Honestly, this wouldn't have been terrible if they had given us some clue beforehand that they were in a skyscraper, but they just kind of gloss over that fact and send Terror right out the window. All they would have had to do to make the scene a little better would be to show a skyscraper, or hint at them being in a skyscraper, or even just flat out say that they are in a skyscraper. Anything would have been better than just leaving that fact out until Terror actually jumps out.

Terror falls and lands on top of a parked car, destroying his body in the process. Meanwhile, Barbatos is commanding them to make sure that nothing is left of the body, and to burn it until it's nothing but ashes. One of his henchman tells Barbatos that maybe he should wait as he had heard stories about Terror, but he cuts him off and says "that fountain a' red when he hit weren't no Jello, Sammy." I have two problems with this; for one, what fountain of red? I looked at the panel of him hitting the car and see nothing that says he was even bleeding, much less gushing a "fountain of red." The second problem is that what his henchman said was stupid. Assuming the stories he heard were the ones about how Terror could put on new body parts and was especially hard to kill due to that; why the hell would you say to not burn him? If his ability is to use other people's body parts to keep himself alive, and he can just pull any person off the street and steal their parts, then the best way to deal with him would be to burn him until there was nothing left to put parts on.

We now see Terror waxing poetically about the sinister game of..."Got your nose." I'm not even kidding, he compares his ability to the game most adults have played with children, using big words to make it sound like its first degree murder. I know it's hyperbole, but it's just stupid. Hiding poor writing using a thesaurus does not negate the poor writing. He then goes on to steal one of Barbatos' thug's arms as the man checks his body, then steals another guards legs in order to be able to get away. The entire time commenting on how he knew that Sammy was a jogger based on how quick and agile his legs felt. Terror then rides away on a motorcycle he hot-wired using the muscle memory of the arm he stole from the first guard he killed after landing on top of the car. He laments throughout this sequence of events about how he is losing profit and how Barbatos' "indifference to the tenets of morality" is taking him too long to fix. He hasn't actually done anything evil, but Terror's idea of morality still seems a little hypocritical.

We now switch, confusingly, to an a man named Mikal Drakonmega (It makes sense later, but I still think it's a dumb name). Mikal is a paranormal researcher who is working on writing a book. To promote this book, however, his agent wants to make a big spectacle. This leads Mikal to say that he is not going to write it because he doesn't want his work to become a sideshow spectacle and he doesn't want to be associated with scam artists who steal people's money off of the paranormal hype. Mikal says he wants to show up the con men while his agent insists that he needs to stop acting holier-than-thou. Mikal says he wants to help right the wrongs he created, as it is implied that he went from a serious occult researcher to a more lucrative job working in the media, contradicting some of his own point in order to get people to buy what he was selling. His agent says he needs to come to his senses, which sets Mikal off, who insists that this decision IS him coming to his senses. The agent then leaves, bitter and frustrated, saying that he has some ideas of his own. His wife is clearly unhappy with his decision. Honestly this is probably the most well-written and drawn part of the story.

Cutting back to Terror, we see him talking to a woman named Alexis, who works for the people that hired Terror to kill Barbatos. He puts on someone's ear, saying that he hears echos of marital problems of whoever it belonged to. Alexis tells him that a bunch of third-world countries are tired of Barbatos supplying their enemies with weapons. Terror replies to this, "So that their neighbor's ability to kill them does not exceed their ability to kill their neighbor--how community minded." I don't disagree, but that still seems like a stupid thing to say, especially coming from an assassin. He then puts in an eye that apparently belonged to one of Barbatos' men. He uses the ears to listen to echos of what the henchman he stole them from picks up, and this is where we find out that Barbatos has sold his soul to a demon called Beelzeboul. We get a few panels of him sacrificing his soul for near-immortality, with Beelzeboul stating that the pact only protects the body. We then cut back to Terror using a female hand he got from somewhere, though it's never quite explained where. Alexis makes a quip about him having nice nails. He is using the arm because it has the skill to draw well, which Terror needed in order to draw a specific mark he thinks may help him. Terror decided that in order to kill Barbatos he needs to find a way to break the contract he made with Beelzeboul.

Terror then goes to see a man named Rekrab about the sigil he had found, showing him the copy he drew earlier. Basically, Rekrab informs him that the only way he was going to get Beelzeboul to appear before him was to summon him himself, as he doesn't come up from Hell of his own accord. This is where Mikal comes in, as Rekrab mentions him to Terror, who comments that Rekrab hit a new low due to Mikal's reputation as a "pop necromancer." Rekrab says that Beelzeboul calls himself Satan for ego's sake and that he fathered a half-breed demon named Hellstrom. Hellstrom, however, blew off his father and purged his birthright. This is where we find out that Mikal is the illegitimate son of Beelzeboul and that with no one to take the inheritance, maybe Terror could use Mikal as a sort of "key" to get down to Hell.

We then cut to a televison showing an interview with Mikal, which is hosted by a man named Ray Marlin Rothermel. I haven't had much more to say about the artwork to this point, but Rothermel's face is drawn like he is constantly doing the "derp" face (I'm only 22 and I feel old just writing that). Rothermel introduces Mikal, who goes on to tell people that they are not at fault for being lured into fraud by false occultists and that it's actually the con men that are to blame. The man next to him, who is introduced as "Anthony Mang, main man of the wacky and wicked Temple of the Risen King," agrees with him and goes on to say that "training to recognize the fraudulent must begin early." Mang then brings out a group of children dressed in stereotypical devil garb, complete with horns and pitchforks, and says that his youth group use pitchforks to "divine the true night spirit from the poor imitation." Mikal immediately gets angry and rips off his microphone, walking off the set and confronting his agent, shoving his face away and berating him for not letting him take the high road. My question is; how the hell did he not notice the guy sitting next to him before they even started. Also, how the hell did he not know Mang's reputation? Surely someone who takes it seriously knows the big name frauds well enough to know when they are sitting right next to them.

Anyway, his wife breaks up the fight, telling them both to calm down. She then sees that his face has gone half bluish-grey and asks what's happening to him. He responds that he is being forced into a part he doesn't want to play and that no one is out there working for who he really is. My biggest complaint here is, once again, the artwork. If they were trying to make it look like his demon side was coming through, they could have done a lot better than simply turning half his face bluish-grey. Give him small horns, or a different eye color, hell just change his facial features in any way that has something to typically do with the demonic. That was just out and out lazy. (Yes, I know this is coming from the guy who can't get anything out consistently.)

Left on that bit of irony, we switch back to Terror, who has entered the home of some unholy monks who worship the serpent once known as Hellstorm. The serpent is kept there and the "High Father" of the monks is the only one who can touch the serpent without being bitten. So in usual Terror fashion, he rips off the monks arm and after a bad pun (he said he was "taking part" in the ritual. That just barely counts as a pun to me), it cuts to him using the "High Father's" arm to kill the serpent. The comic ends with Terror holding up part of the serpent, saying that he was going to be (sighs) executor of the will now that Hellstrom is dead.

This comic is...okay. I mean, it could have been a lot better, especially the artwork, which goes from barely passable to bad. The writing, for the most part, was decent, though the sheer amount of puns (which I refused to subject you to) made it seem less like an edgy comic for young adults, and more like a Silver Age comic that somehow managed to sneak some adult themes past the editors. I know it's a cult classic, and I can see why, but personally, I could take it or leave it.

#Marvel #Comics #Terror Inc.#Detective

1 note · View note

wellmeaningshutin · 7 years

Text

Short Story #76: Shortcut.

Written: 3/26/2017

Ever since Camilla was young, as far back as she could remember, she always wanted to be a girl. Thirty years had been trapped inside the body of some horrible man named Conrad, who had a bland accounting job that he had fallen into in the course of his life, and never really did anything that he wanted to do, never took chances. She never liked to think about those years, which she always considered as her past life, because she had finally decided to make sure that she could finally become who she was inside, even if she was extremely impatient. Hormones, surgery, makeup, tucking, vocal practice, electrolysis, all of that just seemed so boring to her, and would cause her journey to be very similar to her past life, which was just full of bland moments and a whole lot of waiting.

Waiting was something she couldn’t afford to do anymore, because dysphoria had been coming in, full force, and every day was full of anger, hatred, and despair, like her life was some sort of melodrama that she wouldn’t even have the patience to keep watching. Money was tight, too, since she had to keep buying replacements for all of her possessions, which kept breaking during fits of intense anger, where she would grab the closest thing and make sure that it resembled how she felt inside, and then the realization of what she did would cause her to cry, she didn’t used to be this way, then the light crying would turn into full force sobbing, which would lead to despair that would cause her to go into her bathroom, with a knife to her throat or a plastic bag over her head, and a belt around her neck, but the sight of herself in the mirror would just make her angry at herself, angry at the world for having fucked up her birth, angry at herself for feeling so fucked up, and then she would go off and break something else, and the cycle would continue onwards until she fell asleep, which would usually happen during one of her crying sessions.

When one of the neighbors had dialed 911, thinking that some sort of domestic dispute was in progress, and police showed up at Camilla’s door, where they saw that the man and his house looked like they had a run in with the KGB, she knew that she had to make some changes. Therapy was considered, but she realized that she couldn’t handle to go only once a week, and couldn’t afford to do more than that, so, like many people who are desperate, and need easy solutions, she turned to the shadier regions of the internet, looking for information on black magic, an alternative that she never would have considered in her past life, when she was devoted to the teachings of the Catholic church.

However, it seemed like a lot of information online was contradictory, not very informative, unrealistic (later, she would realize that this was a strange criteria to have for magic), or seemingly made up, like the large numbers of sources that she found, boasting about the magical properties of crystals. What confused her the most, out of all of the information that she found online, was a website that claimed to sell crystals that would increase one’s luck and make them wealthier, but why would somebody sell them for $50 each? If they had so many of these magical crystals, wouldn’t they have enough money to give them away? Or did they work on a multi-level marketing system, where you had to sell crystals to get more money, but how would that work? And how could magic effect wealth anyways, since money is just a concept created by people and is really just an abstract concept more than anything. After a very long, and very confused email was sent to the store owner, she fell asleep at her desk, the first calm night’s sleep in the past month.

She never realized why she was able to sleep easy that night, even if the reason was pretty simple. In her past life, she was the type of person who had nothing better to do than to write long letters to politicians, corporations, television channels, local businesses, etc, that needed to clear up a large amount of meaningless questions, complaints, or both, and could spend entire evenings complaining about typos, or asking her mayor what his dental hygiene routine was, just because she was curious of how people in power took care of themselves. The reasons that she was placated by this was the same reason that many people go shoplifting, commit sex crimes, write hateful and anonymous comments online, because it was able to give her a sense of power that she was sorely missing in her life.

When she woke up, she found a response to her email, which only said, “If I gave them away for free, then nobody would want them.”

As she made herself a bowl of oatmeal, and slowly ate it on her couch, staring off at a distant wall, not wanting to see her reflection in the television screen, she came to the conclusion that she didn’t want to waste any more time on the internet, so she would have to go out into the world and find people who were actually knowledgeable in the occult. Yet she couldn’t really afford to leave her city, so she would have to find a local, but she had no clue where those sorts of people would congregate. Deciding that magic seemed like a more foreign thing, she figured that Chinatown would probably be her best bet, so that’s where she went.

That day was spent wandering around the streets, asking people if they knew how to perform magical rituals, making her generally feel like an asshole, she was way out of her league. On her way home, as she felt like a complete and utter failure, she decided that the internet would probably be her best bet, she just needed to hang in there, needed to stop being so pathetic. However, this idea went out the window when she drove by a palm reader’s store, did a highly illegal u-turn, parked in front of the building, and quickly made her way inside, where she found a man in a turtle neck, sitting at a table with a crystal ball on top of it, focused on a television in the corner of the room that was displaying a hockey match, or maybe it was a riot, it was hard to tell. When the psychic noticed Camilla standing there, he put a finger to his head and acted like he muted the television with his mind, but really just used the remote that was hidden in his hand that was in his lap, obscured by the table. “Welcome!” he announced.

“Hey there.”

“Well, sir, would you like to have a palm reading? I can tell your future, I can help you find true love,” swirling his hands over the plastic, crystal ball, “Or, if you are interested, I can tell you how you die.”

Pointing to the chair that was opposite of the man, “Can I?”

“Yes yes, sit down. I knew you were going to ask that. Now, what do you wish to know, I can tell you all, for a price.”

“Oh, I wasn’t looking for very much of that, I’m not interested in palm readings and could care less about who I love, or how I die. I just was wondering if you knew anybody else in the magic community, I need to find somebody who could perform a ritual for me.”

“What? A ritual?”

“Yeah, you know,” tracing a pentagram with her finger, “Black magic and all of that. I need to find somebody who can help turn me into a woman, or at least just my body.”

Worried, “I, I don’t know anybody who can do anything like that.”

“Is there at leas some sort of,” shrug, “occultists union or something like that? Do you people have conventions or something? I just want-”

“Look, pal, if you want to turn your body into a woman, then why don’t you go to therapy or something? Shoot a bunch of estrogen into your dick before you cut it off, or whatever the hell you people do. Why do you want to fuck around with black magic and all of that?”

“Well, I thought about that, but I figured it would be a lot easier to kill a goat, or whatever,” waving that idea away, “and have a real womans body, instead of going through pain and procedures for like two years just for a woman’s body that nobody treats as authentic anyways. I don’t have anything to lose, I’m okay with taking short cuts or whatever.”

Getting a little tense, a little aggressive, “Well, I don’t know anything about black magic, so you’re barking up the wrong tree here, pal.”

“What do you mean you don’t know anything about it? You have to know somebody, have to have some leads.”

Shouting, “I don’t know nothing about black magic,” and then a fist slamming down onto the table, hard, that caused the clear plastic ball to start to roll off, before the palm reader caught it and fixed it back onto its stand.

“What do you,” suddenly, a false understanding of the situation, “Ohh, okay. I get you. Nobody here knows anything about black magic,” a wink, then leaning in and whispering, “If you’re being bugged, then I can-”

“Get the fuck out of here.”

Standing up, appalled, “Fine, whatever, screw you! I bet you don’t even know the first thing about magic anyways, you’re just a fucking scam artist.”

Shouting, and standing up to stare down Camilla, “Scam artist? You think I’m some kind of scam artist?”

“Yeah, that’s right, you might as well claim that you’re a Nigerian prince.”

“Well, hows this for a scam,” reaching out and snatching Camilla’s hand before she could react, then waving his free hand over it, “You’re going to drown in a pool of your own blood, that’s how you will fucking die.”

In a mix of anger, fear, and confusion, Camilla jerked her hand away from the man who smelt overwhelmingly of cigarettes and olives, then stomped out of the building, making sure to slam the door as hard as she could on her way out. “What a lousy, no good, son of a bitch”, she muttered to herself as she got back into her old car, with its peeling paint, and cigarette burns in the seats from the previous owner. Before she backed out, and decided to drive home, she sat there, trying to figure out if the man was trying to scare or threaten her. After a little while she didn’t care, and was already planning out her formal complaint in her head as she backed out and began the drive home. As she was mulling over the third paragraph of the inevitable letter, she noticed a sign of a chain coffee shop up ahead, and figured that it would probably be best to get some caffeine in her now for the long night ahead, especially since she had shattered her coffee pot.

Inside she heard lackluster acoustic covers of already lackluster songs, and decided that it would probably be best to just order her drink and leave as soon as she could, but as she waited the atmosphere of the place seemed to take control of her, allowed her to feel relaxed. As she tapped her foot to the casually predictable tune of the music, she never noticed the woman who had sat next to her, and was surprised when she had spoke, “You are in great distress, aren’t you?” The voice was aged, but youthful, and when she turned to look at the woman she could see no face, only a black veil.

“Uh, yeah, you could say that.”

“You are troubled on how to find a cure, you are desperate to try anything, even what most people would be afraid of.”

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“You-”

The barista at the counter called out, “Madame? Your blended white chocolate, raspberry coffee is ready.”

Holding up a finger, “One second,” then getting up and getting the drink, and returning to her seat, “Okay, so you want answers to your problem?”

Camilla nodded, “Of course.”

“Well, I can provide you with a solution. I can help you transform into who you really are inside, I can make you whole.”

“What’s the price? What do you want from me?”

“Don’t worry about that now, when I want the favor to be returned then I will ask, all I need you to do is to promise that you will be willing to do whatever I ask of you when I call in this favor.”

“You’re sounding like a mobster.”

“Black magic, the mafia, these are both groups that have to exist in the underground, so it should be no surprise that we share some similarities.”

“When can the whole, you know,” tracing a pentagram with her finger for the second time that day, realizing that the motion was very pleasing to her, “happen?”

“Allow me into your car, go where I tell you to go, and we could perform it tonight.”

“Why me? Why would you be willing to do this for me?”

“I’ve been meaning to perform this ritual for quite some time, but I have had nobody who would be willing to undergo the process. That’s one thing that is required of it, the target must be willing. When I saw you come in here, you aura was just right, I knew you would be perfect.”

After Camilla’s drink was served, they got into her beat up car, and she drove where the veiled woman, who only went by the name Madame, instructed her to drive. When she started the car, Camilla expected to be taken to the woods somewhere, where a goat would be slaughtered, they would dance naked in the moonlight, owls would flutter around everywhere, but instead Madame had led her to some run down dance studio, deep in the downtown area. Before they got out of the car, Madame handed Camilla a business car, and she had to ask, “What is this?”

“Its a therapist, I recommend all of my clients to her.”

“If you’re going to be able to help me,” trying to hand it back, “then I don’t think I’ll have any more problems.”

“Just hold onto it.” They made their way into the studio, which was filled with darkness that Camilla could not see through, even though Madame kept walking as if it wasn’t something she had noticed, so the driver had to pause to turn on her phone’s flashlight, which didn’t seem to do a very good job of clearing the dark, but, unsteadily, she attempted to move onwards. It seemed like the place had been uninhabited for some time, there was a worrying amount of roaches, spiders, and rats, but there was also the occasional discarded needle, condom wrapper, doll appendage, or faded remnants of graffiti. Her guide had never looked back, and she struggled to catch up, worried that would become lost in the building, worried about what she may have gotten herself into, but she was lucky that the building wasn’t very large, and it only took her four minutes to find the main dance area, with hardwood floors, walls lined with mirrors, and a circle of candles in the center of the room, but her guide was nowhere to be seen.

“Hello?”

Moving closer and closer to the illuminated circle.

“Hello?”

When she reached the center of the circle, she could see that Madame was not too far off, blending into the shadows, lying on her back with her knees up, and her veiled head pointing at Camilla. They stared at each other for quite some time, then the guide finally spoke, “I am synchronizing my menstrual cycles to the lunar cycles, you will know when the ritual has begun. Please,” gesturing towards the circle, “take a seat.” Camilla sat and waited for some time, watching as the woman lay there, pointing her vagina towards the moon, unmoving, waiting.

After ten minutes, she noticed that blood began to pour out from the woman, and not just a trickle, but large amounts of blood began to pool out and slowly crept towards Camilla, who was starting to become worried, but decided that it would be best to repress any sense of worry, fear, or hesitation, knowing that no matter how bad this would get, it would be better than spending another day inside of a male body. It would be better than having to shave every day, to have to look in the mirror and see how freakishly masculine she was, to have to hear her deep voice, to constantly feel the discomfort of her dick, which always seemed to be uncomfortable and in the way, no matter how much she shifted it around, to never be able to wear feminine clothes, or makeup, because she would know how ridiculous it would look on her, causing hope to turn into hatred. Anything would be better than having to live like that.

So, when Madame instructed her to strip, she stood up and began to remove her clothes, then tossed them outside the ring. Then, following instructions, she stood as the menstrual blood had pooled around her feet, and when she had to she sat in it, dipped her hands into it and smeared it all over her face, placed her face into it and drank it, rolled around in it, made sure that it touched as much as her body as she could, and when she had to chant she chanted. When the blood flow ceased, Madame stood up and walked into the darkness, and Camilla remained in the circle, lying on her back, getting colder and colder as the thick substance seemed to move around her, seemed to vibrate.

Madame returned, this time carrying something bundled inside of a pink cloth, which she held up, let out an awful wail, and then brought down and held it forward so that Camilla could watch as she unwrapped it, revealing a mangled fetus, some infant in the making that had been cast out of its mother before it could even become a person, before it was even close to developing any form of thought, before it could come alive. She held up the the pre-person that had never lived, high above Camilla, and she made sure to twist and tear it in half, causing it to be a bigger mess that it already was, then she leaned down and smeared the things over the prone guy’s face, genitals, and chest, the whole time making some strange moaning noise, or at least that is what it seemed like at first. It took her a while to realize, but Madame had never made a sound since she told Camilla to sit down. However, the transitioning girl could not complain, or get worried about that, at least not in the moment, since her immediate situation was alarming enough.

The remains of the creature that was born before it could live, unable to die, into the darkness, and there was no sound to announce its landing against the hardwood, only a shriek after it had been consumed by the dark. Madame then reached inside of her jacket, and produced a large knife that she placed against Camilla’s flesh, and cut and cut and cut, as if she were giving the desperate girl a c-section, and that was the point where Camilla blacked out. She wasn’t sure if she was conscious during the whole ordeal and was just repressing it, or if she really passed out, but when she came to inside of the abandoned dance studio, freezing, completely naked, surveying the area that was now filling in with morning light, she looked inside of the mirror and was happy to see that she was what she had always known herself to be.

It was surprising that there had been no trace of blood, candles, salt, or anything related to the events of the previous night, and it was a little annoying that her old clothes now felt way too big on her, she was happy that she could live life the way she had wanted to. However, as she exited the abandoned studio, she saw the lights of a police cruiser, and to officers talking with a tow truck driver, who was placing the hook onto her car. “Wait!” she called and ran towards them, “That’s my car! Wait, stop, no, please don’t tow it, I’m here, I can just move it.”

The officers gave her a look, one she didn’t like, and one of them spoke up, “Ma’am, what were you doing inside of that studio?”

“I was just… just..”

“Can’t even think of an excuse?”

Their partner pitched in, “Maybe she’s still high.”

“Alright, I’m going to need to see your ID.” Camilla nodded, reached into her wallet, and removed her drivers license, but when the officers took it they just shared frustrated glances. “You think we’re going to buy this shit? Do you think we’re fucking stupid?”

#Free Write #Short Story #Writers on Tumblr #Gender Dysphoria #Transgender

0 notes

theonyxpath · 5 years

Link

Yes, the Contagion Chronicle continues to open up like a flower with each new section revealed to backers during this Kickstarter. We’re loving hearing from folks as they get excited by the way the Contagion manifests in city and region after city and region.

Is this the way you’ll include the Contagion in your ongoing Chronicle? Or is this manifestation so perfect for your group that you’ll just use it as-is for an all new Chronicle?

It works either way!

Plus, with the Stretch Goals to both expand on the Contagion, and to go crunchier into crossover rules, backers are going to have a fantastic spectrum of options to pick from.

Check out the link below in The Blurbs! section!

Geist 2e art by Avery Butterworth

Speaking of The Blurbs!, I want to point out our whole Onyx Path Media section, and in particular, the weekly Onyx Path News vid that Matthew has been doing for, what?, ten weeks now.

Each week, he’ll give you a fast recap of the week that was, the fantastic projects we’ve put on sale, where things are with our Kickstarters – you name it!

Here’s this week’s link: https://youtu.be/WvO-lsim_Kk

One other thing I’d like to point out that I noticed just this week in the Onyx Pathcast: Whoo-boy do those three Pathcasters let loose a lot of teasers and info for upcoming projects! I’ve maintained a very strong hands-off policy in terms of the content for the Pathcast, and really have let the gang do their thing, but after listening to all the bits of spoilers they revealed in the first part of last Friday’s look at Emotions in Gaming…maybe I should reconsider….

Here’s the link again, if you want to hear insider info about Trinity Continuum: Aberrant, and a whole bunch of upcoming projects: https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

Geist 2e art by Vince Locke

Finally, here’s an update on the Scion errata issue I touched on last week. Neall, the Scion 2e lead developer, continues to review the PDFs and compare them to his errata notes. We can tell already that not all of the errata fixes he input reverted after he fixed them, which is very good news.

We’re not looking at anywhere near the number or severity of fixes that we had feared.

Unfortunately, it would actually be easier to figure out what broke in the errata input process if they all reverted or if there was a pattern to the ones that reverted, but we have still not discovered why these two books had issues after over a dozen before them using the same process did not.

Since we don’t have that solution, but we still have books coming up we want to go through the errata process, we’ve already made some changes so that we don’t get hit with this problem again. I mentioned last week that our in-house developers will be the ones to actually input the errata changes, with guidance from the book dev, from here on in.

Now, we have worked out a new method for our backers and our community to provide us with the errata they find in the first place: a Google Form survey that we will provide links to, which will replace our usual “forum thread” method. We think this will provide a cleaner method for our devs to evaluate the errata we’re provided by the community. Not all errata is actually something that the devs think needs fixing, and this survey should make the ones we really want changed stand out.

You’ll be able to see that in action very soon with an upcoming PDF release!

Thanks everyone for your patience as we go back down the river to discover what went wrong. We should be able to move on some action items with this by this time next week.

Geist 2e Vengeful Symbol by Ron Thompson

As always, we’re dedicated to finding the best ways to bring you into our:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

KICKSTARTER:

The Contagion continues to spread, passing 1200 backers and infecting all in its path with more and more Stretch Goals! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/contagion-chronicle-a-chronicles-of-darkness-cross

Matthew Dawkins has also started running the Contagion Chronicle for some of the members of his Discord, via Google Hangouts! Follow along to get some sneak peeks of the content coming up in the Contagion Chronicle Kickstarter: https://youtu.be/dFMjit-YTwQ

He also asks for your Contagion Chronicle-related questions here: https://youtu.be/axvrFeQOvEg

ONYX PATH MEDIA

Illustration by Charles Bates

On this Friday’s Onyx Pathcast, our team interview Monica Speca, one of our fantastic new up-and-coming developers and who’s working on the Scion Jumpstart! https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

And Here’s More Media About Our Worlds:

Matthew Dawkins is back with another episode of the Onyx Path News for you fine folks: https://youtu.be/WvO-lsim_Kk

Matthew’s actual play of The Contagion Chronicle continues into its fourth episode, as the motley band of a Beast, a changeling, a Promethean, and a werewolf stumble into a scene where infection might have taken hold of a victim: https://youtu.be/7TB9aEMj-84

If YOU have a podcast, YouTube or Twitch channel, or talk about games on a blog or other website, and want to perform actual plays or make reviews of our games, please reach out to the Gentleman Gamer on the Onyx Path forum. From there we’ll share emails and get you started, so when you do start producing content we’ll be able to promote it on our blog and YouTube channel!

The good folks at the Gamers Table have played AND reviewed They Came from Beneath the Sea! They’ve even created some props for their game, and their website can be found here: http://gamerstable.com/cheesy-sci-fi-horror/

Cheesy Sci-Fi/Horror

Here’s the wonderful Occultists Anonymous with their Mage: The Awakening chronicle reaching episode six: https://youtu.be/FH-XCHN_s_I

Blades and Blasters just completed a lengthy one-shot of Scion 2E on their YouTube channel and it’s excellent! Check it out: https://youtu.be/gpmseeSqp7o

The always fantastic Caffeinated Conquests returns with the Gauntlet of Spiragos for Scarred Lands! Please give them your support and love: https://youtu.be/8lVL40fkPX8

Meanwhile, Roll the Role have their actual play of Dystopia Rising: Evolution available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvFtWq6Ys7g

In other excellent news, Mage: The Podcast has been covering all things Mage: The Ascension weekly, and we really recommend you give them a listen for all things purple and magickal: https://magethepodcast.com/

And the Dramatic Failure crew are deeply embedded in a Napoleonic Wars era chronicle of Geist: The Sin-Eaters on their channel: https://dramaticfailure.podbean.com

Please check any of these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games!

ELECTRONIC GAMING:

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is now live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is both rolling and rocking!

Here’s an update from the App devs:

Onyx Dice! We’ve recently released the Changeling: The Lost, Trinity Continuum: Aeon dice, and now the Geist dice. Next up on our radar is: Demon: The Fallen, Mummy: The Resurrection, Kindred of the East, Vampire Dark Ages, and Mummy: The Curse.

We have a serious issue on the Pixel and Motorola phones that prevent the user from using the app correctly. A fix is coming shortly. A temporary workaround is to minimize the app without shutting it down, and then restore it.

ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue you bought it from. Reviews really, really help us with getting folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these fiction books:

OUR SALES PARTNERS:

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the Screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there! https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

And you can now order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=296

And available this week! Deluxe Changeling: The Dreaming and Deluxe Beckett’s Jyhad Diary! The additional books we have after the Kickstarter ship-outs are done are now at IPR!

DRIVETHRURPG.COM:

Running until the 22nd, all WoD 20th Anniversary Edition PDFs are on sale!

75% off all core 20th Anniversary Edition PDFs and 25% off every other 20th Anniversary Edition PDFs

PLUS!

If you are looking for physical Deluxe WoD 20th Anniversary books, IPR has them on sale for 25% off too!

On Sale This Week!

Not Final Design

This Wednesday, we’ll be presenting Dragon-Blooded Journals for sale on our RedBubble store!

CONVENTIONS

UK Games Expo: May 31st – June 2nd From the US comes Eddy Webb, Matt McElroy, and Rich Thomas to join with Matthew Dawkins, Steffie de Vann, John Burke, Chris Allen, and Klara Herbol! Gen Con: August 1st – August 4th Save Against Fear: Oct 12-14 GameHoleCon: October 31st – November 3rd We’ll also be back at PAX Unplugged later this year.

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM FAST EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

Geist2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum Core)

TC: Aeon Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)

Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)

Wraith20 Fiction Anthology (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

DR:E Jumpstart (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

DR:E Threat Guide (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #2 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Redlines

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

TC: Aeon Ready Made Characters (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Heroic Land Dwellers (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Blood Sea: Crimson Abyss for 5e (Scarred Lands)

Second Draft

Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Let The Streets Run Red (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Chicago Folio/Dossier (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Development

Hunter: the Vigil 2e core (Hunter: the Vigil 2nd Edition)

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Oak, Ash, and Thorn: Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Memento Mori: the GtSE 2e Companion (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Creatures of the World Bestiary (Scion 2nd Edition)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

Manuscript Approval:

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Scion Ready Made Characters (Scion 2nd Edition)

Pirates of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Distant Worlds (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Editing:

Spilled Blood (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)

CofD Dark Eras 2 (Chronicles of Darkness)

Post-Editing Development:

C20 Novel: Cup of Dreams (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

V5 Chicago By Night (Vampire: The Masquerade)

V5 Chicago By Night Screen (Vampire: The Masquerade)

CofD Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Witch-Queen of the Shadowed Citadel (Cavaliers of Mars)

Indexing:

Trinity Core

Trinity Aeon

ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE:

In Art Direction

Ex3 Monthly Stuff

Chicago By Night – Art coming in slowly but surely.

Aeon Aexpansion

They Came From Beneath the Sea!

EX3 Lunars

Hunter: The Vigil 2

Contagion Chronicle – KS.

VtR Spilled Blood – Hiring artists.

M20 Book of the Fallen – Contracted.

Dark Eras 2 – Getting artnotes in from devs.

CoM – Witch Queen of the Shadowed Citadel – Contracted.

Pirates of Pugmire – KS art contracted, sketches and finals coming in.

Marketing Stuff

In Layout

Dystopia Rising: Evolution – With Josh.

Signs of Sorcery

Shunned By the Moon

Scion Jumpstart

Trinity Core and Aeon Screens – Need to assemble.

Proofing

Adventures for Curious Cats – Maps being reviewed.

C20 Player’s Guide – At WW for approval.

The Realm

Book of Oblivion – Inputting first round of corrections.

Tales of Excellent Cats

Scarred Lands Spell Cards

Dragon-Blooded Screen – At WW for approval.

At Press

Scion Hero – At Studio2.

Scion Origin – At Studio2.

Scion Dice – At Studio2.

Scion Screen – At Studio2.

Fetch Quest – Shipped to backers.

In Media Res – Getting Backer PDF out to backers.

Geist 2e – Going to backers for Backer PDF.

TODAY’S REASON TO CELEBRATE:

Today we lost an amazing and unique talent in science fiction and fantasy writing: Gene Wolfe. The master of archaic words – Severian in The Shadow of the Torturer wears a fuligin cloak, the color darker than black – and unreliable narrators, has passed away at the age of 87. Scion fans in particular should look for his “Soldier of the Mist”, the story of Latro, a soldier whose head injury during a Greco-Persian War skirmish allows him to see the gods, but also to forget everything as he sleeps – so the novel is compiled from the notes he writes to himself each night to be his memories in the morning.

#Onyx Path Publishing

6 notes · View notes

theonyxpath · 5 years

Link

Yep, just when you think things are working as planned, you get a surprise.

In the case in the illustration above by our old pal Sam Araya, it’s a surprise thanks to the Contagion Chronicle!

Which is, right now, as you read this, seeping into our reality on Kickstarter!

Now, since we funded, support for this one has been steady, but slow. Part of that, we have no doubt, are the adjusted International shipping costs I talked about on this blog a couple of weeks ago.

There’s also a part that is kind of interesting, which is folks waiting to hear about a revealed section of the text that features a region or that has more to do with their favorite CofD game line. Well, we certainly hope that they like what they see when “their” section of text shows up!

In any case, we’re actually pretty happy with where this Kickstarter has been going, and we do hope more folks can jump on before the end a couple of weeks from now.

Check it out here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/contagion-chronicle-a-chronicles-of-darkness-cross

Dystopia Rising: Evolution art by Sam Denmark

I was also really happy just this last week to listen to last Friday’s Onyx Pathcast featuring an engrossing and fun interview with Chris Spivey. It is really interesting, and I think is an excellent place for anyone concerned about how we’ll be bringing Cthulhu into Scion 2e to get an idea of how Chris will be developing that project, and how he’ll be handling the built-in challenges of the source material.

You can find the interview here, on PodBean, or on any of your favorite Podcast venues: https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

Adventures For Curious Cats art by Pat Loboyko

Today, though, we were less happy with having to get together during the meeting and talk about how we need to figure out what broke in our proofing process with our Scion 2e core books.

I’ll talk more about this when we get all the information in, but it seems pretty sure that a number of errata fixes that Neall input did not “stick”, but remained as errors. He is currently, painstakingly, going back through his errata notes and reconstructing what changes need to be made.

The last I checked, he hasn’t found a pattern for why some changes stayed, and others did not, nor why this happened with these two books, but not on the dozen-plus books that have previously used the same proofing process. While I’d like to know that, and will, our in-house devs have already taken over the errata input phase so that our book developers only have to notate the PDF.

This will add another stage, but will also give us an additional chance to identify whether errata that we gathered is actually in a book.

We’ll be able to tell better once Neall finishes his pass, but we’re not seeing anything that breaks the game or makes it unplayable. Certainly, the rules as they stand have worked for the many Scion 2e groups who are already playing the game, including the fraction of Actual Play groups we can highlight each week in our Media section below.

But it is extremely frustrating for us, and Neall, but also for all of the Scion community that stepped up to pore through the Backer PDF and send us what they found. Sometimes, in publishing, despite all your safeguards, stuff slips in. Here’s a painful example of a process that worked…until it didn’t.

Dystopia Rising: Evolution art by Aaron Riley

So, some weeks you can really enjoy the whole process of making something that didn’t exist before, and other weeks you do the job because that’s what you do, and others you have to try and fix what broke. Sometimes all those weeks are all in one week!

But in the end, you do it because it is how we create:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

KICKSTARTER:

The Contagion continues to spread, infecting all in its path with more and more Stretch Goals! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/contagion-chronicle-a-chronicles-of-darkness-cross

He also asks for your Contagion Chronicle-related questions here: https://youtu.be/axvrFeQOvEg

ONYX PATH MEDIA

Illustration by Charles Bates

On this Friday’s Onyx Pathcast, our team explore Emotions At the Tabletop! (I’m assuming the gang are looking at the full gamut of what you feel playing, what you bring to the table, and what emotions are evoked when you play!) https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

And Here’s More Media About Our Worlds:

Matthew Dawkins returns with the Onyx Path News to discuss the Contagion Chronicle and new releases here: https://youtu.be/A27HxT33me4

And he’s not done, because he asks for your Contagion Chronicle-related questions here: https://youtu.be/axvrFeQOvEg

Matthew Dawkins and a whole host of the writers from the Contagion Chronicle are running a live Q&A Monday, 4/8, on our channel at 9pm BST. Here’s the link, so don’t forget to subscribe and click the alarm bell on the site to get notified when we upload a video: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzN5jRB35OvnC-6gxnRY4gQ

Matthew also continues his read through of Vigilant: Through Shadows and Dreams, for Scarred Lands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmTRJx9Qh4o

A newcomer here, as we highlight Twin Cities by Night‘s offering of a Hunter’s Hunted chronicle here: https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-pygx4-ad07fb

Another new challenger approaches, with Roll the Role having run Dystopia Rising: Evolution for us on their Twitch channel here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/403766627

Occultists Anonymous, the Mage: The Awakening chronicle, has reached episode five! Here’s the playlist of all episodes so far: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh4mWsf86RuXzrrY_oHyjU4DdtE4MNsv2

And of course we continue to promote the absolutely superb Scarred Lands campaign by Devil’s Luck Gaming: https://www.twitch.tv/DevilsLuckGaming

A new player on the stage is going to running our Storypath games on their podcast, The Chimera!: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-chimera/id1259343855?mt=2

Please check any of these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games!

ELECTRONIC GAMING:

Here’s an update from the App devs:

ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

Our selection includes these fiction books:

OUR SALES PARTNERS:

We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

And you can now order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=296

And available this week! Deluxe Changeling: The Dreaming and Deluxe Beckett’s Jyhad Diary! The additional books we have after the Kickstarter ship-outs are done are now at IPR!

DRIVETHRURPG.COM:

Starting this Thursday and running until the 22nd, all WoD 20th Anniversary Edition PDFs are on sale!

75% off all core 20th Anniversary Edition PDFs and 25% off every other 20th Anniversary Edition PDFs

PLUS!

If you are looking for physical Deluxe WoD 20th Anniversary books, IPR has them on sale for 25% off too!

On Sale This Week!

This Wednesday, here comes M20 Gods and Monsters, in PDF and physical book PoD versions on DTRPG!

CONVENTIONS

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM FAST EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

Geist2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum Core)

TC: Aeon Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)

Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)

Wraith20 Fiction Anthology (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

Blood Sea Guides for 5e (Scarred Lands)

DR:E Jumpstart (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

DR:E Threat Guide (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)

Redlines

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

TC: Aeon Ready Made Characters (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Heroic Land Dwellers (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Second Draft

Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

Let The Streets Run Red (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Chicago Folio/Dossier (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Development

Hunter: the Vigil 2e core (Hunter: the Vigil 2nd Edition)

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Oak, Ash, and Thorn: Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Memento Mori: the GtSE 2e Companion (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Distant Worlds (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Creatures of the World Bestiary (Scion 2nd Edition)

Manuscript Approval:

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Scion Ready Made Characters (Scion 2nd Edition)

Pirates of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Editing:

V5 Chicago By Night (Vampire: The Masquerade)

V5 Chicago By Night Screen (Vampire: The Masquerade)

Spilled Blood (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)

CofD Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Witch-Queen of the Shadowed Citadel (Cavaliers of Mars)

CofD Dark Eras 2 (Chronicles of Darkness)

Post-Editing Development:

Signs of Sorcery (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Tales of Excellent Cats (Monarchies of Mau)

C20 Novel: Cup of Dreams (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Scion Jumpstart (Scion 2nd Edition)

Indexing:

Trinity Core

Trinity Aeon

ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE:

In Art Direction

Ex3 Monthly Stuff

Chicago By Night – Gaydos getting finals in.

Aeon Aexpansion

They Came From Beneath the Sea! – Art coming in.

EX3 Lunars

Hunter: The Vigil 2

Contagion Chronicle – AD’d for KS.

VtR Spilled Blood – Hiring artists.

M20 Book of the Fallen – Pinging artists.

Dark Eras 2 – Getting artnotes in from devs.

Marketing Stuff

In Layout

Dystopia Rising: Evolution – Slowly but surely.

Signs of Sorcery

Shunned By the Moon

Scion Jumpstart

Trinity Core and Aeon Screens – They are in progress…

Proofing

Adventures for Curious Cats – Maps being reviewed.

Geist 2e – To WW for approval.

C20 Player’s Guide – At WW for approval.

The Realm – Proof comments in, inputting.

Book of Oblivion – Inputting first round of corrections.

Tales of Excellent Cats

Scarred Lands Spell Cards

At Press

Scion Hero – Shipping from printer to fulfillment shipper this week.

Scion Origin – Shipping from printer to fulfillment shipper this week.

Scion Dice – At Studio2.

Scion Screen – At Studio2.

Fetch Quest – Shipping to backers.

In Media Res – Getting Backer PDF out to backers.

M20: Gods and Monsters – PDF and PoD versions on sale this Wednesday on DriveThruRPG.com!

TODAY’S REASON TO CELEBRATE:

Kind of a personal one, but let’s celebrate that I no longer live in Atlanta…as the pollen clouds waft down and cover all surfaces with a fine green/yellow dust. It’s like the Martian invasion in War of the Worlds, and I’m glad not to sneeze my way through it as Spring arrives full-force!

#Onyx Path Publishing

2 notes · View notes