#also they can bond over draft dodging | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rudysrings · 4 years

Text

Twin Pogues of the OBX - 1

A/N + Summary: SO I’m currently obsessed with the Outer Banks right now, and I had no idea that there was so much hype about it until I hit tumblr after watching the show. It kind of got me back into writing for a bit so I thought I would go ahead and publish something that’s been sitting in my drafts. It’s essentially a fanfic that goes through the entire show from the perspective of the reader, who is John B’s twin sister. Let me know if it piques anyone’s interest, because I don’t want to keep pushing out something that people hate lol.

Warnings: Mentions of sex, cursing, slowburn

Word count: 3056

Masterlist

ON WITH IT!

You didn’t want to admit it, but you were tired of listening to the waves. It made you sick to your stomach. It didn’t help that the Chateau was so close to the water that it was all you could hear at night. The waves crashing on the shore. The waves colliding with each other. The waves fighting to topple boats that made the mistake of trying to take on a storm too big for them.

You listened for your father in every wave. You hoped you’d at least hear the ghost of your father.

Unlike John B, you had no hope that your father was alive. At first, you didn’t bother voicing that thought, but as time went on, and John B continued to have delusions, you started getting more and more vocal about your opinion. Your dad was dead. Period.

And it was time that John B accepted that, too.

The two of you may have been twins, but you were as different as two people could get. John B was, for the most part, quiet, reserved and mild. You, on the other hand, had a fuse shorter than the short end of the stick you had pulled. You were hot headed and often misjudged situations too quickly. John B was the calm before your storm. You preferred to call yourself passionate. You smoked, John B did not. You slept around with far too many tourons. John B did not. John B was a dense motherfucker. You could read the room the moment you walked in. The only thing that really bonded the two of you was your love for surfing, your love for the pogues and your love for your dad.

Now that one of those things had died, or simply “vanished,” as John B would say, all that was keeping your two member family together were the pogues and surfing.

The last few months had been hell, and all you wanted this summer, was to have a good time, all the time.

Speaking of which, you and the pogues had decided to break in the summer with a little rule-breaking. Kiara wanted to check out one of Gary’s new beach-house developments, which was being built right over a turtle habitat. You all shrugged at the suggestion and agreed.

You threw a can of beer up, JJ catching it instantly, wrinkling his nose when he looked at the label. “This is the shit stuff, Y/N,” he complained.

You rolled your eyes. “Next time I’ll boot-leg champagne for ya, sweetheart,” you drawled.

JJ winked. “That’s more like it.”

Rolling your eyes, you tossed two beers to Pope, which he promptly dropped and bent down to grab, dusting himself off, embarrassed.

You rolled your eyes, watching as he threw one to John B, who was far too drunk to hold onto it, dropping it on the deck of the house, causing it to burst.

Before you could comment on Kie’s overly concerned “Please don’t kill yourself,” to John B, you heard voices yelling “Hey! What are you kids doing up there?!”

“Shit,” You said, looking for your hat.

“I second that shit,” said Pope nervously.

John B swiftly made his way down, grabbing Kie’s hand and leading them out, Pope on their heels.

“Guys, have you seen my-”

Suddenly, you felt something slip over your head, and you smiled up at JJ, who patted the top of your head and pushed you down the stairs and out of the house, all five of you laughing as Gary and his men chased after you.

As John B jumped the fence, he held his hand out to help Kie over, doing the same for you once she made it. You rolled your eyes, slapping his hand away and smoothly making it over yourself.

Pope, as expected, fell over onto the ground as he jumped, JJ shoving him further jokingly. You glared at the boy, and he held his hands up as you helped Pope up, pulling him by the hand into a sprint.

JJ held his hand out of John B’s beat up old van, pulling your laughing body in. Pope closed the door as John B gunned it, but you opened it again, teasing Gary, who was struggling to catch up with you guys.

You tossed him a beer, which he tried to catch, but failed as he stopped running, his hands on his knees.

JJ laughed as he too leaned out of the van, “They don’t pay you enough, bro!” He yelled to Gary.

Your hair blew in the wind, strands of it tickling JJ’s cheeks.

He spat overdramatically, coughing, “Hey, uh, Y/N? You mind not choking me with your hair?”

You simply gave him a playful punch in the gut, taking a seat in between Kie’s knees, who was sitting on the bench behind John B.

Kie took your long, wild hair in her hands, taming it into a french braid. JJ watched with a goofy smile on his face, his conversation with Pope getting too boring.

John B drove down to the docks, where you guys took out the HMS Pogue for the rest of the day. You tried to slap the book out of Kie’s hands, holding a freshly rolled blunt out for her to share with you, but she glared at you, turning back to her reading. You noticed Pope doing the same thing.

JJ grabbed the blunt from your hands, lighting it.

You leaned an elbow on his shoulder, tutting. “Didn’t realize we ran with a bunch of nerds…”

Before Kie and Pope could retort, John B turned around, releasing a pile of freshly caught fish onto the deck of the boat and you cheered. “Nice, John B. We eatin’ good, today.”

“Yeah we are. You’re cooking.”

“I’m what?”

John B smiled smugly, “I did the catching, you do the cooking.”

You rolled your eyes, crossing your arms over your chest, “Fine then I’ll also do more of the eating.”

“I never agreed to that,” John B argued.

You turned to him, “And that’s because you’re a greedy, cocksucking parasite and-”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. We’re here to have fun, you guys,” said Kie, her hands out to the two of you.

“Man, I’d really like to go one day without you guys at each other’s goddamn throats,” Pope groaned.

“Forget the fish, there’s a party tonight. First summer party. We gotta be there,” said JJ.

“Hell yeah, I’ll take a touron dick appointment over fish and chips any day,” you put your hands on your hips, looking at the rest of the pogues.

John B rolled his eyes at your blunt words, while Pope and Kie shrugged, agreeing.

Everyone looked to John B and he sighed before saying, “Yeah, I’m down.”

You all cheered, running over and piling on top of him, laughing.

The party was one of the best you had been to yet. While Kiara got on her soapbox about plastic and the boys were looking for girls to flirt with, you were on the hunt for someone who could make your night count.

As you waited in line at the keg to fill up your cup, the guy behind you spoke up. “You look too good to be hanging around the cut.” He flirted.

Your blood boiled as you turned around to get in this guy’s face. You stopped short once you saw what a nice face it was. You weren’t shallow, just… horny. “Am I now?” You smiled slightly.

He nodded, “Oh yes, too good for North Carolina even. The likes of you belong in Hollywood, babe.”

He had neatly trimmed blonde hair and striking blue eyes. Guess you had a type, after all, you thought fleetingly.

“Wow, can I get a name, kind stranger?” You flashed your teeth.

“It’s Asher ma’am, and you are?”

You shrugged, handing your cup to the guy near the keg, who handed it back within a second, full. You put your hand on Asher’s cheek, tapping it as one would a small child, “Oh, sweetheart, you gotta earn that.”

Asher’s eyebrows rose, walking with you down the beach. “How might I go about that?” He asked, suggestively.

You smirked. “It’s not how, honey, it’s where.”

And that was all you needed to let this guy rock your world that night.

You woke up alone the next morning in the hammock outside the Chateau, having crashed there after the party. Groaning, you rolled over until you fell on the ground, struggling to pick yourself up. John B appeared out of nowhere, helping you up.

He handed you some water, which you downed immediately, his hand on your back.

“You alright, kid?” He asked. You nodded, “Yeah, I just need a shower like yesterday,” You moaned.

John B nodded, slapping your shoulder. “Next time don’t drink so much, eh?”

You rolled your eyes, flipping him off as you walked inside. You were heading to the bathroom when you passed John B’s bedroom. You noticed JJ, half-naked and leaning over some blonde on your brother’s bed, his forehead practically touching hers. He noticed you instantly. Some emotion flashed across his face before he glared. “Dude, come on. Get outta here,” he said and you smirked.

“Get some, JJ,” you encouraged, barely dodging the pillow he hurled at you as you shut the door.

As you walked into the bathroom, you couldn’t understand why your stomach lurched when you thought about what JJ was probably doing with that blonde in John B’s bed. You shrugged, it was probably just the alcohol.

That afternoon, you and John B had an appointment with social services, who basically confirmed that you two would be put in foster care after they confirmed that your uncle wasn’t home to look after you two tomorrow.

As John B expected, you didn’t take it well. To your credit, you kept it together in the social worker’s office, but you practically had a meltdown the moment you stepped foot outside.

“How can they just fucking take us away! What did we even do wrong? It’s not our fucking fault Uncle T decided to split! Can’t they see that we’re better off on our goddamn own, John B?!”

John B shrugged. “Not much we can do, Y/N. It’s the law.”

At that, your breaths came even faster, “But it’s not fair, John B! What if-What if they split us up?” You were almost hyperventilating now, pulling your own hair.

John B furrowed his eyebrows, pulling you into a hug. “They’re not going to do that. I’m not going to let that happen, Y/N, you hear me?”

You pushed him away from you, “We’ll see, John B.”

The two of you caught a break. Hurricane Agatha came in the same day DCS was supposed to do your assessment. Your mind immediately went to the sick waves that would be forming. You tugged on John B’s shirt, pulling him away from the TV, “Call DCS and call them to reschedule. And then grab your surfboard.” Your grin stretched across your whole face, your eyes probably wild.

John B looked confused, then concerned. “You can’t be serious. There’s a hurricane?”

“Dead serious.” You crossed your arms. “Like you can resist these waves.”

John B shrugged. “Yeah, I’m in.”

The two of you ran out to the ocean, the dark clouds and harsh winds not fazing you, Pope having bailed on you guys, claiming that these weren’t surfable waves.

As you surfed the waves, constantly getting wiped out due to their sheer size and speed, you couldn’t help the thought: Did a wave like this kill Dad?

John B tried to surf a few waves, but he lacked not only your skill, but also your tenacity. He gave up and simply watched you from his seat on his board.

When you noticed a clearly fancy boat being tossed around in the waves, you pointed it out to John B, who squinted, trying to make it out. He agreed that it was strange. Who would go out in a storm like this?

The next morning, after surveying the damage that Agatha had caused, John B suggested that you guys go fishing, given the likeliness that there would be a whole lot of fish to catch in the marsh today.

Happy to put off cleaning up for a day and high on the fact that DCS wouldn’t be able to catch a ferry down here for at least a couple of days, you agreed.

After practically kidnapping Pope from his dad and picking up Kiara, the five of you drove down to the marsh, Pope steering.

Giggling, you pulled JJ by the hand up to the bow of the HMS Pogue and handed him one of the beers that Kiara had brought. He smirked and held it up along with you as he shouted for Pope to go faster. Pope groaned. “We’ve tried this like six thousand times.”

You shook your head. “I’ve got this. It’s gonna work.”

And it did. Kind of. You and JJ were downing your beers, Kiara complaining that it was getting in your hair. You looked over at JJ from your peripheral and smiled slightly at his silly face, mouth open like a fish as he attempted to get all of the beer that was being hurled out of the bottle.

Until the boat lurched to a sudden stop, catapulting you and JJ into the air. You felt your entire body flip as you fell into the water with a loud crash, water surrounding your ears. You broke the surface immediately, blinking against the sunlight. “Fuuuck,” you groaned.

You felt JJ reach you, wrapping an arm around your waist. “You good?” You nodded at him, resting your hands on his shoulders as you let out a breath you didn’t realize you were holding.

John B called out, “You good, Y/N? JJ?”

“I think my heels touched the back of my head,” JJ groaned.

You swam back to the boat, JJ right behind you. “Pope, what did you do?” You asked.

Pope looked as confused as the rest of you guys. “Sandbar. Channel changed.”

As you made it onto the boat, JJ pulled himself up, too, saying, “No shit.”

As your clothes were soaked, you slid your shorts and t-shirt off, leaving you in your teal halter bikini.

You didn’t miss how JJ’s eyes dragged up your figure, his ears turning pink when he reached your eyes and realized you noticed.

Biting your lip to keep from laughing, you turned to Pope, who had his eyes on something in the water.

“Guys...I think there’s a boat down there,” He said.

John B scoffed, “Shut up.”

Kie smiled, “No way.”

But Pope didn’t let up, “No, no, guys. I’m serious. There’s a boat down there.”

You all leaned over the side of the boat and sure enough, there was a large shadow, vague, but obviously in the shape of the hull of a boat.

“Holy shit. He’s right; let’s go!” You said, jumping into the water.

As you swam towards the shadow, you heard Pope muse, “You think there’s a dead body down there?”

You couldn’t stop your subconscious from immediately thinking Dad.

You almost threw up at the thought of stumbling across your own father’s drowned corpse.

But you knew that if that was the case, you would handle it far better than John B. You swam faster, trying to get down there before him.

The five of you made your way to the boat, your eyebrows raising against the water as you saw what kind of boat it was. This was a rich guy’s boat for sure. You recognized it as the boat from yesterday. You all took a peek inside, but couldn’t make out a body. You sighed aloud, bubbles releasing in the water.

As you guys resurfaced, you all laughed.

“That’s a Grady-White,” JJ laughed in shock, “A new one of those is like 500 Gs, easy.”

You guys climbed back into the boat. John B gave you a look. “That’s the boat we saw when we surfed the surge. Maybe it hit the jetty or something.”

Kie looked confused. “You surfed the surge.”

You smirked. “Well… I surfed the surge. John B mostly just watched.” Your brother rolled his eyes but he didn’t correct you.

JJ was getting on the boat when he heard you say that and his entire face lit up. “Yeah, that’s my girl, pogue style,” he said, giving you a high-five.

You grinned back, your stomach involuntarily tumbling at the words my girl.

“Fuck,” you whispered to yourself. Kie noticed, shooting you a look.

You blushed, looking away.

Pope asked, “Wait, wait, do we know who’s boat that is?”

John B opened the hatch on the deck of the boat, looking for the anchor inside. “No. but we’re about to find out.”

JJ shook his head, “Dude, it’s too deep.”

“Only for the weak and feeble, JJ,” John B said.

“Well, I’m not resuscitating you. I’m just making that clear up front.”

You worried that there could still be a body down there. Your father’s body. John B couldn’t see that. Plus, something about the thought of diving felt like a challenge. You took the anchor from John B’s hands. “I’ll go,” You said.

“What the fuck, no Y/N,” said John B.

JJ grabbed your upper arm, “Yeah, not a good idea,” he said.

You shook him off lightly. “I’m doing it,” you insisted.

JJ shrugged. “Well, I wouldn’t mind resuscitating you,” he joked.

You rolled your eyes, “You wouldn’t even know how.”

JJ smirked, “Yeah, but I have experience with-”

Pope interjected as you walked to the edge. “Diver down, fool,” he shook his head in slight disappointment. But then again, when was Pope not disappointed in you?”

JJ came over to you. Looking you hard in the eyes, he gave you a questioning look. You steeled your eyes. “I’m ready.”

He smirked, “You better be.” He gave you a shove on your shoulders, pushing you backwards off the bow of the boat and you could hardly hear him say “Diver down,” and John B say, “The fu-” before the water hit you, swallowing you whole as you quickly sunk with the weight of the anchor.

Masterlist

762 notes · View notes

pipermca · 3 years

Text

Writing continues. I’ve had several new bits for my Alt Modes and Alchemy AU in mind for ages. As one of them is a disjointed serial in the same way that After Tempest was, I decided I’ll pre-post the rough drafts of it to Tumblr (and Pillowfort!) the same way as I did for that story. :)

This is a direct sequel to A Bonding, a Coronation, and a Funeral, and actually begins the same evening where that fic ended.

Tentative title is The King and the Bounty Hunter, so you know where this is going. ^.^

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

King Smokescreen couldn’t remember the last time he’d had such a good time taking fuel.

Maybe it was because he rarely had a chance to sit and talk with his brother about something that didn’t involve the work of running the kingdom or dealing with the complex politics between the throne and the noble houses. Both Smokescreen and Prince Prowl had been incredibly busy for the past half vorn. Between planning and managing all of the changes Smokescreen wanted to bring to Praxus, and dodging insistent nobles who wanted to introduce their creations to the very publicly unattached King, that simply relaxing and enjoying an evening had fallen out of their schedules.

Cadet Jazz had been busy with training, of course. High Commander Irridus had advised Smokescreen privately that it likely wouldn’t be long before Jazz started climbing the ranks of the Praxian Cavalry, since he was both skilled and charismatic. Irridus wanted him in a leadership position as soon as possible. But Jazz was content to work his way up the ranks slowly, and so was spending a lot of time away doing training exercises. As a result, Smokescreen hadn’t talked with Jazz in quite a while, either, although he was sure that Prowl missed Jazz’s company far more than Smokescreen did.

The third companion at the table was new to everyone present. Smokescreen found the bounty hunter a fascinating mech to talk with. Devcon had successfully brought in the rogue Prelate Hitch, the Temple priest who had been involved in the attempts on Smokescreen’s life... And in Lord Halfsteel’s death. Smokescreen was grateful to Devon for helping to finally tie up the last loose end in the horrors that had been unleashed on Smokescreen’s coronation day. But the bounty hunter was also quick-witted, had an interesting take on the politics in the region, and listened to others with an intensity that Smokescreen found strangely appealing. And as he listened to Devcon and Jazz trade stories of their travels around Cybertron, Smokescreen watched how the winglets on Devcon’s back moved whenever he laughed in his deep voice.

Smokescreen didn’t realize how much he’d missed doing exactly this: lounging around after a meal, sitting and laughing and talking with others, enjoying a glass of engex along with the company and the conversation. It reminded him a little of the days before the crown, the mantle, and the realities of leading a country had settled on him, back when he could just relax and be at ease.

Hmm. Maybe he had buried himself in his work a bit too much.

Jazz was the one who broke the spell that had settled over Smokescreen. "Well, Devcon, it's been a real pleasure meetin' ya, but I just got back from field training and I'm runnin' low on energy," he said with an apologetic tilt of his helm. Then he turned and smiled at Prowl. "And, I promised Prince Prowl here we'd get some alone time together before I let myself collapse into stasis." He slipped his hand under the table, and whatever he did there caused Prowl to sit up straight, and his wings to flare out with an audible click.

"Jazz, please," Prowl murmured, but Smokescreen knew that the slant of Prowl's sensor wings meant he didn't really mind Jazz's attention.

As Jazz and Prowl pushed their chairs back from the table, Devcon also stood up. "The pleasure has been mine, Cadet Jazz. And thank you, Prince Prowl," Devcon said, giving them both a small bow. "Please, if you are ever in Altihex, be sure to send me word so that I can return the favour. I can arrange accommodations and company, if you desire, even if I am away on a contract."

Prowl returned Devcon's bow. "I shall be sure to do so," he replied. He nodded at Smokescreen, who was still sitting. "Good night, your Majesty." He narrowed his optics slightly. "Remember our meeting with High Commander Irridus is scheduled for first thing tomorrow morning."

From his seat, Smokescreen held up his glass to his brother in a toast. "I remember, Prowl," he said, suppressing the irritated flick of his wings. "Have a good night."

As Prowl and Jazz made their way out of the dining room, arm in arm, Devcon both took their seats again. "You must also be tired. You said earlier that you'd been on the move for almost an orbital cycle," Smokescreen said, swirling the last bit of engex in his glass before draining the last of it. "Please, don't feel obliged to stay here on my behalf. I... tend to stay awake far later than I should." He picked up the bottle, pouring himself another glass. "On the other hand, you are welcome to a refill, if you want one..." Smokescreen held up the bottle and tipped his wings upwards questioningly.

"Yes, but just a small amount. Thank you." Devcon leaned forward offering his own glass. "This engex is very good, but it's not a type I'm familiar with."

Smokescreen smiled. "I'm not surprised," he said as he started to fill Devcon's glass. He'd only splashed in a little when Devcon held up his hand for him to stop. He switched to his own glass and continued to pour. "This is Northern engex, distilled here in Praxus. The mines in that principality produce some of the purest quality energon in the country, and they have a secret process for its distillation that's only passed on from creators to creations. I daresay you won't find anything like it anywhere on Cybertron."

"I can definitely agree with that. It has very distinctive flavour." He waited until Smokescreen had filled his own glass to the top before leaning back into his seat. He took a contemplative sip. Then he said, "Would it be all right for me to be a bit familiar, your Majesty?"

"That's fine," Smokescreen said. "And please, if we're not talking about business or politics, just call me Smokescreen."

"As you wish... Smokescreen," Devcon said, but there was an odd smile on his face. "And that's exactly the sort of thing I would expect of you. You see, when I accepted your offer for dinner tonight, I was only being polite. But I ended up having quite a good time. It was like..." He tapped his fingers on his glass for a moment as he thought. "It was like an enjoyable dinner with friends." The bounty hunter gestured at the empty chairs where Prowl and Jazz had been sitting. "Being able to talk casually over fuel about everything and nothing was not something I expected when I accepted the invitation to dine with royalty."

"I know Praxus developed a reputation across Cybertron for being a severe, suffocating place, but I'd hoped that some of the news that has made its way out of here changed that preconception a little bit." Smokescreen tipped his wings upwards again. "Can I ask what you were expecting?" he asked.

"It's nothing specific about Praxus." Devcon took another sip from his glass before replying. "My services are in demand, and as a result I've had audiences with governors and nobles and all manner of rulers, all across Cybertron," he said matter-of-factly. "And I've come to expect a certain distance that rulers keep themselves from other mechs. I assume some of it is to ensure an air of objectivity in any association they have, but it always comes across as a coldness, or a sense that they truly think they're superior to the mechs they rule." Devcon's gaze held Smokescreen's evenly. "You don't come across that way, which is a surprise especially with what I thought I knew about Praxus. The care that you show your subjects is obvious in the way you speak about them."

Smokescreen felt a little wash of gratification at Devcon's words, and he inclined his helm at the bounty hunter. "Thank you. I hope the citizens of Praxus feel that way, too." Smokescreen took another drink from his glass and then stared into it for a moment. "There is a lot of well-earned anger and resentment towards the nobility in Praxus, and I want to do as much as I can to reconcile those hurts and indignities that have been perpetuated through generations." He frowned. "It'll take time, though, and I'm being fought every step of the way by nobles who don't want change."

Devcon's winglets twitched. "I surmised some of that in the brief I was given in the contract."

"It's a relief knowing that Hitch has been captured and will face justice along with Lady Crossflare." Smokescreen took another drink. "It's certainly not an end to the trouble that he and Crossflare caused, but hopefully other nobles will see that I'm serious about helping common Praxians, starting with those in Emerald Lake."

Setting his glass on the table, Devcon asked, "What did they do to the mechs of Emerald Lake?" His winglets twitched upwards. "I take it that's a principality?"

"Yes. Lady Crossflare and her family ruled it since before my grandsire emerged," Smokescreen said, twirling his empty glass in his fingers. "They ruled it with cruelty and greed. The crown essentially ignored all that was happening there, and for that... I must take full responsibility, on my family's behalf." Smokescreen held the glass still in his fingers and pulled another vent. "When Crossflare fled Praxus after... after the attempts on my life and the attempts on my brothers' lives, she left her principality destitute. I've sent a team there to help those in most need, but Crossflare emptied the principality's coffers and took everything with her. And now, apparently, it's in protected accounts in Altihex." He grimaced. "No amount of charms from our alchemist or spells from our sorcerer has been able to give us any information about those accounts."

"There's a reason they're called protected accounts," Devcon said. He rested his elbows on his chair's armrests and clasped his hands together. "They're specially protected with charms of their own to prevent exactly that sort of meddling. Of course, that makes them very popular with – ah – unsavory elements, but the Ruling Council in Altihex has upheld those protected accounts for hundreds of vorn." He shrugged. "You might say it's tradition."

Smokescreen nodded glumly. "Yes, I've learned more about Altihexian protected accounts in the past few orbital cycles than I ever needed to know, I think." He twirled his glass again. "I just wish that we could get our hands on the shanix Crossflare took with her. That amount of money could do a lot of good for them mechs in Emerald Lake, and based on the accounting records we seized, the money rightfully belonged to the Praxians living there." He let out a quiet vent, thinking of the reports he'd received of the living conditions the mechs of the principality had been left in after their Lord had left them. They had been destitute before: being forced to work to pay off illusory debts to their Lord, debts that only compounded as time went on and were passed from creator to creations, no matter how much labour was completed. But now, what little shanix circulating in the principality had been spirited away by Crossflare, leaving everyone living there without the financial means to even survive. "Right now the crown is helping to make sure they're getting the fuel they need and the maintenance they lack, and we're trying to stabilize the situation there, but..." Smokescreen fanned his fingers wide as if scattered away chips. "Our resources are already stretched thin. We've been shut off from the rest of Cybertron for so long everyone is reluctant to do business with us still, since we're an unknown quantity." He shook his helm. "I understand their position, but unfortunately it means I'm limited in how I can help Emerald Lake until we get some new trade treaties negotiated."

Devcon's helm had slowly tipped to the side as he listened to Smokescreen, his attention focused on the king closely. "I'm surprised that the crown – the government – is stepping in to help," he said. "In Altihex, the expectation would be for them to find a way to make do, until they can pull themselves up. Giving away shanix like that... Some might say that it just encourages laziness."

"These mechs had nothing. They were starving. They were suffering from engine burnout because they hadn't even had basic maintenance since they were created. They were living two or three dozen to a single dwelling, the adults recharging in alt mode outside to make room for their creations. They were fighting to survive day in and day out, simply because the wages they were paid were not enough to live on. To permit that to continue was unconscionable," Smokescreen said, his words becoming louder and louder as he spoke. When he saw Devcon sit back in his seat, watching him warily, Smokescreen pulled another vent and shrugged, letting his wings bob up and down. "What else would the crown use its money for, if not in the interests of its citizens?" he asked. With a frown, he added, "If I did not use it to help them, then I would just be hoarding cash for no reason than to keep it."

Relaxing infinitesimally, Devcon nodded thoughtfully. "I've never thought about it like that before," he said. A tiny smile flashed across his face. "That's very different from how the governor in Altihex would view the situation, to be sure."

Smokescreen vented again, suddenly realizing how much he'd let himself say. He could almost see Prowl's disapproving frown. Smokescreen always did have a loose vocalizer when he was drinking. It had gotten him into trouble more than once. He gave Devcon a wan smile and tried to shift the subject. "Sorry, I didn't mean to go on and on about that. The internal politics of Praxus probably don't interest you that much."

But Devcon's optics brightened slightly; he seemed to have been lost in thought for a moment. "That's quite all right," he said. "After all, knowledge is part of my trade, and every detail is interesting to me. For example, I had heard that the laws in Praxus changed with your coronation." Devcon gestured towards the doorway where Prowl and Jazz had vanished. "Your own brother is promised to a non-Praxian, and I know your youngest brother is also bonded to a non-Praxian." He smiled at Smokescreen. "You were crowned less than a vorn ago. You work quickly."

"I had... motivation to move quickly," Smokescreen said, remembering the utterly defeated look on his friend's Halfsteel when he talked about the mate the Praxian Temple had chosen for him. "Those laws were some of the first ones I eliminated. Now, a pure-bred Praxian – a noble – can bond with whomever they wish."

Devcon nodded thoughtfully. "Of course. That was part of the information I collected as part of my investigation into my target's whereabouts." Devcon looked at Smokescreen evenly, his blue optics focused on him like a synth hawk. "But – and forgive me again if I am too informal here - it is a surprise that you, the sovereign King of Praxus, is not yet even promised." Devcon lifted a brow ridge. "Unless the customs in Praxus are very different than outside its walls, the first matter of business for a new ruler is to secure their legacy through an heir."

Smokescreen could not suppress the twist in his spark at Devcon's words. His emotions must have been obvious in his expression, because the bounty hunter immediately bowed his helm. "My apologies, your Majesty. I should not have-"

"It's all right," Smokescreen said, waving his hand. When Devcon lifted his helm enough to look at Smokescreen again, Smokescreen managed a facsimile of a smile. "You are exactly right. And you're definitely not the first to have noticed that I am not bonded," he said, thinking of all of the unattached mechs who had been paraded past him in the past few orbital cycles. But he also remembered the golden orb sitting on his desk in his office, and the golden optics of the mech that the orb represented. "Had things played out the way they should have I-" Smokescreen tried to cover the falter in his voice by taking another gulp of his engex. The burn of it steadied him enough to continue. "I did have a promised, before my coronation, but we had only just discussed it. We never had a chance to make it official."

Devcon's blue optics widened, just slightly, and the winglets on his back rose in the same way a Praxian's might when they suddenly understood something. "Your deceased majordomo, I presume," Devcon said.

It was Smokescreen's turn to lift his wings. "Am I so easy to read? Or are there loose lips amongst my household staff?" he asked, knowing the engex was getting to his processor by the bitter tone the words took when they came out of his vocalizer.

"No, your Majesty," Devcon said with a shake of his helm. His voice was gentle. "But it's part of my job to make connections where others might not."

Smokescreen swirled the last bit of engex in his glass, careful not to let any slop over the edge. A voice inside his helm (which sounded very much like his sire, or maybe Prowl) said that he should investigate exactly how Devcon made those connections. But Smokescreen's ambition to do anything had been dulled by the engex, just like it always was four glasses into a bottle.

So instead, Smokescreen vented softly and said, "Halfsteel took the bolt that was meant for my spark. Minutes before that, he had sworn to protect me with his life." Smokescreen tipped his helm back and swallowed the last mouthful of his engex, savouring the burn as it washed down his intake. He coughed a few times before adding, "He was loyal to the very end."

Devcon lowered his helm again. "My deepest condolences on your loss, your Majesty."

"Thank you. And it's Smokescreen, remember?" With an effort, Smokescreen focused his optics on Devcon again and smiled. He gestured with his empty glass at Devcon's. "Would you like some more?"

"No, thank you... Smokescreen," Devcon said, and rose gracefully from his seat. "While I have very much enjoyed your company and your hospitality, just like you pointed out earlier, I have been running almost non-stop for an orbital cycle. I am afraid it's catching up with me now." He bowed deeply, his winglets twitching as he stood up. "Thank you again, your Majesty, and good night."

"Good night," Smokescreen said with a nod from his seat. He knew better than to stand up right now; he might be in danger of toppling over if he tried. He watched as the bounty hunter gracefully swept out of the dining room, and then poured himself another glass of engex. Just one more wouldn't hurt.

Smokescreen sat in the silent dining room, alone, staring at his glass, watching how the flickering lights of the wall sconces reflected off the surface of his drink, and remembering golden optics that once looked into his own with love before they flickered and faded.

#my writing #fanfic #tf smokescreen #tf devcon #serial fiction #alt modes and alchemy au

7 notes · View notes

robotslenderman · 3 years

Note

Fanfic ask game! F, M, and S?

Sorry, it’s all vampires. XD

F: Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

“I have a lot of respect for Calebros. I don’t want him or his clan to be destroyed. And that’s what could happen.”

“We won’t be destroyed,” says Wendy. “We’re too good at hiding, at blending in. But if we were cast out and hunted down as a group… I can’t promise we wouldn’t do some drastic things.”

“Like taking refuge in the Sabbat,” says Qadir. “We know you’re close with your antitribu siblings. Close enough they’d swoop in to rescue you all and take you in, and then we’d have one of the most powerful clans — if not the most powerful — welcomed into the Sabbat with open arms.”

She almost jumps as a Kine leans on a horn; they’ve just been cut off. She hears swearing from a wound-down window.

“We have no traitors in the Camarilla Nosferatu, Qadir.” She’s frazzled from the horn.

“But you wouldn’t be Camarilla Nosferatu any more, would you?” says Qadir. “And your sire, especially, has close ties with Nosferatu antitribu.”

Wendy says nothing.

“There’s a reason why Panhard didn’t put a blood hunt on both of you immediately,” says Qadir. “Luring Rafin out alive was the only way to control his eventual fate, to make sure he didn’t run to the Sabbat. She had Calebros deliver the message because she knew Calebros would be the only person not to encourage him to run and hide.”

“The Nosferatu,” says Wendy, stopping at another walk light. Qadir hits the button this time, “put clan above Sect. Gerard wouldn’t have run to the Sabbat, Qadir, he’d have run to other Nosferatu that happen to be out of reach of the Camarilla.”

“Nosferatu who happen to be Sabbat.” Qadir leans against the traffic light, frowning at her.

“Even they consider themselves Nosferatu first, Sabbat second. They wouldn’t have even told the Sabbat he was there, and believe me, the Sabbat would want to know.”

Qadir snorts.

“I’m not kidding,” says Wendy. “Nosferatu have tight bonds. Stronger than the Toreador have with each other. You wouldn’t understand. Even the Tremere wouldn’t — they take different attitudes than we do. If you leave the Tremere, you’re no longer Tremere, you’re a traitor who deserves to be destroyed. But Nosferatu? You don’t leave, you can’t leave, because the only way to leave is to stop being Nosferatu, to stop being our specific clan of Kindred. You never leave, you just stop being around. So Sabbat Nosferatu are also ours, just as we are theirs, because they’re Nosferatu first, Sabbat second. To them, but also to us.”

“Is that why Calebros had to pardon you and your sire after the Battle of New York?” says Qadir.

Wendy flinches.

So this is just a first draft, but I’m proud of this part because it establishes a key theme of Radio Silence and also puts in a bit of backstory. The relationship Nosferatu have with each other is a huge part of this fic, so this part pretty much introduces that by having Wendy teach Qadir a few things about how Nossies think.

M: Got any premises on the back burner that you’d care to share?

I’ve got a Kiwi Embrace fic that’s not done yet. In this fic, Kiwi’s stranded in the US and too proud to ask her aunt and uncle back in New Zealand for help -- and even if she wasn’t, she’s wanted by law enforcement for basically doing illegal shit to try and raise money for a ticket back to Australia. She’s spiralled more and more until she winds up becoming the ghoul and drug runner of one of the Tucson Prince’s childer, Charlie, who only makes it even harder for Kiwi to get back because he won’t give her her fix each month until she’s handed over almost all her money. And he’s pretty damn good at telling when she’s hidden some.

In this fic, she’s caught Dove’s attention because her vehicle’s become infamous among Tucson for being incredible at dodging the cops -- Carlos ended up mentioning it to Dove, and Dove needs a childe to help her work for the Houston Prince.

This fic basically covers Dove trying to do what the police can’t, and pinning Kiwi down so she can Embrace her.

S: Any fandom tropes you can’t resist?

Apparently I have a thing for “soon-to-be Nossie fledgling running from the Nosferatu”, lmao.

Seriously tho -- I love the “Like An Old Married Couple” trope and 90% of what I cut from my first drafts are characters pointlessly bickering and exchanging quips with each other.

#orodrethsgeek

5 notes · View notes

peace-coast-island · 4 years

Text

Diary of a Junebug

A cozy reading nook

There’s nothing like going to a thrift shop and striking gold. In today’s case, it was at the books section. Murphy and I have been spending the past few days putting together a cozy reading nook with our new gyroid themed furniture. Since the shelves were looking a bit sparse, we headed off to several thrift shops to fill them up.

Going to a thrift shop is like picking and choosing stuff from a mystery goodie bag. Sometimes you find stuff and sometimes you don’t - it’s all about chance. My mom always said whenever we went shopping at a thrift store is that if we find something we like, buy it. First of all, it’s fairly cheap, and second, you’re never going to see it again. So I base my purchases off absolutes - do I really want/need it or not? Even if I’m not gonna need it right away but might in the future, then that counts as a yes.

Today we went shopping at a cute little corner shop in Blueberry. I’ve only been there a few times since it’s kinda hard to get there but whenever I stopped by, I almost always find a treasure. And today, we stumbled across a treasure chest!

Among the many books we found today, there was one that caught my eye in particular. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a coincidence that I would stumble upon this find after hearing the news a couple days ago.

The book in question is called Climb Every Mountain by Claire Bennett. It’s one of those books that I read years ago and it stuck with me. A fairly quick read, but one that lingers for a while. I think the fact that I’ve crossed paths with Claire in the past is why I’ve been so invested in the story.

I wonder how she’s doing right now.

Climb Every Mountain’s a work of fiction loosely based on Claire’s own life - or, in retrospect, a somewhat idealized version of it. An alternate universe where despite everything that happened, there’s still a glimmer of hope that it gets better. Not that Claire’s life was terrible, but more like for every good thing that happened, it gets overshadowed by the not so good things happening behind the scenes.

I met Claire when I was living in Astra, back when she was married to Matt. She, Nathan, and I would often hang out at the Study Library Cafe so that’s how we became friends. After Claire finished grad school we kinda lost touch with her, at least until we found each other on social media a few years ago. So even though we don’t talk often, at least we hear bits and pieces here and there.

Nathan, Claire, and Matt went to the same high school - Claire and Matt being a couple years older - so that’s how they know each other. Astra’s a medium sized town so even if you don’t know everyone, you’ve at least heard of most of them.

Claire wasn’t exactly in the popular crowd, but she was notable for being well accomplished. Straight A, type A perfectionist who’s captain of the cheerleading squad and debate team as well as class president who graduated as valedictorian - she was what they described as untouchable. Despite how she might look, Claire is not superficial or shallow or cutthroat - she’s just ambitious. No one dared messed with her or got in her way.

Then there’s Matt, who was also notable but not exactly popular either. He came from a rich family who was notable in Astra and he made sure people knew that. Orphaned as a baby he lived with his dad’s advisor who tried to manipulate him so when he got older Matt kicked her out and was informally adopted by a friend who helped bailed him out when his former guardian tried to get revenge.

At first glance Matt comes across as arrogant, narcissistic, and not so bright. Part of his arrogance comes from being entitled, though it’s more of a defense mechanism to protect himself from those who tried to use him. The saying still waters run deep applies to him.

Even after everything he put Claire through, I can’t help but feel bad for him sometimes. Don’t get me wrong - it doesn’t excuse his actions, but at least it wasn’t done out of pure malice. Matt has a lot of flaws but the biggest one of all is his tendency towards self-sabotage.

Because their personalities are so different, you’d think people like Matt and Claire would clash. To everyone’s surprise, they were close friends turned high school sweethearts. In a way, they complimented each other. But they also dragged each other down - Claire bringing out the best in him, Matt bringing out the worst in her.

No matter what, Claire still sees the good in him. I don’t think Matt is a bad guy, but he’s definitely not good for her. I get that Claire has a special bond with him - and probably the best thing to ever happen to him second to his adoptive family - so it’s understandable why she’s so forgiving of him. She was in a tough spot as she could no longer tolerate his bullshit and at the same time couldn’t just cut him off like pretty much everyone else in his life.

Claire wrote and published Climb Every Mountain during her senior year of high school. At the time she was standing at a crossroads. She had two equally great scholarships - one for any Ivy League university, another close to home. There were also a lot of other factors she had to consider and in the end she chose to stay home and marry Matt.

Climb Every Mountain is a historical fiction novel set in the 60s that tells the story of a bookish teenage girl who grows up alongside her childhood friend, a rebellious orphan of a wealthy family. Despite their differences, both feel like they don’t belong because of how much they stand out. The precocious Malina is told to stay in her place and downplay her inquisitive nature while KT’s the kind of guy who refuses to give a damn about anything.

The story starts when Malina and KT are fourteen and spans about five years. Malina’s busy trying to figure out the world while KT does whatever he wants, including trying to win over Malina’s heart. As they grow older, they become closer and later get married despite disapproval from pretty much everyone. The two go through a lot of ups and downs as they realize that the world is a lot more complicated and contradicting than they realize.

The end is somewhat ambiguous but also hopeful. Malina defies her family’s expectations by speaking her mind through leading anti-war protests. KT casts away his family’s status and threw everything out of the window by dodging the draft. They were able to get away with being arrested and released because of KT’s status and now that no longer mattered, the young couple had no choice but to flee the country. So Malina stages one final protest, basically giving the government a big middle finger, and in the chaos, she and KT escape.

As they snuck away, both fought the temptation to look back. Through thick and thin, Malina and KT stuck together. Even when starting from the ground up, as long as they had each other, it’ll be all right. No matter what happens, the only thing that’s certain is that they had no regrets.

Something about Malina’s courage and determination always stuck to me. Her and KT’s loyalty to others was something that didn’t really resonate with me until I got older. Knowing the inspiration behind Malina and KT, their story digs a lot deeper.

I’d like to think Malina and KT eventually had a happy ending. After escaping the country and starting over, after everything they’ve been through, they deserve to be happy. I think that’s what Claire wanted for them too. And for herself especially.

Like with Malina and KT, there’s more to Claire and Matt’s relationship than meets the eye. I wouldn’t say that Claire was unhappy with Matt, but sometimes things don’t work out no matter how hard you try.

I don’t want to say that Matt is needy - probably high maintenance is a better word - the kind of person who expects everything and nothing less. From experience, those kinds of people can be exhausting to be around, even if they are generally pretty cool. Matt definitely fits into that category. Always venting his problems to someone - usually Claire - and expecting an immediate response, not caring how you feel or whether or not you’re in the mind space to help out or listen. It’s hard to trust someone or confide in them if they don’t respect your boundaries, especially if they almost always make it about them in the end. And to be honest, I think Matt’s the kind of guy who likes to talk just so you’d pay attention to him.

Claire and Matt were married for about eight years before splitting up. By the time Nathan and I met her, their marriage was starting to become shaky with Matt cheating on her and making enemies with a lot of people. I guess what prompted Claire to file for divorce had something to do with their kids - Katie and Brittany - as that was one major factor that prevented the two from breaking up.

After the divorce, Claire took the girls and left Astra. Matt left too not long after that. He still kept in touch because of the girls so at least he isn’t cut off completely. Claire became a journalist for the Inkwell Gazette so every once in a while I’d come across her articles. She hasn’t released another book since Climb Every Mountain, which is a shame since she’s a good writer. Given what she’s been through, I don’t really blame her though.

While she has always been successful, I don’t think Claire really flourished until she left Matt. I can’t imagine it being easy to make a name for yourself if you’re almost always associated with an heir who’s notable for being troubled. It wasn’t that Matt stifled her - he did the opposite in fact, sometimes to the point where he put her on a pedestal - it was more like Claire can do whatever she wants as long as she puts Matt’s needs over hers. Basically Claire’s a giver, Matt’s a taker.

As for Matt, he’s remained a mystery until a while ago. He pretty much spent the past few years couch hopping, partying, stirring up trouble, and having flings. Then a couple months ago he was driving under the influence - which he’s gotten in trouble for several times - and ended up killing someone in an accident. So he fled the scene and managed to lay low for a while before turning himself in.

There’s definitely more to the story and while a part of me wants to dig deeper, I don’t know if that’s a good idea. Also, I doubt there’d be much to find out anyway since this is the kind of thing Matt’s people would want to keep quiet because of scandals and such. At least from what it sounds like, Matt came forward voluntarily so maybe there’s a silver lining. Knowing him though, he’ll probably get a light sentence and then the whole thing will be buried away like it never happened. Then again, Matt’s not a total asshole so maybe this incident will shake him up and teach him a lesson.

I have a feeling that I’m gonna be re-reading Climb Every Mountain a few more times in the near future. It’s definitely one of those books worth revisiting years later.

#animal crossing #animal crossing pocket camp #Diary of a Junebug #headcanon ramble

4 notes · View notes

cannibalcreeps · 5 years

Text

Thinkin’ bout Chop Top and Drayton

So, he was drafted to the Vietnam War, assuming he is the second eldest (possibly was born a few minutes ahead of Nubbins) Grandpa is too old as heck and Drayton needs to take care of the family so they can survive and clearly the other two boys are not sound of mind to even be considered.

The war started in 1955, I am assuming the three boys are all in their late 20′s in the first film making them 1940 babies, so they grew up during the war.

It’s possible that Drayton was draft dodging to keep a roof over his families head and finally it caught up to them so they had to send Chop over when he was of age and they could no longer make excuses, cause you know damn well the Sawyers are about looking out for themselves they don’t want to send their family members to a war zone.

The events of TCM happened in 1973, a whole 2 years later the war ends and Chop Top comes back home, missing part of his head, his twin dead and now dealing with Drayton and Bubba, so of course he’d spend more time with Bub’s then Drayton,got all those years of brother bonding to catch up! It’s also good that Chop Top did that cause it turned our big soft scared boy into a more confident happier Bubba (I’ll get into that more in another post)

It also makes me think about how it was just Drayton and Bubba for those two years together. I really don’t think Drayton is abusive 24/7, he gets wound up by the twins more then by Bubba and then lashes out to the most easiest target cause the twins ran off like the jackrabbits they are as well that they just fight back which boils up the pot more. Siblings do that, not to say it’s right but it’s not an uncommon thing, rowdy brothers just stir shit up and the youngest or quietest gets the back end of the explosion.

So with a more easily controlled brother I would think he’d be more calmer and kinder (in his own way) with Bubs, especially after Nubbins death. He is the tough love type of brother, keeping his emotions tightly inside but you know he’d be hurtin’ bad after seeing mangled up Nubs. It’s possible he would’ve not blown up as much either, sure at the start he may still lash out but eventually just as he begins to raise his voice he stops himself and instead goes through the easier route of being more softer on poor Bubba.

And then Chop Top returns and all that hard work gets thrown out the fucking window lmao.

I don’t really mind Drayton, I wouldn’t be his friend but I wouldn’t hate him (I just don’t fuck with the whole murdering and killing part) I do feel for him though and I understand why he acts the way he does, this is a man whose young adulthood life was yanked away from him when he had to be the care taker of his brothers after their mother died. Sure he would’ve had Grandpa there but that man was not getting any younger that’s for sure.

I just don’t think he deserves all the hate he gets, yeah you shouldn’t berate and beat your autistic brother, but these are not 21st century people who have all the information at the tip of their fingers to help deal with people who are autistic, especially for secluded small town country boys, all they know is that the Sawyer boys are ‘different’ and that’s all.

But that’s just my tidbit that’s been sitting in my brain for a while, I have more thoughts I want to just throw out but that’s for future posts

update: fixed the date >8 P

#thoughts and dribble #tcm #I just love the sawyer boys so much #it feels good to let it all out #it's ok if you disagree with me these are just my outtakes on these characters

15 notes · View notes

danganronpa-21 · 4 years

Text

Chapter 5 Deleted Scene - Boy’s First Locker Room

Life is busy right now. Some parts of the business you will draw content from; others not so much. The stuff you won’t get content from is what’s most immediate, and so I present to you content until I can make more.

This is yet another deleted scene from Chapter 5 of The Old World’s Future, this one coming from the sixth draft. I am currently chugging away at editing to create the seventh and final draft, but I’ve known this scene was going to be cut for awhile. Fortunately for you and unfortunately for me, I didn’t know it far enough in advance to not make an edited image for it -- so this one comes with an image! And cause I know there’s a chance that someone will ask... yes, they are wearing clothes. The sprites simply work best from the waist up. I’m not about to sexualize my boys and hopefully nobody else will try either.

This is meant to be a bonding scene between Koichi and Phoenix together; I hoped to play it to a comedic/bonding idea. It didn’t come out as I’d hoped across several versions and just generally didn’t add enough to the chapter itself, thus it was cut for time. Hopefully you can enjoy it anyway!

Is there a proper way to introduce someone to the locker room, if they’ve never been in one before?

Please note that this question, is in fact rhetorical, because as far as I’m concerned there isn’t. There was no comfortable way for me to parade Phoenix into the locker room for the first time. But regardless of how well I knew that, I still had to do it. Hell, while I was doing it, I had the urge to hold on to his hand as if he were my son or something. The terror-filled world of the boys’ locker room would never be something I could protect sweet, innocent Phoenix from. We were both simply forced to dive straight in, and do our best to get the hell out of there as fast as possible.

Still, that didn’t stop me from at least trying to give him a warning. Right as I placed my hand on the door handle, I turned back to look at him. Though I tried not to look concerned, my brows were furrowed. I pushed myself to smile a little. By that point, the idea of it was kind of moot. Based off the concern written all over his face, he already wasn’t convinced.

“While we're here, it’s probably best to just try and get through it as quickly as possible. The boys’ locker room tends to be a bit… rambunctious. You’ve never really been in one before, so it’s probably best if you just try to stick with me. Stay out of trouble and all that, you know?” I offered, trying to be encouraging. Looking back at my soon-to-be friend, I couldn’t tell if it was working. He nodded to let me know that he did understand what I said, but the way he bit his lip made me less sure. The question that came after made me even less comfortable with trying to take him there.

“Pardon me, Naegi-san, but I do have one question to ask before we enter…”

Thoughtfully, I turned to him.

“What’s that?”

“What exactly is it that we are supposed to be doing, in the locker room? I was under the impression we were meant to be changing in to our physical education clothes… for the activity? Was I wrong in thinking that?”

Oh no, I thought, he’s even more innocent than I thought he’d be. Even with all of the Japanese dramas Natsumi had claimed he was “obsessed with”, Phoenix did not actually have a concept of a locker room. He must have thought we were changing in the bathroom or something, like one would if they weren’t a rowdy high school student. Man, was I about to drop the bomb on him.

“Ummm… sort of,” I fumbled, trying to think of a good way to phrase it, “We are doing that, it’s just that… that’s what we’re doing in the locker room. It’s specifically a locker room meant for boys, because… well, because we all change in one big room together. It’s meant to be faster than waiting for a bathroom stall.”

Immediately a blush spread across Phoenix’s face, like he had just been told something irredeemably dirty. He almost seemed to take a few steps back, as if the news I had shared shocked him that much. I had tried my best to put it lightly. It was tough to know whether or not I had succeeded.

“All of the boys c-c-change out in… in the o-open? N-no privacy or… or a-anything?”

“I’m afraid not, but… It’s really not so bad, once you get used to it.”

“It feels like such an invasion of privacy!” He exclaimed, hiding his face in his hands. “I do not know how you could manage to change your clothes in front of other boys… I fear I will get self-conscious.”

I placed my hand on his shoulder. The hope was that maybe I’d comfort him a little, but who knew if that would come to fruition. I had been trying to not freak him out before, and look at how far that had gotten me.

“Trust me, nobody’s even looking at you. Everybody is more concerned with themselves than what your body looks like.” I assured him. Deciding to take a chance, I puffed up my best proudly to make a joke. “Plus, martial arts has helped me get some pretty decent muscle, so everybody will probably be focused on me than they are on you.”

I punctuated the end of my sentence with a wink, and successfully managed to make the parapsychologist snicker. Truth be told I did sort of have some decent muscles going, but they were nothing to write home about. It was more of something I said to help ease Phoenix in to the idea of changing in front of others, rather than being something that had some semblance of realness to it. I’ve never really been the type to brag about myself.

“Thank you for your words of comfort, Naegi-san… I suppose that changing in front of others shall be yet another aspect of Tokyo life that I must learn to adjust to.” My companion replied gratefully, using his middle finger to push up his thick-rimmed glasses. “So I imagine that I will have to grin and bear it as we go in.”

Mustering up the most genuine smile I could manage within that moment, I nodded and pulled on the door handle. The second I put my weight on the door and pushed it open, Phoenix and I were attacked by so many things that I had begun to associate clearly with the locker room experience. Just opening the door offered us a tasting plate of screaming, banging, the pungent scent of sweaty freshman boys, the additional pungent scent of too much cologne, and the nearly unbearable feeling of dread it brought all who entered. Knowing there was no way I could save him from this torture, I didn’t turn to look back at Phoenix. The poor thing was probably traumatized already, so instead I ushered him in as fast as I could.

“The sooner we get in, the sooner we get out.” I had assured him.

I kept my hand wrapped around his arm as we wandered in, wondering if this was how my mom felt having to parade around three kids. If it was, I decided that I’d immediately need to buy her a cake or something. It was a challenge to not feel overwhelmed just having to look after Phoenix. Imagine having three little kids running amok. My mom is like a freaking superhero or something… But I digress. Having to look after Phoenix simply made me nervous. I made my best attempts to help him dodge the roughhousing boys as we ventured further in, and eventually we found a spot where we could get changed comfortably. Practically the second I placed my gym bag down on the bench, I let out a sigh of relief.

“I must say, I have… never seen anything like this,” Phoenix confessed, glancing over at me as if to ask if it was always this way, “But I suppose I do see what you meant when you said that nobody would be interested in you and I. Everyone appears to be rather busy.”

“Yeah, they tend to do that. Best thing we can do now is to hurry and get changed so we can get out of here.”

With those words, I wasted no additional time prying my bag open and taking out my gym clothes. Before Phoenix had even placed his bag on the bench, I was pulling off my blazer and unbuttoning my shirt to just get everything off quickly. As I moved to undress myself, he seemed to observe me with this distinct look of surprise on his face… as well as redness that I don’t think he intended for.

“Something up?” I asked him, hoping maybe it would give him the hint to move along. Instead, his face only seemed to grow pinker once he noticed that I’d caught wind of him gawking at me. He rapidly averted his gaze. He hadn’t wanted me to know that he was watching me… but I could certainly see it. It had been written all over his face.

“No, I am alright, thank you. I am simply amazed by your speed.”

Pulling my shirt off my shoulders, I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Yeah, I’ve gotten pretty fast, I’ll admit. It’s an art that you will learn in time. Today, you learn… ummm… uh…”

I noticed an amused grin begin to creep its way across Phoenix’s face as he watched me struggle to find the words. I hoped it was more of a finds-me-charming grin than it was a thinks-I’m-a-moron grin.

“About bonding with our classmates via a scavenger hunt,” He supplied, “That’s what Ashikaga-sensei said, right?”

“Y-Yeah, right.” I said, pretending that I remembered. All I could actually remember from what our teacher said was that we were doing the activity in teams. Well, subdivisions, anyway.

The activity was supposed to be a class versus class scavenger hunt, in which Class 99-A would compete against Class 99-B. As a class we were supposed to use the clues we’d been given by our respective teachers to locate each item, and then bring it back to our final class meeting point. However, because our classes consisted of so many people, our teachers had decided to split us off in to subdivisions. Each subdivision was still a part of the class team, they’d just be assigned a specific chunk of clues that pertained to a specific chunk of items. This chunk would match up with one from the other class’ subdivision, too, so it’d still be a race to see who could find the item first.

If the whole thing sounds needlessly complicated, that’s because it was. But it was also a bonding experience that would solidify my relationships with my classmates, so I took it willingly. Especially considering that I honestly had a pretty solid subdivision. By some bizarre stroke of luck, Ashikaga-sensei had placed Phoenix, Natsumi, and I all in to the same subdivision. The only real downside to that was that we had another teammate, but even then, that seemed manageable. Sure, this fourth teammate was the Super High School Level Child Star, who had a reputation for being prissy and vain — but in comparison to worse things, it felt like a small price to pay. I mean, at least our fourth teammate wasn’t Asuga or something. Now that would have been a disaster and a half.

“I do not believe I have done a scavenger hunt of this caliber before,” Phoenix remarked to himself, “Natsumi and I used to do them together as children when our families would set them up, but it was never anything so… grand, I suppose.”

“Well, Hope’s Peak is known for being over the top. It was like that even before my dad became headmaster.” I snickered to myself, tugging my gym shirt out of my bag with a bit of a struggle. “There’s a lot you can get away with when you’re government-funded.”

My blond companion nodded, once again trying to avert his gaze. Honestly, I found the way he was avoiding me to be kind of cute. Like he had this intense need to respect me and my wishes, so he just wouldn’t look at me until I had finished changing. Talk about chivalry. Whatever girl snatched him up would be lucky indeed.

“That is true. I have heard many stories about the exciting endeavours of Hope’s Peak students.” He answered. His face held a soft sort of smile, once that disguised an emotion I had been unable to place at the time. In a way, it struck me as reflective, but at the same time it had a twinge of fondness to it. And considering all he was doing at that moment was looking around in his bag for his own t-shirt, I knew it couldn’t be because of what was going on around us.

So, doing my best to make him comfortable in this new place, I engaged him.

“Oh, you’ve heard stories?” I prodded, “Do you know any alumni on your island?”

But just as the words fell from my lips, Phoenix’s smile suddenly turned forlorn. Without thinking I found myself opening my mouth to speak, but I didn’t bother to push out any words. By the time I was prepared to, Phoenix’s gaze became locked completely on my own. This was the first time he had looked at me since we had made our way into the locker room. Wearing this dismal grin on his face, he turned to me and uttered some words that seemed so obvious at the time.

“Yes… I suppose you could say that they were… something like that, once upon a time. Quite a while ago…”

#Danganronpa 21 #danganronpa 21 deleted scenes #The Chronicles of Chapter Five #koichi naegi-kirigiri #phoenix nevermind

2 notes · View notes

edh-a-to-z · 5 years

Text

WAR - Best of White

Not every card is EDH worthy.

Sure, I’ve played with plenty of Draft chaff for fun, or when I had no other option, but the cards below will be ones you’re happy to get in trades, and add value to your decks and collections.

Finale of Glory

Grade: B+

Home: Token Decks, Soldier Tribal, Angel Tribal, Ramp Decks

Range: Very Wide

The finale Cycle is a love letter to EDH.

At 4 mana, you’re getting 4/4 of stats, and it get’s more and more efficient as you pour mana in. At 10 mana, it also makes that many Angels. It also doesn’t stop making them if you keep pouring mana in. It’s good early game to stabilize, it can offer tremendous value later, and becomes a “deal with it or die” quickly.

For everyone else...bring your board wipes.

Gideon Backblade

Grade: C

Home:

Range:

Almost impossible to kill on your turn, and also hard to deal with on other turns, Blackblade is a solid, and cheap, addition to any combat heavy deck, or the every meme-worthy Gideon tribal.

Making a creature Indestructible, like your commander, to end of turn is a great +1, and permanent removal is a nice Ult for a 3 CMC walker.

God-Eternal Oketra

Grade: A

Home: Weenie Deck

Range: Wide

I find it kind of unfair to the original Oketra that this, at W more, is a massive upgrade over the original. Less vulnerable to exile effects, better tokens, no drawbacks.

Spam X or 0 or 1 cost minions to get cheap 4/4 Tokens, which are pretty impressive, even for EDH. Really goes well with any deck, as it’s hard to get rid of for good, and it’s a great resurrection target.

Grateful Apparition

Grade: C

Home: SuperFriends Deck, Proliferate Deck, Counter Deck, Infect

Range: Custom Niche

A nice color shift on Thrummingbird which works well in any deck where the bird fits. Not much to say, just a nice small creature.

Ignite the Beacon

Grade: C-

Home: Superfriends, Legendary Deck

Range: Narrow

White just gets the best superfriends deck toys.

Outside of the superfriends deck, if you have ‘walkers that function as combo pieces, win-cons, or removal, it may be worthwhile to run this in a deck with 4+ PWs.

Grab this while it’s a penny rare.

Parhelion II

Grade: D+

Home: Angel Tokens, Vehicles

Range: Narrow

I’m a little prejudiced thanks to my love of angels, and this card is such Battlecruiser MTG, it deserved a mention.

You crew it with an Angel (traditionally 4 power), it has angel abilities, it makes two angels a swing, it can play defense, it dodges some Sorcery speed removal.

It’s also 8 mana, and without some Haste, it takes forever to take off - and you need value fast. It’s more for casual, big-spell magic, but I really love how big it is, and how big it gets.

Prison Realm

Grade: C

Home: Anywhere where O Ring works

Range: Very Wide

We lose some of the versatility of Oblivion Ring, but creatures and planeswalkers make up 90% of what we want to remove anyway. Tacking a Scry 1 is like half a card draw, so nice for white heavy decks.

Ravnica at War

Grade: D+

Home: MonoColor Board wipes

Range: Narrow

I view this as “kill most commanders/legendaries” than anything else. Most commanders are multicolor, and a lot of great creatures are too, so if you want to gamble or play casually, this has some merit. Exiling is also a nice touch, especially for indestructible creatures that often feature in commander.

Otherwise, it whiffs too often for my taste - it’s inability to be an actual board wipe hurts.

Tomik, Distinguished Advokist

Grade: A

Home: Land Tech, Hatebears

Range: Very Narrow

Solid body, and he’s amazing at what he does, but it’s very narrow. Unless Gitrog, Titania, and Omnath are trampling through your meta, leave it in the binder.

The D section - Just Meh

Ajani’s Pridmate - fine card for the lifegain deck, but only that

Bonds of Discipline - 5 Mana is a lot, but hitting every opponent is nice, especially if you want everyone to hit the player that just passed turn to you.

Defiant Strike - Solid combat trick for the Feather deck

Gideon’s Sacrifice - I know there’s some fun here with a tapped Boros Reckoner and blocking stuff, or other interesting damage plays.

Law-Rune Enforcer - Decent, but limitations plus small body (and not scaling well to EDH) prevents this from being useful

Martyr for the Cause - Might find a home in a Proliferate deck, but it’s just a bear with upside.

Single Combat - feels better than Divine Reckoning, as it uses sacrifice over destroy, but I hate giving other players reasonable choices.

Sunblade Angel - A ton of fun abilities - that fails to pass the Lightning Bolt test.

Teyo - Planeswalkers will always have niche usage, especially with all the existing superfriends and proliferate support, but Teyo is so purely defensive, I find it hard to recommend him

The Wanderer - Nice abilities, but it’s a narrow use case, and limitations on removal hurt it.

Everything else is an F, and here’s why:

Battlefield Promotion - I always rate Combat tricks low - they don’t scale well to EDH. This does a lot of things, but winning one battle in EDH doesn’t justify this card

Bulwark Giant - I love giant GF, but she doesn’t make the cut. Giant tribal is pretty bad, so this doesn’t have much support.

Charmed Stray - Bad in Limited, bad here

Divine Arrow - Limited level removal, leave it in the bulk bin

Enforcer Griffin - Griffin tribal is nonexistent, vanilla flyer that could be replace by a Serra Angel or Baneslayer

Gideon’s Triumph - F- for the creepy art, and for the weak functionality

Ironclad Krovod - Trash vanilla

Loxodon Sergeant - Vanilla with ETB

Makeshift Battalion - Battalion was a fun ability, but it didn’t work well for EDH in the past (small number of cards, required to rely on board, very aggressive in Multiplayer), and this isn’t special

Pouncing Lynx - Trash Vanilla

Rally of Wings - Trashy combat trick

Rising Populace - Cute, but not impressive.

Teyo’s Lightshield - A 1/4 is not useful.

Topple the Statue - Cute. Pathetic, but cute.

Trusted Pegasus - Tribal pegasus just isn’t there yet.

Wanderer’s Strike - Exile and proliferate are nice on paper, but Sorcery speed at 5 CMC doesn’t fly

War Screecher - Low impact, even late

#mtg #edh #war of the spark #commander #new set picks #set review #Set Picks

17 notes · View notes

homebrewsno1asked4 · 5 years

Text

2B 2

Welcome! Today’s subclass – inspired by 2B of Nier Automata, for those who just walked in – is the Planar Adjudicator.

What and why is a Planar Adjudicator, you may ask? I didn’t just want to make the 2B class a construct-killer; unless your DM’s world is teeming with robots, that won’t be particularly useful. So I reflavored the androids’ crazy superhuman combat maneuvers as laws of physics they’re allowed to break. And YoRHa as like interdimensional hitmen of balance.

Kinda like “if the Horizon Walker Ranger joined a Paladin order.”

I don’t remember the exact thought process, tbh.

Commence!

Clearances

As Planar Adjudicators climb in rank, they’re allowed to bend certain laws of reality, or waive them altogether.

When you first gain access to these clearances at level 3, you may take three. You may take two additional clearances each levels 7, 10, and 15. At these levels, you may also replace a previously-established clearance with another one of equal level.

See list of Clearances at the end of the class.

Save vs. your Clearances is 8 + proficiency bonus + your Intelligence modifier.

At level 3, the fighter usually gains multiple features with their subclass: 1) Each archetype's primary mechanic; 2) a coin toss between an exploration or interaction feature, usually packaged with an extra skill proficiency.

To fit with the Planar Adjudicator's "spacetime cop" theme, I made the main mechanic Clearances - or laws of reality that the Planar Adjudicator's allowed to break to better hunt their quarry. In an earlier draft, I tried to directly base these Clearances on the various Pod abilities; but after a few false starts, I realized that most of the Pods either don't translate well into D&D mechanics, or would provide game-breaking stat increases/extra attacks. So instead, I looked to the Warlock's Eldritch Invocations for inspiration, and the Clearances scale/stack similar to the Eldritch Knight's spellcasting. (I think... I'm sorry, I really need to be more careful about crossing out my design notes, not deleting them entirely.)

The Clearances are supposed to reflect Nier Automata's flashy combat; encapsulate more of 2B's skills and android abilities not covered by my earlier choices of Race, Background, etc; and beef up the Planar Adjudicator's flavor.

Basic Planar Knowledge Database

Take proficiency in either Religion or Arcana.

As an action, you detect the distance and direction between you and any creature involved in your goal, such as a person you seek vengeance against or someone you pledged to defend. You must be familiar with this creature – i.e. have met them personally, or you know more than passing knowledge about that creature. If the target is on another plane of existence, you instead discern the distance and direction of the nearest portal to that plane, though you don't automatically know which plane it leads to.

The Planar Adjudicator's other starting feature - Basic Planar Knowledge Database - bundles one of two lore-intensive Intelligence proficiencies with a barely-changed version of the Revenant's Relentless Nature. I don't think it's too OP because it's mostly for flavor, but Hey! I've been wrong before.

(Maybe BPKD should at least be 'use x times between rests’?)

Database Upgrade

You hone your insight into your extraplanar quarry by level 7, analyzing your deep repository of lore for weaknesses.

Your melee attacks (not ranged, not spells) now count as magical for the purposes of overcoming resistance.

You gain proficiency in Religion or Arcana, whichever you did not choose from Basic Planar Knowledge Database. Except for critical failures, you can treat any Arcana or Religion roll of 9 or below as a 10.

Fighters' level 7 abilities usually go one of two ways: an attack/defense buff; or an exploration ability packaged with a new skill proficiency. The Planar Adjudicator's Database Upgrade is bit of a mix of both.

This is a melee-only version of the Arcane Archer's Magic Arrow, as well as the other half of the Basic Planar Knowledge Database - while also borrowing a little of the Rogue's Reliable Talent. I'm hoping that's not too much, as religion and arcana are mostly fun roleplay skills anyway. Who knows; the way you run your games, this might be OP.

Executioner’s Clearance

At level 10, you gain two types of Favored Enemy. One is always humanoids. For the other, choose from aberrations, celestials, elementals, fey, fiends, or undead. You gain a +4 bonus to damage rolls with weapon attacks against creatures of both types. Additionally, you have advantage on Wisdom (Survival) checks to track your favored enemies, as well as on Intelligence checks to recall information about them.

When you gain this feature, you also learn two languages of your choice, typically one spoken by your favored enemy or creatures associated with it; for example, elvish for humanoids and deep speech for aberrations. However, you are free to pick any language you wish to learn.

You also have advantage on saving throws against the spells and abilities of both these enemy types.

Fighters' level 10 features are exclusively combat-focused. Usually, they're an improvement to a pre-existing feature.

I borrowed the Ranger's Favored Enemy + Greater Favored Enemy for Executioner’s Clearance. Since even the stacked version of Greater Favored Enemy is still conditional, and it's already only a level 6 ability, I thought it fair to throw the Planar Adjudicator another bone.

Hammerspace

You can equip up to three weapons at a time, in any combination of weight class or ranged/melee. You can swap these weapons in and out as a free action, including in between attacks.

You stow any of these three weapons you cannot feasibly hold in a personal void not unlike a Bag of Holding.

Hammerspace adds a bit more Nier Automata-ness to the Planar Adjudicator's playstyle, what with the giant weapons floating behind you and switching between these giant weapons in an instant.

I can't for the life of me remember what I used as a base for Hammerspace. Honestly, I might have made it from scratch, but I wouldn't give me that much credit.

Unchain Protocol

Against your favored enemy types, your weapon attacks score a critical hit on a roll of 19 or 20.

While the planar adjudicator is at half their hit points (rounded down) or below, they score critical hits on 18-20 for all enemy types, not just favored enemies.

While the planar adjudicator's hit points equal 10 + Constitution modifier or below, your criticals gain a damage bonus equal to your level in this class.

At level 15, Fighters gain a variety of types of combat features. Attack spells/spell-like abilities and attack/damage buffs are common.

I think this is another weird fusion of a couple different class abilities. Like Champion/Barbarian’s Improved Critical plus one of the Brute’s abilities, maybe?

The first part of Unchain Protocol stacks with Executioner's Clearance. The second and third stages of the Protocol affect all critical hits, for the trade-off of inching closer and closer to death.

Evasion System Overclock

When an enemy misses an attack against you, you may incur the effects of Time Stop as a reaction. All restrictions of Time Stop still apply. You take the turns afforded by Time Stop immediately upon using this ability. You may use this once a day.

I know 2B has the whole slow-time-when-you-dodge ability from the beginning of the game; but there’s no way to give the player its D&D equivalent at an early level without tipping the game balance like the fucking Titanic.

My thinking is, assuming the player tries to use this ability to hit or run, Evasion System Overclock only affords them one extra strike, or a get-out-of-combat-free card if the player’s okay with ditching the rest of the party and appearing 1000 feet away. Hopefully, this forces your Planar Adjudicator to be a little more creative and strategic with their extra turns.

Clearances

Law of Applied Force. All ranged attacks have a maximum range of 300 ft.

Law of Auras. You can cast Detect Magic at will.

Law of Darkness. You can see normally in darkness, both magical and non-magical, to a distance of 120 feet.

Law of Healing. Whenever you regain hit points from a potion, spell, or ally’s class feature, treat any dice rolled to determine the hit points you regain as having rolled their maximum value for you.

Law of Inertia. Whenever you successfully deal damage to a creature, you can push the creature up to 10 feet away from you in a straight line.

Law of Interspecies Communication. Although limited by the intelligence of the beast, you can understand and speak with beasts.

Law of Linguistics. You can read all writing. You can comprehend any written word or symbol, should it hold any linguistic meaning.

Law of Natural Cycles. Within a minute of its death, you may ask a recently deceased creature one question. The dead creature’s spirit provides the answer to the best of its knowledge, translated into a language of your choice.

Law of Resilience. Your AC becomes 13 + your Strength or Dexterity modifier while not wearing armor. You can use a shield and still gain this benefit.

Law of Rest. You no longer need to sleep and can't be forced to sleep by any means. To gain the benefits of a long rest, you can spend all 8 hours doing light activity.

Law of Vitality. You can cast False Life on yourself at will as a 1st-level spell.

Law of Warfare. Over the course of 1 hour short rest, you can bond a weapon to you. You can bond up to two weapons at once. These weapons gain a +1 to attack and damage rolls. You can summon or dispel these weapons as a bonus action.

Prerequisite: Level 5

Law of Conservation of Energy. For one minute, you can double your speed, gain +2 to AC, roll advantage on Dexterity saves, and take an additional action on each of your turns. The action can be used to attack (one weapon attack only), dash, disengage, hide, or use an object. You can use this feature once every long rest.

Law of Elemental Order. Every long rest, pick a type of elemental damage. When you hit a creature with a melee or ranged attack, you can use a bonus action to unleash an eruption of this damage type. This eruption is a 20-foot-radius sphere, focused on the target you just hit, and deals 8d6 of your chosen element. You are immune to this eruption. You can use this feature once every long rest.

At level 11, this feature recharges with a short or long rest, and the extra damage increases to 9d6.

At level 17, you can use this feature twice between rests, and the extra damage increases to 10d6.

Law of Proportional Might. Once per turn, when you hit a creature with a melee weapon, you can add 4d8 force damage to your attack, and you can knock the target prone if it is Huge or smaller. You can use this feature once every long rest.

At level 11, this feature recharges with a short or long rest, and the extra damage increases to 5d8.

At level 17, you can use this feature twice between rests, and the extra damage increases to 6d8.

Prerequisite: Level 7

Law of Opacity. Once per rest, you can use an action to gain the ability to see through solid objects to a range of 30 feet. Within that range, you have darkvision if you don't already have it. This special sight lasts for 1 minute. During this time, you perceive objects as ghostly, transparent images.

Law of Motion. For one hour, you are unaffected by difficult terrain, and spells or magical effects can't reduce your speed or cause you to be paralyzed or restrained.

You can spend 5 feet of movement to automatically escape from nonmagical restraints. Additionally, being underwater imposes no penalties on its movement or attacks.

Prerequisite: Level 9

Law of Gravity. At will, you can rise vertically up to 20 feet. While suspended, you have no momentum of your own and you may grab on to other objects in order to move as if climbing. You can change your altitude as part of your movement each turn.

Whenever you deactivate this clearance, you drift safely to the ground per the spell Feather Fall.

Law of Proportional Athleticism. Your jump distance is tripled.

Law of Spirit-Mortal Communication. You can speak to spirits - per the Speak with Dead spell - at will.

Prerequisite: Level 15

Law of Physicality. As an action, you and everything you wear and carry become invisible for up to an hour. If you drop an item or remove it, the item is no longer invisible, and if you try to attack or cast a spell, you're visible again. You can activate this clearance at will.

I don’t have an ending besides thank you for reading, hope it doesn’t suck!

#d&d 5e #5e homebrew #fighter #2b #toobs #nier automata #eldritch invocations #kinda #critical grohl

6 notes · View notes

96thdayofrage · 5 years

Text

Slavery’s denial of rights now prefigured Jim Crow, while enslaved people’s resistance predicted the collective self-assertion that developed into first the civil rights movement and later, Black Power.

But perhaps the changes were not so great as they seemed on the surface. The focus on showing African Americans as assertive rebels, for instance, implied an uncomfortable corollary. If one should be impressed by those who rebelled, because they resisted, one should not be proud of those who did not. And there were very few rebellions in the history of slavery in the United States. Some scholars tried to backfill against this quandary by arguing that all African Americans together created a culture of resistance, especially in slave quarters and other spaces outside of white observation. Yet the insistence that assertive resistance undermined enslavers’ power, and a focus on the development of an independent black culture, led some to believe that enslaved people actually managed to prevent whites from successfully exploiting their labor. This idea, in turn, created a quasi-symmetry with post– Civil War plantation memoirs that portrayed gentle masters, who maintained slavery as a nonprofit endeavor aimed at civilizing Africans.

Thus, even after historians of the civil rights, Black Power, and multicultural eras rewrote segregationists’ stories about gentlemen and belles and grateful darkies, historians were still telling the half that has ever been told. For some fundamental assumptions about the history of slavery and the history of the United States remain strangely unchanged. The first major assumption is that, as an economic system—a way of producing and trading commodities—American slavery was fundamentally different from the rest of the modern economy and separate from it. Stories about industrialization emphasize white immigrants and clever inventors, but they leave out cotton fields and slave labor. This perspective implies not only that slavery didn’t change, but that slavery and enslaved African Americans had little long-term influence on the rise of the United States during the nineteenth century, a period in which the nation went from being a minor European trading partner to becoming the world’s largest economy—one of the central stories of American history.

The second major assumption is that slavery in the United States was fundamentally in contradiction with the political and economic systems of the liberal republic, and that inevitably that contradiction would be resolved in favor of the free-labor North. Sooner or later, slavery would have ended by the operation of historical forces; thus, slavery is a story without suspense. And a story with a predetermined outcome isn’t a story at all.

Third, the worst thing about slavery as an experience, one is told, was that it denied enslaved African Americans the liberal rights and liberal subjectivity of modern citizens. It did those things as a matter of course, and as injustice, that denial ranks with the greatest in modern history. But slavery also killed people, in large numbers. From those who survived, it stole everything. Yet the massive and cruel engineering required to rip a million people from their homes, brutally drive them to new, disease-ridden places, and make them live in terror and hunger as they continually built and rebuilt a commodity-generating empire—this vanished in the story of a slavery that was supposedly focused primarily not on producing profit but on maintaining its status as a quasi-feudal elite, or producing modern ideas about race in order to maintain white unity and elite power. And once the violence of slavery was minimized, another voice could whisper, saying that African Americans, both before and after emancipation, were denied the rights of citizens because they would not fight for them.

All these assumptions lead to still more implications, ones that shape attitudes, identities, and debates about policy. If slavery was outside of US history, for instance—if indeed it was a drag and not a rocket booster to American economic growth—then slavery was not implicated in US growth, success, power, and wealth. Therefore none of the massive quantities of wealth and treasure piled by that economic growth is owed to African Americans. Ideas about slavery’s history determine the ways in which Americans hope to resolve the long contradiction between the claims of the United States to be a nation of freedom and opportunity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the unfreedom, the unequal treatment, and the opportunity denied that for most of American history have been the reality faced by people of African descent. Surely, if the worst thing about slavery was that it denied African Americans the liberal rights of the citizen, one must merely offer them the title of citizen—even elect one of them president—to make amends. Then the issue will be put to rest forever.

Slavery’s story gets told in ways that reinforce all these assumptions. Textbooks segregate twenty-five decades of enslavement into one chapter, painting a static picture. Millions of people each year visit plantation homes where guides blather on about furniture and silverware. As sites, such homes hide the real purpose of these places, which was to make African Americans toil under the hot sun for the profit of the rest of the world. All this is the “symbolic annihilation” of enslaved people, as two scholars of those weird places put it.2 Meanwhile, at other points we tell slavery’s story by heaping praise on those who escaped it through flight or death in rebellion, leaving the listener to wonder if those who didn’t flee or die somehow “accepted” slavery. And everyone who teaches about slavery knows a little dirty secret that reveals historians’ collective failure: many African-American students struggle with a sense of shame that most of their ancestors could not escape the suffering they experienced.

The truth can set us free, if we can find the right questions. But back in the little house in Danville, Anderson was reading from a list of leading ones, designed by white officials—some well-meaning, some not so well-meaning. He surely felt how the gravity of the questions pulled him toward the planet of plantation nostalgia. “Did slaves mind being called ‘nigger’?” “What did slaves call master or mistress?” “Have you been happier in slavery or free?” “Was the mansion house pretty?” Escaping from chains is very difficult, however, so Anderson dutifully asked the prescribed questions and poised his pencil to take notes.

Ivy listened politely. He sat still. Then he began to speak: “My mother’s master was named William Tunstall. He was a mean man. There was only one good thing he did, and I don’t reckon he intended to do that. He sold our family to my father’s master George H. Gilman.”

Perhaps the wind blowing through the window changed as a cloud moved across the spring sun: “Old Tunstall caught the ‘cotton fever.’ There was a fever going round, leastways it was like a fever. Everyone was dying to get down south and grow cotton to sell. So old Tunstall separated families right and left. He took two of my aunts and left their husbands up here, and he separated altogether seven husbands and wives. One woman had twelve children. Yessir. Took ‘em all down south with him to Georgia and Alabama.”

Pervasive separations. Tears carving lines on faces. Lorenzo remembered his relief at dodging the worst, but he also remembered knowing that it was just a lucky break. Next time it could’ve been his mother. No white person was reliable, because money drove their decisions. No, this wasn’t the story the books told.

So Anderson moved to the next question. Did Ivy know if any slaves had been sold here? Now, perhaps, the room grew darker.

For more than a century, white people in the United States had been singling out slave traders as an exception: unscrupulous lower-class outsiders who pried apart paternalist bonds. Scapegoaters had a noble precedent. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson tried to blame King George III for using the Atlantic slave trade to impose slavery on the colonies. In historians’ tellings, the 1808 abolition of the Atlantic trade brought stability to slavery, ringing in the “Old South,” as it has been called since before the Civil War. Of course, one might wonder how something that was brand new, created after a revolution, and growing more rapidly than any other commodity-producing economy in history before then could be considered “old.” But never mind. Historians depicted slave trading after 1808 as irrelevant to what slavery was in the “Old South,” and to how America as a whole was shaped. America’s modernization was about entrepreneurs, creativity, invention, markets, movement, and change. Slavery was not about any of these things—not about slave trading, or moving people away from everyone they knew in order to make them make cotton. Therefore, modern America and slavery had nothing to do with each other.

But Ivy spilled out a rush of very different words. “They sold slaves here and everywhere. I’ve seen droves of Negroes brought in here on foot going South to be sold. Each one of them had an old tow sack on his back with everything he’s got in it. Over the hills they came in lines reaching as far as the eye can see. They walked in double lines chained together by twos. They walk ‘em here to the railroad and shipped ’em south like cattle.”

Then Lorenzo Ivy said this: “Truly, son, the half has never been told.”

To this, day, it still has not. For the other half is the story of how slavery changed and moved and grew over time: Lorenzo Ivy’s time, and that of his parents and grandparents. In the span of a single lifetime after the 1780s, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out plantations to a sub-continental empire. Entrepreneurial enslavers moved more than 1 million enslaved people, by force, from the communities that survivors of the slave trade from Africa had built in the South and in the West to vast territories that were seized—also by force—from their Native American inhabitants. From

1783 at the end of the American Revolution to 1861, the number of slaves in the United States increased five times over, and all this expansion produced a powerful nation. For white enslavers were able to force enslaved African-American migrants to pick cotton faster and more efficiently than free people. Their practices rapidly transformed the southern states into the dominant force in the global cotton market, and cotton was the world’s most widely traded commodity at the time, as it was the key raw material during the first century of the industrial revolution. The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization. In fact, slavery’s expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation—not only increasing its power and size, but also, eventually, dividing US politics, differentiating regional identities and interests, and helping to make civil war possible.

The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth. And that truth was the half of the story that survived mostly in the custodianship of those who survived slavery’s expansion—whether they had been taken over the hill, or left behind. Forced migration had shaped their lives, and also had shaped what they thought about their lives and the wider history in which they were enmeshed. Even as they struggled to stay alive in the midst of disruption, they created ways to talk about this half untold. But what survivors experienced, analyzed, and named was a slavery that didn’t fit the comfortable boxes into which other Americans have been trying to fit it ever since it ended.

I read Lorenzo Ivy’s words, and they left me uneasy. I sensed that the true narrative had been left out of history—not only American history in general, but even the history of slavery. I began to look actively for the other half of the story, the one about how slavery constantly grew, changed, and reshaped the modern world. Of how it was both modernizing and modern, and what that meant for the people who lived through its incredible expansion. Once I began to look, I discovered that the traces of the other half were everywhere. The debris of cotton fevers that infected white entrepreneurs and separated man and woman, parent and child, right and left, dusted every set of pre–Civil War letters, newspapers, and court documents. Most of all, the half not told ran like a layer of iridium left by a dinosaur-killing asteroid through every piece of testimony that ex-slaves, such as Lorenzo Ivy, left on the historical record: thousands of stanzas of an epic of forced separations, violence, and new kinds of labor.

For a long time I wasn’t sure how to tell the story of this muscular, dynamic process in a single book. The most difficult challenge was simply the fact that the expansion of slavery in many ways shaped the story of everything in the pre–Civil War United States. Enslavers’ surviving papers showed calculations of returns from slave sales and purchases as well as the costs of establishing new slave labor camps in the cotton states. Newspapers dripped with speculations in land and people and the commodities they produced; dramatic changes in how people made money and how much they made; and the dramatic violence that accompanied these practices. The accounts of northern merchants and bankers and factory owners showed that they invested in slavery, bought from and sold to slaveholders, and took slices of profit out of slavery’s expansion. Scholars and students talked about politics as a battle about states’ rights or republican principles, but viewed in a different light the fights can be seen as a struggle between regions about how the rewards of slavery’s expansion would be allocated and whether that expansion could continue.

The story seemed too big to fit into one framework. Even Ivy had no idea how to count the chained lines he saw going southwest toward the mountains on the horizon and the vast open spaces beyond. From the 1790s to the 1860s, enslavers moved 1 million people from the old slave states to the new. They went from making no cotton to speak of in 1790 to making almost 2 billion pounds of it in 1860. Stretching out beyond the slave South, the story encompassed not only Washington politicians and voters across the United States but also Connecticut factories, London banks, opium addicts in China, and consumers in East Africa. And could one book do Lorenzo Ivy’s insight justice? It would have to avoid the old platitudes, such as the easy temptation to tell the story as a collection of topics—here a chapter on slave resistance, there one on women and slavery, and so on. That kind of abstraction cuts the beating heart out of the story. For the half untold was a narrative, a process of movement and change and suspense. Things happened because of what had been done before them—and what people chose to do in response.

No, this had to be a story, and one couldn’t tell it solely from the perspective of powerful actors. True, politicians and planters and bankers shaped policies, the movement of people, and the growing and selling of cotton, and even remade the land itself. But when one takes Lorenzo Ivy’s words as a starting point, the whole history of the United States comes walking over the hill behind a line of people in chains. Changes that reshaped the entire world began on the auction block where enslaved migrants stood or in the frontier cotton fields where they toiled. Their individual drama was a struggle to survive. Their reward was to endure a brutal transition to new ways of labor that made them reinvent themselves every day. Enslaved people’s creativity enabled their survival, but, stolen from them in the form of ever-growing cotton productivity, their creativity also expanded the slaveholding South at an unprecedented rate. Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden.

One day I found a metaphor that helped. It came from the great African-American author Ralph Ellison. You might know his novel Invisible Man. But in the 1950s, Ellison also produced incredible essays. In one of them he wrote, “On the moral level I propose we view the whole of American life as a drama enacted on the body of a Negro giant who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds.”3

The image fit the story that Ivy’s words raised above the watery surface of buried years. The only problem was that Ellison’s image implied a stationary giant. In the old myth, the stationary, quintessentially unchanging plantation was the site and the story of African-American life from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. But Lorenzo Ivy had described a world in motion. After the American Revolution—which seemed at the time to portend slavery’s imminent demise—a metastatic transformation and growth of slavery’s giant body had begun instead. From the exploitation, commodification, and torture of enslaved people’s bodies, enslavers and other free people gained new kinds of modern power. The sweat and blood of the growing system, a network of individuals and families and labor camps that grew bigger with each passing year, fueled massive economic change. Enslaved people, meanwhile, transported and tortured, had to find ways to survive, resist, or endure. And over time the question of their freedom or bondage came to occupy the center of US politics.

This trussed-up giant, stretched out on the rack of America’s torture zone, actually grew, like a person passing through ordeals to new maturity. I have divided the chapters of this book with Ellison’s imagined giant in mind, a structure that has allowed the story to take as its center point the experience of enslaved African Americans themselves. Before we pass through the door that Lorenzo Ivy opened, here are the chapters’ names. The first is “Feet,” for the story begins with unfree movement on paths to enslaved frontiers that were laid down between the end of the American Revolution in 1783 and the early 1800s. “Heads” is the title of the second chapter, which covers America’s acquisition of the key points of the Mississippi Valley by violence, a gain that also consolidated the enslavers’ hold on the frontier. Then come the “Right Hand” and the “Left Hand” (Chapters 3 and 4). They reveal the inner secrets of enslavers’ power, secrets which made the entire world of white people wealthy.

“Tongues” (Chapter 5) and “Breath” (Chapter 6) follow. They describe how, by the mid-1820s, enslavers had not only found ways to silence the tongues of their critics, but had built a system of slave trading that served as expansion’s lungs. Most forms of resistance were impossible to carry out successfully. So a question hung in the air. Would the spirit in the tied-down body die, leaving enslaved people to live on like undead zombies serving their captors? Or would the body live, and rise? Every transported soul, finding his or her old life killed off, faced this question on the individual level as well: whether to work with fellow captives or scrabble against them in a quest for individualistic subsistence. Enslaved African Americans chose many things. But perhaps most importantly, they chose survival, and true survival in such circumstances required solidarity. Solidarity allowed them to see their common experience, to light their own way by building a critique of enslavers’ power that was an alternative story about what things were and what they meant.

This story draws on thousands of personal narratives like the one that Lorenzo Ivy told Claude Anderson. Slavery has existed in many societies, but no other population of formerly enslaved people has been able to record the testimonies of its members like those who survived slavery in the United States. The narratives began with those who escaped slavery’s expansion in the nineteenth century as fugitives. Over one hundred of those survivors published their autobiographies during the nineteenth century. As time went on, such memoirs found a market, in no small part because escapees from southern captivity were changing the minds of some of the northern whites about what the expansion of slavery meant for them. Then, during the 1930s, people like Claude Anderson conducted about 2,300 interviews with the ex-slaves who had lived into that decade. Because the interviews often allowed old people to tell about the things they had seen for themselves and the things they heard from their elders in the years before the Civil War, they take us back into the world of explanation and storytelling that grew up around fires and on porches and between cotton rows. No one autobiography or interview is pure and objective as an account of all that the history books left untold. But read them all, and each one adds to a more detailed, clearer picture of the whole. One story fills in gaps left by another, allowing one to read between the lines.4

Understanding something of what it felt like to suffer, and what it cost to endure that suffering, is crucial to understanding the course of US history. For what enslaved people made together—new ties to each other, new ways of understanding their world—had the potential to help them survive in mind and body. And ultimately, their spirit and their speaking would enable them to call new allies into being in the form of an abolitionist movement that helped to destabilize the mighty enslavers who held millions captive. But the road on which enslaved people were being driven was long. It led through the hell described by “Seed” (Chapter 7), which tells of the horrific near-decade from 1829 to 1837. In these years entrepreneurs ran wild on slavery’s frontier. Their acts created the political and economic dynamics that carried enslavers to their greatest height of power. Facing challenges from other white men who wanted to assert their masculine equality through political democracy, clever entrepreneurs found ways to leverage not just that desire, but other desires as well. With the creation of innovative financial tools, more and more of the Western world was able to invest directly in slavery’s expansion. Such creativity multiplied the incredible productivity and profitability of enslaved people’s labor and allowed enslavers to turn bodies into commodities with which they changed the financial history of the Western world.

Enslavers, along with common white voters, investors, and the enslaved, made the 1830s the hinge of US history. On one side lay the world of the industrial revolution and the initial innovations that launched the modern world. On the other lay modern America. For in 1837, enslavers’ exuberant success led to a massive economic crash. This self-inflicted devastation, covered in Chapter 8, “Blood,” posed new challenges to slaveholders’ power, led to human destruction for the enslaved, and created confusion and discord in white families. When southern political actors tried to use war with Mexico to restart their expansion, they encountered new opposition on the part of increasingly assertive northerners. As Chapter 9, “Backs,” explains, by the 1840s the North had built a complex, industrialized economy on the backs of enslaved people and their highly profitable cotton labor. Yet, although all northern whites had benefited from the deepened exploitation of enslaved people, many northern whites were now willing to use politics to oppose further expansions of slavery. The words that the survivors of slavery’s expansion had carried out from the belly of the nation’s hungriest beast had, in fact, become important tools for galvanizing that opposition.

Of course, in return for the benefits they received from slavery’s expansion, plenty of northerners were still willing to enable enslavers’ disproportionate power. With the help of such allies, as “Arms” (Chapter 10) details, slavery continued to expand in the decade after the Compromise of 1850. For now, however, it had to do so within potentially closed borders. That is why southern whites now launched an aggressive campaign of advocacy, insisting on policies and constitutional interpretations that would commit the entire United States to the further geographic expansion of slavery. The entire country would become slavery’s next frontier. And as they pressed, they generated greater resistance, pushed too hard, and tried to make their allies submit—like slaves, the allies complained. And that is how, at last, whites came to take up arms against each other.

Yet even as southern whites seceded, claiming that they would set up an independent nation, shelling Fort Sumter, and provoking the Union’s president, Abraham Lincoln, to call out 100,000 militia, many white Americans wanted to keep the stakes of this dispute as limited as possible. A majority of northern Unionists opposed emancipation. Perhaps white Americans’ battles with each other were, on one level, not driven by a contest over ideals, but over the best way to keep the stream of cotton and financial revenues flowing: keep slavery within its current borders, or allow it to consume still more geographic frontiers. But the growing roar of cannon promised others a chance to force a more dramatic decision: slavery forever, or nevermore. So it was that as Frank Baker, Townshend, and Sheppard Mallory crept across the dark James River waters that had washed so many hulls bearing human bodies, the future stood poised, uncertain between alternative paths. Yet those three men carried something powerful: the same half of the story that Lorenzo Ivy could tell. All they had learned from it would help to push the future onto a path that led to freedom. Their story can do so for us as well. To hear it, we must stand as Lorenzo Ivy had stood as a boy in Danville—watching the chained lines going over the hills, or as Frank Baker and others had stood, watching the ships going down the James from the Richmond docks, bound for the Mississippi. Then turn and go with the marching feet, and listen for the breath of the half that has never been told.

4 notes · View notes