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blackswaneuroparedux · 4 years

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Treat Your S(h)elf: A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945 by Ernst Jünger (2019)

Keeping a journal: The short entries are often as dry as instant tea. Writing them down is like pouring hot water over them to release their aroma.

- Ernst Jünger, A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945 (2019)

Paris is very much my home these days and so I enjoy reading about the history of this beautiful city. It is difficult to live in Paris today and conjure up much sense of the city in the early 1940s. It is indeed, as it is called throughout the world, the City of Light. But back in 1940 when France fell and Paris occupied until its liberation on 24 August 1944, it was a city in darkness. Like so much else that happened in France during World War II, the Nazi occupation of Paris was something entirely more complex and ambiguous than has generally been understood.

We tend to think of those four years as difficult but minimally destructive by comparison with the hell the Nazis wreaked elsewhere in the country. But as recent historians have shown the Nazi occupation was a terrible time for Paris, not just because the Nazis were there but because Paris itself was complicit in its own humiliation. As the historian Ronald Risbottom has shown in his compelling book, ‘When Paris went Dark’, “Even today, the French endeavour both to remember and to find ways to forget their country’s trials during World War II; their ambivalence stems from the cunning and original arrangement they devised with the Nazis, which was approved by Hitler and assented to by Philipe Petain, the recently appointed head of the Third Republic, that had ended the Battle of France in June of 1940. This treaty - known by all as the Armistice - had entangled France and the French in a web of cooperation, resistance, accommodation, and, later, of defensiveness, forgetfulness, and guilt from which they are still trying to escape.”

It is almost certainly a unique event in human history, one in which a ruthless and unscrupulous invader occupied a city known for its sophistication and liberality, declining to destroy it or even to exact physical damage on more than a minority of its citizens yet leaving it in a state of “embarrassment, self-abasement, guilt and a felt loss of masculine superiority that would mark the years of the Occupation. To this day, more than one visitor or foreigners living in Paris are struck by how sensitive Paris and Parisians remain about the role of the city and its citizens in its most humiliating moment of the twentieth century.

Indeed bringing up the subject with French friends, my French partner’s family, or even relatives (by marriage - such as a French aunt married to my Norwegian uncle or the French partners of my cousins here in France) is like walking on egg shells. It brings up too many distant ghosts for many families. Nearly every household has a story. It can be one of resistance or one of collaboration or (more likely) one of passive indifference and acceptance.

And yet I remain fascinated and intrigued partly because of historical interest and partly out of curiosity about the human condition under stress. In Britain - despite the trauma of daily bombardment from German bombers - the country was never invaded. And so whilst war brings out the best and worst in people, it was altogether a different experience to the one experienced by mainland European countries. I don’t think we British truly have understood of life was really like under occupation and the choices people are willingly or not made just to survive the war.

The history of Paris from 1940 to 1944 gives the lie to the old childhood taunt: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. The Germans for the most part spared Parisians sticks and stones (except, of course, Parisians who were Jewish), but the “names” they inflicted in the form of truncated freedoms, greatly reduced food and supplies, an unceasing fear of the unexpected and calamitous, and the simple fact of their inescapable, looming presence did deep damage of a different kind. It traumatised the city and its inhabitants in ways very little understood by others, especially Britain.

The carefully curated image of French resistance against the Nazis has been asked to serve critical functions in that nation’s collective memory. The manufactured myth served to postpone for a quarter of a century deeper analyses of how easily France had been beaten and how feckless had been the nation’s reaction to German authority, especially between 1940 and 1943. And yet the myth of a universal resistance was important to France’s idea of itself as a beacon for human liberty. It was also badly needed as an example of the courage one needed in the face of monstrous political ideologies.

There remained the ethical questions that would haunt France for decades: Which actions, exactly, constitute collaboration and which constitute resistance? It is still asking these questions over 70 years later. But behind such question lies a deeper and more haunting question of moral culpability that many are quick to throw responsibility - along with their own shame of inaction - onto others but not look inwards at their own guilt and passivity.

But what about the occupiers? What did they feel? Were the German Wehrmacht during the day simply tourists sitting in cafes, dining on gourmand food, buying silk stockings and the latest fashions for their wives back home and by night drinking and debauching on the cultural and seedy delights of Paris?

Moral culpability is a question that Ernst Jünger, the celebrated German author, never asks himself of his time as a German officer in Paris. But culpability is a question that looms large after reading the war journals of Ernst Jünger from 1941-1945, now published by Columbia University Press as A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945. It should have been re-titled as a ‘A German writer pre-occupied by Parisian night life and his navel’.

Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) was what is sometimes called a “controversial” figure. A First World War hero who was wounded seven times, he was undoubtedly uncommonly brave. He also insisted that those who were less brave should play their part, forcing retreating soldiers to join his unit at gunpoint. His 1920 book Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern), recounting his war experiences and portraying war in a heroic light, made him famous. In the 1920s he became involved in anti-democratic right-wing groups like the paramilitary Freikorps and wrote for a number of nationalist journals. He remained aloof from the Nazis, however, and, while he boasted that he “hated democracy like the plague”, was more of a nationalist than a racist.

Jünger spent much of the Second as an officer stationed in Paris, where these war journals are an almost daily record of the views and impressions of a well-read literary figure, entomologist, and cultural critic, now available for the first time in English translation in A German Officer in Occupied Paris. Posted in white-collar positions in Paris with the German military during the 1940-1944 occupation.

Nazi Germany produced two wartime diaries of equal literary and historical significance but written from the most different perspectives conceivable: Victor Klemperer and Ernst Jünger. Victor Klemperer wrote furtively, in daily dread of transport to an extermination camp, a fate he was spared by the firebombing of Dresden. Ernst Jünger, by contrast, had what was once called a “good war.” As a bestselling German author, he drew cushy occupation duty in Paris, where he could hobnob with famous artists and writers, prowl antiquarian bookstores, and forage for the rare beetles he collected. Yet Klemperer and Jünger both found themselves anxiously sifting propaganda and hearsay to learn the truth about distant events on which their lives hung.

For English-speaking readers who do not know his work, A German Officer in Occupied Paris shows the many sides of this complex, elusive writer.

In the judicious and helpful foreword by San Francisco-based historian Elliot Neaman, who says. “Like a God in France, Jünger operated on the edge of politics in Paris, rather like a butterfly fluttering among the resistors and collaborators. He didn’t trust the generals, who had taken a personal oath to Hitler, to be able to carry out a coup.”

Jünger had visited the city prior to the war, was fluent in French, and now had the contacts and the time to become even more familiar with the French capital. During his stay in Paris he met painters such as Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso as well as literary figures including Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jean Cocteau, all of whom figure in his Journals, which reflect a view of Paris that had become a tourism mecca during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

To Jünger, Paris was “a capital, symbol and fortress of an ancient tradition of heightened life and unifying ideas, which nations especially lack nowadays” (30 May 1941). After wandering around the Place du Tertre, near the Sacré Cœur Cathedral in the Montmartre section of Paris, he wrote: “The city has become my second spiritual home and represents more and more strongly the essence of what I love and cherish about ancient culture” (18 September 1942). At the same time, Jünger was aware of the “shafts of glaring looks” with which he was sometimes viewed by locals as he wandered in uniform through the city’s streets and byways (18 August 1942, 89, and 29 September 1943).

A German Officer in Occupied Paris is divided into four parts: the “First Paris Journal,” his writings from 1941 through October 1942; “Notes from the Caucasus,” continuing his account through February 1943; the “Second Paris Journal,” covering the period from his return to Paris through the liberation of France in the late summer of 1944; and finally the “Kirchhorst Diaries,” his account of having been placed in charge of the local militia [Volkssturm] and his reflections on the bombings and imminent defeat of Germany.

The “First Paris Journal” reflects the comings and goings of a German officer and writer happy to rediscover Paris at a time when it seemed clear that Germany had won the war and would dominate France and perhaps Europe indefinitely. Closer physically to the fighting following his transfer to the East in October 1942, Jünger devoted greater attention to the fighting and the raw nature of the German-Soviet struggle in “Notes from the Caucasus.”

By the time he returned to Paris and began his “Second Paris Journal” in February 1943, the Germans had been defeated at Stalingrad and it had become increasingly evident that a titanic struggle loomed and that the Germans might well lose the war.

The final section, the “Kirchhorst Diaries,” is set against the backdrop of the Allied invasion of Germany, accompanied by intense bombing and the destruction of German cities and homes including Jünger’s own, and the seemingly countless numbers of civilian refugees seeking shelter and food. Through it all, Jünger continues his reading, including that of the Bible, his book collecting, and visits to antiquarian booksellers when possible, and his chats with various literary figures in Paris and, at times, in Germany.

Much of the material in the Journals is introspective, with Jünger addressing his innermost thoughts and dreams. Snakes also appear with some frequency in the Journals, for example, in the entry of 13 July 1943, where during a restless night because of air raid sirens in Paris, he recalls having dreamt of dark black snakes devouring more brightly colored ones. In the Journal entry, he linked snakes back to primal forces incarnating life and death, and good and evil. This connection, he noted, was the reason people fear the sight of a snake, “almost stronger than the sight of sexual organs, with which there is also a connection” (13 July 1943). Following a conversation with the “Doctoresse,” the name that Jünger used for Sophie Ravoux, with whom he was intimate and had an affair in Paris, he described his own manner of thinking as “atomistically by osmosis and filtration of the smallest particles of thoughts.” His thought process, he explained, ran not according to principles of cause and effect but rather at the “level” of the vowels of a sentence, on the molecular level; “This explains why I know people who couldn’t help becoming my friends, even through dreams” (22 January 1944). Addressing Eros and sexual organs, Jünger added that he wished to study the connections between language and physique. Colours also had spiritual values, “Just as green and red are part of white, higher entities are polarised in intellectual couples—as is the universe into blue and red”.

Jünger’s position as an army captain gave him a panorama of the war that left no room for heroes. Violence became a grim leveller that made ideologies interchangeable. Germans on the eastern front were reading On the Marble Cliffs as a condemnation of Soviet Russia rather than of Nazi Germany. Hitler had unleashed a dehumanising force on the world, one that made Russians, Germans, the French Resistance and Allied pilots all look the same, locked in an escalating cycle of cruelty. Jünger witnessed Allied planes strafing screaming children in the streets, releasing bombs timed to explode while presents were handed out on Christmas Eve. Accounts drifted in of Parisian friends, who had once tried to transcend national boundaries with him through measured discussion in the salons, being harassed as collaborators. His summary of this second war could have been a reverse of the first: ‘Inactivity brings men together, whereas battle separates them.’

The picture of Jünger’s political views that emerges in his Journals, however, is a highly chivalric and military elitist one in which a small number of bold idealists, for lack of a better term, struggle against demos and technocracy, democracy and technicians, who are destroying the soul of an older European society. Writing while back home in Kirchhorst on 6 November 1944, following the expulsion of the Germans from France and walking around viewing the destruction wrought by the Allied bombs in Germany, he observed: “As I walked, I thought about the cursory style of contemporary thinkers, the way they pronounce judgment on ideas and symbols that people have been working on and creating for millennia. In so doing they are unaware of their own place in the universe, and of that little bit of destructive work allocated to them by the world spirit.”

He went on to criticise “the old liberals, Dadaists, and free-thinkers, as they begin to moralise at the end of a life devoted to the destruction of the old guard and the undermining of order.” Jünger then referred to Dostoevsky’s novel The Demons, in which the sons of Stepan Trofimovich “are encouraged to scorn anything that had formerly been considered fundamental.” Having destroyed their father, these “young conservatives,” now sensing “the new elemental power” of “the demos,” are then dragged to their deaths. In the ensuing chaos, “only the nihilist retains his fearsome power.” Jünger mentions Hindenburg, and the destruction of the conservatives by the Nazis is clearly implied (6 November 1944).

In August 1943, he described his political views as a combination of Guelph (relating to the medieval supporters of the Pope against the Holy Roman Emperor), Prussian, Gross-Deutscher (in support of a Greater Germany including Austria), European, and citizen of the world “all at once.” As he put it, “My political core is like a clock with cog wheels that work against each other.” However, he added: “Yet, when I look at the face of the clock, I could imagine a noon when all these identities coincide” (1 August 1943).

While violence raged all around, Jünger continued his secret diary, for publication after the war. This ended for him when American tanks rumbled through his village in April 1945, Jünger proclaiming that the deeper the fall, the greater the ensuing rise. Jünger survived investigation in the immediate postwar period and went on to become a grand old man of German literature, with a considerable following at home and abroad. A year before his death he was – as the phrase goes – received into the Catholic church. Having lived through a violent century he expired in his bed in his 103rd year.

The war journals is a highly nuanced, albeit self-made, picture of a human being in the middle of World War II, who is a flirtatious fascist, yet who apparently seems to care for other human beings, regardless of their so-called social strata or race. Take for example this entry dated Paris, 28 July 1942, “The unfortunate pharmacist on the corner: his wife has been deported. Such benign individuals would not think of defending themselves, except with reasons. Even when they kill themselves, they are not choosing the lot of the free who have retreated into their last bastions, rather they seek the night as frightened children seek their mothers. It is appalling how blind even young people have become to the sufferings of the vulnerable; they have simply lost any feeling for it. They have become too weak for the chivalrous life. They have even lost the simple decency that prevents us from injuring the weak. The opposite is true: they take pride in it.”

Having said that, I found some of the contents repugnant as Jünger, a devout entomologist, easily writes about finding a new insect while fires are burning all around Paris in 1943. Indeed Jünger paints himself as the detached botanist-scholar, determined to survive and help the world recover in peacetime. For him, the best way to avoid being sucked into the vortex of violence was to disconnect from emotion and group mentalities: to feel nothing and be on no one’s side, only bearing witness. A detached eye in the storm.

His journal is a hedonistic carousel, as he frequented theatres, literary salons and Left bank bookstalls along the Seine, as well as having a meeting of artistic minds with Picasso, Braque and Cocteau. It’s possible to make your way through this collection and have a grand ole time, enjoying the moments when Jünger encounters celebrities like Picasso, or when Monet’s daughter-in-law gives him the key to the gardens at Giverny for his own private tour, or when he describes another gourmet meal with the well-heeled of Parisian society: “The salad was served on silver, the ice cream on a heavy gold service that had belonged to Sarah Bernhardt.” Jünger relishes his name-dropping and his contacts with the upper crust. He sees himself as one of the Übermenschen: “In this country the superior man lives like Odysseus, taunted by worthless usurpers in his own palace.”

The author himself gets lost in the fog of mystic self regard as all artistic writers are prone to do and confesses that in an entry labeled 26 Aug 1942: “At times I have difficulty distinguishing between my conscious and unconscious existence. I mean between that part of my life that has been knit together by dreams and the other.”

To read the diary in chronological order is to realise that Jünger’s submersion in art and literature was his way of preserving his humanity while serving the machinery of a lethally violent state. One way of doing this was through a voracious program of reading, chiefly literature and history, often reading two or three books at once. One is not surprised at the German and French reading but at the abundance of English writers, whom he read in the original—Melville, Joyce, Poe, Conrad, Kipling, Thomas Wolfe, Thornton Wilder, the Brontës, ad infinitum. The range is also remarkable. Jünger pivots from the 1772 fantasy Diable amoureux to a biography of the painter Turner to Crime and Punishment. And throughout the entire diary, one finds him reading the Bible, cover to cover, which he began shortly after his posting to Paris.

Over and over again I had to remind myself this is a diary. Diaries by definition have one eye on self serving posterity.

So it’s not surprising that Jünger would tweak reality to create this image of poetic detachment. With his constant stories of indulgence in Paris, the reader might assume he had no job while he was there. In fact he was censoring letters and newspapers, a cog in the Nazi machine he so despised. He omits anything that would make him appear a villain. An ongoing extramarital affair in Paris is barely hinted at. But neither does he try to look a hero, omitting how he passed on to Jews information of upcoming deportations, buying them time to escape.

Should he have continued to enjoy his life as a flâneur for so long? He had solid proof of what was going on, debriefed as he was on the mass shootings and death camps on the eastern front. Throughout his career he had railed against inertia, lauding men of action who sacrificed themselves for a just cause. And then such a cause presented itself. Jünger’s colleagues in Paris were involved in the Stauffenberg plot of 1944, and asked for his help. He was one of the most influential conservative voices in Germany at the time, one of the few that Hitler’s followers might have taken seriously. Yet he refused to commit himself during the chaos. Instead, Jünger waited for evil to destroy itself: a fireman who fought the blaze by waiting for the building to burn down. As usual, he inhabited a grey area.

Jünger remains a problematic figure of controversy, perhaps even emblematic of the aged old question how does one respond to brutish evil? There are no easy answers. Addressing the French who collaborated with Germany during the war Robert Paxton, a well regarded historian of Vichy France wrote, “Even Frenchmen of the best intentions, faced with the harsh alternative of doing one’s job, whose risks were moral and abstract, or practicing civil disobedience, whose risks were material and immediate, went on doing the job. The same may be said of the German occupiers. Many of them were “good Germans,” men of cultivation, confident that their country’s success outweighed a few moral blemishes, dutifully fulfilling some minor blameless function in a regime whose cumulative effect was brutish.”

Was Jünger one of those they called a ‘good German’? Eating sole and duck at the famous Tour d’Argent restaurant, while gazing down at the hungry civilians in the buildings below was the choice Jünger made. In his 4 Just 1942 diary entry he wrote, “upon the grey sea of roofs at their feet, beneath which the starving eke out their living. In times like this - eating well and much - brings a feeling of power”.

We are always told to speak truth to power. Before we can speak one must think. But thinking truth to power is never enough in itself unless one acts out truth to power. Words without action is nothing. So the question one has to ask even as one reads from the detached safety of distance and time: how would one act in his shoes or indeed a Frenchman’s shoes?

More than anything, the diary raises, for me at least, the question of moral culpability. It’s impossible to tell what Jünger was really thinking, and so perhaps one tantalising aspect of these war journals is psychological more than anything else. All this stuff is swirling around his life but we hear about the harmless social fluff for the most part. For example, he notes “In Charleville, I was a witness at a military tribunal. I used the opportunity to buy books, like novels by Gide and various works by Rimbaud.” I wanted to hear about the tribunal, but alas, it vanished into Jünger’s damn book buying.

And yet if you judge Jünger by his diary entries alone then it would be very easy to find him guilty. But diaries conceal as much as they reveal. For all the criticism that Jünger has served up a self-serving exculpatory diary, the truth is that he leaves his most selfless acts unmentioned. It is known that he gave advance warning to Jews facing deportation: The writer Joseph Breitbach was one, as he subsequently confirmed, and Walter Benjamin was possibly another.

None of this, for obvious reason, could be committed to paper, nor could the names of Adolf Hitler or any of his henchmen. Instead, their appearances are marked by Jünger’s felicitous code names. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi chief propagandist, is “Grandgoschier,” a character from Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel meaning “Big Throat.” SS Chief Heinrich Himmler is “Schinderhannes,” the name of a notorious German highwayman but also a pun on horse knacker. And Hermann Goering is simply “Head Forester,” citing the most fatuous of his many official titles.

Jünger thought a great deal about the mystic and symbolic power of sounds, and he reserved his most apposite pseudonym for Hitler, “Kniébolo,” a name that is at once menacing and absurd. It suggests a kneeling demon (Diabolos), a leitmotif of the diary as Jünger became ever more convinced of Hitler’s essentially Satanic character- in the literal biblical sense.

So grey areas get more grey when we either try to step back and be detached to render a verdict on Jünger or if we step into his shoes to get inside his head. This is the limitation of a secret and coded diary, no matter how scrupulously written and how fascinating they are to read. Diaries are written for oneself or an imagined other; they play on the satisfactions of monologue. Letters are shaped by the contingencies of distance and time between writer and recipient; they become over time scattered in various places and must be "collected" to form a single body of writing.

Diaries are shaped by moments of inspiration but also by habit; they are woven together by a single voice and usually are contained between covers. Diarists play with the tension between concealing and revealing, between "telling all" and speaking obliquely or keeping silent. Like letter writing, diarists inscribe the risks and pleasures of expression and trust. The diary is an uncertain genre uneasily balanced between literary and historic writing. The diary belongs to the woman where history and literature overlap. So it’s easy to conclude that we will always have ambiguity and tension between these two polar opposites.

After 1945, Jünger again withdrew into private life, but continued to publish. Seclusion encouraged attention. His reputation grew. Scholarly editions appeared. In three last decades, doubters aside, he enjoyed growing recognition, travelled the world, deepened his knowledge of nature and voiced concern about human damage to the planet. Jünger poured out books late into his nineties. By then he had swept Germany’s top literary prizes and been visited in his Swabian retreat by the statesmen of Europe, including Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand.

Jünger’s experience of life did little to dent his loathing of liberalism and democracy. On a country walk along a bomb-pitted road near his home late in 1944, Jünger indulges a moment of conservative relish, telling himself that it is liberals who are to blame for all that has befallen. How wonderful it is, he writes sarcastically, “to watch the drama of the old liberals, Dadaists and freethinkers, as they begin to moralise at the end of a life devoted completely to the destruction of the old guard and the undermining of order”. “Blame the liberals!” was the reactionary’s charge at birth (there is a profound difference between true conservatism and the extreme reactionary). It hobbled the Weimar Republic and bedevils politics today. Politically, he had learnt nothing. Today Western Europe society is eating itself inwards through the corrosive influence of the woke-ness of cultural Marxism and the conservative now finds himself/herself in the sweetly ironic position of defending the tenets of true liberalism.

For English-speaking readers who do not know his work, A German Officer in Occupied Paris shows the many sides of this complex, elusive writer. These diaries are invaluable about the man and his times. Jünger is nowadays probably less read than read about. So these war journals are to be welcomed and to be read with great interest.

For some these journal entries alone will still provide material to debate the moral choices made - and evaded - by Jünger. To critics, Jünger participated too much and judged too little. To defenders, he was indeed on the hard right, but no fascist and, besides, his prose was what mattered, not his politics. Not to pity Jünger’s personal travails would be defective. Not to respond to his prose would be deaf. But all of us can ponder Jean Cocteau’s final verdict, who liked Jünger and considered him a friend but whose aloofness troubled him: “Some people had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.” Jünger may have washed his hands of his time in Paris but the hand of history forever tapping on his shoulder is less forgiving.

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i-write-and-therefore-i-am · 4 years

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One Monstrous Miracle (Part Three)

Wazzup? I have been hit with the inspiration bug and I felt drawn to work on this story while I have all this fun isolation time. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before but I have this story all mapped out, so don’t be afraid of it being abandoned. I’m gonna finish this baby if it’s the last thing I do! As always, I’m self-conscious of this chapter, especially with characterization but please do let me know how you feel about it! I had fun writing it, and I hope you have fun reading it! (Forgive any mistakes you see, I am only babey).

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Pairing: Aziraphale/Human

Summary: More barging in, some tenderness, some threatening. All in a day’s work.

Warnings: This got SIGNIFICANTLY longer than other parts, so forgive me. There’s more cursing, but I think I’m just gonna have to resign myself to the fact that this is who I am now.

Word Count: 2,889

Men are stupid. It is a lesson that every person that considered themselves attracted to men learns at some point in their life, and it was a lesson that you had apparently forgotten. You had let yourself get pulled in by the promise of exquisite, centuries-old books and now you were paying for it.

You had assumed post-breakup position: laying across your sofa in your old, but still very fluffy pyjamas, a carton of ice cream on your lap with the sound of crap telly playing in the background. You weren’t even paying attention to what was happening on screen, but you knew that the alternative was to sit in silence until it was time for work, and you didn’t know how much of that you could take.

You couldn’t understand what exactly your problem was. Aziraphale hadn’t really done anything wrong, had he? He had been the perfect gentleman from the moment you had met him and yet something in you felt…betrayed. The thought of how angry Aziraphale had gotten, the crashing sound that had come from his sitting room window, the memory of the rage in his eyes frightened you. This man who had lovingly repaired priceless works of literature, who had patiently sat and enthusiastically listened to you rant about all the things that had happened to you over the course of the day, who had somehow remembered every single one of your favourite dishes and had cooked them all himself just because he had wanted to had transformed in front of your eyes. He’d become something terrible and dangerous, and that was your problem. The switch had been too much for you, and your fear had turned into hurt.

It was ridiculous, really. You knew that it was, but that didn’t stop you from avoiding the familiar little bookshop from then on. Partly out of residual confusion and dismay at what had happened, but mostly out of an overwhelming sense shame at how poorly you had dealt with the situation. You’d run away sobbing as though Aziraphale had hit you, when all he had done was defend you fiercely to someone who seemed to be an important figure in his life. No, you wouldn’t be stepping foot near the shop anytime soon if you had anything to do about it.

Unfortunately for you, you had a great less “anything” to do with it than you thought you had.

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It had been another long day. You enjoyed your new promotion and you were eternally grateful that you had gotten it in the first place, but it came with a truckload of new responsibilities that left you singularly exhausted on the bus ride home that evening. In your efforts to avoid Aziraphale at all costs, you had recently taken to riding the bus again, much to your wallet’s chagrin. Again, the foolishness of your actions was not lost on you, but you just couldn’t bring yourself to grow up.

The bus came to a stop and you followed the stream of tourists out onto the pavement. You felt almost like you were in a daze, mechanically turning and walking towards your apartment. Your eyes seemed to see through everything, out of focus and not really paying attention to what was going on around you. Distantly, you noticed that the air had begun to smell faintly of vanilla, like the nearby bakery was baking a wedding cake. In your tired state, you had forgotten that that particular bakery would have been closed long before you had even stepped foot on the bus earlier. Your neighbourhood was not a particularly dangerous one, but it was never smart for a young person to be out so close to dark without being at least somewhat aware of their surroundings. Though you couldn’t have known this, every potential mugger, or killer, or other type of criminal suddenly remembered something urgent that needed tending to on the other side of the city. Speeding motorists found their gas petals to be a tad bit wonky, keeping their vehicles moving along at well under the speed limits. Streetlamps that had long been neglected by the council clicked on, lighting your way home. Just for shits and giggles, for no reason at all (except for one very good reason that you were not at all privy to and were unlikely to be in your lifetime), you lifted your head and turned to look across the street.

Your heart skipped a beat. It was him! It had to be. He was standing in the middle of a group of people, none of them particularly interesting in anyway, so his shockingly white curls and light brown coat stood out like a sore thumb. Your heart beat wildly in your chest. It had been so long since you had seen the man, and the ache you felt as you tried to get a better view of him was almost too much to bear. Unbidden, your arm began to raise itself and his name flew to the tip of your tongue, but before you knew it, he was gone.

You thought about the incident all the way to your building and up the stairs to your flat. You had half a mind to call Aziraphale and demand to know why he was hanging about on Dean Street not ten minutes ago, and where the hell had he gone between the two seconds it had taken you to decide to call out to him and the moment you’d realised he was no longer there. You decided, thankfully, that you probably weren’t going to come at it from the right angle, especially not over the phone, and that you’d be better off continuing as you were. You put your keys and purse down and hung up your coat, thinking about dinner but unable to keep the memory of Aziraphale’s kind smile out of your mind.

You cooked yourself some pasta, not in the mood for a proper meal. You loved cooking, you really did, but it didn’t seem to have the same… ‘umph!’ to it that it had before this whole fiasco with Aziraphale. You had turned on the television so that you could have a bit of background noise while you worked and let yourself focus on the familiar rituals of boiling and straining and stirring. Before long, you had a plate of your favourite pasta along side a glass (a rather full one, mind you,) of your favourite wine. All was well.

Your serenity was interrupted by loud pounding at your door, as if someone were trying to knock the whole bloody thing down. You jumped, nearly spilling your wine all over your face, but you saved yourself at the last minute. Furiously (gingerly) putting the glass down on your kitchen table, you stood up from your chair, intending on giving whoever was on the other side of that door a piece of your mind. Apparently, you weren’t moving quite fast enough for them, because they knocked again, and you swore you could hear the hinges give a little and the force they were being put under. You stomped over to the door, unlocked it, wrenched it open to find—

“What the fuck?” It was Aziraphale’s angry friend. He stood right outside your door, smirking at you like the little shit he probably was. Your brain paused, hit rewind, and started again. You remembered the incident in Aziraphale’s living room and you tensed, preparing yourself for a deluge of indeterminate nonsense about you being mortal? And that somehow being a problem? He was just as unnerving as he had been when you had first seen him, still swaying, still upending the Universe. The real question of the hour was—

“How do you know where I live?!” You screeched, attempting to shut the door in his face, only to be met with his arm. He smirked and advanced on you, forcing you to walk backwards into your own flat. You looked around desperately and saw a hardcover textbook that you had been using to refresh some technique for work. You grabbed it and pointed it towards him, trying to look threatening. The man reached his hand out and you backed away.

“Don’t! Don’t come any closer!” Crowley stopped moving forward, but he didn’t look the least bothered by your performance. He chuckled, leaning against the door frame.

“Well I was going to introduce myself, but it seems you remember me. Let’s put a name to the face, shall we? My name is Crowley and I understand that I may be…how do you say, fit a f? I am sorry, love but you aren’t quite my type.” He finished by making a show of looking you up and down, which only fuelled your annoyance.

“Answer my question! How do you know where I live? Why are you even here?!”

“I’m afraid that was two questions, which one—”

“ANSWER THE DAMN QUESTIONS!” You demanded. Crowley frowned behind his pitch-black sunglasses (which he wore inside, hours after the sun had set) and seemed to grow more serious.

“I—that’s not how I was supposed to start this. Force of habit, you know, it gets the best of us all.” You didn’t respond, waiting for this strange man who had barged into your life on two separate occasions and had brought you nothing but irritation to explain himself.

“See it’s…I…you are—” He stopped, annoyed with the difficulty he was having. You were annoyed that he was still in your flat. “Aziraphale isn’t well.”

Your heart stopped. What? How could that be? You had just seen him! What was wrong? Was he dying? What if—

“He misses you, love. He won’t admit it but he does. He feels awful about what happened and that you were scared or whatever and ran away and he’s been wanting to call you for weeks but he’s too scared to. He’s not himself, Y/N.” This was not what you were expecting to hear. Aziraphale missed you? He’d been thinking about you? You basked in this knowledge for a couple of seconds before your mind stuck on something.

“How do you know my name?” There hadn’t been time for introductions when he had interrupted you and Aziraphale, and you definitely hadn’t said it since he’d interrupted you now.

“Angel talks about you all the time. It’d be grand not to know your name but noooo. Everything is always “Y/N that” and “Y/N this”. “Isn’t Y/N perfect Crowley?”” He’d pitched his voice higher to indicate he was mocking Aziraphale, but you had barely noticed. This was getting to be a bit too much for you to handle. Did Aziraphale…could he actually…did he feel the same way about you that you did about him? Was it even possible? Crowley must’ve seen your confusion on you face because he softened a little.

“Look. Come back to the shop. At least just talk to him, tell him you’re not angry anymore. You’re not angry anymore, right?” He waited for you to respond. You realised that no, you weren’t angry. You missed him sorely, and if you could have him back in your life, even if everything that Crowley had told you was false, it would be more than enough to just be friends again. You shook your head. Crowley grinned at you.

“Brilliant. So, go to the shop, do whatever you two do, and I won’t have to hear about “lovely Y/N” anymore. It’s win-win-win for everyone.” He turned to leave but stopped, sighed heavily, and turned back around. “Uhm. While I’m here, uh. Aziraphale wanted me to…you know…” He cut himself off. He seemed to do that a lot for a man who had no qualms about breaking down doors and interrupting other people.

“You know how people say things that they don’t mean?” He asked, looking up at a water spot on your ceiling. You nodded. He looked down and nodded too, his lips twitching in a smile. “Good. See ya around, love!” And with that he left, the door closing behind him on his way out. You imagined that whatever had just happened was as close to an apology as you were going to get from the strange man--if that was actually what he was trying to do.

You stood and stared at the door for a good while before dropping the book on the ground and sitting heavily onto your sofa. There was so much to think about now, and your mind was absolutely buzzing. You decided that tonight was a very good night to finish off that brand-new bottle you had just bought yesterday.

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Your palms were sweaty. Your knees were trembling slightly, but that wasn’t as bad as sweaty palms. He would feel your sweat and be disgusted and kick you out of his shop before any of your nasty oily sweat got on any of his precious books. Or, replied the competent part of your brain, you could wipe your hands on your jeans and open the damned door already. Your stomach twisted as you raised your hand and pushed on the handle and walked through the doorway.

You were greeted with the sweet sound of bells. The smell of old books and wax and something that Aziraphale carried around with him washed over you, relaxing your shoulders and planting a stupidly stupid smile on your face. You were totally in love with this man, but his bookshop came a close second. You wandered around at first, partly interested in the books and partly biding time until you had to deal with the Aziraphale in the room. It wasn’t difficult to lose yourself in all of the old volumes, and you were so particularly engrossed in one that you were completely oblivious to the man behind you on the stairs.

Aziraphale was beside himself. He had been up in his apartment brewing some tea when the sound of the front door drew him out to the shop. He’d come down the stairs, expecting to find some customer that he would have to fight tooth and nail to keep from buying one of his books but instead he’d found you. After the way you had left, in tears and clearly terrified, he had not dared to hope that he’d see you again. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He couldn’t help himself from watching over you as you walked home, performing the self-same miracle that had kept you safe last night (however, he was not responsible for you looking up at him, that was something else entirely and it had spooked him something fierce). That was all he had allowed himself to do, baring himself from calling you or visiting you, thinking that if you were so frightened of him, you would not appreciate him initiating contact before you were ready.

He ached for you. He thought of you every day; of your smile, your eyes, your intelligence, your passion for his books and your genuine desire to understand him. Over the time you were apart, he’d come to realise how much he cared for you and how much it hurt to not have you in his life. He watched, unwilling to break your concentration as you ran your fingers reverently along the books, mouthing their titles silently. You were beautiful, even with your hair in the messy bun you preferred on days you didn’t have to dress up for work, in ripped jeans and an old sweater. He couldn’t just stare at you all day, so he forced himself to break his trance and clear his throat.

Predictably, you jumped, hitting your hand on the thick wood of the bookcase. You cursed loudly, bringing your hurting hand to your chest. Panicked, Aziraphale rushed down the stairs and to your side, already reaching for your hand.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, my dear, please forgive me! I didn’t mean to startle you, I just…Oh I feel awful!” You let him take your hand in both of his, everything you had meant to say before stepping into the shop floating away as you watched Aziraphale fuss over your hand. You smiled softly at him.

“It’s okay, Azi.” His head shot up and he stared, wide eyed in wonder. You had been the only person to call him that, and he admittedly missed the sound of it while you weren’t with him. You covered his hands with your other one, squeezing gently. “It’s okay.”

He could scarcely think. Or breathe, or do anything but blink at you like the besotted fool he was. You were here, in front of him, touching him, speaking to him, looking at him like that, like perhaps you had missed him just as much as he had missed you. Out of instinct, out of an urge that had plagued him these long months that he had known you, he slowly lifted your bruising hand up to his lips, giving you plenty of time to pull away, to leave him and never set eyes on him again. When you did none of those things, he pressed a sweet, chaste kiss to your knuckles, and then another on the angry red spot that had hit the case. Your breath shuddered in your chest, and you could do nothing but stand there.

Conversations would be had, nothing to personal, nothing close to admitting whatever it was between you, but you didn’t need that. There was an understanding that life without the other person was not worth the trouble. All was truly well.

Tag List:

@chelsdub, @a-hoe-for-vanya, @lordbeezyprinceofhell, @aelin-thefirebreathingbitchqueen, @beetlebway, @dreamerkim, @petalduck

(Let me know if you want to be added. If you’ve asked before and you aren’t tagged, it means tumblr didn’t let me tag you for whatever reason, so ask me again! If you don’t want to be tagged anymore, also let me know!)

#mine #aziraphale x reader #Aziraphale #crowley #good omens #One Monstrous Miracle #michael sheen

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taytei · 5 years

Text

More Ancient AU facts

Stuff that got asked and answered over on my insta that I figured I’d share here as well!

- Lance asked keith out first out loud, but Keith kinda already figured they were dating at that point already (they totally were)

- Keith’s wings are only vaguely sensitive on the webbing on the inner side. They’re actually incredibly durable and can be used practically as shields.

- Soulmates are a thing in this au now by the way

- When you meet your soulmate, it’s an instant connection, a gut feelings. The idea of being separated from them is just so viscerally upsetting, it’s almost painful. Most people meet when they’re older.

- Lance and Keith tho, met when they were babies, so you can imagine how two kids throwing monstrous temper tantrums cause they want to see each other can go sahklhkglsa

- so they didn’t actually realize that they were soulbound until they were older shakhlgsa

- they realized it because, when people get older, they get restless and feel the need to travel to find their partner. Keith and Lance never once felt that way. The closest to that was whenever they were separated from one another. And it just clicked that, “oh, yea, that makes sense” but also kind of “goddamnit, of course it’s him”

- Also, if you are an Ancient’s soulmate, but you yourself are not an ancient, once you soulbond, you basically become immortal so you can stay with them forever

- Lance and Keith intertwine their tails a lot, it’s basically like holding hands

- I just wanna clarify also, that Lance isn’t strictly a mermaid in this AU. He’s an Ocean Descendent, an Ancient one at that. He sticks mostly with the mermaid form because that’s what his parents found most comfortable, so it’s his default. He can take on the form of ANY water based mythical creature if he so wants.

- Also, don’t touch his tail. Unless you are family, a close friend, or given explicit permission, you do not touch his tail.

- Keith takes Lance flying, whether Lance asks him to or not. sometimes he’ll just scoop lance up out of the water unexpectedly

- wing hugs. Ever since they were little, keith has tried his best to wrap his wings around him and lance, even if they weren’t big enough. Once they grew to full size, he would often just cacoon the two of them in his wings whenever he was feeling vulnerable, needy, or protective

- Lance and Keith own an apartment together gsakhlsa

- but they also have their own island that they escape to whenever they feel the need to get away (it was a gift from Hunk for their wedding)

- On their first official date, Lance called in a favor from Allura and asked for a “cosmic light show that’s gonna sweet Keith off his feet and right into my arms”

- something like the northern lights with exploding stars and a metero shower happening all at once ended up being of the most nearly-life threatening but also romantic moments they could have asked for

- i say “life-threatening” but Ancients can’t actually be killed.

- they can be wounded and hurt badly enough that they go into a “resting/healing period”, which is mostly a meditative coma, but they can’t be killed by an outside source.

- when either Lance or Keith is in their resting/healing period, they experience the same feelings as when they’re separated, only like 500x more potent. They’re restless and anxious and more protective and it’s practically impossible to pry them away from the other’s side

- they decide when they want to go out, and once they do, they join The Colony of the Cosmos, where Allura and her small group of people reside.

- Only the Ancients go to the Colony once they decide to die, everyone else on the planet just gets reincarnated over and over again.

- Lance, Keith, Hunk and Shiro’s families are all Ancients, so they all get to go to the colony when they decide its their time

- A bit about the Colony, they’re people of pure cosmic energy. Ruled by Allura and her family. (Honerva and Zarkon are happily married, and Lotor never grew up troubled, they’re perfectly happy).

- When any of the Ancients become cosmic beings, they lose their descendent-attributes (Lance would lose his ear-fins, Keith would lose his horns, etc) and they would gain the Altean-esque ears and specialized markings

- but Cosmic Beings can alter their appearance however they want, so they can always give those attributes back to themselves if they really wanted them

- Lance’s home in built into the underside of a massive island right off the main shoreline

- which Keith visits on quite a few occasions, once he’s granted the Blessed Breath (which is an enchantment that involves an Ocean Ancient tracing a magic rune along their throat that allows them to breathe under water. It’s generally permanent, if used consistently and as long as the caster doesn’t dispel the magic)

- he was only allowed to have it once he actually learned out to swim

- also, it’s impossible for Lance to ever ever drown, even if he’s in his human form

- keith’s is basically the equivalent of lava girl’s land, filled with volcanoes and lava rivers, but there ARE forests of Ash trees and they have beautiful hot springs

- It’s really hot there tho. Lance can visit and endure the heat pretty well, since he’d been visiting since he was little, but he needs to have a canteen of water at hand at all times.

- plus the kogane family had a cooling spring implemented for when lance and his family decided to visit

- Everyone has the ability to look entirely human, no scales, horns, wings, tails, etc, but it’s not really necessary, unless they enter a “Human Glamour required” zone

- Everyone is aware that Ancients exist. they just kind of assume they stay in their “pristine palaces, too good to mingle with the common folk”, not realizing the doofus that just dabbed and the boyfriend that got whacked in the face because of that are two of the most powerful beings in the world

- and being ancients, they’re KIND of famous? once people find out that they ARE ancients. Cause really, they blend pretty seamlessly among everyone else. Most people just assuming they’re common ocean/fire descendent civilians

- people are usually more like “whoa, what? really? YOU’RE an Ancient? I just watched you coke on a baby carrot for almost a solid minute”

- usually that’s followed by people asking just how old they actually are

- Lance & Keith: “it’s been a long time, lost track” - Keith: *actually lost track of how old they are* Lance: *refuses to reveal just how old he actually is*

- Keith gives Lance gifts of gold and jewels and cool weapons that his people either find in their caves or craft from their magma

- the trident that lance has is actually a gift from Keith’s family. The metal is unable to rust or age, it’s completely unbreakable, and with an utterance of a spell, the metal will heat to the same temperature as if it was being forged (like the sun-forge elf blades from the dragon prince)

- meanwhile Lance gives keith ocean found objects, pearls, sea stones, shark teeth, weapons coated in some of the sea’s most poisonous creatures, stuff like that

- Shiro: “I uploaded my music to the cloud, look” An actual rain cloud: *starts playing Africa by Toto*

- Shiro also CAN have normal human feet, but he actively chooses to have bird legs cause he can pick stuff up with his toes without needing to bend over

- When Lance was first learning how to walk, he first went to Allura so he could surprise everyone with how great he is at walking. Only, she taught him by basically playing QWOP with his legs. (google it if you haven’t heard of it, it’s fucking hilarious)

- Hunk is an Earth Ancient, able to shift continents and form mountains with nothing but a thought

- he popped up a statue of Keith for Lance to take to his underwater cavern where Lance keeps all the jewels and gold that Keith gives him, where he basically performs a Part of your World on a constant.

- Pidge is NOT an ancient. She’s a new Age, and gained the figurehead position at a young age because she founded a new type of magic

and FINALLY

- how Shiro lost his wing, how he met adam, and can he ever fly again???

- the accident happened back when he was still a teenager, when Lance’s and Keith’s parents were still the ruling figureheads for their territories. There was a brief moment of imbalance in their world when either Krolia or Lance’s mom was severely injured and wnt into a healing period.

- with the balance so suddenly being thrown off so early in the world’s creation, there was a power backlash throughout the Ancients.

- Shiro got zapped right out of the sky by his own lightning, his wing got fried, and it broke when he crashed landed down

- he lost his wing, since there was ... absolutely no way to salvage it.

- he went to the Forest Fae, as they were renowned healers, when his wing was still aching, and hoping maybe there was an alternative for his wing

- And that’s where he met (one) of his soulmates, adam. (eventually they meet Curtis, cause damnit, shiro deserves two soulmates, LET THE MAN BE LOVED). Adam helped with the phantom pains and worked his best to help the wing heal properly, even if it wouldn’t ever be able to grow in full again

- and as for whether shiro can fly, there IS an alternative.

- a super complicated spell called the “Spirit of the wing”, which basically gives him a spectral wing to make up for what he’s lost. but it is incredibly exhausting on the user, and tends to make his phantom pains act up more severely

- so he only uses it when he absolutely needs to

sorry that this was so long! But I thought that i would share them!

#ancient au #klance #voltron #taytei talks #headcanon list

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ofravensandgenesis · 4 years

Text

World Building Through Character Creation and Background NPCs

Entry 03. I was thinking over how to build out more plot points for both the underlying bones of original fiction, and also fleshing out ideas for some of the arcs in my ACABH fic. Honestly, adding more characters within reasonable limits seems to really help with that. Even if they’re just characters with a name and a few lines of description, or even just one line of description, it makes for a great springboard point to start tacking on more details. From those details, it’s a lot easier to build out the world around them in various layers. Like for the original fiction world I’m building out right now, creating the character Corwin Blackwood with the helpful input from my friends on how the name sounded, resulted in spinning up a huge chunk of the underlying world order. Originally I was going with just a two-sided state of tension and conflict, but Corwin’s family brings with it a third side that’s caught in the middle—people minding their own business that aren’t actively affiliated with either side. In terms of mechanics, the Blackwoods’ existence brought in some specific broad categories of magical beings, a rudimentary idea of various magical systems with an as of yet undefined overarching universal magic system, and social conflict regarding differing points of view relating to said beings and affiliations with them.

His name is all about his role in the story, with the meaning of his first name being “heart’s friend,” and having had a close if tempestuous friendship with the main character. The last name of Blackwood automatically brings to mind a haunted forest, and as inspired by a Netflix Castlevania fic called Baba by Crownofpins on Ao3 as recommended to me by a friend, and the Blackwoods’ home-locale and name makes me think of the Belmonts. So it was easy enough to consider the Blackwoods tentatively as a family of exorcists/monster-hunters/etc in this rough draft. (The Baba fic is pretty awesome btw, it’s got great elements of old Slavic folklore, obviously Baba Yaga for example, among other things. I shan’t spoil it ofc, but I thought it was a lovely read. Adult content warning for the fic ofc, read the tags, etc.) There’s other external factors that helped bring him about, including other recent media consumption on my part also again in thanks to my friends for recommending them, including Mo Dao Zu Shi and The Legend of The White Snake. (Content warning: Both of those works contain adult content, etc.) They’re both stories of Chinese origin that focus on romances that contain supernatural elements, with The Legend of The White Snake being an old classic tale of folklore. But what’s really fascinating to me is the mythology system that’s at play in the stories—I’m so used to “medieval” fantasy settings being European-influenced landscapes and civilizations, it was really cool to see a more involved Asiatic-inspired one. I’ve certainly seen Asian-mythos-based supernatural movies and series before, but not in this specific niche that’s more fantasy-adventure-ish. Usually the ones I’ve come across are much more heavily leaning into the martial arts category of movies as I’d classify them, or set in more modern-based times. That’s probably just a sign I need to go out and find more content of this sort to consume, honestly. But how the above two works treat the whole spirituality/magic/supernatural aspect is admittedly a huge inspiration point for me for how I’m hoping this original fic’s world will be built, and provides a great starting point to go and try to research more into stories and myths relating to those elements. It also happens to fit in neatly with me being interested in trying to learn a bit more about some of my heritage and culture, being partly of Chinese descent. That’s another thing I know I want Corwin to explore as an additional main character: what does it mean when you’re a part of multiple cultures as a person? What’s that experience like? How does that fact shape how he interacts with his world? I know it has a huge impact on how he’s perceived socially and allows him greater access to magical training via one side of his family having the history for it, and it interests me to think of exploring that in writing. What I’m not certain of is what name to label this general cluster of magical beings as—are they demons? Yaoguai? Spirits? There are associations with each word and name, and giving them a newly made up name would mean severing those ties for better or worse. There are definitely classical monstrous elements in that group, but also a lot of diversity, holding up yet another mirror to the run of the mill humans of that world. What is this group of magical beings specifically in this world’s build? Are they humans that have cultivated themselves spiritually enough to transcend, or is it a reincarnation gig, or something else? I’ll probably have to make another OC or import ideas from mythology to explain where they’re from. With regards to the FC 5 fic though, I’m currently listening to more of the in-game dialogue and commentary as provided by DanaDuchy on their account/channel (also: thanks to DanaDuchy for providing the rest of us such wonderful resources on this and other games/works) and boy the dev team did a wonderful job of just adding more of those little details to help make the setting feel alive. Like it’s honestly really cool to hear the NPCs talk about how haunted the King’s Hot Springs Hotel or the Catamount mines are, how Casey at the Spread Eagle makes the best loose meat/steamer/etc sandwiches and burgers in the entire county, the stories behind the Whistling Beaver Brewery, etc. It’s also pretty grim to hear the tales of all the people the cult’s taken and some of the things other people have seen the cult do, namely killing civilians in gruesomely inventive fashion. Which raises as an interesting problem for me as a fanfic writer is trying to figure out A) how much did the Seeds know about these particular clusters of mass murder, B) did they permit it if they knew about it ahead of time, and C) what purpose does it serve? Currently the answer to A is more than enough because the Seeds not knowing wouldn’t fit this AU nor their character builds in it to go well with the level of importance that the themes of responsibility and consequences carry both in the meta of the fic and in-world for Joshua personally. So that means for B, the Seeds are definitely permitting the additional senseless acts of cruelty noted in the dialogue and conflicted-conversations among the Peggies. Certainly they’re aware at least to some extent if not fully aware of the entirety of it, but I would assume based on the Heralds’ personalities that they all do like to know what their people get up to. They all seem like they would want to know the details of what’s going on for various reasons. I’m leaning towards having the particularly senseless murders be a mix of some acts the Seeds ordered, some acts they left open to interpretation to their followers who then took it to a dark extreme, and some acts were instigated by the followers alone. Basically: humans being humans during chaotic dark times and doing terrible, bad shit. Which leads to the conclusion for Joshua that the Seeds should be more disciplined about keeping their followers in line and not sinking down to this level of pointless evil. He’s not wild about their more purposeful evil acts either and is intent on trying to get them to stop the worst of that, but there are darker gradients of black and grey morality for him there to be more outraged by. So that pretty much wraps up C with the answer of “not much” other than humans being terrible to each other. Perhaps from the villainous perspective it helps terrorize the people of Hope County and whittle down the number of people the cult has to fight now or later, but overall that is still straight up mass murder. ...hm, that reminds me, I need to go tweak a line in a past chapter regarding the population of Hope County. I had it too low for there to be a reasonably-sized if small county aside from the cult’s numbers. Hm. I have the cult at around 1,800ish souls, with their goal being 3,000 total based on in-game commentary from nameless background NPCs, and the line from the Book of Joseph “A few thousand pure souls, whose mission would be to start over and repopulate the earth.” Doing a little quick search, there are some counties even in Montana that according to past censuses had 3,000 or less people in them. For it to feel a bit less likely that the Resistance and civilian population would be easily overwhelmed, it probably should be somewhat higher than the cult, since the county’s numbers will include those who cannot or do not want to fight—that being the old, the young, the ill, etc. Plus if the cult’s being quite so gruesomely wanton in the murdering sprees, that means they aren’t out to absorb the entire county, just most of it. But the cult must also be expecting losses on their side as well since this is a violent conquest they’re undertaking and all of Hope County’s armed to the teeth, if not as necessarily heavily as the cult itself seems to be. We’ll stick the vague number at around 2,400 civilians who are not in the cult for now then and add that to the notes—plus some of the cult’s population is certainly from the county itself pre-Reaping, not including increases that happen during the Reaping with all the active brainwashing, kidnapping, etc. Hm, given some of the generic-NPC-dialogue of how people were forcibly turned to being obedient members of the cult who actually did turn on and shoot their once-allies (and in that dialogue, the brainwashed were also long-time pre-Reaping neighbors of the speaker,) that makes Pratt’s situation in-game all the more interesting. He definitely recognizes the Deputy, whereas it sounded like the aforementioned brainwashed-individuals did not recognize their once-neighbors and friends at all. Pratt’s capable of thinking independent thoughts and he’s remained lucid enough to observe his surroundings and plan an escape, despite going on what sounds like a very dark “hunting trip” Jacob may have taken him on to hunt “deer” which sounds definitely like he was hallucinating in a bad way per his own lines. Jacob apparently isn’t a guy to miss out on using easy symbolism for his enemies, specifically the Whitetail Militia. That was probably not the only “hunting trip” Pratt and the other converts have been on, and that would potentially suggest that the converts are still possibly hallucinating much like how the Deputy is during the first portion of Jacob’s boss fight with the destroy-the-music-beacons visual effects, after exiting the Wolf’s Den. Is Pratt seeing something like that scene though? He doesn’t seem to be triggered by the music box or in the scenes where the music starts playing certainly. He’s surely been exposed to Jacob’s conditioning or at least the trials, and the list his name’s on would strongly suggest he passed his trial, dark as that is. Who did he kill as his sacrifice? Is he perhaps more immune to the Bliss effects? It seems to vary in intensity of how effective it is and how it effects people, based on their susceptibility to it—some factors may include addictive tendencies, personalities, etc, looking at generic-NPC-dialogue in Faith’s region. The sparkles that show up on the screen in addition to the red edges do lend themselves to interpreting that Jacob uses Bliss as part of the brainwashing regime, in addition to the hallucinations Pratt, the Deputy, and others seem to experience. (Also the Judges disappearing in Bliss clouds during the first half of Jacob’s boss fight, etc.) Either way, with the mention of no one expecting Jacob to go easy on Pratt, it seems like Pratt was more resistant to the brainwashing and breaking than Jacob expected, even in light of there being potentially more torment lined up for Pratt than the average captured civilian. (I suspect aside from Pratt’s involvement with the officers who tried to arrest Joseph, Jacob in particular is more likely to not think kindly of police men, given his time in Juvie and the events leading to him being sentenced to doing time, setting him on the path to joining the Army and the ensuing tragedy, and separated from his brothers when they were younger. Also possibly the lack of perceived protection from policemen in the times prior to their father Old Mad Seed’s arrest.) However, it could also be that Jacob deliberately set Pratt up to test his loyalty to Jacob and the Project by giving Pratt the opportunity to help the Deputy escape, instead (or a little from column A, a little from column B.) That music did come on awfully fast after the breakout after all, and perhaps Pratt hadn’t made his sacrifice yet. Maybe the Deputy was meant to be his sacrifice, in a less murderous way of just leaving the Deputy in Jacob’s hands. Seems like Jacob would have mentioned it if the Deputy was meant to be Pratt’s sacrifice by leaving them in the cage to their fate, but on the other hand it would fit the game’s plot and Jacob’s theme real well. Plus Jacob’s a cunning bastard and able to plot this kind of scheme out quite readily, I would say. This all probably means I need to flesh out more of the fic’s world with background NPCs here and there a bit more for the plot. That being said, I’m all excited to be borrowing with permission AU versions of some of my friend’s OCs for this. It’s definitely a new addition to the plotting that I hadn’t started out with, but feels like they’d fit in well with the plot overall. Two of the OCs will have a significant impact on Jacob as a character across his entire timeline in the past, present, and future. It’ll be an interesting challenge to deal with that, since while I do want to try to interpret the characters as close to their original canon lines and outlooks as possible, I feel this addition does open up more preexisting lines for Jacob that do fit the hints we get of his internal workings from in-game. It’ll mean he’s got more development in certain areas of his psyche and mental state, but a little bit of twisting here and there still keeps it all in line with the initial interpretation this AU’s got for him. I do feel the addition of the OCs will help bring Jacob to be more emotionally involved than he potentially was to begin with before the real-world-now with the intended future events of the fic, and this creates much more potential for up-close-and-personal levels of emotional exploration for the entire lot of them, both positive and negative emotions. ...oo, we might get to see Jacob actually losing his cool on-screen externally as a result of possible plot happenings. That could lead to an entire mess of the entire Seed family being angry and yelling at each other, creating emotional development. It’s really quite fascinating to try to work out how to get a group to actually get along well with characters like Faith, John, Joseph, and Jacob who are often at odds with each other. All while dealing with their rampant personal issues. Still something to study and test out for other original writings—haven’t quite learned how to take that kind of group dynamic apart and construct something from that inspiration yet. But definitely learning as we go. Back to listening to more NPC dialogue recordings though.

#writing about writing #writing about fanfiction #so many dialogue lines to listen to #Danaduchy is an amazing person to have recorded all of this #you all should check out Danaduchy's tumblr youtube and everything else #ACABH #writing about writing FC5 fanfiction #FC5 #fc5 au #Far Cry 5 #original fic talk #original character talk #OCs

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littlemisssquiggles · 5 years

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Pinehead Headcanons: Oscar’s Other Rose

Someone asked “ You ever notice how you can literally just take any screencap of Oscar looking at Ruby and 99% he has a soft look in his eyes and a soft smile too? I did, and I lose my mind over it all the time. “

Squiggles Answers:

You are indeed correct about that anon-chan. It’s adorable that Oscar has grown attached to Ruby enough that he now looks to her both for inspiration and out of care for her own well-being. Be it in support or in need of motivation, Oscar has eyes only for Ruby Rose. As a matter of fact, you just helped spark a new Pinehead headcanon which I believe may be my favourite one yet, my dear anon-ninja.

To my fellow Pineheads who are curious about Oscar’s past life living in Mistral with his family, have you considered this concept:

What if…the Atlas Arc will introduce us to a second Rose who shares a history with Oscar?

For the sake of this headcanon of mine, I’m going to christen this character fittingly ‘Rosaline Fox’ or simply Rose for short and this character will share inspiration from both the Fox and the Rose from the Little Prince.

What if…when Oscar was a young boy growing up in the farmlands of Anima, he had a childhood best friend named Rose who used to live next door to him during a timeline where Oscar still lived happily with his parents (or single mother since I’m still rolling with that theory) back in his old neighbourhood before he moved in with his Aunt and Uncle.

Imagine…Rose Fox being part of the brighter half of Oscar’s life and the two were close friends since they were in diapers until Rose moved away to Atlas with her parents when Oscar was seven years old. Since then, he never saw her again until they surprisingly reunite with each other in the hallways of Atlas Academy.

I really, really love this concept because it could potentially be a way for the audience to learn more about Oscar’s life. As we know, the main series doesn’t highlight Oscar revealing much more about himself beyond the generic ‘he’s a fourteen year old farm hand from Mistral’. While some Pineheads are satisfied with this and believe that this is all we need to know about Oscar, as you know this squiggle meister firmly but respectfully disagrees. I understand that Oscar is only a supporting character but he’s still part of the main cast of heroes and holds as much importance to the plot as characters like Jaune, Nora and Ren. If we can get to learn that Jaune has seven sisters, even being introduced to one of them in V6 in addition to having a full episode focused on Ren and Nora’s backstory then the same could be done for Oscar, right?

I know all three of these examples were given because the plot set aside time to demand that these stories be revealed since they were relevant to the narrative. We had to learn about Jaune’s sisters since one of them housed our heroes while they were in Argus for V6 and we had to learn about Ren and Nora’s connection to Kunoyuri since the monstrous Nuckelavee that decimated that village was the final boss fight for RNJR back in V4.

Perhaps it can work the same for Oscar where the plot will demand we know a little bit more about him since it will possibly tie into the Merge and/or have some part with him reconciling with Ozpin within his mind. We will see. My point is that I really would love to learn more about Oscar’s past because it’s a good way of knowing more about who he is and what his life was like before. If Oscar is expected to, quote, unquote ‘disappear in the Merge’ as the story tries to imply then wouldn’t it make sense if it spends some time fleshing Oscar out before that time comes. I’m just saying.

This is why I like the idea of Oscar meeting an old friend from home in Atlas. Before we got to meet Saphron Cotta-Arc in V6, the series dropped a hint of her existence way back in V4 and before we saw how Ren and Nora became orphans (particularly Ren), remember we got that hint from Nora back in V3.

Oscar having a second Rose in his life (before Ruby Rose) who was his childhood friend could encourage him to reveal more to our heroes and essentially the audience of what he was like growing up in Mistral. Besides who wouldn’t want to see someone from Oscar’s past tell embarrassing stories of the little farm-bred rascal he used to be.

Plus I like the idea of Rose being part of Oscar’s childhood before he went to live with his Aunt and Uncle on the Pine Family farm.

It’d be interesting if this Rose reminds Oscar of when things were good for him but she is blissfully unaware of the truth of what became of him and his parents after she moved away.

Picture it. RWBY and JNR enjoying Rose talking about the old misadventures of Oscar and Rose of the Mistralian Farmlands and the carefree mischief they used to get themselves into; revealing a different side to Oscar that our heroes weren’t familiar with. This then leads to Rose innocently asking Oscar about his parents and how they were doing/feeling about him being all the way in Atlas since she remembered how overprotective they were of him as a kid, only for Oscar to freeze up and give a rather cutthroat response before trying to change the subject; indicating that discussing his parents was a very touchy subject for him.

Imagine if…Rose Fox is the kind of bold girl who doesn’t know when to take a hint and she brazenly tries to force Oscar to open up about his parents, even going so far as to tactlessly touch the bandages on his neck, questioning the context of those two. This results in Oscar getting testy and storming off, much to everyone’s surprise, especially Ruby’s.

Rose: …Sheesh, lighten up Munchkin! I was only joking. Oscar: *furiously* Yeah well sometimes you don’t know when to stop!”

In the end, Ruby is the rose that goes to comfort Oscar and as a parallel to how Oscar got Ruby to open up during the dojo scene from V5, Ruby encourages Oscar to talk about his family and she is the rose and possibly the first person outside of his family to know the truth of what happened to Oscar’s parents---their tragic death and the deep pain it caused him that he’s been bottling up for years since it happened.

This additionally ties into why Oscar wears the neck bandages; to cover up an old wound he sustained from the incident that claimed his parent’s life. I still wish to think Oscar was raised by only his mom but that’s another Pinehead headcanon for another time.

Oscar doesn’t show Ruby his scars and out of respect for his feelings, she doesn’t push him to. Instead she consoles him and shares her own qualms over losing her mother at a young age too. It’s a pain and an understanding she shares with Oscar and she also fully comprehends why talking about is very sensitive for him.

In the event that a moment like this occurs, I can see it being another key moment that symbolizes why Ruby is important to Oscar. While the other Rose could be the one that makes Oscar remember his home, Ruby represents the new life Oscar has with the JNR_QROWBMY.

While the other Rose is a remnant from Oscar’s past---a life he ultimately left behind, Ruby is a part of his present and will unknowingly move onto to become a meaningful part of his unforeseeable future. Or…at least that’s how this squiggle meister would love to look at it anyways.

My Pinehead headcanon is that once Oscar starts attending Atlas Academy, Ruby’s slight protective nature of Oscar will be amped up to about an eleven. I can definitely picture our veteran Silver Eyed Warrior transforming into a sort of mother hen; constantly hovering around and doting over Oscar every chance she got to ensure that the young farm boy and huntsman in training is doing alright during his first time at huntsmen academy.

I can see Ruby being like this with Oscar to some extent because she was around Oscar’s age when she first started Beacon and her first day was a mess. I’m sure Ruby remembers fully well of all the shenanigans she got up to during her first day at Beacon so she’ll probably want to do her best to ensure that Oscar doesn’t bumble and suffer the same misgivings as her. I can definitely see Ruby continue to look out for Oscar a lot more at Atlas Academy. Kind of like his version of Yang Xiao Long to help him get adjusted.

But get this; I also have this hilarious idea that ties into a response I gave to @albion-93. Imagine if…Oscar is surprisingly popular with the ladies---unintentionally being dubbed one of the heartthrobs of the first years at Atlas. Imagine…Oscar having his very own entourage of squealing fangirls who have dubbed him as the ‘Little Prince’ based off of @miki-13’s fanfiction.

By my imagination, I can picture Ruby’s possessive side as a confirmed Scorpio-born surfacing as she constantly has to shoo away hordes of gushing Atlesian first years drooling over poor Oscar.

In the beginning, Ruby figured that Oscar was blissfully ignorant of his rampant popularity with the ladies but to Ruby’s surprise, Oscar is fully aware. On the contrary, he’s kind of used to it. My Pinehead headcanon is that back in his old neighbourhood, before he went to live with his aunt and uncle, Oscar was the only boy in his age group within a 30 mile radius so Oscar became rather popular with the young girls his age along his block who all had crushes on him and used to literally compete with each other over who gets to be his main girl.

The one girl who didn’t have a crush on Oscar was Rose Fox and she instantly became his best friend since she never tried to force him to be her boyfriend and to infantile Oscar Pine, that was great in his book. Speaking of Rose having a crush on Oscar, I’ll come back to that in a sec.

So Oscar is no stranger to girls’ trying to bark up the Pine Tree’ if y’know what I mean. Fun fact: Did you know that Pine trees smell really good and are known for their distinct scent. Perhaps this can apply to our precious farm boy. Maybe he’s the type of guy that smells good like all the time and has a natural strong yet good scent about him; even when he sweats. I mean it’s a thought.

I can picture girls swarming Oscar like vultures only for the Ruby to be the one to shoo them off; similar to how Rose used to protect Oscar from the boldfaced girls in their neighbourhood trying to court him. I really dig the idea of Oscar having two protective roses in his life.

I like the idea of Oscar being lenient of Ruby’s overprotectiveness toward him, implying that it reminds him of his mother and aunt who used to coddle him the same manner. If it weren’t for Oscar’s Uncle Henry; still nurturing but more willing to challenge Oscar and teach him lessons necessary for him growing up as the father figure in Oscar’s life then he would’ve grown up too soft.

I can picture Aunt Em being protective of Oscar especially after he came to live with her. I can definitely see Oscar being appreciative of Ruby looking out for him all the time since, in a way, she reminds him of Aunt Em. The only difference is that Oscar finds Ruby’s mother hen attitude a likeable quality that he admittedly finds rather cute about her. Picture these two Rosebuds like…

Oscar: Y’know…you’re the closest thing to a close friend I have here and…in many ways, I consider you my best friend. Sorry if that sounds…weird.

Ruby: No, no it’s fine. I consider you my best friend too. *good-humouredly* Don’t tell Weiss though. I don’t want her to get too jealous.

Ruby and Oscar share a laugh.

Ruby: *sheepishly* Sorry if I’ve been overbearing lately with the…y’know hovering and stuff. I just want to make sure that you’re okay and not overwhelmed by everything like how I was my first day.

Oscar: *laughingly* I think we’re way past that actually. Besides it’s okay. I know you’re just looking out for me and I appreciate that. But I also want to look out for you too. Be someone you can depend on. That way, I can return the favour once in a while. So it’s fine if you wanna continue to be a mother hen just so long as you don’t mind me being a papa co---uh…father rooster. We’ll look out for each other. Whaddaya say?

Ruby: I’d like that.

I can definitely see the Rosebud friendship flourishing in Atlas and I’m interested in seeing where V7 may take them. Resuming talk about Rose Fox, remember when I said Rose was the only girl from Oscar’s neighbourhood who didn’t have a crush on him.

Well, turns out Rose did secretly have a crush on Oscar when they were kids and meeting him again in Atlas just brought all of those past feelings bubbling to the surface; rekindling her romantic interest in him.

The concept I had is that this Rose Fox character can play the role of an imposter rose inspired by the Little Prince but her main purpose would be more akin to the Fox.

In the Little Prince fairy tale, after the Prince befriends the Fox, it teaches him the important lesson that made the Prince realize that his rose was his true love.

My reasoning for liking the idea of a Rose Fox character is that I can see them being the reason that not only makes Oscar realize his true feelings for Ruby but Ruby as well.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m really, really liking the idea of Ruby falling in love with Oscar around the same time he’s falling in love with her. I believe in the Little Prince, the Rose acts vain towards the Prince and doesn’t realize how much he means to her until he leaves her alone on his journey, right?

Well, imagine if…it’s the same with our Rosebuds. Imagine if…at first Ruby is rather ignorant of her growing feelings for Oscar and downplays it to it simply being that he is her friend and she cares deeply about him.

However when Rose Fox makes her interest in Oscar known, Ruby uncharacteristically finds her strongly disliking Rose’s romantic advances to woo Oscar. Rose even lets it slip to Ruby that she does have a crush on Oscar; not in a manner of her trying to antagonize Ruby but purely out of Rose wanting to befriend Ruby seeing as she is the new Rose in his life and from one Rose to another, she was hoping she and Ruby could be friends as well.

And at first, Ruby didn’t mind Rose---albeit slightly jealous of her knowing more about Oscar than she did (however Oscar made up for that by telling Ruby everything about him with the two bonding from that reveal). But besides that, the two Roses got along especially since they both shared one commonality---their care for Oscar.

I love the idea of Ruby coming to realize her feelings through a character like Rose Fox. Imagine…Ruby suffering a parallel to the Rose from the Little Prince where when she’s threatened to losing Oscar, even if it’s to another Rose, she is suddenly fuelled with a sense of envy she’s never experienced before. Ruby Rose, for the most part, has always been spirited, passionate and kind to those around her.

Can you picture Ruby being selfish, vain and/or a bit manipulative in the pursuit of ensuring she keeps something or…someone she doesn’t wish to lose to another or anything else? No. Not really.

Do you think she’s void of these kinds of emotions? Not in the slightest.

As a matter of fact, if the prospect of losing Oscar to another Rose turns Ruby into an arrogant girl then this would bring her closer to Salem than she’s ever been. But we all know Ruby isn’t like that. She’s nothing like Salem. However, it could be potentially interesting to see her character temporarily fall pray to these desires only to be brought back by the people who help keep her grounded. Her friends.

If Ruby becomes like this, then I can see Oscar giving her a good scolding to bring her back to her former self. I can even picture Jaune doing that since Jaune knows what it’s like to come out the sore loser in the pursuit of one’s affections. It was the same for him with Weiss and Neptune.

But while Jaune never told Weiss the truth of his feelings, he did help Neptune with his. And I can see Jaune providing Ruby with the same advice. This can be a great example to highlight the core big brother dynamic Jaune shares with Ruby.

Maybe in seeing Jaune comforting Ruby, Oscar gets the wrong idea about their relationship. Then again, I’ll admit that I am NOT a fan of Oscar being jealous of Jaune because he believes he and Ruby are in love or something.

I dislike that fan theory just as much as I dislike the thought of Qrow and Yang having a problem with Oscar having a crush on Ruby.

For how much I’ve talked about it before, you all know how much I’d prefer if Jaune and Oscar share a big brother-little brother dynamic too and harbour a great sense respect for one another. I don’t mind if the plot demands Oscar misinterpreting the Lancaster friendship as romance but not in the sense where he reacts immaturely to it as I’ve read in one or two fanfictions on the subject.

Thus far, Oscar has been shown to possess a level of maturity beyond his years. He generally handles his problems rather casually (albeit a little too casually) and even if he is to have an outburst, it’s usually after an extended period where he surprisingly manages to keep his emotions in tact only speaking out when its reached overwhelming levels that he can’t ignore.

I cannot picture Oscar to be the jealous type to act like a petulant child, throwing tantrums just because Ruby isn’t giving him enough attention. Does that sound like Oscar Pine the RWBY character? Not to this squiggly Pinehead. If this is sadly somehow how he ends up becoming then I will only shake my head in disappointment at the mishandling of an otherwise mature young character.

If anything Oscar strikes me as the type to be silent with his jealousy; choosing to brood internally while doing his best to keep his envy contained. But as mentioned, if it reaches its peak then he’ll probably lash out in one big upsurge that will leave him embarrassed but unapologetically unabashed since these are his true feelings and he can’t run away from them especially if they get to this level.

Anyways, that being said, even if Oscar unintentionally lashes out at Jaune out of jealousy, I feel like it’ll have the same outcome where they’ll both be able to talk it out like brothers. As a matter of fact, I feel like Oscar and Jaune could have a similar talk akin to Victor Krum and Harry Potter in the Goblet of Fire after Krum accuses Harry of cavorting with Hermione who Krum is interested in. But that’s just me.

On a final note, I’m not sure if the possibility of Rose Fox for RWBY is in the cards. However I think she would have made a great character. I like the idea of another Rose helping our Rose to see the truth in her feelings about Oscar. For me, I love this headcanon just for the likelihood of hearing a Rose Fox character say something like this to Ruby Rose:

“…I tried to tame him. I thought if we spent more time together like we used to then at some point he would look at me the way he looks at you. But he never did. He always looks to you even when he’s with me. It’s my fault really for trying to gain the love of someone whose heart has already been tamed by someone else. I may be the Rose he likes but I’m not the Rose he loves…”

It’s moments like these that really make me wish I was a CRWBY Writer just so I can chuck this line of dialogue in Miles and Kerry’s faces because it’s a sweet ass line. Makes me like my fanon Rose Fox girl even more now.

Bonus if Rose Fox is actually a Faunus. I really dig the idea of Oscar’s first friend back home being a Faunus girl. Perhaps…Rose’s family were the only Faunus in Oscar’s old neighbourhood and there were some folk back there who were rather prejudice toward the Faunus. However Oscar’s family weren’t one of those people and raised their son to be the same.

Oscar was always pleasantly nice to Rose which was part of the reason why she liked him so much. The day she started crushing on Oscar was when he complimented her ears after some of the neighbourhood children made fun of Rose for being a Faunus.

If I had to describe my vision for Rose Fox then I can picture her with shoulder-length reddish-brown hair that’s white at the tips like a fox’s tail with dark skin and blue-grey eyes to contrast with Ruby’s silver eyes. Her Faunus feature would her ears so she’ll have cute red Fox ears. I actually quite like this.

But you know, as always, these are only my Pinehead headcanons.

Anyways, if Ruby and Oscar are destined to fall in love with each other then I can only see them coming to realize their true feelings with a little help from a fox.

More Squiggles’ RWBY Content

~LittleMissSquiggles (2019)

#squiggles answers: rwby #rwby #oscar pine #ruby rose #rwby rosegarden #rwby theories #pinehead headcanons #squiggles pinehead headcanons #rwby: defining rose fox

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rallis-fatalis · 5 years

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A Soul’s Bane (And Boon)

Long before Rallis was any kind of proper adventurer, she was getting wrapped up in all kinds of messes equally as convoluted. Learning human language and history with her bookworm of a ward was only so exciting, it was inevitable the dragon would eventually run off and stick her nose in far more complicated matters. To be fair, investigating the sudden disappearance of multiple dig site students was definitely more interesting than another history lesson in an old boring book. It was time for a field trip! And hey, a little hands on learning never hurt anyone, right?

If there was one thing Rallis loved more than anything in all of Varrock, it was the museum and its dig site. Learning how to read and write with her 'ward' Reldo was hard and boring, but going on field trips with Reldo was the best thing ever! He knew SO MUCH and could explain anything to her. Every time he took her to the museum or on a field trip to the outskirts of town for some hands-on learning was the best thing ever! And she would argue she learned more too, if only so she could have an excuse to go back out again with him sooner. With her fascination of the museum and the dig site and with his coaxing and careful use of words, Rallis was able to get 'lie-sensed' (why telling the truth when digging up old junk was so important she didn't know) and approved to help out at the dig site and be privy to any cool news. She helped with digs every day she could after that, digging up old bones, artifacts, and even underground caverns with shrines and ritual grounds from an age long past. It was great, though Reldo would argue the amount of dirt was not worth the trouble. Reading history was much more preferable to washing it out of your clothing and hair all night.

One day on their usual outdoor excursions, Rallis and Reldo came across a cluster of grumbling worried individuals by the dig site gate closest to town. It was a group of dig site workers and museum staff, all panicked and at a loss for what to do. The two listened to the group's woes to learn a group of students from the dig site had gone missing and search parties had been making no progress with finding them. With her desire to help out and explore, it was no surprise that when they explained the situation, Rallis immediately volunteered to help investigate.

"Do you know when or about where the students went missing?" Reldo asked the workmen who had brought the case forward to the staff.

One sadly shook his head. "When, a few days ago now," the other said. "Where though, no one is exactly sure. This elderly woman hanging around the museum shared something interesting, though. Apparently her son disappeared too and he was playing a bit northwest of the border of the dig site, near the forest before the limestone mines. We've looked around but can't find anything."

"Maybe you just need better eyes!" Rallis proclaimed. "I can go look!"

"What she means to say is a fresh look over couldn't hurt!" Reldo corrected before the men could grow angry at the snarky comment. "We can investigate as well. If an outside source happened to also bring forth a similar set of information, it certainly merits further investigation."

The two men nodded. "Alright, we'll leave it to you. Please let us know if you find anything."

Later that day, Rallis was sprinting along to the spot in question in search of adventure while Reldo trailed after her, completely out of breath and tired. "There's no... reason... to run!" he panted. "The clues... aren't going anywhere!"

Rallis threw the gate open that separated the dig site from the main road. "Adventure though, bookman! People are missing and we gotta find them! Ooo maybe they're in another hidden underground god circle like the one I found!"

"A shrine?" he tried.

Rallis snapped her fingers. "Yes, that! A 'shrine.' They could have found one and got stuck! We almost did when I dug that Zaros one up."

They found themselves in a more forested area of the site where no digs were going on. It was too close to the road and deemed void of finds to warrant clearing the trees and setting up shop. It was around here that seemed to be the most probable spot to find clues about the missing students according to the reports. Rallis gave the air a sniff. "Well, it smells like humans if that helps. Humans and dirt. It's small though. Not big like the actual dig."

"Its 'faint,'" Reldo corrected. "They did say the students have been gone for a few days now. That could be why it's not strong." The two poked around more hoping to find anything, maybe footprints or a valuable or something that would show people were here recently. But there was nothing. He was about to suggest checking elsewhere when Rallis piped up about something. He ran over to find her getting excited about dirt.

He sighed. "That's dirt, Rallis. We are in a dig site. There's always dirt."

She shook her head. "No, look!" she snapped while tracing the dirt. "It's in a line. Like when you fix clothing. You know, the line?"

Reldo bent down to get a closer look. "Like a seam," he mumbled as he parted the grass to investigate farther. Rallis was right. It was an unnatural formation to be sure. The dirt folded over itself like a long sewn scar, hidden in the grass. It was really quite hard to see. He was impressed she found it.

Rallis started to dig at it. "Underground god circle, I'm telling you!" She made quick work of ripping away the grass and digging away at the dirt below.

"Well if it is another shrine, digging it open like this might not be the best idea!" Reldo warned. Rallis ignored him and continued until she hit something hard, recoiling with an 'Ow!' as she shook out her hand. The ground rumbled in response, growled even, and in the blink of an eye, the entire length of the dirt seam opened up and swallowed her whole, cutting off a startled yelp as it sealed itself back up as if she were never even there. The scenery went back to its quiet normal self, there was simply one less person in the picture.

"Rallis...?"

She was gone. Vanished. Like she had never been there. Disbelief was gone, panic set in. "Rallis?!" Reldo scraped at the dirt frantically, trying his best to replicate whatever she had done. The dirt wasn't soft and malleable anymore, however. Reldo hissed as he found himself scraping against rock, fingers coming away gritty and bloody. "What just...? How...? Rallis... Where did you go?!"

------------------------------

It was hot. Really, really hot. Rallis wobbled up and brushed the dirt off her clothes. Her skirt earned a new hole but other than that, she was fine. She looked around her new setting. There was no more open sky, nor trees or grass or humans that smelled like old books. Instead, there was a cave, a hot sweltering cave illuminated by fire that blazed in every corner and along every wall. The walls and floor were a dark red, an angry color. Rallis walked around, trying to find a way out.

"Reldo? Are you here?" No response. Hissing whispered in her ears, like that of many serpents talking at once. It sounded like words but there were so many talking it just gave her a headache. She shook her head. "You're not Reldo! I'm looking for my friend, not you!"

Another voice spoke in her ears now. Well, more shouted really, a man's voice but he was whining like a child. "Why am I to be trapped in such a wretched place?! It's not fair! It's! Not! FAIR!" The fiery cavern started to shake and crack, flames spurting out of the walls and ground. "Feel my anger!" One last monstrous shake threw Rallis to the ground. She yelped as she quickly stood back up, dancing from foot to foot as she tried not to step on the floor. It was blazing hot! Sure she had been used to rock heated by lava back home, but this was a whole new kind of heat, an abnormal kind.

From the jets of fire in the walls and ground, forms started to take shape. Out of the inferno, beasts stepped forward. Unicorns, bears, rats, and goblins made of living fire, furious and ready to kill anything that dared move. One of the beasts, a bear, noticed Rallis and sped forward to attack. She easily slid out of the way and raked her claws across its furry side and came away screaming. She huddled in on herself as she fell to the ground and gripped her shirt, her hands stinging like she'd stuck them in a hornet nest. She pulled them away to take a look and found them scorched, blistered, and bloody. The bear turned around to strike again and Rallis booked it. She was not getting burned again!

She sped around a rocky corner and found an alcove hidden away from the fire and beasts and sat down. She hissed as she looked at her scorched hands and gave them a lick. The pain stung so badly, worse than when she'd dunked her foot in lava back home in Taverley and couldn't walk for over a week. She ripped most of her shirt off and wrapped it around her hands, tying the torn pieces into makeshift bandages. She whined as she poked her head around the corner to find the angry fire beasts roaming around. "What is this?" she cried. "What am I supposed to even do? Why am I here? I don't want to be here. I was just looking for some kids!"

Something hissed in her ear, making her turn around to the wall. "Weapons?" Sure enough, hanging on a rack on the wall were four different weapons. A sword, a spear, a mace, and an axe. They were like nothing she had ever seen before, spiked and angry looking. She picked up the sword and carefully set back out to the monsters. They noticed her immediately and came charging, this time a unicorn striking first. Rallis waited for it to get closer, and closer, and there! She slid underneath it and ran her sword across its stomach as it ran. The horse screeched before erupting in a burst of flame. Next one of the giant rats came at her. Rallis stabbed down at it with her sword but nothing happened. The blow bounced off like she had tried to stab a bar of mithril with a stick.

"What?!"

She leapt back before it could give her a nasty bite and kicked it away, foot singeing in the process. She hissed and growled at the monsters, more spawning from the flames. She went after a bear but yielded the same result, as did attacking the goblin. She stared them down and roared a horrifying roar. "I'm thrown down into this pit of fire with no warning, burn my hands and feet, have creepy people talking in my head, and now I can't even kill what's trying to kill me? I DON'T THINK SO!" She threw the sword down and ran back to grab the remaining three weapons. She held the spear in one hand and axe in the other, sword and mace on the ground. With a battle cry, she ran at the beasts and cut them down one by one in a mad frenzy. When one weapon didn't work, she dropped it for another, striking out at everything in the room with whatever she had in hand. The infernal beasts were starting to run in fear from this crazed monster, cowering in a corner. One of the bears was too slow in running, Rallis launching the spear into its back and reveling in its combustion. She turned her attention to the cowering flaming beasts, hissing in her ears egging her on. With a monstrous shriek, she cut them down with a single blow and grinned as she watched the fires dim and disappear.

With the monsters gone, the room cooled. The floor didn't burn and the walls weren't ablaze. The weapons in her hands disappeared into smoke as well, and at once exhaustion hit her. Rallis gasped as she fell to her hands and knees, dizzy and sick and boiling hot despite the now cool room. "Why... how... did I do that?"

The hissing and the voice from earlier echoed throughout the room.

"Feel my rage, for what they did!"

Her head continued spinning, things moving at a nauseating pace, and everything was so hot and burning and horrible. Her head hit the floor as she collapsed on the spot.

---------------------------- There was a dream about someone. A boy running off from his parents to go explore the dig site. He wanted to join as an archaeologist but his parents said no. They were poor. It cost money to join as a member of the museum and dig site. You had to go to school and take tests and all these things that cost money they didn't have. So he ran off to do it all himself. And he disappeared. That was 25 years ago...

Hissing. There was more hissing. It was quieter this time, and not as angry as before. Rallis hissed back, a 'shut up' in Wyvernic, and surprisingly the voices listened. Rallis groaned as she opened her eyes, her head still aching from the frenzy earlier and whatever bits of dream flashed through her head. She blinked the grogginess away and took in her new surroundings. It was really dark wherever she was. She couldn't tell if the place was lit or if it was her ability to see in the dark that was helping her make shapes out. Either way, the lighting was a bit disorienting. She crawled up from the floor and timidly looked around. There were large square shapes, pillars almost, around this circular room. Outside of that, there were no other features that were easily distinguishable. Rallis investigated one of the square pillars up close. They seemed to be hollow, and as she ran her hand across its surface, she felt gaps. 'It feels like bars,' she thought. 'Kinda like... oh! Oh! That thing in Varrock where they throw tomatoes at people, the rude place! What was that called? Jail?'

A slam against the bars startled her out of her thinking. Rallis yelped and jumped back against the wall, or what she thought was a wall but was really a hole in the wall. She tumbled in, banging her head as she fell, and watched in horror as a long thin pale arm reached through the bars of the pillar. More followed suit, and more, and more, until hundreds of ghostly limbs grabbed at the cage and shook. Rallis crept further back into the hole in fear. "What are you?" she whispered mostly to herself. At once, the hands stopped grabbing and shaking the cage and in unison pointed to her, or rather behind her. Her blood ran cold. She slowly turned around and what greeted her was not the shadowy depths of the hole in the wall. No, it was something unnameable, something that made every fiber of her being shout 'RUN.' It was a pale white face floating in the darkness, skin grotesquely stretched over an oval shape. The mouth was stretched open in a permanent scream, the blank eyes wide open in fear. The pale face lifted open like a mouth unhinged, and underneath where a chin and neck might be was an endless gaping maw full of row after row after row of needle sharp blood stained teeth. It screeched like a banshee, Rallis flinching and covering her ears as she sprinted out of the hole and to the opposite end of the room as fast as she could. She clawed at the cage walls and screamed.

"SOMEONE PLEASE GET ME OUT OF HERE!" She tried climbing the walls to get out, but that simply enraged whatever was caged inside. A pale hand reached out of the shadowy depths of the cage and grabbed her by the leg. Then another grabbed her by the arm, and another by the tail and another and another and another until she was pinned against the bars unable to move an inch. She wriggled and writhed and tried her best to break free but to no avail.

"Let go of meaugh-!!"

A hand closed around her throat, ceasing her shouting in a strangled gurgle. The arms held her against the wall as the monster crept closer. 'Let me go! Please, let me go! Let me-!'

The monstrosity was right in front of her now, its shadowy body floating off the ground and fading into the darkness of the background. An arm appeared from its cloaked figure and brought a long clawed finger to her face, nicking her cheek as it dragged its finger down. Suddenly, it grabbed her by the throat and lifted her off the ground, pale captors letting go. The lack of air and sheer terror of it all made her feel so heavy and useless, completely unable to move. The monster's face lifted open once more to reveal the endless pit of teeth and brought her face closer. Through the fog and fear, one thought managed to pierce through and set every nerve on overdrive.

'Move or die!'

Like a spark of lightning, Rallis jolted into action, kicking at the creature and sending it flying. She was surprised it had any solid form at all, honestly. The thing looked like a ghost with a mask. It screamed from where it had fallen and darted forward once more, nearly sending Rallis into that same frozen panic. She shuddered and shook her head. 'No, don't freak out! Don't be scared! If you can hit it, you can kill it!'

The monster slashed at her with its claws but missed spectacularly. Rallis snuck up behind it and jumped onto its back, chomping at what she assumed was its neck. The creature yelled as it rammed its back against the wall, knocking her loose. The thing picked her up and slammed her against the ground once, twice, thrice. If her head didn't hurt before, it certainly hurt now. Dazed and stunned, Rallis laid on the ground and glared at the snarling visage staring her down. She had one shot left before she was either dead or passed out then dead. The beast brought its mouth closer and closer, ready to rip her face clean off, and in a last ditch attempt, Rallis jumped from the ground and nabbed the thing's neck in her jaws. Its cries ended with a crunch as she bit down, its dead body fading into the shadows of the room.

The room seemed to brighten a bit with the beast gone. It was less dark, less unknown. The cages were empty, the shadow beast was gone, it was just an empty room as if everything was a terrifying illusion. Rallis slumped down to the floor, leaning against the wall. Her head felt like it was going to split open it hurt so much. The hissing and the voices were muttering something, surprised, but she couldn't really tell what. "You don't gotta be scared," she slurred, trying to make sense of all the voices. "Look, see?" She motioned to the now empty cages and lack of monsters. "You turn on the lights and it's all gone." Her eyes started to close. "All... gone..."

--------------------------------

There was another dream. That boy was back. He was all alone in a dark pit, sobbing and wailing, wanting his parents. Something slithered around him, something that was one but many. It hissed as it encircled him, smiling as it watched the boy scream and flail as he tried to get away. Countless glowing eyes glared at the terrified child and the creature smiled. "Feel my anger, feel my pain! Feel this death your kind gave me!" The boy screamed himself hoarse as the beast strangled him and turned him into a monster.

Rallis jumped up with a start. Between the angry fire beasts, the horrifying masked monster, and the weird nightmare snippets, she was more than a bit on edge. She hardly had a moment to think about the boy and the monster in her dream as the new scenery all but assaulted her senses. It looked like a rainbow puked all over the room, pale pinks, blues, yellows, and purples decorating the floor and walls in haphazard splotches. Green and orange bands twined with blue and yellow ones to create some startlingly unsafe hazards akin to tree roots. Other than the bright and sickening color scheme, the room smelled weird too, like acid and... sugar? In the distance, there were five lumpy shapes rolling around the floor and five warped doors with nothing holding them up, both just as brightly colored and patchy as the room.

"This just gets weirder and weirder!" Rallis said, watching the shapes roll around and ignoring the doors. One seemed to notice her and rolled over. Wary from the last two encounters, Rallis readied for a fight. But the odd looking creature simply rolled up to her and stared. "Whoa you look weird!" It was like someone took a human doll and switched the arms and legs around and stitched them on backwards. They stood on all fours instead of two and cartwheeled and rolled around instead of walking. Their joints moved in every direction, and its head seemed to slowly rotate in a complete circle as time passed. The thing didn't attack, just stared up at her and drooled and moaned. Rallis got on all fours as well, just like the beast. It moaned and rolled away to rejoin the others. "Wait!" she called after it and began to roll over. She giggled as she rolled like a dog in the dirt over to the beasts and flopped beside them. They all looked down at her, confused.

"Hello!" she laughed up at them.

At once, they all spoke in a cacophonous uproar. Rallis bolted up and covered her ears. "Whoa whoa whoa!" she shouted. "One at a time!" She shushed them all, covering their mouths until they stopped talking. "Phew, much better. One at a time, okay?" She pointed to the first of five. "What's wrong?"

"Who am I?" it cried as its head turned on its axis.

Rallis blinked. "Uhhhh... Iunno?" She shrugged. "We'll come back to that." She pointed to the second one. "What about you?"

It slowly looked around as if it had never seen this place before. "Where am I?"

"Hmm, okay, good question. Let's hear them all first."

She called on them all like a patient teacher hearing her students' questions. Who am I? Where am I? Where's mom and dad? How long have I been here? Am I still who I once was?

She thought for a moment. These were some tricky questions. And it seemed she couldn't get any more information as they only seemed to speak in these questions. She didn't have any clues either. How tricky. "Hmm... roll with me, funny friends!" She rolled across the floor and the five confusedly followed suit. They rolled around the unstable crooked doors, Rallis contemplating the matter as she raced her weird new friends. She stopped for a moment to catch her breath. "When I don't get something, I usually go with it until I get it. You don't know who you are or where you are so don't worry about it! You know what you can do right now? You can roll!" She laughed as she continued on, faster this time, rolling across the weird patchy floor that smelled like poisoned sugar and trying not to get snagged on the weird rainbow roots. She rolled up against a wall with a huff and splayed on the floor with a giggle. The five surrounded her and watched her antics.

"You know!" she started. "I don't know much, but I'll take what I got. You!" she exclaimed and pointed to one of the beasts. "You wanted to know who you are? I think you're a little kid! A little boy who ran away from his parents because he was mad. Why else would I have dreams about someone I never met? Am I right?"

A moment of clarity flashed across the creature's face. It sat down and stared blankly at the wall before muttering something. "Tolna. I'm Tolna." And with that, it vanished in a puff of rainbow smoke, and one of the crooked doors with it.

"Oh, that's your name?" she said to the other four. "Nice to meet you! I'm Rallis." She pointed to the next one. "If you're really that boy from the dreams, you fell down a hole near the dig site when you ran away. That's where you are right now. You're in the hole." It mumbled 'yes' before vanishing as well. She pointed to another. "I don't know about your dad, but your mom is at the museum and she's been asking about and looking for you. She's just a short walk away! It sounded like she was really worried."

The beast started to tear up. "Mom?" And it vanished too.

Two beasts and doors were left. She pointed to one of them. "25 years! You've been here 25 years!" It vanished with an 'Oh.' Now it was just the existential one left. "You tell me. Are you what you used to be?" It could only spin its head in a circle but it seemed to nod no. "Well I think you are! You're a boy named Tolna who fell down a hole by the dig site 25 years ago and has parents who have been searching ever since. That's still you. The rest of you seemed to think so anyway! You just look a little different right now." It seemed unsure. Rallis put a hand on what she assumed was its shoulder. "Hey. Despite everything, it's still you." That answer seemed to make it happy as it disappeared as well. Only Rallis was left now, her and one now unlocked door, not five. "Guess we can go."

The door was small and crooked, fit for more of a child really. She opened it and despite it standing in the the middle of the room, what she saw through it was not the other side of the room, but rather an unending darkness. She shuddered, remembering the masked monster and the dark room from before. 'Nope! That's done! Move on! Don't worry!' She cautiously stepped through, door shutting behind her and leaving her in pitch black.

She walked for awhile in the dark nothingness, keeping a hopeful eye out for anything of interest. Something caught her attention after walking, but it wasn't a sight, it was a sound, hissing from all around her. It tried whispering something in her ear and she whirled around to face whatever it was, but only found the young blond boy from the flashes of dreams she had in this place. She was about to say hello when he spoke. "What's making me feel so bad?" he asked. "The hissing monster? What is it?"

He looked like he was going to start crying. The poor kid was obviously scared. Rallis didn't know how to answer. "I'm sorry," she started. "But I don't know."

The boy sighed and looked away. "No one does. It's so frustrating! It's so confusing!" The boy grabbed his head with a cry as something coiled around him and pulled him into the shadows.

Rallis reached out to help, but the floor vanished from under her. "WHA-?!" She screamed as she fell further into the darkness and away from the boy.

"Stop screaming. There's no escape. It's hopeless."

----------------------------

For 25 years the lost child warped in the shadowy pit in both body and mind, a force beyond his control turning him into a monster. He grew angry at the flashes of life he could see of the world above. There were all these people doing what he wanted to do, but here he was rotting in a hole. No one cared he was gone, no one was looking for him, and it made him furious. He lured people into his abysmal dark cell with hints at a treasure that didn't exist, hoping to pique their curiosity, and one by one people went missing, left to rot in this inescapable hell with him. Everyone would suffer with him, everyone! And the many voices in his head assured him he was doing the right thing.

Rallis flew up from the floor with a start, the feeling of falling startling her awake. She woke to another weird room, this time grey and drab and boring. There were some rock formations jutting out of the ground in various spots around the room and in the center was a massive hole, like a slice that cut it in half. On the other side was something that looked very much like an exit. "If all I have to do is jump across, I'm doing it! I'm getting tired of this!"

She walked closer and her ears drooped more with each step she took. The ravine wasn't as small as she thought. It looked to be 20 feet across, maybe more. That wasn't something she could jump. 'Maybe if I get a running start?' she thought. She glanced back at the other end of the room and realized that wasn't likely. There wasn't much room to run. It was as if the room shrank from her feelings of doubt.

"What's the point?" a voice wailed, snapping Rallis out of her thoughts. "There's no way across. No one will help you."

Rallis looked around and found a young girl slumped up against the wall, sadly staring at the pit. She ran over to take a look and found two others, two boys around the same age. One was on the ground, face planted in the floor, and the other was on his side, like someone threw him and he hadn't bothered to move. "Are you okay?" Rallis asked worriedly as she looked them over. The girl had a satchel with the end of a rope and a cleaning brush poking out, while the two boys had rockpicks strung to their belts. 'That's museum gear!'

"'Okay,'" the girl moaned. "Is anyone really?"

"Ooo Reldo had a word for that! What was it? Angsty?" Rallis laughed as she tried to mimic his voice. "Stop being so angsty, we have work to do!" She tried to pull the girl up but she wouldn't budge. Rallis frowned. "You're from the museum, right? Students of the dig site?"

She looked at the dragon with mild surprise. "Yeah... how'd you know?"

She pointed to the satchel. "Dirt tools! We've been looking for you, you know. People that have gone missing. We found you though so now we can get you all home!"

"And how do you expect we do that?" the girl moaned. "Look." She motioned to the exit. "There's a ditch in the way and no way across. We're going to be stuck here forever."

Rallis dismissed the thought. "Oh that's silly. No ones gonna be stuck here forever. We just gotta get to the other side!" The girl didn't seem convinced. "C'mon! Get up, let's go!" Rallis pulled on the girl's arm until she finally budged, begrudgingly staggering forward. "What have you tried so far?" Rallis asked.

The girl shrugged. "Nothing."

"Nothing?" Rallis all but growled. "You been here all this time and you've done nothing?"

"Well look!" the girl cried. "There's nothing here and there's no way across. Maybe we should just roll into the pit and end it all. There's no point in anything anyway." It was like with every negative comment the girl grew more hopeless and grey.

"No no no no no! No one is jumping into the death hole! Jeez you need some sunlight." Rallis pointed to the pack. "Anything in there that's useful?"

The girl lazily opened the bag and pulled out a brush, some rope, and a doll. "Not really," she said. "Nothing that could get us across."

Rallis took the coil of rope from her. "Well I wouldn't be so sure about that. What about your friends?" The girl shrugged. Rallis rolled her eyes and bent down to wake them up. "Hellooooooo!" she shouted at the boy with his face in the dirt as she shook him. "Time to get up!" She flipped him over and slapped his face.

"Ow..." the boy mumbled, groggily opening his eyes. "What do you want? Can't you see I'm sleeping?"

"Sleep later, work now," Rallis commanded. "We need your help. What have you got on you?"

He closed his eyes again. "What have I got? I've got the pain of the world, the shame of living a lie, the knowledge of misery."

Rallis sighed. "Y'all need help. We really gotta get you outta here." She noticed the rock pick on his belt and took it. "Got anything else like this?"

The boy sighed and nodded as he pulled more rope from the back of his belt and handed it over. "Thank you!" she chirped. "Now I really need you to get up, okay?" He groaned but complied, slowly dragging himself into a sitting position. She moved on to the second boy and pulled him upright. "You too. Time to get moving. What have you got?"

He undid a second rock pick from his belt. "Just this," he muttered. "Nothing useful."

Rallis took it and looked it over. "Oh I think it is. Come on you three, time to go." As the three shuffled over to the ravine's edge, Rallis took the rope pieces and tied them together, making one long continuous piece. Next she tied both ends to the rock picks, tying a firm knot through the hole in their handles. With a tug test she determined it to be as sturdy as she could make it. 'Hopefully that'll do.' The rope seemed to sparkle with her hint of optimism.

There were some dull stalagmites on both sides of the ravine. With the rope and picks, Rallis had a plan. Aiming for one of the rocks on the other side, she twirled the rope in the air, rock pick swinging dangerously close over the students' heads, and launched it toward the rock. The pick hit its mark, wrapping around the rock a bit before snagging. Rallis gave it a hard yank but it did not budge. She grinned and tied the other end to a similar rock nearby. There was now a makeshift tightrope swaying precariously over the bottomless pit.

She held her hands out to her feat as if she were presenting a masterpiece of art. "There we go! Easy!" The students were not impressed, drab stares looking at the pit in front of them.

"We'll never get across," one of the boys said.

"It's too dangerous," the other agreed.

"We'll just fall," the girl chimed in.

Rallis groaned. "No you won't! It'll be fine! Here, watch! I'll even go across first and show you how it's done. I can hold the rope down too once I get across if it'll make you feel better."

The three watched intently as Rallis got on her hands and knees and grabbed the rope firmly. She then slipped into the ravine, nothing but her grip on the rope keeping her from falling. Like a monkey, she swung across, grabbing the rope as she sped along. "I like doing it like this instead of walking," she called back to them as she continued. "That way I don't have to worry about losing my balance and falling!" The three were impressed, watching her every movement. Once Rallis reached the end, she hooked her claws into the rock and kicked off, easily hopping the ledge. She immediately tied the rope and pick down more securely. It had started to come undone from her swinging but she was not about to tell them that.

"There, see?" she called back. "Easy! One of you come on too!"

They watched the slightly swaying rope, hesitant. "C'mon you can do it!" she called to them. "Trust yourself!" The girl stepped forward, slipping down and grabbing the rope like Rallis did. It was hard, but she began to swing across. Rallis held the rope down as she went, and the girl soon reached the edge. Rallis lent a helping hand and pulled her up. The girl was smiling, showing an actual emotion.

"You can do it, guys!" she shouted. "It's not that bad! Hurry up and let's get out of here!"

"Yeah, that's right!" Rallis cheered with her. "You can do it!"

The rope almost seemed to shimmer with light as they encouraged the others on. One of the boys followed their example and monkeyed across, grinning wide as he was pulled onto the other side. It really was easy! He called back to their friend. "Let's go, man! We're finally getting out of here!"

The last student laughed and readied to swing across. He began his trek across, the rope bouncing every which way as he sped over. The movement was too much, however, and once he neared the other side, the unattended rock pick came loose. It fell into the pit, taking the rope and boy with it. Without thinking, Rallis lunged and grabbed the boy by the arm before he could fall to his doom. She was gripping the dangling rope with her foot as the other two students had hold of her tail. The boy she had ahold of was terrified, staring wide eyed at the pit below.

"Don't look down!" Rallis snapped. "Look up here. Everything's fine."

The two students up above were slipping, edging closer to falling in themselves. "They can't pull us up," the boy whined. "This wasn't going to work from the start. You should just let me go."

Rallis growled as she hefted him closer. "I. Think. Not! Don't give up so easily! You just gotta believe!" Without warning, she threw the boy up with all her strength. The other two let go of her tail, letting her fall to grab hold of their friend. Rallis fell all but a few feet before managing to grab the rope, gripping it for dear life as she started to have a small breakdown over what she just did. She was too scared to move, the fear of that feeling of falling taking over. Luckily she didn't have to. With the strength of three people versus one weight, the three pulled their saviour to safety. Rallis flopped onto the ground, hugging the stalagmite the rope was tied to.

"A-are you all okay?" she asked shakily.

They all nodded. "Yeah, thanks to you," the girl said.

"That's good," she replied. "You should probably get out then. The exit is right there and you've got people looking for you. Go home."

They nodded in excitement. "Yeah! Thank you again for all the help." And they vanished, happily sprinting through the exit.

Rallis sighed as she lay on the floor, gripping the rock and trying to calm down from the near death fall. It was so quiet now that she was alone, so empty. That was until a voice spoke in her ear.

"You were faced with an insurmountable obstacle and yet you sought to face it," the voice said. "Why? How could you continue when no one else would help you? What made you think you could get out of the situation?"

"I don't know what in-sir-mount-whatever means," she told the voice. "But I know that you can fix every problem if you just try and never give up. Sometimes all you need to build a bridge is a little rope and hope." She smiled as she sat up and showed off the now glowing rope. The voice disappeared with a thoughtful hum, and with that Rallis walked through the exit, ready to bring an end to this adventure.

---------------------------- The students had been found and rescued and Rallis thought maybe everything was done and dealt with now, so she was rather surprised to find another room through the exit and not the forest and dig site up above. The floor wasn't burning hot and red or a shadowy void of black or a variety of pastels or grey and drab. It was just normal dirt, maybe a bit of clay mixed in too, and it was cracked and filled with holes, like cheese after a rat had gotten to it. Some of the holes were huge too, ones you could easily trip and fall in. Other than that, nothing else was there. Feeling gutsy, Rallis called out.

"Hello? Anyone or anything here?"

The room suddenly felt very heavy, like the air was replaced with iron. Hissing echoed and bounced off the walls, deafeningly loud. The ground started to shake and crack, throwing Rallis off balance. She fell to the ground to see three snake-like and also almost human-like heads slither out of the ground, towering over her in anger. They snarled at her, fangs dripping with venom. Rallis scooted away, more than a little frightened at the beast in front of her. One of the heads slithered down and over to her, stopping mere inches from her face.

"Drak, kinsvet, dragon," it hissed in twelve voices at once, unable to decide how it wanted to speak. "Wah stah eehr, yho thehs et, why are you here?"

"I'm here to help," she replied. "You have someone who needs help, and I think you might need some too."

"Heeehel! Help!" it exclaimed before screeching. "You can't help it," it continued, this time in just one voice. "You can't help it or me."

Rallis stood up and pat it on the head. The beast did not appreciate the gesture. "I'll be the judge of that!" There was a strip of earth that sat neatly between all three of the angry slinking heads, and that's where Rallis plopped back down. The three slithered closer, curious about the person who had bested their dungeon and was still unafraid, even in the face of this new horrifying-looking beast. "Your name is Tolna, right?"

One of the heads said yes while the others said no.

"What's your other name then?" she asked.

One of the heads coiled back as if in pain from thinking about the question while the other two slumped down into their respective holes. "Loarnab," it finally hissed.

"Nice to meet you then, Loarnab," Rallis said with a smile. "Are you a snake beast? A haisarah? I don't think humans can hiss like that!"

"Haisarah... me... ohhct... K I L L E D!!!"

The three heads thrashed about, screaming and roaring and slamming against the walls, chipping into the rocks and sending more cracks in the walls of its prison. "Whoa, hey, calm down!" Rallis shouted at them. They showed no signs of stopping and they were starting to hurt themselves too. With a huff, Rallis jumped at one of the flailing monsters and grabbed tight, climbing up to its head and covering its eyes. It stopped moving so wildly, the other two slowing down in curiosity as well. "Just calm down, you two! There's no need for that! Talk it out instead!" She uncovered its eyes as it seemed to calm down, sinking back down closer to the floor. Rallis hopped back onto land. "Much better. You have some problems too, huh?" The monster seemed to nod. Rallis thought for a moment before snapping her fingers with a plan.

"How about this? I'll listen to both of you and help you both out. But Tolna first!" The heads hissed at her, though one smiled a bit at the end. "Sorry Loarnab, but your anger buddy has been away from his family long enough. He needs to go home. I'll stay with you instead!"

They hissed, unsure, but relented. Nothing had changed for the better down in this pit for a long time. Maybe this new visitor really would help. She listened to Tolna's story, other heads hissing with interjections here and there.

"Well I think there's nothing to be upset about!" Rallis proclaimed. "If you're mad your parents said no to you going to school, ask them why! Maybe you can find out why they said that. There's no need to be scared of new things, either. Everything is new once! Even exploring a hole you fell into and finding an angry haisarah." The heads laughed at that. "And there's no reason to be scared to ask why your parents said no. The worst they can do is just not answer, but I bet they will. New things might be confusing at first too, but that's okay! You just learn them! It might take a few tries but you gotta keep at it. Never give up hope. Things always work out, whether it's finding a way home after falling into a hole, finding a way to go to school, or any other problem that happens. It always works out and everything ends up fine."

The heads seemed happier, having someone to listen and talk to that wouldn't just fuel their rage. "You should go home, Tolna. People miss you."

The heads hissed and smiled and vanished, as did the rest of the room. Nothing was left. Just inky darkness and the sounds of hissing and slithering. "Did you let him go?" Rallis asked the shadows.

"Yesss..." twelve different voices said.

"Then it's your turn," she said. "You've got a lot going on, don't you? Dragging people down here and making them crazy."

Something stepped out of the nothingness. Something big. Its details were hard to make out in the dark, but Rallis could see a large scaly body with a long lashing tail and twelve hissing heads. The beast sat in front of her, waiting. Rallis got comfortable, leaning back on the ground she could feel but not see.

"So tell me, Loarnab the haisarah. What's got you so upset?"

-------------------------------

It was quiet, the only sound being the rustle of leaves in the breeze. The ground was comfy, the grass feeling extra soft and cozy. With the sun setting too, it was the perfect setting for a nice little nap...

"RALLIS?!"

Rallis lifted her head off the grass with a groan. Pieces of grass and small flowers were stuck to her face where she had drooled on the ground in her sleep. She looked up to see a familiar bespectacled face in the form of her mentor. "Hi Reldo," she yawned. He was shaking with, what was that? Anger? Shock? Relief? He pulled her off the ground and grabbed her by the shoulders.

"Where have you been?!" he shouted. "I have been looking for you all day and scared half to death! And now that I've found you you're asleep in the flowers?! Do you understand how worried I've been?!"

Rallis flinched and covered her ears. "Mmmmno more shouting," she groaned. "I just woke up. I had the craziest dream."

"Oh, not as crazy as what I just went through, I assure you! First you fall down a hole and vanish. Then I run off to get help and come back to the missing students asleep on the ground! So hooray, mystery solved I guess, but how? We take them back to Varrock and I come back and there's ANOTHER person on the ground! The missing person the woman hanging around the museum was talking about no less! He wouldn't stop spouting nonsense about some ancient city and a hydra god holding him captive the whole walk back to town. And now this third time, you're here. What, does this forest just spawn missing people all day?!"

Rallis turned away from the shrill shouting man and looked at the ground, as if she would find her answers there. "Rallis, are you even listening to me?"

"Yeah," she said with another yawn. "I've had an adventure too."

Now done with his rant, Reldo took a good look at her. There were holes in her skirt and bruises on her neck. Her shirt was nearly gone and ripped dirty cloth was tied around her hands, reddish stains marring the wrappings. There were small scrapes in a few places on her too. He took one of her hands and undid the dirty wrappings, revealing the bloody burns underneath. She hissed as the air made it hurt again. "What happened to you?" he asked, concerned.

Rallis took her hand away and pressed it against her skirt, covering it back up. Her groggy mind went back to the conversation she had with the hydra. The poor beast had grown into a monster over its death and neglect. What was once a magical creature like any other grew warped and evil as its home was taken from it before being slain and its body and soul used for horrible unspeakable things. Its restless spirit haunted the grounds it died upon, luring lost creatures in to become a part of it or slowly wither away in its solitude. The beast had grown into the personification of negativity and foulness, and it wasn't likely to get much better after ages of neglect, but Rallis tried her best anyway.

Rallis looked back down at the ground and sighed before starting off towards home. "Well if that was all real, this time I've got a story for you."

#osrs #runescape #my writes #oc tag

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richincolor · 5 years

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There are so many books out this week, and we’re thrilled! Which of these are on your TBR list?

The Everlasting Rose (The Belles #2) by Dhonielle Clayton Freeform

In this sequel to the instant New York Times bestseller, Camille, her sister Edel, and her guard and new love Remy must race against time to find Princess Charlotte. Sophia’s Imperial forces will stop at nothing to keep the rebels from returning Charlotte to the castle and her rightful place as queen. With the help of an underground resistance movement called The Iron Ladies-a society that rejects beauty treatments entirely-and the backing of alternative newspaper The Spider’s Web, Camille uses her powers, her connections and her cunning to outwit her greatest nemesis, Sophia, and restore peace to Orleans.

The Last 8 (The Last 8 #1) by Laura Pohl Sourcebooks Fire

A high-stakes survival story about eight teenagers who outlive an alien attack—perfect for fans of The 5th Wave

Clover Martinez has always been a survivor, which is the only reason she isn’t among the dead when aliens invade and destroy Earth as she knows it.

When Clover hears an inexplicable radio message, she’s shocked to learn there are other survivors—and that they’re all at the former Area 51. When she arrives, she’s greeted by a band of misfits who call themselves The Last Teenagers on Earth.

Only they aren’t the ragtag group of heroes Clover was expecting. The group seems more interested in hiding than fighting back, and Clover starts to wonder if she was better off alone. But then she finds a hidden spaceship, and she doesn’t know what to believe…or who to trust.

Barely Missing Everything by Matt Mendez Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books

Juan has plans. He’s going to get out of El Paso, Texas, on a basketball scholarship and make something of himself—or at least find something better than his mom Fabi’s cruddy apartment, her string of loser boyfriends, and a dead dad. Basketball is going to be his ticket out, his ticket up. He just needs to make it happen.

His best friend JD has plans, too. He’s going to be a filmmaker one day, like Quinten Tarantino or Guillermo del Toro (NOT Steven Spielberg). He’s got a camera and he’s got passion—what else could he need?

Fabi doesn’t have a plan anymore. When you get pregnant at sixteen and have been stuck bartending to make ends meet for the past seventeen years, you realize plans don’t always pan out, and that there some things you just can’t plan for…

Like Juan’s run-in with the police, like a sprained ankle, and a tanking math grade that will likely ruin his chance at a scholarship. Like JD causing the implosion of his family. Like letters from a man named Mando on death row. Like finding out this man could be the father your mother said was dead.

Soon Juan and JD are embarking on a Thelma and Louise–like road trip to visit Mando. Juan will finally meet his dad, JD has a perfect subject for his documentary, and Fabi is desperate to stop them. But, as we already know, there are some things you just can’t plan for…

Dealing in Dreams by Lilliam Rivera Simon Schuster Books for Young Readers

At night, Las Mal Criadas own these streets.

Nalah leads the fiercest all-girl crew in Mega City. That roles brings with it violent throw downs and access to the hottest boydega clubs, but the sixteen-year-old grows weary of the life. Her dream is to get off the streets and make a home in the exclusive Mega Towers, in which only a chosen few get to live. To make it to the Mega towers, Nalah must prove her loyalty to the city’s benevolent founder and cross the border in a search for a mysterious gang the Ashé Ryders. Led by a reluctant guide, Nalah battles other crews and her own doubts, but the closer she gets to her goal, the more she loses sight of everything—and everyone— she cares about.

Nalah must do the unspeakable to get what she wants—a place to call home. But is a home just where you live? Or who you choose to protect?

Opposite of Always by Justin A. Reynolds Katherine Tegen Books

Jack Ellison King. King of Almost.

He almost made valedictorian.

He almost made varsity.

He almost got the girl . . .

When Jack and Kate meet at a party, bonding until sunrise over their mutual love of Froot Loops and their favorite flicks, Jack knows he’s falling—hard. Soon she’s meeting his best friends, Jillian and Franny, and Kate wins them over as easily as she did Jack. Jack’s curse of almost is finally over.

But this love story is . . . complicated. It is an almost happily ever after. Because Kate dies. And their story should end there. Yet Kate’s death sends Jack back to the beginning, the moment they first meet, and Kate’s there again. Beautiful, radiant Kate. Healthy, happy, and charming as ever. Jack isn’t sure if he’s losing his mind. Still, if he has a chance to prevent Kate’s death, he’ll take it. Even if that means believing in time travel. However, Jack will learn that his actions are not without consequences. And when one choice turns deadly for someone else close to him, he has to figure out what he’s willing to do—and let go—to save the people he loves.

The Shadowglass (The Bone Witch #3) by Rin Chupeco Sourcebooks Fire

The dramatic finale to The Bone Witch series! Tea’s dark magic eats away at her, but she must save the one she loves most, even while her life—and the kingdoms—are on the brink of destruction.

In the Eight Kingdoms, none have greater strength or influence than the asha, who hold elemental magic. But only a bone witch has the power to raise the dead. Tea has used this dark magic to breathe life into those she has loved and lost…and those who would join her army against the deceitful royals. But Tea’s quest to conjure a shadowglass, to achieve immortality for the one person she loves most in the world, threatens to consume her.

Tea’s heartsglass only grows darker with each new betrayal. Her work with the monstrous azi, her thirst for retribution, her desire to unmask the Faceless—they all feed the darkrot that is gradually consuming her heartsglass. She is haunted by blackouts and strange visions, and when she wakes with blood on her hands, Tea must answer to a power greater than the elder asha or even her conscience. Tea’s life—and the fate of the kingdoms—hangs in the balance.

The Quiet You Carry by Nikki Barthelmess Flux

Victoria Parker knew her dad’s behavior toward her was a little unusual, but she convinced herself everything was fine—until she found herself locked out of the house at 3:00 a.m., surrounded by flashing police lights.

Now, dumped into a crowded, chaotic foster home, Victoria has to tiptoe around her domineering foster mother, get through senior year at a new school, and somehow salvage her college dreams . . . all while keeping her past hidden.

But some secrets won’t stay buried—especially when unwanted memories make Victoria freeze up at random moments and nightmares disrupt her sleep. Even worse, she can’t stop worrying about her stepsister Sarah, left behind with her father. All she wants is to move forward, but how do you focus on the future when the past won’t leave you alone?

You Asked for Perfect by Laura Silverman Sourcebooks Fire

Senior Ariel Stone is the perfect college applicant: first chair violin, dedicated community volunteer, and expected valedictorian. He works hard – really hard – to make his life look effortless. A failed Calculus quiz is not part of that plan. Not when he’s number one. Not when his peers can smell weakness like a freshman’s body spray.

Figuring a few all-nighters will preserve his class rank, Ariel throws himself into studying. His friends will understand if he skips a few plans, and he can sleep when he graduates. Except Ariel’s grade continues to slide. Reluctantly, he gets a tutor. Amir and Ariel have never gotten along, but Amir excels in Calculus, and Ariel is out of options.

Ariel may not like Calc, but he might like Amir. Except adding a new relationship to his long list of commitments may just push him past his limit.

#WeNeedDiverseBooks #young adult books #new releases

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anthonybialy · 3 years

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Patronizing Discriminating

Democrats haven't fixed racism yet, but only because mean corporate greed prevents them from issuing enough bribes to make hatred disappear. The quite historical voting hobbyist group is eternally cranky because their slaves were freed. Compensating with grudge-based policies is not quite the helpful apology.

The poor party must pretend to celebrate Juneteenth while being upset about its Civil War loss. Revenge takes more subtle forms, as the political faction that originated the Klan is still using government to oppress those it deems unworthy. The 13th Amendment is one more part of the Constitution cravenly condescending racists loathe. Enslaving those they keep telling society oppresses is a more insidious process.

Announcements about racism not only persisting but getting worse sure are patronizing, which is the worst kind of racism. Awful bigots don't even have the nerve to admit they're prejudicial monsters. Modern intolerance eschews outright contempt in favor a condescending sad frown aimed at those they've concluded are victims unable to advance in this mean society. Picturing them patting heads is almost redundant.

Wealth redistribution is the unrequested gift from those respectful liberals who love shopping with money pilfered from others. Buying votes gets expensive if you use your own credit card. Besides, who wants to be useful and contribute to a capitalistic monstrosity?

Race hustlers announce this country is too racist for advancement, then pimp policies that confirm it. Self-fulfilling prophecies allow liberals to feel useful. How else could they help others? The presumption that those receiving them cannot get ahead is surely based in respect for potential. At least they don't think anyone's capable. Contempt for everyone's abilities is their best defense against prejudice.

It's tough for the welfare state's biggest advocates to fight racism when they can create their own. You can replace a parent's income, but only after he leaves.

Handout policies that break up families are a wicked way to ruin lives of those allegedly being helped. Liberalism's specialty isn't quite improving life. Its smugly obtuse adherents created a stereotype with handouts they claim are designed to help. Government replaces parents for those it views as children.

The ceaseless dole is a different take on slavery. Getting around the Bill of Rights is just one part of the subtle drive to show how much they care about victims they create.

Keeping junkies hooked on giveaways that provide barely enough to survive is considered compassionate by those who frame working to afford essentials as monstrous. Government is a less-honest drug dealer. Those they've gotten hooked won't be excelling. Your kindly liberal superiors think you're incapable, anyway, so take your dole payment and try to smile about subsistence.

The next law will surely create tolerance. As with every other liberal initiative, laws purportedly to fight discrimination attempt to cope with their own insecurities. Admitting they won't be tolerant without a law is an inadvertently telling concession. Forced compliance resembles mandating insurance mandatory because they won't contribute to charity. What do you mean by helping voluntarily?

Mutual exchange is the best way to learn respect for others. Those who think trade reduces humans to commercial beings never grasp how offering to perform a task is a profitable way to make use of talents. Not seeing what value humans are capable of creating is yet another delightful irony statists don't notice about themselves.

Free markets aren't just for making money, even though it's nice to be able to buy more than rent and ramen. Open negotiation for items and services offers the best chance for everyone to get ahead regardless of the complexion categories they assign.

The chance for anyone to work smart and create value helps anyone able to contribute. Refusing to consider someone's work over color is as horrid practically as it is as a twisted creed. Racism is self-punishing.

If meth doesn't cure it, maybe mixing in heroin will help. Reparations are the apex of lunacy, which is why they're trendy on social media. Presuming there's been zero progress is as daft as suffering for what ancestors did or endured. Maintaining grudges for countless decades is the surest path to progress.

Telling people they're oppressed is culturally hot. Act indignantly on behalf of others who didn't even realize they were victims. Those demanding endless redistribution to fix bigotry have their own industry to ensure remains profitable, at least for them. White liberals flaunting the Black Lives Matter hashtag may as well wear a sign advertising how tolerant they are. Please tell them how cool they are. A Craigslist ad for black friends is too obvious.

Smug liberals presume everyone is as racist as they are. Thinking minorities can't get ahead is behind every sinister scheme to compensate for what they claim society inflicted. Those frowning with concern will never guess how much of same society they've created.

Collective compensation is endorsed for the same reason they want to ban guns, namely the notion that other humans must also be seething with violent rage against anyone who dares disagree. Keep hoping Democrats catch up to the rest of the nation and learn tolerance.

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comiccommentary · 4 years

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The Fluidity of Manga Genres

Erika Lewis

Manga is a fascinating form of literature, and has captivated audiences for generations. But how is it different from any western comic book? The simple answer is that manga is fluid, the genre is not set in stone throughout the whole story. Different styles are used to portray different sections of the story. Western comic books like to stick to themes like superheroes, everyday drama, horror, sports, sci-fi, etc. This is not a particularly bad thing, but it is more common for manga authors to combine genres. One of the best examples of this is the manga Tokyo Ghoul, written by Sui Ishida, which combines horror fiction, wholesome slice of life, and crime investigation into one seamless story. This story is a popular example of how combining genres creates a more compelling narrative.

Tokyo Ghoul is a seinen story about an alternate world where Japan is infested with man eating monsters: ghouls. The public knows these monsters exist, but because ghouls look just like humans they are able to blend into society. A government office of Ghoul Investigators has the responsibility of seeking out ghoul and exterminating them to protect mankind. The story follows a young man named Kaneki Ken who is a human living a normal life, until he is attacked by a ghoul. He survives the encounter and awakes in the hospital only to find that he required an organ transplant to save his life. The only problem was that the ghoul who attacked him was the deceased organ donor. Kaneki becomes half ghoul and is forced to abandon his human life, only to be adopted by a safe house for ghouls using the cover of a coffee house. There he learns to see the humanity of his new ghoul friends and how they are trying to stay alive. However, his new unique half form leads to more dangers than he could possibly have imagined. (shown below is when Kaneki wakes after his surgery)

Tokyo Ghoul sits predominantly in the horror genre, and for good reason. The artwork of the series can be disgusting and disturbing, using predominantly body horror. The artwork shows grotesque cannibalism, murder, insanity, and torture. It definitely is not for the faint of heart. The ghoul of the story looks human most of the time, but can become monstrous when provoked. However, the humans in this story are rather monstrous themselves, with investigators murdering ghoul indiscriminately. Some of the ghoul “ethically” source their food from victims of suicide, but are still exterminated. One terrible sense involves a little ghoul girl witnessing her mother being brutally killed. Horror is such a strong genre to use, and it often overpowers a story, but when it is skillfully combined with other genres it can be made more interesting. American horror stories tend to only focus on horror and gore; this often makes them boring or limits the amount of story that can be told. Manga that uses horror sparingly but efficiently can continue its story for years without losing an audience’s interest.

It is strange, that in a story with so much violence and horror, that there can be so many wholesome moments. Kaneki Ken goes to live with ghouls that he believes are monsters, only to find that he becomes part of a family. The slice of life segments in the story allow the reader to bond with the characters and feel more invested when something bad happens to them. This is brilliant, because often in horror movies and books it is hard to care about the characters. These parts of the story are truly enjoyable and help to distract from the violence in other parts of the story. The ghoul family running a coffee shop and forming individual relationships provides perspective for Kaneki and makes him a deeper character. As Kaneki starts to love and protect his family; the audience starts to root for the ghouls, despite them eating humans. This is a new perspective, to have the monsters in the horror story be the victims is a new and interesting story.

The reader also gets to see the world from the perspective of the ghoul investigators, who provide contrast to the story. The reader learns that some of these investigators are respectable, while others just enjoy killing intelligent living things. As the reader grows to love the ghouls, they also grow to fear and dislike the investigators (even though they understand their perspective). The author's decision to make this a parallel story is fascinating and allows the reader to see yet another genre in the story: crime investigation. It creates incredible tension, as the reader fears that the investigators will find Kaneki and his new family. It deepens the plot of the story to know what is happening on both sides of the conflict and see how the story is playing out before the characters know.

Manga tells stories in a different way than most American media. Instead of rigid expectations, manga encourages new combinations of genres so that new stories can be told. Tokyo Ghoul is only one example of this use of multiple areas of literature. To combine these genres creates what I believe is a truly thrilling series where the reader is truly invested in the characters. Combinations also allow for stories to be enjoyed by wider audiences, which creates wonderfully diverse fan groups. This is why I tend to find manga so appealing.

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enterinit · 5 years

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Madden NFL 20 and other games coming to Xbox One this week

Madden NFL 20 and other games coming to Xbox One this week. Madden NFL 20: Ultimate Superstar Edition (July 30, 2019) WAYS TO PLAY Face of the Franchise: QB1 - Be the Face of an NFL franchise where the decisions you make matter in your journey to become an NFL Superstar. Create your own College Quarterback to play through the College Football National Championship playoffs and the NFL Combine for your shot at the NFL Draft and to be the face of a franchise in a new and personalized career campaign centered around you. Once selected to a team, engage with Madden’s new Scenario Engine which generates personalized playable scenarios, events, and dynamic challenges that build the story of your unique NFL career. Franchise - Simulate a full NFL career and leave your legacy as a player, coach or owner with single-player and multiplayer online-connected leagues. Compete with up to 32 teams in your quest for a Super Bowl Dynasty. Complete with an annual Pro Bowl and Seasonal Awards. Ultimate Team - Compete in the ultimate NFL fantasy team-building mode featuring your favorite NFL players from the past and present. Play games, collect rewards, and upgrade your team with daily, fun and engaging challenges with live NFL content all year-long. Exhibition - Compete in head-to-head online and offline games (single and multi-player) or single player offline against the CPU. Customize your game settings including time of quarters, rules, stadiums, and uniforms. GAMEPLAY Superstar X-Factor – Feel the emotion, personality, and power of NFL Superstars with Superstar X-Factor, an all-new abilities progression system that reveals special abilities for today’s most exciting NFL Superstars when certain objectives are met in games. Combined with authentic personality & real player motion, the stars of the NFL truly come to life in Madden NFL 20. Take full control of player development with new ways to customize player abilities. Unique Playbooks – Playbooks are calibrated to be more unique from team to team providing more variety for strategic game-planning and in-game adjustments. Run/Pass Options – Run/pass option plays are now available to call, bringing even more NFL authenticity to today’s play-calling. On-Field Trainer – Learn how to improve as a Madden player with this cohesive, modernized teaching system that introduces new in-game mechanics over time as you progress through your gameplay experience. New Pump Fake mechanic – Pump-fake to a specific receiver and fake out defenders with a new double-tap ‘throw cancelling’ mechanic. NFL Pro Bowl – Play the annual Pro Bowl within Franchise mode and ‘Face of the Franchise: QB1’ featuring all-stars from the AFC and NFC. Superstar-Driven Play-Calling – Play-calling tailored to the Superstars on your team to quickly get your stars involved when you need them the most. New celebrations – Over 20 new TD and First Down celebrations added to bring more swag to the biggest plays on the gridiron. Mutant Year Zero: Seed of Evil (July 30, 2019) Seed of Evil is an expansion to the award-winning tactical adventure game Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden picking up where the original game ended and offering hours of more gameplay, new locations to visit, and a new leading character! Continue the main story and explore many hours of all new content. Expand your team with the veteran stalker Big Khan the moose and get ready to defeat a new threat to Dux, Bormin, Selma and all the others. In Seed of Evil you must solve the mystery of the powerful and ominous roots which have taken over the Ark. Discover huge new maps, battle new enemies, improve your mutations, get your hands on all new gear, defeat foes trying to take back lost ground and face off against a vicious new adversary. To play Seed of Evil it is highly recommended to have finished the main story in Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, because of story spoilers and the level range of the new content. Continue the main story See what happens after the ending of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden. Continue into a new future for Bormin, Dux, Pripp and all the others at the Ark. How will they deal with what they have learned?New mutant: Big Khan You can now add Big Kahn the moose to your squad of mutants. He is a veteran stalker who has been exploring the Zone alone. He is not only skilled at doing critical hits but also has the unique mutations Ground Pound and Flame Puke, which make him excellent at dealing with groups of enemies.Face a new threat The Ark has suddenly become enveloped in mysterious roots and many of its inhabitants do not seem to be their normal selves. Even the Zone Ghouls appear to have been taken over by this new menace and it is up to your team of stalkers to set things right!Hours of new content Take on new enemies in places like the Hall of Electric Coffins and Mausoleum of Suburbia. The new story in Seed of Evil offers a host of new challenges and brutal fights. Get ready to rethink your tactics as you face off against brand new enemies.Improve your mutations Upgrade Bormin’s Hog Rush to Bear Smash for increased power and Corpse Eater to Corpse Feaster so that regaining lost HP no longer costs an action. Upgrade Dux’s Moth Wings to Wings of the Sniper which removes all range penalties.Retake lost territory Revisit places like the Spear of Heavens or Sea Titans as Zone Ghouls and police bots once again encroach upon places you have already cleared. This time they are stronger than ever! The Blackout Club (July 30, 2019) The Blackout Club is a first-person co-op horror game centered around a group of teenage friends investigating a monstrous secret beneath the skin of their small town. 1-4 players explore procedurally-generated missions against a fearsome enemy you can only see with your eyes closed. Features: A Modern Horror Setting To Explore: A beautiful and modern neighborhood full of houses, woods, and a very mysterious subterranean network of tunnels.Cooperative Gameplay: Drop-in/Drop-out multiplayer sessions for 1-4 players.Each Night A New Adventure: Missions are procedurally-generated and vary according to player level and progress.Richly-Simulated World Supporting Many Play Styles: Players have the freedom to go through the game at their own pace and choose the paths they take through the world.Character Growth & Customization: Players get to create their own character and customize them by unlocking new clothing, gestures, and hairstyles.An Unseen Threat: If players are not careful and draw too much attention to themselves, "The Shape" will come for them. Super Wiloo Demake (July 31, 2019) Wiloo and Agatha need to rescue their dog from the clutches of Dr.ETvaldo! Roll, fly, jump, and shoot your way across a variety of different platforming levels using unique power ups to reach the end of the level. Can you defeat all 5 bosses and rescue your buddy? With 3 different difficulties, experience the quest that you desire with easier or devilish challenges. Features: Traverse 50 levels across 5 different worlds with unique themes.Vibrant 8-bit visualsConquer 5 malicious bossesPick from 3 difficulties to suit your playstyleUse fun power ups to defeat enemies The Tower of Beatrice (July 31, 2019) The life of a thief isn’t easy: always hiding in shadows, clients cheat, traps bite… Working on a contract for a mysterious client, you'll need to infiltrate the tower of the powerful sorcerer Beatrice, steal her Book of Recipes, and get out alive. Along the way you will enter a demon's dreams to discover his most intimate desires, accept a gift from a Granny-spider, start the Clock Tower, feed a snail, make a tea for a demon, piece together a skeleton, and finally fix your own fatal failing. Features: Six floors – each with its own atmosphere and moodSurprising and charming residents – demons of Fire, Frost and Dream, Iron Maiden, Hungry Chest, and many othersAlchemy! Discover many interesting recipes!Unique puzzles ranging from simple to brain bendingAtmospheric and immersive soundtrackMany allusions to famous games, movies and books – spot them all! Pilot Sports (July 31, 2019) PILOT SPORTS, brilliant gaming fun for the whole family! Split screen mode for up to 4 players, over 50 different courses, the widest variety of aircraft and thrilling challenges provide for all sorts of gaming enjoyment! Features: 7 TYPES OF CHALLENGES! Beat the best times in the different game modes!OVER 50 COURSES! The key emphasis is on variety. Complete over 50 courses and set your sights on new records.8 CHARACTERS! Choose your favourite pilot and explore the tropical island paradise together with your favourite figure!FLYING FUN USING DIFFERENT AIRCRAFT! Soar through sensational and tricky courses with the double-decker, a jetpack, parachute or hang glider!BONUS: Beat records and unlock new courses for explorers! Solo: Islands of the Heart (July 31, 2019) Solo: Islands of the Heart is a game about love. About love as fuel, the force that drives us. Love is a universal feeling, but each of us experiences it in a different way. Solo – Islands of the Heart explores the theme of love in an introspective way, allowing players to identify and reflect on their own experiences. The world is divided into archipelagos, with each island representing a unique puzzle. Solving puzzles will award the player with a Sleeping Totem, awakening them to answer a question about love and relationships. As with love, most puzzles have no unique solution. Using boxes, each with different properties and behaviors, players can build their own paths to the Sleeping Totems on each island. Nature and contemplation are also a huge part of Solo: pull out your camera and capture the moment, play the guitar, feed the animals or just sit on a bench and think. The Church in the Darkness (August 02, 2019) No one is forced to join a cult. It welcomes you. It understands you. It envelops you until the words become more than truth—they make you whole. In the late 1970s, the charismatic Isaac and Rebecca Walker lead the Collective Justice Mission. Labeled radicals and feeling persecuted by the US government, they relocate their followers to the one place they believe they can create a socialist utopia: the jungles of South America. There they build Freedom Town. But relatives left behind in the US become worried: what exactly is going on at this compound in the jungle? You play as Vic, an ex-law enforcement officer who has snuck into Freedom Town to check on their nephew, Alex. Whether you choose stealth or violence, you must infiltrate the commune, find out what’s going on within, and locate your nephew, before it’s too late. How dangerous are the Walkers? How far will you go to uncover the truth and save Alex? Could it all have turned out differently? Features: What ending will you get? Will you get Alex out, whether he wants to go with you or not? Will you confront the cult leaders? Will you join the cult?Unlock every ending for each scenario by trying different play styles or making different choices.Multiple ways to play: Avoid detection completely, taking out guards and civilians non-lethally, or kill anyone who gets in your way. Interview characters from Freedom Town and search for clues. Documents and letters scattered around camp will clue you into the true nature of the commune.Fully voiced game, starring Ellen McLain (best known as GLaDOS in Portal) and John Patrick Lowrie (the Sniper from Team Fortress 2) as the cult leaders, Rebecca and Isaac Walker. Varenje (August 02, 2019) "All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it." ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Get yourself a little summer's day with a raspberry jam adventure! Varenje is a cute colorful adventure with a number of puzzles and mini-games made by artists for anyone that considers games to be an art. Eight unique & gorgeously hand crafted chapters await you. Hours and hours of game play will take you to a far away enchanting place. Our hero was spending summer happily at the cosy cottage until curiosity forced him to sample an unknown berry at the stream. Before he knew it, everything had become incredibly large, and he was reduced to the size of a bug! Trying to understand what happened and how to return things back to normal, we set off into the invisible to the human eye tiny world, where worms, beetles and spiders live their life, and build bizarre vehicles, in disguise so that humans do not realize. Our new friends will surely help us by discovering the secret healing potion, which will return us to our previous dimensions. All we need is to collect enough raspberries to cook grandmother's jam. And as we all know - this is a remedy for all ills! Asdivine Menance (August 02, 2019) A century after the events of Asdivine Dios, peace has finally settled in. That is, until a visitor from another world suddenly shows up proclaiming the entire universe is about to be destroyed. Hearing this, Izayoi sets off in an attempt to reverse this seemingly pronounced fate with a trio of very idiosyncratic spirits as they criss-cross four worlds in search of an answer. But what is the answer they find...? Experience immersive turn-based battles with cooperative attacks and new limit break skills! With all quests, collecting and crafting, the battle arena, and even post-game content, Asdivine Menace comes packed with enough elements to satisfy JRPG-hungry gamers. As Izayoi deepens his bonds of trust with his spirit companions, their fates together move in new and meaningful directions! Features: Travel the galaxy to bring the truth full circle in an epic fantasy RPG!Experience immersive turn-based battles with cooperative attacks and new limit break skills! Meow Motors (August 02, 2019) Meet the kitties, the main heroes of the new go-kart racing game! You will take to the track and play as one of a dozen colorful cats memorable for their different characteristics and unique personalities. Overcome various difficulties of the tracks drifting through mines and bombs, stop and slow down your competitors by blasting them with bubble gum and other astonishing weapons. And don't forget to gather power-ups along the way if you want to be the fastest driver on the track! The game will amaze you with: Dynamic gameplay that has three different modes: circle races, drifts, and 'strike' mode20 different tracks where kitties will compete10 kitties with unique abilities that will help you gain an advantage10 power-ups with unique effects to defeat your competitorsCharge your power-ups and get a more powerful effect!Overtake opponents, drift and get bonuses for it. Go grab your kitty and start your first crazy ride! Super Star Blast (August 02, 2019) Super Star Blast is a space shooter with challenging levels of increasing difficulty. All enemies must be shot down to finish a level and go to the next one. A scanner around the player tells roughly where the enemies are located. The player ship can fly forwards to attack and backwards to fight during the retreat against the opponents. After clearing a level you can purchase equipment to boost the ship, as well as extra shields and firepower or more ships. In local multiplayer mode, up to 4 players can fight together trough the levels (campaign mode) or can get each other in a battle (competition mode). Features: Massive challenging levels of increasing difficultyEnemies with unique flying and fire characteristicsUpgrade center (agility, fire power, shield, ships)Single player campaign2 – 4 player local multiplayer coop mode (split screen)Simple and clean 3D space graphics Read the full article

#Games #XBOX

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theglintoftherail · 7 years

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Review: The 1972 Annual World's Best SF

For years and years, I’ve been collecting editions of the Annual World’s Best SF anthology series edited by Donald A. Wollheim, which ran from 1972 to 1990. A couple of years ago I decided to commit to reading or rereading every single one of them - and to reviewing every single story in each of them on Goodreads. As of now, I’ve gotten through 10 of them and reviewed a total of 107 stories, which can all be found here!

I’m doing this partly to expose myself to a wide range of SF in order to grow as an SF author, and partly because there are so many great SF authors whose work didn’t just stick around in public consciousness for one reason or another. I’ve found so many authors that I absolutely love and had never heard of before. (And because those authors are not widely read, it makes me feel like a total SF hipster, which is perversely enjoyable.)

Here are the reviews of the stories from the 1972 edition:

The Fourth Profession, Larry Niven

Well what do you know. I’ve read a few things by Larry Niven and straight-up disliked most of them, but this one was very fun. A few mysterious aliens have landed on Earth, and a bartender happens to get one of them way too drunk and is given pills that essentially give him superpowers. It’s well-paced and funny, with likeable characters and surprisingly high stakes. The ending didn’t quite live up to the rest of the story, but I still liked this a lot.

Gleepsite, Joanna Russ

The editor’s intro to this one recommended reading it twice or even three times, and I’m glad it did, because it’s pretty much impenetrable on the first read – but once I figured out what was going on, it was really cool and fairly chilling. It packs a huge amount of worldbuilding and characterization into about five pages. I’d hate to spoil it so I’ll just say, it opens on a woman with bat wings pedaling dream machines in a polluted dystopian wasteland where most of the men on Earth have died, and goes all sorts of even weirder places from there.

The Bear with the Knot on His Tail, Stephen Tall

Eh. Maybe it’s just that this story is closing in on 50 years old, but it was really just a bog-standard ‘humans discover the first alien life and oh no they’re in trouble’ story. I really thought there was going to be an interesting twist at the end – I even thought I could see how they were setting it up – but nope.

The Sharks of Pentreath, Michael G. Coney

In the near-ish future, overpopulation has resulted in a system where at any given time, two-thirds of the population is kept in Matrix-style tanks and can interact with the outside world via tiny robots, and people swap out on regular schedules. The story’s about an innkeeper at a popular tourist destination who is currently in non-Matrix-mode and who is kind of a dick. I always like SF where the speculative part is just a backdrop to a character-based story, but there was something about the whole concept that just didn’t feel quite right to me - and honestly, the main character was just too much of an asshole for his ‘I learned a lesson’ moment to ring true for me.

A Little Knowledge, Poul Anderson

Three human criminals stranded on a planet of extremely pacifistic aliens kidnap an alien space pilot so that they can sell forbidden technology to a warrior race. I loved everything about the premise, the characters, the worldbuilding, the plot resolution, etc – but the pacing was bizarrely bad, particularly when compared to how strong everything else was. Huge exposition dumps, lengthy scenes that were interesting but have little plot importance followed by rushing through much more significant events, more exposition, etc. Still worth reading, but man, somebody should have taken a scalpel to this thing.

Real-Time World, Christopher Priest

A group of research scientists in an enclosed space station are secretly being manipulated by the people who sent them there, via carefully controlled feeds of news and information personalized for each of them. I loved this at the beginning, but then a bunch of additional SF concepts and twisty plot elements were added in, and then more, and then more. Which could have been cool, but in practice it just wound up making kind of an incoherent hash of what could have been two or even three good stories.

All Pieces of a River Shore, R. A. Lafferty

Perfect from start to finish… almost entirely. An eccentric Native American collector of Old West and Native American artifacts has run across a few impossibly detailed, several-foot-long paintings of the banks of the Mississippi River. He has a theory that there are even more of them out there, and that they might actually depict the entire span of the river when put together. I loved everything about this – but the final cymbal-crash line that explains the mystery pretty much requires you to have had personal experience with 1970s information storage technology. I had to google the story to figure out what the hell was going on, and once I did, it was like “Oh! I see, awesome!”

With Friends Like These . . . , Alan Dean Foster

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, there was a galactic war in which the humans, fighting on the side of the good guys, destroyed the enemy so thoroughly and terrifyingly that the rest of the galaxy forced them all back to Earth and barricaded them in there. But now the bad guys are back, so the other good guys plan to free these mythical monstrous warriors. I wasn’t mad at this, but I personally dislike the trope of ‘humans are the most exceptional race in the galaxy.’ (Also, in general I feel like 70s SF throws a lot of psychic abilities shit around when there’s no real need or justification for it, so that aspect was also annoying.)

Aunt Jennie's Tonic, Leonard Tushnet

A research chemist interviews his old-country hedge-witch-style aunt in order to discover the secrets of her medicines. There was a lot I liked about this, but the main character was just too much of an idiot for me to be fully immersed in it. “I’m purposefully not even writing down the parts of these processes that I think are bullshit, even though there’s no real reason not to” plus “I didn’t make any backup copies of my notes on this incredibly valuable medicine recipe” equals how the hell did you ever manage to become a research chemist in the first place.

Timestorm, Eddy C. Bertin

Did you know that changing the past in a way that you’d think would be beneficial might actually cause something terrible to happen? A guy gets transported to a future place where aliens are doing things to Earth’s past that seem bad, he stops them, oh no they were actually helping. Like the third story, this was either unoriginal at the time or feels unoriginal now that we’ve seen it a million times. And the collection of things that the aliens were manipulating was weirdly arbitrary – stopping the birth of Hitler and the birth of… the Marquis de Sade? Really? And of course, since this was written in 1971, it opens on the assassination of JFK.

Transit of Earth, Arthur C. Clarke

Ok, well this almost made me cry. A Mars exploration mission is doomed and they’re going to run out of food/oxygen, so everyone but one man takes suicide pills early in order to give the man enough time to record a rare astrological phenomenon before he dies. The story is written as a combination of his notes of the transit of Earth plus his personal reflections on life and death. It’s really great. (There is also an almost completely throw-away suggestion that maybe just maybe there are also aliens on Mars, which added absolutely nothing to the plot and probably should have been edited out.)

Gehenna, K. M. O'Donnell (aka Barry N. Malzberg)

This was gorgeous. It’s three vignettes about characters with intersecting lives – all of them go to the same party, and their meeting there changes their lives in various ways, but each story also takes place in a just slightly different world. It uses parallel universes as a metaphor for how everyone’s experience of the world and their conception of themselves is totally different from what other people see. The fact that the stories are taking place in parallel universes is established at the beginning of each vignette by a device that I thought was really cool – each character takes the subway down from Times Square to get to the party, and the stations they pass are all numbered differently. (I looked up another review of this and the reviewer described it as ‘funny’ and ‘an amusing puzzle,’ which is hilarious to me – I thought “how could we have read it so differently” and then realized that that’s exactly what the story is about…)

One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty, Harlan Ellison

Earlier in this project I read Jeffty is Five, also by Harlan Ellison, and this is so similar that I would have known immediately that it was the same author even if I wasn’t already aware. You can never go back to your lovingly-described childhood which specifically involves a lot of comic books and radio dramas and delicious no-longer-produced candy, but you desperately want to because your adult life is boring, but if you try to, it will have terrible consequences, because childhood is delicate and precious. This story is good on a technical level but that theme just doesn’t do anything for me at all, so I didn’t love it.

Occam's Scalpel, Theodore Sturgeon

The mysterious head of a shadowy criminal organization is about to die, and his personal doctor is worried about the right-hand man who is primed to replace him, so he goes to his brother for help… but what kind of help? There are a couple things in this story that are awfully convenient, and it does rely on a super-genius being tricked in a way that an actual super-genius would almost certainly see right through, but I liked the concept enough to overlook those things.

Favorites: Gleepsite, All Pieces of a River Shore, Transit of Earth, Gehenna

#science fiction #sf #classic science fiction #classic sf #Larry Niven #Joanna Russ #Stephen Tall #Michael G. Coney #Poul Anderson #Christopher Priest #R. A. Lafferty #Alan Dean Foster #Leonard Tushnet #Eddy C. Bertin #Arthur C. Clarke #K. M. O'Donnell #Barry N. Malzberg #Harlan Ellison #Theodore Sturgeon

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jennplaysguitar · 6 years

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Abhi the Nomad gives a Track by Track breakdown of his new album, Marbled: Stream

Photo by Jonathan Swecker

Track by Track is a recurring new music feature in which an artist offers a comprehensive rundown of their new album.

Abhi the Nomad may be based in Austin, Texas, but there's a reason for the moniker he chose. Born in Madras, India, the young indie MC moved eight times before he was 18. Even once he thought he was settled in Thousand Oaks, California, immigration laws forced him to move back to India. He managed to relocate to Lille, France before finally getting a second student visa to attend grad school in the US.

Through all that movement, there was only one thing Abhi could hold on to for stability: his music. After all, the best way he could achieve a more permanent relocation to the US would be through a talent visa. With that goal in mind, he's collected all the songs he's recorded over his nomadic years into his latest album, Marbled.

Due out February 9 via the iconic Tommy Boy Records, the 12-track effort is the sound of an artist determined to make his mark. The indie beats find an intoxicating balance between catchy and swagger, making use of acoustic guitars and drum machines in equally successful measures. Abhi finds a sweet spot between two genres that speaks to his wide appeal - as well as his drive. Take a listen to the entire record ahead of its release below.

For more on what it was like putting together this amalgamation of indie, rap, and world traveling, Abhi has broken down Marbled track by track. Read on to learn more.

“Mama Bling”: “Mama Bling” is about literally waking up and checking my Twitter feed, and having a harsh realization about materialism in modern day hip-hop. Being raised by my parents who came from very little, being appreciative and not taking things for granted were principles taught in my house growing up. It's almost like I can't even understand or relate with the majority of the music that is floating around, artists that I used to love have distanced themselves from their humble beginnings and their roots, so this is the “Llast time I'll sit through 'Ye bragging a fashion accessory, or Lupe just smacking my scalp.”

“Dogs”: Setting: me at a party with my friends. Inspired by my second or third year in college, where me and my friends were thirsty and hungry, sex-craved, drooling at the mouth dogs. Being a sober individual now, partaking in party activities is a painful, not fun task for me - I'm quite introverted and always the DD.

“Marbled”: “Marbled” is the aftermath of the party, or more-so the state of mind I was in while I was partying and participating in the scenes described in “Dogs”. I was dealing with a lot of loneliness, addiction and isolation for quite a few years.

“Sex N Drugs”: The lonely addict's anthem, a funky and catchy look at peer pressure and the side effects of trying to be cool. Too many times have I fallen into downward spirals that were direct products of allowing myself to be caught up in “fitting in” and being a part of the “group.”

“Mindset”: From humble artist to big-headed celebrity, “Mindset” is the tale of my potential spiral into depression, like many other artists (Kanye West, Jay Z) who have spoken on how fame has tainted their mental health – this is my forewarning to myself. “Who I am is not, who I was I'm sighing, I never held myself up for something bigger.”

“Letter for God”: Ah my favorite–the universe. The one loner who looked at the stars and “never cared” in “Marbled” remembers the bigger picture: When I was really young, me and my father ventured onto our balcony in Beijing, and we both happened to see a meteor shower (it blew my mind). At that moment, I remember asking him questions about God, space and everything in it. Ever since then, questioning existence, primordial beginnings and our purpose as a species has been something I do quite often - and it's a great way of realizing how little we know, and that our problems don't mean shit.

“Spacecraft”: “Spacecraft” is the aftermath of the former track: “After the questions, Pops handed me a little tea, sleep and a blessing.” “Spacecraft” is an acceptance, the bigger picture has been seen and broadened my perspective, I now understand that the “world's fucked up past fixing” and question why I argue with people and allow things to affect me.

“So Long”: “So Long” is how I learn to love myself: “I've been nothing but notes and strings for so long, so long,” I'm speaking to those around me and explaining how my priorities are aligned, and also trying to push people to motivate themselves in the same sense. However, “You're stuck right here, waiting for my words to change your point of view.” Shout out to my grandpa.

“Somebody to Love”: “Somebody to Love” is the fear of settling down and having “Another boss, another job another heartache.” This was originally made for a Blue Moon ad campaign but we liked the song so much that we just had to stick it in here.

“Headcase”: Classic paranoia, anxiety and self-loathing: “Somewhere along the way, I lost myself.” A headcase is what I am, attempting to ignore these “voices in my head.” Foster's verse is monstrous: “Let the creek run dry/ mind sleeps, while I'm hiding, I always peep one eye.” Just a fat groove about how to get way too into your own thoughts.

“Planes”: Posse cut! The point of this track was to get a bunch of indie artists that I know are making way less than they're owed, and stick it to the man. Money makes the world go round, and it drives independent musicians broke and insane. “If time is money Iʼm gonna, Iʼm gonna watch the hour glass/ Yeah, I donʼt need your loving you can have it back”. Fun fact: This track features three bassists and one guitarist.

“Pressure”: The closer, a summary of my woes: “I FEEL PRESSURE/ OOOH BABY I'M A HEADCASE/ YOU CAN SEE IT ON MY FACE YEAH/ AND I'M WALKING ROUND WITH DEADWEIGHT”. A track about acceptance, once more, coming to face the problems I've been describing throughout the album and moving forward. Life takes its own path and a lot of things are actually out of our own control, sometimes we have to ride the wave. Dope verse from Dylan - he's the Uber rapper who went viral, but he has so much more to offer.

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topmixtrends · 6 years

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DESPITE MANY OTHER predictable changes to its source material, the opening sequence of Andy Muschietti’s wildly successful adaptation of Stephen King’s epic 1986 novel It reproduces the book’s inciting incident with meticulous loyalty. In the beginning of the novel, just before protagonist Bill Denbrough’s younger brother Georgie is killed by the monstrous clown Pennywise in a horrific realization of “stranger danger,” he must run down to his family’s basement to get paraffin for the newspaper boat Bill is building for him. It is an experience of unrelenting terror, despite his desperate attempts to reassure himself: “Stupid! There were no things with claws, all hairy and full of killing spite. Every now and then someone went crazy and killed a lot of people — sometimes Chet Huntley told about such things on the evening news — and of course there were Commies, but there was no weirdo monster living down in their cellar.” King’s powerful evocation of the nearly unbearable ordeal of a solo trip to the basement at age six reminds us of childhood’s blurred line between real and imagined fears.

For contemporary advocates of “free-range parenting” for whom the 1980s represents the last vestige of freedom before the descent of the helicopter parent, this is precisely why the unattended trip to the basement or the playground is vital: independently navigating those indistinct regions of the real and the imagined should help children learn to better delineate between the two. But the gruesome murder that sets King’s novel in motion sides instead with the logic of a famous quotation from Catch-22: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” Georgie successfully conquers his fear of the basement, only to be dismembered down the street by a version of the very monster he’d convinced himself was only imaginary.

Critics have noted the It movie’s overlap with the hit Netflix series Stranger Things in their apparent celebration of autonomous childhood adventure, a possibility many believe to have vanished with the 1980s in which movie and show are both set. Do the parent-free exploits of the young “Losers’ Club” in King’s novel support the idea that parental overprotectiveness be dismissed as so much needless paranoia? The novel instead explores more complex and troubling questions inaugurated by Georgie’s death: Is the best and bravest way to treat our fears truly to tell ourselves that they don’t exist? Is it actually possible, or even advisable, to try to separate the real from the imagined?

From Michael Chabon’s wistful “The Wilderness of Childhood” to more polemical essays like Hanna Rosin’s “The Overprotected Kid” and Christina Schwarz’s “Leave Those Kids Alone” (both in The Atlantic), a proliferation of recent think pieces has lamented the loss of an American childhood in which unsupervised play and everyday encounters with moderate danger build independence, resilience, and creativity. In these views, today’s highly regulated kids not only lack fortitude but also tragically miss out on the risky fun and adventure of yesteryear’s childhoods.

Some of these pieces suggest that fictions can help today’s postlapsarian children imagine a different world, and remind parents that such a world could exist. One contemporary father watches the Spielberg-authored adventure The Goonies (dir. Richard Donner, 1985) with his children. Their sense of wonder is ignited simply by the image of a group of kids striking out on a quest on their own. “Where are their parents?” the author’s kids demand to know. “How are they allowed to do this?” In a New York Times op-ed titled “The ‘Stranger Things’ School of Parenting,” Anna North argues that the acclaimed television series offers more than a pleasurable nostalgia for 1980s kids’ adventure movies like The Goonies and E.T. North sees in the show a valuable corrective to the “hyper-parenting” approach of today (indeed, she goes so far as to suggest that the show’s villainous Dr. Martin Brenner is the only adult that fits the “helicopter parent” mold): “‘Stranger Things’ is a reminder of a kind of unstructured childhood wandering that — because of all the cellphones, the fear of child molesters, a move toward more involved parenting or a combination of all three — seems less possible than it once was.” Synthesizing the ideas of Rosin, Schwarz, et al., North asks us to view Stranger Things as a model for a loosened approach to parenting that acknowledges the world may hold dangers, but accepts that “bravery needs its own space to grow.”

There is general consensus among these essays that the 1980s marks a turning point away from older childhood freedoms. This characterization adds further poignancy to Stranger Things’s loving evocation of 1983–’84. The years following the 1982 release of Spielberg’s E.T., the movie with the strongest imprint on Stranger Things’s vision of its era, are also seen as the beginning of the end of a world in which such fantasies of childhood could seem grounded in a recognizable reality. In the present, the image of a group of unsupervised kids biking headlong into mystery and adventure can exist only as nostalgic evocation of past fictions. What happened in the 1980s to bring us to this point?

As Rosin explains, a series of child abductions and murders between 1979 and 1981 garnered a new level of media coverage for this type of crime. Perhaps most notoriously, the disappearance in 1979 of six-year-old Etan Patz, walking alone to his school bus in New York City, precipitated the widespread perception of a rise in kidnapping and child molestation. Rosin succinctly summarizes the cultural upshot of this infamous case: “[T]he fear drove a new parenting absolute. Children were never to talk to strangers.” Or walk to school, or anywhere else, alone. Simultaneously, high-profile lawsuits over children’s injuries led to a radical overhaul of playground design according to stringent new safety standards. In the views of some psychologists and educators, the removal of any sense of risk in the experience of play undermines the development of children’s ability to negotiate real-world fear or danger. Rosin describes an evolutionary psychologist’s critical perspective on these cultural shifts in the 1980s: facing moderate fear through unregulated exploration and play inoculates us against greater, more debilitating fears that may otherwise take hold. For Rosin and many other commentators, this inoculation is what we have lost.

Stephen King’s It, written between 1981 and 1985 as the fears and protective responses described by Rosin became culturally entrenched in what she terms “the era of the ubiquitous missing child,” might at first blush seem an opening salvo in defense of the childhood freedoms whose loss is lamented today. Indeed, King’s story of a group of outcast kids who band together to fight a protean monster in the fictional small town of Derry, Maine, in the 1950s was a major influence on the plot and themes of Stranger Things; the show originated in part because its writer-directors were turned down in their bid to helm the film adaptation of It. It is tempting to read King’s novel as a wellspring for the lesson North believes Stranger Things revives for our present moment: sometimes kids need to be left alone to confront monsters themselves, because “it’s only when the parents aren’t watching that a child can become a hero.”

If understood in these terms, as a paean to childhood freedoms, King’s novel makes a particularly bold statement for the time of its release. Just a few years after Etan Patz’s abduction cemented the rule against talking to strangers, It’s opening scene and inciting incident finds a boy exactly Etan’s age playing out in the street on his own. Lured to the edge of a storm drain by the seductive banter of Pennywise, Georgie hesitates, reciting the dictum actually much less ingrained in the 1950s of the book’s setting than in the 1980s of its writing: “I’m not supposed to take stuff from strangers. My dad said so.” And in this scene King makes it very clear that Georgie invites his own violent demise by eventually trusting the charming Pennywise and accepting his proffered balloon. If Georgie had run away when he first heard the voice coming from the storm drain, there might never have been occasion for Georgie’s older brother and his band of misfit friends to become heroes.

Stranger Things is King by way of Spielberg: It transferred to a 1980s of risk and wonder in which we never really fear for the main characters’ lives. Season one, after all, begins with a missing child, but unlike It, ends with that child’s safe return. Where the four boys of Stranger Things navigate pubescent romantic crushes and perils, King’s children confront actual sex and death. Georgie’s murder comes amid a wave of child disappearances and deaths in Derry that leads the police to impose an evening curfew. At an assembly, the police chief assures the town’s children that they will be safe so long as they never talk to (or accept rides from) strangers. Townspeople speculate about the presence of one or more sexual predators. The death count rises. 1950s Derry becomes a microcosm of “the era of the ubiquitous missing child” Rosin ascribes to the 1980s United States. And, like the science fiction plot cliché in which a character travels back in time to change the future, It’s 1950s imagines an opportunity to confront the fears of the 1980s in advance, before they become insurmountable.

This projection of 1980s anxieties backward to the 1950s is mirrored in the book’s dual time frame: the characters, grown to adulthood in the 1980s, must return to Derry to again confront the monster they thought they had defeated as children. Riding on the coat tails of its own imitator, Stranger Things, the 2017 It movie transfers the children’s story to a more marketable and mediagenic 1980s setting. This only renders its allegory for 1980s panic over missing children more palpable: here is the moment when kidnappings and murders suffuse the adult imagination, but children may still, for just a bit longer, ride their bikes across town alone. Though more horrific than Stranger Things, the It movie aligns with the TV show in lending itself to the view that the dangers the children face are a necessary and bearable price for the joys and glories of their adventures. Both texts can easily support Rosin’s and North’s claims that with increasingly supervised childhoods, kids — and we, as a society — have lost much more than we have gained.

The show and movie can resonate with this message in part because a central argument in most essays on the loss of childhood freedom is that the fears of the 1980s were imaginary all along. The authors of these pieces repeatedly invoke statistics to demonstrate that the rate of stranger abductions did not actually rise during the period in which fear of this act rose exponentially. Nor have they risen since then, and the overall rate of crimes against children has in fact declined since the 1990s. But for me, this common argument calls to mind a Jay Leno routine about how, after every spectacular disaster, the airline industry seeks to reassure the public with statistics. You are a thousand times more likely, authoritative pilots tell us in television spots, to die from a fall in the shower than in a plane crash. Fine, Leno says, but when I slip in the tub I’m not falling 30 thousand feet! Probabilities mean little to fear and horror. It is enough that the thing really exists. And this is what makes King’s novel resistant to being marshaled along with its movie adaptation and Stranger Things in the case for unsupervised childhood. The monster in It assumes many forms as it appears to each of the kids individually. But there is one consistent principle in its manifestations: “It” asserts the brutal reality of particular fears the children already hold but assume are only imaginary.

King emphasizes this point repeatedly: the unsupervised spaces of play and exploration in the novel’s small-town 1950s are sites of self-discovery and growth yet also of terror and violence. And this violence is enacted by a monster whose particular horror derives from its very insistence that fears are never just imagined. Significantly, King invokes horror fictions themselves in this logic: the monster sometimes appears in the form of figures from 1950s horror movies that the children have previously experienced as fun and cathartic entertainments — as a means of safely facing their fears. But It’s manifestations of the Wolfman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and so on, are far more grotesque and deadly than the fictions familiar to both the novel’s characters and the reader. Some children are violently murdered. Others escape It’s assaults, eventually banding together to fight back.

Despite firsthand experience of the monster, a major obstacle they must overcome is the ingrained belief that it cannot actually be real:

“You’re … not … real,” Eddie choked, but clouds of grayness were closing in now, and he realized faintly that it was real enough, this Creature. It was, after all, killing him. And yet some rationality remained, even until the end: as the Creature hooked its claws into the soft meat of his neck […] Eddie’s hands groped at the Creature’s back, feeling for a zipper.

This scene, in which minor character Eddie Corcoran is murdered in a town park by It’s version of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, exemplifies a central theme in the novel: although we may rationalize our fears as unbelievable, even ludicrous (a clown in the sewer? a man-sized fish creature?), this doesn’t change the fact that the most unimaginable things do actually happen.

Published at the peak of the “era of the ubiquitous missing child,” It offers a less reassuring message than North’s takeaway from Stranger Things, a bromide equally applicable to the It movie: “it’s only when the parents aren’t watching that a child can become a hero.” There is some of that celebration of heroism in King’s novel, for sure. But in at least equal measure, the book troubles the rationalization that fear is just in our heads. Even if stranger abduction is about as probable as a supernatural killer clown in a storm drain, the book turns the reassurances of probability on their head. What matters isn’t the statistical likelihood of these things happening, but the horrific magnitude of the things that sometimes do happen. It requires the passage of an entire generation for the novel’s characters to even begin to cope with what happened to Georgie and the others. And so, the novel proleptically answers today’s unsupervised childhood nostalgists with a challenging question: why shouldn’t it change everything when a six-year-old child is stolen by a monster?

I am not proposing an alternative to Anna North, an “It School of Parenting” predicated on the belief that Georgie should simply have stayed in his parents’ sight at all times. But nor should the portrait of childhood in the novel that inspired Stranger Things be assimilated to the romantic idealization of childhood before “the era of the ubiquitous missing child.” As Joshua Rothman reminds us in a recent New Yorker piece on It, the movie is unable to capture the novel’s vast, messy weirdness — the cosmic fever dream to which its conflicts eventually build. Indeed, the bizarre incoherence of the book’s resolution further illuminates its status as a missive from the trenches of the missing child era: the book’s inciting incident powerfully conveys the horror of real-life events, but its allegory becomes unruly — and eventually unmoored from its historical referents entirely — in its attempt to imagine what it might take to overcome the fears these events bring into the world.

Jason Middleton is a professor of film and media studies at the University of Rochester.

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