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wintermutal · 4 years

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D, E, and Q for the writing ask 👁👁

end of the year writing meme

D. Any drawings or pictures that had a big influence on your writing?

i have aesthetic blogs for some of my characters, where i keep like, random shit that i associate with them, but in terms of general aesthetic probably john divola’s Dogs Chasing my Car in the Desert. i love that set of pieces.

E. Who’s your favorite main character you’ve written?

idk if an antagonist counts as a main character, but Dr. Dean Eiler is my fave person to write. he’s just awful. just literally terrible. he’s so incredibly insecure and immature that he’s incapable of seeing himself as anything but the victim in any situation, hes entitled as fuck, he has a traumatic backstory and thinks that excuses his behavior, and he cares so much about appearance over integrity that he’ll act like an entirely different person in front of people he knows could say something bad about him. overall he either genuinely believes what he’s doing is like, The Good And Correct Thing To Do or desperately finds a way to twist it so he can believe what hes doing is justified.

its like. oh god. hes literally a manchild. fun to write in the awful victor vale sort of way.

Q. Quote three bits of writing you read his year. Can be your writing, or not.

okay. man. this ones gonna be long.

this past year i spent a lot of time on scp stuff, so two of these three scenes are gonna be that; the first being the last time (probably ever) i wrote gears, and the second being a climax scene from my broken masquerade project. the third is a scene from something i wrote during nanowrimo, which is part of the exposition of my original story. im gonna post all this under a cut, because this shit is longer than i remember it being.

notes in italics. scenes in normal text.

in late spring i wrote a piece about all the people a foundation report has to go through in the broken masquerade universe to get put into the database. primarily, it was about the concept of everything in the SCP database being written anonymously, by ghostwriters hired by the foundation specifically to put together the reports, and how the foundation was like, a city of ghosts or w/e because the flesh and bone of it was anonymous. never published it because it was supposed to be at the end of my other big masquerade piece as the epilogue. more than that, though, i think this scene from it is notable because it was the last time i ever wrote gears, and i wrote him a lot differently than i would have when i was younger. this is a bit longer.

Gears heavily disproved of how Harrold had written the Starfish report. It wasn’t on a basis of skill— as someone who had written more than his fair share of reports, he found his technical descriptions of the disintegration of Site-56 and the resulting riot completely satisfactory— but rather on how Harrold had written about the SCPs themselves. He didn’t like how he’d called Miles by his name instead of his number (and his accession number at that; Gears loathed the new numbering system with a passion he did not express). He didn’t like how Site-56 had let Miles go outside in the first place. He didn’t like how they’d given him books. He didn’t like that they’d let him complete a high school equivalent in containment; he viewed that that was outside the Foundation’s responsibilities to provide him an education. He didn’t like that they hadn’t done more testing, and how they had given him the opportunity to move down from lockdown to a more relaxed procedure. The list went on.

All of these things, Gears thought bitterly, were things he would have never allowed back when he was the head of research at Site-19. He was a true Foundation hard liner, one of the last of his kind; one of the old horsemen who’d cracked down and worked, worked ruthlessly, tirelessly towards purely scientific gain. In modern Foundation terms, his policy had only become more conservative as he aged. He held a considerable amount of power in both the ethics committee and the 05 counsel, but both were still harshly divided on whether or not they agreed with the conclusions of his near half-century of Foundation experience.

In a lot of ways, he was the face of the Foundation. He was the grandfather. He was respected. But he also was one of the cruelest men many younger Foundation administrators would ever meet. He was quiet and polite in his mannerisms— of course, he was known for his stoicism, which had stuck with him into his old age and formed much of the outer shell of his notoriety— but what Charlie considered ‘cold’ was what many others considered ‘cruel’. There were plenty of Foundation administrators who still agreed with what he had to say and lined up behind him at every vote, but much of it was spurred either by intimidation or by the assumption that he simply knew what he was doing.

And in his mind, Gears did know what he was doing. He opposed every miniscule vote on every kind of policy in favor of humanitarianism. He’d sat down in his chair at the head of the council meetings and said in his emotionless tone that he didn’t believe in keeping D-Class around, for instance; that it was more scientifically accurate for them to be purged at the end of each month, a policy that hadn’t been in place since the late 1940s. He conducted himself with a pristine poise when asserting that he believed what was done in Korea was in the Foundation’s best interests, which was always seen as a rather cruel answer in regards to the civilians who had died.

Central Committee legend went that he hadn’t always been this ruthless. Jack Bright, 05-6, the only other person older than Charlie and far more progressive than him in his policy, claimed that there was a time when Gears had been softer than this. That he had been kinder. Not much kinder, but not outright bitter and stagnant like he was.

But that was a time far before Korea, and long before his promotion to 05.

So Charlie, looking at the Starfish report at his desk in Geneva, came to the conclusion that what was needed to remedy this situation was Foundation hard-linership. He believed that the Foundation had gotten too slack on the leash. He wrote up the gag order with the speed of a Foundation ghostwriter, albit hindered by the painful arthritis in his hands. He signed it electronically, again with much more difficulty then he considered permissible in terms of efficiency. And then he sent it out. And sat back in his wheelchair with the riot report in front of him. And thought for a while.

People had been joking for decades that Charles Gears would die at his desk. To Gears the real surprise was in the fact that he didn’t die in a lab in the basement of Site-19, in the deep Siberian dark where he’d run his laboratory with that cold stoic cruelty that shocked Foundation newcomers. His desk in Geneva faced a large bay window. In an incredible twist of irony— some would call it mercy— Charles Gears died in the light not an hour after writing the gag order. All he had to do was doze off.

___________________________________

next one is also from my old scp story. specifically, this would be part of the climax. glad i got this ask because it made me look over it again, and i want to modify this for my original stuff because it’s good as hell, but the original is very foundation-specific. also, this is the au where draven is awful. like, everyone is awful, but you know.

“You’re not the only one with a tragic backstory, you know,” Eiler called over his shoulder. “My father was a college professor. Taught classics, of all things. He was also one hell of an alcoholic…”

Miles heard a metal cabinet ram shut with a loud BANG. Something fell into the washbasin and thudded like dead weight. “When I was ten, he got into a drunk driving accident. They took him to the hospital and had him in with a shrink-” his voice suddenly was sharper against the tile and metal of the room, facing towards him now, “-and the shrink told him, ‘you know, it seems like your problems are ingrained in your identity, sir. Your personality, if you will. If you can find a core for yourself, some sort of foundation instead of resorting to whatever this is, you might do a lot better for yourself’”.

There was the sound of polished black dress shoes turning swiftly, then clacking like hooves on the polished white laminate, walking back towards the chair. “Well! My father never liked unsolicited advice from strangers to begin with, but that got to him. He waited damn near six months to get out of there, and in that time he decided exactly what kind of core he wanted.”

And then he was in his line of vision, smiling placidly like he always had. Miles squirmed against the leather restraints, and he disappeared again, reammerging with the careful insertion of an IV needle into the inside of his right elbow. Miles sucked in a breath. His gloved hands were exceedingly cold.

“He came home. Can’t you believe?” Eiler continued, circling back around to the front of the chair, then ripping the sterile plastic from a syringe. “He passed all the psychiatric evaluations from thereon out. Detoxed, even…” Eiler trailed off. The vial of liquid was so small Miles couldn’t make out the color until it was being pulled, millimeter by millimeter, up into the needle and the syringe beyond. Eiler tapped it carefully against the side of the glass tube, then held the plunger between his teeth and began to roll the sleeves of his pressed white dress shirt up to the elbow. In the sharp clinical light, the pale undersides of his forearms were littered with straight wisps of scars, lined like the braces of a railroad track.

“I really should have thought to do this beforehand,” he spoke around the syringe, then finished buttoning the cusps and removed it, holding it delicately in his right hand. “I apologize. Can’t be good clinical practice to hold it like that. But as I was saying.”

Before Miles had a moment to brace himself, the needle was in one of the pale blue veins of his left hand. He instinctively jerked what wasn’t pinned under a wrist restraint; without a moment’s hesitation, Eiler slammed his fingers under the tip of the tan armrest and held them there, forcing his palm down cool and steady, emptying the remainder of the contents into back of his grip. With his body pinned down, it was easier for Miles to realize he was trembling. The substance burned in a way that wasn’t explicitly painful, but left a sort of numbness in its wake that made a pit open in his stomach.

“He came home from the hospital. And detox. He told me about the shrink,” Eiler pulled the syringe out and walked somewhere behind him to dispose of it. Miles realized, vaguely, that although Eiler’s hands were gone, his own was still gripping the chair tightly, as if he was willing whatever it was to stop the inch-by-inch creeping of heat up his arm.

And then Eiler reappeared, now in the form of a hand around his lower jaw, bracing him forwards against the forehead restraint. Miles met his eyes, cool and calm; and then he drifted them down to Eiler’s throat, and realized with a sense of detached horror that he had loosened his tie.

“You know what he said?” Eiler muttered.

Miles could not respond. Whatever it was had travelled up to his neck now, creeping down his torso, coursing through his capillaries. He had never wanted something to stop more in his entire life. He had never wanted something to be a nightmare more.

“'If I’m going to build a foundation, I’m going to build it from the wreckage of you,’” Eiler whispered. And then smiled. And then took his hand away.

Miles swallowed. There was a vague awareness of the jumpsuit zipper pressing against his windpipe, gently, softly, present. Eiler stepped back.

“And then he did.”

The reality cycler roared to life. It occured to Miles that he was going to die.

———-

[x] Doberman Executioner

Flashes. Miles sees flashes from the machine to his right, then feels them behind him eyes, popping in the front of his skull, then ricocheting pain, and then Draven stands on a cold overhead catwalk and looks down on the crowd below and is afraid.

In. Out. Benjamin Kondraki fades from his mind and Alto Clef sets in, telling him he does not have to feel to shoot, and he does not have to think to finish a job. That’s how he killed all those kids, he thinks. He just was, and then they weren’t.

His body relaxes. The warmth in his chest is the feeling one gets with certainty, stability, a meaning. He remembers a time when he could think while doing these jobs, when his morals lined up with his soul and certainties. Not anymore. His job has changed since Korea. Now, his job is simply to be.

And Draven Kondraki would be.

———-

Although Miles does not physically hear the loud cracking sound he hears it mentally, like an electric shock, like something has wormed into one ear and whipped itself against bone. He feels tranquilized all at once; static on his tongue, invading his mouth, burning his teeth. Thinking becomes a struggle. There are small black dots at the edges of his vision and he slumps in the restraints slightly, then hauls himself upwards, pushes his back into the chair, groggily begs himself not to pass out, although it feels less like he wants to pass out and more like he wants to shrink his soul away and fall into a sleep as dark and smooth as the Marianas Trench.

He wants to sleep. Eiler woke him up, he remembers. He’s been so tired lately. He wants to go back to sleep…

And then there is a hand around his jaw, pushing him back against the headrest, tilting up upwards…yes, up to the moths in the overhead lights.

“There are no dogs in the deep dark,” the figure says, the shadow, the white tooth tiles of god, “That’s one high. And now we go low…”

———-

A single shot from the overhead catwalk. The girl’s head explodes into unrecognition. A memory from when he was eight surfaces, vaguely, in the back of his mind: his father saying humans take a tenth of a second to react to anything. Draven applies this tenth of a second. He drops the sniper rifle and starts to run as the crowd is recoiling, and as he runs he hears the sounds of more shots from the wings, from inside the crowd, from the imposters that have invaded this space with such precision.

———-

“There are no sharks in the water,” says a voice. It’s his father’s. They are looking out over the shale beach, the dark sea, the churning tide. Seagulls wheel and cry above them. His father says, “Do you hear me, Miles? There are no sharks in the water.”

Miles says, “Yes there are,” and the vision disappears, up, back up, back to the chair where he is not certain Eiler said ‘sharks’ or 'water’, and he is not certain of much at all, or even if the dark shadow outlined along the wall beyond his television static vision is anyone he knows, and then he is up again; another crack, this one louder; a nip of electricity at his tongue. His head is pushed back again. The palm of a hand is on his windpipe, inches above the zipper on his collar. The hume change is faster this time. He wants to beg and his jaw will not move.

“…And high again,” Eiler says. His train track forearms. Miles realizes in his peripheral that he’s sweating profusely through his jumpsuit, that it’s running down his face and dripping from the tip of his nose. “You see how this works? There’s a process here, Miles—” and the rest is drowned out by the buzzing of the hume field and the high, sharp crack of reality in his ears…

———-

[DRAVEN AGAIN]

———-

He’s holding him on the precipice of a steep cliff, dust and blue sky and noone to hear him scream. Eiler leans in.

“There is no broken masquerade, Miles,” he said, “There was no Korea. Do you hear me, Miles? You’ve been tricked. Lied to. I need you to listen to me.” A tightening around his throat. Hot tears in his eyes. “This is the best you’ll ever get, you see? There is no life for you outside of here. Now I want you to say it with me…”

A low, animal whine chokes up from his throat, thick with terror.

“Say it with me, now. 'There is no revolution because there is no broken masquerade’.”

“Please stop,” he sobs, “Please stop…”

———-

Draven wanted this to stop.

___________________________________

i wrote this one during nanowrimo. yes, miles and eiler here are modified versions of the miles and eiler in the scene above, but with different dynamics because i was just playing with stuff.

“There is no one in the cockpit,” Eiler growled. “This is an automated train.”

They were sitting at the table, a flashlight between them. The bleeding from Eiler’s temple had stopped, but they both had concluded he had a concussion after he’d pressed a hand to his forehead to check the wound, only to be hit with sharp pain and a blurred image instead of the typical biopathic visual.

“You’re saying we’re the only ones here?” Miles asked. He’d assumed there were people in other cabins, staff or something, at least someone running the train to begin with.

“I never said that,” Eiler said. “There’s one other person on board.”

“…Is she okay?” Miles asked. Eiler dug in his pocket for his cigarettes, working by the LED light.

“She should be fine. They drugged her to hell and back at the capitol, she’s on a drip and a catheter…” The flick of a lighter. Eiler had a cigarette in his mouth, now, balancing between his lips. “The hospital car has a backup generator.”

“She’s a prisoner.”

The lighter came to life, illuminating Eiler in the deep dark, creeping from the outside in in the same way sand always made it’s way inside his mother’s home. “You sound awfully surprised for someone sitting on a train going to a prison.”

“We should check on her,” Miles said. The older man took a drag on the cigarette and exhaled; with the heating shut off, the warmth of it left Miles frightened. It was colder outside here than he’d ever experienced outside at the capitol.

“More than that,” Eiler said, “we should wake her up. Pass me my cane, would you?” It was on the floor several feet away; as Miles got it, he pushed himself to his feet, visibly steadying himself on the wall.

“I don’t see why we need to wake her up. She’s a prisoner, right?” Miles handed him the cane, and Eiler balanced his cigarette back between his lips as he pulled an emergency lever, bright red and hidden in the wall beside the back door; it slid back to reveal a gangway through a storage car, loaded with crates and equipment.

“You know that blackout a few days ago?” he asked, limping over the threshold.”

Miles shuddered, remembering the bypass machine, the flickering lights, the nightmare it had been. “I do.”

“She caused it. Only perpetuator. She’s a technopath. Take the flashlight, will you?”

“Wait. She?” Miles took the flashlight and followed, walking along the narrow pathway through the storage car, following closely behind. Eiler’s cigarette glowed through the encroaching dark.

“You’re surprised by that, too? How boring is your life that you think that’s interesting?”

“Technopathy is a Y-linked gene, right? That’s why all technopaths are male—”

“—No, all technopaths you’ve met are male. The Y-linked hypothesis hasn’t been proven. The margin is skewed in the male direction, but a good quarter of technopaths are female. Probably more, seeing as technopaths are less… rigorous about everything than we are.”

“The X-linked biopathy hypothesis has been proven, though.”

“The X-linked biopathy hypothesis is wrong, too. It’s passed through the mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from the mother’s side.”

“You have no evidence for that.”

“And you do? How old are you, twelve?”

“I’m eighteen,” Miles said, shining the flashlight on the lever by the back door of the car. “and we learned both those phenomenons in medical school.”

Eiler yanked on the lever, and the next gangway door came open: the next car was medical surplus, vaccines in styrofoam containers, biohazard bags. “Rule one of the biological sciences,” he said, narrowly avoiding fluid leaking from a broken surplus of saline, “Researchers can’t make up their goddamn minds about any shit less than fifteen years old. Easier to just slap a hypothesis in a textbook, and the people who actually care will dig in and find that it’s more complicated then the goddamn lecture slides said it was.”

“And you’ve been keeping up with all this.”

“Of course. And I’m assuming you’re interested, too, since it wouldn’t be your first foray into research. Tell me, how much of agreeing to be my personal prisoner is due to the fact you heard about a freakish disease outbreak at the very prison you’d be going to?”

“That’s different.”

Miles almost ran into Eiler when he stopped to look at him, his cigarette starting to ash. “You worked at the Moray lab, right? Plague control. Dr. Wilde mentioned it.”

“I ran samples at the Moray lab. They gave me what they didn’t want to do themselves and I sat and did it. I got paid minimum wage. I was the equivalent of a dishwasher. Have you considered that I’m being sent to prison because I was sentenced to prison, but you thought that would put my training to waste?”

Eiler paused, exhaled smoke again, and turned to continue down the aisle. “Most eighteen year olds would be far more upset about going to prison, is all I’m saying.”

“So you think I’m going because I want to catch a strange disease I can die from in four days?”

“Oh, Miles,” Eiler said, “I never mentioned the disease took four days.”

Miles fell silent. Eiler smiled in the dark.

“A lot of my staff died over the summer. Most of them were too busy dying an agonizing, bloody death to be scientifically interested in what they were dying from. The way I see it, at least when it happens to you, you’ll be able to look inside yourself and tell me what’s happening.” He glanced behind him again, taking out a keyring to release a lock on the lever of the third car, “In non-pathics, the sense of hearing is the last thing to go. In pathics, it’s the sensation of casting that goes last. Might as well put it to good use. Might be a little painful though, what with the catastrophic bleeding and all. ”

The lock dropped open. The door slid away, revealing a sterile car with a tile floor and flood lights illuminating the cabin. It looked empty aside from a single gurney, midway up the left side, hung with tubes and wires. Eiler sighed.

“Alright,” he said, “let’s hope she doesn’t kill us.”

#Anonymous #man this is a lot #scp things are in the au where everyone is awful and everyone suffers so like. thats that on that #idk yall know what ur getting into at this point prob but #abuse ment /#think that probably covers all thats in there actually #draven kondraki #gears #writing #vandal.txt

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