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#and indeed ava this season

booasaur · 1 year

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I appreciate your Mary analysis. S2 was ab incredible letdown for me after such a long wait. After Toya’s tweets about shows that praise themselves for their diversity but don’t protect WOC bts, I feared she’d be off the show, but it was even worse than I imagined that she didn’t appear at all and the show tells us she’s dead and then THAT is never used to drive any of the characters nor mentioned again after ep 2, when Mary was so important s1. I couldn’t enjoy s2 at all.

Yeah, unfortunately what I vaguely remembered was something like that, and you're right, except for the sequence where they found out about her death, which I did think was very moving, it wasn't really brought up again or driving their plot.

If her departure was indeed due to a racist incident that's definitely horrible, but unless we hear more on it, we don't know the full truth so it's hard to be sure who or what to direct our anger or outrage toward. Though it's of course still completely understandable that it broke the 4th wall for you and stopped you from enjoying the season.

I myself was still able to enjoy the rest of the show, but Mary's absence does leave a sour note indeed, and it's absolutely worth bringing up.

#replies #sent on 20221125 #Anonymous #4 #5 #warrior nun #shotgun mary #I also wanted to point out last time that it isn't just that mary or lilith would be the dissenting voice against the others #but that they were mature in a different way from bea and suzanne #and indeed ava this season #ava and bea in particular jumped into fully leadership roles and I just wish we'd been able to see them rise to it through this season #with mary and lilith mentoring and blocking them #a bunch of complicated interesting dynamics we lost completely

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thisisnotthenerd · 6 months

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i love where this season is taking us. finding out about the first stoats. that the stoats of last bast speak human. tula locking down bennett at the thought of walmer showing up again. lukas as either a 3rd level bard or 10th level expert sidekick. the entire concept of dr. tara steel.

in other news, we have the final class updates for burrow's end! i'm expecting level 10 to be their endpoint, as they've all landed there this episode. everybody multiclassed, with 3 cleric multiclasses this season.

tula: stoat mom as a feat is all i'm going to say. towards the end, she's really leaning into the healing aspect with the cleric levels.

initial level: redemption paladin 4

final level: redemption paladin 7 | life cleric 3

jaysohn: adhd karate boy, or all stoats in a nutshell. a true killer like his grandma.

initial level: astral self monk 4

final level: astral self monk 5 | swashbuckler rogue 5

viola: the embryonic diapause storyline is going to kill me, i can feel it. it is indeed. instead of going more magic like tula she went more martial.

initial level: devotion paladin 4

final level: devotion paladin 7 | champion fighter 3

thorn vale: anxious wife guy cult leader is something i didn't know i needed until now, but i'm so glad that that's where jasper went with him. and now he's really leaning into the cult and the power of the blue.

initial level: fey wanderer ranger 4

final level: fey wanderer ranger 5 | tempest cleric 5

ava: if generational trauma was a stoat. the commitment to the werther's? phenomenal. she died and came back with magic.

initial level: ancestral guardians barbarian 3 | fighter

final level: ancestral guardians barbarian 5 | battlemaster fighter 3 | grave cleric 2

lila: i'm living for izzy as a stoat that can sneak attack people and read??? and now lila has fireball. what could be better.

initial level: inquisitive rogue 4

final level: arcane trickster rogue 4 | bladesinger wizard 6

all of this info is available in the spreadsheet under level progressions, and also in the ao3 compilation in chapter 11.

#dimension 20 #burrow's end #dimension 20 spoilers #burrow's end spoilers #dimension 20 meta #thisisnotthenerd's d20 stats

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desognthinking · 1 month

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the pier. 9.3k. (or, more from the haunted house designers au.)

ava & (her new) co. have one and a half years to construct three groundbreaking, mindblowing, prestige haunted houses around the country, all in time for halloween. this is scouting/teambuilding trip numero uno. it's not going well so far.

---

Ava sees her at the end of the pier, a dark figure in the already-dark; a smudge of barely-moving ink on the line between wind and water. Barely, indeed – wavering less than the yearning swallow and swoop of the waves interrupted by pillars of wood, and, further back, stone.

At night, after everything’s shut, this place is quiet until the fishermen get out in the early morning. In the off-season, even more so. Rain slings down frequently, and it’s not warm enough for balmy walks by the rocks. Not many come out, if any. Ava’s one.

She calls out as she walks down the planks, only thinking belatedly that perhaps she might not want to be disturbed. Out here behind the motel, unmoving under the preliminary drizzle of rain, embraced and cocooned by temperamentally warping air. It is, after all, that tremulous transitory phase between spring and summer that borrows its faces from both, and switches its masks sharply in the slit-time of blinks.

Bian lian, Beatrice had murmured, not even looking up from her laptop. Face-changing, literally, in Sichuan opera. A flick of a wrist, a deft flourish, and an elaborate face falls and reforms in the fraction of a second.

This was in the motel’s breakfast room, the one with the dubiously cleaned burgundy felt chairs where they served a modest continental breakfast. Mostly cleared out after said breakfast, the air was stained with lingering cigarette smoke from the lounge next door, and the smell of cheap canned ham. The plastic display vases on each table had been stowed away, and in their meager place someone – probably Beatrice – had stuck a crinkly, disposable plastic bottle containing a bunch of freshly picked yellow flowers.

It was not an especially private space, what with the pale pink bellies sunning themselves right outside the glass panels, but it wasn’t as if the conversation had progressed to anything especially private. Legally speaking. Or productive, for that matter.

For the fast forty-five minutes Ava and Lilith had been busy prodding, pacing, and sending small metaphorical pockets of firework powder across the room to burst and splatter all over each others’ skin. Skating them like over wet ice so they would knock against each others’ ankles and bruise upon detonation. Camila, who’d been trying, at least, to keep the situation under control, had gone to pick out some maps and free guides, leaving them simmering in the quickly-warming confines of the space.

A lot of trivial inconsequential things, and a lot of hard, serrated words. First it was an argument of how transformative a depiction of folklore ought to be, theoretically, to balance originality and faithfulness. Then they’d snapped at each other over their personal choices of A24 horror, and Ava’s awfully ignorant lack of exposure to some obscure ‘60s Romanian indie production that Lilith really liked.

And in the corner Beatrice was curled up into a chair, laptop sitting on the flat plane formed by the side of her folded knees.

She was strangely quiet, considering the poorly-veiled spats being undertaken just a couple feet away. By Beatrice Standards, however, this was possibly normal, as Ava was learning. When, riled up, she’d gone around to get a glass of water from the lightly stained dispenser, she’d found her watching an unlisted YouTube video from a couple years ago featuring an in-house presentation Ava had given at Disney. It was about scary rides and storytelling; translating horror into immersive park experiences. A singular earbud was stuffed into her left ear.

She didn’t make any attempt to minimize or pause the video as Ava went by.

“What are you doing?” she blurted, interrupting Lilith going on and on about something or another.

Beatrice hummed. “Camila sent it to me.”

Ava waited, but that seemed to be the end of Beatrice’s explanation. Pixelated tiny Ava on the laptop screen sputtered and spread her arms out as the powerpoint slide behind her belly-rolled to its successor in a kitschy transition.

“Wait,” Beatrice said, before Ava could awkwardly walk the rest of the way to the dispenser. She bent down to scoop something up. “Here.” She held up a can of Pepsi to Ava, still cold enough that the scant condensation on it had not yet beaded up into little pearls. Ava saw that underneath her chair she had stowed a rectangular cooler box of canned drinks, with two or three more cans left in it.

Ava took the can with a soft thanks.

Beatrice quirked her head and murmured something that sounded like you’re welcome.

Beatrice said the damnedest things sometimes, amidst her quiet. Appropriate, sure, but unexpected unless you were looking out closely for the tell-tale flicker at the corner of her eyes, a horizontal dart-to and sometimes a shutter-quick sly twitch of her mouth that indicated she was preparing for an interjection.

Amused, if hardly full-blown entertained. Sharp, but never cruel. Indirect, and three layers deep. Oftentimes three planets away. Ava found it less than scrutable, and more than fascinating.

Bian lian, when they were talking about transitions between spaces and narrative divisions within Houses, which was a convoluted way to say that Lilith was getting evasive over the psychology and philosophy of putting fucking walls and doors in a haunted house. Just when the pressure was about to burst, Beatrice had piped up, and Lilith had turned around, her fists gradually unclenching.

Later, Ava repeatedly scrubbed back and forth through the timeline of a video, mesmerized and marveling by the Chinese art. A minor flourish, or a glance of a cheek and – thwp – an entranced audience guided to look wherever the artist led.

The changing of faces. The fuzzy in-between of seasons. Here on the coast it is even more stark, this time of year.

She calls out to Beatrice as she walks down the planks, and Beatrice turns around. Her hair is bunned up loosely, low and unresistant to ocean-blown stragglers

Ava walks closer when Beatrice turns around, calmly, and hovers a distance away so that Beatrice can keep a cushion of space between them, if she likes.

“It’s drizzling.”

“I know.” Beatrice doesn’t take Ava up on the offer to –leave? To chase Ava back in and away? To reassure Ava that she’d prefer to stay out here, alone? She pauses, though. Looks up, as if there was anything to see up in the sky, too dark for the clouds to distinguish themselves in plumes or pillows. Ava looks up too, just in case, but it’s a mess of splotched black-gray.

Over their heads the apertures in the sky are widening into gulfs, and the dribble of water turns into sheets.

Like the crepe streamers they used to hang up on the doorways in St Michael’s, fluttering maddeningly out of reach. The nuns had thought it was some kind of sick kindness to drape them from low enough beams that their papery ends would lap at and blow into Ava’s face as they wheeled her back and forth down the corridor like the monotone automation of a fucking metronome. Each blue and yellow and pink streamer touched her cheeks like a slap. Ava’d wanted to grip them with her teeth and pull them down.

The rain, Ava reminds herself, is cold and uncaring and holds no such malice.

Beatrice keeps staring into the ocean. “It’s beautiful out here.”

There’s words on the tip of Ava’s tongue but she holds them there and thinks; considers for once, before replying. Something about Beatrice, without saying anything aloud, asks this of her. If she recites a pun it must be good.

“It is.”

Beatrice hums. She turns her head back and inclines her head slightly as she regards Ava. Ava holds her breath.

It occurs to her faintly that she’s never spoken one-on-one with Beatrice, ever. Of her three new coworkers, Beatrice feels the most faraway. She refolds Ava’s strewn, barbeque sauce-stained maps while Ava’s in the restroom, and plugs her wired earphones into a Spotify daylist full of musicians Ava’s never heard of. She has a phone widget on her homescreen tracking migratory birds, and she goes out to the pier alone under ten-thirty p.m. rain.

Ava studied Beatrice’s folders – all their folders – back at the office, once this whole thing was confirmed. Before even they’d found out. It felt almost prying, in a way, even if Suzanne herself had invited her to sit at the desk and passed her the papers. Sure, the Houses they detailed were long public; analyzed and reviewed to death, but this was different. This seemed private. Creativity and creation, to Ava at least, were wild creatures; bounding and bold on the outside, raw and sensitive and prone to clawing themselves apart on the inside.

She switched on the reading light and thumbed through the dossiers. Lilith’s had pen gashes through each iteration, angry and decisive, her documentation otherwise sparse and terse. Camila’s included scrapbooks of fabric and postcard-sized paintings, image references taped on each page.

The shells that Beatrice left behind were schematics and scripts in perfect order and format. Comments typed out formally along margins left deliberately blank, and mechanics illustrated in labeled figures, which were different from tables and clarified as such in the appendix. Without effusion or exaggeration, and with only harshly limited information to be gleaned from a couple of drily humorous notes thrown unexpectedly into the handwritten rightmost column of her change logs.

Amendment for review: section 7d entryway from section 7c now to be approached from visitors’ 9 o’clock, she’d written. Do remind reviewer S. Masters to be awake for it.

Said jester herself stands with her back still facing Ava, just out of reach, on the pier. Her hands dig into the pockets of her oversized windbreaker as her feet dig into the wood under them. Rogue strands and locks of dark hair follow the course of the wind. It’s beautiful out here, she says, just loud enough over the waves for Ava to catch.

Beatrice takes one and a half steps, precisely, so that she’s partially, intentionally, facing Ava. She says something, blown to the wind – about the facts of this place, maybe. Ava hears the name of the town crunched around the round Rs of Beatrice’s accent, and feels her feet willed, as if by that same wind, to step closer.

Closer, closer, until she’s but an arm’s length from Beatrice, close enough she could reach out and adjust on her shoulder the crooked hood of her windbreaker, long blown off the top of her head.

Then Beatrice turns back to face the pier, and she cranes her neck to look at Ava wordlessly, and Ava finally, finally, steps up beside her.

They got to town by car yesterday afternoon, a coastal place long salted by tourism when the tides were right, and only recently rejuvenated very slightly in biology circles when a couple of the further-flung waters got identified as hotspots for particularly unique marine ecosystems.

Beatrice tells her there’s a small new outpost set up from newly-won grant money, although it’s far away from where they’re staying. She glances at Ava. There was a book at the information center, she quickly explains.

Ava knows what she’s talking about – said information center is a ten-minute walk inland, in the town center, and it’s more of a weatherbeaten cubicle with yellowed pamphlets and dusty books than a living, breathing tourist pitstop. It’s battered on all sides by the elements and seems to be standing only because it’s too difficult to dislodge from where it’s wedged between an ice cream shop and a postbox. Beatrice, all the same, peered through every peeling poster on the wall.

They’d gone there yesterday after picking up some groceries while exploring the little town. Ava reached for an easy word to describe the town and found ‘fatigued’, and then she thought some more and concluded that it was drowned in a weird heavy-light emptiness.

The time of the year did it no favors. Nobody goes island hopping in the rain, and it’s not dive season at the reefs. The fishing spots are browbeaten for everyone but the seasoned local fishermen, so the commercial tourist pontoons are netted up and fenced off.

As a matter of fact, it had been so hard to get a ride to the caves, Ava had had to pay extra out of her own pocket. Lilith, of course, had nonetheless taken offense at her ‘poor planning’. Whatever. They have a ride. It leaves before dawn.

Now, side by side, Ava can’t tell if Beatrice is swaying lightly or rocking to the rhythm of the waves, or if it's just an illusion of movement on the pier.

“Sadly a lot of places are shut,” Ava states the obvious, “but at least the rooms were cheap.”

Beatrice tips her weight onto her heels, and this time Ava’s sure of it. It’s easy and balanced.

“No,” she says, after some thought. “I didn’t know much about this town before, but it was a good choice to come here. Especially now during the offseason, when it’s quieter.”

She skews her head oceanward as if trying to listen for something, and Ava follows suit, engrossed to the point of almost being bowled over by the jar of a wave hitting the wooden poles of the pier with a crunching thud.

“It’s strange,” Beatrice says very seriously, “to be congested in so much stillness and silence.”

There is nothing still or silent about the roar of the waves and the rain.

Beatrice’s work, Ava knows, has been increasingly skewing towards exploring a sort of apprehension and anxiety generated by the opposite of a traditionally suffocating enclosed-space experience. It’s strongest in her recent projects; Ava can spot it immediately – bleakly open space, elements of naturalism and realism manipulated with great technical care to subvert expectations and stir up something deeply uncomfortable and primal.

Three years ago, Supermarket Massacre had had her fingerprints all over it. The year after that, the award-winning Aquarium, with Lilith and Camila and that one guy Vincent who’d apparently slacked off then ran off. Last year she took point on her own set for the first time. And in all three, like a bloody fingerprint, the opening scenes – the first sets located immediately past the entrances – were all so characteristically, deceptively normal. Regular, in an unsettling, skin-crawling way. This was only the prelude, of course. Slowly the knife would be driven in and twisted unforgivingly.

It’s funny, because Beatrice insists, time and time again, that she doesn’t see herself as an artist or a creator. She wrote a guest article on a blog describing herself as merely an engineer organizing a space and Ava wryly thought the prose itself, elegant and clear, had given away the lie. What does a haunted house mean? How do we execute a nightmare into something feasible and tangible? Questions that had a myriad of answers and I do not believe we have yet exhausted them. There are many themes and concepts I’d like to reinvigorate beyond their traditional face value.

Subtlety, Ava sees, in last year’s factory-set After Hours. Movement, in increasingly sophisticated ways, beyond simple towering puppetry or rattling machinery or killer clowns scaring people into scurrying down claustrophobic pre-marked corridors. Soundscapes and landscapes that teeter on the brink of too-real, sped up or slowed down or taken one inch rightwards. Of course, unsettlingly unassuming opening scenes. Fear, Beatrice wrote, must be given time and space to breathe and self-propagate.

In a way, if this weekend getaway is a scouting trip less concerned with laying down concrete narrative groundwork and cultural research, and more concerned with opening a door into how each of Beatrice, Lilith and Camila see the world creatively, this bare coastal town is right up Beatrice’s alley.

The least supernatural place in the world. And yet in Beatrice’s eyes it is a town that has dotted perforation lines across its torso tempting her endlessly to tear it open to unearth something deeper and darker that adheres to the inner surfaces of its pleura.

She speaks too-softly but almost excitedly against the thunder. Underneath the reserved, controlled demeanor there’s a glint of a thirst and challenge hidden underneath her tongue.

“The park in the middle of town,” she says, “desire paths all through the long grass and not a footfall on the real ones. There’s a tape that stretches across the pavement with a warning sign dated two months ago.” Her hands have crept up their sides to prod out at waist level, tangling and twirling in the air like dancing with the rain. Or making the rain dance and twist around them.

They freeze in awareness, and the rain slaps down on them.

“Go on”, says Ava. It comes out like a request, coiled up at the end and disappearing into the air.

She thinks Beatrice smiles a tiny bit at that, her eyes unreadable, but she doesn’t go on, and Ava is disappointed.

“Well,” Beatrice’s tone is steady and tells Ava that the door is shut for now, “perhaps we’ll speak more about it after the caves.”

She says this matter-of-factly as if they’re all going to come back on that boat after sunset, sit down cross-legged in a circle with notepads and laptops, and excitedly paint a mural across the ceiling with lime-sharp ideas and skin-crawling narratives. This isn’t going to happen. Lilith nearly put a fist through the glass panels of a cabinet mere hours earlier.

Beatrice is usually the most brutally pragmatic and unsentimental of the four, and here she is talking about the future like the present is a bubble that will undoubtedly pop and reveal a rose-tinted world. Ava doesn’t know what to think of it.

The coldness of the rain is starting to gnaw at and numb her fingertips. She breathes, strange and short. The words come out too easily: “You were watching my presentation from two years ago.”

Beatrice nods. “I was, yes. I finished it over afternoon break.”

“Can I ask why?”

When Beatrice turns, Ava can’t see her face all that clearly. “Well, I wanted to know your principles and approach to designing fear experiences.” In the first flutter-crack of her composure Beatrice coughs twice. “It seemed, at least, something productive to do. And it’s important if we are to work closely together.”

The wind, walloped and fickle so that the rain beating down on Ava’s face seems to change its direction of attack every ten seconds or so, does not seem to pull them closer together, like in fanciful, romantic stories. It just tugs Ava about at her shoulders and knees like a ragdoll and makes her dizzy.

Beatrice pulls her jacket close. She gestures for Ava, shivering harder, to pull her sleeves down her elbows. Ava hadn’t even noticed, and does so now, but she’s still cold – damp-cold then air-frozen from salty windspray. She puts her hands as far as they can go in her pockets. Shifts her weight.

Beatrice’s face twists with – perplexion? Concern?

In the meager light Ava sees her glance back behind them and cock her head towards the light from which they came, questioning.

Ava shakes her head, and Beatrice doesn’t push. She doesn’t sigh out loud but her shoulders follow the trajectory of its motion as she peels off her outer layer, quickly and without fanfare. Underneath she is wearing a thick hoodie that only now begins to darken everywhere except for its already-exposed hood. Clearly, she’d planned to come out to walk, unlike Ava.

Who’d stumbled out late after dinner, full of thoughts that had nowhere to stew and nowhere to run.

They’d had a big fight over the dinner table, boiled over from where it had been bubbling the last two days. There was a slamming of fists on the table, and Ava had torn her napkin from the tablecloth and went to sit alone at the bartop.

What exactly do you want? What’s your structure? Churning in her head like an infinitely turning contraption, mixed fiercely over the anger of being asked to prove it and being goaded harder and harder towards standards that Camila and Beatrice never seemed to be asked to meet.

Full of feelings and other weird, warped rumblings that were difficult to thoroughly unpick as usual. And the messy sensation of all the air in her chest compressed from pushing frustratedly and hopelessly against a wall. Hoping the nebulous concept of Outside might put it into place or at least shove it all into boxes for her to sort out later. Ava, head hot and too-bright, lightheaded and needing to have it tamped down by the physical weight of darkness, had stumbled out into the night. She’d thought only of draining off the alcohol slightly and having it evaporate, along with everything else, from her scalp into the cool air.

It has, now, in any case.

Burned out rapidly from the initial buzz, and then she’d seen Beatrice at the edge of the ocean.

Beatrice holds her windbreaker out, pinched between her fingers. Her hands curl neatly on both sides over the shoulders, and she brushes it once, twice, to chase away the little droplets accumulating on the water resistant surface. They smooth away into a flat of smaller droplets, and she offers it up to Ava.

“Here,” she says softly, “I have a few layers on already.”

Ava hesitates, but Beatrice simply dusts off some water again and turns it with the change in the direction of the wind so that the rain doesn’t get inside. “Before the lining becomes soaked,” she urges in a whisper.

The windbreaker is soft and lined with fleece, and it slips from Beatrice’s hands as Ava takes it and turns away to shrug it on. Beatrice watches her as she pulls her hands out of the sleeves; it is large already on Beatrice’s frame, and on Ava it is almost swallowing, like a ghost encumbered by its drapes. She fumbles with the zipper, pulling it up to her neck eventually before straightening the collar and turning it up.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Beatrice says. She puts her own hands into her hoodie and looks very warm. Wet strands of hair drip down now and cling to her face, but she looks settled.

“So, why did you come to the OCS?” she asks. It doesn’t sound cutting.

Ava pouts and takes the bait. She deliberately shifts backwards onto a foot and crosses her arms so that her sleeves meet and zip with a rubbery drag.

“And what did you learn from my presentation?” Please don’t let this come off as rude please don’t let her take this the wrong way please don’t let her take offense–

“--Guilty,” Beatrice shrugs, a motion that looks almost foreign on her. “But I asked first.” She takes her hands out of her hoodie pocket and wrings them together absently, then lets them fall back down and tucks them back, relaxed, snugly into the pouch.

She looks younger, like this, with her hair mussed by the weather and comfy in her hoodie. Like the windbreaker it is oversized and of indiscernible color. Ava can almost convince herself that it’s bruised lilac or dark blue. More likely it is some shade of plain gray.

Ava exhales, and feels more than hears the wood creak beneath her feet. The water is opening up and closing shut endlessly and Beatrice is looking at her, waiting, watching, and suddenly Ava needs to move; needs to curl her toes and stretch her fingers and get somewhere else. Move somewhere.

And somehow, somewhere inside, needs also –hopes also, for Beatrice to move with her.

Ava nods quickly. The wind changes yet again and her throat is dry. Instinctively she licks her lip and finds it salty.

“How about the path behind the airstrip?”

Beatrice smiles tentatively. “Okay.”

They retreat from the water to concrete. The motel is built on part of an old private airstrip. There’s no longer sand here, just rocks and gravel petering out into the water. Behind the airstrip, though, there is a path that inclines upwards, lit by lamps until it reaches a boarded-up platform that drops harshly down into foam.

Hands in windbreaker pockets, Ava leads them farther from shore. She doesn’t know if it’s the temperament of the sky or an illusion of distraction but the drizzle is slowing down now until it is in comparison barely noticeable as they head up the slope by the lamplight.

“So, why I joined this place,” Ava huffs. Beatrice hums in acknowledgement.

“A few things, I guess. You’ve watched the video,” Ava goes on, and Beatrice nods. “It was about storytelling, and scares, and honestly there’s some truth to how much you can do behind squeaky clean Disney barricades. I said it the first day – I love horror and what the OCS has done with it.”

She tells Beatrice about the first time she went to an OCS House, years ago; they must both have been in college at the time. University, she rolls her eyes, as the corners of Beatrice’s mouth dance upwards, whatever. She’d taken two days off class with a bunch of friends just to travel, because it was the only major independent place that had good wheelchair access back then.

Ava’s not using a cane now but she’d had it with her yesterday after getting out stiff and sore after the long car ride. Beatrice doesn’t ask.

“That halloween, with all the houses – it blew me away. God. No kitschy carnival music, no colorful performers prancing around giving candy out to children at the doors. The food stands?” she gestures, “All outside the gates. No fucking carousels in the scare zones.”

Back then there were fewer Houses, and the compound was significantly smaller. Already it was a carefully calibrated maze, ready to scare in every weather contingency, with traps that would move and performers that would sit very still on steel chairs and, back then, the services of expensive external contractors to beef up the outdoor scenic design.

“But d’you know what’s scary?” Ava turns to Beatrice and stops. Beatrice doesn’t startle, like Ava had feared in the split second after she’d spun around. “Traditionally, you don’t talk about a House, right? It’s rude to put spoilers in reviews or whatever. I loved that. I thought it made it fun, like a secret you’re all in on.”

“Then the OCS comes along and says: No, actually it’s important that people have access to our Houses, and the full extent of that means discreetly available trigger warnings and official spoilers, anytime. We’ll make it a keystone of our design that every House has easy Outs in every section, and advertise it front and center.”

Ava knows Beatrice knows this, of course.

“Which people thought was stupid, right? A terrible business move at best, if not a betrayal of the values of the art.”

Everyone knows what happened next. The move turned out wildly successful: a careless, confident vaunt that the OCS could afford to go to such daring lengths and still terrify people. Daring would-be visitors, almost, to try and stay unaffected. We’re different, it said. Fucking try us then. They were free then, too, to do the worst possible things, in the safest possible environment. And nobody who didn’t need to have a look at the trigger warnings did so, while the number of first-time haunted house visitors shot up.

“Psychology,” Ava nods fiercely, “which is, as everyone knows, at the heart of manipulating fear.”

She leans forward, finally, looks Beatrice in the eye. It’s honest, and it’s terrifying. “I want that – to break the rules. All of them.”

Is that a controversial thing to say? To someone whose modus operandi famously is carefully twisted and controlled restraint, compared to the overflow and excess of most Houses. Who calculates, psychologically, the impact and ideal-slash-worst-case reactions to each moment in the House cascade, as if the mind is a kind of a machine and the House is a code passed through its system. Ava’s read what her critics say of her – that she’s cerebral to a fault. Technically masterful and horrifying; nauseating, in that cold, disturbing way, but that sometimes she fails to recognize that bombast is not a bad thing. That some excess does not the route suboptimize, or that instinct can give rise to flair and not undercooked loose ends.

Frigid, aloof. Beatrice tugs her from where she was headed towards a dead end off the slope, and nudges her up towards where the gradient beneath their feet tapers off. The back of her hand, where it brushes accidentally along Ava’s wrist, is warm.

They’re standing on an outcropping now. The rain has stopped fully and the path is more clearly illuminated by the higher density of lamps on the ground. They’re paid for by the motel, presumably, and somehow dug into the earth. There’s a bench here, too, and in sync Ava and Beatrice wordlessly sit down. The stone surface is wet, the kind that will soak into their dark jeans and leave the seats damp.

They sit, anyway, the bushes crudely truncated so that the view looks out to dark water.

Ava is one of them, now, no matter how much it doesn’t feel like it. Yet, a telltale voice quietly hopes.

The business of haunted houses is a cyclical thing, isn’t it? Unlike working in the park year-round. Sure, there are two permanent fixtures that run through the year and get refreshed every year or so to keep the base revenue going and the OCS name in people’s mouths, but ultimately that’s the side show. It’s a seasonal business and so now the main seasonal campus is dark, strewn with work lights and scaffolding and blueprints.

But even if the OCS as the upcoming season’s visitors will know it is primordial now, with nothing even to show for it yet, she’s one of them. Even if she feels out of place, knee deep in viscous fluid.

In Disney they’d hardly ever travel, because the rides she worked on were drawn from existing fictional worlds and their stories. Perhaps if she was lucky they would visit the place from which the fictional world was mined. Many other haunted house production companies, too, mostly drew inspiration from local or regional folklore or culture. Currently, the trend was, in fact, to camouflage the House itself into the very environment and location on which it stood.

Not many production companies would have her here, in a scraggly nowhere town of her own choosing, filmy with rain-gunk and algae, roofs discolored by harsh caustic cleaning sprays. Dipping her toes into somewhere unknown and parsing out something to bring back to the city and its bad 24-hour coffee vending machines and paint spills on uneven concrete and rough graffitied walls. There is, ironically, something fresh, new and strange about it all.

And it’s why Ava’s here, really. To eat food from different places. Run her toes through grass in every country. Put her tongue out to the breeze and bring it back in the form of twisting walls that cave down around the people within. To behold nothing the same way twice, and to insist on nothing as sacred. Break all the rules.

The waves are distant but the sound carries up and towards them.

“That’s what I gathered,” Beatrice says, wistfully, or thoughtfully, “from the presentation.” She sits a little way away on the bench, her hands crossed at her wrists and fingers peeking out from the thick sleeves. Under Ava’s hands, pressed down on either side, the seat is rough. And Beatrice, back straight and so calm, is soft. Like her eyes.

Beatrice looks down and runs her fingers over the grain of the bench too, coarse and stuck together, although smoothened with time. She seems to sigh, soak the air around her into her pores, and relax. Rise, like foam in a glass.

“In the beginning of the video,” she starts, “You compare a good ride to a good haunted house.” She puts up three fingers and duly counts them off. “Both tell an immersive story. Both twist away from what the audience knows to be reality. Both break convention to surprise.”

Her voice, Ava finds, is endlessly different from the only times she’s heard it at length, over a stuttering video call. Far away from the stricturing of bad connection and Zoom audio, it sounds different – just as modulated and thoughtful, but full of something, contained, yet to overflow. Ava thinks of a pot with a lid with hot, rich soup in it, sizzling lightly with a fragrance that perfuses the whole kitchen.

She talks through the presentation – Beatrice, that is, in her own words, and Ava’s maybe-kind of-perhaps bewitched. It’s the way she fits Ava’s points gently into a structure and perspective that even Ava hadn’t thought of; the way she spins Ava’s hamfisted tangent on dueling flight-or-hug-tight instincts into a dizzying fifteen-second suckerpunch insight into isolation versus community in group horror experiences. Or the way she recites her favorite of Ava’s bad jokes, word-for-word, from memory, and looks genuinely pleased by it too.

Ava doesn’t know for sure. She’s still reeling when Beatrice simply pauses and settles. She bobs her head, a tiny, barely-there smile on her face. “So yes,” she says, “that’s what I’ve learned about your design outlook.”

Her expression changes in hints and tiptoes to something more considering. “But about you, and how we – I, will work with you – that’s not so easily gleaned from one video.”

Ava laughs at that, almost speechless. Still breathless and oddly naked, in a way she’s not used to feeling. “No, no it isn’t.”

She looks up and away, registering suddenly and overwhelmingly the indistinct shapes of trees. Grass. Path markers.

It’s true. They don’t know her, and she doesn’t know the three of them. Not like they know each other, twisting like moss and creepers around each others’ spines. There is something there that’s old and impenetrable and bound in the covers of a book in a different language she doesn’t speak. And she speaks a whole bunch of languages, yes, but none like this one.

“We need to learn how to work together,” she admits. This is an understatement, Ava knows, and grossly so. She thinks about Lilith, but also about Camila and her expansive imagination, its rhythm slightly out of sync from the drumbeat of Ava’s mind, and her easy physical affection that masks an unspoken space between them. She thinks about Beatrice and her uncanny wordlessness and then her uncanny wordfulness that Ava hasn’t had the chance to learn how to anticipate. To everyone that’s not her closest circle Ava thinks she must seem like a pendulum that’s always being chased, and never getting caught, her thoughts running and pivoting a hundred miles ahead.

And together they are musical lines in a contrapuntal piece, and hell, Ava knows only four chords on a guitar.

“We will,” Beatrice decides, suddenly. Ava’s mind has slipped from the conversation, but the bite of it snaps her to alert.

“What will we– what?”

In her alarm their eyes meet. She watches Beatrice’s fingers stretch out towards her on the bench instinctively, and then quickly retract into a half-fist, drumming once, twice on the seat before slotting into her pocket to slide her phone out to sit loosely in her palm.

She wrinkles her nose apologetically. A hairball of worry in Ava’s chest untangles itself.

“I.. just know that you’ve googled us like we’ve googled you.”

As Beatrice talks she turns over her phone slowly, hypnotically. Long fingers press and flip it in a well-worn sequence: the screen forwards and over twice, then clockwise along its side, before repeating in the opposite direction.

“Earlier on you said that Lilith locks herself in a room to brainstorm.”

Huh? Oh yeah, she did. When they were arguing over timeline flexibility for their project and the frequency of check-ins. Lilith said she was flighty and ill-disciplined. Ava told her she was out of her mind and a cold-blooded reptile who’d lost touch with all shreds of human needs and interactions. She’d made a snarky joke about Lilith’s grotesquely fancy ensuite bathroom and finding someone else to try and shit on.

“Well, that piece of trivia is only found in an interview from two years back that’s out of print. You can only find its scans on some niche member-only forums.”

Ava shrugs – this is what you do with new co-workers, is it not? You do your part. And Ava is doing the best she can.

“Yeah, sure,” she concedes, “but that’s not – it’s not–” plainly, it’s not the same. What can Ava do except shrug again?

Beatrice makes a small noise.

“I know,” she reiterates, and the deep furrows of her forehead release and smoothen, like she seems to have come to a realization.

She offers cautiously, hesitantly, “the article does say that. But it’s not true.” She inhales sharply.

“Lilith appreciates her independence, yes, but she knows better than to entirely isolate herself anymore.” Clearly, there’s a story in that. “But the deadline was at midnight, and the editor wanted to add something else in the copy they sent. Lilith was grouchy, we were drunk, and Camila made it up in the return email without telling her.”

Beatrice pauses and tilts her head. Up the curve of her chin to her cheeks, dimples reveal themselves shyly and momentarily.

“Lilith was furious. She only found out when the article was released. The only reason she grudgingly refrained from further action was because, I believe, the falsified information fit into the image of how she wanted to present herself to the world.”

She gazes straight at Ava then, curious and the most open that Ava’s ever seen her. “Nobody’s ever brought it up again,” she remarks, searching Ava. “Well. Not until you.”

Beatrice’s hands still; she wipes her phone against her shirt, and looks carefully at Ava. Ava’s intelligent; far more than people give her credit for. She knows what Beatrice is doing – trying to do, in her own way.

After a long pause, during which the drone of the waves becomes deafening and then recedes, “I won’t pretend that Lilith is merely aloof, or that the things she has said are not unkind or unfair. She’s treated you poorly.”

Ava resists a scoff, and scrambles instead to clear her throat noisily. She doesn’t bring up again the simple fact that, foremost amongst a host of reasons, Lilith is why they’re here. The last straw. The final trigger.

Beatrice regards her like she isn’t fooled.

“She is less coarse to those she’s close to, but has been known on occasion to be rather prickly, even then.” Beatrice, as if remembering something then, chuckles lowly. Gorgeously. “She’s very particular about safety standards and protocols, for example.”

“Once, she yelled at me in front of the whole crew for taking a nap on the floor of an unfinished room in a maze in the dark during lunch. She was angry, and worried, but still. I needed to get away from everyone for a break, and as you might expect, it backfired.”

“I’ll try not to do that,” Ava offers. “I’ll break into her trailer and sleep on her desk instead.”

“Oh dear,” There’s palpable mirth in it. Ava’s poker face shatters into a beam.

Beatrice probably can’t see it. It’s dark.

“Ava?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t expect you to be alright with any of it.”

Ava breathes.

“Okay,” she replies, finally. “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

She lifts the palms from where they’ve been pressed tightly to old, uneven rock. The soft flesh of the heel is kissed with the pattern of the grain.

So Ava turns, on the bench, and her feet squelch most uncomfortably in the wet shoes as she adjusts herself to face Beatrice – not directly, but at the slight angle from which the light of the moon and the light at their feet call out to each other and meet on the tip of her nose.

Beatrice tucks her phone carefully in her lap and turns to Ava too.

And slowly, in dribs and drabs that spill out like the corners of dough sheets cut out from metal molds, Ava introduces herself to Beatrice.

No, not the dramatic, tragic moments – the accident, the orphanage, all that. The night is transient and thinning fast into its wee hours, and it’s the little things first, you know?

The one-coffee-one-energy-drink-one-juice combo routine that gets Ava through long days and overtime hours. The overnight movie marathon treat she grants herself at the culmination of each project. The lucky Super Mario Bros. spoon and bowl set that she’s got to eat out from the day before a big pitch.

Her hiring, Ava thinks, is still a dry and excoriated topic, and so she tries to skim over it. She tries to avoid going into detail on how she got poached, and then how she’s painstakingly combed through all their archival documents and notes, so as to understand. She doesn’t mention the fan content and critic reviews she’s pored over, the world beyond OCS doors she’s tried to immerse herself in to grasp the scale of the project and the context of her addition.

Beatrice narrows in on it, anyway. It looms, Ava supposes, far too large to avoid.

It’s sometime after one A.M. when she puts her head down slightly, and Ava feels the shift.

“You know, I’ve seen some of the forums,” Beatrice strokes down the damp strands of hair that have come loose over her ears. “They’re – not entirely true. I don’t dislike working with others.”

Ava had seen the forums too, and the flint-tipped speculation that slithered about the different pages. Usernames pockmarked with numbers, an argot of acronyms and the slang of self-proclaimed megafans. Posts that didn’t have Beatrice’s name in them but that were transparently about her, describing with vulgar flippance a cool, isolated oddness that locked crew members out from the indecipherable machinations of her mind.

Beatrice’s hands tighten over her phone. “It just takes me some time –” she forces out, and then bites her lip.

Ava thinks about Camila in the corridor this afternoon, after Beatrice had wordlessly entered her own room and shut the door – now, she knows, to watch the video. Ava had stopped for a second too long, looking puzzled after her, when Camila had brushed breezily past.

“Oh, don’t worry,” she’d laughed, “she’s like this. Once she opens up, she’s a completely different little beast.”

Ava hadn’t doubted that – there was evidently a Beatrice that bantered with Lilith and Camila in branching links of long chains that she couldn’t understand; a Beatrice that must have climbed up the towering tree at the back early in the morning to pluck yellow flowers from its crown.

This Beatrice had been ready to go ahead to the counter before Camila and Lilith had even sat down at yesterday’s lunch to place their orders on their behalf.

She hadn’t even needed to check in with them, but came over to Ava’s seat and looked over her shoulder. “What would you like?” she’d asked, and Ava rushed, panickedly, to look over the menu. She traced each line with her index finger, and looked up to find Beatrice, eyes wide and patient.

“This one, please, the burger,” she’d jabbed the flimsy laminated paper, “and a Pepsi.” Beatrice had strode off before a waiter could come over. She’d refused to let any of them pay her back, and when Ava had tried to send her money on her phone she raised her eyebrows very questioningly and Ava melted back into the plastic-backed seat.

In the end, Ava can only personally vouch for the epipelagic – the shallowest fraction of ocean pierced by sunlight. The parts of the person allowed tentatively to surface in every halting, hesitant attempt forward as a quartet. As of now, too, in the drizzly shadows of tonight.

Perhaps the light can reach only fingertip-deep, but Ava wagers there has to be water all the way down. The rest is gut feeling and instinct; slowly glowing embers like a fist in her chest.

“Beatrice,” Ava says, once it’s clear she’s still working her way out of a labyrinth of word finding, “Listen. I believe you.”

Tense shoulders quieten and flatten into a horizontal plane. Ava feels Beatrice’s eyes scan her face, go past her ears and her messy hair and the tip of her nose and then settle, finally, with a helpless little smile.

Ava calls out on the boardwalk. She listens to Beatrice whisper on this stone, and Beatrice listens back. There’s sunlight, hours away, on the horizon but at this moment there’s only secret shades of moonbeam, and those shades are all for them. It’s not enough, still. It’s not enough. Ava wants more.

She wants, she finds with some desperation, to be inside of the invisible circle. There is nothing worse than dragging her feet outside, half a step offbeat, unable to reach in and with nobody reaching out. A ghost, intangible and aware of it, when all she wants is to feel the hot flames of real life – to have Lilith’s sharp tongue lash out and scald her in the way it does Camila or Beatrice – with blunt honesty and easy comfort instead of probing malice. To have Camila’s name light up on strings of text notifications as it buzzes constantly on Beatrice and Lilith’s phones almost the moment they are apart. Beloved, joyful, alight. To have Beatrice… to have Beatrice —

The phone in Beatrice’s hands lights up, too bright, and it makes her squint. A flash of numbers – time – sears itself into Ava’s eyes before Beatrice frowns and puts it away into her hoodie. It’s late, Ava thinks, considering the boat is coming by early to bring them out for sunrise. But Beatrice doesn’t move to go back, and neither does Ava.

Of all the things Beatrice finds terrifying – enough, she’s always been quoted, to transplant them into the nightmare fuel of haunted houses – the dark now doesn’t seem to be one of them. Ava agrees, she thinks: there is no place safer now than where they are, on a rock one measly wooden fence away from a dizzying drop into rock and rushing depths. It feels, for once, and for maybe the first time –

(since the start, after that final infuriating video call when she screamed into her duvet and yelled into her shower and limped to the computer where she bit her lips raw and booked the tickets here and told a trio of uneasy still-strangers that she might struggle to pull them out their homes with her own hands and nails but they would be getting out and traveling to a coastal nowhere-town and fucking sitting down to get this partnership going –)

–it feels like she’s making headway.

Not on the Houses, not on the inspiration for them or the mechanisms and processes with which to put them together, no, although all those, too, in their own ways.

Here, far off from home, next to choppy waters, shorn into grass and trees readying themselves to be busted up by summer storms, amongst flowers somehow poking up through the salt and sand, a breath away from the touch of waves and the tiny crawling organisms that besiege it, (beside an odd girl in the giddy, open air,) – here.

Solid ground.

And maybe Beatrice is right, you know? Maybe life is more similar to the business of soul-sucking fear-buildings than people believe.

Ava’s always had, she thinks, an incredibly lucid understanding on what makes good haunted houses tick. It’s trust, essentially, and safety. How do you enter a situation that frightens more viscerally and wholly than a movie or even a 3D dark ride – and then keep walking?

Headway. The only thing that gets you out of a haunted house is burrowing deeper within.

Arms outstretched, palms open, into its guts and chest. There’s extensive academia on thrill rides: on how much of the atmospheric and storytelling work goes into the sections of the experience that precede the ride, because once the carriage croaks to life, it’s easy to close one’s eyes and lose all clarity.

Haunted houses aren’t like this.

Since she got out of St Michael’s, Ava’s gotten by on a brand of fearlessness, a reputation built on a willingness to try almost anything. But fearless perhaps isn’t the word. She’s scared, still, with every step forward. Worried out of her mind of having to work from scratch all over again. Terrified of going back to before. But this, unfortunately, or blessedly so, is life: the only way out, Ava’s found, is further in.

She doesn’t want to be here. She wants to be there, already there.

Ava wants so badly to be elbow deep in the mud and wires of bringing stories to life far more fully and physically than in almost any other medium. She wants it so bad and so bare that she doesn’t even really know how to spell it out on a cloudy spring-summer night in a way that won’t chase Beatrice away with the breathless depth of her desperation to make people feel in a way they will never forget. Or frighten her with the too-much, too-fast of it all.

She wants to flood people’s imaginations and send adrenaline through their arteries; have them wrap themselves around each other until the impression of lovers’ arms are engraved around the frame of each other’s bodies, shared warmth and solidity the only things keeping them upright through the maze.

And Ava doesn’t need someone to hold her through a haunted house – god, she’s the one with her fingers tugging the strings that shift and twist its spine in circles around its terrified visitors – but it would be nice for once to stand in the control tower, eyes alight, heart racing, with hands as bloodstained as her own.

To run through second-by-second early test run footage and data with another pair of eyes over early morning coffee and buns, discussing furiously the corners where the tourniquet can be tightened or loosened. To have conversations over the mixing console worth muting the scream track for. Even if – no, especially if they have nothing to do with work; conversations past awful awkward shop talk and instead all-in on the minutiae of home furnishings and dream pets and eschatology.

There was an impermanence to the constant shuffling of working groups, the fast paced turnarounds at Disney, but truthfully, she hadn’t been unhappy there. But then the email came through to her inbox on the rare once-fortnightly day that she would sit in her office, cartoonish vampire mug in hand, daydreaming with her laptop open, and that was it.

She flew down to headquarters to meet Suzanne in December. It was quiet in the office, with everyone off on final scouting trips and finalizing plans and sourcing materials and manpower. Suzanne had therefore been able to give her a private tour, and Ava did everything to pretend her mind hadn’t been made up long before.

First there was her personal office, which was the downright coolest room Ava’d been in for a while, forest green and quietly centered around the unassuming framed family picture on the desk. Cabinets of fossils with extra labels in a child’s scrawled handwriting: Terry the trilobite :D and spoonface and illustrated stickmen with swords. Delicate, beautiful, floral watercolor diagrams mounted on the wall and a soft, thick rug with complicated, beautiful depictions of scenes from the Tempest.

Suzanne showed her the generous pantry, which would have sealed the deal if it hadn’t already been set in stone, and then they passed the meeting rooms into the archive gallery.

This was, essentially, a museum of past mazes. A large, dark place of glass and thin, sharp panes of burnished golden light. Suzanne brought her, wide-eyed, through its displays of early Houses.

“You’ve been visiting our Houses, on and off, over the last few years, correct?”

Ava nodded. Since that college trip, really, and whenever she could spare the time and the money.

“Good,” Suzanne said. “If you accept this offer, you will be joining a team of some of our best young designers, so you may be familiar with some of their work.”

Indeed, within the glass cases sat Camila’s famed dioramas, fixed in place now but ready to stir to life once hooked up to a battery. Detailed, hand-painted and assembled, its parts sliding apart into modular sections that could be split open and shifted around.

Lilith’s meticulous blueprints too, and ruthless postmortems and analyses she’d done of her own work, although those were sealed away. “I had to demand that she hand them over and not keep them pinned up at her desk hanging over her head,” Suzanne remarked beside Ava, looking up into the glass at the nondescript manila folder.

“If not you, it would have been her.”

Unsurprising. Disney had used Lilith Villaumbrosia-masterminded sections of mazes in case studies for scene-setting and scare actor interactions. And Ava had entered her House two years ago. She knew.

“I will be honest with you, Miss Silva.”

“Ava.”

“Ava. Lilith is not what you may be expecting, and it may be difficult to get across to her at first. She is as acerbic as she is brilliant.”

That was the twist that was coming, of course: that they were all good friends. That the three designers that Suzanne had long had in mind to join Ava already knew each others’ minds and neural pathways so keenly that they could probably unzip the gyri of each others’ brains like a ribbon and then put them back together.

“They don’t know it yet,” Suzanne warned, “and they will not like it at first, but I see it.” She opened up one of the cases with a key to remove a polaroid of three grinning faces, arms looped together. She held it to the light. “You’re the missing piece to the puzzle.”

But what about everything she’s still missing?

The gravelly ground is solid beneath their feet, and Ava doesn’t feel the vibrations of the waves. The world appears still and frozen even as everything is changing and morphing and blooming, and gaping thirstily for something more she can’t put a finger to.

The water could flood and Ava’s eyes might smart with exhaustion in the morning, or she might try to get two or three hours of sleep and wake up after one anyway, screaming as usual, and all the same Ava thinks she would still be chasing. Running.

There is nothing in her mind resembling gory sets and the creak of animatronics, then, as she looks to her right at a girl she can scarcely even see in the dark, yet that she finds she cannot look away from. Ava can see why the magazines call her a mystery: Beatrice says she’s always on heightened alert, and yet – and yet –

She’s gazing back at Ava in a blanket of complete calm.

The wind from the ocean is blowing, the darkness feels safe. Ava and Beatrice, on a stone bench, talking, close. Easy steps, Ava thinks. Small steps, small questions. Maybe this is how it starts.

She takes a chance. Asks.

Beatrice closes her eyes, exhales, and begins to answer.

(Here are some requirements for a successful haunted house, or a horror film, or a heart-pounding roller coaster: it must evoke emotion that travels in icy ringlets down your spine, and it must stay indelibly in your mind.)

#warrior nun #wn haunted house au #i think my phone might explode from that readmore so i'm sincerely sorry and hope your devices survive 🙏#this takes place (1.5-3??? months???) after the first excerpt i won't lie i did not sit down to sift through the timeline

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sophiainspace · 2 months

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Hello!!! For the character asks game, I’ve got four for you for your icon there, Mick Rory: 2, 7, 8, and 21, if you feel so inclined!

Aww, my icon indeed <3

2. Favorite canon thing about this character?

His loyalty. An underrated thing about Mick Rory. If he’s on your side, he’s never leaving it, and he would die for you. I just queued a gifset of the season 6 (I think?) scene where Mick persuades Sara to come home and tells her she’s his oldest friend (the ‘Rogue Canary with the missing member’ feels, I swear) and it’s like. He was devoted to Len for 20 years, in whatever way you want to interpret that devotion, and he gave that loyalty to Sara - who he calls Boss just enough times that you feel it - and that was no small thing for him. But he would defend her life with his, along with the rest of the Legends. And he did, a lot.

7. What's something the fandom does when it comes to this character that you like?

The sheer weight and quality of creative fanon means we have so much history to draw on for Mick in fic. And it all comes from very few references. Burning down his house. The fight in juvie. The 30-year partnership with Len. And that’s… about it, I think? But look at the amount of young coldwave/young Mick fics and headcanons those lines have spawned. Incredible. I’ve never written a character (or pairing) with so much glorious fanon backstory. It is a gift. (And the fandom didn’t even do all that much with the rich vein of everything we learned later about his family. We had already had given ourselves so much to work with!)

8. What's something the fandom does when it comes to this character that you despise?

It’s kind of related to my answer to question 2. I’m not a huge fan of the general fandom opinion that Mick was only ever mistreated by the Legends (or the writers) and hated every second of his time on the Waverider. Opinions will vary, of course, but I adore that found family for Mick. We do not speak of season two, which was poorly written and used Mick as a plot point, but for the most part after that I think it was clear that Mick loved the Waverider crew and vice versa. He grew as a person a lot on that ship, and he had an arc that I liked a lot overall, with some fantastic unlikely friendships. We got writer!Mick, and dad!Mick, and right-hand-man-to-Sara!Mick, and the growth of so many relationships we never could have predicted (don’t tell me he didn’t freaking adore Ava by the end, after the inevitable rocky start between them), and I loved it all. At times the writers liked to use him for a source of quick comic relief, and at other times his storylines were weird or nonexistent, and there was a little too much ableist writing there, but I still liked where he went on that show. I suspect it comes down to people who only like Mick with Len (romantically or otherwise) who didn’t like to think that Mick could have - and did have - a life beyond the Rogues. And I say all of this as a still deeply devoted coldwave fan, for they are truly my OTP. But still. I love Legends Mick, in a very different way from how I love Flash Mick, and I love the way he grew beyond Len.* Is a lot of my Legends Mick headcanon? Yep. Do I care? Nope. They gave me just enough to work with. :)

*I’m so tempted to get into how, while I love Mick with Len, their relationship was deeply codependent and Len clearly kept him from growing because he was a possessive bastard who loved Mick but also wanted to control his partner on his own terms. And how, even though it took Mick a while to realise he could be his own person outside of that partnership, he grew in some directions he never could have if Len hadn’t died. But that’s off topic - and hey, that headcanon is already in quite a few of my fics, with room for more… P.S. Did I mention I love coldwave and am also quite fond of Len (the possessive bastard) okay good

21. If you're a fic writer and have written for this character, what's your favorite thing to do when you're writing for this character? What's something you don't like?

I love autistic Mick headcanons and playing with them. And of course, I love everything you can do with coldwave, because of all the fanon stuff I mentioned above. Hey maybe it’s time for another coldwave fic…

Character ask meme

#thank you for the Qs!#ask meme #mick rory #meta #legends of tomorrow #the flash tv

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quietblueriver · 10 months

Text

Quick thing #4. Beatrice and Ava go on vacation.

Fluff fluff fluff fluff fluff. Thanks to @gingerniiiija for the prompt, holiday seasons, which I twisted a bit to get here.

“Hey, Bea.”

“Hmm?”

They’re in a hammock, acquired on a whim by Ava on a trip to the city and strung up by Beatrice in one of the groves a little further away from the Cradle. It’s a lazy afternoon, something Beatrice is learning to allow herself more, and she’d abandoned her book some time ago, focusing instead on the press of Ava’s body and unhurried kisses and the warmth of the springtime sun. Ava’s nose is tucked into her neck, and she feels the question in the breath against her collarbone.

“Wanna go on vacation with me?”

“Vacation?”

There’s a jostle, the hammock swinging unevenly until Ava employs the halo, a distinct hum and small glow, to finish hauling herself overtop Beatrice. She rests her arms across Beatrice’s chest and her chin on her wrist as she looks up at her. She is, as always, beautiful, hair a little wild and bright brown eyes wide and excited.

“Yeah!” She bites her lower lip, and Beatrice thinks idly that she’d like to take it for herself, refrains because Ava is telling her something, is excited to tell her something. She files the desire away for later. “I was thinking maybe France? The beach? We have time now, and we can afford it.”

They do have time, war no longer on the horizon, and they can afford it, the Church having set up very generous accounts for them both shortly after Ava’s return.

(She asked questions, of course, when she was unceremoniously handed an account login and a new debit card, numbers so high she had to read them three times to be sure she wasn’t mistaken. Ava, looking at the information on her own account, said simply, “Holy shit.”

“It’s the very least they can do,” Camila said dismissively, already back to reading her book.

“Indeed,” Mother Superion added from her own chair, “And you will continue to receive pay, of course. We can discuss the details when you’ve decided whether you’d like to stay and what you’d like to be doing.”)

Beatrice thinks for a moment, finds all of the excuses not to go far less convincing than the hopeful eyes blinking up at her. It’s a gift of peacetime that she doesn’t take for granted, the ability to say yes to Ava.

“I think you’ll love Nice.”

It’s only the halo that saves them both from toppling to the ground with Ava’s enthusiastic response, Beatrice wrapped around Ava like a koala as she laughs and then lowers them gently back into the fabric, kissing her in apology.

They leave two weeks later, after wrapping up a training series with some of the new recruits. Ava is delighted by everything, starting with the airport, and Beatrice knows, as she watches her girlfriend talk excitedly with a six year old about the plane taking off from the gate next to theirs, that this is going to be wonderful.

She spent most of her life surrounded by people who had everything and made a show of thinking it was nothing. Blasé discussions of trips to Vienna and Moscow and Santiago, vineyards and exhibitions and Michelin stars. She was ashamed, when she first got to know her sisters, of the distance between her life and theirs. She was ashamed of the respect Lilith granted her based on her last name. She was, most of all, ashamed to find that she had learned to take so much for granted herself.

Ava takes nothing for granted. It had been difficult for Beatrice, at first. She’d given her whole life to duty and service, and Ava was so focused on herself, on her own life. She hadn’t understood, at first. But teaching Ava to swim, watching her practice her letters every night, listening to her sing terribly in the shower and learn the names of all of the regulars, Beatrice saw an unfamiliar appreciation for life. She sees it still, although now its more selfish edges have been tempered by security and maturity and love. She is learning, with each lazy afternoon and late-night baking experiment and reality television marathon with Dora and Camila, to feel it herself. Still duty and service, of course. But she’s trying for balance, these days.

“Bea!” Ava squeezes her hand as they fly over the coastline. She’d given her the window seat, happily, and she leans into her now to get a better view of the ocean, letting Ava’s excitement catch hold of her, too.

After dropping their bags in the hotel, their first stop is the Mediterranean. Ava loves the beach, and Beatrice loves watching Ava on the beach, the seemingly endless joy she gets from letting the waves wash over her feet. She also loves the warmth of Ava’s skin after a day in the sun, the way she leans back into Beatrice on the balcony of their hotel room and shamelessly weaves her hand into Beatrice’s hair, tugging her down and letting out a pleading noise that Beatrice understands and responds to immediately, trailing kisses across the precious skin bared to her. Beatrice lets herself go, tries to let every bit of the love she feels make its way to Ava through the press of her lips and the touch of her fingers. She thinks, as she feels Ava come apart underneath her in the hotel bed, the salt of the ocean on her skin, that this must be joy.

On their second day in the city, Ava takes her shopping. Beatrice doesn’t own things appropriate for this weather, for the beach, and she knows this, so she agrees with only some trepidation to spend their morning finding clothes. Ava, who has a collection of things that work in this kind of weather, finds a pair of high-waisted black shorts that she loves and that make Beatrice feel a little stupid when Ava comes out of the dressing room, tanned skin on display. Mostly, though, she finds things for Beatrice. Or, she helps Beatrice find things for herself.

She knows what Beatrice wants. She’d spoken it quietly into the darkness of their room at Cat’s Cradle as Ava traced her fingers over Beatrice’s ribs and listened to her heartbeat. They had a rare day of freedom, in the time when things were still so unsure, and Beatrice and Ava and Camila wandered into one of the smaller local towns to see a movie and get ice cream. They passed a couple on the sidewalk, and it was nothing more than a moment, but Ava watched Beatice’s eyes track one of the women, wearing dark green chinos and a patterned button-down, all in a masculine cut, tattoos visible below her rolled sleeves and boots deep brown and well-worn.

“I think when we…I think after…that I’d like to try to find clothes that make me feel…more like myself.” Ava pressed a kiss to her sternum. “I love that. I’m so excited for you to get to do that, baby. We can go shopping together, if you want.”

Now, she steps into the men’s section without any kind of hesitation, and Beatrice follows. Ava pulls a shirt, a green linen henley, and holds it out in front of her, tiling her head slightly. She must like what she sees, because she turns to Beatrice with a question in her eyes, hanger out in invitation. Beatrice kisses her, hard and eager and more deeply than she usually would in public, trapping the shirt between them. Ava makes a startled noise but recovers quickly, relaxing into the kiss. She uses her free hand to cup Beatrice’s jaw and pull her closer.

Beatrice can’t help herself. This girl, this girl who loves her, is standing right there, holding up clothes from the men’s section for Beatrice as though it’s nothing, as though it wouldn’t occur to her to do anything else. Beatrice knows, actually, that it wouldn’t occur to her to do anything else, that the moment Beatrice expressed that this might make her feel good, Ava was on board immediately; Ava was ready to conduct the fucking train. When she pulls back, Ava is a little dazed, which is rare, and Beatrice feels accomplished. She gets the shirt and several others, as well as some linen pants. Ava even manages to get her to try shorts, and she likes them enough that she gets three pairs.

They wander past a barber shop the next day and Beatrice finds herself stopping, watching through the window as someone gets their cut cleaned up. Ava, who loves Beatrice so perfectly that it sometimes makes her chest ache, stops behind her and presses up to rest her chin on Beatrice’s shoulder. She says quietly and without any fanfare, “I think you’d look very handsome, if you ever wanted to cut your hair that way.” She slips her left hand into Beatrice’s back pocket and presses a kiss under her jaw.

“Really? You…you wouldn’t mind? I know you love my hair.”

“Baby.” It’s so gentle. Beatrice has never been treated with such care, and she’s not sure she’ll ever be used to it. Ava’s hand slips from her pocket and meets its pair around Beatrice’s waist. “I love you. It makes me so fucking happy to see you trying things, figuring out what you like and what makes you feel good.” She tugs at the short-sleeved button-down Beatrice wears as if in demonstration. It’s one of their purchases from yesterday, linen with wide light blue and white stripes, and Beatrice feels good in it.

“I’m thinking about it.”

Ava comes around to kiss her, grinning, and then takes her hand again. “Love that. Wanna go get ice cream?”

They go back to the beach for the afternoon and then return to the hotel to get ready for their reservation at a place down the street recommended by one of the older women Ava befriended on their beach walk yesterday, bonding with them over her obvious delight in a pastry from the bakery next door to their hotel. “You must try it,” the woman, Simone, said to Ava of her favorite seafood dish, before reaching a hand out, and, at Ava’s nod, wiping flaky pastry from her cheek. Ava went a little red but Simone laughed affectionately and said, “You remind me of my granddaughter. Very beautiful. Very alive.” Yes, Beatrice thought as she made the reservations while Ava discussed additional food they must try, very beautiful and very alive.

She takes a shower while Ava naps a little, puts on new, light linen pants and a dark blue button-down. She’s finishing her braid when she hears the sheets rustle, and she turns to find Ava sitting up and blinking sleepily at her. She’s in one of Beatrice’s t-shirts and underwear, the covers kicked entirely off of one leg. Beatrice’s breath stutters, as it does sometimes when she looks at her.

“Hello, love. Did you sleep well?”

Ava’s eyes grow dark as they wander over her, and Beatrice walks toward her like she’s on a string being pulled, no conscious decision, just movement. She’s barely managed to sit on the edge of the bed before she has a lap full of Ava, who is warm from sleep and largely naked and pulls Beatrice’s hands under her shirt immediately. They do not make it to dinner, Ava promising into her skin that she’ll call to move the reservation. Instead, they eat bread and cheese with wine in their hotel room, Ava still in her t-shirt and nothing else. The fish is just as good the next night.

She hands Ava a coffee, iced with caramel and coconut milk, and settles into the seat next to her with her own, more boring latte. Ava kisses her cheek in thanks and hums happily as she takes a sip.

“So, how was your first vacation?”

Ava grins at her.

“Perfect.”

Beatrice sits her coffee in the cupholder of the airport chair and then leans forward to kiss her, her lips sweet and a little cold.

“Perfect.” Beatrice echoes. “Where do you want to go next?”

#warrior nun #avatrice #sister beatrice #ava silva #warrior nun fic #wn prompt fic

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eelerschoice · 5 months

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Good day to you Eel Enthusiasts, tis the season!

Christmas yes, but also audioverse awards season!

Our little eel show wasn't eligible this year, HOWEVER many of our EXCEEDINGLY TALENTED cast, crew and chorus are indeed among the nominees, so let us encourage you to vote for them and the shows they are in:

Fay Roberts who plays our terribly respectable Principal Adept Weaverllyn has been nominated for zir delightful performance as noted Scots snail enthusiast William Henry Baker Blair in the nautical adventure Trice Forgotten.

The multitalented William who gave voice to gruff eeler Aberford Tackmansworth is up for a battery of awards for @TheHallowoods, writing, recurring voices (oh, so many recurring voices), music direction, sound design, and that ohso spooky art, as well as Elder Hosea in OGOA.

Rissa Montañez, who is perhaps a little too into eels as Senior Adept Lacehill, when she isn't serving the finest goth looks, is nominated for her role as exceedingly efficient Quartermaster Val Narváez in Moonbase Theta, Out.

Another audiodrama powerhouse Tal Minear plays Carrick Boater who's seen something nasty in the seawater. They are nominated for all of the R.E. Dracula things, new show sound design, art, music, direction and also for a recurring voice in Moonbase Theta, Out.

Mark Nixon one of our cat-loving Captains Helmswell, is nominated in the Direction category for Shadows at the Door: Season 3 is ambitious and star-studded with some incredibly thought-provoking stories and well worth a listen.

David "Voice Acting Career Now Old Enough to Legally Own a Business In Several Countries" Ault probably needs no introduction: he's up for new guest voice Dr, (possibly Mr if Surgeon) Clayton in Ethics Town, guest voice the accidentally blasphemous bible printer Robert Barker in the Amelia Project, and recurring roles as Lan in Among the Stacks and Arthur Holmwood, Lord Godalming [Tearful Edition] in R.E. Dracula.

(Incidentally, we welcome newcomer Abraham "Bram" Stoker to the AVA nominations, presumably the RE Drac crew have become adept at necromancy to pull this off. Stephen, I know you take your dramaturgy seriously, but this seems a little too method…)

Derrick Valen, provider of some powerful bass harmonies in our Anguilliform chorus is up for * checks notes * Gnoming it up with the October's Children crew as a guest voice in Strong Branching out. Delightful.

And last but not remotely least, Rhys Lawton, who appears as the Scrimchantry's dour school nurse and medical lecturer Acaster Selvage is nominated for his new recurring voice role as philosophical wet catboy January Johnson in Ethics Town, and also for a guest voice in * flicks over next page of notes * "The Secret of St Kilda play Something Muppets in the State of Denmark". Kudos to Strong Branching Out for some truly quality episode names…

I (Lou) take full responsibility for any errors, someone correct me in reblogs or comments if I've got any of this wrong or missed anyone.

Now go on, off you go: https://audioverseawards.net/vote/

#audio verse awards

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purrpickle · 1 year

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In the first season, Lilith was able to track Ava down - first at ARQ-Tech, and then in the catacombs - due to her developed Tarask sensing of the Halo.

And in season two, the Tarasks were still able to track Ava when she used a huge output of its power.

So, even if the ability to sense the Halo seemed to be dampened by the proliferation of Adriel's prayers and crosses, Lilith should have still been able to track her.

And she was! At least twice: first on the ARQ-Tech roof, and then before Ava could reach Adriel on the stage. Even with the main cross and the epicenter of Adriel's followers' prayers being right there.

So, even if Lilith could have tracked Ava down at any point she wanted, and also made it very clear that she was after Ava and the Halo, instead she waited for Ava to come to where she was - come to her - first.

And then when Ava does, Lilith finding her lying paralyzed on the roof, look at her expression:

Before the mocking words start, and even after, she looks sad. Like even though she's not surprised that Ava is there, she wishes she wasn't. It's not a triumphant look, or even that she's eager to fight. In fact, Lilith looks like she's not enjoying seeing Ava stuck on the ground and panicking either - and indeed, the first thing she does is pull Ava up, holding her long enough for Ava to get her feet under her and be able to stand and fight back before starting the fight!

So, one might ask, did all this make sense for someone who saw Ava and the Halo as the enemy to her side of the Holy War? Why didn't Lilith go after Ava at any time when she could, when Ava would be off-guard and unprepared? And why did she wait for Ava to get her energy back before attacking her?

Because Lilith still knew the guilt and shame she had from how she so ferociously hunted the almost defenseless Ava down again and again until she was pinning her against the floor as she started cutting the Halo out of her back. Because Lilith still knew how it was to be on the same team, the Sister Warriors and the Warrior Nun, and the loyalty and deep connection everyone had and was building with Ava before and after Adriel was released, and how everyone would feel if Lilith took Ava away from them. Because Lilith still knew how it felt to be the one responsible for leaving Mary to die, alone.

Because Lilith didn't want to do that to Ava again, hunting her when she's helpless and pinning her to the ground to tear the Halo out of her when she can't fight back. Because even with her anger and new purpose, Lilith really didn't want to kill Ava or hurt her old friends by doing so. Because even if she didn't plan it or know she was going to do it in the future, Lilith helped make up for losing Mary when she told Beatrice how she could save Ava, and helped her carry her to the Arc.

Ultimately, Lilith didn't track Ava down or attack her when she was defenseless...

Because Lilith couldn't and didn't want to.

#ramblings all the ramblings and all the feelings too #does this even make sense? i don't know ha ha #just wanted to get it down #warrior nun #sister lilith #ava silva #fallenhalo #liliava

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possibilistfanfiction · 1 year

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Your footy au is so awesome and giving me all the feelings

[hopefully i’ll be able to finish & post ch4 tomorrow but a little preview (& ode to tobin, if u know lol) to offset how bOring the uswnt game is rn 🙄]

you get a few questions about your continued work in advocacy, team chemistry, and how you’re looking forward to your club season and the world cup.

‘there’s a few new players on the roster that you’ll play against in a few days, maybe a different look to this team than what you might be used to,’ one journalist says. ‘do you have any specific team tactics you’re bringing into this upcoming match, especially as the world cup approaches?’

‘sure. any player called up and rostered is going to be dangerous, of course,’ you say. ‘and their veterans, as well, deserve a lot of credit. i’ve played with mary for years and there’s no better a leader than her.’ you really are thinking about the upcoming match when you continue, ‘and, obviously, in regard to some new faces we’ll see, ava silva can score when she wants, so we’ve got to make sure we keep her in check.’ you can’t help but smile. ‘easier said than done, of course. but beyond that, we just need to stick to our game plan: be patient, control the midfield, win tackles, finish. we’ve come together really well after this break, so i’m excited.’

you answer a few more specific tactical questions, and then you’re done. you say hi to a few of your favorite journalists that you haven’t seen in a few months, and then make your way back to your room. when you look at your phone, you roll your eyes at the number of texts you already see, try to wrack your brain for something you’d said that had been that interesting.

you answer when ava calls, and she’s laughing. ‘hi bea!’

‘hello, ava.’

‘wait, one second.’ she facetimes you with mary in the background, who waves with a good-natured eye roll at ava’s antics; she’s practically vibrating. ‘okay, here,’ she says, then turns her camera around so you can see her laptop on a youtube video, then presses play. ‘ava silva can score when she wants,’ you hear, and you groan.

‘ava.’

‘this is the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me.’

‘ava.’

she’s smiling too big for you to fight it: a laugh bubbles up out of your chest and then mary is laughing too. ‘lilith is gonna have a field day with this,’ she says.

‘i’m gonna print this out as a poster, i think,’ ava tells you, still playing it on loop in the background.

there’s a knock on your hotel room door and when you open it lilith is, indeed, holding out her phone.

‘hi lilith!’ ava says from your screen. ‘looking hot, as always. great and terrifying to see you, please don’t kill me in two days.’

you sigh. lilith leans against the doorframe. ‘ava silva can score when she wants?’

‘okay, you know what i meant.’

‘yeah!’ ava says. ‘i can score! in more ways than one!’

‘goodbye, ava.’

‘bye, love you,’ ava says, still laughing, and you hang up.

lilith just looks at you for a moment and then rolls her eyes, but it’s not cruel. you think, maybe, she might be amused. ‘see you at dinner, beatrice.’

#footy au #i am wOrking on ch4 i swear but hopefully this is silly & fun #shoutout to tobin for saying the Dumbest most delightful shit in pressers love u forever #avatrice

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girl4music · 11 months

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Since I’ve been watching ‘Warrior Nun’ over again (great show by the way but it was unfortunately cancelled after 2 seasons) I’ve noticed some parallels between Ava and Beatrice and Buffy and Spike. Especially the ending. I don’t know if I can explain this in an easily understandable but articulate way.

But I’ll try…

Chosen One: Buffy/Ava

A teenage warrior fighting for the greater good, taking on a destiny they never asked for or chose to take part in. It was just unfairly thrust upon them by the “Council/Church” - an institution run by the patriarchy. But they eventually learn to embrace it as who they are despite the constant urge to want to deny and rebel or give up or not try at all. Despite it not being a choice for them to become this “hero”. This is basic and something you can see immediately. The Chosen One is a narrative that is very common. So you can immediately see the parallels there.

Now for Spike/Sister Beatrice: This will be much more in-depth because I’m still sorting out and shifting through my thoughts and feelings on the parallels that I think I see through their respective character arcs. Forgetting the whole “mortal enemies” thing because that’s not what I mean here. That’s not relevant to this. Not either in a literal or metaphorical way because Beatrice doesn’t go “evil” to begin with. But she very much COULD HAVE, and for much the same reasons as Spike did. Which is my thought process on this whole parallel with them.

Hear me out. I often refer to Spike as a “repressed lesbian” because he so damn queer-coded in such a feminine way but not in a transgender/non-binary way. Plus all the parallels with Willow - who is an actual lesbian but I’m not gonna go into that. But anyway, all through his arc he is fighting his inner violent nature. His monster. His demon. The part of him he cannot escape from indefinitely because it follows him wherever he goes like a dark shadow. Beatrice is a trained warrior and killer basically. She jumps into an identity and a society that doesn’t necessarily accept her but know they need her around for her immense tactical skills and abilities against the “dark side”. And because she knows she has nowhere to go with being rejected by her family for her attraction to girls. And so she falls in line in her circle much the same way Spike falls in line with being forced to work for the Scoobies to earn his keep/keep his life. While Beatrice is very loyal to her Warrior Sister family, she begins to recognize that there’s conflict between who she is and what she believes in and what the Vatican is and believes in. Much of it because of how they’re treating Ava. She starts to see the corruption from her side and not just to the side she’s told to fight against. And then she falls in love with Ava. While it doesn’t dictate or determine her actions and choices, what it does do is make her see that there’s a whole other side to life that she has not considered because of being so sheltered as a child and unable to live life as she chooses. Something she very much relates to Ava on because in her own way she is also incapacitated. Imprisoned. And like Spike - she also could have just gone to the dark side initially. Off the rails completely and became a monster. Resented everything and everybody for the abusive ways that she was treated by everyone around her. But that was never her true nature. And it was never Spike’s either. It was only what they believed of themselves because that’s how they were told and taught to see and think of their life. As worthless. Beneath the worthiness of love or honor or respect or trust. Beneath the right to be treated like a human being. Beatrice could have indeed ended up where Spike ended up. Drawn to the dark side out of the desperation to belong or to matter in the world. To have a purpose or to feel like that they are of purpose to it despite being “too queer” to navigate within it because people can only ever see their hard cover for the pages of pain and trauma and loss that they have inside. And so something of which they think of as their release from their imprisonment at the time ends up being what chains them the most. And for Beatrice that’s all without becoming “evil”. She skipped that phase entirely or maybe it was just very brief like Dark Willow. I don’t know, I haven’t really paid all that much attention to her backstory. I’m much more interested in how it informs her future. That’s why it’s worth it.

And as for Avatrice paralleling Spuffy. It’s mainly the ending scene where I saw it. Only this time it was the Chosen One giving up her life to save the world. Like the original Chosen One hadn’t done all that before. And it’s Beatrice saying too little too late “I love you.” Maybe someone could do a parallel gif set for it.

Like I said - I’m only noticing all this now as I’m watching ‘Warrior Nun’ for the 3RD time all over again. Because honestly I thought it was a pretty damn good show. There’s a lot I didn’t understand but that’s not necessarily anything to do with the writing. Just my capability to follow it so that I can fully understand it. I was like this with Buffy’s ‘Restless’ initially. Didn’t stop it from becoming my favourite Buffy episode, did it? And I think the actresses have some real chemistry for as short-lived as that WLW romance is. But that’s how you know that it is something special to behold. When the chemistry is off the charts from DAY 1. Anyway, I just wanted to write about this as I watch.

I still think the scene with Ava being booted off the cliff is the best scene in the whole show regardless. That was some Goofy “AAAH HOO HOO HOOEY” brilliance. When I say I miss camp. I mean like this.

#buffy the vampire slayer #warrior nun #buffy summers #ava silva #spike #sister beatrice #chosen one #parallels

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nakedmonkey · 7 days

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are u watching hacks s3? it's giving season 1 vibes imo, especially the quality of the writing and the homo subtext in deb and ava's relationship (not that I believe that they will actually be canon ever lol). what do u think?

Hiiii anon ~ I am indeed watching season 3! I am cautiously optimistic about this new season. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed eps 1 & 2, but I'm not ready to give them credit just yet lol we'll see how the rest of the season fares but yeah! eps 1&2 have those fresh season 1 vibes.

I definitely do not think Ava X Deb will EVER be canon. I don't think they ever intend to go there. They're definitely leaning into the romance aspect of that collaborative relationship and they'll "go there" in every romcom drama way possible but they will never be a couple, so it's been fun to see how they explore that so far this season (season 2 doesn't exist as far as I'm concerned) and I'm curious to see how they handle the relationship from here on out!

They (JPL) seem to be very good at beginnings and this very much feels like a reset of sorts, story-wise, so, hoping it's the creative boost the writers needed to get that mojo back!

#hbo hacks #look at all those exclamation marks #this might as well be a corporate email

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thisisnotthenerd · 7 months

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oh boy. deeply excited about this episode.

reskinning divine sense to be looking for your kids is so good. jaysohn and lila are little fiends.

a BEAR???? aabria's gone full in on the body horror. i get why there was a trigger warning email. the chipmunks inside? horrifying. the fact that the heart is beating? incredible. major props to the art team and everyone who worked on that bear because by god it worked. it's doing it's job.

these are some truly deadly stoats and i'm so here for it. at the start of the battle i was afraid of an immediate pc death but by god they're doing it so well. unbelievably violent. i love the use of harengon stats and how it's clear that these are a group of wild animals, carnivores that killed to make their first home and will kill to keep their family. primal savagery indeed.

why is the bear full of blue. oh my god. and the fact that the chipmunks have proboscides and are weekend at bernie'sing this bear. aabria i just want to know where that came from.

the use of lay on hands to cure a disease. my god brennan. an inspired move. and the bullet time. everything about it. lila investigating the blue in her mom. jaysohn leveling up after eating part of the bear. thorn and viola in the brain. ava remembering her past. and tula putting the bear down at peace.

this is truly a legendary episode of dimension 20. we got episode 2'd in the other direction--if a chipmunk filled bear is the first battle? i can't wait to see where this season is going to go.

#dimension 20 #dimension 20 spoilers #d20 tula #d20 jaysohn #d20 lila #d20 viola #d20 thorn vale #d20 ava #burrow's end #burrow's end spoilers #aabria my beloved

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desognthinking · 1 month

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👀 More haunted house designer au?! 👀 I love that concept so much so would be overjoyed if you ever decided to revisit it :)

😎i love it too. i wish i could tell you there are finally actually haunted houses in this one but unfortunately the girls are still working through it 😭 also i am working through it (editing 😭)

so in this one they're on a scouting-slash-forced teambuilding trip and it's um Going. it's a few thousand k of Meet The Ava wherein Ava is frustrated + up against it + dramatic, but also Meets The Beatrice.

anyway anyway it starts like this (subject to me finding it too cringey and editing it):

#also is it revisiting if they've always just been on my mind i'm just incredibly slow gsdufghw #truly writing is a muscle and i have not been working it out hard enough in my life #but don't worry anon even if nobody else in the world was interested i would still be putting them on rotating plinths in my head #i've some fun ideas for non chronological random snippets later i just think they need to narratively have their #The Girls Are Fightingggggg era first before it makes sense to have them where they are later?? you know??#but yeah i'm slow enough that if you have anything beyond this you wanna see 👀#wn haunted house au

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backup-shoe · 1 year

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Lilith, my sweet half-demon child. I would love to see somebody more well-versed in Catholicism take a stab at picking apart the symbolism suffusing her character arc. There are just enough things that my little osmosed-christianity-as-a-child brain recognises, but can't quite assemble into a coherent picture. Some thought fragments that have been kicking around in my head under the cut:

1. Death, resurrection, and a holy wound

Minus the holy wound part, the first two are simply a statement of what happens in Lilith's storyline in season 1. Lilith sacrifices herself to save Ava from the Tarask in episode 5, and returns in episode 7, seemingly resurrected from the dead. So far, fairly run of the mill death/resurrection plot common to a lot of sci-fi/fantasy.

However, when Lilith comes back, she (and we) discover the following remnant of her encounter with the Tarask:

A side wound on the the right hand side resulting from being pierced through by a pointy lance Tarask spine. Hm, this screamed stigmata to me during my first watch through, and with each rewatch, I am become more convinced that this is a deliberate reference to Christ being pierced by the Lance of Longinus during the crucifixion.

However! Lilith can't possibly be the Christ-figure of this show, can she? That is more straightforwardly Ava, who is 1. the protagonist of the show, 2. also rose from the dead, and 3. has a more innocent Lamb sacrificed to save the world narrative come season 2. Indeed, come season 2, Lilith very quickly becomes a full-time antagonist, and really ends up being more of Book of Revelation-esque monstrous figure than a Christ-like figure.

So, how do we reconcile Lilith's face-heel turn with the Christ imagery from season 1? Well, I venture that it is pretty uncontroversial that Lilith, from the very beginning was set up to be Ava's narrative foil, and so it makes a lot of sense for her to share in Ava's Christ imagery. However, in the end, she is not the true Christ-figure but a pretender. At this point, I am sorely tempted to make the leap to calling her an Antichrist, but this is also the point where I run up against the very limits of my knowledge of Christian eschatology.

(An aside: I also tried to figure out if Lilith came back on the third day after she died, but fell down a rabbit hole trying to figure out Ava and Mary's route between episodes 5 and 7. I have come to no conclusion on this matter, because none of the routes they take really make sense from a routing/availability of transit standpoint.)

I will conclude this section with a parallel between Lilith and Ava from season 1 and season 2, respectively, that I thought was neat:

2. Scales, wings, and the Book of Revelation

By the time season 2 rolls around though, Lilith quickly becomes a full-time antagonist, developing scales and leathery wings as she descends further into villainy. At this point, I think the most salient Biblical touchstone for her is the dragon from Revelation 13. Whereas Adriel is the beast, Lilith is his dragon. Given the physical traits she develops, I think this reference was fairly obvious, and not terribly interesting on its own.

The one wrinkle to this that I will note though, is that I think her role as the dragon was already alluded to in season 1. She is the last person who is not Kristian that Jillian Salvius and Michael Salvius interacts with. I think her brief interaction with Jillian and Michael in episode 9 (before she teleports off to the Vatican) is to establish her as the dragon that stood ready to devour the child of the Woman of the Apocalypse (Rev. 12:4). Here, Jillian is the Woman of the Apocalypse, whose child (Michael) was taken away to God (Reya) upon birth (Rev. 12:1-6). Not sure what the significance (if any) of this is in context of the Warrior Nun narrative, but I thought it was pretty neat.

Anyway, tl;dr, scales + wings = dragon!Lilith.

3. A parallel to the conversion of St. Paul

All right, here's the one that drives be absolutely insane, because buried in the midst of all these obvious, in-your-face dragon references, there is a reference to St. Paul of the Pauline epistles! And i can't, for the life of me, figure out what it means for Lilith.

I first noticed this parallel to St. Paul during the scene in season 2, episode 5 where Adriel burnt Lilith's eyes:

This immediately dredged up from the depths of my memory the following image:

(Source: Wikimedia)

This is the lower half of Caravaggio's The Conversion of Saint Paul. Look at how he is on the ground. Look at the way he is covering his face. Is the show deliberately trying to get us to connect Lilith with St. Paul, or was the framing of LIlith's blinding subconsciously conjured from the brain of someone steeped in Catholic iconography?

In any case, this was the scene that got me thinking about Lilith and our boy Paul. Much like our boy Paul, Lilith was blinded but had her vision restored. Unlike our boy Paul whose restoration of vision was accompanies by scales falling from his eyes (Acts 9:18), Lilith gains some lovely scales under her eyes that totally do not make her look like a raccoon:

In addition, unlike Saint Paul, who simply regains his regular vision, Lilith also gains the ability to see "reality," whatever that means. (To the audience's knowledge, it means she sees wraiths, but I have my suspicions that maybe there's more to it than that.)

The interesting thing to me about this reference to Paul, is that it was so strong, but confined to this one specific episode. Lilith never does anything that calls back to this moment for the rest of the season. Nor do her actions at all jive wit what Paul decided to do with this life after he regains his sight (spread the word of Jesus Christ far and wide), unless we count her feeble attempt at converting Ava to Adriel's side during their episode 7 fight.

So, where does this leave us? Why the random reference to Paul in the middle of the season when we already have the dragon of Revelation pretty much right in our faces? Is this a hint at the next step of her journey? Something clearly changed for Lilith during Ava's final confrontation against Adriel—she goes from actively helping him to becoming a bystander, content to watch him get ripped apart by Tarasks. Not to mention her sudden change of attitude in helping Ava, and telling Beatrice that she hopes that they will be on the same side during the upcoming Holy War. Maybe she's meant to play a Paul-like role if the show had managed to get a third season.

tl;dr: Lilith makes my Bible trivia brain go brrrrrrrr. I need someone more knowledgeable in these things to come tell me how I'm getting this all completely wrong.

#i can't believe i have so many thoughts on a supporting character in this silly show #i can't believe i read the book of revelation for this #i also read all of the epistles in a day (for a separate endeavour)#i know i'm probably overthinking a this and that the doylist explanation is probably something mundane like #“we chucked in whatever christian imagery we thought was cool”#but this does not mean i cannot attempt and fail at using it as an excuse to do a deep dive into christian eschatology #warrior nun #hb has thoughts #hb watches: warrior nun

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