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plsimsuchasimp · 3 years

Text

gone (cheating ft. kenma)

an anon asked me to write another version of this post, so here it is. i’m sorry about this, it’s definitely not my best work.

request: “Can you do another cheating fic but with kenma since he is my favorite character”

genre: angst

ft: kenma kozume x gn reader, a little bit of kuroo tetsuro

wc: 1.8k

warnings: fainting, angst, implied cheating

Flopping down on your bed, you picked up your phone and shot off a quick text message to your boyfriend, Kenma.

“hey babe, can we call? it’s been a really long week and I haven’t seen you in forever,” you wrote, pressing the send button with only a moment’s hesitation.

Sighing, you scrolled upwards a bit, reading through the message history. Recently, his texts had been getting shorter and more abrupt, often making excuses when you asked to see him or talk to him.

1 new message. Distracted, you scrolled down to see Kenma’s text.

“sorry can’t i was just about to sleep”

Frowning, you glanced at the top of the screen. 10:53 pm. He never went to bed this early, let alone slept. Your throat constricted, but you tried to brush it off, the thoughts whispering at the back of your head like malicious pixies, insecurities and harsh words. You stared at the simple string of words, wondering what to say. Are you okay? you’ve seemed off recently. No, you were probably just overthinking it.

“okay, have a good night! ily” Read 10:57 pm. No response.

Putting the phone down, you tried to push it to the back of your thoughts, but it nagged at you. Turning on your PC, you logged onto discord and noticed Kenma’s status. He was playing a multiplayer game, in a VC with one other person. Right-clicking, you ignored the feeling of distrust and clicked on the other player’s profile.

You knew her- she was a friend of Kenma’s from school. Kenma had promised you they were just friends, that you had nothing to worry about, but the insecurities crept in again as you realized he’d been spending a lot more time with her instead of you. Biting your lip, you looked back at your phone, the accusing text glaring at you. It seemed innocuous, seemed like you were overreacting. Kenma didn’t really get why you were insecure- he always told you he only had eyes for you, but lately, it didn’t really feel like it.

The last time you two had hung out, he’d laughed at something on his phone, then turned away when you asked to see what it was, muttering something vague about a funny tiktok. You didn’t think much of it at the time, but with thoughts crowding your head, you wondered if it really had been just a video. Kozume had always been distant- you understood that when you started dating him, but was it too much to ask for a scrap of his attention?

You were torn. On one hand, you wanted to trust Kenma, believe that everything he told you was true and he still loved you like he used to. On the other, your gut was telling you there was something off. Praying that he wasn’t hiding anything, you entered a different browser and logged into his Discord account. You’d given each other the passwords to your socials a while ago, your way of showing that you had nothing to hide.

Incorrect login information. The words appeared in red on the screen, the password field outlined in red. You tried again, ensuring that there were no typos, and it still registered as wrong. Your stomach sank, staring at the message on the screen. He changed his password and didn’t tell you. At this point, you knew something was wrong, but you didn’t want to ask him in fear of seeming insecure or clingy, both traits Kenma disliked. Before you could lose yourself further in the swirling tornado of your thoughts, your phone dinged with a new message. It was from Kuroo.

“hey y/n, are you up? we need to talk.”

Brow furrowing, you responded with “yeah, is everything okay?” He read the text, and then the call icon rang at the top of the screen, red and green buttons buzzing gently. You accepted the call, answering with “Hi Kuroo.”

“Hey y/n,” he said, his voice quieter than normal.

“Are you okay?” He sounded off, sad somehow.

“Y-yeah, I’m fine. There’s something I need to tell you, though.” You paused for a second, hoping it wasn’t what you thought it was, before he continued. “Kenma- Kenma cheated on you.”

“W-what?” Time seemed to stop. you couldn’t, didn’t want to believe your ears. Your breath caught in your throat, shock freezing your body in place.

“Shit, y/n, I’m so sorry. I just found out.” Kuroo was still talking, but you weren’t hearing him. It seemed impossible, even though you’d seen it coming. “Y/n? Are you okay?”

Startled, you choked out, “Yeah, I’m okay, just a little shocked.” a little was an understatement. “H-how did you find out?”

“Well,” he sighed, “I saw him kiss her behind the cafe yesterday. I wanted to tell you sooner, but I was still figuring out what to do.” Guilt laced his words, and you got the feeling there was still something he hadn’t said.

“What else?” From his slight intake of breath, you could tell you’d caught him off guard. He was silent for a moment.

“He’s been texting her on Discord for the past month or so. I think you know her, (f/n)?” You felt your heart crash into your stomach, and your worst fears were confirmed. Switching back onto your computer, you saw that Kenma was still playing the game with the girl, and your stomach clenched.

“Yeah, I know her.” He noticed that your voice was quiet, subdued, and he swallowed.

“Y/n, I’m- I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.” He was silent then, waiting for you to speak.

“No, no, it’s fine,” You said, your voice oddly calm. “Thank you for telling me.”

“Of course. Hey, are you going to be okay?” He asked, unsure what was really happening inside your head.

“Yeah. I’ll be fine.” Before he had a chance to say anything else, you hung up, mind spinning.

Oddly enough, you didn’t feel anything. You knew in the back of your head that this was your way of coping, that the hurt and anger and sadness would come later, but for now you didn’t care. Methodically, you went to all of your socials and blocked Kenma, hesitating only slightly to block his number in your phone.

You shut off your computer and turned your phone to silent, sitting in silence on your bed. Slowly, your eyes filled with tears that spilled down your cheeks, expressionless besides the gleaming tear streaks staining your face. Your shoulders shook, and everything seemed to crash down at once.

Your body couldn’t keep up, the sobs overtaking you until you were lightheaded. The room was spinning and the shining moonlight was glinting through the blinds at odd angles, seeming to distort your vision. You couldn’t breathe, and then everything faded to black.

You woke up a few seconds later with your head on the pillow, dazed and hearing the blood pound through your head. You groaned and lay there for a couple of minutes, letting your breathing slow.

You got up and brushed your teeth, staring at your puffy eyes in the mirror. It hurt, to know the man you loved didn’t feel the same anymore. What did you do wrong? Were you too clingy, not good enough, not there for him enough? Why would he cheat on you?

Guilt vibrated around you, and it brought back the memories of every other time. It must have been your fault- it always was.

Sleep took you uneasily that night, creeping in around your obsessive, painful thoughts and lulling you to distraction.

The next morning at school, you wiped the pain from your face and moved through the day in a haze. You saw Kenma in the hallway, leaning against the lockers on his phone, and avoided eye contact. When you saw her, (f/n), anger and hurt swelled up in your stomach, and you tried to swallow it and avoid lashing out.

Later, Kenma stared at his phone as an error message popped up when he tried to text you. We’re sorry, the number you’re trying to reach is unavailable. A pit formed in his stomach, and he went to his other socials, reaching the same conclusions in other places.

“Shit,” he muttered under his breath, amber eyes scanning the hallway. You were already gone, though, and he moved through the swarm of people, eyes focused on the exit. Where would you have gone?

When he showed up at your house that afternoon, you were surprised. He doesn’t waste time, showing you his phone and bluntly asking “Why did you block me?” Your eyes widened to see him slouching there, clearly uncomfortable with going out of his way to do this. “Are you angry at me?”

“Kozume, I don’t really want to talk to you right now.” His face twisted at your use of his last name.

“Why not?”

At this point, you sighed, tired of everything. “You cheated on me. That’s why.” Your voice cracks in the last sentence, and the world stops.

His stomach drops as you turn away, the weight of the world on your shoulders. “N-no. Y/n. Please don’t go!”

Kenma’s not good with words, and you understand that. Sometimes, though, it feels like he’s not trying. As he shook his head frantically, chin-length hair swaying around his beautiful face, you could tell he wanted to say something, but he can’t.

“What is there to say, Kozume?” Your eyes were brimming with tears, your heart squeezing at the sight of him.

“I didn’t- I didn’t mean to.” Even he knows how weak this sounds, how pathetic of him, and when he looks back up at you, his eyes are shiny. “I love you.”

His words ring hollow, and you scoff. “Where was that love when you kissed her behind the cafe? Where was it when you were constantly texting her on discord? Where was it when I needed you and you weren’t there?” You shake your head, heartbreak written all over your features. It’s then that he remembers the declined calls, the unanswered texts, the neglect he subjected you to as he pushed you away.

“I hope you’re happy with her, because we’re done.”

He didn’t even have a good reason this time. All he knew was that he wanted you to stay, but he knew he didn’t deserve a second chance. Against his will, a tear slid down his cheek and dropped to the floor, making him sniffle.

There was nothing you wanted more than to pull him into your arms, cry into his shoulder, but you couldn’t. It hurt too much. You stepped back and slammed the door on him for the final time.

Leaning your head against the door, all of your emotions spilled out. You were silently crying, the ache in your chest almost too much to bear. You thought you heard your name outside the door, whispered just loud enough for you to hear, but you just sank down to the floor and let the tears fall.

On the other side of the door, Kenma’s phone buzzed. It was a text from her, and the disgust and anger that filled his stomach at the sight was enough for him to know he’d never forgive himself for hurting you like this.

“I love you.”

a/n: srry for the anticlimatic ending i was just feeling super bad and not in the mood to write but i wanted to get this out here, hope you like it.

#kenma kuzome #kenma x y/n #kenma x reader #haikyuu angst #haikyuu x reader #haikyuu x y/n #kozume kenma #kenma angst #angst #kozume angst #kuroo tetsurou #kuroo #kozume

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denkamis · 3 years

Note

Hi there!!! I wanted to let you know I love reading your work!! I would also like to request peanut butter with Kirishima, Bakugou, and Amajiki please!

to anon: ahh thank you so much anon!! that seriously means so much to me. i see you’re craving a bit of angst tonight, i hope that i can deliver, since i do like writing a fair amount of angst :,)))

warnings: love triangles, implied cheating, a lot of doubts, insecurities, and swearing. reader is gn! tread carefully with this one please

prompt: eijirou kirishima, katsuki bakugou, tamaki amajiki headcanons + “why are you lying to me?”

eijirou kirishima

kirishima didn’t want to believe it at first

he didn’t want to believe that you actually had feelings for bakugou, his best friend of all people

especially when bakugou knew how he was feeling about you

but how could he ever compare to bakugou? top of your class with such a manly quirk to back up his intense commitment to being a hero. his drive was impeccable, it was no wonder you liked him so much

he tried to keep his feelings on the downlow, wanting to support you and let you be happy with bakugou. it were your feelings, you were allowed to love who you wanted to love

so why was he feeling so distraught?

so utterly trapped by his emotions?

what the fuck was wrong with him?

it wasn’t as if anything between the two of you had changed, either. you were still his best friend, his study buddy, his person to go to whenever he got in his head

except now he couldn’t. he couldn’t look at you the same, especially when you talked about bakugou the way that you did

“hey, i think i might ask him out. what do you think, kiri?”

his entire world collapsed

you two had been studying for history together. it appeared that his brain had stopped functioning, your words processing in his mind. “what?” he asked you in a small voice, clearing his throat to better hide the way his voice had cracked. when his eyes met yours, you were staring at him curiously

“is everything okay?”

“me? oh yeah, no no! i’m okay. i think um, i think you totally should.”

“... really?”

kirishima was kicking himself, biting his tongue to keep his feelings from spilling all over his textbook. it wasn’t the manliest move to lie about his feelings, but he couldn’t simply hold you back from being with someone you liked that much

“yeah. i don’t see why not i mean, you talk about him all the time! so, i figured, if he makes you happy, go for it.”

“are you okay?”

“i- of course i am, i’m okay with you dating bakugou. it’s all okay with me!”

“why are you lying to me?”

“pardon?”

kirishima’s hand holding his pencil tensed, fidgeting ever so slightly as you continued to look at him intensely. nothing got past you

“kiri, seriously. is there something wrong?”

kirishima weighed out his options. he took in your features, your bright eyes looking serious and your mouth pulled into a pout as you watched him react. he held his breath, breaking your staring contest to glance back at his notebook below him

“do you really like him like that?”

“what do you mean?”

“i want you to be happy.”

“kirishima-”

“go date him.”

“huh?”

kirishima looked at you, a small smile on his face that held an emotion you couldn’t quite place. “i think he’ll make you happy. bakubro’s not a bad guy, he’s super manly. i know he seems a bit, y’know, but i think he could really make you happy.” he was nothing compared to him. he could never make you as happy as bakugou.

not wanting to fight, you nodded your head slowly. “if you don’t want to talk about it, you can just tell me that too,” you replied gently. that wasn’t bothering him, you knew that. and yet you decided to keep your head down

to this day, looking at the invitation to yours and bakugou’s wedding still brings a sick feeling of regret to his stomach

he should have told you

he just realized too late

katsuki bakugou

you and katsuki had your arguments back and forth about his work life not constantly, but enough for you to take notice of it

sure, you and katsuki had your qualms but you always made up in the end. you both came back to each other, no matter how angry you both got or no matter how much time had passed

you always came back to each other

tonight though, was awful. it was the worst argument you two had ever had

“what is it now, dumbass?” he growled aggressively, his eyes flicking to you with a certain annoyance that looked all too familiar to you

“where were you tonight? we had a date.”

“was at work.”

he didn’t even look up from his phone

you weren’t satisfied with his answer, knowing him and his schedule well enough to be aware that he had not been at the agency

“no, you weren’t at work.”

he scoffed with a shake of his head. “sure, believe what you want to believe.”

“can you listen to me while i’m talking to you? i’m standing literally right here.”

he let out a small “hm” at your remark, your fists clenched as you gritted your teeth. he was really pushing your buttons now

finally, right then and there, you had had enough of his bullshit

“why are you lying to me?”

bakugou’s head whipped up, face contorted in an ugly sort of snarl like an animal finally biting after being provoked for long enough

“the fuck do you mean i’m lying? why the fuck would i lie to you?”

“i know you weren’t at work! you’re done at five and you came home at eight. where were you?”

“i was going home and stopped a shitty villain, is that what you wanted to hear?” the way he spat words at you with such a venomous tongue made your blood boil. you decided to push further

“what villain?”

“fucking christ, really? do you seriously not trust me?”

you said nothing, fear coursing through your body as doubts plagued your mind. his gaze watched you steadily, tears wetting your cheeks as you crossed your arms. you decided to finally let him know

“i know, katsuki. i saw the fucking texts.”

bakugou seemed to be frozen in place, a slow realization washing over the anger on his face. he looked like a deer in headlights

you stood tall, your chin pointed up as you held faux confidence before him

had you not been enough for him? had you pushed him too far? maybe this had been your fault. no. this wasn’t the time to overthink. you had to protect yourself. you vowed to yourself no one would ever treat you like that again. mustering up all the courage you had, picking your shattered heart off the floor of your now one person inhabited apartment, you offered two words to him

“get out.”

tamaki amajiki

it wasn’t exactly a secret that tamaki was a person who tended to overthink things a lot

he would get jitters and his nerves would act up, causing him to be a little more insecure than the average person

he needed a lot of reassurances, to which you didn’t mind giving him. you loved tamaki, you would always be there to support him. you were his partner, he was your boyfriend. of course you would be there for him to lean back on

there were some times where his mind would spiral, especially when it was later at night and he couldn’t sleep

he stared up at the ceiling, his eyes going in and out of focus as he listened to the steady rhythm of your breathing. twiddling his thumbs, he sighed. you deserved better than the stuttering mess that he was. someone who wasn’t afraid to speak up during nights out with your friends, someone who was more positive and less doubtful

he was scared you would realize all of these things and just walk out of his life

you were so precious to him

he couldn’t have that happen

“tama?”

your voice pierced the silence of the night, his thoughts dissipating as the rustling of the sheets indicated you were sitting up in your shared bed

oh no, oh god had you realized?

“why are you up, darling?” you asked of him gently as the light of the lamp was flicked on

his cheeks looked red and streaked with tears

“hey, talk to me. what’s going on?”

not wanting to be a bother, he shook his head, pulling the covers up to hide his face from you

“n- nothing bunny. let’s just get some rest.”

“why are you lying to me?”

your voice wasn’t accusatory, you had merely asked the question. tamaki, however, visibly flinched at your words

“no, let’s not… it’s really nothing,” he mumbled beneath his blanket shield, turning over to face away from you. he couldn’t tell you about what he was feeling, not now. not when he hadn’t made up at least 80 different ways the conversation would play out. he needed to be prepared for all of them

“tamaki,” you reached out for his touch, your hand meeting his quivering form before he shrugged your hand off his shoulder

“go to bed, it’s nothing,” he said more firmly this time

this wasn’t what he wanted

why was he pushing you away?

tamaki’s hands squeezed the edges of the covers, eyes closing shut in a sorry attempt to block out what he was feeling. doubt and anxieties swirled uncomfortably in the pit of his stomach

“i.. alright. we’ll talk about this in the morning?”

tamaki said nothing in response, your heart wrenching in your chest upon receiving silence

the two of you barely slept anymore than a wink that night, the shadow of your shared insecurities looming over you both

all works © denkamis 2021.

tags:

@meilbox @honeykami @httpfirx @strawberrysalwa @hey-i-really-miss-you @smexy-goose @satis-kei

want to be on the taglist? see this post!

#mha x reader #bnha x reader #eijirou kirishima x reader #kirishima x reader #katsuki bakugou x reader #katsuki bakugo x reader #bakugou x reader #bakugo x reader #tamaki amajiki x reader #amajiki x reader #mha headcanons #bnha headcanons #kirishima angst #bakugou angst #amajiki angst #denkamis.hcs #denkamis.requests

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curlsofsagesmoke · 3 years

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More Analysis of Leadership in TMNT because I Cannot Be Stopped

(really at this point these are just notes for myself as I work on my really long really ambitious tmnt fic, but this is also kind of a follow up to that first analysis I did of the Leo/donnie leadership plot line.)

I've already discussed Leo and donnie as leaders, but I was thinking about season 3, and there are some really interesting moves that the writers make in terms of Raph maturing as a leader in Northampton (and donnie kind of getting the short end of the stick, but what else is new).

so aside from how poorly the writers handled the Leo/donnie plot, which I discussed in the post I linked above, it seems like the season two finale was meant to be the writers' way of saying "hey look we gave donnie a chance to lead and he fucked up, so now we're gonna pass the mantle onto raph." because raph does slip into the leader role in Northampton.

on the one hand, it's annoying to see donnie's leadership potential get shunted aside yet again. I do think all four of them have the potential to be great leaders if they have the chance to mature and develop their skills, so I'm not mad at raph getting the chance to be a good leader. however, the writer's spent two seasons building up donnie's potential as leader, and, as I've mentioned before, we get no closure from them abandoning this plot line. in the farmhouse arc, donnie (and Mikey!) gets forced into that goofy, slightly less competent younger brother role that we saw most often in season one (regarding the a-team/b-team thing).

on the other hand, I love to see any kind of character development for these characters, because it's so rare for anyone in TMNT (2012) to go through lasting change. like seriously, there is not one single stable character arc in the entire show. and raph does make a pretty good leader! his problem with leading (seen in New Girl in Town) is that he panics under pressure. out at the farmhouse, where the threats aren't as serious as the ones they faced in the city, raph becomes a pretty good leader. he's the one watching over and encouraging Leo, training with April and casey, and attempting to continue donnie and Mikey's training in the forest. he's calmer, seems less angry, and is more mature. we do love to see it.

admittedly, this could've fit in really well with the "donnie as leader" plot started in seasons one and two. the invasion was a huge blow to donnie's pride and it probably did shake his confidence in himself a lot. if the plot line had continued into season three, the farmhouse arc could've been a good way for donnie to kind of recover from the failure that was the invasion. we could've seen him struggle to accept his mistakes and learn to overcome his self doubt, the way that Leo did in season one (many times).

raph becoming the de facto leader could've fit in, too! not only would it have been an obstacle for donnie to overcome (aka accepting that just because raph is a good leader on the farm doesn't mean donnie is a bad one in the city) but it probably would've been a good character move for raph, too. raph would've gained a deeper understanding of Leo's burdens and responsibilities, and it's a good way to show how he's matured over the course of two and a half seasons.

and the vision quest episode (kind of the only episode in the whole farmhouse arc where anyone undergoes any kind of serious character development) would've been sick as hell if this plot was continued. because as it stands, vision quest doesn't make a whole lot of sense. they all have challenges to overcome, but the writers tried to force the characters back into the roles they occupied in season one. donnie needed to learn to use his strength as well as his mind, raph needed to learn to control his temper, mikey needed to learn to focus, and Leo needed to overcome his injury (which the splinter-ghost implies is a mental/spiritual block that Leo put in his own path).

but that doesn't make any sense! it's been two and a half seasons at this point, and there should've been more nuanced challenges. Raph's temper in season three isn't nearly as bad as in season one, and it doesn't make sense for him to have to go through that whole learning moment again. same with mikey and his focus; yes he's still immature and easily distracted, but not nearly as much as in season one. donnie's strength challenge is dumb, too, because it's not strength that allows him to defeat tiger claw---it's leverage, which is more of a mental victory than a physical one. and don't even get me started on Leo. "pain is all in your head" is quite possibly the worst lesson in the history of fiction. Leo went through serious trauma and almost died, and splinter-ghost expected him to simply ignore it, as if it was like doubt holding him back? he need physical therapy, not to have to fight a giant shredder in some kind of weird spirit world.

imagine this instead. Mikey's challenge is stillness. he doesn't have a problem focusing when he needs to, but he's a very physical person, and he needs to learn to use his head: to calm himself down, to be still, etc. etc. Raph's challenge is similar. he needs to learn to control his emotions; not just anger, but also his panic and anxiety. he needs to pull himself back into the moment when he gets overwhelmed and prevent himself from panicking when things go wrong. donnie's challenge is confidence. after the invasion, understandably he's shaken and he's probably having trouble trusting himself as a leader, so he needs to learn to accept failure and trust his skills and his instincts. and Leo's challenge is patience. at the farmhouse he gets frustrated really easily by how slowly he's healing, and in the invasion he lost his patience really fast when he and donnie fought. during the vision quest he needs to learn to have patience with himself and not push his limits too far.

I don't even have a conclusion for this little rant. at this point I'm just salty about the writing in the show---not that the writing is straight up bad. it just seems like the writers didn't care about the characters enough to include character depth, character arcs, or meaningful relationships between the characters when they were writing the show. but I guess that's why I'm writing that fic; if you can see the problem, you can fix it, and boy do I see a lot of problems.

#wow another rant #tmnt 2012 #teenage mutant ninja turtles #leonardo #donatello #raphael #michelangelo #Leo 2012 #donnie 2012 #raph 2012 #mikey 2012 #casey jones #April o'neil #fic #actually this is a shameless plug for my fic as well #rant

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spnasylum · 3 years

Text

My notes while listening to Misha’s comments on the podcast: (grab a snack!)

In light of the most recent fandom drama I decided to listen to *that* podcast and take notes as I went along about what was actually said and then give my take on it as objectively as possible. This is basically an essay so strap in!

He complains about not getting a trailer on set that’s the same as Jared and Jensen’s. Even though he has one that can accommodate 3 people. This was the first point of discussion inspired by opening up the interview with a brief chat about Misha currently being in his camper van and how he’s sleeping in it even though he’s still home in Bellingham. The whole hour and 26 minutes has an undertone of complaining and ego stroking by all involved.

Says he’s sad he didn’t get to be there for the final days of filming.

Seems a little nervous about if friendships made during the shows run will last now it’s over.

Admits he has no plan in place or anything coming up career wise and he’s unsure of his future. This is where he brings up Walker and The Boys and says if he had shows like that to go to he wouldn’t feel SPN ending was so monumental. It is said with a slight tone of bitterness.

Side note: the hosts Alaina and Malik seem to be fine with running with the narrative that Misha was part of the show it’s entire 15 year run. Misha clears this up eventually by saying he joined in season 4.

Misha says that he realized about six years ago that SPN could run as “we” wanted it to, implying he has any say in keeping the show going or not. He asserts that he would have been on the show up until the very end in any case. But he didn’t feel that way the first few years he was on the show. So that makes me think something or someone involved gave him the feeling he could be confident in being in the cast for however long SPN aired. Maybe this was after Sera left? Maybe this was when he agreed to a significant pay cut and demotion? Either way it seems he felt SPN = job security.

Misha doubts he’ll have the feeling of job security again.

Says from around age 11 he wanted to be a politician.

Says he saw “successful, untalented” actors and decided “I can do that”. He realized that was naive and it’s actually not easy to be that successful and by the time he got his career going he was basically just in it for the fame it’s not anything he took seriously.

We find out his wife did a doctorate in gender history... for some reason.

That Marilyn Monroe was some sort of baseline for him about creating a public persona (🤷🏽‍♀️) except for getting cosmetic surgery he points out.

Talk about how he got started. Acting classes, improve groups. Moving between Chicago, DC and LA.

Discussion about the differences and similarities between Hollywood and Washington.

States he got a consultant to help him cultivate a fan base and image to connect with an audience after getting on SPN. Admits that was a double edged sword because an anonymous public start thinking that they really know you and things start getting weird.

Mentions trying to find a balancing act of being authentic and having a private life but still keeping your fans.

He admits that the fan base he grew for himself by seeming accessible has caused him to attract people who don’t have any boundaries. This is when he claims the “dialing it back” in regard to how much he shares and mentions his kids specifically as something he doesn’t feel comfortable with putting out there. Uses the word “unhinged” to describe them.

Malik mentions “crazy fans” who seem to know too much about you and finding out where you are etc. Using the example of fans turning up at an airport wanting autographs and you wondering how they even knew you’d be there and what flight you taking. He asks Misha to share experiences about his own crazy fans.

This is when Misha uses the example about having fans who think that when he tweets something out he’s communicating with them personally.

Alaina then says that in the Supernatural fandom people fight each other to protect Jared, Jensen and Misha and it’s “very bizarre”. She volunteered that people think Misha secretly hates Jared and that it’s not true. Not sure why she decided to direct the conversation to a place that would cause drama and give Misha a chance to play victim.

And then...

That’s when he claims that he was public enemy number one with super fans of the show because he’s taking attention away from Jared and Jensen.

That’s when he brings up the alleged organized attack to take down his Facebook account. He says they reported him for... *pauses... claims to not know what. But that whatever it was “Facebook bought it and took it down”. Facebook deleted/deactivated his account but he eventually got it back.

Side note: Facebook (like all social media) have always been bias when it comes to people with leftist views and let them have free reign on the platform. So he must have done something that they would decide to suspend him. I don’t think J2 fans can be blamed for the content he posts and if it violated any ToS. As we know he can post some inappropriate things on social media.

He then brings up the allegations of him taking money out of his organization. Stating it’s “categorically untrue” is all he brings forward as evidence to the contrary.

Side note: I don’t know why then that there’s no receipts or transparency. Why is his mother a beneficiary, why do people who mention he owns Stands get blocked, why set everything up in Delaware and have your for profit and so called non profit interests so entangled etc etc) I guess fans are just supposed to have faith and take his word for it.

He says that ALL of them (Jared, Jensen and himself) have people who hate them in the fandom. But overall the fandom is lovely and supportive of the cast and each other. Makes an attempt at stating there’s no kind of competition or animosity between he and Jared. I think this is like the 3rd or 4th time in the interview either he or Alaina bring up Jared but keep the focus on how Misha is the one facing “character assassination.”

Finally says that all of them have nasty things done to them and they all have had to consult security because of threats to their families etc, doesn’t specify which faction of the fandom that’s coming from. Mentions people filing police reports in the fandom but doesn’t say regarding who or what. Alaina reacts like it’s the first time hearing of this happening. Misha just goes “yeah!” Then they move on to talking about living situations.

Apparently Alaina and Misha were neighbors in LA but didn’t take advantage of that. She doesn’t live in LA anyone, wants a new adventure.

Misha mentions Bellingham is another thing about his future he’s unsure about and how his kids flourished there.

Brings up not being present with his kids even when he’s home because of work and side projects and that the one thing he’s enjoying right now it spending time with them. That he used to operate from a place of guilt because his kids felt like they only have one parent. He and Malik briefly spoke on how their careers have negatively affected their love lives.

Misha says he’s not really involved with Random Acts or running it anymore. (Ummm... what)

He and Alaina discuss Haiti and Nicaragua for a while.

Says he may try to get into directing. Says he likes having creative control. Mentions he likes doing his art installations.

Admits that getting a bit of success made him very entitled and wanting of special treatment. But claims he’s trying to keep that in check (where?) and he’s just like everyone else (well duh!). But he “trades on his celebrity” to get stuff and it makes him feel dirty (I think everyone with any kind of following does that though so nbd)

Talk of how TV/film is more diverse in telling minority stories these days.

Was asked by Malik if he has any kind of chip on his shoulder career wise and Misha says the chip on his shoulder is being bored. But says he needs to work on being more engaged.

He then abruptly wants to end the interview. Saying he has to pick up his kids. Malik wants another question. He asks how Misha has been hurt or healed by his career.

Misha then brings up the movie Karla. Again admitting to becoming more like Paul psychologically irl. But says knowing he has that type of evil in him somewhere (and says that we all have that in us) made him more empathetic to the human condition.

They then say their goodbyes. End of interview.

——

My takeaway. The worst thing he can think to say the people who don’t like him in the fandom did was trolling to get his Facebook deactivated? Also that people can see the suspicious nature of his businesses? It would be really easy to settle that with actually being transparent about the finances, which they aren’t and not having close family as benefactors though. Also, I can only speak for myself. But I never hated him. I actually loved Castiel (before his character was there just to be there in recent seasons and Cass wasn’t Cass anymore. I think Misha’s need to pander to shippers/stay on the show was a great disservice to Castiel and his arc) I was a huge Misha fan, and participated in RA and Gish a lot. I absolutely adored Misha, I led myself to believe he was the most amazing person in the world, obviously that’s the reaction he wanted to cultivate from us. Unfortunately I learned too much, experienced first hand and heard too much to be able to keep cheerleading for him. I feel bad for the people still under the spell of feeling like it’s their job to keep being defensive and unreasonably loyal to someone who you can’t and don’t really know and only have a superficial “relationship” with. Seeing the ever more unhealthy and toxic lengths people feel they need to go to to prop up his ego etc. The constant investment emotionally and financially that goes into it and the “sunk cost” if you let reality in makes it hard to let go I guess. Even he knows that what he’s done to gain and maintain relevance has attracted what he called multiple times an unhinged fan base he has to try and balance without losing his influence. I think he maybe had or has good intentions but his fame hungry drive and narcissistic personality traits win out in the end. The Heller’s seem to have, as always, taken what was said and blown it out of proportion, twisted things and created their own narrative. I do see them using key words from the interview a lot suddenly though to bully for him. So, I guess the dog whistle to the sycophants worked out. I hope that a time comes where they can have a more healthy relationship with the media and public figures they choose to gravitate towards. We can all get over zealous with things but there’s lines that shouldn’t be crossed. For some that seems sadly unlikely. I hope that Misha does indeed one day get himself in check as he calls it and I can feel comfortable to support him again. But so long as he’s being enabled and not held accountable again that seems sadly unlikely. Even though I do occasionally find myself being drawn in by the facade again a little and quickly retreating because the issues remain the same. There is a problematic dynamic in the Supernatural fandom for sure. That’s why for a long time I opted out and just watched the show separately from fandom. It’s why when I found out it was ending I had this odd sense of relief I wasn’t expecting to feel and it made me sad. I hope that now the show has aired its finale we can all reflect on things, hopefully be more self aware and objective and most importantly honest about what really has gone down and why. When things started turning sour there have been plenty of times it could have been nipped in the bud yet wasn’t. People who used this silly yet special show in selfish ways, times when walking away would have been better than sticking around trying to make things and people into something never intended to be, giving into tribalism while claiming we’re a family... for that I think we all hold a little piece of responsibility.

You can listen to it yourself on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0m07her5JUf0JGGtDVohtJ?si=c-RdyZzFQmSzffgNzZhkQg

#anti misha #anti misha collins #misha collins #supernatural #fandom #anti destihellers #strap in its a long one again #opinion #trying to be objective #alaina huffman #malik yoba #anti minions #misha #collins

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phandombigotryarchive · 3 years

Text

Trigger warning:

Discussions of sexual assault, transphobia, transmisogyny, chattel slavery and violent antiblackness.

Good afternoon,

It may come to many people's great happiness in this community that I am no longer interested in muling for a fandom that wants my community dead and excuses our deaths.

I am not here to hold your hand on why you should see Black people as human beings if you are unable to do so.

I'm not here to sit around here to convince you that the Black trauma that you are excusing is of real live human beings. That enslaved Black people were mothers, fathers, cousins, siblings, aunts, nephews, loved ones and by brushing off the pain that they went through, you are dehumanizing literal human beings.

This is a fandom that excuses white supremacy, discrimination of people with facial differences, transmisogyny, orientalism, the objectification of m/m ships (often involving a party of color), ableism, transmisogyny/transphobia, general anti-Blackness, colorism and we can go on for just about forever.

It protects those and their enablers and in addition to this, excuses and normalizes the use of chattel slavery as a fanfiction trope.

Think about this before you consider aligning yourself with the people in this fandom or joining it at all.

Therefore, this archive serves a reminder of what the true nature of the Phantom of Opera fandom holds and no matter how many times you block me, you cannot erase this. It serves as a resource for current marginalized fans and future fans to heed warning of the false respectable aura these bigots parade.

I would like to thank our allies for doing as much as they can for the sake of protecting themselves from this fandom. Don't worry. I saw your posts. I thank you.

To all non-Black people of color that stood by and watch this happen without a care, I'm not surprised that you would have such lack of feeling for Black fans. I would implore you to do better but that would imply that any of you actually had spines.

Anyways. Keep the Black names of actors under Phantom of the Opera out of your mouths and gifsets. I know who you are and that you're seeing this. No, posting pictures of Norm Lewis and Derrick Davis along with others will not solve anti-Blackness in a fandom that excuses chattel slavery.

Non-Blacks cannot accept "apologies" for anti-Blackness and slavery apologists.

Take your performatism somewhere else.

Blackness, being Irani and the beauty of being trans is something to be celebrated. Do not forget this even in such a bigoted, white supremacist fandom.

To all those who are affected by the phandoms bigotry, let me say this. You are not alone.

Now, I will recount these past months events of transphobia and antiblackness. for anyone who was lost within the narrative.

We begin with @transphantomweek. @cefantomeenhabitnoir noticed that i-penna and filthybonnet, both big names in the fandom were perpetrators of transmisogyny. When he called this out, they were instantly shut down, blocked and isolated from the fandom.

@cefantomeenhabitnoir has an entire Google doc dedicated to the harassment they faced and the transmisogyny perpetuated in this fandom and you can find it on his page and in my phandom bigotry callouts tag.

Kept Below is the fic that @cefantomeenhabitnoir is referring to.

See my phandom bigotry callouts tag and @cefantomeenhabitnoir 's transmisogyny/transphobia call out for more details, which is also in that tag.

Now we bring ourselves to our current situation. Madamefaust.

On February 25th, 2021, I called out madamefaust for using the tragic mulatto trope, exploiting the usage of the Dumas Family (real life victims of the Haitian-French slave trade) to racebend Raoul De Chagny as a biracial. Black-French Man in her since deleted fic, "Strange Sweet Sound".

I will explain to you why this is bad.

"Do you even know the implications of naming a Black/White biracial child a bastard and flat out stating that their white side was involved in the slave trade? It means that child’s mother was possibly raped. You are implying that Raoul’s mother was a victim of slavery and sexual trauma. You are playing into the tragic mulatto trope. You are anti-Black."

- Me in my original call-out post (which you can find on my pinned.)

The tragic mulatto trope is trope born from slavery times involving a Black/White biracial child who was the product of rape between a white and enslaved Black party (typically female). They are pitied for their Blackness.

"Lydia Maria Child introduced the literary character that we call the tragic mulatto in two short stories: "The Quadroons" (1842) and "Slavery's Pleasant Homes" (1843). She portrayed this light skinned woman as the offspring of a white slaveholder and his black female slave. This mulatto's life was indeed tragic. She was ignorant of both her mother's race and her own. She believed herself to be white and free. Her heart was pure, her manners impeccable, her language polished, and her face beautiful. Her father died; her "negro blood" discovered, she was remanded to slavery, deserted by her white lover, and died a victim of slavery and white male violence."

After I called this out, many people in the fandom blocked me and began to post very cryptic things regarding cancel culture.

Madamefaust is not exempt from participating in my harassment. Madamefaust is a pharoga writer and a large number of the people harassing me were pharoga shippers. You can find the list of names in @cefantomeenhabitnoir 's bigot call out list.

Even her literal friends and mutuals were posting things regarding the words, "you don't have to care about anything" about a Black woman calling out the literal fetishization of slavery.

Madamefaust did nothing to stop my harassment. Only posting a cryptic post "to stop" while these people still kept indirecting me.

Why didn't you tell them to disengage until the damage was already done? Why didn't you confront them personally and not in some text post? You knew what you were doing. You were watching. This fandom is small.

I hope you feel ashamed and that the shame follows you forever. You were playing with literal Black lives and the deaths of many people who were murdered. Slavery wasn't a fun game. It was endless brutalization and loss of self. Black people's lives were treated as products. Me and many people's ancestors literally had nothing.

Life as an enslaved person was either get raped by the slave master or labor until you die.

And this fandom has the nerve to excuse using that as a fanfic trope?

Now, we move on to @strength-to-try

@strength-to-try dubs themselves an "anti racism" page yet allows antiblack slave trade apologists and their defenders to interact with their posts.

When a Black woman criticizes them (me), they refer to me as a "Black Individual" and flat out state that they aren't going to block out literal

SLAVE TRADE APOLOGISTS, ANTIBLACK PEOPLE AND BLACK FETISHIZERS.

YOU ARE NOT BLACK. I CAN TELL.

You cannot "forgive" or accept apologies antiblackness if you aren't Black.

The entire reason that page exists is because I was calling out ANTIBLACKNESS AND SLAVE TRADE APOLOGISM IN PHANDOM.

FUCK YOU AND FUCK EVERYONE WHO SUPPORTS @strength-to-try and their anti-Blackness, slave trade apologism and willingness to stand with white supremacists all whilst throwing me, a Black woman under a bus.

IF YOU SUPPORT THEM, YOU ARE ANTIBLACK. YOU ARE STANDING IN LINE WITH SOMEONE WHO LETS WHITE SUPREMACIST SLAVE TRADE APOLOGIST ANTIBLACK RACISTS INTERACT WITH THEM.

TAKE IT FROM AN ACTUAL BLACK PERSON (ME!)

FUCKING LISTEN TO BLACK PEOPLE WHEN WE SAY THE SHIT YOU'RE DOING IS RACIST.

The Phantom of the Opera fandom is especially not safe for Black People and Trans Women. It houses, protects and defends WHITE SUPREMACY.

But it is also not safe for darkskinned people, Muslims and Iranis.

It is reeking with people who fetishize the Daroga, a darkskinned Irani Muslim man. They lighten his skin, barely even mention his religion unless they're trying to strip it away or demonize his home country. They write him hyperaggressive and hypersexual towards Erik. They call him a monkey. This is not love. This is racism.

They also hyper-sexualize Irani women and refuse to think critically about why Gaston Leroux describes the Little Sultana, an Irani woman as so blood thirsty and Erik (a white man's) main abuser.

You can find examples in my phandom bigotry callouts tag. Or just read any pharoga fic. It's filled with this prejudiced shit.

Also I encourage you all to stop demonizing Erik's facial difference and to educate yourself on the history of ableism regarding the discrimination of people with facial differences. You can find some of these resources under my ableism tag.

So, in all, go run your money to @cefantomeenhabitnoir for the transphobic trauma you've put him through if you have a single bit of sympathy for them. You know who you are.

I don't expect much from a fandom who condones literal anti-Blackness and slavery apologism. But if any of you do feel remorse, I encourage you to run your money to Black people. Especially darkskinned, disabled and LGBT Black people whenever you see a donation post as reparations.

Silence is violence.

Also, I have put together an artist blacklist of people who supported madamefaust's use of slavery in her fanfic, defended it or flat out refused to stop interacting with said defenders of it.

In addition to this, I have added said artists who have contributed to the racist orientalist sentiment against the Daroga and, of course transphobes/transmisogynist defenders.

You can contact @queerangelic or @cefantomeenhabitnoir for the list to know which in the fandom to avoid.

More than many of you are guilty.

For new Phantom of the Opera fans considering joining the fandom? Read my pinned and check out my phandom bigotry callouts tag.

I suggest that you do not join this hellscape fandom or get out of here while you can.

Avoid this fandom as much as possible.

And Phandom? I'll see you all in hell.

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violetwolfraven · 3 years

Text

Crossover Headcanons

((I know I have requests in my inbox but I just had to get this out of my head. Also I probably won’t be posting those requests for a while because my writer’s block is only barely starting to lift, so...))

Anyway this is gonna start off from one perspective and go to more later. Enjoy. 💜

Tw: past death, nightmares

...

So this is a... spin-off? Of the reincarnation au? An alternate timeline? A variant? Whatever it is the newsies are reincarnated and remember their past.

Also somehow most of them are going to the same college here, (I’m not going to say which one because I don’t want to research colleges right now) even if they’ve got a wide range of majors.

There’s only one dorm building even if people are only allowed to share a room with someone of the same gender.

This works out well for Elmer, because he’s pretty happy to be rooming with his boyfriend, Buttons.

But then he gets up to the floor their dorm is on and almost drops the box he’s holding.

Because it’s fuckin her. His national-level math nemesis since 11th grade. They’ve only faced off twice, the first time with her team winning and the second with his winning, but they’re each the only one who can beat the other in a math competition.

Elmer can see the shock in her eyes as she recognizes him and shouts YOU and then she’s stomping over to him aggressively enough that he’s pretty sure she wants to throw down physically.

Jack (who’s also on that floor with Davey) figures that too, and steps in front of him before she gets too close, but that girl acts like she doesn’t even notice him and shouts I WAS HALF A SECOND BEHIND YOU SOLVING THAT PROBLEM!

Elmer is kinda terrified but he defensively shoots back well I still solved it first and moves around Jack because this is his math nemesis and his fight.

The girl scowls at him for a couple more seconds then just sticks out her hand to shake, and Elmer realizes that he doesn’t actually know her name beyond the surname he’s seen on the back of her mathletes jacket. She introduces herself as Cady Heron.

Elmer Kazprzak, he responds, and Cady looks like she’s trying not to laugh, but he figures that’s probably fair, with how ‘Elmer’ was a common name in 1885 but not so much in 2003.

Jack clears his throat so Elmer introduces him but forgets that this isn’t their high school so things like oh this is Jack. He’s basically my dad. are weird.

Cady definitely thinks it’s weird but she doesn’t question it. Instead she just asks where Elmer is living, and it turns out, of course, he and Buttons are right next door to her and her roommate, Karen.

(I say Cady is living with Karen because Gretchen wanted to live with Regina and rules be damned Janis is with Damien.)

Elmer isn’t completely sure he’s not going to get murdered in his sleep but he guesses if he could handle the 1899 Newsboy Strike and World War I he can handle Cady Heron.

Meanwhile Katherine is going to Harvard so Sarah is rooming with someone she’s never met and she’s a little nervous.

And in stomps a girl who declares I’m a lesbian and if you have a problem with that tell me now so I can switch dorms.

And Sarah responds with my girlfriend out at Harvard would be pretty pissed at me if I did have a problem with that.

The girl lets her guard down, explains that she comes from a small town, and says her name is Alyssa Greene.

After that little bump, they get along good. Alyssa explains that her girlfriend, Emma, registered late and couldn’t get a dorm with who she wanted.

And Sarah’s just kinda like wait Emma as in Unruly Hearts Emma? Alyssa’s just like yeah!! I’m so proud of her!!

Sarah brags a bit about how Katherine is studying to be a journalist with a specialty in queer stories and long story short they become besties and eventually Alyssa introduces Emma for real and Sarah introduces Smalls and Sniper.

Emma and Alyssa are a bit thrown by the whole nickname thing but hey whatever now they have a Lesbian Club!

They do meet up with the boys occasionally but the Lesbian Club meets on a video call with Katherine every Saturday.

Anyway Jack meets Janis in art class and initially they kinda think each other is weird because their styles are very different but then they get in an actual conversation and get along amazingly.

Jack is definitely a fan of Janis’s philosophy of when someone hurts your friends you attack and grind your foe into the ground.

Janis tells her new bestie about Cady and Damien (and Regina, Gretchen, and Karen, though she still keeps Cady and Damien closer than the former Plastics) and she’s honestly shocked by the amount of friends Jack tells her about.

She does recognize some names, though. Romeo and Damien are both theatre majors and they’ve become friends.

But anyway Jack and Janis are like. Super good friends. Art buddies. Mlm/wlw solidarity. Protective friend pals.

Janis is pretty surprised when she introduces him to Cady and they’ve already met, and apparently oh fuck your math nemesis is Jack’s Elmer???

Jack’s just going oh fuck Elmer’s math nemesis Cady is Janis’s Cady???

Also Regina met Spot and Sarah at the gym and now they meet up with a few other people every other week to throw down like their own personal fight club.

At first Regina was just angrily trying to fight with no technique, but don’t worry, Spot and Sarah teach her.

There weren’t a ton of out gays at Northshore High, so yeah the Mean Girls crew definitely gets along with the Newsies crew out of solidarity.

Janis and at least one of the Plastics but I can’t choose which one(s) join the Lesbian Club.

Meanwhile Race is super hyped to meet Emma cause like I choreographed a dance to your song wanna see???

Emma is flattered but kinda weirded out and she mentions her friend Angie who’s a dancer too and Race is just *error 404*

Cause of course he saw the news story and knows Emma knows these 4 big Broadway stars but it just. Hasn’t connected until this moment that she like has their numbers.

He tries not to freak out too much cause he knows that’s weird but Emma eventually goes do you wanna meet her? And Race goes do I wanna meet her? She’s only my IDOL!! she’s been dancing like 20 years and she’s still got it!!

Emma calls Angie partially because she likes her new dancer friend and wants to make him happy and partially because she wants to prove to Angie that people do appreciate her zazz and despite how she was just a chorus girl until a few months ago this random boy from New York has been a fan since he was 12.

Angie can’t exactly fly over at the drop of a hat but she watches some videos on YouTube of Race dancing and like holy hell this kid is good. And his friends are too but this kid right here has zazz off the charts.

When she finds out he’s an orphan she’s lowkey can I adopt him??? but then she finds out he already has an adoptive mother and it’s Medda Larkin.

Medda Larkin who did more than a few shows with Angie when they were young but left Broadway to open her own theatre.

They fell out of touch years ago but still follow each other on Instagram and stuff.

But Angie shows Barry and Dee Dee and she’s super excited like remember Medda Larkin??? THIS IS HER ADOPTIVE KID AND HE’S AMAZING

And they watch YouTube clips of Emma’s new friends in high school shows and like wtf these kids are fuckin talented why aren’t they on Broadway???

They almost tell Emma to tell her friends to drop out of college and come straight (haha not that straight) to Broadway but Trent is like wtf no education is important.

Whatever the actors aren’t that relevant.

Sarah has a nightmare about her death one night. And with the others it’s not as big of a deal because they’re all rooming with each other, but Sarah’s roommate isn’t one of them.

She thinks Alyssa is asleep so she calls Katherine crying about how scared she was, how guilty she felt to be leaving her brothers and friends and Kath without a goodbye.

And Alyssa isn’t quite awake, but she’s awake enough that she hears Sarah whisper about how everything is just so stupid complicated. I shouldn’t be afraid of dying when I’ve done it before—when we’ve all died horribly—but I still am, Kitty. I can’t stop being afraid.

Alyssa is out of it enough that she falls back asleep, but when she wakes up she knows what she heard. That her roommate thinks she had a past life and died and implied that all her friends did.

Emma notices she’s acting weird and when she asks what’s wrong she tells her.

They both know it sounds crazy, but...

Emma tentatively points out some weird things about their friends from New York.

She’s study buddies with Race and occasionally he points something out she got wrong on her history homework. Something so small and inconsequential that it would’ve been almost impossible for him to know unless he was there and remembered from experience.

Smalls and Sniper have a habit of jumping apart if they were so much as holding hands and someone walks in on them, even though they come from a mostly accepting city with an accepting friend group.

That whole group straight up skipped history class the whole week they were learning about World War I and refused to make up the work.

They bring the half-baked theory to Janis who immediately remembers all the times she’s seen Jack draw small war-torn towns in France and dirty city streets and an outdated skyline as if seen from a rooftop, all of them too detailed to be anything but directly copied from something Jack has seen before.

But the question is if they’re drawn from a reference photo or a memory.

Cady realizes, upon hearing the theory, that Elmer and Buttons never take her up on offers to come to football games because they don’t like the noise.

More specifically, she remembers the look on her nemesis/frenemy’s face when he said he didn’t like fireworks.

Aaron notices that Davey always solves math problems by hand. He never uses a calculator unless someone reminds him it’s an option. And half the time, he defaults to using his right hand with terrible handwriting even though he’s left handed. Almost like he was raised with the whole ‘left hand devil’ thing, which doesn’t make sense because he went to a public school; not a religious one.

Damien realizes that Romeo has a habit of correcting the costume department, like he knows the period clothing for Hello, Dolly! better than they do. It annoys the hell out of them because upon some research, he is always right.

Regina notes how Spot and Sarah fight like they’re fighting for their lives in a street brawl. She knows that because she started taking karate in an attempt to win fights. She noticed months ago that her friends use technique that’s barely sustainable, like they’re just trying to stay alive until they can run or backup comes.

However all this is just fun and games, a crack theory they’re all mildly creeped out by but don’t really believe, until Gretchen finds it.

An article on the Newsboy Strike of 1899.

There’s a copy of the Newsies Banner, written by Katherine Plumber, which references strike leaders Jack Kelly and David Jacobs.

But they could write that off as just a creepy coincidence if not for the photo.

It’s the one Katherine and Darcy took that first day, which is in black and white and not the greatest quality, but clearly shows a lot of familiar faces.

A later story by this Katherine Plumber documents lives of street kids with interviews from kids with the same odd nicknames as the group they know.

Regina was the most cynical about this theory and even she can’t deny it now. There’s just too much evidence.

Especially when Karen finds Crutchie’s obituary, but Regina stops her from showing it to anyone else because that’s just too creepy.

The Mean Girls crew and Alyssa and Emma are... unsure if they should confront their friends about this, because a) this is freaky and b) the newsie gang is clearly still harboring trauma due to their deaths.

Plus, as Damien points out, being gay was illegal in 1899. Do you think they want a reminder of how they had to hide their feelings for each other back then?

Emma and Alyssa share a knowing look because they know what that’s like.

In the end Karen lets it slip when she asks Davey a question about her history homework involving World War II, mistakenly believing he was there.

Davey naturally questions her about it and she spills the entire story about how Alyssa heard Sarah’s phone call and they figured everything else out from there. She even shows him the article with the 1899 photo and the Newsies Banner.

And... shit, there’s a lot of memories behind that picture. And that’s them, over a hundred years ago, when they were kids and they weren’t all the same age like this time around.

The old Davey looks so big compared to Romeo and Elmer and god was Specs tall for a 15-year-old.

Davey didn’t even meet Smalls and Sniper in this lifetime until they were 16, but in that picture they’re only 13 and they’re so small.

A sidenote on Katherine has a picture of her in a hairstyle he hasn’t seen her in since 1917.

It’s a mixture between ptsd and nostalgia and Davey can’t decide whether to freak out or be happy.

He takes the article to Jack and tells him about how Gretchen found it and their non-reincarnated friends know.

Jack’s silently cursing the fact that he really should have been more careful with what he drew around Janis, but it’s kinda a relief that they know, honestly.

He shoots a quick text to the group chat and then turns his phone on do not disturb mode while he sits Janis down for a little chat.

He doesn’t go into graphic detail, but he does tell her an abridged version of everything. How they were basically a family and all lgbt+ in the early 20th century and how they died before their time and got a second chance.

It’s more than a little freaky for Janis, but it does explain a lot.

Such as how Jack demonstrates on a dare that he can still do some parkour because once upon a time, he used it to run from the cops.

Elmer tells Cady he’s so quick at math because he used to have to calculate change quickly and later had to help Jack and Davey come up with battle plans based on numbers vs tactics and terrain.

Regina definitely trusts Spot’s combat advice a lot more now because he was essentially a gang leader as a teenager and it has literally saved his life.

Race admits to Emma that her song made him cry because... in this lifetime he might not have had to be closeted, but in his last he was constantly worried about getting arrested or worse if people found out not just about him and his boyfriend, but his friends. His family.

Emma may or may not collaborate with him after that to write a song about how much it hurts to be closeted for your own safety and how much better it feels to be free to be who you are. Race dances in the music video and many of the other newsies make appearances but it’s mainly him and Emma. Spot and Alyssa cry when they see it. Damien does, too.

Who am I kidding everyone cries.

They get like 4 million hits on YouTube and it’s amazing.

The title is probably In the Light or something.

Also Cady, Aaron, Kevin, and Elmer form their own college level mathletes team and no one can beat them.

(Kevin’s not as close with the main group literally only because I don’t know that much about him as a character.)

(Also Stacy, Kailey, and whatever their boyfriends’ names are might be there somewhere but I don’t know them either.)

Katherine does get to meet the new kids in person eventually. And also I didn’t mention this earlier but Specs goes to Harvard too and he comes to visit too.

The power when the Lesbian Club finally gets to meet all in person? Unparalleled.

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babbushka · 4 years

Note

Saying this from a place of compassion and love... if a post criticising you has over 70 notes, the author and people who reblog it are being approached by others agreeing with them, if even anons not within the fandom but who are aware from the situation agree with them (like me)... have you considered they may be right? Please listen. Please do self-introspection. If there’s such a loud message out there it’s because of a reason. Lots of love

I hear you, and I understand where you’re coming from completely, and I’m going to say this as clearly and neatly as I possibly can, because it’s been made very clear that people on the internet like to whip things up and let it spiral out of control.

I reblogged the post that @wayward-rose made with the tags of “i still stand by everything that I said” without much more explanation than that, which people didn’t seem to really appreciate, and I recognize that that was wrong.

This response is going to serve as that explanation. This is most likely going to be long, so I’ll be putting it under a cut, but I hope that people will read my side of things before casting judgement against me. I understand people are going to still cast judgement, and that’s fine, but I would like the chance to just say my side.

The screenshots that were chosen to be put in that callout post about me, of posts and conversations that I’ve had back and forth with people, or posts that I’ve made/ask responses I’ve given, were confusing, because there is much more context surrounding pretty much all of these situations, as well as things that went on behind the scenes. I’d like, if I may, to explain what those screenshots are referring to, from my perspective. For ease of clarity, I’ll just go in the order of which the original post has been done.

The Oscars where JP won for best actor were filled with many beautifully heartfelt speeches about giving support to Australia during the wildfire crisis. Cate Blanchett, Patricia Arquette, Jennifer Aniston on behalf of Russel Crow, Pierce Brosnan -- they all made speeches. And yet, the only thing I was seeing on my dashboard were gifs of JP, a known sexual predator and overall very bad guy, being celebrated for at the very last minute, likely after having seen everyone else include a heartfelt statement in their speech, tacking on a ‘oh save Australia’ at the end of his own speech.

I made a post expressing how I was disappointed with the amount of coverage JP was getting in comparison to how little everyone else who had spoken up. @callmehopeless reblogged the post and began to say that regardless of what JP has done, his message is somehow more important than everyone else’s message that was said, because he won best actor. You all saw the conversation that took place afterwards, with me reiterating my point of ‘yes he spoke out about it but he’s not the only one and he shouldn’t the only one lauded for it.’ and her insinuating that I wanted everyone in Australia to die by fire. Not that it matters for anything, but I would like to mention that while all this was going on, I was frequently sharing support links, donation sites, and news coverage on how to help the wildfires in Australia, as we all were. I didn’t include it on the post, because that’s not what the post was really about, but I disagree with the insinuation that I wasn’t spreading information too.

I still stand by my point that he should not have received the most praise for doing the bare minimum in a time of crisis. I saw that the conversation wasn’t going anywhere, so I ended it. I never accused anyone of being a rape apologist, I only expressed my frustration that the known allegations about him were being ignored. There is a difference.

The second point regarding the blush, I will admit wasn’t handled well on my part. I fully recognize that now, and looking back, I can understand how my frustration with @wayward-rose looks hostile. It was never intended to be hostile, I was just genuinely confused with her reblogging one of my fics as having a “white reader” because of the inclusion of blush. I was extremely hesitant to approach TWR about this tagging of the fic, because the only interactions I had had previously with her, were when she reblogged one of my posts with writing of her own, surrounding a topic that I was uncomfortable with, and then proceeded to lecture me on what triggers are and are not as if I were an incompetent fool, which, for all intents and purposes, she might’ve thought that I was. Conversations with TWR very quickly turn to technicalities, which is why I tried to be as cut and dry about it as I was.

With this frame of reference from her point of view regarding the whole “I have friends of color so I can do whatever I want,” I would like to say that I never had that intention, and seeing it presented that way does make me feel awful, and I’m sorry for it. I don’t want people to think that I’m in any way tokenizing anyone, because if you know me, you know that that’s something I am constantly expressing feelings against. I was trying to explain that I didn’t make up this idea that only white people blush, but I admit fully that it was a poor explanation and a poor argument to have been made. I try very hard to make my readers as vague in terms of skin color as possible, and I thought that because I didn’t mention the color of the blush (like denoting it as a pink or rosy blush for example) that I would be inclusive. I was wrong, and I admit that.

In regards to the writing of Flip Zimmerman with catholic iconography even though he’s a canonically Jewish character, particularly by a non-Jewish author, I still stand by my point. Characters who have no stated religion can and should be interpreted as everyone sees fit, because representation matters for marginalized communities. But when a Jewish character’s identity is replaced or erased with another, well, that’s just a small piece of a long line of casual antisemitism that I wanted to bring up to her. I never wanted or told her to delete her story, I never sent anyone to go fill her inbox, I never told her to edit it. After the blush discussion, I tried to simply end the argument by voicing my concerns and saying I thought it was in poor taste to have done what she did, because of the history around such topics -- and I still stand by that.

The posts regarding the Very Popular Fic I take full responsibility for, I don’t deny that I make them, nor do I deny any of the sentiments in them. I expressed my annoyance at constantly being asked if I’ve read that fic, if I liked that fic, what I thought of that fic weekly for months and months after it blew up on tik tok, despite having expressed my dislike for it in the past. You can only get asked something so many times before it grates on your nerves.

I still stand by my point that seeing content which you find upsetting being the type of content that gets “””famous”” is frustrating. I didn’t imply that I’m only writing for the notes. I referred to the fic as a ‘joke’ because in the tags of that fic on AO3, the author compares it to a shitpost. Similarly to the Other Fic with the handmaid’s tale AU, the author themselves put in the tags of the fic on AO3 that they knew this was in poor taste.

I’d like to make it clear that I don’t dislike fics because they’re popular. I dislike fics because sometimes there’s content that I find disturbing or damaging, or in poor taste with regards to source material. I don’t go out of my way to read that content, because I don’t like it. So when hundreds of people are asking my opinions about it, and I express those opinions, then people like to jump down my throat and say I’m a bully...you can imagine why I get so snappish when the topic comes up. The comment about the brain cells thing was understandably harsh. I apologize for that comparison, it’s just a phrase I say frequently, I honestly didn’t think anything of it at the time, and I’ll do better in the future to not make such harsh comparisons.

I also stand by my point that I don’t like the fic, I don’t advocate for the fic, and it really shouldn’t matter what I think because the author will do what the author does, and that’s fine. I don’t have to like it, and you guys don’t have to like the fact that I dislike it.

When someone sends in a message anonymously, I have no idea who they are, and most of the time, unless they leave an emoji or something, I’ve got no idea what context they’re asking me about, particularly when it comes to blocking. I had absolutely no way of knowing that the anon who messaged me asking why I blocked them, was someone I had blocked for reblogging gifs of mine. However, the idea that it’s a bad thing that I blocked someone for reblogging my gifs with comments I didn’t really appreciate (I wouldn’t have blocked them for the comments shown in the fic, usually it’s stuff about how they want to get pregnant by flip, or once there was someone who commented that they wanted flip to destroy their pussy -- that’s the comments that tend to get blocked.

But either way, blocking people from accessing your content is not a bad thing, and I stand by my point that blocking does not always mean I have anything personally against them, but rather I’d rather just not interact with their posts/have them interact with mine. It’s really not that deep.

I don’t really know how many times I have to say that of course I don’t own a character or anything, but I do say it, constantly. Particularly regarding personal AUs, which, I really don’t find as deep as people seem to think I do. However, the content that I make, I do believe I have some right to voice my opinion on what the internet does with it. I think that if someone comments something on one of my fics, or my posts, or my gifs, and I don’t like it, I should be allowed to block them -- just as anyone else should be allowed to with their own content.

The comment about Ben Solo still stands, I won’t be expanding on that.

The last point that I would like to explain myself about, was made in Hope’s reblog of the post, is the whole “I bullied someone for leaving fandom” incident. I can only assume that she means an author who I had been informed was plagiarizing my work from the fic Blue Moon. I had never had this happen to me before, but I’d been told my many other people that this author has a history of taking other people’s content and uploading it as their own, including someone that I was at one point good friends with. I believed them, and I reached out to this author expressing my concerns, only expressing to please not do this in the future, or at the very least, mention that this was related to my story. This author deleted her account, and that was the last I heard about it.

I’m honestly shocked and confused by how many people have come forward and said that they find my responses to anonymous questions mean-spirited or toxic. I try very hard to maintain a general rule of, if you’re kind to me, I’ll be kind back. In many instances, anonymous questions come across as rude, disrespectful, flat out mean, or frustrating, and so I reply back with a less-than-nice manner.

The last thing I’d like to say on this whole matter is this: I want to make it clear that I mean no personal malice towards any of the people that these screenshots surround. I vehemently disagree with the narrative that I send people after one another, I just don’t do that. What people do is of their own accord. I don’t ever want people to be sent hate, because firstly I don’t think that’s a good thing to do, but secondly, I get sent hate all the time, and I know how it feels. I don’t want that for anyone. I know that the collection of these screenshots may make it seem otherwise, but I really do try to stay in my lane, and I only speak up on things that I’m passionate about -- whether it’s passionately positive or negative.

I would like to apologize for the way that I’ve responded to criticism in the past, it’s just frustrating when people are criticizing you from a perspective that doesn’t take into consideration that there might be more to the story. All I can do is move forward and try to check myself, and I hope that with these explanations, people out there will realize that when I act out of frustration or aggressively, it’s because I feel as though I’m not being heard.

I know that whatever opinion you form of me is yours and will be yours, but if you’ve read this entire thing then thank you, I appreciate you hearing me out. Hope you’re all doing well, and as always, I truly am sending you guys all my love.

#Anonymous #cowboy answers

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kd-holloman · 4 years

Text

The Traveler’s Gift Deleted Scene

I haven’t posted any deleted content lately, so here’s a deleted chapter from D3 of TTG. This chapter--or something really similar--managed to make its way through three drafts before I decided to get rid of it. For some reason (one I can’t think of now that Draft 4 is done) I was reluctant to get rid of it. I’m glad I did, because the story just flows so much better without it.

Warnings: Drug use, mentions of nsfw content, implied molestation, violence, language, and murder.

Louis didn’t know what he was doing crammed in the back seat of the SUV, but he wasn’t sure he liked it.

Johnny was lounging in the front seat next to Mark, while Damien sat on Louis’s left. On his right, Slater unapologetically did his best to take up as much of the backseat as possible.

Louis was still hurt over what had happened to Rodney and he wasn’t about to forgive the brute in the passenger seat for the role he’d played in his murder. That was what he deserved for getting so attached. There was a reason that many of those who worked for the mob kept their home and work lives separate. If they didn’t, things got messy.

Louis had distanced himself from his family to the best of his abilities without raising suspicion. His intimate relationships had a history of being nothing more than one-night stands or brief flings with no emotional attachments. He hadn’t kept up with his childhood friends after returning from the war. They’d had their own lives, families, and jobs to worry about. Once he’d been hired by Marcello, the only person he’d kept up with had been Javier, but only because they’d been partners.

Look where that got you, he reminded himself bitterly. Javier is dead too.

“Oh, don’t be like that, blondie,” Johnny grumbled, his crooked nose pressed against the tinted glass to watch the city streets slide by. “It was just business.” The smirk was audible in his voice.

Louis scowled and slouched against the supple leather of the seat, a quiet spark of fury igniting within him. He was in the car with two other gifted individuals reputations just as red as the blood on their hands. It would be wise to keep his trap shut. With that in mind, he swallowed his heated retort and settled for glaring past Damien, through the window, instead. “Where are we going?”

“Rick has given us an errand to run,” Mark explained.

Slater spoke up for the first time since they’d left the apartment. “If I wanted to waste my time I’d spend it watching videos of dogs that can walk on their back legs. This is stupid.”

“It’s not a waste of time. We’re just reminding Marco who he’s dealing with. If you run a drug ring from one of O’Shea’s buildings, you pay the rent.”

“They’re street trash. I don’t associate with street trash.”

“You’re not associating with them. You’re associating with us.”

“Why did you drag me along again? Johnny is here and he likes to crack skulls together. I’m sure he’s more than capable of getting the job done.”

Mark tightened his grip on the steering wheel so much his knuckles cracked. “Yes, but he doesn’t have your reputation. Your face in a room is enough to make a grown man shit his pants. Don’t argue with me or I’ll put Rick on the phone.”

“Please do. I can’t wait to tell him to go fuck himself.”

“No! I’m not going to call him so you can piss him off. You’ll get all of us in trouble.” He pulled up to the curb in a shady, industrial, part of town. “Go in there, scare the shit out of a couple of drug rats, and we can all go home.”

“He does have a point,” Damien piped up. “If we have Slater, why do we need him and Johnny?”

“I don’t know! I don’t make the fucking rules.” Mark twisted around so he could look at Slater. “You have to be on your best behavior tonight, O’Brien.”

Slater wore a liar’s smile. “I’ll be on my best fucking behavior.”

“I’m too old to deal with this shit,” Mark grumbled before opening the door. “Dee, stay with the car. I don’t trust these bastards not to take a baseball bat to it.”

Damien obediently leaned against the bumper to wait.

There was nothing particularly special about the grimy building. It was a handful of blocks away from the main stretch of road, nestled in the shadows, and out of reach from any street lights. A few cars sat out front, dented, rusting, and paint fading. Their bumpers sat low to the ground, their windows too dark to see inside.

Louis unsnapped his holster, ready to draw his gun if necessary. It didn’t seem like it was going to come down to a shootout. Nobody else seemed concerned, even if the quiet stillness of the night seemed to whisper danger.

Mark rapped on the door in a patterned series of knocks before it swung open.

A haze of smoke hung in the air, curling in lazy wisps overhead. The smell of marijuana was so pungent that Louis felt like he was going to get gowed-up just from breathing.

A man was sitting on a lopsided couch, a woman in his lap was being none-too discrete with her hand down his pants. He jolted upright fast enough to send her to the floor. He pulled the reefer from between his lips. “Who the hell are you?”

Another man had been weighing white powder on a scale sitting among a trash-littered coffee table. At the sound of the other man’s voice, he stopped what he was doing and picked a gun off of the table next to him.

“None of that shit,” Johnny said. He waved his hand and the gun went skidding across the room.

Mark gave an approving nod. He held up his hands to show that he wasn’t about to pull any weapons. “I’m not here to fuck up your shit. Are you Marco? Rick O’Shea sent me. He says your rent is due.”

The man on the couch nodded. He had a tattoo on his face, an X, the blank ink was faded and looked slightly green against his skin. He slid a suspicious look from Mark to the rest of them. “Why did you come with such a big crew if you aren’t here to start trouble?”

“You can never be too careful. I didn’t know if you were going to have twenty guys waiting to punch me full of holes.”

Marco nodded, seeming to decide that it was a fair precaution to take. “Get your ass up and get the hell out of here,” he snapped at the girl sitting at his feet with red eyes and black streaks of makeup down her face. “Don’t you have somewhere better to be. Go on, now.” He gave her a nudge with the toe of his boot.

She was slow to get to her feet and slightly unsteady once she got there.

“If you see Drew or Kevin when you get out there, tell them to mind their own business outside until I tell them to come in. Got it?”

She looked like she hadn’t even registered a word he’d said. She was too high to pay attention.

“Bitch, did you hear me?”

She jerked, the sudden boom of his voice startling her. “Uh, yeah … yeah. I’ll tell ‘em.” She shuffled to the door. It slammed shut behind her.

“Jesus,” Mark said, “she’s fucked up. What is she on?”

The man sat back down on the couch and twitched his fingers toward his friend. Once he had fat stacks of cash he began to count it out. “Just herb, y’ know what I’m saying? Good dealers don’t use their own product.” He licked his finger and continued to count cash. “Your boss is asking for his cut a little early, isn’t he?”

“No,” Mark said. “He’s doing you a favor. He gave you an extension, remember? It’s time for you to pay up. I’m sure you discussed the terms and conditions of the late fee.”

“I know my business,” Marco replied coolly. “I thought I had another week before I paid up.”

“Take that up with him. What’s in the back room?”

“That’s where I keep my supplies.”

Mark looked from the doorway in the back corner of the room to Louis. “Mahoney, take a look back there and make sure we aren’t going to have any surprises.”

Louis touched the brim of his cap in acknowledgement. He looked at the dark room, imagined himself standing next to it, and willed himself there.

Once his shoulder was pressed up against the wall next to the door, ignoring the burning in his bones, he raised his gun and peered inside.

There was nothing but a couple of locked gun safes against the back wall. There was another couch, even more stained and lopsided than the first, to his left. Trash littered the floor, the room smelled like mildew and marijuana. He checked each corner of the room before he gave Mark a thumbs up.

“Oh,” Marco laughed, amused, “you got yourself a bunch of freaks here. I almost forgot that O’Shea had a bunch of them on a leash.” He didn’t look up from counting the money when he asked, “What about you, red? Any tricks up those leather sleeves of yours?”

Slater fixed the drug dealer with a ferocious sneer. “It will be a bad day for you, if you ever find out.”

In the stillness of the night, a series of shrieks came from outside. It sounded like the woman from earlier hadn’t gotten very far and she was having an episode.

“Don’t mind her,” Marco dismissed with a wave of his hand. He gestured for his friend to hand him more money. “She’s always carrying on about something. Back to you, Red, are you going to show off your moves for me?”

“It’s a disappearing act,” Slater replied.

“Really?”

“Yeah and if you watch closely, you can see just how I do it.” With that, he turned tail and walked through the front door.

Mark did his best to appear unconcerned, but Louis saw his jaw twitch from where he stood. No doubt, Slater was going to get an earful once they got back in the car.

Marco finished counting out the cash. “There’s that and here’s the extra chunk I owe him for his generosity.”

Johnny dropped a backpack on the coffee table in front of him.

“Don’t forget that you’re just a phone call away from losing everything, Marco,” Mark reminded the dealer. He accepted the loaded backpack from Johnny. “Keep the boss happy and we won’t ever have to have this conversation again, understood?”

The sharp glimmer in the other man’s eyes showed just how sour the threat sounded. “Of course, of course. I wouldn’t want him to send The Reaper after me. That’s his name, isn’t it? Or is that some sort sick joke your boss made up?”

“I don’t know,” Mark replied with a shrug. “The Reaper just stepped outside. Why don’t you ask him yourself. Mahoney, go get him.”

Louis nodded and disappeared from the stuffy drug den and emerged in the sticky night air. He found Damien leaning against the SUV’s bumper. “Is Slater in the car?”

He shook his head and pointed to the backside of the building. “He went that way, where that girl was screaming. Christ, you don’t think he killed her, do you?”

That was a grim thought, but part of Louis was skeptical. “I don’t think so.” He jogged to the rear of the building, where Damien had indicated that Slater had gone. He only slowed when he heard the staccato smack of a closed fist hitting flesh.

Louis’s heart beat faster as he rounded the corner.

Slater’s red hair was unmistakable, even if the rest of him was hardly visible in the barely-there light.

The woman sitting on the ground, slumped against the tire of a car the color of cigar ash. Her shirt was crooked and her skirt had been hiked up past her hips, revealing too much of a bright pink undergarment. Her head bobbled every once in a while, the way it did when someone was nodding off and trying to stay awake. She was alive.

Louis turned his gaze from the woman and back to Slater. Why? He wondered. Why is he fighting with these strangers when he could kill them in their tracks? Why was he choosing to throw fists when he could end it in an instant? What’s the point?

Judging from the way the redhead stood with his hands in the pockets of his , he wasn’t concerned about the two men circling him like sharks preparing to feed.

“You think you can just come around here and stick your nose where it doesn’t belong?” The taller man asked, his voice raspy. There was an unthreatened melody to his tone, like the idea of a fight didn’t scare him.

Slater’s face split into a grin. “Do you know who I am?”

“From what I hear, you’re the guy that everybody’s afraid of. I can’t see why. You look like a pussy to me. What do you think, Drew?”

The shorter of the men smirked, “He looks like a preppy motherfucker to me, Kev.”

“Run along, Reaper. Let me fuck this bitch and get on with my night.”

Their jibes seemed to have little impact on Slater. He simply stood where he was, watching them from behind his sunglasses. “The only ones getting fucked tonight are the two of you.”

The taller of the two men—Kevin—moved, a snake striking in the tall grass. It was sudden and the force of his punch was hard enough to snap Slater’s head to the side. The hiss of air slipping between his teeth was as sharp as a gunshot.

Slater reached up and brushed his thumb across his upper lip. He inspected it for a moment before he laughed in delight. “Now, this is starting to get fun!” When the man swung again, he ducked out of the way before retaliating with a jab of his own.

In an aggressive flash of fists, Drew joined the fight. It was unfair, two against one, and obvious that the two men wouldn’t stop until Slater was unconscious or dead.

Louis contemplated intervention, but stayed put. He was interested in seeing how this deadly boxing match would end. Whatever the outcome was going to be, Slater didn’t appear concerned.

In fact, with each blow struck him, it seemed to drive him faster, made him burn a little brighter. The smirk on his face continued to grow, even with the bruises already forming on his fair complexion. He showed now signs of slowing down.

The door banged open and Mark scrambled around the side of the building with Johnny on his heels. He skidded to a halt when he saw Slater in the midst of a fight. Then, he pulled a device out of his pocket and lunged for Drew, it crackled and spat in a flash of blue light.

Kevin stopped and looked at Mark, but his attention was jerked back to Slater when the redhead spoke. “If you touch them, I’ll kill you.”

It must have been a credible threat, because Mark hesitated.

His pause was enough time for Johnny to extend his hand.

Drew hardly had enough time to let out a startled yelp before he went flying backward. His body crashed into the brick wall behind him hard enough that Louis heard a crack. Then, he slumped onto a pile of garbage bags, eyes rolled into the back of his head.

Slater’s eyes snapped to Johnny, the smile on his lips vanishing, his expression frigid.

Kevin didn’t need an invitation to send another fist flying. This time, the punch was fueled by even more rage. It slammed into the side of Slater’s face with enough force that Louis’s own jaw ached in sympathy. It sent the two of them into another round of snarls hissed between clenched teeth and battered knuckles.

Apparently, Slater’s arctic glare had been enough of a message to keep Johnny from intervening again. He didn’t make a second move to put an end to the fight.

How much longer is this going to go on? Louis wondered. Are they going to keep going until they’re unconscious, dead, or until Marco comes out with his friend, guns blazing?

Enough was enough.

Louis’s approach didn’t go unnoticed. Mark stepped in front of him to block his path. “Stay out of this, buddy. This isn’t your fight.”

He flicked Mark an unimpressed look. Having something—doors, people, or walls—in his way had never stopped him before and it wasn’t going to work now.

“Did you hear me? Are you deaf or are you stupid?”

“Probably just stupid.”

Mark made a move, the Taser in his fist crackled angrily.

One moment Louis was there, the next he was standing between Slater and Kevin.

Everything went still. The only sound was sound of the fighters and their ragged breathing, their attack thwarted by Louis’s sudden presence.

Louis had done what he could. He’d gotten their attention. Now, he had to keep it.

“Move,” Slater ordered.

He stayed put. At this point, if The Reaper wanted him dead, he had nothing to lose.

“Get the fuck out of my way before I kill you.”

Louis stared down at him, seeing his own reflection in the lenses of his shiny, bent, glasses. He thought about what Damien had said, that Slater had blown a man’s head clean off his shoulders with only his mind. Obviously, he’d been deemed The Reaper for a reason. If he truly wanted Louis dead, there was nothing stopping Slater from killing him. He didn’t look away. “If you were smart,” he warned Slater’s opponent, “you’d get the hell out of here.”

He didn’t have to turn his head to hear the other man run off into the night.

Slater was still glaring at him, four inches shorter than Louis.

It reminded Louis of a game he and James had played when they were kids, one where they stared at each other before the other looked away.

Louis looked back for what felt like an eternity, every muscle drown rigid with anticipation. If felt an awful lot like staring down the wrong end of a loaded gun. Each second dragged as he waited to see if Slater would pull the trigger.

“Johnny,” Mark said, “go tell Damien to start the car. Come on, O’Brien, you’re coming with us.”

Slater kept his gaze on Louis for a few more deliberate moments before he followed Mark without a word.

Louis exhaled a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding. The tension resolved once those hidden eyes were no longer burning him to the core. He gave the girl, propped up against the wheel of the car, one last look before he followed the others.

On the ride back, Johnny broke the uncomfortable silence by complaining. “Why do we even let O’Brien come with us? That asshole gets off on picking fights. I swear—”

Slater, now in the passenger seat, reached out with a bruising and bloody had to flick on the radio. He twisted the knob for the volume until nobody could hear Johnny bitching.

Once the car was turned off, Johnny started again. He slammed the car door hard enough to make it rock. “You want to know what I don’t understand? I don’t get why Boss keeps you around, anyway. You’re a loose fucking cannon. I mean, just ask the new guy, I can kill people too. Big fucking deal! You aren’t spe—”

If Louis hadn’t been watching, he would have known what happened. One moment, Johnny had been going on and on, without a breath between words; and the next, he’d collapsed to the concrete of the parking garage floor, lifeless.

There was a breath of stunned silence among them before Mark reacted. “O’Brien! What the fuck?!”

Slater’s expression was smooth. There wasn’t the slightest hint of emotion on his face. He looked at the body with disinterest before he turned to the other man. His voice was just as blank as his face when he said, “I warned him to stay out of it. I warned all of you. He just didn’t listen.”

“Oh shit!” Damien gasped from Louis’s elbow. “Oh, holy shit!”

Now Louis understood how Slater had earned his nickname. It hadn’t been a myth and Damien hadn’t been exaggerating his power. He had really killed Johnny just by looking at him.

He studied the corpse with morbid fascination. Blood ran from Johnny’s mouth, nose, and ears, pooling beneath his head on the oil-streaked concrete. His eyes were wide open in a blank stare.

Louis looked at Slater, palms sweating. Maybe he shouldn’t have stepped in to stop the fight. By doing so, he had probably signed his death certificate.

Slater paused in front of Louis on his way out of the garage. He leaned in close, reeking of sweat and leather. There was a bruise blooming on one of his high cheekbones. His voice was a whisper, “Consider this your warning. Don’t get in my way again.”

Louis swallowed the nerves that had formed into a ball in his throat and watched Slater disappear into the night.

Tag List: @tricksexual, @wildler, @ganseyboii, @surrealirist, @obsessionandstuff, @pertinax--loculos, @pe-ersona, @a-curator-of-nonsense, @angelolytle, @aslanwrites, @aurumni-writes, @andrewminyardd, @lordkingsmith, @gloriafrimpong

#the traveler's gift #slater michael o'brien #louis elijah mahoney

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stillness-in-green · 4 years

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Changeling: The League (1/3)

Being some errant nerdery combining two things I love very much into one thing that is exponentially more nerdy than either thing on its own: My Hero Academia villains as Changeling: the Lost characters!

This will(/should) be a series of three posts containing some mid-length write-ups on the League of Villains, the Metahuman Liberation Army, and some odds-and-ends on other characters/alternate takes.

Some prelude: The most prominent question that kept coming up as I was brainstorming the write-ups below was, “Is this retelling the story of My Hero Academia using Changeling: The Lost’s mechanics and world, or is this exploring Changeling: The Lost’s themes using the My Hero Academia cast?” Would these versions of the characters be NPC villains in Izuku’s story, opponents (or possibly eventual allies) in some grand, epic clash between Heroes and Villains as begun with All Might and All for One? Would it be the story of a corrupt system, pulled down by the PC group that was Shigaraki and his motley? I had ideas for both, but in the end, I decided that, rather than oblige myself to the MHA canon, I was ultimately more interested in just letting the implied “story” focus on the League and their histories of loss, trauma and recovery, so that’s the spirit in which these are written. (Though things do get a bit plottier when their story intersects with the MLA’s.)

Lastly, these are, of course, completely AU, but if you don’t know who the Liberation Army is, you’re probably still going to trip over manga spoilers, so be mindful.

First, let me lay down some backstory! Specifically, the story of All for One, One for All, and the lives they drew into their story...

THE PROLOGUE

There is a realm in Faerie inhabited by a pair of binary-matched Fae, All for One and One for All, styling themselves as warring brothers. They’ve been fighting for many long generations, each in their own fashion. All for One has tended to keep his power mostly within himself, employing many underlings, but sharing his power with very few of them. One for All, conversely, has shared most of himself with a succession of users, and in each generation, the pair clashes, with OFA not very "present" for the battles (and thus at less risk), while AFO is able to bring more of himself to the fights. Before each battle, each user of OFA would be "freed" for a period to find and designate a successor (who would inevitably go missing a few weeks later), before returning for the battle. They often did this with deeply tormented feelings, but saw little escape from the pattern. Each one hoped that they might be the one strong enough to break the cycle, as OFA told them each time was a possibility--patterns grow stronger for being repeated, after all--but none of them was able to do so until recently. Toshinori Yagi refused to designate a successor, and finally, for his stubbornness, was recalled to do battle without one--without having passed even a fragment of OFA's power on, he was finally able to defeat AFO.

In his defeat, AFO was cast out from Faerie. He had little memory of who and what he was, but retained a sense for fae matters and a limited grasp on his powers. He spent the next several years setting up shop in the local freehold, dabbling with Spring and Autumn Court matters as his fancy took him, and racking up a fair amount of renown with the latter in particular when the former found him too ruthless, and not only with humans. One day, though, he stumbled across what would eventually become his way home--a little boy who felt startlingly familiar, black-haired with a mole on his chin. AFO struck up a friendship, and when he eventually met the boy's father, things began to click into place--he knew this family because he once fought their matriarch, and that connection was the key to his return. As he was once defeated by this bloodline bearing his brother's power, for his rise, he had to defeat someone of the bloodline--but he couldn’t just do it straight out. With his brother, there were pacts in play, old bargains and arrangements. He couldn’t just waltz in and kill Shimura Kotaro.

One of them needed to ask.

THE LEAGUE

Here are the League roughly as we might find them when they’ve been out long enough to build a motley, solidify their bonds somewhat, and start taking on bigger, toothier problems. All have 7 dots of Contracts except Shigaraki, who has a modest leader bump. Just assume he’s been out doing some level-grinding the others haven’t.

Shigaraki Tomura

Quote: “There’s always a win condition.”

Type: Gameplayer Wizened. A trophy/souvenir of AFO’s time on Earth, Tomura survived a durance filled with little but tests in the guise of games. Survival, combat, endurance, manual dexterity, reaction time, strategy, academics, even odd trivia--he learned them all under his Keeper’s tutelage, in preparation for the next battle with his brother's champion (AFO having seen that his brother's way of doing things has its merits). Tomura grew up believing himself responsible for his family's deaths (though he's blocked most of the specifics, he knows in his gut that he's responsible somehow) and watching the realm celebrate the champion who'd defeated Tomura’s Keeper, but who hadn't done a thorough enough job to prevent the cycle from resetting after all.

Toshinori, for his part, initially had no idea that AFO had returned with a child, a new champion. But he did know that AFO had returned (the realms are connected enough that you can't really miss it), and so waited for the next battle with some impatience. He thought that he, perhaps, just hadn't done well enough, that he'd be more careful, more thorough next time. After all, patterns become stronger when they repeat. He doesn't truly understand that All for One can't be killed--not in Faerie, at least--and so there will be no end to the cycle as it stands. Eventually, he got tired of waiting and sought out AFO on his own--and was shocked to find a kid, just a kid, where he expected to find AFO. AFO did not think Shigaraki was ready for this yet, and was not prepared to watch several years' worth of effort and his cute keepsake get slaughtered (and he probably would have been; Shigaraki could have all the lives he wanted in training, but an official battle against the sanctioned bearer of OFA would have been different), so he ejected Shigaraki from Faerie and fought the battle himself. As to what happened afterwards, Shigaraki has no way to know, but the gradual return of various other servants of AFO may eventually begin to shed some light on the subject…

Shigaraki is, when his story truly begins, still figuring out his current game--outside of Arcadia, second chances are harder to come by--but he’s a sore loser and a quick learner, so he never stays down for long, and he’s already made a friend in Toga, who he met in his escape from the Hedge. He still has very ambivalent feelings about his Keeper, which makes him something of an outlier amongst changelings, who typically feel only terror and loathing for the Others that upended their lives and scarred them in ways that will never--can never--fully heal. No one, including Shigaraki, has quite realized his connection to the Emperor of Darkness who caused so much havoc in the freehold when he escaped back to Faerie five years ago. Likewise, Tomura’s fetch, only ten years old, is still in a mental care unit in juvie for the murders of the Shimura family, but dealing with that mess will have to wait until Shigaraki can stomach the idea of even looking at that version of himself.

Tomura looks much as he does in canon, thin and covered with scratching and scarring. Behind his tousled white hair, though, his red eyes gleam and flicker as if they’re forever reflecting the dancing lights of a screen. His masked form has black hair rather than white, and eyes the color of dark, old rust.

Court/Mantle: Autumn, the season of fear. Shigaraki’s entire durance threatened him always with the fear of failure (and the fear of the consequences of failure), and he himself would rather intimidate than charm, but he also shares the Leaden Mirror’s inquisitiveness and discerning eye. As such, even when he first emerged from the Hedge, it was with a strong Autumn mantle, and it’s only grown stronger over time. He’s often trailed by dead, desiccated brown leaves, and Hedge foliage that’s in his presence for any length of time visibly begins to wither--but his mantle flares up even more when he’s being actively combative. Chilly, dry bursts of air can wring involuntary chills from those on the receiving end of his wide grins and dire promises. When he’s feeling more playful, one can sometimes see small flickers of light in the shape of unknown words or hear odd little strains of music from unrecognizable (albeit somewhat tinny) instruments.

Contracts:

Fleeting Autumn I. He’s not so concerned with becoming some kind of symbol of fear that he’s pursued this Contract very much, but it never hurts to get an idea of what your opponent’s afraid of.

Eternal Autumn I-III. It takes time, glamour expenditure, and good dice rolls, but he can kill people this way, withering them down to nothing. Conversely, he can also make plants bear fruit. It’s occasionally useful.

Hours I. He’s figured out how to consciously botch the activation of this clause so as to decay the targeted object instead of restoring it. It usually works, but sometimes randomly backlashes onto him instead, causing him injury--the bigger the object, the worse the damage. The Wyrd doesn’t like being toyed with.

Lucidity I-IV. Clarity is a fluid, malleable thing for Shigaraki, which can make him extremely frightening--he can thank his Keeper’s lessons in control. With this series of Contracts, Shigaraki can and does laugh off the kinds of deeds that would make other changelings quail back in fear of what their own minds would do to them in the aftermath. He can also be shockingly perceptive for someone who by rights should have terrible trouble distinguishing the boundaries between Real and Unreal, Self and Other. However, his use of these powers does make him somewhat mercurial and difficult to predict, even to his motley, as derangements come and go with the artificial inflation or drain of his Clarity. It’s a downward slope, but one he’s taking more slowly than would otherwise be the case.

(Hypothetical Powered-Up Shigaraki: Adds two 5-dot Goblin Contracts, Blood-Binding and The Fatal Transformation. Be it the power of glamour or the breath of life itself, if Shigaraki wants an enemy drained and is willing to pay his pound of flesh, Goblin magic will provide. It’s a good thing he’s got friends to back him up, as both of these powers leave him in a pretty vulnerable state.)

Toga Himiko

Quote: “I met someone cute today. Don’t wait up!”

Type: Mirrorskin/Leechfinger dual kith Darkling. Toga served her durance in the chrome-tinted underbelly of a glass-and-brass dystopia full of mirrors, learning to steal life as easily as she stole food, and to slip from one form to another to keep ahead of everyone who’d chase her down for doing it. More free than she’d been in her old life, to be sure, but still not free to truly do as she pleased, she dreamed of being able to hunt people down the way she’d been hunted down, with no one to answer to for it. In time, she managed her escape and, on her path back through the Hedge, crossed paths with Tomura--distraught, lost, but still with plenty of fight left in him. Each decided that the other was dangerous but sympathetic enough to be a better ally than an enemy, and they teamed up to find their way back to the real world.

Back in that real world, Toga is learning to put herself back together. Getting back home only to find something waiting there wearing her face was a shock to her system, but after some agonizing (and a bloodbath in her parents’ kitchen), she’s decided it’s for the best. If going back to being that girl means giving up the amazing psychic buffet the world now presents her, it’s not even a debate.

Toga in her masked form is dark of hair and eye, a school girl with a wide smile and swift, excitable hands. In her true form, everything bleeds paler--she’s china white, even her hair turning paler than flaxen fiber, most of her features seeming somehow insubstantial except for the long points of her teeth and the gas lamp yellow of her eyes.

Court/Mantle: Spring, the season of desire. Toga, more than anyone in the motley, has embraced the fact that she wants things now that she never would have before, that she has desires that no human would ever understand. And why not? She doesn’t kill people, after all; she just likes to taste. The air around her is always infused with heady floral scents, and when she walks, phantom flowers trail up behind her. Hemlock and cypress vine, spider lilies and nightshade--all lovely, to be sure, but the language of flowers does give her away.

Contracts: Everything about Toga’s Contracts heightens her skills as a predator, and she’s unquestionably the best in the group at it.

Mirror I-II. Allows her to shape her form with more specificity and finesse.

Darkness I-II. Makes her targets more suggestible.

Fleeting Spring I-III. Lets her pinpoint what her targets want so that she can shape those wants or her reflection of them as needed.

Bubaigawara Jin

Quote: “Nothing’s too much for my friends!”

Type: Truefriend Beast. Jin’s human life didn’t differ much from his canonical backstory, minus the super power, but went drastically off course when he was hunted down--even on a motorcycle, hunted down!--by a monster on horseback and the various other monsters tumbling before it. His changeling life consisted of one cage, one chase after another, and while most of the people around him were shaping themselves into being better vessels for coursing, baying, sharp-toothed menace, what Jin most wanted was the pack solidarity. His Keeper thought this was funny but not a very useful trait in a hunting hound, so they started taking him to dog fights instead, hoping to scour the excess sweetness off of him. Lacking a pack to stay for, he escaped, but the wanting for one never left him.

Toga basically tripped over him his first night out, and her kindness then meant he was more than happy to follow her home. He later made the acquaintance of Mr. Compress and Magne on a bar crawl and, wanting all of his friends to be friends together, introduced them to Shigaraki and Toga. He’s also trying to make friends with his fetch, who is finding the whole experience of having a clone pop up at him at unexpected times to be unbelievably disorienting and nerve-wracking. Which one of them is the real one, anyway…?

His mask looks much as Jin does in canon, though his scars are in different places. In mien, he always looks a bit rumpled, with short, sandy brown fur and bright, emotive eyes. He’s dog-eared (literally), one alert, the other floppy, and his hands have stubby, darkened nails. Unbelievably expressive and more overtly doggish body language--he didn’t keep a tail in his flight back through the Hedge, but people tend to remember him as having one anyway.

Court/Mantle: Courtless. Jin’s too mixed up in his own emotions to pick just one to focus on. He likes the idea of Spring, but he’s also skeptical that just wanting is enough to keep people safe, and that fear is rooted deep. He’s also not without his old sorrows. Of the High Court emotions, wrath is his rarest visitor.

Contracts:

Fang & Talon (Dogs) I-III. Jin’s got an undeniable rapport with dogs. He loves them and they love him. There’s practically no mutt he can’t get some words out of if he asks nice. He’s also still got a hunting hound’s nose, when he needs it.

Hearth I-II. Deeply dedicated to his friends, the Contracts of Hearth make advancing the goals of the motley (or hurting the chances of their enemies) even easier.

Eternal Spring I. Easier to be a people-pleaser when you know what pleases people! Toga taught him this one.

Moon I. It’s good to know what people want, but it��s also good to know what kind of crazy people (fetches especially) might be sitting on. This one also helps the group nail down where Shigaraki’s head is at on any given day.

Spinner

Quote: “What a mess. Where are we even going with this?”

Type: Steepscrambler Beast. Spinner spent, by his best reckoning, four years in a Faerie jungle. It was always sweltering, sickbed heat with air so wet you could choke on it, and after a few close calls with the serpentine river dragons and over-large birds of prey that prowled the place, he’d all but given up trying to search for a way out--the sea of trees just went on forever anyway. A long-tongued madman named Stain convinced him otherwise, with talk of hidden trods and clues found in the bellies of gutted fish. When Stain went missing, Spinner resolved to try again, and though he can no longer remember the method of it, whatever he did seems to have worked. He got back to his shitty hometown, but found it just as bad as ever, if not worse, with a fetch still cooped up in his old bedroom, spiralling ever further into depression. And so, fed up with the state of his life and the apathy his fetch reflected back at him, he did something that very few changelings are capable of doing--he left home.

Finding his way to the nearest big city with a proper freehold, Spinner gravitated to the Summer Court and got set up with an apartment in a small complex the freehold maintains for newbies to stay in while they get their feet under them. Not too long after, Shigaraki and Toga wandered into a Summer recruitment drive, with Shigaraki immediately managing to get on Spinner’s nerves--which made it all the more exasperating when Spinner went home and found the both of them moving into the apartment next door to his! Spinner’s still trying to figure out what he thinks of the mercurial and difficult Shigaraki, but they have been bonding over video games of late.

Spinner’s mask is a sun-darkened young man with a prominent nose and a thin, terse mouth. He’s straight-backed but with a certain nerviness in his eyes, a stance that suggests he’s ready to throw the first punch. He has a street punk look--pointy fingernails and pink hair--that people without the sight to know better assume is achieved with a nail file and hair dye. His mask looks exactly like canon!Spinner with one exception--changeling!Spinner has ears. They’re pointy, green and finely-scaled, but otherwise normal humanoid ears and they make his face look just a little wider and more humanoid than canon!Spinner’s lizard profile.

Court/Mantle: Summer, the season of wrath. Spinner’s angry about a lot of things--the state of the world, the injustices served to his motley and the wrongs of his life in particular--but he’s also wrestling with a lot of self-loathing. It’s easy for him to slip into fatalistic thoughts and get mired down in apathy, and every time he thinks he’s gotten past it, someone or something comes along that throws him off, and then before he knows it he’s back on the ground wondering how he’s ever going to get past this. Leaning into Summer’s hot anger helps keep him focused. His mantle is relatively weak, tending to manifest as a warm, dry wind only when he’s particularly fired up or activating Court contracts.

Contracts: Spinner’s well-rounded, but that’s because he has a hard time settling on anything. His ridiculous spread of Contracts illustrates this.

Den I-II. Not interested in leaning into his animal instincts and learning to talk to lizards, Spinner has instead leaned into possessive territorialism. Unfortunately, he still feels like a small fish, so it’s hard to muster up the swagger that would allow him to progress this Contract further.

Fleeting Summer I. Need to pick a fight and score some quick glamour? This is the clause for you! Just make sure Dabi’s not around; that guy’s angrier than the whole rest of the motley put together and it skews the readings.

Eternal Summer I. Makes Spinner a walking thermostat. Yes, sometimes Toga and Mr. Compress take advantage.

Oath & Punishment I. There’s a certain capital-R romance to this Contract that Spinner likes, but he’d need to find something (or someone) to whole-heartedly devote himself to first. At least he can do sick parkour jumps in the meantime.

Artifice I. Temporary repair magic. Handy around the house and when you fight with cheap knives.

Dream I. Useful facts about the local Hedge and he’s generally content to leave it at that--he doesn’t have a lot of use for dream-spinning, not when Magne’s so good at it.

Dabi

Quote: “You’re mad, huh? So what are you gonna do about it?”

Type: Gravewight Darkling. Once upon a time, there was a barren couple who wished desperately for children. For many years, it was only a wish, until Todoroki Enji finally found someone who offered him a solution. Nine months later, Todoroki Touya was born, to be followed by a string of children, each haler and heartier than the last. Seven years later, the firstborn child was taken away in the night. No fetch was left behind--after all, the Other was only claiming the price they’d been promised. Fifteen years after that, a changeling calling himself Dabi dragged himself out of the Hedge, having spent most of his life lighting funeral pyres and digging graves in Faerie until he dug his way out.

Dabi fell in with the rest of the League motley after being found by Magne after a fight went sideways. She patched him up and offered him a group to run around with for a while rather than doing the solo act. He accepted, but his pledges with the rest of the group are a bit different--more paranoid, less supportive. Dabi is distant from the motley, and only time will tell if he eventually lets them in or not.

In mask, Dabi’s a beanpole, wild black hair and bright blue eyes with a caustic grin, skulking about in a succession of black coats and heavy, workmanlike boots. In mien, he’s even taller, a too-thin gaunt with great swatches of skin burned away by restless soul-fires, which still cling and flicker blue around his hands. His skin fits him a bit too loose, and he wears staples to keep it all in place.

Court/Mantle: Summer, the season of wrath. Could it ever be anything else? Rather stronger than Spinner’s mantle, Dabi’s manifests as heat distortions in the air around him and, when he’s particularly riled up, blasts of hot air like you’d get opening up a hot oven. He has some trouble advancing in the Court proper, though, as he prefers to only fight battles he knows he can win. He feels, all the time, sick with rage, but until he proves willing to make stands even when the odds are against him, the Iron Spear’s time for him will be limited.

Contracts:

Shade & Spirit I. If he’s going to see ghosts around all the time anyway, he might as well be able to talk to them. They’re only sporadically helpful, but as a skeleton in the closet himself, he has some fellow feeling for them.

Elements (Fire) I-III. He brought fire with him out of Faerie, but it’s a difficult thing for him to master, foreign to his seeming despite sometimes feeling as if it’s nestled in his very bones.

Fleeting Summer I-II. Dabi’s much at home with wrath, and very willing to shape it to his own ends. Whether or not he sticks around for them, he likes starting fights.

Punishing Summer I. An odd branch of Summer magic, but one that he feels has some promise for him. Compared to the more straightforwardly righteous Contract of Eternal Summer, this feels harsher, longer-burning, and that sings to him in ways he finds very appealing.

Mr. Compress

Quote: “If we’re going to break the law, why shouldn’t we do it in style?”

Type: Larcenist Fairest. A simple stage magician of modest fame once upon a time, right up until he was offered a promising and lucrative gig by a stranger who thought he deserved a better stage for his talents. The stage in this case turned out to be--well, you can guess. His client (Keeper) wanted things stolen--they seemed to enjoy the taste of things ill-gotten--and there was always some new diamond or painting or antique. Sako’s time in Faerie (which he came to share with Magne) was like a string of heist films: glamorous and bubbly and thrilling, but the underside was rife with lurid, impossible violence waiting on the slightest error, the stakes always seemed to be climbing, and of course you could never say no… But one thing you can say for heist films is that they always allot a proper amount of time for planning, and so over time Sako and the others planned their last heist--the one to steal themselves into freedom. If asked, Sako will tell a dozen different stories about how it went, but the truth is his memories are fuzzy, and the only thing he knows for sure is that he and Magne emerged from the Hedge alone.

Sako’s a bit disjunctioned in time--many more years have passed in the real world than he spent in Faerie, and he spent a good many years in Faerie. His fetch washed up in a nursing home in the meantime, riddled with palsy and Alzheimer’s, and though Sako is not by habit or preference a violent man, the sight of it filled him with a primal loathing. And it’s so easy, in an overcrowded environment, to make a mistake with a dosage… Sako still has a piece of the detritus left over, just to remind himself of how his story could have ended, and how determined he is to not let such a future come to pass.

In his mask, Mr. Compress (well, he needed a new stage name) is a handsome, auburn-haired man in his forties who gestures constantly, frequently toying with a short white cane, and speaks in refined if somewhat dated language in a rich, theatrical voice. He always dresses a bit more nicely than he needs to, preferring clothes with hidden pockets and long sleeves, and is rarely without a hat to flourish. His mien mostly serves to heighten all of that--he becomes impossibly graceful and compelling, his voice catching the ear like a song, and his clothes are revealed to be Hedgespun, the feather in his hat belonging to no bird an ornithologist could name, the buttons on his coat and the stone accentuating his bolo tie shifting slowly in pattern and shade the longer you watch, and the cane almost certainly a low-level token of some kind. The most eye-catching thing, though, is the mask--he wears a white mask that always seems to have a different pattern on it, though it never moves while you’re looking directly at it. He doesn’t seem able to actually remove it all the way, though he can slide it around enough to eat or theatrically squint or blink his eyes (dark and bewitchingly expressive). If it’s forcefully pulled off, it’s only to reveal another one beneath it--though he’ll complain that it stings and ask you to refrain.

Court/Mantle: Autumn, the season of fear magic! Mr. Compress didn’t come out of the Hedge with a particular Court affinity, but he was drawn towards Autumn like a compass needle finding true north. He’s only a limited interest in fear (though his response to his fetch shows that he has his share of it), but he’s endlessly fascinated by the ins-and-outs of faerie magic. Trinkets, tokens, pledge-craft--if it’s a clever trick, he’s interested. His mantle shows as pops and starbursts of light, and frequently as a cool, trailing mist about his feet.

Contracts: The only person in the group more focused than Toga.

Separation I-IV. Escape magic fit for Houdini himself. If it looks like Compress is locked up or restrained, it’s almost only certainly because he’s allowing himself to be.

Forge I-III. Sleight of hand is even more impressive when you’re using magic! Extremely convenient for those times when he needs a passable ID or a house key he does not in fact own.

Magne

Quote: “Take it easy, honey. I’ll handle it.”

Type: Metalflesh Elemental. Magne was a criminal before she was a changeling, and it was in that capacity that she--like Mr. Compress--fell prey to an offer that should have been too good to be true. The heist team needed a bit more muscle, is the thing; they were getting caught too often without a good combatant. And so came Magne, given a sturdier body (that could, incidentally, meld through safe walls when necessary) through processes she only remembers in her nightmares. An odd thing happened with her, though--what Magne felt the pull of in Faerie was less the element she became and more the stuff of Arcadia itself. Where her Keeper expected her to become hard as steel, instead she embraced dream conjury; where she was instructed to protect the rest of her band, that protection took the form of healing as often as it did squaring up for a fight. It’s hard to argue with the results, though--Magne is a fierce and stubborn defender of any group that wins her loyalty.

Currently in a live-and-let live relationship with her fetch--she feels a bit sorry for the poor creature, and would rather see her find a way to break free of the image she was forged in and make her own path than kill her. It’s painful to be around her, though, so while Magne’s willing to extend some help from a distance, she would rather the fetch keep her distance. Time will tell if her fetch--who has her own desires and very much shares Magne’s willingness to bust some heads over them--is prepared to abide by this.

Magne in mask looks much as she does in canon, though she can afford nicer clothes. Her preference for butch presentation is unchanged, but the jeans are designer and the shirts elaborate silk prints. She has a collection of fetching sunglasses for any occasion. Her mien is a gleaming ochre bronze, flesh hard and smooth, her hair (a bit darker in color than the rest of her) always a bit stiff but, on the other hand, difficult to muss. Her body is in all ways a more chiselled, more perfected version of the body she went into Arcadia with, which Magne has mixed but overall relieved feelings about. The flesh-to-metal transition her Keeper forced on her was bad enough; whyever would she trust the Others with gender affirmation?

Court/Mantle: Spring, season of desire growth. Magne’s desire is to never be held down by any sort of repression or expectation forced on her by others (the Others in particular), and this pride drew her strongly to the Antler Crown. While she doesn’t exhibit the flowing, graceful beauty so prized in women of the Emerald Court, her passion for self-expression and her unstinting support of those fumbling their way towards the same has certainly won her her share of admirers. Magne’s mantle takes the form of fresh-scented air and pleasant breezes. She doesn’t leave flowers where she walks, but you can sometimes find ivy where her hands have been.

Contracts:

Dream I-III. By leaps and bounds the most talented dream-weaver in the motley, Magne’s oneiromancy is light-hearted and nonjudgmental while her oneiromachy is formidable. Everyone in the motley can soothe one another’s nightmares, but Magne is the best at it. She usually has at least one or two dream-task pledges active with mortals, too, so she rarely struggles to keep her glamour reserves--or her wallet--full.

Elements (Metal) I. Magne’s retained only the minimum level of connection with the metal she was forged from; in truth, her body is less important to her than what she does with it.

Eternal Spring I-III. Easing fatigue, curing wounds, and even bringing in a gentle rain--Magne’s deeply in touch with the rejuvenative aspects of her Court.

BONUS TIDBITS:

Shigaraki experienced more deaths in Faerie than any other member of his motley. After all, you might know the cheat code for unlimited lives, but that doesn’t mean you never die. And it did feel like death, every time. Of course, sometimes failure just meant Sensei shaking his head and Being Disappointed. That still felt a bit like dying too, though.

Over the course of her durance, Toga had more than one knife fight with a cyber hero adventurer hunting through the city’s underbelly looking for a power core. Also, changeling!Toga is much less murderous than canon!Toga because if she were as murderous as canon!Toga, Clarity loss would rapidly render her unplayable.

Spinner was pulled into the motley over a planned playdate heist to see how well Shigaraki and Toga could work as a unit with Mr. Compress and Magne. Being very familiar with heist stories by that time, Sako and Magne decided the group needed one more guy to provide muscle, and as it happened, Shigaraki and Toga lived next door to just such a one.

I have not decided on whether the Todoroki family are a mundane equivalent of the way we see them in canon, all deeply damaged by Endeavor’s ceaseless drive to fulfill his goals by way of his children, or whether they’re actually pretty normal and well-adjusted with the exception of Enji’s one dark secret. Either way, Natsuo is the only one who has any inkling that there was anything “off” about Touya’s death/disappearance. He has no inkling of the truth, obviously, but he always felt that Enji didn't react quite the right way to Touya's death, or thought Enji was behaving suspiciously on the night Touya vanished.

The League’s basic motley pact includes the dreaming pledge, so they frequently take mental voyages into one another’s dreamscapes to clear out the nightmares and indulge in silly, impossible-in-reality lucid dreaming adventures. The exception is Dabi, who would rather have nightmares than people in his head.

Mr. Compress doesn’t jokingly call himself an old man anymore because he’s too traumatized by finding out what he’d actually be like in old age.

Shigaraki, while beginning the story in a fairly ambivalent, uncertain place, eventually finds his way towards a goal of helping to free loyalists--from their hopeless circumstances, from their learned helplessness, from their starstruck adoration. He finds this goal over the course of his late-game encounters with Kurogiri, Gigantomachia, and Re-Destro, and it is through helping them that he’s finally able to begin to process his own feelings of attachment and affection towards his Keeper. It may well be that the fetch of Shimura Tenko is Shigaraki’s final boss.

#bnha #shigaraki tomura #toga himiko #bubaigawara jin #iguchi shuuichi #dabi #sako atsuhiro #bnha magne #bnha spinner #mr. compress #league of villains #changeling: the league #changeling: the lost #my writing

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dicebox · 4 years

Text

The Shepherd

An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. Luke 2:9

“You look lonely, sugar.”

And Jillian was. But not quite in the sense that the woman standing before her was implying. A quick judgment by the state of her dress left little question as to her profession and thus her implication. Although it was not that Jillian felt her mandate was to judge in that regard, to be fair. She was well aware that some might invoke the Lord’s name against such a matter, but she certainly did not see a threat in the woman. Besides, a tug in her chest was still pulling her eastwards as much as it had been for the last few days. This little town had no need of her, and so she was looking forward to enjoying a night resting in an actual bed. Preferably alone in an actual bed.

The woman was still staring down expectantly at her, lips curled up in a friendly smirk. Jillian blinked up at her, realizing she’d been silent for a moment past the point of awkwardness. But it wasn’t every day that a woman propositioned her. She wasn’t sure if mentioning her married state would invite more or less questions about what brought her alone to a small saloon of a small town.

Jillian tried to smile politely. “I am fine, thank you.” She paused, looking between the smirking woman and the bottle in her own hand, before she fished out a silver coin, more than the drink’s worth by several cents. “Would you kindly fetch me another?” The woman smiled widely with appreciation and nodded, stepping towards the counter with a sashay of her hips, apparently unperturbed by Jillian’s polite evasion.

“I’m looking for bounty work. Any trouble of late, maybe the next town over east?” Jillian asked with an attempted friendly smile once the woman had returned with a fresh bottle.

“Well, most days it’s just the usual drunkards and fools ‘round here. If the sheriff put a price on all those heads, he’d be out of silver in a week. Couldn’t say what happens farther out. I got enough to worry of here, yanno?”

“Drunkards that worrisome?”

“Well, sometimes, but really it’s the preacher man that’s been stirring up shit. He’s more dangerous than a mean drunk, I’ll tell you that.”

“The most dangerous man in town is a man of the Lord?” Jillian asked, eyeing the woman more intently.

“Oh, honey, ain’t you read history?” She smiled with a hint of bitterness in her eyes. “There ain’t nothing more dangerous than a man of God.”

Jillian fell silent. She was not particularly learned in history, but she was also not ignorant of men who preached of hellfire and brimstone over a mere a saloon girl like the one before her, or petty gamblers and drinkers that likewise frequented such an establishment, as if they were all the world’s greatest evils.

“Why you so worried ‘bout trouble anyhow? You got nothing to worry ‘bout in here, you know, I can take care of you and me.” She said with a rakish grin, hiking up a handful of skirt up to her thigh.

As Jillian politely averted her gaze with a faint coloring in her cheeks, she nonetheless saw the glint of a derringer stashed in the strap of the woman’s stocking. “I wasn’t doubting that, ma’am.”

The woman’s attention was briefly caught by the sound of heavy footsteps of a few men stepping into the saloon. “Alright, well you just holler if you need anything else. Name’s Marci, by the way.” She asked, starting to step away towards the new arrivals, looking back over her shoulder to Jillian with a knowing grin and a wave.

Jillian wasn’t quite sure whether ‘good luck’ would be an appropriate reply, and so she just tipped her hat in reply instead, smiling faintly with amusement.

---

It was late in the evening and the sight of an empty room and a soft bed was a welcome sight. But as Jillian was about to shrug off her coat, the sound of crashing wood and the fainter crack of a gunshot came from the front of the saloon.

There hadn’t been a familiar tug in her chest that usually gave at least a half-second of warning when darkness was near, but she hurried nonetheless back out into the bar room with her hand on her revolver, pausing at the top of the stairs.

A minister stood in the center of the room, his hand swung out from a strike, with Marci sprawled on the floor before him, blood dripping from her nose, her derringer cast aside on the floor. “You thought to tempt me?!” He barked, sneering down at her.

A trio of men stood beside him, pistols and shotguns held in loose readiness, a warning to the rest of the bar watching with nervous tension.

Jillian’s hand settled on the grip of her revolver, but then she paused.

She could gun them down, to be sure, even if three with guns in hand were dangerous odds. But it would be bloody, public, and against a minister, not some drunken thug or malicious robber. And this was wholly of the earth. Nothing more than the petty cruelty of man, matters of law for a sheriff to handle. To intervene now would draw attention that wouldn’t be taken away by some unnatural creature. This wasn’t her purpose.

But Marci was looking up to her with wide, pleading eyes, and there was no sheriff here now.

A thrum of anger flared in Jillian’s heart.

“Stop!” She shouted, hurrying down the stairs, only for one of the preacher’s thugs to block her way.

“Don’t think to interfere with the Lord’s work, girl.” One of the other men snapped with little regard to her, shifting his shotgun up in warning.

That stirred something stronger still. As ever, Jillian did not so much as call upon the Word so much as let it flow out from her.

“STOP.”

The minister and his men froze in place. The one before her stood with his eyes frozen wide in shock, twitching with fear. Beside him, the preacher’s arm was trapped in the air, ready to bring down another blow upon Marci.

The rest of the patrons were watching her now. The minister and his thugs would only be held in place for mere moments.

Her hand reaching down to clench tightly at the grip of her revolver, Jillian stepped around the frozen man, and up to the preacher. She stared up at him with a thunder in her eyes, a fire flaring up in her heart, guiding her as she breathed in.

“CONFESS.”

The preacher gasped breathlessly, paling and trembling in place as the words fell from his mouth. “I...I tried to solicit her, when she was walking by the church this morning. I wanted her.”

Jillian let out a heavy breath as she looked to the three thugs. The compulsion was beginning to fade, but they still could only stare at her in shock, unable to muster the will to react.

“AS IT WAS WRITTEN, LET HE WHO IS WITHOUT SIN CAST THE FIRST STONE.”

And as it had been written, they began to shy away, cowed and fearful, one by one stepping back to a safer distance to gawk in shocked silence with their guns forgotten in their hands. But Jillian had no intent of letting the preacher flee. When he tried to step back from her, she kicked hard at his shin, and as he wobbled with a shriek, she tugged hard at his shirt, and drove him down to his knees.

A thunder still crackled behind her eyes, even as her voice returned to its normal tone, hoarse and tense with her own cold rage. “Do you think yourself without sin, Reverend?”

“Are...are you...? You can’t be...”

“No, I am not. But I am chosen.” Jillian hissed sharply. “And truly I tell you, you have turned your back on Christ.” Restraining herself as she might have been, she couldn’t hold back a sharp kick to his gut. “You worthless sack of shit!”

As the preacher fell to the floor, writhing and clutching at his belly, she reached down and tore white tab of his priestly collar from his neck. “If you dare call yourself a man of the Lord again, I will come back for you. You had best start repenting.”

“How...how do I...?” The man babbled, red faced and gasping for breath, as he looked up at her in fear.

Jillian stood back up, staring down at him with a restrained fury. “Do not ask me how to be forgiven. I am not Christ.”

Finally turning away, she stepped towards Marci, where she was still sprawled across the floor, staring as wide eyed as the rest of the onlookers.

But as Jillian reached for her arm, she flinched away with a sobbing gasp. "I'll repent, I swear, I swear-" The bloodied woman stammered as she met Jillian’s gaze, her eyes holding the same look of fear as the preacher.

"I didn't mean-" Jillian started to say, taking a half-step closer.

But Marci only hurriedly crawled back across the floor in terror.

Jillian pulled her hand back, frowning deeply, and she turned and strode swiftly out of the saloon without another word. The onlookers by the doors parted hurriedly for her and none dared to follow.

“Did you want me to shepherd them, Lord?” She asked in a murmur, her gaze turning upwards as she hurried to the hitching post to untie her horse’s reins “I don’t know how.”

The stars had no answer. Climbing onto the saddle, all Jillian could do was urge her horse into a gallop and leave another town behind.

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ofstormsandwolves · 5 years

Text

The Whirlwind

Giles/Joyce, Faith/Buffy

Modern/ human AU

Some warnings for implied child abuse or neglect, as well as Spike being a bit creepy.

A/N: (Because this post wouldn’t stop bugging me)

Read on AO3 (account needed)

When Buffy and her friends decide to go see a new band at the Bronze, nothing turns out quite like they thought.

The summer sun was as hot as ever as Buffy Summers and Willow Rosenberg wandered along the sidewalk of Sunnydale’s Main Street. They were heading into their junior year, and while Willow chatted excitedly about all the summer reading she had done in preparation for the new school year, Buffy found her mind- and her eyes- wandering to the posters advertising the last of the summer fun before school started back up. One in particular caused her to ground to a halt, let out a laugh, and whip out her cell phone to snap a picture. Beside her, Willow slowed to a stop too, frowning in confusion until she saw what Buffy had seen.

“Sorry,” Buffy laughed as her fingers typed out a quick message on her phone, “had to send this to Faith. She’s going to love it.”

“Anyone would,” Willow responded dutifully, though she sounded less certain. “It’s very... Interesting.”

“They look like they’ve fallen out of the 90s.” Buffy complained, scrunching her nose up at the poster and pocketing her phone.

“Yeah,” Willow agreed next to her, frowning at the picture, “except the girl looks like she came from the 1890s.”

The two girls were so busy scowling at the watermarked, dog-eared poster taped to the wall outside the Espresso Pump that they didn’t even hear footsteps behind them.

“What we looking at?” Xander asked his two friends with a frown as he came up behind them.

Both girls jumped, and turned to glare at him. He gave an embarrassed smile as he realised he’d scared them, and raised a hand in greeting.

“New band’s playing at the Bronze tonight,” Buffy explained, nodding towards the poster she and Will had been staring at. “We can’t decide whether they’re going for the whole retro vibe ironically, or whether they actually think it looks good.”

Xander frowned, and peered past the girls to the poster on the wall. There was a black and white photo in the middle, showing two guys and a girl. Both guys were in leather jackets, one with dark hair and one with platinum blonde, and both giving their best broody stares at a point somewhere above the camera. Next to the dark-haired man was the girl, with equally dark hair and wearing a long dress. Her gaze seemed to bore right into Xander’s soul. He shuddered.

“I don’t know whether they think it looks good, but I’m certainly not going to tell them otherwise,” he told the girls with a nervous laugh. “Not unless I want to wake up in a shipping container somewhere.”

“They’re pretty creepy-looking,” Willow agreed as she surveyed the poster again.

But Buffy rolled her eyes. “Please,” she told her friends, “they’re just trying to play it cool. I saw so many guys like this when I lived in LA. Besides, they call themselves ‘The Whirlwind’. Not exactly fear-inducing.”

As one, they turned and started to walk away from the poster and down the street.

“So, are we going to be checking out the oh-so-terrifying band at the Bronze?” Xander asked conversationally as they walked down the main street. “Because I for one would love to get out of the house tonight.”

At his words, both Buffy and Willow looked up at their friend in concern.

“Xander?” Willow asked cautiously. “Everything alright at home?”

Xander shrugged, and tried to brush off their concern. “As alright as it usually is.” He kept his eyes fixed on a point up ahead of them, rather than looking to either of his friends. He didn’t notice Buffy and Willow exchange knowing, worried looks.

“You know you can always stay at mine, right?” Buffy asked after a moment. “My parents don’t mind. The spare room’s set up and everything.”

At her words, Xander flashed her a brief smile, but Buffy got the distinct impression it was more to placate her than anything. Xander hated the idea of people knowing just how awful his home life was, and he hated it even more when Buffy’s mom and step-dad knew about it too.

There was a heavy silence before Xander finally spoke. “How many questions are they going to ask?”

Buffy shrugged. “Mom will want to know that you’re ok, and Giles is question-guy as you know, but I can call and explain everything before we even get to mine if you want? Make it clear to them you don’t really feel like talking. They’ll still offer to listen, but I should be able to convince them not to be too bad.”

Willow was nodding along with everything Buffy was saying. “And the Bronze is still doing their ‘summer spectacular’!” Willow reminded them excitedly. “Which means they’re letting anyone over fifteen in. Which means we can totally go to the Bronze and check out that band! Then you won’t even be at Buffy’s house much, other than to sleep.”

Finally, Xander properly looked over at his two friends and gave them a more genuine smile. “Sounds good,” he admitted. “My folks are out right now, so would you mind if we headed to mine so I could pack some stuff?”

Both girls grinned at their friend then.

“Sure,” Buffy smiled. “Lead the way.”

Once they picked up Xander’s things, the three of them agreed to head over to Buffy’s house until they headed to the Bronze that evening.

“Is Faith meeting us there?” Willow asked Buffy, giving her a knowing grin.

Buffy nodded, and blushed a little. “Yeah. She said she might have to sneak out, though. Gwen’s been on her back about getting prepared for school, even though we’ve got a whole other week before term starts.”

“And here I thought adoption meant you got a loving home,” Xander deadpanned as they made their way down Buffy’s street. At his words, Willow raised an eyebrow, and he flushed a little. “What? I just meant Gwen’s pretty hard on Faith sometimes. She comes across pretty scary, and it’s not exactly what you think of when you think ‘adoption’.”

Willow opened her mouth to say something, but Buffy beat her to it.

“He’s right. Maternal instincts and Gwendolyn Post don’t belong in the same sentence. I mean, she’s alright I guess. And if she hadn’t adopted Faith, I never would have met her, but... Well, Gwen sort of makes me uncomfortable sometimes. It’s why Faith and I hang out at mine more than hers. I mean, my mom and Giles can be annoying, but at least they give us space. Gwen’s always hovering, like she thinks we’re up to something suspicious.”

“Of course you are,” Xander teased. “You and Faith are bad girls. Delinquents. With your leather jackets, and skipping class to smooch behind the gym.”

Buffy rolled her eyes and smiled a little at Xander’s words, as Willow giggled.

“Well, where else would they smooch?” Willow joined in. “They can’t smooch behind the library, otherwise Giles would find out.”

“Ok, I admit, Faith and I aren’t exactly model students. But Gwen runs that house like it’s a prison at times, you know? Like Faith’s being punished. She’s just very controlling, and I know Faith hates it.”

By now, they had reached 1630 Revello Drive, and made their way up the path. As they reached the porch, the front door swung open to reveal Giles in the doorway.

“Thought I heard you coming,” he told them with a small smile.

At his words, Buffy froze momentarily. While her dislike of her girlfriend’s adopted mom was well-known, she still didn’t feel all that comfortable with her step-dad hearing her bad-mouthing her. But Giles just smiled wider when he saw Buffy’s reaction.

“I didn’t hear you, Buffy. I was in the dining room doing some work and I saw you coming up the path.”

Buffy’s shoulders sagged in relief, and she stepped into the house, Willow and Xander just behind her. As Xander passed Giles with his rucksack slung over his shoulder, Giles’s smile faltered for a split second before he regained it. He clapped the younger man on the shoulder and gave him a reassuring smile.

“Did you want to run your things upstairs now, Xander? Buffy did call to say you were going to be staying the night.”

For a brief second, Xander froze, before slowly meeting Giles’s gaze. He could see the unspoken offer of listening to his problems in the older man’s eyes, but he could also see that Giles was relaxed and calm. He wasn’t pushing. If there was one thing he had learned about Buffy’s step-dad in the year he had known him, it was that Rupert Giles didn’t force anyone to talk about things they didn’t want to.

“Uh, yeah. I’ll just take it up now.” Xander hurried up the stairs, relieved that Giles hadn’t tried to push him into anything.

“Real subtle, Giles,” Buffy groused as Xander disappeared upstairs.

Giles frowned. “Buffy, I didn’t say anything.”

Buffy rolled her eyes and folded her arms across her chest. “You might as well have. Geez. I hope Mom’s more subtle than you when she gets in from work.”

Giles raised his eyebrows, but before he could respond, Willow interrupted.

“So, uh, I finished that book you leant me,” she told Giles a little nervously. “It was really good.”

Somewhat startled by the change in topic, but pleased by Willow’s words, Giles turned his attention to the redhead. “Yes, well. I had hoped you’d find it interesting. I know you had enjoyed learning about the witch trials in history last year, and that book goes a little more in-depth than the ones you were using for class.”

“Oh, definitely!” Willow agreed excitedly. “We barely even covered half the stuff in that book while we were in class-”

As Willow continued to talk excitedly with Giles, Buffy rolled her eyes and headed to the kitchen for a drink.

“Now, are you sure you’ve got enough money?” Joyce asked for the umpteenth time as the three teens piled out of her Jeep a block away from the Bronze.

“Yes, Mom,” Buffy sighed, folding her arms across her chest. It was bad enough that her mom had insisted on running her, Will, and Xander to the club, but now she wouldn’t even just drop them off and leave.

“I’m just checking, sweetheart,” Joyce responded calmly, before turning her attention to Willow and Xander. “What about you two? You mentioned getting food here?”

“I’m fine,” Willow smiled awkwardly. “But thanks, Joyce.”

Xander, however, shifted uncomfortably and remained silent. There was an awkward pause.

“Well,” Joyce said suddenly as she dug through her purse, “I had some money left over from when I bought Buffy’s new school books, so how about you guys take this.” She pressed a $20 bill into Xander’s hands.

The boy blinked, opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. He did the same again, with the same result. Then, a little shakily: “I... I can’t take this, Joyce. Honestly, I’m fine-”

“The four of you can order one of those appetiser platters they do, once Faith gets here,” Joyce responded calmly. “That should be enough to cover the food and a drink each.” She turned her attention back to her daughter. “Now, you’ll call me when you guys want to come home? Either me or Rupert will come pick you up.”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “Yes, Mom,” she repeated, even more frustrated than before.

Joyce just gave her an indulgent smile, waved at the kids, and drove off. As the three of them started down the sidewalk to the Bronze, Xander tried to press the money into Buffy’s hand.

“You should take this,” he said, still sounding a little shaky. “It’s your money.”

“Xander-” Buffy began, before seeing the look on her friend’s face. She took the money, and gave him a slightly teasing smile. “Suppose I’d better keep it safe so you can’t lose it.”

Xander gave her a little half-smile, grateful. “Exactly.”

As the neared the Bronze, they could say the queue of teens waiting to get inside.

“Hey, B!”

Right near the front of the queue, and waving frantically, was Faith. With a grin, Buffy led the way over to the queue and slide in next to her girlfriend, giving her a kiss on the cheek. Behind them there were a few wolf-whistles, but mostly it was just people complaining about the three queue-jumpers.

“Uh, Faith,” Willow started cautiously, “not that I don’t appreciate you getting here early and all, but I don’t think people are too happy we queue-jumped.”

But Faith shrugged and slung an arm around Buffy’s shoulders. “Screw them, Red. People save their friends’ places in queues all the time. What are they gonna do, fight me?”

“Maybe,” Willow squeaked, going wide-eyed at the thought of a fight breaking out.

“Yeah, well, I could take them.” Faith sniffed, and glanced over her shoulder at the teens who were still glaring at her.

Xander followed her gaze and swallowed as he saw several of the senior jocks glaring at him. “As much as I’d love to see that, I’d rather we got through the night without any big fights.”

Faith frowned at Xander, noting he seemed a little down, before glancing to Buffy, who shook her head. “Your loss, man. I’m wicked good in a fight.”

The Bronze was, inevitably, packed. They managed to bag a table tucked away in the corner near the stage, and Willow and Xander headed off to the bar for food and drinks with the money Joyce had given them.

“Xander at yours again tonight?” Faith asked one the boy was out of earshot.

Buffy nodded. “He wouldn’t tell us what happened, but he packed quite a lot of stuff this time,” she admitted quietly. “I was going to speak with Mom and Giles about him staying for a few more nights.”

“Man, that sucks,” Faith frowned, staring across the dance floor to the bar where Willow and Xander were queuing. “Like, I know Gwen gets on my back sometimes, but I never feel like I’m not welcome, you know?” She paused. “Ok, sometimes I feel like I can’t leave, but that’s a whole different issue.”

Buffy smiled, and entwined her girlfriend’s fingers with hers. “You know you could come stay over too. My parents don’t mind.”

Faith shrugged, trying to look like it wasn’t a big deal, but Buffy could see the look in her eyes that said she was considering it.

“So is that lame band you sent me a pic of playing tonight?” Faith asked as she glanced towards the stage.

“Yep,” Buffy grinned. “I don’t know whether I want them to be as terrible as they look or not, you know? Like, on the one hand it would be really funny if they were terrible, but at the same time I don’t want to spend my night listening to awful music.”

It was at that point that Willow and Xander came back with their drinks.

“What are we talking about?” Xander asked as he placed a Diet Coke in front of Buffy and took a seat.

“The band,” Buffy explained before taking a sip of her drink.

“B can’t decide whether she wants them to be good or bad,” Faith grinned. “I’m leaning more towards bad. I could do with a good laugh.”

Willow frowned. “But then we can’t dance! We’d be too busy with the, the laughing, and the choking on the food, and stuff.”

Buffy grinned at that. “I’ll still dance with you, Will. We can leave Faith and Xander to their laughing while we get our dance on.”

Xander raised an eyebrow at Buffy, and affected a mock-offended tone. “Who said I’d be laughing? I never said I’d be laughing.”

“No,” Buffy admitted, “but I know you too well to know you wouldn’t be able to keep a straight face.”

“True,” Xander conceded, raising his drink in a gesture of agreement before taking a sip.

“Yeah,” Faith chimed in, “and B knows I can’t keep anythin’ straight, either.”

At Faith’s words, Xander choked on his sip of Coke, and Willow patted him on the back. It was while that was happening that three people walked onto the stage and Faith let out an amused laugh, grabbing on to Buffy’s arm.

“They seriously dress like that?” Faith grinned, staring as the band began to prepare for their first set. “This is going to be amazing!”

The Whirlwind, it seemed, was every bit as cheesy as their poster had suggested. While the woman took up her position behind the drums, the two men took up their positions behind the microphones, guitars at the ready.

“Is it me,” Xander asked quietly, eyes still on the band, “or are they missing a bass guitarist?”

Sure enough, both men were playing lead guitar, and given the glares they kept giving each other, there was apparently some rivalry there. The woman behind the drum kit either didn’t notice the tension between her band mates, or she didn’t care, as she gazed idly around the club. There was an awkwardly long pause before the band started playing, during which Faith, Buffy, Xander, and Willow all exchanged uncomfortable looks. Then, the drummer seemed to wake up a bit, and she started counting the band in.

To say that they were terrible would be unfair, Buffy decided quickly, but they certainly weren’t good. For a start, the two singers were constantly trying to sing louder than the other in some sort of bizarre in-band sing-off, and the drummer quite literally seemed to march to the beat of her own drum as she changed the tempo several times seemingly on a whim.

“I’d like to say things can’t get weirder,” Willow whispered as the band finished their second song, “but I think it just might.”

The third song started up just as a waitress brought over their appetisers. The few moments of distraction were enough for something truly odd to happen onstage. Faith snorted with laughter, Willow and Xander exchanged amused glances, and Buffy accidentally swallowed an ice chip from her drink as they saw the drummer had dropped her drumsticks and instead pulled a tambourine out from somewhere and start shaking and beating that instead.

“You should have seen their rehearsals,” the waitress told them somewhat mournfully. “I’m not being paid enough to listen to this on repeat. I told my manager I wanted a raise if this band were going to play here on a regular basis, but I don’t think he took me seriously.”

“Oh come on,” Faith grinned at the waitress, “you’ve got to find this at least a bit funny.”

“Why?” the waitress responded with a frown. “Their tempo is all over the place, the two singers are having some sort of testosterone-fuelled music battle onstage, and it’s giving me a migraine.” She pouted. “And if that’s not bad enough, I can’t even avoid them on campus.”

“They’re students?” Willow asked. “Huh. Maybe they’re not bad, maybe they’re drunk.”

But the waitress shook her head. “Believe me; no amount of alcohol can justify their attempt at music.”

Xander had been silent for the whole conversation, and when Buffy looked over at him she saw he was instead staring, wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the waitress, who seemed oblivious to him.

“- I told the manager they weren’t very good. I’d been made to sit through some of their on-campus gigs last year, and they were just as bad then. In fact, I think they’ve gotten worse. Maybe they’re cursed. But all my manager said was ‘oh, Anya, you have such a funny sense of humour’.” She paused, frowned. “I wasn’t laughing. Why would he think I was joking?”

Under the table, Buffy kicked Xander’s shin, and he jolted. Beside her, Buffy could feel Faith shaking with silent laughter, but Buffy ignored her.

“Anyway,” Anya continued with a scowl. “Enjoy your appetisers, and I hope this racket doesn’t make you want to vomit.”

She stalked off back towards the bar.

It was Buffy’s round, and she headed off to the bar to order everyone some more Cokes- normal for Faith, Xander, and Will, and diet for her. She placed her order and was waiting on the drinks when she became aware of a man leaning against the bar watching her. Hesitantly, she glanced over. It was the blonde man from The Whirlwind, smirking at her as he stared.

“Uh, hi,” Buffy said nervously. “Good set.” She gestured towards the stage, where the band’s gear was waiting between sets.

“Thanks,” the blonde man said, and Buffy was surprised to hear a British accent. “Now, what’s a pretty girl like you doing here alone?”

He stepped closer, and immediately Buffy felt red flags go up in her head.

“I- I’m not alone,” Buffy said shakily, glancing across the dance floor to their table. “I’m here with some friends.”

Faith was too busy laughing at something Xander had said to see the worried expression on her girlfriend’s face, and Buffy found herself silently begging her to notice what was happening at the bar.

“Well,” the man said, and suddenly he was even closer, “not very nice friends, leaving you to get the drinks yourself.” He grinned down at her, and thrust a hand out for Buffy to shake. “William. But my friends call me Spike.”

Buffy shook his hand, but said nothing.Spike frowned. “What? A pretty girl like you doesn’t have a name?”

No, Buffy thought, I just don’t want to tell you.

“Here we are,” came Anya’s overly-cheerful voice as she set the Cokes down on the bar. “How about I help you take these to your table?”

Buffy blinked, and looked to the older girl in surprise. But she saw that Anya wasn’t even looking at her; she was glaring at Spike.

“Thanks.”

Anya’s gaze flitted from Spike to Buffy then, and her expression softened into a smile. “All part of the service.”

Anya made her way around the bar and picked up two of the drinks while Buffy picked up the other two. But as they headed back across the dance floor, Spike trailed after them.

As they neared the table, Faith seemed to notice something was wrong, as she got to her feet. Anya set the drinks down on the table, before turning to give Spike another glare.

“What do you want, William?” she asked in annoyance. “Leave the girl alone.”

That got the attention of Faith, Xander, and Willow.

“What the hell?” Faith asked, still on her feet and looking ready to vault the table if needed. She turned to Buffy. “Did this creep do something to you, B?”

Buffy shook her head, unsure whether to speak, and if so what to say. But it was then that the dark-haired man from the band showed up, looking both irritated and apologetic.

“There you are,” he growled at Spike. “What the hell are you doing?”

Spike shrugged. “Just a bit of harmless flirting. The girl was looking lonely. Thought I’d say hello.” He flashed Buffy another smirk.

She stepped closer to Faith.The dark-haired man glared at his band mate, and quickly turned to Buffy.

“I’m so sorry,” he said quickly, “it’s just my friend here doesn’t seem to understand personal boundaries.” He growled the last part while looking pointedly at Spike. Taking a breath, he returned his attention to Buffy. “Look, can I buy you and your friends a drink, or something? Some snacks?”

“It’s ok,” Buffy insisted, though there was no fight in her voice. Willow and Xander watched her in concern.

“I’m, uh, Angel, by the way,” the dark-haired man said. “Again, I’m really sorry about Spike.”

Spike glared. “Oi. I don’t need you apologising for me.”

Angel clenched his jaw. “Clearly you do, else I wouldn’t be over here in the first place. Now come on, our set’s about to start.”

Angel stalked off, hands shoved in his jean pockets. Spike stayed where he was, a picture of defiance and attitude, but when Anya levelled him with a glare and Faith slung her arm around her girlfriend’s shoulders, he sloped off with a sneer.

“Give me a shout if he bothers you again,” Anya told them, watching Spike leave. “I’ve wanted to go at William since he tried to cheat off me in our Historical Literature final last year.”

Then she too walked off, and Buffy sank into her seat, reaching for her drink.

“You ok, babe?” Faith asked as she settled into her own seat.

Buffy nodded, but was clearly shaken.

“Hey, how about we blow this joint?” Xander suggested, before taking a large gulp of his drink. “It’s not even nine yet, maybe we could go back to Buffy’s and watch a movie?”

“That sounds good,” Willow admitted. “What do you think, Buff?”

Buffy nodded again, and this time managed to force a smile. “Sounds good,” she admitted softly. “I’ll call Mom.”

She pulled her phone out of her pocket, but Faith got to her feet, grabbing her drink.

“It’ll be less noisy if we call from outside,” she told the others. “Besides, not sure I can take much more of bleach-blonde’s creepy stares.”

She gestured towards the stage with her chin, where Spike was glaring at them as he started to holler the words to the latest song.The group agreed, and gathered their drinks as they prepared to leave. As they did so, Angel caught Faith’s eye, giving her a small nod. She gave a single nod back, silently telling the man that they were ok, before slipping an arm around Buffy’s waist and steering them all towards the exit.

Behind them, The Whirlwind continued to play.

#buffy fanfic #fuffy #buffy the vampire slayer #my fic #buffy summers #faith lehane #spike #angel #willow rosenberg #xander harris #rupert giles #joyce summers #Sunnydale 2019 verse

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honeyby · 6 years

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Yang is pretty damn smart: a megapost

Okay y’all, I mentioned this was coming and voila, here it is: a collection of each and every moment in the show where we see Yang demonstrate her intelligence (hopefully updated frequently when new episodes air or when someone points out something I missed). Heads up, it’s a long one because it’s almost like she isn’t an airheaded idiot or something

Pre-Show:

Designed and built Ember Celica

Seriously, whole posts can and have been made about how ingenious that design is

Has her motorcycle license (the only cast member we know of to have one) which would take time and effort

Likely maintains her own bike (and possibly built it given that she would have the expertise thanks to building Ember Celica)

Yellow trailer:

Realizes that a guy with criminal ties is more likely to have information on someone like Raven than most people

By punching Junior she gives any civilians a chance to get out of the club

Creates a shockwave to put her enemies off balance, allowing her to focus on them one at a time while they recover

Prioritizes the ranged DJ when he starts shooting at her

Separates the twins so that she can take care of the easier opponent first

Volume 1:

Got into Beacon (a prestigious academy) the old fashioned way (no forged transcripts (Jaune), no just taking the entrance exam (Blake), no special treatment from Ozpin (Ruby))

Is the first to comment that something seems off about Ozpin (you know, the guy we later find out is an immortal wizard)

After Ozpin tells them their partner is determined via eye contact she puts on her aviators, giving her more control on who she’s paired up with

Uses her landing strategy to cover more ground (putting her closer to her goal of the temple) and also to put some distance between her and Ruby so that Ruby will find a different partner

Then makes plenty of noise so that she’s easy to find for her future partner

She and Blake have no trouble finding the relics and she notices that they aren’t the first pair to do so

Is shown to be paying attention in class in 1x9, more so than any of her teammates sans Weiss (Yang has paper from which she’s presumably taking notes, while Blake does not, and Ruby isn’t paying attention. Yang’s posture is also noticeably straight and attentive)

Is never shown to be struggling in class (unlike Ruby, Jaune, or Cardin)

Stops Russel in Forever Fall so that RWBY and _NPR can find out what’s going on

Volume 2:

Demonstrates a good sense of strategy and tactical cunning during the Risk-style board game

Takes one look at Weiss’s hand and immediately gives her a winning strategy while also ensuring that she can counter her

Realizes that Junior is a good person to ask about Torchwick especially considering she saw him there last time she was at the club

Her entrance is flashy enough to give any civilians a chance to flee in case a fight breaks out while also demonstrating to Junior that she isn’t looking for a fight

Doesn’t feel the need to ask a stupid question like “where did they go?” looking at you Neptune

Is the one recognize the need to slow the mech down and to give the order to Neptune

Helps plan the dance which shows excellent organizational skills

Is the only person to figure out how to get through to Blake

Used a picture as a child to figure out a possible location of Raven and was smart enough to not leave a toddler unattended

Is not shown to have a poor vocabulary and is one of the people to correct Ruby on tussles/truffles/brussels issue

Is the the one to recall the history of Mountain Glenn

Recognizes the problem with her “go with the flow” nature

Prioritizes their mission by sending Blake and Weiss ahead when they meet Neo

She also tends to fall into the role of leader when Ruby isn’t around (giving Blake and Weiss orders to go ahead here, and later in volume 3 where she takes the initiative with Weiss when looking for Ruby and Blake)

Attacks Neo first so that she can’t stop Weiss and Blake

Knows better than to use her fire/explosive shells since that would cause the train car to explode

Switches up tactics to utilize throws and holds when her initial assault doesn’t work against Neo

Launches herself into the air for better coverage during the breach and uses her surroundings to her advantage

Volume 3:

Uses her weapon to give her better mobility on the ice

Immediately understands Weiss’s plan for dealing with ABRN

Actually notices Emerald and Mercury heading off on their own before JNPR’s match

Smart enough to ask Weiss, an Atlas native, what to expect from team FNKI

By destroying the terrain she throws Neon and Flynt off their rhythm, allowing her to easily take both of them out

Knows that she doesn’t have to KO Mercury to win and almost gets him by ring out (which would’ve thrown a wrench in Cinder’s plan)

Volume 4:

Potentially modified her arm (the Atlas scientists would’ve needed the exact specifications of Ember Celica to create a gun that would still be balanced (and others have talked about how precise Yang’s weapon would have to be to not rip her arms out of her socket), so it’s more reasonable that Yang added it herself since she made Ember Celica)

Yang Short:

Recognizes how important it is for Ruby to learn hand-to-hand (which Ozpin brings up later)

Tells Ruby she can’t solve all her problems by running away

Uses the recoil from her weapon to dodge blows, and overall fights very well (and this is pre-Beacon)

Volume 5:

Knows better than to trust the bandit

At the same time realizes he will get her to Raven quicker

By asking him “Is this everyone?” she finds out that there aren’t any in hiding, allowing her to better prepare for the upcoming fight (and as a bonus, she gets confirmation of where the camp is)

She first deploys Ember Celica and then the gun in her prosthetic, giving the bandits multiple chances to reconsider fighting her

Just...the entire fight with the bandits

Walks into Raven’s camp with her wrist things already off, making her more prepared if things go badly and she’s forced to fight

Sees through Raven’s crap and maintains a calm and strong demeanor, which will be more likely to get her what she wants (Yang knows from Tai that Raven respects strength)

Her whole plan to get Raven to take her to Ruby is genius. Like she says, there isn’t a guarantee that Ruby made it to Mistral (and if Yang had left Patch a month or so early it’s possible she could’ve passed them when the detoured in Kuroyuri), whereas she knew essentially where Raven would be and she knows she has the power to send her to Qrow who Yang knows is with Ruby

It is a gamble, but Yang knows that Raven cares about her enough to at least save her life once, and she knows that if it pays off she saves a lot of time

Demonstrates a healthy skepticism towards both Raven and Ozpin

Recognizes Raven’s bird form, which shows very strong observational skills

Calls Ozpin out for not telling them about turning the twins into birds, which shows RNJR that Ozpin and Qrow are still hiding things from them

Is the one to insist on no more lies from Ozpin

Is smart enough to realize that something’s up with Leo and looks around to find anything else out of the ordinary (and once again recognizes her mother and brings it up since she knows she shouldn’t be there)

Doesn’t attack the image of Raven that Emerald conjures and instead blocks Mercury’s attack, implying that she’s getting a basic grasp of what Emerald’s semblance is

Doesn’t let her surprise at seeing Blake again or her irritation at Mercury get in the way of her mission of going after the trio in the vault

Immediately pieces together that Raven is the spring maiden and deduces how the previous one died

Takes control of the conversation and successfully shuts Raven down

Points out the flaws in Raven’s plan and reasoning and convinces her to surrender the relic, essentially defeating one of the strongest beings on the planet without throwing a punch

And since she didn’t know Raven was the spring maiden until she gets down there, a lot of what she says would’ve had to have been thought up on the fly

Shows that she still doesn’t fully trust Oz when she doesn’t tell Qrow that Raven is the spring maiden (which doesn’t hurt them anyway since they now have the relic)

Grimm Eclipse (note: any that are based off of comments Yang has are compared to her teammates’s comments at the same point, so if they’re on here there is a difference which will be noted):

Recognizes the jumping puzzle in Forever Fall as just that: a puzzle (Blake and Ruby only comment that they can make the jumps)

Along with Blake gives the most technical description of the activities on Merlot’s island (calling it an ”industrial sized drilling operation” to be exact)

Recognizes that infiltrating Merlot’s lab has been too easy at the elevators (”this has been all too convenient so far”), and sure enough the very next room is boobytrapped/heavily guarded (Blake makes a similar comment but Ruby and Weiss do not)

Is implied to have her pilot’s license

Long story short (too late), Yang might be laid-back and willing to crack jokes, but she is not an idiot.

If I’ve missed anything, let me know so I can add it (the Grimm Eclipse section probably has more, but I wanted to avoid examples that were shared by the entire team since it is a game and the player needs a certain amount of information to advance). If you need sources, I can add episodes/timestamps (be warned that would take awhile) or I can elaborate. A few of these are a little more speculative, but the language used reflects that (implied, possibly, etc.) and the reasoning is provided.

#rwby #rwby5 #rwby spoilers #yang xiao long #the sunniest #yeah let me know if i've missed something please #maybe one of these days I'll post at a time that isn't ridiculously late #but today is not that day #for my own use

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thefeedpost · 6 years

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50+ True Crime Stories That Will Shock You To Your Core

12 True Creepy Crimes That Will Make You Lock Your Doors Tonight 1. Angela Hammond

youtube

“She was talking on the payphone with her fiance and saying how there is this suspicious truck that keeps driving around the block. Then, that truck parks near her where the payphone is, he gets out and starts looking around with his flashlight as if he lost something, then he confronts Angela and abducts her. Her fiance heard all of this on the other line and immediately got in his car to drive where Angela was. When doing so, he drove past the guy in the truck and Angela was apparently screaming his name for help, so he turns around and tries following the truck and his transmission fucks up and the guy got away. Angela has never been heard from again. And, she was pregnant.”

2. Annie Borjesson annierockstar.com

“I find the case of Annie Borjesson really weird. She was a Swedish student studying in Edinburgh. She then went to Prestwick airport (literally the other side of the country, then down a bit), caught on CCTV at the airport for ten seconds, then left. She tried to take out money multiple times from different ATMs, but didn’t have the funds so was denied. She was seen wandering about Prestwick, and then was found dead on the beach. Her long hair had been cut off, and the post mortem (as far as I have read) concluded death by drowning.

She may have been victim to foul play, or it was suicide. I also found that her parents’ e-mails were allegedly hacked later on. It may be a case of self-inflicted violence/mental health issues, but I find Annie’s case just so bizarre and sad.”

3. The Hinterkaifeck Murders Andreas Biegleder

“The Hinterkaifeck murders. A family saw footprints in the snow leading to their farm, but no footprints out of the farm. A few days later, they were killed in their own home. There was evidence that the perpetrators were staying in their house or the farm before the killings.

It’s creepy because your house is supposed to be the safest place. It’s hard to feel secure when you think about the possibility that your killer may be living with you without you noticing.”

4. Dorothy Scott

“I was just reading about Dorothy Scott recently. Her story is the saddest, and the creepiest was the bones of the dead dog the killer left on top of her remains to throw scavenger dogs off of his trail. Also, how her watch was stopped to the exact moment she died. I just can’t believe that he called her family so often and they could never trace the calls…I know it was the times though. But the whole thing is so horrifying.”

5. Brandon Swanson

“For those who are not familiar with his story, Brandon was a 19 year old who lived in Marshall, MN. He was returning home from a party recently celebrating his graduation from a community college up in a town north of Marshall called Canby and was on his way home.

Along the way home he crashed in a ditch. For some reason he was taking gravel roads even though the highway between the two towns was a straight shot North to South. I am guessing he took this route as a joy ride type of thing since he loved his car and driving in general or maybe he had a little too much to drink at the party and didn’t want to deal with any state troopers on patrol. He called his dad for a ride and eventually got tired of waiting inside his crashed car and started to walk towards Marshall. He claimed to his dad to see ‘lights’ of something nearby then abruptly exclaimed “Oh shit!” to his dad while still on the phone and his call ended. To this day no one knows what happened to him. No body found, none of his belongings found, nothing. There’s more to the story but that’s my summary. If you want to learn more just dig around.

My guess on what happened to Brandon is either he slipped and fell in a river due to not being able to see in the darkness, got shot and buried somewhere by a belligerent farmer who hated people trespassing on his property and would rather shoot then ask questions or was abducted by aliens (which would explain the lights). This case just creeps me out because I too live in Southern MN and I’m semi familiar with the Marshall area. It’s mostly flat farmlands around here so I really do not understand how someone can just disappear into thin air in the middle of nowhere without a body or any remains being found.”

6. The Bennington Triangle Disappearances

“Beginning in November 1945 through October 1950, five people — ages 8- to 74-years-old — went missing in the area. One was an experienced hunting guide and another was a 53-year-old woman described as an experienced camper and hiker who knew the area like the back of her hand. I’ve hiked Vermont’s Long Trail myself and there are places where you get a feeling of being watched by someone or some “thing.” In 2008, an instructor at Bennington College and experienced hiker got lost on the mountain, later recounted his strange experiences and swore he would never again hike the trail alone.”

7. The Setagaya Family

“The killer stayed in the house for hours, eating their [the Setagaya family’s] food, logging into the family computer and sleeping on their couch. It’s so creepy because rarely does a killer stick around for hours after they commit their crime making themselves at home.”

8. Brandon Lawson

youtube

“Ran out of gas in Middle of Nowhere, TX in 2013. Called the cops, much of it is inaudible but he implies he’s being chased into the woods, and says he needs the cops. When police arrived, they find his truck but nothing else. Not a trace of him since.”

9. Katarzyna Zowada (The “Skin case”)

“A young Polish student disappears in Krakow city.

Few months later a ship on the Vistula river stops because ‘something’ stuck into a propeller. What they have found surprised everyone.

They have gotten out a… skin of missing Katarzyna Zowada. To be more precise: A suit made of human skin. Someone had cut all the limbs and head then created a ‘body suit’ from remaining part which was probably worn by the murderer for some time.

Despite media attention and increased police interest every few years a perpetrator never had been found.”

10. Cassie Jo Stoddart

youtube

“She [Cassie Jo Stoddart] was house-sitting for her aunt. She invited her boyfriend over and his two friends came over as well. His friends left and said they were going to the movies. They didn’t.

At some point before “leaving”, they unlocked a basement door, unbeknownst to her. They shut the power off to scare her. They sat there (hiding) until her boyfriend left and she was alone and proceeded to put masks on, come in the house and stab her. If that isn’t bad enough, a video was found where they planned to murder her ahead of time. There was footage of them right after they killed her as well.”

11. Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon Photo from one of the recovered cameras

“Another creepy mystery that resonates with me is the disappearance of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon. Long story short, two Dutch girls visiting Panama decide to go on a hike a day before they were scheduled to meet a guide for a tour and they go missing the same night. 10 weeks later their remains and possessions are found down stream from where the girls were hiking.

What creeps me out the most about this disappearance is the pictures that were found on Lisanne’s camera that turned up in the remains. The pictures go from the usual nice pictures of landscapes and of the girls posing with landmarks to cryptic pictures of the darkness as what many assume were attempts to use the flash of the camera to act as a signal for rescuers. Also there was a photo of back of Kris’s head with what possibly looks like blood by her temple. Just the fact that no one knows what happened to these two during their time in the jungle is what is most unsettling about this mystery.”

12. Daniel LaPlante’s Murders

“Daniel LaPlante is a triple murderer. He killed a nursery school teacher & her 2 kids in 1987. After a massive man-hunt they still could not find him. The ultra creepy thing is what happened. He was eventually discovered-after being on the run-in the closet of a girl he’d dated. She opened her door one night to see him standing there, in her mother’s clothes, face smeared with makeup, holding a machete. He tied her & her family up , but the youngest narrowly escaped. As if this isn’t bad enough, they AGAIN could not find him, till 2 weeks later. The family, who’d moved out, came back home and SAW LAPLANTE IN THE WINDOW. The police were called and later found out why he’d been so hard to find. Daniel had been living in the walls of his former girlfriend’s house the entire time.”

7 Of The Most Brutal Murders Ever Committed In The History Of The Human Race (NSFL) 1. The Toolbox Killer

The transcript of what happened to Shirley Ledford at the hands of Toolbox Killers Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris is the most disturbing thing you will ever come across.

An excerpt from the transcript:

“At this point, after Bittaker had forced Shirley to fellate him, repeated sounds of an administered beating, interspersed with loud screams can be heard as Bittaker savagely beat Shirley about the breasts and, to a lesser degree, head. Bittaker then extracted his pliers from the tool box. Shirley then emits several high-pitched, prolonged screams and cries of agony as Bittaker alternately squeezes and twists her labia, clitoris, nipples and breasts with the pliers. Bittaker then returns the pliers to the tool box. Banging sounds can also be heard throughout, which are believed to have been made as Shirley came into contact with the walls and inner contents of the van as she writhed and flailed.”

Ledford: My God! Please stop it! (Screams) Bittaker: Is the recorder going? Norris: Yeah! Bittaker: Scream baby! Scream some, baby.

2. Kelly Anne Bates

Bates was horrifically tortured for days before her tormentor finally killed her. Below are a few examples of what she went through.

According to Wikipedia, Kelly Anne Bates (18 May 1978 – 16 April 1996) was a British teenager murdered on 16 April 1996 at age 17 in Manchester after being tortured for four long weeks. Kelly’s eyes were gouged from their sockets up to three weeks before she actually died from drowning in a bathtub. These horrific crimes were committed by her partner, James Patterson Smith.

Below is a list from Wikipedia of the specific injuries Kelly Anne Bates endured through torture:

Scalding to her buttocks and left leg Burns on her thigh caused by the application of a hot iron A fractured arm Multiple stab wounds caused by knives, forks and scissors Stab wounds inside her mouth Crush injuries to both hands Mutilation of her ears, nose, eyebrows, mouth, lips and genitalia Wounds caused by a spade and pruning shears Both eyes gouged out Later stab wounds to the empty eye sockets Partial scalping

3. Junko Furuta

Furuta was a 17-year-old Japanese girl whose case became known as the “concrete-encased high school girl murder case.” Furuta was kidnapped by four teenage boys and, aside from the brutality of the assaults against her, the most disturbing thing is that she was held at one of the kidnapper’s houses and his parents were present the entire time, knew what was going on, and did nothing to stop it.

Also extremely disturbing is that Furuta turned 17 while she was in captivity and enduring these horrors. There’s something tremendously upsetting about that.

According to Wikipedia:

To avoid concern over her abduction, the perpetrators forced Furuta to call her parents and tell them that she would be staying at a friend’s house for a while. Over the course of her confinement, Furuta was repeatedly raped, beaten, and tortured by her four captors until they killed her. The parents of Kamisaku were present in the home for at least a part of the time that Furuta was held captive, and though she pleaded with them for help, they did not intervene, later claiming that they feared their son too much to do so.

The killers hid her corpse in a 208-litre oil drum filled with concrete. They disposed of the drum in a tract of reclaimed land in Kōtō, Tokyo.

4. The Hi-Fi Murders

In 1974, two men robbing a Hi-Fi store in Odgen, Utah held captive and tormented five individuals. Only two of the captives would survive. Among the sadism levied on the captives were the following, according to Wikipedia:

Violence included a pen being kicked into an ear and the brutal rape of a teenage girl who was later shot in the head. Corrosive drain cleaner was also forcefully given to the hostages causing horrific burns to their mouths and throats.

Not only were they forced to drink drain cleaner but their mouths were then taped shut so they couldn’t spit it out or vomit it up.

One of the victims, Orren Walker, was shot several times, strangled and had a pen kicked into his ear but still survived.

5. The McStay Family

In 2010, in Fallbrook, California, the McStay family (including Joseph McStay, his wife Summer, and their two children), was brutally murdered. The four were then moved by the killer and buried in a shallow grave in the desert but their remains weren’t found until 2013. For three years they’d simply believed to have disappeared.

Forensic evidence showed that all had been beaten to death with a sledgehammer which was found near the family’s remains. Joseph McStay suffered four blows to the head and the family’s youngest child, only four years old, suffered seven. Investigators also believe the family was tortured prior to being killed.

Charles Merritt, McStay’s former business partner has been charged with the family’s murder.

6. James Bulger via Wikipedia

In 1993, in England, two-year-old James Bulger was abducted by two ten-year-olds at the mall while his mother was distracted.

After taking him from the mall, the two boys took Bulger on a two and a half mile walk. At one point they picked Bulger up and dropped him on his head which caused him to have a bump on his head and, according to bystanders, cry.

The two then took him up an embankment and onto a set of railroad tracks where they began torturing him.

More details of the murder according to Wikipedia:

At the trial it was established that at this location, one of the boys threw blue Humbrol modelling paint, which they had shoplifted earlier, into Bulger’s left eye. They kicked and stomped on him, and threw bricks and stones at him. Batteries were placed in Bulger’s mouth. Police believed some batteries may have been inserted into his anus, although none were found there. Finally, a 22-pound (10.0 kg) iron bar, described in court as a railway fishplate, was dropped on him. Bulger suffered ten skull fractures as a result of the iron bar striking his head. Dr. Alan Williams, the case’s pathologist, stated that Bulger suffered so many injuries—42 in total—that none could be isolated as the fatal blow.

Police suspected that there was a sexual element to the crime, since Bulger’s shoes, socks, trousers and underpants had been removed. The pathologist’s report read out in court stated that Bulger’s foreskin had been forcibly retracted.

Before they left him, the boys laid Bulger across the railway tracks and weighted his head down with rubble, in the hope that a train would hit him and make his death appear to be an accident.

After Bulger’s killers left the scene, his body was cut in half by a train. Bulger’s severed body was discovered two days later on 14 February.

7. Amora Bain Carson

Amora Bain Carson, the 13-month-old baby who was tortured to death by her mother’s boyfriend during an “exorcism.” I’ll tell the story by copying some things from each of their appeals. Jesseca Carson was the baby’s mother, and the boyfriend was Blaine Milam. Jessica Carson was sentenced to life, while Blaien Milam was sentenced to death.

WARNING: Graphic Content

“Carson concluded that the child was like ‘Chucky’ or ‘Pet Sematary’ (horror movies) when the “boy dies and comes back to life all evil and stuff” because the child was “biting Blaine to where it was drawing blood on his hands.” After Milam returned to the child, he took a picture of her and gave it to Carson. One of the child’s eyes was stretched and ‘like warped down.’ Carson heard horrible cries from the child as Milam was attempting the exorcism.”

“During the hours involved, Milam had taken the child to a back bedroom in their small dwelling and wedged the door shut. The evidence would allow a jury to conclude that Carson was necessarily aware of what was happening to the child, because she admitted hearing the screams that accompanied such torture and because she saw the child’s deformed head after some time had passed and heard the sounds caused by the blows.”

“They found blood-spatter stains, consistent with blunt force trauma, near the south bedroom. Among the items collected from the south bedroom were: blood-stained bedding and baby clothes; blood-stained baby diapers and wipes; a tube of Astroglide lubricant; and a pair of jeans with blood stains on the lap. DNA testing later showed that Amora’s blood was on these items.”

“As a result of the ‘exorcism’ conducted by Milam, Amora suffered innumerable injuries that led to her death. Forensic evidence showed the child was beaten so severely that the multitude of fractures to her skull connected with each other like a jigsaw puzzle, and her brain was torn and severely damaged. An arm and leg had spiral fractures indicating they were twisted in two, her torso was either struck by a blunt object or squeezed until the ribs and sternum broke, and her body (neck, chest, abdomen, buttocks, both elbows, both forearms, both feet, right arm, left shoulder, left upper arm, left hand, right thigh, and left knee) was riddled with no less than twenty-four distinct bite marks. Her head and face were so scraped and bruised that all the discrete injuries combined into “one giant injury.” Her liver was torn, and her vaginal and anal orifices were so torn that the vagina and rectum were actually connected, an injury the forensic examiner had never seen before. The underside of her tongue was lacerated from blunt force trauma. She was also strangled. Because of all the injuries she sustained, it was not possible to determine which one was the final injury, and no specific, singular cause of death was determinable. Forensic testimony reflected that several of the injuries standing alone would have each been fatal. Police were called several hours later; when they arrived, the child was entirely stiff and in rigor.”

“On December 13th, appellant’s sister, Teresa, went to see appellant in jail. That night, she told her aunt that she ‘was needing to find a way to get back out to the trailer in Tatum’ because “Blaine had told her that she needed to go out there to the trailer to get some evidence out from underneath of it.” The aunt called Sgt. Rogers and told her that “she needed to get out to the trailer immediately, that Teresa was wanting to go out there to get some evidence out from underneath the trailer.”

“Sgt. Rogers immediately obtained a search warrant, crawled under the trailer, and discovered a pipe wrench inside a clear plastic bag. The pipe wrench had been shoved down ‘a hole in the floor of the master bathroom.’ Forensic analysis revealed components of Astroglide on the pipe wrench, the diaper Amora had been wearing, and the diaper and wipes collected from the south bedroom.”

Werner Herzog did an episode of On Death Row about Blaine Milam and the full episode is on YouTube. It has security footage from the pawn shop where they were supposedly pawning a chainsaw to get money for an exorcism (after Amora was already dead) and a gas station, the 911 call, crime scenes photos (not of Amora’s body, of course, just the trailer) and interviews with pretty much everyone involved (except Jesseca Carson). It doesn’t make it any easier… but this case raises a lot of questions and searching online for these kinds of cases can take you horrible places that use Amora for shock value or misrepresent autopsy photos of other unfortunate victims as her (no post-mortem photos of Amora have been released and her autopsy was sealed). Especially since Amora’s case hasn’t been in the MSM very much due to the graphic nature of her death. With Herzog you’re getting quality information on the case coming straight from those involved.

Bonus: 36 Locals Share The Most Horrific True Crimes That Happened In Their Home Towns

1. “Stacey Castor poisoned her husband and then poisoned her daughter on the daughter’s first day of college. She wrote a fake suicide note for her daughter saying that she had killed her father and was committing suicide because of the guilt. The daughter almost died but recovered from the poison and testified against her mother. They also found out she had poisoned her first husband.”

2. “When I was in 3rd grade I saw a kid get into a police car while I was in chess club. Turns out his father murdered his younger twin sisters by stabbing them to death. Apparently he told them to play hide and seek and murdered them when he found them. When he finally returned to school he got bullied by the shitbag kids at our school, making fun of his dead sisters. He was placed in the custody of his aunt who later committed suicide and he was left in the care of the state after that. That boy’s life was horrible.”

3. “Around 3 years ago, my friend’s father went berserk and killed my friend, his younger brother and his mother, and then proceeded to hang himself. I remember talking to him the week before about a project we had in lit class. His extended family took the project because it was the last thing he worked on before the incident. I had grief counselors talk to me for every class I had with him (Which was almost all of them). Our school still has a Tree and a memorial dedicated to him.”

4.“Probably David Meirhofer’s murders. Among other things he snatched a seven year old girl out of her tent while her family was camping, molested her, then strangled her to death. They caught him because he called her mother to taunt her a year later.”

5. “Neighbors that lived across the road from me were having domestic issues. The wife brings over a box of stuff for us to stash because she is afraid he will steal/burn it. We stash it for her no problem. A week later she is missing, the following week they found her dead, stuffed in a box in his storage unit. He got life. We gave the box of stuff to her daughter.”

6. “Guy beat his pregnant girlfriend to death in front of her kids, then beat her 8 and 6 year old to death. Couldn’t bring himself to beat the 2 year old to death so he threw him in the dryer and turned it on.”

7. “When I was a kid one of my neighbors and his sister murdered their mom by bashing her head in with a real heavy frying pan and then strangled her with the phone cord. (Back when phones had cords) because the mother told the son that he couldn’t take his underage sister out with him to a party. So they killed her and left her body in the closet and then went to the party like nothing happened.”

8. “I live in a (relatively) rural county in England, so we normally don’t have many crimes that you could consider too bad.

About three years ago a 17 year girl I’d met once or twice went missing, she was popular and the community really pulled together in trying to find her. She was also the daughter of a detective who works in our town.

Turns out she was murdered by another lad I’d also met a few times. He was a bit older (22 I think) He seemed okay when I met him, a little cocky but nothing too unusual. He was a photographer who once staged a picture with one of my friends where she was hanging by the neck with a bag on her head. Pretty strange stuff, but I assumed it was all in the name of art.

He’d been rejected by this girl so he lured her to his house on the pretense of taking modelling photos. He strangled her to death when she got there and dumped her body miles away.

Apparently the cops found essays he’d been writing obsessively about her. He’d also taken pictures labelled “before-during-after” of her murder, so it was obviously pre-meditated.

He was given a whole-life sentence (which are very rare in the UK) so chances are he’ll never get to see the light of day again.”

9. “My neighbor that became our family’s friend had a nice step dad. He used to give me rides sometimes. We lived in a bad part of Miami (think inner city, not South Beach) and my nickname there was “smart girl” because I’m the only one in “the hood” that went to college.

Anyway, I moved away and apparently one day my friend’s mom told his step dad she wanted to leave him. He went insane. He grabbed his gun and told her she’s going to die before she leaves or something like that. My friend’s little sister was there too and was crying the whole time (she was like 16). My friend stepped between his step dad and his mom. His step dad told him if he didn’t move he’d kill him too.

He didn’t move. He killed my friend, then the mom. He turned to the little girl and said he couldn’t kill her and that he was so sorry. Then he killed himself.”

10. “The murder of Maddie Clifton. An 8 year old girl went missing in Jacksonville, FL and it became a huge national story in 1998. There was a massive hunt to find her by law enforcement and local residents. Everyone was looking. It’s all anyone talked about. A week into the search, a mother went into her son’s room while he was at school to clean it after the stench coming from it became overwhelming. His waterbed seemed to be leaking. When she looked more closely, she discovered Maddie’s body stuffed inside the pedestal of the bed.

The woman’s son was only 14 years old. He said him and Maddie were playing baseball, and when he hit the ball, it hit Maddie in the eye causing her to bleed. He says he panicked when she wouldn’t stop screaming, and said his father was abusive and was afraid what would happen to him if he she told on him. So, he dragged Maddie inside, stabbed her 11 times and beat her to death with the baseball bat.

Horrible, tragic story.”

11. “A woman murdered an expectant mother and cut the baby out, drove off, then called 911 in an attempt to pass the baby off as her own. I was just off work around that time that night and definitely drove by that exact spot before they found the body. It’s right off the highway. Creepy shit…”

12. “Our neighbor on our street was having an affair and decided it was a good idea to kill her husband then burn the house down so she could be with her pilot boyfriend.

Stupid thing was her boyfriend used to come into one local bar, said he was never that serious about her and that she was clingy, even went so far as to try and get him to be her alibi. All this happened while we were on vacation, weirdest trip home ever.”

13. “If you guys aren’t aware what’s going on in the Philippines. Most drug users/dealers are now being killed by unknown assailants. Just last week we have 2 people dumped near where I live with their heads fully wrapped with tape and hands as well with a cardboard sign saying “I’m a drug dealer. Don’t be like me” (translated from our native language).”

14. “Grew up in a small town north of the bay area, while watching a documentary about Jim Jones my teacher started crying. Found out for several years Jones’s church was in our town (2miles from my house) and after everyone committed ‘suicide’ in Guyana they ran a list of names on the local news. A large number of previous students and their parents were on the list. The shit didn’t go down in my town but a whole generation where I grew up lost friends and family to that guy and the church (with a guard tower) still stands to this day but with a different denomination.”

15. “When I was a baby there was this nice couple that lived down the street from me. No kids, middle aged, average couple. The wife and my mom would talk sometimes – casual pleasant neighborly chatter. Apparently this lady was a total sweetheart and was loved around town.

So one day my mom is driving home, and the couple’s house is surrounded by police cruisers. Turns out the wife commit suicide by shotgun. The problem was – she shot herself twice.

For months they were investigating the husband…they were so close to having the evidence that they needed to nail him for the murder.

One day, my mom and grandma were going to the store. When they left, he was sitting in his driveway in his car. He waved at them as they left. When they get home, there are police and an ambulance outside his house – he was slumped over dead in his car – suicide by carbon monoxide.

They literally saw him as he was killing himself after he killed his wife. Yikes.”

16. “Andrea Yates drowning her five kids. Happened five minutes away and our family still sees her ex husband and his new family on occasion. They’re very nice.”

17. “Let’s see… Where to start? This list doesn’t even include the stuff related to the meth epidemic.

(1990’s) A guy cut another dude into pieces with a carving knife and stashed the body in the deep freezer in his apartment. The police only found them a week later.

(2000’s) A guy got into an argument with their cousin at the club, drove to their house and chucked a firebomb inside. The fire killed all five of their kids, who were home at the time.

(2000’s again) Another guy heard that his estranged parents had a huge life insurance policy in their name. One night, he left home, drove to his parents’ place in Iowa, and killed almost everyone (6 people) with a shotgun, then drove home to eat dinner, while awaiting the news. He was only caught because his 7 year old niece hid in the closet the whole time and she was able to tell who did it.

(2015-now) Several fatal shootings and beatings that have killed a few people. Heroin epidemic.

Oh also, Michael Swango AKA “Dr. Death”, a serial killer known for poisoning victims (4-60; true number unknown), worked as an EMT around the area here in the 80’s.

So, yeah, Central Illinois is just low-key slang for ‘Trevor Philips country’.”

18. “Just happened this month, a mother of a one month old punched her baby to death because she was tired of feeding it. She then blamed the father. Fucked up.”

19. “Whitey here. I live in a small south east town. Back in the 80’s the town was still pretty segregated school wise. Where the railroad tracks once ran through town, was the diving line. South side of the railroad was probably 99.9% black. My backyard fence was part of that dividing line. When I was 10, my parents fostered a black boy my age. He lived in my neighborhood, played on my baseball team. His dad went to prison up in NY and the boy lived with us for 4 years. He moved back when his dad got out. But 30 years later, we still tell people we are brothers.

‘D’ taught me a lot about black community. Especially about times when crimes are committed and the whole black community knows who did it. But don’t tell because “fuck the police” or retaliation from the criminal.

we lived 2 blocks from the closest convenience store/arcade. People walking to the store from the south side of the tracks, walked by my house. It wasn’t the wild west or anything. We may not have gone to the same school sometimes, but we only had 1 recreation department so we played sports together. So we always saw people we knew at the store.

But there was this one guy. For the late 80’s this dude was pretty out and flamboyant when it came to being gay. Remember those 70’s and 80’s short shorts with the stripe. If you hung em just right, your balls were exposed.

Anyway, dude used to walk up and down the street, short short, flip flops, tank top t shirt, medium size afro, and usually sucking on a sucker. He was very friendly. He would stop and talk. He acted like he was a girl. He was alright. My sister and her friend were nice to him. He stopped and talked to them if they were ever about.

Fast Forward. So the dude is found in the bathroom at the ballfield. He had been murdered. Just fucked up big time. Beat to hell and back. And the story every one has head as an urban legend before. They had cut his dick off and put it in his mouth. His balls were in his hand and a broom stick had been shoved in his ass.

No suspects.

Year later, out in the county, a white sherriff’s deputy off duty from another county happens to be in our jurisdiction, checking on his parents’ house. Happens to catch 2 black guys robbing the house. He shoots and kills both after a scuffle.

Oddly enough, under routine drug test, because of the shooting, cocaine shows up on his system. This story is really fishy. Investigation goes on for a long time. The cops finally drop the case, declare it self defense or what have.

This is where my foster brother ‘D’ comes into play. Years later. We’re in our 20’s, shooting the shit and somehow bring up the murder of the gay dude. I was like, ‘I can’t believe they never solved that case.’

D was like what you talking about? Everybody knew who did it. What? He asked, ‘remember the 2 black dudes the off duty cop killed breaking into his parents house?’

Yea I remember that.

Well those were the dudes that did it. Everybody in the “hood” knew it was them. They were always terrorizing everybody. And the house they were breaking into and got caught? Drug deal. Those 2 dudes were dealing drugs, and that white guy, off duty sheriff deputy from another county. Shot em in the middle of the deal.

So two drug dealers/murderers are murdered by a crooked cop, but in the end, I don’t really consider that justice for our friendly neighborhood gay boy that probably never hurt a flea in his 20 years of life.

You may not have any love for ‘the man’ or ‘the police’ but how can a community be silent when innocent people are hurt?”

20. “Second week in my new apartment and my neighbor gets robbed and stabbed. I heard the whole encounter and was the one that called the cops.”

21. “I was emancipated really young. I just moved into emergency housing commission and had to sleep in the lounge room because it had the only light bulb and I’m scared of the dark.

For anyone not in Australia Housing Commission is cheap units or houses owned by the government and rented to disadvantaged people. Mostly junkies and welfare bludgers.

Anyway I was sleeping in the lounge room which had the front door attached when I hear the most blood curling screams.

One junkie had poured boiling water over another chick, stabbed her repeatedly and cut off one of her tits.

I was laying maybe 10 meters away.”

22. “A child was raped and murdered. Guy was arrested and he was killed within 24 hours of being arrested and in a community cell of like 6 inmates instead of segregation he died and no one in the cell seen it.”

23. “I only remember some of the details as I was on holidays at the time and only heard second hand what happened. So a guy who lived around the corner had an argument with his wife over something, got pissed off and then shot her. People heard the gunshot and called the police, which prompted him to run away in his car down the main road about 2km to his parents house where he got into their gun locker, killed his parents and then had a standoff with the police that lasted a couple of hours and ending in him shooting himself.”

24. “We had a group of people who would pretend to be the cops, dressed in all black and wore ski masks and stuff, knock on your door, say they had a warrant, and if you opened it up, they would force their way in and rob you.

This went on for months, like, month after month after month. They decided they were above the law, so their crimes kept getting worse and worse, one of their later houses they beat an old man until he had jaw, facial, and skull fractures so bad he had to have a life flight to a major trauma center where he had emergency surgery. The next old couple they killed.

They were sure the local police couldn’t do anything, the newspaper even said the police had nothing to go on, and it just kept getting worse. One of their last home invasions, they just killed the homeowner as he opened the door for absolutely no reason.

I realized that if someone had defended themselves earlier in the chain of criminality, things never would have reached this point. I ended up getting a Ring Video Doorbell and a Strikemaster II door reinforcements for each external door. I keep firearms in electronic safes ready to use at any moment. Nothing like that is going to happen to my family.”

25. “There was a family in the area I used to live in and I played soccer with the middle daughter. It was three girls — two were adults and one was still in high school — and the parents. The parents were very religious, the mother especially, and they had a lot of beliefs that I (and many people) found…strange.

The eldest daughter (whose name I don’t recall) had a serious mental illness that she managed perfectly well when she lived out of home. She had a job, had a decent life and all was well. The relationship she was in fell apart and she had to move back home for financial reasons. One of the rules her parents had was that she wasn’t to take her meds anymore because they weren’t what they considered ‘godly.’

Things deteriorated over time and the parents continued to withhold her medications. Now, I have a chronic mental illness myself and without my meds things descend into chaos quite quickly so I can’t imagine what it would’ve been like for her with her illness being more serious than mine. Her parents were told by their church to pray over her and everything would be ok.

As I’m sure you can imagine things were not ok. She lost her tenuous grip on reality and became unstable. She attacked her family while doing battle with a series of hallucinations that were telling her awful things about her parents and sisters. She took a sharp kitchen knife and went after her youngest sister (the middle one that I knew wasn’t home at the time) and stabbed her to death in the kitchen. Her father kept trying to defend his youngest child while trying to settle the eldest and he sustained serious injuries. The eldest followed him when he ran from the house to get help and she caught him from behind and stabbed him multiple times in the neck. He died on the front lawn. The mother was injured as well but appeared not to be the target of the eldest daughter’s hallucinations and she managed to survive.

The girl was taken down by tasers when the police arrived — they were called by neighbours who heard the commotion — and she was sent to a high security facility where she still is now. She was very obviously not in control of herself at the time so she avoided criminal charges and the mother moved away from the area.

I feel for the mother most; she essentially lost her whole family. The youngest and her husband had been killed and the middle child moved away eventually too, changing her surname when she got married and chose to disconnect from her mother. I know she blames her mum for what happened because she was the one who withheld the medication. I can imagine that the mum blames herself too.

When that happened it helped my mum to put my illness into perspective — if I’m treated properly, everything will be alright. It was a “there, but for the grace of God, go we” moment.

That was the worst crime that happened in our area for quite a while. Years before that there was a massacre (the Milperra Masacre, if you want to google it) between rival biker gangs who had, and continue to have, a presence in that particular suburb. Since then there was a child drowned during an exorcism after parents were told by a priest (or something) that the kid had a demon inside him and trying to force it out was the only way to save him…he was going through puberty, that’s all.”

26. “The kidnapping of Michael Dunahee. He is still just considered missing but its been 20+ years. You’d have to be pretty optimistic to believe he didn’t meet a horrible fate. He was just a small boy when taken and the incident absolutely ROCKED My small crime free city. It changed everything…parents kept a much more careful eye on us kids..many of our freedoms were taken away…I still feel sick when i think about what horrible things must’ve happened to that poor boy.”

27. “Growing up two brothers murdered their parents and put them in bags in the Attic. They did this because their parents would not let them go to a party nor own a cell phone, this was when cell phone were just becoming affordable for the upper middle class.”

28. “DEA bust next door, serial killers dumping ground five minutes from my house, and Sandy hook is within a 30 minutes drive.”

29. “We sold our house when I was 9 and moved a few miles away. The couple we sold the house to was nice enough, but a little odd. I don’t even know what it was, but even I noticed they were weird, and I was a little kid.

Fast forward about 12 years. I’m in college and these people have a son themselves. One day the man cornered his wife in the dining room and blew her head off with a shotgun. They had been having marital trouble prior to that but I’m not sure what exactly set him off. Kind of creepy to know that happened in my old house.”

30. “The girl who got stabbed by the two slenderman girls? My second cousin. My younger siblings actually played with her 2 weeks prior at a family gathering. Crazy.”

31. “Some kid beat another to kid to death with a bat over an argument that had to do with something related to weed. Mind you the population in my town is like 8,000. This was crazy.”

32. “Well, we’ve got a serial killer running around now – he’s killed seven people so far. (Referring to the current serial killer loose in Phoenix, Arizona).”

33. “I live in Downtown Dallas. I was packing for an international trip the night of the police shooting. I took note of the crowds after work and just made a mental note to “stay inside for awhile” after I got home. It wasn’t until I walked downstairs to get some tacos at around 10pm and a couple cops with sniper rifles were posted up in our lobby and told me to “get the fuck back upstairs, we are on lockdown!” that I realized some shit went down. What I witnessed that night and the following day really changed my perspective on a lot. They didn’t show the majority of it on the news. I have always been very supportive and stood behind a lot of social movements…but there is zero excuse for a 14 year old to spit on a cop, tell me I was a “Mexican bitch” that he “ought to rape,” loot a 7-11, or do any of the insane things that I saw.”

34. The Snowtown, Australia Murders

“In my city some guys went around torturing people to death and then dissolved their bodies in vats of acid. But they used the wrong type of acid (Not strong enough) and people complained of a foul smell, so the police investigated and found semi-liquified remains in barrels.”

35. “Two people ordered a pizza and killed the teenage driver because they wanted to know what it was like to kill a man.”

36. “The 10 mile radius around my childhood home is like catnip to serial killers and evil. BTK dumped one of his victims in a ditch a mile away from my house (before I was born,) the Carr Brothers murdered a group of 5 people in the soccer field 4-5 miles from my home (6th one survived because she wore a metal hair clip that caused the bullet to ricochet away from her head,) A man molested small children on the same street, the old lady that hated us kids ended up murdered by her own son (my mom was the one to find her since she started to smell the decomposing body and a family member asked her if she was willing to go in for her.)

Tons of crimes that never were recorded, gunshots going off in the dead of night, a scream that suddenly got cut short, we were just told to lay on the floor while my father paced the house with a shotgun until he felt it was safe.”