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#just like. slightly different sized rectangles

slttygeto · 3 months

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tags: fem! reader, nsfw, taking pictures.

ft: hanma shuji.

you get shuji a polaroid camera for his birthday, something simple for a man with such an expensive taste—the rolex watch costs more than your monthly rent, without mentioning of course the expensive suits that he carelessly discards of in your bathroom to fuck you in the shower. you always end up freaking out on him that it costs so much, and he just waves his black card, reassuring you that it’s nothing.

(you also forget that there’s a 2023 black matte Bentley parked right in front of your apartment building)

and hanma shuji thinks this polaroid camera is the best gift he’s ever gotten in his entire life. white, a contrast color to everything he owns (phone, car, house decor…) and he holds it in his hands like it’s the most precious thing ever.

when shuji gives you his dress shirt to wear, buys you a new set of lingerie in his favorite color and tells you not to wear any makeup—you don’t know that it would end up with you two having a photoshoot on your bed.

“shuji… the light is blinding me,” your words are muffled as he presses his lips against yours in a quick, wet kiss. he’s shirtless and visibly hard in his slacks. his grey suit pants look so tight against his strong thighs, and everytime he tells you to look at the camera, you pout slightly that he’s making you look away.

“one more baby, yeah? mhm, you smell so good,” the kiss travels from your cheek to your neck and then chest. he bites onto your boob, right above your nipple—and something about the redness that it leaves drives him a little crazy.

so he does it again, lets you wrap your legs around him in a pathetic attempt to relieve the ache between your legs as he litters love bites across your skin. to you this is torture, but to him it’s art. his way of expressing himself, claiming you as his. you are his.

you hear the camera shutter and when he shows you the picture he took of your love bites covered chest, you hate to admit but—it did look hot.

his hand goes to grope one of your boobs, and your hand finds his as you wrap it around his wrist. the size difference, the obvious dynamic being shown in a rectangle piece of plastic. shuji loses his mind as he stares at the picture he took, his masterpiece.

he believes that this is the best form of foreplay. because you are breathing hard, there’s a wet patch forming in your panties and you’re giving him the eyes that he knows all too well.

“wanna take a pic of me with your cock in my mouth?” sounds tempting. way too fucking tempting, but shuji spreads your legs and pushes your panties to the side before pressing his thumb to your clit, toying with the bud until you’re writhing underneath.

“not until i’ve taken a picture of this pussy, hm? gorgeous pussy.”

2024 © all works belong to @slttygeto. do not repost, translate or steal any of my works.

#me and shuji are actually going on our honeymoon yall (losing my mind over him today)#moon's works #tokyo revengers #hanma shuji #hanma shuji smut #hanma x reader #hanma x reader smut #hanma shuji x reader

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20dollarlolita · 11 months

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Frill Skirt Tutorial

Here's a tutorial for making a lolita skirt with a fully elastic waistband.

Recommended background reading: How to pick quilt prints for use in lolita fashion. And here's some things I've previously said about this project.

We're going to make some skirts that look like this. This is a really fun project because you can use a lot of quilt prints, and fully elastic skirts are comfortable and flexible wardrobe pieces.

In this skirt, my pink striped fabric is "Skirt", and the navy with the shoes is "frill". The black lace at the bottom of the skirt is the hem lace, and the lace with the pink ribbon is the transition lace.

You can use the same fabric for the frill and the skirt, making it look more like the skirts referenced above. If you use different fabric for the frill and the skirt, it's is a little bit like faking a border print.

Here's some cutting dimensions. Please excuse the fact that I forgot to turn off "emulate brush dynamics".

Because this is elastic, we're going to be basing the sizes off how much fabric you cut. When you're working with a big, gathered rectangle, you have a lot of options for how much ease you're going to put in the garment.

I forgot to list it, but these skirts really look better when they're lined with a slippery lining fabric. For lining, you just need the "skirt" measurement. For size 1, you need 23" of lining, or 2/3 of a yard.

For size 2, you're going to want 36" of lining, or one yard.

All these sizes include some fabric for extra things like bows and hair accessories. I highly, HIGHLY recommend getting into the habit of making matching accessories as part of the project of making a lolita garment. You're going to need them anyway, so they might as well match.

For size 3, you will want 40" of lining fabric, or 1 + 1/8 yards.

All of these sizes assume that you're using 45" wide fabric. If you're using 60" fabric, you can likely go down a size. (This would be max hip of 52" for size 1, 82" for size 2, and 172" for size 3).

For any view, you will also need enough 1/4" or 3/8" elastic to go around your natural waist (or wherever you wear your skirt) about 4 times. Let's be honest, we all have a massive roll of 1/4" elastic hanging around from making covid masks, so let's use it up.

These skirts are a little bit on the shorter side, because that's just how Meta releases them. Since you're the one making the skirt, you can make some decisions. If you're tall, want to wear a fuller petticoat, or are building a skirt for a substyle where you usually want a longer skirt, you can add a few inches. You'll get a slightly different look if you're lengthening the skirt versus lengthening the frill, versus lengthening both equally. If you're not sure, now's a good time to check out lolibrary and look for dresses and skirts and see where they place the details around the hem. Lolibrary lets you search by brand, so search by brand and just take a note of what you see most often in pieces that you like.

For example, Alice and the Pirates often has the hem detail to be pretty close to the hem on their solid pieces, while Baby the Stars Shine Bright will have the detail going up quite a bit higher. (Please do more than the 10 seconds of searching that I did to get these examples). Therefore, if you want to lengthen the skirt and have a slightly more AatP tone, you can add the length to the skirt part of the skirt, and if you want a slightly more BtSSB tone, you can add the length to the frill part.

Researching your garments is the secret to having handmade garments that actually read as lolita fashion. Lolita fashion history is documented to an extent that no other fashion I've ever heard of is, and it really helps to take advantage of that extraordinary resource.

With our pattern ready and maybe lightly adjusted, let's get to work:

Foundational fact #1: fabric that rips will rip in a straight line along the grain of the fabric. Our skirt is made entirely of rectangles, so we're going to take advantage of that fact. If you want to cut your fabric with scissors, or with a rotary cutter, you're completely allowed to. If you don't have a serger with a functional cutting blade, you might want to cut it so that you don't need to trim the edges. I have a serger and I like to rip it. It might not be the best way, but it's how I've been making my lolita skirts since 2011, and I don't like change and I do like the stress-relieving experience of ripping.

So, lay your fabric out, and mark your cutting lines. If you're ripping the fabric, like I am, you just need to cut a little snip to get the tearing started.

This pattern factors in a half inch for seam allowance. If you're ripping the fabric, you will lose a little bit of usable fabric, so add yourself an extra inch to each cut.

Take your nice straight cuts/rips and lay them out in an organized fashion. You should have a frill pile, a skirt pile, a waistband pile, and an extra pile. If you like piles, you can also pile up your lace next to it.

You're going to sew every pile together so that you have each it its own long strip. Your lining (white fabric) should be the same size as your skirt piece. If it's longer (if you're using 45" quilt fabric for the face and 60" lining fabric for the lining), go ahead and trim them so they're the same total length in the long dimension.

Put the skirt on top of your lining and sew the top edges together.

You'll notice that this skirt is made up in doubles. The skirt is twice the long dimension as the waistband, and the frill is twice the long dimension of the skirt. This makes things easy to gather up.

If you're not using an overlocker to assemble this skirt, you will also want to run some kind of seam finish on the long ends of this skirt, to stop fraying.

(please pardon my hypermobile thumb)

A lot of people do gathering stitches by sewing two lines of basting stitches, and then pulling the thread on those stitches to cinch up the gathers. This does work really well on small things. However, as the amount that you need to gather gets longer and longer, it's gets more and more difficult to pull those threads without them breaking. Instead, I like using an applied gathering string. My current favorite string is waxed dental floss. Most dentists recommend unwaxed floss since it grabs more plaque, so make the smart decision and retire your waxed floss to be in your sewing box.

If you are making this project on a serger or an overlocker (and this is a GREAT first serger project), you can overlock over the dental floss. Here you can see the white floss going between the two needles. The needles are not going through the floss, just on either side of it. Tip: that little hole in the front of the presser foot is actually intended for you to put elastic or thread through so you don't need to hold it as carefully. I forgot and so I didn't do that here).

We're applying the dental floss onto the top edge of the ruffle.

If you aren't using an overlocker, you can do some form of hem finish (my favorite is the 3-step zigzag) and then apply the dental floss by doing a zigzag over it. Again, the needle isn't going through the floor, just on either side of it.

Now, pin your ruffle onto your skirt. I divide the ruffle and skirt up into equal portions, and then pin it first. My ruffle is twice the long measure as the skirt is, and they're both cut out of the same width of fabric. This means that dividing the ruffle up is pretty easy, because I can use the seams of the ruffle. The first seam in my ruffle goes halfway between the edge of the skirt and its first seam. The second seam of my ruffle goes on the first seam of my skirt, and so on.

Then, you just pull your dental floss so that it gathers up the fabric, and pin it down. Since we divided the fabric up earlier, we don't need to spend as much fight getting all the ruffles to be even. Go ahead and pin everything down, and then sew it together.

Now you're going to fold the skirt and lining in half to seam it all together. Match up your seams, and unfold your lining (see picture). This will let you sew the frill, the skirt, and the lining all together in one go.

The easiest time to put the hem and transition laces on is before you attach the waistband. The basic rule with gathered skirts is that it's a lot easier to apply anything flat that you can before you gather it.

In a lot of older lolita tutorials, a lot of people treated lace as optional. However, now that it's not 2007 anymore, we have a bit more of an expectation for detail in the garments we wear. Quilt cotton especially has a very flat texture, even when it has a nice print. If you can add a bit of texture and detail, you want to do so. If you're doing the skirt and the ruffle out of the same fabric, you can probably get away without using the transition lace, but you will still want hem lace.

I didn't have any lace when I was making this one, so I used a couple of lines of decorative topstitching between the skirt and the frill. I got the idea from this blog post from 2010. I didn't execute it as well as Lolita Noveau did, but that was the general concept.

Anyway, waistband time.

Take the edges of your waistband and press them in. You don't need to apply a seam finish before you do this. I have overlocking on mine because I ripped my fabric, and used the serger to clean up the edge. If you don't rip your fabric like a savage and use technology like scissors instead, you don't have that problem.

Fold your waistband in half. It's now time to sew the elastic channels.

Here's the secret to this waistband. Start out by stitching a line about 3/16" away from the fold in your waistband.

When you put your elastic in, this little line of stitching makes your waistband stay on straight, and adds a tiny ruffle to the top. I picked this up from the Metamorphose frill skirts, and it's amazing.

After you've made that line of stitching, start making channels for your elastic. Add about 1/8" of width from the width of your elastic (so 1/4" elastic, sew your channels at 3/8". 3/8" elastic, sew your channels at 1/2"). Leave a space for you to be able to actually put the elastic in. Don't forget this, or you'll have to redo it. Ask me how I know. I found that three channels works pretty well. Don't sew the channel closest to the edge, because you need to attach your skirt.

You're going to need to gather the top of your skirt, just like you gathered the top of your frill. Get your dental floss and your zigzag stitch ready.

Your waistband (flat) will be twice the length of your skirt, so you can pin and pull the gathers just like you did for the ruffle.

So this part is important: You are going to sew the right side of a single thickness of the waistband onto the wrong side of the skirt. I don't have a good picture of this, but here goes trying to explain it.

You need to sew the waistband so that the top seam of the skirt (the part that's sewn to the lining) is sandwiched between the front and back of the waistband. You are going to have your edges of the waistband turned under to hide the raw edge.

While you CAN do this by just putting the top of the skirt edge into the waistband seam and sew it down, you can make it look prettier by doing it like this:

You sew the right side of a single thickness of the waistband to the wrong side of the skirt. This means that, when you unfold it, the seam will be pointing outward, towards the viewer. This feels like it would look bad.

You then press that seam so that it's flat, and then wrap the front of the waistband to the front of the skirt. You tuck the raw edges into the waistband, so that they're all sandwiched between the back and the front of the waistband. You then sew the front of the waistband down from the front.

What this does is it allows you to have very precise control of where your final line of topstitching is. If you've ever sewn a skirt facing and been told to stitch the back of the facing by doing a stitch-in-the-ditch, this is like that but in reverse. It's the same process, but with the top stitching definitely showing.

Anyway, you can now cut your elastic to your waist measurement (or maybe about an inch shorter than your waist measurement) and start feeding it through your elastic channels. Since you're using such thin elastic, it helps to have negative ease (which is the technical name for "cut it smaller because it'll stretch) in your elastic measurements. Start by putting in the elastic at the top casing, and go down.

Sew your elastic ends together when you're done, and there you go! If this is your first lolita garment, congrats! See if Wunderwelt Closet Child has a blouse in your size that goes with your skirt, because they ship fast and some items are really discounted. 42lolita is a lolita-themed taobao reseller that's easy to shop. Basically just don't overpay from devilinspired. If you're going to have to wait crazy long lead times anyway, you might as well be not spending their big marked up prices.

Finish up any little last things, like threading the ribbon through your beading lace, if you used it.

Anyway, now you have a skirt! Yay. Make yourself several and learn how colors, prints, scale, and texture work with each other.

#lolita fashion #handmade lolita #lolita how to #20dollarlolita #long post #sewing #egl fashion

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rel124c41 · 27 days

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SUNDO. jade leech

This is the beginning: you walk into Osaka Bay, sound asleep. This is the end: you are dragged into Osaka Bay, wide awake … and screaming.

tags: japanese mythology & folklore, religious imagery & symbolism, yokai AU, attempted rape/non-con, inspired by Den lille Havfrue by Hans Christian Andersen, sleepwalking, yandere, blood and gore, immortality, declaration of love, did andersen want to fuck fish? i think so!

word count: 9,114

Timid, you step into the water.

Behind closed eyelids, the muscle and nerves of your eyeball flicker like insect wings. Your eyelashes may rest delicate in the closed oyster position but your eyeballs move alert underneath the thin skin.

By closing your eyes, it allows you to see a new world. Sight often blocks and trumps other sensations. With purpose, you narrow yourself to reflect upon the touch of a breeze, the sound of cicadas, and the shape of water embracing your ankles. You spread yourself out, imaging yourself in the wind, and then your eyes pulse under your eyelid skin.

You fly deeper into the lake with a yell of, “I see you!” And suddenly, you shrink down to the size of a six year old child from your adult body, missing your top left canine tooth and wearing a kimono pattern with abstract art of yellow squares and violet rectangles.

In the water, a boy laughs and says, “That can’t be true!”

“Yes it is!”

“But your eyes are closed!”

Eager hands squirm and dive through the water. Fingers reach out like hawk talons, squeezing unsqueezable water. In your hark of the earth, you hear the fierce splashes of you punching into the water to grab your friend. Laughing, you trip over yourself, falling breast first in water, managing to pick yourself up in time just as the lake licks at your throat. Three different voices laugh at you but you only hunt for one.

“I swear, I see you!”

“No way!”

In your attentiveness of your surroundings, you feel the smile that grows on your face. Water leaps up at your cheeks like sparks of a fire. When you laugh, salt slips in your mouth. Suddenly, you change angles and reach to your right instead of your left. The water there moves in a panic. Laughing, you bring up both your hands, readying to push them into the water.

The sun is warm. The water is cool. From the tree, in the breeze, thousands of leaves say in one voice, “My little Muyūbyō. My little sleepwalker. You are going too deep.”

“Mom?”

The hanging leaves are green and lush. “You’re going too deep, (Name).”

You wake up. The rainbow of ways one can wake up is endless and numerous. However, no one really considers waking up to be a varying, changeable state of things. Each unique rise into the waking realm differs slightly.

Today, you wake up like a crab has pinched firmly the tendon running down your upper hamstring. Today, you wake up shin-deep in the lake. Your mother is right. You are going too deep. The water usually stays up to your ankles. The sight greatly disturbs you and your hamstring tendon drums with the full body pain.

That boy. You wonder on the identity of that young boy. Why could you not catch him if you had him right in your sight? Your seeing varies often; sometimes the world is as clear as newly polished glass and other times you are trying to look through a looking glass that is grime and sand stained. His voice – his voice was almost as familiar as your mother's warning.

Eyes enucleated, you would always know your mother’s voice.

Backpedaling, you move and watch until the embrace around your legs slides down goosebumped skin and lies quivering around your ankles.

You look at the sunrise peering over the lake. Hinode starts the upward ascend, pink and orange light falling over the world. Water almost shimmers around your ankles with the welcome benevolence of the rising sun.

Yet with its welcome comes the banishment of the only company you have. Well, for the most part. Even the mischievous kappa, river spirits, will vanish with the sun. You look for them nonetheless, knowing you make sure to fall asleep with cucumbers in your nightwear; food for the yokai, just to certain their volatile hungers are quelled.

You —

You have always been able to see yokai.

Your parents have called you blessed because of it. As a sleepwalker, you are closer to the spirit world than the normal, spirit-blind citizens of the island Kyushu. Despite being blessed, your parents kept your habit of sleepwalking out of the village’s hippocampus — as they would surely see it as a mark of possession.

So much for parental precaution, you are already seen as the village’s resident boogeyman even without them knowing you move in nightly rest.

Perhaps it is a fault of your own.

Perhaps the blame lies on your parents.

You can pinpoint where it went wrong though. Since the incident, you have known you would be kindred to the boogeyman. Despite all the piling up evidence, there is no clearly given perpetrator. Who does the blame of the crime go to for being a boogeyman against one’s will? The crime of that day and then the crime of being yourself. You: eldritch evil in human clothings.

Sekia (the walking world) and ikai (the ‘other’ world), you walk between those and that is a crime.

You would never point the fingers at your God though. The very thought of it makes your stomach tighten like rope and you press your palms flat into your abdomen to resist the urge to puke. God, your last remaining parent.

Shinto is an indigenous faith in Japan but you are born of a time period far too back to even toy with the idea of calling it indigenous. Shinto believes that one is born fundamentally good but struggles with evil spirits. You are born with a mark of evil. Born bad, you defy the religion you preach, practice, and love as if it is an old friend.

Despite that, where you live is in a Shinto shrine, atop a mountain, by a lake.

And, with a frown blemishing your pretty face, you look behind, up at the mountain you have to climb to go home.

Behind the Shinto shrine is a clothesline for drying cottons and silks. It stretches, a pinned butterfly wing, from tree to tree. All that hangs from them is only wet at the bottom. You squeeze the bottom of the nightwear you put there the previous day. Still damp. Ah, if only the elevation was not so high up. This would dry up quicker if I was living off the mountain. It is April and spring is ushering in. Still, it is mildly cold at the isolated point where you live.

You do not think you could stomach the air down in the village. Thin air is all you know. Adapting to glutinous air would be like drowning on land, a paradox regarding your lungs. You pull your nightwear off the skin covering your twin lungs, one hand on each tomoerio of the yogi.

It gathers delicately around your hamstrings before you pull it around the crook of your elbow. Straightening it out, you add the damp fabric to the clothesline. One arm cupping your nude breasts, you compare the height of water to previous nightwear. There is slight discoloration, the bottom a dark gray and navy blue and the rest white and blue as cornflower.

You tense when you look down the clothesline. Finding by one by one that the height of damp decreases in a staircase pattern. It would make sense. Ones that have been on the clothesline longer would be less soaked. But you know better.

You have been going deeper. You have no idea why but you have been walking deeper into the lake.

When you were very young – on the journey to turn two years old in a month or so – you were found in the lake. Above, in the mountaintop, horrified, mournful screams stabbed the air. Your name – screamed with tears and fright in each letter – soared like a tengu bird. Sleeping upright, you were unaware until a hand grabbed you and wrenched you back into the world.

“(Name). Oh my, (Name), my baby!”

When your fretful mother realizes years later that you cannot stop sleepwalking, she only asks one thing of you: to not go deeper than your ankles. You claw at the softest on your chest to get your heart to stop pounding so fretful. Next time, you will reel yourself back before you disobey.

There are a hundred eyes peeking through the paper sliding doors and a trail of footsteps that are too petite to be yours trailing across the cypress wood floors of your home. These are curing images to your heart.

With a smile and hum, you trail a finger across the wall. Multiple eyes blink at the motion like a herd of butterfly wings twitching at a breeze. Leaving behind wet, much larger footprints, you walk through the Shinto shrine to your bedroom. It is time to dress for the arising sun. The sticky smell of stale sulfur and sea trails after you. The yokai of your father’s Shino shrine welcome this familiar scent.

You never had any childhood friends. Quite a desolate thought, yes? Not entirely for you. Never having childhood friends, you cannot sensibly yearn for it with a desperate longing or be saddened by the statement. You never had any childhood friends.

For some reason, you have false snippets of a sekai, a waking world, with a childhood friend with one sun eye and one moon eye. Blended between the realities like you are. And an odd shattered dream made by your hippocampus made of yearning you do not have.

Origami is today’s shared activity. With slices of colored paper the boy has gifted you, you take to folding them into numerous animals. Creasing paper between your fingers and pinching edges with your nails. You work diligently on yours, spine facing the mountain.

You squish down the snake-head-shape the paper has fallen into until you get the diamond you want. With a prideful smile, you continue, fold by fold. You pull bottom up and get an open mouth; when you push both edges inward, you get the squashed wings done, halfway there.

Spine facing the lake, your companion continues on with his. His nails are whetted like a cleaver so he gets preciser and cleaner edges with his origami. Despite the fact he could make something more challenging, his design is simpler and less complicated than yours. He is just finishing up the tail by folding the right corner of the tiny triangle into the middle.

“Azul’s been making a lot of frogs. He says each frog he makes is another coin his future self will soon have.”

“There must be a whole army of them by now then!”

“A militia is more appropriate. I worry one day he will find himself lying down in the grave he has made, drowning under washi paper. The folly of his want.” The boy says this with a facade’s frown; there is really no concern in his mannerisms.

“You say that like you aren’t greedy.”

“Hm … not for things like money, other things.”

You miss the way his eyes burn and shine because you are working on modeling the paper body of your animal. You enjoy your time spent with Jade, this fabricated friend your hippocampus made of the clay of your brain, dearly.

“Food?”

“Ah … well, I suppose that is one of the other things.”

“What else are you greedy for?” You cannot fathom that Jade wants anything more to eat. He is very gluttonous like his brother and octopus friend besides his lithe, feminine frame.

“For one thing –”

“Aha! Finished!”

Eager and proud, you hold up the origami animal. Your creases and folds are not too pristine but the product of effort is still majestic. A crane. The bird said to live a thousand years. “Pretty isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Let’s switch ours.” Your hands make a grab for the origami fish in Jade’s hands.

“But it is the first time you have been able to make a crane successfully. Most people want to keep milestones.” He cannot fathom why you are so eager to share. “The crane should stay with you.”

“But I want to share it with my best friend.”

You wake up like the clap of a baseball in a mitt. Your eyes fly open as the baseball is thrown with a resounding bark of fetch, soaring like an arrow and returning to the second glove. A consciousness thrown between two gloves. The left side of your face feels numb and medicated.The water is up to your shins again, disobedient. Backpedaling without hesitation, you scratch at the side of your face. It feels like a cluster of barnacles are weighing down west facing skin.

You yawn as the sun, the hinode, comes up. A thousand years. What a long time; you could never fathom living such an infinite amount of time. Salt and grime staining your nightwear, you step onto the shore. You would never want to live a thousand years like this.

Another never of yours? You never had any childhood friends.

There are no absolutes in Shinto.

“This is impossible,” you whisper.

“There are no absolutes,” a man replies.

Somehow and someway, you are being wedded. Done with your fruitless attempts to open your eyes, you resign to verbally negotiating your way out of this lucid dream. You have to get out of here but the water has hardened to cement around your legs. You are unsure if this is a fabricated dream, a fabricated memory of a fake world, or if this is the ‘other’ world. Unsure of where you tread, you desperately want the sun to break apart this nightmare.

That is impossible. I am a miko. A miko must be unmarried. I am my father’s helper and I cannot be wedded.

The man replies to your thoughts: That is not true. You are not a miko. The priest is dead. You can be wedded.

No. I cannot wed.

The white kosode kimono covers over your skin like a constant itch. Somehow and someway, without opening your eyes, you know that you are wearing wedding attire. You feel the distribution of another set of legs in the lake. There is an awful weight on your finger.

There are vows being spoken by a siren’s voice. A trickling scale on a piano voice. It feels oddly like you cannot create new memories. Your dreams and thoughts evaporate like trickling sand, stolen. Everything dwindles and moves away like retreating waves.

Do you relinquish your immortal soul to this man?

Do you?

“Yes.”

“My love, a snake is coming.”

You wake up, off-kilter. You fall immediately due to that poor balancing board provided by uneven rocks. With a gasp, your hands go out to catch you, splashes resounding as you kneel down in the water. Another fierce splash follows. You scream as you watch a mamushi dive into the water where you were standing.

“Aa-Agh,” you gasp as you scramble up. “AH!” The world feels like trickling sand, all cascading down around you. A stumbling body turns wildly as the snake attacks. It bites the air and jumps in the water.

Its venomous fangs however are directed at the rising sun. Protectively, it attacks air. The mamushi does not attack you or your retreating, repeatedly falling form. You do not remember what you had just dreamed, pink sunlight on your back.

The only evidence that the impossible happened are your fast, retreating footprints embedded into the shore. But even those washed away with the brine of water, trickling away, stolen.

Tiny footsteps litter the inside of your shrine. After so many years, the footprints have become an infestation comparable to cockroaches, a black sole and five dotting toes. Prints from a zashiki warashi, a ghost girl. They are only seen by children and the house’s owner, but they stay visible to you because you became the owner of the house when you stopped being a child.

Zashiki warashi are said to bring good fortune and be guardians of the house they inhabit. You have had no problems unlike the slight troubles you have had with the eyes in your home. However, a little otherworldly company does not bother you like human company.

Footprints unsourced from a tangible body and eyes unsourced from a tangible head. How odd that you have grown used to that.

You make sure to avoid stepping on the trails of footprints as you walk through the honden, the main sanctity. You notice that the ghost girl’s footprints seem to avoid the heart of the shrine. Behind a cupboard that is seldom opened lies your God, the heart, your last remaining parent. You pass the cupboard and make your way to a window.

You watch the sunrise, contemplative. Sunlight intrudes in long rectangles and breaks the steady zig-zag lines of the zashiki warashi’s footprints. You kneel, clothed in wet nightwear, feet damp.

You remember the day of your parents’ death. It was the only day you awoke in bed instead of ankle deep in water. Thinking you were cured, excitement fueled your feet to the entrance of your father and mother’s bedroom. Excitement skids and burns down to ash as you hold the paper sliding door open, looking upon an empty bed.

It took only a few minutes to find them because even a fool could have guessed where this would end.

For some unlucky reason, you never slipped when walking down the mountain to the lake. Your mother worried it would happen so often. The image of your foot kissing and missing the ground. Like a ram miscalculating his step, you would plummet in her mind, body crunching and breaking as it ping-ponged down a dangerous slope.

Throat thick with salvia, you find them with a terrified cry. You press yourself tightly into a tree, weeping and screaming your miserable mind’s woes into the sekia.

Below you, they lie. Bodies bent like a cluster of twigs snapped for a fireplace and flesh smudged with blood and dirt. Bones point out elbows and knees, breaking the blanket of skin. Wrists and ankles are turned in unnatural positions. Their eyes stare up at the morning sky, the lilac pinks and blue amber of the sunrise like a colorful coffin above them. Up there, their God.

The incident made you the village’s boogeyman. Even if you were the good priest's daughter, their little blessing, the only suspect left for the crime was you.

“You were so wrong. I am not a blessing.”

The window gives no reply. Done with the standoffish nature of the glass fixture, you stand up. The seaweed squishes under your feet, salt grinding into your soles.

“And I am sorry that you were wrong.”

Lakes do not carry seaweed like this.

There is a hand around my ankle.

You wake up. Not violently like the times where your dreams throw you and not softly like your dreams kiss your eyelids open. Instead, you wake up like you have already been awake. No disturbance. Miraculously, there is no disjoint between dreaming and waking. So there is no need to find your footing as you look down.

You and a garappa stare at each other. His yellow eyes blink up at you, flicking water. Skin fern green and dotted with a dalmatian pattern of dark forest green is mostly submerged underwater. The only part of him that rises above the water is his snout and the webbed thumbnail around your right ankle.

In your ribcage, your heart pounds hard like a frog moving to a lilypad before it settles completely. Your one heartbeat length terror came from a single thought: God, he is huge.

Garappas and kappas can only be told apart by size. A garappa has limbs much longer than its twin, stretching out twice the typical size of a kappa. His entire arm is equivalent to your leg. Dizzy eyes track over his lengthy form. If he stood up, the estimated height would be about nine feet.

Rocks may be under your feet but you feel like the ground is shifting sand, webbing itself through your reality. At least, the garappa seems to not be hostile right now. Who’s to say about later?

You look down at the hand embracing around your ankle. Distorted under the water, it looks like your ankle and his hand are off center from the goosebump flesh of your leg above water. Solid flesh, green contrasting to brown, ripples together in up and down motions. You are so dizzy.

Touch-taste senses are a peculiar faucet of aquatic life. Octopus can lay their suckers upon a prey and drink up the sweetness of fear like a butterfly with nectar. You wonder what kind of taste the garappa might be siphoning from cold pores.

“Foon foon foon.” The garappa says, mouth of his snout circling to form the soft Os.

You do not fool yourself into thinking that is a friendly sound.

Garappas are elusive and cowards. This male might have been biding his time waiting for weeks of your sleepwalking to know if you were a threat or friend. To be caught by him and his inhuman strength means this was premedicated. Garappas are extremely fond of pranks and mischief, this you remember.

But what are you forgetting?

“Foon foon foon,” he says again.

“Hoon, hoon, hoon,” you reply, trying to replicate the call of his.

His eyes squint at you from behind the waving mass of black hair. It trails across his face like seaweed but his bright yellow irises are easy to spot among the ebony. His hold on you readjusts slightly at the sound of your voice, not tightening or loosening, just twisting around the indents of where your fibula and tibia met like someone using a pepper crusher.

There is definitely intelligence in those golden suns but that is not really the cause of unease. The unease comes from his size; the image you paint of him standing up and crowding over you. His legs would perhaps end where your collarbone starts.

Please do not stand up. Please do not stand up.

You wonder back to your taste. Would the spice of fear be hidden in the dish of your normal taste or would the spice of fear be an overpowering burn? The heart kept in your chest is very calm. It is tranquil as a sheep, resting in the dropped palpitations of sleep. Perhaps this is still a dream.

Then, the garappa starts to pull. It is a light, hesitant tug. When you hold firm, toes curling up to press tighter into the rocks underfoot, he lets up. His hold goes back to being concrete, unmoving even though the dilating ripples of water suggest different. You and him lock eyes again.

Then, the streamlined face vanishes and you are looking up at a sky of stars. You gasp as water hugs the back of your cotton yogi. A rock cushions your skull’s rapid descent and you wince. The hand on your ankle tugs and tugs.

As if the harsh kiss of the rock breaks a spell, you finally remember what you were trying to recount about the mischievous, prank-loving garappas. You look over the valley of your body, clothed in blue yogi nightwear, the supine side of you soaking wet, remembering. Garappas are known to be sexually aggressive.

“DAMNIT!”

Your arms move fast, grabbing at the sand and rock beside your chest, trying to lift yourself up. A fearful cry escapes you as the next tug disorients your arms and causes you to spill deeper into the lake. You watch wide-eyed as a webbed hand peels back the left side of your nightwear.

“Cut it out! Get off me! Get off!”

Ripples of water jump around your struggling form. You were correct about his measurements. The entire arm is the size of your leg. He trails it up past the gray and blue camellia sewn on your garment. You scream as you feel the touch of soft tissue of webbed fingers on your inner thigh.

A lucid part of you thinks the taste of your fear must be explosive.

You twist violently in the oppressing grip like a fish caught in a net. Chilled fingers grab at rocks around you, trying to pull yourself up onto shore. Your free leg kicks at the shoulder of the garrapa. Warmth blooms on your face when you are dragged again and a cut from ear to cheek is birthed.

“Get the fuck off!” You scream as loud as a banshee. Around you, summer cicadas answer your cry with their own melody and you hear a foon foon foon, almost like a laugh bubbling under the water.

And, just as webbed fingers hover over the apple of your sex, the world falls still and silent. Even the everlasting cicadas stop for the only time in their life. In the bubble of unreal quiet, you stare over your body at the hand dug into the skull of the garrapa.

The piscine hand is the color of tooth white. The knuckles are gradients of green bleeding off into an ebony black. You can tell because the only part of the hand that is not sunk into the garappa’s skull is a single thumb. The thumbnail is sharp as a knife, pressed in the mass of black hair. The arm trails down the neck and back of the garrapa and is indistinguishable under the black water.

You watch the garappa twitch. Still alive despite the four fingers bayonet through his head. His golden sun eyes stare at you as his hand moves down and wraps itself around your lower thigh. He squeezes hard as the four fingers press down, pull out, and press down once again, almost sensually erotic in their motions.

“Fo-Fo-Fo-Fo-Fo.”

You watch pleased as a trail of blood runs down the streamlined snout. Good. Die; never swim again; die-die-die!

Your respite is short lived as you are suddenly pulled down. A terrified cry rockets out of your throat. The hand burrow in the garrapa’s head stops in its descent back into black water, contemplative. The alive yet rigor-mortis grip is desperate and relentless on your thigh.

“Fo-Fo-Fo-Fo-Fo.” The dying garrapa coos like the cicadas chirp. If I go down, I will take you with me.

His circular mouth falls still, an empty O. You watch as red rushes up in an inking squirt to the surface of the night lake. Then, with a breakneck speed, the garappa and pearl white hand disappear. The now blood-stained water rises and moves like scales as their interlocked bodies go under without another word.

The cicadas start to make noise again. The marble surface of the lake reshape back into its flat, glossy appearance. Just a different color. On trembling arms, you start to shift yourself to sit with your posture up straight.

You glance down at the purling motions of your yogi. Under the cotton lies the amputated hand, torn at the shoulder, and now stuck on your thigh in true rigor-mortis. Mind blanking, you stand back up, ankle deep in red water.

Latched garrapa arm swinging between your legs like a front facing tail, you walk out of the lake, soaking wet all over.

You scrape yourself up the summit like a stubborn earthworm. Shaking hands grab familiar tree branches to hoist yourself. Frost-nibbled feet press hard into sediment to keep yourself up. At the top of the summit, just outside your home, the two lanterns of the entrance are lit. You shake harder and shiver harder with the cold.

The lake is on the backside of the shrine, so you slowly round the building. Inch by inch, more of the entrance is revealed to you beyond the thumping glow of lanterns. Two stone lion-dogs, komainu, guard protectively under the gold. The long tongue entrance grows with each hesitant step you take. Resting your hand on the Shinto shrine, you look towards the offering hall.

A man with silver hair kneels, hands clasped in prayer. His cheeks are tinted a pink from the chill of morning.

“I am not taking prayers at this time, Sir. Please return another day.”

The man does not startle at your voice in the same capacity that you startled at the sight of him. His words erode in his mouth before a smile pulls up his lips. You think his eyes are blue. It is hard to tell with glass obscuring them. He is wearing spectacles that look like the melted pattern of a tortoise shell.

“I did not know God was on a schedule. I suppose I can see why. The importance of transactions, why, those can keep someone quite occupied. I am a bit disheartened to see my deal is not worth His time.” The man’s smile is sympathetic like he knows you are suffering.

You grimace at your slip-up. Wanting to be inside, you round around the front porch area so you can meet with him at the entrance. You wonder what he must think of you, soaking wet, leaving behind puddles. “I’m terribly sorry, Sir. You may continue. I cannot offer the services of a Shinto shrine today however. My deepest apologies.” You bow.

“It is no worries. I just came to check if you were okay and make certain that you are.”

“If I’m,” your eyes flicker up in confusion. Straightening, you imagine your face must be the face of confusion like you are a spirit-blind person seeing yokai for the first time. Why would anyone? Does he not know you as the village boogeyman, someone that no one would dare check upon. “I’m quite fine, Sir.”

“Certain?”

“Certainly.”

The silver-haired man seems very pleased at that. Enough to the point where he stands up. Gratitude fills your lungs, almost relieving yourself of the chill. You hate that this is the first human interaction you have had in years and you are so happy to see it be gone.

Maybe you should try to be hospitable. That thought dies as you watch the man. Why, that is really curious – “Sir?”

“Yes?” His tone is acquiescent.

“The direction to the village is that way.” You point past the torii gate and the two guardian lions. He had been rounding the front porch, walking in the damp footsteps you had left behind. The man blushes an even heavier pink at that.

“Ah, my apologies,” he amends sheepishly. He stalks towards you and you wholeheartedly expect him to slip past. Instead, his presence surprises you for a second time. He grabs your salt encrusted hands and holds them dearly. “I am glad to see you in good health.”

You blank at the touch of his hands and go completely vacant at his sincere words. Like a stuttering fish, your lips move up and down wordlessly. Where did that even come from? “Do I know you?”

“I’m afraid not, godfather.”

He squeezes your hands and lets go. His spectacles are a beautiful pattern. The strange man walks off, towards the village, but his gait makes it look like he is walking in the wrong direction. You watch him until he vanishes into nothing. To make certain that he leaves.

Shaking and clenching your hands to get the blood-flow back to them, you enter the shrine. There are no armies of footprints waiting to greet you. You grow colder.

You are hot to the touch.

After such a grievous experience, you develop a fever as May births herself into the world, stabbing April to death. It lasts for a week longer than a normal fever should. Having to climb back up a mountain for an hour each morning is not any aid to the medicinal herbs you take. And now, when you want to rest, you cannot even do that.

You have already taken the bath salts. Inhaling the cathinone crystals, you walk from one end of the shrine to the other end like the ghost of a sailor haunting/walking a shoreline. You sniffle each time you feel the tickle of the drugs in your nose. Walk. Walk. Walk. Do not fall asleep no matter what.

Tonight is hyakki yagyo, because of course the night parade of one hundred demons falls upon the night you want to gain any semblance of rest after debilitating illness. The parades are inauspicious and untrackable.

The hordes of eyes in your walls watch you walk, relatively close to make indents into the flooring by method of your repetitive pacing. Mokumokuren, that is what the eyes in your walls are, an infestation yokai. They take a fancy to inviting in other yokai instead of protecting as the little girl does … did.

You can not risk going outside because of the yokai parade. Thus, due to your sleepwalking, you absolutely cannot fall asleep. People foolish enough to go outside during a hyakki yagyo or peek through their windows are killed or spirited away. It is considered divine punishment for looking upon that which must not be seen.

I have been looking upon yokai since my birth, would this parade really harm me? You never bother to test the floating theory, leaving it to trickle away until the next hyakki yagyo commences the following month. However —

“PLEASE! PLEASE HELP ME! SOMEONE LET ME IN!”

You have never had someone pleading at your door on a night like this. The horde of eyes watch as you consider the bottle of drugs in your nightwear pocket. You only inhale the crystals to stay alert and awake during night but they do cause hallucinations.

“One of your friends,” you ask the cluster of eyes peering through a Swiss cheese wall. One blinks a wet, sticky eye at your question. Then all of them blink when the stranger outside your door starts pounding on the front door.

You hold your hands over your breasts anxiously. Inside the bottle, your drugs gleam like coarse Himiylaian sea salt under the one eye made of light. The lantern is your only company, you remind yourself, not a human or a yokai.

You are alone and will remain alone until death.

It is probably an onmoraki at the door. A bird-like monster who has a talent for mimicking human voices. Onmorkai appear near temples, particularly in the presence of neglectful priests. It is almost too predictable of the yokai. Impiety needs no originality as all the old tricks have always worked.

You wish someone was here but you cannot remember their name. But you have always been alone?

Before you know it, your hand is opening the door. You stare down at the flesh like it is a foreign parasite, like a person stares at a leech after removing a limb from black lake water. When did you even – Why is your memory like this – Before you know, a sun and moon eye are staring down at you.

“Godfather! Priest!” You blank at the stranger’s jovial voice, completely singing a different tone when compared to his previous fright. He is frighteningly tall. “Oh thank God, you are here.” The man laughs. And with a flourish, he steps inside your shrine.

“I – I –”

“Good priest,” you blank when the man gets on his knees. He grabs your hands and squeezes them tightly, holding them over the ring of his teal hair. “I am indebted to you. I swear I was almost killed because of those yokai. A garrapa came from the lake and tried to –”

“A-A garrapa?”

“Yes, good priest, but thanks to –”

You slam the door shut, wrenching your hands from the man. Slamming the door with the man now inside the shrine. Quickly, you turn and start to look for the materials to make a protective talisman.

You miss the grin curling on your guest’s lips.“Not a fan of yokai, godfather?”

The tone used this time is soft and worrying. You turn at the volatile changes of his voice. The man still kneels on the ground, downturned eyes following your movements. He is frowning sympathetically at you.

“Yokai – why I –”

“I’m not. Awful spirits. Killed my twin.”

“I can’t –” you trail off as you search the wooden box in the honden frantically. An honorific fuda should be in here — and — and you have bottles of ink inside your bedroom right! Just a simple protective ward to keep yokai out. You might miss the company of the eyes but you will make those sacrifices. A human hand wraps around your wrist, pulling it up from the mouth of the wooden box before you can grasp the card plate.

“Ya didn’t answer my question. Not a big fan of yokai?” There he goes, switching his tone again. This time is deadly like he is barely concealing a thousand years of bottled up rage.

“I –” You fumble with your words, feeling akin to a child being scolded. Is it psychosis from the bath salts or are you losing your mind – this feeling is so – his eyes are so familiar but also completely alien. “Just garrapas. I can’t with garrapas.”

My best friend’s a yokai. You think but do not vocalize it. Because it is a false thought caused by the bath salts and a faulty memory.

He brightens up. “That’s good! That’s really good, priest. I just wanna check.”

“I’m so-sorry about being so erratic. I just —“

“A talisman. Don’t worry, I’ll help! My name’s Floyd, godfather!”

Your new acquaintance seems eager to leave minutes before the first fingers of pink and orange peer over the horizon. After calming down, the two of you shared tea and refused to look out the windows due to the parade. He is an eager talker, not letting conversation fall still at all. He talks like he has been wanting to talk to you forever. You are glad he wants to leave early despite the parade. A good priest would advise against it but you want him gone.

Something about interacting with him is familiar yet alien.

Cobalt skies turning more cerulean, you and Floyd take to walking outside. As he busies himself with petting your stone lion-dogs smugly, you carry a torch. Dark still lingers with hesitation. You banish a bit of it by lighting the torches by the torii gate. Orange dances on the ground like a wagging wave.

Blanketed by shadows, you turn to look up at Floyd, standing behind you as you lit the last lantern. He is staring up at the gate.

“Are you sure you will be alright leaving a whole hour before sunrise,” you contradict your own agenda with your words.

“Yeah, got to go check on my brother. Make sure he ain’t messin’ anything up.”

Wasn’t his brother killed? The orange from the second lantern dances like a snake. “Sir,” you hesitate when his eyes descend from the gate to you. “Do we know each other?”

“Course, little priest, I just spent all hyakki yagyo talkin’ with ya! Ahehe!” Then happily, the man walks off, down past the torii gate.

Inside the two lanterns, the fire stirs with his departure, locked in a swaying dance.

The fire goes up like a mountain-climber. Wall to wall, it ascends like a sticky hand falling in reverse. In amber and scarlet waves, it weasels through the holes in the sliding doors and eats up the structure like a caterpillar on a leaf. Hypnotic and great, the fire acids through more and more of the Shinto shrine’s stomach.

You cannot live here anymore. You have known for a while these religious bowels held you in a painful kidney stone.

Raising up the torch, you kiss it to the main scanatary’s wall and watch all the wood smolder. Man-made clouds of gray lie heavy on the ceiling, the finely tuned acoustics of the building rumbling with the crackles and pops. Onward, you move until you reach the heart of this system. The cupboard where the sacred object, cloaked in cloth like a newborn, represents your God.

You have no idea what the object could be. Your parents died before you turned sixteen and thus you never got to learn what the yorishiro, the sacred object, is. It could be a single comb or a paper crane or a child’s shoe.

It does not matter when you raise up the torch, holding the flames so they may embrace the cupboard’s two doors. You hold it until fire successfully transfers. Then, as destruction curls over the piety, you leave the heart, walking down the vertebrates, until you reach the anus.

Behind you, the Shinto shrine burns. In front of you, you see nothing as your eyes are as blind as two spider-eggs, glossed and webbed over. You feel the earth distinctively however, water undertows and rough sediment.

The fire, blindingly bright and energetic, speaks. “Good priest, you have done well. The night is near its end.”

You wake up. You wake up like someone has driven a knife into your heart.

Coupled with a pained groan, your eyelashes flutter open. The pain in your chest is defibrillating and runs over your shoulders with a hot white electric current. It feels so unique and so awful. Rapidly, you shove your hand into your yogi and touch over the layer of skin. Your heart hammers against the skin like a woodpecker.

“Oh my God,” you groan, spit running off your lips from the excruciating pain. Coughing around the phlegm, you press your hand hard into your skin, hoping pressure would mimic the job of a tourniquet. Your heart remains relentless.

More spit runs off your bottom lip like a long, opaque slug. He stretches and plops into the lake around your waist. Bile will not be summoned so you settle with fruitlessly spitting into the lake, groaning in pain. Phlegm hangs like snot on your lip as you look up, expecting to see golden sun-rays that will cure you.

Before you stand a man.

Those features seem too feminine to make him a man. His thin, cupid bow lips are just a bit too delicate to be a man’s. It looks like his skin is breathing marble and pearl. Monolids and upturned, his eyes are alluring as a concubine. A sun and a moon eye, shining with something indescribable when the two of you make eye contact. Is that genuine love in his womanly eyes?

“Who … Who are you? Why do I?” His eyes are distantly familiar yet juxtaposingly alien to you. Your vision blurs and his face shrinks and distorts, causing his eyes to overlap into an eclipse. Blinking and spitting, you clear your head. “Why do I know your face?”

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” For a second, you think him narcissistic until he says, “The omagatoki tonight is beautiful.”

A sudden chill causes your hairs to stand on end. Those dueling eyes seem to brighten in the pitch black dark. If he were any further from you, it would be impossible to see him. He too stands waist deep in the lake with you, many inches taller than yourself.

The sudden acknowledgement of existing as prey washes over you. “It’s omagatoki already?” Of course it is. The moon lies behind the man like a dot engulfing a canvas. You blink your eyes thrice as if there is a plastic filter cutting into them.

How did you not notice the telltale signs: cold wind blowing, the strange scent in the air like fish or blood, a sudden chill that causes one’s hairs to stand on end. It is as dark as if you were an explorer in the deep sea. It is omagatoki; how have you not noticed?

The spirit realm is so active around you.

“Who are you,” you ask again, full of questions.

“Me? Why, I am wounded that you do not recognize me. That would be like if I asked you: who are you? Who are you, (Name)?” You stay silent. “A niiyomjei perhaps?” A newlywed bride, he coos.

“I am no yamahime.”

A filthy yamahime is a mountain princess, but they are alternatively called mountain woman or newlywed bride. In a rare pleasure of luck, you have only encountered a yamahime once despite spending your entire life sharing the same home as them: the mountains.

You remember standing guard in front of the Shinto shrine, on the cusp of your thirteenth birthday, arms folded as the yamahime laughed and laughed. The laugh of a mountain princess is a lethal poison, those who hear are either dead or driven mad. Blood snailing down your ears, you stood her down for a sleepless night, refusing to let harm to befall either mother or father.

“Do not call me such a word.” You spit like a cobra at the man.

“My apologies, I misjudged that such a pretty woman as yourself would be honored at the comparison. I would never think to lessen your humanity down to a yokai. Though, why, I have always thought of you as the mountain princess you are.”

The moon backdrops on his body like a halo. All his features are dark besides his eyes and the outline of him pressed tight to the glowing night sun. “And, a newlywed bride? That is a true statement by all measures.”

“I am no bride. I am my father’s shrine maiden – a miko.” Mikos must remain unmarried to help out in a Shinto shrine. Coupled by your isolation, that question seems world-breaking insanity. This man is ridiculous.

But you are no longer a miko. You graduated when you made two graves; you are a priest. A Shinto priest – man or woman – is allowed to marry and have children. This is all insanity.

The man puts his hand to his mouth, closing his eyes and frowning delicately into his fist as if that statement is a physical injury to him. “Come now, (Name),” his moon and sun eyes shine like beetles when he opens them, “the priest is dead. Your father is dead. And you will find that your own priesthood is no longer required.”

“As long as there is a shrine, I’m needed.” The water around you is wrong and peculiar. Weightless and nebulous water clings up your thighs, ending an inch below your belly-button. You have to get back to your ankles. You do not want to cause anyone to worry that you have gone too far in.

“There are guests up there. You really should not disturb their prayers,” the man says as you start to turn, barely making it ninety degrees.

“I am the shrine’s priest, it will be fine.”

“They should go undisturbed; it will only take a moment. They want to explore the shrine inside too. Talk with me some more, bride.”

You ignore that word, unpausing your body. Your yogi floats around like a giant jellyfish cape and you must leave. “No one can get into the shrine, even if it is omagatoki. They would be banished. The yokai of the shrine would recognize a stranger.”

“Only by scent. And you smell like salt water every morning. It is safe to say my brother and boss can continue their prayers unaided and uninterrupted.”

The man, padding through water as he walks over to you, gently takes your left face in the cradle of his webbed hand. His features may be human but you can feel the slime as it sticks. The bone white of his palm almost glows under moonlight. With soft eyebrows, he looks upon you with idolization.

“Why do I know your face?”

As serious as a grave, he says, “I was there. In your dreams. And even when they weren’t dreams, I was still there.”

Each innard organ of yours stirs like a bed of worms at his exigent tone. “Yo .. You’re a umi nyobo … no, a umi no otto.” A sea wife, but then you correct yourself, a sea husband. His features might be delicate but his voice is entirely a man’s. You remember two things about them. Very strong. Very dangerous.

You jerk your head away from the hold of a piscine hand. Frantic, you twist your body away to get back up shore, to lower the embrace the lake has over your body back down to your ankles. You make it only one step before you stop. Eyes facing the mountain, you stare in horror.

Beyond the summit, between the armies of trees, a thick plume of smoke rises up and points it black fingers up to the twilight hours.

Fumbling with your mind, you are drawn back to the present as the man attacks you. He wraps his arms like chains around your waist, pinning your arms. Water stirs around the bottom of the contact. The world tilts as he suddenly pushes you down. Water floods into the front of your yogi, spilling down between your breasts. You fight to be upward and he allows it, leaning his body over you in an acute angle. Water comes to a respite.

Both of you fall still, your chest heaving heavy. He presses his flat chest to your spine. The left side of his face lands on top of the crown of your head. For a minute, you two stay statue-like.

“If you can remember my face and species then you must know my name.”

“I do not,” clenched teeth grit together. “I do not know you,” you deny.

“Yes, you do. We grew up together. You were my only friend. I was your only friend. I gave you a fish to keep you in good health and you gave me a crane in the promise of our life together. As a child, we do things unclouded by hesitation. Don’t you remember that?”

“I was only a child. I had no way to understand that,” you bargain.

“But you participated in our wedlock as an adult. Just a month ago, at night, didn’t you?”

“I can’t remember.”

“I will help you remember. All your dreams and all your thoughts, they will be ours.” A piscine hand carefully picks up wet tendrils of hair from the humid skin of your body. He tucks it behind your ear where cold sweat accumulates. “I’ve only thought and dreamed of you, (Name). I only ever wanted to share an eternal life with you by my side.”

“That’s impossible,” you shiver when he draws a claw over the bridge of the bone in your ear, down to the lobe. “Yokai and humans live in different worlds. The sekai and ikai can’t –”

“I know. I know but you promised. You promised to share that immortal soul humans have with me; the immortal soul that yokai lack. I will be turning you into an umi bozu.”

Umi bōzu … a sea priest.

You have never seen one; you never want to see and much less want to become one. They may look humanoid but they are truly a monstrous sight. Shoulders and a head rising and appearing from rough, killing waves. Giants. Umi bōzu are as tall as a coastal redwood tree, incomprehensible in size. More fearsome than a whale to a sailor and more dangerous than a plague to a newborn. Black as shadow with bulbous, white-blue eyes, umi bōzu are titans of mystery.

Some believe they are the progenitors of the sea and others … believe they come from drowned priests. You watch the smoke move serpentine into the skies. You are almost grateful for the rough, constituting grip because you feel you are going to pass out with the thought of becoming one of those behemoth sea monks.

“I’ll – I’ll wake up. The sun isn’t up. I still have time to wake up.”

There is no way that fire is real. And even if it is real, it is not made by your hands – his brother and his boss –

“You say that the yokai of your shrine would vanish my brother and boss, but you forgot that those eyes are a sign of infestation. Mokumokumen invite other yokai in. You knew that and left them alone to watch you. It is almost like you were waiting for this … the consummation of our marriage. How duplicitous you are.”

“Jade. Jade, wake me up right now.”

His face splits apart in a smile unseen. He knew you remembered.

“You are awake, my wife. You are.”

It is almost disorienting how calm the water is. You feel like a riptide is tearing you up and throwing you left and right. Around your sandwiched waists, you and Jade stand in completely still waters. The current fluidly pushes at your legs but it is like a docile comfort. All is calming and accepting except for yourself. In the air, the scent of blood and fish swims with the breeze.

“Don’t you see that I love you? That I have only cared and protected you. That one garrapa, you must remember that,” you jolt at the reminder. “Though I am a bit sad to learn you remember him so well, you must remember the end of it too. I even sent my boss to make sure you would be in good health. (Name)?”

You see it clearly: your body distorted into a giant as tall as the Great Wall of China is long, a nebulous black form of head and shoulders surrounded by turbulent waves as a tiny ship is thrown left and right with the force of your existence. A ship carrying twenty plus men comparable to a rubber duck in a child’s tub.

You cannot become that monster. You cannot become an umi bōzu. Please God please.

Feverish, you chant Norito, a Shinto prayer only said by Shinto priests. It is a prayer to God to prevent bad things from happening. The words fly off your lips like a flight of birds taking off. You feel like your mind is an empty cavern.

Lord, give me one more chance.

“I really wish this could precede differently; your tender disposition is something I do not wish to upset.”

“God, help me,” you cry.

Jade listens to your tongue wag like it is the sound of a babbling brook. “The shrine is ash, dear.”

Waiting a minute longer, the sea husband grabs your face with his webbed hand. The last of your prayer is whispered as he tilts you to look at him, backdropped by the mammoth moon. His sun and moon eyes shine. “I have waited long enough. Let us start our honeymoon. Let us say goodbye to the sun.”

Then, Jade’s nails cut into you, making gill-shaped marks in the breast of your chest, just over the space where your lungs sit.

And as he drags you down, you scream the last scream of your mortal life.

#twisted wonderland jade leech x reader #jade leech #twisted wonderland x reader #jade leech x reader #twisted wonderland #yandere twisted wonderland #yandere jade leech

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softomegaposting · 8 months

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in honor of my backache from sleeping in my nest on the floor last night (a hardwood floor covered with a sheepskin and a throw blanket) i wanna talk about nest mattresses! in real life and worldbuilding. disclaimer that my knowledge comes from mostly online so it’s probably not completely accurate.

so! cool floor beds i found that would make good nest bases.

the type of bed i could find the most on online is the Japanese futon. it’s what the western futon/sofa bed was originally modeled after but it’s very different. it’s basically a very thin mattress (shikifuton) over tatami mats (rush grass outer layer with a foam or rice straw core). both parts are much more moveable than a western style mattress. another important consideration i think is relevant is that futon covers go all the way around the mattress and can be washed (unlike western sheets which leave the bottom of the mattress uncovered which if it’s on the floor can get gross). futons are also meant to be aired out in the sun, which helps the whole dust thing.

another cool bed type i found are montessori-style house beds. they’re typically used for young children (toddlers and preschoolers) but do come in larger sizes (the biggest i’ve seen is a full). the bed frame sits directly on the floor with a thin mattress and a wooden house-shape on top that can support a canopy/curtains (which would be super cool for a nest lets be real). some also come with bed rails and bumpers so little kids don’t fall out, which i think would also be good for a nest because it’s more cozy.

of course i must mention the “human dog beds” which gained popularity in 2022 from going on shark tank but i remember first hearing about them around 2015-ish (and of course going that would make a great nest!). it is what it sounds like.

another, probably the cheapest option here, is camping mattresses. you know what these are. super thin air mattresses with foam tops. some come in double width (better for a nest imo) but most of them are made of that terrible slippery fabric (good for camping, bad for everything else). this might not be a problem for most people but i’m autistic and i gag touching them. you could cover it with a rug or blanket but those might slip off of it due to the gross slipperiness of the fabric. idk.

the last thing i can think of are traditional mattresses that are just. thin. you could use a mattress topper but a real mattress would definitely feel better even if they’re the same height because real mattresses have a comfort layer and a base layer and a topper only has the comfort layer (=more back pain for you). consider: dorm mattresses (at least my dorm had them, and it made an amazing nest), rv mattresses, and trundle mattresses. they’re all basically the same thing just different keywords (and slightly different sizes for the rvs). my sister has slept on a 4 inch mattress for six years or so and she only occasionally complains of back pain but for occasional use it would be fine (she also has scoliosis so. could be that).

now for some quick worldbuilding notes:

i definitely think that in an omegaverse society nest mattresses would be common. i think they would mimic traditional mattresses but shorter, like rv mattresses, but have an all-around washable cover/sheets to protect from floor grossness, sort of like dorm mattresses but able to be washed more easily. i also think they would come in more square or round shapes instead of the typical rectangle twin shape. i can see them having folding capabilities like some rv mattresses do, so that people could sun them like futons to get rid of dust mites.

i can also see nest frames being a thing, sort of like the montessori bedframes, with pillow bumpers to make a more enclosed vibe. i can also see a huge market for both frame-mounted or ceiling-mounted canopies, because who doesn’t want that.

maybe houses would be built with specific nest areas in mind, maybe with softer floors like tatami vibes or carpet. i’ve heard talk about conversation pits which are absolutely so cool but i can also see the advantage in an elevated nest space. my favorite nest of all time was in a ceiling cabinet because i could see the whole room but was harder to see myself, which made me feel really safe. so maybe houses might be built with raised nest platforms, or even small ceiling lofts overlooking a larger room (i couldn’t find an exact picture of what i’m thinking but this is close:)

#happy omega thursday everybody #i made this instead of doing morning chores. sorry to the pets and also my ma.#this is a cool post i prommy #miscecanis #miscelupus #misceanimalis #alpha beta omega #omegaverse #omegaverse headcanons #omegaverse worldbuilding #omegaverse nest #nesting #a/b/o verse #a/b/o dynamics #sorry everybody who follows more than one of these tags

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dollieduvall · 3 months

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⋆୨୧˚ 𝐕𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐞’𝐬 𝐃𝐚𝐲 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐇𝐨𝐛𝐢𝐞 💌

Words Count: 2.5K

Short Summary: It’s your first Valentine’s Day with Hobie and one that none of you will truly never forget.

Notes: Fluff, only one use of “Y/N”, Might be cheesy (not sure), no mention of gender, first fanfic

꒰ঌᰔ໒꒱ 𝐈𝐓’𝐒 𝐓𝐖𝐎 𝐃𝐀𝐘𝐒 𝐁𝐄𝐅𝐎𝐑𝐄 Valentine’s Day and you still haven’t been able to think of a note to write to your boyfriend, Hobie.

Even though he’s said he doesn’t believe in Valentine’s Day since huge corporations just use it as an excuse to make money, he’s probably gone out of his way to at least write you a note. In fact, he said he doesn’t believe in the capitalist part of it; but he does believe in the ‘love’ aspect of it.

He tolerates the part where loved ones would go out of their way for their partner to make them feel loved. Even if he thinks people should treat their partners like this outside “The Season of Love”, he still thinks it’s sweet.

That’s why you want to make sure this note is perfect. It’s your guys’ first Valentine's Day together, and you want to make it at least memorable. And you obviously don’t want to spend money—not that you have that much money to spend, anyway. You want it to be handmade with extra care and extra love. So after rushing through your homework and making sure you at least did a decent job, you get ready to make the note.

You decide on making one of those cool cards that have multiple layers to them. But before you start anything, you need to come up with what the card’s gonna say first, which will arguably be the hardest part. You don't want it to be too cheesy, but you don't want it to be too bland and typical either. You don't want it to be too short, but you don't want it to be too long either.

You realize that your overthinking is going to make this harder than it needs to be, but you can’t help it. You don't want your first Valentine's Day with him to be just any other thing. You want it to be special and you want everything to look like you put your heart and soul into it, which means that there’s other things that need to be done.

You know Hobie would be fine with anything, which is why you’re so frustrated with yourself. It shouldn't matter as long as it's made with unconditional love. And with that, you begin to put your mind to work so it can come up with something amazing.

꒰ঌᰔ໒꒱ 𝐀𝐅𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐀 𝐖𝐇𝐈𝐋𝐄 𝐎𝐅 writing and scraping papers, which will be used and cut into shapes later on, you finally came up with a note that you’re finally satisfied with. You get out some pieces of blank paper, and fold one of them (which is pink) in half as a base for the card. Before working on the decorations, you write your little note first as neat as you possibly can on this pink loose-leaf sheet of paper. Then, you glue the back and stick it to the card.

Now that the easy part is done, it’s time for the hard part. You close the card and get some red construction paper. You cut it into a rectangle border that’s slightly smaller than the original size of the card. Then, you draw many different colored hearts on pink, white, and red construction paper. then, you get white pipe cleaners and tape them to the back of each paper heart. You get thinner ones and wrap them around the thicker pipe cleaners, so now, they look like webs.

You then draw a little bouquet base and save that for later when you draw the little flowers that will go inside. Then, you cut out some red, pink, and white mini hearts that will be glued to the base of the card along with the red border you cut out earlier. Then, you cut up the thinner, green, pipe cleaners, and then you make small origami flowers to stick to them. Once they’re glued together, you put them in the small bouquet base.

Now for your favorite part: Drawing Hobie.

You get out white paper then draw and color an adorable chibi version of Hobie. His right arm is sticking up because that’s where the balloons will go. His left arm, however, was drawn on a separate piece of paper because then it’ll look like he’s holding the bouquet.

Finally, you glue all the pieces together and the outside decor is finished. Now it’s time for the inside and the envelope.

After you finally finish decorating the inside of the card and the envelope, you start on the paper bouquet, the one that’ll take the most energy, but you practiced endlessly, so now the roses will look picture perfect. Since Hobie doesn’t believe in consistency, you decide to use a mix of three different flowers: roses, gladioluses, and tulips. Carefully folding the papers into the base of the bouquet and the flowers, after about two hours, you’re finally done. You also made Hobie two plushie’s of himself a month in advance.

Satisfied with everything, you’ve done, all you have to do is anxiously wait for Valentine’s Day.

꒰ঌᰔ໒꒱ 𝐈𝐓’𝐒 𝐅𝐈𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐘 𝐕𝐀𝐋𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐄’𝐒 𝐃𝐀𝐘 and you’re so fucking nervous. The school day’s almost over which means that Hobie will be done patrolling soon and will head to your house to hangout like usual, if nothing happens (which you’re worried about), and then you’ll be able to hand him your Valentine’s Day gift. You’re also mentally beating yourself up because you forgot to make him chocolates, but honestly, you think your card and paper bouquet is enough.

Anxiously staring at the clock, you tap your fingers against your desk absentmindedly and stop when you realize that’s probably very annoying for the person next to you to hear. Thoughts surrounded with ‘what ifs’, you had managed to successfully tune everyone out, so once you look back at the board, you realize that the teacher has already gone through three math problems, none of which you have no idea how to do. But Hobie’s pretty smart; maybe he can help you. Not on Valentine’s Day, though.

Finally, the teacher gave the class a homework assignment and the bell rang. Hurrying out the door and speed-walking (almost running) home. You had your card and paper bouquet, but something’s missing. You can’t find the two plushies you spent your blood (literally, you kept pricking yourself with the needle), sweat, and tears making. Then, you find your car sleeping soundly and cuddling the two plushies.

It’s gonna be impossible getting those away from that cat. He loves plushies, and the Hobie ones are no exception. As discreetly and quietly as possible, you try to swap the plushies with another one, but your cat jolts awake, making everything more difficult than it has to be. He meows loudly when you try to remove them from his grasp and even hits you.

However, after fifteen minutes, you manage to replace the plushies with his favorite stuffed penguin. Sighing at your hard effort, you put the plushies on top of the card. Then, you hide everything on the shelf in your closet.

Finally, five minutes after all that, you hear the familiar knocking pattern on your window and smile when you see your boyfriend hanging upside down from a web that’s connected to God knows where. You open the window and let him in.

“Hey, Hobie!” You smile brightly as he wraps you in an immediate bear hug. He kisses the side of your head and gives you a small squeeze. “Happy Valentine's Day!”

“Happy Valentine’s Day, love.” He smiled, letting go of the hug and comically pulling a bouquet of paper roses and a card from his pocket.

Maybe that’s how he fits his hair into his mask.

“I made you a bouquet of flowers and a card. I really hope you love them because I worked my ass off for ‘em.” He laughed softly, giving you a joyful smile as you happily take his gifts. His bouquet is a mix of red and white. He put adorable put an adorable pink bow to tie them together.

“I love them so much! They’re gorgeous!” you smile, hugging him tightly again with one arm. “I’ll take very good care of them.”

“Good.” He quickly took the bouquet out your hands and put them in the vase.

“Enough of the flowers; read the note!” He happily clapped. He was very giddy today. So much for just tolerating Valentine’s Day. Maybe his love for you is currently overriding it.

You take the time to admire the cute little doodles of you two with little hearts all over the front and the words “Happy Valentine’s Day” in the neatest handwriting he could manage. The card was red and white, except for the doodles, of course. You smile and open the card, reading the little note Hobie read for you.

To My Sweetheart,

Happy Valentine’s Day! I know I said I barely tolerate Valentine’ Day, but you gave me a reason to tolerate it a lot more. You make me incredibly happy and you’re one of the many reasons I keep going. I’m happy that I’ve known you for so long. I’m happy that I can call you my Valentine. You’re the love of my life and I can’t wait to see your beautiful smile when you read this letter.

I love you so much and I would give the world for you. I will make sure to make that clear everytime I see you.

Love, Hobie ᰔ

You feel yourself almost tear up and you give him the biggest hug you’ve probably ever given him. That was the sweetest letter you’ve ever read, and it makes you all happy and fuzzy inside.

“I love the card so much, and I love you too. I’m happy I’m able to make you very happy.” It was hard not to cry, but you managed. You’re just so happy to have someone as amazing and loving as your boyfriend.

“Oh! I have something for you too!” You excitedly tell him, heading over to your closet. “We had the same idea with the paper bouquet!”

“Did we now?” Hobie chuckles. He’s happy you went with the whole handmade gifts thing, because now it’s even more special to him.

You excitedly hand Hobie his paper bouquet first. Hobie ADORES it.

“I thought about how you don’t believe consistency, so instead of just roses, I did a mix of roses, gladioluses, and tulips!” You tell him happily.

The fact that you were so thoughtful and paid attention to all the little details and used that to make this beautifully made bouquet almost makes him want to cry. He won’t, but he feels like it.

“These are beautiful, love. I mean, mine is absolutely gorgeous too, of course, but the thought process you put into just makes it even more beautiful and special in my eyes.” He smiles sweetly at you. He’s about to give you a hug but you’re already excitedly handing him his other gift.

“I also made you this card.” You smile.

Hobie’s just in absolute awe. He doesn’t know how to explain his feelings to himself, let alone you. The decorations, the fact that there’s layers to the card, and the ADORABLE chibi of him holding heart balloons with his own webs and a mini version of the bouquet you made him is enough to make him melt, and he hasn’t even read the note yet. But to you, he doesn’t need to say anything for you to know that he loves it.

Happy Valentine’s Day, Hobie!!

I’m so excited because this is our first Valentine’s Day together, so I wanted to make it as special as possible! I know you’ve been extremely busy with all your patrolling and Spider-Man stuff, so I hope that this will be able to cheer you up! I wanted to make sure everything was handmade and made with lots of love! But even all alone can’t prove how much I love you. You make me so happy, and I always look forward to seeing you everyday. When you’re happy, I’m happy with you. When you’re upset, I’m upset with you. When you cry, I cry so we can be each other’s shoulder to cry on.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m always here for you. No matter what’s going on, you can always come to me because I love you so much. You’ll never be alone. You’re not comfortable with telling me everything that’s happened yet one day? That’s fine. I’ll wait as long as you need. I will love you until I’m the one pushing you in a wheelchair around the park when we both turn 80 and even beyond that. I hope you know that.

So, Happy Valentine’s Day, my love!

Love, (Y/N.) (So much for this being sweet and simple HAHA)

And to top it all off, you hand him the adorable plushies you made him; one of his regular self and one in his Spider-Punk costume.

That’s it.

That’s his last straw.

His silence worries you.

Why is he so silent?

Did you do too much to the point he wasn’t expecting it?

Then you hear it.

A singular sniffle is heard from Hobie, and then another, and then another until he’s full on crying.

He then puts everything down and gave you a tight bear hug, while still minding his super strength, and starts crying uncontrollably. You never knew he could cry so much.

Neither did Hobie.

But a gesture like this is enough to make a grown man cry.

“I’m…I’m so sorry. It’s just that I wasn’t expecting the note to be much more loving than I anticipated and the plushies were just adorable. And those were the sweetest things anyone has ever said to me in years. I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love you. You really did succeed in making this day more special than I could’ve imagined.” He rambled.

Up until he met you, he didn’t have a place to go. He had people he could talk to and fight side-by-side with, but none of them made him as happy as you do. He didn’t have a home, he had no contact with his family, and you were one of the few people he could confide in. So, for the part that broke him was the part where you said that you’d stay by his side till the end. Everything else was beautiful and after that, he just couldn’t hold the tears in anymore.

You smile as you hug him just as tight, crying as well because you loved him so much, and seeing other people cry makes you cry, so you let him cry it out. You’re extremely happy that you were able to make him feel unconditional love. You were happy that you made his entire day, week, and possibly the entire rest of the month. You don’t know how long this hug will last, and neither does Hobie, but it doesn’t matter because you’re both content in each other’s arms.

This Valentine’s Day truly is special.

#hobie brown #fanfic #valentines day #atsv #spider punk #x reader #dividers by cafekitsune #fluff #atsv fluff

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lightleckrereins · 1 year

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Six the musical roman numeral earrings guide

Everyone knows that one photo that was posted right before the originally planned 2020 Six broadway opening with all the earrings. Since then the roman numeral earrings have slowly been rolled out to all productions globally. But there is a problem. Most details of the earring prototypes shown in that photo have been changed since then. So here is a quick earring guide.

Aragon: the prorotype earring shows light gold big hoops with a bar across the middle representing a roman number one, eight long spikes and rhinestones on the outer edge and middle bar. After reopening this were changed to a smaller, thicker hoop with (I think) six smaller spikes with rounded ends and no rhinestones. I'm pretty sure this earrings are gold platted to match the chains so the color changedn a bit too. This version is the standard across all productions now, but in the 2022 UKT cast change (which introduced the earrings to the UK) a different version appeared. Size is between the prototype and regular versions. It has seven spikes, again smaller and rounded, and brought back the rhinestone edge and number, with rhinestones looking wider than in the original version.

Boleyn: the prototype earrings were small silver hoops with six spikes and two bars with white rhinestones across slightly to the side representing a roman numeral two. The new version is almost identical just with rounder spikes and the bars more to the side.

Seymour: the original photo only shows a small part of the Seymour earring but it shows a big silver hoop with a roman numeral three in the center. Both the outer edge and the numeral have white rhinestones on top. The new version looks almost identical (I think the way they are made changed but that is not something relevant to the look).

Cleves: the Cleves prototype is a tall roman four with no hoop. Instead it has a closed earring hook (not sure if thats the proper term in english tbh) attached to a small loop on the top of the earring. The entire number has dark grey rhinestones. The current version is very simmilar, but became smaller going from a sort of rectangle shape to a square. Its also notable that the actors wear only one numeral earring for Cleves on the left ear complimented with a different silver earring on the right.

Howard: the prototype earring was a big silver hoop (biggest out of all the original ones) with two bars in the middle forming a narrow V. The numeral had pink rhinestones on top. The current one seems to be smaller with a thicker hoop and a wider V.

Parr: The prototype Parr was a big silver hoopwith a roman numeral six in the center. The numeral had dark blue rhinestones. The current one seems to be unchanged from that.

All the changes I am pretty sure came out of a combination of comfort, safety and durability. The original sharper spikes in Aragon and Boleyn are more likely to get tangled in the queen's hair and could end up hurting them if pulled. And in general smaller and thicker earrings are more likely to not bounce around. Also early on it was reported that the original material caused Sam Pauly an allergic reaction as it contained nickel so that had to be changed to make it safe for all queens to wear.

Also fun fact: I made my first models of the earrings (and my prototypes) in very early 2022 following the first photo as back then the earrings were still a broadway exclusive and there werent any closeup photos of the new ones. And can confirm all changes make a lot of sense once you wear them with the hairstyle.

#six the musical #six costumes #six earrings #dont know if anyone in here knows but I am releasing my earring print files for sale #if everything goes as planned that will finally happen next week

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sincerely-sofie · 1 month

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It took me a minute to finally get my notes straight so I could answer this— I hope it was worth the wait! I’ll give some bullet points of tips I use to help boost my production speed in addition to the strategies I use to try to keep characters consistent. Let’s get into it!

First up: How I draw faster!

Note that these mostly apply to digital art, as that’s my preferred medium.

If your art program has them, experiment with brush stabilization levels. My hands shake really bad, especially while I’m drawing, so I put a lot of effort into finding a stabilizer level that works with my need to control lines while also smoothing out the tremors in my hands. It’s made it so much easier to draw lines like I want to, and therefore lets me move on instead of redrawing the same line over and over again.

Creating templates for your art helps so much— setting up things like canvas size, color profile, DPI, background colors and images like the paper texture PNGs that I love to use ahead of time helps me get drawing faster, while I’m excited and inspired! Similarly, having a naming system for your art files is useful for speed as well as finding and organizing old pieces easier.

Having premade color palettes of local colors for characters is also super helpful for speed, as well as keeping characters on model :>

Personally, I use a single brush for lineart and rely on the selection tool and bucket fill for coloring when I actually bother to color things in. My lines are pretty loose nowadays, and the same goes for when I color things— I don't abide exactly by the lineart I draw, and get pretty messy with the selection tool and bucket fill!

I simplify character designs as much as possible— the standard design of a sigilyph, for example, is pretty complex. But I made Sen a lot simpler (and also forgot the spikes on her torso in this panel. Oops)

As for keeping characters on-model…

I’m very flattered that you feel otherwise, but I actually don't keep characters very on-model between different drawings— just look at the different ways I've drawn Ark below— however, I'm improving over time as I become more familiar with how I want to draw the characters! A big part of my process of keeping characters on model is drawing characters over and over to familiarize myself with how they should look through trial and error.

Learning common angles and poses I will draw characters in is very helpful for making sure they look consistent. As a bit of a downside, though, it makes wonkier angles stick out like a sore thumb! Drawing Ark with his head slightly angled downward was really hard, and I don't think I communicated it that well here:

I try to have the characters broken down into as many simple shapes that fit into each other as I possibly can, like Twig’s head (circle + rectangle snout + angled rectangle horn) Ark's hair (that weird bangs shape) and Dusknoir's upper body (beanbag shape / slightly elongated circle torso, arms coming out of his frill that comes in a very particular arcing line). This makes it way easier to draw characters quickly and consistently, because I can learn those lines and shapes and get the motion of drawing them into muscle memory.

Also, knowing the ways characters emote is like knowing cheat codes. Giving characters things like a signature comedic expression of shock or grin that they make when they're happy are very helpful!

The biggest tip I can give on the topic of keeping characters on-model (at least without model sheets— model sheets are THE way to go. Don’t be like Sofie and neglect those pieces of gold) is really just to practice. Build up familiarity with the shapes and proportions of characters, get a feel for how your hand and wrist moves to get the lines right.

#creativity tips with sofie #art tips #drawing tips #drawing advice #art advice #stuff by sofie #sofie answers asks #(kinda)

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nerves-nebula · 11 months

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So I had this genius idea of making a guide on how to draw your Casey (my particular style at least)

Step 1: Draw a rectangle. It's literally that easy.

Step 2. Draw a diagonal line that is longer than the rectangle above the head. If you're drawing him the size I am here, that's about 2 fingers above. If he's bigger, choose a size that looks right to you, there's no right way to do it.

Step 3: Add a straight (lol) line on the right side of the diagonal line and a slightly crooked line on the left side.

Step 4: Try your fucking hardest to draw wavy triangles at the bottom and connect them to the rectangle. Congrats, you just finished the second hardest part and most of his hair.

Step 5: This is optional, I personally don't do it, but you can erase the top part of the rectangle to help draw the bangs easier. Cause making the bangs easy to draw saves you a lot of screaming in agony over goddamn TRIANGLES.

Step 6: Ohoho GOOD LUCK WITH THIS ONE- Draw some more wavy triangles from hell as short or as long as you want. You want him to have some face? Cool. Nothing but a mouth? Also rad.

Step 7: Shade that fucker in and give yourself some positive reward cause you're almost done!

8: Draw teeny tiny lines at the bottom of the rectangle for his beard. Then make a half moon shape to start his smile (or whatever shape gives you the emotion you want him to have). Draw a thick line somewhere in that smile (I usually go directly in the middle or close to) and give the smile some pointiness at both ends. Don't forget to add a little shading up by his hair for his acne scars (I always add those cause me too, Casey)! You are now DONE (with my version of him at least!)!!

ALSO PLEASE GIVE CREDIT TO THE ORIGINAL CREATOR, @nerves-nebula , Casey is its, not mine!

If you couldn't tell, Nerves, your boy is my newest hyperfixation (he just like me fr), so thank you for creating him and bringing him to life! ❤️❤️❤️

oh pog. its kinda interesting seein how u do it lol. here's a gif of me drawin CASEY mAH BOY real quick :)

honestly mine isnt that different from yours, i also tend to start off with the hair slant & the bottom of the face.

#nnstuff #ask #asks are sweethearts #gif #nnart #casey jones #neglected art

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saw-x · 2 years

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how do you blend your gifs so well? this is something ive been trying to learn but it's so hard. when the gif starts over again and the background that i hadn't deleted shows up it just becomes annoying and covers up everything and is a mess

thank you so much!!! I actually used to have so much trouble with blending gifs (I still do a little tbh) so this means a lot to me 🥺.

Here are some links to tutorials which helped me out when I was learning (x, x, x) plus one I found now which may also be helpful (x).

I've also included my own basic process below the cut with screenshots of what I do to get the below gif. I hope this helps :)

I'm going to keep this fairly basic as I don't have any of my psds saved - so not going to show any of my colouring or basic gif process. A side note: typically I find if you want to do like double exposure gifs I find I have better results if one of the gifs is in bw. This is just a basic blending tutorial and will not go that much into that - but there are similar basic principles applied to making those gifs.

So I start with two gifs that I want to blend. I generally make these gifs the same size and roughly the same number of frames. If your gifs aren't the same number of frames you'll end up with an empty spot on your canvas when the shorter gif finishes (not what we want of course).

Typically if I want my two gifs to be next to each other on the final product I will crop them towards one side so they are easier to lay on top of one another (see below for how I have cropped them). This also minimises how much you will have to delete.

I then colour these gifs as normal - if they are from two separate scenes I do this separately for each gif. Once I am done with the basic gif colouring I highlight all the layers and right click to bring up menu options. I then select 'covert to smart object' so it is easier to work with. For these I am going very minimal with just a curves layer and then I'll add a vibrance layer on top of the canvas with both gifs.

After that's done I have my two basic gifs. I drag one out of the workspace so I can drag the smart object I have created from the layers panel on top of the other gif.

After placing the gif on top I set the layer blending mode of the top layer to 'Screen'. This results in something like this:

In order to erase some of the background that I don't want in the gif I create a layer mask on each layer by clicking on the layer and clicking the layer mask button (the little button highlighted with a circle inside the rectangle).

This gives you this:

Now basically I go on the masks and 'erase' bits of the gif I don't want to show up by using a black paintbrush. I can restore anything by painting over it in white. A really useful tip I've also picked up if if you use lighter/darker shades of grey the blending result will be different (the darker it is the more masked it is).

For the below gif I moved the left gif slightly more to the left and painted a mask over the gif border. I also masked over the background that was covering Ricky's face. The below example is using a black mask for both.

If I were to use grey in the layer mask I would get something like this:

The background is not as prominent but you can still see it coming through. Typically when I make my gifsets I use a lot of different shades to get the exact result I want.

You can also see in my vid timeline that I specifically used the same number of screencaps for each scene so the blending should be seamless.

If the scenes were slightly different lengths I would just move the timeline bar to end where the shorter gif ends (like below).

this is the final result i end up with:

I really hope this makes sense - I kinda suck at explaing things so if you have any other questions feel free to ask :)

#asks #ps help #resources #tutorials #completeresources #allresources #usergif #resourcemarket #chaoticresources #photoshop tutorial #*mine

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tizeline · 10 months

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Can I ask how you draw the mutant mayhem turtles’ anatomy? And proportions. ALSO I LOVE YOUR ART IT IS SO GOOD AND JUST AHHH

(Hopefully that wasn’t weird)

Waaaa thank you!!! :,D!!!!

Uhhhh yeah sure why not. Just so ya know, not great at giving art tutorials so I have no idea how helpful you'll actually find this, but I'll try my best 👍

And this might not need saying, but just so we're on the same page, when I draw the MM turtles I don't exactly stay 100% on model. I generally try to draw them similarly to how they actually look, but I also take some ✨artistic liberties✨, as is the nature of fanart.

Okay let's start with heads, that's probably the one of the MM boys' most distinct feature. For Raph and Leo it's easy to divide their heads up in two main shapes. The lower part of their head sticks out quite a bit compared to the upper part. I dunno how clear it is in these images but compared to Leo, Raph has a bit of a wider head (mostly the cheeks) and the top of it is flatter. Leo's head is a bit more round-ish while Raph's is slightly more angular.

For Mikey and Donnie it's easier to just view their heads as one single shape (The lower part of their heads are still wider than the upper part, but it's not as noticeable as it is with their other brothers) Mikey's head is just straight up an oval. Well, not exactly, like an oval and a rectangle with mixed together. Donne's is less stretched out, like a circle and a rectangle mixed together.

But that's the movie, when it comes my art I have a tendency to dial down the differences between their heads and draw them a bit more overall roundish. (Except for like Donnie, I actually tend to make his face a bit more stretched out and rectangular lol)

I'm still figuring out how exactly I wanna draw these guys TBH, so my art of them isn't super consistent. That being said, there's a lot of squash and stretch going on in the movie's animation when it comes to facial expressions. So even in the movie their head-shapes aren't super consistent either.

Anyway, body proportions!

Aside from maybe height the brother all have pretty similar body-types. Raph I would say looks the most different, being a bit wider. Particularly his carapace is almost bit pear shaped? It gets wider the further down it goes is what I'm trying to say. Leo, Donnie and Mikey have a more consistent rectangular shape. (Another detail I noticed while making this was that it seems that Leo and Donnie have six scutes on their plastron, while Raph and Mikey have 8. It's a bit hard to see tho because their belts are kinda in the way)

With specifically their limbs, Donnie and Mikey are a bit lankier, while Raph and Leo have slightly thicker muscles (tho still rather lanky compared to other iterations of the turtles)

When I draw them they (like with their head shapes) end up more similar to each other than they are with their canon designs. I also draw them with slightly less thin limbs.

Shell! It was hard finding good images of the back of their shells so I dunno exactly how many scutes they have back there, but it seems to be 3 columns at the very least? (Also I think Leo might have a comparatively slightly smaller shell than his brothers?)

The shells also generally take up a bit more than half of their side-profile. Looking more closely at these reference images have made me realize that I draw their shells a bit flat lol.

I don't know how much more help I can give when it comes to their designs. I just end off with some details to remember when drawing them.

Raph is missing a tooth, and Mikey has braces. (Leo had braces in the concept art and I'm stubborn and insist on drawing him with them also because fuck you)

They all have a few scratches here and there, but in typical Raph fashion, he has a LOT of scratches on his plastron. Also his beltbuckle has tape on it.

The space between their eyes is narrower than the size of one of their eyes, except for Mikey. Him having a wider face makes his ...nosebridge(?)... whatever, the space there is approximately the width of one of his eyes. Some facial anatomy for ya'

Another face anatomy thing, the ends of their mouths mostly lines up with the outer edge of their eyes (they're pretty wide)

#tizel talk #tmnt #teenage mutant ninja turtles #mutant mayhem #tmnt mm

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dollsonmain · 9 months

Text

Ok time to put everything away. That Guy gets home anywhere between 2:30 and 4.

While I decide whether I want to use this or not (I’m leaning no with a preference for foam board shelves wrapped in different pastel papers, this modular unit would make more sense in a more modern setting) and because if I wait until I’ve made a decision I will never complete the project

I’ve added a pink panel to the back of the bed covering the former shower. I already like the way that looks better, and I think I will do the majority of the book case/curio cabinet/hutch thing I’m building in pink with the counter top part (which will include that shower-shelf, each faux cabinet door (which will be the most boring rectangles ever), and if I add foam board shelves then each of those being a different pastel color of the matching paper.

That paper was something I got from the Amazon Warehouse to get “free” shipping.

Look at it, though. That’s just printer paper and I glued it to foam board. It did get a little wrinkly in a place or two because I didn’t wait long enough for the Tombow Mono Multi to set, but look how smooth that is. It would never be that smooth with white glue or a glue stick.

I’m almost out of that bottle of TMM, but I have another unopened one, so I’m not worried. It lasts a very long time.

I might go around only the outside edge of that curio thing with this wood-look contact paper so that when the bed is down (which will be never, but just in case) the platform frame will look like wood.

I’ll see how I feel about/ how it looks with the whole thing being pink first. Wood grain might look really weird with how low detail most of the rest of the house is, though the stickers are a little more detailed.

Either way, the rest of that is basically simple rectangles. As long as I don’t screw up my measurements too much, it shouldn’t be too headache inducing to complete.

Still thinking about making the battery port cover look like a fuse box, or maybe just sticking a little picture in a frame on it or something. It’ll look bad regardless. All that matters is that I can get to the screw, really. It’s not like I’ll ever put batteries in it, but someone might some day.

I think I would like to make that weirdly shaped crib storage spot (thank you @dollsahoy for figuring that out for me) into, like... Maybe put some little cleaning supplies in there? like a bucket and some cleaning cloths and maybe a tiny broom or mop, or maybe pet supplies since there are sticker animals EVERYWHERE on this thing. There are like 3 dogs and 7 cats (that is an exaggeration but only slightly).

I stopped buying non-toy Mini Brands so I don’t have any of the kitty litter boxes or anything convenient like that.

I could also just whip up a “door” and cover over the space completely with yet another faux cabinet.

AND I was looking at the MGA MiniVerse balls I have. The smaller one is pretty much exactly the right size AND shape for the fountain cutout on the back of this door.

It would stick out a lot, though, so I might make something else to put there like a rack for garden tools or a narrow planter box or something, just to keep the profile of the house smaller which makes it easier to store.

That could also be a place to put a pet stuff station to hang leashes on or something like that.

I don’t intend to buy furniture for the house I don’t think. I do have a bunch of My Scene furniture sitting around though it’s not colors that would work with this space, and if I buy one of the Gloria sets (or the coveted Avon set....) they come with kitchen chairs and a table and I think I’ll most likely have this set to kitchen most of the time, if not fireplace.

Modern Barbie furniture isn’t the right colors or style.

So decisions I [still] need to make:

how to decorate the fireplace room wall, mantle, and the fireplace itself

what colors to apply to basically everything in the kitchen, especially the appliances, little bits of wall above the cabinets, and the backsplash

whether or not to do detail painting in the kitchen like adding color to the stovetop, faucet, and drawer pulls

which dishes to get and whether to buy dishes that are already done, get some cheap ones and paint them, try making my own again, or something else

whether to use the Mini Brands shelving brackets as modular shelving or make my own foam board shelves

..... The only thing I did today was make a pink rectangle. Ugh.

#1998 barbie family cottage house

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moth-yknowtheartist · 1 year

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Moth, please teach me how to draw the Substitute (do not ask why.)

ok some of this doubles as a professor tutorial but here you go. Let's go on a drawing journey

so first we've gotta get this guy's structure his shapes. For clarity I've color coded the different shapes! Let them overlap and get messy let them get WILD

ok now that we've got the shapes and we cleaned up our lineart a bit let's add some defining features. Lots of this is just scribbling around until it works you can do whatever you want!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!!!!!!

ok nice he's shaping up now. Let's define those features a bit more you know how we love definition

also since it's the substitute let's just scribble in some brows that are nice and evil. I cannot convey to you more how much an eyebrow is just a scribble. It is like infinite monkeys on typewriters if you squiggle enough you will get eyebrow

ok cool nice and defined now we give him fur!! Triangles everywhere just all over the place go wild. Now he is fuzzy!!!

Also this is a good time to fix your mistakes like how I put his face too high LMAO let's bring that down

Ok wow that's a guy that's a dude!!!

Now let's start coloring him, throw a layer under the one you've been drawing on and get ready to go

I do not use a bucket tool I just scribble it all in. It doesn't have to be perfect it's fun it's fun time!!! The colors I use are on the side. If we were drawing the professor my colors are slightly different to convey the difference in puppets

ok let's make him glitchy cause he's a hologram!!! Rectangle tool is your friend. Rectangle tool set to fill with current color is DOUBLE your friend. Go to your lineart layer or a layer above your lineart layer and get ready to rectangle

Set your pen size to really really low for crisper edges, color pick the colors on the different parts of his body, and just start throwing rectangles on there along the side of his body

let's go look at that that's our guy!!! That's the twisted little dude!!! Congrations!!!

hope this helps with your schemes!!!

#puppet history #the substitute

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mpregfrance · 2 months

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it breaks my heart to see France all broad and manly in the new strips. Bring my twink France back! Same size as England and not a single muscle more!

hewwo i'm sorry i didnt see this until now. big agree <3 i'm not sure which strip ur referring to tho. she looked adorable in the brexit strips! ugh my delicate little flower. my wife.

anyway this shouldn't even be a hot take but france was never supposed to be like. macho. yes has some masculine features that enhance his beauty but he's visibly more femme and it's wild to me when ppl choose to ignore this but ok. also if we're going here i think denying him his femininity and exaggerating a masculine figure smells kinda transmisogynistic but that's just me ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ ͡⁠°⁠ ͜⁠ʖ⁠ ͡⁠°⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

personally i stan an hourglass queen. inverted triangle fran w twig legs and no thiccness makes me want to die. madame is canonically caked up give him his ass back!! i can appreciate different body types for him, slim or toned or squishy or anything in between, but def not like buff and built, esp if arthur isn't.

in the same vein i don't have one set HC for arthur's, like i think he could be either thin or more solid or whatever else but he'd always have a more masculine body shape. rectangle w slightly bigger shoulders. he needs to be able to carry his pretty french wife!

we are the same flavor of neurotic anon my beloved. this will always be a safe space for soft curvy mommy france the way god intended <3

#ask and ye shall receive #babygirl #i'm not tagging this bc i don't want to be skinned alive #all opinions are good until i have one apparently

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morrigan-sims · 1 year

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Hiiiiii how did you do your character page it's so so so cool! Is the appearance customizable at all? Like can the rectangles containing the character portraits be a rounded rectangle or a different shape entirely? Have a great rest of your day!!

Hello! Thanks for asking!

So, I used two existing page codes for the base of my page. You can find those here and here. Like all tumblr pages (and web pages in general), they're based on html, and as such are highly customizable.

For example, I changed some of the icons in the individual character pages, as well as the size of the text boxes and images to make things fit better. (It's kind of hard to tell based on just the image on the post, but if you look at the preview compared to mine, you can tell.) Additionally, I totally changed the colors of the everyone page, along with redoing the filters to make them fit my needs. Also, if I remember correctly, I had to change the text box size when you click on it to make it fit the right number of lines without looking weird? I think??? Could be wrong.

html is a very wonderful coding language, and you don't even need any formal training to start learning it. 95% of what I know about html coding for visual purposes (like tumblr pages) I've learned through trial and error and examining existing codes. (Note: I know nothing about JavaScript and html to make different functionalities, so I'm useless in that department.)

If you are interested in learning more, there's lots and lots of websites dedicated to teaching code, including html and JS.

I'll talk about your question about shapes under the cut, cause this is already super long.

In html, you define the shape and size of the image using width and height in pixels. My limited experience involves only circles/ellipses and rectangles/square.

If I remember correctly, there is some amount of code that you can use to make rounded edges to images (I don't know what it is, but I'm aware that it's possible), but it might be relatively easy to also just round the edges in photoshop. So long as the overall image meets the same width and height as displayed in the html, you shouldn't run into any issues. (Unless the image has a frame on it in the code, in which case you would have to change the frame if you wanted it to also be rounded.)

(A google search of "how to make rounded corners in html" should be helpful. I'm typing this right before going to dinner, so I'm slightly short on time.)

There is also a section of coding that can allow images to be auto-resized to fit the space specified in the code. However, this relies on the images still having the right crop ratio to prevent the image getting "squished".

Also, in a similar vein to what I mentioned above, you can use a "square" or "rectangular" image that is transparent outside of the funky shape you want to use and place it in a square or rectangular space in code.

Okay, I think that's all I have to say on the topic! Thanks for the ask! <3

#ask Morrigan #tips #tutorial #coding #html #novac2281

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myriad-rainbows · 1 year

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Image description: a work-in-progress photo of a knit shawl in a white, gray and black gradient yarn. The shawl is made up of narrow right triangles that gradually increase in size around an arc. The effect looks sort of like a splayed hand of cards. End I.D.

The design for this shawl took shape from my ongoing love affair with short rows, geometry, & optical illusions, and my perpetual dislike of the way triangle/rectangle/semicircle shawls constantly slip off my shoulders. Construction details below the cut.

This shawl is knit in garter stitch on US 10/6.0mm steel needles. The yarn is Lion Brand "Shawl in a Ball", which I bought many years ago and have tried to knit into a couple different projects that never turned out quite how I wanted.

I started with a 61-stitch crochet cast on. Row 1 a full knit row on the wrong side (after the first stitch, anyway, which is slipped) for the sake of consistency with subsequent triangles, and also because keeping track of which end is the "starting" end is easier when it's got the tail.

The triangles are shaped using short rows that increase in length by 3 stitches on each "right side" row, with a slipped selvedge—so, sl1, k2, wrap and turn, knit back to beginning of row; turn, sl1, k5, w&t, knit back to beginning of row; turn, sl1, k8, w&t, knit back to beginning of row; etc. I placed stitch markers every 6 stitches because for me that was the sweet spot between "minimize counting" and "minimize how often I have to interrupt the knitting motion to slip a marker".

Using this specific short row method in garter stitch—a wrap-and-turn where you DON'T pick up the wrap and knit it together with the stitch it's wrapped around, just let it hug the base of the stitch—is something I learned from one of Elizabeth Zimmerman's books; I think The Opinionated Knitter, but I don't have it on hand to check. It blends in really nicely with the garter stitch and gives a nice definition to the end of each ridge.

The last "normal" RS row for each triangle stops 4 stitches from the end of the row (followed by the usual w&t, knit back to beginning.) The final row, which is also the setup row for the next triangle, goes: BO the first 6 st, (k2tog, yo, k1) (this means stitches 7 and 8 are knitted together, and you pass the last of the bound-off stitches over that k2tog) to 7 st from end of row, k6… and use the 1 st remaining on the needle as the starting stitch for another crochet cast-on, adding 9 st. This means the stitch count for the next triangle is 64 st, the final stitch of which will become the base of the the next crochet cast-on—the method I came up with results in a crochet cast on that appears continuous, but nevertheless matches the color of the triangle it "belongs" to—and didn't require me to know when I started how many triangles I would end up with.

Binding off 6 stitches and adding 9 whenever I begin a new triangle means each of them is one row taller than the last, so it's a very subtle size increase. I tried keeping all my triangles the same size at first (with a 9-st bind-off at the beginning), but I really didn't like how the shape was coming out. I thought about trying out a more rapid size increase, but I wanted the bind-off to be at least 6 st to make the triangles look really distinct, and adding more cast-on stitches at the end of the row would result in a less pronounced "curve", so I chose not to do either of those things, and it's turning out to be a good choice. Maybe for another shawl, I'll try offsetting my short rows by 2 st instead of 3, and make the size increase between successive triangles slightly more dramatic—making the triangles wider increases the rate of curvature, so it would compensate for the shallowing out that adding a larger number of stitches would cause. On the other hand, the proportions on this iteration are incredibly aesthetically satisfying to me, so maybe I'll repeat a knitting pattern for once in my life.

#knitting #adventures in pattern design #geometry #optical illusions #short rows #Elizabeth Zimmerman #me? documenting my process? I guess it's more likely than I thought!

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