Reblog to give a trans woman a delicious Cuban sandwich

how your friends find out you are dating

xiao x gender neutral reader

hu tao knew something was up the moment you and xiao sat down. you arrived together, again. the first time it was a happy accident, the second was a coincidence. but the third time? something was up. hu tao just doesn’t know what.

she watches as you and xiao approach the table. the restaurant is crowded, and the ghost of xiao’s hand on your back guides you to your seat.

“sorry we are late,” you say once you’ve settled.

“it’s fine,” hu tao, noting how you said ‘we.’ she clears her throat. “don’t worry. you’re not the last ones, anyways. zhongli’s on his way.”

you nod and start looking through the menu, even though you already know what you want. a couple seconds later, the waiter shows up. hu tao puts in your order, and before you can do the same, xiao orders for you.

“and no pickles,” he finishes.

hu tao gapes at xiao.

“what?” he asks.

“no-thing,” she replies. “it’s just… nice that you remembered [name]’s order.”

“so? they order the same thing everytime.”

“doesn’t mean you had to remember they don’t like pickles,” hu tao says mildly. xiao’s lips fold into a contemplative frown.

you clear your throat at the awkward silence that fills the table. “what about zhongli?”

xiao waves his hand. “it’s his fault for being late.”

the waiter comes out with appetizers, and like xiao requested, yours has no pickles to be seen. you all start eating, the awkward air gone, until metal clangs onto the floor.

“oh,” hu tao says, jumping out of her seat and under the table. “where is—“ she pauses. then she shoots her head up, half banging it on the table and rattling water glassed as she does so.

“what’s wrong?” you ask as she rubs her head.

she stands points an accusing finger at you and xiao.

“you two— you’re—“ she looks down and you follow her gaze. it lands on you and xiao’s interlocked hand at your side.

“oh,” you say. you didn’t even realize his hand found yours. it was natural.

“you’re dating?” hu tao demands. you nod.

“why didn’t you tell me?”

“it just… never came up?” you ask. you didn’t realize it was a secret. you certainly never intended to make it one. you decline to tell hu tao that it’s been about six months to save her the distress.

“what never came up?”

you turn to see zhongli approaching. he takes a seat across from xiao, next to hu tao.

“that [name] and xiao are dating!”

zhongli shrugs as he opens his napkin and takes out the silverware. “you didn’t know?”

that was maybe not the best thing for him to say right now. well, at least he didn’t say—

“it’s been about six months now.”

hu tao stands, and leaves.

you remove your hand with xiaos. as you leave to follow her, you hear zhongli ask:

“did i say something wrong?”

The Pirate Lord Part 2

the future queen of Ravka doesn’t even know she’s going to wear a crown

You didn’t talk to him for almost two days.

He practically chased you around, vying for your attention as you avoided him like the plague. He’d lied. And not a white lie—Sturmhond had lied about his entire identity. His life. Well, you supposed, not Sturmhond. Because your captain and lover, the man you wanted to marry, was Prince Nikolai Lantsov, the youngest prince of Ravka.

So you spent your hours away from him processing and memorizing the palace, ducking into random rooms and examining anything you were allowed to see. You had to admit, finding out you were sleeping with a prince wasn’t the worst shock of your life.

You’d smacked him, though. Pretty hard.

“Y/N,” a voice called and you turned to see Tamar approaching, her eyes comically wide as she did a small spin in the hallway. “not too bad of a hovel, is it?” She asked, letting out a low whistle.

“It’s ghastly,” you lied, smirking. “how will we ever survive this?”

“Same way we survive anything.” She mused, flicking a very expensive looking vase as she passed it. “Lots of rum. Lots.” Then she stopped, tilting her head at you. “You should talk to him. He misses you.”

“Talk to who?” You asked, a thread of annoyance in your tone. “Sturmhond, or Nikolai?”

“They’re the same man.” Tamar rolled her eyes, swinging her arm around your shoulders and pulling you down the hall. “Come on, Y/N. We didn’t go through all that hell on the waves just for you two to be pissed at one another.”

“He can apologize to me.” You said, indignant. “Eventually.”

“Saints save us all.” She grumbled, leading the two of you towards the hall for dinner.

-

Nikolai had told you the truth only after you’d docked and made your way into Ravka. And he’d done it in the most ridiculous way possible—simply removing his coat to reveal a second one underneath, smiling and holding his arms out comically to you. He’d even had the audacity to say “surprise” seconds before you whacked him hard on his good shoulder.

The arrow wound was healed, but his muscle was still tender.

Now he watched you at dinner, still sitting with his crew like he always did. The difference now was that the table was far more elaborate, and there was a very comforting lack of eggs and pickles. Tolya and Tamar sat across from you, bickering over Saints knows what, while Nikolai sat beside you as you pointedly ignored him.

“Y/N,” he began, tilting his head at you. You pretended not to hear him, picking at the bowl of fruit on your plate. Fruit for heaven’s sakes. You swore never to eat a pickle again. “Y/N, please, you wouldn’t have been with me if you’d have known.”

You glared down at a strawberry, spearing it rather aggressively with your fork. He sighed and turned in his seat, placing his hand near your arm, but not on it.

“Come on. You know that I’m right.”

Tamar and Tolya were suddenly very, very interested in their own plates, the rest of the crew busying themselves with literally any topic that came to mind. You could’ve sworn someone mentioned how good the plumbing was and blocked them out.

“You don’t know that.” You said, voice cold as you shot him a look. “Everything the two of us have is based on honesty. How am I supposed to trust anything you say? You’re even acting different.”

“I cant be Sturmhond here, Y/N. I have to behave in a certain manner—”

“‘A certain manner’,” you sneered. “How royal of you.”

“You are still my Second, and the love of my life. Being a prince changes nothing—”

You stood up abruptly, almost knocking over a glass as you left the table. The crew stared, stunned, as Nikolai quickly followed, chasing after you out of the dining hall.

You stormed down the hallway towards the door that you knew led to the gardens, and past that, the lake. You’d barely stepped outside before he jumped in front of you, holding his hands out in supplication.

“Y/N,” he panted, walking backwards as you moved towards the lake, out of sight from the palace. You spotted some sort of gazebo in the distance, decorated with cushions and seemingly abandoned, and walked towards it. “Y/N, you have to believe me.”

“I don’t.” You gritted out, stomping over to the cushioned structure. “Have to do anything.” You plopped down onto the cushions, splaying out in a very messy manner. You huffed as you looked up at the ceiling, at the marble arches. “Don’t lie to me ever again.” You ordered, tossing the prince a glare.

He had the audacity to roll his eyes as he sat down beside you, shrugging off his heavy jacket and tossing it aside.

“I told you I wouldn’t.” He said, tilting his head. “But I swear I won’t. Scouts honor.” He held out his pinkie and you snorted, hooking your own through his.

“That’s a very powerful oath, Sturm—” you paused, eyebrows furrowing. “Nikolai.”

“Actually, that’s Nikolai Lantsov—Major of the Twenty-Second Regiment, Soldier of the King’s Army, Grand Duke of Udova, and second son to His Most Royal Majesty, King Alexander the Third, Ruler of the Double Eagle Throne to you, Second.”

“You’re insufferable.” You scoffed, but smiled at his familiar smirk, that mischievous light in his eyes back. “Don’t…act in front of me. I know that you have to be all posh and regal or whatever in front of the others, but not in front of me.” You frowned a bit, unsure of why it hurts to say these things to him. “I fell in love with Sturmhond.”

He swallowed, looking away from you, and sighed.

“You might love him,” he said, softly, his eyes still refusing to meet yours. “but I love you. And I had hoped that that would’ve been enough.” He gave you a look, a calm look that masked his pain and heartache, and you regretted your words the moment he moved to rise.

“No, I—” you grasped his arm, rising onto your knees as you tugged him back down. “I do love you. I do. I’m just going to have to get used to the changes, that’s all.” You knew your expression was pleading, and still you pushed on. “Just two days ago you were a pirate. This is a big switch for me.”

“Privateer.” He mumbled, but allowed a small smile to appear on his handsome face. “I’m sure you’ll adjust when you realize just how much I’m going to spoil you now that I’m in Ravka.”

You let a grin wash over your face as you tugged him forward by his shirt, pressing your mouth to his own. He laid you down eagerly atop the cushions, hands sinking into your hair as he kissed you.

“I love you.” He murmured, losing himself in the feel of you as you freed the prince from his clothes.

-

Your wedding had been an event to mark the century.

You’d had it on your ship, traveling all the way back to the ocean to marry your king. And as you kissed him, your crew and the guests clinking glasses and congratulating you both, the shell at the base of your collarbones lit up, sending tendrils of light and shimmering color across your skin.

“Queen of the seas.” Nikolai mused, glancing over at the water. Colorful fish could be seen under the surface, and when he took your hand and rested it on the rail, you could see the siren’s magic flowing all the way down your body. “I think the ocean approves, don’t you?”

You grinned, head still slightly heavier than usual from the crown that now rested upon it. It had been crafted by Nikolai himself, for you, and his outstanding powers of creation had made you a gorgeous pearl encrusted crown worthy of any queen of the seas. You turned to him, moving into his embrace as he grinned down at you.

“How do you feel about being a Queen?” He asked, raising a brow. His own coronation had been only a month before, an event at which you’d cried an embarrassing amount.

“I feel like being bedded by a king right about now.” You teased, wiggling your brows as he laughed.

“Am I to expect you to start giving me commands?” Nikolai tilted his head, tugging you closer. Nearby, Tolya was still celebrating, having had caught the bouquet. “You’re no longer my Second, you know.”

“You can start calling me Captain if you want.” You teased, leaning forward to press a long, soft kiss to his mouth. He was yours. Officially, now.

Although, you would force him to sail with you someday. Just for fun.

Yeet

hello there I Have a request for you .

so could you do headcanons of how the cookies would react to reader (gn) trying to get a GIGANTIC vegetable out of the ground

(like a potato or a white radish you choose)

You can take as much time as you need to

And have fun!

Po-tay-to, Po-tah-to (Carrot, Beet, Spinach, Rambutan Cookie)

Vegetable gang rise up.

You yawned and stretched your limbs when the morning rays brightened up your room. You gathered your farming gear and attire before marching out of your home, readying to collect the spoils of your labor.

Ah, the fresh smell of fruits and veggies, grown by none other then yourself, you made sure the plants were well watered and planted with good fertilizer for maximum results. You had Carrot Cookie to thank for giving you tips on farming, even getting hands on herself with planting your crops.

You agreed with her, god you loved agriculture.

You spent the morning collecting the crops that were ready to be picked, until you came across this particular potato stem within the ground. You reached down, gripped the stem, and pulled!

Huh?

It…wasn’t moving? You tried lifting it up harder, but it would barely budge. You tried once last time with all your might to pull it out of the ground, only for your grip to slip from the stem, making you fall backwards.

This was quite the pickle! You grabbed your shovel and chose to dig the potato out of the ground, it was ripe for the taking and you weren’t going to let it spoil. Imagine your shock when you had to walk a little away just to dig against the side of the now massive potato in the ground.

This was certainly going to take all day. Oh well, let’s get to work!

“Holy moly, that potato is massive, Y/N Cookie!”

If there was a cookie who’s familiar with giant vegetables in the past, it was Carrot Cookie! So when she stopped by to see how your farm was doing, she was more then happy to help out with your potato problem.

Digging was a slow process, but with two cookies, it does go by faster then with one. All the while, you two chatted up a storm about vegetables, giving each other farming tips, etc.

Farming really did a number on you in terms of physique, your dough was firm and crisp, it was really noticeable when you removed your farming outfit for a moment to fan yourself in the baking sun. Not that Carrot was looking or anything!

You both were finally able to dig below enough to easily pull out the gigantic potato from the ground with the help of your truck with a tow. Carrot was marveling at how great the potato looked, she gave you a lot of praise for it!

You celebrated by taking a picture with her, your hand on her shoulder and hers on yours. #Farmers4life

“Oh…that’s a pretty big potato.”

Beet Cookie was a common camper at your farm, usually here then over there at Carrot’s farm. Beet was just more comfortable with you on that.

She didn’t have the heart to pick at your crops without permission and you appreciated that. Hence why when she noticed a particular large mound of dirt amongst your potatoes, she’d let you know.

Working hard, she admits she glanced a little bit at your crispy dough that baked under the sun, she had to pull her hat down to hide her blushing face.

When the potato is finally dug out, you celebrated by making the best gosh darn mashed potatoes Beet’s ever tasted. Her eyes twinkled when she took a bite out of it, yep, this was worth the effort today!

Beet was always welcomed at your farm, camping where she pleased. You’ll even offer the bed in your guest room for her to sleep in, and while she does say camping is more her style..she doesn’t mind sleeping in a bed. Can she sleep on yours though?

“Me...? Strong? Hehe, stop teasing me! But I’m more then happy to help you!”

With Spinach Cookie, it’s pretty much over. Her strength was substantial, able to visibly shift the potato within the ground.

With enough time and moving space from the dirt, she was able to pull the potato from the stem from the ground!

You gave her your best produce for the today and portion of the potato, of which she happily accepted.

Then she chose to hug you tightly. You had enough of your own strength to at least reciprocate it, but damn did this woman have a grip on you.

“Need to pull out that potato? I’ll do my best to help!”

You figured that in order to pull this potato out of the ground, you were gonna need a strong cookie for the job, and who better then Rambutan Cookie. She hid her blush when you praised her like that, she’ll do her best to be the cookie you thought of her to be.

She was caught off guard by how massive the potato was, but she didn’t want to disappoint you, so she’ll do whatever she can to help you out!

With your digging around the potato and her pulling on the stem, you both made progress throughout the day. She complimented your fields, those veggies and fruits sure were tasty! You complimented her in return, then she was backing to being a blushing mess.

You gave her your best pickings once the job was done, even threw in little extra somethings for her village. She couldn’t thank you enough and hugged you, it wasn’t as powerful as Spinach’s, but it was enough to get the wind out of you!

You’re always welcome at her village if you ever stop by some time!

HEAVEN TIME!!

Okay sooooo a lot of this was put in place before the show dropped so some of it seems really kind of out there. Sorry. ALSO i am aware that technically archangels are not a high ranking of angel but i am stealing paradise lost canon again for that. So there are the seven (eight if you count luci, another was made after he fell to even out the roster) archangels and then right underneath them are the seraphim and there are lots of seraphim. Also exterminators aren’t heavenborn they are just people who died and then signed up for the program, removal of your left eye is a key part of initiation for exterminators, and they are very knights templar-esque in their uniforms

Adam: 

I think hes the most important to start with so. Adam, I do not like him in canon at ALL sorry, in this he’s still kind of a dingus but he’s genuinely quite nice. Funny middle aged divorced man who shows up to meetings late on purpose and dresses like Adam Sandler no matter the occasion,,, hes the embodiment of the Are Ya Winning Son? Meme. Im going with Paradise Lost canon yet again here in that he is head over heels for Eve and only ate the apple after she did so they could get the death penalty together. He is sort of a paralell to Luci in the sense that he is also distant from his family but where with Luci it is a self imposed isolation spurred on by depression with Adam its just that he isnt good at conecting with them. 

He and Eve really drifted apart after the Cain incident and, while they are on good terms, they are like super divorced. He doesn’t know how to talk to Abel (who lives close to his mom in what is basically Heaven’s suburbs) and he only gets to see Cain on extermination day, and Cain really just. Doesn’t want to talk to him. So Adam is in a pickle. He was put in charge of the exterminations shortly after he died to kind of just like, give him something to do and he genuinely does a very good job at it. He sees it as getting back at Luci in a way.

Adam hates Lucifer with like his entire being, Adam is a very chill guy, he doesn’t dislike much of anyone, but he hates Lucifer. He hates him for the Eden thing and he also blames him for the Cain thing so any chance he can take to hurt him is good. Unfortunately Lucifer literally could not care less about the sinners dying so. Theres that.

Then canon roles around and suddenly Lucifer’s “daughter” (due to the nature of Charlie’s birth and the fact that Adam has never met her he doesn’t really buy that she’s a sentient being and not just a mouthpiece for Luci) wants to bring sinners into Heaven which is something that just reeks of foul play to Adam, he will not lose his second go at Paradise to God’s least favorite son, something needs to be done. He takes it to Sera (his boss, technically, more on that later) and she gives him clearance to pretty much do whatever he wants (she was not given the full story!!! Just that Luci is “acting suspicious”) so Adam kind of starts. Meddling

He wants to stop the hotel and he wants Charlie dead. Like honest to goodness he wants to kill her. Hes telling Lute (the only other person who knows the full details of this mission) and himself that its for the good of Heaven but really its just some kind of vengeance, Lucifer took his kids, why shouldn’t he give what he gets? Eventually like, season three climax would be the exterminators absolutely wrecking the hotel and like taking Charlie hostage. Adam is having second thoughts when shes actually like tied up and bleeding out though, he like kinda snaps out of his frenzy hes worked himself into and has a little Just A Man from Epic The Musical moment yknow. But whats done is done, no turning back now, right?

Lute:

Lute is exceedingly different that in canon because I wrote all of my stuff for them before we knew anything about them as a character. They are from ancient greece now. More specifically Sparta.

When they died they were very eager to sign up for the extermination program, a warrior at heart and eager to do good. They quickly caught Adam’s eye and they like, surprisingly quickly rose through the exterminator ranks to Lieutenant (Lute) (Nickname that Adam gave them because try as he might he cannot pronounce their (dead)name.)

They are like Charlie’s age, both in the sense that they are both early twenties and in the sense that they are both ~2000, they and Adam have kind of like, almost father and child thing, Adam is the goofy divorced dad who listens to pearl jam and Lute is the daughter who has to listen to it on the way to swim practice. 

Lute is very strategical, Lute is very serious, Lute feels like they have a lot to prove (especially being one of the few high ranking people in Heaven who isnt either heavenborn or someone of Biblical Importance) less so than they did when they were new, but the itchings of anxiety are still somewhere in there. They are extremely devoted to Heaven’s cause and Adam, though they are having second thoughts about Adams hostility towards the princess by like, mid season three.

Adam (reluctantly, might I add) sent them down to the hotel for a “diplomacy mission” (spying) for a week or two early on in the season and they found that they actually can relate to Charlie? They both want to do whats best for their people and they both have major imposter syndrome (and they both know Vallie, which is awkward, (vallie was apart of Lutes like, personal squadron, kind of an exterminator elite guard before she fell) Lute and Vallie dont hate eachother by any means but the last time they were in a room together they were literally trying to kill eachother so its. weird) but Lute just, isnt as convinced on the prospect of Charlie being some kind of literal puppet for the devil? Adam shoots down her concerns about this though, hes the devil he is the king of lies and deceit, Lute, thats just what he wants you to think, trust me, I know how he works, Ive dealt with him, its okay.

Also they transitioned while in Heaven and asked Adam to set up their top surgery under the guise of like, improving their combat capabilites (he absolutely knew he was just humoring them, I love and adore him if you didnt know)

Eve:

Eve is so cool. She isnt a major character because she is extremely disinvolved with the workings of Heaven, like, purely by choice. She lives somewhere in like, the Primum Mobile ring and has a garden and likes when Emily or the other Heavenborn visit her. Abel lives somewhere close by and he has some sheep. She rarely travels into the Empyrean (the capital city) and just. Shes hanging out.

She was absolutely the main person behind her and Adams divorce, she just really fell out of it after a while, she doesnt hold anything against him she just. Isnt interested in a romance with him. She also has far less of a grudge against Lucifer than Adam (she blames herself more than anything) and thinks that Adam should like. chill out. (Its not good to hold onto hatred for so long, you know.)(Do you forgive him?)(…no.)(Exactly. He isnt sorry, he doesnt deserve forgiveness, Eve.) 

Sera:

Similar to canon except that like, she isnt antagonistic, shes a big cool angel lady who is technically in charge of the exterminations because she is in charge of like, soul circulation. In this au souls who are purged in the Cleanse get thrust back out into the reincarnation zone (hell doesnt know this, Luci never cared enough to ask and there have been no communications between like, anyone else) (heaven souls can also be reincarnated but its a voluntary process, you might ask if this causes like, an imbalance of any kind, with there being far more “evil souls” in circulation, the answer is no, new souls are also freshly created often) this technically puts her in charge of the whole affair, she appointed Adam to help her out and regrets it every day /silly

She isnt keeping the cleanse a secret because in her mind there is no moral issue to keep secret, though it isnt something thats like, advertised, it is perfectly reasonable to think that a lot of people in Heaven dont know about it. She probably would not take well to Adam’s hostility towards Charlie if she knew the full situation but as far as she knows its just a Lucifer plot and she trusts Adam to sort that out. Maybe she shouldnt! He is very biased!

Emily:

Shes also not a huuuggee character, shes one of the youngest Seraphim and the most involved with the ascended soul population as shes the only seraphim to not predate humanity. Shes silly, she likes Adam a lot hes like a funny uncle who your parents dont like. She mostly hangs out in the residential area of the Empyrean just. Hanging out, she doesnt have a whole lot of official duties besides keeping morale up, though teeecchhhniically shes supposed to help Sera with soul regulation by keeping a handle on blessed souls who want to reincarnate by sending them to Sera. Shes also friends with Molly just because I think thats cute.

Molly: 

Im including her!!! You cant stop me!!! Shes angel’s twin sister! She is technically the youngest out of the Ragno siblings and also died second, shortly after Angel. She was very close with her twin in life and while she accepts that her oldest brother and father are probably both in Hell shes holding out hope that Angel is just taking a long time to get through Purgatory. (he is not) (shes starting to have less and less faith in this idea)

She lives in the inner part of the Empyrean with her mom and a couple other non-immediate family members that landed up there. Heaven doesnt really have any kind of currency so like, shops arent as much of a thing as like say, markets where you can trade knick knacks for other kick knacks (there is an unlimited supply of goods of all kinds but like, if you want like a handknit scarf and you want to trade a windchime you mde for one just pop down to the market) but she is running a small sort of beauty parlor thing close to the Centrum (basically heaven town hall, where the Seraphim and Archangels get access to the Abode Of God and also just hold other important matters) thats decently popular. Shes very nice if a little overbearing, has a temper though, also a bit of a prankster when the situation permits (something she picked up from Angel when they were kids), absolutely figured out that Angel wasnt into girls a long time before the actual news came out. She deduced this through years of trying to set him up with girls and her efforts turning up squat. Shes very supportive she is still mad at Arackniss for siding with their dad during the Initial Incident.

Micheal:

Hes the only archangel with any like. Major importance. Hes Lucifers twin brother and the highest ranking archangel since Lucis banishment. He was the main force to take down Lucifers rebellion back when that all happened (i hate viv canon he was banished from heaven because he launched a COUP not because he was silly or something. Hes the devil. Stop woobifying him let him have done something bad. He can regret it, he DOES regret it but he is not a poor little victim he started a civil war.) and would probably show up at the end of season three to like negotiate some kind of peace deal with Charlie. He would not have met Charlie prior to this incedent but he really likes her honestly, its been a few millenia he isnt as upset with Luci anymore, certainly not upset with his daughter who has proven to be nothing but virtuous and kind. 

But also before this he would show up in Lucifer flashbacks, mainly one where hes arguing with Charlie mid/late season one and it would like be cutting in and out of a flashback to Luci and Micheal arguing about Gods favoritism of Adam and Lilith (very new, having just been dropped in Eden, fighting had not yet occured and Lilith and Luci had not yet met eachother, they would not meet until after Lucifer falls to Hell and Lilith dies as punishement for abandoing Eden) and the argument would be like, Luci and Charlie fighting about the fate of the sinners and the ethics of the Cleanse paralleling Luci and Micheal fighting over Killing The Humans because they Suck and Dad Likes Them More Than Us and it would like culminate in a “They dont deserve to die!” where Charlie AND flashback Micheal say that and Lucifer being like, woah, its happening agaiiiiinnn im messing up agaaiiinnnn shes just like micheal and im going to lose her tooooooo and kind of like. Having a little bit of a breakdown. Hes so mentally ill

Also im assigning all the Archangels colors of the rainbow just because. Luci is red and Micheal is blue. None of the others are especially important.

Okay thats all the major Heaven people!!! I think ill do like. Lucifer and Lilith in a combination post with the various Pets (keekee, fat nuggets, razzle and dazzle, ect.) next, then maybe one on the other Big Overlords?? Ive been reading Shakespeare just for help developing one of them I am very normal. Anyway, as always, if you have any questions please ask, I am more than happy to answer!! byyeeeee love youuuuu <3 <3 <3

Weekend Update

12/03/2023

Nerdie, you’re making this a thing now?

Yes! I have to keep ya’ll updated on what’s going on.

Well, what did you read this week?

Many wonderful things:

I will again sing the praises of @ramblers-lets-get-ramblin three part series “When My Time Comes Around.” You’ll feel all the emotions and be thankful that you read something that touches you deep in your soul. 😭 She also attacked my heart again on Frankie Friday with bittersweet angst in Tender is the Night. I'm a fan of the melancholic greatness that is Angie.

So...you like reading about sad things?

There's more to it than that. Just go read her fics! Then you'll know.

Tommy Miller fans unite! @musings-of-a-rose is continuing to feed our younger Miller brother delusions with her series “Falling Slowly.” The slow burn romance is one of the trope I really dig. And Gabriel Luna always. 🫠 Dig into some Tommy…

Nerdie, you’re doing so well, don’t jinx it.

I mean, I'm not wrong. Whatever, moving on...

I also read Honey Stained Hands by the sweet and deceptively naughty @undercoverpena too. Seems to be a Joel fix this week. Post-outbreak. The reader manages to make honey and different sweets in Jackson. Telling ya’ll anymore is a spoiler. Go read it!

There’s also another grizzled man this week. Tim Rockford who in the capable hands of the same writer @secretelephanttattoo who brought us Marcus Pike (Doughnut Debauchery) and the reason I’ll never look at doughnuts the same, I’m sure she’ll find many a use for his gun holsters. She began her new series “Undercover.” I’m throughly looking forward diving into more of the chapters as she releases them.

@linzels-blog wrote another Din Djarin fic that is equal parts sensual and sweet. It’s called Safe to Touch. I’m rather fond of our intrepid Mendalorian and him exploring his body with someone he loves is a treat.

Speaking of which, who doesn’t like baked goods? We’re also being fed by @avastrasposts as she starts her A Baker’s Dozen series with Pedro Pascal characters. Her first one is about our favorite trash cuddle panda Dieter Bravo. It’s adorable. 🥰 Such fluff.

Nerdie, you actually read fluff? This is surprising.

What do ya’ll take me for? I told you, 80% smut. This is in the 20%. Geez. 🙄

I will say though, this next one, 100% smut, not watered down, will burn your throat and you’ll love it and want more. You’ll want it other places. 😘

Welp, we knew it was gonna end here eventually.

Yes! @morallyinept had me removing my socks and pants in an effort to cool down, it did not help. I will think of this version of Dieter Bravo when I’m out at night. Heck, maybe as I walk across the parking lot to get in my car after a shift. That honestly would be the perfect time… long story short, wild back alley sex with both Dieter and the reader being complete and utter lust filled humans. It is called, Back Alley Bang if you enjoy Pedro Pascal characters smut, it’s required reading or at least highly recommended.

Anything new for you this week Nerdie?

Session Two of my “Sard’ika Sessions” will be out on early Wednesday AM in EST. Session One and all sessions will be linked to the Sard’ika Sessions Masterlist. I’m currently writing sessions 3 and 4 from my notebook because I wrote them down. Wild what you think of between the hours of 12 mid and 4am.

I finally started writing for our Pickled Peña prompt! I might even have it in on time. If you’d like to join in, see all the details here. I’m on the fence about smut, odd I know. 🤨

I also started a Benny Miller fic (likely fluff with food) and a Christmas fic with Joel and Layla (on OFC I wrote three fics on a few months ago - I love them very much ❤️). Joel and Layla are on my Masterlist.

Anything outside of fanfiction Nerdie? Please say that’s not the only thing you do. 🙄

I have a job you know. I actually worked this weekend. I visited my mom while she had a cold earlier this week. She’s very into Tom Hiddleston. Not a bad choice, I too appreciate his accent and baritone voice. She enjoys his dancing. 🕺🏽 I’d watching Loki with her and finally got her to watch Andor - she liked it but called it “low budget Star Wars” because she didn’t know any of the actors. I swear she’s so goofy. I love her. She also said that Andor grew on her like The Mandalorian and she wants to see more. I may be able to get her on board with both Lunas eventually. 😝

I’ve been working on my Statistics class. It’s difficult but I’m pushing through. 😵

Finally watched two Garrett Hedland movies this week! Country Strong and Four Brothers. The first was bittersweet but I liked it. He did sing a lot which was wonderful. The second one I’ve seen multiple times with little brother (he loved the movie when we were younger.) Garrett looked so young! It was from 2005 though.

Well Nerdie, your week sounds full. Good luck!

Have a great week everyone!

I jammed to while some music while looking at a picture of Gabriel Luna that @musings-of-a-rose sent me because she knows me well and is always willing to share: 😍

One of the songs was:

Stay safe and feel better to all those who are feeling under the weather,

Love Nerdie ❤️

I got distracted and wrote the Pibbin anyway

Like Robin I also don't know how to roll a joint so this might suck but the concepts cute enough to post.

“Where’d ya learn to roll a joint?” Pickles asks, his face pulled into a grimace as the sight before him might actually be hurting him. Robin scowls at her hands as she spills more ground flower onto the drummer’s sheets. 

“I told you I didn’t fucking know how.” She snaps before scooping the ground weed and mangled rolling paper into her hands and drops it into the trash he keeps by his bed. 

“Fuckin wasteful, Robbi.” He jokingly scolds her. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m not being a good teacher, am I?” His grin grows as green eyes meet black, the blonde’s brows furrowed as she glares at him. He laughs, which is dangerous but he can’t exactly help it. Robin’s cute when she’s all worked up. Which can be distracting given how often she’s pissed. 

“No, dood, you ain’t.” She mocks as she crosses her arms over her chest. He snickers at the overemphasized ‘dude’. He can’t pick which sounds worse. Robin’s genuinely awful midwestern accent attempt or the manager just saying anything so casual. “Fuck this- liqour’s quicker.” Robin hops off the bed, Pickles notices how little the mattress moves at the loss of weight. He thought he was fucking tiny. Robin sorts through a mess of various bottles, varying from open to empty. She rejoins him after finding a bottle of Jameson and takes a long swig.  

“Who raised you?” He snorts as she goes for another drink, flipping him off as she does. To her credit she does offer him the bottle after. “Not even a please.” 

“Oh fuck off, Pickles.” She fires back, her expression doesn’t match her sharp tone. He takes a long drink himself before placing the bottle on the ground next to the bed. He crawls towards his headboard where Robin had placed herself. She presses her back to it as he reaches over her to the messy nightstand, grabbing all they’d been using in Robin’s failed attempts. She rolls her eyes with a groan as he looks at her expectantly. “Seriously? I haven’t embarrassed myself enough?” 

“Nope.” He grins. She tosses another dirty look his way but ultimately sits up straight and nods for him to continue. “Just watch okay? I think yer just gettin yer head.” He adds as he begins with grinding up more bud.

“I’m always in my head.” She mutters. He steals a glance at her face, her eyes fixed on his hands. He doesn’t look long, actively needing to focus on going slow. It was harder than he thought but he supposed it made sense given this sort of thing was second nature to him after all the years. Robin makes a noise of annoyance and he pauses. 

“Too fast?” 

“No just- I got distracted.” She admits. He raises a pierced brow and she buckles with a sigh. “Your hands.” 

“What about them?” He asks, glancing down confused. They weren’t the prettiest, he wouldn’t deny that, but what’s so distracting about hands? Robin reaches forward, as though she’d heard his question, and removes everything from his hands before taking his wrists. 

“I don’t know.” She admits, confusing him even more. “I just think they’re nice.” He feels blood rush to his cheeks embarrassingly fast. 

“They’re a little fucked, don’t ya think?” He says, clearing his throat. Multiple fingers wrapped, some in bandaids that had fucking hello kitty on them (Thanks Toki.), some wrapped in tape he could find. Not necessarily the smartest move but it got him back behind the set faster when a blister burst. His palms had the few odd scars from scrapes gotten in his youth, as well as being covered in freckles like the rest of him. “I ain’t getting it, Robbi.” 

She runs her thumb down the palm of his hand, tilting her head slightly to better look at them. 

“I just like them.” She says with a shrug before releasing them. He’s quiet for a minute as she turns her attention to reattempting a roll. He lifts his hands and tries to see what she had but his brain ends up just focusing on the path her thumb had run down his palm. He hadn’t expected someone like Robin to have calloused fingers. He snaps back when a joint is dropped into his palm. “It sucks.”

“It’s terrible.” He snorts. “How do you do this?” He says lifting the poor abused thing. 

“My teacher wasn’t paying attention.” Robin leans over and reclaims the bottle from the floor. “At least we both suck at something.” He hums, accepting the insult. She places the bottle between her crossed legs just before he takes her wrists. He can feel her confused eyes on him but he continues, flipping her hands palms upward. Her hands are littered in various scars, some faded, some looking recent, and calluses. He runs his thumb down her palm, mirroring her actions. The two are quiet for a bit, Pickles just holding her hands in his. 

“Yeah I don’t get it.”

Fighter #11 - Captain Falcon

- You know how some people name their weapons? Well, the gun strapped to his side is called Falcon. How original.

- Every time he smiles, everyone swears they can see his teeth sparkle.

- Captain Falcon is a big fan of Jurassic Park. He’s not too keen on Jurassic World, though. He feels that it just doesn’t have the same coolness as the older movies.

- If he ever decided to quit racing (which would definitely never happen), Cap definitely has the potential to become a pro swimmer. He’s strong, has perfect form, and looks very elegant in the water.

- This dude totally wears a speedo to the pool, and it’s simultaneously the most cursed and most awe-inspiring thing the fighters have ever seen. The veterans are used to it by now, as they’ve been around him for a while, but the newer fighters wish they could get their eyes bleached. And then there’s Bayonetta, who seductively eyes him up and down the whole time. Whether she’s just teasing or she actually feels attracted to him, nobody knows.

- No matter how many times he’s ridden the Blue Falcon, Cap never gets tired of doing donuts with it.

- He will happily take the kids for joyrides, as long as they agree to keep their seatbelts on and take proper precautions. Safety is Cap's number one priority, especially when it comes to the younger fighters.

- Speaking of which, he is amazing with kids. He always knows exactly how to hype them up and put smiles on their faces.

- Whether he’s at a race or in the middle of a fight, Cap will definitely show off in front of the audience. It's not a traditional Captain Falcon event if he doesn't wink or salute at least once.

- If there’s a bug in the mansion, he’s usually the first one asked to remove it. Usually, he doesn’t mind, but if he has to deal with a moth, it becomes a big issue. For whatever reason, Cap hates moths. One time, Wendy asked him to take a moth out of her room and he reluctantly agreed. Cap hilariously tried to guide the moth into a glass cup, trying not to show that he was scared of it. Unfortunately for him, the way his arms were hyper-extended while his head was tilted back as far as possible made it painfully obvious.

- Cap can’t handle spicy stuff very well and gets pretty bad stomach aches if he has anything with peppers in it. The hottest thing he can handle without having any problems is a dab of hot sauce—that’s it.

- For a guy who seems so lively and outgoing, he doesn’t really speak about his past. Only Mario knows the whole story, as he’s Cap’s most trusted friend. Bowser Jr. theorizes that he used to be a superhero that got kicked out of some super secret hero league.

- Falco originally thought that the Blue Falcon was a cool spaceship and wanted one just like it. When he found out it was actually meant for racing, that only made him want it even more.

- Cap is extremely helpful. Whether someone seeks good advice or just needs help opening the pickle jar, he’s the guy to turn to.

- The kids trust him a lot. He’s like a really cool father figure to them.

- He believes socks are criminally underrated and doesn’t understand why anyone would be sad about receiving them for a special occasion.

- He and Lucario often have intense sparring sessions. There’s no bad blood between them; they just enjoy giving it their all and they can trust each other with going full force. One time, their match got so heated that they crashed Peach, Daisy, and Zelda’s tea party, breaking the table and all of the cups with it. Enraged, the princesses forced them to clean up the mess.

- Cap will often join Ness and Snake when they watch baseball games. If his favorite team wins, he gets super excited (a little too excited, if you ask Snake).

- All of his racing trophies are put on display in his room.

- Due to his popularity, he frequently has to avoid paparazzi in his world. He doesn't mind it too much, but whenever he returns to Smash, he finds himself to be more relaxed because he knows they can’t follow him there.

- In the back of his mind, Cap worries that Blood Falcon is going to hunt him down at some point. He knows he can fight him off, but he doesn’t want anything bad to happen to any of the other fighters. If one of the kids got hurt because of him, he wouldn't be able to live with himself.

- When the Koopalings are bored, he'll play Duck Duck Goose with them. Hey, whatever distracts them from pulling pranks on the other fighters. As long as it keeps the peace, Cap doesn’t mind at all. In fact, he enjoys hanging out with the Koopalings and thinks they’re actually really sweet when they’re not being mischievous.

- The suit that he usually wears is actually the same one that he wore in his younger years; the color just faded from blue to indigo over time. Because it's his original suit, the one he wore during many exciting races in the past, it holds a lot of sentimental value. He hates the thought of getting rid of it and replacing it with a new one, but at the same time, he sort of misses the original blue color. To make him feel better, the fighters got him a new navy blue suit for his birthday, custom made to look just like the old one. That way, he could have the color he wanted without getting rid of his original suit. Cap was so touched by the heartfelt gesture that he genuinely started tearing up.

- He lets Wendy practice doing makeup on him, and he always looks like a pretty princess when she's done.

- Cap’s actually a really good artist. Lemmy asks him to draw stuff all the time.

- He tries his best to keep the kids away from Ridley, Ganondorf, Dark Samus, Sephiroth, Kazuya, King K. Rool, and Wolf because he thinks they’re all bad influences.

- However, Bowser, Meta Knight, and King Dedede are trusted individuals. He knows they aren't completely evil and believes it's not too late for them to turn their lives around (which, for the most part, they already have). Plus, Bowser is the Koopalings' father, and he's already proven that he's a good dad.

- Wario is a big 'if'. Sometimes, he seems trustworthy and fun to be around, but other times, he can be a big jerk. When Cap found out about the baseball card incident, he wouldn't let Wario talk to Ness for days. He always reminds the kids to be careful around Wario; if he asks for money, don't give it to him.

- Halloween is his favorite holiday, and he goes all out for it every year. Once, he went as the Grim Reaper and was nearly hit by three separate cars because it was pitch-black out and no one could see him.

- Flying-type Pokemon are his favorite, especially Talonflame. Talonflame is his buddy.

- He really wants to join the Mario Kart races but knows that the Blue Falcon would be too overpowered.

- If Doc needs a break, he’ll hold mitts for Little Mac.

- Ganondorf is his biggest rival. They can not be in the same room with each other for five seconds without making an unfriendly competition out of nothing. It’s really difficult for them to see eye-to-eye and they fight very frequently.

- Pit used to believe Cap was some sort of fiery falcon god that he’d never met before.

- In his younger years, before he got into racing, Cap considered joining a motorcycle gang. Hylia knows what that could've led to.

- His favorite song from the Smash soundtrack is Mute City [Wii U/3DS]. He, Ness, Lucas, and Villager always get into debates over which Mute City is the best one. Ness likes the original the most, Lucas argues that Melee is the best, and Villager prefers the Brawl version. However, no matter what anyone says, Cap will always stick with the Wii U/3DS version because it fills him with a rush of adrenaline that he can't get from any other song.

Rise of the Runelords: Goblin Politics

An-Nur “Before you do, Chief, I have but one request.”

An-Nur “You are wise AND just are you not?” GM: One of the goblin guards is already eagerly unlocking a nearby door. He sings to himself, “SHADOWMIST, THE GREAT FOUL BEAST, HE WILL CRUNCH YOUR BONES UP!” GM: Ripnugget pounds his chest. “I am both!” he cries.

An-Nur “Then allow me to open this door.” (Thinking the real pickle thieves are hiding behind it) GM: Ripnugget follows after An-Nur on the back of his gecko. He looks confused. “What are you doing Longshank?”

An-Nur “Just a theory,” she swings the door open wide. GM:There is a chorus of shrieks from inside the room. More goblins than An-Nur can count come tumbling out of straw beds, falling on top of each, clambering to grab weapons and shields, hissing at the light.

An-Nur “…bollocks.”

The goblins rush the Longshank all at once

An-Nur (as she goes down). “I guess I deserve this.” An-Nur is dragged down in a tide of biting, scratching, slavering goblins. She is tripped, then pinned, then grappled, then blinded. There are shrieks as the goblins take damaged from her bladed scarves, but eventually Ripnugget wades in and clonks An-Nur on the back of the head with his sword hilt

An-Nur “Arg! Dick!”

(After almost getting kicked to death by a starving horse, and a successful Lullaby/Sleep spell cast on said horse. The goblins are now convinced that she is a harpy. She offers to give them HER pickles from her trail rations if they will just leave her alone. The goblins drag An-Nur to the druid Gogmurt to set things straight.)

GM: Gogmurt studies An-Nur, then looks up at the chief. “Clearly not an ‘arpy.” The other goblins splutter in outrage

An-Nur whispers “Thank you.” GM: Chief Ripnugget continues waving his sword around. “What about the Longshank Pickles?” He jabs An-Nur in the back. “Show us the poisoned pickles!”

An-Nur “Only if you promise no more fighting. Comrades should talk, not hurt each other.” “First the pickles! Then peace!”

An-Nur sighs and draws out the tiny jar of razor thin trail ration size slices. it glints in the light. GM: “Sliiices!” whine the goblins in chorus “The savage Longshanks cut their pickles up like dogs!”

An-Nur “Oh? So you DON’T want my pickles?”

An-Nur “Is that what you’re saying? Well in that case, more for me.” she turns the lid, letting the air escape with hiss, but she doesn’t remove the lid GM: The goblins flinch. “Pickle snakes!” GM: Gogmurt sighs and takes the jar from her. He unscrews it, sniffs, snatches out a slice, then — to the crowd’s astonishment — pops one in his mouth. He chews it thoughtfully, while the whole tribe watches him. Then he swallows.

GM: The silence is broken when Ripnugget calls out. “Did you die?”

All Eyes Lead to the Truth | Home (4x02)

He hangs up the phone, a weary sigh rattling his bones. It’s practically ingrained, this comfort he’s nursed for decades, this habitual safety he’s become so accustomed to. As the contents of Paster’s phone call linger in his ears, he can feel it: that security slipping through his grasp like silt through soil.

“You’re not gonna believe this one, Sheriff.”

The deputy had been the only one on duty when the report of the dead infant came in, a chilling call from the panicked mother of one of the local boys. “Just out there playin’ ball,'' she'd said, “without a care in the world.” The way it’s supposed to be.

The way it should have stayed.

Sheriff Andy Taylor slides open his desk drawer and appraises its contents: a single, metal box he’s never had to open. Not like this. He hasn’t seen it in years, but he knows exactly what lies within: an old revolver, the one his father gave him back before he retired. A six-shooter, he used to call it; fit for an old Western.

For protection, his father had said, as he pressed the unfamiliar cold metal into Taylor’s warm hand. To keep your family safe.

To keep your home safe.

He shuts the drawer. He isn’t ready for this reality, not now. Not yet.

Later, after he’s watched the excavation, Agents Mulder and Scully arrive from Washington. Taylor explains he’s recruited them for their particular expertise on the matter, but the truth is, he just doesn’t want to face any of this: doesn’t want to scrutinize what it means for his town. Doesn’t want to look it straight in the eyes.

Doing so would mean the death of his home. 

After the agents’ examination, he places the tiny victim back into the refrigerator himself, this foul transgression, this abhorrent sin. Just sitting there next to the pickles and Spam. A memory stirs of his father: he used to eat Spam. He can still remember countless hot summer days when, as a child, he’d run down to the station to catch him on his lunch break. Dad and his Spam. Guess it runs in the family.

“Sheriff, I’m going to have to order DNA typing from the Bureau lab,” Agent Scully says as she removes her rubber gloves, surreptitiously looking around, presumably for some proper disposal bin, some protocol to follow. But there is no protocol for this. She settles on the office wastebasket.

“If you think it’s necessary,” he replies. Of course, it’s necessary. But he just wants all of this to be done and over with.

“I do,” she says firmly. “As much as you’d like to write this off as a simple burial, I’m afraid that isn’t the case.”

“That so?” he asks gently. 

“The evidence suggests the child was alive when it was buried. This will be ruled a homicide.”

Sheriff Taylor can feel his heart drop into his stomach, every word vertiginous. All of it only further demonstrates his worst fear: that everything around here will have to change.

Agent Mulder says nothing, merely stares at the closed door of the fridge as if it were Pandora’s Box; when opened, there would be no limit to the evil it let out into the world. 

“I know you’re not going to want to hear this, but I think the next step should be to question the Peacocks,” Agent Scully continues. He can see in her eyes that she is convinced they are involved; she’s seen it all before, he surmises. She’s seen things he doesn’t even want to imagine.

Taylor takes a deep breath and nods. What’s right is right. He’s been looking at this case with emotion, not pragmatism. Dad would have said the same, if he’d ever had to deal with something like this.

“I can take you out there,” Barney pipes up. He, perhaps unconsciously, places his hand on his weapon. The action reeks of raw truth: everyone is, on some level, wary of the Peacocks, but particularly the young kids like Barney. They'd grown up fearful of the unknown, kept in the dark about the true nature of that family. Like modern-day Boo Radleys.

“That won’t be necessary,” Agent Scully says.

Agent Mulder still says nothing, his face drawn into a pensive, mournful expression, locked onto the fridge. 

“And you’re sure this isn’t some outsider?” Taylor has to try one more time. “A vagrant, maybe someone passing through?”

“No, I’m not sure, but we can’t know until we get some more information, Sheriff.” Agent Scully forces a smile. She’s indulging his willful ignorance, treating him with kid gloves. Part of him hates it, but his own behavior certainly hasn’t done anything to dispel the notion that he’s simply not cut out for this.

“Well all right,” he concedes. “You know where to find me.” The agents depart, taking with them the last vestige of innocence.

Later that evening, before bed, Sheriff Taylor sits on his porch, in the quiet calm of his abode, watching the stars. The light flips on and Barbara pokes her head out.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Taking one good last look around before it all changes,” he says. He hopes she can’t hear the hitch in his throat.

“Come to bed honey,” she says. “It will still be here in the morning.” Her gentle voice feels safe. It feels like home. 

They go back inside, the faint songs of crickets subsiding but still audible through the open windows of the house. As his wife begins to ascend the stairs, he glances towards his study, towards the desk, towards the place where he knows that gun lives.

For protection. To keep your family safe.

His family is safe. They will be. They have to be. 

All of us, he thinks, as Barbara’s hand moves protectively across her stomach.

He doesn’t get the gun. 

Read the rest of All Eyes Lead to the Truth on Archive of Our Own!

@admiralty-xfd

I have a pet octopus named Blinky. Am I fooling myself when I think she is looking at me in the same way I look at her?

A neurosurgeon named Henry Marsh was once operating on a patient’s brain. He looked down a microscope and through a hole in the person’s skull. The patient was conscious and talked to his surgeon because the operation was conducted under local anesthetic. This is often the case for fiddlier brain surgeries. Patients are asked to speak or even play a musical instrument so damage or improvement to these functions during the surgery is easily seen. The patient was watching what Marsh saw via a small television. The surgeon moved one of his instruments to point at a patch of brain on the patient’s left hemisphere. Marsh said, “This is the part of your brain which is talking to me at the moment.” The patient fell silent as he looked at his own brain. Finally, from the other side of the ether screen the surgeon heard the patient say, “It’s crazy.”

The question of what consciousness is like poses all the difficulties of describing the deeply familiar. It has this in common with the taste of milk. What is the best way into this vast topic? If you believe the Universe is a circle whose center is the mind of its percipient then we can safely start anywhere and may as well begin with hands.

The signs one can make with the fingers are quite interesting. These gestures, like many authorless things in the commons of expression, have a buoyancy in them. This carries them away from the moment of their use, up into the symbolic. In this way the peace sign, the middle finger or the thumbs up remain comprehensible even if the hands bearing them are removed from the anti-war protest, the argument, or the moment of encouragement.

It was exactly this buoyancy that led the 10th century citizens of Pistoia in Northern Italy to carve two disembodied marble hands, each giving the fig. This is a very old gesture of insolence that represents the female genitals, where the thumb plays the part of clitoris (make a fist and slip your thumb between the index and middle fingers.) The marble hands were raised to the top of the tallest tower at Carmignano castle and aimed at Florence (the hereditary enemy). These hands remained the symbol of Pistoia’s independence for hundreds of years after. When Florence eventually conquered Pistoia in 1228 the first term of their peace was the tower’s demolition.

But even in this example—where a gesture has been so abstracted from particular hands on a particular person as to be severed, set in stone and elevated to something like a political identity—there is one aspect that can’t rise above and out of the moment: the pointing. The offensive hands were pointed at Florence. In doing this the entire city of Pistoia formed itself into a single person whose pair of hands expressed that civic person’s focused indignation.

The fig, like the finger, the thumbs up or the peace sign, can become an entity unto itself. The peace sign can do its work indifferently and doesn’t care if it’s in a text message, on John Lennon’s arm at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, or produced ironically by soldiers in a candid photo. In their indifference these gestures have a great deal in common with words. Strings of words can express intense betrayal or commitment, the feeling of hope or its escape through our fingers, the way we want the check split. But words themselves, string withdrawn, are so indifferent to us and the moments of our lives that when it comes to assembling definitive lists we find their initial letter the most appropriate way of sorting them.

But pointing is different. You can imagine a pickled lexicon of hands, hands severed in the moment of relating optimism or indignation—hands preserved in salt, to be dusted off when we next needed to express those feelings. Obviously this is more Genghis Khan than Noah Webster, but imagine the store room where these hands are kept. The thumbs up now seems ghoulish, the peace sign bitterly ironic and the middle finger entirely appropriate. These gestures are indifferent to their location and readily appear to mean something in any context. But what does the pointing hand express? What is a pointing hand when we cut the invisible nerve connecting the tip of its index finger to a desired object? The image of 9/11 that most haunts me was taken by the photojournalist Todd Maisel. It is of a severed hand he found in the street, pointing at him as it lay next to a single segment of Hershey bar. Like an empty theater, there is something mysterious about a hand that points to nothing.

Pointing, like every gesture, is an instantaneous sculpture the mind makes of its present state. This is necessary because each person’s mind is secluded by an absolute privacy. Our minds, such as we ourselves know them, can only be Morsed out to others through representations like gestures, kisses, silence, and speech. The temptation to examine the physical analogies the mind makes of itself in order to see what can never be seen of a person—their mind as they experience it—has proven irresistible.

A German psychologist called Franz Brentano seized on this in the 1870’s. He proposed that the essential difference between a mind and everything other kind of thing in the Universe was that minds could point. This has come to be called intentionality. Brentano put it like this:

Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not do so in the same way. In presentation, something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. This [...] is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.

In other words, the contents of a mind are woven so tightly into the activity of a mind as to make it extremely difficult to talk about one without the other. Attempting to clip away one’s loving and the person to whom it refers—hoping to leave visible the intentionality that mediated the connection—would produce something approximately as grotesque, wistful, and mysteriously empty as the severed hand that points at nothing. Saying the mind points and calling this a characteristic activity of all minds is one thing, but the analogy yields a strange and frightening result when it is forced to describe a mind bleached of its contents. That is, when it is forced to describe consciousness itself.

You might say—very reasonably—that a mind never exists separate of the content of which it is conscious. If we excuse the edge cases of Buddhist nirvana and cogito ergo sum then this is probably true. Unfortunately, it is the quest for exactly this strange and frightening result that has driven the biological study of consciousness. You can get an idea of where things have been heading by looking at a recent study of cuttlefish camouflage.

Biologists at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt realized something about the way these animals disguise themselves. It seemed to open a window into the neural pathways whereby the cuttlefish convert what they see into what best prevents them from being seen. Cuttlefish camouflage, along with that of octopuses, is by a very long way the most sophisticated found anywhere in the animal kingdom. Cuttlefish skin contains several million sacs of pigment, each of which can be individually stretched or contracted by muscle cells. This display organ is under the direct control of the brain and can completely alter the animal’s appearance in only a few tenths of a second. The crude analogy for us would be voluntary control of gooseflesh, whereby we could spell out words in any font we liked or for that matter depict memories by selectively erecting the hairs on our body.

Now, if you have a black box like the cuttlefish brain, whose secrets and techniques you would badly like to understand, there is an obvious strategy: control what the cuttlefish sees and carefully watch its reaction. If the unknown means by which the cuttlefish decides on a camouflage can be trapped between something you cause and an effect you record, it ought to be possible to infer a great deal about how its brain works.

The Frankfurt researchers accomplished this man-in-the-middle technique essentially by forcing cuttlefish to swim across a Kindle that displayed known patterns while recording from above the camouflage decisions these provoked. Their setup allowed each sac (also called a chromatophore) to be numbered and its dilations or contractions tracked individually over time. The research is still in an early phase but the goal is very clear: extract the method by which the cuttlefish brain has solved the problem of recognizing its environment and mimicking it.

Cuttlefish are able to camouflage themselves virtually from the moment they hatch. This implies two facts. First, that the method is in-born and genetically heritable and second, that because the method is genetically encoded it must be a relatively simple solution. This simplicity is tantalizing. It requires powerful computers, our most advanced artificial intelligences and hundreds of thousands of attempts even to begin to reproduce what an animal the size of a hen’s egg can do in a tenth of a second. All the operations that go into producing an effective camouflage—analyzing textures, finding edges, and displaying the average of what surrounds you—turn out to be extremely difficult problems for us. Problems to which our only answer at present is brute, computational force.

Whether or not this research will harvest a more efficient solution from the brains of cuttlefish remains to be seen, but the principle is as old as modern science: a method must be extracted from the place in which it operates, extracted and put to work for the relief of man’s estate. That's been the stated purpose of science since Francis Bacon first proposed the formulation in 1605.

Sadly, it is not difficult to say which men and whose estate will benefit from this relief.

Economic forces are aligning that give this research and others like it a depressing and sinister aura. Right now the second most profitable division of IBM is its “cognitive solutions unit.” This is a consultancy that helps other businesses identify inefficiencies (i.e., humans) that can be eliminated by automation. Something like 40% of all jobs presently occupied by people are expected to disappear in the next 15 years as machine learning becomes more adept at shuffling paperwork. Businesses that employ thousands of people in administrative departments are expecting automation to reduce these white collar salary burdens (i.e., humans) to 1% of their present level.

The software agents that will make possible these efficiencies of automation are not intelligent in any sense of the word; each agent will be a method for performing an arbitrary task that becomes less clumsy the more iterations of the task it performs. The millions of iterations these programs must run to achieve anything like proficiency at their assigned task makes these methods immensely cumbersome and very difficult to debug when they go wrong. Anyone who has spent time trying to make a machine learning agent work as well as the person whose capacities it is meant to imitate will instantly perceive the benefit of research that cops a solution from biology, where the millions of optimizing iterations have already taken place via natural selection.

Even with the primitive methods we now possess there will be only one historical analogy for this revolution in efficiency and that is the first Industrial Revolution. In the early 19th century the mechanization of cotton cloth production was so fabulously efficient, compared to traditional methods, that the profit margins of newly industrialized weavers were not 10% or even 20% per year but something closer to 10,000%. Needless to say, when efficiencies and profit assume these revolutionary magnitudes human misery follows it like a shadow. Given the economic forces that presently rule the world our complete failure to understand consciousness either analogically or literally is probably more of a blessing than a hindrance to humanity’s estate.

These economic forces require people for its extension and development, but they are no more essentially human than tapeworms are food. This state of affairs—beholdenness to parasitic forces that determine our history and perhaps large parts of our selves—makes the immunity of consciousness to description all the more painful, and our facilitation of these economic forces all the more complicit. Surely, we think, if we could reach up and grasp the awareness that can never be seen, because it is the seat of seeing, the loneliness that breeds so readily within it would not be as painful. The loneliness that is the mysterious accelerant of profit in a society of atomized consumers.

The privacy of minds from each other, and the loneliness it engenders, is one of the great immaterial conditions of human life. Most people are compulsively expressive in reaction against it. The human mind is almost defined by its expressiveness, and by its incredible surplus of this ability compared to the tasks survival demands. So much so that there is a serious account of language as an evolutionary force in itself. On this interpretation, humanity has become steadily less aggressive over time because language allows less belligerent humans to conspire the premeditated murder of the most tyrannical. Over thousands of generations, it is thought, language allowed evolution to select for highly cooperative and verbal, if ultimately cold-blooded, individuals.

Language often seems to beget its own surplus. I think of John Milton—blind, irritable and old—bleating, “I want to be milked!” as one of his daughters sharpened a quill to take the morning’s poetry dictation. Or even better, the nameless master of Englishing one’s feelings who first said of a talkative person, “I couldn’t get a word in edge-wise.” This phrase is at least two hundred years old. Its metaphor of turning a word to present the thin edge to a conversation is thoroughly dead. Nobody who uses it expects to be appreciated as witty. Yet we still recognize the frustrated state of mind that coined the phrase, and this keeps the dead metaphor in currency.

Recognition is an even better example of the mind’s reaction against its own privacy. Perhaps even more than they are made to speak our minds seem built to recognize one another. This power to recognize entities like ourselves runs through seeing a face in something like (ツ), past our revulsion at corpses and too-realistic robots, all the way to one of the most remarkable recognitions of mind it is possible to have.

A marine biologist called Jean Boal studies cephalopods at a university in Pennsylvania. She told a story to an Australian philosopher named Peter Godfrey-Smith, who relates it in his book Other Minds,

Octopuses love to eat crabs, but in the lab they are often fed on thawed-out frozen shrimp or squid. It takes octopuses a while to get used to these second-rate foods, but eventually they do. One day Boal was walking down a row of tanks, feeding each octopus a piece of thawed squid as she passed. On reaching the end of the row, she walked back the way she’d come. The octopus in the first tank, though, seemed to be waiting for her. It had not eaten its squid, but instead was holding it conspicuously. As Boal stood there, the octopus made its way slowly across the tank toward the outflow pipe, watching her all the way. When it reached the outflow pipe, still watching her, it dumped the scrap of squid down the drain.

The story is striking not because of how human (and even petty) the octopus seems but because of how anyone hearing it feels helpless not to recognize a mind at work.

Obviously this anecdote is not scientific research, nor objective proof of a mind—or even of intelligence. The inherent privacy of minds makes their rigorous study a frustrating game of inference, and this only becomes truer the less related we are to the animal under investigation. Even now, though we can look into the human brain with the full battery of medical imaging technology, there is no objective difference between a mind that is dreaming and one that isn’t. Scientists who study dreams have used the same method for decades to determine if one is taking place: they wake their subject up and ask if they were dreaming. In rather the same way intelligence is flexible and therefore difficult to define, minds are private and so, hard to prove.

It is very strange that octopuses, cuttlefish and one or two types of squid are even suspected by scientists—or felt by us—to have anything like a mind. Our last common ancestor with our closest living relative (the chimpanzee) lived around six million years ago. This proximity goes a long way to explaining the similarity of chimps to ourselves. We both use tools, lead highly social lives and have extraordinarily long infancies during which our large brains slowly mature. There is no direct evidence our common ancestor shared these properties but given the fact that humans and chimps both inherited these sophisticated traits, it seems very likely that it did.

The last common ancestor of humans and cephalopods lived 600,000,000 years ago. It is quite certain this ancestor shared very few traits either with ourselves or with cephalopods. This animal was probably a flattened worm, only a few millimeters long and very nearly brainless. Humans and cephalopods inherited virtually nothing from this ancestor more sophisticated than basic molecular biology (very basic: cephalopod blood is blue and relies on copper to bind oxygen rather than the iron in our hemoglobin.)

Despite this, each has evolved a complex brain and an intelligence that, in the case of octopuses, is so devious as to pose real difficulty to their successful captivity by planet Earth’s dominant species. Godfrey-Smith writes,

Captive octopuses often try to escape, and when they do, they seem unerringly able to pick the one moment you aren’t watching them. If you have an octopus in a bucket of water, for example, it will often look content enough in there, but if your attention strays for a second, when you look back there will be an octopus quietly crawling across the floor.

If your soft body offers a meal that’s nearly pure protein it’s very advantageous to know when you’re being watched. However, octopuses are often stunningly incautious around humans. Aristotle noted their blitheness, saying they “will approach a man’s hand if it is lowered in the water.” This is not an exaggeration, especially if a wild octopus is used to your presence. Godfrey-Smith describes a dive in Australia when “an octopus grabbed [a researcher’s] hand and walked off with him in tow. [The researcher] followed, as if he were being led across the sea floor by a very small eight-legged child. The tour went on for ten minutes, and ended at the octopus’s den.”

Lab research has confirmed that the giant Pacific octopus can recognize individual humans by sight, even when the octopuses had never seen these humans dressed in other than identical uniforms. Something similar seems to be true of other cephalopods. A Canadian researcher described “one cuttlefish who reliably squirted streams of water at all new visitors to [her] lab, and not at people who were often around.” This remarkable talent for recognition can actually invalidate behavioral research, which depends on the assumption that the subject is reacting to the experiment you’ve designed and not to the person conducting it. Perhaps tellingly, the Frankfurt camouflage investigators do not mention controlling for this recognition.

Many researchers of cephalopods report a sense of presence with these animals; and these are people for whom it can be quite inconvenient to have very strong, subjective impressions of experimental subjects. Nevertheless, some are moved to assign remarkable degrees of awareness. Godfrey-Smith quotes one researcher as saying,

When you work with fish, they have no idea they are in a tank, somewhere unnatural. With octopuses it is totally different. They know that they are inside this special place, and you are outside it. All their behaviors are affected by their awareness of captivity.

To be the subject of attentive perception is a very particular feeling. For humans, this kind of attention—whether it emanates from a pet dog, your mother, or a cop—is very difficult to distinguish from the feeling of being recognized as more than a physical phenomenon: recognized as the kind of thing that deserves, respectively, the extraordinarily subjective attentions of loyalty, love, or suspicion. And a reasonable working definition of a mind is that it is the kind of thing which merits, and can appreciate, attentions like these.

Hence, it becomes harmful and unilluminating to imagine a mind by itself—let alone to search after an isolable method by which the solitary mind generates awareness. Seen in this way, minds exist to recognize one another and minds exist through these recognitions. That is, the thing that makes a mind more interesting than any other feature of the brain is that its center of gravity does not lie in the skull. 

Almost everyone understands this on an intuitive level. That’s why, for example, the lonely and selfish agent on which most economic models of human action depend requires several years of high-level academic conditioning to take seriously. These economic agents, like their counterparts in machine learning experiments, have a peculiar and obvious mindlessness. Each of these models of mental activity is not only empty of meaning but haunted by a ghost of intention. This is the same ghost and the same uncanniness present in the severed hand that points at nothing.

This bears repeating. Our species’ keenest minds created a model of human activity to describe our behavior and this model is a less convincing portrayal of mental life than the one we cannot help but see in this planet’s smartest mollusk. Think of the cosmic rebuke to our own powers of self-awareness this implies. 

If I try to imagine my own thoughts while being led, hand in tentacle, on a leisurely tour of the seabed around an octopus’ home those thoughts would be from a poem. 350 years ago a poet called Andrew Marvell came up with a famous analogy about the nature of minds. He said the mind was “that ocean where each kind / does straight its own resemblance find.”

Whether cephalopods have a mind in this or any other sense is probably something that must be passed over in silence. However, the fact that certain of them are able to provoke the feeling of recognition on anything like our own terms is an extremely important result. The last time we had anything neurological in common with these animals was more than half a billion years ago, when each of us was a worm and quite unprepared to recognize anything. There is no shared inheritance of mind, as we have with fellow primates, priming us for this recognition. Yet in a few cephalopods Nature has conspired to produce something that grips with the special grasp one mind has for another.

If it is true that you can’t mow the lawn with a blade of grass, and the human mind truly is beyond its own comprehension, moments of recognition like these may be as close as we ever get to ourselves.

Kloktober Day 20 - Original character or self-insert

Abigail gets to know her regular bartender.

she’s not a self-insert, she’s nothing like me—she doesn’t have heterochromia.

anyway, at first this was just gna be shameless mtl lesbian smut but then i figured most ppl wouldn’t want to read about an oc they’ve never heard of fucking abigail. so i made it two chapters—first chapter is totally tame, just serves to have them meet, second chapter isn’t necessary to read at all it’s just sexy times. it’s oc/self insert day i’m gonna be as cringe as i want.

and under the cut i put some more character details and a shipping chart, if you’re interested. <3

Devon Amalgamedle

any/all pronouns, no preference

white, short red hair shaved at the sides, brown eyes; fairly muscled frame, has gotten top surgery

black and red floral sleeve tattoos on both arms; facebones tattoo, not visible unless they WANT you to see it

eyebrow piercing on left eyebrow, snakebite piercings (studs), several ear piercings, tongue piercing

black t-shirt tucked into dark jeans, belt, chain wallet, black boots—wears a battle vest at shows that is so covered in patches that he just safety pins on so that he can remove them or mix them up when he feels like

bartender at the Mastodon

metalhead, closet dethklok superfan—at one point considered becoming a klokateer but never followed through, though she does show up during the climax of aotd (has a horizontal scar on their left cheek from that)

music autism but can’t play a single instrument or sing to save their life

tries hard enough to be cool and casual that they pass as exactly that, until meeting someone from the industry (happens a LOT at the Mastodon, still hasn’t gotten used to it)

has served dethklok multiple times—would pretend he doesn’t know/care who they are while working, but then would run in the back and scream after they left

eavesdrops on conversations between musical professionals, sometimes sends anonymous tips to gossip magazines/the Dethklok Minute—was the one to tell the press Pickles doesn’t drink as much as he lets on, for example

eventually develops a serious case of “don’t meet your idols” syndrome with dethklok in particular. will absolutely still listen to all their music and go to all their shows and buy all their merch still though.

the below shipping meme goes into their character a bit more, including ideas of how their relationship with abigail might go. we obviously know very little about abigail, and i am . NOT shy about taking some creative liberties with her (my day 5 fic lmfao—which is canon in this universe btw). that extends to this. i also used the same picrew maker to make an abigail in casual clothes and so that they match <3

i feel like their relationship is probably pretty boring compared to others' oc relationships (i love all the deranged shit y'all write w ur ocs btw <3 <3 <3), but i kinda did that intentionally, to an extent. they don't get together until during aotd, so i really just want abigail to have a good easy time after everything she's been through. i could also definitely be down to writing some devon stuff that would happen during canon or just interactions between them and dethklok in general.

aahhhh it's all just the idea of, if people are interested in this character, i'll make more stuff. i'm very happy to, but i also know they might not be interesting to people, and as true as it is that i write for myself before anyone else, it's hard to want to write stuff that i know people don't care about. so 🤷🏻 que será, será.

Etherian Post-War Safety-Course for Younglings

(or Kindergarten Kaboom!)  

She-Ra fanfiction Rated G Comedy Entrapta, Hordak, Catra, Pickles the Clone 

Inspired by conversations had with @jidblogger

Summary: In the aftermath of the wars with the Horde, both cosmic and domestic, many dangerous weapons were left behind all over the planet.  Clean-up work will take a long time and discarded weapons will pose a danger to civilians for years to come.  

As part of their community service, former members of the Horde have been assigned to go to public schools to inform children as to what weapons look like and to avoid touching them if they find them.  Entrapta, Catra, Hordak and a clone who has volunteered to assist them have been assigned to speak at a kindergarten.  It goes...um...well?  (A bit removed from the real-world version of this as I wanted to keep a lighthearted spirit.  In our world, landmines from ancient wars are still a problem and they maim and kill in many parts of the world - very often children out playing.  In my story, since it is in response to a comedy-vein ask, I firmly went with the ‘80s cartoon style for a reboot-series story of “The Horde uses stun-weapons / the Horde doesn’t use real bullets, etc.” because I really didn’t want to show lack of respect for a serious real world problem).  I tried to keep this funny with character-writing / character-focus.  

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

Etherian Post-War Safety-Course for Younglings (or Kindergarten-Kaboom!) “Class!  Class! Settle!”   The Afternoon Kindergarten at Mystacor Elementary  School was rambunctious after their nap and Graham crackers.  Several of them were weaving simple sparkle-spells and making misshapen animals and funny monsters out of light, the stuff of crayon-drawings done with magic.  One little boy started levitating the paperweight off of Ms. Astral’s desk.  She closed her eyes, put her fingers to her forehead briefly and then calmly grabbed it from the air and put it back.  She’d been told that she’d taken up an especially difficult assignment and would have had an easier time if she’d chosen to teach in almost any other Etherian kingdom.  Mystacor was, of course, the home of sorcerers’ children.   Ms. Astral stood before the class and raised her voice for attention.  She held her hands cupped and crossed out before her.  “Class?  Classs! We are having some special guests to speak with us today!  They are here as part of the Horde Rehabilitation Program and are going to speak to you about safety.  Won’t that be exciting?”   There were a few groans.  A few faces brightened at the mention of the Horde, a fascination with former enemies. There were some shocked gasps.  A few of the more anxious kids fidgeted and looked afraid.   Ms. Astral jumped back as she opened the classroom door to let her class’ guests inside. She taught a diverse classroom and encouraged respect for all manner of people, but she could not help but be intimidated by the first entrant.  Like many Etherians, she was taking some time getting used to the clones.  They had sharp claws, sharp teeth, unnerving eyes without visible pupils and, most of all; they were big – just big.  This one blinked - those weird eyes wide, green and glowing.  “Um… is this Ms. Astral’s kindergarten?” he asked.   “Y-yes,” Ms. Astral answered him.   Tall, predatory- a super-soldier with just the slightest hint of machine-sounds as he moved… The young woman reminded herself that there were clones in Mystacor.  Some of her students’ families had even adopted a few.  She, herself, had little contact.  Did this one have to wear the old uniform? She noted that the Horde-wings sigil had been crossed out with a large red diagonal line, so she knew she was not dealing with a Prime-loyalist.  Maybe this one was one of those who were not yet comfortable with Etherian clothing.   He bowed.  “I am here to assist my most esteemed brother,” (he said “esteemed” with an emphasis on the last syllable) “The Promised Defiant!  The First of the Named!  The Legendary-” “Pickles, stop.” The clone awkwardly straightened up and entered the classroom in full at being broken out of his spell by the voice behind him.  Ms. Astral’s eyes widened.  She stared up at the figure that was looming before her.  Steel-toed boots, a black dress (no sigil), heavily-armored arms, a collar with a gently glowing purple crystal in its center, a white face, red eyes lined in black and Stygian blue hair… Completing the look was a scowl that could sour milk.   “L-lord Hordak?” He closed his eyes and held up a hand. “Not ‘Lord’ any longer, just Hordak,” he said, “or, if you wish, ‘Atoner.”   “Hah! Way to be overdramatic!  Don’t mind him…he’s always so emo at these things!” Sashaying her way in was a young woman who led with her tail.  She spun around and casually looked at the claws of one of her hands.  “Anyway, let’s get this over with!  The sooner we get done with our mandated community service for the day, the sooner we can leave!”   “You shall have to excuse Catra,” Hordak apologized to the teacher.  “She does not take these things as seriously as she should.”   A whirlwind of purple suddenly burst into the classroom.   “Hey, kids!  Who’s ready for SCIENCE?!” “A princess?” one of the children cried.

“A princess is here!” a couple of others shouted.  

“It’s the pretty-hair one!” a little girl exclaimed.  “Hey, can we brush your hair?”   “Why do you even care about that?” another kid said, “She’s the one who builds ROBOTS!  Robots are soooo cool! Didja bring any robots?” “YES!” Entrapta loudly proclaimed, “You’re all going to meet my best friend, Emily, today! She’s outside, though, so it will be later!” “Ooh!” all of the kids gasped at once. “Lord Hordak!  Lord Hordak!” one doe-eyed boy asked, raising a chubby little hand toward the ceiling, “Did you bring your baby, too?” “My…baby?” Hordak snorted, going cockeyed. “Don’t you have a little blue-guy…” one girl resembling a horned-lizard stammered, “And he’s got wings and a tail and he looks kinda like my little brother, Dougie.”   “I left Imp in the care of trusted subordinates,” Hordak answered.  “Er…um…friends.  Friends.” “Anyway!” Ms. Astral announced, clapping her hands.  “Our speakers are here today to tell you about Horde-weapons and what to do if you see any old Horde-weapons lying around!” “Safety First!” Entrapta said with a bounce.  She lifted one tendril of her hair up in a finger to the oohs and ahs of the class.  Ms. Astral gratefully sat down at the corner of the classroom.  “Pickles!  Can you write on the chalkboard for me?” The white-clad clone delicately took a piece of chalk from the liner of the chalkboard and started writing in big letters: “Softy Farst: Harde We-pons.” “Oh, oh, you spell it like this,” Entrapta corrected him, erasing part of his lettering and showing him what characters to write.  She turned to the teacher and to the class.  “He’s still learning how to write Etherian-Standard.”   “Ah, okay, like this?” Pickles asked. For flourish, he wrote Hordish characters beneath the newly-scrawled “Safety First: Horde Weapons.” “And you want to become a teacher…” Catra scoffed. “Sister Entrapta says I have to start somewhere!” Pickles countered, “Which is why I am following your community-service as a teacher’s aide!  Glory be, the things I am learning!”   “None of us are perfect!” Entrapta chimed, “and he’s grasping our languages surprisingly well for having it just dropped on him!”   “Fair enough.  Shadow Weaver barely taught me anything.” Catra commented, “I had to learn from copying Adora.  At least the teacher doesn’t smell like booze.”   “I would never drink on duty!” Ms. Astral asserted indignantly.  

Catra sniffed.   “She’s using cat-senses!” Entrapta loud-whispered to the class.  “Fascinating!” “Nope, no wine,” Catra said.  “This place reeks of crayons and play-clay. Wow, you kids don’t know how lucky you have it!  All we Horde-cadets had to play when I was your age was scrap metal, dead rats and stun-grenades.” “Dead rats? Ewww!”

“Grenades?  Cool!”

“You can smell our crayons?  What does yellow smell like?”  

The kids were all talking at once.  

Hordak held up a finger and his ears were pinned to the sides.  His previous milk-souring scowl had officially turned into a glare that could scare said soured milk into instant hard cheese.  “How did you get into the grenades?” he demanded, “They were for battle-use only!  Using them for sport was well against protocol!”

“Search me!” Catra snarkily replied “Not my fault the higher officers weren’t securing the munitions sheds! Anyway, we all called them ‘boom-potaters’ and Adora, Lonnie and I would play hot-potato with them all the time!”  

“Oooh!” – All eyes were on Catra.   “And Adora and I would go up to our favorite spot to watch the moons set – it had a view of the entire Fright Zone and we’d just lob those suckers off of there and see how far we could throw them! It was a contest!  I once got one straight through the window of Shadow Weaver’s office and she never caught us!  And one time, we blew up a sewage pipe…”   Hordak was grinding his teeth.  “So THAT was the mysterious explosion that destroyed the plumbing system for a week! I had to make arrangements with the inspector and re-format the pipes MYSELF!  It took precious time away from our Fifth March on Thaymore and…”   “Yeah, yeah, I know, it was a total mistake!” Catra said with a dismissive wave.  “We had to sh…” she remembered her audience suddenly, “We had to make poo-poo and pee-pee in boxes and jars for a week.  It wasn’t fun and it was smelly.”   The classroom burst into an uproar of laughter. “And you see, class,” Entrapta chimed, “This is why you shouldn’t play with any grenades you find!  You could mess up an entire infrastructure system and have to go potty in a box for a week!  And I bet there were no baths, either!”   Catra wrinkled her nose.  “Yeah. We could all smell Hordak coming.”   “WHAT?”   “You already smell like machine-oil and blood.  I bet you don’t even notice what you smell like unwashed!”   “Did you not have an amniotic-fluid shower set up, Brother?” Pickles asked.   “I had to… make do… with local limitations,” Hordak grunted.  “And I bet the former Force Captain smelled of unwashed fur.”   “Wrong!”  Catra gave one of her arms a long lick.  She flicked her ear.  “Part-cat! We’re self-cleaning!”   “Moving on?”  Ms. Astral inquired.   “Oh, yes!” Entrapta said with a big grin. She pulled a small device from her hair. Ms. Astral went stark white. Several children ducked under their desks.  A few children remained seated and leaned over their desks looking forward. Entrapta held aloft, in one tendril of hair, a standard-issue Etherian Forces Horde Stun-Grenade.   “Oh, don’t worry!” she said.  “I deactivated it!” “Are you sure?” Catra asked.    “Yep!”  Entrapta slammed the grenade down on the teacher’s desk. Children screamed.  Ms. Astral jumped and shielded the children at the front. When the explosion didn’t’ happen, they all looked up cautiously to see Entrapta holding two halves of a grenade, showing the interior components.  

“See?” she said. “Every Etherian-Horde Grenade has a liquid-chamber inside!” She held up a tiny vial with a red liquid. “I took it out for the demonstration. See, nice and safe! Oops!”  

The vial slipped through the silky tendrils of her hair.  She swiftly caught it in one of her gloved hands.  “Oooh, good thing that didn’t happen!  If it had hit the floor and broke, everything would have gone kaboom! Which would have been AWESOME! And…bad…um…very bad.”   Ms. Astral did not drink on duty. However, at the moment, she wished for whiskey. Entrapta held the vial out for the children to see (as soon as they’d stopped ducking, letting their curiosity overcome them).  “It is an explosive compound.  Your Principal didn’t want me to explain the chemistry because they thought it was too advanced for you, but I just think she just doesn’t want you all to make it, which is ridiculous because I was making explosive-compounds when I was three and I turned out fine.”   “Perhaps I should take that while you show them the rest, Entrapta,” Hordak offered, gently taking the vial with a thumb and forefinger.  He placed it in a compartment on his hip-guard. “Okay, so take a look at the inside of the grenade!”  Entrapta said, holding out a half.  “So, the vial you saw fits into here, and the charge is here!  And when you pull the pin, this mechanism here strikes the vial, which causes a chain-reaction in the chemicals and makes a BIIIIIG stun-charge! Oh, and you should never, ever pull the pin with your teeth!  That’s a great way to make your head explode into sloppy spaghetti! KER-BOOM!”  

She was laughing maniacally. Some of the children hugged each other. Some hugged Ms. Astral. Others…started laughing manically. Hordak sighed and addressed the class. “The point of all this is not to touch them.  If you see a grenade when you are out…um…playing? Playing, was it?  With your little friends, you should report it to an adult for proper containment and disposal.”  

Pickles held up a finger. “Oh!  And if you see any white ones, definitely do not touch them!  They are the same model on the exterior, but they are Prime’s!  My most exalted Brother, Hordak worked primarily in the non-lethal phase of conquest! Weapons from the Fright Zone will still hurt you, but Prime’s will kill you!”  

He drew pictures of several robots and ships on the chalkboard very quickly.  They were extremely skilled, like blueprints – exacting, the kind of plans drawn by one who had them programmed into his brain.   “Prime,” he stated, “Had four phases of conquest when he found a planet inhabited by intelligent beings.  The first was Gospel – he would announce his presence and welcome everyone to enter peacefully into his Light.  If the entire population did not obey immediately, the second phase was Subjugation.  Etheria spent most of its time in this.”  The clone pented his hands gently, “This was non-lethal warfare, stun-beams and containment of towns.  We Brothers of Prime were authorized to use some force, but were not authorized to end lives, for all creatures great and small belonged to Prime. After that, there was True War – the lethal phase to gain control if the populace was stubborn, and the final phase, when Prime had given up bringing a hopeless world into the Light was Annihilation.”

Hordak flicked an ear. “Indeed, I spent most of my conquest of Etheria in the Subjugation-phase lacking direct orders from Prime.”  He looked down.  “People did… die by my hand, but I thought it prudent to gift as many resources – including the living – into Prime’s hand.”  

The children regarded him with some fear.  

Pickles smiled brightly, reaching over to pat Hordak on the shoulder.  “But we all know that Prime lied now!  And he cannot hurt any of us anymore because he is super-duper dead!  The once Reagent of the Seven Skies is the Regent of a Thosuand Worms! Deader than dead! He Without Existence!  The Lonesome Wanderer of Pure Oblivion - !”     “But his weapons can hurt you!”  Entrapta fielded.  “This is a land mine!”   Ms. Astral stood and shielded her children again.   Catra laughed.  “Oh, that’s a model.  Adora took away all the real ones she tried to bring in!”   “Oh, no, this one is real!  I smuggled it in!”  

 Catra’s eyes went wide. “Entrapta!”  

 “They have to know what a real one looks like, riiiight?’  She set it on the floor.  “Prime’s robots buried a bunch of these in the ground and covered them with grass and stuff.  And if you step on them, you go kaboom!”  

She STOMPED on the mine.

The entire class screamed.   “I disabled it!” she exclaimed.  She held it up in her hair, showing that it was a hollow shell.   Catra’s nose wrinkled.  “I smell pee,” she said.  

“Honestly,” Hordak said smoothly, “I am surprised that we have, thus far, avoided explosions.”   “Alright class, calm down…uh…heheh...uh...heh?” the teacher stammered.  “Are there any other things that the children should watch out for?”  

 “Oh, very much yes!’ Entrapta exclaimed.  “All robots are to be reported to the Dryl offices!  That’s my domain!”  

“And you should never repurpose tanks for parties, like those idiots in Elberon did,” Catra added, flicking her tail. “They stuffed the canon full of confetti.  I’m surprised they didn’t blow themselves up!”  

Hordak drew a small staff from a carrying case.  “This,” he said, “is a stun-baton.  They were standard-issue for my troops.  They were also standard issue in the Galactic Horde.”  He turned to the class, holding it aloft.  “If you find any, please do not play with them.  Entrapta, will you demonstrate?”  

“Okie dokie!”  

The teacher yelped as Entrapta started lifting up her top.  

“No! No! No! No! You can’t get naked in front of CHILDREN!”  

“Naked? Huh?’  Entrapta said, smoothly turning around.  She kept her shirt partially pulled up, showing her back to the class, her front firmly covered.  “Pish! Don’t get in a tizzy, I’m just showing off my back! See this scar, kids?  I got it from a stun baton!”  

Catra was cringing.  Her ears were back, her head was down, she had one hand wrapped around an arm and her tail tightly coiled around one leg.  

Entrapta pulled down her shirt.  “Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt anymore.  Oh! Oh!  And this is exactly how the baton disrupts the humanoid nervous system!”  

She was scribbling on the chalkboard with multiple chalk-pieces in tendrils of her hair.  Soon, there was a human body, a brain, a spinal cord and various branching nerves.  She was drawing arrows representing flow.  “Oh, the electrons go in here, and they seize up the brain and you wake up with a BIIIIIG headache, believe me!”  

Catra was still looking down.  Hordak subtly growled and gave her a sideways look.  He smoothly pressed a switch on the stun baton, bringing a web of crackling electricity to life.   “IT’S LIVE?!” Ms. Astral screamed.   “Of course it is.  My cadets trained with these often and learned to build up a resistance.  They do not hurt much when on their lowest setting.”   “I got a high dose!” Entrapta chimed.   “Fortunately, we do have a lab-animal to demonstrate the effect on,” Hordak rumbled.   “Oh, no!” Catra said, backing up, holding up her hands.  “You aren’t using that on me!” Hordak gave her a wicked smile.  “You do want to educate the children, do you not?’ Before Catra could make a move of self-defense, Entrapta beamed and withdrew a stuffed animal from under the desk. “Tada!” she said, presenting a pink fuzzy plush creature that resembled a koala crossed with an owl with big, floppy ears.   Hordak strode over to it and plunged the active stun baton down on its head.  Smoke rose from it and it burst into flames.   The sprinkler-system activated.  The children screamed and laughed.   “Alright, children!  Single file!” Ms. Astral instructed, making the evacuation calm. Entrapta was laughing.  “Time for the outdoor demonstration!” she chimed. “Who’s ready to see some ROBOTS?!” “There…there’s MORE?” the exhausted and exasperated teacher quailed.   “MUUUUCH MORE!’ Entrapta said, leaning up on her hair and coming close to Ms. Astral’s face.   Hordak and Pickles walked straight and stiff. Catra sighed.  Entrapta expanded her hair and shepherded many excited children out to the playground outside the classroom.  “Emily!” she exclaimed as the robot beeped and trundled her way.   Children squealed and surrounded her. Emily tucked in her legs and rolled. “She’s a giant ball!” some kid laughed. She rolled to a stop and Entrapta patted her on her top.  “Emily was a standard Horde search and destroy drone!” she explained.  “I met her when I was chasing a little cleaner-bot in the Fright Zone!  I reprogrammed her and have given her loads of upgrades!  Queen Glimmer made me get rid of her steel-melting laser, which was so poop of her, but Emily retains a whole range of complex capabilities. She’s smart and affectionate, too!” Entrapta clapped.  “Show them your shuffle, Emily!”  

Emily danced around in a kind of crab-walk.  The children cheered.   “Now, I am going to show you all of the components of a Fright Zone drone – with Emily’s assistance!  Now, most of them should be out of commission and the rest I’ve reprogrammed for rebuilding-help!  However, if you meet one when out playing on the planet’s surface, there are some safety things you need to know!”   Emily obediently raised up for her so Entrapta could show the rapt children how her legs worked.  She then pointed to her optic.  “Here is the optic – she sees through this and this is also where she could fire a laser if she still had one.  All she has now is a pointer-light.  Anyway, you just need to dodge to the side here to get out of the sight-range, and if you hear a ‘whoooo’ powering up, stop, drop and roll!” “If you have claws or can get your little fingers under the chassis,” Catra said, you can rip out their ‘guts!’  The main power-unit is right under here!”   Emily backed away from her.   “Okay, who wants to play a game of ‘Search and Destroy’ with Emily?” Entrapta announced.  “She’s got her harmless laser-light and her optics and she won’t hurt you.  It’s like Hide and Seek!  She’ll beep loudly when she finds you!  Go, go, go!” Ms. Astral sighed as the children scattered in all directions, climbing playground equipment and trees.  They hid behind playground cubby-boxes and bushes. Emily spun around, seeking a target. “I assure you that no harm shall come to them,” Hordak said to the teacher.   Pickles slunk down and got into a hunting mode, himself, deciding to up the excitement of the game by adding a Galactic Horde warrior to the mix.  “You have been captured!” he said to a squirming boy with goat-horns as he grabbed him from behind a tree.   “Alright… I guess this relieves the tension from earlier,” the teacher said, wiping her brow.  “But please, if you come to my class again, DON’T SET THINGS ON FIRE!” Laid out on a table were various tools, scrap and a few weapons that were to be a part of the demonstration (Entrapta wanted to show the kids how to build small robots if they had time, just to make EXTRA SURE they wouldn’t accidentally build one if they found old Horde-scrap).  Hordak was guarding it when a small boy ran right up to it and grabbed one of the grenades. “I’ve got a boom-potater!” he cried in triumph. “No, you little fool!” Hordak hissed running after him.   “Let’s play hot-potato!” he squealed, tossing it toward a pair of children who were outrunning Emily.   In an instant, Hordak launched himself between the children and the stun-grenade.  He took it full in the chest.  A loud boom sounded and a flash of red light temporarily blinded everyone in the area.  His armored form ragdolled, almost going right off the edge of the floating island they were on.  He came to rest in a rumbled heap on his side and didn’t move.   Entrapta was immediately on her feet running toward him.   “Brother!” Pickles cried.   Catra held some of the children back. The two that had been the ‘hot-potater’ target stood with Hordak at their feet.  Inquisitive kindergartners climbed down from trees and playground equipment.   “Is he…dead?”  worried children said, approaching him.   “Poor old vampire…” one little girl lamented.  One of the little boys nudged his head with a toe.  Entrapta was soon bent down before him, checking his armor and his vitals quickly with both her hair and her hands.   “He’s okay!” she said with a thumbs up as he opened his eyes and groaned.   “Brother, would you like some help up?” Pickles offered.  Hordak grunted as Entrapta lifted him to his feet with his hair and helped him to limp to a bench.   Ms. Astral stood in stark wonderment. “Give him his space, children,” she instructed.  “I believe our safety lesson is over for the day?”   Here today, the once Scourge of Etheria had just risked his life and gotten himself hurt to save her children.  Of course, he’d kind of saved them from himself since the Horde guest-speakers had brought weapons to class in the first place, but at this point, she was going to take any blessings she could get.  

When Adora, Bow and Glimmer showed up to pick up their community-service-servers they found Hordak sitting on a bench, sipping tea with a blanket over his shoulders and a gaggle of children looking up at him adoringly, one latched onto his right leg as he kept his ears down with a subdued scowl.  Catra was lobbing stun-grenades into a duck-pond to delighted squeals, Pickles was gently hugging a sobbing kindergarten teacher and Entrapta was leading an army of youngsters who had built small robots that were demanding in mechanical voices “Cook-ies! Cook-ies!”  

“I think we need to rethink this part of the Horde Community Service Program,” Bow said as Adora tried to stop Catra and Glimmer balled up her fists, ready to explode.  

I took a 7 am flight to Seattle yesterday to watch my niece’s last home game. So many people were there to support her and I ended up talking to a woman who we had a number of mutual friends with. At one point she said “oh yeah I remember her, she never even got married’” as though it was weird, and I felt a shot of shame go through me. That crowd is so together and so filled with love and support and my sister and I felt like odd balls, further confirmed when my brother didn’t invite us over to the house with everyone afterwards, it really hurt our feelings. I had to fight my sadness at thinking he doesn’t really want us to be with his family in that moment, like we are the part of his family that is the weirder, sad part. It was pretty horrible but I’m still glad we went, and I was able to get on an earlier flight which was good. Writing about it now brings all of that up. There is a lot there I need to examine.

I had a dream that I was in a new home and the President of Retail was there, she was being really nice but horrified, I realized I didn’t have a top on and my big old boobs were waving around and I I didn’t have a shirt to cover up with. Part of me had this feeling like “this is just the way I am” and part of me was deeply ashamed that I had been walking around in front of her like that without realizing it, and I was horrified. I went into the kitchen to find something to wear but it was too late. When she left, I found a beautiful brand new pair of slippers with Ugg like features and I thought they were hers - I imagined her wearing them at home during the pandemic.

The dream changed to my larger team in a room and R my friend wandering around saying hi to everyone but sidling up to me last, like we had to keep our friendship a secret. There was a plate of Japanese cucumber pickle in front of us.

The last part was horrible. I was moving into a small room which was filthy. I was meeting someone there and felt like I couldn’t clean it up on time. Then I was across the table from a white woman with dark brown hair. She was asking me how I dealt with removing evil and I was explaining to her that sometimes it requires an exorcism, but sometimes it can be exorcised through therapy or different, less extreme ways. Like a continuum of options. Her face contorted as though part of her mouth couldn’t move, like a stroke victim, and I got frightened realizing she was evil.

Best part of yesterday was home to the kittens who decided to play wrestle for the first time since I moved here which was lovely.

what used to be three or four day episodes has now all of a sudden returned to the persistent gloom. the bright spots are fewer and even in them, the clouds block the brightness. even though i came in kindall and cuddled for days she still got up without a word twice at night and left the snuggles, and i don't care who she fucks, but i care who i care about, and i hate knowing that there are seeds of love that will go unwatered because distance and damage are again next to me. two years ago i saw brooke and her original woman hips and how she filled a dress the way honey fills a jar and i didn't care for her dog but i knew i could fall for her, so i did something i never do and i said well god if you're here, how about this, let this union come to fruition and i'll repair what broke with my mother and go further. but of course logic says you should not need an incentive to fix something if you want it fixed, and of course the faithful say god won't give you what you want unless you deserve it, and of course selfishness is at the root of my soul so naturally i got nothing in return. velez was married and ignored, and i wanted to send her back to her dead bedroom dripping and bruised, but she ghosted me. the other married woman, same thing, same scenario, same outcome. krystal gave me two nosferatus in an act of decency i didn't expect, but that doesn't erase infidelity. why didn't izzy let me ravage her like we planned? why did michelle cower at the foot of her domineering mom and why does she now have to kneel at her dad's grave? why'd bunnie leave after stringing me along for months, why was ash a man who clearly can't handle his own sexuality, why would vinita want her ex, why'd ava hold my hand, why'd rose choose pussy, why'd caitlin not want to try again, why'd shauna flee, why'd liz go elsewhere, why'd rey call me every night past midnight for hours and then suddenly go radio silent, why'd chloe hang up on me after a heartfelt talk even though i tried to find her a job so she could sleep easier, why'd two or three hundred other women treat me as disposable or try to get me to pay? what happened to kelly and pickle, her cat, and why did alice have to be real but a flake? why did i have to lose that game of darts when i know i'm better? why have i been missing layups? i have no one to cook for but myself, no reason to clean my room and no reason to shower and no reason to go anywhere. lives are now lived in tandem or away from me. rosie, aahoo, angele, olivia, yas, shivangi, julie. faces in the crowd now. i am an intruder too often in marriages, and now i am hyper aware of being unwanted or taken in small doses like i'm the oldschool green death nyquil. of being disregarded. how many people did i send this script to and how many got back to me? how many people were supposed to give feedback on these stories and i got none? i'm hungry so often and i don't want to eat because i do not like feeling fat and ugly. i'm disappointed so often that nothing is accepted. i spend too much money on restaurants. i have all these little nagging injuries. i don't know the last time someone came up behind me and hugged me. i am not in any weddings. the family i had here that i saw all the time has now dwindled and severed and left in so many directions that i am saddened to have to feel that same thing all over again as if the removal of one family wasn't bad enough. the one person i wanted more than anyone to share everything with and bask in the fact that we beat all of the awfulness that turned us into the shattered people we were is dead and i haven't felt close to whole since. the good things and the good days are here in miguel visiting and in my continual dart and ball improvement and in my consistency in writing this fiction and in my skill in the kitchen and in my cats and in health and wealth. selfishness and isolation say that i will succeed and i will succeed alone. but my god i do not want to write these books with no dedication pages, i do not want to go on a tour with no one making the hotel less lonely, i do not want to peresevere and pat my own back, fall asleep holding my own hand, and keep making meals for one.

Reimu is in possession of quite a bit of rice thanks to Sanae. There was an impromptu party in the past and a great deal more rice was given than was needed. Apparently her fellow shrine maiden was over-enthusiastic and got carried away.

Reimu is in possession of a great deal of money, due to a significant number of donations early in this blog’s life. She primarily uses it for shrine maintenance and the like, and buying the occasional supply of foods like veggies for pickling and dried fish for protein. She doesn’t like the idea of spending it on herself any more than she has to, she’d feel super-guilty!

Reimu’s donation box is much larger than normal, and very heavy. If one were to remove the bamboo exterior, they would find the ODST drop pod that annihilated her original donation box, now repurposed into the new box. There is still a loaded, live submachine gun in there that has been long forgotten about.

Reimu has a really nice wooden storage shed behind her shrine, built for her by a strange shaman man twice or greater her height. She’s really grateful for his help, and wishes she could do something similar in scale for him as repayment.

The woods behind her shrine conceal a large number of sealed objects, ranging from text to speech devices to cans of surströmming. Many things that have been given to her that she deemed to be evil.