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youllallriseintheink · 3 years

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Between Worlds

Well, you guys asked for a story about these cryptids after I finished Prison Cell. Well, I couldn’t get all of them into one one-off, obviously, but I hope you like it! There is going to be some Creatorship. Also, cryptids in this story aren’t a metaphor for disabilities, homosexuality, or anything else- they’re just cryptids.

---

It was the night after Henry’s senior prom. He had had a great time dancing with his friends and could have almost pretended that everything in his life was normal.

Most people knew that Henry was mute, but most didn’t know that he didn’t need to sleep or eat. Most didn’t know that he could sense other cryptids in the surrounding area. When he was a kid, he had made the mistake of telling someone about a cat-like one that he’d seen rummaging in the trash. Having to see it wrestled to the ground and shot minutes later had taught him to never do so again, and certainly to never reveal his own differences to full humans. There were maybe six cryptids in Henry’s home town. Henry knew their location, and knew that all but one of them weren’t doing well. He even remembered when one of them- one of them hardly older than Henry was now- had died. It was like a light going off on a radar board. Henry thanked his lucky stars every day that he looked human and could live a human life. Most weren’t. Most couldn’t.

Henry didn’t communicate with most of the cryptids in his area. He’d already befriended one, and taking care of him was work enough for Henry.

He’d been six years old when he’d found Joey rummaging through their cupboards at night. Joey had been small, then, and a bit more animalistic, with his gangly too-long limbs and crow-skull face. Joey had explained to Henry that his parents had abandoned him, and Henry had allowed Joey to sleep in his bed that night. From that point on, Henry kind of looked after Joey, even as he got bigger and harder to manage.

It was a thankful thing that Henry didn’t have to sleep. It had allowed Henry to go out on his own at night. It was at night that he could play with Joey. It was also at night that they, thankfully, found an abandoned house in the woods where Joey could stay at. It was a good thing, too- little six-year-old Joey could hide in Henry’s room easily enough, but since then he’d grown from having the body of an awkward, bipedal fawn to being easily seven feet tall and somewhat more proportionate. He’d gotten scarier-looking, too. Maybe the little crow skull and baby claws he’d once had would have gained him some sympathy back then. The fearsome talons he had now? The elegant curved skull with the terrifyingly long, sharp beak? Not so much.

It didn’t help that Joey had done some pretty shocking things to survive at this point. Muggings. Hunting the wild animals around his home with his bare hands. Thievery, including robbing people’s houses and on occasion shredding their guard dogs to ribbons with his claws. Henry had gotten a job as soon as he was old enough so he could to help pay Joey’s living expenses- again, not having to sleep was a benefit, and few people understood how Henry managed to keep on top of his studies while working so hard. Of course, Joey still stole sometimes, mostly out of necessity.

Despite the challenges, though, Henry did love Joey and understood that he didn’t choose to be like this, and it was nice to have someone he didn’t have to hide his cryptid nature from. That was why he was heading to Joey’s house in the woods- it was high time that they had a talk about the future. In the past, Joey had expressed terror at the thought of Henry leaving him. So Henry wouldn’t. Not now. Maybe not ever.

Joey leaned down and Henry kissed him on the beak, as he always did when they met up.

“How was prom, dear?” Joey asked.

Good, Henry signed.

“Good.”

Can I stay the night? There’s so much we have to talk about.

“Of course you can.”

I thought about what I want in the future. I want to help cryptids like you. I thought for a while that I could just leave this life behind, but I'd always be able to feel you in the back of my head, and it would kill me if you died and I didn’t know how or why or if I could prevent it. I just don’t know how to make that my life.

“Well, there’s always the studio,” Joey suggested. “We could hire other cryptids.”

That’s a castle in the sky, Joey. I don’t know how to get the money for that. And you might have the time to draw all day, but I haven’t been practicing as much as I should. Balancing work and school, you know. Henry stopped signing and looked to Joey for answers. None came. Well, I guess I don’t have to figure it out right now. I guess I could just work for a while until I figure it out. Let’s just go upstairs. Enjoy our night together.

Joey’s room was dark this time of night, illuminated by a lantern. The walls were coated with Joey’s art. It really was impressive stuff. At one point, Henry had been the better artist between the two of them, but not anymore. That always filled Joey with a sense of both pride in himself and shame that he’d stifled Henry.

“Henry,” Joey said, putting a hand on Henry’s shoulder. “I’ve had this idea for a while... the idea that you could apply for an art school using my art. I mean, you’re talented. You could sharpen your skills again over the summer. Then at art school you could figure out how to make the studio happen. What do you say?”

Henry shook his head. If I go to an art school in another city, I’ll have to leave you behind. And art school won’t teach me how to start a studio. It’ll just teach me how to work at one.

“Right,” Joey said, disappointed. Living on the outside of society had left him dreadfully naïve as to how it worked. “Well, It’s not just about that. It’s about making up for the trouble I’ve caused you. Letting you be free of me for a while. And while you’re gone, I can meet other cryptids. Try to be more independent.”

Henry hesitated. Leaving Joey to his own devices would mean that Joey would be providing for all of his needs through theft and violence, and stood a greater chance of being caught.

“Just do one semester. For me. Alright?”

Henry nodded, then gave Joey a hug. The plan was sealed. The summer went as planned. Henry’s artistic skills came back quickly. They also enjoyed their time together, going for walks down by the river, stargazing, fantasizing about a world where he could take Joey with him. The summer was over too fast, and the two parted ways.

---

The closer Henry got to the new city, the more cryptids Henry could detect, like blips on a radar. He ignored them. He and Joey had talked about this- this was to be Henry’s time to be human, and human he would be.

It was a commitment that was hard to keep. Henry missed having someone who understood what it meant to be different. Sometimes Henry would detect a cryptid who was right near him and get tempted.

One day, he broke. He’d detected a while ago that the older woman that sometimes sat next to him in art history class was a cryptid, though he didn’t know what kind. The strange thing- or it would have been strange if Henry didn’t know what she was- was that the woman looked identical to his mother.

After mulling over how to approach her, Henry had decided to just be honest with her. After they’d chatted a bit and were in private, Henry admitted to being a cryptid, and to what his powers were. It was a risky move- the woman, open-minded as she seemed, might have reported him. Instead, she smiled.

“Oh. Cool, I’m a cryptid, too. One of my powers is that I appear as people’s dream woman.” It was strange and kind of refreshing to find someone so open about it.

What would a little kid see? Henry wrote on the pad of paper he was using to communicate.

“Maybe their best female friend. But most often? Their mom.”

Henry went red.

Allison threw her head back and laughed. “Henry, when there’s only one person in the room, I can see what form I’m taking. And yeah, it doesn’t mean you’re a manchild. A mother is a pretty common one for grown women or, you know, men like you. But it’s okay. I mean, why would freaks like us care about something as small as who you love? Anyhow. The good thing about my powers is that some of them- not this one, though- can be taught. Want to hang out sometime?”

Absolutely, Henry wrote.

---

On what was actually less than two hundred miles away but felt like the other side of the planet, Joey was on the hunt for cryptids as well. Henry had left him with a vague map of where the handful of cryptids around town were. Of course, there was no guarantee that any of them would be friendly or even sapient, and unfortunately, all of them had proven extremely good at hiding. He’d nearly given up on finding other cryptids when he found one of them one fateful night.

Joey had stolen, among other things, money from someone’s house the night before, but couldn’t exactly go into stores to use it. So, instead he was hiding in a back alley, waiting for some street person to come along. Street people were a blessing to Joey- he could have been Satan himself and they still wouldn’t object to being paid to go into a few stores to buy things for him.

A blond, baby-faced man in a hoodie turned into the alleyway, prompting Joey to crawl out of hiding and approach him. The man was scared, unsurprisingly, and adopted a defensive stance. Once Joey was close enough, the other man lunged, struck Joey right in a wound that he’d acquired a few days ago, tackled him over.

“How did you do that!?” Joey demanded of the man. It seemed impossible. Joey was experienced at scraps and must have had over a foot and a good fifty or sixty pounds on the guy.

“Extremely good luck,” the man said with a smile, helping Joey up. “Sorry bout’ that. I thought you were dangerous.” He then continued on his way. It was then that Joey realized that the man didn’t look homeless- he was clean, healthy, uninjured, shaven and all that. Joey ran to keep up with him.

“Do you walk home this way every night? You know, through a back alley at midnight in the bad side of town?”

“Yeah, mostly. Sometimes you just gotta have time to yourself, you know? A lot of people don’t like me. Say I’m a bad omen. Which I am, but I can’t help it. When ah was a boy, I wanted a dog fer Christmas. So, one of my parents’ friends’ house burned down and he had to move in with us temporarily- and they brought their dog. That kinda thing happened to me a lot before ah figured out the pattern. So, I, uh, have to try and make sure I don’t want anything too hard. It ain’t so bad once you get used to it.” The boy’s face showed sadness. Clearly it did bother him.

“Oh. Well, for a person who likes time to himself, you sure seem eager to talk to people. What’s your name, kid?”

“Wally.”

“Wally. Well, I don’t know about you, but I think our meeting was fate. You must have wanted to make friends who were like you! And that just so happens to be what I want. Why don’t we stick together.”

“...That might not be a good idea for ya.”

“I’ll take my chances. I mean, just try to want my well-being and it should happen, right?”

Wally stopped walking. They were at the end of the back alley. Two cops approached them and then fell into a man-hole, saving Joey from having to run from them. “Ah mean... it might happen that way.” Wally’s voice cracked.

“It will. Just trust me. We’ll make it work.”

---

By the end of the semester, Henry was putting more time into cryptid hunting than his studies. Allison was his assistant. She taught him some minor potions and charms before their first “mission.” Henry had thought it was unnecessary. He was wrong. The cryptid they met was a harpy-like creature with poisoned claws, and they’d had to kill it in self-defense.

There were good cryptids, too. Human-like ones. Ones Henry met on campus who walked the border line between “cryptid,” and “gifted, disabled, or both.” There were even a few animal-like cryptids that Henry and Allison could do nothing for except feeding them and giving them some water. But the majority of what set off Henry’s radar were monsters.

Henry had started off excited about “cryptid hunting,” as Allison put it, but now, it was draining him emotionally and frankly scaring him half to death. Allison never tired of it. Allison kept dragging him out. She wasn’t oblivious to his distress and tried to debrief him with comforting words and alcohol (at one point, stuff stronger than alcohol, which Henry had refused), but her lust for adventure was stronger than her empathy.

At the end of the semester, Henry returned home with mediocre grades and no real desire to go back to university. Maybe he would go to some other school and be a person instead of a cryptid this time- the credits he’d accumulated would still count at the next place. Maybe he’d go back to the same place but stop cryptid hunting- which would mean either setting some serious boundaries with Allison or cutting her out of his life, as well as ignoring a pretty significant part of himself. At least he had cryptid friends now. Or, maybe he’d just enter the workforce. He’d have to talk it over with his parents. And Joey. Back at home now, Henry could sense that the cryptids in this town were all clustered together now, matching up with what Joey had said in his letters about forming a little pack. Henry hoped that the cryptids Joey had found weren’t too frightening.

When Henry arrived to the little house in the woods, he could see that a large section had been added onto it. Good. It honestly worried Henry sometimes that Joey was spending so much time in that musty, moldering wooden house. The door was answered by a creature with glossy black eyes and a black pit for a mouth.

I’ll get Joey, the creature signed. It knew sign language. Had Joey found other mutes, or had this creature learned just for him? It didn’t matter. Henry was home, and Joey had made himself a family. Like always, Henry met Joey with a kiss on the beak.

“Welcome home, Henry. We have so much to catch up on.”

That night, Henry ate with Joey’s family and slept curled up in Joey’s arms. It was hard being between worlds. And even though he had the capacity to leave the world of cryptids behind, a big part of him didn’t want to.

#Bendy and the Ink Machine #joey drew #Henry Stein #allison pendle #wally franks #Aus #cryptids #my fanfiction #creatorship

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blockwarden · 5 years

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Civil Defense in the Fallout Series

For better or worse, nuclear warfare has dominated both the American psyche and American media since the dawn of the Cold War. From duck and cover drills to War Games, to fallout shelters and The Day After, we have long looked at the what-ifs of nuclear warfare with an almost violent curiosity—like a train wreck or a plane crash, we simply cannot look away. Although the threat of nuclear war and mutually-assured destruction no longer looms like the spectre of death over our shoulders, we still find ourselves fascinated by it, and our media reflects this. An almost infinite number of books, television shows, movies, and video games have been dedicated, in some part, to the prospect or aftermath of nuclear warfare. Video games especially being a relatively new, mostly immersive medium, have taken the theme of nuclear warfare and ran with it, including Metro 2033, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., DEFCON, Civilization V, Call of Duty, Metal Gear Solid, and Ace Combat Zero, to name just a very small number of them. But no game series is more synonymous with nuclear warfare as the Fallout series.

Although I could personally talk about the Fallout universe, the history, the sociopolitical setting, and the Great War itself for hours on end, the gist of the series is that in a retro-futuristic, alternate timeline world, on October 23, 2077, “Red China,” the Soviet Union, and the United States finally pulled the trigger and engaged in a full-on nuclear war, with bombs falling on most U.S. cities, including Las Vegas, Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. The war itself lasted only two hours, but more energy was released in the first moments of the Great War than all the previous human conflicts combined. Entire mountain ranges were created by the sheer tectonic stress caused by the bombs, and the oceans and rivers of the world were contaminated irreversibly by the “relatively low-yield” warheads. In short, the Fallout series is a (somewhat exaggerated) look at the realities of mutually-assured destruction, and a clear representation of all our nuclear fears.

But how realistic is this? How likely is it that if something like the Great War were to happen today would our land and water still be unusable 200 years in the future? In discussing this, we need to first look at the preventative measures taken in the Fallout universe. And this starts with civil defense.

Not much Fallout canon is dedicated to civil defense. Although there are posters from the “Civil Defense Administration” found in-game, most preventative measures in the Fallout series come from Vault-Tec and their vaults. But these vaults were sociological experiments disguised as fallout shelters, and ultimately, Vault-Tec was not actually concerned with the preservation and continuation of the United States post-war. Some vaults were rigged with poisonous gases, some had purposefully faulty blast doors, and some were simply absurd (such as Vault 77, which was populated by 999 puppets and one man.) Since we can’t consider Vault-Tec an agent of emergency preparedness or disaster response, we must turn back towards the aforementioned Civil Defense Administration.

We know from in-game dialogue, terminals, notes, holotapes, and even character backstories that most people in 2077 were expecting a war any day. We can find personal basement shelters in bombed-out neighborhoods, Pulowski personal preservation shelters dotting street corners, and in the beginning of Fallout 4, as the bombs approach Boston, we can hear air raid sirens. We can find government bunkers like the South Boston military checkpoint and the Greenbrier Resort, and although not morally aligned to the concepts of American civil defense, some vaults did manage to provide safety for generations of dwellers. So, we know that some effort was made, and we can assume that these efforts were spear-headed by the Civil Defense Administration. But this is where the similarities between historical American civil defense and Fallout civil defense stop.

Walking around in a Fallout game, you encounter decimated homes and buildings, upturned roads, and irradiated water and soil. Skeletons litter the landscape. The few remaining buildings for the most part lack running water or electricity. There is no trash collection, there are no vehicles, there aren’t even any authorities outside of rag-tag militias capable of curbing the rampant crime across the wasteland. Doctors are few and far-between and mostly self-taught, and pockets of radioactive waste remain in open-air pits. If the Fallout series truly had a Civil Defense Administration, this dangerous, dirty, destroyed world would simply not exist.

Historically, civil defense has focused on both emergency preparedness and disaster response. The civil defense agencies of the United States were comprised of rescue squads, decontamination squads, demolition and clearance crew, auxiliary police officers, auxiliary firefighters, nurses, doctors, road repair crews, utility repair crews, drivers, messengers, radio operators, food and housing corps, chaplains, refuse collection crews, and even gravediggers—all who focused on disaster response and, more importantly, rebuilding. Civil defense was almost singularly-focused on the idea of rebuilding, of piecing the country back together after an emergency, of reestablishing normalcy as quickly as possible.

In Fallout, however, this doesn’t seem to be the case, except for a few exceptions. After the bombs fell, those remaining U.S. Armed Forces members tried their best to maintain order and control, but they quickly succumbed to the radiation and mobs. Then there were the Responders, seen in Fallout 76, who were an organization of police, firefighters, medics, and general volunteers that emerged in 2082 to provide medical assistance, supplies, and survival training to survivors. They were followed by Project Purity in Fallout 3, which was dedicated to decontaminating the water of the Washington D.C. area and providing potable water for survivors, although the project began in 2277, 200 years after the bombs fell. The last exception would be the Mojave Express, a courier service seen in Fallout: New Vegas in 2281. There is also the NCR Sharecropper Farm in Fallout: New Vegas, as well as a pastor in Diamond City in Fallout 4. But this is…it. There is no large-scale, nation-wide effort to rebuild. There are corpses and skeletons left where they fell, there are burnt-out cars left in the middle of the road, there are collapsed bridges and spewing pipelines and ponds so irradiated they’ve birthed new monstrosities like Swan in Fallout 4. There is no governing body, no faction that truly takes the reins, not even a surviving member of congress (technically, there was with the Enclave, but their motivations were selfish and generally fascist.) And this is anathema to the spirit of civil defense.

From a civil defense perspective, the Fallout series is almost insulting. It shows a total lack of law and order, a lack of neighborliness, a lack of effort to hold the world together. It shows tribe mentality, it shows the collapse of society, it shows the end of the world as we know it. This is not what civil defense, fictional or historical, would have strived for. It could be that, as we see in the case of Appalachia in Fallout 76, those who tried to rebuild were wiped out. It could be that, much like historic civil defense, it faced opposition in the form of apathy. Or it could simply be that a partially-recovered world is not nearly as compelling as a game as one where every water purification plant is overrun with Mirelurks and feral ghouls leap at you from the public library.

This is a sentiment echoed by many players of the two latest titles, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76. I’ll spare y’all the student game developer rants as much as possible here, but there’s a lot to be said, so hold on. Most players absolutely hated the settlement system in Fallout 4. They despised the Minutemen, Preston Garvey, and protecting innocent farmers from Raiders. They hated having to sacrifice rare parts like gears and screws to build defenses. They hated the radiant quests. In short, they hated rebuilding and recovering. This could be because Bethesda did a pretty ham-fisted job at motivating the player to recruit and rebuild settlements, or it could be because Bethesda kind of forgot that the Fallout series, since its infancy with Interplay, was meant to be post-post-apocalyptic. It was meant to be a game about a half-restored world. One only needs to look at places like Vault City or Shady Sands or even the New Vegas strip to know this. These were settlements that had rebuilt and moved on from the Great War. Bethesda has effectively abandoned this since acquiring the series, choosing instead to feature wastelands over burgeoning towns. So, while Diamond City and Bunker Hill might have running water, they’re still using oil lamps and sleeping in drafty, scrap wood houses as if the bombs fell just a few weeks ago.

A game where survival is not nearly as hard, where you aren’t grilling rabid dog meat and sleeping on a flea-infested mattress, is just not fun to most players. So, if the Fallout Civil Defense Administration had done a realistic job and cleaned all the literal skeletons out of the closet, Bethesda would have ultimately lost the one thing driving players in Fallout 4: the desire to survive.

This isn’t a condemnation of Bethesda at all—in fact, modeling at Bethesda Austin is kind of my dream job—but it is perhaps a critical look at their failure to use civil defense properly in order to bolster a certain environment, atmosphere, and play style. We simply don’t know, however, how much research and effort Bethesda (or even Interplay or Obsidian) put into civil defense. For all we know, one of their artists was simply inspired by the infamous “Serving you in time of emergency!” poster and didn’t think anything of it. But for a game that essentially trailblazes our pop culture understanding and opinion of nuclear warfare, it’s kind of a shame that civil defense is so overlooked. The Fallout series is almost obligated to get things right, especially when there are people who legitimately think the Vault Boy/Thumbs Up technique is a true way to measure fallout.

(It isn’t. This will get you killed.)

#articles #fallout #fallout 4 #fallout 3 #fallout 76 #fallout new vegas #civil defense

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etherian-affairs · 5 years

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Rescue Mission

The continued Etherian adventures of Mirak and the Horde United.

OC Story but Perfuma is here this time.

Mirak was angry. Very angry. The sort of anger only her people could know. At least presumably. Lesser species could get angry but Mirak was relatively certain that like all other emotions they felt it was a less impressive form of anger. Second Officer Cass sat nearby, watching the seven foot tall death dealer pace in their little hidey hole. Mirak was growling and cursing under her breath. A thousand combat scenarios playing through her honed mind.

They had lost Tim.

Well Tim had been captured. By Princesses no less! Flower princesses! Couldn't they tell his emblem was white and not red?! Ridiculous! Rude even! Now Tim was probably being tortured for information he doesn't have! Unacceptable! Tim belongs to Mirak! He is HER Lizard Man! Only she gets to torture him!

She has to pause to hold her breather to her mouth and take a few clean breathes. After so many without it the air really begins to hurt.

Lavender eyes, ablaze with rage, shoot to Cass, who leans back in a notably wary fashion. "Yeah?..." The human asks. Her own brown eyes showing the slightest hint of fear, her pulse visible on her neck.

"We're getting Tim back. Tonight!" Mirak declares!

"O-okay... How though... Last we saw they were taking him back to Plumeria... Like the actual... Town? City? Autonomous collective?" Cass momentarily confuses herself and honestly Mirak has no idea what Plumeria was either from a technical standpoint.

"kingdom!" She hisses out anyway. "and it doesn't matter! We're getting Tim! We'll infiltrate!" Yes! That was a good plan. A stealth mission. Mirak had much experience in those. In getting in and out of places she should not be in. Of removing people in those places from existence.

"... Um..." Cass begins. "Okay but... and I mean this respectfully. You're a seven foot tall bat creature that looks like Lord Hordak." She points out.

That was a potential problem at first glance. In space this was usually solved with her sleek black stealth armor and bad lighting but on Etheria all she has is her cobbled together gear and ridiculously good cinematic lighting. Luckily Mirak has thought this through! She had run the scenarios! Her brain was honed for these sorts of things by decades of training and indoctrination and even a fair bit of eugenic breeding and cybernetic engineering.

Mirak pushes away the little voice in her head telling her that she needs both physical and psychological maintenance very badly. Preferably before her unstable psyche and modified body suffer breakdowns. There is a mission to finish.

So instead her lavender fangs glint in the low light of the small hideout. "Don't worry little Cass, Lady Mirak has a plan."

Cass's complexion goes pale.

...

It was a good plan, Mirak's plan. Her plans are often good. This was of course due to the fact that she thinks of them. Currently the defacto leader of the Horde United was skulking in the trees at the edge of Plumeria. The sun was almost done setting and her goggles could be off for a change, letting her eyes be free!

The fact said eyes give off a very visible lavender glow was of no concern to Mirak. People tend to not notice that until it is too late for them.

Cass had been sent on her daring infiltration mission so now Mirak needed only to wait for the signal.

It was simple, elegant. Cass would head into Plumeria posing as a simple traveler and ask for a place to stay the night. Then when the pitiful sleepy Etherian natives found themselves too tired to stay awake Cass would go search Plumeria for Tim's location. Upon locating Tim she would signal for Mirak by making a specific series of clanking sounds with some pans in her gear which Mirak's superior ears would of course pick up without issue.

Then phase two would begin, Mirak would light Plumeria on fire and they would get Tim. Simple and elegant, as previously said. Efficient too.

'When in doubt, burn it all down' as her old academy instructors would say.

Mirak waits in the shadows for what must be hours. The sun goes down. Music picks up in Plumeria. They're not sleeping... This is a problem.

Etherians are weak sleepy things! They should be sleeping!

A change of plan is required. That's alright, no plan ever survives contact with the enemy after all. Mirak shifts in place, readying the makeshift flamer she had cobbled together. It's an objectively dangerous device, made out of a stun baton, a scavenged pump, and skiff fuel. It looks liable to blow up if used. She will use it to ignite the immediate area, drawing the Plumerians out to fight the fire. Then she will light them on fire as well.

Fortunately before she can unleash her righteous fury upon the Princesses and their evil trees, or just blow herself up with her makeshift flamer, Mirak's sensitive ears and night honed eyes pick out someone approaching! An Etherian woman! Tallish for them. Blonde. Flowers in her hair.

Disgusting.

"Hello?" Said Etherian woman speaks up, foolishly making herself known to anyone who might not have already detected her! "Um... I was told a Mirak would be waiting out here?"

A Mirak?! The only Mirak here is Mirak herself. This could only mean one thing... They got Cass, and are so effective at plant based torture that she immediately gave up the details of the plan! Of course she did, Cass is a little pathetic thing. Cute but not nearly as capable as Mirak or Tim.

Improvise Mirak! Improvise!

Mirak returns the flamer to her back and reaches for her hip to pull her spare stun baton up. Firing a ranged blast will alert anyone else searching. She can't run on her bad legs but if she waits her long stride should let her close on this pathetic search party of one quickly enough and eliminate her relatively quietly. The Etherian doesn't seem to have any weapons after all. A strange oversight.

"I was told by Tim and Cass you were out here? Waiting to rescue Tim? My name is Perfuma and I wanted to invite you in to Plumeria, and apologize for the misunderstanding."

Mirak hesitates! A new development?! No... It must be a trick...

Suddenly the alien warrior surges out of the brush as fast as her poorly constructed legs can take her, raising her baton and snarling. Perfuma looks stunned, eyes wide, freezing in place. No doubt the terrifying visage of one from the same species as Lord Hordak charging causes a moment of panic.

Then suddenly.

"Oh there she is." It's Tim! That's Tim's voice! Coming from her left flank!

Mirak doesn't stop her charge however! She can eliminate this princess then talk to Tim!

Unfortunately a vine that definitely was not there a moment ago trips Mirak and she tumbles over.

"Oh. I'm sorry. Tim told me you would try to kill me and that I should trip you because you have terrible feet made of scrap metal." The Perfuma creature sounds apologetic. A clever ruse. "oh my you are quite frightening though..."

More important than whatever Perfuma is saying is that Tim is a traitor. Mirak looks over to him from her place on the ground. Gauging if she can get a shot off on him and get up at the same time. He's standing in his armor, a ring of flowers on his head. He waves with one hand, biting into a fruit with the other. "Hey Mirak. I told them what was actually going on and they let me go. I knew you'd come to get me so... I've just been waiting."

"We do apologise. We did not realize the significance of his emblem being white instead of red."

Mirak looks back and forth between them before she slowly stands up. Deciding not to shoot Tim. "How can I be sure this is not some elaborate ruse?" Mirak asks with suspicion.

Perfuma's eyes are wide again, staring up at the creature before her. Mirak could probably lunge and get a bite in on that long neck before Perfuma could do any more plant trickery.

At least if she didn't have her breather on.

"It's not!" Suddenly Cass! She's approaching too! Way to go Cass, big help you were. "They're having a party and Tim was just hanging out there. Really worked out for us!"

There is a tense moment as Mirak hmms and thinks this through. Then she deactivates her baton and holsters it. "So you were not tortured Tim?"

"Not at all."

"Not even a little?"

"Not even really weak torture."

Mirak's brow furrows. Strange. They had him for hours. Mirak would have started torturing immediately!

Perfuma finally seems to regain her composure. "Um... If you promise to remain nonviolent we would be happy to welcome you to Plumeria. You are fellow rebels after all." She smiles.

Mirak looks at her two compatriots who are nodding enthusiastically.

"Very well. We shall see what sort of hospitality Princesses can give us!" Mirak Huffs! She's heard her old Madame Huff before and it feels right!

Perfuma claps her hands together. "Wonderful! I am sure everyone will be interested in seeing you as well. The children will love your ears!"

"What?" Mirak stares dumbfounded. Tim and Cass both snicker.

...

It's not a bad night. Mirak gets to terrify some people. There's music and some dancing. Mirak acquires a cool piece of wood to use for a future maker project. Also she learns that apparently she qualifies as a 'maker' and should apply for the makers guild.

Mirak will probably not be doing that.

Also there's fruit. She's not huge on fruit, preferring meat and blood, but it's okay. It's food. Tim and Cass seem quite happy about it.

Maybe Princesses aren't all bad. Some definitely can remain un-cremated.

For now.

#my writing #my OCs #she ra OCs #mirak #lizard man tim #horde soldier cass #mirak's etherian adventures #perfuma

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vanithesquidwrites · 5 years

Text

Waiting for Water (1/8)

First fanfiction. Criticism is welcome, but try not to eat me alive! I'm here to play in the sandbox, not to become a writer. ;-)

Apologies for the somewhat reader-unfriendly Second Person PoV. It was chosen for a reason; hopefully I manage to pull it off. The first chapter is spent in a very bad mental space, by virtue of directly following the cliff, and refers to suicide rather bluntly.

The fic follows Tharaêl as PoV. The one and only relationship of the story does not involve him, and happens entirely offscreen.

Crosspost to AO3 for those who prefer to read there. Warning: 10k words post.

Maybe it's worth a try.

Maybe it's even worth thousands.

1 - TO NOWHERE

You don't remember the first day.

There has to have been one, like every other time. You know that, intellectually. And yet like every other time, it simply isn't there. Only the sound of wind, the cold of ice and snow, then waking up under a tent with your head pounding like a drum.

It makes sense, you suppose. You had other things on your mind than the company or landscape. Two decades' worth of other things. And even without them, it is a fact of life that you are shit at beginnings. Endings, you can manage. Especially bad ones. But fresh starts and rebirths? New leaves turning over? Those happen to other people. The Undercity knows no spring, and neither do its denizens.

Maybe that's why the memories never manage to stay. Or maybe the ghost of your past steals them away from you, like the mercenary said it did back in the Refuge. You suppose that makes sense as well. If the soul is long dead and the body not even yours, why should the mind be otherwise?

The second day goes by as most days do, its memories clear enough — but that day does not feature much. Mainly dark skies, the discomfort of too-small clothes you cannot recall acquiring, and a slow trek down frozen slopes, trailing the mercenary's back. Precious little words, if any, after you think to ask why you are walking in the first place.

"Because if we were to find ourselves among the merry citizens of Ark right now," the mercenary answers you, "I trust neither of us to not tear out the throat of the first prissy Sublime who walks by."

You don't believe you could. You feel too numb for that. Too numb, and much, much too tired.

You close your eyes an instant and Letho's head rolls across the tiles, as if it was a ball that had fallen from his shoulders. Your eyes fly back open, and you shudder, shaking your head to help clear the image away.

You hadn't believed you could ever tear out Letho's throat either. And yet you did, didn't you? You did. No amount of clumsy attempts to put his corpse back together is ever going to change that. Nor will any amount of dwelling within the Upper City. What will you even do, once there? You have no Path. You know no trade. How long until you fall right back into stabbing and cutting throats?

Two moons?

Three?

Perhaps it is better to walk. Perhaps the bears and wolves will solve the problem on the road. A painful solution, perhaps, but a fair one by all accounts. You feel more kin to them than to the city, anyway.

If all else fails, the fall remains, you tell yourself as a comfort. The slope is not quite as high up as the old temple was, but the cliffs remain steep, and the ground more than far enough. All you have to do is turn right, walk a little, and close your eyes — and then there will be no more questions, no more pain, no more remembering the absence behind Brother Sorrow's eyes.

But you said that you would try, and so try you do. The fall can wait. There will always be time later, unless you are dead already.

That second day is cold and unmemorable, but its evening stands out, with an improvised bonfire in the shelter of an old tomb. Your bread is long since hard, and even the mercenary’s Dal'Sark mead feels like liquid ice, but a pair of freshly-killed wolves promises good meat for the next few days. The mercenary skins and cuts with the ease born of long practice, while you prowl the area looking for dead wood, fishing twig and branch from the snow like you once did scraps from sewage. Wet wood, most of it, but still much better than the risk of running out of firewood in the night.

When you think to ask about watch, the mercenary shrugs, and answers your question by recalling the apparition she fought the Father with. You spend the rest of the evening haunted not by the ghost, but by the questions it leaves you too terrified to ask.

What is it that remains, behind the undead eyes of the lost Rhalâim?

If you were to find and dig up the corpse that once used to be yours, if you brought it to life as some Entropists do, who would be looking through its eyes?

Tharaêl Narys?

What is Tharaêl, anyway?

More questions dance across the back of your mind and eyelids, fleeting, formless, and all the more terrifying for their lack of definition. You try to grasp for words with which to give them a shape, but the sounds all die in your throat.

You end up lying back to back with the mercenary, in a half-tent half-bed assembled from her bundle of cured pelts and a pile of coffins. The corpse of the second wolf, wrapped in some old linen, serves as your common pillow. The aptness goes uncommented, but it does not go unnoticed; neither of you sleeps all that much, instead trading quiet childhood stories throughout the night.

For all the awkwardness and lack of proper sleep, and for all that the apparition nags at the back of your mind, that one night proves to be your most comfortable in years. Restful in some vague, abstract form. Perhaps because of the fire, or your freedom from the Temple.

You wake up to what the mercenary tells you is a blizzard.

The weather sees you spend third and fourth days alike walking from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn again, making use of any little bit of calm in the storm. This rock, that outcropping, those trees — all are made into shelter from the northern winds for a while. All are quickly left behind, never quite sufficient. The days run into each other, a jumbled mess of blinding snow, aching legs, and cold meat. The exhaustion builds on along with your migraine, until a cloud of hollowness settles over your mind at the sight of the ghost hacking at wolves and bears.

You know you knew the man before. You recognize his silhouette, the line of his shoulders and the shape of his brow. You remember that your first glimpse of the ghost had surprised you, five days ago — just as you remember that you proceeded not to care. You had been more... amused... by the mercenary turning the Father's own lamb against him than scandalized by the fate of your so-called brother.

You knew him then. You know you did. And yet his name escapes you now, no matter how deep you try to dig into your mind. So do his duties and his age, his reputation in the ranks, or even simply how far his bedroll had been from yours. Remains only a gaping hole and a vague sense of dread, as if some unseen hand had reached into your head and torn out the memories.

They'd been there just five days ago.

The inevitable question slips out on that fourth night, as migraine steals your sight and leaves you scrambling for context within a blinding void.

"How dead is he?"

You believe you are attempting to fetch wood when it happens, but you're not completely certain — your mind proves just as prompt to lose all track of itself when migraine blinds you as when meditation did. Still, fetching wood makes the most sense. You can do little in the wild but help to keep the fire fed, and you have been pondering firewood for the past days. The steps between green limb, wet limb, dead limb, and rotten limb. Wondering about the edges, about the point at which torn limbs can still sprout new roots into soil.

You hear the mercenary turn, the stop to her shuffling and the sound of her cloak brushing the ground. You hear that particular brand of silence that is usually accompanied by a perplexed frown.

Then she swears. Much, and angrily. In several languages.

"...That is one mess of a question," she replies in a tired voice once the swearing finally ends. You presume you must have sat down, because her words are clear, undisturbed by movement or distance. "Shit, I'm sorry. It might take a bit to lay down context for what you're really asking, and I'm self-taught, so I'd have to make up corny analogies instead of—"

"How dead am I," you ask on, ignoring her babbling. "Am I dead? Undead? I don't feel dead, but all the reasons why I don't are things that your... thing clearly does as well. I don't feel alive either. I don't feel anything. What's the difference? Is there a difference?"

There is silence, for a long while, and you almost regret interrupting. But you know the mercenary enough by now to be sure that if you hadn't, the blathering would never stop. Yet for all that she falls silent, she does not provide an answer, and so you blunder on, trying to put the void that caught onto you into words.

"There wasn't a difference for — for Letho," you explain, and a shiver runs through your bones at the sound of your own voice. "His body was there, but... no, it wasn't even his body, was it," you mumble in realization. "Just the... substitute. Why was it so — what's the turning point? Is there some—"

"You're alive, Letho's dead, and it's undead," the mercenary cuts across your words, and though sight does not register, you can hear her walking over and feel her sit down next to you. "The short answer is that you're nothing like my apparition, and that I am very fucking sorry I didn't rethink its presence. I just — you were fine with it before, and — shit!"

You hear her slap her own face with both hands a few times, as you saw her do after Qalian, after the mercenary, after Brother Hatred. You hear her take in a long breath, as if fighting to calm herself.

"The full answer is complicated," she lets out in a sigh, "and it is guesswork, not research. Are you sure that you want guesswork? It's done you enough harm as it is."

As if that could matter in any shape or form. Your entire life is guesswork. The past decade has been nothing but harm. More of either can hardly make a difference by this point. You care for the answer less than for a stop to the hollowness. You want the doubts, the shapeless questions, to be over. Dead and buried.

"I need this to be done," you say, hoping that the mercenary will read your intent in the word.

"...Okay," she finally answers, and you sigh in relief at having gotten through without five minutes' worth of digression this time. But then she stands back up, and her steps move away.

Before you can let out a word of complaint, however, the mercenary returns on your other side, and you can feel the weight of her cloak settle on your back. She wraps it around your shoulders, pulls the fur-lined cowl over your bare head, and sits back down next to you, sighing all the while.

"I'm not cold," you say, though you suppose the weather makes it by nature half a lie.

"That's not what it's for," she replies, but before you can ask what she means by that, she starts to explain at long last. "I don't know how the Rhalâs speaks of death, but if you're like most people here, you see it as either a place like the 'Eternal Paths' or as a... permanent state, of sorts. It isn't. The place doesn't exist, and the state is entropy. Death is different, although entropy can lead to it. Death is... more or less a cardinal direction in the Sea of Eventualities."

You feel yourself blink at the words as you attempt to conjure some sort of mental image. Then you feel yourself frown at the words, as sight refuses to comply even within the confines of your mind. Your rub your hands against your eyes, but the pressure does little save for making the migraine flare.

"Here," says the mercenary's voice, and after a few crackling sounds, you feel the cold wetness of snow slide across your forehead. "Rub it on a little. It helps a bit, or it does for me at least."

You feel your way into grabbing the compacted snow from her hand, and press it over your eyelids for a few seconds at a time. It's not a healer's cure nor an apothecary's balm, but it does numb some of the pain, if only a little. It's all you're getting, in any case. If the mercenary had a spell or potion to cure headaches, you figure she would have proposed it by now.

It's almost amusing, in its own dark, depressing way. Throwing fire at passersby? Any Arcanist can do that. Crushing minds with a thought? A Psionicist's bread and salt. Tearing out souls, raising the dead, building untold abominations out of rotting blood and bone? There always seems to be some Entropist working on it.

But curing a migraine? Good fucking luck with that.

"I'm fine," you tell the mercenary, once the throbbing has subsided enough for you to cast the snow aside. "Keep going."

It's only once the demand is out of your mouth that you realize it should have been preceded by 'thank you.'

"Sure," the mercenary agrees, probably long since used to your curtness. "So then, if it helps: imagine that the Sea of Eventualities is a big room filled with tables. Now take any of these tables, and imagine that it's a facet of time, with our reality as a map spread on top of it. The map covers the whole table, north east west and south, and we can go anywhere on it, provided we have the means that fit the terrain."

Simple enough, so far.

"But even though we don't see them on the map as such, there's actually two more directions we can go," the mercenary says, and you imagine from the sound of her chainmail that she is gesturing to illustrate her words. "Up above the map, which escapes our facet of time into the rest of the Sea of Eventualities, and down below the map, which collides with our facet of time and goes absolutely nowhere. That's what death is: running into the table and getting stuck in time. Still with me?"

You must have nodded, because she resumes once again.

"Alright. Now, undeath. Imagine that people are like boats sailing across the map, with their bodies as the hulls — sorry," she gives your shoulder a tap at the unfortunately familiar word, "and their souls as the sails. The hull by itself drifts, and the sail by itself sinks, so they have to be tethered to each other to go anywhere. Those tethers are usually a strong mast — senses — and well-tied ropes — memories. But if there's, say, a big storm in the Sea of Eventualities while the ropes or mast are damaged, the sails — the soul — can be torn off by the wind and make that move up or down. It still exists," she hurriedly insists. "It's just... off the map. Over the clouds or, more commonly, under the water."

You suppose this is why you feel like you are drowning on air so often. The less time you spend thinking of the body, the better — but if the hole your past made of your memories are its ropes, your soul has to be in a sorry state indeed.

"Now, the soul is just like actual sails," the mercenary presses on. "Whether the storm carried it up or down, it can't move back onto the map by itself, let alone bind memory-ropes to a sensory-mast. It doesn't have limbs to tie knots with. So unless someone catches it, or some magical wind moves it again, it's just... stuck. That's how undeath happens. The soul untethers, there's a big wave in the Sea of Eventualities, and the sails get thrown back onto the hull, rather than on the mast and ropes."

Letho's head rolls across the tiles, and you let yours fall in your hands. A shaky breath escapes your chest.

Don't. Don't think about Letho. Not now. There's nothing to do there anymore. Letho is done, Letho is gone. Just as he always was. His corpse — not even his, not truly — just happened to keep walking for a few years.

...What had become of his body? The real one? You looked everywhere. The pit, the sewers, the waterways, even all the way through the crypts once you knew how to wield a blade. What had the Father done with him? Did you find him and simply push him out of your mind, like you did the screams and silence the mercenary told you of?

And what of that damn temple? Did you bury him then? You'd wanted to. You still do. You'd asked the mercenary to leave, and she had, and then...

...Then you'd woken up in the tent, and she was right there.

You can't remember. You fucking can't remember.

"That's not what happened to you," the mercenary hurries to say once again, though she fails to catch up with your careening mind. "You're not undead. I know that, because my spells don't harm you and I can't see your soul. Which means that it's tethered in place. Not mismatched, not damaged, not free to take."

'Not damaged'? It doesn't feel 'not damaged'. And what does 'not free to take' even mean? So what if it wasn't? It hadn't been before, and that hadn't so much as slowed down the Father, now had it? Let alone stopped him. Clearly, anyone who knew how to undo the ties could do so at will, just as he did.

Just like the mercenary might. Where would her knowledge come from — where would her ghosts and skeletons come from — if not keen interest and practice? You are not so blind as to believe her ever fully truthful with you, not after seeing her so freely take part in your lies. Not after noticing the long silences between your questions and her answers.

If you were to fall on these slopes, would you, too, wake up as an empty ghost, or as a shambling corpse?

How would you even know, before it was too late?

You clench your eyes tight and press hard against your temples, trying to force your mind into killing the suspicion. You cannot afford to let it take over the emptiness anger left in its wake. The woman can be daft, yes. Naïve even for a Sunchild, and much less mindful of consequences than she fancies herself to be. But as she is all that, she is also steadfast. Even at her most inane, as you disagreed on every last thing under the Sun, she was never anything but loyal to you.

You cling to that loyalty, even as naivety burns. Your past is gone. Your cause is gone. Your rage is gone. Letho is gone all over again. Your life is gone, twelve years gone at that. Even your swords and bow are gone, presumably still on that cliff, though you can't recall leaving them. Your hideout still remains, but you cannot go there, and the mercenary knows of its location anyway. The woman's loyalty is the only thing you have left. You cannot let your doubts pry it away from you.

You blindly scrape the ground for another handful of snow, and press it against your forehead. It does little more for the migraine, but it does serve to distract the mind. The mercenary has begun to rub your back in what you assume she means as sympathy, but you tune the sensation out to concentrate on your hands. You focus on the cold, on letting suspicion seep out of your skull like the heat; imagine doubt running down your gloves with the melting ice.

It doesn't work, of course. You never were good at meditating, and the few things you were good at are too tainted by circumstance to be of any use right now.

"So, to answer the things you really meant to ask," the mercenary continues, oblivious to your inner thoughts. "Did somebody 'create' you? No. Nobody can create souls, only dissipate them or move them. That's why we're all still stuck using Pyrean crystals. So what the," she pauses, "what he did was halfway between casting a spell on you and giving you a wooden leg. He altered you, yes, but he didn't create you, only a 'hull you must transcend’, to use his own parlance. That shit he said was just his arrogance speaking. The only person with any right to call you their masterpiece is yourself."

"I know," you reply. And you do. Still, hearing the woman say it manages to be almost... comforting, somehow. Even if the thought of this being the best that you could achieve only serves to drive needles in the wound.

"And are you dead? Well, you're not off the map, are you? You're not above the clouds, you're not underwater. You're here," she says, and she pulls your gloved hands away from your face to hold them in her own. "I'm still with you. We're walking south towards Frostcliff Tavern, it's snowing, it's cold, and it's bloody fucking miserable, so we're definitely alive."

"Hurray," you mutter with all the sarcasm you can still work into your voice, and the mercenary grips your hands tighter in response.

At least you still have this, you tell yourself, focusing on her grasp and the melted snow on your brow. You have the cold to numb the pain, and a pair of hands willing to hold onto you rather than cast you away. An acquaintance, even, if one with a strong propensity for utterly failing to understand your point. You clench your jaw and grit your teeth, attempting to summon the determination you'd still possessed a week ago. So what if you have little left to your name? You've managed with much less, and done it twice at that. You can handle a third time.

The thought feels as hollow and empty as the mercenary's hands.

"Now for the... messy parts," she keeps going, more hesitant this time. "Does that make you a different person than before the experiments?"

Your false heart skips a beat.

You call yourself Tharaêl Narys. You feel like Tharaêl Narys. You even remember being Tharaêl Narys — or at the very least remember some of it. But does that hold any meaning, if Tharaêl Narys was a corpse left to rot on the Father’s workbench? If his memories are halfway gone? Are they truly his memories, or merely a copy of them? A set of old ropes wrapped around another's soul?

If you were to go find his corpse and have it brought to life again, who would look out of its eyes?

Tharaêl Narys?

What is Tharaêl, anyway?

"...Unless this body is a perfect copy of the previous one," the mercenary blunders on, "I'd say that yes, you are different. Very. But not in some fundamental sense of not being yourself," she interrupts your thoughts before they can spiral further. "You're still who you were yesterday, still who you were ten years ago. Rather, you're like... someone with permanent lycanthropy, or a piece of music meant for a lyre being instead played on a flute. Undergoing a change of form by itself induces a change of content, because the information is no longer processed in the same fashion. Some inevitably gets lost or otherwise displaced. Still you," she insists, "but different."

Okay. You but different. It sounds... trite. Almost nonsensical, really. But it's good enough. It will do. It's not like anyone is there to tell the difference anyway; anyone who remains only ever knew Brother Wrath. Nobody left alive knows Tharaêl Narys. Not even you, some days.

"And were you dead," she continues, "as in did your sails get thrown into the water and remain there for a while? If what he said is true, yes. And you're probably," she hesitates again, "...confused, or at least partly so, because you still have that sense of up above the map and down under the map existing even though you can't see them anymore. On top of that, your ropes, your memories, aren't tied to your new senses in quite the same place as before, which eight years of being taught to filter out your body can't possibly have helped. So you feel... poorly connected. Like you're detached from things, when you are attached — just not where you expect to be."

Because it just figures. The Rhalâs simply has to be poison to you all the way down to the marrow. Of fucking course.

First the gutter, then the sewers, then an orphanage that sold you, then the Dust Pit, then a cult that tore out your soul in the most literal of ways. What next? Maybe you should tell the mercenary to double-check her ceiling. With your luck, it may just cave in the moment you get there.

You raise an arm to wipe your face with the back of your glove, and the mercenary's hand is dragged along with yours, her freezing steel gauntlet colliding with your nose.

"So sometimes," she goes on once again, waiting for you to be done to pull your hand back to your lap, "when things get very stormy, you... flicker. A big wave crops up, and since the ropes that tether your soul aren't in the same place as before, your soul gets pulled by the wind a very little bit, for a very little while, in a way that you're not used to. Then the wave passes, and you come right back into place. And that's what you are," she concludes, bringing your two hands together and clasping them between her own. "Not dead, not undead, just... very out at sea, and needing to tighten a few bonds here and there."

You take a long breath in. You let it out, slowly, attempting to discipline yourself into relaxing your jaw.

You take in another.

A third.

"What happens if the ropes break down," you manage to ask on the fourth, finally able to form words.

"They will not break down," she answers, adamant. "And if somehow they still do," she forestalls your remark, raising her voice even as you were opening your mouth to protest her optimism, "I can catch souls, and I have a friend who can bind them. I'm not going to let you drift, I'm not going to let you drown, and we're going to do our best to make you stormworthy again. Alright?"

It's stupid. It's optimism without thought, words without actions, good intentions without the slightest speck of actual planning to back them up. Hopes upon hopes upon hopes, resting on the shoulders of an outlander daft enough to still believe in fairytales such as friendship and fairness in the Undercity.

...Still, whatever it is, it's there. There and willingly shared with you. Not with Brother Wrath, or some masterpiece, or with some other mental construct only extant in their beholder's mind. With you. Tharaêl. Not Tharaêl Narys, perhaps, but Tharaêl who smirks and screams and stabs and keeps calling the woman the fucking idiot she is.

It's a hope and a prayer, but it's what you have, and it's clearly all you're getting. Maybe you can both make it through this stupid plan as well, like you somehow did the last one.

Your shoulders feel as if they are mere moments from turning to stone, and so you let your head fall back, hoping to relax the muscles of your neck a little. That plan finds itself thwarted by a dull thud, however, and a smattering of snow falls on top of your upturned face. It takes a few blinks for you to notice that you are staring at the underside of snow-laden branches. You must have had your back to a tree. You hadn't even noticed anything was there.

You have barely realized that you could see the branches by the time the migraine throbs, robbing you of sight once again.

You sigh.

"It all sounds so simple when put in your daft metaphors," you tell the mercenary, blinking out the melt of the snow that just dusted your cheeks.

"I did warn you I would be forced to make corny analogies," she says, sounding somewhat... amused, somehow. "It is mostly accurate, though. If heavily, er... stylized."

"That's not the point," you snap, bringing your head back upright to look at — or rather blindly stare at — the direction her voice comes from. "Metaphors don't mend souls. They don't stop arrows. They don't fill the stomach or shelter from the mud. It doesn't matter how I feel or what pretty little thoughts you decide to have about it — it matters what I can do."

"...That would be why I offered my roof, yes," the mercenary replies, uncomprehending. "So you can figure out what you want to do."

"But I don't know what can be done. For food, for money, for — for anything, fuck it all. Not in the Upper City. As things are, I'm just going to end in the Pit all over again."

Or on another cliff, you do not say. The mercenary can likely deduce that one on her own.

She lets go of your hands, leaving you once again stranded in the white void. Mercifully enough, the silence does not last; you can hear her shuffle in place, creaking leather and crackling snow against the backdrop of the wind. Then you can feel the heavy hood settle against your scalp once more, its fur lining tickling the tips of your ears and eyebrows. It must have slid of when you let your head fall.

"You'll manage," she tells you as you hear her sit back down. "You need time to wind down, yes, but you have it. I have enough money to last us both a good long while. We'll be fine. Both of us."

That's a stopgap, at best. Not a true solution. You're unarmed, you're unskilled, you're Pathless, and it seems that to any competent Arcanist looking at you, you're also dead besides. Not the most auspicious of ways to start a new life anywhere, let alone in the damn city. But there's no point in telling her that, now is there? Having bought a house within Ark does not make the mercenary any less of an Outlander. She would hear the words if you spoke, but she wouldn't understand them. Just like she doesn't get them now.

You let your head fall back into your hands, but the mercenary soon pushes them away, grabbing you by the shoulders to pull you back to your feet. You let yourself follow the pull, stumbling a few steps once the difference in heights makes her hold more hindrance than assistance.

"You're tired and having an unbelievably bad week," the mercenary says, in a tone of voice that you take to mean the words are a conclusion. "Come on. I'll make you some windbreak, and you can rest as long as you want. Don't worry about the fire, food, or watch. Just lie down until you feel like getting up again. Take all the time you need. If it's an hour, it's an hour. If it's a week, I'll find us food and build us a tent."

You try to look at her, turning your head in the direction of her voice — and find out to your own surprise that you can see her, if poorly. The white of all the moonlit snow still shoots fire into your brain, but the spots of black about her — her hair, her eyes, her clothes — are dull and dark enough for you to grasp the contours of. You gaze into that shapelessness, into those blobs of blackness dancing across the white void, and the shapeless question finally takes form as well, tumbling from your lips like so many stones on your back.

"If I hadn't killed him," you ask, and you despise the way your voice quakes as it forms the words. "If I hadn't killed Letho — could you have brought him back?"

The blobs of black flicker, and you wipe at your eyes, attempting to fend off the migraine and the light. But you feel melted snow run down to your chin at the gesture, and so you wipe harder, harsher. Willing the drops to fade away.

You don't cry. You can't afford to. Every tear is a chink daggers can use to reach your bones. You are exposed enough as is. No need to make your weakness worse.

"...There was no soul left there," the mercenary says, her voice almost lost in the wind. "I looked as hard as I could, but he was gone long before your swords ever touched his neck. I'm sorry."

Letho's head rolls across the tiles, as if it was a ball that had fallen from his shoulders. The mercenary's fingers dig into the wool and the leather stretched along your arms, uncomfortable in their hold and in their simple existence. You let go of your face, bat both her hands away.

She lets you.

"Try to sleep, Tharaêl," she says, blobs of black bobbing with her voice. "If things get in any way truly dangerous, I'll teleport us home right away."

"Home," you echo the mercenary's silhouette, in a fruitless attempt to wring meaning out of the word.

"Yes," she insists, her voice still quiet and yet firm. "Home."

You stare at the shadow of her, at the uncertain shape of snowy trees against the bright night sky. You wonder what it is that determines the gap, that defines the difference between "Sister Pride, to be killed", "Brother Hatred, to step over", and "Brother Wrath, to be brought home."

You wish you knew what Letho saw, when he picked you to share his hay rather than any other child.

"...Okay," you tell the mercenary, resigned to finding no answers.

Of the fifth day and night, you recall only dreams. Nightmares, really. A rough push at your back. Masks in the night. Your swords cutting through bone. Sha'Gun in the temple. Your arms covered in blood. The old man begging for his son. Letho asking the Father whether or not to kill you. Reaching for his face only for it to melt and rot in your hands. The mercenary stabbing you and leaving you to die. Letho's body falling to pieces, combusting into unrecognizable charred meat. A head rolling across the tiles. Then another. Then another. Then another. Then another. Then another. Then another. And all the screams. So many screams. Then silence, and then nothingness, and beyond that a deep, dark void.

You are almost grateful for the glare of the snow when you wake up.

The mercenary says that you were more comatose than asleep, curled under the small tent of furs nailed to an old table that she had assembled for you. Says that she tried to shake you awake, slap you awake even, once you began tossing. Says that she could never manage.

You suppose there is luck in that. You could have done without the dreams, but thanks to that day's worth of sleep, the migraine becomes bearable.

That sixth day is... good enough. Your memories still flee you, but sight and sound are clear, the snow is less blinding, and the cold of the air feels crisp and clean on your face. You devour a breakfast of bear atop the bare wooden guard post you seem to have been sleeping on, then the mercenary and you set out for the Crystal Forest, infinitely grateful for its shelter from the wind. An idle argument on the nature of wisps springs up along the way, meant less for relevance than to busy the mind and fill the silence. You segue into theory upon theory, only rarely interrupted by spirits and elementals — which the mercenary in turn interrupts with her own.

The mercenary's ghosts are notably absent.

You feel somewhat... useless, standing there watching her. Almost enough to make you wish you'd kept your swords, wherever you left them. Or at least thought to keep your bow. What are you even doing, strolling unarmed and unarmored through the Northwind Mountains? Depriving your hired sword of her strongest weapon just to assuage your own fears? What the fuck is wrong with you?

Your arrow pierces through the mercenary's neck, your swords through Brother Hatred's throat, Letho's head rolls across the tiles as if it was a ball that had fallen from his shoulders, and the diffuse pink glow of the Crystal Forest returns to your awareness in a gasp.

That, the memories say, in their infinite wisdom. That is what is wrong with you. That is what you are doing, what you are striving to avoid, strolling unarmed and unarmored.

You try to push the thoughts out of your mind's eye as you walk, but you never truly succeed.

You ask the mercenary about weapons themselves, eventually, in an attempt to redirect your focus from their use to their abandonment. She seems rather unconcerned by their absence, however. She can handle elementals and many more besides, she says, cheeks flushed with anger, or perhaps disapproval. She can do it with or without your assistance, thank you, and with or without ghosts. You put your swords to good use anyway, she adds, and it felt wrong to take them back. Better to leave them to the mountains, serving to mark Letho's grave.

You did bury him, then. That's... good. A net improvement on the dreams. You still cannot recall one bit of it, but the knowledge that you did go through with your plan makes the memories less pressing to recover. All that matters it that it was done. That whatever remained of Letho's soul was laid to rest, and that you were there. The details are irrelevant.

Gods, you buried Letho.

You buried Letho and it only took you an entire fucking decade spent failing to recognize anything from his stature to his voice. You lived with him, for fuck's sake. You saw him almost every day! How did you manage to be so fucking blind?! And how many bodies did it even take you to get there? The old man and his family, the 'handful' for the Rhalâta, the handful you didn't quite kill but drove to their deaths anyway, the other Rhalâim, the other mercenary... Would you have killed the mercenary walking by your side right now, if you'd had no other sacrifice to give before the door of the Room of Paintings? And how many dozens did you kill in the Pit? You don't even remember.

Some fucking brother you are. Some fucking friend.

You shake the thought out of your head, willing doubt and regret away, and resume your slow trek southwards in the mercenary’s wake.

When you reach sight of the tavern at last, on the evening of that sixth day, the last light of the sun is fading from the peaks. The mercenary's pace progressively slows down, before coming to a dead stop right in the middle of the road. You are the one who needs to prod at her, for once, for her to admit to her issue.

Which happens to be the Rhalâs sitting for all to see right in-between your eyes.

You would be angry at yourself for the gross oversight, but you mostly just feel disturbed. You've been dodging your own reflection for years because of the damn brand, donned hoods and headbands whenever needing to slip out of sight. It's barely been a week; how did you manage to forget it was there already? If your mind is wandering that much, there may in fact be merit to the mercenary's delaying. Frostcliff's denizens may not have thought much of one stray Rhalâim, but Ark's city guard would likely not have been quite so kind.

The mercenary observes the brand, pokes at it with a steel-gauntleted hand, then claims that there may be a rather simple solution. Scars don't take to magic too well, but this one is rather shallow by virtue of its location; a simple pass of skinning knife should expose fresh tissue, raw and recent enough to cure. She could heal that cleanly, she thinks, like she did all your other wounds.

She'd been wary of offering without Ambrosia close at hand, she says, but with a good bed to rest in — and a 'colleague' to barter with in Frostcliff — the issue is as good as gone. Why spend time and effort hiding something she can simply remove?

You've seen her wield her skinning knife enough to trust her skill with it, and maybe getting a good look at a piece of your artificial flesh will... help things sink in, somehow. You've worn the Rhalâs across your face and shoulders more than enough. Those years are gone; so should it be. You hesitate only for an instant, before taking up the offer as wholeheartedly as you can.

You lie back onto a nearby rock, tilting your head upwards as far as it will go. It feels alien and familiar all at once, movement and position well known, but the starry skies overhead as foreign as a brand new land. You find yourself looking up at the mercenary too, for once. A strange experience in itself, after so many days spent striving to recall to look below your shoulder level when trying to catch her eyes. She tests your forehead with a thumb, pinches and twists the skin, determining depth and angle — and you find yourself wishing she would simply get things over and done with.

The mercenary leans over you, eyes and blade-bearing hand focused on your forehead, framed by the dark night sky and the light of the moon.

The mercenary cowers at your feet, lip and nose broken and bleeding, framed by the blue light of a spell cast in your direction.

Your hands dive to your hips, but they grasp only air; you try to step away, and back into hard rock. You open your mouth to bark a question, yet find yourself winded, breath coming in short bursts and ears filled with nothing but the drum of your racing pulse. Cornered, you blink, once, twice — but still the change of scene refuses to make sense, leaving you to cast your gaze about in a vain quest for answers.

It strikes you, as you look around, how unfamiliar the sight is. The lines of the peaks, the texture of the snow and rocks, all of it is alien to you. The Temple had held its own grandeur, especially in torchlight, but even it had been held between the cave's walls, had stooped under its ceiling. There had always been rock, wherever your eyes went. Not so here. Here there is sky, there is distance — and there is horizon. The Temple had never had one. Nor had the Undercity. Not even the Upper City, the handful of times you'd been there.

The world had been aborted. Stopped in its tracks by rock walls. And yet now that you're freed from them, you keep feeling that if you stumble you will fall into the sky.

Your thoughts come to a brutal stop, as you find yourself riveted by the sight of droplets of blood splattering across the blue glow. You raise a hand to your face, and it comes away slick and red, as a sharp burning pain flares to life in its wake.

"Fawhaêl?"

Your follow the voice by instinct, and your gaze returns to the mercenary, still bracing herself on the ground. You'd forgotten she was there. Her eyes meet yours, wide and dull black, from behind the blue shimmer of her spell—

—and the details do not add up. It is her off hand that faces you, not the one she casts fire with, and all her spells drain, burn, or freeze. They do not lacerate, do not cause wounds that bleed. She does not seem to be angry, let alone attacking you. Her posture isn't aggressive. It's defensive, if anything. Worried, even, judging from the line of her brow. The spell is a shielding one. You've seen her cast it many times. You've seen her act like this before, back in—

You blink.

Back in the orphanage.

Shit. Did you have a... a 'seizure' again?

"...Yeah," you answer both her call of your name and your own mind, letting your gaze flutter about for more hints of context. "Yeah, I'm — what happened?"

The mercenary's head rolls back in visible relief, and her shielding spell winks out.

"Sh'fhine," she slurs, reaching out with one hand to brace herself on rock. She drags herself to her knees with a groan, starts to fish around the belt bags where she keeps her potion stock. "Yuhr ohhay, I'm ohhay. You fhunch like a fugghin fhroll, ut I'm ohhay."

Your vision starts to spin as you eyes flick from blood to rock to snow, and suddenly your head feels like it's set adrift, unable to fully focus on the mercenary's words. You let the rock at your back bear your weight, and turn your face up to the sky, using the stars as reference by which to gauge the accuracy of your sight.

The trembling lines take a moment to fully resolve into dots.

"What did I do," you ask, once you feel sure enough of your own senses to resume your question. "I don't — this didn't happen when I got the brand done."

"Sh'fhine," the mercenary reiterates between snorts, spitting what you suppose is the blood running down her throat. "You had an ehhisode. Shudda sheen iss gommin. Whir gud. Khenna heal fhad?"

It takes you a confused moment to parse her words, caught as you are by the remnants of the sensation of slipping from your own grasp. It takes more moments still for your eyes to return to her in response, and for her extended hand to reach through the fog of confusion that is blanketing you. But it does reach, eventually, and you give the mercenary a silent nod in response.

You tune out her ministrations as you focus inward, slowly reining your breath and pulse back under your control.

A few potions and spells later, the mercenary's nose and lip are in one piece again, and your forehead no longer bleeds. Your garments, however, can hardly say the same, and you are left to clean what looks like a pint of blood off yourselves with nothing but handfuls of snow. A lost cause if there ever was one.

"Sorry," you tell the mercenary.

You don't know what else to say.

"I've set you on fire twice," she replies, shrugging. "I kind of deserve it for being so bloody stupid, honestly. Yes, let's take a knife to Tharaêl's head and make light of it! What could possibly go wrong?"

"What did you say?"

The mercenary's eyes raise from their inventory of her ever-shortening stock of medical supplies to throw an exasperated glare in your direction.

"I am not daft enough to repeat it, thank you very much."

...Fair. Grating, but fair. You recall broken noses to be a rather annoying experience. You let the mercenary proceed with her sorting of her stocks in silence, allowing your eyes to wander across the ground and rocks — and the blood staining them.

"...The brand," you finally remember, and you run a hand across your forehead by rote, finding it eerily smooth and tender. "Did it work?"

"Yes," the mercenary says, her frown turning into a smile as she packs the last of the potions and salves back into her bags. "Well, we look like we butchered our way down the road and you really need a shave, but your face is as smooth as it ever gets and I've got hides to salt and hang, so we can blame the bears, and — whoah."

Your eyes whip back to the mercenary, only to find hers open wide, their uniform blackness staring as if through you.

"What?"

"I'm fine, don't worry," she answers, but the way she lengthens each sound would tend to say the opposite. "I'm contemplating the extent of our luck, I think. Shit. It hasn't been this bad in a long time. The visions, not our luck. Our luck is great."

"Great," you echo in pure disbelief.

Visions? What the fuck is the bloody idiot going on about, this time?

"Well, this version of you is sporting a rather distinct lack of being dead," she says, "and I am not dragging your corpse. So I think yes, we're doing great. Sucks to be alternate us, though."

"Arcanist's fever," you deduce.

You've never experienced the sensation yourself, but you've been there as others did, in the Pit and the Temple both. Messy moments, those were, some of them with messier endings still. None ever outright saw into other realities as the fever hit, however. That, or they never mentioned it.

"Yeah," the mercenary confirms your guess. "Ambrosia and some rest, and I'll be good as new. The shady guy near the back tables always has some. Don't worry. I can trade him some books for it."

Which means that both of you are unable to defend yourselves, and fully dependent on the assistance of a 'shady guy' who may or may not be present. Fantastic. Utterly grand.

You open your mouth to tell the mercenary of the flaw in her plan, only to let it close again. You look at her face, her flushed face, and it dawns upon you that its red never came from anger. She had been crimson-cheeked this morning already. Yesterday, you had slept; the days before, you hadn't been able to see — and the day before that, you hadn't been able to care.

How long has her fever been 'this bad', exactly? Since the blizzard? Since the Father? The bloody fucking idiot. You wonder if her alternate selves are as daft and red-cheeked as she is.

You wonder why they drag your corpse.

Letho's head rolls across the tiles, and you try and you try again to put it back where it belongs, to erase the image of the headless thing on the ground, of your swords going through its neck, of its eyes turning to the Father as if you'd never existed. But the blood is too slippery, gravity too unforgiving. Time too immutable. The corpse remains a corpse, no matter what you do.

The woman's eyes keep flicking to your left, running along the lines of something she alone can see. You pick up her backpack with one hand, grab her shoulder with the other, and half-push, half-guide her from the bloody rocks back onto the snowy trail.

"Let's get ourselves indoors," you say.

The woman nods, and you set down the road to cross the final few yards to the inn; her opening the way at an unsteady pace, you standing at her back, making sure she does not stumble.

The place is a simple enough structure from the outside. Old wood, stones older still, a handful of dirty windows. If not for the snow and the sky, you could imagine it fitting in the Undercity. Along Glimmerdust Lane, perhaps. Next to the orphanage, even. But as soon as you pass the stray drunkards to walk through the door, the impression vanishes like the illusion it was. The game tables are there, as are the exhausted patrons and bards singing their tired songs, but the room has a warmth to it, a sense of hospitality to its air, that even the Refuge on its very best days had never so much as approached.

It's an inn like any other, and yet it's too vivid. Too loud. Too everything at once. You feel your shoulders tense at the lack of dark corners, your hands twitch at the lack of weapons to grab if need be. You know nobody here.

You are nobody here, for better and for worse.

The mercenary points to a table close to the hearth, where an old, cowled man pores over a stack of books. Following the unspoken request, you half-push half-carry her across the sunken area that serves as the inn's entrance, help her over the few steps leading to the dining room proper. She greets the old man much like you would greet your own contacts, and a mere few minutes of bartering later, both she and the man are smiling — him over an old tome you gather must have been priceless, and her at an armful of familiar vials.

"Dinner," she proclaims with a smile.

"You better have some pennies left to buy me a real one," you retort with a frown.

The woman breaks into laughter as she uncorks her Ambrosia, and you follow her to the counter in the middle of the room, finding yourself chuckling as well. Maybe from the absurdity of it all. Maybe from sheer raw nerves.

The innkeeper is as warm as her hearth and tavern, and just as cloying to your mind. She grates against your skin and bones, leaving you wanting nothing so much as running back into the snow. The mercenary, for her part, seems unaffected by it all. She smiles at the woman, looks through her purse, and looks at you — then she books a 'small room for two' until 'the start of the new week'.

"This night and three more days," she tells you on the stairs, still relying on you to walk in a straight line. "Board included if reasonable — some meat and vegetables are okay, but start pawing at the desserts and you'll be paying extra fees. You can go down for some rabbit once we're done settling in."

It would likely not do to start an argument right on the stairs, within sight and hearing of all. So you wait until you make it across stairs and second floor both, the door of the small room closed securely behind your back.

"I thought we were going to Ark," you say once the mercenary is seated safely on the bed.

"We are," she confirms, taking a pause in her drinking of her second vial. "But I want this to work out, so I'm maximizing your chances first, and step one of that is drinking all of this Ambrosia and sleeping an entire day. Then there's letters I need to ask the Myrad Keeper to deliver, and — well, let's just say dumping you onto the marketplace right now doesn't strike me as a good idea."

"I managed just fine by myself for twenty years," you retort, the mercenary's condescension serving to destroy your patience. "You don't need to baby me, damn it. I'm not a fucking child."

The mercenary's brow furrows, and she cocks her head to the side.

"I don't doubt that you can deal, Tharaêl. I've seen you deal with much, much worse. But can you deal in a way that doesn't leave bruises or draw blood? This," she says, pointing to her slightly bruised nose, "is what I'm wary of. Your reflexes are adjusted for surviving under Ark, not living within it, and they're honed to a fault. Hence, a few more days to process things, ask anything you want to ask, and practice coexisting with tired and drunk surfacers."

The rational part of your mind thinks of swords best left to a grave, of allies best not alienated, and of heads rolling across tiles. But the feeling part of your mind, the part that wields the swords and kills the friends and cuts off heads, breaks through your fraying nerves like water through a dam. You whirl on the mercenary, fists clenched over nothing, voice catching on thin air.

"Practice," you snarl, putting all the contempt you can in the word. "You think I need to practice spending time around tavern lowlives? Where do you think I spent my fucking days, these past ten years? Do you even listen to what you're saying, for fuck's sake?"

"I think the uniform you wore has handled the problem for you," the mercenary says — and though her eyes follow your hands, her own hands, she folds in her lap. "I think you relied on it much more than you realize. Are you going to hit me again?"

The question pierces through your heart as surely as any blade would, and drains the anger out of you faster than any weapon could.

Letho's head rolls across the tiles, as if it were a ball that had fallen from his shoulders.

The mercenary cowers at your feet, lip and nose broken and bleeding.

You let the backpack fall to the ground and turn back without a word, through the small room's door, through the second floor, through the back entrance you'd spotted on your way up the stairs. But you have barely taken a few strides into the snow when the realization hits that you have nowhere else to go.

You stare at the shadow that you guess to be Northwind Peak, towering over the landscape, dark even against the night sky.

You should have let yourself fall.

You should have fucking jumped.

The fatigue of the week descends back onto your shoulders, and you let yourself sink to the ground in the middle of the road. You brace your elbows on your knees and let your head rest in your hands, as unwilling to walk further as you are to go back inside.

You've been sitting there for a while when you hear the snow crackle at your back a few times, and then a heavy weight fall on the ground right next to you. A steel-gauntleted hand puts a plate in your line of sight, its contents leaking steam like a small stream of clouds.

Roasted rabbit and potatoes.

The woman scoots closer, fidgets for an instant, and you find yourself wrapped in her cloak all over again. She pulls the edges together, enfolding the both of you in the warm wool and rabbit fur, then takes a swig from a bottle you assume to be Dal'Sark Mead before setting it down in front of you. She sets her own plate on her knees, picks apart a piece of ribs with her bare hands and teeth.

After a few minutes, you start to do the same, allowing the food and the drink to return their warmth to your limbs.

The mercenary sits with you in the snow until dawn, gazing first at the stars, then at the way the rising Sun chases them out of the heavens in a burst of crimson and blue.

Neither of you speaks a word.

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tonightinthewasteland · 5 years

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The Appalachian mountain range was hushed with the early breaths of winter as it rolled in on low hanging clouds. The sun was almost gone and the temperature had already dipped nearly ten degrees by the time they stepped into the yellow light of Sunny Top station. Casey bypassed the vendor bot and workbenches to make a flying leap for a grand four-poster bed resting regally at the back of the station, unconcerned with what the seasons might have done to the integrity of its wood frame. He lost his hat mid-flight and landed with a bounce that only made the bed groan with abuse. Rolling pleasantly, the mattress felt bony with frequent love but it wasn't, he thought with a wide grin, the cold ground. He rolled over at the sound of approaching boots and found Nate a few steps back surveying the space critically. Casey shimmied himself into a princely reclining position and propped his head up to watch the older man with some amusement.

Nate moved cautiously from one end of the space to another, taking in the grim decor, living details, and landscape around them. His eye caught Casey's, who smiled brightly at him, and he returned it with a frown of deep displeasure.

Casey didn't have to ask Nate what bothered him, he knew. Environmental awareness and deduction was a newly perfected skill that Casey acquired unwillingly by way of Nate himself. The room had been ingested and deciphered almost instantly upon arrival. They both saw the lack of exits, the blind hill behind them, the proximity of the road, the attraction of Vendorbots, grotesque signs of raider occupancy, and the barrel fire still burning tall and hot. The only difference between them was that Casey didn't care.

Nate had moved out the station, no doubt to scrutinize the high and low road, but Casey knew he'd find no one. If a weary traveler hadn't stayed the night then they were in a hurry to make it to the valley below. They could even be halfway down the mountain by now, thought Casey. Even so, Nate came back looking just as pinched in the face as he had before.

"...all’s fair in love and war, commander?" Casey asked playfully, drawing Nate's gaze with the curl of his voice.

"What?" The older man's voice was coated in road dust.

"Are the seas calm, Captain?" Casey teased again. "Or Is there smoke on the horizon? Are we safe?" He asked finally.

"We are never safe," Nate said harshly.

Casey just hummed behind his smiling mouth in acknowledgment. He had stopped taking offense at his companion's matter-of-fact-ness months ago.

The older soldier hadn't lowered his gun and remained intense between the bed and doorway, clearly restless and untrusting of their surroundings. Casey palmed the mattress invitingly, speaking with sincere concern.

"Lay down, Wooyf, you're tired."

Nate, who had been watching the doorway, turned back towards the bed. His face remained solemn but his eyes had grown softer. He didn't bother to correct Casey's natural mispronunciation of Wolf.

"You sleep. I have things to do first."

The young man blinked and pouted thoughtfully before throwing himself dramatically against the mattress, letting his legs and arms drop akimbo as he moaned sensuously.

"Oooh, Nate come to me! Warm me with your big bad wooyf body!" He kept his eyes shut serenely for effect and didn't see Nate roll his.

"Sleep while you can, Casey. I will be back."

Casey sat up quickly. It was his turn to frown, which must have been severe because the disapproval was enough to halt Nate midstep and regard the Scribe curiously.

"I just will be in the next room. Don't worry." He said reassuringly, misinterpreting Casey's facial cue. The older man went around the corner and a few moments later brought the whirr of a pedal saw along with the commons sounds of a man at work.

If there was an activity Casey couldn't come to peace with, it was sleeping alone. Much of his childhood was spent wedged between his parents like a puppy, fueling animosity with his constant need for their comfort. Until the bombs came down. His parents had not been warm people before the vault but inside with the world falling around them, they surrendered drowsy kisses and the occasional admissions if love, to him and each other.

Outside his family suite, young adulthood saw six years of domestic companionship in a suite of his own until the rug of monogamy was pulled out from beneath him just shy of reclamation day. He then slept the last month of his seemingly healthy relationship starting at an indifferent back, one cold foot of space between them that felt ten miles wide. He woke up alone the day the vault opened and had slept that way ever since.

Alone in the back of a station, he let himself roll into the groove worn into the mattress by strangers and brought up his knees, willing the concave circle to become nest-like and warm. Exhaustion snuck up on him in the half-light, bringing with it an unforgiving winter draft that rocked him to sleep.

Casey woke at the sound of a magazine snapping into the chamber. With catlike clarity he rolled to his knees, digging for his switchblade with a thumb stuck down his boot. It was full dark and the world was still, save for the bouncing shadows brought by firelight, and Nate held up both hands in surrender.

“At ease.” He soothed from his seat near the fire barrel looking mildly surprised and marginally impressed, 10mm in one hand. “I’m sorry if I woke you.”

The Scribe let out a shaky breath of relief and relaxed theatrically, dropping like a ragdoll back into the mattress.

“No, no...” The young man sighed. “It was just a dream is all.” His muscles protested at their release and he moaned. How long had he been curled up like that?

Nate withheld comment and grunted in understanding. He’d had those sorts of dreams before and resumed cleaning his gun in respectful silence. As he shook out a rag, he didn't see Casey grin up at the ceiling but he heard the smile in his voice.

“Want to know what I was dreaming about?”

He grunted noncommittally.

Casey rolled on to his stomach and was watching his companion closely now. Nate brood over an old gun, leaning to firelight to catch all the details of his work. Even in the orange glow as shadows traced each graceless scar and age line, Casey couldn't help but think him handsome. It was the determined set of the man's mouth and dark, downcast eyes that intrigued him the most.

“I was dreaming about getting plowed by supermutants.” He announced suddenly, making Nate jolt in his seat.

“Casey!” Admonished the Knight, lip curled back with disgust.

The Scribe buried his high, bark-like laugh in the mattress beneath his chin and let out a stream of muffled apologies at the sharp point of Nate’s disapproving glare.

“Sorry-sorry! I’m kidding! I’m sorry!”

When the giggles subsided Nate punished him with a long, stormy quiet before he spoke again.

“Go to sleep.” He said coldly, though Casey thought he sensed a weariness as if Nate was speaking to himself.

“Okay,” Casey surrender with bored finality, feeling a touch guilty. He had just begun to turn into the bed when he lifted his head back up suddenly. A bright, mischievous smile crept to his face.

“...only if you sleep with me.”

The young man hovered above the bed expectantly, waiting for the rebuttal that was sure to come, but instead, Nate strapped the gun to his hip and gave Casey an unreadable look that dropped the smile from his face.

“Fine.” The Kight agreed.

Things didn't fall as smoothly as that. Nate had to relieve himself first, which got Casey thinking he might as well do the same, then a stomach growled and a late dinner of fried Cram and corn was arranged. As Casey scrapped the black edges of the pan Nate surveyed the perimeter once more. The two met again face-to-face from their respective bedsides, one covered in icy dew feeling reluctantly satisfied with the state of things, both looking like strangers.

Nate climbed on first and rest his back against the ornate headboard with legs crossed comfortably. He watched patiently as Casey rested one knee on the mattress before hesitating, then raised his brows as the young man stumbled through a quick apology before exiting the space once again. His voice had cracked as he excused himself.

Nate stared with animal-like intensity into the empty air Casey left behind.

When the young man came back around the corner he appeared hot-faced but determined, making a purposeful beeline for his side of the bed and rolling neatly into place. The ensuing silence was busy, sizzling like distant radio static. Casey lay obediently reposed, back to his companion, and the volatile nature of the silence told him that Nate was not convinced by this play at innocence.

“Is this enough?”

Casey flinched, unprepared for the question or how the deep roll of his voice slipped beneath the darkness.

“Yes.” The Scribe muttered a touch too quickly, tightly.

Nothing moved between them but fire and shadows; somewhere in the night, something wailed like a small child.

“Yes...” He insisted again, letting it out like a held breath and deflating at the edges into the mattress. “It’s enough.”

Natan Cortez belongs to @avaleon. Dis for you bae.

#fallout oc #natan cortez #casey loomis

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parangarico-blog1 · 5 years

Text

Purchasing That First Ukulele - Part 2

Presentation

The past article talked about the group of ukuleles. A wide range of sorts of tonewoods are utilized really taking shape of a ukulele each having their very own uncommon tonal characteristics and grain designs. Settling on a cover or strong best ukulele can impact the sound quality and also the cost of the ukulele. This article examines these subjects to help in your basic leadership process. This article is the second in a three section arrangement that examines these issues in purchasing that first ukulele. The article finishes up with some accommodating indications.

Mahogany Tonewood

Ukuleles are produced using an assortment of woods, for example, koa, mahogany, spruce, cedar and maple are alluded to as tonewoods. These tonewoods enormously decide the general sound quality and cost of the ukulele. This area centers around mahogany as the prime tonewood at its ubiquity and cost.

Mahogany is commonly viewed as the prime tonewood and ukuleles produced using mahogany are likely the most prominent available. Mahogany is a medium thickness wood that is normally rosy in shading. Mahogany ukuleles by and large create tones that are warm and brilliant without a lot of accentuation on either end of the tonal range. A great many people will in general begin with ukuleles produced using mahogany wood for its shading and tonal characteristics.

Quality Laminate or Solid Wood Construction

Cover is fundamentally pressed wood for the most part found in many ukuleles today. To create a perceptible sound the body of the ukulele must have a thin soundboard generally 0.0625 inches thick. With this resistance, the wood can tend to break or the grain in the wood can isolate after some time.

Overlays are a unique composite wood particularly intended for ukuleles. They are not the modest compressed wood with scrap wood stuck in the center. Their sturdiness settles on them an amazing decision utilized in the soundboard taking into consideration the expected slenderness to deliver a more intense sound and are not defenseless to grain parts. Quality built cover ukuleles are extremely well known, have extraordinary sound quality and are an incredible esteem. The vast majority will in general begin with overlay ukuleles since they don't require the extraordinary consideration as in strong wood ukuleles.

Strong wood ukuleles, or one with a strong wood top, will quite often give a more splendid tone than a ukulele produced using an overlay. This is mostly because of the way that they vibrate more uninhibitedly than overlay woods. With strong wood the grain thickness can fluctuate making the sound be transmitted somewhat better. This implies no two ukuleles produced using a similar strong wood will have precisely the same tonal characteristics. Numerous ukulele players incline toward this since this makes every ukulele have its own one of a kind voice. Strong wood ukuleles will cost more, however it sounds much superior to overlay ukuleles. Exceptional consideration must be taken with strong wood ukuleles since they wound less demanding than overlay ukuleles.

Accommodating Hints

The best encourage is to go to a music store that moves ukuleles and make inquiries. Get the instrument, take a gander at it and check whether it lives up to your desires and that you will appreciate playing. Sadly, there are very few shops that have some expertise in moving ukuleles and numerous stores have a constrained choice.

There are numerous trustworthy sites that move ukuleles for not as much as what you may discover in music stores. A significant number of the better sites ought to have a client bolster division where you can call or email questions or concerns, if not stay away from them.

Here are some useful hints:

· Laminates are strong and will in general normal tonal sounds that can be alluring for steady stable after some time.

· Most individuals will in general begin with mahogany cover ukuleles. They are reasonable and there is a wide choice.

· The wood thickness in a strong best can differ making every ukulele remarkable in tonal characteristics.

· Solid wood ukuleles by and large have a higher sound and cost more. Unique consideration must be taken to keep away from wounds.

Ukuleles can bring long periods of melodic satisfaction as you investigate its history and melodic adaptability. This article just addresses a portion of the imperative choices in acquiring that first ukulele. The last article in this arrangement talks about tuners and strings. Up to that point, glad strumming!

#ukuele guitar guitarist

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hollowworldentertainment · 4 years

Text

Macabre Beauty

The city of Svelt sat quietly as the sun started to lower beyond the horizon, the light flickering over the tree line leaving behind patches of warmth from where it last touched. As the last beam of light disappeared into the nearby forest, there was a brief moment of silence, before the sirens started. All through the town one by one sirens started to sound, they echoed all through the forest and down the nearby mines. The miner’s picks stopped as the echoes reached their ears, dropping them where they stood they made their way back to the surface. Single file they marched out of the narrow openings back into fresh air, as they trudged back to town the mines dust was pulled from their backs and taken by the wind. Meanwhile in town a woman was setting up her art, her canvasses decorated the outside of her home. She stood back from her display content with her efforts, she turned to the skies smiling, she could see the dust clouds from the workers leaving the mines.

“Ok, I will get them this time. I am going to sell a piece today.” Eyne reassured herself as she looked at her reflection trying to boost here confidence.

The miners all made their way back into town, from all directions they poured into the city, ready for the beds they are denied all day. Eyne stood by her home grinning as the miners slowly trudged past. She called out to them,

“Another bad day in the mines? How about you purchase some art to make your home even brighter when you return. Art is great for..” Before she could finish a man that dwarfed the other miners walked in front of one of her pieces.

“You do draw pretty pictures of the trees and homes, but we work twelve hours a day. We compete with one another trying to find gems and other precious metals, why on Anodyne’s plagued Hollow would we waste our money on shit we would never see?”

The man was staring at Eyne with a face of tired confusion, making her feel uncertain she stuttered out the only response she could think of.

“To make your homes pretty so you have something to look forward too?”

“We sleep when we get home, some of us are lucky enough to have food waiting. Then there are people like you trying to waste our time and money on useless shit, this is trash, you are trash.”

The man picked up a canvass and smashed it across his knee, throwing it in the mud under the marching miners feet. Slowly it was completely trampled into the soft mud. Eyne slumped to the ground broken, she had been trying for months to sell even one piece, but it is clear that no one has time for her art. Defeated she started taking down her art from her home. As each one came down she became more and more filled with emotion. As her hands grasped the last piece she exploded with rage, throwing it to the ground smashing the wood her painting was on. Still fuelled with rage she laid waste to the remaining pieces, scattering coloured wood chips all over the front of her plain brown home.

Eyne’s heart took its time, eventually it started to slow back down allowing her to think.

“No, you know what I am not going to give up, this is my dream and I will be damned if Anodyne claims this dream as well.”

Eyne rushed inside and started to pull her own walls down to make more canvasses, piece by piece her home turned into a skeleton, barely able to support the roof above her head. She stayed up all night painting with the last of her supplies, ignoring her job she painted all through the day in preparation for the miners returning from work.

Sirens start sounding off all around town, before long the familiar dust cloud emerged from the tree line. Standing tall and ready with her new paintings she was certain she was going to sell today, she had picked a new topic to paint and knew it would go down great.

The miners all walked by as before, but this time one stopped staring. He started to wave down others walking by. Before long she had stopped many workers in their tracks, all of them staring at her art pieces, even the large man from the night before was stood staring.

“I knew I could win you over, art is important especially here because of how shit life is. We need the distraction.”

A man from the crowd spoke out in an angry voice, “Then why in living hell paint the mines?”

Eyne turned to her art where she had painted miners at work, harvesting crystals, ferrying resources, and leaving their smoke cloud at the end of the day. She did not get a chance to answer the demanding miner, her walls were swarmed by the miners that started smashing every piece of work she had crafted. Pieces were thrown through the windows colliding with what was left of her walls, after only a few minutes her house came crumbling down.

“We die in those mines, why the fuck do you think we would want to see those fucking rock walls anywhere but work. I am not going to apologize for your house, you are sick and I hope Anodyne finds you.”

The angry miner spat on the remains of Eyne’s home, before following the crowd. Eyne slumped to the ground defeated, she lay among the pile of scrap that was her home. Her skin shivered in the cold mud as she her emotions surged over her. The mud soaked into her clothes, it stuck to her skin and caught the night’s cold winds. She could barely feel her limbs as the cold took full effect.

Her wallowing was interrupted by the sound of carts and trucks rolling through the mud, Eyne looked up noticing a strange group of people walking through town. They had carts pulled by animals and plenty of them, at the back of group was motorised vehicles chugging through the soft mud. Eyne was too hurt to speak out, but she watched as they all slowly moved past. A few of the newcomers stared for a moment, but did nothing to help Eyne. Eyne had never seen so many living children in one group, they even seemed happy as they stomped their way through the muck.

Eyne climbed out of the mud and started following the loud group of newcomers. It was not long till there was confrontation, the new arrivals grouped up in the middle of the city and were being harassed by the locals. Loud voices were being thrown all around, but the newcomers were yet to speak a word.

As the commotion of the locals started to die out due to a lack of resistance an elderly woman emerged from one of the carts, in her hand she held a frosted bottle which she tossed to the nearest local. They pulled the cork and sniffed it, their nose flared and their head recoiled. Immediately they took a swig, the longer he drank the more contorted his face became. After downing half the bottle he released it from his lips exhaling with delight.

“Set up shop hag.”

The man raised the bottle and screamed at the top of his lungs, “They have alcohol!”

All the locals started to cheer as the newcomers started to spread out and set up stalls, music started nearly immediately along with the newcomers children running about.

“Grab your money and yourself, the Gypsies are in town. We have all the hard to acquire tastes, alcohol, emotion drugs, nightmare meat, and so much more.”

Eyne watched as everyone rushed to find their money to buy the life sweeteners that Svelt does not sell. She herself wanted to buy but was incapable as she now had nothing, she turned away to go back to her demolished home. The voice of the miners echoed around her head as she slowly walked away from town centre. Her mind turned to the small amount of rope she had in her home, and the tree she used to play on when she was young.

“Come with me, Eyne I need you.”

Eyne was dumbstruck that this old lady knew her name, “You know my name, you must know I have nothing. I am of no use, worse I waste what I have I am beyond useless.”

“My name is Eyne, I assume I am bad at everything because I can’t sell art. That is you, come with me stupid little girl.”

The old lady walked off towards the gypsy market with Eyne in tow,

Eyne mumbled beneath her breath, “I am not a little girl I am 48, stupid old lady.”

The two of them walked through the entire Gypsy setup, past all the venders selling hard to obtain goods. The sweet scent of nightmare meat filled her nose, before another aroma took over. Someone had removed a lid to an emotion drug and had taken a sip of, ‘Happy’. The man started to cheer and shout instantly as the drug took hold of him, he proceeded to run into a crowd of Gypsies and started dancing with them.

The longer Eyne was exposed to the Gypsies and the enjoyment they were having the more her insides started to tighten and her eyes started to well. She was at her breaking point, ready to burst.

“Quick in here young one.” The elderly lady rushed into a small motor home, it seemed to lean as the plump woman climbed aboard. Eyne was curious, she followed and entered the cramped home. Everywhere she moved she nearly knocked something to the floor, cautiously she found her way to a seat where she could knock nothing anything, or get in the way of the old gypsy lady.

“Why did you bring me in here?”

The old woman turned to smile at Eyne, nothing said she just continued to run around her home shifting things from one surface to another.

“Look I have no money so there is no point in trying to sell me anything.” Still the woman shuffled items in her home. “Look you old hag are you going to answer me or just waste my time?”

The old lady chuckled as she brought over two glasses, “But you have nothing how can I waste something that is not there?” She proceeded to pour a fine whisky into both of the glasses, “So have a drink young one and I will tell you how to sell art.”

Eyne was upset that the old woman had sassed her, she reluctantly took the glass and lent back into her chair waiting the hear what the old crone had to say.

“First of all, my name is not old hag it is Gara-vae. I want to help you sell art, because I love art.”

Gara-vae knocked back the entirety of her drink, “I think the best things in life are those that are not needed, and art is right up there when it comes to useless. I mean completely useless, like no one needs it, not one single piece is needed, ever.”

“I get it, it is useless.” Eyne yelled as she took a mouthful, promptly spitting it back into the glass choking on the smoky burn.

Gara-Vae giggled, “It takes some time to get used to.” She grabbed Eyne’s hands and looked deeply into her eyes. “The only way to make something less useless is to give it a function.”

Eyne was confused she just sat staring back into Gara-Vae’s eyes.

“This world is beautiful in the most macabre way, it may punish everything you do but it also gives the opportunity for such beauty, as long as you embrace all forms of beauty.”

“I, don’t…”

“It is simple paint a canvass with a simple background and watch as they come flocking. All you need to do is eat this and start painting once again.”

Gara-Vae pulled out a small crystal from her pocket, Eyne’s eyes lit up as the crystal shone.

“Do you know what this one does?”

“I do, all I ask in return is you travel with us and sell your art for the community.”

Eyne was incapable of saying no, before her was the opportunity to consume a gem of power. Even though she had no idea what it was the powers they bestowed would give her the edge to strive in Hollow, not just survive.

Hands shaking Eyne grasped the gem into her hands, she could feel it humming as she took hold of the tiny crystal.

Months pass and the gypsy fair arrived at another town, among them was a tired looking artist, sitting among a plethora of pieces. Many people came in to look as she placed her paintbrush against the side of a customer’s head, the brush started to glow as she moved it to the canvass. The brush was pushed against the empty canvass and an image started to appear, as the painting finished the piece and her eyes seemed to glow a pale purple, then the image started to move. The customer exclaimed as one of her nightmares had been pulled from their brain and placed into a canvass. She was incapable of keeping up with the demand at each new town they stopped at, making her artwork increase in price.

Eyne had never been happier, she had a family for the first time. Traveling nearly every day across the landscape of the largest continent of Hollow, Vispyr. With each passing day Eyne understood what Gara-Vae meant, although dark Vispyr had a beauty that was unmatched. It was not beauty by definition, it was not colourful, nor nice, but it was truly macabre. That was the hidden beauty that was hard to find, but better than anything Eyne could imagine.

To anyone who likes my stories, you can find the full catalog on my website, additionally you can find me on a variety of other social media.

Instagram | Twitter | Patreon | Facebook

#writeblr #writing #writer #hollowworldentertainment #macabrebeauty #chapter36 #horror #short stories #horror stories #short horror stories #horror writing #scifi #scifi writing #scifi stories #fantasy #fantasy writing #fantasy stories #dark

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entergamingxp · 4 years

Text

I went Christmas carolling in Rust with a real piano

Quite frankly, I’ve been looking for an excuse to show off my piano skills on Eurogamer for some time – and this month the perfect opportunity fell right into my inbox. A few weeks ago, Rust – the survival game infamous for its anarchy and general brutality – added a surprisingly wholesome instruments DLC pack, allowing players to construct a variety of instruments such as trumpets, drums… and pianos.

This was already intriguing, but one line of the press release really caught my attention. The instruments accept MIDI input. Oh boy. Did this mean I could hook up an entire electric piano to a computer, and play live piano in Rust? I had to try it out.

And, of course, it’s the Christmas season – so to make it festive, and my life extra complicated, I announced to my editors that I would go carolling. Live. In Rust.

I had mixed results.

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First things first: the setup. I ordered myself a MIDI to USB cable, a book of easy Christmas carols, and hijacked my flatmate’s Kawai keyboard. Due to space constraints I had to move all my PC gear into my flat’s living room – but the upside of this was I able to easily swivel between keyboards, and have a Christmas tree in the background to set the mood.

Next, I had to actually acquire a piano in Rust, which is easier said than done. The Wheelbarrow Piano requires 200 wood and 100 metal fragments to craft, and players must be in the radius of a level one workbench (which in itself requires 500 wood, 100 metal frags and 50 scrap). Thanks to the nature of Rust, you die – a lot – and I quickly realised playing on ordinary servers would take me days to craft a piano, with a high chance of then being offline raided. I also (correctly) anticipated being frequently shot and mugged – thus meaning I needed several back-up pianos.

To speed things up and make the process of dying and losing loot less painful, I selected a modded server with increased resource harvesting levels, along with instant crafting and free starting tools. After an hour of base-building and resource-gathering, I had my first piano. I then created about 10 more, and buried them in the ground like a paranoid squirrel.

Before I started performing Christmas bangers to the unsuspecting denizens of my Rust island, however, I needed to get to grips with the piano.

In my initial experiments, I discovered Rust’s piano doesn’t actually play like a modern piano, thanks to the way the MIDI input works. It may sound like an out-of-tune modern piano in tone and boast the same range of notes, but without a sustain pedal or proper dynamic nuance, it plays more like one of the piano’s forerunners, the harpsichord.

In 17th century Europe, clavichords were capable of dynamic contrast via touch – but they were too quiet for proper performance. Harpsichords had volume, and a precise crisp sound, but no dynamic control thanks to their plucked-string mechanisms. The first true modern-day piano capable of dynamic variation was invented around 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristofori of Padua (pianoforte literally means “quiet-loud” – although it wasn’t named that until later). Cristofori’s piano introduced a sophisticated hammer-action mechanism which allowed strings to be struck quickly before the hammer retracted – creating sound louder than a clavichord, and providing the dynamic contrast the harpsichord lacked.

Why do dynamics matter so much? They allow for greater emotional expression, but also for the voicing of specific parts within complex pieces. In essence, you can bring out a melody and other subtleties within chord-heavy music which you just can’t on a harpsichord. This is partly why, unfortunately, Moonlight Sonata sounds whack in Rust.

Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in Rust is NOT the one pic.twitter.com/eqBkQibwzA

— Emma Kent (@GoneEFK) December 17, 2019

The other reason is lack of a sustain pedal – the right-foot pedal allowing for the continuation of notes, which didn’t come into common use until the Romantic era around 1800-1850. Yes, this is actually a stealth piano nerd article, I fooled you all.

Here’s Cristofori looking smug after inventing the first piano. Credit: The Met.

You can sustain the sound in Rust by manually holding notes (which isn’t always possible in some pieces), and you might be able to get away with it by editing a pre-recorded MIDI file to artificially lengthen notes beyond human capabilities. But, in short, Rust’s Wheelbarrow Piano is a mish-mash of keyboard instruments from across the centuries – and feels more like a harpsichord than a modern piano. I guess that’s unsurprising, seeing as it looks like it’s been created from sheet iron, gardening equipment and baby’s first keyboard.

Unfortunately it sounds more like my school’s practice room pianos than a baby grand.

All this means the Rust piano is perfect for Baroque-era and early Classical pieces such as those by Domenico Scarlatti, or Johann Sebastian Bach – but less ideal for flowing Romantic/Impressionist pieces by the likes of Claude Debussy and Erik Satie. Thus, for the purposes of Christmas carolling, I tried to select fast-moving pieces, or ones where I could hold chords to make up for the loss of a legato (smooth) sound and thicker texture provided by the sustain pedal. Not that it always worked.

Ok this is kinda cute

J.S. Bach’s Prelude in C, from The Well-Tempered Clavier

I wouldn’t call Rust’s piano well-tempered but here we are pic.twitter.com/UqbHYnpYMy

— Emma Kent (@GoneEFK) December 17, 2019

On top of these limitations, the Rust piano is definitely in need of tuning. I guess it’s going for the honky-tonk vibe, but this does make singing along more challenging. I also discovered that listening to the piano as I played it in-game, rather than through my keyboard speakers, made the pieces themselves slower. Thanks to slight input lag, my brain was waiting longer than expected to hear the notes actually sound in-game, which led to a more hesitant playing style. I could bypass this for flashy piano solos by simply muting the in-game sound and listening to my real-life keyboard (as I did with my Scarlatti performance), but it wouldn’t work for accompanying my singing, which I needed to time perfectly with the piano in-game. This slow pace would come to haunt me when attempting the very long “gloria” in Ding Dong Merrily on High. I eventually resorted to playing left-hand only accompaniments, as along with semi-sightreading the music and the input lag, it was too much for my brain to process.

The world’s slowest rendition of God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen pic.twitter.com/L32NQ88MQR

— Emma Kent (@GoneEFK) December 17, 2019

Then, finally, I realised I had yet another problem. Rust normally requires players to hold down a key to activate voice chat, which is an issue if you have both hands on a piano. I was later told this is possible to activate via console commands, but at the time, I sped up the process the old-fashioned way by using two items in my kitchen: a lollipop and a spatula.

Why does this look like a Rust instrument?

Finally set up, I started hunting for people to serenade. The downside of picking the modded server, it seemed, was that it was less populated than the regular servers – while the abundance of resources meant the southern area of the island was effectively a PVP warzone. I got shot many, many times by people simply acting preemptively before they were killed. Most of the time, I was merely mauled by bears, or killed by radiation poisoning. “DO YOU WANT TO HEAR A CHRISTMAS CAROL??” I screamed desperately at a player flying overhead in a chopper. They carried on flying. Perhaps they didn’t hear?

Eventually, someone actually approached me and said hello. By this point, I was mid-way through a bottle of red wine, with a terrible mic too close to my face, a slightly laggy out-of-tune piano, and the unnerving sound of gunfire in the background. I instantly pounced on the poor sod to play them We Three Kings. They had the decency to wait until the end of the carol before murdering me.

Next, respawned and restocked with a fresh supply of pianos, I found someone looting a small shed and called out to them over voice chat. As ever, I immediately got knocked down by gunfire. Slightly irate, I offered the only thing I could.

“If you help me up, I will play you a Christmas carol on the piano.”

Despite all odds, that worked, and my life was prolonged for at least a few more minutes. After a very breathy Ding Dong Merrily on High, I asked the voiceless player to jump if they wanted to hear another one. They T-bagged my head, which I took as a yes. God Rust You Merry, Gentlemen started off well enough, until mid-way through I started to hear the sound of a gun being cranked very loudly above my head. This was slightly off-putting, and I soon messed up my accompaniment. Punishment was swift, and severe.

Playing piano with a gun to your head is quite stressful, it turns out.

Feeling a little despondent, I ventured north in the hope of finding a more appreciative audience – like one of the three kings, looking to impart a wondrous gift on the right person. Fittingly, I found a horse and ventured through the desert, where I found someone rooting around inside a barrel. This time, I decided to take a gentler approach, opting for a piano rendition of Ding Dong rather than going all-in with singing. Apparently they enjoyed this so much they were willing to stick around when my game crashed, and I had to load in again. Surprised, I then cracked out the absolute classic Once in Royal David’s City, and waited to hear their response.

“That was actually sick”

I couldn’t believe it – I’d finally impressed someone. “Are you feeling more festive?”, I asked. “Yes”, the player replied. Fantastic.

My work there done, I sailed away across the dunes on my horse, happy in the knowledge I’d imparted some Christmas joy on at least one Rust player. Although the game is renowned for its trigger-happy players, I wonder if I would’ve had more success on a normal server, where the resources are more scarce, the risks of being overly-aggressive are higher, and the island is more populated. Still, the fact I was able to convince someone not to shoot me in Rust – even temporarily – truly shows the healing power of music. And I hope you all learned something about pianos.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2019/12/i-went-christmas-carolling-in-rust-with-a-real-piano/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=i-went-christmas-carolling-in-rust-with-a-real-piano

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ourfreepontoonboatme-blog · 6 years

Text

Popular Styles of Bathroom Style

The bathroom has come along means in the previous one hundred years. Back after that, a "bathroom" was something just the affluent and also fortunate can manage to have in their home. The Edwardian and also Victorian designs of the moment are still a preferred selection today. They look elegant in a rental property or home bathroom, and also never lose their allure in regards to style. Click Here.

Today, many thanks to innovative pipes and also modern-day innovation, the bathroom might well have advanced regarding it can. With deluxe steam bath and also hydrotherapy bathrooms, it's tough to envision how washrooms might obtain anymore innovative. That claimed, the bathroom, like any space in your house, is ever before transforming in regards to layout fads. Below we check out the five most prominent designs of bathroom designs. Standard, Nation, Shoddy elegant, Contemporary and also Dream. Typical The Standard bathroom could imply either conventional in regards to Edwardian or Victorian design, or about a common white bathroom with fundamental hygienic ware as well as the bathroom. Below well be taking a look at the design of bathroom style where everything began. The Edwardian bathroom. Over the previous years, with the appeal of TELEVISION programs like Transforming Spaces, the fad for antique washrooms has seen a genuine upswing. An uncommon treasure of an old sandal bathroom or typical rustic tap could be discovered at a scrap lawn or in an avoid. However, the good news is makers are staying up to date with need with masterfully crafted typical bathroom items. Specific spaces operate in particular residences, so if you're staying in a modern-day high home, the conventional bathroom isn't most likely to benefit you. If you have an old home or vacation home hideaway this design of the bathroom is one you must think. Virtually constantly, the bathroom is the center item tourist attraction of the conventional bathroom. A free-standing roll-top or sandal bathroom rests happily on a sleek dark flooring, and also just if going for a conventional continental design bathroom will certainly an inset or sunken bathtub hold charm. When enhancing a typical bathroom both soft tones and also vibrant colors could function well. Solid tones of browns, maroons as well as environment-friendlies provide a great heat to the area, yet be certain the bathroom is well lit, perhaps with a luxurious light fixture.

One of the most attractive points regarding the standard bathroom is mess provides it even more of a lived-in result, hence improving the standard appearance. As an ending up touch an old design collection of evaluating ranges, a huge mounted mirror or cumbersome standard radiator will certainly offer the space that comfortable antique feeling. Nation The nation design bathroom is maybe the most convenient kind of layout to develop, as well as like the conventional bathroom truly functions well within the appropriate residence. The timeless nation appearance is ideal related to flower wallpaper, a high beam of lights, container fuss and also a bathroom cover. Adhering to the standard layout, cast iron bathrooms and also deep, jagged hygienic ware are just what offers the nation bathroom its timeless appearance. Examine, flower or plaid drapes are favored over roller blinds, as well as shutters, though unusual in England, supply a wonderful type of personal privacy along with contributing to the national result. Timber plays a huge component in this appearance, as well as most all furnishings functions well in this setup, particularly beech, maple, ash as well as oak vanity systems as well as closets. Wood floorings must be varnished to match the furnishings. Embellishing might see a stenciled theme made use of as a boundary, as well as the method of scrubbing paint on the wall surfaces with a sponge provides the area that put on all-natural appearance. Commodes with high degree tanks as well as draw chains are uncommon nowadays, yet a should have for the nation bathroom, as are standard faucets for the bathroom and also a container. Nearly any type of type of free-standing bathroom will certainly match the nation bathroom. If wanting to have a shower, a tiled walk-in shower is a good idea choice with a drape to hide the location. For the last touch include wicker baskets loaded with pot, cable basket racks and also trendy wall surface lights. Shoddy Posh " Worn-out trendy," a fair neologism made use of to explain space layouts, is a rare mix of disregard and also design. It is among one of the toughest bathroom designs to develop, and also it takes a strong choice to opt for this bathroom design. It probably attains its complete capacity in a continental residence, either a French estate or old Spanish suite. The outright reverse of an equipped bathroom, the worn-out stylish appearance is inequality of designs as well as items. This design ideally matched to those that have acquired a bathroom as well as desire to upgrade it a little instead compared to fork out on a brand name brand-new bathroom collection. The trick to decor is neutral tones with a couple of dark shades. For the wall surfaces select a matte or level wall surface paint. Pale golds as well as yellows function especially well as does flower or examine formed wallpaper. As with the nation and also conventional restrooms, cast iron bathrooms are a must. Either a roll-top or sandal bathroom will certainly do, as well as although you do not desire openings or corrosion, the extra run-down it looks the much better. Counter leading containers are very advised in this setup, and also the watch out for very uncommon embellished layouts. Put it on a washstand or run-down vanity device. Include special accessories and also vintage mounted mirrors. Modern In lots of restrooms there is little space to function with, so making the many of the room is necessary. Having bathroom furnishings made to determine is one of the most useful style options when renovating the bathroom. The number of people has had a bathroom with a chaotic airing cabinet? With the contemporary bathroom, there's no have to stuff your toiletries, towels as well as cleaning up liquids around the central heating boiler. With fitted vanity devices, storage space systems and also closets you'll have all the room you require. When analyzing modern-day bathroom style, wall-hung furnishings needs to obtain a reference. White gloss will certainly never head out of style, however a lot more just recently furnishings surfaces such as wenge, beech as well as maple have made an actual introduction in appeal. As the furnishings, wall-hung hygienic ware is a wonderful space-saving option while providing the bathroom a modern feeling. Hid tank devices are an even more eye-pleasing appearance compared to the typical close-coupled bathroom. Shower baths are a terrific functional method of maximizing the area, to ensure that you have the convenience of both showering and also bathing. Walk-in showers are additionally incredibly popular in the modern-day bathroom, as well as if acquiring a shower room for the modern-day bathroom pick one with a chrome framework over white. Chrome, as well as stainless-steel, are the supreme option in the modern-day bathroom, as well as faucets as well as bathroom mixers are offered in a variety of modern layouts, instead of the standard design taps. Pick chrome towel rails over conventional white radiators, as well as matching chrome devices. Do not hesitate to enhance with strong colors when tiling or paint, obtaining the comparison right with the chrome as well as the gloss. If utilizing drapes refined with the layouts as well as colors, yet ideally opt for fashionable roller blinds. Dream Bold to be anything greater than standard, the dream bathroom layout allows you to be ingenious with your dreams and also preferences. With the focus on advanced, this design of the bathroom is the reverse of the reactionary. The dream layout is preferably special to just bigger restrooms, as with all advanced indoor layout huge open rooms are just what brings the area with each other. Or incorporate the two will certainly a well-developed bathroom display as well as a glass shower panel. For the hygienic ware choose wall-hung or typical close-coupled commode and also a container withstand with intense angles as well as a modern layout. Abstract towel rails, as well as wenge wall-hung furnishings, fit well in the dream bathroom, offering it that tranquility practically unique appearance. The best high-end in a dream bathroom would certainly need to be a water-resistant TELEVISION. You might also suggestions consider increasing the bathroom up as fitness center, full with the stationary bicycle as well as rowing equipment.

Accessories need to be inconspicuous, so select points like little stacks of stones as well as contemporary wall surface prints over candle lights as well as nick-nacks.

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captain-unlikelynutbouquet-blog · 6 years

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Douglas Georgia Cheap car insurance quotes zip 31534

"Douglas Georgia Cheap car insurance quotes zip 31534

Douglas Georgia Cheap car insurance quotes zip 31534

BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare quotes: : http://freecarinsurance.xyz/index.html?src=tumblr

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Douglas Georgia Cheap car insurance quotes zip 31534

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Car Insurance?

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How much does car insurance cost for a new driver?

How much does car insurance cost per month for a new driver (16 years old) in california?

Does Auto insurance go down automatically after the age of 25?

if I drive and small and cheap car...

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Is my auto insurance goes up after I got speeding ticket? How much would it cost me?

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we are moving to newmarket, ontario. we are wanting to get rough ideas about the cost of car insurance. i hear it is quite expensive but was wondering if someone could illustrate in some way or give an example of how it is worked out. also could someone reccommend a trustful dealer?""

Douglas Georgia Cheap car insurance quotes zip 31534

How much is an average motorcycle?

I'm thinking of getting my motorcycle license soon, how much would a new Honda cost? I'm talking about the cost of the bike, not insurance etc.""

What's the best way to maximize how much an insurance company will pay for my totaled car?

My well-loved 10 year old Honda Accord was hit today by another driver. Both the other driver and myself are OK but my car was totaled. The other driver's insurance company will be reimbursing me for my vehicle. But I'm afraid that what they will offer for my car will be less than its worth to me in running condition. What's the best way to maximize how much I'll be reimbursed?

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Hi guys, so here is my situation. someone rear ended me when I was yielding to other cars. The police came and gave her a ticket and he made us exchange information because he said the damage to my car doesnt look like its over $1500(thats the only time they issue a police report. I live in virginia).I hit my head and back pretty bad so I have been experiencing severe back pains and minor headaches. I have been seeing a chiropractor and putting all the bills on my health insurance. I got an email from my health insurance where they sent me a form for me to sign saying i will reimburse them from any settlement for health coverage that I get from the other person's auto insurance company. I havent signed/sent the paper back to them yet. Do I really have to reimburse my health insurance company??? the thing about it is, I am graduate student doing research(phd) so my insurance is fully paid for my the NIH at the beginning of the school year(so i personally dont make any monthly payments from my paycheck or anything). So do I have to reimburse my health insurance(GM southwest) for any health settlement i get from the other person's auto insurance company? I am thinking about getting a lawyer. is it really worth it? someone please help.""

How much will my car insurance go up after this accident!?

How much will my car insurance go up after this accident!? So, I did something stupid. Pulling into a parking spot, I accidently scrapped against another car. I got out of my car and looked at the damage on the other car. Obviously a lot of my paint was on it (On the drivers side, back door) but it looked like under the paint there were just a few very minor scratches and scuffs. NO Dents at all. Of course, I waited outside until she came out. She was very nice. We exchanged insurance information. How much do you think this will cost me? I live in NYS who I guess has a 'no fault' policy. I am 22 and the car is under my moms name, the insurance under my dads, if that means anything.""

Is health care in the US affordable to everyone?

If not, then why is so many people opposed to free universal health care like in France, UK, etc? How many of you can pay $100 doctor visits or (god forbid) $500,000 surgeries, not counting expensive prescriptions?""

Car Tag and insurance prices for a car over 20 years old?

If a car is over 20 years old how much would the price of a tag and insurance would be and I have a 1985 Cadillac Deville Saden and is restoring it. What do you think my prices would be for it? P.S I'm only 18 I'm new to this.

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What does it cost too get sr 22 insurance?

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I'm driving to Monterrey, about 140 miles south of the border. I've driven in Mexico before and done the visa thing and all, but I've never driven my car there. When I drove before, I was under the rented vehicles' insurance. I know I need to purchase a driving visa from the customs building right across the border in Nuevo Laredo, but what about my insurance? I have AAA, and i've heard that they do something, but i'm not sure what!! Any suggestions or advice about international driving insurance??""

Do black males have higher insurence then white males?

Obtaining health insurance policy number?

I need my health insurance policy number for a school trip I'm taking. I don't have my Insurance card and I am wondering how to get my policy number thanks.

Can i have two different Auto Insurance policies?

I have two different cars can i have two different policies on each vehicle in the state of kentucky?

How much do you think my first year of insurance would cost with a v8 engine as my first car in new york?

If i am 16 how much (average) would my first year of car insurance in New York cost if i get an 8 cylinder 5 speed car?

My job doesn't offer me any insuance - what's the best affordable health insurance I can get?

""What are all the expenses in owning your own SEMI TRUCK plus Trailer? I mean stuff like insurance, plates,?""

I mean stuff like insurance, plates, registration, gas, taxes? On average how much do these costs run? Please name all of them and how much they usually run. Details please, Thanks !""

Guestimate how much i will have to pay for insurance?

In MA, a 1994-95 honda civic hatchback 120,000 miles,im 18 and didnt take driver's ed. This is my first car. All i have is a permit for 4 months.""

How much will my car insurance go down if I switch to liability?

I have a 1999 Oldsmobile Alero and pay full coverage right now at about $50 per month. I'm a 25 y/o female with a clean driving record. Any ideas?

Can i get insured on a chevrolet camaro 1ss 2 door v6 in the uk?

my parents said they will buy me a chevrolet camaro and ship it to the uk, its the 1ss v6 2door. they told me i had to pay insurance does anyone know wether or not i can get insured on this car in the uk, i live in london, im im turning 18 in november and this wil be my first car, and do you know approx how much it will cost?""

Good Student Discount for Car Insurance?

I am a Senior in highschool living in california and my parents are trying to get me car insurance this week, however i dont know which GPA matters. Last year for my junior year i recieved a 3.8gpa and this year i have a 3.4. Am i supposed to show my cumulative gpa or one of these semester report cards?""

What do you do when he doesnt have car insurance?

I was in a car wreck two weeks ago. We thought he had safe auto to the police report which is a nightmare but which made it worst he has no insurance at all. He had been drinking early but did not blow enough to go to jail. What can be done about him driving without insurance and drinking

Can I Switch my Auto Insurance to Full Coverage Just To Get It Fixed????????????????

Currently I have liability auto insurance and i hit a deer. I have a really nice car but can't afford to get it repaired at the moment.(THE DAMAGES COSTS SOOOO MUCH!!!!!!!!!) Is there anyway that i can switch my car insurance to FULL COVERAGE JUST to get it fixed????? I heard that some people get full coverage and are able to fool the insurance company into paying for there damages, BUT HOW. IS THAT REALLY POSSIBLE WITHOUT GETTING CAUGHT. IF SO , PLEASE EXPLAIN TO ME HOW. I REALLY LOVE MY CAR, BUT CAN AFFORD TO GET IT FIXED. I REALLY NEED SOME HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!""

Classic car insurance with Geico?

I have a 1967 Chevrolet Impala SS. It has 118k. It's all factory except for a cd player, two 6x9 speakers and window tint. I don't have any insurance on it at the moment and I want to get classic auto insurance. How exactly does that work and what would it cost me. Thanks.""

Car and insurance problem.?

If I was in the process of getting a driving lesson from my instructor, I crashed his car. Am I suppose to be in charge of this, but I don't have a license yet. So, am I going to be the one who pays for the insurance or the instructor?""

Who will be responsible for my dad's car wreck/Will my insurance premium go up?

I let my mom borrow my car to get to work for about 6 months. I knew she had it, I never insured it and neither did she. My dad is abusive and tries to contol everyone and their possessions (my car, my apartment, my bf's car). He hit a local business and caused 15k of damage. He has never worked and my mom just recently started a job-I have had to work for everything in my life and I'm frustrated with always being taken advantage of. My dad was taken away from the scene in an ambulance, the owner's of the property he hit never received his name or contact info. Since the car is registered to me, am I liable? Although it was his accident, will my future car insurance premium go up because of this?""

Cheap car insurance...?

If you buy a shitty car for like $500, can you get insurance that only covers the other person in a crash and not you?? I know they used to have this?""

Douglas Georgia Cheap car insurance quotes zip 31534

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