#our do gooder girls :'))))
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HUMBLE chapter four
Summary: a fairly fluffy chapter of the blooming friendship between charlie and alastor. And we find out that Vox and Charlie have history....
“THAT FUCKER’S BACK!” Vox slammed the doors open to the large apartment he shared with the other Vees.
“Which fucker would this be?” Valentino asked without looking up from his phone.
“Who else?! The radio demon!”
“What? That grandpa’s back in town?!” Velvette’s jaw dropped.
“That’s not all. He’s teamed up with Charlie.”
Velvette and Valentino blinked at him. “Who?”
“Morningstar! Charlie Morningstar!” He was still met with blank stares. “LUCIFER’S DAUGHTER.”
“Oh, FUCK!” Velvette dropped her phone. “How’d you find this out?”
“Because he crashed our fucking date!”
His partners stared at him, and that’s when Vox remembered he’d withheld that little bit of information. “Yes, I went on a fucking date with her, ok?! Kind of.”
“Kind of?” Velvette asked.
“She thought it was a business meeting, even gave me a binder and a 45 minute presentation about her little hotel. But at the end of the date-“
“Meeting.” Valentino smirked.
“-she was totally into me. Things were progressing, I was making my move, and that red motherfucker shows up OUT OF NOWHERE and interrupts us. Charlie looked mortified, and then he’s got his grimy little claws all over her-“
“Is she fucking the radio demon?” Velvette asked.
“WOULD YOU LET ME FINISH?!” Vox’s screen flickered.
“Calm down before you fry your circuits again.”
“Sorry, he just pisses me off. Anyway, he’s got his claws all over her, and suddenly she’s calling him AL-“
“She’s totally fucking him.” Valentino smirked.
“NO! No, she’s not. She seemed upset that he was there. Anyway, turns out they’re business partners and running the hotel together. And then he just up and vanishes with her! FUCK!”
Velvette and Valentino exchanged glances. “I don’t get it.” Velvette finally said.
“Don’t get what?”
“Why you’re acting like a whiny little bitch right now over some girl!”
“She is NOT some girl.” He huffed and straightened his jacket. “It’s a long story.”
“Then give us the short one.” Valentino rolled his eyes.
“I fucked up the chance I had to go out with her a long time ago. And I’m not going to fuck it up again.”
“But WHY? What the fuck is so special about her?!”
“You wouldn’t understand! It doesn’t matter, my FRIENDS should be supportive of me!”
“We are, when you’re not acting fucking insane!” Velvette walked over to him and grabbed his shoulders. “We’re in the middle of a fucking turf war. We’ve got bigger things to focus on than your FEELINGS about some girl! Who, by the way, won’t want SHIT to do with you when she finds out about all your dirty little secrets. So I suggest you GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER, put on your big boy pants, and get the fuck over it!” Velvette stomped off.
“She has a point. She’s too good for you. And I don’t mean she’s out of your league, you’re leagues above her in my opinion. I mean she’s too kind hearted.”
“You don’t get it. That’s what I like about her.” Vox sat down and looked defeated. “She’s not like anyone I’ve ever met. She’s good. ”
Valentino sighed and sat by his friend. “Personally, I think she seems like a pain in the ass. And where do you think this is gonna go? You’re gonna date the holier-than-thou princess who wants to rehabilitate sinners? And she’ll just be ok with how we run things? No. She won’t. She’ll get in the fucking way. I gotta ask- why did she think it was a business meeting?”
“Because…I mentioned that the Vees were interested in investing in the hotel.” Vox grimaced.
“Are you fucking kidding me? We’re not investing in that shit hole!”
“You don’t have to! I will!”
“Uh-uh. You’re not attaching the Vees to this. We have a reputation. And doing charity work for the little do gooder doesn’t fit our image. So if YOU want to give her YOUR money, fine. But you’re not attaching us to this.” Valentino groaned. “Can’t you just fuck one of the blonde whores from the club? Or any of them and we can put a wig on them?”
“It’s more than that. You wouldn’t understand.”
“I really don’t. Things are so much easier when you leave feelings out of them.” He left Vox alone with his thoughts, and they drifted to the first time he’d met Charlie.
-a long time ago-
Well this sucked. Why did all the other demons get things like animal heads? He had a FUCKING TV SCREEN. He could hear the others snickering at him and making fun of him. He wondered how long he was obligated to stay at the party.
“Hi there!” A cheerful voice said from behind him. He turned around and saw an angel smiling at him. She had to be an angel, with her golden hair and bright white skin. She was gorgeous.
“Hi.” He gave her what he hoped was a charming smile.
“Welcome to hell! It’s probably not what you expected, right?” She giggled. “I’m Charlie! Nice to meet you!” She stuck her hand out and he shook it.
“Victor. Victor Octavious Xavier.”
“Wow, that’s certainly a mouthful! I should tell you, if you do want to change your name, this is your last chance. Not that there’s anything wrong with your name! A lot of people just want to choose something else.”
“Is that what you did?”
“Me? Oh, no! I was born here.” She gave him a nervous smile. “I’m…Lucifer’s daughter. Charlotte Morningstar, princess of hell. I don’t really like to lead with that. It tends to make people nervous.”
He let out a nervous peal of laughter. “You’re joking, right?”
“Nope. And I know what you’re thinking, isn’t Lucifer the big ugly red guy? But everyone forgets, dad is a fallen angel. Anyway, I have to give the orientation speech, but I hope to talk to you more later! Enjoy the party.” She smiled and walked to the stage.
“Welcome to Hell! I know you probably have a lot of mixed feelings right now. Maybe you don’t know why you’re here. Ooor maybe you know exactly why you’re here. Anyway, it can be scary to start over, which is why I host this welcoming event! I’m here to help you get your feet on the ground. To your left, you’ll find pamphlets of information about hell, as well as information about the overlords and districts, and some of the opportunities available to you. To your right, you’ll find answers to frequently asked questions! Also, counseling is available to you! Maybe you need to talk it out or just need a hug, but I’m here for you.”
“HOW BOUT A BLOW JOB, BABY?” A voice in the back shouted. Charlie let out a nervous laugh.
“Aaaanyway, you don’t have to go through this alone. I’m confident that if we all work together and try to make this place better, tomorrow will be a happy day in hell.”
She was met with a roar of laughter. “Is this bitch for real?!”
“Yep, that’s pretty much what I expected.” Charlie sighed and walked off the stage. He found himself following her to the bar as she got a drink and downed it.
“I really liked your speech. I think it’s admirable what you’re doing.” He smiled at her.
“You’d be about the only one.” She rubbed her temples. “It’s like this every week.”
“You do this every week?!”
“Yeeeeah. But I don’t mind! Even if I can make things better for one sinner, I’ll know that I made a difference.” She smiled.
“I’m sorry, I just…how are you here? You seem so-“
“Nice?” She smiled. “I’m the devil’s daughter. I can’t change that. But I can try to use my power and my knowledge to make things a little better. Dad thinks it’s a waste of time, but I don’t care.”
“I think it’s really great. You’ve certainly made me feel better.”
Charlie’s eyes welled up. “Really?”
“You have. And I think I am going to change my name.”
“Oh yeah? What did you have in mind?”
He gave her a small smile and took a drink. “Vox.”
-the present-
Alastor wasn’t sure if Charlie would be in the kitchen for breakfast or if she’d be avoiding him. He opened the door and saw her holding an egg. She tapped it lightly on the countertop and nothing happened. She tried again, a bit harder and frowned. CRACK! She’d pretty much blown up the egg.
“Fuuuuck!” She grumbled.
“I always use my thumb to puncture the middle, then pull it apart.”
She didn’t even jump this time when he spoke. “Shall I take over?”
“Thank you, but no. I need to cook an egg.”
“If this is about what I said yesterday-“
“Of course it is. And you’re right. I am HUNDREDS of years old and I can’t cook an egg? So I will!” She gave him a determined smile.
“Charlotte, I really don’t mind.”
“I need to do this.” She picked up another egg and whacked it on the counter, splattering herself with egg. “Why are they SO FRAGILE?!”
“Charlie dear, look.” He picked up an egg and put it in her hand. He placed his hand over hers and guided it, lightly tapping it on the edge of the pan. “Then you use your thumb to break the rest of the shell and pull it apart.” The egg plopped down into the pan.
“Nice! Thanks Al.” She began pushing the egg around in the pan, scrambling it. He watched briefly with amusement before pouring a cup of coffee. He fixed Charlie a cup too with a god awful amount of sugar and set it beside her. They were off to a good start.
“Delivery for Charlotte Morningstar.”
Charlie looked up in surprise. “Oh! That’s me.”
“Sign here.” A delivery demon shoved a clipboard at her.
“I wasn’t expecting a package. Vaggie, did you order anything?”
“Nope.”
The delivery demon headed out to a van and unloaded an embarrassingly large bouquet of roses. “Oooooh god.” Charlie watched with wide eyes. The demon brought them in and dropped them in the middle of the floor and left. Vaggie and Charlie gaped at it.
“Uh…that’s…wow.” Vaggie cleared her throat.
Charlie walked over to it and plucked the card off, though she knew who it was from.
“ Charlotte,
Please forgive me for my behavior last night. I hope you’d be willing to give me another chance. I must admit my interest in you isn’t entirely professional, but you should know that in no way affects my investment in your hotel. Voxtech will be investing regardless.
Give me a call sometime if you’d like to go out again. If you prefer to keep things professional, I can always send Valentino or Velvette to meet with you.
I hope you have a great day and that these flowers made you smile.
-Vox”
Charlie grinned at the note. “YES! Voxtech wants to invest!”
“And that required an elaborate bouquet of roses?” Vaggie asked skeptically.
“Oh, um, there was some other stuff too.” Charlie blushed.
“Charlie. You can NOT be considering going out with this guy.”
“I don’t know, he seems sincere! And this is a really sweet note.”
“I’m sure it is, because he’s playing you.”
“Is it so hard to believe someone would actually want to go out with me and not want something?!”
“When they’re a demon overlord? Yes, it is!”
Charlie was shocked. “Vaggie, why are you acting like this?”
“Because I’m sick of seeing you letting the wrong people in! You only end up getting hurt. You trust EVERYONE.”
“I’d rather trust everyone and be wrong than trusting no one.”
Vaggie was silent. She had an expression on her face Charlie couldn’t read, then walked quickly out of the room.
Charlie ran her hands through her hair in frustration. What was Vaggie’s problem lately?!
“Weeeell! Someone’s trying to make a good impression.” Alastor said, coming to stand beside her and look at the flowers.
“It’s…kind of a lot. I don’t really like things like this.”
“Flowers?”
“No, big showy displays like this. It’s basically saying ‘look at all this money I have to blow!”
“Roses ARE a classic symbol of romance, though.”
“I know, but…no, it’s sweet. I shouldn’t complain. Oh! The good news is thaaaaaaat:” she paused for dramatic effect. “THE VEES ARE INVESTING!” She handed the card to him with a grin.
Alastor read the note and his smile grew tighter. What was this asshole’s game? “Wonderful. Though it’s not my area, I believe this place could benefit from some new technology. It would draw people in.” He handed the card back to Charlie with a smile.
“Listen, now that I know your feelings on the matter, I won’t call him and we can work with the other Vee’s.”
“Nonsense! I can behave myself. Now, in what sense are you returning the call?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you calling the Vee’s, or calling Vox?”
Charlie looked conflicted. “Um… is it weird that I kind of want to call him? You know what, it’s weird. Never mind.”
“You should call him if you want to, Charlie.”
“But you-“
“There’s no reason for your personal life to affect our partnership. My problems with Vox are my own.”
“I mean it, Al. You’re more important to me. Your feelings matter.”
There was a loud crackle of static. “Oh Charlotte, don’t worry your pretty little head. Go out with him! Let him spend some of his excessive wealth on you!” He patted her on the head and left, leaving Charlie feeling confused.
A few days passed and everything was fairly smooth. Alastor and Charlie had breakfast every morning and worked together through the day. It was a perfectly normal platonic partnership. Until that evening…
“Hey Al, have you seen Angel?” Charlie asked.
“He left about an hour ago for work. Is there something I can assist you with?”
“Thanks, but this is really more of Angel’s area. It’s ok, I’ll figure it out.”
“Come on now, doll! What do you need?”
Charlie looked embarrassed. “…my date is tonight. And I don’t know what to wear.”
“Ah, fashion! I’m not entirely incompetent about it, I’d say I’m a pretty sharp dresser myself.” He gestured at his well tailored suit. “I’d be happy to lend a hand.”
“I’d really appreciate it. I’m not very good at this sort of thing.” They went up the stairs and Charlie walked in her room, while Alastor stood in the doorway. “Al?”
“Forgetting something, doll?” He held up his hand and it was as if there were an invisible wall.
“Oh! Sorry. Alastor, enter freely and of your own will!” Charlie grinned.
“Thanks, sweetheart, now I feel like Dracula.”
Charlie’s brows raised in surprise. “You know Dracula?”
“Of course! Excellent book by Bram Stoker. A delightful read!”
Charlie walked over to her bookshelf and waved him over. “It’s my favorite book. I have eight editions! I’m a sucker for a pretty cover.”
“You know, there’s a whole thing about not judging books by them.”
“That’s true. I just like collecting different versions. I like to see the different designs. This one is my favorite. It looks the fanciest.” She plucked a black book off the shelf with elaborate gold detailing.
Alastor let out an appreciative whistle. “My, my, that IS a sharp looking cover!”
Charlie put the book back on the shelf and opened her closet doors. He was taken aback by the enormous amounts of bright colored fabrics. “Oh my. Hurts the eyes a bit, doesn’t it?”
“I know, I really need to get rid of some of it, but who has the time?!” She began shoving mountains of fabric aside.
“And yet, I’ve never seen you wear anything besides that red suit.”
“I know, I just feel like it’s the most professional. This closet is full of stuff I’d like to wear. But that’s a separate issue. Ok, here’s what I’ve narrowed it down to.” She grabbed an armload of dresses and brought them over to her bed. “I’ve got a little black dress, a red dress, a pink dress, and another blue dress.”
“It’s difficult to choose without seeing them on you, doll.”
“Right! I just didn’t want to take up too much of your time. I’m sure you’ve got better things to do.”
“Such as?” He smiled.
Charlie blinked. “I actually have no idea what you do in your free time. I feel like I probably don’t want to know.”
“HA! You crack me up, Charlie girl! If you’d like to have our appointment tomorrow, I’ll show you.”
Charlie laughed. “That’s a funny way to say hanging out.”
“Hanging out?”
Charlie took her dresses into the bathroom to try them on. “Spending time together as friends! Which we don’t have to have an appointment for. Just ask!”
Alastor was perplexed. Were they friends? He supposed they were. “I was referring to our deal.”
“Ok! What time?”
“How’s 7 PM?”
“Sure! Ok, here’s option one.” Charlie came out of the bathroom in a little black dress. It was fitted and flared at the waist, giving her a cute silhouette, but it was short.
“Alright, very lovely. Though a bit short, don’t you think?”
“That’s what happens when you’re six feet tall.” Charlie smirked and headed back into the bathroom.
While he was waiting, he was DEFINITELY going to snoop around. He walked back over to her bookshelf and saw a picture of Charlie with a green demon. She had her arms around him and was grinning widely. The green demon just looked smug.
“Here’s the red one.”
He turned around and let out an involuntary crackle of static.
“Uuuuum, I don’t really know how to interpret that.” Charlie smiled.
“It’s a lovely dress. If you’re a STREET WALKER.” The dress was short, tight, and had cutouts on the sides.
“You don’t like it? Angel gave it to me.” She walked up to him and smiled widely. She did a slow turn to show him all angles. When she turned back around he was looking at anything but her.
“I don’t think wearing something out of Angel’s wardrobe really suits you.”
“What’s the matter, Al? Are you alright?” Charlie moved even closer and smiled sweetly up at him, but he saw the mischievous glint in her eye.
“Just fine, dear. Just worried about your modesty.”
Charlie couldn’t contain her laugh any longer. “I’m only teasing, Al. I just wanted to see your reaction. There’s no way I’d wear this ANYWHERE.”
“Then why do you have it?”
“Angel gave it to me. He said I needed a clubbing outfit.” She shrugged. “Onto the next!”
He continued to poke around her room, examining the different photographs. He stopped in front of a family photo and was surprised that she looked more like her father than her mother. She and Lucifer shared the same big eyes and smile.
“I feel like a cupcake.”
Alastor turned around and laughed. “You LOOK like a cupcake, doll.” It was a ballerina style dress and enormously puffy. She turned around and headed back into the bathroom. A moment later, the dress came flying out of the bathroom. “Just burn it, it’s awful!”
Alastor chuckled and picked up the dress. “What’s the story here?”
“A stuffy wedding.” She replied. He realized she’d left the door cracked open and he could see her. She was beautiful. He quickly turned away.
There was a knock on her door. “Want me to get that, doll?”
“Would you?”
Alastor walked over and opened the door. “Hello, Vagatha! How can we help you?”
Vaggie was stunned. “What are you doing here?!”
“Assisting. Did you need something?” He smiled widely.
“Yeah, to talk to Charlie. Is she here?”
“Yes, she’s getting dressed. Charlotte! Vagatha is here, should I let her in?”
“Sure! Out in a sec, Vaggie!” Charlie’s voice called out.
Alastor opened the door wider with a shit eating grin. The little moth girl was pissed. “Make yourself comfortable. Charlotte, may I make a suggestion? I don’t think we’ve had any winners so far.”
“Go for it!”
He walked over to her closet and began going through the clothes and humming.
“What the FUCK are you doing?” Vaggie glared at him with her arms crossed.
“Helping Charlotte select her outfit. She asked for my assistance.”
“I find that hard to believe. Outfit for what?”
“Why, for her date tonight!”
Vaggie’s face fell. “Date?”
“Ok, this one is pretty but kind of a pain in the ass.” Charlie walked over to them. It was a blue cocktail dress, but with a corseted bust that had to be laced up.
“Hmmm.” Alastor examined her and circled her like a shark. “I guess it depends on whether or not you’d like to breathe.”
Charlie laughed. “Well then you’d better find something better or it’s the black one! Hi Vaggie, what’s up?”
Vaggie looked stunned. “Oh, uh, I was going to ask if you wanted to do something tonight, but apparently you’ve got plans.”
“Yeah, my redo date with Vox is tonight. Didn’t I tell you?”
“No. I feel like we’ve barely seen each other.”
“You’re right, I’m sorry! I’ve been so preoccupied with the hotel. How about tomorrow night: you, me, pjs, and entirely too much junk food?”
“I’d like that.” Vaggie smiled.
“Don’t forget, I have you from 7-8, doll!” Alastor added with a smile.
“Yeah, it’ll have to be after 8. But that still leaves us plenty of time!”
“Are you sure you can work me into your busy schedule, or are you too busy hanging out with any other overlords?” Vaggie glared.
“Vaggie…”
“I’m sorry, I just…can we talk privately?”
“Sure. Be right back, Al!”
Alastor continued sorting through the racks of clothes and sent his shadow to eavesdrop.
“What are you doing, Charlie?!”
“What do you mean?”
“Why is the radio demon answering your door and going through your closet?”
“Because we’re friends, and I asked for his help.”
“You could’ve asked for MY help.”
“You hate this sort of thing. Vaggie, what’s going on with you lately?”
“I just…I’m worried that you’re letting the wrong people in. You’re so kind and I know you want to see the best in everyone, but you have to be careful.”
“I don’t really know what you’re worried about. Al hasn’t once tried to murder me or overthrow me. He’s been really kind.”
“EXACTLY! He’s NOT kind. Do you have any idea how many people he’s killed? How many souls he owns? He’s known for causing chaos and terror, so it doesn’t strike you as odd that he’s picking out your outfit like you’re girlfriends?!”
Charlie sighed. “He’s given me no reason not to trust him. And yes, I’m aware of the things he’s done, and I don’t expect him to change overnight and suddenly be a saint. But he’s here. He’s helping with the hotel. And I think it’s really unfair to keep treating him like this. I know you’re worried about me, and I’m lucky to have a best friend like you looking out for me. But I also need you to trust me a little bit. Alright?”
“Alright. I will. Just be careful, Charlie.”
Charlie hugged Vaggie tightly. “Thanks for being such a good friend. Think about what movie you wanna watch tomorrow night, ok?”
“Sure. Have fun on your date.” Vaggie gave her a weak smile.
Charlie returned to her closet and found Alastor holding up a light blue dress. “Give this one a try, doll.”
“Oh, that’s pretty! I don’t remember this one.”
“How would you know, with everything you have stuffed in here?”
“It seems a little…dated.”
“Just give it a shot!”
“Alright…” she took the dress into the bathroom.
Alastor wasn’t entirely sure WHY he’d created a dress for her. He just didn’t like the idea of her going out in any of those other so-called dresses. Charlie was elegant. Those dresses were not.
“It’s not my usual style, but… I think I like it!” Charlie came out of the bathroom and did a little twirl. The puffy blue dress flared out around her. He’d modeled it after a 1950s style dress, which was fitted up top but full at the bottom. Since it was a formal occasion, the neckline was off the shoulder.
“You look FANTASTIC! Just a few finishing touches…” he pointed his microphone at her and placed a delicate pearl necklace around her neck and fashioned her hair into a more vintage style.
“Al, you’re AMAZING! I might have to have you take over as my stylist instead of Angel.” She giggled and looked at herself in the mirror.
“Angel should not be giving fashion advice to anyone. I’d recommend not taking ANY advice from him.” Alastor came up and stood behind her in the mirror. “See here? Beautiful and elegant, without being provocative.”
Charlie started to move, then stopped and bit her lip. “Something wrong, doll?”
“I wanted to hug you, but I figured you wouldn’t-OOF!” He’d crushed her against his chest. Charlie grinned at her victory. He finally let her go and she smiled up at him. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, sweetheart!” His grin was genuine. “Though between you and me, this is all going to waste with that squawk box.”
“Speaking of…what are you NOT going to do?” She crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow.
“Hmmm, I don’t know what you’re referring to.” He smiled.
“ Alastor.”
“I wouldn’t DREAM of ruining your little date, dear.” He tweaked her nose. “Why, I thought you were going to burn the hotel to the ground last time!”
“I just…I don’t get to do this much.”
“Do what, doll?”
“Go on dates. People aren’t exactly lining up to go out with the princess of hell. Most people think I’m a joke.”
“Those people, darling, are imbeciles. Total, utter idiots.”
“I mean, I get it. I’m different. And my dad is literally the king of hell, so the idea of having to meet him one day…he’s scared off quite a few boyfriends. A few girlfriends too. And friends in general…”
“Would this happen to be one of those boyfriends?” He summoned the picture of her with the green demon.
“Oh. No, dad didn’t scare him off. He was just an asshole.”
“Then why do you keep his picture displayed?”
Charlie took the picture and chewed on her lip. “He was important to me. And this night was important to me. Dad FINALLY let me go to a dance. I was so excited. I made sure I had the perfect dress…but it wasn’t a great night. I mean, it started out that way. This picture was taken early in the evening.”
She jumped when she felt Alastor’s thumb on her lip. “Stop that. You’ll chew your lip right off, young lady!”
“Nervous habit. Anyway, it was over after that night. But I kept the picture because, at the time, I was ridiculously happy. I’m not sure anything has made me feel like that since then. Being young and in love…it’s a powerful feeling.”
“I wouldn’t know.” He plucked a stray hair off her shoulder.
“Really? You’ve never been in love?” She looked at him with big eyes.
“Sweetheart, I never even LIKED anybody.” He grinned.
“No one? There wasn’t a SINGLE PERSON you liked? Tolerated, maybe?”
“I loved my mother. That was all.”
“I find it hard to believe there was not one single person you remotely tolerated.”
“Nope. Just me and my audience!”
“So radio was your thing even when you were alive.”
“Of course! That’s how I became the radio demon.”
“But Vox is a television demon and he has a tv as a head. You have fluffy ears.”
“FLUFFY EARS?” He scoffed.
“Or is that your hair?” Charlie got a wicked smile on her face and stepped closer.
“Careful, Charlotte.” He gave her a matching grin.
“If you’d juuuust let me touch-“ she reached her hand out and he grabbed it.
“You’ll have to try harder than thaaaat!”
Husk and Niftty looked up at the sound of a scuffle, which was coming down the stairs. There was a red blur as Alastor came streaking into the lobby with a blue blur after him. “Give up, dear!”
“NEVER!”
“What the HELL is going on?!” Husk shouted as the pair crashed through the lobby.
Alastor paused long enough for Charlie to leap onto his back. “HAHAAAA!” She shouted triumphantly. She rubbed his ears and smirked. “I win.”
“Holy fuuuuuuck….” Angel walked in the front door with wide eyes. “I’m gone for two hours and she’s jumpin’ strawberry in the lobby?”
Alastor and Charlie froze. Charlie was on his back with her legs wrapped around him, which he was holding to support her, and she had one arm around his neck and the other on his ear.
“Oh! Hi guys! This…is not what it looks like.” She let go of Alastor, but he hadn’t let her go yet. “ Al!” She hissed. He dropped her legs and she fell to the floor with a thump.
“It LOOKS like you’ve got a death wish.” Husk was still gaping at them.
Charlie stood up and cleared her throat. “Sorry, Alastor. I got a little carried away.”
“Quite alright.” He appeared to still be frozen in place.
“I, uh, better go straighten up before my date. Thanks for your help, Al!” She smiled brightly and headed up the stairs.
The lobby was silent. Alastor was still frozen in place, trying to process what had just happened.
“I SHIP IT!” Nifty screeched.
“You what?” Husk asked.
“It means to want two people to be a romantic thing, even if they ain’t.” Angel answered.
“I ship you and Angel!” Nifty said to Husk.
“The FUCK you do!” Husk glared.
“Relax, she also ships me and the strawberry pimp.” Angel gestured to Alastor, but he was gone.
“She say she had a date?” Angel asked as he sat at the bar.
“Yeah. She’s going out with that dumbass tv demon.” Husk answered as he slid Angel a drink.
Angel’s face paled (as much as it could, he was covered in white fur.) “WHY?”
“Fuck if I know.”
“I gotta talk to her.” Angel ran up the stairs to Charlie’s room and began knocking.
“Go away, Al! I’m busy!”
“It’s Angel, toots.”
The door opened a minute later. “Oh! Hi Angel. I thought you went to work?”
“I did, but Val sent me home early, which is why I need to talk to you.”
“Oh! Ok. Come on in.”
Angel began anxiously pacing. “Look, I don’t like to stick my nose where it don’t belong, but I’m worried. Vox is NOT a good guy. You’d be horrified if you knew some of the stuff he did. But I also know you’re gonna say everyone deserves a second chance or some bullshit like that, so forget it. But what I’m worried about is Val.”
“Really? Why?”
“Cuz I went to work like I always do, and Val tells me I’m gonna be working all night. Big surprise. But anyway, I’m there like two hours, we ain’t even really gotten started yet, when he gets a phone call. I could tell it was Velvette cuz that bitch is loud. She was yelling at him about needing to take care of something. Then suddenly Val has to go and sends everybody home.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you think Val, my pimp and owner of my soul, is gonna be happy about his business partner going after you? You’re like the anti-Val!”
Charlie absorbed the information. “But…why would he be so upset? I know we have our differences-“
“Because if you knew the things he did to me and the way the Vees treat people, you’d wanna take them down. Business comes first for Val. And if you’re a threat to it…”
“You’re talking like he’s gonna try to kill me.” Charlie snorted.
“He might.”
“Look, I know he wants to protect his business, but attacking the princess of hell would be incredibly stupid.”
“So he might not attack you. He might take it out on someone you care about.” Angel looked at her and she read between the lines.
“No. Angel, no. I would NEVER let something like that happen because of me.”
“Look, this could just be me being fuckin’ paranoid. Go on your date. Maybe he’s a charmer and I’m wrong about everything. And Valentino wouldn’t do anything right then. He’d just threaten you. But be. Careful. Why don’t you ask strawberry to play guard?”
“Because that would only make things worse. They have…issues. I’ll be ok. And I’m not completely helpless. Especially when it comes to my friends.” She hugged Angel tightly and he rested his head on hers.
“Look, I know I give you a lotta shit, but you’re one of the only people that gives a shit about me. And I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“I promise I’ll be safe. Thank you for telling me.”
“You’re welcome. Now what the hell are you wearing? You look like you’re from the 50s!”
Charlie was puzzled. Alastor had said his problem with Vox was that he’d hurt someone he cared for. So there WAS someone! She’d have to think about that later.
Alastor had been in his room trying to process everything that had just happened. The thing that confounded him most of all was the sheer JOY he had, running from Charlie and acting like an idiot. He hadn’t even minded when she caught him and touched his ears. It felt pretty nice actually. This was all dangerous, unfamiliar territory. He meant what he’d said. He didn’t even LIKE anyone. But somehow, Charlie had wormed her way in and planted a seed.
He was FOND of her. He LIKED being around her. It was weird. He didn’t like not having control over everything, and that included his feelings (or usually lack thereof) so having FONDNESS for another person was incredibly frustrating.
He felt like he should apologize if he’d made her uncomfortable. With what, he wasn’t sure exactly, but he saw the horror on everyone’s faces. He headed out into the hallway and was about to knock on her door when he heard her conversation with Angel. He stood there and listened, feeling anger begin to boil inside him. That disgusting, low life pimp had better not lay a FINGER on his Charlie-
Woah. HIS Charlie? Where did THAT come from? He didn’t have time to question it because the conversation was ending and Angel was about to leave. He knew one thing for certain:
There was no way in HELL she was going alone.
#hazbin hotel#hazbin hotel fandom#hazbin hotel fanfiction#charlastor#charlastor fanfiction#charlie x alastor
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(I think my trick or treat sent without anything added to it oops!! here’s my second attempt 😅)
Last Minute Trick or Treat! 🍬🍬 -
What Halloween party games (like apple bobbing, pumpkin carving etc) do you think Everlark absolutely excel at?
Happy Halloween!
This has spun off into a very quick, rough fanfic--some THG characters play the party game "Werewolf" (also known as Mafia).
"What roles are we doing again?" Clove asks. I shift in my seat, glancing at the random bunch assembled here in Caesar Flickerman's basement. From the popular Gale to Thresh and his little cousin Rue, we have nothing in common but that for some reason, Caesar invited us all here for a game of Werewolf. I hadn't wanted to come, but Prim claimed she was too old for trick-or-treating and Gale insisted we come.
The party, hosted by the senior Caesar, mostly consists of high-achievers, do-gooders, and Thresh who had to watch his little cousin Rue. Basically, those not the type to get drunk on Halloween night. And as Gale knew I was one of those, he lowered himself to come to this party with me. Although this smaller group is more my speed, I'm lost in the rules of their game. I understand we have three werewolves to kill and we have to guess who they are, but I don't understand all of the different names people are tossing out for other roles in the game. I sit back as others discuss the particular minutia of this particular game.
"Three werewolves, a witch, a seer, a hunter, a little girl, four villagers," Caesar says, then gives a wide, toothy smile. "Oh, and cupid. They'll pick the lovers."
"Can the witch save someone each night?" Marvel asks.
"No," Caesar said. "One potion to save and one potion to kill the whole game. If they die before they use it, that's never used."
More questions fly at Caesar as he clarifies the roles and what each one does. I try to keep them in mind because I'll end up with one of them. The seer can find out if someone is a werewolf or not each night. The hunter can choose one person to kill alongside them if they're killed. The little girl can peek during play to see who's who, but if they get caught, the werewolves will surely kill them. And the two lovers, chosen by the cupid, will die if the other one does, too. The villagers do nothing but get killed and join in the accusations of who the werewolf is.
"Let's have everyone pick out their roles now," Caesar says as he jostles a bowl of torn-up paper with the roles jotted down. He starts with Glimmer, then goes around the circle of us to hand out the slips of paper. I'm halfway into the circle and I pick out my role.
Witch.
Two potions the whole game. One to save and one to kill. Easy enough to remember, but I don't care for that responsibility.
"Now that everyone has their role," Caesar says, "we can get the game started!"
He steps outside the circle and turns off the lights, so the only light comes from the LED color-changing lights, which Caesar sets to blue. Shadows form around the circle and makes everyone now just a little harder to read.
"Welcome to our little village," Caesar says as he takes center stage in the middle of the circle. "All of us have lived quite peacefully together in our village on the outskirts of the forest. But lately, something's been happening. Sheep and pigs have gone missing, only track marks of being dragged away and finally splatters of blood giving any clue to what this bloodthirsty monster must be. Now, after a long day toiling at your crops and spinning wheel, you retire to bed. Everyone, close your eyes."
I follow the instructions and settle into the darkness behind my eyelids.
"First, cupid will have to choose the lovers. Cupid, open your eyes." Caesar pauses, then says, "Cupid, point to the two lovers." Another pause. "Thank you Cupid, you may close your eyes. As for the rest of you, I'm going to walk around in a circle and if I tap your knee, you're one of the lovers. When I tell you to, you'll open your eyes and see your true love. And remember, if they die, you die, too."
Not me, not me, not me, I chant in my head. It might only be a game, but the thought of being anyone's "lover" makes me uncomfortable. My eyes still shut, I wait as Caesar takes a loop around the circle and then feel a strong tap against my knee so that I can't deny I've been chosen for this.
"Lovers, open your eyes and discover who it is you will die without," Caesar says.
I open my eyes and immediately make eye contact with Peeta Mellark, who is possibly the nicest boy in my grade. The whole school, probably. He gives me a shy smile and my insides become runny and I can't help but smile back and hope I don't ruin his game for him by getting accused first of being a werewolf thanks to my resting bitch face.
"Lovers, close your eyes."
I shut them again. Caesar runs through the werewolves, who make their first decision on who to kill, then offer the seer an insight into whether or not someone's a werewolf, then the witch. I open my eyes and decline to use either potion.
"The sun rises red in the east, you wake up and discover that blood has been spilled this night," Caesar says. "Madge and Cato are on their way to the town's bakery only to discover in the middle of the town square, slashed and gutted: Delly!"
Delly lets out a groan. "The first one!"
"Who were you?" The red-headed Kit asks.
"Cupid," she says, showing her slip of paper. Caesar holds out the bowl an she tosses it back in. I narrow my eyes at her for a moment. So she's who I have to thank for this extra job of keeping Peeta safe.
"Any accusations?" Caesar asks.
"I've noticed in this game," Gale says, "that the first person to die is often closer to one of the werewolves."
I already know where he's going with this. Delly and Peeta are good friends, have been since we were kids since they live next door to each other. And I have to stop it.
"Delly's friends with everyone," I say. "Even me. That doesn't help much."
"But there are some people she's closer to," Gale says.
"You know, I heard Glimmer moving around during the werewolf part," Clove interrupts.
Glimmer gasps and says, "I was scratching my arm!"
"Or you could have been moving your arm to point at someone," Peeta says. He clearly knows what Gale had been thinking, too.
"Are you accusing Glimmer then?" Caesar asks.
"I am," Clove says.
"Seconded," Peeta agrees.
"Anyone else?" Caesar asks.
"Marvel," Cato says.
"What?!" Marvel asks.
"I don't know," Cato says, shrugging. "Gotta have at least two and you're just as likely as any of us."
Glimmer and Marvel have their opportunity to defend themselves, Glimmer giving an impassioned speech about this being just like the Salem Witch Trials, and Marvel shrugging it off with a "Whatever. I didn't do it and Cato's an idiot."
The vote's close, but in the end, it's seven to five, not in favor Glimmer.
"Villager!" she says, showing her paper. "I hope you're happy now!"
Madge gets killed off by the werewolves next, and the accusations around that fly around. Kit ends up on the chopping block, but that was bad news, since she was our seer and now we have no insight into who might be a werewolf. She didn't even get to share with us what she'd learned the first two nights.
The next round, when I open my eyes, planning to turn down using the potion, Rue's little hand waves at me from around Thresh's huge body on the chair next to me. She gestures to herself and I understand she is, aptly, the game's little girl.
"Would you like to save anyone tonight?" Caesar asks.
Rue looks at me with wide eyes. I look at Caesar, nod, and gesture toward Rue. He points at Rue in confirmation.
"Would you like to poison anyone, witch?" Caesar says. "And as a reminder to the little girl, they cannot communicate during the night. Only peek."
With Rue unable to aid me, I shake my head.
"Well, last night was quite an adventure," Caesar says. "Rue was out of bed and spying on the werewolves when they spotted her and ripped her open with their teeth. Leaving her to die, a witch came by and used a potion to revive our Rue back to life. No one has died tonight, and the witch's saving potion is used up. Now, any accusations?"
"Marvel!" Rue says, pointing her finger at him. "I was peeking and he saw me and pointed to me! I didn't get a good look at the others, but I know he's a werewolf!"
"Seconded," Thresh says, the first time he's talked all game.
"Any other accusations?" Caesar asks. No one brings up any other names and Marvel groans, accepting his fate.
"I was a werewolf," he says and puts his slip back in the bowl. Everyone cheers the first successful werewolf kill.
Next round, all I have left is a killing potion, which I don't use. I wish for more saving potion, because clearly the werewolves will be after Rue now, and sure enough, come sunrise, she's the one who's dead.
Now with the accusations, things are desperate.
"Katniss has been quiet," Clove says. "Hasn't talked since the first round."
"Katniss is always quiet," Peeta says. "You can't accuse her because of that. You'd have to throw Thresh in as well."
"I think it's Clove," Gale says. "She's been making bad accusations this whole time."
"Shut up!" Clove says. "Actually, I think it's you. You only voted Marvel because everyone else was and you've been bossing everyone around more than us, but we've only gotten one werewolf."
"I second Clove," I say. She is acting a little too defensive.
"And I second Gale," Cato says.
Gale and I are the only one who vote for Clove, and everyone else votes for Gale.
"Hunter," Gale says. "And I'm taking Clove out with me."
Clove gives a low growl and flips her paper around. "I was a werewolf."
"So there's one left." Cato looks around. "Who else? The witch and two villagers?"
"And the lovers," Thresh says.
I try not to look guilty, but Thresh clocks my expression and squints at me. Oh no, he thinks I'm the werewolf.
"All right, remaining players, close your eyes," Caesar says.
With my eyes shut and Caesar telling the remaining werewolf to choose their kill. Based on the look given to me, Thresh must be a villager. Which means that either Cato or Peeta is the werewolf. If Peeta dies, I die. Even if he is a monster. But maybe, if it's Cato and I take him out with the poison, Thresh won't have to die, too.
"Witch, you may open your eyes," Caesar says. I look up at him, his skin and hair illuminated blue in the light. "Do you wish to use your potion?"
I point at Cato. Caesar confirms, but the pool is so small now it'd be impossible to misunderstand where I'd pointed. I see the "dead" look at each other in despair and realize my mistake. Cato isn't the werewolf.
Peeta is.
"Very well, everyone open your eyes," Caesar says and claps his hands in delight. "Oh, this has been quite an interesting round! Last night, a pair of lovers slipped out in the dark together to commit a double-murder. First, the werewolf ripped Thresh's throat out and ensured his death, while the witch poisoned Cato's beer and he died choking on his own vomit."
Cato throws his hands up and glares between Peeta and me. "Which one of you killed me?"
I raise my hand. "I was the witch."
"And I'm the werewolf," Peeta says.
"So the werewolves won?" Clove asks, holding her hands to her chest in hope.
"No, the lovers won," Caesar said. "It's rare that neither of them gets killed off, but it helps that Peeta, as a werewolf, deterred them from killing Katniss and they stuck together in the game without the rest of you realizing it. With the other two dead, in the end, the lovers prevailed and get to live in their little village in the woods peacefully, with no one to bother their supernatural lives."
I can't help but cheer and when Peeta gets up from his seat and offers me a high-five, I do one better and give him a hug. We are lovers, after all--it's the least I can do.
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Class of Villainy & School for Monstrous Youths- Scared Straight
Hey ya’ll! This is a fun little idea I had! First things first, I want to tell you about a special project Sparky and I have in the works for after Mirrorverse is complete: a mega crossover of all our major AU’s, ie Class of Heroes/Villainy, School for Monstrous Youths, Creepsters and Ghoul Squad! This is a separate AU from that, but here’s the gist: What if…the heroes met the monsters beforehand? They end up telling them about their villain selves, and the monsters suggest they send them by for a little visit. Here’s what comes of it. (As always, @imsparky2002 and @artzychic27!)
As the villainous classes approached the gothic castle that strongly resembled their school, they were feeling pretty smug. When those insipid ‘hero’ counterparts had informed them that they had OTHER counterparts in this world and that they were interested in meeting the dastardly teens, they knew they had to check it out. Another group of spineless do-gooders to lord their superiority over…or so they thought.
“What do you think those imbecilesss were sssnickering about?”, Jafardrien sneered to his companions as Kimton and Ivan Oogie pushed open the massive dark wood doors.
“Who knows? But whoever these new goody-good counterparts are, they’ll be no match for us, my friends!”, YzAlya boasted, her head held high as the other villains agree.
“Hi!”
The villains started as they turned to see the Adrien of this universe, smiling at them in a rather…creepy manner, “We’re SO glad you guys could make it!”
“Sssooo, you’re me? No offenssse, but you don’t look like anything ssspecial.”, Jafardrien snarked, earning chuckles from his friends.
The other Adrien just kept smiling, ignoring the comment before he spoke again, “Well, no need to hang around in the doorway! My friends are just DYING to meet you!”
The villains scoffed, and started down the main hall, with no idea what was awaiting them within the school. Average Adrien laughed softly, a slight sinister note underlaying it. His friends were about to teach these villains a lesson they would never forget...
As they continued down the main hall, the villains noticed the lights were getting progressively dimmer. 'Oooh, spooky.'
But at that moment, from the shadows somewhere behind them, a childish, unsettling giggle echoed through the previously silent space. The evil teens turned to look in all directions but spied nothing, continuing on their way...only for the laughter to sound again just moments later...this time even closer.
"Alright, who's there?!", Mari DeVil demanded, hands on her hips. Only to jump with a yelp when she felt coarse fabric brush against her hand. "What was that?! Something just touched me!", her friends all looked at her skeptically, but still, her partners moved closer.
The devilish fashionista felt the brush of cloth again, this time against the side of her arm, and she turned to glare at the only member of the group who happened to be made of cloth, "Ivan, knock it off!"
The boogeyman looked at her incredulously, "Ah'm nowhere close ta you!", only to be met with a fiercely irritated glare from the girl.
"Well, something made of cloth keeps touching me, and it's getting-"
"Peekaboo.", said a cheerful and creepily childlike voice from behind the fur-coated vixen, causing her to jump and shriek, whipping around to see what looked like...her, but stitched together of gray fabric and with large blue buttons for eyes. The smile on her stitched lips was not comforting in any way as she peered at the villains.
With another creepy giggle, she spoke in the manner of a demented toddler to her captive audience, "Hiiii. Do you wanna play a game with me?", she asked, producing three large needles from her pocket, which she aimed at her neck, causing each villain in the group, but particularly Mari DeVil, to feel an uncomfortable sensation in their own necks.
"I...think we'll pass!", the fashion maven said quickly, before she ushered her fellow villains down the hall, to a cheery "Bye bye!" from her ragdoll counterpart, followed by the sounds of her skipping away in the opposite direction.
The villainous group then ducked into a room on the right side of the hallway, eager to be separated from the disturbing doll. But when they filed into the room, it was completely dark...bar for the pale glow of eerie blue candles. Though it appeared they were the only ones in the room, they could all feel a...presence. Something else was there...
The villains all shivered as something icy whooshed past them from behind, sending a chill down their spines. They whipped around to look, but the space was empty. They felt the same sensation sweep behind them again, only to yield the same results when they turned.
"Okay, something is in here!", YzAlya said firmly, only to yelp when something brushed the back of her neck...something that felt like soft but ice-cold fingers...
"Alright, what was that?!", the young sorceress demanded, whipping around to look in all directions...only to feel that chilling touch from behind once again.
She quickly turned around and found only a bare wall looking back at her...for only the briefest of moments before the room was shaken with a thundering "BOOOO!" as a terrifying specter with glowing purple eyes phased through the solid surface in front of her. The wicked potions expert let out an ear-piercing shriek before bolting for the door, her friends close behind.
They walked down another corridor, allowing themselves to regroup after their ghostly encounter. But this only lasted a moment, as the lights in the hall suddenly went out, forcing the villains to feel along the walls and floor to find their way.
As he moved slowly down the hall, Honest Nino felt his foot brush against something on the floor. Bending down to pick it up, he brought it into the light from Mireides' crackling hair...only to let out a loud shriek that was echoed by his friends when he found himself holding a green-skinned, severed arm.
"Holy shit!", the fox hybrid cried as he dropped the arm to the floor, only for a set of bizarre noises to hit his sensitive ears: heavy, stomping footsteps and a deep, guttural growl.
"Umm...guys? I think I know who the arm belongs to...", Madame Sabrina squeaked, pointing shakily at something in the distance. The other villains turned to look, seeing a tall, green-skinned, dead-eyed figure that was missing an arm stomping towards them menacingly. The electrodes sticking out of the sides of his neck were giving off loud and bright sparks of electricity, some jumping dangerously close to the villains.
It was then that the creature caught sight of the goddess of death's flaming hair, and his heterochromic eyes dilated in sudden fury as he began to shake.
"Fire....BAD!", the teen Stein shouted in an angry and distorted voice, picking up a chair by the entrance of the classroom and hurling it at the villains. "BAD!", before following it with another furious roar. The villains didn't waste a second and hightailed it down the hall.
Moments later, having managed to evade the enraged Franken-Teen, the villains found themselves next in an old, grand banquet hall, with all the drapes pulled closed. The entire room held an almost deathly chill as the villains moved further within.
Juleficent's hand jumped to where her scepter should have been when something suddenly swooped behind her head...only to find it absent. DiabLuka jumped when something dark and small whizzed by in front of his face. He could have sworn it felt like a leathery wing.
The dark fae twins and their villainous companions jumped with a start when two ear-piercing shrieks suddenly echoed through the eerily quiet hall. The noise had come from above them, so they turned their heads toward the ceiling. To their relief, the only thing that they saw upon inspection was a pair of harmless looking bats, peering at them through the darkness.
Shaking their heads to clear their minds, the diabolical twins focused their eyes ahead, ready to move on through the school...when they each felt a strong and icy grip clamp down on their shoulder. Turning around and taking defensive stances, they felt their blood run cold at the sight that greeted them.
Two tall, deathly pale figures with glowing eyes the color of venomous mercury and taunting, cruel grins accentuated by dagger sharp fangs. And from both these fangs and their tinted lips dripped a deep, red liquid that smelled disturbingly of copper...
"Welcome to our school.", the female of the two said, her eyes gleaming even brighter as her ice-cold hand moved from Juleficent's shoulder to brush her cheek.
"We just love to have new blood in these halls.", her brother chimed, staring straight into DiabLuka's eyes in a way that made the evil rocker's skin burn. Those words were all it took for the villains to make an attempt to bolt for the doors...
Only for the vampiric twins to already be there, smiling at them mockingly.
"Do you really think you can run away from us?", the vampiric goth mused, looking at the villains condescendingly. They quickly turned for the other exit, only for the two vampires to meet them there once again. No matter where they turned, where they tried to run, the blood-drinking teens were always ahead of them, laughing wickedly.
"We're as swift as shadows in the night, you'll never outrun us!", the vampire Luka taunted the villains as they made one last dash for the doors. Deciding they had frightened them enough, the two allowed the villains to make their escape.
The group burst through the large set of double doors and found themselves running through the night air...until they realized they were now in the shadows of a dense forest. The only illumination came from the moonlight filtering through the leaves of the trees.
As they moved through the thick underbrush, the teens couldn't help but feel as if they were being...hunted...stalked. Something was in these woods and was watching them very closely. Kimton felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as he swore he heard something growling in the bushes off to his side.
Continuing through the dark trees, the villains had just managed to somewhat calm their nerves, when the woods around them suddenly shook as a thundering howl ripped through the previously quiet forest, ringing in the ears of the wicked adolescents and rattling the branches of the trees.
Hearts hammering in their chests, the classes of villainy looked up, towards the source of the sound, and were met with the sight of a tall, fur-covered figure with glowing golden eyes standing above them on a rock.
With a loud, blood-chilling snarl, the creature leaped down from the stone crest and landed a couple meters away from the villains, the crouching position of his muscular form reminiscent of a wolf ready to pounce on a hapless deer, his eyes still glowing like lamps as he stalked slowly through the shadows towards them, growling all the way.
Trembling like a leaf, Kimton made to reach for his silver hunting knife…..only to find that, like Juleficent's scepter, it was gone. When he looked back up, his reaching for a weapon seemed to have enraged the wolf, because he suddenly lunged out of the darkness, tackling the hunter to the ground with a furious growl, his eyes glowing brighter than ever before.
"You think you can kill me, bitch?", the werewolf snarled, the only response he got from the villain being an ear-splitting shriek. Which only grew louder as the monster's razor sharp teeth suddenly moved towards his throat, keen on ripping it out...only to stop. With a barely traceable move, the wolf boy released Kimton and disappeared into the woods, leaving both the imbecilic hunter and the other villains baffled and more than a little terrified.
With the young hunter still trembling from his near experience of being a werewolf's dinner, the villains exited the forest and found themselves in a field of tall grass in the sight of a nearby greenhouse...but once again, they clearly were not alone.
Jafardrien, Cosetteweather and Simon Frollo jumped as something moved very quickly through the grass directly behind them, accompanied by a bizarre hissing sound, like an entire chorus of snakes. Lady Chloe and Reshma Hook did the same a moment later as the grass around them rustled and brushed their backs.
All around the villains, almost impossibly fast, an unseen creature blazed through the tall grasses of the field, stirring up unsettling rustling and always, that strange, strange 'hisssss.’
"Okay, I swear, if that is some giant-ass snake, I am going to lose it!”, Honest Nino squeaked, his eyes darting around rapidly in fear.
"I'm pretty sure snakes don't have feet, which I’m definitely hearing!", Maxdrome countered, though you could hear how shaken he was in the pitch of his voice.
"Well then, what is it?!”, Madame Sabrina demanded, just as whatever reptilian beast was hiding in the grasses brushed along past Alix Khan, sending the tigress into a snarling defensive stance.
"Okay, who or what is there?!”, she growled angrily, sweeping the area with her eyes, "Come on!", but the only response she got was another wave of rustling, just to her right, and the ever-present hissing noise reaching a crescendo.
To her left. To her right. Behind her. In the distance. Right in front of her. Whatever this creature was, it moved astronomically fast, dizzying the hybrid’s senses. It was everywhere at once, but at the same time it was nowhere at all!
Suddenly, the hissing sound was less than an inch away from Alix Khan, and when she looked at her friends, she saw them watching something behind her with rising horror. So she turned around to look..
And looming over her with curved fangs bared and reptilian blue eyes shining with malice, scales gleaming in the light of the moon, was a creature with a writhing nest of venomous snakes in place of hair, all letting out the same vicious, deafening hiss as the girl herself. The tigress couldn't hold back the terrified scream that escaped her lips, nor could her friends as they rushed to avert their eyes and flee the creature's territory.
"Over there!", Mylensula shrieked, pointing to the greenhouse, hopefully a safe haven where they could get their wits back.
Though it took them a moment with their eyes covered (they didn't want to become statues), they managed to make their way to the greenhouse. Pushing on the cold glass of the doors to open them, they entered the circular building…and found themselves in nothing short of a jungle, twisted and ridden with all manner of bizarre flora. And what’s more…they could swear that, though they had no eyes, these monstrous plants were all watching them, tracking their every move.
Slowly making their way forward, the villains could swear they heard something creeping along the floor behind them, but when they turned to look, they saw nothing and kept going.
Only for a certain sea witch to let out a sudden shriek as she felt something grab her tentacles, quickly winding through them and holding her in place. Her friends turned to look in alarm, seeing her completely entangled in vines. Ivan Oogie, Juleficent and YzAlya had quickly moved to try and help her, only to find themselves entangled similarly, along with the rest of the villains, in a matter of moments.
From somewhere in the darkness above them, a soft, peaceful voice began to sing…
“The gentle breeze….stirs the leaves…”
The entangled villains looked frantically around for the source of the eerie melody, but the higher level of the greenhouse was so shrouded in darkness that they couldn’t make out a thing.
“And stirs my soul…my heart deep inside me…”
The haunting tune continued as the villain still couldn’t trace its origin…and the vines wrapping around them were starting to grow thorns.
“Sense my worth…as one with earth…of greater whole all connected as one…”
As the final words of the unsettling song floated through the air, the villains finally caught sight of something in the shadows of the mangled treetops. A pair of glowing green eyes with unsettling yellow sclera, twinkling as they peered at the group on the ground through an opening in the thick leaves.
“Do you like my garden?”, a mellow, almost musical voice echoed through the greenhouse, as the vines around the evil teens grew even tighter, “Because my darlings seem…curious about you…”
The villains heard rustling above them and saw the leaves part to reveal a girl who seemed to be just as much a plant as anything else in the room, eyes still glowing and smiling with an eerie serenity as the vines on her arms and legs wound through the branches of the trees, creeping down towards them.
With a laugh that almost sounded too pure, she suddenly vanished into the trees, right in front of their eyes, and the vines loosened enough for them to start pulling free.
After he managed to free himself from the grasp of the vines, the teen boogeyman quickly moved to assist his still-ensnared scallop...only for something with immense strength to strike him down from behind, the sea witch crying out his name in alarm as she watched her beloved crash to the ground.
Coughing up a bit of blood (that had definitely squashed a few of his bugs) from the blow, Ivan Oogie managed to, despite immense pain, turn himself around in a sitting position….to find himself looking up, up, way up at an enormous figure, cloaked completely in shadow, apart from the menacing, almost crimson gleam in his dark eyes and the pale moonlight glinting off his, not so much fangs as tusks.
The hulking monster’s stone expression didn’t change as he spoke with a thick Russian inflection:
“When a bug is bad…you crush it.”, before he lunged forward, his fist plunging downward, straight towards the boogeyman’s skull. The villain managed to scramble out of the way just in time, yelping in fear at the cracks that split the cement ground under the abominable teen’s fist. Unfortunately for Ivan Oogie, he wasn’t quick enough to dodge the yeti’s next blow, which slammed into his chest and sent him flying to the ground once more. He was left gasping for breath, his eyes wide as the monster approached him once more.
“Spookums!”, Mylensula shrieked, trying frantically to disentangle her tentacles from the vines that still held them tight, “Get away from him, you half-witted brute!”
Suddenly, from the darkness above them once more, sounded a familiar, harmonious voice:
“Now now, my love, let’s not be too rough with our guests…”, the plant girl’s words scolded gently from somewhere unseen, punctuated by another creepily angelic giggle, “They still have to meet the rest of our friends…”
The mountain of a monster nodded and receded into the darkness, leaving the young boogey broken on the floor.
With the sea witch supporting and fretting over her wounded beloved, the villains quickly bolted from the greenhouse as the plant girl's ominous laughter echoed behind them, eager to leave the monstrous lovebirds behind. They ran alongside the edge of the school, aiming to stay in the shadows.
Suddenly, in the darkness behind them, a loud THUD sounded. Something had alighted behind them, and the wicked friends whipped around as quickly as they could. But they were only fast enough to catch a fleeting glimpse of another huge creature, this one with unnerving pale yellow eyes, before it alighted into the air with a mighty bound, and disappeared over the rim of the school’s high walls.
The villains waited in place for a moment, expecting the creature to return. When it didn’t, they took a collective deep breath and continued in their way, carefully edging along the wall.
A minute or two later, they heard the same sound as before, this time much closer than it had been the first. When they turned this time, they were able to get a good, full look at the monster. A hulking mass of muscle, just like the yeti before them, their haunting yellow eyes peered out at the villains from behind their wild, dark hair, holding a look that was playful and yet deeply feral.
Just as the villains had turned around to try and run, the towering sasquatch had vaulted over their heads, landing right in front of a trembling Doctor Cabello, and seizing the hoodoo expert by the throat, lifting them up in the air.
“Go ahead and try to run. Wherever you turn, I’ll be there.”, the monster growled, squeezing tight before dropping the witch doctor to the ground and vaulting back up over the wall.
With the voodoo doctor still shaking like a leaf, the villains quickly threw open a set of wooden doors and raced back into the school, finding themselves in the empty auditorium. The room was totally dark except for a single spotlight shining on the stage, which they slowly made their way towards, though they kept bumping into chairs. Fishing out her spare cellphone, QRC shone the flashlight app around the room, illuminating a path for the villains to follow. But as she swung the beam around, it caught on something that gleamed white on the ground. Moving closer…it was a bone….and then another…and then another.
All around them were a bevy of small bones. They all appeared to belong to a humanoid of some kind, but they gave off a strange…energy. Suddenly, from the darkness around them, an adorably deranged laugh sounded, echoing several times over. At the same time, all of the bones began to rattle on the ground, drumming out an ominous beat.
At that moment, they rose from the ground and shot toward the stage, assembling themselves beneath the spotlight. With a blinding flash and another maniacal giggle, a skeletal girl with an impossibly wide grin appeared on the stage.
“SURPRISE!”, she trilled, making a number of the villains jump, giving a twirl and laughing once more. Before leaping gracefully from the stage and disappearing into the darkness.
A mere few moments later, she appeared once again, with a shriek of delight, mere inches away from the candy queen’s face, who let out a yelp of shock.
“Tag, you’re it!”, the skeleton giggled, booping QRC on the nose, making the villain racer squeak in fear. Not wanting to engage in any sort of game with the creepily cheerful girl, the villains turned and fled down a side hall.
With the gleeful giggles of the skeleton still sounding in their ears as they fled, the villains found themselves now in a small alcove that almost resembled a cave one would find within a mountain. The stone walls became massive slabs and stalactites hung from the ceiling.
But the most defining feature was a large pile of what appeared to be small stones from this distance in the center of the central chamber. An ominous air hung about it, as if something was waiting for them to try and approach.
Taking the flashlight from QRC, Kagami Yu was the first one bold enough to approach the pile…which upon shining the beam over it, was revealed to be gold and jewels. Seeing the temptation in the eyes of the pirate and crab-hyrbid, the other villains gave them warning death stares, they didn’t know what could be guarding this hoard.
Inching closer and closer, the general moved the flashlight over the massive mound of treasure, only for the beam to catch on something… different, when she was only a foot or so away. A pair of glowing, reptilian green eyes, glaring at the gathered villains with an ethereal rage.
Draped over the pile of gold was a snarling dragon with bronze scales and gleaming golden claws, her keen eyes never leaving Kagami Yu, tracking her every move. Slowly stalking further down the pile to be little more than an inch from the villain, she said only one thing, in a voice that carried an ancient, powerful air:
“Leave now.”
Kagami Yu could only squeak as she and the rest of the group turned and hightailed it without a second thought.
Fleeing down a side hallway in the cave's wall, the villains next found themselves in what appeared to be a laboratory with a very old-age, steampunk design. Unsettling creaks and wafts of boiling hot steam sounded from the outdated machinery at random and startling intervals, and in the center of the room was a rusted old work table.
On the surface of that table laid a boy, made entirely of copper. His mechanical eyes were wide open but dark, he appeared to be powered down at the moment.
Despite the threatening atmosphere hanging about the room, Maxdrome couldn’t help but approach the table out of curiosity. Looking down at the old-world mechanized version of himself, he tentatively reached out a hand, touching the cool metal of his hand.
Instantly, the lights of the robot’s fiberglass eyes snapped on, and with a sharp ‘whirr’ his head whipped around to face the evil machinist, looking him dead in the face. Slowly, the light in his eyes turned a deep red, as he suddenly jerked up from the table.
“Intruders on the premises.”, he grated out in a strangely echoing and monotone voice, “Commence termination protocols.”, and with that he lifted his arm, aiming what appeared to be some kind of built-in plasma cannon straight at the villains.
Firing off shots with alarming speed, the villains just barely managed to dodge the orbs of energy, one of which exploded into a blinding flash that left the villains scrambling on the floor. When their sight returned, the robotic boy seemed to have vanished without a trace.
“Wh-where did he go?”, Kimton stammered, his eyes as wide as saucers.
“Don’t know, but good riddance!”, IsmaScar responded, “Let’s bolt!”
Not wanting to be there when the mechanical menace returned, the villains quickly moved on to the next room, which ended up being a sandy expanse that resembled the interior of a pyramid. Moving deeper into the room, they noticed the wall was covered in hieroglyphs, and the few that Maxdrome recognized did NOT mean pleasant things. When they could just barely see the light from the corridors opening, they noticed two massive shadows, one on each wall. Upon bringing the flashlight for a better look, they were revealed to be twin sarcophagi.
Not wanting to risk disturbing whatever was in the massive, elaborate coffins, the villains quickly moved to back out of the room…only for Jeanatoa to trip over a small cat statue, landing with a loud crash.
In less than a second, waves of scarab beetles scuttled across the floor, crawling over the villains as all the sand in the room began to swirl ominously around their feet, rising higher by the second.
From the sarcophagus on the left, a loud roar of fury, demonic in every sense of the word sounded. Moments later, an enraged and echoing voice boomed from the sarcophagus on the right:
“WHO DARES AWAKEN THE QUEENS FROM THEIR REST?!”
The villains trembled, frozen with fear as the lids of the tombs slowly opened, allowing two mummy girls to step out and slowly turn to look at the villains with rage-filled, glowing and dead eyes.
Turning to look at each other once more, they began murmuring in ancient Egyptian and making ominous gestures with their hands. The sands around the villains began to rise higher and higher, until they were completely surrounded and unable to see beyond the desert cyclone.
ZoeHans and Lady Chloe huddled close together, only to be wrenched apart when a hand grabbed each of them by the throat, finding themselves looking straight into the luminous eyes of the mummy sisters.
“You have made a grave error, mortals.”, the first mummy, who was holding Lady Chloe, intoned, her voice as regal as it was terrifying.
“Kneel before us or die by our hands.”, the mummy holding ZoeHans snarled, squeezing the princess’ throat tighter.
When the villains didn’t make any move, due to being petrified with fear for their friends, the mummies scowled, seeming to see it as a sign of disrespect. Dropping the two female nobles, they began to utter a terrifying Egyptian chant, the sands and dark shadows swirling around them. Not willing to stick around to see the results, and seeing the door was not blocked by sand anymore, the evil teens quickly bolted from the corridor.
Screaming as the haunting voices still carried ominous Egyptian chants behind them, the villains ran blindly for a distance until they suddenly found themselves beside what appeared to be the school's pool, though it more closely resembled a large lagoon.
The water, though oddly dark, looked clean, so a few of the villains went down to splash some on their faces to help calm themselves. LeOnDine in particular dropped to her knees and looked at her shaking reflection in the water. Only to jump back with a yelp when she swore she saw a second pair of eyes staring back at her from within the depths.
“What’s wrong with you?”, Kimton asked, raising an eyebrow at the girl who just forced a smile and turned back to the water as the villains regrouped on the shore.
Dropping her head down so she could take a deep breath, the redhead regrouped herself…only to hear a bizarre bubbling sound, then see a shadow slowly looming over her. She slowly lifted her head back up…and shrieked at the sight of the scaly, seaweed-draped creature with the razor-toothed smile and glassy eyes.
But when she blinked her eyes and her friends looked over, the monster was gone…
“Alright, WHAT is your problem?”, Kimton demanded, looking at his loyal companion in annoyance.
“Ondine, dear, is something there?”, King Marc asked in a much gentler tone, after shooting the hunter an equally annoyed look.
“I-I don’t kn-know…it was h-here and th-then it-“, the redhead started to stammer out, her eyes the size of saucers.
“Uh….guys?”, Jeanatoa squeaked, pointing to the large cluster of bubbles that had suddenly began to gather on the water’s surface. Before the villains could even fully react…an ENORMOUS creature with a long neck, grayish-blue scales, razor sharp teeth, a tall crest down its back, and a thrashing tail emerged from the water, letting out a deafening roar as the waves set forth by its entrance drenched the screaming villainous teens.
The villains ran, nearly trampling each other, as they scrambled to get away from the monster, leaving the pool atrium and emerging back in the hallway. Getting their breath back, they continued on their way...until they were given pause by the sight of a rather...unusual gargoyle.
Suspicious and more than a little creeped out, the King of Hearts slowly approached the statue, which bore a disturbing resemblance to the mad monarch. But when he reached out to touch the stone sculpture, its eyes suddenly snapped open and a granite hand shot out and grabbed him by the throat before he could react.
Before the alarmed poison king could rush to help his beloved, the gargoyle suddenly alighted into the air, still holding a trembling, squeaking Nath of Hearts.
“You are not welcome here, evil one.”, the creature rumbled out in a voice like crashing boulders, his vice grip on the young king’s throat growing even tighter. Too tight for the other boy to even choke out a response.
All of a sudden, with absolutely no warning, the gargoyle dropped the villain, who crashed to the ground with a loud thud, before swooping upward and out of the school through an open window.
With the King of Hearts now slightly limping from the impact of the drop, his fair beloved supporting him, the villains continued down the high-ceilinged hallway...until a large shadow swooped over their heads. Looking up, they saw nothing but the high-arched ceilings, so they continued on their way…
Only for the shadow to swoop over them again, this time from behind. The eyes of the wicked team darted around frantically, trying to track the shadowy creature as it swooped overhead, back and forth, left and right, but it was simply too fast.
Then suddenly…the shadow stopped moving, and all went quiet. Until the Poison King heard an odd, soft fluttering behind him. Like the beating of a butterfly’s wings.
Turning around slowly, he was met with the ghastly sight of a creature with grey wings, six raised arms, massive and glowing green eyes, twitching antenna and a frantic grin. Before King Marc could scream, the monster beat him to it, releasing a deafening, high pitched trill that followed the villains as they turned to run once more.
Surrounded by the echoes of the moth man's terrible shriek, the dastardly teens bolted down a narrow side corridor, quickly finding themselves in near pitch darkness. With a flashlight leading the way, they made their way down the hall, which seemed to get narrower and narrower by the second.
Simon Frollo shuddered intensely…he could swear he felt something watching him from the darkness, incredibly intently. Several times, he would turn around and swear he saw a large, glowing eye…only for it to disappear a mere second later, making the villain wonder if he was beginning to go mad.
But slowly, the other villains began seeing the eye too. Everywhere they looked, it would be there for only the briefest of moments, driving them to the brink as they felt their every move being tracked.
After a brief while, they all stopped seeing the eye, and their nerves began to calm as they continued down the hall. But it was then that Simon Frollo felt a hand on his shoulder. Knowing he was at the very back of the group, he slowly turned around to look…
And was met with the sight of a tall, startling figure, grinning creepily as he stared at the young minister with his giant, single, gleaming eye. Simon Frollo shrieked and bolted in front of his friends at alarming speed, though they quickly followed.
With the young minister still murmuring about demons, they continued making their way down the corridor, and while it got thinner, they were relieved that they could now see somewhat clearly as the walls were now lined with torches.
Only for that comfort to turn to terror as the flames of the torches suddenly roared and engulfed the sides of the hall, leaping and snapping at the villains from all sides.
Lacey Gothel squeaked as she swore she saw a demonic, grinning face in the flames off to her side, but it quickly vanished. Only to reappear again everywhere she seemed to look. Doing her best to ignore it, she and the other villains quickly continued forward down the hall, avoiding the flames all around them as best they could.
Only to be forced to stop in their tracks and yell in shock when a massive column of white hot fire leaped up in front of them. Their horror only increased when a creature, seemingly one with the column and made of pure flames herself, emerged and gave a thundering, demonic shout which blended into the roar of the fire. The villains all screamed, feeling as if they were looking upon a being from hell.
Almost as suddenly as they had appeared, the tower of flame receded, and the flame girl disappeared, allowing the villains to run further down the hall...until they reached a dead end… at the same time they heard something approaching from behind. Eerie groans and heavy shambling footsteps sounded from the direction in which they had come.
Slowly turning to look, they were met with the sight of a harrowing figure, rotting arms outstretched and eyes dead and cold behind her tangled ginger curls as she lumbered towards them, moaning all the way. Turning back to the walls, the villains desperately looked for some kind of exit.
But in the moments they were distracted, the zombie girl seemed to have moved much faster than should be possible for her sort, as Madame Sabrina felt a cold hand brush against her back, and turned, trembling, to see the undead monster right behind her, growling as she said only one word:
“BRAAAAINS!”
Suddenly, a brick beneath Maxdrome's hand sank into the wall, opening a dark passage, which the villains quickly ran into, eluding the zombie girl. At the end of the dark hall, they found themselves in what appeared to be an abandoned classroom. Hoping to get a moment’s respite, they sat down at the rickety old desks, breathing heavily and gathering their thoughts. But then…
“What the hell isss going on?!”, Jafardrien cried, his friends wondering the same thing as the desks suddenly took to the air, all of them surrounded by a bizarre blue aura.
‘Are you enjoying our game?’
MimRore blinked in confusion. The voice had sounded in her mind, and it was identical to hers…but it wasn’t.
Suddenly, that same voice filled the minds of all the villains:
‘You all have been the most entertaining of guests. Your shrieks are the music to our ears.’
Shaking with confused terror, they turned to the front of the room to see an otherworldly being floating in front of them, her silvery hair floating around her head and her eyes lit with the same blue glow as the one surrounding the villains. She smiled serenely as she began to spin and jerk them around in the air, giggling malevolently.
All of a sudden, the desks were lowered to the floor, and the extraterrestrial girl had vanished from sight. Bolting out of the old lecture hall, and still a little dizzy, the villains emerged near what appeared to be the entrance to a set of catacombs. As they tried to decide whether to enter, they suddenly felt a strange sensation around their feet. Looking down…they all cried in disgust as they found their legs buried up to their ankles in a gelatinous blue ooze that almost seemed to be moving about on its own.
“What on earth is this?!”, Mylensula screamed, shuddering at the feeling of it sloshing around her tentacles, “It’s disgusting!”
Mari DeVil squeaked as she saw more of the bizarre guck dripping down from the ceiling and oozing over the walls.
Suddenly, all the goop began to move at once, rapidly gathering into a cluster right behind Mireides, who could only shudder in revulsion as it took the shape of some kind of being. The goddess almost puked as two goggling eyes and a drippy mouth with an oozing smile formed on the creature. It reached out a slimy arm toward the flame-haired girl, who dry-heaved as it managed to touch her before quickly darting away.
But the creature didn’t follow. Instead, she oozed toward a hole in the floor, which they dropped down into, leaving a glistening trail of slime in her wake.
Trying to keep themselves from fear-vomiting, the villains quickly bolted through the entrance of the catacombs, finding themselves entrenched in shadow. From somewhere in the distance, a low growl sounded. Looking around, the villains could see nothing but the sound continued to grow louder…
Before it was replaced with an echoing roar that shook the ground, and they were suddenly able to spot a pair of feline eyes, watching them like a hawk through the darkness. Slowly, the creature that bore the eyes began to stalk forward, revealing the form of a giant creature resembling a black-furred mountain lion as it stepped into the light.
Before the villains could make any attempt to either escape or placate it, the big cat lunged with a feral snarl, moving straight for the king of the Savannah, who managed to dodge being tackled, but not the creature’s claws, which left bleeding gashes on his arms.
IsmaScar could only tremble, unable to move from the pain as the creature prepared to lunge again…only to give him what almost looked like a smirk, before receding back into the shadows.
As the enormous feline suddenly stopped its attack, the villains fled deeper into the catacombs, suddenly finding themselves in a series of winding corridors...a maze. Like one ripped straight from an old movie, old wet stones and lit by torches.
With Cosetteweather taking the lead, they slowly began to make their way through the winding corridors, hoping to find an exit as quickly as possible.
But after a short while had passed, they began to hear unusual noises. The sound of hooves pawing sharply at the ground and an angry sort of snort…getting closer and closer to where they were by the second. Something else was in this labyrinth…and it didn’t seem to want them there.
Trembling with fear, Cosetteweather lead her friends around the next bend…only to find, standing less than twenty feet away, a monster, with gleaming horns and eyes that seemed to be glowing blood red…and very angry as her hooves pawed at the ground.
Before the dastardly gang could fully process what they were looking at, the minotaur suddenly gave a loud bellow of fury and charged straight for them, Cosetteweather barely being missed as ZoeHans yanked them out of the way.
“WOAH! Look, just calm down, alright?! We’ll get out of your maze, just chill!”, the sheep hybrid gasped out, though this only seemed to infuriate the creature, which lowered its head and prepared to charge again.
Only for the walls of the maze to suddenly shift, separating the villains and the bull, which did not seem to take this very well at all while the group of friends heaved a sigh of relief.
Still hearing the enraged snorts of the minotaur, they were, thankfully, able to quickly find an exit. But when they emerged from the maze, the room they ended up in was completely coated in what appeared to be giant spider webs.
“Oh my god, EWWWW!”, Madame Sabrina cried, “What the hell could have made webs this big?!”, the redheaded diamond enthusiast demanded, looking around the room in disgust.
“I’m not sure, but I’d rather not find out!”, Lady Chloe answered her friend, shuddering as her arm brushed against one of the webs.
The rest of the villains agreed, and tried to move through the room as quickly as possible…only to find the sticky nets of thread getting denser and thicker, to the point they were impossible to avoid, and the villains became entangled.
Reshma Hook could only whimper as she heard a strange scuttling noise above her head, knowing that those multiple tapping limbs likely belonged to whatever had made these webs.
Looking around cautiously, she spied nothing…until she turned back to face the front and screamed at the top of her lungs, suddenly face-to-face with a girl with six glowing red eyes, razor sharp teeth and six limbs that were pawing at the air, hanging upside down in front of her face.
The spider girl only laughed as the pirate whipped out her cutlass, slicing herself and her friends free of the webs as quickly as she could.
Eager to get away from the arachnid girl, the villains fled deeper into the catacombs, ending up in the massive concert hall that laid at its heart. The air in the room was thick with dust, and the only light came from flickering old spotlights near the ridiculously massive stage. Dead in the center of the rickety structure was a massive pipe organ, surrounded by unearthly violet candlelight.
Moving further inside with trepidation, the villains looked around the spacious room, getting the feeling once more that several sets of eyes were watching them. At that moment, a thunderous musical note sounded through the room, rattling the walls and ceiling, as well as the bones of the vile teens.
Looking back at the stage, now sitting at the seat of the organ was a dark figure, clad in a sweeping black cloak, half of his face concealed by a gleaming silver mask. They turned to face the villains, his masked eye glowing with otherworldly energy.
“Looks like y’all have come to the end of our l’il show…”, the ghostly musician said in a honeylike voice that projected through the entire room. With a sweep of his cloak and a roar from the candles, he suddenly vanished from the stage…
…Only to reappear right behind Jeanatoa, who gave a loud shriek as the phantom’s booming laughter filled his ears.
“But now it’s time for the grand finale!”, the monster said grandly with a dazzling smile, “Come on out, ya’ll!”, before he disappeared with another sweep of his cloak.
The collective heartrate of the villainous gang skyrocketed as the phantom's maniacal laughter filled the room as his friends gradually revealed their presence. They had been waiting for the villains to give them one final spook...
"It's been so much fun playing with all of you. Won't you stay a little longer?", Maridoll chirped as she appeared suddenly behind Mari DeVil, still holding her needles as the fashionista shrieked.
YzAlya let out a high squeal as she once again felt the sensation of soft, icy fingers on the back of her neck and the chilling voice of SpectrAlya whispered "Boo..." in her ear.
"GRRRRRAAAARRRGH!", FrankenNino roared as he lurched after the terrified fox hybrid, his electrodes giving off waves of sparks.
The dark fairy twins cried out in terror as a familiar pair of bats swooped over their heads with deafening shrieks, before shifting into the vampire twins who hissed at them in malicious glee.
Kimton shrieked as a golden-brown-furred wolf the size of a small cow leaped from the darkness and pinned him to the ground, its teeth bared in a snarl.
From the shadows to her side, Alix Khan heard a familiar hissing sound and only managed to jump out of the way with a shout at the last second to avoid the snapping jaws of a flurry of snakes and the mocking smile of the girl they were attached to.
Mylensula could only squeak in fear as she was, in the blink of an eye, bound once again in vines like iron chains, as a distortedly sweet voice hummed a familiar song, getting closer by the second.
Ivan Oogie trembled as a massive hand clamped around his throat, lifting him up in the air, finding himself staring into the stony eyes of the yeti once more
“Bug not get away this time.”, Ivan Bumble growled menacingly, squeezing the boogeyman’s neck tighter.
Doctor Cabello yelped in pain as they were knocked to the ground, a giant foot planting down on their chest as Denisquatch smiled eerily at them from above, pressing down and limiting the voodoo mystic’s ability to breath.
QRC squealed as a bony finger tapped her on the shoulder, whipping around to see SkeleRose with an eerie grin, waving her own severed hand at the villain.
Kagami Yu was direly wishing for her sword as DracoGami slashed at her with a mighty roar, forcing her back into a corner.
Maxdrome yelled in frustration and terror as none of his hacking mechanisms worked on the robot firing plasma bolts at him, cursing steam-powered technology for being so simple and yet complex.
Lady Chloe and ZoeHans screamed and panicked as they were overtaken by scarab beetles, the laughter of the mummy sisters mocking them from somewhere unseen.
LeOnDine shrieked in terror as a scaly hand from the fountain in the center of the room reached up and grabbed her ankle, no doubt about to attempt to drown her.
Nath of Hearts cried out when he was suddenly snatched up into the air by the stonefaced Nath Goyle, a crushing grip around his throat once more.
King Marc screamed and cried as MothMarc swooped down only inches from his head over and over, giggling mockingly at the villain’s fear.
Simon Frollo curled into a fetal position and whimpered as he saw a familiar eye watching him from the nearby shadows.
Lacey Gothel screamed as the face of Flamecey taunted her in the torches around the room, moving quicker than a wildfire spreads in a dense forest.
Madame Sabrina threw whatever object she could get her hands on at the approaching Zombrina, but nothing seemed to deter the girl from her set path.
Even MimRore’s giggles seemed a bit nervous as AstraRore slowly hovered toward where she was standing, knocking things out of the way with her telekinesis.
Mireides was barely holding back their vomit as a familiar blue goop gathered around their feet, a watery giggle filling her ears as the substance rose higher and higher.
IsmaScar jumped as the huge cat from before leaped out in front of him, growling menacingly as it approached, its eyes challenging him to try and fight back.
Cosetteweather screamed as she barely managed to dodge the minotaur that charged straight at them, its horns leaving gouges in the wall.
Reshma Hook wailed as she was suddenly wrapped in webbing and drawn up toward the ceiling, a grinning Spider Resh slowly creeping towards her.
Jeanatoa covered his ears as the phantom’s haunting song filled his mind, singing about how the villains had no chance of surviving this night.
As the monsters closed them in from all directions, the villains all simultaneously reached their final breaking points. The screams they released filled the room to the brim. Many of them were crying and they were so engrossed in their terror that they didn’t notice the monsters all suddenly retreat back into the darkness, the only thought in every malicious mind being escape. Which they did as they bolted through the large oaken doors that had suddenly appeared, shrieking all the way as they ran as far as they possibly could from the darkly palatial school.
When they were certain that the villains were long gone, the monsters emerged from the shadows once more, exchanging looks and processing the nights events…before they all began to laugh. Loud, booming, joyous laughter that filled the space vacated by the screams of their wicked counterparts.
“Dudes!”, FrankenNino cried as he doubled over, “We got them SO good!”
“Did ya’ll see the looks on their faces?! They thought we were gonna kill ‘em!”, OperJean guffawed, slapping his knee.
“Okay, that was WAY more fun than I thought it was gonna be!”, Ondine Blue admitted, petting her boyfriend and IsmaCat’s heads before they shifted back into their humanoid forms.
After their laughter died down, bearing proud grins, the assembled monster students turned to look up at a small, eye-like creature that had served as the surveyor of their spooking work for a certain group of ghoulish heroes...
"So...how did they do?", Average Adrien asked the Ghoul Squad as they appeared before the monster classes through a viewing portal. The phantom, werewolf, vampire, stein, mummy and witch exchanged looks before they prepared to pass their judgment…
This is one lesson the villains will never forget! Leave your thoughts in the comments and reblogs! And keep a lookout for a fun prequel and sequel to this story from Sparky!
(The song MyLeaf sings is Emma’s Song from Power Rangers Megaforce. I felt it could be suitably creepy in this scenario!)
#miraculous ladybug#class of villainy#disney au#school for monstrous youths#monster high au#crossover
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Hi! How would you describe the dynamic between Alfonso and Lila, and how in your opinion Lila sees Alfonso? He is one of the few character in Lila's life that I've not really understand, and I remember that you have written some post about him, so I thought I could ask your opinion on his relationship with Lila.
I am finally on vacation so I can answer this with the attention and care it deserves!
LILA AND ALFONSO - THE (QUEER) FRIENDSHIP THAT HAPPENS OFF-SCREEN
[Warning: SPOILERS for book 4 of MBF. Also warning: Massive post. Read it with coffee or tea].
So! What do we know about those two? Lila is our beloved, the Heroine of the 1,000 Faces, someone you can read as cruel or kind, mischievous or honest, intuitive or logical, and it all makes sense because she's all that and more.
Alfonso is our only (open) LGBTQ+ Representative in Town and thus his portrayal is more stereotypical. As MBF aspires to be an all-encompassing tour of the greatest movements and ideologies of the Twentieth Century (the saga is truly as humble as its two main characters), there is a character who stands as a representative of each of them. For example, Mariarosa stands for the women's rights movements (all of them) and the sexual revolution of the 60's-70's. Pasquale stands for communism, class consciousness and resistance to state mechanisms (quite a lot to stand for as well). Lila and/or Lenù will be more or less influenced by all of these movements without ever labeling themselves as anything.
Alfonso stands for the then-called gay liberation movement and social rights. He's one of the very few men in the series who isn't a testosterone vessel with a traditional "masculine" role. He's soft and shy, a do-gooder, and as much of a people-pleaser as Lenù. He's intelligent and interested in languages, but he also has a hedonistic streak. He has some traits in common with Lenù, but without her ambition and perfectionism. He might arguably be what Lenù have resembled without Lila in her life.
Alfonso and Lenù start a friendship on their teens, which is uncommon at the time, as no one expects a boy and a girl to be just friends. They talk a lot, enjoy each other's company and sit together in class. Lenù finds Alfonso very handsome (1) and wonders whether there's anything more on his side. Lenù being Lenù, I'm guessing that she wasn't exactly difficult to read, and that might've made Alfonso a bit wary. He already has another girl friend, Marisa Sarratore, who expects more of him and whom he initially uses as a cover - two may have been too much.
At the same time, Lila is now Stefano's young wife, and this has probably started a new dynamic between Alfonso and Lila, even if it's just because they are family. We know that Lenù comes up often in their conversation, e.g., when Lila asks Alfonso to bring Lenù to her place so she will have a place to study. This will be the model of their whole relationship - Lila commands, Alfonso obeys. Still, there seems to be a growing intimacy between them, even if Lila is mostly interested in passing messages to Lenù through him at this time.
When Lila creates her own "artwork" and hangs it on the shoe shop, Alfonso is mesmerized (this happens on the book only). He happily kisses her cheeks and claims, "I always knew you were dangerous". I love the subtext of this scene. What Lila has done with her own picture is an act of deconstructing her body. She's ripping open her heteronormative self (literally dressed as a bride) and creating something different out of the pieces. The result is defiant, seductive, an image that is both vanguardistic and excessive, and all the straight-coded characters feel immediately threatened and repulsed by it. This is the blood and bone of the queer and most specifically the transgender experience; what Lila has done in a bout of rage/enthusiasm has an extremely queer reading just because of the act itself (2). Hence Alfonso, who is probably starting to find out who he is on that side of the town, is telling her: "You and I are birds of a feather! I always knew!".
At that point, Lila claims not to understand Alfonso's words, but she surely knows that Alfonso is Different, Not Like Other Men, and that he's reluctant to Behave As Expected with women. Lila is trying hard to conform to the rione's standards as Stefano's wife and she's finding it very difficult to Behave As Expected, both in and out of the bedroom. The idea that she may somehow be like Alfonso, someone who can't fit in because of who he is, may be very discouraging for her.
Alfonso: "We were two strange bodies inside the Carracci family".
So Lila is the first one to start cheering and clapping when Marisa kisses Alfonso on Rino and Pinuccia's wedding, a situation that was clearly embarrassing for him. We already know that Lila can be mean when she's annoyed, so I'm guessing that this was done on purpose. Not much later she will admit to Lenù that she was wrong - without specifying what was so wrong with her behavior that day (3). It is also suggested that Lila may have contributed to spreading the rumors about Alfonso being gay - we'll never know.
Despite these hardships, Lila and Alfonso's relationship evolves (because Alfonso is a cookie and won't stay mad at her), and at some point they have a conversation that gets more intimate than the others: he comes out to her as "ricchione" (4). They don't talk about queer sensibilities or gender questioning yet, only about attraction. Lila is the first person he discusses this at length with, though he's most likely had some experiences with men before.
It's not clear when this happens. My best guess is when Lila and Alfonso kind of overlap at the shoe shop. At this time, Alfonso is contemplating whether he should marry Marisa, while Lila is involved in an all-consuming affair with Nino (without Lenù to talk to). Love is a bit of an Achilles' heel for Lila; we know that affection makes her vulnerable. Did she and Alfonso have a heart-to-heart in the shop? Did Lila only listen, or did she also share any secrets in exchange? I can definitely picture them in intense conversation when alone and then playing siblings-in-law in the company of others. Consider also that when Alfonso looks back to this event, it's with a sense of hope and relief, and he seems to know Lila pretty well afterwards (5). Whatever Lila said, it wasn't judgmental - she probably encouraged him to do whatever the fuck he wanted. Lila is usually more cautious, so this reinforces my idea that she was living her romance with Nino at the time.
As stereotypical as it may be, there is a classic dynamic in the friendship between a girl and a gay guy - for him, she might be easier to forge a connection with, and for her, he might be a gate to a different sensibility. This may have been the case for Lila and Alfonso (6). The burgeoning friendship may have come as a relief for both of them, but especially for Lila, who is trapped in a heteronormative world, sexualized by everyone and almost always chased by men. Alfonso looks up to her and finds her gorgeous, but he doesn't want to sleep with her, and it's not just the looks he admires - he wants the attitude, the whole personality, and unlike Lenù, he openly recognizes this effect that Lila has on him. This naïveté may have been very touching to Lila, who is, at the bottom of her heart, pretty hungry for acceptance and unconditional love.
However, Alfonso is unwilling to help Lila in any way that may be confrontational for his family or his employers (probably scared that they would turn onto him as well), and that tiny bit of a "relief through nice conversations when alone :)" is not enough. Thankfully she has Lenù Enzo, who proves to be (mostly) the only one who is willing to risk his life for her.
Alfonso: "If I'd been born a woman, I'd have wanted to be like her".
When Alfonso decides to take Michele's "advice" and marry Marisa, he's probably already very taken with Michele - he tells that to Lila not much later. To Lila, this is extremely helpful, as she's already planning how to get the most out of Michele without having to become his lover. As much as Lila loves certain people, she also harvests utilitarian relationships, especially within the rione. The plan they come up with seems to benefit both of them - Alfonso gets Michele, Lila gets Michele's money and influence.
The "seduction" of Michele comes with Alfonso dressing as a woman and adjusting her appearance more and more to look like Lila. It's not just a trick, but a true desire of Alfonso's, who is uncomfortable with his appearance and wants to look more womanly. It's never clear whether Alfonso is actually transgender or not, and I have found a lot of confusion in MBF-related texts. In favor of this idea, the narrative seems to be encouraging the fact that (s)he has "a woman's soul", and it is said that (s)he refers to her/himself in feminine form at times (Lenù changes forms a couple of times in her mind when she sees how much (s)he's changed). Many people that we consider transgender now didn't self-identify as such at the time. However, the queer community has always mixed up gender identities; also, Alfonso never seems to go by any other name, something that would clearly represent her/his rebirth as her/his new female-presenting self. To me, Alfonso seems to be embracing gender fluidity as a traditional feminiello, but that's the problem of standing for all the LGBTQ+ letters in one single character. For clarity reasons, I will keep on referring to him as a "he", though it might be more accurate to use other forms.
At the beginning, Lila seems to have her reluctancies with this process of Alfonso, as if this new persona of his could be no more than a grotesque imitation of a woman from a man's point of view ("you can copy me but my shit will always be mine"). HOWEVER! Just as Lila changed her mind regarding Being Queer, she quickly drops the terfy mindset, gets into the gist of Alfonso's Makeover and becomes collaborative (one cannot use the world "enthusiastic" when it comes to Lila).
This change of mind is not surprising, as both Lila and Lenù love games and they are very much attracted by the queer narratives of transforming/becoming ("diventare"). There is this scene where Alfonso, Lila and Lenù are shopping for clothes. Lila chooses (women's) clothes for Alfonso as if they were for her, and Alfonso, in turn, tries them out as if he was her. The fact that even the shop owner is a "ricchione" emphasizes the playfulness and queerness of the scene, where everyone seems to be having a lot of fun except for Lenù, who is a bit awkward. If people tend to see Lila as less heteronormative than Lenù, it's because of these scenes - because even if Lila never does much herself, and even without direct contact with any kind of world but her small neighborhood, she seems to be potentially willing to partake in stuff that leads her off the paved path (7).
Still, Lila being Lila, she always treats Alfonso with a sense of superiority, like she can boss him around and dispose of his time as she wants, especially when he becomes her and Enzo's employee at Basic Sight. She jokes that Michele is chasing "the shadow of [her] shadow" (meaning Alfonso). This treatment of Alfonso by Lila isn't much different from the way Lila treats almost everyone, including Lenù, who is often irritated by her domineering ways. Lila seems to follow a similar pattern with most of the people she loves - treat with contempt first, panic afterwards if they seem too tired of her, and quit everything and help if they are in need.
But I get annoyed at the narrative at this point because the purpose of the seduction is to make a puppet of Michele by making him do TEH G4Y. This leaves Michele confused, though this version of his actually seems much nicer. But he's watered down, less of a man now; he's gone "crazy". I get that passion makes you do irrational things -take both Lila and Lenù with Nino-, but the way this relationship is handled gives me the creeps. The fact that Alfonso and Michele are the only two characters openly DOING TEH G4Y, while the two leads often walk down the border of the THOUGHTS OF TEH G4Y but never come down to "doing" anything, seems to recall a former time when the "4ctions" were the only thing that mattered for queerness, and it was OK to feverishly long for your friend as long as you never did anything about it (8).
When Michele finally manages to break up with Alfonso and gives him a brutal beating as a final gift, Alfonso is heartbroken. He starts not showing up at work, being gross and overtly sexual in front of the children (9), and seeming confused with her own male/female self. He basically crawls down the deep dark well of the G4Y, and, in essence, this stereotypical downfall matches Lila's. Alfonso also wants to run away from his own body (Lenù's words) and escape toxic masculinity, which in his case is also creeping from the inside. In the end, Alfonso dies, probably murdered by Marcello in retaliation for his involvement with his brother, as Alfonso himself had warned it would happen. So, in a way, it is toxic masculinity and corruption under the façade of respectability what gets him killed.
Lenù: "She reached out to him as if he were a mirror to see herself and extract from his body a part of herself".
Lest aside the queerphobia of Alfonso's storyline, his strong bond with Lila remains (and, to a lesser extent, with Lenù). Lila could've fired Alfonso when he started being unreliable, but she didn't. On the contrary, she and Enzo supported him, even though he may have cost them precious money (10). When Alfonso is killed, Lila is heartbroken, to the point of neglecting her daughter for a while. Lenù realizes that her relationship with Alfonso must've been way more intense than what it seemed on the surface. This abounds in Alfonso's parallelisms with Lenù as some kind of "living matter" that Lila uses for the tasks that she can't (or won't) do herself, be it writing books or being openly queer fully changing her appearance so that it matches the inside. Also, Lila probably feels very guilty about Alfonso's demise for the role she played as the instigator of Alfonso's "feminization" and Michele's seduction (11).
What did Lila and Alfonso talk about when they were alone? Did she let herself be silly and have fun with him? Did she find in him the pure and simple adoration she once got from Lenù? Did she play him for her profit, or did she just play the role that Alfonso urged her to play? There are very few instances of "pure" friendship in My Brilliant Friend and I think we are all left a bit starved in that respect. I'd like to believe that Lila and Alfonso were probably friends in the purest sense of the word, each of them finding in the other a hand to reach out for, and the confidence to do the things you already want to do, in a strange world.
Phew, this was lengthy but fun! Who's next? Elena and Mariarosa? Lila and Pasquale? I'm up for all of them!
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(1) What a coincidence that Alfonso ends up resembling Lila!
(2) Lila, by the way, shares the execution of her queer artwork with a very willing Lenù, who picks up on the performative/playful nature of the act instinctively.
(3) Lenù complains of Lila being a pain in the ass and giving her trouble but she actually loves Lila being silently non-conforming and Not Traditionally Womanly, and rabidly dislikes when she acts like everyone else in the rione. She needs Lila to be the odd one out (instead of her) just as much as Lila needs Lenù to fit in and triumph in a male-dominated world (instead of her).
(4) "Ricchione", meaning both homosexual and queer, is the only word that Alfonso will ever use to describe himself.
(5) Alfonso is the only one (along with Lila's mom) who doesn't believe that Lila is with Lenù in Pisa when she runs away with Nino, so he may at least suspect that she had a lover.
(6) A similar dynamic may be at play with Lenù and Alfonso, with Lenù commenting that she felt like kneeling and confessing her more intimate thoughts to him.
(7) Lenù, thanks to her education, has potential access to way more nuanced environments than Lila, but she's reluctant to explore some of the most interesting ones (like the lesbian separatist movement Mariarosa's groups of women). It is worth mentioning, though, that she never questions Alfonso and believes that Lila made the woman in him come out.
(8) Though Michele gets de facto involved with Alfonso and Lenù's thoughts range from the vaguely sapphic to the blatantly sapphic, none of them are willing to associate themselves with anything queer. Lila doesn't count either, as queercoded as she may be. That draws a sharp line between Alfonso and the rest. If neither the feelings (Lila?) nor the thoughts (Lenù?) nor the actions (Michele?) count for being queer, I'm not sure I know where the difference is.
(9) Being vulgar and gross at times, as if speaking the truth but in a socially unbearable manner, and coming closer to a feared state of "craziness", is something that also happens to Lila.
(10) As if I couldn't love the guy more, Enzo is enraged at the fate of Alfonso to the point that he wants to confront Michele physically. Lila restrains him, worried about their daughter.
(11) When Michele is finally free of Alfonso's influence, he becomes an even more dangerous enemy for Lila's family. We all know what happens in book 4.
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More Mollibby & One-Sided!Mollandrea cause I got more ideas that continue to make me laugh about this headcanon.
Before "Home Is Where The Haunt Is", Molly looked SO UNCOMFORTABLE when Andrea gets quite close to her.
Meanwhile, Molly has NO PROBLEMS when getting incredibly close to Libby or when Libby pulls her close. Molly, we KNOW you have favorite!
I honestly believe that Andrea thinks that Molly developed a crush on her at the end of "The Don't Gooder", completely unaware that she was trying to fix HER OWN MISTAKE.
Meanwhile Molly here with a perfectly timed sky heart, was so desperate to make a forever member with Libby (and Scratch), cause she didn't know where'd they be in fifty years. Becoming homeless & almost dying didn't really help.
Andrea believing that Molly has a crush on her, would TOTALLY expect Molly to show up at her door with a bouquet of flowers...
Meanwhile Molly's over here giving Libby a whole baby kitten for Christmas!
Following up for the last one, Andrea would also think that Molly has a framed photo of her, when she actually has a framed photo of Libby.
While Andrea would probably try to keep Molly around by "friend-zoning" her with material things...
Molly is still over here cherishing the friendship Libby gave her!
Molly really said "Instead of hanging out with the luckiest girl in Brighton, I'm gonna hang out with the unluckiest girl in Brighton!"
Imagine if at some point during their time at Brighton Middle School, these three join the year book group.
Andrea would totally think Molly would want selfies with her... And then you cut to Molly taking all sorts of fun selfies with Libby.
Imagine a scenario where the class is watching a horror movie, Andrea would think that Molly would wanna hold her hand. Saying something like "Aww Molly! You must be scared! You can hold my hand if you want. Not that I'M scared or anything..."
Only to be absolutely ignored by Molly, who is having a blast with Libby as they quietly roast the whole movie!
Imagine a middle school dance scenario though!
Andrea's TOTALLY expecting that Molly's gonna ask her to the dance, even saying to herself that "I'll probably have to turn her down! It's not like I WANNA go to the dance with her. It'll ruined our bestie status!"
Only for Molly to be helping out Libby pick out suits and dresses so the two of them can go together!
What do you all think of these? As you can see I had lots of fun with these.
#The Ghost and Molly McGee#TGAMM#Molly McGee#Libby Stein-Torres#Andrea Davenport#Molly x Libby#Mollibby#Molibby#One-Sided!Mollandra#Cartoon Fandoms#Cartoon Characters#Favorite Characters#Cartoon Love#All of these are great too me!#Remember... I AM FINALLY AWARE THAT NONE OF THIS IS CANON!!
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oh. ow. I am watching a Persona 4 video essay, and they brought up Chie not having a dungeon, and facing her shadow in Yukiko's dungeon, and that since she didn't appear on TV or have an appearance on the Midnight Channel a lot of her Shadow's attitude is based on the perception of Yukiko and the immediate group, not the full town.
And I suddenly felt so lonely because it felt like... even though it's such a huge source of anxiety and trauma for the characters... Chie literally has an issue of being such an average tomboy in the shadow of Yukiko that she just kind of isn't really perceived. While she's one of the most popular character in the game, if she wasn't one of our main characters she would be just as easily "Green Jacket Girl" or "Loudmouth Girl" in the background of someone else's story. Not notable enough to make an impact, or at least that's how she sees it. And the sad part is there's a possibility of that, save for Yusuke and Yukiko (And Yu. Lotta Yus on Chie's side.) but like. it hit me and like. Having been The Weird Girl growing up like. Damn. Felt that.
I love you Chie, you nerdy little do-gooder. You're the people who hear screaming and actively work to disengage the impulse to run away, and run towards to see if you can help. Even if it's thankless. I love her so much.
#chie satonaka#I don't know what I'm doing#I'm just crying alone in this chillis tonight#you need that protein girl you gotta build muscle to carry this team#been on team chie since day one I love her#no I don't know what I'm talking about leave me alone
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A new dawn arises over Lightverse. Delta, young and naïve as he is, seemed to be the only one to sleep comfortably throughout the night. He was only occasionally woken up by the restless tossing and turning of his older friends.
It’s probably best to take the opportunity now to explain how a young prodigy such as himself ended up with this band of do-gooders in the first place. A few months before current events, Castor had saved Delta from robotic troops designed by the team’s most prominent nemesis: an evil engineer who wanted to take the power of the Gaia Crystals for himself. Delta became fascinated by the new hero on the block and would watch his exploits from a reasonable distance. When his mother fell into a comatose state one day, Delta turned to the only people he knew that would be able to help. Since then, he had been living with the team, getting accustomed to their daily lives, and had become fast friends with Castor. Of course, even a brotherly relationship like theirs isn’t without flaws. And today would be an example of such a hiccup.
“EXISSY GONE!!”
Indigo runs into Delta’s room and practically crashes into his wall. Delta sits up in his bed with a start, “Huh-?! What!? Castor’s missing again?!” “Mmm!”, Indigo confirms. “Oh geez-!”, Delta jumps out of bed and throws on his white baseball cap and blue glasses, but doesn’t bother changing out of his pajamas, “Do the others know!?” Indigo nods, “Mm-hm! Big Green tried to talk to him this morning but we saw his room empty!” “Hang on- “, Delta grabs his walkie-talkie and turns it on, “Castor-! Castor, do you read me!?” No response, the kids only hear Delta’s voice coming in from the walkie still in Castor’s room. Delta runs into the room only to see it all for himself. “I just said it was empty.”, Indigo pouts. Nitro comes up behind the two, “Not only that but the Crystals that were in our possession are gone as well.” “Wait what???”, Ex calls out from a different room. Delta’s eyes well up with tears, “Castor… why do you keep doing this?!”, he dashes back into his room and slams the door. Nitro sighs, “Poor kid…”
A few minutes pass, and Delta hears a light tapping on his door. “Delty???”, Indigo asks. She presses her ear against the door and hears him sniffling. “Indigo, leave me be!”, he wipes his eyes, “It’s embarrassing if a girl sees me cry…�� Hearing that, she takes the initiative and opens his door, then walks over and hugs him, “I don’t care about that. You need this.”
Delta freezes for a moment. After a beat, everything comes crashing in like a tidal wave. All that’s happened over the past day and the reality of it hits him suddenly. And in his friend’s warm embrace, he fully breaks down and clings to her as he cries.
#creators#creators novel#creators-novel.tumblr.com#digital art#original story#my art#original character#original fiction#orange#chapter 53
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Did your tavs follow the generic romance route for the characters or do something different? Obviously not in-game but in your headcanons
Thanks so much for the ask!!!
Andis (romanced Wyll and Karlach, I just realized I've barely mentioned that) kind of put our girl on hold when she showed up in the middle of the night, at that point he didn't know her all that well and he prefers to be close with someone before getting romantically involved. By late act 1 he & Karlach & Wyll were all very close and he was pretty sure they both liked him and each other so one day he just sat them down for polycule negotiations and they're all dating each other now. The ultimate do-gooder power throuple. They don't ever sleep together though, Andis is demisexual and Wyll prefers to take things slow anyway. I have a lot of thoughts about what happens to their little polycule after the end of the game but that's a post for another time.
Salix stuck pretty close to Astarion's usual romance route, though this time the using each other for protection thing was mutual. She would absolutely dump him if she thought he might ascend though. She is not planning on being anyone's pretty decoration. I'm sure she'll be able to persuade him out of it. Probably.
Ren also followed Gale's usual romance route, he suits their sort of style of romance very well, the only difference being that some of the scenes would go differently due to Fun Ren Lore (asexual + artificer + can't read + was his classmate for a bit), but nothing that would impact the usual storyline in any major way.
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since so much of the mg au has to do with "how others perceive you" i'm curious to know as to how you've interpreted the snippets of these characters that ive incoherently put out
Ash/Ranger: No idea, which leads me to believe they're the most stable person here. A typical do-gooder, probably has more of a logistical conflict like putting time away for themself than a complex of some variety since they're season 1.
Peppermint/Starshine: Has convinced themself that they don't care what other people think because they're rash and abrasive, but cultivating distaste is still cultivating yourself for other people. I understand being sick of the mg squad and being constantly compared to other people, but unless the press is extremely stupid I don't understand how that vigilante arc would successfully give them that separation, unless it's also a way to prove to themself and everyone else that they're more competent than people assume. I love it when characters make horrible decisions. PLEASE drop the script to the breakup comic.
Takeover/Gambit: Being queen of the idgaf war makes it hard to judge how genuine is if she does or doesn't. She has a "we're just coworkers" mentality. No idea how long it takes for her to evolve past it. Can't be a former gifted kid if you can outrun the demons. It's not that she wants any of this as a civilian or in chao5, but she's never really felt as if there's another option. Hasn't cried in like two years
Mochi/Seraph: They're a lot going on here but fucking fair enough I'd also be a mess if I was constantly scrutinized for feeling grief. they're probably the greatest support system for our later season protags in working through "What does a magical girl owe the people?" if anyone would just fucking talk to them
Beta/Cyberbunny: Throwing darts at a list of character traits would give me a more accurate assimilation of its personality and struggles than cobbling something together from that moodboard and the broken marionette art. Silly but it's a front. Does it even go to school??
#Does Peppermint have beef with anyone else at any point of is it just pg?#Idk what the hell you'd call the tension between Peppermint and Takeover but it sure as hell isn't “just coworkers”
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Girl Genius Fave Characters + Hogwarts Houses
Or, "Two characters you thought were in Slytherin, but aren't, and two you thought weren't in Slytherin (but one of whom actually is)"
Since Tarvek's section is Long and I live on AO3 where you know ahead of time who’s getting written up): the faves are {Bang, Tarvek, Violetta, Zoing}. No, there is not a favoriter much less favoritest among them.
Bang: Gryffindor
She's Gryff in that she has one hammer [well, knife] that she applies to all problems. You might think be tempted to think she's Slytherin because she's willing to kill people to get what she wants, but she's not really ends justify the means. She's more stabbing justifies the stabbing. She has one value system, and applies it to everything. Pretty much Gryffindor in a nutshell. You don't conform to my value system? I will make you conform!
Tarvek: Ravenclaw
Tarvek is the hardest to place. The natural inclination is Slytherin. He's our beloved underhanded weasel of ambition. Smells exactly like Slytherin. But there's something a little off. He wants to rule the world, but rather than it being an ends in and of itself, for Tarvek, this appears to be a means.
Ravenclaw, however, fits, and not just from Sparkiness. He studied the socio-political problem, and believes that his solution is the best solution, not just for his own gain. The world can be a better place, not just "better for him," and the way to get there is to rule it all. And I believe he wouldn't necessarily fight for the title if he thought the world was going to be okay (probably in Gil or Agatha's hands. Maybe not Gil).
Let's take a look at the ways we see he isn't just for himself:
He saves Grandma
He saves Colette
He saves Anevka
He saves Lucrezia
He saves Violetta (by sending her to Mechanicsburg)
He drops onto a Fun-Sized Mobile Agony and Death Dispenser
He saves a jager and a Vespiary Squad member from a burning dirigible
He goes up against a Slaver with a wooden sword (and thank goodness Agatha is there)
Okay, so most of these you can argue are still Slytherin. Saving Grandma wins him lots of Family Points, for example. But grabbing Jorgi on top of Ruxala? Recall, his first and primary goal was to save the weasels. (Wait a second... how does he even know to save the little furballs? Bang, a high-ranking Wulfenbach captain didn't know about them until a few hours ago. I guess that's a question for another day.) He's 2 seconds from death the entire time. You could still argue he wants Ruxala for her knowledge, and the jager wins him points with Agatha. But the wooden sword move is exactly the sort of nonsense you expect from Gryffindors.
So Gryffindor!? Motives are a closer match, but the methods are off (which, you'll note, is exactly the opposite problem he has with being a Slytherin). Tarvek's way of dealing with problems is basically everything but straightforward because he knows if he hits a problem head-on, he's going to die. (And maybe this is why his type is too heroic for their own good.) Also, I don't know how you would do a Gryffindor calculation and think, "Yeah, I should save Lucrezia." (You're about to bring up a Wormtail-shaped argument, aren't you? I love me some Peter Pettigrew character analysis so Bring. It. ON!)
Well, Hufflepuffs are do-gooders, too, so why not Hufflepuff? Tarvek does work his butt off, but have you heard him talk about his family? There's a piece to Hufflepuff that believes in the very best of people, and that is very much not Tarvek. Maybe it's that he believes it of everyone but his family. Which is like, anti-Slytherin (arguably therefore Slytherin). Or something.
It's a little unfair that at this point, we only have one house left standing, especially because, surface level, you could easily place every Spark in Ravenclaw, and no one would really say you were wrong. They're all capable of disappearing into their lab, spending hours (if not days) on their chosen project (or whatever happens to pass under their hands), and operate at a level that is untouched by non-Sparks. But just because they're all able to do that, does not mean we should just lump them all in Ravenclaw. (First of all, that'd have to be one sturdy tower.)
For Tarvek, though, it fits. His approach to the socio-political situation doesn't seem to stem from what do I gain from it and how do I end up on top. Instead, he studied and understood the game, thoroughly thought about each and every possibility and the futures they could bring, decided he hated it, that it does no one a benefit, and the only way to get out is to win it, and to do that, he again leaves no means unexamined in crafting his plans. To him, it's chess. And when Agatha walks into the picture, he does a lot of re-calculating. Suddenly the things he had taken for granted as the only way are no longer the only way, and he's willing to adjust his plans to fit the new reality. He’s sort of an experimental Ravenclaw in that way. Come up with the theory, see how it unfolds, and adjust as you go.
The only "outlier" on Ravenclaw is that Tarvek has amazing restraint for a Spark, and doesn't get lost in his passions and interests. But you could also chalk that up to, he's calculated it out, and this really just is the best way. (I mean, well, it is.)
Violetta: Hufflepuff
By far the most straightforward to place. She knows her family is problematic, but then argues that Auntie Margolotta was awfully sweet for not trying very hard to kill her. She spends her first part of Mechanicsburg hating Tarvek for sending her away, but manages to figure out on her own why he sent her. And at the end of the day, she'll save his ass. (It's her job, she says.) And she works insanely hard. Sure, she also complains about it incessantly. (Just let her have cakes and dresses already!)
Zoing: Slytherin
If Tarvek was the hardest to place, Zoing is probably the most surprising. The obvious easy choice here would be another Puff because wholesome, but it just doesn't feel right. No one's going to argue against Zoing being the purest, but Zoing does not think of everyone as equal or even pretend that some people are more equal than others. Zoing's #1 is Gil. He will be loyal forever and always to Gil first. And Zoing has teeeea ambitions. (Who knows what he would've done if Gil said Agatha was there to make tea. And Zoing probably has a running [one-sided] competition with Wooster as to who can be more helpful to Gil.)
For all his tea ambitions, not everyone gets Zoing!tea. There are people who deserve tea, and people who don't deserve tea. Othar probably isn't ever getting tea (unless Gil explicitly says Othar gets tea). If you dissed Gil or laughed at Zoing's hat, you're probably not getting tea. I'd have words with you for making Zoing spite you, but it'd be possible.
You might think of loyalty as a Gryffindor trait, but, let's face it, Zoing is not the bravest.
A full Hogwarts
I swear I didn't pick houses or characters so that I could have a full set, but let's not pretend … I am very pleased by this conclusion. Sorting method a little bit derived from @sortinghatchats, but I didn't want understanding their taxonomy to be required reading (it’s fun though!). And shout out to @circumference-pie without whom this post would have never existed.
#girl genius#tarvek sturmvoraus#bangladesh dupree#violetta mondarev#zoing#hogwarts sorting#this was languishing in my drafts so now i just hit post#i like it as a character analysis#maybe asking for trouble but I am open to discussion#curious on other people's takes!#mad abour her but not nostalgia for fandom#shavynel scribbles
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Thanks again for your detailed analysis on CSI and its writing!! I have a question somewhat related to CSI - what other media would you recommend that emulates the storytelling of GSR and CSI? Specifically the character of Sara Sidle and the subtlety of the character development are facets that I really like, but I've struggled to find similar. I know that is a really broad ask, but I'm curious if there are other shows that capture that vibe that you would recommend!
hi, anon!
thank you for your kind words!
re: your question:
so if i were to list out some of the attributes that make csi, gsr, and sara sidle unique in terms of the storytelling and character development (imo), i'd probably include the way the show prioritizes depicting the characters' professional lives over their personal ones and, at least in the early seasons, is possessed of a literary quality; the way the ship is unbelievably slow-burn and for the most part occurs "between the lines;" and our girl's "jagged edges" are shown long before the reasons for them are unveiled, but once said reasons are unveiled, they make perfect sense in retrospect.
i can't think of one single show with one ship that involves one particular character that checks all of these boxes in the same way that csi does.
the best i can do is offer some shows/ships/characters that check at least some of the boxes (but not necessarily all of the others).
so with that caveat in mind:
the two shows i would recommend—probably to the surprise of no one—are the west wing and er.
more discussion after the “keep reading,” if you’re interested.
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the west wing
ways in which tww is comparable to csi
while the profession being examined is incredibly different (a team of us presidential administration senior staffers vs. a team of crime scene investigators), the west wing is similar to csi in that it focuses heavily on the professional lives of a group of highly-intelligent, highly-flawed workaholic do-gooders all invested in a common cause, all of whom are married to their jobs in the extreme.
like csi, the narrative is situated almost entirely in the workplace, with very little play given to the "at home" stuff, except insofar as those two spheres naturally intersect.
if you like the "found (team) family" aspects of csi, then you'll probably enjoy that aspect of tww, too.
ditto for literary nature of the drama and the shakespearean overtones.
as for the ships: one of the more prominent ships on tww is josh lyman x donna moss. much like with gsr, they are a pairing comprised of an eccentric genius/social disaster and his incredibly loyal employee, who is also a genius in her own right, who, despite their mutual attraction from day #1, cannot be together due to their devotion to "the sacred profession™." if you enjoy the slow-burn of gsr and all of the pining/yearning of the early seasons, then j/d will probably scratch a similar itch for you.
while no one character on tww is a real sara analog, the characters in general are well-drawn, nuanced, and three-dimensional, and the characters of josh, toby, and leo are all ones that do have their traumatic backstories explored over the course of the series.
i will also say, independent of any comparison to csi, tww is definitely one of the best-written television programs i've ever watched, boasting several examples of episodes i would consider to be technically perfect.
while the subject matter may not appeal to everyone, if it does appeal to you, or at least could, i highly recommend you give it a chance just because the stories are so well-told and the characters are so engaging.
it's just really superlative television.
excellent all around.
bonus points: jorja fox has a recurring guest-star role on tww (as secret service agent gina toscano) during s1-s2.
ways in which tww is not comparable to csi
of course, all of the above said, tww and csi are (overall) incredibly tonally different, just by nature of their different subject matters, so if part of the appeal of csi for you is the darkness and morbidity, then the shiny, bright idealism of tww may not be for you.
also, just in general, tww is not a "procedural" in the same sense that csi is. it is much more highly serialized, to the point where missing a single episode can make the show incomprehensible going forward. it also doesn't adhere to the same kind of "we're introduced to a problem/case at the start of an episode, the characters work on/investigate the problem/case throughout the course of the episode, and by the end of the episode, said problem/case is almost always (re)solved" patterns that csi does. that so, if part your enjoyment of csi derives from that pattern or even from the general "neat and tidiness" of being told self-contained, forty-five minute episodic stories that generally are wrapped by the time the end credits show up on screen, then, again, tww may not be for you.
furthermore, with regards to j/d, they ultimately have a very, very different vibe from gsr, so don't expect the same kind of dynamic, even if the superficial trappings of "boss and employee extremely slow-burn forbidden romance" are the same. theirs is a much more “i’m going to tease and hassle you because i love you” kind of deal than anything we see from grissom and sara, for sure.
their storyline is also much more “mainline” than gsr’s ever is, particularly in the later seasons of the show.
as a general disclaimer, i will also throw out that, as is the case with csi, certain aspects of tww (which aired from 1999-2006) are now very dated, so you have to go into the show with a willingness to sit through some late 90s/early 00s shenanigans.
er
ways in which er is comparable to csi
on many levels, er paved the way for csi in terms of being a long-running procedural—both shows clock at in at fifteen seasons in total, all said and done—with cinematic aspirations.
as is the case with both csi and tww, er is another show that focuses on a group of highly-intelligent, highly-flawed workaholic do-gooders all invested in a common cause, all of whom are married to their jobs in the extreme. like csi and tww, it is also a show where the majority of the focus is on the characters' work lives, as opposed to their home ones, except insofar as there is natural overlap.
of course, more so than tww, er is a procedural, so while it is generally more serialized than csi, it is also very much the kind of show where most of the medical cases are ones that we follow and solve within an hour. that same familiar satisfaction one gets watching the "csi pattern" play out is present as the doctors cycle through their patients.
tonally, er is probably closer to csi than tww is, just by nature of featuring storylines that deal with life and death.
as for the ships: the ship that comes closest for me to gsr of any other ship on television (at least in terms of execution) is er’s flagship—doug ross x carol hathaway. hathaross is, like gsr, a ship where the characters have romantic history that predates the start of the show; they start out the pilot apart but then gradually over the course of several seasons come together in epic fashion. their love story is filled with yearning, drama, heartache, and transcendent, all-encompassing love. at its core, it is, like gsr, the story of a man who considers himself bad to the point of unlovability and the troubled girl he slowly learns to open himself to because he is pulled to her by a love that ultimately proves stronger than his not inconsiderable self-loathing and doubt.
as for characters: the character that i would say reads most similarly to sara for me of any other character on television also comes er—first nurse and later doctor abby lockhart, who features on the show from s6-s15 (and for her last several seasons on the show is ostensibly the closest thing er has to a “main character”).
like sara, abby endured an incredibly traumatic childhood, the details of which are incrementally revealed over her first several seasons on the show and make total sense in retrospect, given her characterization. like sara, abby has a sardonic, wry, sometimes abrasive outer affect that she uses to mask how much she cares on the inside. like sara, abby is a messy, contradictory, flawed character who is allowed to make some fairly sizable mistakes and whose actions are not always “prettified” as is sometimes the case with other female leads. she is nuanced, realistic, and interesting, and the amount of growth she shows over her nine years on the show constitutes one of the best and most-rewarding character arcs i’ve ever had the pleasure to watch. her final episode on the show is one of the best sendoffs i’ve ever seen. so much of what happens with abby is very thematically similar to what happens with sara. it’s also just really, really good stuff by itself, even without the comparison.
not gonna lie: er is my favorite show of all time, and i wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who is a fan of excellent tv. despite having debuted almost thirty years ago, it absolutely holds up, with wonderful characters, engaging storylines, and some of the hands-down best, most game-changing episodes of television in the history of primetime drama.
bonus points: not only does jorja fox also have a fairly prominent recurring guest-role on er (as resident physician dr. maggie doyle) in s3-s5, but marg helgenberger, george eads, wally langham, liz vassey, and archie kao all also make guest appearances on the show, as well—to say nothing of the fact that many, many doctors and patients on er also show up as victims and criminals on csi.
pretty sure some of the folks who appear on both shows are jorja’s friends she’s gotten jobs for because she’s a peach like that.
ways in which er is not comparable to csi
because of the setting, subject matter, and temporality, er isn’t as literary as either csi or tww are in nature—and, in particular, it doesn’t tend to have the same kind of mythological underpinnings that the other two programs sometimes do—so if that aspect of csi is a big draw for you, then you might not be as satisfied with what er has to offer.
in later seasons, er also differs from either csi or tww in that it does start to explore more and more of its characters’ personal lives outside of the sphere of the workplace, and, at times, it does veer fairly heavily into the territory of relationship drama.
for as much as i love the show overall, there are some love triangles i find tedious.
as for the gsr to hathaross comparison, as is the case with j/d on tww, hathaross is a much more “main text” ship than gsr is by far, so if the subtext of gsr is something you really go for, just know there’s no real replication of that here.
likewise, with the sara and abby comparison, be aware that, at least personally, i don’t find abby’s romantic storyline at all as compelling as sara’s (and in fact i don’t really ship her endgame pairing at all), so if you’re like me, while you’ll enjoy her individual character development a lot, you might be lukewarm or even averse to what they do with her love story-wise.
as per the disclaimer with tww, be apprised that er is an older show (which aired from 1994-2009), so some of the storylines and concepts are dated.
though, honestly, overall, it’s held up really well and was remarkably progressive even during its early 90s seasons.
if neither one of these recs appeals to you, then other things you might check out:
while ted lasso is a comedy and doesn’t have much in common with csi otherwise, it does do an excellent job of exploring various characters’ trauma and unveiling what makes them tick in a way that might be something you like if you’re a fan of how sara’s trauma storyline is handled on csi.
the character of juliet burke from lost has a very different background than sara but is similar in that she is a brilliant, resourceful woman who starts out in “no one could ever love me because i’m a mess”-mode only to eventually find a transcendent, consciousness-altering love that teaches her otherwise. the execution is not the exact same as with sara/gsr, but the vibes are comparable.
anyway, like i said up top, there’s really nothing that i would consider to be a particularly close match to csi, gsr, and sara’s storyline on the whole, but hopefully something i’ve talked about here might be enjoyable to you.
thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.
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I posted 102 times in 2022
That's 102 more posts than 2021!
43 posts created (42%)
59 posts reblogged (58%)
Blogs I reblogged the most:
@biggestofmans
@particleperks
@my-name-is-tubbo-hi
@wizardpotions
@sweetpeauserboxes
I tagged 49 of my posts in 2022
#dream smp roleplay - 42 posts
#ask blog - 42 posts
#dsmp rp blog - 41 posts
#c!ranboo roleplay blog - 41 posts
#ask - 13 posts
#c!ranboo - 2 posts
#(i'm really bored so yknow what?) - 1 post
#(it would it would be very silly) - 1 post
#(internet safety is important kids!) - 1 post
#(even for cookie run or other little mobile games) - 1 post
Longest Tag: 57 characters
#(gonna rb this with hwhbh ranboo and see if it's any fun)
My Top Posts in 2022:
#5
Hi Mr. Boo I was wondering how does it feel having a god fatherly figure in your life? Also do you have games on your phone 👀
Hello to you too~
It's actually not too different from having a not-god dad. Not god-dad as in like your parent's really close friend, but like a dad. Who is also a god. It's not very different from having a not-god dad, because they're still a dad, just one who's closer to me and who can summon cranberries from thin air whenever I want to eat some. Because boy oh boy, do i love them cranberries~
Yes I do have games on my phone.
I have cookie run and also tetris
You cannot play them.
they are mine
>:)
6 notes - Posted July 18, 2022
#4
Hello Mr. Boo, hope your having a lovely day. What’s your opinion on mushrooms?
HI! it's nighttime where I am but luckily for YOU my brain is being a JERK and will not let me sleep~
Mushrooms! I like me some mushrooms. Good in the garden, gooder still in a stew. Make for a good stir fry when you mix them with some onions. Like em on my pizzas even if my husband makes fun of me for that. He's one to talk since he likes to eat them raw. So does our son. He says he wants to be a mushroom some day. And Who am I to squander his fungal aspirations?
We have a family friend who's a mushroom elf if that is anything. his name's george. he's old and very nice. like 200 hundred years old. almost as old as my great grandma! kidding kidding. she's still forever young at heart <3
But yeah his name's george and I don't really ever talk to him unless I'm picking up our platonic boyfriend. he goes over to hang out at his place a lot to help in the garden. it makes him happy. he says it helps with his seasonal depression that makes me happy, too. him being happy not the seasonal depression. that makes me sad because I hate seeing him be sad
DID YOU KNOW THAT MOLD IS A TYPE OF FUNGAS??? DID YOU KNOW THAT MOLD IS WHAT MAKES CHEESE AND THAT IT'S MOLD WHEN YOU EAT IT?? THAT'S RIGHT!! CHEESE! IS MOLD! NOT JUST BLUE CHEESE OR MOLDY CHEESE OR WHATEVER, OH NONNOOJO NO!! IT'S ALL MOLD BABY YEAAAAAAAAAAAAA oh look at that, my brain's shutting off, weel shit, gnit
7 notes - Posted July 20, 2022
#3
My husband just walked into my study and sat on my lap before asking me to tell him things that would “inspire distrust in our marriage and fill him with diresome dread.”
What did you all do to him? He said Tumblr told him to do this. What did you all do? What the fuck did you say to my baby?
7 notes - Posted August 21, 2022
#2
no-eyed girl? but why not a no-eyed boy? perhaps I need a no-eyed boy to pop into our existance in order to feel convinced enough to bring both of out realities to an end through the power of a little smooch on the cheek. ya ever think of that?
10 notes - Posted May 31, 2022
My #1 post of 2022
Wonder what would happen if I put grape jelly on one slice of bread, put strawberry jelly on another slice of bread and made them into a sandwich.
11 notes - Posted September 5, 2022
Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →
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hey hey !!
how are you vaygus ? personally, my day just started so, my objectives for 2day is to finish most of my hc and one shots/drabbles rotting in my drafts 😞😞😞
question 😋: do you have a wishlist?
by wishlist it can be clothes, food, furnitures etccc
personally i even have a special drawer in my notes named “thoughts” were i write all stuff i will HOPEFULLY buy one day (when money will show up🥰)
and one of em are games omlllll
like Re ofc, let’s play are good but real life experience is gooder 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼(expect biohazard i can’t die yet), and a playstation 5, or a switch.
about switch, my friend maybe s’ gonna lend me her switch because she want me to test “zelda”
i heard a few things about it and the visuals are just so beautiful i hope to try one day !
i remember yesterday when me and my frens were talking about our childhood and nintedo ds and how i was the only one who didn’t have any (strict parents obliges 😞😞) but a girl one day lend me her ds and i played E-shop games all weeknd 😋😋(was the only video game experience i had in my entire life till now)
but THE game i dream of every day and night is Detroit Become Human. Omllll this work of art
if i get one day to play this game on computer, tv or whateva i’ll jump of a building of happiness
omggg sorry vaygus i wrote a whole essay (i even have more to say but i better shut the f up)
have a good day !
-🌟
HIIIIIIII MY LUV
i’m good !! i was quite productive today :) did lots of cleaning n stuff and i was writing a nanami request but i’m currently doing my hair 🌞🌞🌞
i hope u got ur stuff done !! or at least a good amount of progress on it 🤞honestly real, i have ab 20+ drafts rotting currently atm.
oooo a wishlist? hmmm. honestly not really. i do need to get a new bass guitar soon (i play bass) and i’m saving up for this pretty one i stumbled upon, she’s so hot. for other stuff, maybe some things to decorate my room + vinyls since i collect vinyls, some clothes for the spring time, and probably some manga. aw that’s cute !! <3 i hope u get everything u need pookies
real 🕺 some lets plays r kinda boring ngl, i find it more fun to actually play the game (unless they’re one of my fav youtubers ill watch them all day)
ZELDAAAA. such a goated game, lmk how u like it !!! yessss the graphics is so gorgeous, quite breathtaking xo
and you’re good !! i always adore u stopping by in my inbox starry bae <3
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Barefoot girls hold a ribbon and loop around a maypole. Some, styled as the “Little Lambs,” dance for the hundreds gathered at the 15-acre Timonium estate known as The Farm. There are pony rides, potato-sack races, even a live band as people celebrate the end of history.
In faded photographs of the community, I see people who are trying to live their lives halfway to heaven. But that isn’t quite right. We were actually trying to bring heaven into this world. Along with others in the broader Catholic charismatic renewal, we believed that the Holy Spirit was pouring out right before our eyes. Because of our faithfulness, we were witnessing the breakthrough of the kingdom.
I was born into the Lamb of God, one of the dozens of covenant communities to take root in the 1970s when the charismatic renewal first swept the nation. Perceiving the American Catholic Church to be in a state of spiritual decline, Marylander Dave Nodar, his wife, Cheryl, Father Joe O’Meara, and a few others envisioned a kind of New Jerusalem in Charm City. They settled on the Westgate and Rock Glen neighborhoods off Edmondson Avenue on the City/Catonsville line. By the late 1980s, approximately 250 families occupied the two-story homes in those neighborhoods or on their periphery.
From the start, leaders encouraged Lamb of God’s members to eschew the modern world. Families were to limit television, secular news reading, even charity work. In Nodar’s view, offered to The Baltimore Sun in 1984, do-gooders meant well, but they “tended to fall into Marxism.” It was better to focus on one’s soul and the group than to become involved in “humanist” causes.
A policy notebook adopted from a parent community in Michigan stipulated that women (even higher-ranking “handmaids”) were to submit to their husbands, bear as many children as God willed, and refrain from masculine duties, such as spiritually directing children beyond the age of six. Men, in turn, were not to become too involved in domestic work or the more mundane routines of child-rearing. I don’t remember these specific rules, only knowing that feminists were miserable and that my mother loved me more than working moms loved their children.
On Sunday evenings, we convened at Woodlawn High School, UMBC’s event center, or some other place for prayer meetings. A music team worked the crowd into a zeal, then slowed the beat for adults to speak in tongues—ancient Hebrew, I was once told. “Slain in the spirit,” some fell to the ground and convulsed. Some went forward to deliver prophecies. There really was a sense of spontaneity, though it seems many of the divinations had been pre-screened by Nodar. An unidentified community member later told Baltimore magazine in 1994, “He’d decide if it was from God.”
Not long after the story ran, the community dissolved amid an archdiocese investigation around their finances (no legal charges were ever filed) and cult-like tendencies, then faded from public memory.
When I close my eyes, I can see and hear those prayer meetings. If I close them really tight, I can even slip back into their imaginal realm, outside of ordinary time and into a kind of deep time. Charismania is wonderful before it is terrible—a swooning into the sacred.
As children at the community-run school in Halethorpe, we celebrated our religion’s Jewish roots. On Christian Heroes Day, we dressed as Mary and the apostles. Some of us, wanting to show off, called Jesus “Yeshua.”
We heard relentless stories about Christians’ persecution. A Holocaust lesson centered on Corrie ten Boom, the Dutch woman imprisoned for hiding Jews. It will be years before I understand exponentially more Christians were part of the Third Reich than victims of it.
My mother helped to vet the books in the school’s library, which included books like Little House on the Prairie and The Courage of Sarah Noble. These stories of early settlers made me feel even more chosen—a super-Christian. But I swiftly moved on to approved adult titles at home.
One day, I was absorbed in a volume of Chicken Soup for the Soul when I came across my mother’s marginalia. “NO,” she had written for my benefit in the white space, along with a note explaining why the author’s conclusion was all wrong. Part of me will always be nine years old, reeling from this blow. Her later perusing of my diary and listening to my teenage phone calls—these did not sting as much as this first, thunderous notice that even while reading alone I was under surveillance.
My best friend, “Lydia,” whispered with me about which of our peers’ parents left marks when they spanked them. The threat of violence pervaded the children’s sphere. A wooden paddle hung in the school headmaster’s office and in many of the homes in “the cluster.” Mostly, kids’ own dads did the job. They could deliver more force than our mothers, while serving as stand-ins for our heavenly father. When they explained that they only hurt us out of love, any confusion was subsumed by allegory.
I didn’t know it, but a Catholic woman in the Westgate neighborhood had been complaining about us to the archdiocese. Almost from the moment it took over her block, the Lamb of God seemed to Patricia Whitman like the proverbial whitewashed tomb: beautiful on the outside, but inside, full of dead men’s bones and every kind of filth.
“It wasn’t Jim Jones, it was one step below,” she’ll tell me three decades later, going on to explain how leaders manipulated some members to remain committed while “pruning the vine” of others. “They’d threaten that if people left, they wouldn’t have spiritual covering, meaning the devil might pop out and get them at the grocery store. They were in danger of losing God’s grace.”
As little girl, I was fond of Fr. Joe, who came over for dinner and squeezed my hand under the table, but Whitman distrusted the man whose collar gave the community a veil of legitimacy. She’d heard he made girls and women uncomfortable. On a beach trip, she was told, he’d walked in as some girls were undressing. She was privy to things because she was a confidante for those who’d been shunned by Nodar and his associates, or who were contemplating leaving. Her front porch was many neighbors’ only safe place to be.
Between 1983 and 1987, Whitman wrote a series of letters to Archbishop William Borders conveying her concerns about the Lamb of God’s cult-like tendencies, including its “view of women as submissive and subordinate creatures,” and citing scandals in covenant communities in other states. He urged charity toward her fellow Catholics and claimed to have no authority over the group.
Then, in the early ’90s, rumors began to spread that some community money was missing, and Borders’ successor, Archbishop William Keeler, summoned Whitman downtown to talk. Only after their meeting did she realize he had picked her brain to see how much she knew, not because he wanted to help the people in the community. He seemed worried she would go to the media.
Neither Borders nor Keeler honored her requests for confidentiality. It was never long after mailing her concerned letters about the Lamb of God community that members would linger outside her gate to pray, one even sprinkling holy water in her yard. One local priest threatened to have her excommunicated if she didn’t quit her crusade.
The financial controversy pertained to the $1.9-million sale of The Farm to developers. Some members, who tithed up to 10 percent of their income to the community, wanted to know: Where did all the money go? In 1992, former members John and Marie Cignatta were so perturbed by this question and other matters that they penned their own letters to Keeler, pleading with him to intervene. He agreed to formally investigate the community, then invited Nodar to apply for official status as an archdiocesan organization, subordinating the group to church authorities.
If Keeler hoped to avoid negative press, he was surely disappointed to see the exposé this magazine published in February 1994. In “The Cult Next Door,” Patrick J. Kiger luridly details how community tensions exploded into a “suburban holy war.” He quotes an ex-member on the “Stalinist” system of surveillance that had people reporting heterodoxy up the chain, also spilling ink over Nodar’s reputed perks, which, even before The Farm’s sale, included a free home and community-paid services ranging from plumbing to the babysitting of his children.
That was the year my family left Baltimore for the hour-north town of Hanover, Pennsylvania. If my parents were relieved to leave the community behind, they didn’t let on. When they claimed to be “getting away from crime,” they didn’t seem to mean their co-religionists’ crimes. My brother and sister were unfazed, but I cried, as I didn’t want to leave Lydia.
In those days before social media, it may have been inevitable that our childhood friendship wouldn’t survive the distance. As the years passed, I thought less and less about Lamb of God. I had no idea that, while the school remained, the community had largely dissolved, nor that Nodar had formed a new evangelization ministry. Even though I struggled for words to describe Lamb of God to my new school peers, I didn’t think of it as anything more than a group of like-minded families that my parents found. There was too much continuity before and after the community for me to view it with suspicion.
The parish we attended in Hanover was animated by the very same fantasies, especially pertaining to women. In fact, it was in a religious education class there that I learned that feminists were not only miserable, they were eminently rape-able. Unmarried women had no virtuous men to protect them, and contracepting women—well, they “asked for it” by disavowing their fertility and thereby objectifying themselves. Anyone who doubted this could read Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which foretold of a hellish world for women following the advent of the pill.
It got to me, this exhortation to marry and have a house full of babies “or else.” This was so, even though, by the early 2000s, the newspapers were reporting on rampant clerical sex abuse, and the tone of some laymen’s voices when they spoke to their wives was enough to raise the hair on my arms. There was also unremitting talk about sex: who was having it, who wanted to have it, who dressed like they wanted to have it. I was then a virgin, but I felt so ashamed. I needed Lydia more than ever, but I settled for eating as little as possible. I couldn’t be a Delilah if I disappeared.
Reflecting on the interregnum between the established order and revolution, the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote in 1939, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” My dad drew upon a similar idiom to account for the way I was becoming more sullen and defiant. He took to remarking he once had a happy little girl, but aliens came and abducted her.
Spiritual abuse is such a quiet violence—a violence of the shadows—it was decades before I found the words to contradict him. By then, I’d left the Church, married one of the heathens, and born two children. Still, my father listened. He said he was sorry for not protecting me from the toxic elements of Catholic culture.
For all our conflicts, my father and I have never been estranged, and so I’m at ease telephoning him in 2020, after I’ve read about Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s People of Praise, to insist, “We were in a fucking cult!” No, he says, it wasn’t that. I do more research and circle back: “Mom was a handmaid.” He replied that she wasn’t and anyway, Lamb of God didn’t really use labels.
Still wanting answers, I joined a Facebook group for current and former members of covenant communities. It’s here that I see that Fr. Joe has been removed from ministry after three women accused him of “inappropriate touching.” I dial Dad again. He’s heard about it, but the language is so vague—it could mean anything, he says. My mother chimes in that Fr. Joe was always affectionate. These days, that can be misconstrued.
The archdiocese won’t release to me records pertaining to Keeler’s investigation of the community, but I find a slew of digitized documents about Lamb of God, including Whitman’s outgoing and incoming letters, at the University of Michigan. I call this woman, now 79, and listen as she talks about the community and the authorities’ tacit endorsement of it.
“It really made me question my faith,” she says of the latter. “I had to remind myself that my strength in God is what counts.”
Not long after our conversation I read more explosive news in The Baltimore Banner: Fr. Joe has been identified as #155 in the state attorney general’s report on child sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. He reportedly kissed children on the mouth and would try to move his hands up girls’ legs toward their genitals when a dinner guest at their homes. A housekeeper told of him talking about the size of her breasts. One woman described him tracing the outline of her bra, and another reported “a fondling regimen, inappropriate touching, and digital penetration.”
I text the story to my parents, but they don’t reply. When I stop by their house later that day, I notice The Sun’s pages on the table. I ask my dad if he’s read the Banner piece, and he says yes. He’s disturbed, though he needs to investigate the publication’s credibility.
A few days later, he and my mother come over for dinner, and we talk about Fr. Joe. There’s no question on anyone’s mind that he’s done grave wrong. At one point, my dad goes outside to join his grandchildren at play, and my mom offers that she did not like the way Fr. Joe would kiss her head, though it never occurred to her to object.
I wonder if Lydia has seen the news and if so, what she thinks of it. After years of meaning to do so, I reach out and ask if she wants to have lunch. After I send the message, I wonder if she’ll find it strange. It’s been so long; at this point, we’re really just the kind of friends who like each others’ social media posts. She quickly replies, saying how often she thinks of me. She’d not heard about Fr. Joe, so I send her some articles.
When we meet, I am startled by her voice. It’s not as I remember it. I let the sting wear off before making the observation. “I was thinking the same thing,” she says. “We don’t have our little girl voices anymore.”
Having found this common ground, or perhaps having named what is gone, we quickly fold back into each other. We share our scars, our dangerous memories. We acknowledge how impossible it was to move on. I tell her I’m thinking of writing about the community. She takes a deep breath, and I can see how heavy it all is.
Driving home, I think of the Valentine’s Day card I recently found wedged in a stack of old photographs. “To Audrey: We thank God for you and the happy way we feel loving you. Dad.”
Then my mind drifts toward the women who came forward about Fr. Joe. I wonder exactly how many of them were in the Lamb of God and how close they remain to its people, images, rituals. Do their children attend the school that is still around? Or is the community more of a spectre, something that only finds them in the dark?
It occurs to me, at the very least, each one of these women must have retained hope, as I have, that a new world really is at hand. Justice, democracy, the Kingdom of God, whatever she calls it—it’s coming.
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We are the girls with anxiety disorders, filled appointment books, five-year plans. We take ourselves very, very seriously. We are the peacemakers, the do-gooders, the givers, the savers. We are on time, overly prepared, well read, and witty, intellectually curious, always moving…
We pride ourselves on getting as little sleep as possible and thrive on self-deprivation. We drink coffee, a lot of it. We are on birth control, Prozac, and multivitamins…
We are relentless, judgmental with ourselves, and forgiving to others. We never want to be as passive-aggressive as our mothers, never want to marry men as uninspired as our fathers…
We are the daughters of the feminists who said, “You can be anything,” and we heard, “You have to be everything.
- Courtney Martin
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I think they've gathered here for me
You are beside me
I am beside you where something is meant to be
Prison can’t hold all this greedy intention
And so _______ calls the cops And they arrive on the scene
With their red lights flashin' in the hot
New Jersey night
He could identify the guilty
"Remember you said you saw the getaway car?"
The trial was a pig-circus, he never had a chance
Guess who testified*
Yes, that's the story of the Hurricane
The gooder they come, the harder they fall
Turn around you are a nasty joke, oh yeah
Get your heart beatin' baby
That's all I ever get from your family ties
Take your little brother swimming
They can't understand it, I'm just a Peace lovin' guy
You know how sometimes you're so tired of the country you could run to the ocean till there's nothing but sky
Blows the cover of lies but in the same breath your heart breaks
That jukebox in the corner blastin' out my favorite song
it won't be long til summer comes, now that the boys are here again
It's no secret that I left you and still I don't know why
We were stuck in a sad song
Only you can make me do what I don't usually do
So don't treat me like a puppet on a string cause I know how to do my thing
You said you wanted to feel alive so we went to the beach
When you don't know who you are you fuck around and find out
I can't hide from you like I hide from myself
I'm tryna protect myself but only you know how to
Thank you, thank you, I'm okay cause you care, I made it through today
Never will forget I came
We all laugh oh, hah, what a gas!—watching you chew on the bones; in the morning light you didn't look so nice
Now, John, at the bar is a friend of mine. He says, Bill, I believe this is killing me.
And the waitress is practicing politics
They say he's sick, he’s obscene 
I got no friends 'cause they read the papers
Let me tell you about the other side
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Just this side of love is where you'll find the confidence not to continue
It’s up to us to break the cycle
Every step we take from here is vital
You and your girl, things could be pretty
But underneath this there is a secret that nobody can reveal
On Fire Island……
Mommy never laughed when the joke wasn't funny
If someone asked me to describe her I'd recall everything
Where do my parents end and where do I begin?
Daddy always worked hard
He didn't sleep much
Daddy always wanted everyone to like him
I think I'm just like him
Things like that drive me out of my mind
"At the count of 3," he says, "I hope I can disappear"
Baby Borderline
Throw!, away your troubles, baby, dream a dream of me.
You need a big God
Shower your affection, let it rain on me and pull down the mountain, drag your cities to the sea
Coincide with the air, fall in love with the sea
A doom is awaiting unless we undo our damage
I love my baby and my baby loves me
I passed the streets where I lived for 10 years when I saw ya by the river
We walked the beach and You reached for my hand
This is unconditional love
And the moral of the story, I can testify
Cause there's nothing quite like
The blinding light
That curtains cast aside,
And no attempt is made to explain away
Things that really, really, really really really are behind.
You can't hide...
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