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dailyadventureprompts · 11 months

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Scragglmop the Destroyer

Once feared throughout the land, a great and terrible dragon grew tired of being endlessly hunted for his hoard and faked his death with the aid of a glory-hungry gnomish bard. Living on for centuries in the guise of a street cat, the dragon is now a hair's breadth from resuming his rampaging ways after the bard's descendants have lost the fortune he gave over to them for safe keeping.

Adventure Hooks:

A series of unexplained fires has wracked the city in recent weeks, which has both the guard and the populace on edge. Rumours swirl blaming arsonists, saboteurs from a rival kingdom, even an illegal duelling society of mages, but none have yet put it together that all of the workshops and businesses were all patronized in one way or another by the famed Candlebright noble family.

Coincidentally, Hignatta Candlebright, young head of that same noble house has sent an invitation to the party to join her at a famed teahouse to discuss a delicate matter involving the retrieval of stolen property. Hignatta has all but taken over the teahouse and its guestrooms since her own family home burned down near the start of the panic, and the party might begin to draw a connection when half way through their meeting the teahouse begins to fill with smoke, panicking patrons, and a booming, sourceless voice that demands "WHERE IS MY GOLD, CANDLEBRIGHT?!"

If you really want to mess with the party, consider introducing them to the fluffy street cat completely independently of the arson plot, making a nuisance of himself in the market while they're trying to shop, or catching mice in their store-room should they have acquired a residence in town. Have them befriend the cat as they might any bad-tempered stray, only to realize after the adventure is half way through that the mice he catches are always somewhat charred. Also imagine the looks on their faces the moment the party's home is broken into by an enemy and their housecat incinnerates a wave of intruders for disturbing his nap.

Background: Everyone knows the story about how the legendary hero Gailen Candlebright saved the realm from the tyrannical dragon Slaggrath, a beast known to devour whole armies and raze kingdoms in search of treasure. It's the ubiquitous tale against which all adventurers are measured against, made all the more ubiquitous thanks to the fact that the deed is memorialized in drinking ballads, children rhymes, and even a few folk operas. Gailen was a troubadour of not insignificant skill before he became a legend, and he had little trouble using that skill and hardwon fame to ensure his deeds would never be forgotten.

As with many tales told by the bards, Gailen left out quite a bit of the truth when concocting his tale: It was a late night in a roadside tavern and the young Candlebright was approached by a sourfaced man with a tangled beard and clothes that might have once been quite fine. Gailen had sung for his supper and then some, his hat was overflowing with tips from a long night's work and a greatful crowd, and the old man wanted to know how it was exactly that the Gnome hadn't yet been robbed; The roads were full of all sorts of rough types who thought that their strength entitled them to others' wealth, bandits yes but worse yet kingsmen, who took what they wanted sure that that they were above any kind punishment.

Seeing that the old man had fallen on rough times, likely having been robbed himself, Gailen spoke from the heart: He'd been robbed a few times yes, but he got by looking like someone that no one would bother to steal from, dressing in his fine clothes only on days he'd perform, and keeping most of his riches in the safe keeping of others, such as the caravan masters he frequently traveled along with.

The old man considered Gailen's words and the two sat up drinking through the night debating the merits of the Troubador's duplicity. Was it not better, asked the old man, to defend what was yours with strength and reputation, That everyone might learn from the failure of those that had trifled with you before?

Gailen looked at the many scars the old man bore and countered that fools never learned their lesson, they just thought themselves better than the last fool who risked it and they'd keep risking it till luck won out or they went to join all the fools that had come before.

It was dawn when the two parted ways, Gailen tottering off to bed thinking he'd given council to a reformed bandit chief, the old man slipping out of the inn and taking to wing thinking he'd concocted a brilliant scheme with the help of his newest, and perhaps first, friend.

i was a week (and one pants-shitting revelation over the old man's true draconic nature) later that the legend of Slaggrath came to an end: Gailen walking into that very same tavern bloodied, burnt, and with the broken off horn of the great wyrm held above his head as a trophy. The news spread like wildfire, the name Candlebright ascended to the shortlist of the realm's great champions, and not a soul questioned when the newly knighted Gailen comissioned the construction of an elaborate series of vaults beneith the castle he'd just been awarded. The bard had everything he wanted, and in return he and his family would hold the dragon's horde in trust, not touching a single copper and adding a little to it each year out of respect for the wyrm's generosity.

Future Adventures:

Even before he charmed his way into unexpected riches, Gailen was an ardent follower of Garl Glittergold, god of ambition, wit, and wariness. Genresavvy bard that he was, he understood that this fabulous windfall wasn't just some gift from his god, it was a test, and that to keep his good fortune going he'd best abide by the exact deal he'd struck in that tavern. Gailen kept Slaggrath's treasure under lock and key all his life and made sure his children did the same despite never telling them where he got it, in accordance with his pact with the dragon . Feeling that the Candlebright family has sat on its laurels for far too long (especially since practical and buisness minded Hignatta has been increasingly questioning why her late grandfather insisted on keeping a giant pile of money in their basement and never spending it), the god has seen fit to shake things up, ensuring that some long lost blueprints for the vault have fallen into the hands of a group of thieves, who broke in and cleared the vault though the very same secret passages Slaggrath used to pop in every decade or so and make sure the count was up to date. The dragon is pissed, convinced Hignatta has reneged on her family's deal.. and all the while the thieves get closer and closer to escaping.

Depending on how the party handles it this situation could break bad in any number of ways: The dragon could give up on being Scragglmop and go on a rampage forcing the party to put him down, they could intercede on Hignatta's behalf and ensure the treasure is returned possibly earning themselves a cushy position as retainers of house Candlebright, perhaps most dangerously they could earn the attention of Garl Glittergold himself and end up being singled out for their own unstable blessing.

In addition to being motivated by the prerequisite desire to get rich, the thieves were hired by an ambitious mage who has long desired to get his hands on Gailen's Horn, the draconic trophy the bard thereafter used as the sigil for his house and hollowed out into a heavy instrument through which he channelled his most showy magic. The mage has designs on the horn as the centrepiece of a ritual drawing on the object's history of power and triumph. Given that the horn is in fact the centrepiece of a giant con it's going to bring some very unaccounted for variables into the mage's ritual which is liable to set off its own chain of problems down the line.

Art

#adventure #mid level #dragon #town #city #dungeon #thief #garl glittergold #disaster #bard #gnome #I thought this was going to be a short one T_T curse you writers brain #monster hunt #patron merchant #patron noble

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therobotmonster · 11 months

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You can complain about the crassness of 80s advert-toons, but what came before wasn't good just because it didn't have a toy company paying the bills.

In fact, that was part of the problem.

(splitting this into its own post)

Pre-80s, your biggest player in TV animation was Hanna Barbera. Post-Cartoon Network kids won't remember, but before they had a network to fill, HB made low-cost dreck exclusively. Race-to-the-bottom, cheap-as-possible, formula driven dreck.

Some of it was dreck with potential and staying power, because you had guys like Alex Toth trying their best to make good stuff despite being given the budget of a Viewmaster disk.

Kidvid in the 80s was the first time, en-masse, someone cared about the quality of kids' entertainment on TV. Not kids' edutainment, PBS existed for awhile, but actual get down and have fun kidvid. Prior to that you had the distressing puppet shows from Sid and Marty Kroft and everything else was 'what will the kids care?' low-end channel filler.

(Channel filler that was, by the way, still selling toys and candy. Just not themed after what the kids were watching)

Then in the 80s, suddenly a lot of people care about the quality of the show. They care because the show is a very expensive ad campaign, but suddenly the avenue to maximized profits drove through a show that was actually engaging and entertaining to kids.

At the same time, your animation industry was flush with new money and a desire to not see that snatched away by another 1960s parent panic that killed the Sugar Bear cartoon. So the studios did everything they could to not make the shows the advertisements they were assumed to be. The goal of elevating the project to avoid feeling like an ad-writer also slipped in. You get stuff like Real Ghostbusters, Spiral Zone, Bravestarr, some very impressively animated and written shows...

And before that, remember, was Jabberjaw, Huckleberry Hound, and fucking Clutch Cargo.

Yes, that is a pair of human lips projected onto a blank face because they couldn't afford animation.

And everything that wasn't a toy-toon had to have a bigger budget to compete. You don't get Thundarr the Barbarian until HB has He-Man breathing down its neck. There is no Le Mondes Engloitis if they don't have the merch wave washing over France. The Disney Afternoon was only what it was because it was trying to contrast itself from the figure aisle.

There is no BTAS or Gargoyles without the action figures.

New Google makes searching for the quote basically impossible, but one of the leads on G.I.Joe has a quote along the lines of: the fantasy of G.I.Joe was not a war fantasy. The fantasy of G.I.Joe was the idea that when you get in trouble, you have a large group of friends who will be there to help you through it.

And one last dirty little secret. Before they could make cartoons based on toys the toy market was still driven by licensed stuff, it was just stuff based on live action properties:

The 80s are seen as this time in which kids were deeply exploited, and all the money made in the kidvid and toy industries is seen as the evidence of that. The idea that the boom happened, even in part, because kids were actually getting media and toys they wanted never occurs to them.

And what did youtube make into the face of kid's entertainment?

If the YT kidverse had to deal with the regulations and rules of 1980s advertising cartoons none of that would have happened.

No one wants what these guys are selling.

#toyetic #80s nostalgia #toys #cartoons #advertoons #advertising #hanna barbera #retro cartoons #the discourse

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soberscientistlife · 1 year

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After the Berlin conference of 1884-1885, different European nations set out to mount their flags all over Africa.

—King Leopold II set out for the Congo and declared it his territory proclaiming it his property.

—Congo was rich in many minerals, but at the time it was richer in ivory and rubber.

—King Leopold II’s government declared that rubber harvesting was a necessary tax that would be paid to the crown by those who lived on the land.

—The rubber industry in Europe was booming and he had to meet the demands of the market. As punishment for not fulfilling the quota they cut-off of your limb or get murdered.

—Leopold II had an army which consisted of about 19,000 european mercenaries, called Publique Force. The military aggressively recruited Africans into its lower ranks as well. These Africans were press-ganged into service and they were executed if they resisted

—The European officials were so ruthless and based on their rubber hatred and targeting that they created a rule for soldiers to cut off and deliver the hands of any of the Congolese citizens killed for failing to fulfill their quota.

—The source began to decline thus becoming slightly scarce . It was then more difficult to obtain the rubber, as many individuals had to climb tall trees to reach the vines. People may often drop from the trees and fall to their deaths.

—In addition to the shooting and maiming, disease was another factor that caused millions to die. The wellbeing of the workers was not taken into account by the Belgians, most starved.

—However, this did not make the Belgians stop. they continued the slavery and enslavement of the people of the Congo.

The burning of their villages was one of the painful accounts of the genocide of the Congolese. The commissioners and their officers also gave a certain quota to a whole village to fulfill and if they failed their villages and inhabitants were burnt down.

Diplomatic talks and pressure from many quarters would later lead Leopold II to renounce his rule over the Free State of the Congo and then hand it over to the Belgian Government, and then the Congo to be named the Belgian Congo.

Source: africanarchives Instagram

#black history #black history facts

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fatehbaz · 1 year

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In 1901, Liang Qichao, a prominent Chinese journalist, wrote an essay entitled “The New Rules for Destroying Countries” (“Mieguo xinfan lun”).

In it, he presented what he had come to understand were the patterns of nineteenth-century Euro-American colonial-imperialist world domination into which China was being drawn. Egypt is the first among five examples he cited of a people and a state crushed by these “new rules.” No simple military invasion or despoiling occupation, the new rules proceeded under a subtler logic. According to Liang, English financial advisers had inserted themselves into the Egyptian court, inducing the state to indebt itself so completely that international bankers could take over from within. This ingenious mode of domination constituted what Liang called “formless dismembering,” hardly detectable as it proceeds, and announcing itself suddenly once it has taken place. Without quite articulating it, Liang was theorizing the advent of finance capitalism in relation to colonialism, with Egypt at its core. [...]

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Aaron Jakes [...] takes up the relation between imperialist domination through the financialization of capitalism in the colonies [...] in his comprehensive account of the British occupation of Egypt from 1882 to 1914. [...] The [financial] crises, produced in the metropole [London, Paris, New York, etc.], were analytically and practically worked out by yoking colonies as productive places and colonials as laboring and culturally marked/racially othered bodies to metropolitan concerns over empire [...], making Egypt a “laboratory in which to settle those greater questions of the Empire” (25). [...] [T]he original goal of British colonial governance was to enhance [...] cotton-growing for export to the global market and capital investment/speculation. [...] The British restructuring of rural space and agrarian social relations [...] severely constrained the room for maneuver of the Egyptian peasantry, who had long used the porousness of the relations among land, property, labor, and power to gain whatever advantages they could. Peasants were now locked firmly in place, and when [...] [financial] crisis hit, their indebtedness left them relatively defenseless. By 1905, superficial prosperity hid roiling discontent with economic development but also with colonial legitimacy. [...]

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[T]he Egyptian journalist Ahmad Hilmi recognized the British discourse of development as “gilded speech” that created an economistic reality without accounting for the lived complexity of actual Egyptians. As Jakes puts it: “despite the occupation’s command over the means of representation, the shared sentiments and experiences of the Egyptian people were irreducible to the charts and tables that adorned the pages of Cromer’s annual reports” (118).

In comparing Egypt’s poverty to the British-produced poverty of Ireland, for example, the economic boom of gushing capital investment was revealed to be a mechanism of wealth accumulation for the few. [...] [T]he gap between rhetoric and reality [...].

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All text above by: Rebecca E. Karl. “Review of Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism.” Jadaliyya online. 21 June 2022. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

#abolition #ecology #imperial #colonial

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choclodox · 1 year

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As far as Mansk knows, his entire squad just got killed a SECOND time, leaving him as the sole survivor. HE👏IS👏ALIVE👏 you can’t tell me he’d get killed by having a dead body yeeted at him, but Lyle can survive a drop onto the side of the ship and then into the water. ⁣

Mr. Cameron, if you’re concerned about a plot hole, I humbly offer you my solutions:⁣

The way I see it, he tgets hit with that dead body, tries to steady himself against the railing, slips on the wet deck, hits his head, and gets knocked out. When the ship starts capsizing, he wakes up, runs (ditching his heavy gear), and jumps overboard. The reason why he doesn’t go back to Bridgehead? That dead body also damaged his throat com, so he can’t contact anyone. ⁣

He then swims to an island and is stranded there for a while until some Metkayina people spot him.⁣

Badda-bing badda-boom, they turn him in to the Sullies, and now he is of great importance to them because he has info on the RDA.⁣

That or the RDA finds him again because they have tracker chips in the recoms. At this point the recoms are property, so why wouldn’t they? Like…this is ARDMORE we’re talking about. She wouldn’t be above it.⁣

PLEASE, JIM, HE NEEDS TO LIVE 🔥🔥🔥 IF NOT FOR US THEN FOR THE MARKETING!!

#avatar #avatar the way of water #avatarfanart #avatar2 #avatar 2 #recom mansk #mansk #mansk recom #avatar mansk #private mansk #na'vi mansk #grillmaster mansk #manskisalive

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lilliankillthisman · 6 months

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At this point he had to find a partner. It was physically impossible to operate all over the country as a one-man outfit. So in the spring of 1949 he lunched with Fred Maynard, who had rejoined Healey and Bakey eighteen months ago. They both recall a terse conversation:

"Are you committed to Healey and Baker, Fred, for the rest of your life?"

"No"

"Will you join me as a partner?"

"Yes"

me and who???

#oh to be a late 1940s property developer cornering the market in towns outside the home counties #the property boom

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mystra-midnight · 9 months

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Haunted Hoedown - DAY FOUR

summary: it felt like a thunderstorm was roaring in your head. Yyu heard him, but his words didn't register in your brain the way they should have. there was only building, mounting, and ruining pleasure that was spreading through your organs and seizing your limbs.

warnings: ghost!eddie x reader. mentions of an unsatisfying sex life/readers ex being a douche. masturbation. voyeurism. somnophilia. eddie being a tad mean/dom.

words: 5.7k

notes: day four of the haunted hoedown challenge being hosted by @inklore and @psychedelic-ink. a bit delayed because i was away seeing amy lee live and in person and fangirling. i tried a different style here with that i'm not 100% sure i love but i hope you enjoy reading.

prompt: american horror story Inspired + “i would burn the world for you.”

May 7th. 2001.

"Tell me why this place is so cheap."

You looked wide-eyed around the apartment. It was utterly perfect—exactly what you'd been hoping for when moving to Hawkins, Indiana. The walls were painted off-white, there were brand new stainless steel appliances, and there were timber floors throughout. The ceilings were high, and there was a little reading nook, two large bedrooms, and a large clawed bathtub.

But the best part was that it was advertised at more than half the true market value. It was absolutely ridiculous, crazy, and completely illogical, and you couldn't understand why.

You saw the realtor flinch at the question, which immediately brought you down from the clouds. Shit. Of course, it was too good to be true. There had to be something wrong with the property for the owner to be selling it for practically next to nothing.

With a sigh, you faced him. His expression was grim.

"Well, you see, um, there was, uh," he stammered, tripping over his words as he searched for the right ones, the ones that wouldn't scare you away. "About fifteen years ago, before the urban development and technology boom came to Hawkins, a young man died in the trailer park that used to be on this lot."

Your heart dropped as the horror of his words sank in, but the feeling was fleeting. Someone who was a stranger to you died ten years ago. They hadn't even lived in the apartment, so that didn't explain the next-to-nothing price. You said as much to the realtor, pressing him for more information.

"The owners want to sell the property quickly, rather than for money. They've explained that there were some... how do I put this? Some strange events occurred while they were living here."

"Such as?"

"Things would move when no one was around. There were always problems with the central heating. The televisions and radios would change channels in the middle of programmes or turn on in the middle of the night. I assume most of this is because of defective wiring somewhere in the building, but none of the electricians were able to find the cause."

You watched him cringe, as though saying the words aloud was physically painful to him. It all sounded ridiculous. And none of it was enough to make you turn down such a fantastic property for such a stupidly low price.

"That's all?" You teased, flashing the man a smile. "Consider the place sold.

June 11th. 2001.

Despite the realtor double-checking and then triple-checking, you crossed your T's and dotted your I's and bought the apartment that same day. You moved in the following month, piling boxes upon boxes, each one with a specific room written on it in your scribble: kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, guest room, reading. You bought new furniture and decorated the walls with pictures of your family and the knick-knacks you'd accumulated after college.

It had taken weeks to sort out all the rooms and empty all the boxes, but the apartment finally felt like a real home, and you'd completely forgotten what the realtor had said when showing you the property: strange events.

It started after three blissful and uneventful weeks. Things had started to go missing, just like he said. It wasn't anything overly important, just small things like your rings, your glasses, or sometimes even your panties. Things would go missing for days at a time before reappearing in locations that they had no business being in.

And then the cold started. Not just cold, but freezing cold.

It got so bad that some nights you would see your own breath misting in the air. It never seemed to matter how high you set the thermostat or how many blankets you piled on top of you—you couldn't stop shivering.

But while all these things were certainly strange, they weren't illogical. You could explain each of them: you misplaced things because you'd moved towns—hell, you'd moved states—and were getting used to living somewhere new. It was also cold because the central heating was faulty. The lights would flicker because the wiring was done wrong. All of that made perfect sense.

But what didn't make a lick of logical sense was when things started to move while you were staring right at them. Hallway doors would swing wide open, slamming into the walls as though they'd been ripped open violently in fits of rage. Shadows would creep along the walls when you weren't looking. You'd catch a glimpse from the corner of your eyes of these stalking shapes, only for them to be gone when you turned to look at them.

Then the photos started to fall from their hooks on the wall, sometimes thrown across the room, so that the frames broke and glass shards littered the floors. You make yourself a meal only for the plate to be thrown off the table and against the wall, leaving the paint stained with splotches. It frightened you, leaving you turning off the lights, running to bed, and hiding under the covers like you were suddenly twelve years old again.

The worst of it was when the dissonant whispering started. It would wake you in the middle of the night, leaving you clutching a baseball bat for dear life. Your co-workers all agreed that you were stressed and overworked, probably exhausted from uprooting your entire life and moving across the country. None of them believed in ghosts, horror stories, or haunted houses.

You thought you might be going insane until you saw him.

July 4th. 2001.

Eddie Munson.

"Hey!" You called, startling the boy standing in front of your dresser. The top right drawer was opened, and your panties were on full display. Hidden beneath them was your vibrator, and you found yourself flustered, angry, embarrassed, and scared.

He looked at you with wide doe-eyes, swimming pools of brown that you could easily get lost in if he wasn't holding a pair of your panties to his nose like some god-damn pervert. You held a bat in your hand, ready to swing, when he turned and ran. You give chase, following him around the queen bed with fresh sheets and into the bathroom that joined the two bedrooms.

By the time you rounded the bed and made it through the doorway, he was gone, seemingly having vanished into thin air. Your panties were on the ground. You spent hours checking rooms, closets, and any nook and cranny a boy of his size could hide in. You even called the police and filed a report, but there was no evidence of forced entry.

In the days that followed, you took to sleeping with the bat besides the bed and a kitchen knife beneath your pillows. It was childish, but having them so close made you feel safer.

The next few weeks were surprisingly and uneventful, and soon you settled back into a familiar routine. Work five days a week, from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon, come home and eat, channel surf for a few hours, shower, and sleep. You were even able to have friends over without anything weird ruining the atmosphere.

It was as you were chancel surfing that you saw him again. You were looking through the music stations for something to listen to while you showered; you skimmed through the pop stations and skipped over the metal stations before setting on one that was playing When It's Over by Sugar Ray. The song was catchy and tended to get stuck in your head with how much it played on the radio, but it was a good one.

"Wait! Go back!"

You screamed.

With your heart pounding wildly in your chest and your stomach having fallen out of your arse, you stared at him. He seemed entirely unaware of your fright, instead gesturing frantically at the television. "Turn it back!"

This was the first time you'd gotten an up-close look at him. He was dressed in black jeans with rips in the knees and a shirt that said Hellfire Club. As he motioned between the remote in your hand and the television, it rode up, revealing a trail of hair that started at his navel and disappeared into his jeans. He had a leather jacket on and a denim Dio vest over it.

He looked like something straight out of the 80's.

"Back!" He yelled louder this time. He sounded panicked and frantic, and that was what snapped you from your stupor. You flicked backwards through the channels, finding the metal music one, when he ordered you to stop. He stared wide-eyed at the television, where Metallica was playing a live concert. You recognised the song; it was Fuel.

"That's James Hetfield," he said, his tone disbelieving. He flopped open-mouthed onto the couch as Kirk Hammett and Lars Ulrich began the opening rift. "This is Metallica."

"Yeah?"

"I don't know this song."

"It was released about four years ago; how can you not have heard it?"

You pressed yourself tightly into the arm of the couch, feeling it dig painfully into your back, when he whirled around to face you. His face was overcome with surprise, shock, and something else you'd yet to comprehend. Wild curls bounced around his face before settling into place.

"Four years?"

You shivered beneath the intensity of his stare and his emotions; even his presence in your apartment sent a chill down your spine. You nodded quickly, clutching the television to your chest like it was a weapon. Your grip was so tight that your knuckles ached.

"That's not possible," he whispered, turning back to the television as the lyrics started. "They look different. They sound different. This is crazy. They just released Master of Puppets?"

That caught your attention, and it was then your turn to be surprised.

"That was fifteen years ago."

"What?" He rounded on you a second time.

Over the next few weeks, you learned more about him. He’d lived in the trailer park with his uncle Wayne, and he’d passed in a tragic accident, an earthquake; his uncle had never found his body. You suspected there was more to it, but he was unwilling to give more details.

That accident had happened fifteen years ago, and the trailer park had been demolished about seven years later. A development block had been built to replace it, which eventually turned into an apartment complex as Hawkins expanded.

Eddie had only been twenty-one when he died. You learned that he liked music. Well, no, you learned that he loved Metallica and Dio. So you started to leave the television on when you went to work, letting it play from dusk to dawn to keep him entertained. Then you started buying magazines and comics to leave them open for him to read; you even bought home Metallica's latest CD.

And as the weeks dragged on, his presence in your apartment became less terrifying, except for the times he would seemingly materialise from nowhere. You even started asking him to hang out with you at night. The two of you would spend hours watching movies and music videos and just talking.

September 19th. 2001.

"Come on, Eddie!" You whined. He was behaving like a child, and you were exasperated and fed up with his antics. He was standing in front of the door with his arms crossed over his chest, obscuring the words on the front of his shirt.

"Don't you 'Eddie' me," he cautioned, his brown eyes narrowing into a glare. He hated the idea that you were mocking him, though he was smart enough to realise that wasn't what you were doing right now. "He's an asshole. I don't understand why you can't see it."

"Because I know him! You've only ever seen him! Briefly, I might add!"

Eddie threw his hands up in frustration; the sound that left his mouth was all but a growl. He wanted to grab you by the shoulders and shake you until your brains leaked out of your ears. Then you might be smart enough to realise that Michael was a fucking douchebag. "And I see you too!" Eddie spat, the fieriness in his tone making you roll your eyes and shiver simultaneously.

"Every time you've seen him, you come home frustrated, like the man doesn't know how to fuck or something! You always come back bitchier than when you left!"

"Eddie!"

If you could have hit him, you would have. His words hit too close to home for comfort. Michael was nice enough, if not vain and at times arrogant. He came from money, and he often acted and thought that money would carry him through the world. But he treated you well enough, and you enjoyed his company most of the time.

Except Eddie's intuition hit the nail on the head—Michael didn't know how to fuck. At least, not well. Each time you felt the familiar warmth of orgasm approaching, the same thing happened. It didn't matter that you'd be crying out his name and clawing at his back, begging him not to stop; he'd move, change his angle, change his pace, change his position, and you would be left a frustrated mess.

On the rare occasions he cared, he was able to make you cum. He'd work you over until you tumbled into oblivion, his fingers buried in your pussy as it clenched and spasmed around them, your back arched off the mattress. But he cared for his own pleasure above all others, and nine times out of ten, you didn't finish.

"Eddie!" He mocked. "Is my name the only thing you can say, sweetheart?"

"I'm not taking dating advice from a dead man!"

You regretted the words the moment they left your mouth. Tears burned in the back of your throat from how you swallowed the urge to cry, your emotions reaching a fever pitch as you walked through him. And as you passed, the cold of his presence enveloped you in a frigid hug but didn't stop you.

Instead, you left.

You drank too much that night; said too much, and let Michael work you over for far longer than you normally would. After being compliant and patient all night, he draped your legs over his shoulders, grunting and groaning as he fucked you, only to cum on your stomach before kissing you goodnight and slipping away. That had been the boiling point.

The relationship ended with you slapping Michael so hard that your hand hurt.

When you made it back home, the apartment was dark, cold, and empty. The television had turned off automatically at some point in the evening, and none of the lights were on. You’d expected him to be waiting for you with a smug smirk and an I told you so attitude, but Eddie wasn’t there, and that hurt more than the disappointing sex.

September 26th. 2001.

Six days later, you still hadn't seen him. Each night you tossed and turned, his absence from your life a gaping wound that often left you bleeding out and gasping for air. The apartment felt too large without him—too quiet and too empty. But you resigned yourself to the fact that you'd chased him away. He'd have found someone else to haunt, someone who appreciated him instead of insulting him. So you found something else to occupy your mind.

Except while you were settling into the mountain of pillows on your bed, the scent of clean linen and vanilla swirling around the room, he decided to make his grand reappearance. Well, no, not exactly.

The moment he chose to reappear was when you were sprawled on the bed, thighs spread wide, and heels dug into the mattress as you worked the tips of your fingers over your aching clit and into your leaking hole. You hadn't had sex since breaking up with Michael, but the ache had been in your belly long before that. The knot between your hips was pulled taut when you saw Eddie standing at the foot of the bed, panic bursting to life inside your chest. You snapped your thighs tight together, your hand flying to press into the sheets to hide the sticky evidence of your arousal.

"Don't stop," he said softly, his voice breathy and light. His wide-doe eyes meet yours. "Please."

"Eddie," you whispered as your face warmed with embarrassment. He didn't miss the way you rubbed your thighs together, desperate to stifle the ache between them. In that moment, you wanted him to be the one touching you. You wanted to feel the warmth and weight of his palms as he held you down and his breath on your neck as he kissed, bit, and sucked. You wanted him in the worst way, and it hurt you beyond words that you couldn't have him.

"Open them." His tone was harsh this time—forceful and demanding, enticing a soft whine from your parted lips. The smirk that found its way to his plump lips was sinful. "No wonder he couldn't get you off. Was he too soft, sweetheart? You need to be told what you want to do, fucked like a whore, to be able to cum?"

Eddie wanted to grab your ankles and drag you to him. Your little nub was so sensitive that he wanted to spread you open and rub the tip of his tongue against it until you were begging for him. He wanted to watch you cum on his cock, his fingers, his thigh, his tongue, and his cock again. He wanted to feel you with every fibre of his ghostly being. "Be a good girl and open your legs, yeah?"

You were slow to react. You parted your thighs slowly and shyly until you were exposed to his hungry gaze. The insides of your thighs were sticky and shiny with the evidence of your first orgasm; your puffy folds were still slick as you parted them with your fingers, moving to rub one on either side of your clit. Your breath hitched at the sensation and the way his eyes followed your movements.

"Eddie," you whined his name softly while your head tipped back, your throat exposed, and your chest heaving with each sharp intake of air. The crown of your head mashed against the pillows, leaving your hair a mess. You imagined the way his hands would feel—rough and calloused. He'd played guitar before his death; you knew he'd be good with his fingers. He'd be able to find that spot deep inside your gummy walls that made stars, no, galaxies, burst to life inside your veins.

"What a fucking prick." He spat the words through his teeth, each syllable filled with venom. "Didn't know how good of a thing he had until it was gone. Never even deserved to have such a pretty pussy if he couldn't get you off. I bet he couldn't even do it with his fingers buried in there or with his tongue, either. Bet he just rammed his dick in without getting you worked up first."

"He doesn’t.." You sighed, your breath airy and full of arousal. "He... he never tasted me."

If it were possible, Eddie would have cum in his pants like a fucking virgin. Not only had that asshole left you a worked-up and unsatisfied mess because he didn't know how to fuck you right, he'd never even tasted you, which was a crying shame. Right now, all Eddie wanted to do was have your sweet cunt beneath his mouth. You were a feast on display, and he was forbidden from tasting, touching, and fucking.

Eddie watched as you pushed your fingers into your clenching hole, chasing the orgasm that was starting to sear through your veins. You were so wet, your slick dripping down the crack of your ass, only to be lost in the bed sheets. "Forget about him," he followed up with a gentler tone, the cold of his presence enveloping the air around you until your nipples turned to hardened peaks that crowned your tits. "Forget about him. Just touch that hot cunt for me, sweetheart."

You answered him with a whimper, your lower lip quivering before being captured between your teeth as your fingers moved deeper, seeking and searching for that sweet stop. You heard his sharp intake of breath as you fingered yourself; the schlick sounds echoing around the room were obscene and pornographic. Your slick arousal coated your fingers, your hand, your palm, and your thighs, shining beneath the dull glow of moonlight that peaked through the windows.

"Harder," he barked, and you obeyed. The heel of your palm slapped against your clit with each thrust of your fingers. "Faster."

It felt like a thunderstorm was roaring in your head. You heard him, but his words didn't register in your brain the way they should have. There was only building, mounting, and ruining pleasure that was spreading through your organs and seizing your limbs. You come hard and long, crying a pretty symphony made up entirely of his name.

October 31st. 2001.

It worked for a while.

In spite of the entire situation making your face burn, you couldn't say no to him, not when he looked at you with those pretty doe-eyes or when he called you his good little whore. Thus, Eddie watched as you masturbated for him every night. He would tell you when to cum and how to touch yourself. You'd be told how many fingers to use and watched as you fucked yourself open.

It worked—until it didn’t.

After days and weeks, it wasn't enough to just touch yourself. You wanted him to touch you, but that was entirely impossible. So you threw yourself into your work and your social life to distract your meloncholy heart. But each night, in the privacy of your apartment, you belonged entirely to him. You worked a double shift today in preparation for Halloween. Eddie hadn't said anything when you'd come home exhausted. All you wanted to do was crawl into bed and sleep like the dead.

And that was exactly what you'd done.

You didn’t remember falling asleep, but you knew you weren’t awake yet—you were floating on clouds in that blissful in-between. It was 3:15 a.m. in the morning, and you vaguely recognised the blurry red outline of the didgital clock on the bedside table. The witching hour on All Hallows' Eve.

It was only the sudden, sharp zing of pleasure that woke you.

You cried out. Your voice was hoarse, and your vocal cords were thick with a myriad of emotions: sleep, confusion, panic, and sudden desperation. Reality finally dawned upon you as honey-sweet pleasure swept through your limbs, making them feel heavy and sluggish even as you grabbed a handful of the thick mop curls between your spread thighs.

You bucked your hips without intention, pushing his face deeper between your sticky folds until he grabbed your waist and pinned you to the mattress. When he pulled back and wrapped his wet lips around your throbbing clit, you could feel him smiling. A deep hum rumbled through his vocal cords and vibrated through your core until you were moaning outloud, your back in a perfect arch as red-hot lightening sizzled through your veins.

"E-Eddie?"

The panic in your voice finally encouraged him to lift his head. His doe-eyes were blown wide with lust, almost entirely black. You saw the way his chin dripped with a mixture of his saliva and your slick; he was a vision of exctasy that made your brain short circuit. This wasn't possible—it literally wasn't possible. But it was real. You felt the weight of his hands on your waist, the way his fingertips dug into your skin hard enough to leave bruises, and the way his weight dipped into the mattress.

"Was wondering when you'd wake up, sweets," he mumbled, his breath hot against your mound. Your thighs trembled and squeezed around his head when he dipped his head to lick from your quivering hole to your clit, lapping at the slick that practically leaked from you. There was a part of you screaming, wanting to rage and be angry at him for doing something like this while you were sleeping. There was also a part of you that wanted to be as distraught now as you had been the day you found him sniffing your panties.

Both parts were quiet, making room for the horny, touch-starved part of yourself to come to the surface. Your nails scratched his scalp when you tugged hard on his hair. Eddie tightened his hold on your waist to stop your impatient squirming as he kitten-licked your folds. You were already embarrassingly close, and he knew. It was obvious from the way you were squeezing your thights around his head until his hearing muffled and how you squirmed and wriggled as the pressure in your belly built.

You made this sound—a little gasp of pleasure—that sent arousal rocketing through his veins and straight to his cock when he pushed two fingers into your tight pussy. His fingers were thicker than yours, larger and longer, reaching deep and rubbing against all of your nerves. You came without warning, slick walls clamping rightly around his thrusting fingers as the world shattered around you into sweet oblivion. Eddie kept his lips wrapped around your little nub, sucking and flicking his tongue against it as crystal shards of pleasure shot through her entire being. It felt like a bolt of white-hot lightning had struck your soul and set her world ablaze.

When you sagged against the mattress, Eddie climbed the length of your body, his lips leaving a trail of hot, wet kisses from your clit and up your belly, through the valley of your tits, until you were tasing yourself on his tongue. You touched him for the first time with shaking hands, feeling his skin against your palms, tracing the outline of each tattoo, and feeling how his muscles shifted and tensed beneath his skin as he settled between your thighs.

He was real; he was here, and he was yours.

As Eddie rubbed his cock against your sticky folds to get himself slick and lubricated, he groaned into your mouth. The flushed tip nudged your clit, causing you to gasp and arch beneath him. "Eddie," you moaned softly, your entire body burning and your eyes pleading for more.

"Say it." He growled. His breath was hot on your neck as he smeared open-mouth kisses along the column of your throat. He already knew what you wanted, but he wanted you to say it. He had to hear you say it. When you bucked up against him, desperate to feel him fill you or for friction of any kind, he pinned your hips down, refusing to give into your demands.

"Eddie," you whined. "Eddie, please, please, fuck me—ah!"

The stretch as he pushed inside was intense and immediate, more so than anything you'd ever felt. But it wasn't painful. No, it was deliciously mind-numbing. Your nails dug deep into his shoulders as you threw your head back. Your lips parted in breathless cries when he bottomed out, filling you so completely. The two of you have never talked about this moment, his size, or what to expect when having sex. Mostly because neither of you had expected this to ever happen.

Now that he was between your legs, holding them open with heavy palms, you knew that he was big—bigger than Michael and your other ex's. Eddie watched the way your lips clung to him as he pulled back, leaving only the crown of his cock nestled in your tight walls, and he moaned as you sucked in each inch of him when he snapped his hips forward. It felt like he was carving his way into your guts, rearranging your organs, or hitting the back of your throat. Maybe that was over dramatic; you were cock-drunk and delusional already. Maybe it was just the intensity with which you wanted him to act that made you irrational.

All that you knew for certain was that he was here, and he was fucking you, and you never wanted him to stop. You were crying, the tears having finally fallen, and you couldn’t stop shaking as lava pooled in your stomach. Eddie grabbed you by the chin, his thumb and forefinger pressing into your cheeks, so that you were pouting when he kissed her again. "Look at me when I'm fucking you."

Your eyes snapped open. When did you close them? You didn't know.

"This is what you needed, huh? You just needed a cock inside you—someone to fuck the attitude out of you. You're just a cockwhore, aren't you, baby?" His voice was rough as he growled the words through his teeth. He was hovering over you, hands on the mattress either side of your head, trapping you in the shelter of his body. You cried out when he made a particularly deep thrust; his aim never faltered. He found that spot that made galaxies come to life and made your thighs tremble around his slim waist.

"Answer me!" He repeated it louder this time.

"Yes!" You wailed. You felt racked with pleasure when he put a hand on your tit, palming it roughly and pinching your nipple to bring your attention to him. "Yes, yes, I'm a whore, just a cockwhore—of god, right there, right there."

"Whose whore?"

"Eddie, Eddie, please, need to cum—"

"You wanna cum?"

"Yes, yes, please." He was holding you at the edge of the world, leaving you staring into the abyss. You were buzzing with excitement, entirely ready and willing to take a leap of faith with him. You needed to free-fall; you needed to float through the clouds, and he wasn't letting you. Not yet. Not until you gave him what he wanted.

"Then tell me whose whore you are."

"Yours! Your whore! Just yours!"

Now that you'd given him what he wanted, he fucked you harder, impossibly so. The sound of his pelvis hitting the backs of your thighs was a constant smack, smack, smack. The headboard hit the wall with a resounding thud, thud, thud. The neighbours would surely complain, but you don't care because he's going to break you, ruin you, and wreck you.

The knot in your stomach unrolled quickly and all at once. A fresh wave of rapture raced through you like lightening arching through your veins, leaving you staring at the roof with wide-open eyes that took in nothing that they saw. Your back bowed into a perfect arch as you came harder than you thought was ever possible—even harder than you had the first time he'd watched you touch yourself.

Eddie buried his face against your neck, his abdomen dipping in and out as he chased his own release, his breath superheated against your skin while he panted. He was lost in you—the smell of your shampoo, the taste of your chapstick—utterly and hopelessly lost. Eddie came only a moment later, long and hard, painting thick ivory ropes along your quivering walls.

"So fucking good, baby. Pussy was made for me." He rambled between kisses, licks, and bites along your neck. Your nails scratched down his back as you preened beneath his praise, your mind somewhere in the clouds, no higher, in the thermosphere. "You're squeezing me like a damn vice. Fuck, you're perfect. I would burn the world for you. You're mine, aren't you, baby? My desperate whore. All mine."

Eddie kept you pinned to the mattress, legs still thrown over his shoulders as he huddled over you, almost folding you in half. He grabbed you roughly by the chin, forcing you to look at him. Your eyes were unfocused, and your face was streaked with tears. He felt your pussy still fluttering around his softening cock as you rode the coattails of your orgasm, each aftershock making you twitch and shake. He kissed you hard until you were breathless. You mewled into his mouth and pawed at him.

And you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that you were his.

#haunted hoedown #hauntedhoedown #eddie munson #eddie munson smut #eddie munson fanfiction #eddie munson imagine #eddie munson x reader #eddie x you #eddie munson x you

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buckyscrystalqueen · 2 months

Text

Winter Wolf: Part 14

Pairings: Bucky x Reader

Warnings: Swearing, fluff, angst

Word Count: 3,523

A/N: Finally got the muse to finish this story! YAY!

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7 / Part 8 / Part 9 / Part 10 / Part 11 / Part 12 / Part 13

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Who’s the cutest little princess in the whole wide world?” Bucky cooed from your bathroom as he gave Anastasia a bath, while you caught your notebook up on the last two years of your life. You smirked to yourself as your daughter giggled away and splashed in the water in her blow up bath tub in the shower. “You are! Yes, you are!”

“Thought I was the cutest in the world.” You called out, playfully as you leaned to the side the slightest bit to see your husband with your eyebrow cocked.

“Not anymore!” He cooed, teasingly with barely a glance over at you. “Ana wins that, hands down now. You didn’t age so well in the dinosaur years.”

“You’re rude!” You laughed as you chucked a pillow at him, easily hitting him in the side to which he completely overreacted to make Ana laugh harder.

“What was that?!” He asked her as he shook his head and pushed himself off where he had purposely fallen to his hip. “Did Mommy just hit me, go boom?! Oh, yes she did, and Daddy’s gunna remember that shit later tonight, too. Yes he will.”

“Are you receiving company?” Tony asked as he knocked gently on your open bedroom door. You froze the slightest bit and closed your notebook as you looked over at him in shock.

“Umm... yes? How am I supposed to answer that, Tony.”

“I know I ruined your birthday.” He started as he opened up his tablet and held it out to you. “And I also didn’t get you a wedding gift. But I figured I’d at least try to kill three birds with one stone with this as a way of apologizing for what I put you through, after everything you have done for the world.” You nodded and scooted across the bed to take the tablet as Bucky did his best to get his daughter out of the bath peacefully for bed so he could see what was going on. You looked at the screen and almost instantly felt the scalding heat you felt the day you watched your home burn to the ground.

“My plantation.” You whispered as you looked at the charred remains. “It’s still there?!”

“It’s technically a historical site.” Tony said as he glanced over at Bucky as he leaned on your door frame. “You owned the biggest plantation in Georgia during the Civil War. It was on the market for a while back in the late 1800’s, early 1900’s but then was taken off...”

“When I moved to London to go to school.” You said with a nod. “I was a doctor... my Lord.” You whispered with a shake of your head.

“Well the property went to the government some time in the 1920’s, and was deemed historical. So they maintained the property and the other houses and stables. But they never rebuilt the main house...”

“There’s an old willow tree a ways to the right of the house.” You said as you closed your eyes and tried to look past the last day you were there in your mind. “It was nearly as tall as the house and I could see if from my bedroom window. Is it still there?” You opened your eyes and looked over at Tony, who slowly shook his head and shrugged.

“I’m not sure. It took me a while to track this place down, because no one knew who the owner was after the war, and I haven’t been down to look yet. Figured you’d want to go first.” You nodded your head and looked back down at the photo as Bucky sat down on the bed beside you with Ana.

“It had a huge wrap around porch.” You told him as you showed him the photo with a small smile as more memories flooded your mind. “John made us rocking chairs that sat right here so we could watch the sun set. Mine had a hole in the right arm from when I stabbed it with my knitting needle after a disagreement one night. And it had these big white columns in front that held up the roof and the small porch up there. Look, baby... this is where Mommy lived.” You said to Ana as you traded Bucky her for the tablet when she tried to get away from her dad.

“We can leave in the morning if you’d like.” Tony said as he pushed off the door frame. “Jet’s ready. Just let me know when you are, whenever you are.”

“Tony.” You called out before he could walk away as your daughter used you as a jungle gym. “Thank you.” He gave you a tight nod and a small smile before he turned and walked away, leaving you to catch up on your memories with your husband.

“So you owned a plantation?” Bucky said, because it was partially news to both of you.

“I inherited it when John passed.” You said with a nod as you wrangled your toddler into your lap. “It’s strange, until I saw that photo, all I could remember of that place was the day I was shot and left. But now, I’m seeing the giant wood burning stove in the kitchen, and the stone fireplace in the parlor. I can see the staircase that ran up the right side of the main hall, that led all the way to the back with this... oh, God it was the most hideous carpet in the world, but it belonged to John’s mother and he loved it.” You scoffed and shook your head as you got up to put Ana in her jammies. “I am not sorry to see that carpet burned down. I wonder if the fire went all the way down to the basement.” You said as you paused at Ana’s dresser and turned around with your brow furrowed. “There’s... there’s something in the basement... I can’t remember...”

“Well, do you want to go look tomorrow?” He asked, pulling you from your thoughts so you could get your daughter dressed. “I mean, I wouldn’t mind seeing this ‘biggest plantation in Georgia’ that my wife owns.”

“It was a big plantation.” You agreed with a huff. “Pain in my rear to work and hotter than all get out most days.”

“Oh, and we’re turning Southern with it.” He laughed as he scooted up on the bed to relax in his spot. “You worked the fields?”

“I did.” You said with a slow nod as you picked up your clothed daughter and walked over to the bed so she could have her night time bottle before bed. “I was a woman before my time back then, and still a Yankee at heart you could say. When John and I married, I convinced him to free our slaves, and made sure they all worked for pay. He was very well off, he could afford it, and they all worked even harder if at all possible once the overseer was let go. But when the war happened, money got a little tight, and we lost quite a few hands to typhoid but the work still needed to be done. So yes, I worked my fields until the war was dropped on my doorstep one night.”

“You know, you get more and more impressive every single day.” He said as he set Tony’s tablet aside to lay down beside Ana so he could look at you. “I am so honored to get to call you my wife, doll.”

“Even though my memories come in snippets and I’m dinosaur old?” You teased as you picked up your notebook to update some past notes.

“Absolutely.” He laughed as he reached across the pillows to rub your back. “Makes you mysterious.”

“OK, we’ll go with that.” You laughed as you handed him the remote so he could put on the ‘Good Night Moon’ show Ana loved before bed while you wrote. You hummed and shook your head as you opened your notebook and clicked on the plantation memories page. “Mysterious, he says. Crazy I say.”

“Go write your notes!”

——

You were glad to see that the massive live oaks lining your driveway were still just as gorgeous as ever, but it absolutely disgusted you to see that your front lawn had been turned into a giant gravel parking lot. A deep growl rolled from your chest, and Steve gently reached over the front seat to grab your wrists, while Bucky put his hand on your knee and gave it a gentle squeeze.

“We can fix it, sweetheart.” Your husband said softly as Happy, Pepper’s assistant, parked his rental car beside the one Tony, Pepper, and their lawyers were in, since parking the jet on your property was apparently not an option. Your growl turned into grumbling as you got out of the car, but turned right back into a much deeper growl when you turned to see a six foot tall, chain link fence around your old home. But all noises simply stopped when you saw your willow tree.

“I’m gunna fucking kill someone.” You said as you ripped away from Bucky and Steve and stormed over to your tree, where a young couple was carving their initials amongst the decades of others, including your and John’s original carvings. “Back the fuck up!” You roared as you let your claws fly just as Steve wrapped his arm around your upper torso and yanked you back.

“Just back away from the tree.” He said quickly to the terrified kids with a shake of his head. “Go on.” The second they were clear, he set you down, and you retracted your claws to walk over and run your fingers over the destroyed wood.

“No...” You said with a shake of your head with tears in your eyes as you looked around until you found the faint, misshapen heart that was almost gone with age, and distorted letters carved by your late husband.

“We’ll see if we can fix it, baby.” Bucky said softly as he touched the small of your back. “Look, the older ones are already fading.” You nodded your head slowly and looked up at the higher names, that were a little less distorted than yours, but were fading as well.

“You must be Mr. Stark.” A peppy older woman in period clothes said as she headed over to the group. “My name is Abigail, I’ll be your guide of the Jackson Plantation...”

“I’m sorry, the what?!” You said as you whipped around to look at her with rage in your eyes, which made Tony step between the pair of you with a tight ‘all business’ smile.

“You’re gunna want to clear the property.” He said evenly with a nod. “Now. For everyone’s safety.”

“Oh! Oh, I’m afraid I can’t do that...” Abigail said as you stormed away from the group to look at a metal plaque on your side of the fence around your house.

“Oh, this is not good.” Bucky said with a shake of his head as you read the lies someone had made up about your house, before you simply ripped it off the post and easily crumbled it in a ball before Steve could get to you.

“Wait, you can’t do that!” Abigail shrieked as you ripped the fence open with more grumbling and headed up to your house with Steve, and Bucky right behind you.

“I’m warning you once more.” Tony said as he simply watched your guide’s horrified expression. “Clear the premises...”

“I’m calling the police!” She cried as she pulled her cell phone from the pocket of her dress.

“I am the fucking police here!” You roared from the front steps as you rounded and glared at her. “This is my fucking land! You are trespassing here!”

“This is property of the National Parks Services...” She tried with shaky hands, which made the Wolf rear her ugly head at the woman’s weakness as a sinister darkness filled your eyes.

“And that’s where you’re fucking wrong.” You said as you slowly walked back down the steps toward her. “This land belonged to my first husband, John William Scott, who was a confederate soldier that died in the war. The plantation, which was named Green Pebble Hill by his aunt, Cecelia Ann Scott MacDonald when she was a child because of the moss covered pebbles in the stream in the back fields by the way, was left to me, (Y/N) (Y/M/N) (Y/L/N) Scott, his sole heir because I’m not able to bear children due to my mutation. Find his will, I know he had one. It’s dated May 16th, 1864, the day before he left to join ranks before the war even started.

The house was burned down by Yankee soldiers in July of 1865, four days after I got a letter saying my husband was killed, not by looters in 1868 like your historically inaccurate sign claims. Burned down by men who were instructed to kill me when they found that I was helping both their soldiers and ones of the confederacy. I was shot in the left lung for helping wounded men, no matter what color their coat was, because that is what good people do. But thanks to my mutation, I can’t fucking die! My body just rejected the musket ball as they burned my home to cinders. Now, get these people off my fucking property immediately or you will learn all about the hell I’ve been through the past one hundred and twenty four years since I first learned how horrible people could be just for the fucking sake of it!” She nodded her head frantically as you turned on your heel to head back up to your house, grumbling under your breath. “Stevie, help me with this.” You said as you carefully walked up on the porch again. “There’s a safe in the basement. It has that letter... I think the will...”

“Babe, be careful.” Bucky said as you grabbed a long, charred, weather warn piece of wood that made up part of the wall of your first floor and lifted it up so that your best friend could see a similar piece of wood that was attached to it on the far side of the house.

“OK, I see it.” He said as he jumped down and ran to the other side as tourists began to flood toward the parking lot to leave.

“(Y/N), we can get a construction crew...” Pepper tried, but Bucky quickly looked back and shook his head at her.

“Just leave her. She’s being buried by new memories, and she’s battling the Wolf. No one can stop her right now.”

“Get ahold of your boss.” Tony said as you and Steve chucked the wood away from the building. “I want contact information to whomever believes they own this land. We’ll be taking it back from them now.” Abigail nodded her head again and continued making phone calls as you and Steve made a path down to the basement that seemed relatively untouched thanks to it’s all stone frame.

“It’s...” You said as you jumped down into the basement after twenty minutes of clearing the rubble of your upper two floors and hesitated. You closed your eyes and tried to picture yourself putting the letter in the safe as Steve jumped down in front of you to help. You turned around in your spot and went through the motions of the memory, before your head shot up and to your left. “Over here. Under some flour sacks.”

“I need a light!” Steve called out as you took a step in that direction but stumbled the slightest bit over a small pile of stones. “Wait, (Y/N). We’re getting a light.”

“Here, Tony said just put it on.” Bucky said as he carefully leaned over the edge and dropped Tony’s Ironman helmet down to Steve. Your best friend held it out to you and you squeezed it on to your head before squinting at the bright screen that popped up in front of you.

“Man, what did I do with only lanterns down here?” You asked yourself as you awkwardly stepped over the stones, around whatever had started to grow in the dark space, and over to the sacks of flour that was your safe’s cover with the help of the night vision from Tony’s suit. Once they were thrown to the side, you picked up the three by three cast iron safe with a grunt, and carried it back over to Steve.

“Alright, hold on. Let me get out first.”

“How do I get this thing off... Oh.” You gasped as the mask opened and shrunk down to sit like a thick necklace. “That works.”

“You find it?” Bucky asked as Steve found solid ground and kneeled down to help. You passed it up to him and climbed out yourself as Tony, Pepper, and his lawyers talked to the cops that came to deal with the ‘disturbance’ with Abigail, her boss, and a pair of local representatives from the National Park Services.

“OK, wait just set it here.” You said as you pointed to the ground by the back steps as you kneeled down beside it. “Shit. When is his birthday? Or was it the day we met.”

“Don’t think of it that way.” Bucky said as he came around to the back of the house to see what was inside this little mystery box. “That’s not gunna help here like it doesn’t help you find your cell phone at home, remember? Walk through the last time you used it like you did in the basement. Picture yourself with the letter in your hand.” You nodded your head and closed your eyes as you held out your hand with the letter in it. “Down the stairs, to the left. You moved those bags and kneeled down. You reached out and turned the dial to...”

“Thirty-two.” You said as you opened your eyes and leaned forward. “Seventeen. Nine. His birthday backwards.” A smile spread across your face as the locked popped open, and the metal door creaked as you pulled it open. “Thank you baby. I never would have remembered that. See, the letter.” You said as you carefully pulled it out and unfolded the telegram. You looked over the slightly faded ink with a small sigh, before wiping off the top of the safe and setting it down. “Oh, look. His will. I didn’t know I had the original. Oh, look at this.” You laughed as you pulled out an old photograph of you on your wedding day. “I made that dress by hand. And this picture took forever to take. Cameras weren’t what they are back then.”

“God, you haven't change a bit.” Bucky said as he sat down beside you to look, as Steve crouched down on your other side.

“I aged like a fine wine.” You teased as you added the photo to the stack. “Oh, and this is John. Oh, sweetheart.” You sighed as you slowly shook your head with a fond smile. “Bless his heart, that man couldn’t grow a beard to save his life.”

“He’s... a lot older than I expected.” Bucky said as he took the photo from your hands, delicately.

“Ten years senior.” You said with a nod as Steve excused himself softly to let Tony know you had the original will. “That was normal back then. I married him when I had just turned seventeen so we were together... like seven years before he passed.”

“Wow.” He breathed as he handed you back the photo.

“What else do we have? Confederate bonds. What’s this? Oh, gold. Could have used that. Oh, my jewelry...” The pair of you sat for another twenty minutes or so, going through old memories and things you had kept safe when John left. You were ecstatic to find the deed to the property along with his father’s will and a couple other documents related to his family.

“OK, I have to say this is blowing my mind a little bit.” Bucky said as you pulled out a pistol wrapped in an old t-shirt to make sure there was nothing left underneath it. “Like... this is your stuff. Not your relatives, yours. You actually touched these documents before today.”

“Gives being older than dinosaurs a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?” You laughed as you started carefully putting everything back in the safe.

“And you own this land.” He said as he looked up at the massive, 2000 acre property in front of him.

“I do.” You said with a nod as you closed the door of the safe. “Legally and soon, officially.”

“Damn.” He said with a shake of his head. “Yea, we’re raising Anastasia here.”

“I’m absolutely OK with that, my love.” You said as you stood up and picked up the safe. “I just have to prove who I am to the US government after spending nearly one hundred years trying to avoid doing just that. That’s gunna be the real fun.”

Part 15

#Bucky x reader #bucky barnes x reader #winter wolf #winter wolf series

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shimmerloid-ai · 3 months

Text

Introduction - What is VOCALOID?

Hello everyone, Shimmer here! This is my first post in this guide blog thingy. I thought it would be a good idea to explain what VOCALOID actually is before I jump into how to use the software. Otherwise, it would be like baking a cake without knowing what cakes are.

So, let’s start by addressing what VOCALOID is not.

VOCALOID is NOT an anime series. Although Hatsune Miku made cameos in "Dropkick on My Devil!", she never originated from an anime series because she is NOT an anime character.

Second, VOCALOIDs are not those crappy AI voice models. You know, those weird “voicebanks” where you can make Spongebob Squarepants sing "7 Rings" or have Cartman from South Park rap "INDUSTRY BABY"? Yeah, those are actually illegal renditions of celebrity voices without the knowledge of the voice actors/influencers/singers whose voices were used to make the models. You just put the models over an audio track, and boom. Lazy, illegal shit.

youtube

Finally, this is just common sense, but VOCALOID did not originate from Project Sekai! Colorful Stage! The Cryptonloids (Miku, Rin, Len, Luka, Kaito, and Meiko) have existed long before the game was released; VOCALOID 1 was released in 2004, while the money making machine was launched in Japan in 2020. That is a gap of sixteen years, and if you compare the time between Hatsune Miku V2's release and Project Sekai, we have another thirteen year difference there.

With that being said, what *is* VOCALOID?

The best definition I can give you is that it is a digital singing synthesizer. Basically, it is an instrument, but instead of piano notes, you get vocals.

youtube

And no, *this* AKITO is not associated with the Akito Shinonome from Project Sekai.

To advertise this voicebanks and increase their appeal, Crypton, VSINGER, AH-Software Co., Internet Co. Ltd, and many other companies that make voicebanks for this software have cute or hot anime-style avatars designed for their box art. This was a great marketing scheme in my opinion, because wouldn't you be more inclined to purchasing something if it looks aesthetic, kawaii, or epic? Just look at GUMI's design!

Alright, I have a feeling I may have bored most users who are reading this weird info-dump, so I am going to add one final, important point. Remember our wood analogy? Well, we have the workbench (VOCALOID), and the wood (the voicebank(s) of your choice). Making a desk for instance would be like making a cover of a song. But people can make the same kind of desk with an entirely different appearance or texture. Similarly, a lot of producers can make covers of the same song, but they can sound entirely different in regards to their pitch, tone, or melody. This aspect is known as "tuning".

Tuning is basically the process of editing the properties of a voicebank and the notes/lyrics they are singing to create a specific sound. People can tune the same song in different ways. For instance, listen to the original "Rolling Girl" by wowaka, and then these covers. They are all the same song, but tuned in entirely different ways.

Below is the original song:

youtube

And these are all covers:

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Also yeah, that last cover is mine, it's my blog, I can promote my content if I want to)

I hope that just by listening to these you can see how tuning can vary from individual to individual. Its all a matter of how you control the parameters of the singer.

So yeah, I yapped enough so I'm gonna end this infodump right here. I'm not surprised if you guys are still confused, so I'm going to leave some helpful resources down below as these people are better at explaining shit than I am.

youtube

My next post will involve some common terminology used in the VOCALOID community, such as “VSQx”, or “pitchbending”.

Goodbye for now!

#vocaloidproducer #vocaloid #vocal synth #vocaloid4 #Vocaloid tutorial #Youtube

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artbyblastweave · 2 years

Note

Hi! I've been reading a lot of your thoughts on superheroes, and wanted to ask you a question if that's okay.

I've always been interested in the genre, but lately I've gotten frustrated with how "safe" the entries play it. No matter what, there's always a Justice League, a world built on superscience, and most "importantly" of all, a Superman. I wanted to ask if all of these things a required for a superhero story, and if so, how far can they be stretched while remaining within the genre?

My conjecture is that from a bunch of directions, it’s a legibility issue.

Long swaths of rumination under the cut.

The superhero genre, out of all genres, is one of the most self-referential; it’s subject to an exaggerated, snowballing and self-reinforcing instance of the Mount Fuji Problem, as laid out by Terry Pratchett:

“J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.”

Superman is Mt. Fuji.

Superman is enormously popular. The first modern superhero, the one the rest of them are patterned on or in conversation with. In the early days, a lot of superheroes were just naked attempts to cash in on Superman, to the point of IP slapfights (This is how DC acquired the rights to Shazam/Captain Marvel.) In the interregnum period caused by the Wertham Scare, he was one of the only superheroes that survived and saw continuous publication. As a result of this bottleneck, superheroism is a genre monoculture; all characters conceived of as “superheroes” are only a couple of creative generations removed from Superman. All of this gives him- and characters patterned directly on him- an outsized influence in both the public and authorial perception of what a “superhero” looks like.

So fifty years down the line, when you’ve got creatives crawling out of the foxholes to try and make some superhero things that are new and innovative or parodic, a few things start happening:

Number 1. Superman is Very Legibly a Superhero. Superheroes, up until the MCU boom, were pretty niche in the mass market; a lot of pre-MCU films (and actually a lot of MCU films, this is my perennial beef) are structured in a way that makes it seem like they’re apologizing for daring to be superhero properties. Note the aversion to code names, the costuming choices made in the X-Men films, the irony poisoning. Superman was one of the exceptions to this, (Others being Batman and Spider-Man;) he’s too iconic. He’s one of a handful of characters who’s clearly a superhero and nothing else. (I’m going to return to this point later.) So if you wanted to invoke superhero at a glance in a mass-market property, making them have costumes and/or powers like Superman (sometimes with hints of Batman) was a fast way to communicate this. As the number of works that do this increase, the gravity of the bias swells because of the pool of precedent- the likelihood that your audience has seen not just Superman, but numerous parodies of Superman. (I was friends with a woman once who knew almost nothing about Superman beyond the fact he existed, but upon being told the broad strokes of his backstory, said, “oh, like in Megamind!”)

Number 2. Superman attracts the interest of Creatives and Iconoclasts. This is the non-cynical take on the above; Superman’s outsized presence in popular culture means that inevitably, a lot of really competent writers are exposed to him, grow up with him as one of their blorbos, and rotate him in their head non-stop for years until they’re finally in a position to write something. The Superman pastiches in Astro City and Irredeemable and Supreme Power and Invincible and Jupiter’s Legacy and The Authority and BNHA and Powers and on and on and on- they’re in there because the writers wanted to tell a story about superheroes, sure, but more specifically they want to yell their hot takes about Superman, who they love, out to the world. And many of these stories are thoughtful and reflective of the human condition or whatever, and so the canon of “Oh my god you have to read this” superhero works, inevitably start to contain tons and tons of Supermen pastiches. (And Batman pastiches; he’s subject to a similar dynamic.) The effect is reinforced.

Number 3. Even in niche or fan-oriented superhero works that don’t suffer from the above-described marketing pressures, familiar character archetypes are useful shorthand that lets you get to whatever novel point you’re trying to make faster. This applies to Superman, who I’ve focused on up until this point, but this is also a good point to start talking about one of the other things you mentioned, the Justice League.

In Invincible, the Guardians Of The Globe, world’s premier superhero team, are 1-to-1 pastiches of the classic Justice League Lineup. I own the ultimate collection in which Kirkman explained that choice; beyond the fact that they were very powerful heroes, and that it was very very bad for the world that they were dead, the actual nature of the Guardians was immaterial to the story. All things being equal, it therefore made the most sense to him to just piggyback off pre-existing comic book fan affection and reverence for the JLA, because his editor was breathing down his neck to get the actual story moving after the six issues of relatively low-stakes adventure that Kirkman had insisted on in order to make the reveal hurt more.

Strong Female Protagonist is (was?) a webcomic about the world’s most powerful superheroine sliding into semi-retirement after neutralizing all the superheroic threats and realizing that her actual toolbox with which to enact lasting societal change is pretty limited. There are a lot of powersets you could give to the most powerful hero in your setting; a lot of aesthetics you could give her; actually, by making her a woman at all you’re already breaking the mold. But there’s utility in starting somewhere bog-standard so that everyone’s on the same page when you start doing the social commentary.

Black Summer is a story about John Horus, the most powerful hero in the world, deciding that the only way to stay consistent with his commitment to evenly applied justice is to execute George Bush for War Crimes, explain why he did so, present the evidence, and ride off into the sunset; his five surviving teammates are then left holding the bag as a pissed off military closes in. The most powerful hero in this case is pointedly designed to look more like Magneto than Superman, but the seven-person team dynamic is clearly meant to broadly invoke that of the Justice League; this gives the readers somewhere to start when picturing what the team dynamic looked like before it collapsed, and it makes the ways in which the group is really obviously not at all like the Justice League pop.

Superhero story which are about someone needing to replace the world’s greatest superhero? Often rely on this fan-legible shorthand. (BNHA, Dreadnought, a couple others.) Stories in which the most powerful hero died as part of the backstory and left an imperfect world for the survivors? Often rely on this fan-legible shorthand. (Welcome to Tranquility, Renegades, etc.) Stories about the kid of the world’s most powerful hero trying to live up to their expectations? Often make use of this fan-legible shorthand (Sky High, Hero, etc.)

Extend it to other individual superheroes. You want to critique the economic injustice implied by superheroism, or the ways in which it would physically and socially destroy you? It’s efficient to invoke Batman or Iron Man, quintessential billionaire powerless capes, and go from there. You want to examine the hellish existence of the working-class teen superhero? Efficient to invoke Spider-Man and go from there. You want to examine the uphill battle of the female superhero in a male-dominated field? Efficient to invoke Wonder Woman and then go from there.

When you can simultaneously save time and creative energy AND demonstrate to your audience that you know the genre canon, the shared referents, the in-jokes- why reinvent the wheel?

The effect is reinforced.

Number four. In works that are about a more unconventional or unique superhero, A tertiary Superman-figure can be a useful genre signifier.

So, the obvious rebuttal you could provide to everything I’ve said so far is that the superhero genre is obviously, comically, massively more diverse than just Superman and copies of Superman. You can make a superhero based on almost anything, intersecting with almost any genre. This is, in fact, the key to the genre’s longevity; the degree to which “Superhero” is such a nebulous genre category that you can cram basically anything into it and have it work. You can remix it forever.

However, this is a double-edged sword; while a superhero universe can accommodate literally anything, many of the resultant “superheroes” are superheroes purely because they exist in the context of a superhero universe; they stop existing as such if removed from it. Blade is a superhero, but the Wesley Snipes Blade films are not really framed as superhero films. Doctor Strange, extracted from the rest of Marvel, could just be an Urban Fantasy property. Green Lantern and Nova and Captain Marvel could be yoinked out and reframed as participants in the Space Cop flavor of Space Opera. Context-scrubbed Thor could be high fantasy. Context-scrubbed Hulk could be a monster movie. Context-scrubbed Guardians of the Galaxy becomes Space Opera. Ant-Man wasn’t originally a superhero; Hank Pym debuted in a one-shot horror/adventure comic about a scientist who nearly gets killed fucking around with a shrinking formula and an anthill, and then he got retooled when Marvel realized superheroes were coming back. Logan was a fantastic film but like many X-men films it divested itself from the framing of superheroism as much as it possibly could. On the opposite side of things, you could take a property like Buffy The Vampire Slayer- generally not viewed as a cape thing- and slot it into the Marvel or DC universe without having to alter anything. If someone like Shepard from Mass Effect, with their armor and future-weapons and/or their biotic powers, crash landed on Marvel or DC Earth, they’d transmute into a superhero just by virtue of who they’re now standing next to when shit starts going down. (This is the backstory of at least three superheroes, probably more.) Superheroism is incredibly fluid. It’s incredibly modular. It’s incredibly contextual.

There are a handful of characters, though, for whom this isn’t true; as I mentioned above, they’re superheroes and nothing else. They’re the platonic implementations. Batman is one example; the most grounded and gritty version of the character ever put to film still couldn’t get around the fact it was about a vigilante in a bat costume beating up the mob. Superman is another; It’s basically impossible to make a Superman film that downplays the iconography, the power, the social position and license of the superhero. The social position and license are huge parts of this!

So, if you’re gonna write a story about a unique superhero- a superhero with a cross-genre origin, or an unconventional aesthetic, or really esoteric powers- a way to keep your story anchored in the genre is to include a Superman-style figure or a Justice-League style organization as a tertiary presence within the worldbuilding, in order to make it 100 percent clear to your audience what lens they’re supposed to view this story through, and to emphasize the contrast posed by your esoteric cape. Worm does this, juxtaposing a protagonist who controls bugs and thus has to fight like a maniac for every victory against an all-powerful Superman-analogue who exists in the background of the setting (although he swells in narrative importance in the back half.) Another example is The Shadow Hero by Gene Luen Yang, which is a comic about a Chinese-American vigilante in the 1930s who, due to a poorly worded pact with a spirit, becomes invulnerable to bullets and nothing else; a more traditional Superman Analogue called “The Anchor of Justice” exists in the background of the setting, only getting a couple of speaking lines, and is mainly used to demonstrate the double standard society applies to superheroism when someone other than a white guy starts doing it. Incredibles does this as a background gag, with the sheer number of heroes in Edna’s “no capes” montage who were clearly trying to fill the Superman niche but continuously couldn’t cut it. Valiant comics did this. Wild Cards I think did this. City of Heroes I think was doing something like this by having prototypical flying-brick Statesman as an NPC while all the PC heroes were (by virtue of being PCs) significantly more diverse and outlandish in powers and presentation. There are other examples of this juxtaposition trick that I’m not thinking of.

So, what are some works that don’t do this?

Here’s a non-comprehensive sample of works that unhook themselves from the standbys;

First off, The Marvel Universe. I think I’ve talked a few times about how the Marvel superhero community is pretty heavily dysfunctional, disjointed and fractious in comparison to the DC superhero community; The Avengers are an absolute shitshow in comparison to the Justice League, as individuals and as an organization. It’s easy to forget due to their total conquest of contemporary pop culture but Marvel was churning out unconventional cape after unconventional cape for years without stepping on DC’s toes; for a long time they were the answer to this question. Any time that Marvel has played at adding a Superman analogue to the setting, it’s usually in the context of pointing out how radically different the setting would work if there was a number-one top-tier hero like that running around.

Heroes, the first season at least, is heavily in conversation with traditional superheroism without actually featuring any of the aesthetic markers within the show itself; no costumes (because supers are simply too new as a widespread phenomena to have the institutional backing for that) no obvious Superman figure (one power per person) and the handful of cast members trying to behave like superheroes are explicitly doing so because of the existing cultural referents of fictional superheroes; by the end of season one nobody has made it all the way to the finish line in terms of costumes and codenames.

Absolution, a comic miniseries by Christos Gage about a superhero who snaps and starts playing Dexter, using his versatile forcefield powers to emulate dozens of different murder weapons so that the killings can’t be traced back to him. The setting is aggressively and deliberately street level, with almost no obvious character analogues, a host of novel powers, and “superheroes” that are universally incorporated into police departments as superpowered SWAT teams. However, the books politics are noxious; it seems that the author’s objection to the police is that they don’t kill enough people. But I bring it up because it’s visually clearly a superhero work while still having a strong aesthetic aversion to all of the tropes you specifically mentioned.

No Hero by Warren Ellis, which is about a superhero team created in the 1960s by a counter-culture chemist who stumbled upon a psychedelic drug that provides superpowers. The team is, in universe, very visibly attempting to carve out an aesthetic identity independent from that of traditional superheroes, brutally fighting crime in varied combinations of gas masks, latex, and evening wear; the group is also tiny, due to the team’s founder being rightfully paranoid that the government is going to jump on his secret recipe. It’s also an incredibly visually horrific book. Body horror galore.

Uber by Keiron Gillen is an alternate history in which World War 2 was fought by super soldiers, developed initially by the Axis and then by an increasingly-panicked America and Britain. The project of the comic was to repudiate the idea of the superhero as an individualist figure who can overcome anything through grit and moral righteousness; in the words of Gillen, it’s a comic about how Galactus is going to beat Spider-man, every single time. In keeping with this, the superhumans are fairly cookie-cutter (developed in batches down known lines of research) the outcome of superhuman fights are determined purely by which of the two superhumans were better made, and as military projects the “heroes” are named using the same conventions as battleships (USS Colossus, HMS Dunkirk, etc.)

Watchmen is an interesting situation. The one powered hero, Dr. Manhattan, is mainly used as an exploration of Superman’s geopolitical impact- the effects of the most powerful thing in the world being an American agent. But in terms of actual origin and aesthetic Manhattan is primarily in conversation with the Marvel Stable; a lab-accident origin, space-age energy powers, presence within the setting’s second wave superhero resurgence rather than having gotten in on the ground floor. That one is picking and choosing recognizable elements in order to do a bunch of different things at once.

Most of these tie back to the Mount Fuji thing; the absence of immediately recognizable figures in these works are, due to the volume of precedent, themselves a very pointed and noticeable choice. Sometimes even a choice the characters themselves are making within the story. And this presents a challenge to any capefic author who deliberately eschews familiar archetypes because they’re sick to death of them; go too far out of your way to excise Superman from your story, and you run the risk of just providing implicit commentary on his ubiquity instead. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

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One last note; you clarified in DMs that the “super science” you were referring to was that of the crop of pulp heroes; Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Phantom, et al et al. I think something different is going on here from everything else I’ve been going on about. When superhero settings incorporate these proto-heroes, it’s part in-joke and partly a nod to legacy; these were the characters immediately preceding Superman and Batman, the prototypes, the incubators for a lot of ideas and aesthetics that later superheroes would take and run with. Many 1930s-1940s superheroes are visually the “missing link” between the two genres; examples of this include The Spirit, The Sandman, and The Green Hornet. In superhero settings that are built “from scratch” outside of the big two, with a setting history that stretches back before the 1930s, it’s therefore common to incorporate a few figures patterned along these lines as a form of tribute. The flip side of this is that the archetype is also very easy to attack and parody; many of the pulp “men of science” were predictably tied to very yikes-inducing ideas about race, gender, and so forth, and thus if you want to criticize the basic assumptions of heroism, one way to do this is to take the archetypes at the root of the genre and then make them period-appropriate jackasses.

I’ll cop to being significantly less informed about this last bit, and thus significantly less confident in the conclusions I’m drawing about it; I’m therefore going to refer you over to @maxwell-grant, who’s very into the pulp hero side of things and can probably give you a more informed perspective both on how the science hero types informed the development genre, and the varying degrees to which they’ve hung around as both objects of tribute and parody.

#thoughts #asks #superheroes #marvel #dc #meta #media analysis #this ran pretty overlong but I think I covered most of the bases #But I'll acknowledge there's a decent chance I overlooked some important element you were trying to get at #so feel free to follow up if this didn't get at everything

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bts-hyperfixation · 1 year

Text

Outside of the Fox

OT7 x Reader - BTS (1332 words)

Chapter 4/21

Y/N longs for a new life when the one she’d been living comes to an abrupt stop. Without much thought to those she is leaving behind, the little fox packs a backpack and disappears. She stumbles across the shelter and makes an interim home for herself while she works out exactly what she wants from her second chance.

Last

The next few days are difficult. Acclimating to your new living arrangement was more challenging than you'd originally assumed it would be.

During the day, a lot of the residents are too busy to stop and talk to you. Jimin is there sometimes, but there is only so much time in his day that he can actually spend with you. Noelle is pulled every which way by people that need help with interviews or housing. And you decide it is best to avoid Lyra at all costs.

So you make yourself scarce.

You take off early in the morning of your third day at the shelter, exploring the area surrounding the building. You walk around aimlessly taking in the surrounding scenery. There isn't much in the immediate vicinity. It's a relatively run-down neighbourhood with a couple of restaurants, some large storage facilities, and a few abandoned office buildings.

There is one street full of bright shining new businesses. A small part of the community that's trying desperately to cling to life if such a drab area. A variety of restaurants, bars, and boutiques line the road, with an underwhelming private karaoke room at the end. It was dark and run down compared to the other businesses but it carried its own charm. A pathetic neon red 'open' sign blinked in the window next to the door, drawing you in.

You approach it slowly, but not many people seem to pay attention to it. Not that they really would this time of the morning. You take a closer look. It's hard to see through the dusty windows. Someone is moving behind the counter. Even through the grime, you can see the way their smile lights up their face as they dance around, not expecting to be disturbed.

A little bell chimes as you push on the door. The poor man jumps as you enter, his eyes wide with obvious confusion.

"Can I help you?" He asks.

"I'm just exploring, I didn't mean to interrupt."

"Are you kidding? I was hopelessly bored! I'm Hoseok, my friends call me Hobi."

"Y/N, nice to meet you Hobi... have you lived around here long?"

"Only, my whole life. Although not in this exact area. This little street is relatively new. I've been working here since I turned sixteen, this Karaoke spot is the only thing left of the original area, although that's not a bad thing."

Hoseok goes into detail about the history of the district, explaining how everything went from dreary in the last few years to sparkly and new. A grant had been given to the shelter and they'd used it for some of the more business-savvy residents to start their own businesses. It started as a market just once or twice a week and had now formed a booming economy.

He was starry-eyed as he spoke, clearly passionate about the place he'd grown up.

"It's so cool watching the hybrids really come into their own after coming from such shitty backgrounds." He grinned.

His smile really suited his face, an adorable heart shape that may have seemed odd on anyone else. It really accentuated his other facial features. You're so wrapped up in his smile that it takes you a moment to catch up to a fact that should of been glaringly obvious the moment you walked in.

The hybrids.

Singling himself out.

He wasn't like you.

"You're human?" You ask, slightly panicked.

Hybrids and humans have come a very long way in the last century, but some of them were still very old-fashioned in their ways. Many still thought of hybrids as a commodity, property to be owned, much like your ex and his friends. But other humans were more inclined to treat hybrids like slaves, lesser than property, something to be utilized and thrown away.

Hoseok didn't seem to be the type, but it was better to be on guard, some people were very good at hiding their true intentions.

He tilts his head as if the question came out of nowhere.

"Did you not notice the lack of furry ears or tail?" He half chuckles, sensing the change in your demeanour.

He backs away a little, giving you space even though a counter already separated the two of you.

"I hadn't met a human in this neighbourhood until now."

You watched him carefully but tried to calm yourself down.

"If it helps, I'd never met a hybrid until about 18 months ago when the market moved in... Nothing personal, my path had just never crossed with any. Although I do hope it keeps crossing yours now..." He winks.

An odd time to flirt, but a blush creeps up your neck regardless.

"I... I'll keep that in mind." You stammer before reaching for the door handle, not looking away from him, just in case.

"You know where to find me!" He calls as you exit.

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You stumble back to the main building after your aimless adventure and resign yourself to another boring afternoon of watching the world pass you by. This time you sit on the opposite side of the room, near the children's play area. At least if you've got nothing better to do you can watch Jimin work.

The kids hang off his every word as he reads them a story. Each time he finishes a sentence the children surrounding him fidget to get a little closer, desperate to hear the next words that fall from his lips. Even a story they've heard thousands of times before sounds brand new coming from him. You find yourself becoming almost as enraptured as the kids themselves. You can't help the mild disappointment you feel as the story comes to an end and Jimin closes the book. The groans of children fill the room as Jimin shoos them away to finish their homework.

The sadness in your stomach fades as his eyes meet yours. His over-enthusiastic smile is quickly becoming your favourite thing.

It seems as though he may finally have some time to sit with you as he starts to head in your direction. You feel conflicted when you realise how excited that makes you. You had intended to make new friends once you came here, not attach yourself to the first friendly face. Still, that was proving difficult, and it was easy to talk to Jimin.

He reaches you quickly, pulling up the chair beside you.

"Any luck with your master plan?" He asks, leaning back, putting his feet up and closing his eyes.

"What master plan?"

"I don't, you won't tell me, but I'm sure you must have one." He opens one eye briefly to look at you.

"I'm glad one of us is sure..." your lack of enthusiasm seems to strike a nerve within the panda.

"Come on Y/N! You're young, you're beautiful, and you seem really clever. You must have some idea of what you want to do next."

He leans to the edge of the chair, feet firmly back on the floor, all attention on you. You stutter trying to get out a sentence, but his un-wavering eye contact makes you choke.

"Look I know restarting is hard, God knows I missed my family a lot when I left, but I wouldn't change it for the world. The shelter is a great place to be, but you aren't going to find what you are looking for watching us all from that chair."

You don't get a chance to fight your corner before he is called away by someone else needing his help.

You think about his words for the rest of the day. Maybe sitting around and waiting for your interview wasn't the most proactive, but you had done an awful lot of 'proactive' during your exit. Now seemed like a good a time as any to relax a little.

Still, Lyra's snoring wasn't the only thing keeping you awake all night. Jimin's words cycled around your head no matter how much you tossed and turned.

This chapter should've covered three days but due to a lot of travelling I'm doing it only covers one, the other two will likely be shorter chapters on their own as well. I hope everyone had a good lunar new year. Enjoy the year of the bunny!

Unfortunately, my beta is still out of action (feel better soon xx) So we are gonna have to struggle through my grammar mistakes and tense switching for now! Hope you enjoy this short addition! Let me know what you think!

Outside of the fox masterlist

Masterlist

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