#slapped this together from a template i made SIX YEARS AGO | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

marypsue · 5 years

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This one’s for @dubsdeedubs, who requested “Stan + changeling” and kindly allowed me to use any variant on ‘changeling’ that my little black heart desired. And that is the last of the oneshots from that monster meme I posted forever ago! I am not currently taking prompts.

I’m also on AO3 as MaryPSue!

...

Stan doesn’t say anything, just stares up at the portal.

Ford clears his throat, but Stan doesn't look away. He also...doesn't...blink.

"Whadja say this thing was, again?" he says, hoarsely. Not that Stan's voice is ever not hoarse, but...there’s something about the way it rasps that makes all the hairs on the back of Ford’s neck stand up, like a metal chair leg dragged across concrete flooring.

“It’s an interdimensional portal?” Ford says. He doesn’t mean for it to come out like a question. There’s just something about the way Stan asked. It’s almost like he already had an answer in mind, and ‘interdimensional portal’ isn’t the one he was expecting.

Stan's silent for just a beat too long. And he still hasn't blinked.

“I...” he whispers, eyes still fixed on the portal. “Think I kinda remember something...that looked like this...”

If he says anything else, Ford can’t hear it over the clang of mental alarms.

“What?” he demands. “What did you just -”

Finally, finally, Stan turns to face Ford, and Ford chokes on his own words. There’s something – something in Stan’s eyes, something about Stan’s eyes -

“Ford?” Stan asks, reaching out with one hand, and Ford staggers backwards. For a split second, Stan’s face crumples in hurt, until he follows Ford’s eyes down to his own outstretched hand.

And the six fingers extending from it.

It’s Stan’s turn to stumble back, a look of fear spreading across his face as he stares at his own hand, holding it out at arm’s length like he can distance himself from his own body. Ford’s sure his own expression is a mirror of Stan’s.

“What -” Stan chokes, giving his hand a shake. Ford isn’t expecting much of anything to happen, and it doesn’t look like Stan is either, because his eyes, already wide, go even wider when his hand starts to...melt. That out-of-place extra pinkie starts to soften and drip like a lit candle, flesh dribbling down to fuse seamlessly into the side of his hand until it looks like that extra finger was never there at all.

Both Stan and Ford stare at it in wordless horror for a long moment.

Then Stan looks up at Ford, his eyes wide and frightened, and Ford sucks in a breath. At any other time, he would have said that Stan’s eyes were merely bloodshot, that the reddish tinge cast over them was nothing more than evidence of a lack of sleep and, most likely, some manner of degenerate living. But - Ford’s been paying a lot of attention to people’s eyes, lately. And Stan’s eyes had looked completely normal when he’d walked through Ford’s front door. Also, the human eye doesn’t naturally produce that kind of opalescent sheen.

“What are you,” Ford breathes. His voice seems strangled, knotted up in his chest in the painful tangle that draws tight at the way Stan steps back, looking like he’s been slapped. “You are not my brother. What are you?”

Stan - the thing impersonating Stan - is still giving Ford that hurt look, like it hasn’t realised that the game is up. Somehow, that, of all things, loosens the knot in Ford’s chest enough for him to find his voice again. “Go running back to your equilateral master and tell him that I won’t fall for his tricks!"

“Ford -” the thing pretending to be Stan rasps, but Ford is shaking with anger now and the quiet plea in the imposter’s voice only stokes the flames of his fury.

“Get out of my house!”

The imposter looks, for a moment, like it’s going to argue, going to beg, but then its eyes narrow and it pushes past Ford, heading for the elevator.

...

Stan throws himself into the Stanleymobile and slams the door behind him. He leans back in the driver’s seat, breathing hard. It’s only partly from the running he’s just done.

His skin is crawling. He hopes not literally. He’s too much of a coward to look down and find out.

Something had gone wrong, when he’d looked up at Ford’s weirdo science project and the buzzing fluorescents had caught an oil-slick sheen on its metal surface. Something had cracked inside his head. Now even his own, familiar flesh is strange.

The familiar driver’s seat of the Stanleymobile is only comforting for a moment or two. And then that crack in his head splinters it. He and the Stanleymobile have been together for nearly his whole life, haven’t they? But - something’s trying to tell him that he’s only had the car since -

Nevada.

Stan nearly bashes his head against the steering wheel. Nevada, where he’d been locked inside his own trunk and left to bake to death. Nevada, where he’d found a hiding place, a dark warm enclosed space away from the eyes of his captors. Nevada, where he’d found a helpful template to base an appropriate disguise on.

He remembers chewing his way out of that trunk. For the first time, it occurs to him to wonder whether that would even have been possible to do with human teeth.

He’d needed to know more about the world he’d found himself in, more about how to fit in and go undetected, more about how to operate the motor vehicle he’d found. He’d copied neurological pathways, synaptic connections. He hadn’t expected the structure to hide such a complex consciousness. He hadn’t - hadn’t realised how much it would affect him. How much it would overtake him, how -

Stan grips his head in both hands, vaguely aware that one of them no longer feels remotely like a hand. It keeps wanting to be something more like a lobster claw. He doesn’t want to let it, but right now, it feels like a losing battle.

An alien. He’s some kind of goddamn shapeshifting alien that tried to pretend to be Stan Pines and got in over its head. Stan Pines - Stan Pines’ corpse is quietly mummifying somewhere in the desert near Area 51. No wonder Rico’s gang had been so mysteriously quiet lately.

And here he’d thought Ford’s stupid nerd basement was the weirdest thing he was going to have to deal with today.

Stan takes a deep breath.

Okay. First things first. Whether or not Ford’s really his brother, there’s something wrong about that thing in his basement. For one thing, it’s made out of what can only be parts of a spaceship like the one Stan crash-landed all those years ago, and nothing in Stan Pines’ memories indicates that Ford should have known anything about it. For another thing, Ford’s clearly scared of someone - or something. And whatever an interdimensional portal is, it probably shouldn’t fall into the hands of some Rico-type character who intimidates people into getting what they want.

Either way, it looks like Stan’s going to have to deal with this.

Stan takes another deep breath, and another. He gives the steering wheel a squeeze, testing that he’s got the right number of fingers and that they all work the way fingers are supposed to. And, of course, focusing on this portal thing will give him something to think about that isn’t himself. Denial’s always worked for him.

Maybe he can make it work a little longer.

#gravity falls #this is mary's fic tag #sorry dubs i think i lifted some themes from atns

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flavorednarry · 7 years

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The day Niall kicked off his debut solo tour 'Flicker Sessions' was also the 35th anniversary of the day Don Henley released his first solo album. I came across below article and there is some uncanny resemblence between the way Niall and Don started off their solo careers. No wonder, they share a father-son kind-of relationship.. read on:

35 Years Ago: Don Henley Releases His First Solo Album, ‘I Can’t Stand Still’

By Jeff Giles August 29, 2017 9:36 AM

After the massive multi-platinum success enjoyed by the Eagles throughout the ’70s, the idea of going solo following the group’s implosion must have been at least slightly daunting. But the band members wasted no time striking out on their own. By the time Don Henley released his solo debut in August 1982, more than one of his former bandmates had already started the post-Eagles phase of their recording career.

Over time, it’d become clear that Henley was content to move at an increasingly deliberate pace, taking years between albums, but the arrival of his first solo LP, I Can’t Stand Still, arrived less than two years after the Eagles’ farewell live collection made its way to stores — a fairly impressive turnaround, given that he had to put together a new band, find new songwriting partners and figure out what he was supposed to sound like outside the context of his old group. As he later admitted, it helped that he had something of a chip on his shoulder.

Recalling the phone call from Glenn Frey that led to the official breakup of the Eagles, Henley said his longtime partner started off talking about normal stuff like sports before casually letting it slip that he wanted to make a solo album. Although Frey didn’t necessarily come out and say the group was over, Henley could read between the lines — and he wasn’t happy about the way it went down.

“I always thought in my mind that when the group broke up, we’d all get in the room together and get good and drunk and sort of cry on each other’s shoulder and say, ‘Well it was great and I love you and we’re gonna just quit now,'” Henley told Musician. “He didn’t mean to do it that abrupt way, but it was too painful for him to do it any other way. He just sorta had to whip it out like that. I understand it now, but at the time it pissed me off. I just said to myself, ‘Well, if he’s going to make an album, I’m going to make an album too!'”

To start his new chapter, Henley started woodshedding with a number of West Coast session players to build up material and define a new sound. It was during this period that he ended up playing with guitarist and producer Danny Kortchmar, a former partner of James Taylor‘s who had embarked on a busy session career after leaving Taylor’s band. After testing the creative chemistry, Henley hired Kortchmar to serve as the cornerstone of his new solo band as well as his primary co-writer; of the 11 songs Henley recorded for I Can’t Stand Still, six were Kortchmar co-writes, and one — the future rock-radio single “You Better Hang Up” — was a solo Kortchmar composition.

Chalking his decision to enlist Kortchmar up to “gut instinct,” Henley admitted that his choice of collaborators stemmed as much from necessity as it did from creative ambition. I knew I needed a good musician ’cause I’m not,” he continued. “I knew I needed a good guitar player. I mostly play piano. I play drums like a songwriter; I don’t do anything fancy, just play the beat and try not to get in the way.”

While Kortchmar was certainly a big part of I Can’t Stand Still‘s musical bedrock, he was far from the only player on the record. Setting the template for future Henley releases, a small army of session musicians and special guests were rounded up for the tracks, with longtime associates like J.D. Souther, Warren Zevon and ex-Eagles Timothy B. Schmit and Joe Walsh stopping in, as well as ringers like Leland Sklar, Benmont Tench and Toto‘s Steve Lukather and Jeff and Steve Porcaro. Other famous names in the liner notes included keyboardist Garth Hudson, late of the Band, and Bill Withers.

It all added up to a sound that was, unsurprisingly, far busier than the country-inflected aesthetic the Eagles had been known for. Although the band’s records had gotten somewhat glossier over time, they were downright rootsy compared to I Can’t Stand Still — an album whose synth-coated buzz was summed up by the Top 5 single “Dirty Laundry,” which found Henley’s pointed (and ultimately prescient) observations about the growing paparazzi culture fueled by a New Wave beat and surrounded by walls of keyboards and digital noise.

The evolution may have caught some fans by surprise, but from Henley’s point of view, it was still rooted in the music he’d always loved and been inspired by — and was still a solid framework for the sort of radio-ready social commentary he’d found himself drawn to in the Eagles’ later years. “‘Dirty Laundry’ is just the blues, but we put a lot of technology into it, and put some subject matter into it. That’s what I like to do,” he pointed out. “I had a manager who once said, “There’s two kinds of songs:There’s beat songs that you can dance to, and there are message songs.” And I always thought, ‘Why can’t you have both? Why does it have to be one or the other?'”

That approach worked well with “Dirty Laundry,” but it was still a work in progress. Peaking at a respectable No. 24, I Can’t Stand Still proved there was an audience waiting for Henley’s solo work, but suggested the Eagles’ whole may have been more than the sum of its parts — at least in terms of sales. And as evidenced by the way he stalled out below the Top 40 with the similarly socially minded anti-illiteracy track “Johnny Can’t Read,” scoring a pop hit with more serious subject matter is often harder than it looks.

Still, as a first step, I Can’t Stand Still gave Henley something to stand behind as he plotted his next move as a solo performer — and let him test the waters as an artist finally in complete control of his own creative destiny. As he told a number of critics, he’d made a series of compromises throughout his years in the Eagles, and although he remained proud of their work, it didn’t always reflect his true perspective.

“One thing I’m proud of on this album is I have a sense of humor,” reflected Henley. “All the critics always said how serious the Eagles were. We never really took ourselves that seriously at all. We joked about it all the time, but maybe it didn’t come through in the music. I think I finally managed to get some humor into my music on this album. It’s a very dry humor, it’s not your basic knee-slapping fart jokes, but it does come across.”

And as for that daunting feeling as he started all over again? Henley seemed to make peace with it after he started his solo flight. “There’s a whole new generation of kids out there who don’t know about the Eagles. I think I’ve stretched out from that,” he told NME. “It’s inevitable it’ll be compared with the Eagles, but that’s all right. We did some good things.”

#*whispers*#eagles = one direction #don = niall #glenn = harry?#danny kortchmar = Gerry morgan?#don henley #niall horan #niall

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annamcnuff · 7 years

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Cycling into New York City, Via The Bronx

“This could be a complete disaster. Or it could be fun. Either way - let’s be ‘avin it.”

Wise words from younger sibling, Jonty, as he boarded a plane to join me in Boston at the start of the week. This is the sibling that deposited a brown coloured gift in the bath when I was 5 (true story) and the reason I slapped a 9 year old lad when I was 7 (I don’t condone violence in any form. Unless they call your brother “Specky four-eyes.” Then you get buck-wild on their ass).

Yes he’s 27. Yes he’s 6ft 3". Yes he’s far more sensible and grown up than I am. But he’s still my 'little’ brother. And this week it was my task to guide him safely from Boston to NYC.

BEING A TWO

Having ridden alone for 3 months since Lydia left my side at Reno, it was strange to have company again. Contrary to expectation, when cycle touring with another, a real conversation is rare. You mostly develop a form of store-sign Tourette’s, uncontrollably shouting names of places you pass in odd accents. I have no idea why this happens. It’s a new-world phenomenon.

One thing that didn’t change was the level and frequency of singing. In fact, singing levels hit an all time high. For when riding with a partner, it is imperative that everything be expressed via the medium of song. Were you to buy the 'East Coast Hits’ album from this week, you’d enjoy classic tracks such as - “I need a wee”, “My chuddies hurt”, “Where is Lockwood Avenue?” and “Can I turn right, at this Red light?” (Radio edit). Where I was once alone in these musical endeavours, not only did I now have a back-up singer, I also had a percussionist. It turns out that Jonty and I would do very well in a musical round of Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

Riding with a member of the opposite sex for a few days also proved rather educational. Too many times I’d set off and find myself alone 100 metres down the road. I’d look back and spot Jonty with his hands down his pants, rearranging 'the furniture’. Apparently it’s all too easy to mount your bike in an excited leap and land on one of your testicles. Who knew?

CAPE COD AND THE WAMPANOAGS

Heading straight to NYC from Boston would have been a little too straightforward, so I decided to indulge in a cheeky side step onto Cape Cod. Here we stayed with Jim and family, and got to talking not about clams, or lobsters or cranberry farms (all things you might associate with the region), but instead we chatted Wampanoag. Wompa-who? Wompa-I’ll explain…

A key trip revelation has been the discovery of US Indian reservations. I knew they existed (I’ve watched Dances with Wolves after all), but I had no idea just how many there were, and how large. In Arizona I spent 2 days cycling through Navajo (Nava-ho) land, which spans over 24,000 square miles. The Cherokee, Sioux, Chippewa and Apache are just a few of the other tribes living on one of the 326 reservations across the US. These areas are 'sovereign nations’. That is, they are countries within a country. They have their own laws and schools, and are governed and policed by separate political forces.

Spread throughout Massachusetts, including Cape Cod, are the homes of the Wampanoag (Wom-pa-nog) Indians. I was fascinated to learn that the spoken language of the Wampanoag died out 100 years ago, but one woman (with the aid of a linguistics degree from MIT) has been working since 1993 to revive it. She’s been successful, and although it’s now her 2nd language, it’s the mother tongue of her 10 year old daughter. Int that just wonderful?

THE ELI WHITNEY MUSEUM

Leaving the Cape and continuing South, we entered the town of New Haven - home to the prestigious Yale University. For those not yet old enough to walk the halls at an Ivy League School, the town offers an alternative - the Eli Whitney museum.

Upon entering, it’s immediately apparent that this isn’t an ordinary children’s museum. It doesn’t follow the standard template - that is, brightly painted walls, carpeted floors and milk and cookies on offer at 3pm. Instead, it treats youngsters as miniature adults, providing a space in which they’re respectfully encouraged to learn under their own steam.

Founded by William Brown (trained in child development) and Sally Hill (trained in design) The Eli Whitney is founded on a notion of 'essential experiments’. The discovery method, trial and error, it has many other names. Sally and Bill believe that you learn by doing, not watching. You screw things up. You get messy, noisy, break things, but eventually you find a solution. The individuality of experimentation is a central theme, and although classes are structured, there’s no set list of things you should and shouldn’t learn before you 'grow up’.

It’s an incredibly unusual place - one that nurtures and indulges the naturally inquisitive mind of a child. It provides a platform from which kids can develop an understanding of how the world around them is put together, and plants the starter-seed for a lifetime of exploration.

Perhaps I was so struck by The Eli Whitney because this the way I’ve always liked to learn (just ask my Mum and Dad). Perhaps it’s because it bases itself on the very thing I tell anyone and everyone who asks me why I embarked on this trip. As children, we’re curious. We’re excitable. We’re willing to tell people what we want to be, to try in spite of everything else, to get messy and wind up in a right royal pickle. All too often something happens in adulthood that stops this process dead in it’s tracks. We let the belly of our fear-monster get fat with regret and missed opportunities, and above all, we stop asking questions. We stop believing that there’s a unique and individual solution to just about anything if we just … keep going.

RIDING INTO NEW YORK CITY

Full of inspiration, and with my inner-child rekindled, we left New Haven bound for New York. Riding into the city was …. unforgettable. I knew it was going to be ugly, I’d figured as much, and been warned on top of that. Still, it had to be done. So we rolled up our sleeves and waded headlong into the urban jungle.

Twenty miles out, North of the Bronx in New Rochelle, we got 'stuck’ in a traffic jam. Quite an impressive feat when on a bike, non? Here commenced three hours of using every sense possible (including my sixth one) to avoid being run off the road. I didn’t take it personally. The swearing, honking and bumper dodging weren’t reserved solely for us after all - although I’d wager that we had more car doors opened in our faces than most.

The only way to describe the Northern Bronx is as an assault in the senses. It’s like a scene from The Fast and The Furious (one through six) collided with Tooting high street, in the midst of an M25 traffic jam. And I’ll make no bones about the fact that it made this white middle class chick feel a little uneasy. More because Jonty and I stood out like a sore thumb. And then because a man made a beeline for us at a traffic light just to say “you two be careful through here”. Fabulous.

We could have found another way in. We could have taken a ferry over to Long Island, and gone in via Queens. But who knows what different traffic treats lay in store that way. Plus, really, it’s just like mushrooms, Blue cheese, olives and frogs legs - you can’t say you don’t like something until you try it. I won’t be using my holiday to go back to The Bronx next year, but at least I’ve experienced it. Ain’t no regret in that.

So we took three and a half hours to ride the last 20 miles (a new record), but eventually we made it to Downtown. Jonty was safely delivered to his awaiting girlfriend, Kate, and so ended my duty as a big sister for the time being.

This is my 3rd visit to the city that never sleeps. I’m a huge fan of the crazy place and so excited to come back with a purpose. I’ll be seeing a few more touristy sites whilst here, visiting a local school and meeting the guys from Right to Play USA before rolling out again on Tuesday.

To you all from The Big Apple, farewell until next week.

McNuff out :)

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