#sometimes i watch the recording of the audio and it blows me away that i can do that | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

shoheiakagi · 11 months

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😏😏 A - Z for Shohei and Chitose, if you could please? - redlovesashes

of course <3 but i just skipped like two questions since this was getting pretty long

send me a homra boy!

A = Aftercare (What they’re like after sex)

Akagi: super sweet and affectionate. Cleans his partner up with a towel, or draws them a bath, before spooning them. and yes, he does this with his flings and hook ups too, he’s just very affectionate after sex

Chitose: smokes a cigarette while going through his post nut clarity. He either knocks out after smoking or tries to get away as soon as possible. But if he’s drunk, i can see him cuddling onto his date before passing out, snoring in their ear

B = Body part (Their favourite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

Akagi: works out a lot to keep in shape, but is proud of his biceps, especially since thats where his homra tattoo is. Loves to flex his bicep around his partner, especially when theyre in bed and his s/o is absentmindedly tracing his tattoo. Shouhei is obsessed with his partner’s waist, always wrapping an arm around to pull them in closer. He’s especially obsessed with how small their waist is, constantly pressing kisses and blowing raspberries on their belly

Chitose: he loves to flex his abs, always posting gym selfies on social media. On his partner, he likes a full pair of lips and a thick ass. He has a bad habit of smacking or squeezing his partner’s ass when they walk by, not caring about who’s watching.

C = Cum (Anything to do with cum basically… I’m a disgusting person)

Akagi: has a breeding/cream pie kink. He loves to cum inside his partner, filling them up to the brim. Nothing beats the sight of his cum leaking out of his s/o after sex. He will literally scoop up any leaking cum with his finger and stuff them into his partner’s hole

Chitose: loves cumming all over his partner’s face and chest. Whenever he needs to release, he has his partner getting on their knees and swallow his load

D = Dirty Secret (Pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

Akagi: with his partner’s consent, he records some of their sexy times; some of them being audio recordings, others being video recordings. When hes alone and bored, he watches some of their videos and can’t help but imagine their videos being posted online in one of those amateur p*rn sites. He's a little embarrassed to admit on how hard he gets at the idea of random strangers (and even his friends) watching him manhandle and rawdog his s/o while they cry out his name.

Chitose: he sometimes fantasizes about having a threesome with another homra member. He doesnt know why, but theres just something about the idea of spit roasting someone with a fellow member that turns him on. He asked dewa once but the latter turned him down lmaoo. His ideal candidates are dewa, kusanagi, mikoto, and shouhei.

E = Experience (How experienced are they? Do they know what they’re doing?)

Akagi: has an ample amount of experience. i can see him losing his virginity during high school, either with his s/o at his house when his parents were out, or maybe during some house party with some random person he vaguely knew. Every now and then, he would end up picking someone up from a party or club to release any stress he’s been building up from the week.

Chitose: has a crazy amount of experience. He lost his virginity to his late girlfriend during high school, and has been pretty vanilla with her. Post-breakup, chitose is consistently getting laid every weekend with so many different types of people, where he learns a lot of new moves, positions, and kinks

F = Favourite Position (This goes without saying. Will probably include a visual)

Akagi: if hes feeling romantic, then missionary and the lotus position are his favorites, since it brings him closer to his partner while maintaining eye contact. If he’s feeling horny, jealous, or angry, then he favors any position that would end with him pinning his partner down while he selfishly thrusts into them (i.e. doggy, against the wall, holding their wrists above their head, etc). Regardless, he will always favor any position that ends with his partner’s leg over his shoulder as he pounds into them

Chitose: doggy style because to him, nothing screams more primitive and wild than this position. Something about controlling the other person’s movement while gripping onto their hips gets to him. He finds it so cute when they collapse face first on the pillows bc they can’t handle his thrusts, only for him to yank them back so that theyre pressed up against his chest as he continues drilling into them

G = Goofy (Are they more serious in the moment, or are they humorous, etc)

Akagi: he can be pretty serious and intense during sex, but for the most part, he’s cracking jokes and making small talks with his partner to make sure theyre feeling comfortable. He’s a big fan of talking during sex; literally the type to ask you about your day as he thrusts into you

Chitose: i think chitose can be very flirty and humorous during foreplay, but when it comes to the actual deed, he suddenly becomes more quiet and serious, more focused on getting his release

I = Intimacy (How are they during the moment, romantic aspect…)

Akagi: peppers a lot of kisses around his s/o’s face and neck, especially when he first enters them and feels them tensing up. Would whisper a lot of encouragement and praises into his s/o’s ear, telling them how beautiful they are and how proud he is of them for taking in his dick so good, how they were made for his dick, etc. Would even kiss their hand and wrists when he gets excited and emotional.

Chitose: without even realizing it, chitose is actually soft with his partner. stroking their neck, kissing their forehead, making sure that they enjoyed the experience as well. he's very seductive, spending a lot of time to 'woo' his lover by tracing a finger down their spine, kissing their collarbones, treating them to a fancy dinner before getting into bed, etc.

J = Jack Off (Masturbation headcanon)

Akagi: when alone, he masturbates to the sextapes he created with his s/o. i can also see him and his partner masturbating to each other during a video call, both of them missing each other's touch

Chitose: actually doesn't masturbate that often since he's mostly out there getting laid lol. but i do see him joining the other homra guys in watching watching adult videos that include some crazy positions or their favorite p*rnstar, and we know how those sessions go

K = Kink (One or more of their kinks)

Akagi: bondage. he loves the dominance he gets from tying up or handcuffing his partner to the bed, leaving them vulnerable to him. bonus points if he gets to blindfold them as well

Chitose: he's really into roleplaying with his partner. especially scenarios where his partner acts as a cop and he acts as the big, bad criminal that they have been trying to catch. its his favorite since it always end up with his partner bent over and handcuffed to the bed post, while he taunts them about being this godawful cop who is terrible at their job and has no other purpose but to be fucked by him

L = Location (Favourite places to do the do)

Akagi: when he was younger and even more reckless, nothing excited him more than fucking his fling in the back of his friend's car. now that he owns a motorcycle, he takes his s/o to secluded areas where he can bend them over his bike without any care. but when it comes to more common locations, he's been leaning towards fucking his partner in the shower

Chitose: he doesn't really have any favorite location. but he does find himself in the same dingy love hotel way too many times. if his partner is lucky, chitose might drag them over to his apartment and fuck them in his living room

M = Motivation (What turns them on, gets them going)

Akagi: i've mentioned this before, but red is his kryptonite. theres just something so seductive about his s/o wearing red that makes him lose control

Chitose: its no surprise that chitose doesn't need much to be motivated. as long as youre conventionally attractive with a nice body and a cute face, consider him turned on

N = NO (Something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

Akagi: anything that would hurt him or his partner (knife play, smacking/punching on the face, etc) and scat play

Chitose: breeding kink. even if its just during the heat of the moment, he doesn't even want to entertain the idea of accidentally impregnating his partner

O = Oral (Preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc)

Akagi: like any other guy, he does like receiving a good blowjob. But unlike some guys, he actually likes returning the favor, genuinely wanting his partner to feel good. It also helps that he has an oral fixation, so he’s always happily burying his face between his partner’s thighs, enjoying their taste.

Chitose: prefers receiving head than returning the favor tbh, he's a bit selfish like that. but luckily his dick makes up for his selfishness! he's not shy to yank his partner's hair while theyre blowing him. he gets a little impatient and eventually takes over and fucks their mouth. lets out a loud curse and momentarily falls in love when his partner eagerly swallows his cum

P = Pace (Are they fast and rough? Slow and sensual? etc.)

i feel like it depends on the mood for both akagi and chitose when it comes to their pacing. chitose, despite being a firm no strings attached guy, can be pretty slow and sensual when he wants to. but most of the time, i can see him being fast and rough during sex. when shouhei is feeling romantic and wants to make love to his partner, he will be thrusting into them slowly, whispering praises into their ear. but there has been plenty of times where he would roughly fuck his partner into oblivion

Q = Quickie (Their opinions on quickies rather than proper sex, how often, etc.)

Akagi: he prefers proper sex, but is open to quickies if him and his partner are in some public setting but he suddenly pops a boner and is now craving for his partner's touch

Chitose: very familiar with quickies, since there's been a few nights where he had multiple partners at different times throughout the night (and yes, dewa did take him to get tested the next day)

R = Risk (Are they game to experiment, do they take risks, etc.)

Akagi: behind chitose and kusanagi, he has the most sexual experience, so i can see him being pretty adventurous but with some limitations

Chitose: the most experimental guy out of homra. he's been around the block multiple times, slept with different types of people, so he's the most open minded when it comes to taking risks in sex

S = Stamina (How many rounds can they go for, how long do they last…)

okay but theyre both from homra so theyre definitely capable of fucking all night 🤬

T = Toy (Do they own toys? Do they use them? On a partner or themselves?)

Akagi: he does not own any toys, but he knows that his partner owns a vibrator, so a lot of sessions have him teasing his partner by placing the vibrator against their nipples or inserted into their hole while their hands are tied up

Chitose: you didn't hear it from me, but he owns a sex swing which is hidden in his apartment and is used on very few people

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

Akagi: can be pretty mean when he ties his partner up, teasing them with his tongue and fingers and pulling away right when theyre about to cum

Chitose: 10x meaner than shouhei cause one time he literally left his partner alone in his room for some time, tied up with a vibrator shoved between their legs

V = Volume (How loud they are, what sounds they make)

Akagi: very vocal, grunting out curses as he thrusts into his partner, moaning into his partner as he eats them out, etc. but he prefers to gasp and groan into his partner’s ears as he pins them on the mattress, pumping into them

Chitose: unable to speak complete sentences, but is always cursing and growling as he gets closer to his orgasm.

W = Wild Card (Get a random headcanon for the character of your choice)

Akagi: had sex on halloween night with his jason voorhees mask on, which was a major turn on for him and his partner

Chitose: once snuck a girl into homra’s van for a hookup. Everything was going well until kusanagi bursts in right when he was about to cum. Safe to say that him and kusanagi werent able to look each other in the eye for a couple of weeks

Y = Yearning (How high is their sex drive?)

Akagi: very healthy sex drive. He can keep it in his pants for the most part, sleeping around here and there. so unlike chitose, hes able to have normal conversations with ppl he’s attracted to. However, once he finds his person, hes suddenly horny like a dog in heat, needing to always touch them and grope them, before dragging them away to some secluded place

Chitose: wayyyyyyyy too horny to the point he might need some professional help. He sees one attractive person and it hasnt even been 10 minutes until he already starts fantasizing them on his bed, face down and ass up

Z = ZZZ (… how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

Akagi: exhausted by the time they finish their last round. For the most part, he tries to clean up his partner and run a bath for them before cuddling to sleep, but there has been times where he literally knocked out on top of his partner, his dick still inside of them

Chitose: chitose never really falls right asleep after sex, no matter how many rounds they go for. Sometimes, he’s sitting up and lighting up a cigarette. Sometimes, he’s laying down, staring at the ceiling. Other times, he’s in a rush, wearing his clothes and gathering his stuff and rushes out before the other person wakes up

#ty for the ask!#ask #ask game #starryredflames #akagi shouhei #chitose yo

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bloodcoveredwithwalls · 3 years

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Content

Tags: Soft, soft, fluff, INSIDE era, gender neutral (any can read)!

Word Count: 2.7k

You walk out of the kitchen with a glass of coffee. A spoon of sugar and enough milk. Just the way Bo likes it. Today though, he wanted it made for the evening, instead of his usual morning routine.

“Bo! Your coffee’s ready!” You scream up through the stairway.

“Coming!”

Running down the stairs was Bo, with a stack of clothes, some his, some yours. You recognize one of your favorite clothing on the pile in his hands.

“Excuse you, is that my flannel?” You ask, tugging on the cloth.

“Excuse me, and yes. Yes it is, honey.” He answers with his eyebrows raised and an awkward smile.

“Aaand, what is it for?”

“That, I may not be able to tell you now. But, come with me to the guesthouse today, will you? I’ll give you a sneak peak.” He says, placing a soft kiss on your forehead. No struggle of course, he was way taller than you.

You nodded, “Okie. Very exciting.” noticing your wool beanie in between the stack.

Bo’s been working on a new project. For at least a year now, he’s been planning on everything. The songs that’ll be in it, how it’ll be played out. Your living room, bedroom and even the kitchen has Bo’s notes and his notebooks scattered around. You’ve promised him long ago that you wouldn’t open or look into any of them. Of course, you didn’t, respecting and giving him his privacy.

He stays in the guesthouse for hours a day. From morning to night, some days he would even sleep in the guesthouse. You’ve never been in there since he first went in to start his project. Never stepped close at all. Sometimes though, whenever you lay in bed at night, you swore you could hear him slamming the keys of his keyboard from afar, or maybe even him yelling at things.

You know he struggles with his own content. You’ve been through this quite often. He would sometimes come back to the house frustrated, unable to create something that he would like. Some days, he would come back crying, walking straight into your open arms and sobbing into your shoulder. And although you’ve offered to help, he shrugged it off and reassured you that he wants to try his best and work on it alone.

“You need anything else?” You asked as you follow behind him.

“At the moment, no. Oh, wait actually yes. You know my favorite pair of socks?”

“The one with the yellow bit at the end?”

“That’s the one. Thank you Y/N, honey.”

You place the coffee mug on the kitchen table and walked to your front door, where right next to it, is a little cabinet. You pull the top drawer open and looked for the socks, pulling pair after pair, until you found them.

“Found them!” You happily beamed. But as you look back to where Bo was last, he wasn’t there. You saw the sliding door leading to the backyard open , the gentle breeze greeting the kitchen and living room.

You closed the drawer and briskly walked to the kitchen to grab Bo’s coffee mug before stepping out through the door. You tiptoe through the cold grass, quickly making your way to the guesthouse.

Just as you were about to step into the room, Bo came out, quickly closing the door and stopping you in your tracks. He spread his arms out to cover the door. You looked at him with raised eyebrows.

“Okay. Just a fair warning before you go in. There’s a lot of random shit scattered around literally everywhere. So, don’t be too surprised. Or worried.” He smiles.

“Got it. Oh, and here are the socks. And coffee.” You throw back a smile at him. Managing a thumbs up with the pair of socks in your grip.

“Perfect. Thank you so much.”

He turns around and slowly pushing the door handle down his his left elbow, turning his head slightly to you with a shy smile on his face as you both enter into the guesthouse.

The lights were off, the room only illuminated by the sun peaking through the blinds. As you look around, you realize he wasn’t kidding at all. The floor was covered in different wires coming out from different directions. A camera on a tripod was set in the middle of the room, facing towards where you first entered. One of his keyboards was placed on its stand near the camera to a certain angle, while the other that Bo owns was on the floor, awkwardly propped up against the wall.

The desk and cabinet had different books and pieces of paper scattered on top, camera

“Alright, if you don’t mind, the sofa we have is where you can sit on for now. I know the room’s an absolute mess right now.”

He puts his hand out for you, and you grab onto him, slowly making your way to the sofa in the corner of the room with your eyes to the floor, making sure you aren’t stepping on any of the cables.

Bo sat down on the sofa, and pats on the empty space next to him, signaling you to sit. As you did so, you couldn’t leave your eyes off every corner of the room.

“So, this is it so far.” He sighed.

“I don’t even know what most of all the stuff on the floor is for.” You said, waving your hands from the left to the right, framing what you’re seeing.

“Here, let me show you.” He stands up, walking towards on of the devices on the floor. As he stepped on one of the buttons on it, a bright purple light projected from a panel near you and onto the right side of the wall.

He stepped on a different button, and this time the light projected to another direction from a different panel.

“Woah…” You muttered.

“Pretty cool right?”

“Very cool…” You said with your lips parted in awe.

He takes a sip of the warm coffee. “And, tonight, I want you to be here as I record my very first step to my project.”

God, his smile could sweep you off your feet every, single, time. You were so proud of him, so happy to see him step out of his nest and finally work on something once again.

You frantically nodded, not able to contain your excitement.

He took a sip of his coffee, “But. We might have to wait a bit, because I’ve gotta record this first bit in complete darkness.”

“You sure you want me to stay? I mean, I can wait back in the house.”

He placed his mug on the desk beside him and walked towards you. He reached his hand out and you placed yours in his.

“I haven’t been at home much for some time now. I only ever come back to sleep or to have dinner with you. And you’ve been the only person there for me throughout my process of making this.”

His blue eyes stay on yours. His voice is soft, very gentle, making sure you’re getting what he’s trying to say.

“And Y/N, it’s only fair that you get to be a part of it.”

Once again that smile of his is back. You can’t help but to jump up from your seat and hug him, landing your head on his chest. He froze for a second, hands spread apart with you in between. But in a second, he enveloped you in his warm embrace.

“I am so, so, so proud of you.” You said to him in a muffled voice, “I really am.”

He slowly releases you, and holds you by your shoulders. You notice he was a little teary eyed, his face softening from usual. You place a hand on his cheek and he rests on your hand, soon his left hand follows and holds your hand against his cheek.

“Let’s get ready shall we? I’ll help out with anything you need.” You said to him.

For the next two hours, you helped Bo get ready to record. He vaguely tells you what goes where, and you follow as instructed, moving his cameras around, testing it to see if it’s the way he wants it. Lights were moved around to different areas of the room, testing the way it shines onto him from different angles. You listened and watched as he tests his mic, adjusting how loud the audio output was gonna be, making different tracks to separate the instrumental track from his vocals. This was all a fascinating process for you.

Occasionally, you would have to leave the guesthouse to wait outside as Bo tests something out. He’d told you prior to getting ready that he wanted a few things to be a surprise to you when he starts recording. You were a sucker for his surprises. Anything that Bo’s ever made is a masterpiece to you, so, you’d be happy to wait outside to see what he’s done eventually.

It wasn’t long that you had to wait outside until finally, he opens the door to the guesthouse and tells you to come in. Even then, he covers your eyes to avoid you from looking around too much and spoiling the fun. He guides you back to the sofa, and after you’ve settled on your seat, he tells you to close your eyes.

“Keep them closed! No peeking!”

You hear his voice moving further away from you as he said so. Your curiosity grew, wanting to know where he’s going and what he was up to now.

“Okay, okay! Promise they’re closed!”

You covered your eyes with both hands, unable to hide your smile. You’ve never felt this excited for anything ever since the pandemic started.

“Okay, once I tell you to have them opened, I’ll have started recording by then. So, try your best to be as silent as possible.”

“Got it.” You manage a thumbs up with one hand, while the other now covers both your eyes.

You hear him shuffle around the room, a little “ow” coming out from him as he slaps something on. You didn’t recognize what it was. Then, you heard what you thought was the light switch being flicked. After hearing him shuffle around a for a bit more, he finally tells you to open your eyes from a distance.

“Okay, you can open them now, honey.”

You put your hands down and slowly opened your eyes, blinking a couple of times to adjust to the suddenly dark room. Bo was sat on the chair you both set up, with the light shining to his right side. You guessed what he slapped on was the headlamp stretched around his head. You had a million ideas of what it might be for, but knowing Bo, it’s probably an idea you wouldn’t have thought of.

You pressed your bottom and top lip together and did a zipping motion from the left to the right. He smiled, holding his laugh in as to not mess up the shot. You shoot him a thumbs up and he returned it by blowing you kiss.

And he started. He pressed a few buttons on the keyboard of his laptop then sat back against his chair, relaxed and a little slouched. A catchy beat came from the speaker you helped him set up. Soon after, a few synths came in, making a tune. You sat, frozen to the sofa, only able to take in what's happening in front of you.

Bo was looking away from the camera before he slowly starts lifting the mic closer to his mouth, before starting to sing on cue.

“If you’d have told me, a year ago that I’d be locked inside of my home.” In between, a pre recorded audio of him singing came up before he continued singing live again.

“I would’ve told you, a year ago, “Interesting, now leave me alone.””

You were in awe. You love his deep voice. Finally hearing him sing to these new lyrics that he’d wrote over the past year felt so surreal. You smiled seeing how Bo bounces his leg to the beat of the song.

“Robert’s been a little depressed. No~”

You felt your heart sank at the line, but you kept your cool, not wanting to distract him. Although you were quickly able to calm down a little after hearing the bridge of the song come up. You couldn’t lie, it’s a catchy song.

Once you heard the build up to the chorus, you saw Bo reach his hand up to press a button on his headlamp.

“I’m sorry I was gone, but look I made you some content.”

Bo looked up and so did you, and your jaw dropped as the disco ball hung on the ceiling appeared to be spinning around, reflecting the light shining from his headlamp. The disco ball projected all the lights against the walls of the room, making it look so bright and interactive. You looked around the walls, seeing the lights dance on every single item in the room. You couldn’t hide the smile growing on your face, forgetting if Bo might get distracted by you.

“Daddy made you your favorite, open wide.”

You snap your gaze back at Bo after hearing that, loving how he added in that line to the song. He was concentrated as ever, maintaining a leveled eye contact to one point as not to move the light shining on the disco ball. He continues on, and you stare at him, smiling as you enjoyed the catchy tune.

“It’s a beautiful day to stay inside.”

He lowers the mic with the last line, and looks down into the camera, shining it with the headlamp. You squint your eyes, to try and look at him. The room went dark as he turns his headlamp off, leaving the room pitch black. He walked over to the light switch and flicked it on.

He catches your eyes, smiling wide at you.

You stand from the sofa, making happy little hops towards him.

“How did I not see the disco ball?” You ask in complete awe.

“That’s a bit of Bo’s magic.” He jokes, grinning at you as he takes of his headlamp, throwing it to the chair.

You hug him again, tight and proud. Happy that you were able to linger in the guesthouse and watch him take his first step into the project.

“So. What do you think?” He said, throwing a glance around the room then to you.

You cling on to him, a hand around his waist while you lean on his side.

“Absolutely incredible. Loved the song, loved the lighting, and definitely loved seeing you sing.”

“I need you to know this song’s for you. You’re the reason I’m able to start making content again. So, thank you so much.”

You place other hand on his chest, still leaning onto him.

“Thank you for starting again.”

He reached around for your hand, holding both of them in his before leaning down to kiss you. So gentle, so loving. He places his hand on your cheek, letting his fingers fall to your jaw and neck, the perfect fit. He pulls away, giving you one last quick peck on the lips.

You sigh happily.

“Well, we can leave everything here for now. Give me a sec, I’ll just quickly turn everything off.”

You watch as he leaps to his laptop, then to his speaker, making sure everything’s been saved and turned off properly.

“Alright. All good.”

“Pasta for dinner?” You ask him, intertwining your hands with his.

“Anything you make, really.” Nodding in approval.

You both step out of the guesthouse, knowing that for a few months or maybe more, you won’t be able to see him in there anymore. Before he closes the door, you take a last look at the slowly spinning disco ball. You were left to imagine what’s Bo going to create next. Only surprises.

You walked back to the house hand in hand, watching Bruce wait in front of the sliding door.

“Anyways, Daddy huh?” You teased him.

“Oh hush, I know you love it.” He laughed, patting the top of your head.

Boy, was this fun to write. Thank you so much to @pharlapcartoonist for the request and idea behind this, I hope you liked it! I’m open to more requests! Hope everyone has a great day! Please stay happy and stay safe. <3

#bo burhnam #bo burnam inside #bo burnham fanfic #bo burnham fluff #bo burnham x reader #bo burnham x y/n

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vixenpen · 4 years

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Okay so I got a idea. Can you do a scenario with Kirishima and bakugou (separately) were they are famous 18+ asmr artists. And when they get to the spicy parts the actually have you there. So there basically fucking you while recording. And things get really nasty

Bruh...this idea is so fucking hot to meee like, could you imagine??!?!?

ASMR Boyfriend (+18)

(Art by: @sakimichan )

“I hope you know how special you are, and how much you mean to me,” your boyfriend held your gaze. “You deserve all this and more, and if you ever doubt how I feel about you, I’ll make sure to correct that. Understand?”

You bit your bottom lip to avoid saying: ‘yes.’

Today’s episode was a Valentine’s Day livestream special which meant big bucks for you and your ASMRtist boyfriend, Eijirou Kirishima’s, date tonight.

Your role was tech support and...sound affects. You were supposed to be monitoring the chat to make sure everything was going well, but the way your boyfriend’s ruby eyes were boring into your own lustfully, had your full attention. It didn’t help that his voice had dropped an octave becoming heavy and sensual.

The comments were going crazy.

Yes daddy. Ily 💕

🥺🥺🥺

😍😍😍

Big daddy EJ loves me

“Let me show you what I mean, Pebbles.” He curled a single finger and winked, blowing a long strand of red hair out of his face.

You damn near tripped over the chords littering the floor to straddle his lap.

Kirishima chuckled, catching you by your ass and gripping it gently.

He kissed you softly eliciting a hum from you. Listening to your boyfriend flirt and seduce for thirty minutes straight all while giving you the deepest bedroom eyes he could muster always had you ready to go. Today was no different as he had been laying it on extra thick.

“Do you love me?” He asked, biting your lip.

Despite yourself, a small ‘mhmm’ slipped out.

He held your hips tight and ground you on to his clothed erection.

“Can you feel how much I love you?” He asked, eyes sparkling as he gazed up at you.

Before you could answer, his hands dipped beneath your shorts and stroked the heat building between your legs.

“Cuz I can definitely feel how much you love me.”

You moaned. Kirishima brought the mic closer. He pushed the material of your panties out of the way and hissed at the sensation of your cream coating his fingers.

“I can’t wait to fuck you, baby doll.”

I can’t either so hurry up and do it.

You thought to yourself, impatiently.

You ground into your boyfriend’s erection for some relief. The moans and smacks of your tongues colliding with one another grew more feverish.

The chat was going off like crazy as hundreds of horny listeners expressed their desires.

“Wanna taste you,” Kirishima managed to murmur as he whipped off your shirt.

His own shirt followed. You took in his perfectly sculpted physique bulging and flexing with muscle. He gave you a sharp toothed grin and you stifled a giggle.

“You’re so fucking cute, Pebbles.” He tapped your nose. “My sweet doll.”

Kirishima worked your shorts and panties down your hips.

His eyes dipped to the desire between your legs and his tongue slithered across his lips.

When his mouth descended on your hot sex, you stopped holding back, and let out a breathy scream.

“Taste just as good as you look, baby doll.”

“Oh god, Eiji.” You sighed as your boyfriend’s tongue massaged your folds and flicked at your clit.

He slipped his fingers in and out of your sex and lapped up your cum.

“Do you love me?” He asked.

“Yes,” you sighed quietly.

“Hmm?” He stroked into your gripping pussy harder.

“Yesss.” You replied, louder this time.

“I can’t hear you, Pebbles.” He stuffed two of his fingers, slick with your juice into your mouth and hoisted himself up over you.

Chest heaving, you watched as he pulled his thick, veiny member out of the jeans he had been wearing.

Without warning, Kirishima held your gaze and pummeled into you deep and hard, sending your back arching off the couch.

“Do. You. Love. Me?” He ground out, punctuating each word with a hard, deep stroke.

Your loud wails of: “Oh god! Yes, yes, yesss,” overlapped with the question.

The chat was singing like crazy as donations and comments poured in. However, it could barely be heard over the slapping and screaming of you and Kirishima’s sex.

As the chat went off in the background, your boyfriend lowered his lips to your ear and in a voice meant only for you said: “Happy Valentine’s Day, baby, we’ll have a real date tonight. I love you.”

“You can’t take it when I tease you, huh, brat?”

SMACK!

The thick leather kissed your bare ass, drawing out a whimper from you.

Bakugo chuckled. His crimson eyes met yours in the mirror set up across from his work station. Ever since you two had decided to spice up his ASMR streams, he had installed those cameras as a little extra incentive.

It just made the experience all the more hot.

“Look at you,” he chuckled, digging his fingers into your hips and pulling you back against the hard on poking through his black jeans. “Is this punishment or pleasure?”

He spanked you again. You jumped.

“Hard to tell when you’re giving me that desperate look. You slutty little brat.”

His nails ranked down your back. A long his of pleasure and pain escaped through your teeth and you arched in response.

“You like this way too much, don’t you?” He asked, a hint of sincerity slipping through in the question.

“Maybe I’ll just leave you here like this.” He jeered. “Let you just sit here. like the horny little brat you are.”

He stepped away from you, eying your round ass bent over before him lustfully. His grin was wicked as he gazed down at you.

You shot him a pleading look over your shoulder. You weren’t supposed to talk during his recordings until it came to the spicy parts, but sometimes Katsuki pushed it too far. You were so horny after watching him stroke his dick and talk shit for half an hour, you were this close to begging him to fuck you.

“Aww, look at you. You need daddy’s dick that bad?” He asked. “Fine, but you won’t get it that easy.”

Your sex clenched at the thought of what Katsuki had in store.

In an instant, he stood before you. He cocked his head and gave you his signature cocky smirk with an almost animalistic gleam in his red eyes that both scared and excited you.

“Suck daddy’s dick if you want it that bad.” He said in a voice so gruff and raunchy, your knees gave out.

Nimbly, you worked his angry looking flushed erection out of his pants and peppered the tip with kisses.

You kept your eyes on him as your tongue lolled out to taste every inch of his long member from top to bottom.

“Fuck yeah, babe, just like that.” He groaned, arms uncrossing to fall limply at his side.

You kept it up, stroking his dick as you juggled his heavy sack in your mouth.

“God, I love that fucking mouth of yours...”

Every praise and deep, shuddering moan went straight to your sex. You put on a show of slurping and groaning and smacking on his dick like it was a lollipop, both for the audio and to hear his cursing and shit talking babble.

“That’s it, ahh, fuck! That’s it right there.” He grabbed the back of your head and helped guide your bobbing head. “Daddy’s little freak. Nasty little slut. Fuck!”

His hips snapped forward, sack smacking your chin. You sat on your ankle and pressed down against it to offer some relief and much needed pressure to your aching clit.

“I’m gonna fucking cum, baby. I’m gonna cum in this filthy mouth of yours. You want that, huh? Huh?”

“Mmhmm!”

You felt Katsuki’s dick flex and with that, his hot seed burst into your mouth. With a sigh of satisfaction, your boyfriend slid out of your mouth.

He grabbed your jaw and brought you to your feet to meet him.

“Such a good girl now, aren’t you?” He smirked, brushing the dribble at the corner of your lips away with his thumb. “Guess daddy will have to reward his good girl now, won’t he?”

#asmr sounds #asmrtist #bnha imagines #my hero academia #bnha #bnha scenarios #my hero fanfic #bnha smut #kirishima x reader #eijirou kirishima #bakugo katuski x reader #bakugo x reader #slight n/sfw #n/s/f/w #this is filth #black writers #bakugo smut #kirishima smut

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seungmoroll · 4 years

Text

Electric Love - Lee Felix

Word count: 1.5k

Genre: fluff

A/N: This is the sixth installment in the Electric Love Series. You can check out the others here.

There were a few cons that came with being neighbors with your best friend. Sometimes him and his friends were too loud and sometimes they would even barge into your house to steal your food. You swore you were going to murder Felix that one time they barged in and you were doing a face mask that made you look like an alien. Felix’s friends were hot, and a bunch of hot guys do not need to be seeing you like that.

However, there were definitely more pros of having your best friend live next door to you. Number one being that he had hot friends. You can’t help but stare at them from your bedroom window whenever they’re swimming in Felix’s pool. Another beneficial thing is that you literally can hang out whenever you want to. You guys basically have movie nights every other night. His sisters are basically your sisters, they even tell you sometimes that they prefer you over him.

While you mindlessly scroll through your twitter feed, you get a text from Felix that says, “You up for a swim?” You respond with, “Be there in 10.” Peeking out your bedroom window, you check to see if any of Felix’s other friends were there. You were especially keeping an eye out for Seungmin and Jisung. Seungmin because you thought he was kind of cute and Jisung because you were looking to get payback for that prank he played on you the last time you saw him. However, as you looked, you saw no silhouettes or figures. So, you figured that either it would only be you and Felix hanging out today or they were all inside his house.

After you finished getting ready, you made your way to Felix’s house and when you rung his doorbell, his mother had answered the door.

“Oh, hello dear. Felix is out in the backyard. You can go right on ahead. Oh, and let me know if you want me to make you guys something.”

“Alright, thanks Mrs. Lee.”

Making your way into the house and to the backyard, you spot Felix through the glass door. His back is faced towards you, so as quietly as you can, you slide the door and sneak up behind him.

“Boo.”

Frightened, Felix jumps and clutches his chest, “Y/N, don’t scare me like that, I could’ve dropped my croissant.”

You were about to tell him to stop making vine references, when you realized that he was actually holding a croissant. Shrugging, you rip off a piece of his croissant and pop it into your mouth.

“Great, first you scare me and then you take my food, what next? Are you going to take my friends too?”

“Felix, no offence, but I don’t want your friends. Speaking of your friends, they coming over?”

“No, why? So you can make googly eyes at Seungmin?”

Offended, you say, “I do not make googly eyes at him.” Felix gives you a look, “He’s cute, I can’t help it. I can’t help that all your friends are cute.”

“If all my friends are cute, does that make me cute?” Felix asks, raising his eyebrows at you.

Gently patting him on the cheek, “The cutest.”

You make your way to the pool, and slowly get into it. The water cools down your burning skin as it envelops you and you relax into it. Floating in the water, eyes closed, you find peace, but that peace is interrupted once you hear a loud “CANNONBALL!” Water all around you splashes everywhere, and you are forced to open your eyes.

Similar to the way Dave from Alvin and the Chipmunks screams Alvin’s name you yell, “Felix!”

He gives you a cheeky grin, “Oops.” He goes underwater and begins swimming away from you. You swim after him and reach out for his ankles when you get close enough. You pull at his leg, and when you hear his scream underwater, you come up and begin laughing. Felix joins you in your laughing fit once he comes up for air.

“C’mon Felix, two for two.”

“You’re such a meanie, Y/N.” He splashes water towards you. Suddenly he says, “Wait, I just thought of something.” He gets out of the pool and heads towards the table where all your stuff was. You see that he grabs his phone and a water bottle. Approaching the pool, smiling he says, “Let’s film Tiktoks.”

Felix was always on Tiktok, he even knew all the dances, you, however, knew nothing about it. You didn’t even have the app downloaded. The only Tiktoks you saw were the ones Felix showed you or the ones you saw reposted on another platform. Him and his friends were always filming Tiktoks, but he’s never asked you to film one with him, that is until today.

With a serious look on your face, you tell him, “I’m not doing the renegade, Felix.”

“Y/N,” he whines.

“Anything, but the renegade.”

“Fine.” He sets the water bottle by the edge of the pool and slips back into the pool, phone in hand. “You remember that song ‘Shake It’ by Metro Station? There’s an easy dance for it that we can do.”

The phrase ‘easy dance’ differs between you and Felix. Felix happens to be an amazing dancer that can easily learn dances, you on the other hand, were not that good of a dancer. You would have to watch the dance a hundred times for you to remember it. Luckily for you, Felix is a good teacher.

It takes you approximately 20 minutes to learn the dance and 15 more minutes for the two of you to record it. When the two of you watch the final video, you laugh at how stiff you look compared to Felix. He tells you that your stiff dancing is cute, and you thank him by splashing him with water.

“Let’s film one more Tiktok.”

“Fine. This better be the last one.”

“It’ll be the best one yet.”

“What’re we doing for this one?”

“All you have to do is be your pretty self.” You’ll never get used to Felix’s random compliments. He even does it in front of the guys and as the peanut gallery, they always go “ooh” and “awe,” at this point you’ve learned to ignore them.

Listening to Felix’s words, you lift your feet off from the bottom of the pool, and let yourself float, watching as Felix presses the record button. A song that you don’t recognize plays from the speaker, and Felix lightly paddles towards you. You look between him and the camera, curious as to what was supposed to happen.

Felix comes up to you and gently wraps an arm around your waist and begins to spin you around in the water. He does this all the time to you, so instead of screaming, you laugh to show that you’re having fun. Felix is laughing along with you and just when you’re about to ask him what you guys were supposed to be doing, when he suddenly holds you by your face. Before you could say anything else, he presses his lips against yours. You automatically wrap your arms around his neck and kiss him back.

You’ve always known that you had feelings for Felix, but you were afraid to do or say anything to him in fear that you would ruin your friendship. You would rather have him in your life as your friend than not have him in your life at all. Now that you’re in this position, however, you were ready to risk it all, obviously Felix was.

By now, the video and audio have stopped, but you’re still in each other’s arms, lips still moving against one another. Eventually you run out of air and pull apart from him, giggling. You examine his face and watch as a water droplet from his hair drops down to his eyelashes. You think to yourself, “Gosh, he’s so gorgeous.’ Another thought comes to your mind, and you can’t help, but let it escape your mouth.

“Is this how most Tiktoks end? If so, I think we should film more Tiktoks together.” The pair of you laugh at your remark.

“No, but if you want it to, ours can.”

“I think I’d like that.”

“Do you guys need anything-oh, uh, never mind, I see that you two are a bit busy.” Felix’s mother quickly leaves the two of you before you guys can even separate from each other.

“Well, dinner is definitely going to be awkward tonight.”

“I just know that my house is about to get a call from your mom.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I think this video is going to blow up.” You give him a blank look before you put your hands on his shoulders and push him into the water.

You hate to admit it, but Felix was right. He posted the Tiktok and it got a lot of views. It got so many views that you even downloaded the app to read the comments. The boys wouldn’t shut up about it for days, but it doesn’t matter to you, because of Tiktok you now have a boyfriend and you have a new favorite song.

A/N: Wouldn’t filming tiktoks with Felix be so fun? Feel free to let me know what you guys thought of this, and if you were in the areas affected by hurricane Laura, I hope that you are safe! ❤️

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what-kinda-fuckery · 4 years

Text

Hey so, I was one of the star struck falsettos stans that spent the forty dollars for the webinar, and I took notes (like a weirdo). So I decided I would share my funny moments and updates from the cast here!

- Host: Everyone should be keeping their audio off.

Christian: Oh alright!

Host: nO Christian not you

- Christians in Manhattan and his hair is back and he’s wearing a Superman t-shirt.

- Brandon is with his parents in NJ

- Stephanie and Brandon still love each other

- Brandon: Meat should be cooked just right

- Betsy: Stephanie are you in maple wood?

Stephanie: Well thank you for telling everyone where I am (she’s in NJ)

- Stephanie: Are you fucking kidding meee!!!

- Tracie is in LA, she looks like she’s in Costa Rica and I love her dog.

- Anthony’s VOICE IS LOW EVERYONES FREAKING OUT

they’re all talking about Anthony’s clear skin

- Andy Randy is in LA with a fresh haircut his boyfriend did it and he’s watching too much TV

Andrew: I’m watching this is America

Stephanie: SO GOOD

Andrew: SO GOOD

- Everyone’s having hard days

- Christian is acting out tracies dog’s pathetic bark and everyone’s like WHAT are you doing bc it looks like he’s about to throw up

- BETSY IS A WEEK AWAY FROM HAVINGA WHOLE CHILD

Betsy: What else do you do during a pandemic? Have a baby!

Andrew: Can I toss out another baby name? Celery.

Literally everyone: Goodnight Andrew goodbye!

- Christian is living with a girl (?) and playing board games instead of watching television

HE COOKS NOW EVERYONES PROUD OF HIM

Christian: yesterday I made pork filet en croute

Stephanie: I MADE PORK WITH SAGE AND APPLES ON WEDNESDAY

Stephanie: In mean girls they wear pink on wednesdays. In falsettos they make pork.

- I can’t get over Anthony’s voice

Again everyone returning to his literally perfect skin

- Stephanie: When watching four jews in a room in the beginning who’s in China?? I know the answer I just want to hear someone say it.

Andrew, with a thick accent: It was Bryna, in China, with a torn miniscus

- Christian: Did anything interesting make it on to the telecast between me and you? Andrew? Actually I dont remember I need to do my research.

Andrew: There’s been some strange comments about Christian and I- (AT THIS POINT IM WHEEZING)

HE MENTIONED THE TONY BONY

HE SAID IT WASNT A THING

HE DIDNT HAVE ONE

Andrew: No that’s not a thing that happened

Brandon: Andrew i want you to know that it’s okay if it was. It’s a safe space just the seven of us. (Lol)

- Bill Finn would take two steps into the room: “WROONG”

Stephanie: he wanted me to sing the end of I’m breaking down up the octave and I said #notmytrina

Brandon: #NOTMYTRINA

- Tracie what did you do during act 1

Tracie: Betsy and I sat in that dressing room for like an hour and a half

Andrew: You SANG the WHOLE SHOW TRACIE

- Betsy watched parts of the first act to feel like she was there

- Betsy sprained both her ankles at one point during the run and was a trooper anyways

Brandon reenacting Betsy limping during look look look look

Everyone dies laughing

Christians LAUGH makes me SO HAPPY

- Betsys screen is frozen like this: 🤨

Andrew: What if she went into labor??? (This is a common thread throughout the zoom)

- Anthony: I’m getting a lot of glitching so Stephanie is just like “HUH UH UH UH”

- Betsy comes back and everyone is like

YOU GUYS ITS COMING!!!

- They bought Andrew an ice cream for his birthday from the vending machine at rehearsal

- Andrew: The Hawaii crop top

Betsy: I would give anything to have that

- Tracie: it was very hard. Very precise bringing the blocks together

Brandon: Trying to be like oh my god we’re going to a funeral

Andrew: MY DEATH IT WAS MY DEATH

- fan question: What did the blocks weigh?

Stephanie: They were like thick yoga blocks. Not heavy but awkward shaped

Andrew: Significantly heavier when Anthony sat on them

Anthony: I just realized how much I got thrown around

Stephanie: Anthony were you proud of yourself? #proudofyou

Anthony: The one moment I was cringing was father and son

Christian: HERE WE GO *SLAPS TABLE*

Betsy: Anthony’s like BLAH BLAH BLAH blah my line BLAH BLAH BLAH my line BLAH BLAH

Christian: I LEAVE THE PAUSE IF YOU CANT GET IN THATS ON YOU

Anthony: I was blinking in that number like constantly

Christian: THE WHOLE THING LIKE A SALAMANDER

Oh Anthony.

- Andrew: I HAVE A STORY ABOUT CHRISTIAN BORLE. Tech for what more can i say. He was laying on me. We were shirtless in underpants under the blankets.

Christian: SLOWER

Andrew: he leaned over; He sniffed his armpit and said “I hope you like France”

EVERYONE DIES LAUGHING INCLUDING ME

Christian: i haven’t worn deodorant in 10 years true story

- Christian: i seem to remember holding our pillows and blankets pretending like we were partying on fyre island and Andrew said:

Andrew: WHATS YOUR NAME???

Christian: No no it was something like:

WHAT HOUSE ARE YOU STAYING IN??

Andrew: WHAT HOUSE ARE YOU STAYING IN???

Betsy: James lupine I feel like we’re ruining this show

- Andrew: The shenanigans were real but so was the sadness

Stephanie: We’re real and we’re funny what you gonna do

- Andrew talking about how hard the show was to do: Finding some liberty, It’s a hard world to live in all the time. It was a hard time especially for Christian. I would sometimes go home and cry for no reason

Brandon: Building up emotion with nowhere to put it

Betsy: then Lesbians come in and provide all the levity

Stephanie: Although Dr. Charlotte brings in horrible news

Tracie: Everything’s beautiful at what more can i say and I’m like not so fast

- Tracie always had a funny thing to say

- Who broke character the most on stage?

Anthony Stephanie and Christian

Anthony: it was when I said “I don’t want a bar mitzvah” and I spit in your face a lot and you went like *puts arms up* and someone at stage door was like very condescending like it’s not professional

Christian: Oh my bad we’re people sorry

- Stephanie wrote a line in the show “YOU HAVE PAINTINGS OF DICKS”

- James wanted her to cut off her finger during I’m breaking down

And turn around with a bandaged bloody finger

- Betsy’s nose bleeding during something bad is happening

And Tracie was like something BAD IS HAPPENING

Tracie: Christians throwing up right now

Betsy: Bloody Kleenex up the nose THE SHOW MUST GO ON

- Fan question: Stephanie how do you belt with a banana in your mouth

Christian: Practice practice practice

Stephanie: just shove it in your cheek. But Really that wasn’t supposed to happen

Anthony’s nickname in the rehearsal room was little bananas because he had to gather up all the pieces of stuff after Stephanie shoved the table over with her rear. Sometimes he didn’t have enough time to put it somewhere so he would just put the pieces of banana in his mouth and that’s where it came from

That’s why

- Andrew: Stephanie your glasses are very chic

Stephanie: Oh my gosh thank you *shocked*

- Betsy: Bill was like I’d rather DIE than change lyrics for the pbs special

FLaT aS a LaKe

- Cue everyone accidentally talking over each other and saying what at each other for 30 seconds

Christian: what? what? what?

Who is it?

What’s going on?

- If you could play anyone else in the show who would it be

Anthony said Mendel

Tracie said Mendel

Brandon said Trina

Andrew said marvin

Betsy said whizzer

Stephanie said Mendel

And I honestly couldn’t hear if Christian said anything whoops

- Brandon: If someone could at some point explain to me the Mendel eats dirt meme? People have been Asking me if Mendel eats dirt? I don’t think it’s about Trina Trina is not the dirt. I was overwhelmed. Can someone in the Q&A explain this? *A few seconds later* oh It was from a meme generator?

Christian: Greaat.

Brandon: It’s a fan fiction about Mendel eating dirt and getting aroused by it

Everyone: WHAT

- They still get fan art

Someone recreated the whole soundtrack 8bit and also with KAZOOS

- Brandon: CONGRATS CHRISTIAN ON LULOS WIN FOR LITTLE SHOP. If you haven’t seen Christian in little shop it’s revelatory I’m not just blowing smoke up your ass I have not laughed that hard in a while at the theatre

- Christian talking about little shop

Christian has a 12 inch Batman toy in his dressing room and he misses it

- Ticket prices were getting out of control before corona everyones hoping this will make a difference

Brandon and everyone think it should get more accessible

- Brandon: Hear hear I need a refill

- Stephanie: Your hair looks incredible Brandon (it did)

Christian: She’s been waiting to talk about it for 53 minutes

- Andrew: Well Betsy what I’m wondering is have you crowned yet??

Proceed everyone dying

Brandon, taking a picture of the screen: This moment will go down in history as When Betsy was asked if she was crowning

- Everyone mimicking zoom freezing by starting a sentence and freezing halfway through

- Christian: What new Steven sondheim musical are you excited about Anthony *devilish grin*

Anthony having no idea what Christian is talking about

Christian: Come on Anthony you know the answer. Ugh. The minds of the young. You’re smoking pot now aren’t you??

Christian: We have a lot of fun

- Andrew: I’m trying to get people to pay attention to me

- Christians pretending to be frozen

Cue a lot of yelling: Stephanie BRANDON STEPHANIE

NO CHRISTIAN

Everyone accusing each other of being frozen

NO YOURE FROZEN

- Andrew: Let’s all act like we’re frozen

Steph: I see Andrew acting like hes frozen

Betsy: Watching you do that is killing me

- Listening to the cast recording for the first time together

Stephanie: Why was I the a-hole that couldn’t be there???

Christian: That’s a question only you can answer

- Betsys husband came in everyones like BETSY LOOK OUT

Christian: that scared the shit out of me

- What is marvins last name and what was his line of work

Christian: we definitely said it at some point right? (They didnt) but he was in advertising. What was the last name? Gardens? O’Malley?

- Andrew: Betsys gone oh no

Betsy: I’m right here!!!

Andrew: She’s giving birth (again)

Stephanie: Betsy Wolfe is a ceiling

- Brandon: Welcome back Anthony. You’re here now.

Anthony singing merrily we roll along over Betsy trying to tell a story

Christian: STOP SMOKING POT IN YOUR BEDROOM ANTHONY

- Betsy: Steve (Steven Sondheim) comes to the door I call him steve

Into the woods is the reason Betsy is in theatre

- Betsy: Andrew was nervous singing at the tonys for Book of Mormon and he got dry mouth he sang like 😬I BELIEVE and he licked his lips so much during the song.

Brandon: Did you have a boner then too?

Andrew: GUYS DONT BE DICKS

Stephanie: It’ll be like dry mouth, boner

Andrew: BETSY YOU FUCKIN BITCH ITS ACTUALLY NOT THAT BAD

Stephanie: Bets maybe we should wrap it up

- Brandon sings MARRIAGE PROPOSAL

EVERYONE TELLING HIM TO STOP SINGING I took a video it was beautiful might post that later

- “Tracie Thomas from Lent!”

Tracie having stage fright

Tracie: Billy porter said “oh child we all forget the words” and walked away

- Anthony said WHO SHAT THE BED in four jews once

Anthony: That’s my contribution. Steph got her line, I got who shat the bed

- Steph: We lost andrew oh no

Christian: Um, we lost andrew ten minutes ago. Yeah when Brandon started singing

- Then Betsy sang a song by Bill Finn beautiful

- Steph: Wear your masks and eat pork on wednesdays

That was it!! I hope you enjoyed and people who were there if I got anything wrong that’s my human error it was hard to note everything I wanted to. Smooches! Byee

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reddus-sideblog · 3 years

Text

Pathfinder Update

WOOPS ALMOST FORGOT TO PUT A BREAK SORRY ABOUT YOUR DASHBOARD

So, the Ninth Life, Captain Lora’a’s ship, makes good heading towards the once Velakan and now Pragian prison isle. On the eve before the ship arrived Tisiphone produced the Twin Orb, and took Valka through to Bostadt, going with him to “watch over him” while he brewed potions of See Invisible (our trust of Ivan was running ever lower). Once TIsiphone was satisfied that Valka was occupied with making the potions she left to go “take care of some things”.

Valka said for her to say “hi” to Vera for her, and Tisiphone pretended, quite poorly, to say that she would if she did in fact happen to go by the Silver Stag. Tisiphone came back to the Ninth Life the next morning, seemingly a lot calmer and with her carefully washed and braided. It was rare to see her hair so carefully maintained, instead of the usual fluffy mess that it is usually seen in. Tisi had forgotten to buy any further supplies, though. Valka did, however, make the See Invisible potions.

Once the Ninth Life came into view of the prison isle the Stormbreaker let up the wind and cast his gaze at the isle. It noted how the island seemed to have an enchantment about it that caused a permanent effect of rainy weather on the isle, and the construct, seemingly for it’s own amusement, decided that the weather’d be changed to a sunny day, overpowering the local enchantment. And so on what was now a nice sunny day, Ivan and his companions, and Kii, Valka, Nik, and Tisi took to the rocky shore of the island in dinghys.

The island was a miserable rock, sticking up out of the ocean to the West of the Southerlands/Velakor, with a trio of towers sticking out of its heights, and its structure burrowing into the rocky form of the island. Each tower was armed with a ballista, and to the rear (or rather opposite side of the island from The Ninth Life) was a nice, if modest, manor.

Once we made it to the shore Ivan went ahead and talked with the warden commander and seemed to have legitimate papers and explained the situation at hand. The commander went about readying the island’s defences and Valka whined loudly, convincing the warden commander to let us relax in his place of residence before the fighting began. On our way there we saw the kitchen of the complex (Valka hopefully asked if they could get some food, but it had already been lunch time a bit ago and they weren’t willing to compromise).

So the group ended up at the commander’s place of residence, and were allowed to stay there for the time being, until all the screaming and shouting and terrible, terrible battle began. In the main room was a queer game board, set up to be used with miniature soldiers on a mock field of battle. Tisiphone and Valka could not figure out how to play that so they used the miniature soldiers to play chess, which didn’t go particularly well as there was no grid and they kept arguing over which pieces were where/how they could move. Eventually Tisi went off to check on Kii, who had flitted off into the warden’s study, and found her looking horrified at a set of papers that referred to the isle’s prisoners as by monikers, namely Tile-Liker (a halfling jailed for sex-crimes), Merchant (an elf arrested for evading Pragian taxation [Tisiphone said to leave them, as she had little love for elves]), and, lastly, The Heir. The Heir was a human, seemingly of noble status, and being subject to some of the most terrible treatment imaginable, he was kept bound around the clock, and fed little more than table scraps left over from the previous night’s prepared food. Alongside this he was quite regularly to be beaten and lashed, otherwise being left shackled beneath the kitchen of the isle, in the very midst of the fortress. Kii was tearing up as she realized that this very well may be her brother, and realized the treatment he must have been suffering since the Pragian takeover, this whole while. Valka sent out his Clockwork Spy “Edward” off to find that prisoner and inspect him, to see if we could determine if he was our man. The clockwork spider scuttled off to go investigate.

Meanwhile Valka was raiding the warden commander’s larder, and came to notice a rack of wine bottles, up on a higher shelf. He beckoned over Nik, bidding him to help reach the out-of-reach alcohol. Tisiphone chided him, pointedly saying to keep it for a “libation or celebration” once this was over with. Nik stowed away the booze, and Valka pouted. Edward appeared once more, delivering an audio recording of this “The Heir” prisoner. Within moments of the recording playing Kii knew that it was in fact her brother Roland de Velakor. She was beyond elated. After a bit we reckoned that it was about the time that Jodd the Butcher would be arriving, by the sounds of the commotion outside. Everyone drank their potions of Resist Energy (Electricity) and See Invisible. After doing so Kii froze. There was someone in the room with us. One of Ivan’s men.

Kii lept past Valka (terrifying the poor boy) and electrocuted the spy with a Shocking Grasp before he could realize what precisely was happening. This done, the group headed out, with Valka and Abe splitting off and entering the kitchen, above Roland’s holding chamber to rescue the heir. Kii looked about the room and down past the grate with Valka for a moment, before heading back to join the group. As she reached the front courtyard/beach a HUGE crack of thunder and a blue blur sped by, and one of the island’s towers erupted in an electrical explosion, throwing masonry into the sea, lighting men ablaze, and quite destroying the tower. Jodd and his dragon flew about, landing near where our boats had been landed. He leapt down from the saddle upon the dragon and landed and began roaring furiously at the assembled guards, about a dozen in total “I am Jodd the Butcher, Dragon Rider, and I have come to take my brother, Roland! If you dare stand before me I will crush you and throw your bodies to the sea!”

Having seen which way the winds were blowing, and realizing their cause was one and the same, Tisiphone, Nik, and Kii opened up on the backline of the guards, Kii herself stabbing and subsequently Force Punching the warden commander off into the sea at such a furious velocity that his body ripped apart with the force of the blow. Given the treatment of Roland, he probably deserved it. Tisiphone gave Jodd a friendly wave after unloading her repeater’s clip into a man. In the kitchen, Valka melted the locks off of the floor hatch separating Roland’s cell from the kitchen, before unspooling some rope, tying it off, and then shimmying down into the cell. He fed Roland a Potion of Critical WOunds which made him quite suddenly more hale and hardy, though it did nothing to replace the lost left arm and right leg (the arm lost at the lower forearm and the leg not too below the knee).

Jodd’s dragon flew to another tower and devoured the men manning the ballista, and Jodd himself charged the guards frontline and pulped a man’s head with his maul. Flushed Jodd tried to say two things at once, instead saying “Fancy meeting you here again!”, and we engaged in what ended up being a rather swift melee against the remaining guards. Beneath, in Roland’s cell, Valka hid, as someone came to the cell door, looked through the vision slot, then closed it and went off. Valka slowly, but surely, undid Roland’s bonds, before picking him up clumsily and preparing to climb up to the upper floor with him. Kii, however, was finished with the combat, and cast a Dimensional Door into the cell and grabbed Roland from Valka, and returned to the shore with him (leaving Valka to haul himself back up to the kitchen).

On the shore, amidst a spread of corpses that was attracting seabirds, beneath a burning tower, a particularly petty sibling spat began, between a powerful spellsword and a mighty dragon rider. Kii and Jodd both claimed that Roland was their brother, and seemed unwilling to settle on letting him be the brother to both of them. Valka and Tisiphone were a bit taken aback, realizing both how terribly their own bickering with their respective siblings must have come across. Eventually, through the intervention of Roland, Tisiphone, and Valka, we came to know that both Kii and Jodd were half-brother to Roland, through their father (the old man got around, seemingly Jodd was born of an adulterous tryst between the king and a Pragian noblewoman, Roland was, of course, the only surviving rightful heir born of royal marriage, and Kii is of course half air spirit).

Now agreed that Roland was brother to both of them, Kii and Jodd were delighted to be in his presence. Kii had made herself known to Roland only as an elusive, young fae thing, existing largely in secret after being delivered unto the kingdom’s door step by her elemental parent. Jodd, meanwhile, seemed to have known about Roland for sometime, but had held his tongue on it for some time. Once he heard of the regicide of the Velakor family, but then heard that Roland may yet still survive, Jodd had taken it upon himself to become someone with the power to do something about it, pouring himself into becoming a dragon rider of Pragia (he was born to Pragian nobility of course) and using that to find and take Roland back, or die trying. Jodd certainly is an impressive physical specimen, but he truly is only 19, and his attitude often shows it. And Kii...she really, really is a little sister (paradoxically she is actually the oldest by age, but we’ve decided to start stating the difference between “age” and “maturity” with fantasy races, as it can all be a bit relative at times). Roland is a 23 year old man, and still young, but his time has certainly aged him a bit prematurely, and left it’s scars on him, physical and mental.

So, the Nik, Tisiphone, and Valka (of course with Tisi and Nik rowing) took the landing boat back to the ship and took the second landing boat with them, as they’d not seen hide nor hair of Ivan and his men aside from the one spy, and were not going to wait for them at all.

Meanwhile, Ivan waited to spring his plot, knowing that the idiots would blunder down to the island’s lower depths to free Roland. The sounds of battle had died down, so soon enough they would be coming down, by whatever pretenses, to free The Heir, and then he would have rid the world of the last remnants of the de Velakor line. Ivan waited to spring his trap patiently, as slowly it began raining. Ivan and his men would be left on that island until the next supply ship would come by, which may take a up to a year, maybe two.

On the deck of the Ninth Life Captain Valka commanded his servant, the Stormbreaker, to get them away from the wretched island, and so they did. The wine stolen from the warden’s manor was spread about, in celebration of reunited siblings (really, seeing the de Velakors together was heartwarming) and while a drunken Valka came to play against a mildly buzzed Roland (who beat the catfolk handily), Kii approached Tisiphone and asked her about the Southerlander’s clockwork arm, and how she’d come to get it. Tisi took a long draught of the wine and let it come into her system before telling Kii the story, after which Kii asked if she could fashion clockwork limbs for her crippled brother, which of course she agreed to (seeing the young man hobble about was a terrible sight).

Nik, meanwhile, feels a fair bit worse (despite making friends with Jodd’s dragon, Bluon [look he named it when he was like, 10, give him a break]), for his own lack of family. He watches the sea pass by a lot on The Ninth Life’s journey towards the Western Kingdoms (our next destination after a pit stop or two), feeling very lonely as a tiefling among the humans and others aboard the ship.

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doomedandstoned · 3 years

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Spelljammer Reveal Trippy New Vid, Talk ‘Abyssal Trip’

~Doomed & Stoned Debuts~

Interview by Billy Goate

Cover Art by Aaron Cahill

Our week of big interviews continues as we meet up with the ethereal doom outfit from Stockholm SPELLJAMMER and premiere a new music video, from their just released second LP, dropped only weeks ago on RidingEasy Records and now the number one album on the Doom Charts.

'Abyssal Trip' (2021) is an enthralling listen from edge to center, with lavish textures, deep thematic content, and unforgettably emotive atmosphere that will stick with you for life. Enjoy it as you read the revealing conversation with Niklas Olsson (guitar, vox) and Robert Sörling (guitar) that follows as we unpack their steller new spin, talk nerdy gear shit, and contemplate humanity's fate.

And now, Doomed & Stoned is pleased to bring you the world premiere of the brand new video for that epic third track, "Among The Holy."

Give ear...

Spelljammer - Among The Holy (music video)

You guys have been a band now for damn near 15 years, maybe longer. Most bands don't make it past two years! What is the "key" to the band staying together for so long and continuing to find inspiration for creating new music?

Rob: I don’t think it’s been 15 years just yet but we are getting there, haha. None the less - that’s a really interesting question! Nik and I started the band much because we share the same taste in music, film and, well, art in general. I think that's the core keeping it all together. Also, there have been a few constellations of band members over the years, all with their own dynamic. I think these kinds of changes, and the new directions of the music because of that, is part of the inspiration. Maybe another reason is that we all live in different cities and because of that sometimes a lot of time passes between rehearsals, writing sessions and such, making us always craving for new Spelljammer jams and songs.

Nik: The craving yes. And another reason I think is the fact that we’ve never really been in a rush to get anywhere. Anything Spelljammer, the music included, takes time. If we had been set on making it, this thing probably would have fallen apart a long time ago.

Abyssal Trip by Spelljammer

How did the theme for Abyssal Trip originate?

Nik: I have always been more drawn to the feelings or emotions you get from a riff or piece of music than to any theme of a lyric. But I would say that any themes came in at the lyrics state, which is at the end of the process. But the themes aren’t that specific to any of the albums. I think I cast a pretty wide net in the beginning and stuck to it. For the next album perhaps we will venture more into unchartered waters. We’ll see.

What fascinates you about the Great Abyss of the ocean?

Nik: I totally get that the word abyss conjures up images of ocean trenches and, yes, the ocean is a fascinating and to a large extent undiscovered place. However, when I wrote that I wasn’t necessarily thinking of the ocean but more the abyss of our own minds. But I think it’s a word that evokes many things, like despair and doom, and it is of course totally open to interpretation.

Is mankind doomed or do we have time to correct our course?

Nik: I’m not as pessimistic of a person as the lyrics may suggest. I think we will be here on earth for a long time. Mankind is clever (perhaps too clever for her own good) even if there are a lot of people hell-bent on trying to screw up everything for everybody else.

Rob: Yes, and considering how ignorant and careless (some) people are acting during this pandemic, at least over here, makes you wonder if there’s any hope at all.

Nik: People are the worst. Ultimately, though, none of it matters because we’re all doomed.

Have you guys seen any good movies/documentaries or read any good books lately that inspired you or otherwise challenged your thinking about life, the present, or the future?

Rob: I can’t say that I’ve seen or read anything recently that challenged me significantly, I guess I’m getting too old to be that overwhelmed haha. The film A Ghost Story though was kind of cool though because it was different, slow and weird (in a good way), and for me it’s always inspiring to read/see/hear something that makes you think, "Man, I wish I had come up with that idea”.

Nik: Absolutely! Punch Drunk Love, Moon, and Office Space are definitely movies like that. I have watched so many movies and series through this pandemic and I can’t remember any of them right now. But I did just notice that there is a season 3 of Loudermilk on HBO! If you haven’t already, see it! I’m currently reading "Homeward Bound, The Life of Paul Simon” by Peter Ames Carlin. It’s a good read about one of my favorite musicians.

For recording this album, what kind of gear did you use and what production/engineering considerations did you have to take into account?

Rob: Since we did a remote recording in the countryside we had to use whatever stuff that we could fit into a couple of cars. I have a couple of old audio interfaces that I linked for a total of 16 channels. I also have a small collection of mics (nothing fancy) and we used them all and the rest was borrowed. We set up the drums in the living room and put the guitar and bass rigs as far away as we could (the adjacent rooms) to avoid bleed and just focused on getting the rhythm tracks done. The goal was to get us all in the same room and to catch the vibe from a relaxed rehearsal kind of situation. The bass rig used was a Orange Terror Bass and an Ampeg SVT 810 and the guitar was tracked through a Reval Mark I and/or Orange TH-100 and a Orange PPC 412. Of course there’s always some unforeseen problem lurking and this time it was the electricity in the old country house.

Nik: I don’t use many effects, just a fuzz. For this one I used a Supercollider from Earthbound Audio. It is exactly what the name suggests. That’s all you need really.

The album cover is amazing! It reminds me, in some strange way, of the creature in the old B-movie Robot Monster (1953). What's the story behind the artwork?

Nik: It definitely has a B-movie vibe that I really like. I’m afraid I can’t really tell you much about it other than the artist name is Aaron Cahill and you can find his stuff on Instagram under the name nghbrs.

I filmed your first US appearance at Psycho Las Vegas in 2016. Fans want to know: do you have ambitions of returning to North America once the world sorts out this pandemic?

Rob: Yes, that’s our first and only US appearance so far and we wouldn’t mind at all returning to Vegas or any other part of the US. For now it’s really hard making any plans at all. In fact, you would think that this kind of isolation would enhance creativity, and maybe for some it does, but for us it’s actually been the most unproductive period so far for Spelljammer. So I’m hoping that by the time this thing blows over we get the inspiration back both for writing/recording new music, and in time hopefully revisiting the US!

Nik: I agree, playing at Psycho Las Vegas was a blast. I hope we get another opportunity to come back some day.

Spelljammer at Psycho Las Vegas/a>

Some Buzz

“The vastness of everything is something that I think about a lot,” says Spelljammer bassist/vocalist Niklas Olsson. And it certainly shows in both the expansive, sludgy sounds and contemplative lyrics of the Stockholm, Sweden based trio. Following a 5-year break between their previous album, Ancient of Days — perhaps fittingly spent pondering said vastness — Spelljammer is back with an album that perfectly bridges the band’s earlier desert rock leanings and their later massive, slow-burning riffs.

'Abyssal Trip' (note: carefully reread that album title) takes its moniker from the perpetually dark, cold, oxygen-free zone at the bottom of the ocean. The 6-song, 44-minute album fittingly embodies that bleak realm with rumbling, oozing guitars intercut with dramatic melodic interludes. The songs take their time to unfurl, making them even more hypnotic. Likewise, the lyrics take a poetic approach to establishing the sonic scenery.

“The lyrical themes we address, like the ultimate doom of man, and the search and longing for new and better worlds, are still there,” Olsson says. “The concept of something undiscovered out there in vast emptiness is pretty much always present.”

The recording process for Abyssal Trip differs from previous releases in that the band — guitarist Robert Sörling, drummer Jonatan Rimsbo and Olsson — opted to capture the performances while holed up in the mental bathysphere of a house in the countryside near Stockholm. “The songs benefitted from the relaxed environment of being away from everything,” Olsson explains. Indeed, the album sounds confident and meticulously arranged, afforded by the band’s isolation. Sörling mixed the album and it was mastered by Monolord drummer Esben Willems at Berserk Audio.

Album opener “Bellwether” begins dramatically with a very slow, nearly minute-long fade in of rumbling distortion setting the stage for heavily distorted bass and guitar plucking out the lugubrious riff for another minute and a half before the drums begin, and likewise equally as long before vocals gurgle to the surface. “Lake” abruptly shifts gears, opening with an unusually fast gallop before rupturing into thundering doom that soon drops into a clean-tone Middle Eastern melodic breakdown.

The title track serves as the album centerpiece, opening with ominous film dialogue about blood sacrifice that launches into pummeling, detuned guitars rumbling over gut-punching drums and howling vocals hearkening to the proto-sludge of Pink Floyd’s “The Nile Song.” The dynamic relents briefly for a slow building clean guitar melody before all instruments lock into a jerking riff topped off by a trilling Iommi style lead. Throughout, Abyssal Trip is, just like its title suggests, an epic tour through desolate zones which yields much to discover.

Follow The Band

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#D&S Debuts #D&S Interviews #Spelljammer #Stockholm #Sweden #doom #metal #doom metal #music video #HeavyBest2021 #RidingEasy Records #Doomed and Stoned

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snow-lavender · 4 years

Text

The Last Day of Sanity

AKA, “Ahh, there’s the bitch”

Word Count: 10959

Yeah so this one maybe got away from me in terms of length. But I’m also really proud of it, and proud of getting it done. Thank you for reading if you do!

Warnings: suicidal impulses, discussion of suicide, apparent (but not actual) suicide, mild blood and gore, hospitals, talks of institutionalization, ableism and derogatory language toward those with psychosis and similar conditions, violence (though not very described, mostly implied), and apparent character death. (It's Say Goodbye, so, y'know. Fun times.)

AO3 Link Here

Seán was staring at his ceiling. That wasn’t exactly rare these days.

His head was pounding, just like it had been for the last week. His hands were shaking. He couldn’t get warm. He couldn’t focus. Sometimes, when it was especially bad, he could barely string together a sentence.

Simply put, he was a wreck.

Something flickered at the edge of his vision. When he looked, there was Robin, covered in blood and stab wounds. He didn’t move, just stood by the closet, staring at him.

His breath hitched for a moment, but he forced it back under control. Pushing up to sit, he tried to calm down. “One, two, three, four.” he muttered as he inhaled. He repeated this as he held, exhaled, held.

One, two, three, four.

When he opened his eyes, Robin was still there, a few feet closer. He closed his eyes and tried again.

One, two, three, four.

It’s not real.

One, two, three, four.

It’s not.

He looked again. Robin was looming over him now. “Fuck it,” he muttered, pulling out his phone and snapping a picture of Robin's face.

To: I’m a Cat Man: hey s there anythibg there

A second later, he got a reply.

From: I’m a Cat Man: Nope, you’re all good.

To: I’m a Cat Man: Thx

Sure enough, when he looked back up, he was alone again. Laying back down, he spoke aloud. “Really, man? I know you can only do one of these a day. Why blow it this early in the morning?”

As expected, Scáth didn’t reply.

Seán sighed and closed his eyes again. This whole thing wasn’t exactly uncommon. Something about Halloween made it stronger, and brought out its more sadistic streak. He was used to that; he’d been dealing with it for twenty-some years. But this year was worse than it had ever been. Normally, it was just shadows at the edge of his vision, hearing things that weren’t there, maybe three or four nightmares about his family getting horrifically murdered. This was the first year Scáth had been able to create full-blown hallucinations.

Fucking family curse.

His stomach growled. Seán groaned, but pushed himself out of bed. If he really focused, he might be able to put up a front long enough to make some coffee and cereal. And then go back to bed and nap until he needed to record.

At least this year, he had some help. Marvin had seen him collapse last week, when he’d had his first hallucination. After hours of non-stop prodding, he’d finally weaseled out the truth. That made exactly one person on the planet that knew he was still dealing with this shit.

Back when he was a kid, he’d told his family about the voices and the shadows. The next few years had been frantic, trying to find some sort of “cure”. He’d eventually decided to stop being such a stressor and just fake being better.

After that, he managed to strike up a sort of symbiosis with Scáth. They would talk occasionally. He tried to indulge it every now and then; it must be boring being stuck in the head of some depressed asshole, after all. And in response, Scáth had been a bit more lenient in recent years. He’d thought maybe they were finally sort-of getting along.

Apparently, that wasn’t the case.

Jackie looked up from his textbook. “Oh hey, you’re finally up! Took you long enough.”

“Mhm.” Seán just walked over to the counter and put on a pot of coffee. He opened up the cupboard. Did he have enough energy to make oatmeal?

Jackie looked at him curiously. “Are you okay? You look pretty out of it.”

“Hmm?” Seán looked up. “What’d you say?”

Jackie stood up from the table and walked over to him. “Seriously, dude. What's up? You look like shit.”

“Feel like shit.” he replied, rubbing at his face. “I must’ve caught a bug or something. I’m dealing with it.”

“How’d you catch anything? You never leave the house!” Jackie said, smirking.

Seán shoved him playfully. “Alright, alright.” He pulled back. “Really, Jackie, I’m okay. I’ll take some Tylenol or something. Don’t worry about it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” No. This was only going to get worse. But he didn’t want to bother the others with it. He’d dealt before; he could deal now.

Jackie still looked a little skeptical. “Okay, I guess. Yell if you need anything?”

“Yeah, of course. I’m gonna go work, see ya.”

Seán walked out of the kitchen, coffee in hand, and nearly collapsed against the wall. Fuck. He needed a nap before he recorded, but none of the stuff was done up for today yet. He groaned into his mug and started the trek back upstairs. 20 minutes. He could rush out a thumbnail in 20 minutes and then he could sleep. Maybe.

Belatedly, he realized he never actually ate anything. Oh well. The day was already started, and he was not walking back down those stairs again.

Only four more weeks left of the month.

Fuck his life.

>=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=<

“I’m gonna stay on my fucking bongos! Yeah!” Seán smiled, leaning back. “That should be all good, Robin, but tell me if the audio levels need tweaking.” With that, he leaned forward and turned off the camera. The game was much better than the last two, he had to give it that. Still not as good as the first, though. He clicked upload, putting the footage in his dropbox.

The cockroaches swarming his arm chittered. He looked down at them and sighed. “You done?” he asked, brushing them off. He ground a few under his feet for good measure, then got up and headed to the kitchen.

Marvin and Henrik were there already, testing another one of Hen’s hypotheses. Something about manipulating objects and line of sight, he wasn’t sure on the details. Seán ducked under the floating twigs and grabbed some yogurt. He frowned when he heard a thump behind him. Turning around, he asked, “You guys okay-”

Both men were on the floor. Marvin was gurgling, his throat slit. Henrik was motionless, a bleeding hole in his forehead. A man with a knife stood over them, face shadowed.

Seán dropped his bowl with a clatter. He backed up against the wall. “No, no, no,” he panted. “What did you- Who are you?”

The man turned to him, head cocking in curiosity. Then he took a step forward.

“Get away from me!” Seán shrieked, grabbing a steak knife off the counter and holding it out in front of himself. “Don’t come any closer!”

The man didn’t listen. He strode forward, reaching toward Seán. Seán screamed as the man grabbed him. “No, please!”

“Seán!”

He lowered his hands, and suddenly Henrik was knelt in front of him. “Seán, look at me, try to breathe.” Henrik spoke slowly, reassuringly.

“What...Schneep?” Seán glanced back to the center of the room. “But you were...where did…”

“Look at me.” Henrik said. “Just focus here.” He set a hand on Seán’s forehead. “You feel warm. You did not actually recover from that virus, did you?”

“...No.”

“I see.” Henrik stood up. “I will run out to the pharmacy. Marvin, watch Seán.” He stalked out of the kitchen, muttering to himself.

Marvin slowly sat down next to Seán, who had buried his face in his hands. He pulled off his mask and ran a hand through his hair. “Bad one?”

Seán didn’t speak for a moment, instead leaning into Marvin’s side. “Yeah…”

There was silence for a while longer. Eventually, Seán spoke up again. “That was the second one today.”

“What? I thought you said-”

“I did. It’s never been able to do that before.”

Marvin rubbed at his face. “Fuck, man. What should we do?”

“Dunno.”

Marvin bit his lip. “I know what you said before, but maybe we should find someone else. I’m kinda out of my depth here.” “Mhm...”

“Have you thought about maybe getting an exorci-”

“No!”

Seán pulled away from Marvin. “No, please, I can’t..I can’t do that again. Please don’t make me.”

Marvin reeled back, surprised. “Are you okay?”

Seán shook his head. “I don’t- we can’t. Please don’t. They hurt so much.”

“Hey, it was just an idea.” Marvin leaned back against the counter. “What d’you suggest, then?”

Seán didn’t reply. He was too focused on steadying his breathing again. “I can’t see an exorcist.” he repeated.

Marvin looked worried. “Okay, I got it, jeez.” He shuffled away from Seán a bit. “Now what?”

“I don’t know.”

>=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=<

Things only got worse from there.

The hallucinations got more frequent and more violent. Seán was trying to weather them, but he was often bedridden with nausea now, and there was no distraction in his room.

He knew Jackie and Henrik were getting suspicious. Hen had prescribed something stronger after the first week, some sort of antibiotic. Seán had just been flushing them down the toilet. He didn’t want a fucked up immune system on top of all this.

Which led to now, the four of them all sitting together in the living room. Seán couldn’t stop fidgeting, and he could see Marvin glancing at the others, concerned. He sucked in a breath, scrunched his shoulders, and spoke.

“I’m cursed.”

Jackie and Henrik both squinted at him. “Come again?” Henrik asked.

Seán closed his eyes. “My family’s got a curse and I got stuck with it and this thing is always haunting me and usually it’s fine but it gets worse in October but not this bad so this is unusual and I keep hallucinating and I feel like shit I’m sorry.” He looked back up.

Jackie looked both confused and on edge, like he usually did around new magic. Henrik, on the other hand, looked perfectly neutral. “I think I maybe misheard, Jack, you said you were cursed and haunted? This is why you have been so off lately?”

Seán nodded. “I don’t know why it’s so much worse this year. It won’t talk to me either, I’ve only seen what it shows me. It’s like it’s...I don’t know. Acting like it’s angry at me or something?”

“And this is normal for you? This talking to it and seeing it?”

“Yeah.” Seán frowned. “I feel like that’s not really the important part here though? I just wanted to let you guys know why I’m all messed up right now. Marvin and I are trying to figure it out.” He waved an arm in Marvin’s direction.

Henrik turned sharply. “You are?”

Marvin glared back. “Just cause I’m not gifted in healing doesn’t mean I can’t help.” He exhaled. “It’s a little hard to research. But I’m getting some wards and potions and stuff. That should keep it under control.”

“I see.”

Jackie broke in, “How can I help, though? I mean, obviously I’m useless with the magic stuff, but there’s gotta be something I can do, right? You’re also just sick, so I could help with food and cleaning and shit.”

“And what about a doctor?’ Henrik asked.

“Are you serious?” Marvin replied, standing up. “Your friend just told you he’s been dealing with something that would drive a lesser man insane, and you’re so focused on your pride that you get upset he didn’t come to you?”

“In case you didn’t notice, I said ‘a doctor’. Not ‘me’.” Henrik pushed himself up as well. “This has nothing to do with my pride.”

“Guys, please.” Seán said, rubbing at his eyes. “It’s a magic thing, Hen, a doctor isn’t going to help. They sure as shit didn’t help when I was a kid.”

“Well, then they were a bad doctor.” Henrik walked over and sat next to Seán. “Please Jack, let me call a taxi. It’s a Thursday, the emergency room won’t be busy.” he pleaded, resting an arm on his shoulder.

Seán leaned into it. “I’ll be okay. October’s half over anyway, this’ll be done after Halloween. I can deal with it,” he said, smiling.

Henrik looked like he wanted to say more, but Seán got up before he could. “I’m gonna try to get some sleep. Night all.”

Jackie trailed behind him. “You need help up the stairs?”

“No, I’ve got it, thanks.” Seán gave him a side-hug. “Don’t worry about me, it’s supposed to be the other way around.”

Jackie snorted. “You’re not my fuckin’ dad.”

“Ehh, dad, guardian who’s known you three months, potaeto, potahto.” Seán ruffled Jackie’s hair. “Night, doofus.”

“Night, goober.”

>=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=<

Scáth was in his fucking videos.

Seán stared in horror at his monitor. He’d noticed some sort of buzz on Tumblr earlier in the month, but today something had gotten everybody excited enough that the tag was trending. That made him work up the energy to log on; he’d been too tired for social media otherwise. He’d been greeted with an overload of gifs and art, all of some weird, glitchy demon version of himself.

In retrospect, Robin’s text about ‘extra editing’ made sense now.

“What the fuck!?”

Seán looked around his room wildly. “Scáth!” he yelled. “What the everloving shit? What have you done?”

There was no answer. He slumped back in his seat. Maybe it was lack of sleep or something, but he started crying. The channel was his safe place, his people, and now this thing was trying to worm into it. He hated it. He hated it, and he hated how terrible he felt, and he hated this stupid curse. More tears rolled down his face, faster than he could rub them away.

There was a knock at the door. “Jack?” Henrik asked. “I heard you yelling from downstairs. Is all okay?”

When he didn’t answer, Henrik opened the door and came in. Taking in Seán’s state, he gently pulled him out of the chair and into a hug on the floor. “Is okay, my friend. It will be alright.” Seán hugged him tighter, unable to stop crying.

They sat there for some time, Henrik rubbing his back and calmly reassuring him. Seán burrowed into his arms. Hen’s shirt smelled like lavender, and soon he could feel his tears soaking into it. He didn’t move though. The embrace was warm, safe and grounding, just what he needed. Henrik was good at that, physically comforting in exactly the right way,

“What happened?” Henrik eventually asked.

“Scáth is getting into my videos somehow.”

“You saw something in your videos?”

Seán nodded. “I’m so sick of this.”

Henrik pulled back. “Do you want to speak of something else? Have other things been happening?”

“I don’t know. I just feel like I’m always being watched, y’know? Then I keep seeing things out of the corner of my eye but I don’t know if they’re visions or just my imagination. And I keep losing time? Like I zone out and suddenly it’s ten minutes later.” He shuddered. “I don’t know if that’s it, like, possessing me or something.”

Henrik nodded. “Are you ever aware of that? Having a feeling like something else is controlling your body?” he continued.

Seán snorted bitterly. “God, don’t give him ideas,” he said, closing his eyes. He could still feel the tears dripping out of them, slow and sluggish.

“And do you feel like your thoughts are all out of order?”

“I mean yeah, I guess, but I think I’m just tired…” The situation clicked, and Seán stiffened. “Henrik, are you trying to fucking diagnose me? What the hell?” he snapped.

Henrik pulled away fully, looking affronted. “Jack, this is a serious situation. What you have-”

“What I have isn’t something you would have studied! Did you not believe me this entire time?”

“I...what you are experiencing feels real to you, I do not mean to trivialize that. But this...it is dangerous to write off all scientific help, Jack. A professional could help you figure out what this is.”

Seán glared at him. “I know what it is. I told you.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Is this what you’ve been wanting to talk with me about the last few days? Is that all you came up here for?”

Henrik tried to reach out again, but Seán swatted his hand away. “No, of course not! I was worried about you!”

“Yeah, cause you think I’m fucking crazy!” Seán scooted away from him. “Fuck off!”

“Seán, I-”

“Leave me alone!”

Henrik paused, but then stood up. “Alright. Please, call one of the others if you need anything.” He walked out of the room, but stopped in the doorway. “I am sorry. For overstepping.”

Seán didn’t answer, so Henrik left and closed the door behind him. For some reason, he did a one-eighty in the hallway and tried to come back in, but by then Seán had already summoned a gust of air to turn the lock. Eventually, Henrik gave up and went downstairs.

When he was sure Hen was gone, Seán pushed up and headed to the bathroom. He could feel something sticky and flaky clinging to his cheeks.

>=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=<

He pointedly ignored the book about schizophrenia on the coffee table the next morning.

>=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=<

“Hey, you in there?”

Seán groaned, pulling his pillow off his head. Marvin stood in the doorway, holding a steaming cup of...well, he hoped it was coffee, but the logical side of him knew it wasn’t.

“Dude, you can see me, what d’you mean, ‘you in there’?”

Marvin sat down across from where he was laying, putting the mug on the side table. “You never know, it could’ve been like yesterday.”

Seán pushed himself up, shakily, until he was sitting against the headboard. “Huh? What happened yesterday?”

“You went unresponsive for a while, remember?”

“No.”

Marvin bit his lip. “Oh. Well, you did. Just sat there staring for like, eight hours. None of us could get you to react to anything.”

Seán couldn’t think of a response to that beyond, “Fuck.” He gestured to the mug. “What is it this time?”

Marv leaned back. “Chamomile and Valerian, mostly. Tried to cast some charms on it, but we’ll have to see about those.”

Seán peered down into it, looking at the three lumps sitting in the draught. “And...marble?”

“Nah, just pebbles from the creek.”

“If those break apart and I get a mouthful of sand, I’m punching you.”

“Quit bitching and drink it already.” Marvin sat up. “Oh, I brought some Ibuprofen, too. It’s been six hours, right?” he asked, pulling two tablets from his shirt pocket.

“Yeah, thanks.” Seán reached over to grab them. He pulled a mouthful of liquid from the cup and shook it around the room quickly to cool it, before drinking it out of the air to swallow the pills.

“Well, at least your magic’s more under control?”

“Mhm,” Seán replied, taking a sip from the cup. “Still crazy nauseous though.”

“Well, Henrik could have something for that…” Marvin said, trailing off as Seán stiffened. He folded his arms. “You two are going to have to make up eventually.”

“Coming from you.”

Marvin scowled. “Hey, that’s different!” He fiddled with a strand of hair. “You two are close, I...look, just, he cares about you. Don’t fuck that up.”

Seán sighed. “Can we not do this right now? Please? My head’s hurting like a bitch”

“I guess.” Marvin stood up, brushing off his pants. “I’ve got to run to the store. Let me know if that one helps more than the others, yeah?”

“Will do.” Seán answered, burrowing back under his blankets.

Marvin flicked off the lights as he left, and Seán turned to block out noise with his pillow again. Before he could, however, there was a light knock on the door.

He pushed himself back up to a sitting position. “Did’ja need something else- oh. Hey, Jackie.”

The teen pushed in further at the acknowledgement. “Hey Jack.” He wavered by the side of the bed until Seán patted the spot next to him. Looking relieved, he sat down.

“What’s up?”

“I don’t know, just...how are you feeling?”

“Okay, I guess. Why?”

Jackie exhaled shakily. He fidgeted a bit in place. “I..”

Seán caught on and opened up his arms. Jackie immediately fell into them and started crying. “Last night was horrible,” he said between sobs. “I thought you were gone. I thought you were going to be a vegetable and we’d have to put you in the hospital. I thought at any moment you might just stop breathing. I never want to deal with that again.”

Seán tightened his hug. “Jackie, I’m so sorry,” he mumbled.

“You just stopped talking in the middle of a sentence and wouldn’t move. Nothing I did would get you to wake up. I tried shaking you and screaming at you and Hen tried pinching and prodding you and Marvin tried spells and nothing worked. Eventually we had to keep on doing normal stuff with you just sat there and that was even worse. It was...we couldn’t…” Jackie burrowed his face into Seán’s neck. “I was so scared,” he whispered.

Seán stared at the opposite wall. “I had no idea.”

“Huh?”

“I didn’t know, I thought I just slept through yesterday afternoon. I don’t even remember going downstairs. Marv mentioned something but-oh God.” He closed his eyes, feeling tears rolling down his cheeks. “I don’t remember.”

Jackie sobbed again. “No no no no-”

Seán didn’t reply. He just felt numb. Hallucinations, panic attacks, fainting, all of those he could deal with. They were awful, but they were over with quick enough and then he could get back to normal. But this, completely checking out, for hours at a time?

What happened to my soul during that? Where was I?

Seán was snapped back into the present when he heard Jackie hyperventilating.

“Woah, hey, Jay, look at me.” He pulled back and lifted up Jackie’s face. “You’re okay. I’m okay.”

Jackie shook off his hand. “Are you though?”

Seán’s breath hitched. Jackie rubbed at his face, shuffling back a bit. “What if this doesn’t stop after Halloween? What if you just keep getting worse and worse until…” He didn’t finish the sentence, but they both knew what he meant.

“I won’t.” Seán said firmly. “He’ll be gone after Samhain, I promise. That’s how it works.”

Jackie looked unsure, but didn’t argue.

“And I mean, failing that, we could just end it all.” Seán shrugged.

Jackie reeled back. “What?!”

“Kill myself. End it. Just stop. No more of this and I get control of the situation.” Seán leaned back with a smile. “Wouldn’t that be nice? No responsibility, no pain, no anything. Just nothingness and an empty body left over.”

“What are you talking about?”

He looked over. “Wouldn’t that be nice?” he repeated. “I bet you’d really enjoy it.”

Jackie got up off the bed. “I’m getting Henrik. Something’s wrong.”

Humming contemplatively, he got up as well. Jackie backed away from him, bristling. He turned and rummaged around in his bedside table. “It’s a shame you’re wearing a green hoodie today. We could have had a nice Deadpool scenario going on. That’s what you want, right? To be a superhero.” He pulled out the large butcher’s knife. “When you mix green and red, you just get a gross lookin’ brown.”

Jackie bolted for the door. He’d almost reached it when a gust of air slammed it shut. He tried the doorknob, but quickly pulled away. “Ow! What the fuck?” He cradled his burnt hand as the knob glowed, then began to slowly melt. Jackie turned back to Him in horror. He smiled. The teen was so scared and desperate, it was hilarious. Even funnier, though, was the sadness in his eyes. That’s what came with loss and grief, right? How silly, he wasn’t gone! He grabbed the teen’s shoulder, throwing him to the floor. He knelt over him, a knee on his chest to keep him down. “Hello!”

Jackie was crying now, breaths coming uneven and whiny. “Why, what, who are you?” he gasped.

He hummed. “Let’s see, how to do this.” He looked over at the knife in his hands. “I don’t think this can get through a skull. Chest it is!” He grinned. “You’ll like it! Empty and painless and out of my way.”

He stabbed. Jackie screamed.

He stabbed, Jackie screamed.

He stabbed, Jackie whimpered.

He stabbed. Jackie didn’t respond.

He looked up. The door was open. Someone else screamed.

Standing in the entrance were two other men, the magician and the doctor. More fun!

He stood up, allowing Henrik to run to Jackie. Marvin raised his hands, and vines sprouted around His arms, binding them together.

Henrik frantically buzzed around Jackie, attempting to stem the bleeding, calling 999, turning him on his side into recovery position. “You’re too late,” He spoke up helpfully. “He’s all cleaned out. Nice and empty and gone!”

Henrik kept trying to find a pulse, started CPR as Marvin stood by, horrified. It took a very long time, (frankly He was rather bored by the end of it) but eventually the doctor stopped. “Herr Gott nochmal...” Henrik looked up at the magician, eyes full of tears. “I couldn’t...he’s…” A sob cut him off as he buried his face in his hands. Marvin fell to his knees, expressionless.

“Are you done?” He burned through his plant-handcuff, rubbing at His wrists.

Both men turned to look at Him, furious. “What the fuck have you done?” Marvin yelled at him. The magician strode forward, eyes glowing. “You’re goddamn insane! We should have kicked you out after your first hallucination, you psycho!”

“You can’t kick me out, the apartment lease is under my name.”

“How could you-”

He slit Marvin’s throat.

The magician hit the floor with a gurgle. Henrik screamed, moving towards the door, but He glitched over on top of him. “Hi!” he said with a smile. “Believe me now?”

Blood squirted all over his pajama pants.

“Jack.”

He smiled, surveying the three corpses. No one but Him now.

“Jack!”

He sobbed. How could he have done something like this?

“Seán!”

He jolted.

Seán was sitting back on the bed, still swaddled in blankets. Jackie was shaking him, a hand on either shoulder. “Please, please answer me!” he begged.

“...Jackie?”

Jackie’s arms dropped. “Holy shit. I...fuck. You- you just started screaming, I had no clue what was going on, I thought you’d checked out again-” He breathed harshly. “You’re here, though.”

Seán stared at him. “You’re alive?” he murmured, reaching up a hand to cup Jackie’s face.

Jackie looked confused. “Yeah? I’m fine, it’s you we should be worried about.”

“You’re alive,” he repeated, pressing his other hand to the teen’s unmarred chest. “Thank fuck, I thought he...I thought I..” Another sob cut him off, and he curled in on himself.

Jackie hesitantly wrapped his arms around Seán. “What happened? Are you okay?”

Seán didn’t answer. He just kept crying, letting Jackie hug him.

>=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=<

The next morning, Seán had had enough.

He’d whipped up his recordings as quick as possible, not bothering to check for the glitches he knew were there. After eating as much yogurt and ginger ale as he could stomach (about half a cup of each), he stumbled back up to his bedroom.

Henrik had a 10 hour shift today, so he didn’t have to worry about being disturbed for a while yet. Seán half-heartedly kicked the clothes on the floor toward the hamper, then pushed Schneep’s scattered papers and notes into a pile next to the desk. Having cleared enough space, he set one of his pillows down on the floor between their beds and laid down. He’d had problems in the past, falling out of bed when he did this.

He fidgeted for a while trying to get comfortable (and calm his nerves). Hopefully, the two of them could strike up some deal, something that would make Scáth happy and make next October more bearable. He didn’t think he’d be able to come out of another month like this unscathed.

Breathing deeply, Seán closed his eyes and tried to blank out, focusing only on his thoughts. When he opened them again, he was in a black nothingness.

“Scáth, I know you’re there.”

He took a few steps forward. “Don’t ignore me, asshole. We need to talk.”

“Oh, do we now? So when you ask for something, I’m to respond right away?

Seán whipped around, furious. “What the hell is wrong wi-” He stopped abruptly.

Scáth looked like….him.

They’d met like this before, a few times. If either was particularly pissed off, this served as a place for parlay, or whatever. But all of those times, Scáth had been, well, a shadow; a dark green, gaseous silhouette. Now, it looked almost human. Ripped jeans, combat boots, gauges, and a shock of green hair. And his face. It was as if Seán had an edgier, demonic twin.

Scáth grinned at him with a mouthful of nearly normal teeth. “You like the new style?”

Seán took a step back. “Why do you look like that?” he asked, voice wavering.

“Oh, you know. Reasons.” He took a step forward. “Gosh, Jack, you look terrible. Something keeping you up at night?”

“Fuck off.” Seán spat, fists tightening. “What do you want?”

“Wasn’t it you that called for me? I didn’t come to this wanting anything!” His tone was mocking, patronizing.

“You know what I mean. What happened with you? Suddenly you’re, fucking like, attacking me and making me hallucinate, disassociate, whatever, making me sick, looking like me? And talking in full sentences, what happened to the ominous one word thing?” Seán gripped at his hair. “Did I do something to piss you off? Is that what this is, some revenge thing mixed with your fucked up interests? What do you want, Scáth, I’m at the end of my rope here.”

Scáth laughed. “What, you think I haven’t wanted to do this our whole life? I’ve been dreaming of this since day one, McLoughlin! You, half insane, begging and pleading, surrounded by people who want you institutionalized,”

“Don’t-they don’t want-”

“Oh, is that right? Look me in the eyes and tell me your parents wouldn’t be locking you in another priest’s basement if we were still living with them. Tell me that doctor isn’t going to drop you in a psych ward the moment he has the chance.”

Seán couldn’t bring himself to meet his gaze. Instead, he looked down, scrubbing at tears. “Why now, then? I don’t understand, what changed? What did I do?”

Scáth knelt down to his level, still grinning. “Not a goddamn thing. I just finally got the strength I needed.” His smile turned into a snarl. “Do you have any idea what this is like? My line was powerful enough to force a Taoiseach onto his own sword. And suddenly, because someone’s family stopped having kids for two centuries,” he spat, “I’m stuck with a pathetic, whimpering, traitorous, English speaking c̛̹h̛̪͙i̙l̬̘̫ͅd̪̱̜̤̤, and not even enough power to manifest in the real world.” Scáth grabbed the front of Seán’s shirt, hoisting both of them up. “I was going to bring this land to its knees, bring us back to where we should stand, and instead I got landed with Y̶̛̻̤͕͟O͇͕̜͈̖U̹̕.” He dropped Seán a few inches, wrapping his claws around his neck.

“Shit- Let go of me!”

Scáth snarled. “Here’s a secret I figured out, Jackaboy.” He leaned in, black eyes suddenly glowing a brilliant green. “That community of yours has more power than you could ever imagine. And their ideas! Holy shit, you should see what some of them come up with. They’ve got creation bursting at the seams. Give ‘em a few crumbs, they’ll make the loaf of bread themselves.” He grinned, teeth spiky and horrible. “Say hello to your newest figment.”

Seán was thrown to the floor. He pushed himself up, rubbing at his throat. “Scáth...please, please tell me you didn’t,” he gasped.

Scáth grinned wide. “I prefer Anti, thanks.”

“Oh, God.”

The demon snorted. “He didn’t help your ancestors, buddy, and he sure as hell ain’t helping you.”

“No, there’s no way, you couldn’t have…”

“You should hear them, Seán. ‘Ooh, wouldn’t this be cool, what if he did something for Halloween, what do you think that character would be like.’” He nudged Seán with his foot. “I’m just giving the people what they want!”

“You’re manipulating them to gain power.” Seán growled.

“Eh, same difference.”

“Scáth...just stop, we can figure-”

The demon glitched, and suddenly he was holding Seán up by the shirt again. “I told you to call me A̛̹n̷̫͚̱̗͕t̥͓͡i̝̻!” he yelled.

Seán wriggled in his grasp. “Like hell I will.”

“Oh, that’s how it is? You’ll use the kid’s new name, but not mine? Favouritism isn’t a good look, Jack.”

“Leave him out of this. Leave them all out of this, I’m the one you’re bound to!” Seán wrenched sideways, forcing Anti to drop him. He pushed himself back up to stand opposite.

Anti shrugged. “And?”

Seán gulped. “I- you can’t, please. Please. You can do whatever you want to me, fine, just don’t hurt them.”

Anti stared at him blankly for a few moments. Seán met his gaze, tearful, still gasping for air.

Then the demon laughed. It started low, but raised in pitch and fervor, bouncing around the space without rhyme or reason. Seán glanced around as it echoed around his head.

Anti glitched into his face again. “Well, you offered. How can I refuse such a generous invitation?”

“Huh?” Seán staggered backwards, replaying the conversation in his head. He froze as the weight of his words sunk in. “Oh, God, no. No no nonono…”

Anti wiped at his eyes. “Like a fuckin’ fiddle, holy shit,” he chuckled. “And they say loyalty can’t be a fatal flaw.” The demon waved with a flourish. “Have fun over the next few days, Jack, there’s only so much more time till Samhain.”

Seán surged upwards, knocking his head into Marvin’s.

“Ah, shit!” Marvin fell backwards onto his hands.

Henrik turned around from the desk, looking relieved. “Seán! Thank goodness, I couldn’t wake you, but it looked intentional this time, so I called Marvin up.”

Seán ignored him, turning to Marvin, panicked. The magician looked back, rubbing his forehead. “Seán? What’s wrong?”

He swallowed. “I fucked up. I fucked up real bad.”

>=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=<

“No wait, turn it that way a bit...yes, there!” Jackie exclaimed triumphantly as he and Marvin maneuvered the table into the recording room.

Seán entered behind them, carrying a pumpkin and bag of tools. “I’m sorry, if I’d known it wouldn’t’ve fit through the door, I would have asked you to grab the other table.”

“It’s fine,” Marvin reassured him, leaning back to stretch. “I think the other one is even bigger, anyhow.”

Seán set his things down, unpacking and laying out the knives. “Well, thanks then. I can take it from here, guys.”

He noticed Jackie and Marv glance at each other. “You sure about this? If you space out or slip while carving, you could really hurt yourself,” Jackie said

Seán sighed internally. “I’m good!” he replied, turning around to face the other two. “I have to film something for Halloween anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.” Jackie and Marvin’s grimaces only deepened at that.

He leaned against the table behind him. “I think that last spell you tried really worked this time. I haven’t felt this good since September!”

Marvin’s eyes widened. “Wait, are you serious?”

He smiled wide. “Yeah, I wouldn’t lie about that stuff. You know what I told you, he said this week was going to be hell, but I haven’t seen a thing! Just heard one or two, that’s nothing compared to before.”

Marvin seemed shocked at that idea. “Wow. I uh. Didn’t think we’d actually figure this out.” He was trying to hide it, but Seán could see the subtle joy in his eyes.

“Hug?” Seán asked, arms opening. Marvin nodded loosely wrapping around him, smiling all the while. After a moment, Seán gestured for Jackie to join them. The teen complied happily.

The three of them stood there, huddled together in the recording room. After a bit, Seán pulled back. “I really do have to get this done, though. It’ll be an hour, tops, then I’ll come back down.” He hesitated a moment, then continued, “Henrik’s going to be back soon, right? Maybe we can all go out to dinner together.”

Jackie’s grin widened even more. “Yes! Yes, please, we haven’t done something as a family since your fight.”

“Yeah, I...I wanna fix that. I’ve been treating him like garbage.”

Marvin patted his shoulder. “Good on you. Have fun recording, let us know if anything goes wrong?”

He waved his phone. “Will do. See you guys in a bit.”

>=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=<

“Okay, so the last thing you wanna do is get your knife, and you’re going to have to do fine-”

What’s happening?

Why can’t I move!?

Shush.

Oh God.

I said shut up.

Nononono, please, don’t-

They’re simple instructions Seán. Be quiet!

Stop the knife, stop the knife, stop the-

Oh for fuck’s sake. I’m going to be so glad when you’re gone.

You can’t do this, this is my body!

Not for long.

No, stop, please, stop!

Shink.

It hurts, please, I don’t want to die, it hurts, stop!

Oop, looks like it’s time to go! Say bye-bye, Seány-boy!

HELP ME!

>=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=<

Marvin looked at the clock nervously. “It’s been over an hour.”

“As it was twenty minutes ago.” Henrik replied tersely, leg bouncing.

Jackie sat up abruptly. “I’m going to go check on him.”

Marv ran his hands through his hair. “You probably shouldn’t. Everyone still thinks he lives alone, he’ll have to scrap all that footage. What if he’s in the middle of something important?”

“I don’t care, I feel like something’s up. What if he spaced out again?”

Henrik bit his lip. “You said he was more or less cured.”

“We said he said he was more or less cured,” Marvin murmured.

“I’m going.” Jackie said adamantly. Before Marvin could protest further, he turned and bolted up the stairs.

He came to a stop at the end of the hallway. “Jack?” he asked, knocking. “It’s been a while, you done yet?” When there was no answer, Jackie frowned. “Seán? Everything okay?”

He tried the doorknob, but it wouldn’t turn. He banged on the door. “Seán! What’s going on?” The teen wiggled it more, worried now. “Hey! Talk to me!”

Jackie cursed under his breath when there was still no reply. “Fuck, okay. Sorry in advance, man.” He breathed deeply and steadily, trying to focus. Then he began throwing himself at the door, attempting to ram it open.

Even with all this commotion, no sound came from the recording room. Jackie picked up the pace, the doorframe beginning to creak. “Come on, come on.” Then the lock gave way, the frame splintering as Jackie forced his way in. “Yes!”

He staggered in, balance thrown off. “Seán?”

At first glance, the room appeared empty. It was dim, the curtains closed to make the set consistent. The equipment was still set up, though the lights were all off. He could smell something burnt, as if the bulbs had all blown out. There was another smell, too; something metallic. A fully carved pumpkin sat on the table, knife shoved in the top haphazardly. Both chairs were empty. No one was here.

Jackie pushed inward. There was no way Seán could have left, they would have seen him. Was he in the bathroom?

Then he heard it, barely- a hoarse wheeze, like someone was out of breath. His foot stepped in something wet, then nudged something soft. Jackie froze. He almost didn’t have the resolution to look down. But he did.

Then he screamed.

>=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=<

Henrik looked up quizzically at the first set of bangs. “What is he doing?”, he murmured, sitting up straight.

There was another round of bangs, followed by repeated thumps. Marvin sat up as well, glancing toward the stairs. “What, is he trying to break down the door?”

Henrik paused, listening closely. Then he pushed himself to stand quickly. “Oh for the love of- I think he is.” He rubbed at his face. “He’s going to lose us the deposit. For fuck’s sake.” He hurried out of the room, Marvin following. As they reached the bottom of the staircase, there was the sound of something cracking and the thumps stopped. Marvin slumped his head against the wall and groaned. “Really, Jackie?”

Henrik frowned, sympathizing. “I will help you all pay for damages. I should have better calmed him.”

Marvin gave a subdued thumbs up. As they turned to head back to the living room, they heard a scream. “Henrik! Help!”

Henrik bolted upstairs. Jackie was slumped against the wall opposite the recording room, staring inside. He looked absolutely horrified. His left sock was soaked with blood at the toes.

Henrik cut past him to rush into the room. He flicked on the lights and surveyed the scene. Nothing seemed out of place, but...

He checked the floor.

Seán laid limp, unmoving. His right hand loosely cradled a knife and a pool of blood stained the carpet around his head.

“Scheisse!”

Henrik dropped down to his knees, feeling for a pulse. His fingers came away wet. As he turned Seán’s head he saw the deep, jagged cut across his throat. Henrik’s heart dropped into his stomach.

He fumbled for his phone, dialing 999 while still searching for a heartbeat. He found one just as the operator picked up.

“Hello, yes, I need an ambulance right away!”

“Sir, what is your emergency?”

Marvin’s voice was in the background, likely comforting Jackie, but it was distant, muffled. Unnecessary noise in the current crisis.

Henrik wriggled out of his shirt while yelling into the phone. “My cousin has a slit throat! He is currently unconscious, has a weak heartbeat,” he paused, holding a hand above Seán’s mouth. “little airflow, hypoxia is likely. In fact, the cut is deep, a tracheal transection is possible. The injury occurred sometime in the last two hours, but I don’t know when exactly.” He placed his shirt around the neck injury. “He’s lost at least a litre and a half of blood, perhaps more.”

“Sir, can you give me an address please?”

“Ah, I am not sure exactly. Marvin?” He turned back around. Marvin had his arms around Jackie, murmuring, but he looked up when Henrik called his name. “Huh?”

“What is the apartment’s address?”

He relayed what Marvin told him to the operator. Meanwhile, he kept tabs on Seán’s pulse and breathing.

“Alright, an ambulance and Guard vehicle are on their way. Is there anything else I should know?” the operator asked.

Henrik glanced around. “Uh, the cut was made with a kitchen knife, definitely not sanitized. And-” He paused, breathing deeply. “There is no sign of a break in, and neither I nor our roommates heard anything. The wound is most likely self inflicted.” Marvin and Jackie’s heads snapped up at that, but Henrik ignored them. “He should be placed under suicide watch until we know more.”

“Had he been displaying destructive or out of character behaviours before this?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, I’ll alert the hospital’s mental health crisis team. Keep the wound covered-”

“Yes, I have a shirt on it already. I am a surgeon, I do not need advice. Thank you for your help, go give it to someone else now.”

“But-”

“Have a good evening.”

“Sir!”

Henrik hung up, slumping. “Marvin. Go get Jackie a blanket and some water. He’s having a panic attack.”

Marvin stared at him, dumbfounded. “Henrik, you don’t actually think he-”

“A blanket, Marvin.” Henrik repeated numbly. He fumbled with his phone one handed, opening the clock and placing it on Seán’s stomach. He kept one hand on Seán’s wrist and one over the wound, watching the time.

Marvin entered the room. He glanced back toward Jackie, who was now huddled in a blanket. The teen seemed to be shaking less, that was something. Marvin cleared his throat.

“Could you two go wait for the ambulance, please?” Henrik said.

Marvin wrung his hands. “Hen, he wouldn’t have-”

“Marvin.” Henrik looked up, keeping his hands in place. “Right now I need to focus on keeping him alive. Please, go wait for the ambulance.”

>=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=<

Two days later, Seán hadn’t woken up.

“Not too worrisome,” Dr. Heaney had assured them. “Given the trauma, a state like this isn’t unusual. Just give him time.”

Henrik had added later, over dinner. “His pupils still respond, and he verbalizes sometimes. That is good.”

Still, he could see how worried Jackie and Marvin were. They’d all taken time off of work or school. Every possible minute was spent in the ICU, waiting for something to change.

Henrik could see the pitying looks his coworkers kept giving him. He’d brushed them off initially, when they asked about his lack of scrubs, but it was a rural hospital. Word got around. By the next day, nearly every doctor or nurse had given him an awkward shoulder pat or asked to pray for him. He could see Marvin bristle every time one of them walked by; every 10 minutes, it seemed, someone was sticking their head in the room and asking, “You three okay in here? D’ya need anything?” Frankly, Henrik was amazed Marvin hadn’t snapped at them yet.

Jackie was pacing again. He alternated between that and sitting in a chair wringing his hands. He’d be inconsolable the moment they got back to the apartment, if the last two nights were anything to go off. Henrik had tried to comfort him verbally, but he couldn’t get a word in edgewise. So he’d resorted to just holding the teen as he cried, screamed, panicked, the works. Then it was off to bed for more of the same tomorrow.

Marvin was eternally tense and pissed off. Yelling at the two of them, baristas, pizza guys, anyone not in the hospital. Henrik had given up on trying to get him to talk about his feelings. He clearly wasn’t going to express them willingly. Nothing to do but wait for the emotions to build up until they exploded out in a breakdown. Henrik just hoped the magic wouldn’t be a factor. Their landlord was mad enough about the broken door. A miniature jungle would not help their case.

Henrik himself just felt numb. He couldn’t cry, couldn’t get angry, hadn’t even felt shocked after the ambulance left. His emotions had crashed that night, and had yet to resurface. The small moments he did feel something, it was guilt over not feeling anything. He was a robot, pushing forward as his human roommates broke down around him.

This was their new cycle: wake up, eat, come to the hospital, refuse to talk to each other or anyone else, grab lunch downstairs, come back, go home, fall apart, repeat.

Henrik didn’t know how much more any of them could take.

The heart monitor started beeping rapidly. Marvin startled from his nap, blowing hair out of his face. Jackie froze, turning toward it. Henrik slowly got to his feet, crossing the room. Seán’s heart rate had picked up abruptly, jumping up as if he’d run a marathon. Henrik squinted at it. That didn’t make any sense, even if he was waking up it’d be slower…

Jackie gasped. Henrik glanced at him, but the teen was already rushing forward. “Seán?”

Sure enough, Seán’s eyes were slowly opening. He blinked, eyebrows furrowing. Henrik backed up, reaching towards the call button. Just as he touched it, a painful shock seared up his arm.

“Ow!”

“Hey!”

The doctor turned toward Jackie while he flexed his hand. Seán was grabbing Jackie’s arm firmly. It almost looked like he was digging his fingernails into the skin. Seán’s head remained slumped, looking down. “Let go, man!” Jackie protested, trying to pull away. Seán didn’t reply. His chest heaved

Henrik strode forward, reaching out to touch Seán’s shoulder. He flinched away, not looking at him. Henrik raised his arms placatingly. “Seán, try to relax around the breathing tube, you’ll hurt yourself!” Marvin was up now too, all three of them surrounding the bed.

Jackie finally wrenched himself away. Checking quickly, Henrik could see small dots of blood in his hoodie. A small part of his brain was screaming to get a nurse, but he’d been waiting for this for days. He wasn’t leaving.

Seán stared down at his hands, looking terrified. Marvin bent down, asking what happened, was it the curse, why would he hurt himself, but Seán ignored him. “I..Oh my god...” he murmured. Then he started laughing, high pitched and insane, and that…

That wasn’t right.

He shouldn't be able to talk with the tube in. How could they hear him perfectly?

The door suddenly slammed shut.

The three of them whipped around at the sudden noise.

“What the hell?” Jackie yelped. He ran to the door, trying to pull it open. Marvin’s hands began to glow. “Jay, get back!” he yelled, as a bolt of fire flew into the door. There was a flash, but when it cleared, the door was untouched.

Marvin took a step back. “What? That’s not possible!”

Jackie ran forward and began banging on the door. “Hey, we need help in here! The door’s stuck and my cousin is freaking out! Help!”

Henrik blinked. All the sound around him was muffled. The lights were too bright, why were they so bright? All he could hear was the buzzing. Buzzing coming from all around. Multicoloured lights flashed behind him. People moved and screamed in front of him. He couldn’t figure out what was going on. Any reasoning he tried was too much to stomach. Was this…

“Seán.”

Henrik whirled around and ran toward the bed. “Wait!” Marvin yelled behind him, but he ignored it. The doctor grabbed onto the side of the bed, skidding a bit.

Seán was sitting ramrod straight, staring forward. He was still laughing. Why was he laughing? How was he laughing? What on Earth was going on?

“Seán!” Henrik repeated. He reached out to grab Seán’s arm. “You need to lie back down, your body’s been through a lot.” Seán didn’t look at him. He kept staring forward. Henrik shook his arm. “Can you hear me?”

Seán’s head whipped toward him, almost inhumanly fast. He looked at Henrik, smiling around the breathing tube. “I’m not supposed to be here,” he said plainly.

“What?”

“Why am I still here? I don’t want this, I’m supposed to be done with this. I’m supposed to be dead!” He was crying now, tears streaming down his face around his constant smile.

The other three bristled. Jackie stepped forward slowly. “Seán, you can’t actually mean that-”

“I’M NOT HIM.”

All the lightbulbs in the room blew out. The heart monitor overloaded and sparked. Static screamed at a deafening level. Jackie, Marvin, and Henrik all covered their ears, wincing. When they straightened, they noticed a new silhouette, standing over Seán’s bed.

The figure looked like a man, average height and wearing all black. Meanwhile, Seán had collapsed back onto the bed, lying still. Marvin waved a hand, summoning a handful of glowing flowers. As he moved forward, the light fell across the stranger’s face.

“What?” Henrik murmured, hand flying to his face. Jackie stood frozen in horror. Marvin, however, was glaring daggers at this person. He conjured a burst of flame, preparing to strike.

The figure stared down at his body in wonder, flexing his shoulders and wiggling his fingers. “Cad a tharla?” he whispered. He jolted as the air around his hands sparked. He then turned to look across the bed to Henrik, then down at Seán.

He stretched out a hand, frowning. Abruptly, Seán’s body began to seize and Henrik could hear muffled screaming. “Stop!” he yelled, grabbing the person’s hand just as Marvin fired.

The figment’s body glitched, and suddenly Henrik had a fist to his temple. He reeled to the side as Marvin’s flame flew past and scorched the wall. Henrik stared. “What- how did you?”

“Amach leat.” Marvin growled, raising a hand again.

The person cocked a head to the side. “Cad atá tú ag dul a dhéanamh, a bhuachaill deas? Ní féidir leat mise a bhualadh.”

“Amach leat.” Marvin repeated.

The figure shrugged. “Cibé. Is maith an rud é tú a fheiceáil ag úsáid tine arís.”

Marvin’s scowl deepened. He threw another fireball, but the person smiled, glitched, and disappeared. Henrik yelped, ducking down to avoid being hit.

“Fucker.” Marvin muttered.

Jackie unfroze. “What the hell was that?!” he shrieked, waving his arms around.

Henrik uncovered his head. He stood up slowly, looking at Marvin. “That...was that?”

The magician opened his mouth, looking angry, but both of them were interrupted by a strangled noise coming from the bed.

Seán’s eyes were open. They bolted around frantically, and his chest heaved. Henrik grabbed his hand. “Relax, let it breathe for you. You’re safe, you’re in the hospital.” Seán vocalized, panicked. Henrik squeezed his hand. “It’s okay, you’re okay..” His eyes drifted over to the equipment. The heart monitor was broken, beeping intermittently. Thankfully, the ventilator was still operating. Henrik looked up at Jackie, who was standing at Seán’s other side. “Can you go get a nurse?” he asked.

Jackie’s head shot up. “What? But the door-”

“It’s probably fine now.” Marvin said tersely. He was standing with his arms crossed, glaring at Henrik. Henrik looked away quickly, focusing on Seán. “Please, try to calm down. You’ll be okay, no one here will let anything happen to you. Here, squeeze my hand,” he soothed. He jerked his head toward the door. “Jackie, go.”

The teen hesitated, then took off down the hall. Marvin and Henrik could hear him yelling for help, quieting as he ran further. Marvin stepped up to take Jackie’s spot next to the bed. He avoided looking at Henrik, instead grabbing Seán’s other hand. He didn’t say anything, just held it.

Jackie and a nurse came bolting back into the room. The woman looked around the room, at the three of them, the glitching monitors, the scorch marks. She grabbed her pager, typed something into it, then approached them. “What happened? Why are the walls...are they burnt!?”

“I don’t know, the electronics went on the fritz and it seems like something in the walls burnt.” Henrik blurted out.

“What on earth would have caused that?” She said, shaking her head. Then her eyes widened. “Henrik, your cheek!”

Henrik raised his hands, dropping Seán’s grip. “Ah, it is nothing! I ran into the door at home. It’s been stressful, you know, I wasn’t looking.”

Her eyes narrowed, then darted down to Seán’s panicking form. “Alright, out, all of you.”

“But we-” Jackie spoke up.

“Out, now. This isn’t safe and we need to work. Heaven knows it’ll be enough work stabilizing and moving him already.” She pointed toward the door sternly.

“Don’t fight right now.” Henrik whispered. Marvin’s mouth snapped close. The nurse herded the others out of the room. The last thing he heard was “I need Doctor Heaney, the crisis team, and a maintenance worker in Room 072. Yes, all at once! Hey, it’s alright, honey, you’re safe-” And then the door clicked shut.

>=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=<

When they got home that night, Jackie found the video. They had watched it, morbid curiosity overtaking them. At the climax, Henrik dropped the phone in shock and Jackie had to run to the bathroom to vomit. Marvin walked over to the couch and started throwing pillows and blankets, furious but silent.

Henrik found himself hyperventilating. He tried to speak, but couldn’t get the words out. “How did, he didn’t, upload, people will, have to take it down!” he stuttered.

“We can’t.”

Jackie stood in the doorway, still looking sick. “I tried to delete it on Seán’s computer. The button isn’t even there.”

Henrik stared at him. “What, you, how, you know, when did-” He tried to take a few deep breaths. “You know his password?”

“Jesus fuck, Henrik, priorities.” Marvin spat from behind him. The magician pushed past Henrik into the hall. He pulled on his sneakers.

Henrik and Jackie followed him. “Where are you going? The hospital said we can’t go back until Wednesday.” Jackie said.

“Pharmacy.”

“Why?”

Marvin didn’t look at them as he zipped up his coat. “We can’t just let that be without any follow up. I’m going to go get some clippers and dye.”

Henrik’s jaw dropped. “You said you’ve been growing your hair out for years!”

“Priorities, Henrik.” Marvin slammed the door behind him.

When he got back, he went straight to the bathroom, ignoring either of them. Henrik confiscated Jackie’s phone after the teen had another panic attack looking at Tumblr. An hour later, he heard the door upstairs slam. An hour again, and the door opened, someone crossed the hall, and it slammed again. Henrik opened YouTube on his phone. Sure enough, there was another video up on the channel. The thumbnail featured “Jack” smiling happily. Unharmed. As Henrik put down the phone, he heard a guttural scream come from Marvin’s room. All the plants on the windowsill withered and crumbled to dust. Henrik merely leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

He couldn't go back into the shared bedroom, not now. So he might as well try to get some sleep here.

Henrik spent the next twelve hours staring at the ceiling and trying desperately not to think.

>=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=•=<

They stood awkwardly outside the room. No one wanted to go in, not after what happened last time.

“The receptionist said this one, right?”

“Yes.”

No one moved.

“Heaney said he’s been back to a normal sleep schedule. He’s probably awake.”

“That is good.”

Marvin ruffled his newly shorn hair. Jackie shifted his weight, fidgeting in place.

“So uh…”

“Hm?”

Henrik scratched the back of his neck.

Jackie dropped his hands. “Fuck it,” he said, grabbing the doorknob.

The door swung open. They stared in, not moving.

Seán stared back at them. The new room was brighter, with more windows, and it made him look much less pale. He was lying propped up by the hospital bed. The breathing tube had been replaced with an oxygen mask. He had several drips running into his arm. Two sets of handcuffs secured his hands to the rails of the bed.

He smiled slightly and waved as much as the cuffs would let him.

Jackie was the first to break away. He entered cautiously. “Seán?” he asked quietly, reaching the bed. Seán nodded. He sat up, reaching out a hand. Jackie grabbed it in a flash. He stared for a few seconds more, biting his lip. Then he lunged, pulling Seán into a tight hug. Seán let out a breathy laugh, reciprocating as best he could.

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” Jackie sobbed. “So fucking glad.”

Henrik and Marvin walked in as well. Marvin’s face darkened as he looked at the cuffs. Henrik went over to the side and pulled two chairs over from the wall. “We don’t have enough for everyone, sorry.”

Jackie hopped onto the foot of the bed. Henrik passed on a chair to Marvin, then set his own on Seán’s opposite side. Seán’s eyes widened as he got a good look at Marvin. He opened his mouth, but Henrik was quick to interrupt. “Don’t even think about speaking. That will only give you more time in here.”

Seán closed his mouth and resorted to just pointing, at Marvin’s hair and then his own.

“Yeah,” Marvin said. “Don’t worry about it. We needed an emergency video for the channel. Besides, this way I can fill in until you get out of here.” He looked down at the cuffs. “Are you okay with those on?”

Seán paled. He made a so-so motion with his hand, but his eyes were panicked. Marvin quickly grabbed the hand and squeezed firmly.

Henrik cleared his throat. “I brought your laptop.” Seán perked up. Henrik dug into his bag and pulled it out. “I cleared it with your doctor, it’s fine as long as you don’t have the charging cables.”

“Oh!” said Jackie. “You guys gotta see this video the Grumps did recently, it’s so good.”

Seán unlocked the laptop, then passed it over to Jackie. Soon, they were huddled up together, falling down a YouTube rabbit hole.

They were interrupted by a knock. A nurse stood in the doorway. “Sorry to bother you,” he said sheepishly. “Just making the rounds.” He stepped in. “How’re you doing, Mr. McLoughlin? Any pain from the IVs?”

Seán shook his head. “What about your throat?” He shook his head again. The nurse checked some of the drip bags. “Alright, your next dose is in a few hours, but call someone if the pain gets bad again, alright?” Seán nodded.

The nurse turned to the others. “You guys haven’t had any problems, have you?” he asked quietly.

“What d’ya mean?” replied Jackie.

“Well, he hasn’t, ah,” the nurse gestured to Henrik’s cheek. “You know?”

Seán’s eyes widened. He looked at Henrik’s bruised face, then to the nurse, then back to Henrik. Then he raised a shaky hand to point at himself.

“It’s alright!” Henrik said quickly. “You weren’t yourself! I am fine!”

“Why is he in handcuffs?” Marvin interrupted, arms crossed.

The nurse looked dumbfounded. “Are you serious- I literally just-” He sighed and rubbed at his eyes. “With the sudden move and all this equipment, we couldn’t ensure his safety without them. Or ours,” he added under his breath.

Marvin’s scowl deepened. He moved to stand up, but Seán grabbed his hand. He shook his head, eyes wide. Marvin slowly sat back down, still tense.

The nurse looked uneasy. “Okay...well, if that’s all, I’ll leave you all be for now.” With that, he left down the hall.

Marvin watched him go testily. Then he rounded back on Seán. “You’re okay with this!?”

“I’m not safe to be around.” Seán whispered hoarsely. He didn’t meet any of their eyes.

Marvin deflated at that. Jackie and Henrik shot each other a look. The latter got up and moved to the door. He glanced out into the hall before closing the door and walking back. “Seán, you literally weren’t yourself. Some...some thing came out of you and attacked me.”

Jackie nodded. "It was, like, a shadowy, angsty, demon you."

Seán blanched. Henrik took a deep breath. "Is that what your demon looks like?" Seán nodded. Henrik buried his face in his hands. "God, I'm so sorry."

Seán patted his arm. He then turned to Marvin and made a 'continue' motion.

Marvin sighed. "Honestly, there's not much more to it. It showed up, blew out the electronics, glitched around a bit, taunted me, and left."

Seán made a motion toward himself. "No, not back into you, just disappeared. Poof." Marvin answered.

Seán looked sick. He opened his mouth again.

"I don't want to hear anything out of your mouth, especially if it is an apology for something out of your control." Henrik said without looking up.

Seán slumped back, taking a deep breath. Then he made a gathering motion with his hands. Jackie stared at him for a second before going "Oh!" and shuffling over to curl into Seán's side. He then looked expectantly at Marvin and Henrik.

They spoke up at the same time. “No, you guys do your thing, I don’t want to ruin that-” and “I doubt we all would fit, Marvin can take the other side, I’ll just stay here-”

Seán leveled a look at them. Jackie snickered into his hand.

Henrik and Marvin both squirmed, neither moving for a moment. Then the magician huffed. “Alright, fine, move over.” he said, shoving the bed railing down. Seán gasped as he was pulled sideways with it.

“Ah, shit!” Marvin caught him. “Fuck, right, sorry.” He raised it back up and let Seán get his balance. Henrik laughed as he lowered the other rail slowly.

It was clumsy, but eventually they all managed to cuddle together on the bed. If Jackie felt some tears falling onto his head, he didn't mention it.

The four brothers stayed like that, watching Game Grumps until a doctor ushered them out at the end of visiting hours.

32 notes · View notes

illfoandillfie · 4 years

Note

A sequel to Hoodie with Sub!Ben

Oh I have the biggest soft spot for sub!Ben lmao. This is on the shorter side but I hope you like it!

Hoodie

1000 Follower Celebration

~~~

When you left that morning you’d thought nothingof the hoodie you’d been wearing. Ben’s hoodie. It was cold out and you had abunch of errands to run so you wanted to feel as comfortable as possible whiledoing them. It didn’t even occur to you that it wasn’t your own jumper untilyou got Ben’s message asking how far off you were. When you told him you werestill around fifteen minutes away he replied with a sad emoji and a miss you.You chuckled to yourself and glanced at your uber driver. Miss you wasBen speak for I’m horny, why aren’t you here?

You: Just look at the photos we took when I stoleyour hoodie.

Ben: How do you think I got into this situation.

You: I stole it again today. Wearing it right now

Ben: Come home so I can take it back

You: Maybe I don’t want to give it back, it’svery comfy

Ben: Guess I’ll have to convince you

You: Okay convince me

You: No touching until I get home

You watched as Ben began typing and then deleted hisreply, the three dots disappearing and then reappearing and then disappearing oncemore. Finally, he responded. Two simple letters. OK.

The drive took less time than you’d estimated dueto a string of green lights and thinner traffic than you’d have guessed wouldbe on the road at that time. The good luck you had in the car meant yousurprised Ben when you walked through the bedroom door, although he wasn’t theonly surprised one. You found him, lying in bed, headphones in and eyes shut ashe jerked himself off. You took the few steps towards the bed, tugging theheadphone from his ear. He yelled in surprise and pulled his hand away, hiseyes widening as he realised just what had happened.

“Thought I gave you an instruction, pretty boy,”you slowly began to strip as you spoke, toeing off your shoes, peeling off yoursocks, and pants. You left the hoodie on and settled yourself on the bed,wrapping your hand around Ben’s leaking cock.

“Thought you s-said fifteen minutes. Fuck, feelsgood,”

“You’re so needy today,” you cooed, watchingBen’s every reaction closely, “did you plan on getting off without me and then havingme when I got home too?”

“Yes,” his voice was breathy, already so far gonewhen you’d arrived home, close to finishing.

“Greedy.” You stopped, moving your hand away ashe whined at the loss, “oh, bub, did you think I was actually going to let youfinish?”

“Hoped you would,”

“Well, you can forget that. Not going to happenany time soon. So,” you paused and lightly trailed your fingertips over Ben’sthigh, making his breath huff loudly from his nose, as you waited for him tocalm down enough for you to continue, “You were looking at those photos of me?”

“Yes,” his speech stuttered out into a guttural moanas you began stroking his cock again.

“And listening to that little audio recording youmade of me?”

“Yes, fuck please don’t stop,”

You stopped, smiling at his frustrated whine, “Doyou look at them a lot?”

“Sometimes,” his voice was a little shaky as hetried to control his panted breaths, “especially when I’m away.”

“Perhaps I should take a few for myself then,”you pulled your phone from the pocket of the hoodie, opening up the camera andsnapping off a few quick shots. But that wasn’t quite enough. If you were goingto get off to visual stimulus, you’d prefer video. So you switched to recordingmode and hit the red button, “Now, bub, be a good boy and tell the camera whatyou want,”

“I-I want to cum,”

“Poor baby, so desperate. Why don’t you go aheadand ask for it then,”

There was a sharp intake of breath from Ben asyou once again worked your fist over his cock, using your thumb to collect thepre-cum from his tip and spread it down his shaft, “fuck, please let me cum.”

“Think you can do a bit better than that. I toldyou I needed convincing.”

“Please please please,” his words came faster ashe got closer to the edge, his head pressed back into the pillow, “I, fuck, In-need it.”

“That’ll definitely help me next time I’m all onmy own,” you said as you stopped the recording and Ben’s orgasm, his frustratedcry ringing out behind your words, “you’re being such a good boy now, bub,promise I’ll give you what you want soon.”

“R-r-really?”

“Very soon, just one little thing first, okay?Wait right there for me.”

Ben just nodded, letting out a sigh of relief athis reprieve, as you stood up and made your way to the cupboard. After somemomentary digging you found what you were looking for – a piece of rope. Youmade sure to wriggle out of your underwear before taking it back towards thebed.

Ben made a small noise in his throat when youreturned and showed him what was in your hands.

“You okay if I tie you up?”

“God yes,”

You laughed softly as you leant over so you couldbind his hands to the headboard, pressing a kiss to his lips when you were done.

“Are you at least going to take my hoodie off?”Ben asked as he tested the strength of your knot. It held.

“No. Don’t think I will.”

“But you know how much I like watching your titsas you ride me,”

“Yes but I’m a little concerned with how closeyou are and I fear that one look at them would have you cumming before I’mready to let you. Also I’m not going to ride you. At least not yet.”

“You’re not?”

You pouted as you shook your head, “Sorry, bub,but we both know you’re not going to last very long, especially not when you’rein my warm, wet cunt,” you enunciated the last three words clearly, Ben’sbreath hitching with each one, “and I’d like to get off at least once beforeyou blow your load.” You repositioned yourself on his thigh, slowly beginningto rock back and forth, humming as you finally got the friction you needed.

“Babe, really?”

“‘Fraid so. But you don’t mind, do you?” You adjustedyour pace, leaning backward with one hand on his shin, grinding harder againsthis thigh.

“No,”

“No, you don’t mind at all,” you panted, “You quitelike, fuck, when I do things like this, tease you and mmm-make you wait.”

“Plus, I like watching you when you cum. It’s whyI love it when you ride me.”

Small whines caught in your throat as you draggedyour cunt back and forth on his thigh, getting lost in the feeling on your clit,the way your slick spread to his leg, how rough and deep his voice was as hekept talking, simultaneously trying to distract himself and push you closer toorgasm.

“Could watch you all day when you’re on top ofme. The way your eyes slip shut and you throw your head back. Just like that. Youlook so hot,” Ben tensed his thigh in an effort to help you along, “all I wantto do is touch you. Lick your neck and squeeze your tits and hold your hips.Maybe slap your arse because I know how much it turns you on.”

“But, ohh, but I kn-know how much it turns you on-nwhen you’re tied up. Can’t reach me.”

“Turns me on so much. Please, Y/N, please cum soon.I don’t think I can last much longer.”

“I’m no-not even t-touching you,”

“No but I can feel how fucking soaked you are andall I can think about is being inside your cunt. Please, I want it so bad. Iknow you’re close. I can tell when you get close because of the way you breatheand those filthy fucking noises your making. It’s my favourite sound in theworld. Wish you were riding me though, squeezing my cock as you moan my name. Ipromise I’ll be good and do whatever you want if you just ride me.”

“Ben,” you moaned, so close to falling over theedge but not quite able to get there, “fuck it, okay, yes. Want you inside me,”you stopped grinding on Ben’s thigh, still breathing heavy as you shuffled forwardon your knees and sunk down onto his cock.

“Shit, shit, shit,”

“Soon Benny, just hold it for a little longer,”

He’d given up on speaking, biting his lip as henodded and tried to hold back his climax. As soon as you could you beganmoving, raising yourself on your knees as your hand slipped down to your clit.Ben jerked in his restraints, as you leaned forward to kiss him, whiningagainst his lips as you felt your orgasm approaching.

“So close, so close,” your muttered, face onlyinches from Ben’s, his panted breaths mingling with yours in the space betweenyou, “F-fuck you can cum Ben, cum for me.”

It was all he needed to hear, moaning your nameas he finally let go though the sound was quickly joined by your own moan as yourrelease washed over you, eyes slipping shut.

When you managed to pry your eyes open again youfound Ben watching you.

“What?” you asked, slightly breathlessly.

“Told you, I like watching you.”

“Not sure the romance outweighs the creep factorthere, Benny boy,” you pushed yourself up and carefully lifted yourself fromhis lap, shuffling up the bed on your knees so you could untie him.

“Excuse you but I think it’s very romantic of me,”as soon as his arms were free he propped himself up on one arm and leanedforward to kiss your knee, “Besides, if I like watching I’ve got more incentiveto keep making sure it happens.”

“Oh well that is definitely a benefit,” you turnedaround and stretched out, letting Ben pull you into his arms and kiss you deeply,“how’re you feeling?”

“I’m good,” he pressed a kiss to your shoulder ashe snuggled closer, One hand playing absentmindedly with the hem of the hoodie, “just happy I can actually touch you now. Also happy yougot home so fast and caught me.”

“Me too, that was fun. You want me to get youanything? A drink of water maybe, or something to eat?”

“In a minute, just kinda want to stay here for abit longer.”

“Whatever you need, bub,” you let out a deepbreath, relaxing into Ben’s chest as you brought your hand up to stroke his hair.

#my writing #my blurbs #smut blurb.ben hardy x reader #ben hardy smut #idk ya'll #i've had this half written for like a week #and its currently 1.20am #so i hope it's okay #Anonymous #1000 follower celebration

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philosophiums · 5 years

Text

{god okay finally i’ve finished!!!!! i’ve got drafts of all five parts done and am starting to go through and revise, which i will post as i complete. i could revise three or four more times but like...... don’t have time for THAT. so here’s the neil-in-a-dress au that @microolli has been drawing. hopefully this ends up being even *close* to what you were hoping for}

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Part One: Targeted

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North Carolina’s humidity is reaching critical mass, and every breath of Andrew’s feels a little too much like warm water, like he shouldn’t be letting it into his lungs. Sundown didn’t help cool things off, and the breeze that had been blowing through the cracks in the windows has since choked off and left the three of them treading water. If he’d wanted to drown, he would have picked a better location; even he deserves something classier than a shitty black van parked on the side of some shitty two-lane road, lights off to hide better in the dark.

It’ll storm soon. Later tonight or tomorrow, but this slow buildup of airborne swamp water has to produce something destructive – there’s no other option. He just wants to be happily settled in some air conditioning before the sky splits.

Andrew sweeps his eyes up to check on Aaron beside him, noise-cancelling headphones settled over his head and eyes trained on the screens in front of him, and then he pivots to look at Nicky in the driver’s seat, whose hand is caught in his hair as he tries impossibly hard to stay alert.

Three hours have gone by. Something awful twists in the pit of his gut, instinct letting him know that whatever peace they’ve managed to hold is about to be disrupted. “Check in,” he says, returning to his original position, head down and eyes closed, his hands loose between his knees. He focuses on breathing and listening; those are his only concerns right now.

“One,” Dan’s voice scratches through his headphones, and then, “two,” as Matt follows suit. They’re in the building, the closest to the client, and no matter how much Wymack likes to go on about teamwork and making an effort to participate, this mission is on Dan and Matt’s shoulders. If something goes wrong and the client gets injured, it’s their fault. Allison and Renee count off three and four respectively, and their feedback is clearer because they’re closer – outside the building on the perimeter, sweeping circles back and forth to make sure nothing’s been planted. Andrew thinks it’s a pointless maneuver for only two people, that the gap in their patrol leaves a massive opportunity for anyone, but he doesn’t bring it up. Nicky’s five, which at least confirms that he’s still awake, and finally, from a full state away, Kevin and Wymack check in as six and seven. Aaron doesn’t get a number, both because Andrew’s eyes are on him and because he’s tasked with staying entirely focused on the cameras that they have running – so much so that Andrew’s in charge of the audio from everyone’s microphones and comms.

It’s absolutely pathetic that it takes nine people to keep one man alive when it should require only two, and take maybe four for padding on the wealthier clients. But before last year, Fox Den, Inc. couldn’t even manage with eleven people on-sight. Circumstances changed. People died. Kevin bled his way across several state borders and proclaimed he was staying, and then Andrew was convinced to stay, too. Sometimes, when Wymack bribes Andrew with just the right incentive, the whole plan runs smoothly. But usually they only barely manage to keep their clients alive, let alone unharmed. It’s as if their presence alone causes mayhem to kick up from the dust, and Andrew thinks that they would have better luck killing people for money – especially since right now they tend to get people killed and lose money – but the only time he voiced this, he got glared at and overruled. Maybe they’d manage better if they could work as a team, but Andrew’s more interested in keeping his family alive than the client, so shit tends to fall apart when anything gets serious.

Why Wymack hasn’t fired Andrew yet is really anyone’s guess. Probably because Kevin’s favorite mantra is that Andrew’s full of potential but lacking initiative.

Kevin thinks too much.

The venue they’re casing is a small but high-end party in a public building, the room reserved and vetted for by the property owners. The chatter coming through Matt’s microphone is mundane, if more muffled than normal given the dress restrictions of the event. There’s some money talk – in the way that wealthy people talk about money, which is to say there’s conversation about new business ventures and investments and how “overpriced but worthwhile” education is for their children. The conversation makes that dark lake in Andrew’s chest ripple with his anger, but none of the topics raise anything close to concern. There haven’t been any red flags all evening.

And Aaron hasn’t made any motion yet tonight to signal anything amiss on the screens, and there hasn’t been a perimeter breech that Allison and Renee have found, and there’s been no interruption of new information from Wymack or Kevin.

So, why does Andrew still feel like something’s about to go wrong?

He trusts his gut. “One, circle closer to the client,” Andrew instructs, head still down and eyes still closed. The van dips quickly towards the driver’s side and Andrew’s heart drops with it, but he doesn’t move at all. He assumes that it’s only Nicky turning around to look at him – Andrew hasn’t bothered to give orders pertinent to the mission in four… no, five jobs now.

“Something come up?” Dan asks, tone down as the chatter around her sways in and out of Andrew’s hearing, coming in from her headpiece and her suit mic as a unit of sound that only barely lines up and makes sense together.

Of course, Andrew could tell her the whole truth, which is that nothing solid has come to his attention. There’s no evidence that the job is about to go south. Matt is already close to the client. But the strangling snag of his gut has never lied to him before – so much trauma has tuned him to know exactly when it’s coming. “Yes,” he says, which is enough of the truth to assuage her, and doesn’t elaborate.

“Andrew?” God, Kevin needs to not be talking right now. Andrew’s fists clench between his knees. “Did you notice something? What did you hear?”

“I can’t hear anything with you filling up the radio waves.” And really, what a poor fucking design for this part of the plan, but Andrew stops thinking about how Nicky should be solely in charge of communication when he catches sight of Aaron moving, and that jerky motion drags all of Andrew’s attention to his twin.

His head snaps up, and he watches Aaron’s mouth move in a slow, incredulous way, though he can’t hear him at all given the chaos that suddenly erupts through Andrew’s headphones. He rips them off and drops them, welcoming the bang of silence through his head. With the way Aaron slumps in his chair, there’s no way the client is still alive.

“What the fuck just happened?” Nicky asks, and Andrew would bet it’s into the comm system as well, but he’ll just bog down the channel, since that’s what everyone else is asking, too. “Shit.” He moves like he’s about to bail from the front seat, and Andrew’s not sure if Nicky’s thinking about running inside or coming around the van to join them in the back, but he’s not taking chances.

“Stay put, Nicky. He’s dead.” Andrew says it with a sigh.

Nicky swears again, but he stops acting like he’s leaving.

Andrew’s slow to stand up, left leg braced out so that he doesn’t have to rush to find his balance. It’s been a long night, and it was all for nothing; now all that’s left is figuring out what the fuck happened. Aaron pulls off his noise-cancelling headphones and tosses them to the lip of a desk in front of him, and Andrew takes a step and a half to come up behind him.

“Rewind it,” he says. “Show me.”

Aaron doesn’t move right away, and their synced sluggish responses make Andrew wonder if the damp air has become something thicker without them noticing, or if they’re both starting to wonder what the point of them doing this is. It feels rote, so Andrew doesn’t rush Aaron into moving. Eventually, Aaron leans forward and rewinds the tape.

When the recording starts to play, all Andrew sees is boring rich white people milling about in clean-cut fashion. He finds their client in the upper corner of the main screen, and the middle of the right screen; Matt is half-visible in the main screen and gone in the left, and Dan is invisible in all three. He watches the main screen, sees Dan come in from the bottom, casually slipping through the crowd with a mellow urgency that no one picks up on. And then the client just drops.

No obvious killer.

Well. Shit.

“Again,” he says, eyes staying on the screen even when Nicky decides to scramble between the front seats and join them.

Once more, Aaron rewinds the tape. Andrew delegates them each a screen. “Watch the top left corner only,” he says, because now they need to find whoever killed their client and lost them more money and reputation. They go through until Aaron stops the tape and rewinds again, and again until Andrew stops him. “There.” He points at the figure, the one he noticed last time but this time is sure of.

“How can you tell it’s her?” Nicky asks, leaning closer to the screen as if proximity will make the pixels any more clear, as if it will make the cutting silhouette in the black dress and close-cut curly auburn hair turn around and show her face. “She’s so far away from him.”

As if that hadn’t been Andrew’s first hesitation in picking her out. “Watch her hand,” he says, and moves aside as Aaron rewinds the tape one last time to watch. A second before their client crumples, the woman raises her arm, fingers shaped like a pistol aimed at their client, and pulls it back like it’s been fired. There’s no weapon in sight, but their client dies anyway.

When they get back to Columbia, they’ll have to comb through all of the video footage to look for any other occurrence of the woman throughout the night, but for now they have authorities to deal with, and then Andrew is going to start drinking.

#the foxhole court #tfc #tfc fic #microolli #idk what to tag this as we're here now #my fics

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aftermathdb · 4 years

Text

DEATH BATTLE Review: Mob vs. Tatsumaki

Two Psychic Powerhouses do battle!

Mob′s Preview.

The preview opens up with the hosts describing Shiego Kageyama, whose name can sometimes be read as Mob. So that’s what people generally call him.

Apparently, he accidentally took over a local gang, founded his own cult,

(as seen here)

And is an incredibly powerful psychic warrior.

Keyword being “psychic.” Physically speaking… He’s…

Yeah…

But, thanks to his psychic powers, Mob can throw all sorts of debris around to slam his opponents.

He has an incredible powerset that would give Mewtwo a run for his money, and with all that power, he’s pulled off some insane stuff, something that the hosts are about to get into now.

Well, the fact that Mob’s psychic abilities are reliant on his emotions is a bit strange. When he was younger and tried to use them, he accidentally hurt his younger brother. So he wanted nothing to do with them.

But like all emotions, it would never really go away. When Mob gets angry enough, he explodes in whatever emotion he’s feeling at the time.

Each of these are incredibly powerful, but it’s the ???% form that’s the most powerful.

Mob has caught lightning, flew several kilometers in seconds, and one time, he powered up so quickly, he apparently caught fire. Taking into account as to how fast he would have to have been moving to pull this off, on top of taking it literally, this speed comes out to…

5626.64 feet per second.

Another time, he tanked a strike from another psychic,

(This one), a feat that measures out to over 80 tons of TNT.

Mob has created entire spheres out of buildings in the same fight!

(Katamari Damaci is on the Switch right?- I kinda want to give it a try after seeing this).

Mob even moved clouds to great effect. In real life, it takes a friggin’ _Hydrogen Bomb _to pull that off.

So, Mob’s definitely benching way more than your average joe. This feat is worth more than all of the nuclear warheads in the world!

Mob isn’t invincible though. He does have his limits, and those limits are pretty clear.

But for average middle school student Shigeo Kageyama, this is all in a day’s work. He’s even managed to work past his past and accept his powers and his emotions.

So look out, he may not look like much, but he’s one heck of a powerhouse.

Tatsumaki′s Preview.

In a world where monsters and villains constantly threaten the world, mankind is fortunately protected by superheroes. Some of which are so powerful, that they can use psychic abilities to combat the bad guys. They’re known as Espers, and the best of them is the Tornado of Terror, Tatsumaki.

At the age of seven, Tatsumaki was taken to a facility to test and study her psychic powers. Seven.

Thankfully, she was rescued by a hero who… told her not to always rely on someone to save her. Well, she decided to become a superhero despite or maybe even because of those words.

As an Esper, Tatsumaki can fling all sorts of things at her opponent. She mainly likes to focus on telekinetically throwing rocks at her opponents. Big rocks, small rocks, rocks from outer space, she doesn’t really care. And for all the non-rocks out there feeling left out, she also throws those as well.

Trains, buildings, monsters, she doesn’t really discriminate.

Tatsumaki is so powerful that she can create extremely powerful earthquakes.

Her power is above all other Espers, even more than her older-looking but still younger sister, Fubuki.

Because anime is weird.

And thanks to her horrible upbringing, Tatsumaki is kinda a brat with some major trust issues. To the point that she doesn’t want Fubuki to have friends.

Tatsumaki’s powers are precise enough to the point that she can do all sorts of crazy-ass things. But Boomstick wants to focus on one thing in particular…

(Well, there’s Wiz’s good deed for the day).

She can mess with any other person’s psyonic abilities, so long as they’re weaker than hers. Which translates to pretty much everyone else.

And while that “Pulling a meteor from space” thing isn’t actually present from the source material, it’s still plausible given her abilities.

At one point, she pulled a bad guy hideout from under a city that was about 1500 meters underground. Since Z City is similar to Ginza Tokyo, there’s some calculations that can be made from that feat.

This means that Tatsumaki can psychically bench over 3,200,000,000 tons. That’s like benching 62 Great Walls of China all at once.

And she’s insanely quick too. At one point an alien named Boros attacked City A with a bunch of bullets. Tatsumaki redirected them back at his ship at a speed of 647,300 meters per second.

She’s extremely tough too. To the point that she can withstand multiple hits from significantly powerful attacks like being hit with 300 times the weight of Earth.

She’s even managed to fight the One Punch Man himself, Saitama. She still lost, but it was probably for the better, as she was humbled by the experience, and finally mellowed out about Fubuki having friends.

But Tatsumaki isn’t invincible. Espers in her world aren’t great at multitasking in the sense that if she’s attacking, she can’t be defending.

Still, very few can rival the power that she has at her thoughts.

The Battle Itself.

Luis, Jerky, Kiid, and Kayas on animation. Mob will be voiced by Beau Bridgland and Tatsumaki will be voiced by Jennifer Alyx. one hundred percent by Brandon Yates, and Chris Kokkinos lead on audio.

So, the fight starts because Mob is lost, and mistakes Tatsumaki for a student of the local middle school. She takes offense, and slams him into a wall.

Mob, of course, retaliates, and the Tornado of Terror also starts the fight.

(Look at this scene! It looks like it could have come straight from the anime!)

Anyways, about ten seconds later, Tatsumaki is pushing Mob to his first limit, and is striking at his shield.

Had this been anyone else, they would have been dead. But as for Mob?

He goes to 100%.

For the record, Mob gets all the badass lines in this fight.

Tatsumaki gets her shield up in time, but Mob’s more varied arsenal gives her a run for her money.

But all this attack does is just push Mob to his full maximum.

The battle is eventually taken to a crater, where Mob disables Tatsumaki.

Finishing Blow in

5…

4…

3…

2…

1…

Okay, I lied. Tatsumaki gets one badass line.

Verdict + Explanation.

First off, Wiz says the typical line.

And then they go into how much of a stomp it was for Tatsumaki. According to the DBC, whenever they say this, it usually means that it was hard to get to this conclusion, and that they had no idea as to who was going to win.

But to be fair, Mob does have some edges. Like the simultaneous offense and defense ability, and a few others.

Unfortunately though, he’s just a middle-schooler who never wanted to use his powers to begin with.

Tatsumaki is a high-ranked Superhero who trained at an early age. Experience advantage: Tatsumaki

Mob catching lightning seems impressive, but it’s not quite what you might think. There’s two types of lightning. The leader, and the return stroke.

Mob is clearly catching the leader. While impressive, it’s not quite on the same level as Tatsumaki.

The bullets she caught were all solid, with no explosions attached. Saitama proved this by him punching them with no boom.

Given their size and how much damage they could do, the speed they would be moving at would mean that Tatsumaki’s reaction would be nearly 9 times greater

Now, as for Mob’s absorption abilities, there’s a clear limit that he has, considering that he had to transfer some of that energy into broccoli.

So yeah. There’s research involving broccoli.

Impressive. Now take in mind as to how powerful Tatsumaki is.

Tatsumaki launching those bullets back comes out to about 470 gigatons of TNT. More than enough to overpower Mob’s shield.

Simply put, Tatsumaki’s output exceeded Mob’s.

By about a factor of 9, to be precise. And with her speed, she could switch between offense and defense so fast that it wouldn’t really matter if Mob could do both at once.

And Mob is more of a defender than an attacker. And with defense not being something that could outlast Tatsumaki, he was kinda dead in the water. Especially since Tatsumaki wasn’t dependent on her emotions to use her powers like Mob is.

The winner is Tatsumaki.

Overall impression.

If they were trying to get people to watch and/or read these guys’ adventures, they certainly succeeded. Overall, the feel of the episode has great humor to it, and the animation is top-notch.

I was even under the impression that Mob would win thanks to his simultaneous abilities of offense and defense. So, they were pretty good about keeping some people on their toes.

7.8/10

Next Time…

Oh god. I feel so bad for the animators for this one.

Is there a fight that you want me to review? - Send an ask/request, and I’ll look into it!

Do you want to read my fanfic based around DEATH BATTLE itself? click here!

Thank you for reading, and I hope to see you next time for…

Total Insanity

#Death Battle #Deathbattle #review

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brokenfoetus · 4 years

Video

youtube

I used to stream my gaming all the time.... Not so much these days... mainly I have too many things that require I pause and walk away for a few min.... which I mean... clearly is not enjoyable to watch.... a pause screen or my character standing still for 2-4 min is not super exciting.... I still sometimes will record stuff and post to youtube... I used to stream entire game playthroughs start to finish.... Twitch can be problematic sometimes though... gets annoying with constant ads... not that youtube is any better about ads but... twitch has seemed to have a tendency where people watching lose the stream connection... and then have to see the fucking ads again when they try and refresh.... which if it was just a 30 second ad it wouldn’t be so bad.... but when you have to watch that 30-60 ad 2-3 times in a row.... becomes... FUCKING OBNOXIOUS.... when I have more time to game and I’m not so busy with all the work stuffs... I would like to setup my stream on youtube and see how that goes... I do enjoy interacting with viewers but.... after around 10 years of working at various call centers either having to do sales/billing or IT/Support/networking stuff..... I fucking DESPISE wearing headsets.... I really fucking do.... maybe someday I’ll buy a nice mic setup that doesn’t pick up the background noise of the game or something so I no longer have to.... few things feel as physically uncomfortable to me as wearing a head set now..... I do wear one sometimes for co-op games with friends but... ugh... it gives me the worst fucking headache.... and while my headset now is actually pretty damn nice as far as cheaper ones go... I just can’t afford the mega nice ones.... especially if they end up... well.. not really helping... and are still uncomfortable.... minor complaint indeed but.... you try having something dig into your temples while trying to focus on things for 2-4 hours... it BLOWS GIANT DONKEY GENITALS..... But..... I Digress.... Down the road.... when I have upgraded a few things for my PC and have a decent setup.... it’d be fun to do again on my free time... or if I’m on a hiatus or something... We will see.... For now... here’s me murdering things... and I’ve randomly posted them before I’m sure... The First is the only video that got a shitload of views really... It’s because I got the Dark Souls 3 Expansion at midnight on release day... and at the time had nothing better to do... so I obsessively played... and killed the hidden dragon boss in the first 24 hours of release... so people were desperate for tactics and tips.... and well... all the other videos suggested smacking it’s hind legs all day but.... I found that doing so made it freak out and do really annoying dangerous attacks that got me killed so.... I did what I usually do..... which is say “FUCK IT....” and then just face to face murder the thing while ENRAGED..... sadly.... I fucked up while recording... and accidentally set the audio settings wrong.... so there was no audio.... just video.... So I set it to some... “The Black Dahlia Murder” regardless of my mistake... and also... regardless of the candy ass whines I got for not setting it the Dark Souls III soundtrack... which... I did not own or have..... The video came out pretty epic fun to me.... hehe... and to some other viewers as well I suppose. -The End<3

#Me #Personal #Pointless #ramblings #Gaming #and Stuff #THE END

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chalabrun · 5 years

Note

If you are taking prompts, pls, oh pls, can I have Venom riding Eddie possibly combined with possessive!Eddie?

Warning(s): E, sexual content

Lately, it seemed as though his fortunes were beginning to look up, if only a little. Within the past week he’d been hired by a local, community paper. Nothing nearly as prestigiousas what he’d worked with in the past, but it sure as hell beat the crap out of writing for crappy celebrity rags. All news is still news, his advisor for his journalism major had told him, crap or no. What mattered wasthe integrity of the one reporting it and the validity of the truth. Nothing else was supposed to matter.

So, for his first real assignment, he’d been deigned to cover a local charity auction that would be benefiting some local orphanages. Despite the foul reputation he possessed amongthe other vigilantes that crawled through Manhattan, anything that was for the betterment of kids was something he could always get behind.

Prestige didn’t matter for something like that.

Dressed in a serviceable dress shirt and black trousers paired with worn but newly buffed penny loafers, hair slicked back, availing himself before the mirror made him think he looked prettydamn good all things considering.

However, it seemed as though his Other was in disagreement.

Wish you didn’t have to go, Eddie, the symbiote said within his mind, manifesting over his shoulder and nuzzling against his pulse. Teeth affectionately grazed his neck in reddening runnels, but nothing that would last for very long. A sweet displayof possessiveness that warmed him. Want you to spend the night in. Can feel the child growing. Wants to be with its father.

“I know, love,” Eddie murmured as he turned his face into Venom, brushing a soft kiss into its form. Venom purred loudly and bumped its head against his jaw, crooning as he feltits appendages entwine over his dress shirt, winding around his midsection and trailing towards the waistband of his pants, feeling his cock twitch and a rumble of lust pour into his mind like water.

Want to spend the night with you, too. Have you all to ourselves, the symbiote purred as it just barely breached his pants, hearing the top button pop open.

God knows, he wanted this, too. Still, the blond bid his stirring cock to calm down with how they were already running five minutes behind schedule. That didn’t mean he was callous.Venom had been feeling much more possessive and needy since this pregnancy had begun, much more emotionally charged than the other ones. He understood and did anything within his power to be more accommodating.

“You will later, love. I promise,” Eddie assured despite the lame, reedy whine that pitched from Venom as it nuzzled him one last time before begrudgingly disappearing insideof him.

Within a five minute bus ride and a block to walk, Eddie was at the auction in no time at all despite the slight hindrance. The people there were upper middle class types; wealthy enoughto participate at all, but modest enough unlike the insufferable wealthy class that would’ve shown up in even more ostentatious displays of wealth. Showing up for no one’s benefit but their own reputation and tomaintain the status quo masquerading as charity.

Eddie already had a mental checklist of people he planned on interviewing, one already sighted by the coat check. She was a smartly dressed, curvaceous blonde woman in a flattering, steelgray pantsuit that accentuated those curves. Admittedly, even he couldn’t help but stare for a minute longer than he should’ve, which earned a jealous and unhappy whine from the symbiote.

It’s just an interview, love. I won’t take long at all.

Then why were you staring at her? Like you wanted her, Eddie?

Eddie swallowed guiltily, unable to answer before making a beeline for her anyways. Venom resigned itself to sulking in the recesses of his mind, faintly hissing whenever Eddie smiled warmlythrough the questions, or at the way the woman flirted right back. She tucked errant locks of hair behind an ear, Venom sometimes mockingly repeating the way she said things in a tone of voice that dipped its toes into sultry.

See? That wasn’t so bad, was it?

Venom only responded with a snarling, feral hiss and grudging silence. Though it caused Eddie to take pause, he couldn’t blow this. Despite it, between interviewees and the occasionalpause to watch the auction play out, the symbiote manifested a single hand from the creeping ink that ran down Eddie’s arm and twined their fingers together, even though Eddie seemed too absorbed in current affairs toeven take notice. Too discouraged to try again, the symbiote retreated into miserable silence.

Several hours later, beaming at how well it went, when closing offers were made did Eddie feel as though he had ample material enough to retreat to an abandoned wing of the small communitycenter the auction had taken place in, switching on a set of lights and pulling out a chair in what appeared to be a bistro likely used as a food kitchen on reserve.

As Eddie was busily making notes in the margins of the notebook he’d used to record the transcripts, pairing it by listening to the audio he’d collected during the actual interviews,his hand suddenly lifted of its own accord and hurled the notebook, furiously, halfway across the empty room to slap on the tile meters away.

“Ven? Why did you--”

Eddie had no time to complete his question as he was seized and slammed by his back into the table he’d been sitting at, temporarily stunning him as he cracked his eyes from the impactopen into a vision of Venom manifested and pinning him by his wrists into the table.

“If you don’t want me, why don’t you couple with that human woman?!” came Venom’s impassioned, furiously hurt accusation. “Should go back to being nothing more than a suit for you!” Through that anger, Eddie could feel the symbiote trembling, quaking through this vice that seemed to be waning in pressure with each and every second.

Eddie’s own expression twisted in indignation and they remained in a stalemate for a pregnant pause before the blond manfully flipped them around, extricating himself from an entrapmentthat had been fraudulent to begin with.

Venom’s body jolted from the impact and anything that could be said was met with Eddie crashing their lips together, the symbiote reacting intensely and clawing into his scalp andback, engulfing each other in an embrasure too tight to be human. “You honestly think I want anyone else after you?” he growled into the column of venom’s neck as he sank blunt teeth into it, a savage purr rumbling through his Other’s chest cavity like a motor. “To be with someonewho will never understand me the way you do?” Venom’s flesh jumped and twitched and shivered as those teeth and lips traveled lower, uttering a shameless moan when he lapped at a pectoral with worshipfulness.

But like that, he took pause and Venom’s immeasurably pleasured eyes slowly opened, Eddie smiling with heartbreaking tenderness as he cupped Venom’s face before kissing lower,wrapping his arms around Venom’s abdomen where their child was growing, the symbiote’s claws in his hair taking pause. “You think I’d want anyone else but the parent of our child?” he asked withshining blue eyes before tenderly plotting kisses where the fetus was growing, Venom trembling with desperate adoration it never thought it’d have.

A defect. A faulty Klyntar that shamed its race.

Yet here its host was, showering it with so much love and devotion it thought it might burst.

Then, Eddie lifted his gaze, dark with lust. “Maybe I should prove it to you, love,” he purred as he sank to the floor, against a wall, bringing Venom to straddle his lap. Handscurved over formed hips and groped its rear, Venom hissing pleasurably while mentally pinned in anticipation and want, warm and hazy as a cloud of steam. “Fill you up with so many babies until this whole fucking planetis overrun. Prove to everyone that you’re mine.”

That alone was enough to awaken every bestial arousal in the symbiote, that which had bloomed from the furious and possessive passions that had flourished between them through the years.Yes, Eddie, we want that! We need it!

As if forgetting speech from there, Venom fell upon Eddie with desperate, possessive need as it scrambled to switch off the tab and undo his fly in a passionate love of the cock it adoredfilling it up so much. Pinning Eddie to the floor sans the hands that held on to its hips, Venom panted wantonly when it finally found Eddie’s cock and sprung it free, serpentine tongue coiling about the shaft and lavishingattention upon the head while Eddie fell back with a deep groan as Venom hungrily ravished it. The man’s face grimaced in pleasure while Venom pumped his cock with enrapturing effect, squeezing it in intervals that wasenough to make him go mad.

Gasping when Venom’s tongue was removed with a wet pop, the symbiote greedily sat itself on his cock and began riding him mercilessly hard, growling, “Mine, mine, mine, MINE,” in deep and lusty timbres. Eddie braced his feet into the tile, momentarily glad his shoes had good purchase while fucking Venom as hard and snapping his hipsto such ends that Venom gyrated its hips roughly on his cock, snarling its deep and feral pleasure.

The symbiote panted roughly and winded, ragged and drunk on pleasure. For several minutes was it sustained, Eddie’s calves and thighs burning from the exertion placed on his musclesas he gasped with each beat of the hard and fast fucking he gave the symbiote.

Suddenly, Venom curled into itself and pumped its hips once last time before its tongue lolled out in a drunk gasp and it collapsed boneless on him, mind whiting out in the intensity ofits orgasm. Eddie fucked Venom a few more times before he unloaded his seed inside the symbiote who purred and gladly squeezed and milked his cock dry even while slumped and panting hard on him. Eddie flopped when he’dfinally had enough, hands numbly rising to stroke over his beloved’s back that elicited a deepening purr and happy, relaxed shudder.

Eddie smiled, lazy and giddy. “You alright, love?” he murmured breathlessly, the contently dozing symbiote arching into his touch and sliding upwards at once to butt his jawlike a feline and nuzzle adoringly into his neck.

“More than okay, Eddie,” Venom purred, stretching its arms and talons out before relaxing again on its host with a gusty exhale. It turned its head and began to lavish lazy, affectionate licks along his jawline and jowls, eyes driftingshut in its contentedness.

“Yeah?” Gently did he approximate where the womb was, slipping a hand between their bodies and soothingly rubbing the area that warmed to his touch, oily skin rippling pleasurablyfrom the affectionate contact. He grazed a soft kiss on Venom’s crown, continuing the soothing circles he conferred to Venom while the symbiote trembled from the love that threatened to overwhelm it. “Baby doingalright, love? Not hurt at all?”

Venom’s arms engulfed Eddie’s head in a sudden embrace, resting their brows together and wanting to sink into this moment, forever. As soulmates. As the father and parent totheir child. As a love greater than it’d ever dreamed possible.

“No, Eddie,” the symbiote sighed, blinking languidly before embroiling him a deep, breathless kiss.

I love you, Eddie.

I love you, too, my darling.

#eddie brock #venom #symbrock #veddie #my writing #ey sorry for the late! hope you likey B]#whimsikalmusing

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maximelebled · 5 years

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Growing Pains - Zelda, Tony Hawk, The Sims, games and related memories from my formative years

This blog post is about my personal history with video games, how they influenced me growing up, how they sometimes helped me, and more or less an excuse to write about associated memories with them.

This is a very straightforward intro, because I’ve had this post sitting as a draft for ages, trying to glue all of it cohesively, but I’m not a very good writer, so I never really succeeded. Some of these paragraphs date back at least one year.

And I figured I should write about a lot of this as long as I still remember clearly, or not too inaccurately. Because I know that I don’t remember my earliest ever memory. I only remember how I remember it. So I might as well help my future self here, and give myself a good memento.

Anyway, the post is a kilometer long, so it’ll be under this cut.

My family got a Windows 95 computer when I was 3 years old. While I don’t remember this personally, I’m told that one of the first things I ever did with it was mess up with the BIOS settings so badly that dad’s computer-expert friend had to be invited to repair it. (He stayed for dinner as a thank you.)

It was that off-white plastic tower, it had a turbo button, and even a 4X CD reader! Wow! And the CRT monitor must have been... I don’t remember what it was, actually. But I do once remember launching a game at a stupidly high resolution: 1280x1024! And despite being a top-down 2D strategy, it ran VERY slowly. Its video card was an ATI Rage. I had no idea what that really meant that at the time, but I do recall that detail nonetheless.

Along with legitimately purchased games, the list of which I can remember:

Tubular Worlds

Descent II

Alone in the Dark I & III

Lost Eden

Formula One (not sure which game exactly)

Heart of Darkness

(and of course the famous Adibou/Adi series of educational games)

... we also had what I realize today were cracked/pirated games, from the work-friend that had set up the family computer. I remember the following:

Age of Empires I (not sure about that one, I think it might have been from a legitimate “Microsoft Plus!” disc)

Nightmare Creatures (yep, there was a PC port of that game)

Earthworm Jim (but without any music)

The Fifth Element

Moto Racer II

There are a few other memorable games, which were memorable in most aspects, except their name. I just cannot remember their name. And believe me, I have looked. Too bad! Anyway, in this list, I can point out a couple games that made a big mark on me.

First, the Alone in the Dark trilogy. It took me a long time to beat them. I still remember the morning I beat the third game. I think it was in 2001 or 2002.

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There was a specific death in it which gave me nightmares for a week. You shrink yourself to fit through a crack in a wall, but it’s possible to let a timer run out—or fall down a hole—and this terrifying thing happens (16:03). I remember sometimes struggling to run the game for no reason; something about DOS Extended Memory being too small.

I really like the low-poly flat-shaded 3D + hand-drawn 2D style of the game, and it’d be really cool to see something like that pop up again. After the 8-bit/16-bit trend, there’s now more and more games paying tribute to rough PS1-style 3D, so maybe this will happen? Maybe I’ll have to do it myself? Who knows!

Second, Lost Eden gave me a taste for adventure and good music, and outlandish fantasy universes. Here’s the intro to the game:

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A lot of the game is very evocative, especially its gorgeous soundtrack, and you spend a lot of time trekking through somewhat empty renders of landscapes. Despite being very rough early pre-rendered 3D, those places were an incredible journey in my young eyes. If you have some time, I suggest either playing the game (it’s available on Steam) or watching / skimmering through this “longplay” video. Here are some of my personal highlights: 25:35, 38:05, 52:15 (love that landscape), 1:17:20, 1:20:20 (another landscape burned in my neurons), 2:12:10, 2:55:30, 3:01:18. (spoiler warning)

But let’s go a couple years back. Ever since my youngest years, I was very intrigued by creation. I filled entire pocket-sized notebooks with writing—sometimes attempts at fiction, sometimes daily logs like the weather reports from the newspaper, sometimes really bad attempts at drawing. I also filled entire audio tapes over and over and OVER with “fake shows” that my sister and I would act out. The only thing that survived is this picture of 3-year-old me with the tape player/recorder.

It also turns out that the tape recorder AND the shelf have both survived.

(I don’t know if it still works.)

On Wednesday afternoons (school was off) and on the week-ends, I often got to play on the family computer, most of the time with my older brother, who’s the one who introduced me to... well... all of it, really. (Looking back on the games he bought, I can say he had very good tastes.)

Moto Racer II came with a track editor. It was simple but pretty cool to play around with. You just had to make the track path and elevation; all the scenery was generated by the game. You could draw impossible tracks that overlapped themselves, but the editor wouldn’t let you save them. However, I found out there was a way to play/save them no matter what you did, and I got to experiment with crazy glitches. 85 degree inclines that launched the bike so high you couldn’t see the ground anymore? No problem. Tracks that overlapped themselves several times, causing very strange behaviour at the meeting points? You bet. That stuff made me really curious about how video games worked. I think a lot of my initial interest in games can be traced back to that one moment I figured out how to exploit the track editor...

There was also another game—I think it was Tubular Worlds—that came on floppy disks. I don’t remember what exactly lead me to do it, but I managed to edit the text that was displayed by the installer... I think it was the license agreement bit of it. That got me even more curious as to how computers worked.

Up until some time around my 13th or 14th birthday, during summer break (the last days of June to the first days of September for French pupils), my sister and I would always go on vacation at my grandparents’ home.

The very first console game I ever played was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on my cousin’s Super Nintendo, who also usually stayed with us. Unlike us, he had quite a few consoles available to him, and brought a couple along. My first time watching and playing this game was absolutely mind-blowing to me. An adventure with a huge game world to explore, so many mysterious things at every corner. “Why are you a pink rabbit now?” “I’m looking for the pearl that will help me not be that.”

Growing up and working in the games industry has taken the magic out of many things in video games... and my curiosity for the medium (and its inner workings) definitely hasn’t helped. I know more obscure technical trivia about older games than I care to admit. But I think this is what is shaping my tastes in video games nowadays... part of it is that I crave story-rich experiences that can bring me back to a, for lack of a better term, “child-like” wonderment. And I know how weird this is going to sound, but I don’t really enjoy “pure gameplay” games as much for that reason. Some of the high-concept ones are great, of course (e.g. Tetris), but I usually can’t enjoy others without a good interwoven narrative. I can’t imagine I would have completed The Talos Principle had it consisted purely of the puzzles without any narrative beats, story bits, and all that. What I’m getting at is, thinking about it, I guess I tend to value the “narrative” side of games pretty highly, because, to me, it’s one of the aspects of the medium that, even if distillable to some formulas, is inherently way more “vague” and “ungraspable”. You can do disassembly on game mechanics and figure out even the most obsure bits of weird technical trivia. You can’t do that to a plot, a universe, characters, etc. or at least nowhere near to the same extent.

You can take a good story and weave it into a number of games, but the opposite is not true. It’s easy to figure out the inner working of gameplay mechanics, and take the magic out of them, but it’s a lot harder to do that for a story, unless it’s fundamentally flawed in some way.

Video games back then seemed a lot bigger than they actually were.

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I got Heart of Darkness as a gift in 1998 or 1999. We used to celebrate Christmas at my grandparents’, so I had to wait a few days to be back home, and to able to put the CD in the computer. But boy was it worth it! Those animated cutscenes! The amazing pixel art animations! The amazing and somewhat disturbing variety of ways in which you can die, most of which gruesome and mildly graphic! And of course, yet again... a strange and outlandish universe that just scratches my itch for it. Well, one of which that forged my taste for them.

I can’t remember exactly when it happened or what it was, but I do remember that at some point we visited some sort of... exposition? Exhibit? Something along those lines. And it had a board games & computer games section. The two that stick out in my mind were Abalone (of which I still have the box somewhere) and what I think was some sort of 2D isometric (MMO?) RPG. I wanna say it was Ultima Online but I recall it looking more primitive than that (it had small maps whose “void” outside them was a single blueish color).

In my last two years of elementary school, there was one big field trip per year. They lasted two weeks, away from family. The first one was to the Alps. The second one was... not too far from where I live now, somewhere on the coast of Brittany! I have tried really hard to find out exactly where it was, as I remember the building and facilities really well, but I was never able to find it again. On a couple occasions, we went on a boat with some kind of... algae harvesters? The smell was extremely strong (burning itself into my memory) and made me sick. The reason I bring them up is because quite a few of my classmates had Game Boy consoles, most of them with, you know, all those accessories, especially the little lights. I remember being amazed at the transparent ones. Play was usually during the off-times, and I watched what my friends were up to, with, of course, a bit of jealousy mixed in. The class traveled by bus, and it took off in the middle of the night; something like 3 or 4 in the morning? It seemed like such a huge deal at the time! Now here I am, writing THESE WORDS at 03:00. Anyway, most of my classmates didn’t fall back asleep and those that had a Game Boy just started playing on them. One of my classmates, however, handed me his whole kit and I got to do pretty much what I wanted with it, with the express condition that I would not overwrite any of his save files. I remember getting reasonably far in Pokémon before I had to give it back to him and my progress was wiped.

During the trip to the Alps, I remember seeing older kids paying for computer time; there was a row of five computers in a small room... and they played Counter-Strike. I had absolutely no idea what it was, and I would forget about it until the moment I’m writing these words, but I was watching with much curiosity.

The first time I had my own access to console games was in 2001. The first Harry Potter film had just come out, and at Christmas, I was gifted a Game Boy Advance with the first official game. I just looked it up again and good god, it’s rougher than I remember. The three most memorable GBA games which I then got to play were both Golden Sun(s) and Sword of Mana... especially the latter, with its gorgeous art direction. My dad had a cellphone back then, and I remember sneakily going on there to look up a walkthrough for a tricky part of Golden Sun’s desert bit. Cellphones had access to something called “WAP” internet... very basic stuff, but of course still incredible to me back then.

I eventually got to play another Zelda game on my GBA: Link’s Awakening DX. I have very fond memories of that one because I was bed-ridden with a terrible flu. My fever ran so high that I started having some really funky dreams, delirious half-awake hallucinations/feelings, and one night, I got so hot that I stumbled out of bed and just laid down against the cold tile of the hallway. At 3 in the morning! A crazy time! (Crazy for 11-year-old me.)

(The fever hallucinations were crazy. My bedroom felt like it was three times at big, and I was convinced that a pack of elephants were charging at me from the opposite corner. The “night grain” of my vision felt sharper, amplified. Every touch, my sore body rubbing against the bed covers felt like it was happening twice as much. You know that “Heavy Rain with 300% facial animation” video? Imagine that, but as a feverish feeling. The dreams were on another level entirely. I could spend pages on them, but suffice to say that’s when I had my first dream where I dreamed of dying. There were at least two, actually. The first one was by walking down a strange, blueish metal corridor, then getting in an elevator, and then feeling that intimate convinction that it was leading me to passing over. The second one was in some Myst-like world, straight out of a Roger Dean cover, with some sort of mini-habitat pods floating on a completely undisturbed lake. We were just trapped in them. It just felt like some kind of weird afterlife.)

I also eventually got to play the GBA port of A Link To The Past. My uncle was pretty amused by seeing me play it, as he’d also played the original on SNES before I’d even been born. I asked him for help with a boss (the first Dark World one), but unfortunately, he admitted he didn’t remember much of the game.

We had a skiing holiday around this time. I don’t remember the resort’s or the town’s name, but its sights are burned in my memory. Maybe it’s because, shortly after we arrived, and we went to the ski rental place, I almost fainted and puked on myself, supposedly from the low oxygen. It also turned out that the bedroom my parents had rented unexpectedly came with a SNES in the drawer under the tiny TV. The game: Super Mario World. I got sick at one point and got to stay in and play it. This was also the holiday where I developed a fondness for iced tea, although back then the most common brand left an awful aftertaste in your mouth that just made you even more thirsty.

We got a new PC in December of 2004. Ditching the old Windows 98 SE (yep, the OS had been upgraded in... 2002, I think?). Look at how old-school this looks. The computer office room was in the basement. Even with the blur job that I applied to the monitor for privacy reasons, you can still tell that this is the XP file explorer:

A look at what the old DSLR managed to capture on the shelf reveals some more of the games that were available to me back then: a bunch of educational software, The Sims 2, and SpellForce Gold.

I might be misremembering but I think they were our Christmas gifts for that year; we both got to pick one game. I had no idea what I wanted, really, but out of all the boxes at (what I think was) the local Fnac store, it was SpellForce that stood out to me the most. Having watched Lord of the Rings the year prior might have been a factor. I somewhat understood Age of Empires years before that, but SpellForce? Man, I loved the hell out of SpellForce. Imagine a top-down RPG that can also be played from a third-person perspective. And with the concept of... hero units... wait a second... now that reminds me of Dota.

Imagine playing a Dota hero with lots of micro-management and being able to build a whole base on new maps. And sometimes visiting very RPG-ish sections (my favorites!) with very little top-down strategy bits, towns, etc. like Siltbreaker. I guess this game was somewhat like an alternate, single-player Dota if you look at it from the right angle. (Not the third-person one.)

I do remember being very excited when I found out that it, too, came with a level editor. I never figured it out, though. I only ever got as far as making a nice landscape for my island, and that was it!

A couple weeks after, it was Christmas; my sister and I got our first modern PC game: The Sims 2. It didn’t run super well—most games didn’t, because the nVidia GeForce FX 5200 wasn’t very good. But that didn’t stop me or my sister from going absolutely nuts with the game. This video has the timestamp of 09 January 2005, and it is the first video I’ve ever made with a computer. Less than two weeks after we got the game, I was already neck-deep in creating stuff.

Not that it was particularly good, of course. This is a video that meets all of the “early YouTube Windows Movie Maker clichés”.

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Speaking of YouTube, I did register an account there pretty early on, in August of 2006. I’ve been through all of it. I remember every single layout change. I also started using Sony Vegas around that time. It felt so complex and advanced back then! And I’m still using it today. Besides Windows, Vegas Pro is very likely to be the piece of software that I’ve been using for the longest time.

I don’t have a video on YouTube from before 2009, because I decided to delete all of them out of embarassment. They were mostly Super Mario 64 machinima. It’s as bad as it sounds. The reason I bring that up right now, though, is that it makes the “first” video of my account the last one I made with the Sims 2.

But before I get too far ahead with my early YouTube days, let me go backwards a bit. We got hooked up to the Internet some time in late 2005. It was RTC (dialup), 56 kbps. my first steps into the Internet led me to the Cube engine. Mostly because back then my dad would purchase computer magazines (which were genuinely helpful back then), and came with CDs of common downloadable software for those without Internet connections. One of them linked to Cube. I think it was using either this very same screenshot, or a very similar one, on the same map.

The amazing thing about Cube is not only that it was open-source and moddable, but had map editing built-in the game. The mode was toggled on with a single key press. You could even edit maps cooperatively with other people. Multiplayer mapping! How cool is that?! And the idea of a game that enabled so much creation was amazing to me, so I downloaded it right away. (Over the course of several hours, 30 MiB being large for dialup.)

I made lots of bad maps that never fulfilled the definition of “good level” or “good gameplay”, not having any idea how “game design” meant, or what it even was. But I made places. Places that I could call my own. “Virtual homes”. I still distinctively remember the first map I ever made, even though no trace of it survives to this day. In the second smallest map size possible, I’d made a tower surrounded by a moat and a few smaller cozy towers, with lots of nice colored lighting. This, along with the distinctive skyboxes and intriguing music, made me feel like I’d made my home in a strange new world.

At some point later down the line, I made a kinda-decent singleplayer level. It was very linear, but one of the two lead developers of the game played it and told me he liked it a lot! Of course, half of that statement was probably “to be nice”, but it was really validating and encouraging. And I’m glad they were like that. Because I remember being annoying to some other mappers in the Sauerbraten community (the follow-up to Cube, more advanced technically), who couldn’t wrap their heads around my absolutely god awful texturing work and complete lack of level “design”. Honestly, sometimes, I actually kinda feel like trying to track a couple of them down and being like, “yeah, remember that annoying kid? That was me. Sorry you had to deal with 14-year-old me.”

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At some point, I stumbled upon a mod called Cube Legends. It was a heavily Zelda-inspired “total conversion”; a term reserved for mods that are the moddiest mods and try to take away as much of the original foundation as possible. It featured lots of evocative MIDI music by the Norwegian composer Bjørn Lynne. Fun fact: the .mid files are still available officially from his website!

This was at the crossroad of many of my interests. It was yet another piece of the puzzle. As a quick side note, this is why Zelda is the first series that I name in the title of this post, even though I... never really thought of myself as a Zelda fan. It’s not that it’s one of the game series that I like the most, it’s just that, before I started writing this, I’d never realized how far-reaching its influence had been in my life, both in overt and subtle ways, especially during my formative years.

And despite how clearly unfinished, how much of a “draft” Cube Legends was, I could see what it was trying to do. I could see the author’s intent. And I’m still listening to Bjørn Lynne’s music today.

The Cube Engine and its forums were a big part of why I started speaking English so well. Compared to most French people, I mean. We’re notoriously bad with the English language, and so was I up until then. But having this much hands-on practice proved to be immensely valuable. And so, I can say that the game and its community have therefore had long-lasting impacts in my life.

I also tried out a bunch of N64 games via emulation, bringing me right back in that bedroom at my grandparents’ house, with my cousin. Though he did not have either N64 Zelda game back then.

The first online forum I ever joined was a Zelda fan site’s. There are two noteworthy things to say here:

It was managed by a woman who, during my stay in the community, graduated from her animation degree. At this stage I had absolutely no idea that this was going to be the line of work I would eventually pursue!

I recently ran into the former head moderator of the forums. (I don’t know when the community died.) One of the Dota players on my friends list invited him because I was like “hmm, I wanna go as 3, not as 2 players today”. His nickname very vaguely reminded me of something, a weird hunch I couldn’t place. Half an hour into the game, he said “hey Max... this might be a long shot, but did you ever visit [forum]?” and then I immediately yelled “OH MY GOD—IT IS YOU.” The world is a small place.

Access to the computer was sometimes tricky. I didn’t always have good grades, and of course, “punishment” (not sure the word is appropriate, hence the quotes, but you get the idea) often involved locking me out of the computer room. Of course, most times, I ended up trying to find the key instead. I needed my escape from the real world. (You better believe it’s Tangent Time.)

I was always told I was the “smart kid”, because I “understood things faster” than my classmates. So they made me skip two grades ahead. This made me enter high school at nine years old. The consequences were awful (I was even more of the typical nerdy kid that wouldn’t fit in), and I wish it had never happened. Over the years, I finally understood: I wasn’t more intelligent. I merely had the chance to have been able to grow up with an older brother who’d instilled a sense of curiosity, critical thinking, and taste in books that were ahead of my age and reading level. This situation—and its opposite—is what I believe accounts for the difference in how well kids get to learn. It’s not innate talent, it’s not genetics (as some racists would like you to believe). It’s parenting and privilege.

And that’s why I’ll always be an outspoken proponent for any piece of media that tries to instill critical thinking and curiosity in its viewer, reader, or player.

But I digress.

Well, I’ve been digressing a lot, really, but games aren’t everything and after all, this post is about the context in which I played those games. Otherwise I reckon I would’ve just made a simple list.

I eventually got a Nintendo DS for Christmas, along with Mario Kart DS. My sister had gotten her own just around the time when it released... she had the Nintendogs bundle. We had also upgraded to proper ADSL, what I think was about a ~5 megabits download speed. The Nintendo DS supported wi-fi, which was still relatively rare compared to today. In fact, Nintendo sold a USB wireless adapter to help with that issue—our ISP-supplied modem-router did not have any wireless capabilities. I couldn’t get it the adapter work and I remember I got help from a really kind stranger who knew a lot about networking—to a point that it seemed like wizardry to me.

I remember I got a “discman” as a gift some time around that point. In fact, I still have it. Check out the stickers I put on it! I think those came from the Sims 2 DVD box and/or one of its add-ons.

I burned a lot of discs. In fact, in the stack of burned CDs/DVDs that I found (with the really bad Sims movies somewhere in there), I found at least three discs that had the Zelda album Hyrule Symphony burned in, each with different additional tracks. Some were straight-up MIDI files from vgmusic.com...! And speaking (again) of Zelda, when the Wii came out, Twilight Princess utterly blew my mind. I never got the game or the console, but damn did I yearn badly for it. I listened to the main theme of the game a lot, which didn’t help. I eventually got to play the first few hours at a friend’s place.

At some point, we’d upgraded the family computer to something with a bit more horsepower. It had a GeForce 8500 GT inside, which was eventually upgraded to a 9600 GT after the card failed for some reason. It could also dual-boot between XP and Vista. I stuck with that computer until 2011.

We moved to where I currently live in 2007. I’ve been here over a decade! And before we’d even fully finished unpacking, I was on the floor of the room that is now my office, with the computer on the ground and the monitor on a cardboard box, playing a pirated copy of... Half-Life! It was given to me by my cousin. It took me that long to find out about the series. It’s the first Valve game I played. I also later heard about the Orange Box, but mostly about Portal. Which I also pirated and played. I distinctly remember being very puzzled by the options menu: I thought it was glitched or broken, as changing settings froze the game. Turns out the Source engine had to chug for a little while, like a city car in countryside mud, as it reloaded a bunch of stuff. Patience is a virtue...

But then, something serious happened.

In the afternoon of 25 December 2007, I started having a bit of a dull stomach pain. I didn’t think much of it. Figured maybe I’d eaten too many Christmas chocolates and it’d go away. It didn’t. It progressively deteriorated into a high fever where I had trouble walking and my tummy really hurt; especially if you pressed on it. My parents tried to gently get me to eat something nice on New Year’s Eve, but it didn’t stay in very long. I could only feed myself with lemonade and painkiller. Eventually, the doctor decided I should get blood tests done as soon as possible. And I remember that day very clearly.

I was already up at 6:30 in the morning. Back then, The Daily Show aired on the French TV channel Canal+, so I was watching that, lying in the couch while waiting for my mom to get up and drive me to my appointment, at 7:00. It was just two streets away, but there was no way I could walk there. At around noon, the doctor called and told my mom: “get your son to the emergency room now.”

Long story short, part of my intestines nuked themselves into oblivion, causing acute peritonitis. To give you an idea, that’s something with a double-digit fatality rate. Had we waited maybe a day or two more, I would not be here writing this. They kind of blew up. I had an enormous abcess attached to a bunch of my organs. I had to be operated on with only weak local anaesthetics as they tried to start draining the abscess. It is, to date, by far the most painful thing that has ever happened to me. It was bad enough that the hospital doctor that was on my case told me that I was pretty much a case worthy to be in textbooks. I even had medical students come into my hospital room about it! They were very nice.

This whole affair lasted over a month. I became intimately familiar with TV schedules. And thankfully, I had my DS to keep me company. At the time, I was pretty big into the Tony Hawk DS games. They were genuinely good. They had extensive customization, really great replayability, etc. you get the idea. I think I even got pretty high on the online leaderboards at some point. I didn’t have much to do on some days besides lying down in pain while perfecting my scoring and combo strategies. I think Downhill Jam might’ve been my favorite.

My case was bad enough that they were unable to do something due to the sad state of my insides during the last surgery of my stay. I was told that I could come back in a few months for a checkup, and potentially a “cleanup” operation that would fix me up for good. I came back in late June of 2008, got the operation, and... woke up in my hospital room surrounded by, like, nine doctors, and hooked up to a morphine machine that I could trigger on command. Apparently something had gone wrong during the operation, but they never told me what. I wasn’t legally an adult, so they didn’t have to tell me. I suspect it’s somewhere in some medical files, but I never bothered to dig up through my parents’ archives, or ask the hospital. And I think I would rather not know. But anyway, that was almost three more weeks in the hospital. And it sucked even more that time because, you see, hospital beds do not “breathe” like regular beds do. The air can’t go through. Let’s say I’m intimately familiar with the smell of back sweat forever.

When I got out, my mom stopped by a supermarket on the way home. And that is when I bought The Orange Box, completely on a whim, and made my Steam account. Why? Because it was orange and stood out on the shelf.

(As a side note, that was the whole bit I started writing first, and that made me initially title this post “growing pains”. First, because I’m bad at titles. Second, because not that I didn’t have them otherwise (ow oof ouch my knees), but that was literally the most painful episode of my entire life thus far and it ended in a comically-unrelated, high-impact, life-changing decision. Just me picking up The Orange Box after two awful hospital stays... led me to where I am today.)

While I was recovering, I also started playing EarthBound! Another bit of a life-changer, that one. To a lesser extent, but still. I was immediately enamored by its unique tone. Giygas really really really creeped me out for a while afterwards though. I still get unsettled if I hear its noises sometimes.

I later bought Garry’s Mod (after convincing my mom that it was a “great creative toolbox that only cost ten bucks!”), and, well, the rest is history. By which I mean, a lot of my work and gaming activity since 2009 is still up and browsable. But there are still a few things to talk about.

In 2009, I bought my first computer with YouTube ad money: the Asus eee PC 1005HA-H. By modern standards, it’s... not very powerful. The processor in my current desktop machine is nearly 50 times as fast as its Atom N280. It had only one gigabyte of RAM, Windows 7 Basic Edition, and an integrated GPU barely worthy of the name; Intel didn’t care much for 3D in their chips back then. The GMA 945 didn’t even have hardware support for Transform & Lighting.

But I made it work, damn it. I made that machine run so much stuff. I played countless Half-Life and Half-Life 2 mods on it—though, due to the CPU overhead on geometry, some of those were trickier. I think one of the most memorable ones I played was Mistake of Pythagoras; very surreal, very rough, but I still remember it so clearly. I later played The Longest Journey on it, in the middle of winter. It was a very cozy and memorable experience. (And another one that’s an adventure wonderful outlandish alien universe. LOVE THOSE.)

I did more than playing games on it, though...

This is me sitting, sunburned on the nose, in an apartment room, on 06 August 2010. This was in the Pyrénées, at the border between France and Spain. We had a vacation with daily hiking. Some of the landscapes we visited reminded me very strongly of those from Lost Eden, way up the page...

So, you see, I had 3ds Max running on that machine. The Source SDK as well. Sony Vegas. All of it was slow; you bet I had to use some workarounds to squeeze performance out of software, and that I had to keep a close, watchful eye on RAM usage. But I worked on this thing. I really did! I animated this video’s facial animation bits (warning: this is old & bad) on the eee PC, during the evenings of the trip, when we were back at our accomodation. The Faceposer tool in the Source SDK really worked well on that machine.

I also animated an entire video solely on the machine (warning: also old and bad). It had to be rendered on the desktop computer... but every single bit of the animation was crafted on the eee PC.

I made it work.

Speaking of software that did not run well: around that time, I also played the original Crysis. The “but can it run Crysis?” joke was very much justified back then. I had to edit configuration files by hand so that I could run the game in 640x480... because I wanted to keep most of the high-end settings enabled. The motion blur was delicious, and it blew my mind that the effect made the game feel this smooth, despite wobbling around in the 20 to 30 fps range.

Alright. It’s time to finish writing this damn post and publish it at last, so I’m going to close it out by listing some more memories and games that I couldn’t work in up there.

Advance Wars. Strategy game on GBA with a top-down level editor. You better believe I was all over the editor right away.

BioShock. When we got the 2007 desktop computer, it was one of the first games I tried. Well, its demo, to be precise. Its tech and graphics blew my mind, enough that I saved up to buy the full game. This was before I had a Steam account; I got a boxed copy! I think it might have been the last boxed game I ever bought? It had a really nice metal case. The themes and political messages of the game flew way over my head, though.

Mirror’s Edge. The art direction was completely fascinating to me, and it introduced me to Solar Fields’ music; my most listened artist this decade, by a long shot.

L.A. Noire. I lost myself in its stories and investigations, and then, I did it all again, with my sister at the helm. I very rarely play games twice (directly or indirectly), which I figure is worth mentioning.

Zeno Clash. It was weird and full of soul, had cool music, and cool cutscenes. It inspired me a lot in my early animation days.

Skyward Sword. Yep, going back to Zelda on that one. The whole game was pretty good, and I’m still thinking about how amazing its art direction was. Look up screenshots of it running in HD on an emulator... it’s outstanding. But there’s a portion of the game that stands tall above the rest: the Lanayru Sand Sea. It managed to create a really striking atmosphere in many aspects, through and through. I still think about it from time to time, especially when its music comes on in shuffle mode.

Wandersong. A very recent pick, but it was absolutely a life-changing one. That game is an anti-depressant, a vaccine against cynicism, a lone bright and optimist voice.

I realize now this is basically a “flawed but interesting and impactful games” list. With “can establish its atmosphere very well” as a big criteria. (A segment of video games that is absolutely worth exploring.)

I don’t know if I’ll ever make my own video game. I have a few ideas floating around and I tried prototyping some stuff, though my limited programming abilities stood in my way. But either way, if it happens one day, I hope I’ll manage to channel all those years of games into the CULMINATION OF WHAT I LIKE. Something along those lines, I reckon.

#video games

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