#these two are one of my top three pairings in this series/in power rangers
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Casey/RJ playlist!
Up next on my Power Rangers playlists is Casey/RJ!
Now I'm a little shocked going back and realizing how popular this fic got! I'm rather proud of the character development in it, but to find out that it's the most viewed&kudosed Casey/RJ fic on ao3? Was a bit of a shock. I'm so grateful for everyone that's read or enjoyed it- this playlist is for y'all!
@skyland2703 @madhare0512 @khruschevshoe @liveinalovelyway @disastardly @augment-techs
#casey rhodes#robert james#casey x rj#these two are one of my top three pairings in this series/in power rangers#this was really the fic that got me into the flow of this series#yes i wrote a couple of others first but this is the one that balanced character/relationship development & convinced me to keep going#power rangers#power rangers jungle fury#Spotify#playlist#my fics#aletterinthenameofsanity#the front bottoms#panic! at the disco#ruelle#alessia cara#lovelytheband#fm static#mother mother#onerepublic
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2022 in Books
My reading stats for this year are so weird because I started reading a lot of children's chapter books and graphic novels. According to Storygraph I've read 292 books this year, and I know I didn't include everything.
Since it's hard to really compare all the things I've read, I've made 3 different top ten lists based on the sorts of things I read this year.
Top Five Books
1. The Wolf Among the Wild Hunt by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor
2. Gryphon Ranger: Crossline Plains by Roz Gibson
3. Flames of Hope by Tui T. Sutherland
4. I Hope We Choose Love by Kai Cheng Thom
5. By the Silver Wind by Jess Owen
Top Graphic Novels
1. Magical Boy by The Kao
2. Dog Man by Dav Pilkey
3. Wingbearer by Marjorie M. Liu
4. Manu! by Kelly Fernandez
5. Space Story by Fiona Ostby
Top Chapter Books Series
1. The Babysitters Club by Ann M. Martin
2. Animorphs by KA Applegate
3. Horse Country by Yamile Saied Mendez
4. Unicorn Academy by Julie Sykes
5. Secrets of Droon by Tony Abbott
Additional commentary below the Read More, but I'm not the author of any of these books and I don't owe you a Real Summary.
Top Five Books
1. The Wolf Among the Wild Hunt by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor
-I'm not usually into spooky stuff, but I am into platonic ride-or-die friendships between people who are convinced they're monsters
2. Gryphon Ranger: Crossline Plains by Roz Gibson
-The past couple years have been a revelation in discovery that actually a lot of people feel that gryphons are the best mythical creature and that Redwall was great but Adult talking animals with swords is even better. It seems it is my fate to become a furry.
3. Flames of Hope by Tui T. Sutherland
-I still do love dragons, and this was a very satisfying season finale for Wings of Fire. Tui has done several variations on subverting the Chosen One and it's a unique and interesting take each time.
4. I Hope We Choose Love by Kai Cheng Thom
-Everything that is wrong with Internet Queer Culture and how to fix it. Well, sort of. It's a good read for recentering oneself, I think.
5. By the Silver Wind by Jess Owen
-Speaking of gryphons, I'm not sure how long it took me to finish this series, but I am slowly working my way through the canon of Gryphon fantasy.
Top Graphic Novels
1. Magical Boy by The Kao
-A trans boy finds out that he's inherited his mother's magical girl powers - including her outfit! A loving parody of the magical girl genre that also expresses how frustrating it is for queer and trans folks.
2. Dog Man by Dav Pilkey
-Come for the poop jokes, stay for the generational trauma and moral philosophy. Dav Pilkey is a genius and I will die on this hill.
3. Wingbearer by Marjorie M. Liu
-No this one isn't about gryphons, they just show up briefly. It's just so pretty...
4. Manu! by Kelly Fernandez
-What if a magical school was a girl's Catholic school? And one of the kids may or may not be a demon, but is definitely an adorable chaos queerling?
5. Space Story by Fiona Ostby
-three timelines - one of a woman on a space station waiting for her family, one of her wife and child building a ship to join her, and one of how the two of them met. Slow and sweet and hopeful in the face of a bleak future and a really good use of multiple timelines.
Top Chapter Books Series
1. The Babysitters Club by Ann M. Martin
-I would have hated these as a tween, but as an adult they're bomb. I'm only like 20 in but they're a masterclass in character development and episodic storytelling.
2. Animorphs by KA Applegate
-I never actually finished the series as a kid, and was hoping to do so this year, but that will probably take until January. Anyway it's way more intense than I remember.
3. Horse Country by Yamile Saied Mendez
-Just another horse girl series, but this one stars girls of color who are flawed and interesting characters.
4. Unicorn Academy by Julie Sykes
-It's trash. Absolute trash. Girls in a boarding school who get paired with a unicorn and need to unlock their magical talent with Power of Friendship while going on somewhat contrived G-rated adventures. Absolute garbage writing and worldbuilding. But it's my kind of trash and I fucking love it.
5. Secrets of Droon by Tony Abbott
-Another masterclass in episodic storytelling, and how to balance standalone adventures with longform plot. Early volumes are a bit twee but the stakes get raised as the series goes on. I want to co-author this but with kids of color exploring a fantasyland that is less colonialist.
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USS Texas (BB-35) modifications Part 1: 1914 to 1925.
USS Texas had a long active career compared to other battleships and went through numerous changes and modifications to keep up with new technology and stratiges.
It is important to note, she was saved from the scrape heep three times in her life time. I will go into each time as they come up in my 4 part series.
Here is a quick overview of her base stats.
She and her sister, USS New York (BB-34), were the 5th pair of Dreadnoughts ordered by the US Navy and were the first US Battleships built with 14 inch guns, making them the most powerful Battleships in the world when they were commissioned in 1914. Her guns had a maximum range of 22,000 yards. (They could fire further had they not been limited by the 15 degree of max elevation.) She as built with 4 torpedo tubes below the waterline, to read more about them, see my dedicated post. (Link)
She was the last US Battleship powered by coal and the second to last built with triple expanding reciprocating engines. USS Oklahoma (BB-37) being the last. She had two engines driving two propellers. This allowed her to have a max speed of 21 knots and max range of 7,060 nautical miles, or 8,125 miles (13,075 km), at 10 knots. She was originally designed with single turbine engine driving 4 propreller, the same setup as USS Arkansas (BB-33) but the inefficiencies of the early turbines at lower RPMs caused the Navy to switch to reciprocating engines.
Her armor consisted of 10 to 12 inch at midships, 6 inch in the aft and 9 in lower belt in the aft. I will go over this in a different post as she was the last constructed before the US Navy went with the All-or-Nothing armor scheme of USS Nevada (BB-36) and onwards.
She was built in a time when aircraft weren't even a concern and the real damager lay with torpedo boats. Hence why she was built with nineteen 5 inch guns below deck level and no anti-aircraft guns.
She was commissioned on March 12, 1914 at the Newport News Shipyard. She joined her sister USS New York (BB-34), who was commissioned a month later, in New York Navy Yard in April. During this time, the US Navy modified her foremast crow's nest and removed her searchlights from the top of her cranes. These were reinstalled at a later date.
She didn't go through the normal shake down period after comissioning due to the situation in Vera Cruz, Mexico. Instead, her crew conducted it while with she was enroute and in the Gulf of Mexico. Normally, a warship would conduct a shakedown to find any defects and fimilairize the crew over six months before joining the fleet.
She had twenty-one 5 inch guns when built, nineteen in casemates on her second deck, and two more on her superstructure. These were for torpedo boats and other smaller warships that might get close enough to cause damage. However, they were found to be usable in only the calmest of conditions and were slowly removed and placed higher in her superstructure.
Note: I will be referring to this diagram when I am referring to each 5 inch gun removed.
In June of 1916, the search lights on top of her cranes were replaced range finders and a month later were replaced with 3 inch anti-aircraft guns. Her two ranger finders were moved to the tops of turret No. 2 and 4.
She was the first US battleship to be fitted with AA guns.
Also during this time period, two horizontal arms and a vertical antenna on front side of mast and her forward observation platform were added.
After the US enter WWI, she went to her yard for the changes to her super structure. Her stacked searchlights on her fore cage mast was changed to a single platform, with the lights side by side. A torpedo defense platform was installed between the bridge and the lower searchlight platform. Three 5 inch guns at position 9, 10 and 19 were removed from the second deck.
Note: It is almost the period when it's the hardest to tell her apart from her sister.
She ran aground on September 28, 1917 at Block Island, RI and had to enter a drydock in New York Navy Yard in October to repair the damage. The US Fleet went to Europe without her because of this. While there, the Navy decided to modify her more by adding training marks to Turret No. 2 and a range clock. The 5 inch guns at position No. 1 and 2 were removed.
Also added were two range Clocks, one on the fore and aft mast towers. For more info on them, read my post on them. Link
She left the east coast on January 30, 1918 and rejoined the fleet in Scapa Flow. The next changes occurred while in Jarrow Slake, England, from October 20 to November 4, 1918. She received an enclosed pilot house (bridge), her mast tops were enclosed, and a aircraft fly off platform was added to Turret No. 2. To read more about her bridge and it was changed, follow this link to my earlier post of it.
After January 1919, she entered New York Navy Yard for more changes. A airplane platform was installed on Turret No. 4, and 5 inch guns were removed from positions 3, 4, 5, and 6.
In January 1921, the toredo platform was enclosed and her search lights were raised.
In August of 1921, six more 3 inch AA guns were installed on Turret No. 3, No. 4 and on the superstructure. To make room for the AA guns, the airplane platform was removed from Turret No. 4.
By 1924, she was considered quite behind the time as far rapidly evolving technology and was due to be replaced by one of the 1920 South Dakotas. However, due to the Washington Naval Treaty, they were cancelled and materials were instead used to refit and rebuild her and other battleships instead.
See Part 2 (link) for the next part of her changes and modernization or skip to Part 3 or Part 4 if you want.
This 4 part series is in response to an ask from @enriquemzn262 . It became too long to stay in one post and took longer than I intended to write.
source
NHHC: NH 45290
#USS Texas (BB-35)#USS Texas#Battleship Texas#New York Class#Dreadnought#Battleship#history#Part 1#united states navy#navy#us navy#usn#my post#USS Texas History Series
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Fireworks
A/N: Hey! So I’m back with another fic that’s surprisingly not my usual ShieldShock MO. I recently binged Power Rangers RPM and now I’ve joined the fandom, 11 years too late it seems cause the fandom is pretty much dormant/ nonexistent especially here on Tumblr 🤦🏾♀️But for anyone who hasn’t seen it, RPM was meant to be the last season of Power Rangers EVER so Disney took ALL the risks and it turned out to be IMO not only the best installment in the 20+ years of the show but some pretty good TV in general! It’s the most adult season they’ve made and with the A1 script and even better acting (Rose McIver, Adelaide Kane, Eka Darville!) it’s hands down SO enjoyable! Anyway, my birthday was on Saturday (#VirgoSZN 🥳) and this self indulgent fic of my new favourite OTP (Dillon x Summer Lansdown) is my gift to myself. It may be hard to follow if you don’t know the show or characters but I hope it’s still an enjoyable read.💜 Gifs by @vakariaan
Title: Fireworks
Pairing: Dillon x Summer Landsdown
Summary: Dillon and Summer finally stop dancing around each other. (Set between the final Venjix battle and the last scenes of Episode 32)
Rating: G
Warnings: Super fluffy and cheesy lol! Lots of direct references to the show.
“That’s three in a row, boys!” Summer Landsdown grinned as she knocked the last striped ball into the top right pocket of the pool table from what seemed like an impossible angle. She blew on the end of her pool stick like it was a smoking gun.
Her teammates Flynn McAllistair and Ziggy Grover were still staring at the cleared table, unable to pick up their jaws off the floor. The blue and green rangers were struggling to understand how they’d suffered yet another defeat at the hands of the yellow bear ranger.
“But that’s not-”
“How did you even-”
Summer handed the pool stick to Ziggy with a smile and took her empty red solo cup from Flynn. She called cheekily over her shoulder as she headed into the kitchen. “Let me know when you’ve had some practice.”
At the punch bowl on the breakfast bar, Summer refilled her cup and grabbed a seat on one of the high stools around it. She took a sip and surveyed the garage.
A week had passed since the Rangers had defeated Venjix. They’d finally cleaned up the destruction in the lab and rebuilt the city’s Command Center, so a night of celebrations and relaxation was in order before they headed off in different directions for the rest of the year. They’d gone all out for the party in true RPM style: lights, garlands, drinks and snacks with music blasting from Flynn’s blue Hummer.
Scott Truman sat with Dr K on the leather couch near the pool table, as Ziggy and Flynn set up a new game of pool. Summer watched with amusement as the red ranger tried to explain the game's objectives, with flagging patience, in response to the good doctor’s endless questions. From a nearby armchair, Tenaya listened intently to the two, raising questions of her own ever so often. Recently freed from Venjix’s control, she was still a little shy and understandably overwhelmed. She kept her distance a bit but was still willing to be involved in the conversation.
The sound of a whirring drill from the left of the garage broke Summer���s focus. She glanced over to see Gem and Gemma working on some kind of experiment as usual if the tangle of wires, bolts and explosives on the aluminium workstation was anything to go by.
Gemma waved excitedly, screwdriver in hand when she caught Summer’s gaze. She shared a knowing smile with the blonde ranger and pointed in the direction of the garage door with an exaggerated wink. Summer blushed and ducked her head in thanks, leaving her cup on the table as she made her way outside.
She found him leaning on the front of the Fury, looking up at the dome’s artificial night’s sky. He was the ultimate picture of the lone wolf black ranger; brows creased in deep thought, arms folded across his broad chest.
Summer was well aware that he knew she was coming closer - enhanced hybrid hearing and all - but she tapped on the hood of the black muscle car anyway to alert him of her presence. They’d been spending a lot more time together since the Rangers’ victory but he still liked to take some time away on his own. She didn’t want to disturb him if he wanted to be alone.
“I thought your brooding days would be over now that you’ve found your sister,” she teased as she stopped in front of the car.
Dillon chuckled as he looked over at her through his dark, shaggy bangs. “This is actually my happy face.”
He extended his arm in a silent invitation for her and she carefully settled next to him on the bonnet of the black muscle car.
“Sometimes,” Dillon began, still focused on the sky, “I look at the moon and the stars here and wonder what the real things are like outside of the dome. It was hard to see it during my time in the Waste Lands but now with Venjix gone, there aren’t any toxic gases to block the view.”
Summer hummed and waited for him to continue.
“The war is over and everyone’s going back to their old lives, but Tenaya and I don’t remember what life was like for us before.” He sighed and looked over at her, “But we do want to find out what the world out there is like without Venjix. We’ll get to know each other, snuff out any remaining factions and try to help hybrids like us who are looking to start over. I mean I wouldn’t call it soul searching, but if we found ourselves out there that would be great too.”
“Oh..” Summer whispered a little deflated, “that... sounds like a good plan.”
Dillon watched as the emotions flashed across Summer’s face till she gave him a half-smile. She could hardly hide her surprise though when he took her hand in his and laced their fingers together.
“But,” Dillon started with his signature smirk, coming around to stand between her legs at the front of the car, “if you’re not in a hurry to go back to life as a princess, I was hoping you’d consider coming too.”
With his free hand, he tucked a stray curl behind her ear, his dark eyes never leaving her bright hazel ones. “With us...With me…Ouch! Hey!”
“That wasn’t funny!” Summer grumbled, smacking him repeatedly on his chest for her momentary distress.
Dillon laughed as he pulled her closer to him, taking her other hand as well to make sure he didn’t get hit again. He leaned his forehead against hers. “So, what do you say?”
Summer couldn’t help the relieved laugh that bubbled up but she wasn’t gonna make it that easy for him. She suppressed a smile as she brushed her nose lightly against his, watching as his long lashes fluttered. “Exploring the world with a rebellious hybrid and his sweet sister? Why would I want to do that?” She challenged playfully.
Dillon knew she was baiting him, teasing him as usual but he was more than willing to bite. He closed the gap between them, sealing their lips with a tentative kiss. When he was certain she wasn’t going to slap him again, he increased the urgency, revelling in her sighs and the feel of her soft lips against his as she wrapped her arms around his neck.
They’d both been anticipating this moment, having been denied twice recently, so the thought of stopping even for a second seemed ridiculously absurd. Between kisses, the black wolf ranger tried his best to convince Summer.
“Because,” he mumbled against her lips, “even when I have the best intentions... I can’t promise I won’t do anything crazy... And I’m definitely going to get into trouble… But there’s no one else...out there... I’d trust to save me... but you.”
Arms still wrapped around him, Summer hummed as she tried to catch her breath. Dillon took smug satisfaction in the dreamy look on her flushed face when he pulled back.
“I’m in,” Summer smiled and it was Dillon’s turn to breathe a sigh of relief- not that he’d admit it, “but I have one condition,” she added mischievously. “I get to drive the Fury if we ever encounter a tornado — Dillon!”
Summer squealed as he picked her up and spun her around for her cheeky comment. Laughing with her, he set her back down on the car and leaned in for another kiss…
“Get a room!”
“Whipped!”
Scott and Flynn both coughed dramatically as they made their way out of the garage to settle themselves on a lowered wall to their left. Dillon rolled his eyes at their antics while Summer buried her face against his chest in embarrassment.
Tenaya filed out after the rangers, smirking at the couple. “Finally.”
“Really?” Dillon scoffed at his sister, “You too?”
Tenaya shrugged as she crossed in front of them to sit on the ledge with the boys.
“Don’t listen to them,” Ziggy began as he perched himself too close to the couple on the hood of the Fury, oblivious of Dillon’s exasperation. Summer placated his pending outburst with a hand to his chest as Ziggy droned on.
“We’re all happy for you crazy lovebirds. Took you long enough with all those longing looks and flirty lines. Though I’m not really sure how such a grouchy cyborg scored a sunny babe like Summer. N-not that I’ve been looking or anything! You should at least think about coming up for air before you miss the show—Ahh!”
Ziggy let out a shout as Dr K dragged him off the car by his ear and pulled him along to the ledge opposite where the others were sitting. “Ranger Operator Series Green,” she scolded, “Ranger Operators Series Black and Yellow do not require your analysis of their blossoming relationship nor do I believe that they appreciate your close proximity while they engage in a lip lock.”
The gang howled with laughter at her statement, much to the confusion of the young doctor.
“Thanks, doc… I think,” Dillon shook his head, turning in Summer’s arms so that he was facing outward again.
Summer ignored the rising blush on her cheeks and directed her attention at Ziggy. “What show?”
“The light show-”
“-to celebrate our victory!”
Gem and Gemma gushed excitedly as they rushed out to join the others, wearing large headphones and each carrying a detonator.
“A big win-”
“-Requires a big explosion!” The duo cheered, exchanging high-fives.
Dillon wasn’t so convinced as he arched an eyebrow at the Boom Twins. “Right. Because that’s exactly what the traumatized citizens on Corinth need— unexpected explosions.”
“I understand your concern, Ranger Operator Series Black,” Dr K admitted, “and we did take that into consideration when we cleared it with Colonel Truman. By tapping into the new configuration at the Command Centre, we were able to integrate reverberation retention technology into the dome’s shield so when the explosions go off in the biofield, we can redirect the noise elsewhere. It’s similar to the programme used to rid of the stale air in the dome.”
“So we designed it so that everyone can see it,” Gemma began.
“But only we get to hear it go BOOM!” Gem finished, pointing to his headphones.
The silver and gold rangers pushed their buttons without further delay and the team joined with the rest of Corinth as they watched the silent fireworks light up the night’s sky.
Summer rested her chin on Dillon’s shoulder and whispered to him. “I’m going to miss this.”
Dillon looked around at the eccentric bunch. They got on his nerves but they weren’t half bad most of the time. He’d started off as a reluctant teammate - joining only due to Summer’s persuasion - but these people had become trustworthy friends who helped him to fight off the Venjix virus inside of him and find the only family he seemed to have left.
Without them, he wouldn’t have plans to see the new world with the one who made him rethink his Lone Ranger act. He’d tried to keep them all at a distance, but she’d melted his icy heart somehow and cared for him through all of it, even when he seemed to be more machine than man.
Dillon turned to kiss Summer on the cheek. “Me too.”
#power rangers rpm#power rangers#dillon x summer#dillon#rose mciver#scott truman#eka darville#tenaya7#adelaine kane#flynn mcallistair#ari boyland#ziggy grover#milo cawthorne#dr k#olivia tenet#gem and gemma#yellow ranger#black ranger#summer landsdown
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Power Rangers AU-Chapter 9
Pairings: romantic Logicality, Prinxiety, Demus, Remile
This Chapter features: Roman centric, brief coming out story, again another ‘filler episode’, sorry
This Chapter Warnings: swearing, talks of passive aggressive homophobia and transphobia from another character, talks of therapy and seeing a therapist, mentioned first kiss, food and eating, sympathetic dark sides
Credit for this AU goes to @when-day-met-the-knight (specifically this post).
If you would like to be added to the taglist for this fic please let me know in reply!
First Previous Next
Chapter 9-Faith
Roman would always remember his first homecoming. Logan had been his closest friend since the fifth grade, but in the few months leading up to Homecoming he had been pulling away. Roman didn't know why at the time but he was determined to get their friendship back to how it used to be by asking him to homecoming. Roman remembered it all so vividly. Logan wearing a long-sleeve pale blue dress and ankle boots. Roman wearing his favorite dress shirt and pants. The two arrived at the dance, went into the full gym, and listened to one song. Then Logan ran.
Roman was so shocked he couldn't move. He just watched Logan go. Roman looked around, worried that people could see him all alone. Then he ran after Logan, scolding himself for even thinking about other people's thoughts before Logan. He was terrified. Why had Logan been so distant? What had Roman done wrong? He thought this dance would help, but now it seemed to have backfired so bad he might lose his best friend.
When Logan returned to Roman's worried side, he was with Patton Valentine, a sweet boy who Roman had subscribed to on YouTube months back. The most surprising sight however, was that Logan and Patton, who were roughly the same size, had switched clothes. When Roman asked about the outfit swap Logan simply smiled and asked Roman to join him outside, saying a quiet goodbye to Patton. That was the night Logan had come out to Roman as trans. Then it became the night Roman came out to Logan as gay. Then the night Logan also came out as gay. Then the night they both talked about crushes without it being as awkward as before. Finally, the night they both shared a bag of microwave popcorn with Remus while they sat in the twins' treehouse and watched Star Wars Clone Wars on a portable DVD player.
Roman also knew that he would never forget his second Homecoming. Logan had decided not to go, and Roman figured he wouldn't push it. Roman actually had a boyfriend named Breyden at the time so he went with him. Roman had a good time and at first it didn't seem like that night would be all too magical. Until Breyden kissed Roman. Roman's first kiss. At a school dance, with a cute guy, and during the song 'Die Young' by Ke$ha. Roman's and Breyden's relationship lasted only a few months after that, but it wasn't a bad breakup. Roman still considered Breyden a friend and life went on.
Junior year Homecoming was the first school dance Roman didn't attend. Homecoming was mainly for the Freshmen and Sophomores, besides Roman was busy preparing for his first lead role in a musical.
Now, as a senior, Roman was spending his Homecoming night sneaking Logan into his car and driving with him and Remus to Thomas's for impromptu therapy. The three arrived at Thomas's fairly quickly, but not without Logan complaining that Roman didn't have to pick him up.
Patton was already there when they entered. He sat on the couch looking down the hallway toward's Emile and Thomas's rooms. Thomas was in the kitchen making something that was sizzling, and humming along to Wicked.
"Hey, Pat." Roman greeted him.
"Heya kiddos!" Patton smiled cheerily back.
"Whatcha makin' back there Thomathy?" Remus asked, plopping himself down practically on top of Patton and pulling out his phone.
"Quesadillas." He replied.
"Oh that sounds good." Roman said.
"Smells good too!" Remus shouted distractedly. "So is Dee here yet?"
"No, sorry." Patton shrugged.
"Hmm." Remus only looked at his phone more intently.
"What are you two?" Logan asked, taking his place next to Patton as well, though farther away that Remus was.
"What?" Remus asked, an eyebrow raised.
"You and Dee. I'm confused by the manner of your relationship." Logan began.
"We're friends. I think. Most of the time. Maybe." Remus said with a sideways glance.
"I assume you know that answer made no sense whatsoever." Logan leaned forward to look at the other boy.
Remus huffed and put his phone down. "Look, I've told him how I feel about him and he just ignored it. He wants to stay, whatever we are, and that's fine with me."
"That's bull crap Remus and you know it." Roman stated.
"Well, it's not my call Roman." Remus retorted. "I'm not gonna force him. Besides, even if he wanted to date me-"
"I'm still not convinced you two aren't dating now." Logan leaned back.
"-I wouldn't go out with him. He's still friends with Kayley and I personally want to rip out each fake eye lash and injection on her stupid face." Remus growled.
"Wow." Logan pursed his lips.
"Oh I can't stop picturing it." Roman groaned.
"How sure are you that he doesn't want to go out with you?" Patton asked.
"Pretty sure. Like I said, he ignored me earlier. And more to the point he's friends with Kayley!! She disgusts me." Remus went back to his phone. "She always goes on about how much of an ally she is! She said the A in LGBTQIA was for ally. Like bitch, no!"
"Language." Thomas and Patton said at the same time.
"I think I'm allowed to call her a bitch." Remus sneered.
"I don't like her too much either Remus, but you still shouldn't call people that." Patton said.
"Why don't you like her?" Roman asked.
"Like Remus said she talks constantly about how much of an ally she is, but when Juleka came out as a lesbian, Kayley started saying just awful things and called her slurs." Patton stated. "She kept talking about how Juleka had a crush on her and how gross it was that she's gay."
"When I began my process of coming out she pretended to support me, but when it came to actually helping me with bullying or actual transitioning, she didn't do anything." Logan added.
"What? Why didn't you say anything?" Roman asked astonished.
"Well, it didn't matter, you enjoyed sitting at her lunch table, besides it really didn't bother me as much as it may seem." Logan dismissed.
"Well shit." Roman's voice cracked. "I can't believe I let her just get away with this."
"It's not your fault Roman, it's not your responsibility to police her for her actions." Logan stated.
"But I still could have noticed. Why do I even sit with her?" Roman ran a hand through his hair and knawed on his bottom lip. He knew what Logan was saying was true, but it still didn't sit well. He was supposed to be there for protect his friends when they needed and he had let this girl get away with hurting them for too long.
"Kayley only wants to sit next to you for clout you know." Remus interjeted.
"Well I'm not sitting with her any more." Roman scoffed.
"You can sit with me." Patton suggested. "Naomi thinks you're all very entertaining."
"What are you guys talking about?" Dee's voice asked from the door, shutting down the conversation immediately.
"Nothing." The four replied, looking in different directions.
"Okay then." Dee shrugged, not sounding totally convinced. He went over the the couch and sat down next Remus.
It was quiet, though not uncomfortably so. Roman perked up when he heard a door open and close down the hallway and Emile stepped into view.
"How's this?" Emile asked, walking down the hallway. He entered the livingroom and gave a small twirl.
"I like this one a lot more." Patton told him.
"Like what a lot more?" Logan asked.
"The outfit." Patton explained. "Emile's got a date to homecoming tonight!"
"Who ya going with?" Remus asked.
"My girlfriend, Sara." Emile responded.
Everyone seemed to be looking at Emile in some form of confusion on Roman spoke up.
"Oh my god for a second there I forgot straight people exist!" He laughed. The seniors all began laughing with him.
"Ha, ha." Emile crossed his arms. "And just so you know, I'm not straight. I just don't feel like labelling myself right now."
"You shouldn't be pressured to anyway." Logan stated.
"Thank you Logan." Emile nodded. "Now! Outfit thoughts?"
"I already said I liked it. Very cute." Patton remarked.
"I have no issues with the clothing." Logan said plainly.
Roman examined what he was wearing. A shell-white dress shirt, small pink bow-tie, and black pants. Simple, comfortable, adorable; Emile.
"Very dashing." Roman told him.
"Alright by my standards." Remus shrugged.
"You have no standards." Dee pointed out. "Very nice Emile."
"Great!" Emile sighed. "Alright, have fun with therapy tonight, I'm leaving."
A series of farewells were said to Emile as he left, and the Rangers went back to silence. Thomas finished making quesadillas and began handing them out. They munched while awaiting Renette's arrival. It didn't take too long, but Roman had watched Remus practically inhale his quesadilla and he didn't need anything more. When Renette knocked and opened the door she gestured for each of them to enter a car. Roman saw she was on the phone and looked particularaly exhausted.
Roman hurried his friends out the door and into cars before they could protest his choices in seating. Patton and Logan next to each other in the first one. Remus and Dee in the next. Finally, Roman and Thomas in the last one. Roman figured his matchmaking for the night was over and hopped in happily.
Renette got into the passenger seat of the last car and looked back to smile at Roman and Thomas.
"No! Listen to me, you listen to your mother." Renette continued, signaling for the driver to start the car.
The other cars started their engines and they pulled away.
"You know what I mean when I say listen to your mother. You're not going out tonight. I don't care that it's friday. If your mom said no and your dad said no then what makes you think I'm gonna say yes?!" Renette continued. "Oh don't you 'Ma' me Remington! You've been sick for a whole week, and you know that those kids do-"
She listened to what the other person was saying.
"Well I didn't know Emile was going to be there you should have led with that! Emile going is your most valid argument so far!" Renette pasued again. "No this doesn't mean you can go! One good argument from you doesn't change my mind. Besides, your mom and dad both said no, even if I wanted you to go I'm outnumbered! Nope, I'm sorry hun but I'm not risking it! You're sick and this is Florida, people don't exactly vaccinate down here. End of discussion."
Roman looked out the window trying to make it seem like he wasn't eaves dropping.
"Yes yes, love you goodnight." Renette hung up and sighed into her chair. "Roman, if you ever want kids meet my son, he'll change that real quick."
Thomas, the driver, and Renette laughed.
"Then again, you've met Emile so you probably think kids are just little angels." Renette added.
"Oh he's certainly not a little angel." Thomas rolled his eyes. "Emile may seem like it, but I've seen him sucker punch people a few times."
"Only cause you trained him to!" Renette laughed.
It fell into a lull of discussion between the adults after that. Roman pulled out his phone and began texting Logan. Until Patton took over to text using Logan's phone. When the cars stopped it was at a building a ways outside of town. The sun was going down earlier and earlier as winter drew closer, and currently the sky was just fading into a deep blue.
Roman, Thomas, and Renette stepped out of the car. The other Rangers followed quickly and together they all went inside. It was well lit and smelled of lemon scented cleaner. Renette led them past a few doors until reaching a counter with a woman sat in front of it.
"Hey Janica, how are ya?" Renette asked.
"I'm doing good Renette. They should all be ready for you boys." Janica replied, she handed Renette a piece of paper. "I need your signature here." She pointed to a line at the top. Renette signed and Janica took the paper back, then gave Renette another paper. "These are their assigned rooms."
"Thanks Janica." Renette smiled, taking the paper and moving to enter the door right of Janica's desk.
"Oh, best of wishes to you and your family Renette. There's a little something that a few people in the department put together for you. We heard about Remy and wanted ot help." Janica smiled.
"Thanks!" Renette smiled warmly, opening the door and walking in. "Okay boys, Roman you're room one. Logan room two, Dee room three, Remus room four, Patton room five, and Thomas you know where to go."
"Thanks Renette." Thomas nodded.
Roman looked to his right and saw a stretch of doors, marked one to fifteen. He walked all the way down with the others, each friend leaving him to head into their respective doors. Roman finally reached the door with a bronze 1 nailed to the front and inhaled. He put his hand on the doornob and twisted. He felt his stomach tighten but he didn't entirely know why.
"Roman?" A sweet voice inside asked.
"Yes." Roman nodded. He looked over to see a larger woman sitting casually in a chair. The room smelled like carmel scented candles.
"Come on in." She told him. "It's okay, whatever you're comfortable with. Want some tea, coffee, water?"
"Um, no, I'm good." Roman replied, taking a seat on the grey leather couch across from her.
"Okay. My name is Doctor Faith Hop, you can call me Faith." She smiled. "Are you ready to begin?"
---
It was Tuesday the next week when Renette showed up again.
"Hopefully you all set up a schedule to meet with your therapists weekly?" She asked.
The Rangers all nodded.
"Wonderful." Renette smiled. "Now, a couple things I need to get out of the way. One, I set up a meeting with a couple friends of mine, some higher-ups in foreign governments. It's very important that you meet and discuss with them next week. Two, I need to hear any and all strategies from this moment on. Especially now. That fiasco during the last attack cannot happen again. We need results. I'd hope you all have come up with some idea as to how you can get any closer to defeating Virgilius. I want to hear everything."
"Okay, uh, Renette, what do you mean we're meeting with your friends?" Roman asked. "I don't really have a lot of time to drive somewhere like Washington D.C."
"Yeah and my moms are getting really sick of my excuses as to why I can't be home for take-out night." Dee said. "I miss eating chineese food with them."
"Don't worry about that, my friends are coming here. I cleared this with Thomas weeks in advance."
"And you're only telling us now?" Logan quirked an eyebrow.
"I could only tell you now. Anyway, you all share science class together I believe, and your teacher and our current official working at the school has agreed to give the whole grade a large group project, with which you will claim you are all working on Saturday, so you can arrive here." Renette said quickly.
Roman looked at her incredulously. "Mrs. Ryans?"
"Yes, she works for me." Renette smiled.
"She works for you?" Patton's eyes went wide.
"I believe I just said that." Renette stared.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Dee put his hands up. "So you're telling me, that Mrs. Ryans works for the government and has been spying on us-"
"I certainly never said she was spying on you but yes since you've become Rangers she has been keeping a closer eye on you."
". . . Right." Dee deadpanned. "So she's making our entire grade do a group project just so we have an excuse to leave the house on Saturday?"
"That is correct." Renette nodded.
"If we're here on Saturday when are we going to work on said project?" Logan asked.
"Well that's not my problem." Renette dismissed.
"Hold up, hold up!" Roman started.
"No, no, no, no, no." Dee started waving his hand.
"Wait a minute, what?!" Patton exclaimed.
"I'm gonna fail science." Remus sank into his blow up pink chair.
"Oh you boys will figure it out." Renette tried to wave off their concerns. "What you need to focus on is the meeting with representatives from the UN who expect a level of professionalism from the only people on Earth that have acess to weapons that can defeat the Dragon Witch."
"Oh god." Roman sighed.
"I shouldn't go." Remus shook his head.
"You're all going. Whether you like it or not." Renette stated. "Now, I am hoping, praying, you boys have some kind of lead or strategy that can be used against Virgilius."
It went quiet.
"What happened to those letters you found on the map?" Thomas asked.
"Oh, yeah, that turned out to be a dead end." Roman grimaced.
"What letters?" Renette asked.
"Um, yesterday, we were looking at this map of the county." Patton got up and pointed. "Logan put pins into the places where Virgilius previously attacked. Even attacks from a year ago. Anway, we were just looking at em' and I thought these kinda make the shape of an 'H'."
"We figured he was trying to say 'help' or send a message." Dee sighed.
"And?" Renette asked impatiently.
"When we traced them all out it said 'Ha suckers!'." Roman said in an annoyed tone.
"Exclimation mark included." Logan reminded.
Remus started laughing. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I mean I'm not really that sorry, but come on that's good. Like he got us."
Roman looked at his brother and just shook his head slowly.
"Clever child." Renette pondered. "Distracting you, throwing you off his scent."
"We're pretty sure he's like in his twenties." Roman said. "He's tall so."
"Yeah taller than me." Remus said, almost impressed.
"Okay, good to know." Renette nodded. "But, other than your failed attempt, do you have anything more for me?"
Roman looked around. Logan, the one who usually concocts their plans, had nothing. However, when Roman looked to the others, he saw them exchanging glances. Thomas, Remus, Dee, and Patton lookedas if they were all in silent debate with each other. Finally Thomas gave a firm nod and the four looked to Renette.
"We may have something." Patton told her.
Taglist:
@tulipscomeinallsortsofcolors @maddarc @pheonix-inside-reblogs @thisismysanderssidesblog @almost-all-my-ships-are-gay @mostpeopleannoyme @the-smol-est @i-sexually-identify-as-a-mistake @nadja-chamack16@too-bi-too-function @rainbowbowtie @mistypelt1234 @tricksterangel25 @authorized-trash @echocw @stripestar128128 @coffee-mugz @slitherynchicken
#roman sanders#prinxiety#logicality#remile#power rangers au#sympathetic dark sides#patton sanders#logan sanders
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different anon but i would love that rec list you mentioned ....👀
ok here we go my most up-to-date and comprehensive newt/hermann rec list yet! combining elements from all the other ones i’ve made! this is in no way a be-all-end-all of the best newt/herm fic or anything, these are just ones ive remembered to bookmark--i’ll def edit and add stuff as i go bc i know i left a bunch off
for the most part they stay away from uprising bc i don’t like to read uprising compliant fic LOL
G/Not Rated:
Portrait. by VictoryCandescenceWe all know about Becket and Mori, the Last Rangers of Hong Kong and the late Marshall Stacker Pentecost. But Doctors Hermann Gottlieb and Newton Geiszler might be two you haven’t heard about until now. And when you hear their story, you’ll wonder how it ever stayed a secret for so long.
the future’s owned by you and me by kaiyenYears after they stopped writing each other, Newt and Hermann run into each other on the steps of Cambridge University Library. Quite literally.
The Love And Care Of Your Pet Kaiju Skinmite by IasNewt brings home a new pet. Hermann is justifiably horrified.
Don't Hang Up Yet, I'm Not Done by SmallishWormMasterOfTheUniverse“With all due respect, sir,” said Hermann, “I fail entirely to see any humor whatsoever in this situation.”“Yes,” said Pentecost. “It adds to the effect.”The world is ending, Hermann Gottlieb is a radio show host, and Newton Geiszler is absolutely convinced it all has something to do with aliens.
T:
Alternate by perniciousLizardNewt accidentally ends up in a place that’s almost exactly like his own reality, with one major difference.
Operation: RTF by purpleeyesandbowtiesMako’s bio teacher is acting weird. Well, weirder than normal. And there’s a new teacher who Mr. Geizler claims is a college buddy, but there’s something about this whole thing that feels….off. Naturally, the only reasonable solution is Operation: RTF.
Hypothetically by supersymmetryAka Tendo sets Newt and Hermann up on a blind date because someone had to.
Mariposa (aka westworld au) by janewestinTwo years after his last encounter with the host called Newton Geiszler, Hermann finds himself back in the park.
D = V * T by seabassThere are no monsters, mutants, or war. Robots do not stand as gladiators against the test of Man. Warriors do not drift together, close in thought and will and action.There’s just a hole in the desert. And it grows.
there’ll be no life of crime by ByacolateAs much as he respects Stacker Pentecost, Hermann hates him a little for dangling Hannibal Chau in front of Newton’s eyes like a toy mouse on a string.+ the rest of the series…..!
Ships Ill-Lit At Night by Rikku (the same author has an excellent uprising fix-it if you’re interested)Hermann Gottlieb and Newton Geiszler are correspondents for years before they first meet, and then it is years more before they will admit to even being friends. Meanwhile the war rages, the monsters that rise from the sea surely too powerful to be fought with brittle ships of wood and sail.At least when the Fleet fights it, they must all stand together.
A Sharp Dressed Man by AveleraHermann’s latest book needs an author photo. However, when he’s given a makeover and a suit that actually fits for the photo shoot, his appearance is so transformed that Newt mistakes him for his (much hotter) older brother, Dietrich.Hermann decides to play along.
It Was Only A Kiss, How Did It End Up Like This by AnonymousPuzzler“Hermann, come on, I don’t have to be up for another hour, go shut off your stupid alarm so I can go back to sl—”Finally, Hermann had grumbled incoherently, shoved himself up on one elbow, kissed Newt full on the mouth, and rolled out of bed.Suffice to say, Newt was very, very much awake after that.
and i couldn’t whisper when you needed it shouted by LvslieHe still smells like Newt; bears traces of his recent nearness. Clothes sleep-wrinkled from the proximity, from the way Newt’s ankle has during the night hooked around the calf of Hermann’s good leg and dragged his whole body seamlessly closer. Cheek half-flushed from the face unconsciously nuzzled his into the side of Hermann’s neck—evidence of his presence, fast asleep, as Hermann lay still and fretful for hours an end, staring at the ceiling and feeling sick with wanting.[An early 20th century AU inspired loosely by Maurice and Age of Innocence.]
Meet Me There Across The Water, And We’ll Start An Endless Storm by CancerConstellationHermann, an honorably discharged veteran has retired to continue working as a Keeper at a Lighthouse. It is perfectly solitary, and with little in the way for incidents. Newton is the sailor that washes up on the seashore after a summer storm.[Late 19th century Lighthouse Keeper AU–or the one where Hermann was an aspiring artist whose dreams got a bit derailed, and Newt is the sailor that needs to learn to take his time with things.]
It Was Love At Second Sight by rednightsHermann receives the first letter when he is eighteen years old.or: Kaiju don't attack the Earth, but Hermann and Newt still write letters, botch their first meeting, and fall in love, not necessarily in that order.
the truth about me (and the truth about you) by danimagusNewton suffers from a bout of memory loss and is told Hermann is his fiancé. Hermann plays along, to his endless shame.
Transducer by hal_incandenza (or: 1970s espionage AU)“I need you to hide something for me.”“Oh, excellent. Of course, Newton, please allow me to jeopardize my career. And yours as well. My pleasure. Do go on.”“Yeesh, relax,” said Newton. “It’s a personal thing, not a work thing.”“As if there is any division between the two,” Hermann snapped.If only you knew, Newt thought.
M:
First a Darling, Then a Marvel by isozymeNewt runs a simulation given three constraints:1: Newt wants to clone a kaiju2: Hermann does not want Newt to clone a kaiju3: Newt is going to clone a kaiju anyway
Can I Be Your Memory by agrajagHermann suffers from amnesia after a bump to the head and is suddenly very nice to Newt. Newt is way too gay to handle this. And what will happen when Hermann’s memories return?
The Geiszler & Gottlieb Post-Saving-the-World Lecture Tour (series) by zach_stone
if you would stay In the wake of the world not ending, while certain heroes are invited to a parade of talk shows and press tours, the two-man remains of the PPDC’s K-Science division are scheduled for a series of guest lectures in a good selection of the world’s major universities.Newt and Hermann travel to from Hong Kong to Boston, and Newt tries to come to terms with a world that’s not ending and his feelings for Hermann that are becoming harder to hide.
find shelter somewhere in me“You ready for this?” Newt mutters as they approach the podium.Hermann shoots him the smallest smile, touching Newt’s wrist. “With you, always.”The Geiszler and Gottlieb Lecture Tour continues, and Newt realizes Hermann may not be coping with the aftermath of the war as well as he pretends to be.
E:
Darling by BeeLoveIn which Newton rides Hermann for all he’s worth. Or at least tries to.
Our Breath Will Still / A Short Distance Ahead by irisbleuficThis story is a study in monster-hunting and risk-taking, professional and otherwise.
Problems with Local Denim Topology (accnt orphaned tragically)This is how, when the chaos of Newt’s life finally settles down into something approximating normal (one apartment, one nine-to-five job, one handsome husband, and no kaiju), he finds himself struggling to pull on an old pair of skinny jeans.
Sea Swept by cypress_treeA high seas fantasy AU in which Hermann is a ship’s navigator and Newton is found washed up among flotsam.
Surrounded by berlynn_wohl (all of this author’s newt/hermann PWP is like. fucking top tier.)Newt is involved in a teleporter accident, with sexy results. That’s it, that’s the fic.
Circumstances by glassfrogIt was Newt who suggested the handcuffs.
newmann drabbles & fics by skeleton_twinsa collection of short newmann fics
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Okay so partially motivated by how many references there were in SPoP and largely bc it's been in my backlog for years and I remembered the whole thing got uploaded to youtube a while ago, I finally got around to watching Revolutionary Girl Utena for the first time so time for some hot takes
2 clarify I did see the movie about around 2000 which was my introduction to the series, and I did see like 1 episode back in anime club (over a decade ago now tbh) but for the most part I went into this with only a vague sense of the ending and offhand knowledge of a few of the weird comedy episodes so this was mostly a blind watch
Before getting into #spoilers I will say that this ended up being an easy Top 5 and that it's definitely still worth watching (fair warning for the very frequent rape and incest (and sometimes both)), especially if you've somehow also avoided most of the context of this show like me, and it really is one of the rare Nothing Else Like It kind of show (though it has roots in older shoujo like Rose of Versailles and modern stuff like Revue Starlight have picked up its lede)
Okay spoilers from here on
I really only kinda have vague memories of the more knightly take on Utena from the movie so Series!Utena having this powerful Dumb Jock Energy threw me
Like she's out here invoking the Air Bud Rule from minute one
This bit where Akio is going on about some Important Life Lesson thing and she's just fuckin
crab walking im
what a hero i love her
I have always kinda been more partial to shoujo than shounen bc the sense of like emotional urgency and the heightened exaggerated feelings are just more compelling to me narratively and what Utena does spectacularly is really drive that to fucking 11 and it permeates every aspect of the show
Like the melodrama of it all is so shameless and it's so committed to letting its visuals and music drive the mood and emotional intensity of its stakes that they kind of speak for themselves and demand to be taken on their own terms rather than having clear or rigid interpretations
Like it's kind of a situation of "yes most of what you're seeing ties into the show's bigger themes and characterization but also you can just vibe to the spectacle as well" like even when it's not on the Dueling Arena there's a theatricality underlying everything that pairs perfectly with the spirit of shoujo even as it... not necessarily contradicts it, but challenges it in some ways and also wants to coexist with it?
And I think that's the interesting thing how it wants to tackle some of these arch concepts tied into the genre while also being deeply intertwined with it. Like it really is a Product Of Its Time in so many ways but it also feels somehow timeless and transgressive in others even now?
Like part of me would be interested to see a remake that took into account 23 years of conversation about how much perceptions of gender and sexuality have changed but at the same time would it lose some essential part of itself in that transition? idk potentially
Also lbr a hypothetical remake wouldn't even attempt to revise anything it would just redo it thus making it pointless
So I know this has been a thing that's been brought up before but seeing it play out dang RGU and NGE really are just companion pieces to each other huh
Subverting the themes and narrative arcs of their respective genres, mysterious quiet girl who's directly the key to everything, the ritual of action setpieces rendered as Actual Ritual in the story, banger OP, comphet ruining everyone's lives
Also they really don't have much in common comparatively but I'm definitely seeing pieces of Utena in Kill la Kill too? Particularly how Mako's arc feels like a fleshing out and expansion from the archetype divergence Wakaba got in that one ep (I can't believe klk was the utena/wakaba au fanfic)
Speaking of which damn he is a sleazy bastard and a gross predator but ngl Akio can Get It he and Ragyo are basically the same character and I guess this is just my type apparently???? oops
Like I'm recognizing how like really awful he is but also you really can't blame Utena for crushing on him he is super hot and charming
aside i lost it at the audacity of "well even tho i am a man like twice your age (AT LEAST) and took advantage of the situation and also i am clearly not the type to take no for an answer since you didn't reject me you're basically just as bad as me" bruh
The Black Rose Arc is... interesting bc like it borders on superfluous with how it resolves and yet the introduction of a "monster of the week" type power rangers element specifically built to expand on the secondary cast is a pretty inspired choice
again my primary point of introduction to the series was the movie which is basically a remix of the Student Council arc so when I got to 12 I was like wth are they gonna fill the rest of this with? WELP
What I really like about it is that usually this kind of setup-- the 'character is faced with their dark inner thoughts they shy away from and they become a short-term enemy' deal-- ends with the char in question coming to terms with this and overcoming it to become a better person
but here it's just like... they lose and then they just gotta... sit with that, forever. Like it doesn't really change the status quo of their relationships w/ utena or the others but it does just stick around for them and now the audience knows that about them too. like sometimes you just can't take that shit back.
Utena's relationship to queerness, having heard about it tangentially for years but seeing it play out now is also interesting bc while in the grand scheme it doesn't feel necessarily any more ahead of its time than something like Cardcaptor Sakura there is a casualness to it that's distinct
Like for the most part it's either kind of the tangential fluff that even then was part of shoujo as a standard but then there's also stuff like the Akio/Touga or Touga/Saionji hinting or Kozue's casual pass at Anthy in addition to the maintext Juri/Shiori push-pull and ofc the subtext-but-maintext Utena/Anthy threads
I wanna take a moment to talk about Juri bc of how kind of in the spirit of the show itself it plays things both with and against the grain with her
Like she's a Tragic Lesbian which is nothing new but usually this character type (and Distinctively Lesbian characters in general) in anime/manga tend to be portrayed as being very predatory, invasive and either played for laughs or to repulse the audience, so the degree of empathy RGU shows her in 97 is rare to see even now.
Like there is a "safeness" to her bc of how unattainable Shiori is (though their arc ends in a decidedly ambiguious way), but it doesn't really feel like she's getting the short end of the stick over the more straight-leaning characters bc arguably all of the relationships here are defined by an aspect of chasing the unattainable, echoing Utena's own quixotic search for her Prince, and her choosing to remain closeted feels realistic *especially because* of the surrounding context of how heteronormative the world she exists in is. Like the character is aware of that and is navigating it in a way that feels honest
Speaking of which it's interesting how the reveal of Juri's pining for Shiori in Ep 7 echoes the bigger reveal of Utena/Anthy bc of how it plays up this heterocentric love triangle or at least it seems to be but then the cards are on the table and no that's really not what it is at all, and it feels significant that after spending most of the series naively oblivious to Juri’s feelings and what she wants out of a relationship with Shiori that Utena finally Gets It in Ep 37
Is it a coincidence Juri actually gets to be the one to point it out? No
Speaking of triangles big ups to the Ruka/Juri/Shiori one honestly bc of how hard it commits to the unknown third result of a LT where absolutely no one comes out happy and it actually works even with the handicap of Ruka basically coming out of nowhere just for these two episodes
Like all three of them want the one person who's absolutely never gonna love them back and that's just rough buddy and isn't that kinda the show in a nutshell
So the thing that struck me about Utena/Anthy and how it plays out is how subtle it really is. And that does make sense bc while f/f teasing/subtext again was part of shoujo before it's quite a different thing for the heroine to ultimately reject her 2 male love interests and choose a life with her female best friend, esp in nineteen ninety seven
Like I think you can argue that Ep 12 feels like The Moment where What Their Relationship Is, Definitely shifts and that possibility is suddenly there, and then it doesn't come back in a big way until the ending but there are tiny glimpses throughout where you can see that working in the background if you’re really paying attention
Small things like Anthy's flashes of unspoken jealousy, Utena fretting over her even when she's in bed with Akio, and part of that is coming from going in with a knowledge of what the endgame is and keeping an eye out for it. I can hardly imagine being a viewer during the og broadcast and then ep 34 comes and suddenly the intent is made clear and our understanding of the inciting incident gets all flipped turned upside down
And to a modern viewer I can get coming into this for the first time and being frustrated at just how close to the chest it gets played, but that's also kind of the only way it gets to happen at that point in time? But I think it ultimately is effective and vital to their individual arcs and dovetails nicely with the themes of the show
Like I remember hearing that original manga creator Chiho Saito was pretty against their paired ending, but with a lot of convincing from Ikuhara ultimately came around to it, and it's hard to imagine the anime's ending working any other way and being nearly as impactful
And there is something really beautiful about the bucking against the established idea of yuri relationships being a childish concept that gets left behind in order to 'grow up' actually becoming the impetus of their own journeys into adulthood and eventually back to each other, and it’s hard not to feel a little disappointed that for this Bold Step and declaration for the future that RGU takes that while yuri is more common than ever it largely continues to exist within the realm of schoolgirls and something to be left behind in adolescence like for RGU’s faults and shortcomings it saw this world of possibility in moving forward, while the genre largely elected to stand still
And it really speaks to either the timelessness of the show or how much the queer experience has remained constant that even with a tragic ending, that hope, or rather the promise of their reunion, feels bold and defiant and genuinely uplifting even now
Like the moment where just before they reach out to each other one final time, and their voices as children speak out to each other, as if finally fulfilling a promise they barely remember, I really did just start ugly crying
Lastly some assorted closing thoughts--
-Touga? Punk. Guy really takes advantage of Utena's whole prince thing to manipulate her, ends up losing to her in the rematch and then fucks off to mope for like AN ENTIRE SEASON then pops back up "oh yea im in love with her literally nothing else about my behavior has changed tho" like lmao you tried i guess
-Also i know Touga's design is p stock standard bishounen ojou-sama type but god this is all i can think about when I see him
- Green Touga Saionji is a bitch-ass motherfucker but like he at least tried more than anyone else so uh that's something I guess?????
Like the guy clearly has some unresolved feelings about Touga so i'm inclined to be sympathetic bc wow poor choice my dude but also... bitch-ass motherfucker
-Nanami really went through this thing for me where it's like... she's a brat and a shitty person but it's also hard to really dislike her bc she does get what she deserves most of the time and also she gets kinkshamed more than most of the cast despite none of them really having a high ground over her lol
-Miki did nothing wrong (aside from like the implied incest but that's also like... half the relationships in this show uh)
sidenote I can completely see the notable excess of Incest Subtext/Maintext being intended as like... A Thing to comment on how common it is within shoujo and also tying in to like the bigger themes of Growing Up bc the idea that you’re chasing after your own damn siblings betrays some freudian inability to mature or whatever but tbqh it doesn’t always feel like the show knows the line between commenting on this and indulging in it and RGU is very indulgent by its own nature so I really can’t blame people put off by the show as a whole bc this is an area where RGU is largely indistinguishable from its genre peers
-Juri really did nothing wrong tho also props for having the best duels
-FUCK SHIORI THO for eel
so obviously i have not seen the show up to now but I've been in yuri circles for a long time so I knew about Juri/Shiori and my perception of it had always been "oh it's one of those kinda messy with complicated feelings" kinda ships where the drama is a big part of the appeal and that's true but like
the actual nature of it I did not realize up to now and OH SHIORI'S REALLY THAT BITCH HUH
So not only does she date that one anonymous guy specifically to spite Juri unaware she doesn't actually like him BUT THEN WHEN THEY GET REUNITED SHE'S JUST LIKE LOL IT DIDNT MATTER BUT HEY WE COOL RIGHT *AND THEN* when she finds out about Juri's feelings she's like HELL YEA I CAN HANG THIS OVER HER HEAD FOREVER FUCK HER
***AND THEN*** when she gets some karma after Ruka dumps her ass she airs her dirty laundry out in front of EVERYBODY like Juri hasn't been dealing with this shit like an absolute champ the whole time like?????
Like ok i get that there's the sad longing drama there and usually that's my jam and the show itself seems to end on kind of an ambiguous note and the follow-up manga from this year seems to leave it as kind of a "maybe" but I'm sorry get Juri a better GF 2020 she deserves better
I saw some Juri/Wakaba going through the tumblr tag for the show and honestly that's some big brain shit I'm here for it
Also now knowing exactly how this dynamic operates it really makes that Jasper/Lapis reference pic one of the SU crew drew of them read very.... interestingly???????? (tho Lapis' design reads a lot closer to Kozue and that's probably a closer personality analogue too)
-I love that thing in ep 37 where the whole SC is just very casually like hey utena if the whole revolutionizing the world thing with anthy doesn't work out uhhh call me im free haha just kidding unless...? lmao
-I'm pretty uninclined to try to pin precise sexuality HCs to characters for series this old where the ambiguity is part of how its danced around like partly coming from my own experience I'm inclined to read Utena as bi but that really is just coming from me?
But on the other hand literally every time a guy is like "i love you utena come be happy with me and we can love each other forever" she's like "k" after having left them on read for a day and disconnects from them entirely so lesbian going through comphet is a pretty valid read i think lol
-Lastly I think it’s pretty interesting but validly frustrating how fast and loose the show’s relationship with dream logic and non-traditional storytelling really is like when the shadow girls show up I was like “oh this is a greek chorus thing and it’s meant to reflect on the themes of the episode” (or uh in the case of exactly Ep 29 to break from tradition and explicitly tell us what a characters deal is lmao) but then no actually turns out they’re actually real characters who exist within the show too fuck you
ANYWAY I really did love this show and felt like I got a lot out of it despite it being pretty infamously hard to decipher but the ways it's inscrutable appeal to me specifically so very happy with this I'm gonna be thinking about it for a while
#revolutionary girl utena#cw: rape mention#cw: incest mention#might follow up with some thoughts about the movie later
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...Diamond and Pearl...
Finally, I’m down to the last two pokémon I need to capture in Pokémon Platinum. These are the Sea Guardians, a pair of Mythical pokémon called Manaphy and Phione.
There is a bit of debate around the classification of these guys, as they break some of the generally accepted rules about Mythicals/Legendaries. Manaphy is definitely classed as a Mythical, but unlike all those that came before it, it is able to breed. Rather than being in the undiscovered Egg Group, it is in one of the Water Egg groups, which means when you leave it at day-care with a Ditto (it is still genderless, so it can only breed with a Ditto), an egg will actually be produced. However, this is where the controversy comes in. Hatching the egg will reveal a Phione, rather than another Manaphy, leading to the fan debate of whether or not Phione itself should be classed as a Mythical. Personally, I don’t care - just get in my ‘Dex!
On to obtaining Manaphy. This can be either very easy, or pretty hard...
The easy route: Since this is a Mythical, there were various distributions of Manaphy via the Mystery Gift system so, using the aforementioned exploit, I easily obtained multiple Manaphys in short order. Except, to me, this feels a bit like cheating. I’m happy to use the Mystery Gift exploit for those Mythicals for which there is no other, more legitimate way to get them, but that just isn’t true for Manaphy. So this brings us to...
The hard route: There are a series of spin-off games know as the Pokémon Ranger series which are also on the DS and, although they are technically classed as Gen3 games, they were known as ‘The Road to Diamond and Pearl’. To this end, they allow you obtain a Manaphy Egg via a special, post-game mission. All of the games in the series - Pokémon Ranger, Shadows of Almia, and Guardian Signs - have the ability to access this mission, but in the latter two, it requires access to the Nintendo WFC to download them, something that is no longer available. I think you can use the same exploit from the easy route to download the missions, but if I do that then the Manaphy isn’t really any more legit than just getting it from Mystery Gift directly! This leaves us with the original Pokémon Ranger.
In the original game, the post-game Manaphy Egg mission is on the cartridge already and doesn’t require downloading. The drawback is that this is available only once per game, and by this I don’t mean once per save file, I mean once per physical cartridge! This means if you buy a cartridge that has already been used for this mission, you won’t be able to use it yourself. Great! To give myself the best chance of this working, I purchased an expensive sealed copy of the game from eBay and fortunately it was indeed brand new, not just something that had been resealed Phew. Now to complete the game.
Pokémon Ranger is a fun enough little game based in the new region of Fiore where, unlike in previous regions, pokémon aren’t captured permanently in Poké Balls, but instead captured temporarily using something called a Capture Styler. This whole capture mechanic is based around the DS’s new touch screen functionality as you use the DS stylus to draw a number of uninterrupted circles around wild pokémon in order to capture them. Once you have captured them, they will follow you until you either use their powers to help capture other, stronger pokémon, clear obstacles, or heal your damaged Capture Stylus. The only exception to this is your partner pokémon, Minun, who remains with you the whole time.
You start off as a rookie Pokémon Ranger - a sort of seemingly self-appointed police force who investigate crimes, help out citizens in need, and generally deal with whatever nonsense is going down in Fiore. You work your way through the 10 missions and as you progress you get stronger and are able to have more pokémon in your team at one time. The plot involves stopping the schemes of Team Go-Rock, a music-themed evil team wo want to use the regional professor’s cutting edge Capture Styler technology to capture and control the three Legendary Beasts of Johto; Raikou, Suicune, and Entei.
The game is pretty easy with just a few challenging captures along the way, and soon all is right in Fiore again, thanks to me. In the post-game, the Ranger Net menu can be accessed in order to complete the ‘Recover the Precious Egg!’ additional mission, whereby a the remnants of Team Go-Rock steal a strange egg from the Rangers and you have to get it back. Once you recover said egg, the professor realises it is a rare Manaphy egg and suggests you send it to Sinnoh via Mystery Gift to hatch it since ‘pokémon eggs don’t hatch in Fiore’. Weird, but fine. That is my queue to send it over to my Platinum game!
Pokémon Ranger: Completed!
Back in Platinum, a short amount of cycling later, the egg hatches and Manaphy is all mine! Now this should be it - aside from a quick trip to the day-care to breed a Phione - but for a couple of reasons, the completionist in me wants to try out one more spin-off game. Firstly, there is in fact another way to get a Phione, rather than just by breeding the Manaphy that I just obtained. On top of this, this same method also allows me to get a hold of a Mew - one of the most difficult pokémon to track down legitimate versions of. Both my previous attempts needed some workarounds - a glitch in Gen1 and a distribution ROM in Gen3 - so this was too tempting to pass up. Time to play Pokémon Ranch.
Pokémon Ranch is a WiiWare title, which sadly became unavailable for purchase when Nintendo closed down the WiiShop in 2019, although if you happen to have a copy, it will still continue to be fully functional. With no Wii, or way to get hold of the game, this initially seemed like a dead-end until I mentioned this problem to my good friend, Barry (@cakeinmilk). Barry had a plan.
I will hand over to him to tell you all about it next time, in my first-ever guest article! Take it away, Baz!
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Sexiled (Part 12/23) ~ Steve Rogers x Reader College!AU
A/N: HI lovelies! Happy weekend! So I’m not really sure what project I’m going to focus on next, but so far this is the one whose muse is strongest so here we are. I hope you enjoy.
Summary: Halloween shenanigans begin
Characters/Pairings: Steve x Reader, Bucky, Thor, whole gang is mentioned
Rating: T
Warnings: Language, underage drinking
Word Count: 1651
Series Masterlist | Main Masterlist
“So am I really the only one who figured it out so far?” Bucky asked as you played Mario Kart on Friday afternoon.
“Yep,” you mumbled as you blue shelled him and flew past him to win.
“You suck.”
“Don’t be a sore loser.”
He blew a raspberry at you in response.
“So what are you and Steve dressing up as for the party tonight?” he asked as you started another game.
“Wonder Woman and Superman. What are you going as?”
“I’m not going.” He tried to sound nonchalant but didn’t succeed.
“What? Why not?” you asked, pausing the game.
“Well, Dot’s probably going to be there.”
“You could still come hang out with us. I mean Thor’s your friend, not hers so she may not go.”
“When have you ever known Dot to pass up free alcohol?”
Frowning you were forced to concede the point.
“Besides, I don’t even have a costume. I was supposed to do a couple’s thing with her.”
“Well, if that’s the only thing keeping you from going tonight. Then I’ve got just the thing. Wait here.”
You were immediately up on your feet.
“Where are you going, doll?”
“I’ll be right back.”
When you returned Steve had gotten back from lab. You grinned and handed the box to Bucky and greeted Steve with a kiss.
“Hi, handsome.”
“Hey, sweetness,” he grinned down at you as you settled your arms around his waist.
“When did you get this, doll?” Bucky asked as he looked at the Batman costume.
“Steve wasn’t sure if he wanted to be Batman or Superman so I bought both a few weeks ago. Never got around to returning it,” you shrugged. “You don’t have to come with us, but if your only reason not to was that you didn’t have a costume. Problem solved.”
“Thank you, doll. I’ll think about it.”
“That’s all I ask.”
You squeezed his shoulder and glanced at the time.
“I’m going to grab a shower before the bathroom gets overrun. I’ll see you later.”
“See you later, sweetness,” Steve gave you lingering kiss which had Bucky fake gagging.
“Shush.”
“Quiet’s not my style, doll.” He winked at you. “I’ll see you tonight.”
You rolled your eyes but grinned at the positive response.
“Good.”
You were pleasantly surprised by how well the costume fit, considering it only cost thirty bucks. You were just fixing the tiara when there was a knock on the door.
“One second,” you mumbled through a mouthful of bobby pins.
When the head piece was secure, you fastened on the bracers and smiled at your reflection before pulling open the door.
“Wow,” Steve stared at you slack-jawed for a moment.
“Hey, Superman,” you flirted.
“Hey yourself. You look great, sweetness.”
He glanced at the other side of your room and you smirked, grabbing at the S on his chest and tugging him into the room.
“Nat’s already downstairs with Clint,” you explained kissing him firmly as the door swung shut behind him.
“Do we have to go?” Steve whined when you finally broke apart after your make out session. You’d somehow ended up on the bed in his lap. “I’d much rather stay here and keep doing that.”
“Yes, we have to go. We promised since we skipped last week,” you reminded him as you climbed out of his lap and started fixing your hair. “Sam will say I stole you again if we don’t go.”
“Well, he’s. Never mind,” Steve trailed off, ears turning pink.
“What?”
“No. It’s nothing. I was going to make a dumb joke.”
He seemed to be getting redder by the second and now you had to know what he was thinking.
“Please, tell me,” you pleaded, pouting at him. You reached for his hand as you sat next to him.
He only lasted two seconds before growling under his breath.
“You’re dangerous. You know that right?”
“I’m aware. But I also just want to know what you were gonna say.”
Sighing, he leaned back staring at the ceiling.
“I was going to say Sam was half right, because you had stolen my heart.” You were about to call him on his corny joke when his eyes snapped to yours and he continued speaking. “But you didn’t, because I gave it to you. Without hesitation.”
You gnawed on your bottom lip in an attempt not to cry, but it didn’t work and a few tears slipped out.
“I didn’t mean to upset you, sweetness.”
“You didn’t. That was adorable and sweet and everything a girl wants to hear. Jerk,” you grumbled.
He chuckled and reached out to wipe the tears away.
“You have my heart too, you know. Free and clear.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too. Now stop making me cry, so I can redo my make up.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He snapped a salute. “But if you’re going to redo your make up anyways…”
He pulled you in for a searing kiss that took nearly all your lipstick off.
Fifteen minutes later you were finally ready to go. You knew your friends would be fuming, but you couldn’t wipe the stupid grin off your face. You grabbed your phone and purse, checking for your ID. You debated wearing a jacket but decided that for one night you’d let aesthetics win out, so you grabbed Steve’s hand and pulled him from the room.
“Good timing. Buck says he’s about to come up here and drag us out.”
“Did Bucky decide to go after all?” you asked as you locked your door.
“Yep, he’s downstairs with the others. And he loves the costume. But you know funny thing I don’t remember considering being Batman,” Steve commented once you were down the hall.
“Because you didn’t.”
“You ordered that after they broke up last week, didn’t you?”
“Yup. Gotta love free two day shipping,” you smirked. “You didn’t tell Bucky, did you?”
“Of course not.”
“I know we’re all going as a group. But I thought he might be more comfortable going with us as a trio.”
“It was a great idea, sweetness. And my lips are sealed.” He wrapped his arm around your shoulders and kissed the top of your head. “You’re the best.”
The group was chattering excitedly when you reached the lounge. There was a flurry of greetings and compliments when you and Steve entered.
“Superhero suits you, doll,” Bucky whispered as he sidled up beside you.
“Thanks, Bucks-a-billion. It suits you too,” you grinned up at him. “Come here.” You pulled up the camera on your phone and took a quick selfie both of you beaming.
“Good idea, y/n. We need a couple of pictures!” Wanda insisted when she saw you and Bucky.
A couple pictures somehow turned into a full blown photo shoot, and you finally got out of the dorm thirty minutes later. How could you resist when you’d all picked staples from your childhood?
Nat and Clint were a spot on Kim and Ron. Sam and Riley were Buzz and Woody. Wanda and Pietro had decided to go as Raggedy Ann and Andy. And Tony, Rhodey, and Bruce were dressed as the red, blue, and green power rangers.
“HEY!” Thor boomed when he opened the door. “Come on in!”
You all piled into the house.
“Drinks are in the kitchen. Dance floor is through there.”
The group split up, Thor lingering by you, Steve, and Bucky.
“You look amazing as always, y/n.”
“Thank you,” you giggled.
“Let’s get you all drinks and get this party started. Right this way.”
Steve held your hand as you followed Thor towards the kitchen, and you in turn tugged Bucky with you by the elbow. He offered you a wry smile when he figured out you weren’t going to let him sulk for the entire night.
Thor handed you each a beer and chatted for a few minutes he was pulled away, but not before making all of you promise to play flip cup later on.
You were the first of the three to spot Dot sauntering around the party with Brock on her arm. You almost gagged at the sight of the both of them. Bucky was momentarily distracted, talking to Sam and Riley so you pulled Steve away to point her out.
“Damn it. I was really hoping that she wouldn’t show.”
“Me too. But also ew. Please tell me Bucky would not have worn that costume.”
“I can’t but mainly because I am not thinking about my best friend in an outfit like that.”
Steve visibly shuddered at the thought. Brock was parading around in what could only be described as spandex booty short orange overalls that were supposed to resemble a prison uniform and she was wearing a slutty cop costume.
“They deserve each other.”
“Definitely.”
“At least it doesn’t seem like she’s looking for him,” you noted.
“And the cowl covers his face. Maybe she won’t recognize him.”
“With that jawline?” you snarked.
Steve arched an eyebrow at you before chuckling and shaking his head when you shrugged, refusing to take back the comment.
“Well let’s hope she’s not in the mood to start shit then.”
“That we can do.”
You both sighed for a moment before Steve shook his head in a mental reset motion.
“Come on. We’re here to have fun. Buck will leave if he thinks we’re worried about him.”
“You’re right. Dance with me?” you grinned up at him.
“Happy to, sweetness.”
He led you into the next room where people were dancing, happy for the opportunity to hold you close. You loved the way his hands felt on your hips as the two of you grinded to the music.
It didn’t take long for your friends to find you and start shooting the both of you meaningful looks. You ignored them and focused on the happiness coursing through you. Tonight was going to be a good night.
A/n: Yeah so some partying for the gang. I hope you enjoyed! More partying to come and more for this story.
xoxo
Naynay
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Get to know me
Rules: Always post the rules. Tag 11 new people you’d like to know better.
1. Dogs or Cats?
I like both, I’ve had both and I’m perhaps a bit more cat person nowadays. Still dogs will always have a special place in my heart. Especially German shepherd dogs. They’re actual people in dog form, I swear.
2. YouTube celebrities or normal celebrities?
I’m not into either. Though if I had to pick one, then maybe normal. I may be old-fashioned, but I find it quite odd one can become famous by just filming their everyday life instead of being an actor in a movie, writing a book or composing an album.
3. If you could live anywhere where would that be?
Japan. Sure, every country has their own problems, but in Japan I like how they generally seem to appreciate nature, their community, healthy food and work still has value. Their street fashion also seems to be so multicolored I’d fit in pretty well, unlike in my current country.
4. Disney or DreamWorks?
I’m not a fan of either, but if I had to choose, definitely DreamWorks. One: they make better movies and more original ones, and two: I’ve never understood the Disney hype anyway.
5. Favourite childhood TV show?
Power Rangers. Though watched later also the original, Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger, and it was a lot better than the US version. Recommending warmly!
6. The movie you’re looking forward to most in 2020?
Usually the more some franchise has sequels the more skeptical I’m becoming of their quality. However, I’m a fan of the first three Saw movies and Valak is definitely squad goals, so I was thinking of going and watching The Organ Donor and Conjuring 3.
7. Favourite book you read in 2019?
I still haven’t finished it thanks to a certain MMO, but I have The complete fiction of H.P. Lovecraft on the go.
8. Marvel or DC?
I don’t like either, I’m not into superheroes. I also have the same problem with Marvel as I have with Disney: the hype. It’s so unfathomable it has distanced me. Though DC has Watchmen and Rorschach was amazing in the movie, so I guess DC?
9. If you choose Marvel favourite member of the X-Men? If you choose DC favourite Justice League member?
Uh... the what? *googles Justice League* ..... I have no clue who these characters are, haha. They’re all so muscular... and pretty... and hero-looking... urgh. I think I’m feeling a bit sick. Where’s the villain I can be salty about when they die? And why isn’t Rorschach on the list? He’s the hero I deserve!
10. Night or Day?
Definitely night. Feeling like a corpse during days, and once it becomes dark it’s like “LET ME SING YOU THE SONG OF MY PEOPLE.”
11. Favourite Pokemon?
I have to choose just one? Mismagius, Haunter, Kadabra, Mewtwo, Espeon, Umbreon, Houndoom, Suicune, Mightyena, Absol, Darkrai, Cofagrigus, Zoroark, Chandelure, Hydreigon, Reshiram, Mimikyu, Corviknight, Zacian
12. Top 5 bands:
Beast in Black, Kamijo, Heilung, Nox Arcana, Nightwish.
13. Top 10 books.
The Witcher series, Assassin’s apprentice + sequels, all Dragonlance books with Raistlin and Dhamon saga (except the 4th one; it sucked so bad I’m pretending I didn’t see anything and it doesn’t exist), The Shining, Pet Sematary, The complete fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. I’m quite picky with my books, but I guess that still makes even more than 10 books.
14. Top 4 movies
Pet Sematary (1989), Zombieland, Shaun of the Dead, Scary Movie 3. No matter how many times I watch these they just keep getting better.
15. America or Europe?
I’m evenhandedly disliking both for having an uncontrollable infestation of nazis, flat earthers, climate change skeptics, LGBT-phobes and religious fanatics either killing people or slowing down or banning basically anything that would be an improvement to someone else’s life except themselves. If we had inhabited other planets I would’ve been out of this disgrace of the universe eons ago. (:
16. Tumblr or Twitter?
Both are good, though personally I like tumblr more, since you can fit more stuff in posts. Though the new censorship and porn bot problem are beyond ridiculous.
17. Pro-choice or Pro-life?
Pro-choice. Duh.
18. Favourite YouTuber?
Cryo Chamber, Rapid Liquid and Li Ziqi. Especially Rapid Liquid’s quality content sums up perfectly what’s going on inside of my head when it’s not full of night terror creatures.
19. Favourite author ?
Either Andrzej Sapkowski (the Witcher), Robin Hobb (Assassin’s apprentice) or Stephen King. Can’t decide.
20. Tea or Coffee?
This... must be the most difficult question I’ve ever heard. What a horrendous sacrilege to even ask such. I couldn’t live without either.
21. OTP ?
I’ve never understood and most probably never will understand the fascination of pairings. Seems to me like everyone else are hyper excited of watching the grass grow and I’m just like ?? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ??? ?
22. Do you play an instrument/sing ?
I used to play piano when I was a kid, but then I got Playstation and I quit. Nowadays I have an ocarina, and can play A Place to Call Home and Black Mage Village from FFIX and Lilium from Elfen Lied. Would love to learn to play cello once I find some energy, time and money to get started.
---
Tagged by @sakuyamori and @lareine-kira
Tagging: @hangedemperor , @kyrie-silverwings , @paleshadeofrose , @roxinova , @haila-wetyios , @a-sharlayan-abroad , @trahja-tia , @muted-howl , @eorzeasfrozenknight , @under-the-blood-moonlight & @kiara-nocturne
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THE CURSED - Ch.3
Being an English Princess in 1739 is everything for Y/N, a Princess from a prosperous, powerful kingdom, to be happy about… until her parents arrange for her to marry a Prince from a nearby kingdom against her wishes. Unable to join her on her journey, the Royal family hires the Winchesters, two experienced Rangers, to guide her. However, the Princess and the younger brother begin to display affection for each other, and when her heat threatens her life, Sam makes a possibly deadly decision to save it.
PAIRING: Alpha!Sam x Omega!Reader
WORD COUNT: ~3300
OVERALL WARNINGS: a/b/o dynamics (heat/rut, claiming, knotting), age gap, smut of varying levels, descriptions of injury and gore, a tad of dub-con and 18th-century sexism from time to time, occasional bits of angst, fighting, and violence, eventual minor character death
NOTE: Edited by @crispychrissy and @quiddy-writes - please heed all warnings! Please keep in mind that this series is set in the 18th century - society is not what it is today. I do not control where your eyes go; if you feel disturbed or think something may trigger you, it is your responsibility to either stop reading or scroll past.
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Series Masterlist
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Y/N’s scent was starting to get to Sam; he hadn’t smelled an Omega that tantalizing in three years. It was rare that an Alpha took notice of an Omega after losing one, but as they traipsed down the road, Sam wondered for the millionth time if maybe he might have found another Omega to claim… he hadn’t felt the need in a long, long time.
No. She’s meant for another. You can’t.
But just as the sun rose above, the early morning light bathing their backs and freeing them from the night’s chill, Y/N doubled over in pain, falling to her knees in the center of the road. Pala jerked on her rope and whinnied before nudging Y/N’s side as the girl grabbed at her lower belly, fingers splayed wide over the fabric of her bodice.
“Y/N!” Sam fell to his knees beside her, a hand on her shoulder as he tried to get her to straighten up. Then her scent slammed into him with the force of a charging horse.
Dean smelled her as well, but didn’t suffer the same effect as his brother. “She’s in heat,” he said roughly. “Come on, we need to move faster if we’re going to make it.”
Sam stepped back, trying to hide the trembling in his body as Dean lifted Y/N into his arms and helped her into Shadow’s empty saddle. She groaned and curled her fingers in the horse’s mane.
“It hurts,” she whimpered, tears already brimming in her eyes.
“I know, I know.” Dean picked up the pack she had been carrying and fastened it to the saddle. “How long have you been in pain? Why didn’t you tell us?”
Y/N shook her head. “Since last night, but I’ve never felt a heat this strong before, I’ve never been allowed around Alphas… ahh!”
She doubled over again with a cry, and Dean shot his brother a look. He could tell Sam was barely restraining himself, but they had a mission; get the girl to the wedding, stay for that, and return home. If Sam acted on his impulses and claimed her, the punishment for his crime would be horrible.
So they trudged on, traveling over a range of hills before coming to rest in a group of trees well away from the road. They tethered Pala to a thinner tree and pulled the saddle and packs from both horses. They set up their shelters in a ring of trees just as the sun began to dip over the horizon and Dean built a fire, using two sticks to support strips of meat from a couple rabbits Sam had shot earlier as Y/N busied herself with plucking the stems from the wild berries they’d collected earlier. Her cramps had gotten so painful she was constantly on the verge of emptying her stomach, but Dean forced her to drink and kept a linen sheet soaked in water wrapped around her shoulders in order to keep her fever at bay.
They ate in mostly silence. The only sounds were the chirping of crickets and the wind whistling through the tall trees and the rippling of muscle as the two men ripped the still-sizzling meat apart. Sam ate in an attempt to distract himself from the primal ache in his gut, and Y/N barely ate at all. Afterwards, the brothers washed their hands and faces in a nearby stream while Y/N situated herself in their tent. Dean, who knew all too well what Sam was feeling, took the opportunity to speak to him.
“It would be wrong,” he said quietly.
Sam glanced over at him. “What are you saying?”
“If you claimed her, it would be wrong,” Dean muttered. “She’ll have her Beta in two more days, she can survive this.”
Sam shook his head. “If she survives the next two days and is satisfied by a Beta,” he scoffed as if offended by the term, “I will be impressed.”
Dean noted his brother’s assertive body language and knew exactly what Sam was contemplating. “Don’t. What she needs is to marry her Beta and be with him—”
“No, what she needs is an Alpha!” Sam growled, “not some stinking, useless Beta who can’t give her the satisfaction she needs.” He sighed and shifted, looking back towards the camp. “I should never have come on this journey.”
“Why?”
Sam inhaled slowly and pointedly said, “bad timing.”
“You—” Dean folded his arms, “your rut?”
Sam nodded. “I can feel it coming. If I lose control around her…”
“Brother, she’s barely of age—”
“And children are wedded all the time,” Sam interrupted. “She’s eighteen, older than most. And I would claim her if I could,” he affirmed with confidence. “I’m better, stronger than the man her family wants her to marry.”
Dean scoffed. “You’ve never met him.”
“He won’t be right for her.” Sam growled, turning and stalking through the trees towards the slowly dying campfire. “I’m going to sleep. The sooner this mission is over, the better.”
***
The next morning, Y/N’s heat had gotten even worse. She’d tossed and turned all night, practically weeping with the pain, and the scent of her heat made its way to Sam. More than once he fought the urge to take her right there, two feet away from where his brother lay fast asleep. And all those times he told himself that it would be wrong.
But Y/N was young, at her most fertile, and Sam was beginning to fantasize about claiming her, knotting her throughout her heat and seeing her grow round with child… his child. If he could, he’d impregnate her over and over again, building a family bigger than he could ever dream of.
The next evening they found another tavern. Upon seeing Y/N’s condition, the old innkeeper took pity and allowed them to stay in two adjoining rooms upstairs. Dean kept busy with wrapping the feverish Omega in cool towels and making her drink her special tea to ease the cramps.
Sam remained in an adjoining room, picking the twigs and burrs from his fur cloak in an attempt to distract himself from the ache of his rut, which was nearly in full swing. His balls were full and heavy, practically begging for release even though he’d already snuck off to the private bathroom twice to ‘relieve’ himself. He wouldn’t be satisfied until he knotted an Omega, and there was one lying ten feet away, in heat and ready for him. Dean had gone downstairs to fetch food and water, and when he announced that he was going to retire for the night, Sam knew it was only a matter of minutes before he could make his move.
Soon after Dean’s soft snores filled the room, he quietly turned the knob of the door that separated their rooms.
Y/N lay naked on top of the blanket, her body covered in sweat. Her slick glistened on her inner thighs, and her trembling fingers were anxiously pressing at her belly, trying to soothe the cramps that were only getting worse by the second. Her scent engulfed him, and once again he felt himself harden almost painfully. It appeared that his scent had affected her too, as she arched up off the blanket, eyes flying wide open.
“Sam—”
“You need me.” He muttered stiffly. “You won’t survive another two days like this, it’s killing you.”
She exhaled heavily, chest heaving as she sucked in another breath of frigid air. “Please, Sam, don’t hurt me.”
“I won’t hurt you.” Sam growled as another wave of her scent washed over him. “Y/N, you know exactly what you want. Just ask and I will help you.”
“I n-need…” Y/N hissed and pressed at her belly again. “I need it, Sam.”
With a growl, Sam moved closer. “I know you need it. Do you want it?”
She looked torn between refusing and giving in. Finally, she made her decision.
“Yes.”
The second the word left her mouth he was on top of her and laying a harsh, bruising kiss on her lips. Her teeth bit at his lower lip, and Sam felt his cock throb eagerly in his pants at the pain.
At the best of times, Sam was kind, sweet, and understanding. But this acknowledgment of their bond, what they both needed in that moment, had flipped a switch. They were about to cross a line that they knew was wrong, immoral, and neither of them cared.
She gripped him tight, legs wrapping up around his waist as her hands tugged at his shirt, threatening to rip the already worn-out cotton. A chuckle escaped his lips as he leaned back to help her pull it up, exposing his firm, chiseled chest. Y/N skimmed her fingers over his skin, feeling every last ripple of muscle and scar that covered his body. Without hesitating, Sam crawled down her body, caressing her skin until he was able to shove her legs apart and bury his lips between her thighs. She was bare, and he pressed a quick kiss to each lip of her pussy before turning his attention to the most sensitive piece of her.
Y/N had never felt anything remotely close to that before. She writhed on the thin mattress, mouth open in a silent scream as Sam licked and sucked at her sex. "Sa-Sam…!”
He promptly shoved slid two fingers inside her and began roughly pumping back and forth, searching for her sweet spot. She cried out against the palm of her hand as her toes curled, her core fluttering and clenching around the Alpha's long, nimble fingers.
"I'm—" she never got to finish her sentence. With a harsh suck of her clit, Sam sent her over the edge, growling possessively as her slick trickled over his hand. He worked her through it, fighting the urge to ruin his pants before he could properly knot her. When she was simply a whimpering mess, he crawled up and knelt between her shaking legs.
"Sam, please," she was literally sobbing with need now, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. "Please, Alpha, I need you."
"I know," Sam reached down and wrenched the tie of his pants open, allowing his length to spring free and into his waiting hand. He used the arousal that coated his fingers to slick himself before notching himself at her opening. He expected her to buck her hips away at the feeling of him there, but she wrapped her legs around him and pulled him close, scratching at his arms and emitting quiet, needy moans.
“Alpha,” tears brimmed in her eyes as she begged for him. “Please, I—”
Sam silenced her with a kiss. “Quiet. I don’t want anyone to hear us.”
She whimpered against his mouth as he ran his length through her folds, coating himself in her slick. When he began to press into her, she flinched, nails digging into his shoulders as she gasped out in surprise. He stopped, looking down at her with nothing but lust coursing through him. “I forgot… you’ve never been with a man before."
“No,” she whispered, “but I don’t care, I just want you…”
He assured himself that he could knot her without claiming her. He had just enough restraint to take comfort in that.
When he began to push into her, past that thin barrier of her maidenhood, he felt her walls flutter and clench around him as her legs shook around his waist. She cried out against his mouth and scratched at his back as he pushed deeper inside her, reveling in the warm, soft wetness of her womanhood around him. She was better than he’d imagined, tighter, softer, warmer.
The perfect Omega for him.
Y/N was surprised at how easy it was, how, after the initial shock and burn of his entry, Sam just pushed inside and seated himself there, resting heavy and thick. Other women, including her own mother and handmaiden, had warned her about the pain, about how it hurt for so long, how virgins always bled and fought… but then she realized that there was no way it would ever hurt, no way she would ever bleed or have to fight the Alpha off.
She was supposed to be with Sam.
And she was all that mattered to him.
On Sam’s first thrust, she nearly cried out in pleasure. He clapped a hand over her mouth and dug his knees into the thin mattress, using it as leverage to push forward again, and he swore she melted around him. His head dropped onto her shoulder as he moved harder, faster, careful to keep the sound of his hips slapping against her as quiet as possible. The little bed rocked on the floor, creaking slightly as they moved in tandem.
He felt her tighten around him and lifted his hips just enough for him to get his other hand between their bodies, rubbing his thumb over her sensitive bud in small, slow circles.
Y/N could barely discern fantasy from reality. The hot, thick length of the Alpha inside of her was more than she could have hoped for, and she clawed at his skin as he filled her over and over and over again, her gasps and cries muffled by his huge hand. Her fingers would never provide the pleasure of him rutting inside her, and her eyes rolled back into her head as she pictured what their bodies must look like together. The room was dark, only lit with moonlight, but as Sam lifted himself up on shaking arms, she glanced down, trying to see where he was entering her.
“Oh,” Sam panted, “God, I need you… need to knot you. Roll over,” he pulled out and helped her move onto her hands and knees before pressing her down against the blankets and thrusting back into her.
It felt even better in this position. Y/N yelped quietly as his length pounded against the perfect spot deep inside her. He was holding her perfectly, both hands on her waist to hold her still as he began moving faster, more urgently. The wet, slick sounds of him inside her filled the room. Sam curled over her, bracing one hand over her shoulder as he kissed the side of her neck hungrily.
Then his hips began to stutter, and she felt a sudden tightness where he was entering her. His knot.
She panicked, trying to pull away and whimpering with sudden fear. Sam went still and kissed her shoulder comfortingly.
"Shh,” he soothed her, “it's okay. I’ve got you."
“It’ll hurt.”
He nodded and dropped his forehead between her shoulders. “Maybe, but only this first time, I swear.”
“Y-you're sure?"
Her voice was wracked with need, but Sam could hear the hesitation. "I promise," he murmured. “Do you trust me?”
“Yes,” she turned her head, looking back at him over her shoulder. “Yes, I trust you.”
Sam kissed her again and rolled his hips. They were a long way from just knotting, he thought. This was becoming something a lot more.
“Good,” he whispered, “let me make love to you.”
He slipped one hand down between her thighs and rubbed his fingers over her clit. When her sex throbbed around him, he continued to move. His knot had relaxed during their moment of conversation and he took the opportunity to stroke in and out of her, getting her to peak before edging her away, not letting her cum until he did as well.
Then, when Y/N tightened herself around him and arched her back receptively, Sam lost control. He snapped his hips forward, managing a dozen hard, feral thrusts before he released inside her, his knot swelling rapidly and locking them together. Both of them silently moaned out each other’s names, mixed with gasps and the sounds of Y/N’s whimpering as the tightness between her legs nearly became too much to bear.
At the feeling of his release filling her in thick, warm bursts, Y/N finally fell over the edge, shaking violently as her climax scorched through her, prolonging when Sam brought his hand up and cupped her breast, his fingers teasing the nipple.
When he was at the height of his pleasure, Sam lost the ability to think and allowed his primal instincts to take over. All he wanted to do was make her his forever… the last love he’d ever take.
With a ferocious snarl of the word “mine” he dipped his head and sank his teeth into the back of her neck.
She did cry out then, this time with pain. Nevertheless, her body spasmed as another earth-shattering climax washed over her, and Sam pressed his free hand over her mouth, forcing her to stay quiet. He collapsed on top of her, uselessly bucking his hips in an attempt to fuck himself deeper into her filled cunt. With a breathy moan, he pulled his teeth from her neck and lapped at the bite marks, already feeling them begin to heal under his tongue.
He cursed himself silently, even as the soft moans and contented sighs she emitted threatened to arouse him again. He’d broken his promise to himself that he wouldn’t claim her, that simply knotting her would be enough to relieve them both until they left her at the castle with her groom.
God, have mercy on our souls, he thought.
“Sam...”
The soft pant of his name was enough to alert him to the fact that he was nearly crushing Y/N underneath him, and he slowly turned onto his side, cradling her close so that his knot didn’t tug. “Yes?”
“You—” Y/N’s voice was thick with post-coital bliss, “you claimed me.”
He buried his face in the uninjured crook of her neck and bared his teeth in a mixture of regret and pleasure. He could still taste her blood, hot and coppery on his teeth as he ran his tongue over them. “I’m sorry.”
“Don't apologize,” Y/N murmured. “I… I wanted you to. It was perfect.”
Sam chuckled and nosed affectionately at the curve of her shoulder. His heart was pounding in his chest, cock still hard inside her. “I’m glad. Are you in pain?”
“Not as much as I feared,” Y/N laughed quietly and tilted her hips so that Sam fit more comfortably inside her. However, the feeling of his knot sent a shock of fear through her blood. “I can’t be married.”
“I know.”
“You could be jailed, tortured,” she let her head rest on his arm as he extended it underneath her neck. “Sam, you could be killed.”
“I know.”
“And you don’t care?”
“Who said anyone will find out that you’ve been knotted?”
“You claimed me.” Y/N brushed her fingers tentatively over the mark, wincing when she felt the already-healed skin under her fingertips.
Sam grimaced. Of course, he was stupid to think that his claim on her would go unnoticed. “Right…” he caressed her skin with a feather-light touch and nipped playfully at her jaw. “What if we never arrived?”
“They’d send a party to find us.”
“Well then,” Sam kissed over her shoulder and reached to fill one palm with her breast, “what if they don’t?”
Y/N sighed and arched herself into his touch. “They might, Sam. And I have to do this for our families. Our marriage is sealing an animosity and without it…"
“I don’t care about that,” Sam growled and pushed his hips forward, making sure Y/N felt him still locked inside her. “I care about you. You’re my Omega now. Mine. Say it.”
Y/N trembled at his words. “I’m yours, Sam.”
“Good.” Sam nuzzled her shoulder and pulled one of the blankets over their still-entwined bodies. “Let’s sleep. We can discuss the situation in the morning.”
She reached down and brushed her fingers over her inner thighs. “I need to clean…”
“Shhh,” Sam brushed his lips over the shell of her ear and splayed his hand out over her lower belly, where his cock and seed were still nestled in her fertile body. “In the morning.”
If you want to see chapter 4, reblog and leave a comment! Feedback is my fuel!
TAGS FOR THIS SERIES ARE CLOSED
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The Sixth Ranger Appears!
Sorry, It took so long... sometimes I get stuck with a scene and have no idea how to fix it for days! Also, never thought Sentai was so darn hard to write!!!
This part contains an in-fanfic reference to my Nanoswarm series ( Chapter 1: https://chaniters.tumblr.com/post/181620799154/sugar-vice if anyone’s interested in reading that).
Also, spoilers for Fallen hero as always.
___________________________________
Super Sentai Rangers 7
“Watch out!” Ortega yells, pulling you out of the way as the giant blades tear down the spot you were standing a split second ago.
And yet another one approaches, your mind alerting you with barely enough time to block its attack with your axe … Not that it helps, as the clone simply sends another blade your way, too fast even for your eyes. Your nano-suit absorbs the hit, sparks flying everywhere. You’ll get a good bruise out of it, you think as you hold your chest stepping back from its reach.
“We should probably retreat,” you say jumping back to put some distance in between.
“What, you think they’re going to let us?” Ortega asks ducking to avoid being decapitated “Can’t you do your thing, buy us a few seconds?” he asks raising his spear to parry another hit.
“I can try…” you say without much conviction. Delving into the catastrofiend’s mind is a no-no. Doing it with so many of them…“What the hell… here goes nothing”
You look at them focusing your mind...Blinding someone is a complicated affair, requiring you to manually cancel the images sent to the brain by the cornea. The farm had you practice it endlessly and it was a truly daunting task. It wasn’t until you were free that you realized how pointless it all was… when all you had to do is force them to close their eyelids which serve that exact purpose.
The things stumble as they are suddenly marching blind, giving Charge enough time to ram them like a thunderbolt, toppling them on top of each other. It sends them a good distance back… enough for the two of you to move on the other direction.
“They are not as bad as the original Catastrofiend!” Charge says attempting to stay positive.
You have to admit he’s right. They don’t have nearly as much combat experience as the real thing. They are most likely fresh from their tubes, and you could manipulate their minds without any side effects.
Still, there are at least fifteen of them and you’re still counting…
“I think they’re bad enough” you reply, watching as two of them finally open their eyes and start lifting a car, preparing to fling it at you.
“Oh boy… they are learning fast “
“Dodge!” you yell as you both jump in different directions, the flying vehicle missing you both narrowly.
“How do you like this, rangers?” All versions of Dr. Grim laugh at you.
“When are you going to shut up?!!” Ortega said retreating, while the things advanced blades first.
You rise quickly as well, backtracking as well, holding your axe ready… ready for what you wonder.
“How are you holding up? We’re almost there” Steel goes through the intercom.
“Well, the fight’s not going well if that’s what you’re asking” Ortega answers giving one of the things a small wound with his electro-spear as he keeps moving back.
That is until he bounces on your back… The fiends have you completely surrounded.
Back to back, against the enemy. There’s nowhere else to go. The clones raise their blades upwards, ready to slice at you both from all directions.
“Can you blind them again?” he whispers
“I don’t think they’ll fall for that again, and they don’t really need to see us to chop us to pieces right now, do they?”
“Darn. At least we’re together...”
“Any last words rangers?” The Grims ask, giggling at you both.
“Ehhh… let me think… “ Ortega says, buying time.
“Maybe I can distract them long enough for you to make a run for it” you whisper again
He takes your hand, squeezing it firmly “No, I’m not leaving you… but tell you what, try to distract them, and I’ll make an opening. It’s worked before...”
You smile under your helm. That’s obviously not going to work and he knows it. “Idiot… fine, I’ll do it… on your mark”
“Hey, Grim! Or Grims… I’m not sure what to call you” he says turning to them.
“Whichever you prefer is fine,” they say, clearly amused.
“Oh. Thank you… Here are our last words!”
You focus your mind… ready to do your worst against the Catastrofiend clones. At least you’ll give them a good light show as a parting gift.
“I’m listening,” they say musically.
“Fine.. well our last words are… GO … FUCK… YO…”
He doesn’t get to finish that sentence, because the four Catastrofiend clones standing in front of you suddenly begin glowing in hot white light… and then combusts in successive spectacular explosions, sending showers of flaming gore everywhere. The other monsters turn to their attacker, momentarily distracted. You pull Ortega to the side, out of their reach without hesitation.
As the flames die out, a tall green figure is standing behind the scorched remains, wearing a suit looking oddly similar to your own, but with double pairs of wings and a hot-red smoking wrist laser on the left hand. You’ve seen it before… You know who it belonged to...
“Pathetic,” he says looking down on the two of you
“Vitruvian!!?” Ortega asks bewildered
“Elyse!!?” You can’t help ask, too late realizing the mistake, as the mind inside the helm can’t possibly be her.
“Whatever you do, stay out of my way. You’re both obviously incompetent” he states, preparing to engage the monsters already marching on him. One of the clones attempts to leap at him and take him by surprise, but he answers extending his wings to evade it easily, and his henshin bracer forms a large energy sword with which he beheads the thing in a single fluid spinning display of savagery before. The fiend is dead before either of them touches the ground…
You feel your jaw touch the floor… and the inexperienced Catastrofiend copies are having it far worse. They look at their fallen confused, and that is all the green swordsman needs to charge at them, slashing through them as if they weren’t even there, his armor quickly covered in the many colors of Catastrofiend blood.
You and Ortega look at each other briefly, moving to protect the green (ranger’s?) flanks… only that there’s not much you can do, as he single-handedly wipes them out in pieces, his laser shooting once more at those who attempt to flee.
“I’m sorry… I’ll have to leave you now rangers, we have a prior appointment and your friend is being a real bore” the Grims say, all of them with the look of someone whose dog has just been kicked.
“Leaving so soon?” the green warrior says rapidly firing his laser, vaporizing one of the four bodies of the doctor before the other three teleports away cursing at him in pain, leaving his flaming friend behind...
“I’m not saving you again,” he stated without turning at you… Before extending his wings and flying away...
“...what… the fuck… just happened…” you ask in shock.
“Why did you say, Elyse?” Ortega asks confused, bringing you down to earth FAST.
“Elyse? I didn’t say that! I said peace so the green guy knows we’re on his side!” you lie
“I heard what you said pendejo! You lying piece of shit !!”
Steel, Herald, and Argent arrived just in time to see you getting at yelled by Ortega. He’s using Spanish and mostly words that his mother would not have been proud of.
_______Back at Mortum’s lab_________
“So let me get this straight” Steel asked exasperated. “Elyse was Vitruvian all along… and she started the nanovore swarm?”
“Yes… “ you admit reluctantly under Ortega’s glare.
“And you never told anyone...?”
“No, I didn’t becau… ow!” you complain as Ortega punches your arm.
“Weren’t you supposed to be able to tell someone’s identity?” Argent asked with arms crossed “I mean you’re a telepath”
“Well, she was a telepath too!!” You complain
“I get that part, you already explained. But you said she’s dead.”
“I know… It’s just when I saw the suit… I couldn’t help it.”
“Now, I’m also wondering why Mortum possesses the same Technology as Vitruvian” Steel stated, giving Mortum an accusing look”
“Don’t look at me, mon amie. Am I not doing everything in my power to help you? You knew I was a villain, It’s not unheard of that someone else manages the same back channels. Besides, I think I’ve done more than enough already to earn that pardon”
“You helped Vitruvian try to destroy the city?” Ortega interjected
“It wasn’t like that…” Cyrus started
“You, don’t get to defend him!!” Ortega glared again at you again.
“... right” you say holding your arm because he hits hard.
“Whatever he did, It’s not going to change anything now” Argent spoke with a more practical tone
“I won’t admit to doing anything” Mortum stood his ground.
“Fine. I’ll drop it… “ Steel said tiredly. “But whom else could have access to Vitruvian's nanites technology?”
“And a replica of her suit,” you add.
“Your own suits are designed using that one as a model…” Mortum explains. “Someone else must have stolen Vitruvian’s technology. She wouldn’t have shared it with anyone”
“With anyone buy you, you mean?” Steel asks
“Hmpf… I won’t confirm, nor deny your implications, Marshal”
“I’m wondering why doesn’t this “Green Ranger” just join us” Herald interrupted. “I mean, we’re all on the same side, right?”
But no one had answers for that.
_____________
Terror and Blitz smirked as Grim walked up to Regis’ and her control station.
“So how did it go Grim?” Blitz snickered
The three remaining Grims walked past them, without a word.
“Didn’t there use to be more of you Grim?” Terror asked. “This job’s too much for you… you’re losing yourself in it”
One of them briefly turned to her as the other two walked up to Regina’s station. “Your puns are criminal and painful Terror… and I’ll get a replacement for my neural network soon enough. Maybe I’ll use a regene this time. A Regene with magnified brain capabilities” he said, as the two glared at each other.
“I’d kill you first” she answered.
“Ahh.. you join us finally,” Regis said rising from her chair ending their exchange.
The Grims kneeled to her, without another word.
“It seems your plan has failed Grim… and you’ve wasted valuable resources creating those clones that are now rotting on the streets… Also, instead of two dead rangers, they’re all alive and we have one more to fight against. Green one too, they are certainly colorful. Hmm… anything to say in your defense before I consult the Apocalypse force on what to do with you?” Regis asked
“I don’t really think we failed, all things considered”
She smiled “And why is that?”
“I got these” one of the Grims said extending a severed Catastrofiend blade-arm, the edge covered in semi-liquid nanite ooze. “I believe the apocalypse force will be very interested in them”.
“Nanite technology” Regis pondered studying them from her seat. “You have my attention Dr. Grim.”
“I have a plan… But I’ll need the assistance of Doctor Terror and Doctor Blitz… a joint operation to put an end to the Ranger threat… and their new annoying ally.”
“No way!” Blitz started
“I’m not working with those losers,” Terror said pouting.
“Granted. Blitz and Terror will be under your command” Regis spoke looking at Grim. “But if you don’t come through, you’ll answer for your past failure… And so will the two of you” she said looking at Blitz and Terror, the two going pale.
My Fanfics: https://chaniters.tumblr.com/post/181692759294/my-fanfiction-for-fallen-hero
DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fan fiction using characters and the setting of the Fallen Hero: Rebirth and upcoming Fallen Hero: Retribution games written by Malin Riden. I do not claim ownership of any characters from the Fallen Hero wold. These stories are a work of my imagination, and I do not ascribe them to the official story canon. These works are intended for entertainment outside the official storyline owned by the author. I am not profiting financially from the creation of these stories, and thank the author for her wonderful game/s, without which these works would not exist.
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A short story I made out of short stories I’ve written under other names.
When she died, I felt a series of perforations, hollows and bruises
about my skull. I saw her die behind static.
By the stone wall adjacent to the office supplies store, I
bewailed her, screaming,
burning myself later with the tip of a lit cigarette.
I put ash and poison on my wrist for the ones who died.
I wanted to pick a strawberry off the plant in my parents’ backyard
and once more taste its succulence. I wanted to impale my head with the
iron tip of a weathervane. Slice open my vibrant red aorta.
Seeing them all in a hole
through the light emitting
through the asylum blinds.
I myself am a corpse in a bed
in the forensics ward,
green moths on my blanket,
rotting silently in a pastel grave,
killed by medicine,
wasted by time.
If you come close enough to hear my thoughts
(like a chemically-enhanced ghost)
distort and clamor
amongst the traffic, the television,
the noise a death in a family brings,
I will let loose my hatred
like a ribbon from hair,
unraveling red Medusa strands.
I will draw more ribbons on your flesh
if you touch me,
bleed you into the wood,
hammer a nail into your heartline,
devour your fear like a shot of amphetamine
to my malevolent blood.
2013
Stacey
1.
Some of us are the river’s current, floating through life swiftly or slowly, as if in a trance of somnambulism. Some of us are a human shell at its edge, refusing to follow its pattern and be a part of it. Why follow them when you can live on the fringes of society, away from its stigmas and scrutinizing scorn?
2.
When Ellie married Samuel Barnes, the world was a rose-gold utopia. Three years later, at the age of twenty-nine, Ellie no longer felt that the chemistry they had once remained. On a windy September afternoon, when she returned to the red-brick bungalow she shared with Samuel on Hillsam Avenue, Ellie heard moans and sounds of sexual ecstasy emitting from their bedroom. Another woman was there. Ellie’s eyes instantly began to burn like hot coals in a campground grill. She examined her wedding portrait on the wall of the hallway as she moved in slow motion through it. They had been photographed in front of the church’s stained glass windows, a spectrum of color radiating behind the couple adorned in black and white.
She ran her fingers through her long brown hair, blinking through the lake of sorrow in her dark eyes, and suppressing a sob, pushed open the bedroom door at the end of the hall. Another dark-haired woman Ellie didn’t recognize was riding Samuel, and when she registered the door slamming open, she turned around wide-eyed with a cry of alarm, her brown nipples in full view.
“I knew it,” Ellie told Samuel bitterly. “I knew for at least a year that there was someone else!”
Samuel looked at his wife blankly and didn’t reply, his face almost smug.
“Who are you?” Ellie shrieked at the strange woman.
“Lila Stern,” the woman replied. “And clearly, Sam doesn’t love you anymore. He loves me. He has for the entire year you suspected something was going on. We would both like you to leave.”
“Don’t dictate what I will do in my own house, you fucking homewrecker!” Ellie shouted. Lila, remembering her nudity, covered herself with the indigo comforter.
“I agree with Lila,” Samuel said. “Just pack your things and go, Ellie. You’ve been a nagging, paranoid pain in my ass for too long. You’re in need of a psychiatrist, but you won’t pay heed to my advice. All you are lately is a cold fish who’s no fun. A fucking schoolmarm. Find an apartment somewhere. Leave.”
“Now,” Lila said.
Ellie slammed the door shut and bolted down the hall and into the kitchen. She opened the cutlery drawer and grabbed the sharpest knife she could find. Tested its point with the tip of her index finger. A small blood-drop formed in the small pad of flesh. Although Ellie’s tears rained down like heated glass, she felt no physical pain.
I won’t pack my things, she thought. I have a better idea.
She glanced at the neon green digital clock above the oven. It read 1:11 p.m. It was September 24th. As she placed the knife into the pocket of her navy blue peacoat, grabbed her smartphone, scrawled a quick note and left the house, Ellie knew what to do. No more morning to afternoon shifts as a psychiatric nurse at St. Mary Medical Center’s psych unit. No more wondering when Samuel would be home from his nightly excursions. As she walked towards the river, passing the other houses, the Texaco, the railroad tracks, the boarded-up, shutdown factories, memories flashed before her. She remembered her lonely childhood, her even more tumultuous adolescence where she slept with a crowbar in her pillowcase and read The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird at the edge of the schoolyard grass away from everyone.
“I wish you’d never been born,” Ellie’s mother told her, swilling red wine from a tall, dark bottle.
“I second that,” her father said, puffing on a fat cigar. Once she made it to the river, Ellie collapsed like a house of cards to the white sand, and howled the loss of her love into the godless sky. She glanced from side to side to make sure no one was watching. She couldn’t be sure if someone was for all the foliage and bushes. But she didn’t care. She sat there for the longest time, her breathing a series of hyperventilation. Samuel’s face was all she could see, then Lila’s, the two of them like a rotating holographic image. She wanted her cremated ashes bequeathed to the river. She wanted no tomb in the town cemetery. No funeral. The note she wrote with these directions was in her left pocket of her coat. Such a heavy coat for the nice weather, but Ellie was always cold. Her body, feather-boned and catatonic, slumped over a large rock and she let the tears wet it like a water nymph mourning the loss of a handsome sailor on a receding boat.
Ellie turned on her cell phone and listened to Paula Cole’s “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?” one last time. It sounded faint above the river’s churning. Just like the woman in the song, she too had an non-devoted, careless husband. She wept hardest at the chorus:
Where is my John Wayne?
Where is my prairie song?
Where is my happy ending?
Where have all the cowboys gone?
“To greener pastures,” Ellie said to herself. “To rose-gold utopias I’ll never see.“
3.
The clock on the wall of Mrs. Sykes’s math class ticked in time to my heartbeat. The hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get when I crave marijuana was there, screaming like a lacuna asking to be filled. The time for more recalcitrance (in this case, truancy and drug use by the river) was near. While Mrs. Sykes droned on like a monotonous honeybee about the Pythagorean theorem, I got up from my desk and slung my backpack over my shoulders. Her gunmetal grey eyes followed me to the door with the poster of the Power Rangers on it, all teamed up together. Always use the buddy system, the poster said.
“Where are you going, Stacey?” Mrs. Sykes asked.
“Skipping class,” I told her. “And dropping out when I turn eighteen in February. This is non-negotiable. You can’t stop me.”
Before my teacher could retaliate, I flounced out of the room, leaving the scoffing and titters of my peers behind me. I left my textbooks in my locker to lessen the load in my backpack. I unzipped a small pocket and grinned at the verdant green pot in its glass pipe.
Jimmy Stirling is the one who introduced me to pot when I was a junior a year before. He was a senior, and one of Lewis and Clark High School’s few homeless students. His dad was a cantankerous drunk and gambler who threw him out. Jimmy spent time singing songs on the sidewalk for spare change, or sleeping at the homeless shelter for adolescents. For someone who was homeless, Jimmy frequently had a remarkably full tin can of bills and change. His singing voice was a rich alto tearing pleasantly through the downtown breeze. On October of last year, he found me crying under the highway after school let out. I recognized him from my creative writing class.
"What’s wrong, Stacey?” he asked.
“My brother’s locked in the loony bin. He’s possessed. He killed Alvin, my guinea pig. Everything is falling apart, and to top it all off, Liam broke up with me this morning.”
"Man, I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. “You every try marijuana? It might make you forget all that stuff.”
“I don’t have any money,” I said, knowing that anyone with marijuana downtown expected payment in return for it.
“That’s alright. I have some I’ll share for free. Let’s sit in my favorite place to do it.”
I followed him, listening to him sing as we walked the few blocks to an alleyway with a set of cement stairs against a condemned apartment, leading to a bolted door. He sang Skid Row’s “18 and Life” and Black Sabbath’s “Killing Yourself To Live.” We sat on the bottom step . He loaded the pot into a glass bowl and taught me how to light it, how to inhale the hit of smoke without exhaling it too soon. I caught the gist of it. Suddenly, within a few minutes, everything was funny. My mind was suddenly devoid of all negativity. I was giggly, light as a tumbleweed blown by a gale of fierce wind. I felt energetic, talkative, and happier that I’d been a long time. Shortly after my day with Jimmy, I learned he went to jail for getting caught with Ecstasy tablets in his lockers. He was also rumored to be selling cocaine and heroin downtown. He wasn’t allowed back at school. I never saw him again. The flashbacks vanished when I approached the river and saw her. She was a woman with long brown hair. She was wearing a peacoat, jeans and pair of black loafers. I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw what she was doing. The woman older than me by at least a decade, was holding a kitchen knife to the veins in her right wrist. She made no sound when she punctured them, her hand dangling over the water. I watched her bloodletting turn part of the emerald river red. It was spouting out like the slashed throat of a sacrificed farm animal. She turned and saw me when i stepped on a twig by accident and snapped it in two.
“Go away,” the woman told. “Believe me, you should be letting this happen.”
She took in my red ringlets, my sharp green eyes, my pink hoodie, my Converse sneakers. Then she went for her throat with her knife and slit it open with perfect finesse. There was a vibe coming off of this woman that insinuated I should just let her die. I could sense that her life had been miserable and mean. I sat on a rock out of sight of the dying woman and got high, thinking of her spirit rising, transcendental and free, into the sun and clouds. I thought of how the first settlers of the city I live in came here 10,000 to 30,000 years ago. Before there were cemeteries, they buried their dead in unmarked graves. I thought of all the skeletons that must be under the grass of the lawns and parks, the sidewalks, the urban streets. I thought of the days of religious fanaticism, and how had I been born then, I would have been buried in unconsecrated ground for my heathen ways. I didn’t believe in god, but I did believe in Satan.
2019
Stacey
I am not sure exactly when my family died. Before they died, I was a genuinely innocent soul whose conscience burned to a crisp. I couldn’t blame myself for it, but I didn’t know who to blame because the ones responsible for my family’s death never came out of their disguises, synthetic human skin and features made to look exactly like my family members would look if they were really there amongst you. I still hear them call to me over highway noise and wind, while I’m taking hits off a meth pipe or smoking a cigarette on an overpass with dead eyes and no ache. I’ve already ached so much. Without them I am a branch breaking off of a tree. It’s hard to explain what I mean by disguises; they look so much like my family but aren’t. They could look like anyone and they’re wearing synthetic skin designed to look like my mom and dad.
I am Stacey Galloway. I was born to a family that never loved me but that I tried to love fiercely. I may have turned into a drug-addled street kid but I still wanted them to love me, anyway. I remember when I first suspected them to be dead. I was sitting in my old apartment in the living room with a scream in my ears that sounded like my mother’s emanating from my laptop and whirling through the dusty air like a trap I would remained enveloped in. I heard a chainsaw start up and then the sound stopped. It was like an audio recording that just stayed there screaming and sawing in my computer speakers. The voices told me my parents were dead and replaced by “skin masks.”
I asked, “What is a skin mask?” “Synthetic skin made to look like your parents. Exactly like your parents. And your younger brother,” a man replied out of thin air. “Someone else is wearing skin that looks like them now. Every feature of your family has been replicated, special contact lenses have been made, someone with the same height as them is wearing skin masks.”
I couldn’t see him but maybe he could see me. I hoped not. What he was saying was too horrible to want to comprehend. It’s humanly possible to do this, with the aid of a lot of fake skin and ways of knowing how the victim worked, how they spoke, where they lived, whom they spoke to. I will never know that world and don’t want to. It’s insidious enough just to live in the city I live in, gone and waking up with ice in my chest in a house that is now unfamiliar and rearranged. All I want to do is get high to forget about it, and it’s worked after awhile.
I know the police will do nothing because I don’t know how to explain it without dying or not making sense. I never wanted this.
I never wanted to lose the only lifeline I had.
So after the voices came from my laptop and told me these things, I left my apartment, locked it and went to the stone wall by the office supplies store about a mile away. I sat there in the gravel and lit a cigarette, the parking lot blurring through my wet eyes. I didn’t know why I believed what I was hearing, but I was anorexic and schizophrenic, and didn’t know how to not believe something that seemed so real. Before all this, I heard voices talk to me in my room that really were there. No one was physically present around me, but their voices reverberated throughout my walls, my silent television, my closed laptop.
“We’re going to kill your family,” said the voices.
I didn’t believe them. I didn’t reply. I thought they were full of shit.
Now I know they’re not, because although the identity thieves of my family are never in prison, the handwriting of my parents has changed, and so have the cadence of their voices. They speak in European accents now when they think they’re alone and that I’m out of earshot. But I can hear them. It’s hard to understand what they’re saying. It’s plain English, but indecipherable at the same time. My brother’s identity was never actually stolen. He is eighteen and currently going to college. I am twenty-three and never doing anything with my life again. I’m in the loony bin.
I stare through the green and blue in the slit in the blinds and think about the house I grew up in, a green bungalow in the middle of a golden field of grass, a porch swing, wind chimes and an attic window that never lit up. My father always told me our attic was full of asbestos and that it could cause mesothelioma to inhale it after years of exposure to it.
“But,” he said, “there is no asbestos in the rest of the house. You’re safe.”
In the backyard, my mother grew strawberries and tomatoes. There was a one-car garage and a deck, a wooden fence and a glass picnic table with chairs surrounding it. I remember days, years of smoking marijuana in my room and listening to music. Grey smoke filling the room with the scent of weed, filling my lungs with blackness and my heart with euphoria. I will do that later on, in another place, when this institution is tired of me and forces me out the door like I want.
When I went home after my tantrum by the stone wall, I noticed that my parents were still there, or they just appeared to be. I saw no blemishes, no redness, nothing but them with a synthetic look to their skin, it appeared to be fake. But there was my mother’s hair, my father’s hair, my father’s eyes, their faces. Over the next several years that I lived in the house with them, I noticed that while they copied the handwriting of my parents well, it was slightly altered. They could do their signatures perfectly, but their notes to me and their grocery lists were different looking than a note would be were it from my parents. I was distressed by the way my father’s eyes were either a dark blue or a light blue. They looked like two different sets of eyes. He tried to hit me three times, but never went any further than that. I could tell he was an angry man all of a sudden, and though he looked like my father, I knew he wasn’t. He was wearing a synthetic skin mask. It looked like my father, but it wasn’t. Its skin is fake. It wasn’t real. Same with my mother. Whoever these people were, I know I need to chop them up and leave their remains to dissolve in a landfill somewhere. I want to leave my brother, Steffan, out of it. I know there’s a way to make them expose themselves. Purchase a gun, aim through the summer air at the targets, themselves and tell them, “Take off your skin masks! You’re not my parents! You killed them.”
They wouldn’t be able to reply, and if they were somehow compelled to reply and tell me what they did with my parents, I would happily kill whoever is underneath that fake human surface and tell the cops that they were serial killers who spied on my parents for years and stole their identities. Something I never wanted to happen to them or to myself. I hardly ever talk to “my parents” anymore and Steffan stays the hell away as well. I know I have to have them buried but for now, I think I’ll drown myself in writing. I haven’t explained what is going on to the psych ward, which is going to let me out anyway soon. I know how to handle it myself after hearing one of the directors of the facility tell me, “Your family is skin masks.” The sick fuck laughed to himself and I knew I had to flee and get those people who thought they could ever replace my parents, who were unkind to me but were all I had. I hated everyone else or lost the ones who mattered. I’m going back into their house and I’m going to dig up my gun and aim it, loaded with silver bullets, at their brains. I know they’ll unmask. I’m not born yesterday. I know I should do this. I would never duplicate a mask made to look like real skin and identity of someone else, and wear it over myself as though I could become that person. I’d rather swallow a bottle of pills and go to sleep forever. Fall asleep in a meadow of bluebells and Vicodin.
Before here, I hung out under a train bridge where I always wanted to follow the mysterious Mathilde, a girl whose surname I didn’t know to this day, anywhere and everywhere. She came there to buy meth and was always hanging out with older men, smoking a meth pipe and blowing the smoke up into the lights under the train bridge on the cement walls, watching it float, a white demon mask, in the illumination. I joined her once. She asked me, “Why are you doing meth, Stacey?”
“Because I’m miserable without it. It makes me feel like I could walk for miles and it feels like it’s only seconds until you’re at your destination. I feel like I can die alone on the autumn breeze and die happy.”
“Don’t die, Stacey. You’re the last one of them that should be killed.”
“Some of these bitches really should die. Last night, someone threatened me with a lead pipe after I threatened his friend with a lit cigarette after that cunt tried to beat me up. The both of them should burn up in a chamber underground.”
Mathilde smiled. “How did you know I love that sort of thing?”
“Because I can see through you. I’ve seen you in fights under here, too. Try to keep a low radar. I know you haven’t initiated any of those fights, but try to see there are real dangers here in town and don’t let anyone know where you live. I heard you lost your ID recently and had to get it replaced. It was stolen. I’m only saying this because I care about you, Mathilde. I don’t think they’ve done anything with your ID except disposed of it, by now. I think we should stick together.”
“I don’t have any friends except you,” said Mathilde.
And a few days later, I was shoved away into the psych ward, the loony bin, the human menagerie. I felt like a psychiatric science experiment, doped up with meds and lost in the dull, utilitarian rec room, playing ping pong, watching an episode of Intervention in drug therapy, browsing the bookshelves, learning different coping skills, watching the bus park and then leave through the glass cage of windows, learning about different behavioral therapies, making collages with magazine pictures, standing in line for more meds, staring at the ceiling light reflecting from their TV, craving drugs and wanting to cast off all purity. I couldn’t stand it here any longer. I still can’t. I’m crazier and know I won’t pay for what I’m about to do, considering how horrible what these people did to my parents is. I can’t let them live any longer and everyone is buying into their disguises except and another lady whose name I don’t know. Their old friends won’t speak to them. A lady who lives me nearby told me my mom isn’t herself anymore.
“She’s not Autumn,” the lady told me. Autumn is my mother’s name.
She said nothing about my dad, but all the voices ever reiterated to me was that my dad, Roger, was killed and that I would never know where or what had been done with him. I’ll forever remember that scream and chainsaw sound on my laptop, playing through the speakers out of dead silence. What was I supposed to do with that information. Say I heard it out of thin air? I’d sound psychotic to law enforcement, mental health services and anyone listening. I can’t just ramble about this to random drug addicts, either. I can’t tell them why I’m purchasing the gun, what its purpose is, or where I’m going to kill those thieves. I am haunted by days of sleeping and screaming and all I can do is bleed Ativan and never want to wake up. But still want to avenge my parents’ murder as well. I’m getting out soon. I will sleep under the stars for a night out on the deck, and wait until the daylight breaks to kill them when they emerge from behind their locked door and into the interior of the basement.
You’ll see. They have masks that are so fake-looking they betray themselves, they give themselves away. I can find a way to move on and I know I shouldn’t blame myself, because this destruction of the family foundation was never my doing. It was theirs, whomever is living in those disguises. I’ve told no one. I can’t allow myself to be labelled as psychotic or severely mentally ill, but I have been. I can hear the voices to this day, and four psychiatrists told me that schizophrenia is incurable. The voices can only be tapered down with medications. There is no cure alive for hearing voices, for visual and auditory hallucinations. I’ve seen things too. I’ve seen people that look ghostly and transparent appear by the river, or sitting on curbs, and they vanish into thin air just as quickly as they appeared. A cop by the river, a man in a grey hoodie on the street curb. I see black shadows above me, or white or golden flashbulbs emanating in the ceiling like there’s a camera taking my picture. The voices still talk through speakers, walls and televisions. Car radios. Computers. A speaker will transmit a voice faster than anything. All they’re telling me is that my family was bad and that they deserved it. I know most people wouldn’t agree with this or think this is okay. Nothing is okay. I will never feel like I’m wholly human again.
2016
Mathilde
1.
In the woods there whispered a secret I felt compelled to follow, just to discern its meaning. It could’ve been a blessing or a curse, and still I was brave enough to leave my repressive household for those screams that normally would frighten someone, but I’ve been reduced to a frozen-hearted Banshee on the floor of a seclusion room more than once. I remember the fog of those moments and feeling more broken than even the most dismantled women could get. Screaming because it was expected of me.
I left home when I was eighteen, dropped straight out of high school, a nightmare I never hope to relive. Age eighteen was the last time I saw a psychiatric facility. My family and me lived in a Tudor mansion in the city’s most affluent neighborhood. It was my parents and my sister Sinead, who was always the opposite of me, the black sheep.
“Mathilde, no one is screaming in the woods,” she’d tell me when I first heard the shrill, ear-scorching girl’s shriek echo from the trees bordering the park.
I ignored her and ran knocking a stone statue over, and sought out the source of feminine distress.
“Hello? Are you alright?”
“No matter where you go, I’ll find you,” was the whisper that fervently replied from somewhere in the foliage. As though the angel or apparition (whatever she was) could read my mind. I was thirteen.
Pale and whey-skinned compared to my sister, who perpetually blushed and took better care with her pretty countenance. She snagged Dale Tierney before I could get to know him; naturally someone like him would gravitate towards an extroverted floozy like my sister Sinead. He greeted me politely but tersely upon visiting our house, as I was not the subject of his interest. My sister was seventeen, and a senior in high school, while I was in ninth grade, a razor-freak and antisocial, maladjusted misfit. Sinead pretended not to notice. My cuts bled on tiles to industrial rock music. No one could stop me.
*
“Mathilde-”
“Don’t speak, or I’ll excavate your heart from your chest and incinerate it while I smoke a coffin nail,” I replied. He was chasing Dale with a bat, and I remembered a brief feeling just like getting fucked with a knife. Some bat-wielding perverts had jumped me several years ago and shoved the handle in.
“Mathilde!”
“I’ll eat your heart before I burn it over the pyre,” I snapped.
In the abandoned grain elevator building made of cement, a place I pretended was a mental institution, I executed him. Lobotomized, Never anesthetized, because I wanted him to feel like hell. I always knew there was no inferno underground where bad people like myself and this man who is dying beneath a series of rope knots. I have bound him in a length of chain as well. Years ago, long after the screaming in the foliage to the cacophonous magpies had ceased, I heard a woman or young girl wail in agony above the ceiling. The attic I never went up in because it was asbestos-ridden, and I wondered how schizophrenic I had become.
I told my father (a man who once told me “try harder” while I pretended to asphyxiate myself with a shoelace adorning the knob of my bedroom door) that I heard a scream erupt from the attic.
“Well, your intake with mental health is tomorrow,” my dad replied. “We’ll get you on the right meds.”
I hoped and prayed there was no reality behind the scream.
The house was over 100 years old; it could’ve been a benevolent or malevolent apparition.
He’s dead.
I’ll splash him with acid and dissolve him into the floor.
I see Dale watching me from the doorway all of a sudden.
“I am Hell itself,” I tell him. He seems to know the guy I offed was scum.
We laugh.
*
I wake up from my zoning out on the couch at 3 a.m., content, knowing I had no part in it. None of it was my fault. Tori Amos’s To Venus and Back album has played on repeat all night. I could’ve retained my innocence if the city’s pathetic excuse for a population cut me a little slack, but now all I have time for is complete, indisputable indifference. And euphoria over everything, hedonistic amusement showing at all times. So happy I could die in outer space. I wouldn’t even care. I used to put methamphetamine mixed with angel dust, or PCP into my bloodstream and it was then that I discovered a drug that could take away the fear of death itself. A man said, “Get the fuck out of here or face my gun.” I saw no gun to speak of and felt numb with nothing but mania in my head under the freight train bridge. I moved myself as far away from him as I could go. I was full of amphetamines under the bridge. A place downtown full of drama and drugs. I saw a man hold a knife to the throat of a man in his late teens or early twenties. I told the older man with the knife, “Don’t cut him. Just don’t. I don’t want police under here. I’m not calling them. Just…don’t,” I told him lifelessly. This was before the gun threat with the possibly non-existent gun in one of his pockets. The man withdrew his silver blade and backed off the guy, who was the only one allowing me to use a meth pipe. I felt no affection for him considering I don’t know him to this day, but I wonder how I’m not afraid to waltz out into the insidious Spokane night. A hellhole in the central eastern part of Washington state. I never liked this city, famous for its underground whoredom and criminal activity since the early nineteenth century. I intend to haunt it just like the screaming ghosts.
But I won’t scream. I’ll just make them their own worst enemies. I don’t feel I will ever really die, even when my body does.
“I hate you and I love myself, you pathetic fucking city,” I whispered to the mirror. I would place them in an underground chamber. Baths of acid dissolving useless DNA. When people like me are crossed, the night can scream and sleep will reveal what Hell can be. I’ve dreamt of being in a kennel on a plane. Jail cells on a bus with cages lining the aisle that remind me of a jail on wheels. It deserts me by the side of a road aligning a river. Sometimes I dream of treading deep water and drifting along in its waves like a damned soul. I dream of people glaring at me in dark alleys, houses where there’s nothing to watch but a woman in a peach-colored dress entertaining some businessman, drinking something out of a wineglass while she does it. An abandoned asylum being haunted by myself and others. It’s like I’m haunting somewhere that is judging me as I judge it.
I made a carbon copy of him. A clone. I drifted away on dissociative hallucinogens to the sound of his voice in my ear. I don’t care that he’s not really here.
Whenever anyone badmouths him, I feel like they should meet the Windex I pretend to pour in their coffee.
I’ll do what I please for the rest of my life.
2.
Colored balloons and iridescent papier-mâché dotted the walls on the summer evening of my sister, Sinead’s, suicide. I staggered home to Stevie Nicks’s “Stand Back” blaring from her room above the stairwell on repeat, a bottle of Robitussin lingering in my bloodstream. I felt high as a kite. I stared into the rainbow vortex, the littered warps of tinsel on the floor, and remembered hours earlier an argument ricocheting off the walls between Dale Tierney and Sinead. I couldn’t understand them through their slurred drunkenness. I remember a wineglass breaking against his car as it was tossed aside by Sinead.
I had never known her to fall apart.
I would have never done this to him, but I chose to keep out of his way and never tell him how I felt. I was like winter without him, cold as silver and bracing as the winds of the east. I could sustain the fantasy of him more than the reality.
He was somewhere in the house, probably, drunk in the kitchen and avoiding the drama of prior hours.
When the song played one more time, I ascended the stairs and traipsed down the corridor to Sinead’s room.
Do not turn away, my friend
Like a willow I can bend
No man calls my name
No man came
So I walked on down away from you
Maybe your attention was more
Than you could do
One man did not call
He asked me for my love
And that was all
The lines from the song tore through the air and were like bells of 80s euphoria in my ears. I saw Sinead dead with a jagged red line across her throat, torn open from a self-inflicted wound. Blood spattered the mirror of her vanity table. I never thought she had the guts to even prick her finger. I watched her white face for a moment, its waxen marble idiocy, its vacant, grey-eyed death. In extremis, she looked more at peace than I’d ever been in life.
Dale was nowhere to be found on the property. A white sheet covered my sister’s face and they wheeled her to the morgue. I would soon adorn her grave with clematises and dahlias. I would miss her soliloquies on the balcony before he entered our lives. She was so melancholic sometimes, but nowhere near as much as I.
The day after her funeral procession, a blur of black hearses and silver cemeteries, mounds of dirt cascading over her coffin, I smoked angel dust and watched the rain fall outside as I blared heavy metal from the stereo. Tears only burned once and I allowed them to fall for two minutes. Nothing could bring her back, and when Dale rang the doorbell I only told him, “She’s gone,” and closed the door in his face. His double stood behind the closed door ready to embrace me and disappear with me into the bed.
“No one should be allowed to even reach me, touch me or talk to me,” I said. I told the silent thin air. I didn’t want a reply, and I awoke the following day to a touch on my shoulder. When I turned, I saw nothing. Not a person. Not even a trail of vapor. I’d deny anyone from knowing the monster that is me.
Something in me still laughs, despite the grief.
I can see her in dreams. I can see Dale in dreams.
I’d rather daydream on drugs and live in the ruins of my old house than deal with the heinous society around me.
Broken doorknobs and glass I can’t shatter. I swallow pills and wrap myself in blankets, dreaming of a boundless, lazy sea that carries me in its midst. When I reach land, it is steep and treacherous.
I awaken in my mirage’s arms. I am an endless realm of sadism when someone poses as a threat. I once pointed a silver crescent of a knife to the skin of one of his would-be attackers. I won’t ever let go of the image Dale embellished in my mind.
I am as dead as the man in the cement left in a puddle. I am as dead as Sinead, wallowing away in a hallucinogenic reality.
I find nothing damaging although my health is rotting like the grass in the heat waves. Rotting like the relics in every yard, made of metal and plastic. I hate everyone in the world and all I wanted was to end the city.
All I wanted was to end time.
To corrupt and corrode.
To slide right out of life older than anyone had ever been.
3.
I’m only twenty-five years old, and it took me that long to finally kill someone. It was in defense of Dale while we wandered for a couple minutes when I ran into him, discovering he also had an affinity for the abandoned grain elevator where I killed whatever his obtuse name was. I knew somehow he would grace my presence that day. The would-be attacker was quite the opposite of a graceful presence; he was a storm. A storm boiled in my blood, too, and instantaneously, I made the baseball bat fly out of his brandishing arm and struck him several times. Dale Tierney grinned as he watched me debase the humanity right out of the man’s veins. I left him there to rot by some old filing cabinets.
Months after all of that happened, I no longer cry tears or cling to a crucifix on my pillow in the shade. There is nothing more to make of myself; no one will expect anything of me for a long time. Maybe never. Isolative by both night and day, I crave no presence to sustain me through the day. My parents flit about the house and are mostly not in it.
Yesterday I met a girl in a white dress with glittery, crimson-bleeding eyes in the foyer. She bid me follow her to the mirror beneath a chandelier and told me my beauty would wane. Then she vanished into the air like an exploding star. I didn’t care and I told her to hush and leave me be. I gazed into the mirror, not as dissatisfied as I used to be. Sinead was always prettier, but I no longer envied her for it. If anything, I missed her. I never knew, in my cough syrup-induced state, what Dale had told Sinead that pushed her over the edge enough to slit her throat. She took her own life right off the planet. I will forever imagine her ricocheting into the stars, an astral angel leaving her own body and becoming a new being in the form of a spirit. The girl with blood rivers in her eyes was nowhere near as beautiful as my sister.
Whenever I think of the glow of emergency vehicles outside the limits of the mansion, I pacify myself and push away the thought as fast as it came. I know there were no witnesses besides Dale and me. There was no one to see us all meet there, not knowing one another would gather there to explore the grain elevator. Barbed wire, rusted beer cans and rejected heroin needles littered the ground at the base of the cement building. It had been shut down since the 1970s, and not a soul usually stirred in or around it premises by the railroad tracks. There was nothing to do at the place besides fuck or get stoned. In this case, I killed someone and left him for dead in the place’s basement. The bat was disposed of. Everything wiped clean. No information regarding me can be salvaged because I am a lightning bolt full of speed running as fast as I can away from everyone.
4.
I am sitting by the 7-Eleven high on acid. Halos and wings bleed out of the sky and litter the parking lot in a debris of feathers and gilded circles. I cannot scream in my house, so I went downtown to swallow an LSD-laced sugar cube and careen in the opposite direction from rational thinking. There was nothing to do but melt away along with everything else around me. I wanted the patterns of the strip mall across the street to keep melting, the neon of the bar on Dante Avenue to keep illuminating the girl beneath its sign with the darkest eyeliner I’d ever seen. She kept moving from side to side erratically, as if she were high on speed. I just can’t sustain my lifeform without drugs. I become other selves. I talk to ghosts of humans, both living and dead. She is talking to the empty air that always has answers. Her cigarette smoke forms a crown. I get bored and walk down the street, the church on its corner alit with hallucinatory flames. I think I see Sinead staring at me beneath the wainscoting in someone’s house through their window. I hate everyone except her and Dale, but whatever he said to her caused her to slice her own throat open. I can’t trust him to not make me capsize. I can’t let my iron guard down when it comes to my walls.
Do not touch me, I command every living human.
There is a star I stare at to the south that shines its light upon my shoulder blades ripping open, my veins bluer than before in my wrists. I caress them. The most important love is self-love, I tell myself. That is how I will flourish.
2019
Mathilde
1.
They found the remains of the body that I left behind in a fit of post-traumatic rage. It was a puddle of lye and hydrochloric acid, and gone was the baseball bat-wielding storm of a man after he tried to assault my sister Sinead’s lover, Dale Tierney. A few years ago, my sister committed suicide over an incident with him in which the circumstances are still unknown to me. Since then, I’ve been laying on my bed with voices compressing my head, telling me they’ll sell me and kill me. I am too strong, too fortified with indifference to care. My parents are rarely at home and I’ll never tell them. My dad would just advocate for changing the medication combination I’m currently not taking.
My twenty-eighth birthday is just around the corner. A brand new gun I purchased from one of my meth dealers shines in my hand in the starlight, full of a fresh supply of bullets. My red-lipsticked smile could enchant the devil. On top of the hill where I stand are two high school enemies, Jamie Frances and Stormy Hale. The last place I saw them was under the freight train bridge. They were sharing a pot pipe. They called me an ugly dog. That time, I let it slide off like snow from a gabled roof. Now, I’ve got the two of them right where I want them and I’m still not bothered by their comment. Underneath of them the grass blades look like ebony knife blades and my hand is on my cheap but efficient gun. It’s a silencer so there won’t be much sound when I snuff their lives out. I know how reckless this is considering anyone could have seen me out their window at 2 a.m., but I’m willing to risk it anyway. Jamie and Stormy don’t see me watching from the top of the metal stairs.
2.
I approach with quiet steps across the hilltop. Their backs are turned. My hand grips the gun more firmly than a snake’s coiling hold on a victim. Closer. They turn around. Closer still. Jamie yelps like a mouse before the gun’s bullet catches her in the head, embedded in the wisps of her brown hair. She collapses like a darted, tranquilized animal to the grass. Next, I point the gun at blond, self-righteous Stormy. I see nothing. The fear in her face screams a novel’s length of words. I fire at her forehead and she, too, is done for. It’s my lucky night that they chose this hilltop to smoke weed. I was coming here to smoke meth. I embellish each bitch with another bullet hole and calmly leave them there, the swishing sound of the gunfire replaying in my mind.
The hill. The black grass blades. An abbatoir for two girls who crossed a thin line.
3.
I go home, hide the gun and decide I’m already too high to take another hit. I open an antiquated copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel and nearly read the whole thing, satisfied that the voices in the wall have been silenced. I’ll read the end tomorrow. Before I close my red-tinted eyes at 8 a.m., I think I see Sinead standing at the edge of my bed.
“Good job, Mathilde,” she tells me. “You snuffed those cunts out just like a hurricane takes out a wooden house in southern floods.”
I love her.
I miss her.
I almost cry, but my emotions are in a graveyard somewhere. My eyes are only ice instead of liquid tears. My heart isn’t broken. I know she’ll always be with me. I know that the mirage I made of Dale will always love and caress me, even when I’m no longer young and dangerous. He’s not really here but it’s like I can see him anyway.
4.
I imagine the bones of Stormy and Jamie decomposing under the cold earth. And if they are cremated, their ash is undisturbed in urns for centuries. I think of crimson bullet holes on the hilltop of a feminine warzone. It’s the last thing I see before I fall into a pleasant slumber.
2019
Stacey
They released me from the psych ward. I have a gun in my hand. I’m veering towards the bungalow with meth reeling in my veins, my hands on a fifteen dollar loaded gun. I purchased it from a man in a trench coat in an alleyway. I open the door.
“Where were you?” asks my non-mother. She looks and sounds like my mother, but she isn’t my mother.
“It’s late.”
“Take off your skin mask,” I tell her, withdrawing the gun and pointing it at her head. “Stand up and unmask! You’re not my mother! Take that damn thing off!”
She starts to hyperventilate, and stands up. She fumbles with the layers of skin parts that originated in some clandestine building. They come off and underneath is another pale woman. I don’t study her face but I don’t recognize it. The moment I realize I’m right and that this is a malevolent identity thief, I blow her brains to pieces. I shoot her full of three holes. I only wish this were a smoking gun. I steal away into dad’s TV room and he does the same thing. He’s just an ordinary guy underneath. These two strangers are people that have lived the lives of someone stepping into a stranger’s skin. Stealing their house, their job, their lives. I’ll never sleep again. Once they’re both dead, I call 9-1-1.
“I just killed my parents’ identity thieves. Come and pick up their remains,” I tell the operator once asked what my emergency is. I tell them my address and they wheel them away. They’re covered in white sheets. A bunch of cops tell me, “You’re not going to pay for this. They were dangerous. They were unpredictable. They could have killed you, too. You haven’t assaulted us, and we thank you for that and understand how hard this is to talk about for you. So we’re going to just let you stay in the house for awhile. Keep the gun with you.”
They leave.
I’m considered a murderer in self-defense. I’m not even going back to the psych ward because I haven’t told them my history of hospitalization.
I scribble a murderous vignette in a composition notebook that night called “Cornfield Rot.”
It reads:
1.
“Some of us are wraiths gliding through your world, blissfully unaware of your cryptic eyes staring past us, of your mouths that eject inanities. All we’ve heard is noise for years.
We’re used to it.”
2.
This is the paragraph I hear spoken aloud to me in a phantom whisper at 3 a.m., my alarm clock bathing my stoned self in a neon green glow. It’s a feminine voice, half-familiar and as faint as the illumination from the clock. My pillow is like a wreath of thorns. I eat pills, caffeine, switchblades and shards of broken teacups. There is a prevalence of apathy that spreads me in me, but what I lack is fear. What they say I lack is self-respect. I suck down another joint, draining the grass until it glows like the motel fire I will see in a few days. Lighting up the firmament with incandescent flames, fiery orange mingled with slate grey. I always wanted to rip open the sky like paper and end the world. When the Days Inn burned down from one of my lit cigarettes, I fled the scene as the firetrucks skyrocketed past me. Black flames filled the town with poison. The colors blurred through the water in my eyes. I hated everything around me since I could think, since I could speak.
Something explodes behinds me as I propel myself further away from the scene of my infantile crime. No more late-night TV, no more waking up to the same sailboat prints on the walls. No more panhandling at the hamburger restaurant next door to the Days Inn. I’m as thin and intangible as a wisp of smoke floating through the adrenaline-suffused air. I’ll disappear into the fields and search for rotting bodies under the pines.
I imagine swallowing a handful of pills next to the concrete platform by the abandoned bowling alley, the one with the crimson anarchy sign spray-painted on it. I see a haze of red Victorian wallpaper and a knife aimed at many skulls. A flash of fire will light up in other places someday. I won’t kill myself while they recline in the brambled ruin and laugh.
3.
Sometimes I can hear the dead in the dirt beneath me say, “I am under here.” I’ve heard them come from underneath the bus stops I wait at, the sidewalks, the swimming pool, the abandoned drive-in theater at the edge of town.
I can’t see them, but I can hear them with ears that hear nothing but bells, voices, or chaos. I can feel my pain get carried off with the breeze at such times. They give me the hope that death is an opening to a portal of the soul’s immortality.
4.
My makeup is burning off. I’m a limp, ragged doll in the corn maze getting eaten by ants. I got lost looking for the exit. I am rot given back to the earth.
2015
Janine
Amanda Warwick, age twenty-two, lay submerged in a halfway-house, painted yellow walls, dirt yard, a place to be jettisoned to. She had overdosed on methamphetamine in the heated, sunlit parking lot of multiple storage garages, her head in a hole in the cement next to an empty Halloween candy basket shaped like a Jack O Lantern. After the sharp inhalation of crystallized smoke found her brain, she was set off balance with the cathedral’s clamoring bells, the beauty of the wind’s white noise. She drenched herself in the calm black water of the lake, washing asunder the sins of Janine Crellin. Janine, with her green eyes and reddish-blond hair, a contrast to Amanda’s coarse black curls and hazel orbs, was in an infamous fixture in Amanda’s past. She had bled Amanda in the alleyway, bedazzled by the trails of blood flow, scarlet stars, mesmerizing to Janine. They were both sixteen and lived next door to each other. A red brick house with a picket fence (Janine’s) set beside a white house with green shutters (Amanda’s).
Janine was belligerent. Amanda was polite. They weren’t friends and Janine’s problem with her originated from a source unknown to her. In wild, vociferous rage, Janine left cigarette burns, several of them, that felt like surface tumors after they swelled with ash and pain.
What could I have done to you? Amanda thought.
Amanda was never wholly perceptive of what she was doing to Janine. If the evidence of Amanda’s taunts and provocations had been recorded, her remarks would have been proven to have been said aloud. On that day in the alleyway, Janine couldn’t refrain from assaulting Amanda because of Amanda stealing a plastic bag of marijuana. All they both wanted to do was get high. Janine withdrew a knife, the steel blade glinting, sawing gashes formed like lightning bolts. Gashes made while Janine sat on Amanda’s neck to choke and carve across her stomach, the spaces between her ribs where Janine slightly poked Amanda’s ligament, tearing it. When Amanda passed out from lack of oxygen, Janine began to carve some more. The thighs. The calves. A turning over of the deprecated body. More blood pools against the jutting bones of the shoulderblades.
What a passage to destitution, what a decline of descent into the laconic state of shades pulled down, the swallowing of Vicodin. Amanda was in for it. After the cutting and the burning done unto her flesh was concluded, Janine took off into the night where she was always most comfortable.
Amanda never would have been revived if not for a lone transient who discovered her with a faint pulse and numerous raw wounds, blood cold, veins a transparent blue beneath the skin on her crooked arm. He called an ambulance at a pay phone and Amanda was swept to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with a concussion, loss of blood, five broken ribs and amnesia. It took Amanda one week to recall Janine’s attack and even longer to recover her memory; her head had been hit so hard on concrete. She chose to press charges and Janine was confined to jail for eight months and later on to psychiatric care on and off for three more years. She was very troubled. Her anger seemed baseless. Amanda wondered, withdrawing from meth in her bed, if she had died that evening in rigor mortis in the snowfall, if some silver angel of death, one of grace and storms, would have absolved her of fear and taken her to another side. One separate from life where we all may go, anointed. Amanda wasn’t sacred anymore. She had survived but now she wanted to expire. Amanda thought of Janine in a devious city, weapons hidden away, only to come out again for the dismemberment of corpses, dragged in burlap thorough a secluded forest, placed in a ditch by the railroad tracks under a pine tree, branches hanging low with needles. Amanda’s thoughts were decay, wasp stings, rotten fruit, sour wines, aspiring homicide. The residents of the group home generally ignored Amanda, but as of recently, they wanted her dismissed as a resident because of her conflict with them over trivial matters of ones full of more depth than would have been suspected.
Meanwhile, Janine was exactly where Amanda supposed, in the position of a merciless killer. She let the bodies sink into remote lakes with heavy stones tied to them, not a trace of her DNA left on their remains because she wore hair nets and was careful. She often got high and was free of institutionalization. No more secluded cages or millstones of grim prophecy. Amanda was only an attempted murder. When Janine left town at eighteen, she acquired a car to transport the bodies. In her new town, a population of nearly 30,000, she knew the civilians to target. She knew who they were.
Fanatics.
Chaos itself.
Dysfunctional child-abusers.
Every house with a shrine dedicated to only the pristine. Their gilded monuments.
So far, Janine had killed seven people.
Her victims:
1. Jay Motley, 36, convicted child rapist and wino
2. Alyssa Sparrow, 14, student, frequent bully
3. Martha Wilde, 45, child killer and teacher
4. Karen Wilder, 21, employee of Burger King
5. Kevin Fielding, 7, was terminally ill
6. Tess Moriarty, 22, bartender
7. Matthew White, 29, pawnshop owner
*
When Janine Crellin was four, she saw in her parents’ living room, a black halogen lamp with white flames flickering at the top. Either it had been left on too long, or her mother had set the fire herself, Janine decided.
“Look what you did,” said Mrs. Crellin, blaming the fire on her. She would grow up to relish those flames, pyromania impending. First, Janine burned her journals, then people.
In remote plains tied to wooden stakes with twine, gazed at by onlookers, the only ones who could hear the screams.
Amanda Warwick, in her reverie of Janine, planned to kill her. A new resident told her where she was living. Not far away.
“Here’s her address. I’ve smoked weed at Janine’s house. After what she did to you, Amanda, I would undo her.”
Seven people were dead so far and Janine still slept, tranquil at night. Never would she allow grief or guilt to disturb her. She had made to list of victims, having met them all, knowing their crimes. They had moved to the town for its quaintness and scenery as well as to carry on their traditions of immorality. Only one victim was innocent. Kevin Fielding, who was only seven years old with severe cancer. Just a needle in his vein put him to sleep and sent him, Janine supposed, to celestial firmaments.
How far could she get by being a killer? In the distance, Amanda tried to peer into the room of Janine and sacrifice her dead.
Amanda
I was born in the middle of nowhere in a Gothic castle with saints and gargoyles guarding the doorway. My father had painted blood coming from their eyes as they knelt in prayer, keeping watch over our mercenary riches. He was blond with brilliant green eyes. When I lived on the grounds of his castle, I had to be his farm slave doing yard work and keeping the flowers by the moat neat and alluring. He made me kill the animals I admired more than the humans. I will forever remember what he did to my eyes. A complicated surgery that lifted up my skin and transformed my eyes from squinty and listless to bulbous and beautiful. I was staring into an antiquated mirror surrounded by four girls prettier than myself preparing me for eye surgery. My father grabbed me aggressively by the wrists, placed me on a cot and put me to sleep momentarily to perform plastic surgery. An eyelift, he called it. The girls giggled in their pinafores, playing dress up at girls from the nineteenth century. I will kill Janine. They looked just like her. I will kill her. We are sisters. We have the same father and I killed him when he came to my adopted parents’ house to kill me. Shot him point blank in the head. His ghost will never be able to speak to me from the dead.
I am ready to kill this girl Janine who fucked me up when we were teenagers. People tell me to stop being so high school and grow up, but I’m not in high school or hanging out with high school kids. Just people that keep the mentality around too much and I’m bored of them. Where will I find her and how will I get past her gang of people that I know is protecting her, driving her around in cars to burn people and sink them into rivers. Nobody can find her but I know she’s the type to kill and I heard a woman discuss her and use the term “murder” and “rope.” I don’t know how to take a person down and a part of me tells me to stay away from her. But a part of her wants Janine to kill me again and send me on my way to a better place. The government wants to control my health and not allow me to smoke meth. It houses me in group homes that are unkind to me and compare my surgery to drivel compared to what their daughters with a lot of money paid to get. They got way better facelifts. I have weird eyes. Currently, I’m on the road looking for a way to find out what Janine’s doing, spy on her a little. She lives in a plain wooden house and I can see her in the window, staring out at me knowing it’s me; I am easily recognized by my eyes, even at a far distance. I’ve changed my mind. I want Janine to kill me. I can take a lot of pain. I know I won’t survive her and I can’t help but throw myself at the mercilessness of this sadistic girl.
*
Nobody saw Janine drag Amanda’s lifeless corpse up the three cement stairs and into her house to dispose of her with acid. She shot Amanda with a silencer the moment she saw her face loom large and moon-like at the window, open and paneless. The neighborhood Janine lived in was full of gang bangers and drug addicts that shot up and shot people driving by them at night in the street. I must be in the right place, Janine reassured herself. She planned to dispose of Amanda in a nearby landfill, to never be figured out.
2019
Mathilde
My old friend, Janine from summer camp, was just arrested. She told the news she assisted in the suicide of Amanda Warwick, a girl who Janine claimed wanted to kill her. A girl I once met under the train bridge, Stacey Galloway, is not being prosecuted for the murders of Brian Harlow and Jane Seymour, her parents’ identity thieves. It’s really sick shit. Brian and Jane wore skin masks that were completely like real human skin and the features of Stacey’s parents had been duplicated. She didn’t really know what to do about it for many years until she just went crazy. She told me about the recording from her laptop, and I didn’t know how to explain it. I had heard the voices, too. If you don’t want to hear voices, I recommend that you don’t do drugs. You will become a schizophrenic satellite. You’ll hear the world speak to you, and the people in public will say what you’ve heard your voices say when you think you’re alone at home. They can hear you breathe, they can hear you sing, talk, even think. I don’t know how to put Stacey at ease. I’m never really on edge anymore, but I can tell she is. I always wanted to make her my partner in crime. Even Janine would have done well, but I’m against her opinion that Kevin Fielding needed to die. He was just a kid, and I’m against killing kids. Apparently something leaked out and someone turned her in. She is now in prison forever.
I know the same thing won’t happen to me because I plan to stop after three killings. I wish I could free her and I wish I could ease Stacey’s pain. What’ s happened to her is horrible.
Like my old friends, June and Marcelle. Their group home has been shut down and I don’t know where they are, now. Both girls were beautiful and crazy. They had been raped by strange men who met them at the house of their legal guardians and they killed their guardians in self-defense. Marcelle didn’t pay for her crimes, but June had killed the neighbors as well as her guardian and got locked up in the criminal forensics ward for seven years. Just as I’m thinking of them, I decide to write. It’s about a girl who’s always being watched.
It runs on like this:
It was my sophomore year of college. I had just completed the first day and everything depressed me, especially the shadows of the maple leaves dancing on the wall in my dorm room.
“I’m going out for awhile,” said my roommate, Naomi Carver. I assumed she would be gone for a long while. My homely reflection stared back at me from the rectangular razorblade I held in my hand. I took in the zit on my chin, my black curls, my lackadaisical brown eyes. I turned the blade away from me and reflected the white, utilitarian walls covered in posters of new wave bands, the fake plastic red flowers in a vase on the nightstand, the Russian dolls next to it. The bottom of the blade was still covered in cocaine powder from a night Naomi spent partying at a friend’s apartment. My eyes stung. I moved in slow motion to the bathroom and ran water on my wrist in the sink. The key is not to think, I silently told myself. The key is to gash the vein and not fear what’s beyond. With the past, present and future forgotten, I made a vertical red line on my wrists, tearing into the blue creek of vein beneath my porcelain flesh. It brought forth a mild sting, like a bee’s. Blood spurted like a fountain into the sink, onto the mirror.
When I began to feel weak, I allowed myself to fall to the linoleum and wait for a bright light, a celestial set of golden gates. Before I faded out entirely, I felt a pair of arms pull me up and heard Naomi’s distorted shouting.
“Mildred!”
I blacked out, thinking it was only a hallucination when I saw a girl who looked like me staring at the scene from the entrance to the dorm room. I would see her later, in new circumstances. It turned out that Naomi forgot her phone, which is how she found me attempting to end my dismal life.
They sent me to a local hospital, where they staunched the bloodfloow and where I eventually came to. The first thing I remembered was how I used to be such a sweet little girl. I think the most soulless day I had was when I was in junior high and I burned Elena Miller with a lit cigarette, all the world curdling behind my eyes with anger.
“Where do you want it?” I asked Elena, wielding the cigarette like a knife against her arm. “Your skin, or your clothes?” I pointed the tip at the polyester of her blue blouse. At the finality of my outburst, I chose her pale wrist as the target. Elena gasped instead of screaming. I spent two weeks in juvenile detention, was expelled and transferred to another school. As I was recalling this savory memory, a psychiatrist came to evaluate me and she concluded I needed inpatient treatment in the psych ward on the upper level of the hospital. Once I was up there, I frequently threw thermonuclear fits in the blinding flourscence of the ceiling lights. The leather restraints they placed on my bed burned like fire. They were too tight. A whole week later, they sent me to a place of higher security, a building as old as the 1950s called Astria State Hospital. Located in Astria, Washington, a small country town full of orchards and horses.
Over the course of the next two weeks, I covered my bedroom window with collages and childish colored pencil drawings, once of which was a depiction of me rising above three pastel-colored buildings and into the sky. I wore a black dress and had no legs. Often, I stared up at the sky during cigarette breaks and felt like falling to one of the hollow black holes in outer space, but I was bound by the limitations of earth. My heart felt like hellfire.
“Mildred Swain should burn with fire,” said a patient with wild hair, pointing at me and taking a puff of his cigarette. I could only wonder how he knew my last name, let alone was he was saying this. I had been as friendly as possible since I was admitted into the hospital. As I lay in bed one night, a litany of insults came from both patients and staff passing by the door. They called me ugly, weak and deserving of death. I pulled the blanket over my head and refused to fight back. When I felt they were gone, I emerged from under the blanket, and saw her come in. The girl who looked exactly like me loomed, pale and spectral over my bed. She moved as though she were walking on water.
“Who are you?” I asked her.
“An extension of you,” she said. “You are doomed to be hated until you die. Humans are forever to be your plight. When you go home, they’ll talk about you on the sidewalk, in the park, in the classroom. All you can do is be strong and persevere.”
She went on talking until I fell asleep. When morning came, I felt groggy. The sunshine evaporated me. I felt like a puddle of snow melting beneath my blanket. Slowly, in the midst of the empty room, I willed myself to rise to the ceiling and become united with the camera I felt to be hidden in the light above. I watched myself from the top and there was my strange twin in the branches of the cherry tree outside my window, snapping my picture with a polaroid, the black eye of the lens like the eye of an observant spider.
2019
Stacey
In the dream, I am small enough to fit into a crawlspace. I cannot hide from my mother’s red wine in our barren living room that is as black as a power outage, as black as my rotten innocence. My mother picks me up and takes me to the car, says it’s time to go, I need help. She parks outside a stone clinic and leaves me inside. I cry out and am told to be silent by a stern receptionist. Two white coats hold me down and drag me to a white room with a thirty-something redhead in it. She has painted the word “borderline” on the wall next to an immaculate, gold-framed mirror. When we face it to see our reflections (mine child-like, hers much older), we are propelled from its shattering glass by a defiance of gravity. We coil up and writhe, possessed by demons. Satan lets us die together, which is a blessing compared to living in the hospital. I close my eyes one last time without seeing my mother. I only see the broken glass, the blood on the wall (bright as an ambulance light), the linoleum beneath my cheekbone. I am a dead husk of a human determined to haunt the city I was born in. Life grows black again. I don’t scream.
Marcelle
2012
Marcelle Trahern was raised by two cunts with Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a term derived from the original Munchausen syndrome itself. If one has Munchausen syndrome by proxy, it means a caregiver (in this case, the godmother of Marcelle), chooses to refrain from giving their charges the right health, supplements and nutrients to keep them alive. In fact, they make them worsen with sickness and degradation. Subtly, so the good doctor won’t notice they’re causing the illness for their charges. The first bitch had decided to poison her subtly instead. Marcelle’s godmother favored ipecac. In their small village, church was a mandatory service where all girls had to see the Lord Jesus Christ be praised or crucified on film. A montage of filmy sunlight and a golden cross shone from an array of manipulative Christian imagery, perceived on an overhead projector.
Marcelle went every Wednesday and Sunday in a grey stone building with elaborate brick arcs painted black outlining the stained glass windows. The broadcast room was like an insidious revelation opening up a nightmare to the eyes of sensitive Marcelle, without the abrasive steel to pry a pair of eyes open. Especially when the topic was eternal damnation or the crucifixion of Jesus. It was like a metaphorical film lobotomy. They just stayed peeled open, unable to shut or fall asleep for any reason. Nanny Cravat insisted she stay awake. She favored those antiquated neckbands.
The girls sat around her in stiff, ungraceful lines, backs upright or slouching depending on the girls’ preference to posture. Ms. Winifred Scarlet, who had been killing off children in her home for three years, took Marcelle in at eleven years old the year her mother died and Marcelle was never able to know the woman by heart in a way her memory could rely upon. Winifred was a registered foster mother and she was ailing. Marcelle killed her foster mother (and made the police and medical examiner rule the death as a suicide). She sang “Don’t Fear the Reaper” in her choir voice while spoon-feeding Winifred “sugar in a spoon bowl, so the medicine goes down.” She gagged on the Drano and no longer said the words Marcelle needed to hear: “You should be ashamed of yourself,” “You should be grateful,” “Why didn’t you try harder?” Winifred was involved in a canned television broadcast again for that last comment, a boring, banal comedy Winifred needed to have Marcelle watch with her before bed in 2011.
On March 24, a clear, shiny spring morning, Marcelle knew that she had no one to rely upon any better by the time the next foster mother came around to raise her. She was a distant harridan of a woman with a thin, pert mouth shut tight at church and open like a wrathful shrew to chastise Marcelle at home.
“See that window?” said Nanny Cravat, her second godmother: a malevolent, Puritan woman with brown hair in a frizz and vacant eyes.
“You’ll be lucky if God saves you when you fall out of it. It’s all shit. God’s for nothing. But I fear hell just as much as you do. All we can do is try to believe and see if God listens.“
In her dress made for church, the stiff lace a cascade of black and white. A knee-length skirt and pilgrim collar. Church uniform. The telepathy Marcelle heard: “devout truths”, “deep breaths,” “if you need to console yourself, use these coping skills.”
All the things Marcelle picked up on by reading minds that she could never express piled up in her head and she was crazy.
“Marcelle may be crazy,” said a soft-voiced man about to make an assumption based on what he saw in elaborate artwork in a journal: a drawing in Bic pen, of a realistic-looking Nanny Cravat swallowing a spoonful of something, reminding him of milk poisoning and a scary story his mom sometimes read to him at night in his portentous childhood. Marcelle’s self-portrait was accurate. She overheard the bell ringing in the distance beyond her thoughts of his voice by the cathedral bells that rang with worship, clanging vehemently. When Marcelle got home after spring choir ended, she planned the Drano death. It was under the kitchen sink, meant to mingle with Nanny Cravat’s cup of milk.
“Nanny, I hope you enjoy your milk,”
“Come, have a sit-down,” said Nanny to Marcelle. She set the glass of milk in front of Nanny Cravat, who was wearing her red velvet blouse and white cravat.
“Put that milk on the table carefully. Don’t spill it.”
Time to die, Marcelle wished. Down the throat went that blue liquid permeating Nanny Cravat’s esophagus as she choked. The only number Marcelle knew to call wasn’t an option, and she had to make her own way in the world feeling like humans weren’t worth anything and we’re all just partially alien. Meretricious, cheap people.
Marcelle wanted to die in outer space. She left the raw death and agony of Nanny Cravat slumped over on the table after she choked. Marcelle became the third eye, the third shrew, the ultimate survivor of destiny and doom.
June
2014
My lucidity died in the house I grew up in. I was raised in an arcane Hitchcock mansion with a cupola. There were no servants due to my guardian, Scarlett Freeland’s, illicit exploitation, and her fear of it being discovered. Therefore, she let everything collect dust. Her mansion was tall and monumental. It reminded me of a Halloween sticker decoration one puts on a windowpane. On our street, Cupola Avenue, named for the cupolas on each house, I suffered many seasons of violent turmoil at the hands of Scarlett. She owned a video camera that she balanced on top of a tripod and told me it was my “surveillance.”
On several occasions, at the age of thirteen, I was raped by a multitude of strange men that Scarlett invited inside. She would put 80’s hair metal on the stereo while they raped me and she sat in a red armchair, smoking numerous cigarettes. Sometimes, I wouldn’t get raped and instead it would be my deed, according to every person in the room, to kill a person in front of me. I’ve killed 37 people in Scarlett’s house, each one dissolved with acid in the cupola on film, and killed on film as well, before being doused with acid. Each time this event happened, it was recorded and burned onto a disc to be viewed on Scarlett’s TV.
There were only two other houses on Cupola Avenue: the Tarringtons’ house and the Miltons’ house. Clyde Tarrington lived in a two-story house painted white with black shutters. He lived there with his daughter, Blithe. On their front door was a poster of a symbol that held a cryptic enchantment for me: a cross with an hourglass in the center of it. It always reminded me of their time running out. I had wanted to kill Blithe for so many years. I felt her to be prettier than me with her lustrous black hair and piercing green eyes. She always loved to remind me of how I would have been killed by my twin sister, Adele, had she lived. In the womb, she was the alpha and I was the omega. On a rainy day when lightning split the sky into slices, Adele and me were playing dress-up with red velvet gowns and silver high heels. We were twelve. I convinced her into a “baptism,” holding her head underwater. Despite my carrying the title of the omega twin, my newfound strength prevailed and she soon ceased to breathe.
When Scarlett found out, she didn’t seem to care. Neither did the rest of the neighborhood; they were always killing people. We melted her body into the floor of the cupola with acid.
My name used to be Lillian Freeland, but once my twin was dead, I uncontrollably became someone named June. She came to me, like a doppelganger, looking exactly like me, but bearing no evil intentions.
“I am here, and I am not leaving you,” June told me. I regret killing Adele despite her greater knowledge of schoolwork. We were both homeschooled and Scarlett never told us what she did for a living. I learned later on that she worked for the federal government.
My liberation from Scarlett’s persistent and unyielding abuse came on the day of my eighteenth birthday, April 17. After she made me read Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallot” to two men, who raped me when I was done, and when they had left, I waited for Scarlett to go upstairs and watch one of her movies. I sauntered to the garage and snatched an axe, the same one Scarlett used in satanic rituals when she was young. I made the predatory ascent up the stairs and into her bedroom. Then, as though she were a chopping block and as though her sanguine bloodflow was sacred, I swung the axe down upon her skull. Hard. She was watching The Caretakers, a black and white movie about women in group therapy. She fell to the side, writhing in pain. I went to the front of the chair and brought the axe down upon her back until her spinal cord was severed and her tenebrous heart gave out. I left her there and ran back downstairs, screaming the whole way.
Next, I opened Scarlett’s freezer and grabbed a carton of Marlboro 100’s, lit one, and burned the subtle swastikas hidden in the patterns of an Oriental rug. I gazed around me, took in the contents of the living room: the Kit-Kat clock shaped like a black cat with bulging eyes, the white topaz chandelier, the gutted hearth, the period furniture. I decided it was time to leave my home behind forever. I grabbed a pink backpack and shoved the carton of cigarettes inside, along with a drawer full of working Bic lighters. I threw in three shirts, six pairs of socks, six pairs of underwear, two pairs of pants, a journal, a pen, and a gun. I topped off the luggage with some rubber vampire teeth I endeavored to save for a malevolent purpose: murdering Blithe Tarrington.
I put my hand on the gun as I walked outside, holding it securely within the large pocket of my forest green trench coat. To my knowledge, the Miltons across the street were always killing people (Scarlett always said so.), but I didn’t know how they felt about Blithe. I didn’t care. I rang the doorbell, staring down the cross and hourglass on the door’s poster. Luckily, Blithe answered the door. I pulled out the gun, and her face became as stricken as one being lashed with a switch.
“Get inside,” I gnashed, pushing her onto the floor and slamming the door behind me. “And don’t get up. Don’t even talk.”
She talked anyway. “Lillian, please don’t kill me. You don’t have to - “
“But I want to, and I can, and I will kill you and nothing will ever be able to resurrect you!”
“What’s going on with that Freeland bitch? Why is she in my house?” screamed Clyde, who had just descended the stairs. I shot him in the head, and he slumped over, instantaneously dead.
“You’ve been killing people in this house for years, and it’s time to go!” I vociferated over her harrowed wailing. “Now, put these in.” I unzipped my backpack and handed her the rubber vampire teeth.
She stared at me, wide-eyed with feral fear. She did nothing. She said nothing.
“Your mouth, dummy. Put them in your mouth.”
I handed her the teeth, and she took them from me and placed them over her own toothpaste commercial-white teeth.
“You look the very caricature of Halloween,” I said, laughing as I blew out her brains. The remains flew against the wall and painted an inkblot test of blood smears everywhere. I walked into Blithe’s bedroom after I was sure she was dead, and saw a purple canopied bed, a bookshelf filled with many classic and contemporary novels, among them: the Brontes, Oscar Wilde, Theodore Dreiser, Jane Austen, Anais Nin, D.H. Lawrence. I grabbed Nin’s House of Incest, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, and left the house.
I didn’t make it very far. I was down the road not very far when I was arrested. I always feared them coming for me. I fell onto the asphalt, scabbing my knees and not feeling it. I denied what was happening. I muttered to myself incoherently.
“We know you killed some people, Lillian.”
“My name is June,” was all that I said before my mind shut off and I suddenly woke up vegetative in a jail cell.
*
Eventually, I was labelled not guilty by reason of insanity. The police found Scarlett’s recordings and the recordings that the Miltons and the Tarringtons made of their own killings when I told them about the neighborhood, and what Scarlett had done to me. One day, I will get out of the forensics services ward, where the criminally insane are housed. I have spent many nights here, remembering the death and ravagings, my hair coiling like Medusa’s on the pillow of the restraint bed, the leather straps leaving black bruises on my wrists. Every night, I pray to God and Jesus and all the saints that ever were that I’ll be forgiven for my killings, and be accepted into a realm I can call heaven.
My lucidity will live again, resurged.
2017
June and Marcelle
Cathleen Carter
She led me to the house with the cupola
Where she stabbed me in the backyard
Blood flowed glowing red from my pale skin
Staining my white blouse
And my throat ached
I haunt the halls
And my voice resides within the walls
I’m a phantom floating through the inmates
Living in my killer’s group home
Eyes stare from the cupola
I don’t know who saw me die
I’m buried under a thorny bush
Bones hidden by woods and tiny baby teeth
She scattered
Covering my grave with evidence from her recent infanticides
She stabbed my baby
And cut me for giving birth
In her bed
My lover carved our initials in a tree
And we’ll always be in touch
I eat strawberries off a plate in his room
We hung a dreamcatcher to capture his nightmares
Of me being tortured by her ringed hands
Bag placed over my head
Cathleen Carter, the snuff film queen
(I have killed many)
Choking on film reel
Always having to be polite
In the morning light drinking tea
Deirdre, the killer, laced it with GHB
Putting me to sleep
Separated from my lover
Pillow soaked in warm tears
His tears and mine
We drink them in vials and kiss under stars
Soon he too will be a ghost
Swallowing pills on a blanket in the cemetery
Deirdre will find us and take our picture
Maybe she’ll capture my phantom on camera
*
With curiosity, Marcelle Trahern saw from the window Deirdre Carter and her niece, Cathleen, arguing. The infant was dead, that much Marcelle knew. Cathleen Carter had given birth to a baby girl now with stab wounds, lying in red and white rigor mortis in her crib with blood on the teddy bear, in the dolls’ hair and on the lampshade on the side table. Most of the inmates, as they were known due to the group home’s strict rules, were gone for the day at an event and June Freeland was downstairs Deirdre Carter quickly took over June’s life after leaving her post as nurse at the asylum where June was housed. June was incompetent to stand trial, declared insane and sent away for seven years. She had returned to Scarlett Freeland, her former guardian’s, mansion to live. It had been converted into a group home for women with trauma issues.
All thoughts of June vanished from Deirdre’s mind when the knife blade shone in the sun, an ominous metal glint that suddenly penetrated the naked pearl throat of Cathleen. She collapsed to the grass in the fenced-in backyard and as the earth was fresh from the rain, Deirdre found a shovel leaning against the toolshed and dug a fresh grave. Marcelle had never liked Cathleen much because she was always harping on the girls to follow the rules: don’t smoke dope, don’t invite boys over without permission, etc. She had gotten herself knocked up by Miles Sutherland, and Deirdre highly disapproved of him with his leather jacket and cigarettes. Marcelle only saw him once when he drove to pick up Cathleen for a date, his handsome face a silhouette in the dark window. Marcelle decided to keep quiet about the death. She watched Cathleen be tossed into the grave liked a broken doll. Deirdre had tied a plastic bag over her face and stabbed her in the chest. For ten minutes, Marcelle watched Deirdre extract Cathleen’s heart from her chest cavity, holding the dead, lifeless muscle in her palm, her calm blue eyes narrowed and focused on it like a witch in a black magic ritual. June suddenly appeared beside Marcelle.
“The bitch is finally dead,” Marcelle said, breaking her vow not to tell anyone. “What is she going to do with the heart?”
“I don’t know,” said June.
The girls, both in their twenties and too old for Cathleen’s trashy immaturity, watched with morbid fascination as Deirdre snapped a polaroid (after turning off the video camera)
of Cathleen’s corpse before throwing dirt back over her and packing it in. She laid stones over it and from her pocket, she took something white and scattered it over the grave. When she went back inside the house, Marcelle and June left the cupola to inspect what Deirdre had spilled. Six tiny teeth in the front yard, taken from a toddler’s mouth. A previous killing. When the cops led Deirdre away after June called them, June put on a nun habit and took over the house.
They heard Cathleen’s whispers of love for Miles and reassurances that Deirdre was gone. They buried her baby in an infant cemetery labeled merely “Infant Cemetery” in iron above a fancy gate bearing an entrance to the graveyard. June called the cops by her own policy, knowing hiding a murder is wrong.
“Marcelle, she’s a psycho, bats-in-the-head bitch and she could have come after us, too. It’s better that she’s gone.”
“I guess so,” said Marcelle. her mind on Nanny Cravat choking on her milk laced with Drano. Marcelle had fled the world of Christian broadcast rooms and the sex trade. Nanny Cravat had invited several men over to force themselves on her, and she was glad she couldn’t remember it in great detail. Dissociating was so divine. Girls wore meretricious makeup to school and church and their naked limbs stuck out from cheap, mall-bought
miniskirts. Marcelle would have given them all Drano in a cup, too, if she knew how not to get caught.
But she was far from their bratty voices now, with June Freeland, Anika White and Marilyn Sanders to keep her company. In the meantime, the house became less of a group home and June began paying the monthly bills with Deirdre’s leftover income found stashed in a safe in her room. Marijuana smoke soon filled the rooms and the girls giggled at the enhanced cartoons on the television, making funny faces at the ceiling. Then, Cathleen appeared in the mirror behind them in her prom finery, staring sternly with her stab wound, The blood withdrawing and disappearing into the gash. Anika screamed. When the others asked what was wrong, Anika revealed what she saw.
“You’re too high,” Marilyn said, running a hand through her rainbow hair. But Cathleen stood behind them, strawberry juice the color of blood on her mouth, back from Miles who contacted her spirit and she came when summoned and manifested herself in the flesh.
Cathleen
My baby is gone
In an infant coffin underground
I wear black to mourn her
And place flowers on her grave
Miles embraces me in the cemetery
Where we have sandwiches and milk
He marvels as the food disappears from the plate
And the milk drains from the thermos
He can see me fresh as daylight
A rose haloed in gold
I am fragile dust and fairy winds and gilded blond hair
They find him dead the next day
By the gravesite of his daughter
His lips blue from the pills
His hair plastered to his head
In the spring rain
His indolent heart gave out and from her prison, Dierdre laughed at the television giving news of Mile’s suicide and the note he’d left:
I’ve gone to be with Cathleen, who drew me into hear heart forever, and our daughter Melanie’s, too. Dierdre couldn’t kill my love, though she tried very hard.
I saw Deirdre from the corner where I stood, staring at ladies dressed in orange watch the television and play cards. Now that I’m dead, I can go anywhere I want to in the world. I’ve explored the moors of England and I’ve been to Alaska, the northern lights illuminating the night sky and I didn’t feel the cold nor the heat of Death Valley, California. I flew and touched the top of the Eiffel Tower.
“Anything can be done in death, it’s like magic is yours after you die,” I told Miles.
Down he went with me and they buried us side by side. We go into earth, then Summerland, then back again. When I haunt the group home, I conjour nightmares for the girls who tormented me, especially June Freeland who told me I looked dressed as gaudily as she had for one of the snuff films her guardian she murdered made her do. I know many murderers: the worst of them being June and Marcelle. I read the evidence of Marcelle’s Drano murders in her journal and her revelations of sex with strange men who came when called by Nanny Cravat, Marcelle’s godmother. But something told me not to be a hypocrite and tell on her. I never had a mother like these girls. She abandoned me on the doorstop of St. Xavier’s Orphanage and Dierdre, the nun (she was a devout Catholic before she moved on to work for the hospital) who knew her sister’s face and knowing I was her niece, took me in and after years of her impossible violence and nagging, I am finally set free and better off, even if by her hand.
The Ouija Board
“Miles committed suicide,” said Marilyn to Marcelle. “It’s on the news.”
“Oh,” said Marcelle. “I bet Cathleen’s ghost dragged him down with her. Anika keeps seeing her everywhere and is freaking out.”
Anika was fast asleep in her room, having taken a dose of Haldol to help the hallucinations.
“But you aren’t hallucinating,” Cathleen had insisted when she came to Anika late at night. Sometimes she wore a nun habit like June, who had taken to smearing on red lipstick and blaring Courtney Love from the stereo. Sometimes, she sang opera with a crucifix dangling around her neck, and quite good. The girls loved listening to her sing her songs of lovers who lost their loved ones like Miles and Greek tragedies where Persephone became trapped for six months in Hades with the Lord of the Underworld and six months on earth. Gods and monsters fighting their battles to the death. The Ouija board they used to summon Cathleen worked. Anika revealed the messages to them of their conversation she heard in her head. Anika directed the board marker’s movement in their hands.
“Cathleen, where are you?” Anika asked, finally facing her fear of the unknown.
“In Summerland, with Miles,” was the reply.
Anika spelled it on the board and all were shocked.
“I knew it was real, like heaven but better than clouds and angels playing harps, waiting at the gates to judge you,” Anika said. “In Summerland there is no judgment, or pain or violence. Just love, laughter and magic. I learned all about the theory of the afterlife in Summerland from a Wiccan book I found in the used bookstore downtown.”
“Are you sure it isn’t fake, Anika?” Asked June, who doubted the paranormal.
“I heard her voice, just the way it was when she was alive!” Anika stormed out of the room, offended by June’s remark. The Ouija board remained still. Out of all of the girls, Cathleen found Anika most vulnerable to her presence. Cathleen enjoyed scaring them a little. But she never spoke to June, who ascended the staircase with a boy from the nearby prep school, holding a candlelabra and smoking a Marlboro cigarette. Marilyn played 20 Questions with Anika in their room and listened to her account of what she read in Marcelle’s journal.
“I saw too,” said Cathleen. “She sent people to their death same as insane June. I wonder what sort of terrorism Dierdre endured at a young age.”
“Probably witnessed something violent, or had no parents like you. I didn’t,” said Marcelle, who stood behind them listening and hearing Cathleen’s voice just like Anika.
Deirdre
High on a precious hill stands my home for abandoned, unstable girls
I can’t return to it
I’m in prison garb in the women’s prison surrounded by barbed wire and a river runs past, saturated in pollutants spilled by the nearby plants and factories.
I used to be a nun, then a nurse, mercy-killing the elderly, smothering infants and pretending they died of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), immune to the wails of inconsolable parents informed by the doctor in the corridor.
I spent my early childhood in a ramshackle farmhouse in Louisiana, smothered by my mother and her hot back coffee thrown in my face. How her knives danced before my eyes. When my baby brother died when I was fourteen, they thought it was SIDS. I hated babies. My mother told me to kill it, it was a sickly, weak little boy and wouldn’t last the year. I fed him to a hungry feral cat and watched the skin ribbon over her bones from the cat’s carnivorous snacking. My mother, a widow always in grey with shadows under her eyes the color of her sweater, watched the baby’s decomposition.
I felt an affinity for June the most out of all the girls in my home. We had killed and had bad mothers who abused our bodies and sucked our souls out through crazy straws, leaving us bereft and insane. I couldn’t plead insanity the way June could, though.
I wish I were out of this stale air and away from these women, with their murderous stairs and rancid shouting, their fights that lead them to solitary. I won’t put a hand on these women. I won’t go to solitary.
June
I murdered this whole neighborhood besides Clinton and Mary Milton and their twin son and daughter. The parents went to prison for murder, and the kids live somewhere else now. The house is vacant. I never enjoyed what Scarlett made me do. They housed me in an asylum, where I spent the majority of my time in restraints staring at the ceiling with vacant eyes and Medusa coils in my hair that snarled on the pillow.
I dreamt of black widows biting me and in my dreams, Deirdre, who worked there at the time as a psychiatric nurse, didn’t tend to my bites that reddened on my hand. When I wasn’t dreaming, Deirdre liked me. Now she’s in prison where she belongs. I no longer handle nitric acid or kill people or endure stiff baseball bats tearing open my cunt.
Scarlett watched my defiling from behind the camera, recording the rapes in the dark room. I was smothered in her cellar and remembered it, screaming, spitting out the pills, refusing to take them. Deirdre heard my whole story, decided to move into the old Freeland estate and take over as group home director. I moved out of my trailer to stay there. Weird I should live here after killing someone here. I used to hallucinate Blithe, who I shot and killed, but I don’t see her lately. I dismiss Anika despite my own experience. Sometimes, the ghost of Cathleen gets old as a topic and I think all should remember the living and forget the dead that can’t reach us, gone to nether realms.
But what if she was there? What if she can reach us?
I’ll never know. One day I’ll be a ghost myself. I have faith that there is something prettier to see than this insidious earth after our bodies run out of time and our souls transcend.
There must be something better than what I had, what Marcelle had, what Cathleen had, what all of us had.
I think I just heard a voice. Is it the still, small voice of God, or is it a spirit coming from some divine region, holy or unholy?
I am a combined angel and demon. I want to drink absinthe and sleep with that voice.
Mathilde
2019
I stood in the calm, obsidian woods and gained my frail balance against a ramshackle cabin. Wolves dashed out of the shadows, ignoring me and veering towards a carcass in a wildflower-bordered clearing. I was pretty certain it was human. Then I saw a ski-masked perpetrator, blood channeling from his disguise. He offered me a bouquet of purple irises in his scathed left hand. In the shunning woods, feeling like the ghost of someone gone, I tore my lavender dress on a nail in the cabin’s wood. I declined the masked monster’s offer. Suddenly, I was pulled inside by someone behind the front door. I cried out, closed my eyes and could hear the door shut and bolt. Once the lightbulb on the ceiling flickered on, I saw my rescuer’s face like a sanctified revelation. The kindest pair of dark eyes I had ever seen. My speech failed me but his did not.
He told me, “Nothing will kill your equilibrium while I’m here. You no longer have to claw at wooden walls are cry into a pillowcase. Notice that soon the sun will come up and figuratively, I’ll give you a pair of rose-colored glasses to view the world through. A better world than this.”
“I-“ I began.
“I love you,” he said.
Of course, he was handsome and I coveted him highly. He pressed his perfect mouth on mine and carried me to bed. After the sex and the sun-glow, he told me he’d be my dreamcatcher, and if not the destroyer of my enemies, the bane of them. The unidentified mask never showed up again. We soon left the cabin to live in a castle. He taught me to love instead of maim, to be tender instead of destructive. I learned to give myself away to a man created by the sparks of imagination itself.
*
I ease myself out of bed after this dream and take another hit of glass. Something to make the world glitter with white ice and a way to make the hell inside freeze over. I see him blur on every bridge, every riverbed, every highway. There is no hallucination more powerful than him. Nothing will perforate me and make me stop haunting this city. Nothing will make me bleed out onto the sidewalk because I am too fast for the blade, the bullet. The smoke flows through the open room and hits the sun. I wake to sirens piercing the quiet. I’m the cause of them but I know their glow won’t alight on me and swallow me up.
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Top 5 moments that really defined your time as an RPer.
[This is an incredibly long post. So, feel free to read it or not as you wish. Blessedly, there is no ‘NSFW’ alert associated with it. Brutal, visceral, and sometimes anguish or feelz inducing commentary, but nothing you can’t have up at work or around the (Grand)babies. So, have at!]
#1. - Beyond the terrible graphics of the games at the time, my first real experience RPing happened when i was nineteen. A friend of mine from school had invited me on leave with her (Yes, it was that kind of education) to her home to get away from the boredom and strictness of our vocational training. I said yes, and while we were off at her place (which, also, was in the woods in the middle of nowhere, but in a different state) she introduced me to her Aunt, who was an avid DM. The woman had accumulated just… man. Volumes in binders of faces and forms of men and women - models, actors, singers, you name it - which she had rated from 1 to 20 for the purposes of allowing players to choose their character’s ‘comeliness.’She had it all. The picture books. All of the (2E) D&D books and supplements. She asked how long I’d been roleplaying, and I said I hadn’t. So, she broke it all down for me. Let me choose from an extensive collection of dice and line-by-line explained the mechanics of the game for me.My first character? A dual-classed Drow Fighter/Ranger. She made an NPC Human Paladin and the story for the background to explain the two of them being a battle couple was easy for me to come up with. She loved it. I killed myself with my own bow, and my own arrow, my first time using it. (I rolled a 1.) and she used the NPC to heal/resurrect my dumb Elf. Best introduction to RP I could offer to anyone, and it was mine.#2. - A Co-Worker asked me if I’d ever RP’d before, and I told him about #1 on the list, which had been five? Six years before. He said he would love to have me for a ‘beefy’ Campaign he was putting together, and after negotiating on the terms and times, I agreed. The Campaign was ridiculous. (Not in a bad way.) Just uber powerful creatures all over the place. So, he required every player to be half-something from the Monster Manual.I made up a Half-Halfling/Half-Celestial and made him a Bard/Psion. While we were at work, I rolled his stats (which were INSANELY GOOD.) And he sat and watched. (The stats were so good that one of the other Players, sitting next to the DM, accused me of cheating, and the DM laughed and said I watched them roll *my* dice. Those are their scores. I laughed crazy hard.) That Campaign about three years, and was insanely good fun. I eventually retired my Half-Celesital as an Avatar of Fharlanghn, the God of Travelers. (My Muse was a Psionic Nomad.) And the GM still phones occasionally to ask me to RP him as an influence on current or on-going campaigns.
#3. - My (now ex-) Boyfriend found out that I was an avid RPer in Guild Wars, and asked me to come RP with him (I think he was jealous of my Muse’s in-game Husband) in World of Warcraft. We rolled up a pair of Druids. But, within a week, two things unexpectedly happened. He got bored of his level 5 Druid and ditched me to go back to his level 54 Warlock. AND I levelled up without him looking for herbs, and on my first trip to Darkshore (Like, level 11 or 12?) I witnessed a pitched PvP Battle between a level 56 Night Elf Hunter and a skull icon (later learned, level 60 Raider) Tauren Warrior. I was Resto and started healing the Hunter. At the time, I had no clue what ‘flagging’ was, or that my Muse could be harmed by doing it. I just wanted to help the guy who looked to be putting up a hell of a fight given the disparity between them. (I assumed the Tauren was just a very powerful mob.) The Hunter won the fight, and greeted me ICly. Introduced himself. Thanked me profusely, and since I’d cobbled together an identity for my Druid before my BF and I had stopped playing together, I just rolled with it. The Hunter eventually became the Druid’s Lifemate.#4 - The next two are more personal, and as you know (Nerd) Last year was absolutely devastating for me. I lost twenty-six writing partners during a significant IRL series of hardships involving losing my health, which cost me my job, which led to me losing my home, all while trying to take care of my kids and maintain a Guild with a massive storyline.
The vast majority of the Co-Writers i had at the time were just relentless about wanting and needing to be ‘important’ to the storyline, rather than working together with everyone to solve the puzzles that were laid out. And, I was DMing two or more events each month from my cellphone out of a motel my family was paying for for several months. During that time, I lost two important friends who were RRP Partners for Teren. One due to refusal to communicate at all why they had suddenly started getting angry every time I mentioned RP (even when it wasn’t for Teren) and another who literally just… disappeared. Not just from me. From everything. All without explanation. Of the twenty-six acquaintences/Co-Writers who dipped on me during that SL, those are the two that still haunt me the most, and they are the primary reasons I keep my Writing Circle so small.
Has their continuing influence on me been positive? No. I don’t think so. Not in the long run. But, has it been powerful? Has it shaped the future of my writing and my relationships with others in/out of character and IRL? Unequivocally.
#5 - Mister Rogers (Teren, wtf are you going with this?) Mister Rogers once said that when something bad would happen, he would get scared. An accident. A fire. Something worse on the news. His Mother would tell him to “look for the people trying to help. There are always people trying to help. Look for the Helpers.”
At the bottom of the abyss for me, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically - there were people, IRL, OOC and IC, who were genuinely trying to help me. Even when I told them I just wanted to wrap up all of our mutual storylines and walk away from writing - not just Roleplaying, but writing stories at all - they did everything they could to help me. Help me figure out what their Muses needed. Help me figure out what my Muses needed. Helped me connect with strangers to tie up story elements that had disappeared with the people who were abandoning the large-scale Campaign that had been running off of my phone for months on end.
There were at first a couple. Then a few. Then a handful. Now, there’s a little under a dozen people who have made writing possible for me again. Who stuck with me through all of the terrible shit that made even logging in to Teren’s old account an exhausting, heartbreaking slog. Who eventually helped me heal myself with self-care strategies I’d never needed before, and to give some solid foundation to Teren’s storyline so that - even if I couldn’t save all of my Muses - I could save this one.
At the beginning of the year, I kicked off this blog, still unsure if it would last a month, or if I would walk away from it after all. Two months, three months in, I still didn’t know the answer. What I did know, is that I was (albeit slowly) getting the desire to write again. I was (slowly) feeling the urge to create again. And I was striving to interact on a level that would allow me to leave if the old warning signs started cropping up, without devastating my Co-Writer’s storylines. (Which is a lot of why so much of what Teren does happens in Nishan; which is only a small pocket of Azeroth as a whole.)
To wit, the amazing legacy and continuing tales of Teren Kiden and his life after 01/01/2018 aren’t a product of “A” moment. But, of People. People who recognized that I am a person and not a collection of pixels. People who empathized with the catastrophe my life had become and - instead of disappearing - did what they could. No one had to solve my problems. Most didn’t have to do anything but RP. But they all helped me to recover from the single worst year - IC, OOC, and IRL - of my life with patience, poise, respect and - most extraordinarily - with hearts that were strong enough to let me go, even though they desparately wanted me to keep holding on to our friendships, because that was what I needed most at the time.
[To each of them: @daughterofkiden, @summerbloom-fae, @karrista, @olivia-lovecraft, @news-nerd, @huntsman-hawthorne, @maluraunderchild, @renlavaye, @scassira, @waroftwowolves, @stonestridernerd, @phamguero, @oh-yeah-no @kelladen - you are all such beautiful, understanding, and exceptional people, and I quite literally wouldn’t be here, writing, without you. Thank you so much for your extraordinary strength and exceptional qualities of character. You are more deeply cherished and appreciated than you will ever know.]
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Do you have some newmann fic recs to share?
omg ive been waiting for a question like this for so long...i’m probably going to shy away from most of the more well-known ones (not bc theyre not well-known for a reason, but bc you’ve likely read/been recced them already LOL). organized by rating, my personal top favs starred!
(also to begin: literally anything by @lvslie by god do they speak to my newmann soul)
G/Not Rated:
Portrait. by VictoryCandescenceWe all know about Becket and Mori, the Last Rangers of Hong Kong and the late Marshall Stacker Pentecost. But Doctors Hermann Gottlieb and Newton Geiszler might be two you haven’t heard about until now. And when you hear their story, you’ll wonder how it ever stayed a secret for so long.
the future's owned by you and me** by kaiyenYears after they stopped writing each other, Newt and Hermann run into each other on the steps of Cambridge University Library. Quite literally.
The Love And Care Of Your Pet Kaiju Skinmite by IasNewt brings home a new pet. Hermann is justifiably horrified.
T:
Alternate** by perniciousLizardNewt accidentally ends up in a place that’s almost exactly like his own reality, with one major difference.
Operation: RTF by purpleeyesandbowtiesMako's bio teacher is acting weird. Well, weirder than normal. And there's a new teacher who Mr. Geizler claims is a college buddy, but there's something about this whole thing that feels....off. Naturally, the only reasonable solution is Operation: RTF.
what's your rush by Byacolate(series thats so cute and domestic it murdered me)
Hypothetically by supersymmetryAka Tendo sets Newt and Hermann up on a blind date because someone had to.
Mariposa (aka westworld au) by janewestinTwo years after his last encounter with the host called Newton Geiszler, Hermann finds himself back in the park.
D = V * T by seabassThere are no monsters, mutants, or war. Robots do not stand as gladiators against the test of Man. Warriors do not drift together, close in thought and will and action.There’s just a hole in the desert. And it grows.
Ships Ill-Lit At Night by Rikku (still only on chap 2 but i l o v e it)Hermann Gottlieb and Newton Geiszler are correspondents for years before they first meet, and then it is years more before they will admit to even being friends. Meanwhile the war rages, the monsters that rise from the sea surely too powerful to be fought with brittle ships of wood and sail.At least when the Fleet fights it, they must all stand together.
M:
First a Darling, Then a Marvel** by isozymeNewt runs a simulation given three constraints:1: Newt wants to clone a kaiju2: Hermann does not want Newt to clone a kaiju3: Newt is going to clone a kaiju anyway
Can I Be Your Memory by agrajagHermann suffers from amnesia after a bump to the head and is suddenly very nice to Newt. Newt is way too gay to handle this. And what will happen when Hermann's memories return?
E:
Darling by BeeLoveIn which Newton rides Hermann for all he's worth. Or at least tries to.
Our Breath Will Still / A Short Distance Ahead** by irisbleuficThis story is a study in monster-hunting and risk-taking, professional and otherwise.
Problems with Local Denim Topology (accnt orphaned tragically)This is how, when the chaos of Newt’s life finally settles down into something approximating normal (one apartment, one nine-to-five job, one handsome husband, and no kaiju), he finds himself struggling to pull on an old pair of skinny jeans.
Sea Swept by cypress_treeA high seas fantasy AU in which Hermann is a ship's navigator and Newton is found washed up among flotsam.
#i might add more later when i can thing of them!#maria's newmann blogging#fic rec#ask#long post /////////#Anonymous
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Kisekae Insights #16: Hiroki and Akari’s Strawberry Mysteries Part 2 (with IRL context)
Hiroki and Akari’s relationship goes on the biggest rollercoaster you’ve ever seen in this project. Remember Zi-O Rule 3 and throw all sense, logic and justice out the window, because a lot of what I’m about to tell you would be illogical or illegal in real life.
The last instalment only covered one of the storylines that was inspired by the final episodes of TVB dramas from 2013-14; this instalment will cover two more along with another one that absolutely tops all of them even though it didn’t get adapted. As such, I would like to remind everyone that there are content (trigger) warnings for themes associated with mental illness, suicide and domestic violence.
These are the darkest storylines that I’ve ever written for the project. In fact, that was the first time I delved into darker themes, so even to this day, there are some places where I feel I went a bit too far. However, I don’t want to change what I’ve written (at least the important bits), so I’m going to live with it and learn from it (just as I’m doing now).
After reading both instalments, if you think that I’m an incel or a creep or whatever, then I don’t blame you. Likewise, it is your choice to decide whether you want to pity me or not.
Well then, it’s time to continue deeper into the rabbit hole.
The absolute state of the next generation
This storyline covers all of Series 8 and 9, but I’ll just cover the major highlights. It’s time to go further down this rabbit hole.
Some time after the Battle of Koshi Castle and the Manchester Campaign, Hiroki and Akari became companions of the Doctor at the start of 2014. In May 2014, halfway into Series 8, Maurice Mouseling of the Takeda Army asks the Doctor for help fighting Girl Power and he heads to Shizuoka with Hiroki and Akari.
The Takeda Army were on an expedition to Kyōto when they were attacked by Girl Power, who are led by Narutaki and Daniel and camped at Mikatagahara. As the Takeda engages Girl Power in battle, they taunt Hiroki by telling him that he is ugly and that Akari hates him. Incensed, Hiroki charges into battle, followed by the Doctor, Maurice and the Takeda cavalry. They manage to drive Girl Power back to Hamamatsu Castle, but fearing an ambush, the Takeda decided to camp outside for the night.
Before sunrise the next day, a group of ninjas attack the camp and set it on fire. Amongst the commotion, Hiroki tries to find Akari, but when he does, they look at each other for a moment before Akari runs off; her betrayal had been arranged by Daniel and Girl Power. Following the battle, Angelina, Maurice’s daughter, takes Akari’s place as the Doctor’s companion alongside Hiroki.
Daniel takes over the leadership of Girl Power alongside Akari and Zoey, who were originally the leaders of the own factions before forming Girl Power. In response, three Girl Power members, Maya, Christie and Anna, leave Girl Power and become the Advice Girls, who attempt to convince Hiroki to move on from Akari but end up giving him prophecies like the Three Witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (I only know this because I was learning about Macbeth in school at the time, I don’t know why other people didn’t like it because I sure liked it enough to incorporate it in my project).
In June 2014, Girl Power leads an operation to free Shaun from the underground prison base where he is held. Hiroki meets with the Hongmen, a triad-like group with affiliations to UNIT, and plots with a few members to kidnap a Girl Power officer for ransom. They kidnap an officer, Vincent, whose father owns a Chinese restaurant and as if by coincidence, Akari is with him as well. Hiroki calls Vincent’s father and asks him for $50 million (it made sense in HKD, but considering the size of the restaurant I based this on, I eventually realised that it didn’t make much sense in AUD). He also low-key sabotages his operation by tying Vincent’s arms with a reef knot, making his location on the wall so that Vincent’s father would see it when he calls him again, and saying “I’m sorry, Akari, I am so so sorry” when he chloroforms her after calling for Vincent.
Vincent’s father sees the location and goes there to find his son. Vincent manages to free himself and Akari before they find a car and get away with his father after he provides him with a distraction. Hiroki and his co-conspirators manage to burn their car and get away as the police arrive.
Later, when Zoey leads ten Dalek ships to attack Yokohama, Narutaki confronts Hiroki and reveals that she knows about the kidnapping; he tells her that Akari was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and that he never intended on killing anyone. This was why he sabotaged the kidnapping that he set up (and also to show everyone that he was fucking bananas). In return for her silence, Narutaki asks Hiroki to stop attacking the ships and instead do something to disorient them for a while so that Girl Power’s invasion of Equestria would be delayed.
This portion of the storyline was based off the kidnapping storyline from Brother’s Keeper (巨輪), with Hiroki playing the role of two characters, namely Sam Kiu Tin-seng, the main character and the brother of Vincent’s counterpart played by Ruco Chan (陳展鵬), and the head of the kidnappers. While this may have seemed like a good idea at the time, combining the characters meant that I couldn’t adapt the bit where Sam beats his brother up and the head of the kidnappers yells at him for it (I once liked doing impromptu dubs in front of my computer, but my parents would get annoyed, especially when I tried to shout quietly because saying violent things for acting purposes gives me a real rush, which is why I stopped because it’s become a bit of a trigger for me).
There’s no more Akari-related stuff that I adapted, but I did adapt another bit from that drama for the Christmas in July Special. There’s a scene towards the end where Hiroki fights the Master in Canterlot, but just as Hiroki is about to shoot him, he gets shot in the back by Shining Armor. That was adapted from the bit where Sam fights the mob boss who he was working undercover for (the head of the kidnappers worked for him).
Anyway, that’s it for Series 8. Let’s move on to Series 9.
The Day of Retribution
Following the Battles of Odawara Castle and Nagashino, Hiroki discovers that Akari’s cousins are planning to pair her with one of eight boys in a Bachelorette-esque competition, but with the help of Momoka and the Kōmeikai, he defeats them and takes Akari back. However, this was actually a set-up as when they got back to the TARDIS, Akari kissed Hiroki and stole his biodata before stealing Momoka’s TARDIS (having not returned it to the Pony Doctor yet) and leaving. Hiroki takes control of the Doctor’s TARDIS and severely damages it while going after Akari, causing them to crash into a parallel world, coincidentally the same world where the Hiroki of that universe was forced to marry Hideko Kimihara. The Kikuchi Clan were in charge of that plot, but Daniel and Girl Power were facilitating some of the events from behind the scenes.
This adventure features the debut of Samurai Mode, a prototype of the Superhero Project based on Samurai Sentai Shinkenger where Hiroki and the others morph into the Samurai Rangers. After some fights with Girl Power and their minions, the Doctor takes Hiroki and the others back to their universe. Upon returning, Hiroki discovers that Girl Power have allied with many armies and are preparing an all-out siege on Yokohama.
While the Doctor fights on Trenzalore, Hiroki gathers his allies together and they advance on Sekigahara, where they cripple Girl Power’s strength severely. Following that, Hiroki advances on Ōsaka, where Parker arrives to help them. During the later stages of the battle, Hiroki confronts Akari, who can morph into a Samurai Ranger as well using the same powers that Hiroki has. Hiroki defeats Akari and proceeds to bitch-slap her multiple times, calling her a “stupid bitch” and thinking that everyone, especially her family, wants him dead. It’s also in this scene where we get this gem of a line: “Every time I see minxes like you it makes me want to puke!” Akari teleports away before Hiroki fights and defeats Daniel.
Following this, Akari and Shaun send a message to everyone, inviting them to Kyōto for a celebratory dinner. Parker knows that this is a trap and urges Hiroki not to head there without working out a plan first, but he decides to lead an all-or-nothing attack the next day, on “the Day of Retribution”, proclaiming that “that slut’s gonna get her just desserts”. In a heated confrontation, Parker attempts to show Hiroki that he is becoming like his enemies, but Hiroki points out that he was as ruthless as himself at one point. Parker tries to shoot him, but instead, he swears to bring him to justice with his own hands.
The next evening, Hiroki advances on Kyōto with the Hongmen, joined by the rest of the Samurai Rangers (except the Doctor) and the Kōmeikai. While the Hongmen and Kōmeikai hold the fort at Nijō Castle, Hiroki and the Samurai Rangers head over to Honnōji and fight the Girl Power officers. Once they reach the gate to the top level, Hiroki tells his friends to leave while he goes up alone.
Hiroki confronts Akari at the top of Honnōji and they have a fierce fight. Severely injured, the two of them charge at each other and stab each other before pulling their swords out and hitting each other one final time with a spin as they fall to the ground. You would think they would have both died at this point, but no, they’re still alive somehow.
Akari had made an arrangement with Shaun for him to kill Hiroki. She lets him in, but before Shaun can kill him, Hiroki stabs him repeatedly. It is then that Akari shows up with a gun, saying, “I’m gonna put a cap in your ass,” but Hiroki snatches the gun from her and slaps her three times before pointing the gun at her head and shooting her. Bang. Fucking headshot.
Right at that moment, Parker and some UNIT soldiers arrive to arrest him. They take the long way around back to UNIT as the roads are blocked in Ōsaka, but Hiroki manages to escape. A chase ensues in the streets of Nantan, Kyōto with Hiroki taking a teenage girl hostage, but just as he is about to carjack someone, another car crashes into the back of the car he is jacking and squishes him up against the back of a truck, as you can see in the GIF below. You would think he would have died at this point, but no, he manages to teleport away because (as I realised recently) Parker didn’t bother to confiscate his vortex manipulator. Doctor Who logic, amirite?
Hiroki arrives at an Osterhagen station, that just happened to be a short distance away from Kyōto, and prepares to use an Osterhagen Key, given to him earlier by his assistant, to activate it. The Dalek fleets retreat from Trenzalore as they confront him, but Hiroki remotely sets the five stations online before detonating the nuclear warheads under Earth, destroying the planet and taking the Daleks with it.
As Hiroki prepares to meet his eventual death on the moon, the prospect comes faster than expected when Akari’s brother, Michael, confronts him, having survived as well. He was the one who Maya, Christie and Anna predicted would eventually defeat him, as he was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped”. Hiroki and Michael fight and the battle ends with Michael stabbing Hiroki and Hiroki shooting him back. But just as they fall to the ground…
“Deus ex machina!”
The Earth is restored and everything is back to what it was, down to everyone’s ages as they revert to what they should be, discounting the extra eight years as a result of the Manchester Campaign. As an unconscious Hiroki lies on the grass, in blood-stained clothes, rain pouring over him, thinking that dying would be the best thing to ever happen to him that day, the Doctor materialises his TARDIS over him. After he has Hiroki wash himself and change his clothes, the Doctor tells Hiroki that he has become too possessive of Akari; before the Battle of Odawara Castle, he heard what Maya was telling him about his love to Akari being one-sided, but he never said anything because he wanted what was best for him.
With Girl Power’s invasion of Yokohama still imminent, the Doctor and a rejuvenated Hiroki quickly head there to save the city from certain doom.
And that was Series 9. Before I continue with the story, I’d like to take this time to point out that the confrontations between Hiroki and Akari in Ōsaka and Kyōto were inspired by the final episode of Black Heart White Soul (忠奸人). Hiroki played the role of Henry To Yi Hang (杜以鏗), played by Waise Lee (李子雄) and Akari played the role of Scarlet Sze Ka Lei (施嘉莉), played by Leanne Li (李亞男). Parker played the role of the cop, Cheung Lap Fan/Funny (張立勳), played by Ron Ng (吳卓羲). The Day of Retribution (I legitimately called the Series 9 finale that) was probably one of the darkest episodes I’ve ever written and as a result, I’m both proud and not proud of it at the same time. I made Hiroki cross lines I would never have made him cross, nor would I do in real life, which makes it really fucking scary, especially when you take the IRL context into account.
And you know what the most epic part is? Three years later, I found someone who makes Waise Lee look like Tim Shaw compared to Sacha Dhawan as the Master. In 2016 and 2017, Hugo Ng (吳岱融) played Ko Tin-tsau (高天鷲) in Brother’s Keeper II (巨輪II) and Cheung Tin-lung (蔣天龍) in Burning Hands (乘勝狙擊), which led him to become a bit of a meme in Hong Kong. I didn’t watch the former drama, but I was lucky enough to catch the final episode of the latter while I was on holiday in Hong Kong. In that episode, Cheung Tin-lung shoots up a wedding, beats up his son, then gets killed by his wife. Words cannot express how the incel inside me fucking loved that shit, which made me wish that Hugo Ng came back to TVB 3-4 years earlier than he did so that I could have adapted him instead of the other guy. It’s because of that scene that I call him “the Chinese Elliot Rodger” because his character did what Rodger never got to do in real life (not that I’m applauding him for it because it was still tragic). For consolation, I took the idea and incorporated it into All Riders vs. Dai-Shocker the next year.
Anyway, let’s move on to the final chapter. While Daniel and the rest of Girl Power were ready to advance on Yokohama, Akari and her friends separated from the group and began working against them. While confronting Narutaki at Nijō Castle, Hiroki learns that Akari plotting with Shaun to kill him was to hopefully bring him to his senses so that they could talk with him; Akari has been planning to betray Daniel since the Battle of Sekigahara since she and her friends thought he was starting to go too far. Akari shows up in the final battle and after Daniel’s defeat, she finally meets Hiroki on good terms for the first time since Mikatagahara. She gets a call from Hiroki’s previous incarnation (a la Deep Breath), who had just reset himself and was minutes away from regenerating, telling her that however scared she is, Hiroki is more scared than anything she can imagine, which is absolutely ironic given everything that happened so far. They got back together and lived happily ever after… until the Moushouden Series.
Finding their mutual feeling
UNIT continued to develop the Superhero Project throughout 2015 before it was launched in 2016. The Samurai Rangers from Series 9 would be succeeded by the Shinkengers, led by Akari Ichigo as ShinkenRed; Hiroki, the Doctor and Angelina would eventually gain new powers in 2017-18 (becoming Kamen Rider Decade, GokaiRed and GokaiPink respectively), the Gold Samurai Ranger would continue as ShinkenGold while the remaining two would resign. Narutaki would go missing and show up in Decade as Kamen Riders Duke and Gold Drive, while Veronica would debut as Kamen Rider Gridon towards the end of the series as a Rider of the Kougami Foundation.
During those years, Hiroki and Akari tried their best to love each other again, but they couldn’t. Akari only got back with him because she felt bad over what her actions with Girl Power did to him and she was scared of what would happen if she betrayed him again. As time went on, she actually began to fall in love with Hiroki for real, but she constantly denied this. Hiroki felt guilty about staying with Akari because of what Maya, Christie and Anna have been trying to tell him for months and also because he felt (later confirmed) that she was only staying with him out of pity. As such, neither of them had the courage to confess their true feelings for fear of the other’s reaction, so they became distant towards each other. Hiroki took any and every opportunity to fight Akari, putting his all into their fights, but he could never bring himself to kill her.
In July 2018, during Age of Riders Genesis, Akari decided to have Hiroki reconcile with her cousins, but his paranoia and previous animosity caused him to become prejudiced towards them. Akari realised that Hiroki was only acting this way because of what she and Girl Power did to him over the years and as such, she believed that it was payback for their actions (and inactions). Following some conflicts, Hiroki and Akari come to terms with their feelings for each other and apologise for everything that happened. Akari would become Kamen Rider Duke in this movie and from Soulbound Series 3 onward after Narutaki decided to fight as Kamen Rider Gold Drive permanently. In turn, Akari would pass on her role as ShinkenRed to Kyōya Shinomiya.
While the two would continue to feature in the Moushouden Series, this marks the end of Hiroki and Akari’s relationship story arcs in the project.
IRL context (Judgement Time)
It’s time for me to give the IRL context to this entire saga. Writing these two instalments has acted as an opportunity for me to reflect on my own actions and feelings. While I realised that I may have been a bit of an asshole at some points, I stand by my opinion that “Akari” was being an asshole as well, but not as much as I was. After reading this, you are welcome to judge my actions, but keep in mind that I’ve learnt from those past mistakes. Okay then, here we go.
I first met “Akari” at high school a few weeks into the start of Year 7 in 2011. Towards the end of lunchtime, I was sitting near my locker bay, with my stuff ready for the next class, when “Akari”, who was sitting near me, said hi and asked for my name. At that moment, I was so stunned by how beautiful she looked that I couldn’t ask for her name back. On top of that, she was in the same year level as me, in the class next to mine. Every time we saw each other over the next few years or so, we had very little interaction other than saying hi or bye.
I told a couple of friends about my crush and later, I found out her name on Facebook. I added her and when she accepted my friend request, I tried getting into her DMs, but she referred me to her cousin who essentially told me to fuck off. This was a time when Facebook chat didn’t keep your messages, so I unfortunately don’t have a record of that.
The major turning point for this was at the start of Year 10 in 2014. For Valentine’s Day, the student committee organised a little fundraiser where people could write little love letters for a gold coin donation. Naturally, I couldn’t let this opportunity pass me by, so I wrote a letter for “Akari” (don’t ask me what was in it, writing these instalments was cringy enough as they were).
The day after Valentine’s Day, I tried to clarify things with “Akari”, but she referred me to her cousin (not the same one from 2011), who called me ugly and told me that “Akari” hated me. That exchange cemented in me that “Akari” was an absolute fucking bitch, which led to her blocking me on Instagram and me blocking her back on Facebook. I ranted about it to one of her friends (who I was more familiar with) and a few days later, we had a little talk and she told me that my love for “Akari” was one-sided, that “Akari” didn’t love me the same way I did her. After getting my feelings straight, I changed the direction of Doctor Who Series 8 and 9 to the way that it is now (her friend suggested that I remove her from my project completely, but I couldn’t resist keeping her in as a villain). It didn’t help that all this happened a few months before Elliot Rodger’s Day of Retribution (which I named the Series 9 finale after).
Despite this turning point, my crush for “Akari” never subsided. Even when my friends got tired of feeding my delusions, possibly because they stopped caring, I began making ironic and cringy memes about the subject that were only shared among Facebook friends. As the chuunibyou in me led me to attack her and her friends in a pretend manner, inspired by Dynasty Warriors, I started adapting attacks from Super Sentai and Kamen Rider as I was just getting into those franchises at the time. This led me to be known more for that instead of my crush, though there were people who were still aware of it.
During a formal event at the end of Year 10, I actually managed to get a photo with “Akari” (which was frankly a miracle given the incident at the start of the year). I wanted to get another photo with her at Year 12 formal, but when I stood in the line and called out to her, she just ignored me. Granted, I was with two other girls at the time (godfuckingdammit), so despite how much I wanted to check that off my bucket list, I kind of deserved it. I ended up memeing this encounter anyway, so joke’s on her.
I never saw “Akari” again after Year 12. Over the years, particularly during this year’s coronavirus lockdown, I did a lot of reflection on everything that happened between me and “Akari” and I realised a lot of things I was too autistic to realise at the time.
Am I fine with accepting that “Akari” never loved me back? Yes, but I strongly think that she should have told me herself instead of getting her cousins to do it for her. If she did, then my complaints would have been invalidated, but all she did was make herself look like a coward. If I had violent tendencies, that’s different, but I feel like I deserve to know how she felt about me without being bullshitted.
Why did I still have a crush on her despite what happened? Honestly, it felt like an abusive relationship for me – you keep pining for her in the hope that she’ll see you differently than she did before, but she just sees you the same way she always has.
Couldn’t I have been friends with her instead? Honestly, the thought rarely crossed my mind and even if it did, I was too scared to approach her because she was usually with her friends. Though I was never able to realise or express it at the time, I also felt jealous because she was hanging out with some boys as well. If I could change one thing about all this, I would have asked for her name at the start instead of having to go on Facebook to find out. I don’t know whether it would have made a difference either way, but if it could have contributed to me having at least some sort of friendship with her, then I would change my past and watch over my past self as he did the things I wasn’t able to do.
Why did I still do the chuunibyou Kamen Rider shit to her at school? From the outside, it looks like chuunibyou Kamen Rider shit and funny random antics, but what nobody ever knew is that I had internalised resentment for her and that I frequently fantasised myself winning against her in a fight (preferably Kamen Rider-esque). I honestly wish someone would have understood, but knowing myself, if someone asked me why, I would just say “I don’t know”.
Would it be possible for me to patch things up with “Akari” at this point? Honestly, even if I had the choice, I don’t think I want to bother (unless she wants to, which is very unlikely). Her social media’s all on private and I don’t want to back down from the high ground by unblocking her on Facebook just for some silly thing that happened when we were young. Besides, how do I know if she would want to be friends with me given the fact that I barely have any contact with anyone from high school?
Don’t I know that love isn’t just about how someone looks, but also what their character is like? Yes, and I wish I knew that before or at least made the effort to be friends with “Akari” just to see how she’s actually like. I fell in love with “Akari” because of how she looked, but I never bothered to find out what she was like. My impressions of her are merely based from what I saw or found; at the start, she seemed like a mysterious girl, but later on, she just turned out to be an absolute bitch. Back at school, if I could have the chance to be proven wrong and change my opinion of her, I would probably have taken it, but now, I think there’s no point anymore. Her smile caught my eyes and heart and it’s the only thing I know well about her that I’ll never forget.
It’s really weird looking back on my project and seeing how many storylines revolved around Akari. I started writing “Akari” into Doctor Who not long after I started writing stories for what would become my project; at first, Akari appeared as alternate counterparts of herself before her main universe counterpart was introduced in Series 5. My (passive) interactions with “Akari” would act as inspirations to my stories, the two biggest ones being Shaun and the Manchester Campaign storyline in 2013 (inspired by my jealousy of seeing Akari with another boy) and the Next Gen Series past the halfway mark of Series 8 (inspired by the turning point I stated earlier). At the same time, I also wrote in some interactions between Hiroki and Akari that took place between 2003 and 2011, which just goes to show how much I was obsessed with her back then.
During the Moushouden Series, I planned to end the Hiroki and Akari relationship arc because now that we have graduated high school, there was no reason for me to maintain (most of) my animosity towards her and her cousins, particularly since the chances of us encountering each other again are slim to none. Same reason goes for Hiroki in my project – I didn’t want to end the series with Hiroki, Akari and their families still resenting each other. While writing out the endgame, I also tripled down on the past interactions in Three Kingdoms, as it covered the events between 2003 and 2011 and provided a bridge to Hiroki and Akari’s debut at the end of Doctor Who Series 5.
Now that these two instalments are done, I feel like a weight has been lifted from me, though the consequences of my actions still remain. “Akari” and her friends know about my crush towards her, they know that I’ve written them into my stories and they know that I changed Akari’s name to what it is from the Next Gen Series onwards. As such, if they were to read these two instalments, I strongly believe they would know who I’ve been talking about.
I don’t know if I have the courage to apologise to “Akari”, on the off-chance she finds out about these instalments, given what she did, particularly in 2014. I’ve justified my reaction towards her in that she was too much of a bitch to even face me directly, but I don’t know if other people think the same way I do. To that point, I’m ready to be considered an asshole or an incel over this saga because after all this reflection, I realised that I could have been in the wrong all this time regardless of whether “Akari” was in the wrong or not.
I wrote these storylines because I was too autistic to face my crush for fear of rejection or embarrassment. Now, these storylines, along with whatever memories, impressions or fantasies I have of her, have become stark reminders of my regrets and sins throughout this saga. I’ve counted up my sins, “Akari”, how about you?
That’s it from Kisekae Insights for the time being. I’m starting to feel burnt out after writing 16 instalments and there are some other things I want to focus on, so I’ve decided to take a break from this series for now. Given how I said that this series would have no set schedule, I could put the series in the back of my mind for a while and you would be none the wiser, but I thought I should tell you about this since I’ve already posted instalments for six months in a row. There are other things I was planning to cover, like Gokaiger, Decade and Soulbound, but those will have to wait for another time. Look forward to them when they come out, but for now, don’t get your hopes up too much.
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