Just another hypothetical pesterlog, written last night before the current update so maybe slightly out of date.
I'm scared too, Karkat. D:
-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling ectoBiologist [EB] --
CG: OKAY SO I REALIZE THAT YOU’RE PROBABLY BUSY
CG: AND I HAVEN’T BEEN LORDING MY SUPERIORITY OVER YOU OR ANYTHING IN A WHILE
CG: AND YOU MUST BE REALLY FUCKING BROKEN UP ABOUT THAT
CG: BUT JADE’S NOT ANSWERING AND I REALLY
CG: UGH FUCK WHAT AM I SAYING
CG: LOOK JUST
CG: ANSWER YOUR FUCKING GLASSES
CG: YOU STUPID GRUBSUCKING SHITFACE
CG: JOHN
CG: JOHN
CG: OH MY GOD WHERE ARE YOU
EB: karkat!! hi!
CG: JEGUS, TOOK YOU LONG ENOUGH.
CG: I’VE BEEN SITTING HERE FLIPPING MY SHIT SO HARD IT’S FUSED WITH THE EGG SCRAPER.
EB: gross!
CG: WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU DOING THAT WAS SO IMPORTANT.
EB: oh, it’s this plan of rose’s, i'm supposed to be fixing the battlefield.
EB: i can’t find the tumor though.
EB: you don’t think it was some kind of joke, do you?
EB: rose usually isn’t into that stuff but she has been pretty different lately.
CG: SHUT THE FUCK UP, I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR INANE WIZARD FRIEND.
CG: IF I LOOK AT ONE MORE WAND I THINK I’M GOING TO VOMIT UP EVERYTHING I’VE EVER EATEN IN ALL SIX SWEEPS OF MY MISERABLE AND TRAGICALLY SHORT LIFE
CG: IN A VERITABLE FOUNTAIN OF HATEGORGED INGESTION POUCH FLUIDS.
EB: haha, i get it, you’re back to trolling me again!
EB: or oh, maybe this is one of those other conversations in between the first one and the linear ones.
EB: troll timelines sure are confusing!
CG: NO, LISTEN
CG: I DIDN’T CONTACT YOU TO TROLL YOU, OK?
CG: I JUST, OH GOD
CG: HOW THE FUCK DO I EVEN SAY THIS.
CG: A COUPLE OF MY FRIENDS WERE JUST MURDERED
CG: BY ONE OF US.
CG: AND ANOTHER ONE HAS GONE COMPLETELY OFF THE RETARDED END OF A NIGHTMARE CLOWN FUCKSTICK
CG: AND IT’S REALLY FUCKING DARK IN HERE BECAUSE THE LIGHTS JUST WENT OUT FOR NO GOOD REASON
CG: OTHER THAN SO THAT ANY SECOND NOW SOME TENTACLED HORRORBEAST WITH TEETH THE SIZE OF STRIDER’S EGO AND A CLOWN NOSE CAN GLUT ITSELF ON MY ENDLESSLY BRAVE AND STALWART FLESH.
EB: …
EB: this is kind of a weird prank, karkat.
EB: i mean, it’s pretty cool of you to try!
EB: the colonel would be, um…well, maybe not proud, but c+ for effort!
EB: but it’s a little too morbid to be funny.
CG: OH MY FUCKING GOD.
CG: ARE YOU SERIOUS?
CG: YOU THINK I’M KIDDING?
EB: well, of course you’re kidding!
EB: haha, you expect me to believe that the other trolls killed each other?
EB: that’s crazy.
CG: WHAT
CG: YES I FUCKING EXPECT YOU TO BELIEVE IT
CG: YOU UNBELIEVABLE BRAINLESS SHITSTAIN
CG: OK JUST
CG: LOOK, I WILL STOP INSULTING YOU.
CG: AND I WILL STOP EVEN SAYING FUCK.
CG: SO YOU KNOW I’M BEING ENORMOUSLY, UNEQUIVOCALLY SERIOUS WHEN I SAY
CG: THAT I THINK I MIGHT BE ABOUT TO DIE.
CG: AND I’M PRETTY MUCH FREAKING OUT ABOUT IT.
CG: LIKE MORE THAN I’VE EVER FREAKED OUT ABOUT ANYTHING.
CG: WE’RE TALKING FULL-ON BULGE THUMPING PANIC FREAKOUT HERE.
EB: um…
EB: wow, i guess i'm not sure what to say.
EB: you can’t die yet, we had a plan!
CG: NO SHIT!
EB: isn’t there something you can do??
CG: LIKE WHAT?
CG: MY SUPERPOWERED MUTANT BRAINED PSYCHIC HACKER FRIEND COULDN’T BEAT THAT PSYCHOTIC ASSHOLE WITH THE WAND.
CG: HE DIDN’T EVEN HEAR THEM DIE BEFORE THEY DIED.
CG: AND GAMZEE COULD BE ANYWHERE.
EB: um…what?
CG: NEVER MIND, THE POINT IS
CG: WHILE I AM DEFINITELY THE PINNACLE OF HEROISM AND LEADERSHIP AND FIGHTING SPIRIT
CG: SCALING THE HEIGHTS OF FUCKING SHIT UP ON A DAILY BASIS
CG: I REALLY DON’T THINK I’M IN A POSITION RIGHT NOW TO TAKE ON THE ABOMINATION THAT IS THE ERIDAN/DEMON DREAM TEAM OF SLAUGHTERING EVERYTHING THAT MOVES
CG: NOT WHILE THERE ARE STILL HONKS COMING OUT OF THE HORN PILE.
EB: huh?
EB: who’s eridan?
CG: THE MOST AMAZINGLY MENTAL DOUCHEBAG WHO EVER LIVED.
CG: THAT’S REALLY ALL THERE IS TO WAG MY PROTEIN CHUTE ABOUT ON THE MATTER.
EB: karkat, you have to do something!
EB: can’t you escape?
CG: ESCAPE TO WHERE?
CG: THE WHOLE FUCKING MEDIUM’S BEEN BURNT TO A CINDER.
CG: AND IN CASE YOU HAVEN’T NOTICED I’M FLOATING AROUND ON A METEOR IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GODDAMNED VEIL.
EB: so?
EB: alchemize a spaceship or something.
EB: you’re an alien, you can do that!
CG: DO YOU EVEN LOOK AT THE WORDS YOU TYPE?
CG: OR DO YOUR FINGERS JUST RUN ON AUTOPILOT WHILE YOUR BLOATED THINK PAN DRIFTS AROUND IN ITS IGNORANT GLORIOUS WASTELAND OF BREEZY OBLIVION?
EB: uuuuugh
EB: you said you were going to stop insulting me so you could be serious!
CG: OKAY OKAY FINE
CG: WHAT DO YOU SUGGEST.
CG: I’M SITTING HERE IN AN EMPTY BLOOD-SOAKED ROOM.
CG: WITH A CLOWN, A DEMON, AND A LONELY FREAK ALL CLAMORING TO SLIT MY THROAT IN THE DARK.
CG: ESCAPE IS NOT REALLY AN OPTION
CG: BECAUSE THE DEMON IS OUT THERE
CG: AND I STILL DON’T KNOW WHERE GAMZEE IS
CG: AND SOME OF MY FRIENDS MIGHT STILL BE ALIVE SOMEWHERE AROUND HERE.
CG: SO I’M ALL EARS, EGBERT.
EB: hmmm…
EB: well, if some of your friends are alive you should go find them!
EB: it’s always better to be together than alone.
CG: GREAT IDEA, I’LL JUST SAUNTER ON OUT INTO THE LAB AND EXPOSE MY SOFT AND VULNERABLE BACKSIDE TO EVERY LURKING TERROR IMAGINABLE.
CG: THAT IS THE DUMBEST PLAN I’VE EVER HEARD.
CG: NO PLAN WAS BETTER THAN THAT.
EB: okay, geeeeeeeez.
CG: DON’T YOU DARE START WITH THE VRISKA THING.
CG: FOR ALL I KNOW SHE’S ON A MURDEROUS RAMPAGE TOO.
EB: pffff.
EB: vriska wouldn’t do that!
CG: WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU.
CG: SHE KILLED YOU ONCE ALREADY!
CG: NOT TO MENTION
CG: OH GOD
CG: TEREZI
CG: I HAVE TO FIND HER.
EB: i just said that!!
CG: SHUT UP!
EB: ok but listen, karkat.
EB: you should bring your troll chat thing with you.
EB: it’s not a good idea to be alone!
EB: even if i'm in another universe and everything.
CG: WHAT ARE YOU SAYING.
EB: just that i think you’ll freak out less if you talk to someone.
EB: you can even troll me and say fuck a lot if you want.
EB: i don’t mind!
CG: …
CG: WHATEVER.
CG: THANKS, I GUESS.
EB: sure!
EB: let’s go find terezi.
CG: YEAH.
CG: … [:B
EB: :)
Last edited by SataiDelenn; 01-26-2011 at 10:44 AM.
Repost edit for some awkward phrasing and grammar. I really need to stop writing so late at night.
Vriska and Tavros, after they reconcile in Karkat's memo, after she kissed him and then dumped him on the floor. Surprisingly, writing Vriska was not as raeg-inducing as I expected it to be.
From the other side of the room, Tavros gave a little lowing sound. Vriska tossed a glance over her shoulder from her spot at her desk, and quirked a dark eyebrow at him. He was kind of scooching around, pushing with his arms at the floor. It was getting rapidly more pathetic as she continued watching, so she stood, smoothing out the smooth white dress, and crossed to stand over him.
She gave an impatient little scoff, towering above him, uncaring or oblivious of the angle she was offering his gaze. Not that it mattered; he wouldn't have noticed anyway. It was one of the most frustrating things about him, his complete cluelessness. It was a close second to his helplessness, which was yet another facet that for some reason sent her over the edge. Helpless things made her want to make them squirm, watch them writhe as she poked at their weak spots. Kill them slowly.
Her lips pursed as she considered his sprawled form. Her rage drained from her as she took in the bony shoulder and wiry arms, too skinny for the muscles that were on them. It was an impartial observation, like a cat noticing the limp of a mouse. Okay, so that wasn't entirely true; somewhere, buried under all that contempt and tired frustration was a small stirring of pity. He was pathetic, and totally at her mercy.
Still she didn't move, hands perched on her hips. They traded gazes. His large, liquid eyes had no emotional shielding on them; he was anxious and a little frightened, and god was he feeling sorry for himself for being so incompetent-
-she gave another sigh. No, that wasn't it. Really, she knew more than most what Tavros felt. He wasn't feeling sorry for himself. He felt lost.
God she hated this stupid empathy crap. It was such a load of steaming hoofbeast shit.
She could see traitorous little tear tracks that had started from the corner of his eyes and trickled down the hairless sides of his skull, leaving little shining spots on the base of his horns. She tisked, flipping her hair. "I told you not to cry," she scolded.
If anything, that seemed to hammer in the final nail for him. She had meant it lightly, despite her stinging tone, but fat tears started rolling from his eyes anyway, and for a rare, brief second, it caught her off guard. She was used to Tavros's wishy washy nature by now, but he never cried over things she did or said to him, no matter how viscious she got, and she certainly did test those limits at times.
Telling him not to cry because he didn't have the strength to facilitate his own movements was kind of like demanding he not be upset by the death of his ridiculous lusus. They were immutable facts of life, and there was nothing he could do to change it.
She gave another little sigh, as she stooped to latch under his shoulders, ignoring the sniffling. He was all bone and no kid squish, and he felt like some sick creature wobbling around, somehow still alive by some miracle that Alternia seemed to have forgotten about revoking. "Big baby," she said, matter of factly, which to her suprise did not make him cry harder. She supposed he was just ashamed of his own sheer inability. She had him a few inches off the ground, and he was pulling his elbows under him, levering himself upwith his hands. She could feel the muscles strain and twitch between his shoulder blades, beneath his thick jacket, and she added a little more boost, asking, "Can you even sit up by yourself?"
"Uh, not. Not really." He swallowed as he steadied himself, palms to the floor.
"Why? I thought it was just your legs you broke." She reached over and began untangling the rocket car from the thick strands of webbing in the corner.
"N-no. My spine broke. I can't, uh, really move around below my ribs."
Vriska's thick lashes batted slowly as she broke apart the grey material industriously, the soft hiss and pop of the webbing punctuating her words. "Wow, so you really are useless. Like, really useless."
"Yeah, pretty much."
The rocket car fell out with a bang that made them both cringe. "Well, that's out now!" She said in a falsely chipper tone. She whirled to him with a toothy grin. "Ready, pupa?"
"Uh-"
"Too bad!" She stepped over again, and gripped him under the arms and dragged him a few fet closer to the car. She expected him to heavier, but as she yanked on him, she could better see the shapes of his legs under the cloth of his pants. They were thin, almost shriveled. "Alriiiiiiiight! Now grab the edge of the car."
He didn't need to be told, he was already gripping it and hoisting himself, an old hand at this. He got himself so that he was clinging to the side, face level with the top, arms crooked over to keep him there. This was so incredibly silly.
Vriska bent and gripped him behind the knees, feeling the bone and wasted muscle. She realized he must have worn those large jeans with thick material so as to hide his legs. She lifted and uncerimoniously toppled him over the edge, and he disappeared with a bovine grunt. It was small enough in there that he had no problem resituating himself, sitting up after he tucked his legs down. He blinked at her, a touch of anxiety flooding back into his face.
She slapped her hands on the hood of the car, and leaned over, giving him another predatory grin. "Come on, Pupa Pan. Let's go find some treasure on this dump!"
And she tried to forget the feel of his skinny, sunken legs beneath her hands.
Strider brothers fics (many thanks go to egregiousBass for compiling them):
Musical Interlude- Dave tries to ironically score in the ongoing fight to one-up his brother. By joining the school chorus.
Trees and Tentacles- Bro's insomnia leads to inspired art and a little brotherly bonding time.
Undone- Dave tries to see his brother one last time.
Supermarket Shenanigans- in an early installment of the Striders, Bro looses Dave in a store. Cue panic.
My House- Dave butts heads with a lady friend of his brother's.
Binary- Bro's life and death are simple and convoluted affairs.
Climb- a brief look at where Bro is after he rocketboards off the roof.
Key- Bro teaches Dave the key behind being an ironic roof rapping ninja.
Parenthood- What Bro had to go through to make Dave what he is.
Parental Guidance- Parent teacher conferences are never fun for anyone involved.
Of Bathrooms and Beatdowns- The Striders' early morning rituals turn into unpleasant experiences at a party bro dj's at; aka roofies are never okay.
The Two of Us Are Dying- Bro has dreamt of his death sporadically for the past 13 years. Fallout.
Rap Battle!- One of the brothers' many sylladex hashrap battles. Chaos ensues.
If Illness was This One- Bro Strider is sick. Dave is not happy. The pumpkin shows up. [what pumpkin?]
Puppets and Porn- Bro Strider runs a faux/real puppet pr0n website from his home. With a minor in it. Of course someone was going to be totally not cool about it.
Puppet Porn pt II- Child protective services get called. Shit gets real. THE APARTMENT IS CLEAN OMGOMGOMGOMG
Voyeur- Jack Noir watches as Bro dies at his feet.
Surprise!- Dave wakes up on his birthday to the usual Strider shenanigans.
When "Puppets" Go Bad- Dave watches a clip of a video on Bro's computer of what looks to be a puppet trying to kill him in his sleep. Though, that's not quite the case.
Repost edit for some awkward phrasing and grammar. I really need to stop writing so late at night.
Vriska and Tavros, after they reconcile in Karkat's memo, after she kissed him and then dumped him on the floor. Surprisingly, writing Vriska was not as raeg-inducing as I expected it to be.
From the other side of the room, Tavros gave a little lowing sound. Vriska tossed a glance over her shoulder from her spot at her desk, and quirked a dark eyebrow at him. He was kind of scooching around, pushing with his arms at the floor. It was getting rapidly more pathetic as she continued watching, so she stood, smoothing out the smooth white dress, and crossed to stand over him.
She gave an impatient little scoff, towering above him, uncaring or oblivious of the angle she was offering his gaze. Not that it mattered; he wouldn't have noticed anyway. It was one of the most frustrating things about him, his complete cluelessness. It was a close second to his helplessness, which was yet another facet that for some reason sent her over the edge. Helpless things made her want to make them squirm, watch them writhe as she poked at their weak spots. Kill them slowly.
Her lips pursed as she considered his sprawled form. Her rage drained from her as she took in the bony shoulder and wiry arms, too skinny for the muscles that were on them. It was an impartial observation, like a cat noticing the limp of a mouse. Okay, so that wasn't entirely true; somewhere, buried under all that contempt and tired frustration was a small stirring of pity. He was pathetic, and totally at her mercy.
Still she didn't move, hands perched on her hips. They traded gazes. His large, liquid eyes had no emotional shielding on them; he was anxious and a little frightened, and god was he feeling sorry for himself for being so incompetent-
-she gave another sigh. No, that wasn't it. Really, she knew more than most what Tavros felt. He wasn't feeling sorry for himself. He felt lost.
God she hated this stupid empathy crap. It was such a load of steaming hoofbeast shit.
She could see traitorous little tear tracks that had started from the corner of his eyes and trickled down the hairless sides of his skull, leaving little shining spots on the base of his horns. She tisked, flipping her hair. "I told you not to cry," she scolded.
If anything, that seemed to hammer in the final nail for him. She had meant it lightly, despite her stinging tone, but fat tears started rolling from his eyes anyway, and for a rare, brief second, it caught her off guard. She was used to Tavros's wishy washy nature by now, but he never cried over things she did or said to him, no matter how viscious she got, and she certainly did test those limits at times.
Telling him not to cry because he didn't have the strength to facilitate his own movements was kind of like demanding he not be upset by the death of his ridiculous lusus. They were immutable facts of life, and there was nothing he could do to change it.
She gave another little sigh, as she stooped to latch under his shoulders, ignoring the sniffling. He was all bone and no kid squish, and he felt like some sick creature wobbling around, somehow still alive by some miracle that Alternia seemed to have forgotten about revoking. "Big baby," she said, matter of factly, which to her suprise did not make him cry harder. She supposed he was just ashamed of his own sheer inability. She had him a few inches off the ground, and he was pulling his elbows under him, levering himself upwith his hands. She could feel the muscles strain and twitch between his shoulder blades, beneath his thick jacket, and she added a little more boost, asking, "Can you even sit up by yourself?"
"Uh, not. Not really." He swallowed as he steadied himself, palms to the floor.
"Why? I thought it was just your legs you broke." She reached over and began untangling the rocket car from the thick strands of webbing in the corner.
"N-no. My spine broke. I can't, uh, really move around below my ribs."
Vriska's thick lashes batted slowly as she broke apart the grey material industriously, the soft hiss and pop of the webbing punctuating her words. "Wow, so you really are useless. Like, really useless."
"Yeah, pretty much."
The rocket car fell out with a bang that made them both cringe. "Well, that's out now!" She said in a falsely chipper tone. She whirled to him with a toothy grin. "Ready, pupa?"
"Uh-"
"Too bad!" She stepped over again, and gripped him under the arms and dragged him a few fet closer to the car. She expected him to heavier, but as she yanked on him, she could better see the shapes of his legs under the cloth of his pants. They were thin, almost shriveled. "Alriiiiiiiight! Now grab the edge of the car."
He didn't need to be told, he was already gripping it and hoisting himself, an old hand at this. He got himself so that he was clinging to the side, face level with the top, arms crooked over to keep him there. This was so incredibly silly.
Vriska bent and gripped him behind the knees, feeling the bone and wasted muscle. She realized he must have worn those large jeans with thick material so as to hide his legs. She lifted and uncerimoniously toppled him over the edge, and he disappeared with a bovine grunt. It was small enough in there that he had no problem resituating himself, sitting up after he tucked his legs down. He blinked at her, a touch of anxiety flooding back into his face.
She slapped her hands on the hood of the car, and leaned over, giving him another predatory grin. "Come on, Pupa Pan. Let's go find some treasure on this dump!"
And she tried to forget the feel of his skinny, sunken legs beneath her hands.
She took pleasure in the thought of facing down the demon. Her grin widened with a trace of smugness as she stretched her wings, ignoring the carnage around her. It wasn't her doing, after all.
She took pleasure in the thought of facing down the demon. Her grin widened in pure smugness as she stretched her wings, ignoring the carnage on her hands. He had practically asked for it, after all.
She played the games for fun. Nobody pushed her, or relied on her, or made her do this or that. Oh, she got a little interested in the levels, later, but she played the games for fun.
She played the games to live. She pushed herself, relied on herself. She will not let herself be eaten. She will not. She will not! Oh, she started to enjoy it, later, but she played the games to live.
Revenge felt good. Blood dribbling over her, blue and thick, as she hit, and she hit. He was screaming for her to stop but she didn't. She had to make her pay.
Revenge felt good. Blood dribbling from her face and shoulder as she concentrated, pushing the pain and using it for her own benefit. An ever dwindling part of her begged her to stop, but she didn't. She had to make her pay.
Sometimes she sees them looking at her with pity, or sadness, or even anger. She's okay with that. She doesn't care. They don't know, not really. They have no idea how loud the voices are, how strong the pull of fate, what it feels like to drown in that pull until her own emotions and wants are snuffed out. They have no idea, and she's okay with that. She'd be okay if they did know, too. She's okay with a lot of things.
Sometimes she sees them looking at her with pity, or sadness, but mostly anger. She's okay with that. She doesn't care. They don't know, not really. They have no idea what it's like to wake up with screaming nightmares about being eaten alive, or how hard it was for her to feed her lusus at first. They've never had to see the bloodless, mummified corpses of their lusii's last charges. They have no idea, and she doesn't care, because caring about the looks hurts too much, and eventually when even not caring starts to hurt, she forces herself to enjoy the looks, just like she enjoys the hurting and the killing and the act of betrayal. They SHOULD fear her. She's DANGEROUS. She's BETTER.
And here I was thinking you were only good at writing play scripts.
In my first readthrough I was actually thinking in terms of a split personality (which I thought was awesome as hell) but I reckon that's not what you intended :?
She raised the chainsaw, ready to make the first cut.
He raised the lance, ready to make his first stand.
Her lusus had raised her, loved her, supported her and made her strong.
Vriska had teased him, mocked him, meddled with him and tore him down.
That should have made it harder. Somehow, it made it easier.
That should have made it harder. Somehow, it made it easier.
Her lusus had loved her, and she had loved her lusus, and that was why she had to do this, that was why she had to carve into the flesh of a virgin mother grub and get the matriorb. Later, someone would point out the symmetry of it all, a mother grub raising a troll, who in turn would raise a mother grub. It made her smile. She liked symmetry.
She had teased him, yes, but he could bear that. Throw everything at him, weigh him down, make him fall so he’d never rise on his own two legs again. He could take that. It was when he learned what else she did that he snapped. Messing with Jade? Creating the demon? It made him…angry. He didn’t like being angry.
Jade green blood dribbled down her arm and caught the light of the sun as she hoisted it upward. The matriorb was the hope for her species, but it was more then that to her. It was her hope that there would BE a future. It was all she could take with her of her lusus. She hoped she could be as good a custodian as her lusus was.
Mud brown blood dribbled down her arm and caught the light of the glowbulbs as she hoisted them upward. His legs. She was seriously taunting him with his own FUCKING legs. He couldn’t hold back anymore. She’d offered him one free shot. He used it.
It was time.
It was time.
It was time to plant the seed of the new future. It was time to remember her lusus in the best way.
It was time to show her that she was done screwing everyone over. It was time to make her pay.
She stumbled as Eridan appeared, giving her one cold glance before moving on.
He stumbled as she slapped him, giving him one cold glance before impaling him with his own lance.
She screamed as the matriorb shattered.
He screamed as he fell.
She raised her chainsaw, ready to end it.
He raised his hand, not ready to die.
It was over.
It was over.
All but Death, can be Adjusted—
Dynasties repaired—
Systems—settled in their Sockets—
Citadels—dissolved—
Wastes of Lives—resown with Colors
By Succeeding Springs—
Death—unto itself—Exception—
Is exempt from Change—
-Emily Dickinson
A Death blow is a Life blow to Some
Who till they died, did not alive become—
Who had they lived, had died but when
They died, Vitality begun.
-Emily Dickinson
Originally Posted by Katrika
Duality
She took pleasure in the thought of facing down the demon. Her grin widened with a trace of smugness as she stretched her wings, ignoring the carnage around her. It wasn't her doing, after all.
She took pleasure in the thought of facing down the demon. Her grin widened in pure smugness as she stretched her wings, ignoring the carnage on her hands. He had practically asked for it, after all.
She played the games for fun. Nobody pushed her, or relied on her, or made her do this or that. Oh, she got a little interested in the levels, later, but she played the games for fun.
She played the games to live. She pushed herself, relied on herself. She will not let herself be eaten. She will not. She will not! Oh, she started to enjoy it, later, but she played the games to live.
Revenge felt good. Blood dribbling over her, blue and thick, as she hit, and she hit. He was screaming for her to stop but she didn't. She had to make her pay.
Revenge felt good. Blood dribbling from her face and shoulder as she concentrated, pushing the pain and using it for her own benefit. An ever dwindling part of her begged her to stop, but she didn't. She had to make her pay.
Sometimes she sees them looking at her with pity, or sadness, or even anger. She's okay with that. She doesn't care. They don't know, not really. They have no idea how loud the voices are, how strong the pull of fate, what it feels like to drown in that pull until her own emotions and wants are snuffed out. They have no idea, and she's okay with that. She'd be okay if they did know, too. She's okay with a lot of things.
Sometimes she sees them looking at her with pity, or sadness, but mostly anger. She's okay with that. She doesn't care. They don't know, not really. They have no idea what it's like to wake up with screaming nightmares about being eaten alive, or how hard it was for her to feed her lusus at first. They've never had to see the bloodless, mummified corpses of their lusii's last charges. They have no idea, and she doesn't care, because caring about the looks hurts too much, and eventually when even not caring starts to hurt, she forces herself to enjoy the looks, just like she enjoys the hurting and the killing and the act of betrayal. They SHOULD fear her. She's DANGEROUS. She's BETTER.
I haven't submitted to this thread in what feels like ages.
I am working on that sad!fic you're all so looking forward to expecting.
In the mean time give me something short term.
So name a character and a theme, I'll check back later and work on some quick poems or rhymes.
Till then.
honk
HONK
honk
DARK MOTHERFUCKING CARNIVAL, BROTHERS
Sunset and evening star
And one clear call for me
Let there be no moaning of the bar
When I've put out to sea...
"Help me! Help me! Alaiesce! Alaiesce!"
The elven girl lay where she had appeared in the Furthest Ring. She had been overcome by betrayal, despair, and heartbreak.
And now she was in Hell.
Her society spoke of the netherworld as a place of darkness and cacaphony. Screams would fill the air, they said, and you would never be allowed to go insane, for insanity begets insensation, and that is too good for the damned.
But she was not damned.
She played her part as the Gird'ti of Space. She was the tie that bound her friends together. She thought she had found trust in the agent who had betrayed evil and joined good.
But she found that in this universe, some have no allegiance.
She had fulfilled her duty. She was blessed, that was certain.
So why was it that her angel had not found her?
Had she transgressed? Was she damned by virute of the accident that was this game?
The inscrutable shrieks and bellows sounding around her seemed to say, yes. You are in the non-world, like the angel foretold. You are doomed. Our voices shall coalesce into a hellish song and we shall delight in its nonmeaning.
Join us.
A hand touched her shoulder.
"Hello."
It was the first word she understood since coming here. And it still sounded as a crawling roar attempting to be a word.
"I am the Empress. My name is F]f;r|. What's yours?"
The girl only cried. She could do no more.
"There's no need to be afraid. You're safe now. Death and sadness can't reach you anymore."
Lies. Lies from the throat of an Empress of Hell.
"This place is nothing but death!" She yelled. "Nothing can comfort those who are sent here! You are the ruler of this place, and your ill-concieved lies cannot pierce me! I am of the elves! I have lived my life fighting everything you are! You forebore my angel and you took me to where I don't belong! Send me back! SEND ME BACK!
"Listen to yourself. You speak out of grief. You may grieve. You speak out of anger. You may be angry. You speak out of sadness. You may be sad. But you are not cursed."
She turned to face her denier.
What lay underneath the terror may have been somewhat elvish long ago. But what it was was melded with what was not. The Empress was filled and overflowing with Nothing.
And Nothing was what Elves dreaded most.
She screamed the rest of her resolve away. She fell backward, petrified of the demonic presence that sought to undermine the truth she had known for generations.
And it was perhaps that scream that pierced the ring.
Green lightning crackled, spreading the monstrosities that had tried and failed to speak to her. Bright, rich, royal emerald green bisected the darkness, and seperated the girl from her tormentor.
The Empress, whatever she was, could not bear the touch of the girl's sun. She fled, assuming her true nature and speaking what could have been both a curse and an apology in a tongue that the Elves could not understand.
Her Angel had found her.
As he stood above her, seperate from the beasts and together with her in heart and mind, he spoke five words.
YOU WILL NOT TOUCH HER.
A/N
This is what happens when three distinct ideas enter the particle collider that is my mind. Those were:
A. What if there was a race that was completely incompatible with the Horrorterrors?
B. What if Doc Scratch barged in and saved Kanaya from the Furthest Ring?
C. What if I made a pseudosequel to LucidSeraph's And With Strange Aeons?
Be warned, that last one is quite distubing.
Last edited by Graven_Image; 01-26-2011 at 02:03 PM.
I haven't submitted to this thread in what feels like ages.
I am working on that sad!fic you're all so looking forward to expecting.
In the mean time give me something short term.
So name a character and a theme, I'll check back later and work on some quick poems or rhymes.
Till then.
honk
HONK
honk
DARK MOTHERFUCKING CARNIVAL, BROTHERS
Nepeta for character, Adorabloodthirsty for theme.
In which I try to acknowledge Kanaya's death in a way that is not 'sobbing like a wriggler'.
And fail.
Bearer
1.
You study history. Names and dates and battles stick to you like blood does to skin, on land, drying to a lace of dust after an hour of brilliance. On land you spend days- there are days, on land- and you spend days at a time reading the stones of conquerors until you crackle when you walk from crusted names.
And when days is over however many days that takes, you swim. That is to say, you forget. The individuals and their numbered deaths.
Because you study history, but you are interested in what is left of history after truth’s gore washes away. The clean bones of a good story: that’s what you like to hold, after the fact, in the wet silence of your head.
2.
So this is what you do.
You keep the vertebrae of each glorious victory, stringing them together into new arcs; and you keep the players, recurrent, their roles unchanging, war by war. Not those who were key only by chance; not those who simply received the right weapon at the right time, fools uplifted by chance and powers beyond their ken. No, you gather those who rise every time, of their own strength, just the same under their changing names. You distill a thousand princes to a single faceless figure, his outline nebulous but his core burning bright and true, and then you proceed to admire him immensely, and wonder if you look like him when you glower; forgetting, for a moment, that he has no one pair of eyes with which to compare your own.
As clear or clearer is the memory of the Empress he serves. It doesn’t matter which of the Empresses, because they’re all the same, really, the richness of their veins always telling true
(sometimes it catches you by the throat how royal she is. Royal, and alive, and near: perhaps even now breathing water you exhaled into legendary lungs)
and whether she is the first or the eleven-hundredth of the line, she is high and fine, stern and playful by turns, and though she gives the hero impossible tasks, she waits for him, after. She waits while he fills all the sixteen seas with blood, patiently: her gaze lingering and warm through the glass of her goggles.
From the details remaining about the various trolls who have unsuccessfully attempted to win the fin of an Empress in ages past, you piece together the rival, of the same caste as the hero and his match in all respects but one
(even if in the vividest of your dreams you cut him and he bleeds the wrong hue, bleeds something from directly across the wheel from what is proper, historical, right, and stares up at you with strange eyes)
And he comes into the tail with red hopes but soon finds enmity more satisfying than pity.
The other quadrants are more difficult. Not for him, never for him, great generals don’t have to scrounge to round out their perfect squares, but for you, because conciliation, for you, has only ever come cased in bitterness, like the living meat of a shellbeast in your mouth, with its residue of mucus over muscle.
3.
You meet Vris.
She’s beautiful and irritating and not really worthy of pitched affection from anyone, let alone you, but when she tosses her hair and laughs and beats you to the end you want to dig webbed fingers into her throat, which counts for something. And you are five sweeps old and you can’t expect the to find your soul mate immediately, and- in the meantime her glittering compound glances fill a hole in your bladder-based aquatic expanding and collapsing vascular system that you hadn’t known was there.
That’s worth something. It has to be.
“8mporaaaaaaaa,” she calls you, voice reaching tremulously up past the register of the storm that has both your ships ashudder. “Come and get me,” she types, lighting up your laptop when she’s only a few yards away, her other hand rattling with dice in motion.
You never do.
You worry about that: about why, when you’ve decided to make the best of this unsatisfactory and, if you are honest with yourself, possibly unwilling kismesis, you find yourself unable to really carry it through. Why you find yourself with your back still to the rail, until she sighs and lowers her fist and goes to slaughter children. The military leader you learned so thoroughly by reading and forgetting and fantasizing would never hesitate to grapple with his true-hated foe, you know.
4.
You begin to get an inkling, though, when she introduces you to Kan.
Kan speaks coolly, her elegant diction like the depths of water, and when she talks to you, slow and measured and precise, you can forgive yourself for not following Vris’ swagger down to the piled victims at once. You can forgive yourself for grimacing a little at Vris’ gruesome displays. And while you still cannot conceive of a moirail for your model, your perfect troll, without feeling bile rise in your throat, you can at last picture the dusky balance he engages in with an undeserving but ambitious antagonist; the artful distance maintained between them by a troll with blood like the surface of the sea on a stormy day.
You wish you knew what she looked like. Land dweller, and diurnal at that: exotic almost beyond imagining. You picture someone a little like Vris, but with a more restrained smile and darker skin through which the verdancy of her veins shows only in moments of great emotion, and then fleetingly, like something vivid stirring in the murk of the ocean floor. It doesn’t satisfy you.
Funny how the faces you want most, to hang on your pure bare fiction and admire, are most obscured. And how the faces you know best never look right.
(She says you weary her; she says you do it on porpoise. She laughs.)
5.
The game happens, in a sudden blossoming of dream and nightmare. You knew it was coming: Kan told you. Not all at once, but over seasons, piece by piece until you could fill in the rest yourself.
And you do. You think and think and think until everything is filled in (except the quadrant that really is filled, and how you wish it weren’t) and you just know that this is going to be perfect.
She gets you in. It feels, unmistakably, like history: the moment when the jug of water breaks expanding to a thing with the weight and solidity of years. The moment where the world tilts, like land is sea and a wrecked ship can heal.
Except-
6.
You get your wishes.
Alone, then, you have time to construct ever more elaborate scenarios for your little cast of movers and shakers. When your arms are shuddering from sustained fire, your thoughts are all of them. And because the Empress and the Rival hurt too much to consider (your face still stung from where his fucking mutant eyes dared to lash out, the beams’ overlap so close to her signature Tyrian that watching, your teeth grind down like pearls in reverse, pulled back to their beginnings) you devote loving thought to mounded ash and buried heat. In your mind’s eye, Kan dances, long hips twisting, and the hero and the object of his petty hate are silenced, standing, watching, tolerance made flesh.
You don’t begrudge her never coming to see you, alone of the others. An austispice so perfect shouldn’t be risked on angels.
But when you’ve found a wall high enough to hide behind and observe, for a little, the crowded raging skies, you think she’d have their grace and none of their violence, and her arms would spread like wings to shield hate from hate. And the next time you go out into the fray, you fire a little harder, for what they are and what they’re not.
7.
All of the wishes. All of them.
The battlefield, and you see her, know her instantly, her sign’s shade dragging your eye like a beacon. She does not look anything like Vris, as it turns out.
“Hi,” she says, a flicker of tooth in her small smile.
You say nothing. You can’t speak for happiness. It might not be official, still, but- she fights between you and another, Sollux and Vriska and briefly, terrifyingly, Gamzee, and throughout you are aflame with joy. Drowning in its heat.
It gives way to melancholy when you’re hurled into the Veil with the rest, when you see everything go wrong. A spark remains.
8.
The lighting aboard the asteroid is poor, with none of the poetry of sun in shallow water or of the unending brilliance in your Land, but she wears it well, you think giddily; as well or better than her skirts. The gentle gradation of shadow, which flattens the others and sucks life from their expressions, makes her look calm and wise.
Now, you think. Now. Here, at the end, where desperation illuminates necessity. She’ll do it of her own accord, seal the deal without more than one thought. All she needs is a little push.
You show her Lalonde’s work. You smolder like the best ocean vents. You say:
“We’re goin’ to need more wands.”
Her eyes slide toward you, a gold glimmer under lashes like kelp.
You wait. This is it. She’s going to step in. You have it all worked out, now. Vris was a conflict of romantic interests, and Sollux won’t ever reciprocate for long enough to make the need convincing, the yellow-livered little sponge that he is, but there are no such problems with Rose human. Kan will see that as clearly as you have, and she’ll say-
9.
“Okay,” she says.
10.
No.
No, that’s not how it goes.
“What?” you say.
“Okay,” she says (again), giving you a strange look. “I’ll make you a wand. You can use it to escalate these ongoing tensions with Rose. I’ll even pass on the news to her, if you like, since you no longer have use of a computer.”
You say nothing.
She takes you down to the alchemiter, and after a little fussing, during which you can only stare, numbly, at her narrow back, she produces a wand. You hardly give it a glance. You hear nothing, while she explains its functions to you, cool and careful and uncaring about you or Rose or, you have to assume, fucking anything.
When she presses it into your hand there are no fireworks: no special feeling to tell you that this is destiny, and history, and here. It’s ivory, smooth as her voice in your palm, and when you clench your fingers the carvings on its side bite into skin, like what she was actually saying, all along.
11.
But destiny, sometimes, happens by degrees. It was never holding the wand that was supposed to give you a sense of recognition. It’s not a rifle: the mechanism isn’t attached to its slim belly. There’s no brushed steel or oiled wood to sing of power to his fingertips. Only bone.
When you use it, though. When you follow her directions (which were not, could never really have been, commands).
Then light expands in interlinked globes from both ends, and you can feel it pushing through you even as you see it coiling out into the air; you can feel it. You are abrim with light, light trapped and knotted up in your volume like light in open sea, bent on itself to form an old, almost-forgotten design. Kan smiles, restrainedly, at your elbow, and doesn’t touch you. Doesn’t wrap a hand around your wrist. Doesn’t stop you from stalking away, prize raised.
To hell with romance, you think. With myth. History is history. Here and now you can do anything.
You can feel them, inside you: the waiting archetypes, the triumphs of your ancestors, polished to new brightness. Victory foreseen will be your backbone; pride remembered fanning out to push against curve of your ribs.
(And if, later, after almost everything-
-after purple thick and fast, because she wasn’t the Empress of your imagining, she was a dead end, a child without judgment, without heart-
-and you saw to that, didn’t you-
you saw strong black-tipped fingers tighten around a white lipstick case, and a tentacle of fluid jade move under stone, and wanted, in your bones, your real bones still there beneath calcified memory, for those same greenish fingers to tighten around your wrist-
-to restrain you, to dilute your hate as the sea does blood-
-well. There was a science to it: that was all. You master it soon enough.)
Nepeta for character, Adorabloodthirsty for theme.
The lioness ruffles her fur as she licks herself clean
she did it for herself, not to be mean
As her tongue trails across a mutilated spread
she cuddles close to her blood covered bed
Yawning loudly as she goes down for a nap
and then is soon awakened by a loud
PAP
The lioness hissed as she saw her new foe
and began to nibble on his dumb stupid toe
He begged and he pleaded
he cowered and cried
its not my fault he wanted to die
but now he is filling my stomach with juices so sweet
it’s the freshest of meat that can not be beat
and once I am done I will clean my face
and hunt down the rest of his adorable race
In which I try to acknowledge Kanaya's death in a way that is not 'sobbing like a wriggler'.
And fail.
Bearer
1.
You study history. Names and dates and battles stick to you like blood does to skin, on land, drying to a lace of dust after an hour of brilliance. On land you spend days- there are days, on land- and you spend days at a time reading the stones of conquerors until you crackle when you walk from crusted names.
And when days is over however many days that takes, you swim. That is to say, you forget. The individuals and their numbered deaths.
Because you study history, but you are interested in what is left of history after truth’s gore washes away. The clean bones of a good story: that’s what you like to hold, after the fact, in the wet silence of your head.
2.
So this is what you do.
You keep the vertebrae of each glorious victory, stringing them together into new arcs; and you keep the players, recurrent, their roles unchanging, war by war. Not those who were key only by chance; not those who simply received the right weapon at the right time, fools uplifted by chance and powers beyond their ken. No, you gather those who rise every time, of their own strength, just the same under their changing names. You distill a thousand princes to a single faceless figure, his outline nebulous but his core burning bright and true, and then you proceed to admire him immensely, and wonder if you look like him when you glower; forgetting, for a moment, that he has no one pair of eyes with which to compare your own.
As clear or clearer is the memory of the Empress he serves. It doesn’t matter which of the Empresses, because they’re all the same, really, the richness of their veins always telling true
(sometimes it catches you by the throat how royal she is. Royal, and alive, and near: perhaps even now breathing water you exhaled into legendary lungs)
and whether she is the first or the eleven-hundredth of the line, she is high and fine, stern and playful by turns, and though she gives the hero impossible tasks, she waits for him, after. She waits while he fills all the sixteen seas with blood, patiently: her gaze lingering and warm through the glass of her goggles.
From the details remaining about the various trolls who have unsuccessfully attempted to win the fin of an Empress in ages past, you piece together the rival, of the same caste as the hero and his match in all respects but one
(even if in the vividest of your dreams you cut him and he bleeds the wrong hue, bleeds something from directly across the wheel from what is proper, historical, right, and stares up at you with strange eyes)
And he comes into the tail with red hopes but soon finds enmity more satisfying than pity.
The other quadrants are more difficult. Not for him, never for him, great generals don’t have to scrounge to round out their perfect squares, but for you, because conciliation, for you, has only ever come cased in bitterness, like the living meat of a shellbeast in your mouth, with its residue of mucus over muscle.
3.
You meet Vris.
She’s beautiful and irritating and not really worthy of pitched affection from anyone, let alone you, but when she tosses her hair and laughs and beats you to the end you want to dig webbed fingers into her throat, which counts for something. And you are five sweeps old and you can’t expect the to find your soul mate immediately, and- in the meantime her glittering compound glances fill a hole in your bladder-based aquatic expanding and collapsing vascular system that you hadn’t known was there.
That’s worth something. It has to be.
“8mporaaaaaaaa,” she calls you, voice reaching tremulously up past the register of the storm that has both your ships ashudder. “Come and get me,” she types, lighting up your laptop when she’s only a few yards away, her other hand rattling with dice in motion.
You never do.
You worry about that: about why, when you’ve decided to make the best of this unsatisfactory and, if you are honest with yourself, possibly unwilling kismesis, you find yourself unable to really carry it through. Why you find yourself with your back still to the rail, until she sighs and lowers her fist and goes to slaughter children. The military leader you learned so thoroughly by reading and forgetting and fantasizing would never hesitate to grapple with his true-hated foe, you know.
4.
You begin to get an inkling, though, when she introduces you to Kan.
Kan speaks coolly, her elegant diction like the depths of water, and when she talks to you, slow and measured and precise, you can forgive yourself for not following Vris’ swagger down to the piled victims at once. You can forgive yourself for grimacing a little at Vris’ gruesome displays. And while you still cannot conceive of a moirail for your model, your perfect troll, without feeling bile rise in your throat, you can at last picture the dusky balance he engages in with an undeserving but ambitious antagonist; the artful distance maintained between them by a troll with blood like the surface of the sea on a stormy day.
You wish you knew what she looked like. Land dweller, and diurnal at that: exotic almost beyond imagining. You picture someone a little like Vris, but with a more restrained smile and darker skin through which the verdancy of her veins shows only in moments of great emotion, and then fleetingly, like something vivid stirring in the murk of the ocean floor. It doesn’t satisfy you.
Funny how the faces you want most, to hang on your pure bare fiction and admire, are most obscured. And how the faces you know best never look right.
(She says you weary her; she says you do it on porpoise. She laughs.)
5.
The game happens, in a sudden blossoming of dream and nightmare. You knew it was coming: Kan told you. Not all at once, but over seasons, piece by piece until you could fill in the rest yourself.
And you do. You think and think and think until everything is filled in (except the quadrant that really is filled, and how you wish it weren’t) and you just know that this is going to be perfect.
She gets you in. It feels, unmistakably, like history: the moment when the jug of water breaks expanding to a thing with the weight and solidity of years. The moment where the world tilts, like land is sea and a wrecked ship can heal.
Except-
6.
You get your wishes.
Alone, then, you have time to construct ever more elaborate scenarios for your little cast of movers and shakers. When your arms are shuddering from sustained fire, your thoughts are all of them. And because the Empress and the Rival hurt too much to consider (your face still stung from where his fucking mutant eyes dared to lash out, the beams’ overlap so close to her signature Tyrian that watching, your teeth grind down like pearls in reverse, pulled back to their beginnings) you devote loving thought to mounded ash and buried heat. In your mind’s eye, Kan dances, long hips twisting, and the hero and the object of his petty hate are silenced, standing, watching, tolerance made flesh.
You don’t begrudge her never coming to see you, alone of the others. An austispice so perfect shouldn’t be risked on angels.
But when you’ve found a wall high enough to hide behind and observe, for a little, the crowded raging skies, you think she’d have their grace and none of their violence, and her arms would spread like wings to shield hate from hate. And the next time you go out into the fray, you fire a little harder, for what they are and what they’re not.
7.
All of the wishes. All of them.
The battlefield, and you see her, know her instantly, her sign’s shade dragging your eye like a beacon. She does not look anything like Vris, as it turns out.
“Hi,” she says, a flicker of tooth in her small smile.
You say nothing. You can’t speak for happiness. It might not be official, still, but- she fights between you and another, Sollux and Vriska and briefly, terrifyingly, Gamzee, and throughout you are aflame with joy. Drowning in its heat.
It gives way to melancholy when you’re hurled into the Veil with the rest, when you see everything go wrong. A spark remains.
8.
The lighting aboard the asteroid is poor, with none of the poetry of sun in shallow water or of the unending brilliance in your Land, but she wears it well, you think giddily; as well or better than her skirts. The gentle gradation of shadow, which flattens the others and sucks life from their expressions, makes her look calm and wise.
Now, you think. Now. Here, at the end, where desperation illuminates necessity. She’ll do it of her own accord, seal the deal without more than one thought. All she needs is a little push.
You show her Lalonde’s work. You smolder like the best ocean vents. You say:
“We’re goin’ to need more wands.”
Her eyes slide toward you, a gold glimmer under lashes like kelp.
You wait. This is it. She’s going to step in. You have it all worked out, now. Vris was a conflict of romantic interests, and Sollux won’t ever reciprocate for long enough to make the need convincing, the yellow-livered little sponge that he is, but there are no such problems with Rose human. Kan will see that as clearly as you have, and she’ll say-
9.
“Okay,” she says.
10.
No.
No, that’s not how it goes.
“What?” you say.
“Okay,” she says (again), giving you a strange look. “I’ll make you a wand. You can use it to escalate these ongoing tensions with Rose. I’ll even pass on the news to her, if you like, since you no longer have use of a computer.”
You say nothing.
She takes you down to the alchemiter, and after a little fussing, during which you can only stare, numbly, at her narrow back, she produces a wand. You hardly give it a glance. You hear nothing, while she explains its functions to you, cool and careful and uncaring about you or Rose or, you have to assume, fucking anything.
When she presses it into your hand there are no fireworks: no special feeling to tell you that this is destiny, and history, and here. It’s ivory, smooth as her voice in your palm, and when you clench your fingers the carvings on its side bite into skin, like what she was actually saying, all along.
11.
But destiny, sometimes, happens by degrees. It was never holding the wand that was supposed to give you a sense of recognition. It’s not a rifle: the mechanism isn’t attached to its slim belly. There’s no brushed steel or oiled wood to sing of power to his fingertips. Only bone.
When you use it, though. When you follow her directions (which were not, could never really have been, commands).
Then light expands in interlinked globes from both ends, and you can feel it pushing through you even as you see it coiling out into the air; you can feel it. You are abrim with light, light trapped and knotted up in your volume like light in open sea, bent on itself to form an old, almost-forgotten design. Kan smiles, restrainedly, at your elbow, and doesn’t touch you. Doesn’t wrap a hand around your wrist. Doesn’t stop you from stalking away, prize raised.
To hell with romance, you think. With myth. History is history. Here and now you can do anything.
You can feel them, inside you: the waiting archetypes, the triumphs of your ancestors, polished to new brightness. Victory foreseen will be your backbone; pride remembered fanning out to push against curve of your ribs.
(And if, later, after almost everything-
-after purple thick and fast, because she wasn’t the Empress of your imagining, she was a dead end, a child without judgment, without heart-
-and you saw to that, didn’t you-
you saw strong black-tipped fingers tighten around a white lipstick case, and a tentacle of fluid jade move under stone, and wanted, in your bones, your real bones still there beneath calcified memory, for those same greenish fingers to tighten around your wrist-
-to restrain you, to dilute your hate as the sea does blood-
-well. There was a science to it: that was all. You master it soon enough.)
In which I try to acknowledge Kanaya's death in a way that is not 'sobbing like a wriggler'.
And fail.
Bearer
1.
You study history. Names and dates and battles stick to you like blood does to skin, on land, drying to a lace of dust after an hour of brilliance. On land you spend days- there are days, on land- and you spend days at a time reading the stones of conquerors until you crackle when you walk from crusted names.
And when days is over however many days that takes, you swim. That is to say, you forget. The individuals and their numbered deaths.
Because you study history, but you are interested in what is left of history after truth’s gore washes away. The clean bones of a good story: that’s what you like to hold, after the fact, in the wet silence of your head.
2.
So this is what you do.
You keep the vertebrae of each glorious victory, stringing them together into new arcs; and you keep the players, recurrent, their roles unchanging, war by war. Not those who were key only by chance; not those who simply received the right weapon at the right time, fools uplifted by chance and powers beyond their ken. No, you gather those who rise every time, of their own strength, just the same under their changing names. You distill a thousand princes to a single faceless figure, his outline nebulous but his core burning bright and true, and then you proceed to admire him immensely, and wonder if you look like him when you glower; forgetting, for a moment, that he has no one pair of eyes with which to compare your own.
As clear or clearer is the memory of the Empress he serves. It doesn’t matter which of the Empresses, because they’re all the same, really, the richness of their veins always telling true
(sometimes it catches you by the throat how royal she is. Royal, and alive, and near: perhaps even now breathing water you exhaled into legendary lungs)
and whether she is the first or the eleven-hundredth of the line, she is high and fine, stern and playful by turns, and though she gives the hero impossible tasks, she waits for him, after. She waits while he fills all the sixteen seas with blood, patiently: her gaze lingering and warm through the glass of her goggles.
From the details remaining about the various trolls who have unsuccessfully attempted to win the fin of an Empress in ages past, you piece together the rival, of the same caste as the hero and his match in all respects but one
(even if in the vividest of your dreams you cut him and he bleeds the wrong hue, bleeds something from directly across the wheel from what is proper, historical, right, and stares up at you with strange eyes)
And he comes into the tail with red hopes but soon finds enmity more satisfying than pity.
The other quadrants are more difficult. Not for him, never for him, great generals don’t have to scrounge to round out their perfect squares, but for you, because conciliation, for you, has only ever come cased in bitterness, like the living meat of a shellbeast in your mouth, with its residue of mucus over muscle.
3.
You meet Vris.
She’s beautiful and irritating and not really worthy of pitched affection from anyone, let alone you, but when she tosses her hair and laughs and beats you to the end you want to dig webbed fingers into her throat, which counts for something. And you are five sweeps old and you can’t expect the to find your soul mate immediately, and- in the meantime her glittering compound glances fill a hole in your bladder-based aquatic expanding and collapsing vascular system that you hadn’t known was there.
That’s worth something. It has to be.
“8mporaaaaaaaa,” she calls you, voice reaching tremulously up past the register of the storm that has both your ships ashudder. “Come and get me,” she types, lighting up your laptop when she’s only a few yards away, her other hand rattling with dice in motion.
You never do.
You worry about that: about why, when you’ve decided to make the best of this unsatisfactory and, if you are honest with yourself, possibly unwilling kismesis, you find yourself unable to really carry it through. Why you find yourself with your back still to the rail, until she sighs and lowers her fist and goes to slaughter children. The military leader you learned so thoroughly by reading and forgetting and fantasizing would never hesitate to grapple with his true-hated foe, you know.
4.
You begin to get an inkling, though, when she introduces you to Kan.
Kan speaks coolly, her elegant diction like the depths of water, and when she talks to you, slow and measured and precise, you can forgive yourself for not following Vris’ swagger down to the piled victims at once. You can forgive yourself for grimacing a little at Vris’ gruesome displays. And while you still cannot conceive of a moirail for your model, your perfect troll, without feeling bile rise in your throat, you can at last picture the dusky balance he engages in with an undeserving but ambitious antagonist; the artful distance maintained between them by a troll with blood like the surface of the sea on a stormy day.
You wish you knew what she looked like. Land dweller, and diurnal at that: exotic almost beyond imagining. You picture someone a little like Vris, but with a more restrained smile and darker skin through which the verdancy of her veins shows only in moments of great emotion, and then fleetingly, like something vivid stirring in the murk of the ocean floor. It doesn’t satisfy you.
Funny how the faces you want most, to hang on your pure bare fiction and admire, are most obscured. And how the faces you know best never look right.
(She says you weary her; she says you do it on porpoise. She laughs.)
5.
The game happens, in a sudden blossoming of dream and nightmare. You knew it was coming: Kan told you. Not all at once, but over seasons, piece by piece until you could fill in the rest yourself.
And you do. You think and think and think until everything is filled in (except the quadrant that really is filled, and how you wish it weren’t) and you just know that this is going to be perfect.
She gets you in. It feels, unmistakably, like history: the moment when the jug of water breaks expanding to a thing with the weight and solidity of years. The moment where the world tilts, like land is sea and a wrecked ship can heal.
Except-
6.
You get your wishes.
Alone, then, you have time to construct ever more elaborate scenarios for your little cast of movers and shakers. When your arms are shuddering from sustained fire, your thoughts are all of them. And because the Empress and the Rival hurt too much to consider (your face still stung from where his fucking mutant eyes dared to lash out, the beams’ overlap so close to her signature Tyrian that watching, your teeth grind down like pearls in reverse, pulled back to their beginnings) you devote loving thought to mounded ash and buried heat. In your mind’s eye, Kan dances, long hips twisting, and the hero and the object of his petty hate are silenced, standing, watching, tolerance made flesh.
You don’t begrudge her never coming to see you, alone of the others. An austispice so perfect shouldn’t be risked on angels.
But when you’ve found a wall high enough to hide behind and observe, for a little, the crowded raging skies, you think she’d have their grace and none of their violence, and her arms would spread like wings to shield hate from hate. And the next time you go out into the fray, you fire a little harder, for what they are and what they’re not.
7.
All of the wishes. All of them.
The battlefield, and you see her, know her instantly, her sign’s shade dragging your eye like a beacon. She does not look anything like Vris, as it turns out.
“Hi,” she says, a flicker of tooth in her small smile.
You say nothing. You can’t speak for happiness. It might not be official, still, but- she fights between you and another, Sollux and Vriska and briefly, terrifyingly, Gamzee, and throughout you are aflame with joy. Drowning in its heat.
It gives way to melancholy when you’re hurled into the Veil with the rest, when you see everything go wrong. A spark remains.
8.
The lighting aboard the asteroid is poor, with none of the poetry of sun in shallow water or of the unending brilliance in your Land, but she wears it well, you think giddily; as well or better than her skirts. The gentle gradation of shadow, which flattens the others and sucks life from their expressions, makes her look calm and wise.
Now, you think. Now. Here, at the end, where desperation illuminates necessity. She’ll do it of her own accord, seal the deal without more than one thought. All she needs is a little push.
You show her Lalonde’s work. You smolder like the best ocean vents. You say:
“We’re goin’ to need more wands.”
Her eyes slide toward you, a gold glimmer under lashes like kelp.
You wait. This is it. She’s going to step in. You have it all worked out, now. Vris was a conflict of romantic interests, and Sollux won’t ever reciprocate for long enough to make the need convincing, the yellow-livered little sponge that he is, but there are no such problems with Rose human. Kan will see that as clearly as you have, and she’ll say-
9.
“Okay,” she says.
10.
No.
No, that’s not how it goes.
“What?” you say.
“Okay,” she says (again), giving you a strange look. “I’ll make you a wand. You can use it to escalate these ongoing tensions with Rose. I’ll even pass on the news to her, if you like, since you no longer have use of a computer.”
You say nothing.
She takes you down to the alchemiter, and after a little fussing, during which you can only stare, numbly, at her narrow back, she produces a wand. You hardly give it a glance. You hear nothing, while she explains its functions to you, cool and careful and uncaring about you or Rose or, you have to assume, fucking anything.
When she presses it into your hand there are no fireworks: no special feeling to tell you that this is destiny, and history, and here. It’s ivory, smooth as her voice in your palm, and when you clench your fingers the carvings on its side bite into skin, like what she was actually saying, all along.
11.
But destiny, sometimes, happens by degrees. It was never holding the wand that was supposed to give you a sense of recognition. It’s not a rifle: the mechanism isn’t attached to its slim belly. There’s no brushed steel or oiled wood to sing of power to his fingertips. Only bone.
When you use it, though. When you follow her directions (which were not, could never really have been, commands).
Then light expands in interlinked globes from both ends, and you can feel it pushing through you even as you see it coiling out into the air; you can feel it. You are abrim with light, light trapped and knotted up in your volume like light in open sea, bent on itself to form an old, almost-forgotten design. Kan smiles, restrainedly, at your elbow, and doesn’t touch you. Doesn’t wrap a hand around your wrist. Doesn’t stop you from stalking away, prize raised.
To hell with romance, you think. With myth. History is history. Here and now you can do anything.
You can feel them, inside you: the waiting archetypes, the triumphs of your ancestors, polished to new brightness. Victory foreseen will be your backbone; pride remembered fanning out to push against curve of your ribs.
(And if, later, after almost everything-
-after purple thick and fast, because she wasn’t the Empress of your imagining, she was a dead end, a child without judgment, without heart-
-and you saw to that, didn’t you-
you saw strong black-tipped fingers tighten around a white lipstick case, and a tentacle of fluid jade move under stone, and wanted, in your bones, your real bones still there beneath calcified memory, for those same greenish fingers to tighten around your wrist-
-to restrain you, to dilute your hate as the sea does blood-
-well. There was a science to it: that was all. You master it soon enough.)
In which I try to acknowledge Kanaya's death in a way that is not 'sobbing like a wriggler'.
And fail.
Bearer
1.
You study history. Names and dates and battles stick to you like blood does to skin, on land, drying to a lace of dust after an hour of brilliance. On land you spend days- there are days, on land- and you spend days at a time reading the stones of conquerors until you crackle when you walk from crusted names.
And when days is over however many days that takes, you swim. That is to say, you forget. The individuals and their numbered deaths.
Because you study history, but you are interested in what is left of history after truth’s gore washes away. The clean bones of a good story: that’s what you like to hold, after the fact, in the wet silence of your head.
2.
So this is what you do.
You keep the vertebrae of each glorious victory, stringing them together into new arcs; and you keep the players, recurrent, their roles unchanging, war by war. Not those who were key only by chance; not those who simply received the right weapon at the right time, fools uplifted by chance and powers beyond their ken. No, you gather those who rise every time, of their own strength, just the same under their changing names. You distill a thousand princes to a single faceless figure, his outline nebulous but his core burning bright and true, and then you proceed to admire him immensely, and wonder if you look like him when you glower; forgetting, for a moment, that he has no one pair of eyes with which to compare your own.
As clear or clearer is the memory of the Empress he serves. It doesn’t matter which of the Empresses, because they’re all the same, really, the richness of their veins always telling true
(sometimes it catches you by the throat how royal she is. Royal, and alive, and near: perhaps even now breathing water you exhaled into legendary lungs)
and whether she is the first or the eleven-hundredth of the line, she is high and fine, stern and playful by turns, and though she gives the hero impossible tasks, she waits for him, after. She waits while he fills all the sixteen seas with blood, patiently: her gaze lingering and warm through the glass of her goggles.
From the details remaining about the various trolls who have unsuccessfully attempted to win the fin of an Empress in ages past, you piece together the rival, of the same caste as the hero and his match in all respects but one
(even if in the vividest of your dreams you cut him and he bleeds the wrong hue, bleeds something from directly across the wheel from what is proper, historical, right, and stares up at you with strange eyes)
And he comes into the tail with red hopes but soon finds enmity more satisfying than pity.
The other quadrants are more difficult. Not for him, never for him, great generals don’t have to scrounge to round out their perfect squares, but for you, because conciliation, for you, has only ever come cased in bitterness, like the living meat of a shellbeast in your mouth, with its residue of mucus over muscle.
3.
You meet Vris.
She’s beautiful and irritating and not really worthy of pitched affection from anyone, let alone you, but when she tosses her hair and laughs and beats you to the end you want to dig webbed fingers into her throat, which counts for something. And you are five sweeps old and you can’t expect the to find your soul mate immediately, and- in the meantime her glittering compound glances fill a hole in your bladder-based aquatic expanding and collapsing vascular system that you hadn’t known was there.
That’s worth something. It has to be.
“8mporaaaaaaaa,” she calls you, voice reaching tremulously up past the register of the storm that has both your ships ashudder. “Come and get me,” she types, lighting up your laptop when she’s only a few yards away, her other hand rattling with dice in motion.
You never do.
You worry about that: about why, when you’ve decided to make the best of this unsatisfactory and, if you are honest with yourself, possibly unwilling kismesis, you find yourself unable to really carry it through. Why you find yourself with your back still to the rail, until she sighs and lowers her fist and goes to slaughter children. The military leader you learned so thoroughly by reading and forgetting and fantasizing would never hesitate to grapple with his true-hated foe, you know.
4.
You begin to get an inkling, though, when she introduces you to Kan.
Kan speaks coolly, her elegant diction like the depths of water, and when she talks to you, slow and measured and precise, you can forgive yourself for not following Vris’ swagger down to the piled victims at once. You can forgive yourself for grimacing a little at Vris’ gruesome displays. And while you still cannot conceive of a moirail for your model, your perfect troll, without feeling bile rise in your throat, you can at last picture the dusky balance he engages in with an undeserving but ambitious antagonist; the artful distance maintained between them by a troll with blood like the surface of the sea on a stormy day.
You wish you knew what she looked like. Land dweller, and diurnal at that: exotic almost beyond imagining. You picture someone a little like Vris, but with a more restrained smile and darker skin through which the verdancy of her veins shows only in moments of great emotion, and then fleetingly, like something vivid stirring in the murk of the ocean floor. It doesn’t satisfy you.
Funny how the faces you want most, to hang on your pure bare fiction and admire, are most obscured. And how the faces you know best never look right.
(She says you weary her; she says you do it on porpoise. She laughs.)
5.
The game happens, in a sudden blossoming of dream and nightmare. You knew it was coming: Kan told you. Not all at once, but over seasons, piece by piece until you could fill in the rest yourself.
And you do. You think and think and think until everything is filled in (except the quadrant that really is filled, and how you wish it weren’t) and you just know that this is going to be perfect.
She gets you in. It feels, unmistakably, like history: the moment when the jug of water breaks expanding to a thing with the weight and solidity of years. The moment where the world tilts, like land is sea and a wrecked ship can heal.
Except-
6.
You get your wishes.
Alone, then, you have time to construct ever more elaborate scenarios for your little cast of movers and shakers. When your arms are shuddering from sustained fire, your thoughts are all of them. And because the Empress and the Rival hurt too much to consider (your face still stung from where his fucking mutant eyes dared to lash out, the beams’ overlap so close to her signature Tyrian that watching, your teeth grind down like pearls in reverse, pulled back to their beginnings) you devote loving thought to mounded ash and buried heat. In your mind’s eye, Kan dances, long hips twisting, and the hero and the object of his petty hate are silenced, standing, watching, tolerance made flesh.
You don’t begrudge her never coming to see you, alone of the others. An austispice so perfect shouldn’t be risked on angels.
But when you’ve found a wall high enough to hide behind and observe, for a little, the crowded raging skies, you think she’d have their grace and none of their violence, and her arms would spread like wings to shield hate from hate. And the next time you go out into the fray, you fire a little harder, for what they are and what they’re not.
7.
All of the wishes. All of them.
The battlefield, and you see her, know her instantly, her sign’s shade dragging your eye like a beacon. She does not look anything like Vris, as it turns out.
“Hi,” she says, a flicker of tooth in her small smile.
You say nothing. You can’t speak for happiness. It might not be official, still, but- she fights between you and another, Sollux and Vriska and briefly, terrifyingly, Gamzee, and throughout you are aflame with joy. Drowning in its heat.
It gives way to melancholy when you’re hurled into the Veil with the rest, when you see everything go wrong. A spark remains.
8.
The lighting aboard the asteroid is poor, with none of the poetry of sun in shallow water or of the unending brilliance in your Land, but she wears it well, you think giddily; as well or better than her skirts. The gentle gradation of shadow, which flattens the others and sucks life from their expressions, makes her look calm and wise.
Now, you think. Now. Here, at the end, where desperation illuminates necessity. She’ll do it of her own accord, seal the deal without more than one thought. All she needs is a little push.
You show her Lalonde’s work. You smolder like the best ocean vents. You say:
“We’re goin’ to need more wands.”
Her eyes slide toward you, a gold glimmer under lashes like kelp.
You wait. This is it. She’s going to step in. You have it all worked out, now. Vris was a conflict of romantic interests, and Sollux won’t ever reciprocate for long enough to make the need convincing, the yellow-livered little sponge that he is, but there are no such problems with Rose human. Kan will see that as clearly as you have, and she’ll say-
9.
“Okay,” she says.
10.
No.
No, that’s not how it goes.
“What?” you say.
“Okay,” she says (again), giving you a strange look. “I’ll make you a wand. You can use it to escalate these ongoing tensions with Rose. I’ll even pass on the news to her, if you like, since you no longer have use of a computer.”
You say nothing.
She takes you down to the alchemiter, and after a little fussing, during which you can only stare, numbly, at her narrow back, she produces a wand. You hardly give it a glance. You hear nothing, while she explains its functions to you, cool and careful and uncaring about you or Rose or, you have to assume, fucking anything.
When she presses it into your hand there are no fireworks: no special feeling to tell you that this is destiny, and history, and here. It’s ivory, smooth as her voice in your palm, and when you clench your fingers the carvings on its side bite into skin, like what she was actually saying, all along.
11.
But destiny, sometimes, happens by degrees. It was never holding the wand that was supposed to give you a sense of recognition. It’s not a rifle: the mechanism isn’t attached to its slim belly. There’s no brushed steel or oiled wood to sing of power to his fingertips. Only bone.
When you use it, though. When you follow her directions (which were not, could never really have been, commands).
Then light expands in interlinked globes from both ends, and you can feel it pushing through you even as you see it coiling out into the air; you can feel it. You are abrim with light, light trapped and knotted up in your volume like light in open sea, bent on itself to form an old, almost-forgotten design. Kan smiles, restrainedly, at your elbow, and doesn’t touch you. Doesn’t wrap a hand around your wrist. Doesn’t stop you from stalking away, prize raised.
To hell with romance, you think. With myth. History is history. Here and now you can do anything.
You can feel them, inside you: the waiting archetypes, the triumphs of your ancestors, polished to new brightness. Victory foreseen will be your backbone; pride remembered fanning out to push against curve of your ribs.
(And if, later, after almost everything-
-after purple thick and fast, because she wasn’t the Empress of your imagining, she was a dead end, a child without judgment, without heart-
-and you saw to that, didn’t you-
you saw strong black-tipped fingers tighten around a white lipstick case, and a tentacle of fluid jade move under stone, and wanted, in your bones, your real bones still there beneath calcified memory, for those same greenish fingers to tighten around your wrist-
-to restrain you, to dilute your hate as the sea does blood-
-well. There was a science to it: that was all. You master it soon enough.)
@cephalopodConcupiscence (what an apposite username):
I love how you worked in Eridan's interest in history - something I haven't seen explored before. Your use of language is fantastic as well - there's something very lyrical about your sentences, and you manage to make Eridan comprehensible without taking away from what a massive wanker he is. If I were going to critique anything, I would say that on occasion your use of metaphor and metonymy becomes over-ornamental and makes it hard to follow the story. While that very ornate heightened style is pretty apposite to Eridan's delusions of grandeur, I think if it gets to the point of obscurity you might want to tone it down a little, or at least make it clearer who or what is being discussed.
To go into a little more detail, this was actually one of my favourite lines:
your face still stung from where his fucking mutant eyes dared to lash out, the beams’ overlap so close to her signature Tyrian that watching, your teeth grind down like pearls in reverse, pulled back to their beginnings
The cascading clauses give an almost cinematic effect, and while I was unsure about "Tyrian", on consideration it's actually perfect for Eridan and his obsession with all things royal and epic, not to mention the aquatic origins of Tyrian dye (in fact the aquatic imagery throughout is brilliantly evocative). However, your tendency to separate off limbs and body parts from their respective owners is a little awkward and lacks clarity - not to mention that the idea of Sollux's eyes lashing out all by themselves is a bit bizarre. The idea of teeth grinding themselves is less peculiar somehow, but it still feels more natural to say "he ground his teeth" rather than "his teeth ground".
I'm sorry if this seems hypercritical! I do it only out of love, because your story is otherwise genuinely excellent.
Nepeta for character, Adorabloodthirsty for theme.
The lioness ruffles her fur as she licks herself clean
she did it for herself, not to be mean
As her tongue trails across a mutilated spread
she cuddles close to her blood covered bed
Yawning loudly as she goes down for a nap
and then is soon awakened by a loud
PAP
The lioness hissed as she saw her new foe
and began to nibble on his dumb stupid toe
He begged and he pleaded
he cowered and cried
its not my fault he wanted to die
but now he is filling my stomach with juices so sweet
it’s the freshest of meat that can not be beat
and once I am done I will clean my face
and hunt down the rest of his adorable race
Author's notes
This was pretty fun and simple
I am up for more.
That was great. I look forward to more of these.
Also, here's a thing.
Royal Duties
Karkat starred at the body, breathing through his mouth; the smell was too much for him. It was a stupid idea, really. Jack had already destroyed Prospit, and the chances that her dreamself still existed was too slim to even guess at.
But while there was still a chance, he owed it to her to try.
Getting down on his knees, he cradled her body, trying not to look at the gaping hole through her torso. Nothing could block out the squelching noises, or stench of entrails and blood, or the lukewarm feel of a cooling body. Placing one hand behind her head, Karkat tilted her head up, a thin line of green blood began to trail from the corner of her mouth, and he spent several seconds debating whether he should go through with this. He shuddered when he placed his hand down next to her to stabilize himself, and pulled it away, leaving a hand-print in the slowly growing pool of blood. He looked at the stain on his hand before a grim determination set in, and he lowered his hand back down.
Pausing to take a deep breath, Karkat leaned in quickly and kissed her, suppressing the urge to gag, the taste fouling his mouth. He wondered what exactly he was supposed to be doing; the technical details of reviving someone via a kiss on the lips was something he had never bothered to learn. Was there some sort of technique he was supposed to be doing, some sort of incantation? Maybe he should have payed more attention when Feferi revived Sollux, then he wouldn't be sitting here looking like some sort of deranged pervert.
After a solid minute of pressing warm lips to cold, Karkat pulled back with a gasp, taking air in great gulps. He looked back down at Kanaya and waited for something to happen.
Nothing happened. Kanaya continued to be cold and dead.
"No shit, fuckass. It's the dreamself that revives, not the corpse."
Karkat chided himself, shaking his head.
"Kan...Kanaya. I know you can't hear me, but...please, wake up. Gamzee's gone insane, and everything's going to shit. C'mon, I can't deal with all this without you."
Blots of watery bright-red started to fall on Kanaya's face, streaming down to mix with jade green.
"It doesn't matter that Prospit's been blown up, that doesn't mean you were there when it happened...so just, please..."
Karkat lowered his head until his hair just barely brushed her forehead.
"...please, wake up."
When the Prince abdicates his throne, it is up to the Knight to take on his duties.
This is about some kids playing SBURB. They may or may not be familiar kids...
Story: Begin
dauntlessAuthority[DA] began pestering aphonicChroma[AC]
dA: Okay, so, are you ready?
aC: no, not really.
dA: What!? Why not!? >:O
aC: because, my computer is acting up.
aC: and because my mom is sleeping and i don't want to wake her up.
aC: ok?
dA: >:I
dA: I don't really care! I just want to play!
aC: you're pretty over dramatic.
dA: I'm not over dramatic, I'm normally dramatic!
aC: yeah, okay, whatever.
aC: why do you want to play this so bad?
dA: Because it'll be fun, duh!
dA: My home is boring and I've beaten all of my video games!
dA: You can only play the same games so many times before they become boring!
aC: okay, i get it.
aC: my computer should be better in a minute, anyway.
dA: What is even wrong with your computer?
aC: downloads aren't working.
dA: Your computer sucks!
aC: yeah, it does.
aC: tell the others i'll be ready in a minute.
dA: Don't keep me waiting!
aC: whatever.
dauntlessAuthority[DA] began pestering elementSubjugater[ES]
dA: AC isn't ready yet! >:I
eS: let me guess
eS: his computer is acting up
dA: Yup!
eS: it's always acting up
eS: we need to get him a new computer
dA: He says it'll be done fixing itself in a minute, anyway.
dA: But a minute is toooooo long!
eS: no
eS: you're just reaaaaally impatient
dA: Well!
eS: not everyone has the fastest computer around babe
dA: >:(
dA: Whatever!
dA: Are you ready?
eS: yeah totes
eS: we're done moving in and stuff too
eS: so my computer is all unpacked
eS: shit is ready to go
dA: Excellent, all as planned!
dA: Well, I've got to tell UI now!
dA: You stay ready.
eS: i don't think i could ever be more ready
dA: Good!
elementSubjugator[ES] began pestering aphonicChroma[AC]
eS: okay dude
eS: you need to keep your girlfriend under control
eS: she is ridiculously annoying today
aC: she isn't my girlfriend.
eS: well
eS: color me surprised
eS: i'm pretty sure she talks to you the most and she seems pretty flirty with you
aC: well then i think you're retarded.
eS: whatever bro
eS: just hurry up with your computer
eS: so i don't have to keep being bugged by her
-- aphonicChroma's computer has shut off --
eS: ...
eS: what the shit
dauntlessAuthority[DA] began pestering universalInconsistency[UI]
dA: AC is almost ready, but his computer is being a butt!
uI: I figured
uI: Im pretty sure his computer is famous for its terribleness
dA: Everyone else is ready, though(?)
uI: Yes Im ready as well
uI: I am honestly wondering how fun this game will be
uI: Games promising total immersion have never been quite
uI: Good
dA: No, I'm pretty sure this will be the best game!
dA: Have you seen it's reviews?
uI: No
uI: I dont read magazines
uI: Kind of a waste of my time
dA: :T
dA: Well, anyway.
dA: Do we know who's connecting to who?
uI: No but I figured youd want to be connected to AC
dA: And why is that?
uI: You have affections for him right
dA: No! Where did you even get that idea?
uI: From how you act around him for long periods of time
uI: Which is most of the time you talk
uI: I think youve logged more hours talking to him than any of us
dA: That's because I have to bother him the most!
dA: He's always holding up my plans! >:O
uI: Maybe then
uI: You should stop basing your schedule around him
uI: Hmmm
dA: ...
dA: Shut up!!!!!!
dA: Listen, my mom and her friend are bothering me to come downstairs for something, I have to go!
uI: Yes sure
uI: Have fun being downstairs
uI: Hahaha ;)
dA: >:(
No but seriously, good fic. I hope it turns out to be suitably awesome.
Quotes
"It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag."
-Father Dennis Edward O'Brien/USMC
Courage is endurance for one moment more....
-Unknown Marine Second Lieutenant in Vietnam