LyrexJulian

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blah blah blah I wrote some of this alre--no I didn't. I just did it in my head. Okay. So what happens after this.
Okay, for now I'm cutting off the date, putting it in storage until I can figure it out or not. Probably not.
Dammit, where is my sexual tension? It was everywhere in the first drafts, and so far, Julian is afraid of Lyre and angry at her. I need to turn that around. Get him
So here's what happens. At some point Julian's mom really beats on him. Not after the photoshoot, later. I'll worry about it later.
Julian is feeling especially pressured by being blackmailed by a wilder, his mom for hanging with Tris, who has just forbidden him to do so any longer, and Tris gets pissed by Julian's lack of balls when he goes along with it, by getting a panic attack at a party when someone toxxes him with a semi-paral tox and dump him in a closet and close the door on him as a prank(he sobs and pisses himself) which results in a violent flashback, and in the end he stumbles in Masquerade for reasons he can't understand and Lyre finds him at the bar.
She asks him what he's doing there, saying she's done her research and knows his mom is against the whole fem/masc thing.
"Yeah. Whatever. /Vack/ her," I mumbled, reaching for my beer.
"I think you've had quite enough," she said, cutting me off and pulling it away. I grabbed her arm, glaring murderously at her.
"T'night, of /aall nnightss/, isssnot tha night t get b'tween me and /mmy vackingg beer/," I snarled. Sweet oblivion. Simple, mindless drunken stupor. That was all I asked. Too much? Apparently.
"Am I going to have to ask you to leave?" she asked, her voice cold, the black, furry lips peeling back over the wicked sharp teeth. I wasn't drunk enough yet to forget serious shit, but for a moment, I had actually forgotten she was a bouncer.
"No," I mumbled. "Juss...please, juss let me have the beer..." I could feel my face beginning to crumble as everything built up in my throat, rising rapidly and smashing into the walls of sullen, angry indifference I'd been building all evening.
Not now. Not now not now not now not now...
"Just leave me alone," I said, my voice quavering as I weakly tugged at my glass, encased in her grip. "Pllease jus go away an leave me alooone..."
Fat, glimmering tears were pooling in the corners of my eyes and beginning to spill over. I let my head slump down on the bar, hoping she hadn't seen.
She had. I knew it because I felt her let go of the beer. I dragged it back over to me and waited for her presence to fade so I could take another swig and let the liquid fire blast down my throat and numb it enough to stop me from crying.
Please just go please just go please just leave me alone and above all please don't /ask.../
"Are...you alright?" she asked quietly.
"Ye--no. Yess. Fsine. I'm onlyy vackinngg /vacked/ in thha vackingg /ass/ in liikke a b'jillion differen' ways. Vack off."
"...I see."
The tears were still flowing. Had to make it stop. Go away and let me drink my beer.
"...Mr. Forest. Would you...like a more private atmosphere in which to drink?"
It was so cordial and polite and not on-your-knees-bitch-I-have-blackmail of her I actually thought that for one, it was someone talking, and for two, despite the name, they were talking to someone else entirely.

Zhatica worldbuilding: Pain

The storm outside weighs heavily on my mind, and I am not right for making tonight.
But make I will, or I will at least try.

Tonight I make something new for Zhatica. Or rather it has been being made for some time now, and I have now chosen to write it down.
I do not yet have a name for it. I would rather not call it a god, as that is a bit presumptuous, and anyways, they are not gods. They have worshippers, and they have powers, and to an extent, they have immortality.
But they are not gods.
And when have gods ever truly been gods? More that the gods that have existed have all been manifestations of ideas, of mass concepts. War. Love. Darkness. Wisdom. Dreams. Cats. Storms.
I think I will make a thing of cats, and he will be beautiful. He will have long dark hair that shimmers and reflects the colours of jewels when the light strikes it right. His skin will be a golden bronze, his body slim and powerful and delicate.
But I am not writing about him tonight. He has been made, he will be further developed.
Tonight I am forging Pain.
It is Pain that throbs in my right temple, that tucks itself up under the tip of my right shoulder blade and gnaws at my muscles(which is an aching) that crawls into the spaces between the bones of my spine and stiffens and bemoans my back. It is Pain that visits me every day in some form or another. It is with Pain I am very familiar. In others I have known as well as me.
Pain is also male. He is white, all over, though not naturally. He has an almost human colour(though there are no humans in Zhatica, for they are dull) but it is never really seen except maybe in his cheeks from the screaming he can't utter. Pain also has white hair, though, though I am not sure why. Perhaps simply because he does, and that is how it is.
Pain in the first days of Zhatica lay in a place you couldn't see but you could hear sometimes and maybe touch it(like madness), on a slab of something like stone, and bound him with things you couldn't see so that he lay utterly still, not even able to breathe. Not that he needed to, but it was yet another form of discomfort.
In those days there was no Pain in the world, because it was all in him on his slab. His slab kept it inside him. It is not known who put him there, or who he was before(if he was anything, or anyone) or how. The Great Spirit did not mean him to be, or he would not have been able to leave.
Pain felt everything of Pain, everything from finger pricks from sewing needles to heart attacks to fingernails getting ripped off(accidentally or on purpose) to a hookjaw's bite to rape to murder to everything. And the people did not feel it. Instead of pain they felt something like tingling, though rape was still a terrible thing, for it is not the physical pain that scars. Perhaps Pain should have only been called Physical Pain, because that was all he was. People got sad and twisted up with hate often enough despite him.
Perhaps Pain was a Wall of some kind. A person that became a barrier, though he couldn't tell you how. I'm sure whoever did it meant all well and good.
Pain would lay on his slab, feeling everything everyone did not have to feel. You'd think that after a time it would all build up into one terrible mass and he'd be able to shut it out somehow. But no. Every fragment of every second was Pain, and he felt it, and thought it, and knew it, and it was all he could feel or think or know. And he could not thrash or scream or wail or vomit or sleep. The stone he lay on forbade it.
He could cry though. He did. For long periods of time, and frequently. Wouldn't you?
There were so many tears, the flow so regular, that as they dried they left behind enough salt to sew his eyes shut, and trickled down his face and began to build little stalactites and stalagmites connecting his head to the stone. He was not aware of this.
And it was in these days that Masochism and Sadism were sired, and I will tell you of them, though not at the moment.
It was at a point much beyond this, after Pain left his slab and was released into the world once again, that a young woman named for a hat, with Sadism coiled inside her(not around her heart, for Sadism is not a thing of the heart, but of the gut and lungs and blood and hands) came from a time much later on, by means that will not be explained, and took him off the slab. Pain himself was incapable of moving, but she bore in her his own power that had been passed on without his knowledge, and with that power twisted in the way it was, and being a new power in its own right that the old magic did not know, it did not break the seals on Pain, but slid through their crevices and slithered round their locks, and so he was taken off his slab, his imprisonment.
Later she would tell it all as a matter of business, for if it had never been done, people would have gone on without pain, and in her business the pain of others was a necessity.
But in truth, as she stood there, and looked on him, and saw that he was beautiful, and tangled and broken and devoured by Pain, in a way that she, carrying Sadism, found beautifully terrible, she felt something like a hunger, and so when she took him off his binding, there was more than business in her heart and mind.
She bit the salt from his eyes herself, her mouth wetting it enough to dissolve(for it was only salt, and if there had been stone as there is in the water that makes true cave-teeth, her teeth would have broken instead) and put her cloak around his shoulders, for he wore only a thin, frail garment of white that was like a dress, and it was crumbling into bits like spider-silk even as she lifted him. She gave him water to drink, which he could not remember, though he fought it--he fought her--at first, afraid of something, though he didn't know what. And finally his lips were wetted, and he drank, and finally slept. He would forever love sleep afterwards, for it was the first taste of it he could remember, and sleep is a wonderful thing to know for the first time ever when you can properly know it, and cherish it. People that have been able to sleep all their lives could never appreciate it the way he did.
When he woke, she held him, as she had held him during all the time he slept, though neither could tell you how long it had been. She gave him food to eat, food from a strange tree from a strange place very long ago, a tree that called itself the Swampfather(though that in itself is another tale.) It was only then that he realized that his muscles had done something called atrophy, where they had withered so that he was a collection of bones and skin and the memories of internal organs, and little else.
When he had eaten he slept again, for his body was hard at work taking the strangeness of the fruit and making it into new organs, and muscles, and energy. And when he woke again, he began to understand at last what had been done for him, and now that he knew it, something more than joy and delight and gratefulness all together overflooded him, so that he laughed and cried and wanted to dance, but didn't know how, so he instead kissed the woman on the mouth, and contentedly nestled himself again in her arms that night as he slept again.
She never did sleep. She had been told of the consequences of a mere like her sleeping in such a place, and had traded one of her eyes for the eye of a cat. Cats do not shut their eyes unless they want to sleep, and they do not sleep unless they want to. She knew tiredness many times over, but she did not sleep.
When he woke again for the third time, she told him it was time to leave.
He was not Pain during this time, nor after. That name was no longer his, for once he had been removed from the slab, the conditions of the bindings had dissolved, and the world knew Pain--not in a sense that it knew it once again, but that it had always known it, for one of the conditions had been that during his binding, the world should /never/ know Pain in any sense. Not in the current, not in the past, not in ancient memory. And now it did, and it always had.
As he was leaving, she told him what he was not anymore, and that he ought to take a new name. He asked her what the name ought be, for he did not know. He didn't really know anything. All he had ever known was Pain, and that was gone from him now.
She told him he should go find it for himself. He asked her for her name, though we will never know whether or not she told him. He did know it later, though, when they met again. There are those that believe they became lovers for a time, but there is no evidence of this--and at any rate, she was not the type to take a lover that did not enjoy her indulgences in the infliction of pain on others as much as she did. And especially to him, such a thing would have been cruel.
His whiteness left him as he left that place, and she left some other way. The Pain had kept him white in agony for all this time, and now he began to have colour again. His hair remained white, however, and his eyes were so pale a blue they might as well have been also. He went out into a world that did not remember him as he had been. He went among mere people, and they knew him as something more than themselves, for whatever he was, he was not mere--he could not have been, to have been what he was. As time passed, people knew him better, and he did eventually tell him who and what he was, and what he had been, though he never told of them of how things had been before. There was never any need.
Some still called him Pain, then, once they knew, though he winced at this. The name he took was Chime, because the first thing he saw when he came out of the place he had been was a forest full of little silver bells tied on tree branches by little red ribbons, and they made a wonderful noise. He asked a flower what the name of the sound was(and he didn't know yet that not everyone could talk to flowers and trees and animals and things) and when it told him, he decided the name was as beautiful as the sound. And so he called himself Chime.
Chime gained power as people came to know him as he was, and became something more than he had been as Pain--for as Pain, he'd had no real power, and had been little more than a dam to a reservoir--so that as time passed, and times passed, he became able to do what he had done before, by choice. When asked, and when he felt he had been asked through the proper ceremonies performed by those with the proper sentiments(though he was a gentle spirit, and good-natured, he did turn out to be a bit of an arrogant creature, as many of those like him often do) he would once again take on the Pain of another, and very rarely more than one person at a time. On some occasions, when the need of those who cried out was great, he would take the pain immediately, without ceremony, without tribute. It is said he even did this for rape, and when such a time occurred, he would lie in the temple built for him, swathed in sheets, and weep blood once more.
He had lovers, for he was beautiful, and beautiful in a way that feminine or masculine women were entranced by him. But his seed was infertile, and he did not give his women children, and Chime did not disapprove of this.
But Pain had had children in his day, which Chime did eventually discover.

Goldilocks

It's a blurp of an idea that popped into my head after being up late last night reading Transmet and this morning when we visited a used bookstore in Manassas where I happened upon a book titled "Red Raptor." Even if it was the story of a prehistoric female Utahraptor, the method they told her story was not quite my cup of tea. I'd recommend Mek checking it out though. I don't know if it's his cup of tea either, but I figure it's worth mentioning. It's an old book though, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to find.
"Goldilocks" is the public's nickname for Specs, because she and her sisters are yellow raptors. I'm under the impression that it's popular for velociraptors to be portrayed with red colouring, so I wanted to do something different.
Goldilocks also comes to mind because of this morning's report on the planet that scientists have recently decided may be capable of supporting life. The man on the news described it as the "goldilocks" because its location to the sun in its system provides it with the "just-right" combination of temperature, etc.
I say ten bucks they end up calling the planet Goldilocks. I'm sure it'll come into some official name later like New Earth or Second Earth or something fantastically unimaginative like that. But I bet for the honeymoon period they call it Goldilocks.

My mom just opened a package from the vet's office. It had two cards and a little slab of blue clay. The clay had Boots's pawprint, as did one of the card.
We'll never forget you, buddy. You were a good cat.

Moving on before I cry little a little girl.


I'm a Utahraptor living in New York City.
That in itself should be enough to keep you reading.
Sitting in an apartment in the dark at o'dark thirty tapping away on my typewriter--the keys are easier to hit with claws, and sturdier, too--was not my idea of how this day would begin. I much rather had intended to sleep in after a long night of binge-drinking with the drawns tightly blinded--does that make any sense? Or am I still a little drunk? Oh well, you know what I mean--to keep the garish light of day out until I felt damn well ready to get up and greet it on my own terms. That is, sometime around the crack of noon.
Yet the people of the city that never sleeps are bitter bastards, and seem to have adopted a policy of, "if we can't sleep, no one can."
That is why I was dragged by the tail out of a delicious dream involving a pair of overweight triceratops bogged down in tarpits and screaming their little throats out at this despicable time of the morning by the sound of jackhammers pounding the city's heartbeat into the sidewalk at the foot of my apartment complex. A negligent rhino stumbled down it a week ago in a drug-induced stupor and when he decided it was time to pass out, his horn gouged a three-foot long wound into the already fragmented cement. It bled dirt and the guts of a massive fungi network that have been marinating in the wet darkness under that slab of sidewalk for what looked like years, if not decades. The fungus was white, bulbous, and gleaming. It looked like a baluga whale's corpse infested with tumours.
But I digress, and excessively. You get to do that when you're drunk.
Where was I?
Being a Utahraptor in New York City. No, I covered that.
Being up at this hour. Yes. No, that was the baluga. And tumours. So it's not a matter of where was I, it's a matter of where I was going.
Gus's whimpering from the corner has just reminded me.
She came home with a bullet graze on her thigh fifteen minutes ago. I was awake for it, thanks to the city's obnoxious, cigarette-smoke stained heartbeat. Gus is my sister, and she narrowly avoided being shot this morning in a hate crime committed in a downtown rave club reserved for us dino freaks. I won't deign to go into detail about it. That would involve interrogating my little sister, which I'd rather not due, and I'm sure you'll get plenty of fiction about it to appease your mundane curiosity on this morning's eight o'clock news.
Where I'm going with this, I suppose, is why? Why was my little sister almost shot in the crotch, which was probably meant to be her stomach, or even her lung? I'll tell you.
It's because you all suck.
Not just you humans that hate us primitive weers. It's our own damn kind, dammit, the flesh and blood of our own that betrays us. And I'll go ahead and tell you this, too--see how nice I am, to do your thinking for you?
Because in dino-reserved establishments, no humans are allowed to be involved in the club's staff. At all. Humans are only allowed in as guests with no less than two accompanying dinos to vouch for them. And this guy that almost killed my sister was human. He stank of it. He was filthy with the sweat of his racist nerves and racist adrenaline that kicked in before he was about to Kill A Dino and resurged after he had Killed A Dino, which made him a Man To Be Feared. He was cocky after he'd done it, do you realize that? So he tried to do it again. The fucker tried to kill my sister. Because one innocent wasn't enough.
And it was a dino bouncer who let the fucker in.
Why? There's a lot of these "whys" hanging about my apartment lately, and they're starting to get under claw. It's fucking irritating. They shit in my bed, they shed on my furniture, they scratch up my curtains and scream at me whenever I try to sleep.
You fuckers put them here. I want them out.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a half-empty bottle of Bourbon to pour out the window on some construction worker's head and a bullet wound to mend.

Specs shoved away from her desk, the chair's wheels squeaky-squeaking over the floor. She considered the Bourbon, and took one last sip before she stood, went over to her window, and poured the rest out over the street. Some of it hit someone, if not all. Specs didn't care enough to make sure it was aimed at a construction worker. Either way, it was still satisfying.
"Asshole," Gus grunted from her corner. She was slumped against a wall and looking a lot happier than she had when she'd come in. The empty bottle of whiskey in her half-claw-half-hand probably had everything to do with that.
The medical market had yet to develop a set of antibiotics that worked on all weers in general as well as any that worked on Utahraptors specifically. The coding for each species of weer's magic gene was different, and even though shamans and witches could formulate poultices that were universal, they didn't last. So unless you lived next door to one, or even on the same block, they didn't do a weer much good. Specs knew some healers, but none close enough at the time for the pain Gus had been in. So Specs gave her sister alcohol.
Alcohol, Specs thought tiredly. The gift that...well, there was probably a clever way to finish that thought, but she couldn't formulate it right now. Still a bit drunk. So very tired.
"Ready for antibiotics?" Specs asked. Both she and Gus smirked at the old slang.
"Lay it on me," Gus rumbled. Her voice got gravelly when she got exhausted. Most dinos' did. Voice was one of the first things to revert when the body got too tired to maintain an entirely human front.
Specs got the pure alcohol out of her bathroom cabinet along with the bandages.
"Fuck movies," Gus muttered as Specs laid out an old tattered towel under her sister's leg to catch the alcohol. "You seen the latest werewolves movie? Fuck wolves. Why they so damn popular?"
"They're fluffy," Specs said, untwisting the cap from the bottle. "Humans love fluffy shit."
"Fuck fluffy. Scaley's badass, everyone knows it."
"Prepare for touchdown," Specs grunted, and poured a handful of alcohol over the graze on Gus's leg.
Her sister snarled and her upper body writhed as she struggled to keep her leg still. Small patches of transformation rippled across her, the primitive gene fighting to lash out at the pain.
"Fuck," Gus growled, her voice having dropped an octave. She blinked and winced, and her jugular area contorted as she readjusted her larynx. "Fuck," she repeated, and the word snapped with a much more satisfying clarity in the quiet of the apartment.
"Werewolves?" Specs reminded her sister.
"Yeah. Fuckin' movies. Got us in real life but they still try to pull that instant regeneration shit. And vampires, man. Fuckin' vampires. Still tryin' that shit, like they still think they gotta be real as wolves and we're just hidin' 'em somewhere."
"Humans are stupid," Specs said with a shrug, gathering up the dampened towel and using it to mop up what had soaked through. "Bandages?"
"Do it myself," Gus muttered, sitting up further.
"You're drunk off your ass," Specs said dryly.
"So're you."
"I was. Writing's sobered me some."
"Heh. Does it now? We gotta get you REAL drunk someday, see what you'd write then." Gus snickered. "I bet porno."
"It's not porn when it's literature, little sister," Specs corrected as she wrangled a cigarette out of the box with her snout and foreclaw, lighting it on a candle kept burning for exactly that purpose. "When it's written, it's erotica."
"Whatever," Gus snorted. "I bet you'd write it if you got drunk enough."
"Who's to say I need to be drunk?"
Gus raised an eyebrow.
A pounding on the door startled them both. Specs flicked her tail at her sister, a command to stay. Gus nodded and got back to fumbling drunkenly with her bandaging. They both knew who it was.
Specs waded through a carpeting of crumpled papers, the remains of past blog entries, essays, short stories, and one book she'd been working on for two years. None of it was ever thrown away. It'd been accumulating since she'd moved in three months ago.
"You need a maid," Brass growled as Specs opened the door. She muscled her way in past her younger sister. "Where's Gus?"
"Back he-e-re," Gus snorted in a sing-song voice. "I just had the gr-hic-reatest fuckin' idea ever."
"You gave her beer?" Brass snapped at Specs.
"Had to put the antibiotic on her," Spec said with a smirk and a shrug.
"She's only eighteen."
"Alcohol on fresh wounds fuckin' hurts, Brass."
"I know. I also run a bar, you dick. You know how many underaged pricks I shut down--"
"A day. I know. You tell me over and over. Just this once, B. You know she gets it at parties anyway."
"Not in our own damn house--"
"Who's house?"
Brass remembered they were adults now and where she was.
"She was in pain," Specs muttered as they entered her writing room, where Gus was slumped in the corner. "Scared shitless. I did her a kindness."
"Don't do it again. Shit, Gus." Brass crouched down next to her youngest sister and snagged the bandages from her hands, which were having difficulty staying hands. You could always tell when a weerdino was drunk, even from a distance. They couldn't stick to anyone form. "You drink the whole damn bottle?"
"Brass, listen," Gus slurred, struggling to sit up. "We gonna make a million. Here's what we do, 'kay? You listening?"
"I'm listening."
"Ow. Not so tight. Hokay, so, what we do is, is we get Specs drunk, kay, and we make her write porno--"
"Erotica."
"Whatfuckever, she writes sex, okay, and then we sell it on the black market. Everyone loves her fucking blog, everyone'll buy it. I'm a fuckin' genius, right?"
"We wouldn't have to sell it on the black market," Specs remarked as she pulled her blog entry out of her typewriter and folded it into its envelope. "Erotica is its own genre of literature. We could get it published properly."
"Fuck it," Gus said. "We'd get shit from publishers on royalties. They'd get half the profits or some shit."
Specs looked at her sister sideways as she sealed the envelope with her tongue and stamped her friend's address on it. Specs didn't mess with computers--she was a full-time scaley, someone who preferred to live entirely in beast form 24/7, and computers were hard to manage when you only had three fingers on each hand that weren't very flexible and ended in massive, viciously sharp claws.
"Do you even know what you're talking about?" Specs asked with a mild curiosity. Brass shot her a glare over her shoulder as she finished tying off Gus's leg.
"She's an airheaded raver that's just been a witness to a traumatizing hate crime, almost been shot herself, ran all the way back here alone through New York City at night in the rain, and downed a whole bottle of whiskey, and you're asking her if she knows what she's talking about?"
"We call it Goldilocks!" Gus suddenly exclaimed. "The Goldilocks collection. Of porno."
"Erotica."
"Whathefuckever it's called!"
"I've gotta get this mailed to Rube," Specs said, waving the envelope about. "I'll hit up Lace for a poultice on the way back. Make sure Gus doesn't chew on my armchair again."
"You're going out?" Brass said, an actual tinge of disbelief in her voice. "Your sister was almost shot a half hour ago and you're going out to mail your fucking blog entry?"
"It's a blog entry about my sister almost getting shot, if that helps at all," Specs replied as she donned her hat and fished a plastic bag out from under the sink in her kitchen to keep the envelope safe from the weather. The storm hadn't hit her part of the city, but she wasn't taking chances. "And I said I'd get a poultice."
"Whatever," Brass muttered, trying to help Gus off the floor. "Fuck off and die."
"Love you too," Specs said dryly on her way out.
Brass was about to make a retort when she heard a loud flapping noise, and as the door shut behind Specs, a wyvern the size of a raven landed on the fire escape outside Specs's open window. It was wearing a polic bonnet around the base of its neck. As Brass stared at it, it cocked its head, examining her with one beady little eye, and squawked.
"What the..."
"It's the Lawman!" Gus mumbled as her head began to slump. "He helped me 'shcape the coppers..."
"What?" Brass looked down at her sister as the younger weerraptor's eyes slid shut. "Why'd you have to escape the cops?"
Gus was already out cold.
Brass felt an uneasy feeling blossoming in her gut as she dragged her sister over to the couch and dumped her on it.


This doesn't deserve to be posted as an actual deviation, so my blog gets to endure the fodder, but if anyone cares I have a sequel bit to this floating around in my head and I could put it down if you want. I don't see it continuing beyond that.
I did enjoy writing this, though.