🖼️

Green hills and enemies. These things, they make us sentimental inside.

[alulars]

Visit Original Link

YOUR MOMENTS OF JOY HAVE THE PRECISION OF MILITARY STRATEGY.

#ALULARS. independent original side characters from the narrative world of @soothfog (follows back from that account). loosely pulled from biblical text. intermittent activity. written by jordy (they/it/he), ‘95, other accounts here.

PROMPTS /// ABOUT + RULES ⤵

ABOUT.

MR. JOHNSON.

🎶 / 📌 / 📝

name. alias of mr. johnson or johnson. will not share his true name pronouns. entirely indifferent to gendered language but uses he/him in adherence to his vessel’s physical appearance and identity for ease of covert existence age. older than the world residence. earth (currently), heaven (previously) appearance. has possessed a human vessel, faceclaim: jason isaacs, hugo weaving (shared vibes of the two; they're not two different vessels) brief. assigned via a rank of godly orders to clandestinely monitor humanity in attempt to subvert a series of apocalyptic events. stuck in a human vessel to maintain his undercover position. detests being confined to an organic, human form but is too loyal to desert the mission

THE DEVIL.

🎶 / 📌 / 📝

name. the devil pronouns. whatever pronouns your muse uses age. older than the world residence. earth (currently), hell (previously) appearance. whatever face claim your muse uses brief. the devil is a mirror. assumes the form of whoever is nearest. feels/smells/knows your negatively charged history like negatively charged ions. doesn’t just understand you—absolves you. permits you as you are. you require no change. they abandoned their post in hell to live on earth. hell is an environment. hell is what you make of it. the devil made it fair. in the power vacuum, the damned's free will guides the course of hell which will inevitably spill-spew into earth. the devil lives on earth and is the boss of a spun glass factory.

RULES.

shipping. i ship chemistry. only at your discretion and approval. replies. tentatively mutuals only. if we’re not mutuals but you wish to write, send me a message and i’m sure we can work something out. age. while i don’t mind minors following me, i will not write with or follow you. i’m simply not comfortable with the age gap and life discrepancy. icons. i will occasionally use icons on this account. you do you. writing. my writing is generally longer here, but i will try to keep in the ballpark of your reply length. do not feel compelled to do the same. i don’t use any formatting or small text. i don’t mind if you do, but i have difficulty reading heavily stylized text and tend to stay away from accounts that do so because of this.

[inl4ndempire]

@alulars continued from here

half-rotted, the empty church has leeched its substance into the ground, a sacred alluvium spoiling the earth around it. he can feel it out by the cabin, clinging to the soles of his shoes, stinging him within the flesh of his borrowed body. persistent and pernicious, in a way that promises gradual madness.

even the most minor agonies are to be appreciated. this one is no small part of the place’s appeal. makes him less likely to be followed and the cabin a good spot for a think. usually.

❛ ah. ❜ almost disappointed. ❛ not a shred of taste among your lot, is there. ❜ he remains motionless in the door frame. the only movement within the room is the brief facsimile lent by the light from the kerosene lamps, shuddering in their glass columns. subcutaneous, he coils and condenses inward, prepared to beat a hasty retreat if required. ❛ no manners, either. as bad as demons. if you’ve come for a cup of sugar, i haven’t any to lend you. ❜

[alulars]

He can see Crowley's soul fibonacci-clench into itself.

Firm: "Stay."

Not an assurance, a fact: "I will not exorcise you.” Imperfect combustion produces smoke. All fire incandescently, incessantly practices this deficiency. When Johnson’s gaze intersects the alkanes disjoining in the kerosene lamp, the smoke vanishes and the fire growth-spurts. Between them, demon and angel, the threat—exact, permanent obliteration—lingers much the same.

With a minute tick of Johnson's head—sharp nose pointed like a fisted knuckle—the door shuts. It bumps Crowley’s backside and sweeps him across the threshold; a slithering sliver of golden hour sunshine squeezes through the door-to-floor gap like an amber amphibian.

Johnson, stiff-legged, moves beside a lamp to more closely supervise it. Thus, pure flame: grey dead-ends snipped away. The harsh light jack-o-lanterns his face; warmth purrs at the triangle tarp of Johnson's cheek skin; his body (a larger, colder insulator) accepts the natural dispense, and he abets that marginal indulgence by remaining. “Are you aware demonic exorcisms leave a smell?” His attention gusts to Crowley; smoke escapes again.

Johnson lifts his chin, tone illuminating: “Like fermented afterbirth.” His own rumination.

He articulates words with equal care, smooth and walnut-jaded. “Your departure is difficult to relish. It… irritates the nose. It evaporates the mucus membrane. Dorsal to that sense, the eyes, soon begin to suffer. Inflammation. Itchiness. Temporary blindness. To neutralize the effect, your human host, if alive, will involuntarily lactate milk from their tear ducts. Men and women alike. And you—" Johnson wisps his hand through the impalpable, stillborn air "unto the veil—are too far gone to experience the fragrant fallout." His eyes glower below the concave meniscus of his brow: "Let alone apologize for it." He looks to the lamp. Its presence humanly savored. He looks to the lamp long enough its bright physics burn white stigmatas into his central vision. Until the seared afterimage will last—must last—longer than his fleeing hedonism.

"'Manners'." Johnson scoff-mocks.

[witchrealms]

(x)

[wovi]

*

barthes

[alulars]

I do think insects are inscrutable to johnson because their life pulses are too fragile to feel without crushing their tiny bodies. so he can’t read their buggy thoughts. and this ineffable nature allows him to project his own questions and quarrels onto them. he watches them scurry like abacus beads thinking if he can solve them he can solve himself.

[alulars]

MOODBOARD: johnson & hara.

@alulars + @petitsdieu

[petitsdieu]

❛ Oh? I'm sorry ... I had thought you already did. ❜

From here, in any spillikin increment you could view him in at, he sees with an Eye that underwaters. Deficiency manifests us all a little differently. Or fear. Over-watering is violence too after-all. So is a lark-splitter ... he wouldn't be the first to slipskin a viognier to confirm the already confirmed. Confirmed now is the tannin-touch left in my mouth when he insists doubly to leave the plant mostly dry.

It's personal now. If you slid a hand deep inside her, the roots of her would be under watered, categorically, too. Aphrodite’s biggest risk on the soft disk of her cheek? Never. She places the contingency plan it the radicle. Helen always goes with Paris. Even if that’s by the tippy-toes of her tail-boned kissed hair-ends. And it's those same patterns, same Godly-anointed ⸺ from egg and yearly unto till now ⸺ that sets her to be the creature she is always. He could make her see it as he does but that will never make her water-repellent ( but isn't it something that she thinks he'd even want that ).

Also, this is her Eden and she'll cry this greenhouse to it's flooded biblically so he can understand ... if she needs to.

❛ She'll die if I do. ❜

[alulars]

"And it will die if you do not."

Hell is a climate that Johnson vigilantly predicts and evicts. Comparable in devastation and origin to rising greenhouse gases. Amongst Hara and him, whisking beyond a veil she cannot detect, hell-souls brew-rue together as tantrum-y and useless as hail. Almost literal. That is the nearest analogy she would understand¹. Hells are everywhere. Common, dense Hell biomes: the Bermuda triangle, hospital elevators, parked cars with orange meter tickets latched to their windshields, cell towers. And here; nowhere is empty. When Johnson stalls his breathing, he can hear Hell². He does so; his lungs a jammed turnstile. Damned souls prattle-tattle on each other by tapping against the all-glass walls of the greenhouse (defectively clear like nonobservant mirrors). It is a grating noise. Worse than the dragged drudgery of respiration (that scrapey rake); he chooses the lesser irritation; he breathes.

Eden, Hara forgets, is a herbal hospice, it is no heaven. Even plants have souls, of which water does not leaven. To teach this, his thumb and index finger pinch together, beakish, and peck the air. Water breaks from the cordyline's scaly stalk. Its leaves pucker and prune like a great grandmother's skinny lips after each farewell. Hara's face similarly wilts.

Johnson steps toward her, his pace matching her slow respiratory rhythm, as if sail-catching it, until he is beside her. He portions an immodest distance between their bodies—the cheap shoulder seam of his black suit jacket perfectly stencils her rounded hairline when they bump. For practical reason: at this distance, no more and no less, he can reach all the offending plant's foliage.

In the dirt, his shoeprints sink centimeters shallower than hers. Many creatures, living or otherwise, do not survive his presence. Hara does. These beetles (their obisidian backs the size of torture-torn fingernails) do. Their appendages scratch into the earth; six-legged pupils dedicated to excavating fresher black; their bodies the benchmark. Hers his. Johnson's gaze, just as biologically instinctive; burrowing. The neat part of Hara's blonde hair sweeps down the middle of her scalp like a rushed signature; his ring finger traces that shape on his thigh. Too meditatively slow to convince himself it was a flinch.

Johnson peels the watering can from her grip.

His fingers lift into the cushion of her downturned palm, carriage-side-decorum, and guides it to the sleek vein of a cordyline leaf.

"Press here."

~*~*~

1.) Though, in this abstract hypothetical, Johnson imagines Hara would, after the percussive pelting of real hail passes, collect the icy welts like de-lobed diamond earrings. As if more than one pair is laudatory rather than lamentable.

2.) Hell: a collective noun that refers to a brood of solipsistic souls.

[calleido]

proval lake, pyatigorsk, russia

[deleteddelete]

[alulars]

doing drafts and ruminating on johnson's nebulous mission of "stop the apocalypse" and how that ultimately translates into him being an angelic first responder to living hell-conducive events/people.

i have said (and in a reply i'm working on atm, will continue to say) hell is a climate. i mean that metaphorically. but also literally. a lot of lee's narrative (the world johnson inhabits) is very surreal magical realism. where things have very physical orders and conditions but still exist very abstractly/wonderfully.

hell is a literal place, yes. the devil lived there. but it's no different than saying pompeii is a place. the events and history of a place are what makes that location hell. the geography/biome is dress setting. pompeii, you think volanic eruption. ohio, you think astronauts and corn. both are bigger than their lands and while we might discuss the physical events of the volcanic eruption, the only reason we do is because of how devastating an affliction it was on/to people.

if you want to understand better, hell is hail and each icy blob is a soul. when alive, your corporeal vessel insulates your soul well enough that it can't quite solidify into something so hardened and destructive. but it isn't impossible. the spiritual and physical conditions rarely arise (like how the northern lights are rare or rainbow clouds are, etc). once deceased, the soul parts from the body. it's a much more flowy state of existing and certain dispositions and lived-histories-when-alive will make a soul more susceptible to intensifying into something denser and volatile in "the afterlife". like how hurricanes form by oppositional temperatures stewing on the ocean, hellish-inclined souls are much the same. they create this atmosphere. and that atmosphere typically originates in a similar place like how hurricanes typically are made in similar spots in the ocean and usually disseminate/decimate to similar places. this is hell. souls aren't sent there, they're naturally compelled there. the devil oversaw this atmosphere/area.

this can happen in living beings. it's much much rarer and difficult to manifest. johnson assures it doesn't. he also generally tries to prevent people from acts that will make them more susceptible to hell-soul conditions once dead (e.g. all the reprehensible vileness of life given impure motives).

[alulars]

🧠 : what do they assume people think about them? 🧩 : what part of themselves do they not understand yet? 🧨 : what pushes them past the point of restraint?

🧠 what do they assume people think about them?

hmm, that’s interesting. i don’t know if he does have these presuppositions. i think he expects and wants a god-fearing reverence extended toward him that is his right. almost child-like, I don’t think he has a full capacity to, like, inhabit a theory of mind: the ability to not only understand others have beliefs and perspectives different from your own but being able to conceptualize those beliefs/perspectives without explicitly being told them. as an angel, he previously had a perfectly objective/integrated understanding of the world and that origin has made it difficult if not impossible for him to understand that being “right”/sound doesn’t mean he is correct especially when it comes to subjectivity.

🧩 what parts of themselves do they not understand yet?

johnson doesn’t understand his sense of self whatsoever. he is adamantly refusing to acknowledge the existence of his own will and therefore somewhat successfully unaware of how present it already is. he has a static sense of self that he is acting on—more than he knows.

🧨 what pushes them past the point of restraint?

people not living up to their potential—he despises this. he hates seeing luster dull or go unused or un-honed. or unholy things that aren’t black and white. he’ll lash out and hurt or kill you even if it’s an impermanent solution.

[alulars]

⚖️ : what line will they never cross?

what line will they never cross?

johnson will do anything if he thinks it’s holy. violence, murder, threats, mutilation, curses, etc. little can’t fall within the confines of holy. but the line he’ll never cross is physical or sexual romance. he’s repulsed by emotions but he’s even more repulsed by physically expressed romance: kissing, sex, etc. emotions so intense it’s a kind of bodily element. he’d well and truly sooner cut his own heart out (i mean this very literally) than let himself feel and express himself that way.

🧷 who failed them?

god inadvertently has abandoned him but he’s incapable of thinking that. he’s growing bitter and his feelings are burgeoning into something he soon won’t be able to ignore and will outgrow the voiceless void of god.

🌊 what emotion do they drown in when they're alone?

any emotion is drowning to him. he regularly attempts to bastardize any feeling into anger or disgust because he feels those are the most tolerable and rebuking of emotion itself (they’re not but it’s the closest he thinks he can get). when alone, he sometimes attempts to microdose on the more internal, self-centered emotions like desiring the presence of another. he usually does this in public places like parks, watching humans. he feels like he’s doing something disgusting and unforgivable when he consciously and directly attempts to address the existence of an ego (that wants things of others that isn’t divine). genuinely will repent, penance-like after this. violently slit a demon’s throat or some other easy, obvious cleansing of the world that requires no subjective thought.

[alulars]

🔪🕯️📉

🔪 what would they do if survival demanded cruelty?

what we call “cruel” johnson views as honored honesty. he’s readily willing to be cruel. especially if it is for his own self preservation or—and he can mentally twist this so it seems to him this way—for god.

🕯️ what do they grieve that no one else sees as a loss?

collectivism but without ego. which isn’t possible because you are an indivisible part of the whole. similarly, perceiving the world authentically without it sieving through the limited senses of a human and more importantly without it being tinged by the emotional/subjective/personal conception of a human perspective, something he is confined in having possessed a human vessel. he knows he will never be able to return to an egoless/identityless state even if he were to vacate his vessel and live as a true form angel (that is essentially slipping into the physics and cycles of the world). it’s an ironic maddening ouroboros cycle: to grieve that he is able to grieve, to want to not want. he’s so cyclically mad. the second best thing from not wanting is making himself never accept or get used to it which is a very violent and deliberate and almost (ironically) mindful/existential never-ending exercise. he’s more fucked and incorporated than he realizes.

📉 what's their most common self-criticism?

that he cares too much or at all. there’s no room or reason for him to care—god’s plan should be filling and fulfilling enough.

[zachrp]

ᝰ🚬 𝚉𝙰𝙲𝙷𝚁𝙿 .ᐟ SYMBOL HEADCANON QUESTIONS. CHANGE ANY PRONOUNS IF NECESSARY. SOME MATURE THEMES MAY BE PRESENT.

EVERYDAY LIFE / DOMESTIC

📋 : how organized is your muse?

✅ : what do they pretend to have together that they don't?

🕰️ : what time do they naturally wake up when no one needs them?

☕ : what's their morning ritual, and what happens when it's disrupted?

🧺 : how often do they do laundry?

🪞 : do they look at themselves in mirrors, or avoid them? why?

🍽️ : do they eat to survive, for pleasure, or as comfort?

🏠 : what part of their living space reflects them the most?

🌱 : do they keep plants, and are those plants alive?

🧼 : what's something they're weirdly particular about being clean?

📺 : what do they put on when they don't want to think?

SOCIALIZATION / CONNECTION

🗣️ : are they better one-on-one, or in groups?

📱 : do they text back immediately, or let messages rot?

🫥 : how often do they pretend to be fine to keep the peace?

🎭 : how different are they with strangers versus people they trust?

🤝 : do they make friends easily, or accidentally?

🧠 : what do they assume people think about them?

🌘 : how hard is it to really know them?

🎉 : do they enjoy social events, or endure them?

🪑 : are they the type to leave early without saying goodbye?

INTROSPECT / INTERNAL LANDSCAPE

🕵️‍♀️ : how often does your muse think about death?

🧩 : what part of themselves do they not understand yet?

🫀 : what emotion scares them the most?

👣 : do they believe they deserve good things?

🧱 : what walls are they aware of building? which ones are they not aware of?

🕳️ : what do they spiral about at night?

📉 : what's their most common self-criticism?

💀 : do they trust their own memories?

🌊 : what emotion do they drown in when they're alone?

PERSONAL / DEEP / TRAUMA-ADJACENT

🩸 : what wound shaped them the most, even if they won't admit it?

🔥 : what moment do they replay when they're ashamed?

🧷 : who failed them first?

🕯️ : what do they grieve that no one else sees as a loss?

🪤 : what pattern do they keep falling back into?

🧨 : what pushes them past the point of restraint?

🧬 : what did they inherit emotionally from their caregivers?

🕶 : what lie do they tell themselves to survive?

🩹 : what actually helps them heal, even if it's unhealthy?

HABITS / VICES / COPING

🚬 : what vice do they justify the most?

🍺 : do they drink to socialize, numb, or celebrate?

💊 : what's their relationship with substances, past or present?

🏃 : do they move their body to feel alive or to punish it?

🛏️ : how do they sleep when things are bad?

🎧 : what kind of music gets them through the worst days?

🖊️ : do they write things down or let thoughts rot in their head?

☔️ : do they intellectualize pain instead of feeling it?

🕳️ : what habit would unravel them if taken away?

SEXUALITY / INTIMACY

🫠 : is it easy for them to get turned on, or do they need emotional safety first?

💞 : do they separate sex and feelings, or blur them dangerously?

🛑 : what's an immediate turn-off for them?

🔥 : do they crave intensity or stability?

🤲 : do they like being in control, or giving it up?

🪶 : are they gentle with people they desire?

🍒 : how do they feel about their own body during intimacy?

🎱 : what do they need to feel wanted?

🔒 : do they guard intimacy, or give it too freely?

💔 : have they ever used sex to avoid something?

MORALITY / CHOICES

⚖️ : what line will they never cross?

🩶 : what line have they already crossed and justified? or regret?

🧭 : do they believe they're a good person?

🔪 : what would they do if survival demanded cruelty?

🪙 : what do they value more, loyalty or truth?

🚪 : who would they abandon if forced to choose?

🕊️ : do they believe in forgiveness? for themselves? in others?

🧨 : what would make them snap permanently?

📜 : what promise do they regret making?

🪦 : what hill would they die on?

[alulars]

a decommissioned lodge overtaken by weeds. / crowley mr j

Decades earlier, this cabin housed the local sexton; a quarter-mile south: the white, clapboard church. Daily, that young man would pet the church's entrance railings like bowed cat spines and re-trim a central path through the golden maiden grass perpetually taller than most children, taller than most tombstones. Far enough in the background, tucked behind the church, the graveyard looms, hidden, like a nicotine patch under a smoker's shirt sleeve. At exactly five o'clock in the evening, the church's sheer shadow perfectly shawls the dead with the cool tenderness of a diurnal pillow fluffed-and-flipped; that's how the sexton imagined it as he marveled by the marigolds. Eventually, the priest died and the rural countryside was too barren to transplant a replacement. No longer tended to, the cabin and the church are little more than two geometrically piled tinders. Slowly, Mother Nature tightly braids green ivy up the steeple.

Today, inside the cabin, several iron-black lanterns cling burr-ish to the cedar-log walls; their swollen-red flames itch-etch every splintery groove of the room—unsanded floorboards and trunk-girth banisters and wide doorframes—like visual poison ivy. Kerosene gassily gurgles in their glass bellies; hydrocarbons twig apart like millions of crossed fingers after witnessing a billion-dollar lottery ticket simplify to zero¹.

Statues crowd most of the open floor. One particularly substantial sculpture, over a ton, has stamped through the dry-rot planks into the leveled dirt below. Hued by the stark-dark lantern-fires, all the statues adopt a two-dimensional, painterly chiaroscuro. Sleeping Cupid lounges on a tree-stump-table and the shadowy pits of his quaffed locks tint his roots a neglectful, overgrown ebony. Most relics here Johnson recognizes as lost and legitimate. Whoever is responsible for this... curation... will return.

Johnson waits. Amongst kindred forms: for one hour and thirteen minutes, he stands as motionless as the statues.

Demons reek. Worse than the dead rat by the sink curled in on itself like a yin-less yang. Johnson smells Crowley before he sees him (Johnson exhales: it is a forceful shove of air through his nostrils). The front door squeals open. In the doorway, dusk-light dribbles around Crowley's all-black ensemble like a melted-down counterfeit halo. For a demon, Crowley dresses well. For a human, too, were he one. But what soul once glimmered in that vessel, Crowley has dragged, bedraggled beyond recognition: keelhauled within their own body. Soul stinkily, sinkingly bloodlogged. Crowley is, therefore, appalling to look at. Johnson's gaze surveys the room at a smooth, uniform rate then accuses Crowley: harshly—perhaps humorously—reductive: "You collect rocks?"

~*~*~

1.) Lee's nostalgia: Watching live on television with his mother and youngest aunt as the host pulls lottery numbers from the storming, swarming cage of white balls and seeing that brief, bouyant hope in both of them as the balls spun, the jackpot not yet unwon.

[kommetz]

reading a textbook for class and i’m going insane. why is this just poetry. what. this is a STEM class what’s going on.

[kommetz]

HELLO????? HELLO?????

[inrovina]

"Everything?" A flicker of nervous energy sparks a tremor in his voice; this less astonishment than abrupt fear. Xeno is not foolish enough to have forgotten Johnson's smooth, efficient threat of evaporation. His cryopreserved soul survived their first encounter, but his gaze now jumps across the room, catching on Wesley. He looks human on the outside—he is human, in all the ways that should matter—and no one else would know, no one else but someone who knows everything, that Wesley's heart sits frozen inside his chest, preserved and immortalised by Xeno's own hand when death came too close.

Xeno looks away quickly. He tries to distract Johnson—believing such a feat possible—by twirling the party hat in his hands. "Well, that's obviously true. I look good in anything, so. Suit yourself." He pops it back onto his head, letting the band snap against his chin.

"Elfgar promised he'd come tonight. Did he come with you?"

[alulars]

More often than not, eyes are merely the soul's ornamental weather vane flurrying to whatever carnal flotsam moves it. Johnson turns his head to follow Xeno's internal forecast. Mechanically fluid; exactly enacted centrifugal force: a metabolically perfect expenditure and not a calorie greater; Johnson is an unerring conservative system. The shark-ish point of his nose accentuates the motion marvelously. At the end of Xeno's frayed gaze, a man: his parabolic smile, upward-opening and so severely asymmetrical—rotated from its standard vertical form by (Johnson notes this as easily as the man's height: six-foot-four-inches) half a negative exponent cotangent—would find better purpose, Johnson thinks, as an extra credit question on a freshman honors algebra test rather than squandered at this thronged reception.

Johnson's attention slipstreams along Xeno's and returns to their closed visual loop. He watches the white elastic string blurily kickback into the vulnerable, flat underside of Xeno's jaw like a collapsed violin bridge. Johnson reaches an index finger out and tucks the string behind Xeno's left then right ear; the twangy pinch coils a quaff of his hair comically similar to the friction-twined balloon ribbons strewn about the abode.

This gesture is not altruistic.

As Johnson adjusts the string to un-pin Xeno's ears, his thumb hooks below the hinge of Xeno's jawbone to mine the deoxygenated veins overripe with thoughts; his skin is cool, his blood is cooler; his thoughts are equally frigid and the transference condensates Johnson's mind like an abrupt brain-freeze that he harshly strangle-blinks away. Many detritus contemplations sieve through Johnson's thumbprint, but a name—Wesley—hitches, too large to slink past, like an alluvial gold grain.

"Even if I were to serve as his personal chauffeur to heaven, that man would not follow me." This is an attempt at levity. About as buoyant as oganesson. Happy Birthday, Xeno. "I came in his stead after he reminded me—" Johnson holds a finger out to signpost the beginning of statement one: "—angels traditionally appear as messengers—" two fingers: "—and he does not own a phone." Johnson's head ticks, and that visual hand crumples into a compressed-repressed fist then falls, irritated by the implication. Contrary to current evidence: "He does not own me."