writing. mostly.

Self motivation is hard. Follows from @ceriseofthesky. As of November 2021: still alive but not really writing.

[dreamerandschemer]

I haven’t really posted much for the past several months, but I’ll probably be writing a few more things in the coming weeks - hopefully I will have some more time.

I also thought I might as well offer to fill any prompts anyone wants to see? I’d be willing to write 200-400 words for anything reasonable.

[gingerly-writing]

Prompt #2216

“You’re so pretty, unnaturally pretty. Some might say…supernaturally pretty.”

[dreamerandschemer]

“Why, how ever did you guess?” Justine smiled wickedly, the light in her eyes betraying both her mirth and her decisively inhuman heritage. Her lips, too, were parted just enough that, if one was paying enough attention, a person could see the way they were just sharper than natural.

May always paid attention to Justine, and not just because she was the prettiest person in every room. She was the most clever one, too, and the smartest, and the funniest... (There were a lot of reasons to pay attention to her girlfriend, May reasoned.) 

“It must have been something to do with how absolutely gorgeous you are, of course. None of us mere mortals could ever hope to compare.” May drawled, moving herself closer to Justine’s side. Justine obligingly wrapped an arm around her.

“Aw, you flirt,” she said. “Though, really, it’s not like I hide it.”

“I know,” May agreed. “But I think I would have noticed anyway.” She kissed Justine on the cheek, because it didn’t really matter if her girlfriend was a demon, or a goddess, or whatever she was, because she was still beautiful and amazing and absolutely still Justine.

[gingerly-writing]

Prompt #2088

“Well, that’s disappointing.” The villain was crouched down, their nemesis’ mask dangling from their fingers. Their spouse’s dead eyes stared back at them, glassy and lifeless. “You shouldn’t have tried to work against me, dear. Now I’m going to have to find a new partner.”

[dreamerandschemer]

“Stop me?” the villain laughed, the sound unpleasant, sharp, and humorless. “That’s funny, you really think you can.” 

She was beside her nemesis before he could even make a move to restrain her, hit her, or anything else, and he barely gasped as she slid the knife into his chest and shoved him to the ground with her other hand. “I wouldn’t hold out any hope,” she said casually, already removing the knife with another twist, “even if your team arrives in the next few minutes (though the probability is low), this lovely blade has a wonderfully rare neurotoxin. Tricky to encounter, but worth it, I think, considering it will kill you quite painfully and very fast.”

He glared at her, attempting to gather enough focus for his signature energy attack, but he was already experiencing the effects of the poison and the wound. It was only a few seconds until he was completely dead.

The villain smiled, then turned away from his corpse. The heroes weren’t near enough to catch up quickly, and it was about time to call her husband and say she was on her way home from “work,” as she called it when talking to him. Perhaps she would make dinner and celebrate a success at her job. He’d surely be happy for her.

Her phone only received the dial tone. Was her husband not answering her? She though he knew better than that. No, this must be something else -

The villain’s attention caught on her nemesis’s dead body, the low buzzing sound from one of his pockets and the way his face was still frozen in anger. Perhaps...

The villain crouched down, pried the royal blue mask from his face and traced his features with her eyes. He was certainly recognizable.

“Well, that’s disappointing.” Her spouse’s dead eyes stared back at her, glassy, lifeless, and that same shade of grey. “You shouldn’t have tried to work against me, dear. Now I’m going to have to find a new partner.”

She placed her phone, still in her other hand, back into her pocket and walked away. No need to make dinner tonight, she supposed. She’d treat herself for her success. But still... a disappointment.

[gingerly-writing]

Prompt #2040

“You actually clean your glasses?” The villain wrinkled their nose. “That is so stereotypically lawful good, you should be ashamed of the cliché.”

“You don’t even have glasses, so you don’t get to judge.”

“Oh, I need glasses, I just don’t wear them.” They shrugged. “Or contacts.”

“You’re just stumbling around half blind? That’s chaotic stupid and also cliché!”

“‘Chaotic stupid’ isn’t a real alignment-”

“And not being able to see isn’t a real life choice!”

[dreamerandschemer]

“Well,” the villain admits, gently depositing her teacup onto the table (it’s her turn to kidnap her nemesis, after all, so they might as well have tea; this is one thing both of them will pointedly ignore when they talk about clichés), “I’m actually allergic to something in most contact lenses solutions. But don’t go getting any ideas, it won’t kill me.”

“You could just wear glasses! Like the rest of us!” Honestly, the hero doesn’t understand the villain sometimes. She’s tempted to roll her eyes at her, but with what she knows now, would the villain even notice? “It’s like you don’t even want your evil schemes to succeed!”

The villain laughs, though somewhat sarcastically. “Or maybe I just don’t want some enterprising young hero like you to smash them. Glass shards in my eyes and a couple hundred dollars to replace them every week, really?” Well, that and the glasses were what the villain wore to her day job. Shouldn’t give away everything to the opposition, after all.

(...That was also a cliché, wasn’t it. The villain decided to ignore the fact her secret identity - er, civilian identity - was basically an evil Clark Kent, complete with the mysterious abandoned-at-birth and journalism.)

“Come on, you know that’s bullshit,” the hero says. Her own tea is turning a bit cold and she’s getting down to the dregs, which means it’s time to wrap this up and escape in a few minutes. First things first, though; she can’t abandon a conversation. “How many times have you seen me with new glasses?”

“I don’t know,” the villain says. “Maybe you have a hundred identical pairs. Your uniform is always exactly the same by the next fight, and I bet you wear the same suit to your day job.”

The hero winces. That’s... a bit close to the truth. She likes things very particular and very neat. But still. “That’s not it,” the hero manages to say. “Surely you have someone designing your costume for you? It’s pretty high tech. Wouldn’t be hard to add a visor or something.”

“And have you aiming for it in the next fight?”

“Come on,” the hero cajoles, “I’m sure I could hook you up with a designer with a lack of morals. Next kidnapping attempt, maybe I’ll make sure to introduce you before it’s your turn to escape.”

“No, thank you. I’ll take my nearsightedness.” Well, actually her farsightedness. But maybe one of the days the villain would take the hero up on her offer. She smiles, behind her teacup.

[dreamerandschemer]

“Are you sure?” he asked, frowning as he looked over the seed packet the man had handed him. “They don’t look like much. Nothing else on this forsaken piece of land has been able to grow, and it certainly won’t underground.”

The man shrugged. “If that’s what you want to believe. Maybe you’re missing out on the best deal of your lifetime - imagine being able to go home and tell your mother that you’re actually going to have more to eat than whatever canned goods you have stocked in that bunker of yours. Come on, kid, you can’t tell me you don’t miss eating fresh food. But if that’s what you think, I don’t suppose I can help you.” 

He reached over and snapped back up the packet, pocketing it into his overcoat. Nothing much could be seen beneath it - he had the same long gloves and the only slightly see-through face shielding that everyone else did. You couldn’t go outside without them, anyway, so it was to be expected. That’s what happened when you managed to survive the first part of the war - you got stuck in the aftermath.

“I can’t pay.”

“Oh?” the man asked. “So you’re willing to believe me now, eh? I know you and your mother have some hidden reserves.” It wasn’t a question. “What are you willing to over me from them?”

He hesitated. It was true, they had had a pretty good stock of the little things, things like chocolate bars and canned peaches, but that was dwindling fast. It probably wasn’t what the man meant, anyway. There were a few things left, in the stasis chamber - nothing as nice as fresh vegetables, but milk and eggs and things like that. His mother was holding out on those, though, because what they were really worth was being sold.

He must have waited too long, though, because the man was already turning away. “Wait!” he exclaimed, “I - I could bring you, I mean - I have milk, surely you’d want that?” Too much of his desperation must have bled into his voice, and he winced, but the man was suddenly facing him again and slyly smiling.

The man dropped the seed packet into his open hands. “So nice doing business with you, Jack.” He grinned, the smokey light glinting off his one gold tooth. “Now go home and tell your mother.”

[corvidprompts]

"But only the pure of heart-"

"Bah, 'pure of heart,' what drivel. 'Purity of heart' was a load of horseshit made up by those fools in their ivory towers to make sure their chosen golden birds were the only ones allowed to be heroes. Nobody's really 'pure of heart'."

[dreamerandschemer]

“You’re not supposed to touch that!” the priestess gasped. “The Sword is not meant to be touched by a person such as us. It would burn your flesh from your hands!”

The old woman turned to look at her. The priestess was glad for the pause, afraid as she was to get any nearer to the Sword. If the old woman continued to walk nearer, there would be nothing the priestess would be able to do.

“You really think that?” the old woman said. Her voice was scornful, but incredulous - did she not think that the priestess knew the Truth? This was what every child of the Order of Ivory knew! It was not like this was one of the obscure Mysteries.

“Please, I beg you, do not touch it!”

The old woman reached for the blade, her fingers just about to come into contact with its’ gilded hilt. “And why not! I doubt you’re going to use it to do anything about that damn king and his army.”

Did she not see that she would die? “But only the pure of heart -”

The old woman cut her off. “Pure of heart? Bah! What drivel. A load of horseshit, and made up by your old fools in your Ivory Tower. Much more useful to them if only their chosen golden birds are allowed to be heroes!” She paused, looked back at the priestess as her hand lifted the Sword from its’ rest. 

“Nobody is ‘pure of heart’, not really,” the old woman said, the Sword blinding as it was raised.

[writing-prompt-s]

At band camp, your school’s marching band is doing a very complicated routine. This accidently summons the Devil, but he has a trumpet in hand.

[dreamerandschemer]

Miranda, the flutist, is a self-proclaimed satanist. Or something? She’s goth, she reads edgy books that have skulls and crystals on the front, and you’re pretty sure she attempts to summon demons in her spare time. So, if someone was to tell you last Thursday that the Devil was going to appear during band camp, you’d probably point to Miranda as the cause. Well, after you finished scoffing at them.

Of course, the way things went, the person least to blame was probably Miranda. She was sitting on the side with a broken ankle and while she was playing her flute, she was nowhere near the middle of whatever happened.

“Whatever happened” being the whole thing that went down where the Devil just showed up with a trumpet. (Arthur later commented that he thought he played fiddle, not trumpet, and of course you smacked him, because that was seriously uninspired.)

The marching band - that is, thirty-three kids ranging from high school freshmen to high school senior - were totally unsupervised after your teacher got called off somewhere and didn’t return. He had directed you all to run through the drill “one more time, I swear this will only take a few minutes, really,” and after stumbling through it once someone had the brilliant idea to make it more complicated. (That someone may or may not have been you, but who’s going to admit it?) Everyone was kind of exasperated and would have rather sat down for a bit, but it was a Challenge™ and that meant it had to be accepted.

So all thirty-three of you, except for Miranda with her broken ankle, ended up accidentally coming across some magical combination of... unholy dance moves, infernal noise (that’s the clarinets, because the ones in your band are awful, don’t you dare argue, Marguerite), and the general mayhem of unsupervised teens.

That’s where the Devil comes in, quite literally.

It was the works, you know - sulfur, colored smoke, a bit of noise that was only just loud enough to drown out your awful playing - and there, right in the middle of it, a man (or, what appeared to be one, but then again, ~Evil~ is... probably a man, yeah, and a rich white one, at that) dressed in a very expensive looking business suit with a vaguely amused expression on his face. You still wonder if he was actually surprised or anything, but the Devil’s gotta have a good poker face, so who really knows? In the moment, you were still stuck with thinking it probably had something to do with Miranda.

Well, the band stopped playing (er, messing around) at that point. It was like magic! Everyone just turned towards him - the Devil - and he just coughed lightly (for effect) and said, “I suppose someone here is looking for something I can help them with?” (Well, he said it... better than that, but your memory is close enough.) It also wasn’t really a question, but it pretended like it was. 

(The Devil also pretended that everyone didn't suddenly know who he was - just like that - but you all did.)

One of the trumpet players looked real shifty, all of a sudden. His trumpet was okay, you guess, but he’d been talking and talking and talking about this one type he really wanted (you didn’t know all the details because you didn’t play trumpet, but he said it was good) and maybe he’d been thinking too much about it all practice. And, look, the Devil suddenly had a trumpet! And... it only cost one soul, and it wasn’t yours, and he did join in practice and the music was much better (and the flutists didn’t suck, for once) and your teacher never returned to make you do really boring drills, so it was okay, right?

...Yeah. You kind of wish you could blame it all on Miranda.

[gingerly-writing]

Prompt #1788

“But I need a cape!” the villain whined, struggling against the hero’s fisted grip in the sleek material. “It’s not fair for you to use it against me!”

“‘Fair’ doesn’t factor into winning city-levelling battles,” the hero said. “Now, hold still so I can cuff you.”

“Never!”

[dreamerandschemer]

Stasis had known, as long as she had been a villain, that the point was to go for the dramatic. Rather than freezing a single security guard in place, why not a whole museum and all its’ patrons, so she could waltz in and grab what she wanted? Why not stop the movement of a whole lake and watch as the boats halted and the people who had only just stepped in were similarly caught by the motionless water around their ankles?

And what said dramatic and powerful in a costume more than a cape? They were fashionable, and Stasis just had to be fashionable, didn’t she? And perhaps it was petty, but it was so nice to twirl her cape around in a display of motion that no one else around her retained. When she took the movement from all those people, where better to put it than into making herself look amazing?

Also, how could she be a villain without one?

She supposed she’d be finding out, because right now, Neutrality had one of his hands dug into its’ reinforced fabric and she was stuck struggling against the hero’s fisted grip in the sleek material. “But I need a cape!” Stasis shrieked. What if he ripped it? It wasn’t built to stand up to people tugging it on a whim. “It’s not fair for you to use it against me!”

Neutrality, had she been looking him in the eye and not trying to force his hands away from the cape, looked spectacularly unamused. He, as one of the few heroes whose power was not about affecting people or matter but rather about being unaffected by others (or objects under their influence), had finally been called in to deal with her. 

It had been raining this morning, and as much as she hated the affect it had on her hair, it had been the perfect opportunity to enact her latest plan. She had frozen thousands of raindrops in place around the city, creating unmovable points all through the streets and causing chaos. People realized they were trapped in cars they couldn’t force open due to the water sitting on their windows or that they couldn’t leave from under overhangs, and Stasis herself was able to pass unobstructed to her destination. 

However, she hadn’t made it, because someone thought the fact a few cars had crashed at the edges of the area was reason to arrest her. Or the fact that she had been planning something larger and significantly more deadly, know that she knew she could freeze the weather in place.

And, of course, as a hero Neutrality had quite a differing opinion on what was fair and what wasn’t. 

“Fair,” he said, his other arm pinning hers away from where she was trying to grab the alternative weapon at her belt, “doesn’t factor into winning battles or on stopping plans that could injure the whole city. Now, hold still so I can cuff you. Or perhaps your favorite cape is going to be destroyed.”

“Never!” Stasis gasped, continuing to try to pull away, or at least kick him with her shoes, which were similarly impractical. “I paid a lot of money for that cape, and you better -”

Neutrality managed to cuff her anyway, and it was quite a shame her cape was damaged on the way.

[writing-prompt-s]

“Yes, the angels are pretty, but don’t get too close.”

[dreamerandschemer]

Everyone knows about the angels in a more or less taken-for-granted way. We see them standing vigil in town squares and on clock towers, under moonlight and sunlight and fog, bells ringing in time to what might be called their breaths. It used to be a game, when we were younger, to try and ask an angel questions.

We don’t anymore.

It’s not that... they’re not dangerous, not really, not in an intentional or cold hearted way. They’re just not safe. Angels, like lions, are not tame or safe or anything but what they are. Angels are angels. They are their purpose, and for years and years and years, ever since they came to our world, their purpose has been to stand vigil.

That was what I had asked one, once. There was an angel at the end of the lane who stood in a patch of yellow flowers and looked like a woman, as much as any angel can look like a person. She looked a bit like she was made of fire, too, like the sunlight the plants had been looking for had magnified itself over and over until it could hardly be called just light. I was young, and wanted to know why there was an angel near my own home.

I ran right up to her - because I was a child and children are fearless, when they want to be, when they don’t know better - and I told her my name.

Her face, which had seemed to be facing the sky, turned towards me, and it was like looking into the sun and just as featureless from so close. Hello she whispered. it suits you

Even those words were hard to make out, like her voice was overlapping and repeating and ringing as I listened. It didn’t hurt, though, and I was not going to be deterred from my curiosity.

I thanked her and asked as many questions as I was filled with. “Thanks! Why do you look like light? The angel in town looks like wind and the other one was really really tall. Do you know them? Why don’t you do you really have a hundred hundreds of eyes? Why are you called angels? Are you really a girl? Why are you here? What’s your name?”

I meant why are you on this lane, not why are you here, but something about that question must have had more of a draw than the others. Or perhaps it was what I really wanted to know, I’m still not sure. Either way, it was the only question she answered.

the angels shall stand vigil she said, her shining face returning to the sky. And it was like standing underneath a hundred thousand bells, like I was in the middle of a thunderstorm, like the ground was trembling. I raised my hands to my face as her light intensified, and when I moved them away I was back in my own yard, my ears still ringing with a voice I knew I should not have heard.

[gingerly-writing]

Prompt #1774

”I’m not gonna lie,” the villain slurred, “it hurts like a bitch.” Burns covered their torso and arms, and their skin glittered with feverish sweat.

The hero fluttered over them, not daring to touch. “You were supposed to be invulnerable! They told me you were invulnerable!”

[dreamerandschemer]

The villain looked up at her, eyes not quite focusing as they found the hero’s face. “Yeah, well, might have exaggerated. Just a bit.” They coughed, and it sounded awful and rough as the villain tried to clear their smoke-filled lungs.

The hero had done this. She had done this, and for what? Sure, she had stopped the villain from... from doing whatever their nefarious plans were on the word of the Alliance, but...

She hadn’t wanted to mess it up like this. The fire should have just slowed the villain down, kept them preoccupied with the smoke and collapsing roof. Not whatever this was, the villain collapsed and...

Even if someone could get here quickly, would they even be willing to help them? The villain had no back up, nothing but the powers that might or might not even be real.

...collapsed, and dying.

With horror, the hero realized that’s exactly what she did.

[writing-prompt-s]

You, a pest control specialist, are hired to take care of a bat problem. What you find though, is a group of vampires.

[dreamerandschemer]

“So,” you say, blatantly staring at the twelve (or possibly thirteen, because that was seeming more and more likely) vampires in the living room you’re standing in. “So, uh,” you repeat, “should I just be... going, then?” 

When you got a call the other day to make an appointment to discuss getting rid of a bat infestation, you thought it would be pretty regular - figure out the scope, the house layout, all that. Now, though, you’re pretty certain you’re not going to get paid and, as a nice little bonus, your entire worldview has been shaken apart.

“Sorry,” says one of the vampires, almost sheepishly. He looks to be a teenager, but honestly? He’s probably like twelve centuries older than you or something. “I think Tyler though it’d be funny. He’s done this before, you know?” He looks at you expectantly. You hesitate and make a brief nod. You don’t know, though you expect the call was a prank, or whatever passes for it among vampires.

(This is where your train of thought breaks down yet again. You were perfectly happy to go about your mundane, somewhat depressing life without ever considering the fact that vampires exist. You have the awful feeling that one of these days, and altogether too soon, you’ll find out other strange creatures do, too, and get some sort of curse from the latest cockroach infestation.)

[ao3tagoftheday]

Help Refugees, Get Fic!

Gentlebeings! I call you here today to announce the formal opening of a very special event: A charity fic exchange to raise money to support migrants and asylum seekers on the US southern border.

What is this thing?

As many of you will know, thousands of migrants arrive daily at the US-Mexico border seeking asylum in the US. They are fleeing political oppression, gang violence, domestic abuse, economic collapse caused by climate change, and innumerable other terrible situations. The Trump administration has decided, rather than fulfill our country’s obligation under international law to provide asylum to those who need it, to instead imprison migrants under inhumane conditions, separate them from their families, and deny them access to legal counsel.

Luckily, there are a bunch of great organizations working to provide legal services and humanitarian assistance to these migrants. And we are going to give them some fucking money.

Who are we donating to?

We will be supporting:

The International Rescue Committee, which provides humanitarian assistance to migrants released from border detention;

Border Angels, which provides water and supplies along migrant routes to prevent people from dying in the desert;

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which provides legal and social support for refugees as they settle in the US;

And RAICES, which provides free and low-cost legal services to those detained at the border.

How does this work?

About 200 wonderful fandom creators have offered to provide fic and/or art to those who donate to any of these groups. Detailed instructions about how to get your fic/art once you’ve donated can be found here.

What do I do if I’ve signed up as a creator?

Your instructions are right here!

Where will all this cool fandom content end up?

All of the creators working on this project are encouraged to post their stuff in this AO3 collection!

So what’s in this for me?

Other than, like, helping people? Well. If there’s one truly universal fandom experience, it’s wanting fan content that doesn’t exist. Now you can make it exist! Want a drabble about your favorite villain hugging a puppy? Just ask. Yearning for a painting of your OC as a pirate? An artist is standing by. Need a handholding fic? An absurd bit of crack? An a/b/o smutfest? Now is your chance, my friends. It’s not every day you get to indulge yourself and do good simultaneously. Go for it.

Ok but seriously though.

One of the absolutely amazing things about fandom as a community is the way we are able to organize ourselves. We organize cons, kinkmemes, communities, fucking AO3. We’re a goddamn powerhouse. So let’s organize ourselves to do some good in the world. My original post announcing this project currently has 2,822 notes. That means that, if everyone who interacted with that post donates a dollar to one of these organizations, we’ll raise over 2,000 dollars to support migrants, and add potentially over 100,000 words of fanfiction and dozens or hundreds of pieces of fanart to the universe. And that’s just if we keep this restricted to the people who already know about it.

My goal for this project is that we raise 10,000 dollars. If everyone who’s already interacted with this project gives 5 dollars, we’re there. If we get this post to 10,000 notes and everyone interacting with it gives 1 dollar, we’re there. If we get this to 50,000 notes, and just 20% of us give 1 dollar, we’re there. I think 10,000 dollars is a goal we can not only reach but surpass, and once we get there, well, I guess we’ll aim for 20,000. Let’s get started.

[writing-prompt-s]

The daughter of a pair of serial killers falls in love with the ghost of one of their victims.

[dreamerandschemer]

The day after both her parents stood trial, she didn’t know what to do with herself. She hadn’t spoken to them for years and years and years - there had been an argument, not long after she left for college and directly before she had removed every last trace of herself from their house. They told her she was making a poor decision, she said that if they truly cared they’d shut the hell up - something like that. 

She hadn’t even known they’d been fucking arrested until she saw that headline. No one had bothered to... to... to call her to stand witness or whatever. She knew nothing about law, nothing about trials or murder or how people got declared Guilty and sentenced. Maybe she would have studied it in some other life, but she hadn’t in this one.

God, that was a terrible thought. She had lived - she had lived, the somewhat-darling daughter, at least for eighteen or so years, and all these years afterwards. Yet, there was someone - there was - so many (it said there had been five, or maybe six) - there were people grieving and dead and her parents had been the ones to do it.

How’s that for a legacy, huh? Here, instead of inheriting some money and some more debt, here’s the fucking fact that your parents had literal skeletons in their closets, just in there with Aunt Maggie’s awful fur coat and some old shoe boxes. Now, go back to work in the morning and don’t think about any of it!

Yeah, no. She called in sick and called herself a coward, but in all honesty she didn’t have the time to be a coward with the fact she was mostly spending the morning either staring at the wall or throwing up.

Sometime around ten, she finally forced herself to get dressed and make herself some tea, maybe toast. She pointedly ignored the cellphone on the kitchen counter, even as it buzzed low but not quite quietly with incoming texts, and forced herself to read the article that had been sitting out all night with its’ damning headline.

She forced herself to read it, because what else was there to do? She knew that word would get around, because that was what always happened, and sooner or later some reporter would track her down or some distant acquaintance would consider it their very own personal duty to interrogate her.

Well, that, and the fact that she felt complicit, or implicit, or whatever the word was. She knew, rationally, that she shouldn’t have been expected to have known - all these dates, harsh in black and white print, were months and years after she had stopped talking to her family. But surely there should have been a sign, surely she failed, surely she was supposed to have done something -

And now all there was to do was force these pages into her mind, lock them in her memory.

There were those six people, each identified and with an image placed in the paper - there was a man called Charles and a young woman who grinned with a toothy smile still full of braces and a grocery store manager and a little boy with a puppy in his arms. She found herself lingering over those images, not the ones of her parents arrested and sentenced (and she hated them, how she hated them, but that could never, ever come close to the hate those other families must hold).

She read until she moved from standing up with paper in hands to bent over it at the table to crying again on the floor, and she looked and looked at the faces of all these people. She didn’t know them, and what had happened meant she never would, but their names and eyes and three sentence biographies remained, and they haunted her.

[corvidprompts]

“There’s… something in the back of my mind, shoving me to just go jump.”

“That’s depression.”

“No, moron, I can fly, remember?”

[dreamerandschemer]

The two of them stood along the rooftop and scanned the city blocks that spread out beneath them, just far enough back that the lack of railing and somewhat crumbling tile wasn’t too worrying. Or at least, that was what Kay tried to convince themself as they stood a few steps behind Claire, who had no such reservations.

Kay noticed with not an insignificant amount of worry that Claire did indeed seem to have none, and was whispering to herself something along the lines of “just go jump.” Kay really did not want to get any closer to the edge, but would probably feel like a terrible, horrifically bad friend within moments if they just ignored whatever was running through Claire’s mind. She was their very best friend, after all, and Kay did not see any conveniently positioned super heroes to do something if she decided to take a dive off the roof.

“Oh!” Claire turned a bit back - though now her feet were positioned even more poorly for the tiled roof - and looked at Kay. “There’s - sorry. I’m just half convinced I should just go jump. Looks pretty clear and a lot faster than walking back down all those steps.”

“Pretty certain that’s depression telling you that,” Kay muttered.

Claire rolled her eyes. “No, moron, I can fly, remember? We literally discussed this earlier.”

Kay wondered if they should tell Claire or not that they’d thought she was joking. 

(It wasn’t like it was uncommon to have super powers of one variety or another, but it wasn’t uncommon to joke about having them, either. Half of their friends, after all, had tried to convince their classmates or coworkers or the people at some restaurant that they were the local hero, which... might actually be Claire, and wasn’t that a scary thought?)

[dreamerandschemer]

oh hey i just realized i’ve made 100 posts not including this one! i have some writing that will hopefully be up in the next day or two, if not in the next few hours :)

also, my offer is always open - if anyone wants to send me prompts, I’ll be happy to write a short piece for you,

[dreamerandschemer]

ok I actually wrote three stories in one sitting! so they’re all queued for tomorrow and the next day so you’ll be seeing them soon.

[dreamerandschemer]

oh hey i just realized i’ve made 100 posts not including this one! i have some writing that will hopefully be up in the next day or two, if not in the next few hours :)

also, my offer is always open - if anyone wants to send me prompts, I’ll be happy to write a short piece for you,

[writing-prompt-s]

How do you describe pain to someone who never felt it?

[dreamerandschemer]

You have said you have felt pain -

A few paper cuts, a scrape, perhaps bruised palms from

Falling too hard.

I still respect you but I resent that at the same time -

Do you know the pain of

Fearing and crying out soundlessly?

I do not, either.

How can I when I walk on clouds and could drink wine, if I wanted-

When my hands have never hit nor touched,

My eyes covered in rose that I know is there yet do not see.

The few paper cuts we both have hurt,

But is that enough to call it pain?