just sayin i mean we all remember her as chelsea from princess protection program right? my old otp still exists at least in the hearts of disney yuri fans everywhere, right???
idea: “having no redeeming qualities” like in the “annoying main character way.” meant to apply to more than just the main character, though.
the idea is that jane deserves to be more interesting (!!!) i guess. and also magic should totally be fleshed out.
Magic was forbidden in Auradon. Not that it didn't happen, but it was forbidden. Not supposed to happen.
It was, of course, all thanks to King Beast and the Fairy Godmother. After banishing the villains to the Isle, the logical conclusion they reached was to functionally remove magic from their own society, too. Like cursing just the villains to live without magic wasn't bad enough.
Jane sat through a history class about someone's brave dad chopping down some trees or evil trees or spiders or dragons. The story was the same every time. Prince saves princess. Usually with the help of magic. Auradon was boring. Life was boring. Life shouldn't be boring, especially not in Auradon. Jane had no value among the students at Auradon prep for one simple reason - she had no magic, unlike her mother. While everyone else was gifted with the same talents their parents had, Jane was not. Jane was deprived. Jane fucking hated it.
She could do well in school - great. She could try hard to look pretty - fine. She couldn't make friends... she couldn't make magic. She looked over to the desk where Ben and Audrey sat. Magic whizzed around Ben, it was plain. He glowed like embers in a dying fireplace. Everyone saw, girls and guys alike. As prince, that was natural. Yet Jane had nothing.
Maybe not nothing though. Jane had her own brand of 'magic' which she personally believed in - dreams. She dreamt so often of the Isle of the Lost. In spite of being so horrible, so full of evil, lawless people, it was all she could really focus on. She'd dreamt up characters, wild or silly or beautiful or sneaky.
These characters lived real lives, Jane thought. A struggle everyday to live was a real life.
Audrey and Lonnie answered some questions about the hero of the day. Jane ignored the class entirely and doodled away in her notebook. he was drawing Audrey from behind, not a stupid spiteful demonic-styled adaptation, just an attempt at capturing reality. Funny lines pulling into Audrey's braid, or showing the wrinkles in her cardigan. Ben next to her, the whorl of his hair. She drew lines spiraling out from his head like rays of light. 'Magic,' she labelled the lines. They became a field, like the electric fields they learned about in "Natural Magic" aka Science. They pointed towards a funny sketch of a dragon.
Yeah, Long live Evil! Jane laughed to herself, the slogan of her dream-friends making its way onto the dragon logo. Class had been over for a few minutes and Lonnie poked her to pack up, assuming that Jane was still taking notes or something. Jane packed up. Or packed up everything except her freshly vandalized notebook, holding it to her chest like it was her only connection to reality. She hated Auradon. Would anyone understand? She believed in her personal magic.
Making her way back to her locker, avoiding anyone and everyone, staring down the ground like she'd missed it dearly during class, she would of course walk straight into someone, someone's bright blue Auradon prep uniform jacket. "Hey Jane, make sure to look where you're going." Ben smiled at her and moved to pick up her dropped notebook. Of course he'd notice her drawing of him and the stupid logo. "Hey... nice sketch." Jane bashed herself on the head and groaned. "Thanks Ben. Really sorry for bumping into you, I'm really sorry. I'll be going." Her face was poison-apple red and she rushed to her locker to get her stuff and go home. Or the library. The library, yeah.
Ben just stood by his locker thinking over what he'd seen. Yeah, he had dreams about the Isle. He'd seen the symbols of its residents.
Long live Evil, huh?
after spending maybe the past week in my room almost exclusively doing nothing..., feeling shitty about my ability to do anything and just reading about people who do cool stuff (undertale, people in my class, or maybe @ruffsficstuffplace) and then it clicks! wait a second !!! I can get out of bed adn do anything!! except wait I have homework nop cant write any fanfiction 4 u but maybe i’ll code or create something beautiful or write bad poems or fanfiction! why not?! the world is at my fingertips.
i obviously don’t have the capacity to translate my positive energy into anything more than dumb cliches. just wanna spread some love & shoutout to some cool people. okay, one cool person among many.
so i read the book a while back... and sure, it’s “a great addition” to the canon, i mean, “kind of”. (warning: my opinions ahead. warning: me thinking too hard about disney’s descendants ahead. warning: surprisingly long)
(tl;dr: me complaining about the book)(and the rest of the canon actually)
im just bitching that the book wasn’t written for 20 yr olds like me (yes really). now we can continue.
you know, besides the biased jayvie/jevie, the parts of carlos’ character which were virtually unmentioned in the movie, the transition of their relationships between book and movie (which i interpreted - the time between book and movie to be NONE, based on that little snippet implying that the end of the book leads straight into rotten to the core)
so the book was great in that it gave character to Jay and Carlos who basically got nothing from the movie... (and ben. and a little to mal?)
okay, so from the book, let’s look at carlos. not friends with jay nor mal. has to do chores for cruella, OK. let’s talk about his ‘bedroom’. his bedroom is a dressing room on the other side of some myseriously long and dark corridor full of bear traps with cruella’s fur jackets on the other end, near the door to his room. But! there is also a door to somewhere else in the building (Hell Hall. Ha ha. Devil Haha.) so if you thought carlos had to go through the bear traps just to get to bed, i mean, that’d be false, right? carlos is characterized as a genius nerd. he invents a device that can pierce the magical barrier. so, is carlos gifted with being a genius because cruella de vil has no unique or interesting traits? just curious. i love carlos. just, movie carlos has only TWO ‘nerd’ indicators that I can think of. Hm. 3.
he likes video games
he knows how to use the laptop in spite of coming from the isle where there is no wifi and etc etc
his little line about the breadboard circuit? the humor of the line is that it sounds nerdy and means virtually nothing, actually. id literally be flabbergasted if a complex magical security system had a breadboard circuit in it, like, was it made by kindergartners?
just that movie carlos really has NO obvious hints that he is a huge nerd. the only one of these 3 things that i picked up from my first viewing was the first one, which is the weakest indicator...
if carlos was such a nerdy nerdy geek boy, shouldn’t evie have shared her good marks with carlos instead of doug? or was it because carlos already knew she was smart, in spite of his whole “girl you are on fire” thing to mal, like he didn’t know what being good was. or was it because doug had to be shoehorned in so that evie would have a “nice” romantic interest?
i just wish there had been a stronger connection between movie and book carlos. it really causes me to interpret the book as “just another fanfic” because carlos is really not that similar between them imo. omg! is it because carlos was bad at tourney? but he was good at running. but just from a dog? lool?
also i mean, i think it’s “convenient” that carlos, rather than being an animal abuser, is just afraid of animals, but i think it would be a lot more scary and compelling if he was a sadistic animal torturer (AND reasonable given his mom) or failing “torturer” at least like would want to kill animals for their fur, “they literally exist for no purpose other than to be eaten and worn,” or something.
timeline complaint: every story happened 20 years ago and all within the same kingdom and also within 20 years technology evolved like this instead of magic? cruella de vil’s story, mulan’s story, beauty and the beast, sleeping beauty, all happened 20 years ago? let’s say we have aurora. she is 16 when maleficent is defeated. audrey is 16. audrey was born when aurora was still 16? perhaps... wait - that also means that maleficent “bore” mal that year. in 101 dalmations, there are cars. in beauty and the best, i believe there are guns. or muskets or something. blunderbuss? in mulan, their projectiles are fireworks. (okay, they’re better than fireworks, but there are no guns) in sleeping beauty, there is magic and there are swords. tsk tsk. hrmph. i get that it’s impossible to make a nice timeline.
... idk, i’m reading and reading, and i think i’ve really see most of what i wanted to about carlos. perhaps at the end during the gargoyle questioning, i mean - their struggles near the end were just melodramatic but also immature. shrug, 9-12, yeah yeah. we know from pretty early on - actually, looking at the page, we find out that cruella’s true love is her furs on page 241, which is more than halfway through the book. wowie. enough about carlos. i wish he had more *continuous* character in the canon media. i like both movie and book carlos but separately.
let’s talk about someone boring - mal. mal is pretty much just as interesting in the movie and book. she is kind of my favorite, but really, she is so fucking boring. she has nothing going on except for being a hypocrite (which is why she’s my favorite). the other thing i like about her (which does carry through the book to the movie) is that she is wonderfully manipulative to the girls. actually, wow, yes, only to girls. she always kinda meanly flirts to evie, like when mal says they’re playing 7 minutes in heaven and she asks evie to play and it’s like “Come on, you want to be my friend, don’t you?” and evie gulps and goes “You want me to be your friend?” like she thinks mal wants to play 7 minutes in heaven with her. *w* but that’s my brain at work, not melissa de la cruz’s. but mal never really gets like that with the boys. maybe because she understands evie’s insecurity that way? but carlos is similarly insecure, just wants nice relationships. i mean, they all do. so what up with the gender bias. w/e. mal’s a big ol lesbian and wants evie to want her. >:3 other than that mal is a pile of boring. and then gets ruined by ben. vomit vomit barf.
okay, jay is up. jay is nice... i feel like he doesn’t get a lot of spotlight in the book nor the movie. jay’s pretty actively friendly. he also like does some het flirting with evie! obviously that was my biggest complaint with the book. he also likes working together.. trading with mal, holding hands with people pretty un-hesitatingly... honestly i just don’t care for jay that much or i feel like i’ve spent too much time on this already to spend a lot of time researching jay right now when i could do it later and better.
eeeeviiieeee...... so good. so continuous throughout, too, for the most part. evie... yeah, evie is really the best character. evie and carlos. evie is pretty consistent. she also is the least evil, always. always always. okay, fine, carlos is the least evil. everyone is totally spot on about evie. the fan literature on evie is real vast and i agree with basically all of it, so i guess i’m not going into that at all.
i dislike how evie “forgets” that she is smart by the time she meets chad. sure, she’s just playing it down. then why is she so proud of herself when she gets a B+ in chemistry when in fact they do study chemistry on the isle, and she knows she is smart already? AND carlos knows she is smart. really, it would be more “core 4 canon” to sub doug for carlos - i REALLY don’t ship evie/carlos (does that even have a name?) but i mean their relationship is really good. and doug just really - like he’s fine, but i agree with whoever it was that said they hate doug -well i don’t hate him, but evie didn’t NEED a “nice romantic interest.” doug’s worth having just for his dancing in the movie. yeeup.
also i kind of wish evie having a short temper was more of a thing. from the movie, she kind of lost it on chad at the family day thing. mmmmmmmmmmm yeah she could get mad more often mmmhhmmmmmm *heavy breathing*
oh god this got out of hand. but i have so much more to say!! but i’m tired so it wouldn’t even make that much sense. ugh, i need to write out bullet points for myself or some shit.
wait!! no i forgot a really nice sentiment that i’ve only begun to understand within the past year of my living so you young folks might not even know what i’m talking about!
when i said, “the transition of their relationships between book and movie,” what i meant was, they weren’t that close for most of the book, they hardly knew each other before the book, and logically during the movie, that’s when most of their relationships formed (in a deeper and meaningful and FUN way). and you might think, “that’s horrible, in MY HC they were close and knew each other forever” but there is this certain wonderful magic of being around people that you don’t exactly know, but have these really cool and open-minded conversations with - where you find your differences and similarities equally and respect and love both of those things. so MY HC probably would have really cute and funny and embarrassing conversations and hangouts at auradon prep where they discover funny things about each other that they never knew because they never cared to get to know each other before. where they realize whether or not they’d really be ‘in love’ or ‘loving’ each other because of the little things about their personalities, not just the way they look or act on the surface - because they’re all insecure little bitches, and we and they both all know that.
eg. a factoid that they could find out would be something like, when evie gets sick she always lays down on her stomach because superstitiously she believes that is the best position to stop hurting. or that when carlos drinks too much and throws up, instead of going for the toilet, he always goes for the sink and he doesn’t know why. or that jafar brushed jay’s hair until some surprising age like 10. or that mal used to shave weird and unconventional places on her body like her toes and feet and arms and behind her ears (like the soft fuzzy hairs) until she lived in auradon with evie and evie told her it was weird to do that.
or what magic they think is the most good, and the most evil, and what crimes are the most evil, and what kind of suffering is the greatest - conversations you couldn’t have unless you’d hung out and really talked it all out, but it would be so intimate and fun to do and once that phase of getting to know each other is over, it will probably never come back. (fine, the last part is *mostly* my cynicism.)
also i tried to screencap this but really it was pretty blurry every time i coudl get the entire thing but honestly check out jay's long live evil logo. seriously. underrated.
that's one of my favorite parts of rotten to the core. right when jay climbs down the ladder. yup.
so i've been thinking really hard about mal's outfits... and how many zippers she wears?!?!?!
coudl this be a drinking game or something? every time you see an unnecessary zipper?
i mean we all remember that post about the gloves and how they slowly stop wearing the gloves because they become their genuine selves or whatever, but THESE ZIPPERS. what does it mean? why does she wear so many zippers when evie is prepping her for her date? what what asldkf what dose it all mean anwyasy?/?
when i was younger i used to get really mad when i read stuff that wasn't as long or smutty as i wanted... shrug emoji. oh well. i have a couple things that i just add to when i have time, or just finished something hard like a lab report...
i would add more to this some time. sentiment: questioning
Mal didn't need to hide her drawings from anyone, and really, didn't.
Her arms just fell over them protectively, keeping others from smudging them,
or looking at them wrong.
"... carve its heart out ..." floated the Fairy Godmother's words over to Mal.
Who was next to Evie. Mal felt Evie's smile grow at that and the desk they shared shifted. She readjusted her arm and rubbed her temple as Evieasked a vapid question. _Do I really have to do all the work around here?_ Mal turned to look at Evie incredulously. Evie must have known what she was doing.That's what this all was to her, probably. One big joke. Being asked questions about goodness by the good-est fairy of them all, Evie must have been poking fun at the Fairy Godmother by pretending to be stupid, right? Then it would have made sense, the Fairy Godmother's response or lack thereof. Evie met Mal's annoyed look and she beamed like she'd won a prize for the dumb shit she just said. Evie tossed a glance at Mal's drawing of the Fairy Godmother's wand and wondered how Mal remembered exactly what it looked like.
Mal looked away, towards their wonderful teacher. She answered the question the right way, and everyone mockingly asked her how she got it right. That's how it seemed, at least, who knew when it came to these kids. They couldn't actually be that dumb, could they? Of course anyone would know what the Fairy Godmother wanted to hear them say, and it wasn't hard to give it to her.
Cue the mousey little girl to identify herself as the Fairy Godmother's daughter.
Mal nudged Evie, pointing out what could become a new toy. Evie looked on in
disdain, or something like it, or maybe just annoyance or indifference. Mal didn’t know, and honestly shouldn't care. Mal's interest is piqued and her fingers moved across her bottom lip because she couldn't wait for the excitement of the hunt, or the catch, or the fight that Jane might put up, or the silly
putty that she would turn into. Evie smiled disarmingly at Jane, like she always
did. Jane is gone and Mal's scheming officially begins.
If they can't get to the wand while it's in the museum, then they must figure out
another way. The Fairy Godmother wouldn't be an easy target, but little Jane just
might be.
The boys started wrestling over nothing just to be able to touch each other, and
the Fairy Godmother lets them go. "E, what do you think of that girl? Jane?" Mal's voice is a loud whisper and Evie's is quiet. "What do I think of her? Horrendous." Mal remembered being told that if she rolled her eyes too much, they'd stick that way. "She's Fairy Godmother's daughter, Evie. AKA, she can get us the wand... probably."
"Well, great for her. And you. While you two are going at it, maybe get her to fix
herself up a bit, huh? She probably needs it, based on the way she acts. Like she already gave up on trying to be pretty a long time ago because of something
someone said."
Mal was insulted and confused. "Fine, be that way. Go do your homework." All she wanted from Evie was some approval, or an idea to help her along. Not an assload of sass. She could and would do it on her own.
interviewer: so what qualities do you have that would make you right for this job?
me: uh well i run a descendants blog
interviewer:
me: i know the movie word for word
interviewer:
me: i really nEED THIS JOB
this is so close to home i'm dying.
JUST TODAY had an interview and they asked me to explain something i'm passionate about and i spent a couple seconds filtering out all the things i couldn't actually say.
i got pretty mad the other day when my peers/friends were making fun of the idea of working at pinterest.
me, myself, thinking, well, if you’ve heard of the company outside of jobmine (our school’s internship system), then it must be a pretty good place to work. naturally pinterest counts. I don’t use it, but I’ve heard of it.
I didn’t apply because I tried to apply to smaller companies this time, but really regretted not applying to pinterest after hearing about cool events they ran.
but my friends saw pinterest as a joke, not a serious place to treat as a great place to work. Why??? Well, the reason was two things:
pinterest is for girls
the people who work at pinterest are almost all girls or gay guys, according to my friends.
I’ve thought about this way too much over the past few days not to say anything about it. Point one - what the fuck does the audience of the software have to do with the work itself?! People gladly work on video games made for dumb kids and I don’t know, social media platforms or restaurant review websites, or.. I just don’t see the relation between the audience of the product and the reason to work there. My last manager (who I LOVED he was very cool and open-minded and really worked to help me learn and improve, just … a really great work experience) worked at Gaia online for a long time, and at first I thought ‘haha gaia online is so silly’ but really, no! It’s not stupid to work there. The work is not related to the audience. The infrastructure, the technology, is not 'kid-sized’ even if the audience for the product is.
So I just mean to say that it’s a load of shit to say you think a company is beneath you (AS AN INTERN!) because its audience is stereotypically female, or I mean really, could be a race thing, could be a socio-economic thing, who CARES if it’s good software and getting used by people and maybe even helps them (probably at the cost of their personal information like basically every piece of software is these days). I don’t know. Obviously I’m not logical enough.
The second thing really got my goat when I realized what bothered me about it. What’s wrong with a company being girls and gay guys? (and obviously not really, because you can’t make a stupid generalization like that, but you know what? ti’s okay, 'cause we keep going.)
Maybe, MAYBE, MAAAYYBE, what’s 'wrong’ about working at a company where the norm is women, is that YOU COULD BE A MINORITY?!?!?!!?!?
ps. i really don’t mean to start arguments because i know it all exists, and that i must be wrong somehow, etc etc. just sometimes, you think the people you know are above having certain biases and then…
wait better analogy than gaia online. it’s like saying you wouldn’t work for LINE just because asians use it. like okay, the work can be related to the audience, definitely, but i just don’t think that you should look down on a company just because it caters to an audience, or the stereotypical audience. i know one guy who uses pinterest. (and is not 'ashamed’ i should add)
ok, so i've thought this since i first saw descendants, which, let's be real, was at least 12 viewings ago...
first off, there is no 'other parent' to any of them. the idea is that the descendants (at least of the villains) were created 'asexually' or at least, magically.
the villains caught wind of the whole exile thing in advance, and prepared magic knowing that after the exile they would not have access to magic. so this hateful, vengeful magic gives birth (hohoho) to these descendants, but kinda more like a time bomb
so then the descendants were literally created with the purpose of serving their parents and carrying out their revenge.
then ben (at least child of beast) was cursed to fall in love with one of them
descendants get to aurodon because of that curse, their personal agency makes them want to be good
but because of how they were created, there's some kind of timebomb or condition where they will be magically forced to carry out revenge on their parents' behalf (ves?)
bad shit ensues i guess. idk. like, realistically, seriously, i think i only came up with it to break up bal and try to make malvie happen in my mind.
but really it wouldn't have to break up bal... idk. i like ben, just not OTP i guess... ◕ ⌒ ◕
'I was just guessing,' said Evie. 'I don’t know anything about anything.' Carlos wanted to tell her that she was selling herself short, when he realized that he always did the same thing.
after evie points out that carlos' device might be leading them to the scepter
so, since i'm posting things on tumblr now, here are some images i made using uhhhh.... grafx... something ("Grafx2"), and lua. looking at them makes me want to try again. the idea was to make something tile-able for a website background, but really they just don't work right. 1 - NES palette i got from somewhere, 2 - gameboy palette i got from somewhere (i think wikipedia), 3 - using some default palette and selecting a range of purples and blues
trying to use prompts things. this one is “fall aesthetic”
the idea isn’t like ‘write explicitly this’
it’s “hunh do something, anything at all”
I sat on the shitty little dorm bed and looked through imgur posts on my phone. This was the beginning of my new life, they said, when they left me here. Sure, my mom was tearing up as she said it and hugged me for the last time for a while.
Classes didn’t start for another week. Orientation week was probably a load of bullshit, and it was starting the next day. Going to university was going to change my life. Probably. It looked and felt cheap and boring so far. The buzz and hum of girls outside my room eager to meet each other was comforting, or off-putting, or nerve-wracking. My dorm was a bunch of double rooms and some single rooms, and they were all girls my age on my floor. What was there possibly to complain about?
More footsteps outside and the sound of friendly girl 1 and friendly girl 2 greeting someone new. Louder. “Oh, I don’t think your roommate has arrived yet…” the voice of the RA bounced off the door. What a surprise my roommate-to-be was in for.
The door opened quietly and the RA retracted her verbal misstep. “It’s fine, I’m here. Hey. Cool to meet you,” I exude like a sigh. My shit is pretty tidy and I’m already set up. From the looks of her face she’s going to be claiming a lot of counter space for cosmetics or clothes or “girly” things. Whatever, that’s cool. Do what you like. All my quiet, internalized energy begins to emanate from my skin or something, like I’d just been waiting for her to come in, come into my life, stop me from being alone. I kind of want her to be just mine, don’t go away, just chill with me.
She smiles sheepishly and introduces herself, so I respond in kind. She’s cute. She’s pretty. She’s fashionable. She begins to unpack her junk carefully and she hums nervously to herself. She’s taller than me. She’s got a kind of deeper voice than me, she’s kind of … hot?
I don’t want her to leave. I ask her some shit about where she’s from, somewhere like Georgia - but not a hick, she laughs. I tell her where I’m from. I tell her that my thing is fine arts, like drawing. I ask her why she wanted to come here.
She turns around to face me sitting on my bed cross-legged, she leans against her bed like some kind of model. She didn’t want to be around -there- anymore, that’s for sure. I smile coyly not asking what she means and assuming something like the worst which twists my smile like a wet towel dried by an angry mom. What’s your thing, then, and maybe it’s something like fashion and design.
I’m drowning myself in her attention and I know it, so I try to stop. I ask her if she wants help, and leave it at that. She laughs that I wouldn’t know what to do with her stuff anyways. I’d be offended but she’s honest and I like it and her and so much.
Back to my phone, its blank screen, my eyes following her hands or hair or legs or nose as she navigates the room we’ll both call home for a while.
She finishes putting her stuff away and jumps onto her little bedroll of a bed. She can probably tell I’m just casually watching her, probably. She looks over to me and I look out the window between our beds like nothing’s special. The leaves are yellow, red, green, or absent. The little naked twigs of branches remind me of me, and the filled-out leaves with beauty and color remind me of her. Feels like fall.
*post-post-writing guilt is consuming me here: the idea of this was to like, a - try to write something, b - try to use weird or unconventional like figurative speech at least once (i already removed some weird things), c - put something online and not be ashamed shit i lost already
whatever, i have to stop being an anus and post this so i can do actual school work.
so let’s write some fanfiction… starting from some basic bitch prompts, first
Magical Cooking (or How Not to be Wasteful)
The thing about baking a batch of cookies is that you end up with more than just one. Mal and Evie had agreed to keep them in their dorm room to make sure no one ate any by accident. The recipe had them make a dozen cookies, and with one gone, there were still eleven more sitting on Mal’s bedside table.
After the coronation, things had really quieted down. Or, they’d quieted down for Evie, specifically. Mal spent much less time in the dorm room now that she was seriously with Ben, and Jay and Carlos were usually busy playing Tourney or their video games. Evie didn’t mind the quiet too much, it was just a first for her. On the Isle, she was never alone. Doug was interested in her, and it was nice to have someone to study with, but she’d already let him down nicely - not that it would be bad to hook up with him from time to time. Evie knew that Doug would expect too much from her, and cared about him enough not to want to cause trouble for him.
The cookies sat on Mal’s bedside table innocently enough. All it took was one mistake for them to get their use. Evie invited Doug over to cram for a exam the next day. Everything was going great, they’d gone over some key concepts and were taking a break before going into the past exams. Doug examined the room (from the surface level, he dared not look into any girls’ drawers or closets) and he saw a plate of beautiful, delicious looking cookies. He made his way to them quietly and then picked one up and smelled it.
“Evie, these smell great,” he sighed, ready to take a bite. As soon as she saw him holding the cookie, she cut him off “No!” and snatched the cookie from his hand. And immediately shoved it into her mouth. And before Doug could respond, shoved all the rest of the cookies into her mouth, too.
“God, I just LOVE these cookies. I can’t believe I forgot they were there! Ha, ha…” Evie blurted, still chewing some of them, having already swallowed most of the cookies.
Doug looked on in confusion and asked, “Really? I couldn’t have had just one?”
“Ohh, no… these are magic, they help me keep my skin good…” Evie lied lamely, and Doug saw through it. He sighed and let it go, it must have been something she couldn’t tell him about, and he wanted her to understand that he could respect that she wouldn’t want to tell him everything.
Evie on the other hand, was ready to run into the bathroom and spit out any of the cookies she hadn’t swallowed yet, and cursed herself for eating all of them like a big idiot. They had only tried the one cookie on Ben, and maybe it had been not that effective since he liked her anyways. She didn’t really feel any different yet. Maybe the cookies wouldn’t work on her since she was a girl, too. Or maybe they would only have worked on Ben.
Doug rolled his eyes as Evie made a series of faces while she had her internal monologue, and returned to the table where they had been studying. Evie followed after a few minutes, and they silently worked on the past exams. Except Evie was not working on a past exam. Her mind was occupied with whether or not the cookies worked, and in turn, Mal. Did she feel like she was suddenly “in love” with Mal? No… She turned over in her head memories of Mal, and whether or not they stirred any ‘love-like’ emotions within her. Meeting her on the island and wanting to impress her since everyone knew Maleficent was the most powerful villain on the island? Doing Mal’s makeup before her first date, putting blush on her cheeks, applying lipstick with her fingertips…
She decided to work on the exam and try to forget about the cookies. Easy enough, for one or two problems. After maybe fifteen minutes had passed, she couldn’t focus at all. How would Mal react? What would happen when she found out? It’s not like Evie would try to do anything, would she? Mal was definitely, definitely interested in not only Ben but also just boys. Or maybe not, there was nothing stopping Mal from being with a girl, certainly not her own mentality.
“Hey Doug, I’m really just getting distracted. I think I just need some time on my own for a while, also I know we’re both gonna be fine for this test.” Doug looked up surprisedly and sighed, again, knowing not to ask too much of a teenage girl.
“Just let me know if anything’s wrong and you do want to talk to me about it, Evie. I’m always here. Really,” he packed up his notebooks quietly and left.
After Evie was sure he was out of earshot, she decided to contact Mal using magic. She stumbled over what kind of rhyme she would need to find Mal, and then laid her mirror down on the cookie plate. “Mirror, mirror, on the plate - help me find my dumb roommate.” Its surface swirled with magical mist, and eventually the doors of the dorms came into view. Ben was walking Mal back to her dorm already. Jealousy surged through Evie when she saw they were holding hands. It ran from her stomach to her throat and settled into her chest, causing her to clench her hands into fists. Evie watched as they strode up to the door to their dorm room, looking peachy as ever. Him with his light blue varsity jacket, and white pants, like the dumb king he was… leaning in to kiss Mal with his pure and beautiful love, as though no one else could love Mal like that. She picked the mirror up and moved to her bed, placing it face down. Their parting words were a quiet murmur through the door, and Evie still wasn’t sure whether the cookies were really working their magic yet. She had never really taken to Ben anyways. She wouldn’t be as lonely as she was now if it weren’t for him. She missed Mal a lot.
The knob turned and Mal said to Ben, “see you tomorrow.” Evie didn’t move, even though her heart leapt. “Evie, what’s up?” turned quickly enough from a casual greeting into a serious question. “We agreed not to use the cookies, E!”
Evie groaned loudly, torn by internal conflict. “It… the cookies… I didn’t use them on anyone…”
Mal squinted at the plate, and saw that there were crumbs everywhere. “Sure looks like someone ate them…”
Evie rolled around on the bed, really wanting to tell Mal what she’d done but she wasn’t sure if she could even handle facing her roommate yet. “I swear to all that is bad, that I di- that- look, I didn’t give them to anyone.”
Evie’s wording was suspicious enough, coupled with the fact that she wouldn’t look at Mal. Mal knew something was up, and sat on her bed across from Evie. “E, look at me. What happened with the cookies? Did you throw them out?” She watched Evie push her arms into the bed and slowly turn her head to look at Mal.
“Mmn… Mal? I just like, really miss you, you know? You’re like… never around anymore.” Evie felt her heart being torn in two, going over how Mal really left her in the dust after she started dating Ben. It wasn’t fair! Mal was right in front of her now, though, and maybe really listening to her. “The cookies, I mean, I had to stop Doug from eating them by accident, you know? He just saw them and thought it’d be okay, so I stopped him, of course!” Evie couldn’t stop smiling when she saw the corner of Mal’s mouth curl up as she realized what had happened.
“Evie, so you maybe ate one, but you definitely got rid of them? Can you just like sit up and look at me like a normal human being?” Evie laughed and sat upright. She beamed at Mal, Mal, Mal, Mal, purple locks tumbling over her shoulders. Her look of concern was heartmeltingly endearing, her lips pursed in concern caused Evie’s to curl up at the ends. Her cute little dimples making her serious face look laughably adorable, her eyes alternating between inspecting the plate where the cookies had been and Evie’s own. Mal sat with her hands pressed firmly into the bed at her sides, with one leg crossed over the other, and wearing that cute leather jacket she always used to on the isle. Mal was so cute. So perfect.
“I got rid of them. They’re gone. It’s all good!” Evie giggled innocently, and Mal knew that there was probably nothing too bad to worry about, Evie was pretty smart, and pretty handy with magic, too. So maybe it’d be worth it to play a game with Evie, to see what really happened with the cookies.
Mal’s mind was plotting, busy at work, and Evie was in no position to tell her it was unattractive. She rose from the bed with a twinkle in her eye that didn’t go unnoticed. She’d see how Evie would react to a few different concepts, and that would tell her if she’d really eaten a cookie or not. Mal already knew the truth, though. “E, this date just now was so nice. Ben is really a great guy,” she turned her head back towards Evie on her bed to see her face. Evie of course was pouting, unhappy to hear about the object of Mal’s affection. “He took me out to the forest where Aurora and her prince first met, where she sang 'once upon a dream,’” Evie couldn’t help but roll her eyes, hearing about Ben. “And then he used magic to play the song and we danced, and he’s sooo handsome, and he’s a great dancer. He’s the perfect guy,” Mal sighed melodramatically to make a point. Evie’s emotions were racing through her veins, hot and unburdened by shame or normalcy, or rather freed by the magic of the cookies, and she snapped, “Sure, sure, he’s the most amazing, wonderful, attractive, manly, handsome, beautiful, fun-loving, good-hearted, thoughtful, kind, sharing, … great… nice…” Evie lost track of what words she’d said, resorting to wordless grumbling.
Mal broke into a smile, but of course was turned away from Evie. “Got a problem with him? He IS all of those things.” Mal was just playing games, but Evie was breaking apart. She was elated to see Mal, to be so close to her, depressed to hear her express her love for Ben, so envious that Mal obviously didn’t feel that way about her, excited by the prospect of sleeping in the same room as Mal, all at once.
“You don’t even know!” Evie exclaimed, exasperated. She was tearing up and leaned against the heardboard of her bed, watching Mal’s back. Evie covered her face with her hands, pressing hard into her forehead. Mal, continuing with her game, exhaled slowly so that Evie would hear. “I guess I’ll just get ready for bed, E.” Evie’s fingers parted to see Mal when she heard the telltale -zzzip!- of Mal’s jacket. Without looking back at Evie, Mal tossed her jacket onto the ground and stretched her neck, tilting her head left, then back, then right. She sighed again, blatantly deliberately. The cheesy obviousness was lost on Evie, as the sound of Mal’s breathing hummed up and down her spine. Her eyes followed the movement of Mal’s fingers as they slowly pulled the hem of her shirt up around her waist. Evie held her breath as Mal removed her shirt and also threw it on the ground, leaving Evie quite a view of her pale back and black bra.
Mal started unbuttoning her jeans and decided to turn it up another notch. Evie’s hands were on her cheeks, her heart felt like it was going to rip itself from her chest and weasel its way into Mal’s bra just to be as close as possible to hers. “And after it all, we were just making out against a tree, and the sun was setting, and he had one hand on my cheek, and the other on my hip… his lips were just perfect, like, firm, but he would just know how to do it right…” she ran one of her hands over her stomach while describing the situation and the others’ fingers over her own lips. Evie had nothing to do but sit there and take the teasing. Mal could practically hear Evie’s heart beating like a nightcore mix of a speedcore song, fast and relentless, and felt no guilt for what she was doing to her friend. She always wondered what it would be like for this to happen, and now it was real, and she was in charge. The last part was just a convenient bonus.
Mal didn’t have enough experience taking off her pants in a sexy way, though, and after sliding them off her hips, she awkwardly pulled each leg out separately, and Evie couldn’t help but giggle. “Got something to say?” “M-m-mal, you’re… I mean, I tell you all the time you’re just really cursed hot.” Evie spluttered dumbly.
It was down to the wire - or socks, as it were. Mal still hadn’t settled on whether she wanted to make the move or force Evie to do it. The story about Ben wasn’t true, anyways, he didn’t know what to do at all with a girl’s body, it was all just fantasizing on Mal’s part. Evie probably had more experience kissing than Mal, anyways. Mal liked this reasoning and also knew it would be much more fun to force Evie to cave to whatever magic she’d consumed in however many cookies she’d eaten. “Jeez E, is it just me or is it really hot? I don’t even wanna put anything on for bed, I’d just be covered in sweat.”
Mal heard Evie gulp before barely uttering, “I think it’s just you.” Evie’s cheeks were flushed and her hands trembled slightly. She’d never really felt anything like what she felt just then - rushes of various emotions, so intense, and some fear of rejection, really, really, really intense desire, and this strange knowledge that it was probably all magic-induced. Evie watched her breathing, and made sure it was even-sounding. The girls fell into silence and Evie just continued to pulse with ten times the intensity of Ben’s confession after the tourney game.
She knew that Mal was playing her and part of her wanted to act on it, another part felt bad for Ben, and another part kept her glued to the bed. Mal turned back to face Evie, standing somewhat proudly in her bra and underwear just like she did when she was practicing being sexy. If Evie hadn’t been so riled up, she would have laughed at the unusual stance Mal took, the way her arms and legs just didn’t seem to be moving entirely naturally. There was no question that Mal intended to make use of the cookies, and that Evie did too, but this would have fallen into the category of “actually evil activity” which both girls had been avoiding for the past few weeks. Not evil because it would be both of them, or two girls, or that neither of them would say no even without the influence of magic, but only because it might actually hurt someone emotionally. Ben was good at knowing when magic came into play, maybe he would somehow know if Mal saw him the next day. And it wasn’t like the cookies’ effects would just 'wear off’ if they acted on the magic’s effects.
Mal snapped herself back into the game by remembering that Evie started it. Mal laid herself down onto her own bed, and sighed, spreading her arms out, trying to dispel her nerves. However, as soon as she closed her eyes, she heard Evie move from her bed. She closed her eyes and waited. Evie’s socked feet padded on the wood floor, one after the other, approaching gently and evenly. Each girl heard her heart louder than the footfall, and Evie turned off the lights and closed the curtains. She had the sense to take care of logistics, obviously.
Evie finally moved towards Mal, who was basically shivering from uncertainty but also from the cold of being nearly naked in the room. Evie looked at her hands to see them shudder and shook her head like a wet dog before returning to her mission. With a manner that betrayed her state of mind, she straddled Mal and propped herself up with her elbows on either side of Mal’s head. “I love you, you know?” she whispered as she leaned towards Mal, whose eyes hadn’t been open for almost a minute, and kissed her like anyone would their first kiss with someone new - gently, slowly, not wanting to scare her off. For Mal, this was just a kiss, albeit a good one, with someone who was far more experienced than herself. For Evie, her planet was spinning out of control and the moon was being thrown out of orbit, cast off into the infinity of the universe. Unable to stop herself, Evie killed the kiss and spat, “holy fuck” before continuing the kiss like she would have wanted to. She sucked on Mal’s lower lip, bit it, kissed her deeply and passionately as though she’d never loved anyone else. Not that Mal wasn’t exercising her own agency, pushing back towards Evie and making sure Evie understood that this was not a one-sided affair.
As they kissed, Evie began to lower her body onto Mal’s, keeping her warm and increasing their contact in spite of the clothing between them. Exhiliration thrummed through them both like loud music in a club, and Evie’s right hand moved to let her draw spirals from Mal’s ear to her jaw to the corner of her mouth. If Mal was in a club with loud music, then Evie was sitting in front of an enormous subwoofer, feeling the tiny hairs in her ear shrivel up due to the noise, her heart pounding like some kind of perpetual motion machine.
Mal’s hands gripped Evie’s torso and Mal used her fingernails to encourage Evie’s touches and kissing. She let one set of fingernails serve as a monitor for Evie’s behavior and the other worked at rolling Evie’s shirt up to her bra and then some. Their bare stomachs came into contact, the invisible-soft hairs tickling skin that usually goes untouched. Evie kissed down along Mal’s neck more messily than a war-worn lover might have, then leaned back to pull off her own shirt. Mal impishly pressed Evie’s hips into her own and ground against her, smirking as Evie couldn’t help but gasp, smile, and look back into her eyes hungrily. Evie’s neurons fired like submachine gun rounds and she thoughtlessly moved her left thumb to a spot right over the seam that ran down the middle of Mal’s panties. She pressed her left hand into Mal’s pelvis and minded her thumb moving back and forth slowly like it’d been working at the motion for sixteen years or so. Mal’s first instinct made her grab Evie’s left arm to move it away, she hadn’t let Ben go there yet, but then she realized to go through with this meant to place her hands on Evie’s thighs, underneath her dark blue ruffled skirt.
Evie gasped, leaned forward to kiss Mal again, and breathily and oh-so-seriously reassured her “I would never hurt you.” Mal smiled at her friend’s confession of intent but began to flounder. She’d never done these things (with someone else before) (especially not a girl).
