Do you have any headcanons about young Sally? Because like I think shes such an opportunity like we know just enough from Percy to have an idea but we can also diverge almsot as much as we Ehat because it’s entirely possible she acts in a specific way eith Percy abd her friends.
tbh I just imagine her as one of the messiest people alive vut I imagine every character lile thay so idk
i think she was very messy yes 🙂↕️🙂↕️🙂↕️🙂↕️ i think a lot of people make remarks about how percy is definitely poseidon's son and acts just like him meanwhile sally is very put together and they don't understand it and blah blah blah. whole time poseidon is over there going???? she's so much worse than me??? what are you guys on about??
that tiktok audio. quit being so nice and show them how crazy you are. yeah that's poseidon to sally every time and she plays soooo innocent but only he remembers sally's wild child days and no one believes him when he brings it up. "yeah right poseidon. sally jackson definitelyyyy did coke and hooked up with you in a public park. i definitely believe it buddy........." and poseidon is bashing his head into a wall because he definitely used godly manipulation to keep sally out of jail and off a list for public indecency so he has no evidence to back him up and prove that he got swept up into her storm of chaos just like she got swept up into his.
her pr team did amazing with her but trust her wild child days were enough to draw in the chaotic god of the oceans. he liked her chaos. just believe me on this. she keeps it nice and pretty now that she's older with a new husband but that messy girl still slips out here and there and paul is always befuddled by it. poseidon gets hype about it "YOU SEE? YOU SEE? YOU SEE????" and sally already back to her put together behavior so everyone thinks poseidon is genuinely losing it
but anyway yeah like sally's parents died when she was five, she grew up with an uncle that she dropped out of high school to take care of, and she ended up completely alone with no money and no prospects. she honestly just stopped caring for a while. she couldn't see a solid future for herself and never though she'd amount to anything, so she just. lived life to the fullest as a broke, semi-homeless young adult. she was in and out of bars and clubs and doing all kinds of substances and couch surfing and going home with randoms just to have a bed to sleep in for the night before she woke early in the morning and snatched some cash and food from them before leaving
the only reason she started settling down a bit was because of percy. they began expecting percy and poseidon was like. he has to be raised in your world, either by you or someone you trust or the system but he has to be raised mortal and sally was like. fuck. i gotta lock in for the little tyke. and she started applying for like the shittiest jobs that paid her dirt but it was enough to keep her fed and alive so it worked
it was really difficult tho and she needed a lot of help but like. didn't have a support system. there was no one in her family still alive and in her corner to help out. when percy was a baby-baby, she spent a lot of time in shelters because she was living on the streets. pulling from my own experience here b lol but she made friends with another single mom and they ended up pooling together enough money to get a shitty apartment together
but money was still a huge problem and sally was considering drastic measures to make money but just before she committed to it, she sent a desperate prayer to hestia, sacrificing the little food she could afford for herself and sacrificed it to her, pleading for some kind of protection for percy and assistance for her nephew if sally went through with this
her six month old application to sweet on america finally showed results and they reached out to her and offered her a job with higher pay than was offered and she was able to actually afford to live again
struggling but still living
she got her friend a job there too so they could both pull in money and get stable
so percy had this little kid who he grew up with for a couple of years until sally began to notice monsters trailing them and beginning to take note of percy was earlier than poseidon said it would happen and her friend and her friend's kid got hurt in the crossfire of a little skirmish and sally didn't want to keep them in harms way and began talking about splitting up and getting their own places
if poseidon didn't find her first, it probably would've been dionysus considering the scenes she frequented
ugh could you imagine
or hermes. like she's snuck in thru the back of the movie theatres before posing as a worker and got behind the counter and got snacks and candy and a drink before slipping into an auditorium and just gorging herself on it all while watching some random ass movie
she stole a lot of bs to get by and that was always her favorite tactic of just acting like she belonged there and no one questioned her.
she didn't give a gaf bc she was lowkey passively suicidal (sally 🤝 percy) and didn't care what happened to her and just decided to do what she wanted until she got caught and thrown in jail or died doing something stupid. she deadass saw no point in her life
she took poseidon to a lot of moshpits and would get so fucking drunk and when stumbling out and leaning against him, her throat would be so raw from all the screaming and drinking that she could barely talk
she still had the voice to shit talk a cop tho. and the coordination to run afterward. yeah poseidon loved her chaos and percy is definitely both of theirs
she did roller derby as a teen. idk just feels right.
she has a trampstamp
she actually can't drive. like she had to sell her uncle's car to rake in more money for his treatment but it went nowhere and she was left with no vehicle but luckily she's in nyc with a decent public transit system and its pretty walkable so she was able to get by and then she just took the bus to her job at sweet on america since gabe didn't want her driving the car anyway so it never got brought up. however she did want to take percy to montauk so she sweet talked him into letting her take his car out there
that's how she learned to drive. not well, but she can manage it. but she better not get pulled over bc she does NOT have her license
her uncle got her put on antipsychotics when she was a teen because of all the shit she claimed she saw thru the mist but no one ever believed her so she was on meds for a bit but she hated it and it never really worked and eventually they didn't have the money to keep affording them so she stopped taking them
her and rachel bond over the same experience because i like to think mr dare also put rachel on meds since she was able to see thru the mist
she definitely still loves poseidon but she also loves paul. they are the epitome of "he is stable, you are deep" where paul gives her a quiet, peaceful life but whatever she had/has with poseidon goes deeper than she can admit because he genuinely saved her life in a roundabout way because she would not have made it past 22 had she not had percy and had to get her act together and try for him
like poseidon, the great greek god of the seas, saw this young woman utterly alone and unmoored and lost and at her rock bottom, and poseidon loved her and helped get her back on the right path and she feels like she genuinely kinda owes him her life but also its her life and she wants to live it and she knows poseidon will respect that which just makes it worse
Mulan AU where she does get caught by the other fresh recruits while she's bathing but Mushu helps her spin it like the lake is cursed by an evil lizard demon and will turn men into women if they stay in it for too long.
From there it's not actually difficult to get the other soldiers onboard with covering up the fact that poor Ping took one for the team and got afflicted by the vagina curse, especially since it would have been all of them if they hadn't gotten the warning ahead of time. So they agree to help him cover it up, because obviously the army's not going to understand.
Shang is... tentatively glad that the men are bonding and getting along, even if they continue to be deeply weird about it.
Mulan: Uh, what boobs? Huh? Where did these come from?
Mushu: *facepalms and thinks quickly* (speaks from the shadows) I AM THE SPIRIT OF THE LAKE! BEWARE MY CURSED WATERS FOR THEY WILL TURN MEN INTO WOMEN!
Ling, Yao, and Chien Po: Oh no! The spirit of the cursed waters!
Shang: ...is this why you've all been insisting we don't camp anywhere that doesn't have a lake.
Shang: and then none of you actually swim in it.
Shang: and you all keep jumping at shadows.
Shang: wait a second Ping did this happen before or after you became insanely good at fighting?
Shang: did you get better at fighting after you became a woman.
Shang: are women better at fighting than us.
Mulan: ....uh. well. maybe? no one's ever tried to find out.
Yao: [thinking very fast] y'know Captain it's just so hard to find recruits these days.
Chien Po: Real shortage of men.
Ling: Lots of women, though.
Mulan: [catching on] Without marriage prospects.
Shang: You're right, men. The spirits must have done this in order to show us that we should be recruiting women as fighters.
Mushu [from the shadows, seeing an opportunity to do the funniest thing]: EXACTLY, LI SHANG. I HAVE TRANSFORMED PING INTO A WOMAN BECAUSE YOU HAVE TOO LONG OVERLOOKED THE TRUE WAY TO WIN THE WAR.
Mulan [seeing an opportunity to get all the stories straight]: O Great Spirit, is it reversible?
Mushu: WHY WOULD YOU WISH TO REJECT MY GIFT? I HAVE SEEN YOUR HEART, CHILD, AND HAVE ALREADY ALTERED THE MEMORIES OF EVERYONE WHO KNEW YOU BEFORE YOU LEFT FOR THE ARMY. YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN THEIR DAUGHTER.
Li Shang: Welp, the spirits have spoken. Ping - wait is your name still Ping if you're a woman now?
Mulan: Uh. Actually, I was thinking of renaming myself. How do you feel about Mulan?
BONUS:
Mulan [climbing out of the eleventh lake the men have arranged for her to swim in]: Yeah no, it didn't work. Still got boobs. [tries to appear dejected].
Chien Po: If it makes you feel better, they're very nice boobs.
When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.
The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?
This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.
one time me and some pals spotted one of those big cookie cakes in a store. it was done up with red icing and little X's for kisses and in the middle it said
No One Like You
now, it took us a while to realise it meant "(there is) no one like you". at first, we all parsed it as a botched "no one like(s) you"
for ages after when we'd wind each other up we'd declare "NO ONE LIKE YOU ☹️👎"
"the most unrealistic thing about project hail mary is that a woman is in charge" WRONG look up the glass cliff. women are much more likely to be promoted to positions of power when things are going poorly and people need a woman to blame. she refers to herself as the "world's whipping boy." the person put in the position to have to commit ecological and humanitarian crimes of that scale in order to save the earth would only ever be a woman.
If you're writing anything involving cons, scams, heists, or morally questionable characters who are very good at lying, here are some free resources I've been using for research. Saving you the "why is this in my search history" anxiety.
1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.
2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.
3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.
4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.
5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.
Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.
Reblog to save for later. Your WIP will thank you.
we have to thank our brave soldiers in fandom who write gen fics. we have to thank our brave soldiers in fandom who write character studies and stories with no focus on romance or sex. we have to get on our knees and thank the brave soldiers in fandom who write about minor characters and friendship and family with no focus on romance or sex. i know it’s hard to care about characters in a world that seems to only revolve around ships but i see you. and i love you
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