Question; There's some etiquette about refusing gifts, right? It's considered rude? Does that go both ways and, if so, What would happen if you gave a Fae a packet of Salt and Vinegar chips
That would be a little like telling the person you just stabbed that the knife is a gift; etiquette goes out the window.
An Alp is a creature from Germanic Lore. They’re said to be able to enter dreams. Some sources claim they’re succubus-like in nature, feeding on Tantric dreams (or just straight up tantric acts), Others say they just like causing people Nightmares. They all wear magical Hats, known as Tarneskappes (I may have spelled that wrong) that are the source of their powers, Among which is the ability to shapeshift. If you manage to steal one of their hats, They’ll grant you pretty much anything in their power if you’ll give it back (though it’s probably not a good idea to try unless you REALLY want a wish, since they hold grudges). Or you can keep the hat and use its powers (and have a very, very irate little creature being quite annoyed at you) They’re also said to be the cause of that feeling you get sometimes when you’re half awake, that something heavy is sitting on your chest and getting heavier. It’s them, they are the chest sitter. They ADORE coffee, (and/or tea, specifically with honey in, my sources don’t agree on which) to the point if they’ve been bugging you with nightmares or Sexy dreams (or Sexy Nightmares) or have just been sitting on you all evening, They’ll leave you alone for the night if you offer them some (But they WILL show up in the morning expecting you to pay up) and Lemon is basically their own personal iron. Some of my sources claim say they’re the spirits of stillborn children (which makes the potential succubbi-likeness even less pleasant, to be frank). Others say they’re Straight up fairies, or some combination. One of the things I’ve seen claimed (but only in one place, with no suggestions of it in any others) Is that they’re kinda like gnomes or gremlins, that really like tinkering with things and making things.
So there’s a quick and probably somewhat inaccuate primer on the basics of Alp Folklore!
It’s, uh. Not a straightfoward thing.
With reference to the fanfic end of year thing;1, 3 and 12?
aaa thanks for asking!
1: favorite fic you wrote this year
puttin me on the spot here! I really love the snh au but I don’t think I can count the whole series as 1 fic. I think I’ll say Passing the Torch for this one. Fun fact: my dumb ass cried while writing it
3: favorite line/scene you wrote this year
now you’re really putting me on the spot! this was like my most prolific year ever for publishing stuff, I’ve got at least 60k of words to pick from.my favorite line I wrote this year hasn’t been published yet (spoilers ;) ). I’ll give one favorite from each fandom:For BNHA, it’s probably this bit from Mineta Minoru Gets Force-Fed Respect Women Juice:
Bakugou, without a word, started stomping out of the gym. Halfway across, he realized he was still holding Midoriya’s training glove, and pelted it across the room, where it smacked Midoriya in the face.
And for BatIM, it’s this line from Inkfinity Train:
Right. It had been so long since he’d encountered real water that he’d almost forgotten it could get things clean. Almost forgotten that clean was a thing at all.
12: favorite character to write about this year
Frankenstein!Kaminari from the Super[Natural]Heroes AU, hands down. I never paid Kaminari *that* much attention in canon, but goddamn do I love this take on the boy
My friend @lordlyhour‘s birthday was a few days ago and I wrote him a quick little story set in one of his settings. He’s a cool dude and his settings are really top notch, so go ask him about them if you like gothic fantasy with teeth. (heh.)
Anyway I’m posting the story right here.
I will also post it in full under a read more.
“We've Been Threatening Our Friend Azza and it's About Time We Made Good”, is a gothic fantasy with an overly long title inspired by the similarly named “Some of Us Have Been threatening Our Friend Colby”. Azza is a haunted girl, and her friends are having none of that shit. CW for black humor and mutilation
You’ve probably heard this one before, perhaps even lived it yourself. You have a friend, mousey little thing, wants to be braver and cooler than she is. She starts dabbling in things she really oughtn’t to dabble in. Could be sex, drugs, mind altering sound waves, brainslug abuse. You try to get her to stop but she won’t listen to reason. At that point she’s already too far gone.
Fae Fieldings was the one from our friend group. About four foot tall and certainly no taller, she was a drab sort of albino, hair and skin like aged ivory and eyes a dull lead grey, not at all like the fashionable blood-red on bright white albinos popular in young women’s novels. Being inclined to melancholy, she was always intrigued in what the kids call the gothic scene. Fae demanded we all start calling her Azza, a name she loved but would never say wherefrom she learned it, and started wearing half-mourning everywhere. That’s all black with a single splash of some somber color, in her case a dark tyrian purple was the prefered tone. Half-mourning doesn’t allow any shine anywhere on the outfit, so she replaced all her jewelry with matte black pins. That should have been the first sign. Some might be inclined to think the curious name with all the Zs in it would be, but no, it was the pins.
See, she didn’t have any piercings, so she just ran the pins through her face.
Misery exploded when she saw her bloody, scabby face for the first time, not because it was gruesome—we’d all seen gruesomer—but because she was concerned Azza hadn’t heated the pins first. Misery was a tattooist—obviously, all tattooists take the name Misery—and had all kinds of experience with pins and needles and the business of sticking them inside of people, so it was her right and duty as a professional to worry about this kind of thing, and we all nodded in approval. Azza hadn’t heated the pins, it turns out, as that would have ruined the matte black paint, but she had disinfected them. Misery sighed in relief, as she wasn’t at risk of infection at least, and offered the mousey girl some tips on how to do it without getting blood all over everything, and indeed she oversaw several of Azza’s future pinnings herself. But ofttimes the girl would show up with a blotch of blood just barely visible on her matte black dresses and I knew she’d done it again without consulting Misery. Yet I held my peace, because it wasn’t too often.
We didn’t really get concerned until she started pinning her eyes shut. I said “now why would you go and do a fool thing like that? You’re gonna go plummeting over the edge of town carrying on this way and then the Canyon Things’ll get ya and the Bridge will be weakened, and that’s bad for everyone.”
And she replied, “Oh Dave, if I ever want to see something, I’ll just take the pins out, my eyes are fine. Besides, the smiles guide my path, making sure I don’t bump into anything.”
I groaned in exasperation. “Cheezers Crice, you’re seein’ smiles now? Misery hold her down, we’re gonna put a stop to this right now.”
Azza kicked and spit and hissed like a cat at bath time but between the two of us we unpinned her eyes and treated her wounds, and Misery threatened her. “Don’t go doing this kind of shit without a trained tattooist, it’s bad for you and bad for the Bridge. Now, I’m not gonna go get an officer-priest just yet but if you don’t cut this shit out, I’ll mortar you myself, and it’ll be perfectly legal.” This was the first of many such threats.
Fact is we all loved Azza and didn’t want to mortar her, but we also didn’t want her soul to get corrupted by the Canyon Things and become one more set of teeth perpetually a-gnawing on the very foundations of our beloved Bridgetown. The former emotion was unfortunately stronger than the latter for a good deal of time, which is why we let it get so far in the first place, and a right shame that was, entirely on us.
So naturally when the time came that Azza had gone too far, we decided to take all the responsibility upon ourselves and ensure that her mortaring would be a most pleasant affair that even she would enjoy, even if she were disinclined to agree. But I do get ahead of myself.
So, there was a brief period where Azza went missing. It would be narratively appropriate for the inciting incident to have been the unpinning of her eyes, but truth is we don’t think there was one, or at least we didn’t think to ask. She’d been acting perfectly fine and dandy for about five days and we finally thought she was back to normal and had kicked any spectres that might have been haunting her with their smiles. Then on the sixth day Misery and I popped by to bring her a pot of pottage—to show that there were no hard feelings and that we were glad she had returned to the straight-and-narrow and were encouraging her to stay on it if she knew what was good for her—we found the door open, Beneathing Sigils carved on the walls with her fingernails (“goddammit Azza you melodramatic shit,” I muttered, tossing the pottage against the wall). Equally melodramatic but more interesting were her severed fingertips, which we discovered on the floor of the kitchen.
“I took away her knives after the incident with the stiletto ‘piercing’,” said Misery.
And I asked, “Where’d you hide them?”
And she said, “I threw them off the edge of town.”
So I said, “Considering she carved the walls with her fingernails, having no sharp objects clearly didn’t stop her. I think it’s safe to say she bit them off.”
And she said, “fuck damn phantoms and their oral fixation,” for at this point it would have been obvious to all except for an exceptionally slow toddler that this was some kind of a haunting, and of course even that exceptionally slow toddler would be hard pressed to forget the oral fixation that most of these phantoms have.
I knelt and touched the fingertips; the blood was almost dry but still sticky to the touch, so my clairsentience was fully capable of tracking a vision of their last moments, and it was indeed just as we had suspected, and much like Azza had let us know the other day there had been a beautiful disembodied smile a-floating through the house, and it had lead her out the door. I scooped up the fingertips and got to work dowsing for Azza, a process as laborious as it is boring to read about—what good Bridgetownie doesn’t know how to do a dowsing?
What followed was a delightfully gothic week of chasing after her through all the city’s seediest slums and darkest corners, always getting close and always being given the slip just when we were sure we were gonna catch her, a week whose contents I will not relate because quite frankly who wants to read about all the dead-ends we ran into? Sure, we explored the town a bit, saw some interesting customs and feats of architecture, met a bayou witch or two (in the suspended bayou dangling over the canyon of course), but you seen one canyon-spanning bridge metropolis, you seen’em all I say.
Finally we found her in the Lattice, and this is something I will take a moment to describe as most people haven’t seen one and it’s a crying shame. The Lattice is part of the bottommost layer of Bridgetown and is of course made of a mishmash of beams and crossbeams, intersecting and interweaving like the web of a great spider, if a spider made webs of steel broad enough for three to walk abreast. Each beam, or at least the ones closest to the entrances as fe dared to venture farther unless they had to, has a plaque attached bearing the name of the soul reinforcing them, a final memorial and resting place, at least until the contract is up. See, laypeople use mortaring as a generic term for the process which keeps our city from collapsing into the darkness Beneath, but the law makes a clear distinction between mortaring and beaming. The Lattice is where people who choose to support the bridge in their afterlife spend a little chunk of their eternity and this process is thus called beaming, or sometimes latticing; criminals and the like are more likely to be mortared into the great stone legs of the bridge, which, according to those few ghosts I’ve met who finished serving on the beams, is much less comfortable.
As we readied to descend, I drew my haxagun and Misery ignited her tattoos, filling the tunnel with brilliant rainbow light. We figured there was a small chance that Azza had managed to start some kind of Incursion if she made it this far, and I personally thought it quite practical to fill the room with a six barrelled blast of blessed buckshot.
Fortunately It was a beautiful sunset when we got down there. If there had indeed been an Incursion, it would have been pitch black all around save for the ghost light coming off the memorial plaques. As it was, the beams did little to obstruct the gorgeous red and gold glow, so we were quickly able to find Azza’s little black and grey form a-huddled in a corner, shivering with infections both bacterial and spiritual. The phantom’s grip on her was so strong even we could see glimpses of her—it must have been a her with those pretty painted lips—of her dainty smile.
“Oh Azza Fieldings, you squalid fuck,” said Misery, scooping her up like a babe. “You’ve gone too far this time, you know.” The banishing charm she had newly tattooed upon her wrist flashed, and the phantom dissipated. This was not a permanent solution, but so near to the Beneath it was going to be a lot harder for this one to crawl back up the Bridge.
Azza nodded miserably. She had thick black twine stitched all a-crisscross on her face and down her neck, and her once-lovely black dress was splattered and besmottered with fluids of various hues. “You melodramatic Fieldmouse,” we both said, as affectionately as possible. That had been her old nickname when we were all in school and frankly she deserved it. We took her home and cleaned her up, and the next day we sent for Gant.
Gandino San Agustin is a mortuary lawyer, and of course with the structure of the Bridge needing souls of the dead to maintain it, that makes him very important indeed, a fact that he will not allow people to forget. He wears his ruffled collar and powdered wig everywhere, and whenever someone calls him Mister San Agustin he promptly corrects them to Honorable Mister San Agustin. Naturally we call him Gant and refuse to call him anything else just to take him down a peg.
You may have guessed Gant is our friend and indeed the four of us are all school chums, so much as we like to give him a hard time we knew he was the correct person to turn to on this issue.
He took one look at Azza’s sorry state and said “Ahh Fieldmouse you squalid fuck,” and she replied with naught but a shrug and a sheepish grin. Gant immediately got to work on writing up a contract.
“Do I have to get mortared though?” Azza said, “I’m feeling ever so much better. Ain’t seen Miss Smiles since yesterday, promise.”
“Now now,” I scolded, “you done went too far, and this is what we have to do.”
Misery followed up by saying “besides, you’re not really gonna get mortared, you’re gonna get beamed. It’s much nicer, you saw how the sunsets look from the lattice.”
Gant grunted in agreement. “You’re just lucky these fools found you and not an officer-priest.” We all nodded. Now everyone knows that officer-priests do a good and necessary job, and if Azza had just been some gutter rat or even a mere acquaintance we wouldn’t have bothered going to the trouble of not reporting her, but officer-priests are prone to on-the-spot mortaring if a case is as severe as Azza’s looked, and who can blame them, we don’t want any Incursions after all.
Holding up the contract, Gant said, “this gives the three of us full custody of you and your property for the next five years until it’s been proven that you really aren’t haunted anymore. At any point during, if you go too far again it gives any and all of us the authority to mortar you. Should you die from any causes, natural or super, during that time, your soul will be mortared automatically. After the end of the five year period you get your independence back, but the three of us still retain the right to choose whether or not your soul gets beamed, and frankly after all the trouble these two went to they’re entitled to some financial compensation, so they’ll probably go with it.”
Azza rolled her eyes. “Fiiiiine, it’s not like I can take care of myself with my fingers fallen off. where do I sign?”
Gant indicated the little box at the bottom where the blood seal goes. Azza licked at the stump of her left ring finger until the scab broke and started bleeding again, and touched it to the contract. With a flash of green ghost light her fate was sealed.
“If we do wind up having to mortar you, how do you wanna go?” asked Gant, rolling it up and putting it away in his nacre scroll case.
“Firing squad,” said Azza.
I clicked my tongue. “Now that’s just an ego trip for you ain’t it?”
“After all you put us through, I think a nice hanging is all you deserve,” Misery pointed out.
Azza gagged. “As if I want any more marks on my pretty neck. How about you just break me on a wheel? I’ll wear something padded so it doesn’t leave a bruise.”
“Now that’s the first sensible idea you’ve had in weeks,” I said. Taking out a pad and pen I started writing. “Now how about the entertainment? You want live music?” And so we began to plan for Azza’s execution and mortaring. You never really know if these kinds of things will be necessary, but in Bridgetown it’s best to be prepared for grim eventualities, and to greet them with a bit of joie de vivre.
