call me lark! (she/her). this blog features my many fandoms and interests. i queue most posts. feel free to drop by my ask box or message me. i like talking to people! mutuals pls dm me for my discord :)
i write fic! here are a few you should check out:
on clemency - SoC (G, 1/1, 3.8k, kanej, kaz meets his estranged young daughter)
you promised - PJO (G, 1/1, 2.3k, di angelos in the lotus hotel)
heartlight - Stranger Things (ongoing series, byler fantasy au)
tags:
posts of lark: lark originals, so to speak
lark screams into the void: vent posts teehee
lark answers: for asks
lark’s fanfiction: my fanfiction
lark writes: my writing process/fic outtakes
i tag all posts by topic/fandom/character/ship as well as for art and gifs!
my feminism wholly includes transgender women. 🏳️⚧️
“It’s funny,” I told Flewin. “We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She’s weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem.”
The husband was writing an article on classic video game records, was surprised to find out that holding the Tetris record is a bit of a big deal, and mentions how good his wife is at it.
The guy he’s talking to mentions that the record is 327, way lower than his wifes usual scores of 500-600.
They travel to a tournament, and she goes to do her attempt. Just after she beats 327, and is climbing higher, a judge brings up to the husband that the specific version she’s playing actually has a different record of 545.
She overhears that she needs to beat 500-something, and keeps going, setting the record at 841.
There was a decent but ultimately forgettable fantasy novel I read a long time ago that had a single moment that stuck with me.
The protagonist has just won the world famous sword fighting competition in the big, rich capital and is talking to his mentor, and says something about being the best swordsman in the world. The mentor frowns and tells him that no, he isn't. He is the best swordsman out of the people that could afford to show up to this tournament. There could be a mercenary way out in the mountains, patrolling a snow encrusted fort's walls that could kick his ass and there was no way to know until he was already losing to the guy.
I think about that a lot, and how for every apparently dominant competitor, there might be a fucking ronin out there somewhere capable of destroying them.
It's actually kind of cute and sweet when you can clearly tell that an amateur writer posting their stuff online doesn't really know how something would actually work in real life. Like ok you're probably a kid and it's understandable that you don't really have as much life experience as you've got confidence in the story you want to tell.
You'll get a 15-year-old first person narrating protagonist going like "I've got five older brothers and I'm the only girl so they're really protective of me :)"
like ok I'm guessing you're an only child, and that's sweet that you think that's how it works, but in a set-up like that, being the youngest of six and the only girl, the closest thing that they'd get to being attentive and protective of you would be giving you multiple sessions of intensive experimental exposure therapy to determine once and for all if a human being can develop an immunity to getting waterboarded.
I’m the oldest of like 8ish kids and the youngest was forged to impervious steel in the fires of hell itself [getting roasted alive for sixteen goddamn years by the seven salty fucks who refuse to let him die]
@teaboot I HAVE to showcase the tags, I'm sorry. I understand this completely because my brother got to have a DS when he was like 5, and I had to wait until I was 9 (and looking back as a 28-year-old, that's nothing, but to a 9-year-old? Sacrilege). I was SO ENRAGED
prompt: Ozai has Azula watch Zuko (his progress or rather lack thereof) from way earlier on, possibly even before Aang gets away from the iceberg in the first place
There it is, written at the bottom of his banishment notice, wobbling in and out of his vision and he’s not sure if that’s his eyes—
(father wouldn’t have meant to blind him, so the way his eyes flinch away from bright lights and reading, even from the scrolls Uncle brought for him for some reason--this is a serious mission, why did he bring play scrolls, if they don’t take this seriously it’s going to take forever to get home--the way his eyes flinch away doesn't mean anything, because being blind isn’t going to help him catch the Avatar so he’ll just not go blind—)
It’s either his eyes, or. Or the rage. It has to be the rage.
So Zuko reads the line again, and lets the fire brim up and overflow, until sparks chase the shout from his lips.
“Banishment to be overseen by Crown Princess Azula?”
- - -
“Prince Zuko,” Azula says, standing as tall as an eleven year old can. She’s using his title, so that he’ll use hers. And if he doesn’t than he’s ill-mannered and not fit for his own.
“Crown Princess Azula,” Zuko grits out.
“I’ll just be inspecting your ship, then. Father’s orders.”
Two men are in shackles by the time she’s done.
“—Fostering mutiny against your prince,” she is yelling, and somehow her voice is just as high-pitched as his without sounding childish at all. “When our father hears about this—”
- - -
“So you had them executed,” Fire Lord Ozai inquires. Lightly. And from behind his flames.
“Of course, father,” says the kneeling child. “It was an attack on our family.”
Her father doesn’t say anything.
Azula is eleven. Eleven, she had presumed, was old enough to count.
One, two, three. Four, with Uncle. The royal family.
Her father is silent still.
One. Two.
“Forgive my impertinence, Fire Lord,” she says. “I will bring them to you for judgment next time.”
“Do so,” Fire Lord Ozai says. He does not contest the ‘next time.’
- - -
“Crown Princess Azula,” Zuko says.
“Your bandage is off, brother,” Azula says. “Are you blind?”
“No.”
(The blur of her red robes, the eye-searing glint of sunlight off her headpiece—he’s not blind in that eye. He’s just… still recovering.)
“Lovely,” she says. “Then what’s your excuse for the condition of this ship?”
…He has an increased budget for repairs, by the time she’s done.
- - -
“Brother,” Azula says, “traditionally knives are to be delivered to the back.”
“I… what?” her brother says, still holding out the inexplicable thing. “No, I bought it at port. For you. See, it matches the one Uncle got me.”
“How original,” she says.
Her brother turns a shade of red that puts his bending to shame. Not that it’s a particularly high bar. “Fine, I’ll just—throw it out.”
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic. At the least, Mai will want it.”
- - -
“Nice knife,” says Mai, looking at the hilt peeking out of Azula’s boot.
“Be silent,” Azula says, thus ending that conversation.
- - -
“Did great-grandfather… did we…” starts her brother, fresh from scurrying about the Eastern Air Temple like some particularly dim-witted pheasant-monkey, the dust not even brushed from his clothes even though he knew her ship was waiting down here. “Azula, there were children—”
“Be silent,” she says.
- - -
“You’re leaving frequently,” comments father, as his knife cuts through the pheasant-monkey, clicking against the plate below. The persimmon-cherry sauce is thick and red and smearing.
“I find it advantageous to cultivate a working knowledge of our nation’s tactics,” Azula answers. She does not push around her meat like a child, but she does eat only lightly; the dish is more sour than she remembers.
“And your brother?”
“Oh, him,” she says, to which her father smiles.
- - -
“...What?” Zuko asks, blinking down at the scrolls.
“It’s your birthday,” Azula says. “Apparently, I should have gotten you a calendar.”
“Thank you?”
She sighs.
- - -
“Do we… tell him we can hear him?” asks the assistant cook, as the prince continues monologuing. Dramatically, and loudly. Through the pipe connecting the drain of the kitchen sink to the ones in the shower.
“Ssh, I think this is one of his new plays.”
- - -
She gets him a calendar for his next birthday. It’s not funny.
- - -
He gets her a doll, for hers. The look on Uncle’s face as she torches it in front of them both is hilarious.
- - -
“Brother,” she says, looking up at the damage to his ship. “This is not the way to requisition additional repair funds.”
“Captain Zhao,” her uncle says in the background, with heights of pleasant antagonism she can only aspire to. As if a general could mistake Zhao’s new insignia. Particularly with all the polishing he does.
“It’s commander now.”
“How did you manage this?” she asks.
“Uh,” Zuko says. “Can we… speak alone?”
She eyes her brother’s shifting stance. Eyes, too, the way Zhao’s men are already moving to intercept and interrogate his crew. One of the new commander’s more noxious habits is stalking her brother’s every move.
Well. She’d been meaning to deal with that, anyway.
Azula snaps her fingers at the commander’s guards.
“Detain him,” she says. And for a moment, just a moment, her dear uncle freezes, as if she were talking about someone he actually cared for.
The guards don’t. She’s trained them better than that.
“Princess,” Commander Zhao says, his snarl well hidden behind a smile. “What is the meaning of this?”
“Crown Princess Azula,” she corrects. “Now ssh; the adults are talking.”
- - -
They have an Avatar to catch, apparently. Her brother is coming home.
#her brother is coming home#it may be time for some other changes as well#how does the pheasant-monkey taste father?#oh of course I haven’t had any#you know I haven’t liked that since I was a little girl#are you feeling well father?#why don’t you have a little lie down father#oh is your crown uncomfortable?#let me just remove that for you#hush now#sleep#goodnight father#say hello to grandfather for me (tags from @muffinlance)
say what you will about the Habsburgs but I really appreciate how many of them created massive baroque synecdoches of their own neuroses. Charles V drove himself crazy trying to manage an intercontinental empire in the 1500s and then spent his final years in a monastery surrounded by clocks, obsessed with trying to get all of the clocks ticking in unison. Philip II was a meticulous and obsessively pious introvert and he turned his palace into a bureaucratic warehouse with him sitting at the top floor, correcting the grammar of his advisors’s letters like he was grading essays. Rudolf II was completely checked out of his role as emperor, obsessively collecting foreign curiosities while wars and religious revolts slowly devoured the Holy Roman Empire, just like the live lions and tigers wandering the halls of Prague Castle and attacking servants at random. All of them (the Habsburgs not the lions and tigers) had debilitating prognathism from centuries of inbreeding to keep their ‘noble blood’ (and to keep their territories consolidated), their bodies falling apart from the sheer weight of their dynastic history and endless pursuit of purity and centralization. It’s bizarrely and tragically beautiful.
its so funny when british ppl say the letter H they have to wheeze it out like HAITCH but then they say things like orrible and ello.. girl where did the haitch go
Accross Britain (I can't speak for other countries with stone circles and standing stones) an extremely common rejoiner is that these stones in a circle cannot be counted. In some places that simply means that noone will agree on how many there are, in others it means that anyone who counts them will immediately disappear, to god knows were (some say Avalon. I say to some sort of digestion chamber. Wilder men than me will suggest that's two phrases for one concept).
One thing we know about vampires is they are cursed, as part of the condition, with a deep and fundemantal requirement to count things.
Therefore I posit that, much in the way nematodes in soil are naturally preyed upon by fungi who form little mycellial nooses for worms to snag themselves in, vampires are - by force of random brownian motion (vampires cannot share territory and therefore will force each other apart to ensure a wide spread of biters) to encounter stone circles, whereupon they are forced to count them and henceforth be removed from the board. So to speak.
This also happens with this circle of trees in The House at Pooh Corner. The vampires get stuck forever trying to count the trees. This is why everyone in the Hundred Acre Wood is safe from vampires.
i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point
aren't gorillas gentle giants or something. i stay out of his way, he doesn't maul me, we have a nice time picking out clothes together in opposite sides of the mall
Male gorillas are super aggressive and territorial. Also they interpret nearly every human mannerism as a sign of aggression or a challenge. Smiling and eye contact are both things that zookeepers have to be taught to suppress when they’re in the vicinity of gorillas.
This is all irrelevant because the obvious answer is five black mambas. I mean, that’s not actually very many snakes, and malls are fucking huge. And unlike a gorilla you can definitely outrun a snake if it does show up. Find an open space in the mall where you can see any snake coming and just hangout out there. Fucking easy.
Misguided! I would much rather have a mallmate I can easily see and hear coming. I'm confident I can stay out of the gorilla's way, but if I step on a snake or one otherwise gets the jump on me, it's all over.
It's not just about the physical danger either, it's about my mental health. One gorilla, unless he's actively mad at me, I just keep a healthy distance between us and make sure I never get trapped. With the snakes, it requires a lot more constant vigilance
Black mambas have a reputation build on being very venomous and very fast. I'm not sure why you would think you could outrun one (or five) in an enclosed space like a mall.
Malls usually have pretty slick floors, and escalators. I’d choose the gorilla simply because I think that would make an more interesting story (and a better-selling autobiography, I Survived the Mall Gorilla) but I think I’d stand a pretty good chance at avoiding the mamba. They’re fast and aggressive and will chase you but unless we started immediately beside each other I think my sneakers would have the terrain advantage over scutes.
fucking enamored with the implication that this gorilla is fully intelligent but is trying to manufacture plausible deniability like the movie barnyard
