It seems to be original to the house! The blocks look a little too big to be railroad ties in my opinion but the house is very close to a train station…
i wish all my beloved followers and mutuals a very “you find a fic that has the exact premise and characterization you’ve always wanted to see but never had the energy to write yourself and it’s really good and just as long as you want to read”
After raising the price of COVID-19 vaccines more than four-fold this year, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told investors Monday that the company will also likely hike the price of its lifesaving COVID-19 antiviral treatment, Paxlovid, raising further concern about access and healthcare costs.
Remember when everyone on earth started shitting on Martin Shkreli for cranking up the price of AIDS medicine? Time to do the same for Albert Bourla. Everyone needs to know his name, and everyone needs to virulently and vocally hate his goddamn guts.
when you think about how anakin’s metric for smart plans are (a) his own plans and (b) obi-wan’s, everything about him and padmé makes a lot more sense
Padme is, crucially, kind of insane in a way that matches Anakin, but also smarter than him to the point where he’s very impressed by anything she does, and so he assumes she’s got more common sense than him.
They hate doing this. They think it’s beneath them. But they do it anyway.
The Vicomte Graoul de Saucisson – and this is another thing about ogres. Ogres as a species are nobility. There is no such thing as a low-born ogre. There is always room in the ogrish peerage for another vicomte, another prince, another branch to tie to the rotted tree – strode up to the chateau in human shape. The roses in the garden shivered as he passed by. The huge, high doors opened by themselves and he walked through them without a shift in his stride.
When the doors slammed shut behind him, he moved to shrug the shape off his shoulders like a coat.
Then he saw the woman.
He froze. He stared. She stared back.
He slowly pulled the shape back on. “Who are you?” he asked.
She looked mildly appalled. “Who are you?” she asked. “What are you doing in my home?”
“Your home? This is–” He stopped. He reconsidered. “I am the Vicomte de Saucisson,” he said. “I’m looking for the Marquis de Pamplemousse. He is a… colleague of mine.”
“Oh,” she said. She could’ve looked more abashed. “I’m sorry, monsieur, he’s never mentioned you before. You must be here to share your congratulations, of course, I can fetch him right away.”
“He’s never mentioned you either,” the vicomte did not say. “Of course,” he said. “Congratulations. What about?”
She looked surprised. “Have you not heard? Monsieur, the curse on my husband has been lifted.”
He stared. His lips started to form the words “What curse,” and then there was a sound like a horse falling down a set of stairs and a man he had never seen before wearing the marquis’s clothes came barrelling down the hall.
“Vicomte!” said the man with the marquis’s voice. “My human friend! The curse has been lifted, and I am a human once again!”
He was slightly out of breath when he reached the woman. He clasped her arm and grinned at him with manic desperation. “This is wonderful news! You must be here to share your congratulations!”
“Lie like hell,” said the man’s eyes.
The vicomte stared. “Oh!” he said. “My – human friend! Human once again! Words fail me. After all these–” (there was the slightest hesitation) “–years?”
The woman put her head at an angle and narrowed her eyes at him.
The man walked up, still grinning like a rictus chimpanzee, and clasped a hand on his shoulder. “Yes, of course! Darling, me and the vicomte are going to have a manly one-on-one conversation while he shares his congratulations, as we human men are wont to do.” And then with a strength that could only be ogrish, the marquis pulled the vicomte by the shoulder down the hall and into a drawing room.
When the bolt of the lock clicked into place behind them, the man wearing the marquis’s clothes visibly sagged.
“What the hell,” said the vicomte.
“You should’ve sent word ahead that you’d be coming today.”
“I never do.” He gesticulated and tried to conjure a single question out of the swarm buzzing in his brain. “What the hell is going on? Who was that? Why are you pretending to be human? What curse are we talking about?”
The marquis groaned and crumpled into a chair. As he did he shifted out of human shape, clothes magically tailoring themselves to contain his ogrish form. He looked a bit like a moose crossed with a wolf.
“I had a moment of weakness.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t a stroke?”
“I got married.”
“And that’s another thing–”
“Graoul, please.” He sighed and put his face in his talons. “Last winter a merchant broke into my home. He stole one of my roses, and in exchange I asked him to send me one of his daughters to be my bride.”
The vicomte nodded. This at least was a sacred and recognizable ogrish custom, and he did like to see the old ways in practice.
“And it was fine! It was perfectly lovely. She’s a wonderful woman, but one night I decided to put on a human shape to change things up in the bedroom, and she lost her mind! Started talking about how I was clearly an enchanted prince and that her love for me must’ve broken some curse and turned me human again! I had no idea how to tell her otherwise, and now I’ve done it for too long to back out.”
The vicomte stared. “Sorry,” he said. “You decided to turn into a human to spice things up in the bedroom, and that was the face you chose?”
The marquis growled. “If I knew I was going to be wearing it for the rest of my life I would’ve gone with something better.”
Chaotic disaster human semi-successfully masquerading as a responsible adult. Or might be secretly several cats in a cloak. No promises.
Fan of stories in all their forms, especially fanfiction as an interactive, transformative medium that sometimes does violence to the original canon.
The author is dead and if they're not spinning in their grave at what you did to their stories, you're not trying hard enough.
Thinks fans deserve Harry Potter more than JK Rowling does and should get it in the divorce.
Also fan of Star Wars, the Locked Tomb, CATS the musical, Tomb Raider, Penny Dreadful, Lovecraft Mythos, fairy tales, folk tales, and a shitload of garbage 80's-90's-era sci-fi and fantasy.
Source of spontaneous fandom meta essays, shitposts, and the occasional fic, as well as the tendency to find something shiny about practically any subject under the sun (or above it, or including it). Yes, I reblog things in their gazillions all at once because the queue system has extra steps, bite me. Yes, my inbox is as abandoned and overgrown as Sleeping Beauty's tower, bite me some more.
Fiction is tagged In which I write. AU speculations and other things that may eventually become stories are tagged story building.
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