pugbutter

E:\cyberpunk\the_deadliest_question.exe

"Between you and me, I think the real ones were worse. Too small and sour," Jewel replied. He didn't quite feel deceived, but he felt a once-bitten wariness now toward those advertisements in the news bulletins. Like most things in this city, the raucous boasting and immaculate surface sheens had built up an impossible apex, a summit upon which only the superhuman could plant their flags. They had promised the sky was bluer down there, the ocean cleaner; and though there certainly were fewer dead fish bobbing on the surface, still the waters were deemed unsafe for swimming, so the difference in water quality seemed not to matter in any practical effect. And of course, the prices in the tourist districts were old-fashioned highway robbery while the "real" areas, the ones swarming with roving gangs of young children as old wooden ships swarmed with rats, were much too perilous for city folks like him. While he was largely able to keep it to himself, Jewel had a pessimistic streak which even the enormous airstrip struggled to contain, and he had a talent for being able to complain about anything.

Still, even if he was the sort of man to air his concerns so wantonly, he would not have complained this time, mostly because he did not need to see a true blue sky, or the world's last clear blue ocean; he had wanted silence, and peace, and a condition of the inner apathy by which so many of his coworkers could gracefully let their problems roll off them like rain off an oiled coat, no matter how heavy the bombardment. These he had found in the luscious faux-velvets of his hotel bed, and in the enclosed rainforest garden, and several other places down there.

"2F, huh?" He rested his head against the window, his eyelids threatening to snap shut any moment. Too bad. He wanted to avoid work talk but he couldn't think of anything else he and Ona were both interested in; she didn't drink whiskey, nor he overpriced diet supplements. "Who got laid off?"

ᚠᚨᚱᛋᛁᚷᛚᛁᛝᛋᚨᚷᚨ

Of the few possessions Hrífa owned which could fill up a bed-bag or a small sleigh, fewer still would be of great use on a long seaward voyage. The first he plucked from the walls and the small piles of refuse was the spear, whose strength he tested against his knee, and by jabbing into scaly tree-flesh; and although it held up, he felt the give in it, and knew that it would not survive very many slams of a shield boss or strokes of an honed sword. He set it aside, resolving to buy a new pole in the village before they embarked, if such a pole existed. It would make a decent knife even if the shaft snapped.

Then he sifted through the debris. His old helmet, converted into a chamberpot by hammering the peaked scalp down into a flat bottom, was too far rusted and stained, and besides, it reeked terribly. Even the lowly seiðmann carried about him some semblance of Nordic dignity, albeit one rather distorted to the eyes of more assimilated onlookers. His armor, then, was paltry, for even his wrist bracers were boiled leather, not splinted with iron strips nor sewn in with mail; and he was much too poor for a mail shirt, as were most the villagers, though he could imagine the tribe's few warriors were lending out their weapons and armor to their friends. After all, the long winter struck the entire island, and every village upon it, so they needn't fear war and conflict with the locals, who also wished to conserve their supplies and their strength, turtling themselves up til they ate the very last of their stores.

Could he then persuade someone to part with their mail and helmet, that he might not look so fragile on the battlefield? Of course these "battles" were against helpless coastal villages and Christian monasteries, but armor was armor, and whether it was a proper sword or a desperate slave's reaping hook, Hrífa wanted something hard and protective between the blade and his viscera. Stealing was out of the question, even if he already had been indicted of it two dozen times that day around town; they wouldn't wait til they reached shore to toss him overboard. The witch preferred to wait til they landed before he would slip away into the night, to begin a new life in the Franks' lands or the Visigoths'.

He supposed, then, that he would have to rely on the gods after all. Playing by the brave, noble warrior's rules had been a nice thought to humor, but Hrífa could see he was ill-equipped to see it through. He glanced over to his bag of rune sticks, and decided on a whim to give them a throw. Reading the results in the bones, which landed face up or down, and overlapped in certain patterns, according to the will of those great beings in Valhalla and elsewhere, Hrífa translated their meaning, and the results astonished him.

E:\cyberpunk\the_deadliest_question.exe

Jewel held up a finger, hoping to stall for time, if but a moment. When granted (grudgingly or otherwise), he had thrown his suitcase into the back seat, but first, retrieved from it a bottle. As he joined her up front, seizing for himself the passenger seat, he tucked it between his feet. "Duty-free," he shrugged. It would have been stupid not to indulge himself at those prices.

Part of him needed the liquor; and the other part, a true moment of silence, or the city's vulgar version of it, which wailed relentlessly with engines, steam, and whirring cogs. He still hadn't found his stomach yet for talk revolving around work, business, interviews, and paperwork, though he was never one to deny the woman her meticulous nature, the robust industry which would earn her the promotion she wanted. Some day. All they had to do was notice her, and she had already won them over with her smile, the real, wrinkly one.

"It was great, Ona. I got to try the real thing down there. From a real tree, not a petri dish." He pointed knowingly to her poor-girl's health tonic sitting in the cupholder, the stench of citrus invading his nostrils pleasantly, if not subtly. It was familiar to him, like the scent of clothes scavenged from around the bed, and pressed to the face, to remind oneself of she who was real flesh just a few hours ago, but now just a memory. When he smelled lemons he always suspected Ona was nearby, fretting over her almost-perfect figure, still not perfect enough. He shut the door behind him, trapping the cold outside the vehicle, but the violent lemon scent inside. Pick your poison. He buckled up; he chose his methods of suicide carefully, and violent vehicular manslaughter seemed to him much too crass. He much preferred the poison route, indeed.

ᚠᚨᚱᛋᛁᚷᛚᛁᛝᛋᚨᚷᚨ

The spear in question was in terrible disrepair, no doubt from neglect, with wind and weather hacking away at the shaft and splitting splinters. Upon the iron blade, too, they spat acrid breaths, which turned it orange and flaky. Like a babe weaned too early from the teat it sat and rotted in the corner, useless in all the hermit's endeavors; it did not aid him in hunting or fishing, and as far as he knew he had entered no blood-feuds with another man's family. No one seemed particularly keen either about stealing his lands or the meager products he reaped from them.

But could a wolf truly outgrow fangs, or a stag antlers? Rather, when these things fell away, new ones grew in to fill the gaps. Warriors, similarly, perhaps could never escape their own tools of justice and survival; their antlers, too, found their way back into their hands. Eventually.

"Well, before she tries to wield my spear," Hrífa mumbled naïvely, "I'd better go and polish it. Good day." He did not want her getting splinters, after all. And he, too, needed to pack his belongings. He'd begun to compile a list of necessities in his grey little brain just as he turned away from Adlif, and attempted to scurry away to his solitude.

LF Long term, multi chara partners (Mature 18+)

free bump

E:\cyberpunk\the_deadliest_question.exe

When the horn honked Jewel jumped back with alarm, his id flashing in his eyes, a deer spooked by the halation of headlights. He smiled, but Ona knew it was disingenuous; the smile itself was vibrant enough, but at his eyes and cheeks, where he should have wrinkled, instead his features were limp, drooping, lifeless. He smiled socially, not spontaneously; to be polite, not because he was in a good mood, she saw.

"Hey!" he said. "You didn't forget!" He regretted the words from the moment they left his mouth; like bullets he could not call them back to their casings, their powder all spent. He realized how Ona, ever bursting with eager obsequiousness, might interpret them: that she was unreliable, that he did not trust her to follow through on her promise. Sharpening his wits up in that moment, he watched her face carefully, searching for those subtle changes in her features which would betray her feelings. Not even patchers could hide them perfectly.

E:\cyberpunk\the_deadliest_question.exe

Alan Jules "Jewel" Elliott, who on some days appreciated his mundane string of names and on others hated them as unspeakably generic plastic, thought that when he decided to claim some of his vacation days, forsaking the daily hamster-wheel for a week or two, the drug-high from the extra sleep and sunlight (the smog there was red) might at least last him long enough to reach his decrepit little apartment on Third West. Instead he felt it draining from his bloodstream even as he stepped through the long, snaking tunnel of security precautions leading off the airplane and out of the terminal.

I'm home, he thought contemptuously to himself.

Does any of your skin contain polysiloxanes, including those which are distributed under the street-name "Gargoyle"? No. Any metal hardware below the neck, including bones, cartilage, enamel—? No. Have your cephalic implants malfunctioned recently? Yes, but I'm not in the mood right now for another two hours of paperwork. So please and thank you, I'll tell you "No" just to move forward. Instinctively he reached for his temple and pressed against it, slightly soothing the prickly needling sensation he felt bashing against the inside of his skull, but the security personnel, either not noticing or not caring, said nothing about it. Maybe his rank in the company afforded him some secret luxuries, like getting through security checkpoints with only half the inquisition any normal squat on the street received.

Diseased by jet-lag, by simple, mundane exhaustion, by a fierce craving for decent bourbon, by the bright, sterile colors which assailed his eyeballs like a little nuclear holocaust self-contained within the airport, Jewel dragged his soles along the dreadful carpet. Its hue frustrated him terribly, how it teetered toyingly between a pale steel-blue and a true colorless grey, so he dragged these downtrodden eyeballs up toward the big sheet windows and the languid milky walls, scanning them for something but also nothing in particular. He overlooked the hanging plants, because every airport used the same hanging plant, from the species to the plantpot cupping it, in every dreary hallway. So his tired eyes had adapted to ignore them, and their fake-vibrant greens were assimilated in his eyeballs' angst by the insipid greys. He felt like a germ crawling along a news reporter's bleach-polished, perfectly straight tooth, with all flaws and blemishes but him already banished from her smile. He could feel germs slithering along his skin in turn, with the way everything shined, glass and steel and polymer; he was much too alive for this place, too filthy with biles and tissues.

By the time he had escaped this bureaucratic labyrinth intact, he was much too irritable to be thinking straight, and as he started sleepwalking home, he nearly walked past his ride. She was sat nearby, waiting for him to arrive.

@DarknessDawning

Loving and Dreading the Black Shroud [shylarah & pugbutter] [Historical/Gothic]

[redacted]

ᚠᚨᚱᛋᛁᚷᛚᛁᛝᛋᚨᚷᚨ

"Well, she, she did seem more interested in discussing the children of trees, now that I recall it again," Hrífa conceded. Though he did not run he was soon leaning back with a mousey timidity quite befitting his epithet. The man was crazed and perhaps at times rather oblivious, but far from stupid, and the dauntlessness of this threat did not simply wash over him like the tides drifting over the seaweeds stuck in the sands; not at least when he had no immediate means to combat it. Hexing him was not a feasible option, Hrífa understood, til the witch was out of range of the man's bear-like fists.

---

Meanwhile ...

---

Had they nothing at all to say? No matter, Hralding thought. Maybe they feared him for now, but once they'd traversed a tempest in their proud little longboat, once they'd bled beside each other, once their hands grew the calluses of oars and came to resemble his own, they'd see him soon enough as just a sailor, albeit more experienced than they, and more grounded in northern manliness.

"What's everyone scared of? Well, Fjalfar has already discussed where we're going and why," yawned Hralding, "at great detail. I've little else to add, really. Tomorrow you learn how to oar til your arms fall off."

Literally every Kinski-Herzog movie

A bunch of movies about rambling madmen played by Klaus Kinski, an actor who the director squabbled with constantly and threatened to kill a few times? Plus really dangerous filming conditions, some ranking among the most dangerous of all time?

Yeah pretty much.

Aguirre is a personal favorite though.