TokyoPewPew

Smoke and Steel

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"Gentlemen," she addressed the group, "There are divers opinions in this room over the right course of action, though it seems the two most favoured are to march against my Cousin on the South coast or to march on this silver mine. Mister Krasimir, Colonel van der Szaalm, I appreciate that I am not one with the wisdom to make this decision, but I pray I am able to discern wisdom when I hear it. Kindly, could you please put your best case forward for your course of action and I will decide from that."[sic]

@Dyelli Beybi

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𝕽evel as they may in all their pointed improprieties—those among them who glowered and grumbled and bickered—no man graced those chairs with his highfalutin bottom who did not raise it at the sight of Ariana. Those still spitefully wearing their caps now hurried to strip bare their scalps in deference. While those who had first refused to bow—now they bent lower than anyone. Szaalm, for his part, only had to stand and face the door, all other courtesies already attended to. But while his breast and his toes and his long, beaklike nose faced fully the parlor doors, his eyes skewed. Wandered. He noted well which among them only deigned to decorum when arrived a figure from whom they sought to profit; who respected the chain of command, and really the whole orderliness of things, only when it fitted their—sensibilities. The hypocrites who would be trouble sooner than late. Aye, Szaalm too did not yet trust the general of the two thousand, who might yet decide to cut their throats in the night, ending the rebellion overnight and very nearly without bloodshed, to much reward and commendation from his masters—neither did he trust the moneylender, who at any hour might deem their cause too risky to his assets, too costly of an investment, and accordingly withdraw—both of these, by Szaalm's estimation, being utterly without heartsblood, uncolored by cause or principle—but any man who did not doff and bow as a captain did not deserve those same doffs and bows when he made fieldmarshal. So Ariana's ear was all that time pressed to the keyhole. Szaalm smothered his first instinct, one of deep amusement; assuming of it some girlish need to know what

her subordinates said about her when they thought they went unheard. A girl, aye, that she was, but still in bearing, if not yet in standing, a queen; moreover, a queen of so few years and yet already twice-betrayed. The first knife from her cousin and the next, more tragic still, from her first and only sister; both slavering and snapping for the younger's righteous place upon the throne (though only one of them bedding elves and false idols, for the time). Indeed. Upon a moment's reflection, their positions swapped, Szaalm had to reckon himself just as generous as she with his suspicions.

Ere long only he and Ariana remained standing—they, and that detestable cultist, who called himself Krasimir and yet grinned with Skotinódasos's lips, wheedled with Skotinódasos's tongue. Like a bad dream was that man: two hundred miles away and yet never ceasing in his hauntings, his specters numerous and widespread across the camps. His words somehow wriggling as damp and fresh against the ear as grave-worms drilling the skulls of the enviable dead.

"Arrogance, Your Majesty, may wear many masks," Szaalm said, when at last his turn had come, though not before a long and choosy pause, "but I warn thee 'tis a beast of a single face—ever the same sin, only cladded at times in different coats. The arrogance—for instance—whereof a man might make camp many leagues from the rest of the army, beyond the reach of his commanding officers, that he may raze and plunder with impunity—and yet presume to leave his toadies at the war table, that he still get his say—why, 'twould be the very arrogance which may yet compel him to take the rest of us for fools. Kith and foe alike.

"Our foes. So as I attempt to understand them—anticipate their needs, their nature—they do unto us the same, for 'tis the very character of war. And as not all our foes are idle, glutted—halfwit aristocrats, some in their musings may chance upon the thought that we are scarce of powder. Scarce of men and horse, and in fact a great many things aft the battle. Their most prudent wilt then have cause to ponder: 'Whither go those churlish rebels, to seize what needest they? And by what means, and for what aims?'—just the same as thy council hath hither bandied. The mines, agreed, may be the soonest course—but the soonest course wilt they first suspect.

"In brief, ma'am," Szaalm said, taking another moment's silence to construct his closing argument most cautiously: "methinks it an error most grave to underestimate Voron, or his satellites. For they may yet be wise enough to reason our deficiencies; and, thereof, to conceive of our plans to satisfy them. Take their powder, and aught else we may need, aye; aye, enrich ourselves and harry the enemy in one stroke; but be we wise as well as needy, we must beware a place mayhap already guarded, ergo, a wolf-trap placed and baited."

closed

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I've got ideas for both 「Gang Leader × Good Girl/Bystander」 and 「Newly Turned Vampire × Old Vampire」, if you're still looking for either of those!

Book Quotes

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it—the silence—meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came, it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.

— Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Smoke and Steel

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𝕿he good colonel, despite a disposition mostly hale, and all manner of courtly airs, had most evidently met some difficulty on the long walk from his summons; the dung-strewn fields, and, thereafter, the motte (beneath its murder holes, betwixt its chokepoints, up, up the merciless road which snaked the hillside to its apex). He wore his suffering all about him: red of complexion and clammy of skin was he, throttled at the neck by a wrinkled ascot, at the waist by belly-cinching belt. Sword and baldric troubled his one shoulder, while the other itched and fretted beneath a warm-colored halfcape. Perhaps most useless of all, however, were his gauntlets, of fine, worn kidskin stitched; and tucked at his waistbelt for ease of reach. As if he should have sudden need on that festering midsummer's day to warm his hands. As if among thirteen thousand allies he should so soon find a knave to quarrel with, and grievances to bear against him, and such ravenous indignation that he should start sending Inburians to the very same hells as he'd sent four Elga during the battle. He pinched the crown of his hat where he always pinched it, three even, greasy creases worn in where thumb and forefingers had crimped the aged felt. This he plucked from sweaty brow and tossed upon the table, baring his damp scalp and stuck locks in deference to the higher ranks; while also claiming, by its placement, one of the empty chairs ere he'd stridden over to it. Handsome and stout for his advanced years, with a sturdy gait, and a lordly demeanor despite his lowborn standing and no matter the weather; but whether under shaded brim or candles' glimmer, his eyes always shifted. At present they leered suspectly from general he did not trust, to financier he did not respect; and back again to the general; from the rows of gormless faces which were his fellow good-colonels, to the deafening

absences resounding from the gaps, the other empty chairs. Particularly the chair at table's head, which it begrudged him deeply to see so, as that particular absence meant he had worn his Sunday finest through the stink and the shit and the heat all for naught. Just as well, perhaps, that Szaalm had brought his gauntlets, then. Evidently the rest had already started up with their squabbling, and expected his own partaking in good order. They spoke courteously enough of each other while describing their dilemma, but the syllables thus uttered were only a mask to the slithering thoughts beneath; their inflections told the true story, their intonations, their emphases.

"Godsgrace! How should I know?" said Szaalm with an insincere modesty as he threw himself into the creaks and protests of the chair, and purchased his feet upon one of the table legs that he might sprawl his own, and rear back his seat onto its hindlegs in such a rakish way—getting himself most settled and comfortable, or near enough as he could manage in the smothering heat—"mayhap abandon any thoughts of Inbur altogether?" By careful inflection and cadence had he fashioned this suggestion like a jape, and for his efforts garnered a good few chuckles from the table. But for as preposterous as this suggestion was—and it was, to the rest, quite preposterous—warring with his jovial tones were his countenance, and, again, embedded within it like gaping wounds, his eyes—gravely earnest all, and studying the others for their objections.

@

@Dyelli Beybi

Book Quotes

In private moments I take up the volume and the rough, thorny binding hums in my hand like a beehive. As I turn the pages coniferous sap sticks to my fingers. In the rustle of its paper I hear the nocturnal stirring of owls. Letters become iridescent beetles that uncase their wings with a click and whir into the air. This book is a wild tangle of words, a shadowy ravine through which unseen beasts prowl, rustling the pages as they pass.

— Thomas Wharton, "The Paper-Thin Garden"

Book Quotes

Her soul brightened with the nostalgia of her lost dreams. She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst, and only then did she discover how much she missed the whiff of oregano on the porch and the smell of the roses at dusk, and even the bestial nature of the parvenus. Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.

— Gabriel García Márquez, A Hundred Years of Solitude

Book Quotes

When they got up in the morning, Jurgis was sent out to buy a paper; one of the pleasures of committing a crime was the reading about it afterward. “I had a pal that always did it,” Duane remarked, laughing—“until one day he read that he had left three thousand dollars in a lower inside pocket of his party’s vest!”

There was a half-column account of the robbery—it was evident that a gang was operating in the neighborhood, said the paper, for it was the third within a week, and the police were apparently powerless. The victim was an insurance agent, and he had lost a hundred and ten dollars that did not belong to him. He had chanced to have his name marked on his shirt, otherwise he would not have been identified yet. His assailant had hit him too hard, and he was suffering from concussion of the brain; and also he had been half-frozen when found, and would lose three fingers on his right hand. The enterprising newspaper reporter had taken all this information to his family, and told how they had received it.

Since it was Jurgis’s first experience, these details naturally caused him some worriment; but the other laughed coolly—it was the way of the game, and there was no helping it. Before long Jurgis would think no more of it than they did in the yards of knocking out a bullock. “It’s a case of us or the other fellow, and I say the other fellow, every time,” he observed.

“Still,” said Jurgis, reflectively, “he never did us any harm.”

“He was doing it to somebody as hard as he could, you can be sure of that,” said his friend.

— Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

Book Quotes

Abelman’s Dry Goods
Kansas City, Missouri
U. S. A.

Mr. I. Abelman, Mongoloid, Esq.:

We have received via post your absurd comments about our trousers, the comments revealing, as they did, your total lack of contact with reality. Were you more aware, you would know or realize by now that the offending trousers were dispatched to you with our full knowledge that they were inadequate so far as length was concerned.

“Why? Why?” you are, in your incomprehensible babble, unable to assimilate stimulating concepts of commerce into your retarded and blighted worldview.

The trousers were sent to you (1) as a means of testing your initiative (A clever, wide-awake business concern should be able to make three-quarter length trousers a by-word of masculine fashion. Your advertising and merchandising programs are obviously faulty.) and (2) as a means of testing your ability to meet the standards requisite in a distributor of our quality product. (Our loyal and dependable outlets can vend any trouser bearing the Levy label no matter how abominable their design and construction. You are apparently a faithless people.)

We do not wish to be bothered in the future by such tedious complaints. Please confine your correspondence to orders only. We are a busy and dynamic organization whose mission needless effrontery and harassment can only hinder. If you molest us again, sir, may you feel the sting of the lash across your pitiful shoulders.

Yours in anger,
Gus Levy, Pres.

— John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Book Quotes

I carry in my coat a snuff-box, though I’m not much in the habit now. Inside its lid there is a painting, done in miniature, of Greek or Roman ladies at their baths. They sit with thigh and buttock flat against wet tile and lean one on the other, nipple grazing shoulder, cheek to belly. Steam-secreted pearls are beaded on their spines, the hairs about each quim curled into little nooses by the damp.

I think, perhaps, too oft on women for my years. The maddening petticoated presence of them, every sweep and swish a brush-stroke on the sweltering canvas of my thoughts. Their sag and swell. Their damp and occult hinges where they open up like wicked, rose-silk Bibles, or their smocks, rime-marbled underneath the arms. Their ins and outs. Their backs. Their forths. Warm underhangs and shrew-skin purses, dewed with bitter gold. Imagined, they burn fierce and sputtering, singing, incandescent in my prick, my centre. I may close the lid upon this snuff-box filled with nymphs, yet in my dreams its clasp is broke and its contents not so quickly shut away.

Once, I believed that when I’d grown into a man and married, I’d be plagued no more by the incessant posturings and partyings of my bordello mind. I would no longer suffer the relentless elbow-cramping visitations of these succubi, that mapped the foam-splashed shorelines of my passion; penned their snail cartographies upon my sheets and clouded my good sense with humid, feverish distractions.

So I hoped, but it was not to be. Though wed with an obliging wife whose cosy hole was made a velvet-curtained stage where to play out my lewdest skits, the tide of jiggling shadow-pictures did not ebb, but only boomed the louder in those bed-wrapped, warm-lapped latitudes upon the shores of sleep above the snore of spouse and cot-bug’s measured tick. Denied thus any hope of swift reprieve from satyriasis, I sought to slake my thirst for carnal novelty with whores and serving-maids. When this did little more than whet an appetite already swollen, I drew consolation from the thought that soon I should be old, the imprecations of John Thomas surely grown more faint and hopeless, easily ignored.

Alas, with snow upon the thatch, there is yet wildfire in the cellar, stoked with willow limbs and jutting trunks. So much for good intentions. Often now it seems that my desire is worse than ever, with nought but the flimsiest of hints required to set my meditations on their soil-strewn and indecent path.

— Alan Moore, Voice of the Fire, "Angel Language, AD 1618"