11. magnetic levity
feat. altair, hemera, and eli

---

"So, when you touch the keyring to the keystone..." you lift your hand. a bolt of lightning travels between the rules, and the autozam crackles to life. you slide the drive lever forward and put your hand on the control stick.

"The Zephyrian battery stimulates the electrical coils, which power the engine and the vehicle's other features - radio, sensors, gauges, and the air bags and cooling systems invoke the wind aspect, of course. We just need to engage the thrust--" and you press down on the button atop the control stick. "And away we go."

you slowly pull out of the garage, maneuver the autozam down the driveway and down the street. a light classical melody plays over the radio as you trundle along. there's a stiff wind - it blows across your sides, though the windshield keeps out the worst of it. Hemera leans an arm over the side of the door, looks at the scenery, and yawns.

"Does it go any faster?"

"In theory," you say.

"Can I give it a go?"

you have a bad feeling about this. but you let your Dad into the driver's seat anyway.

---

the safety belt keeps you pinned against the back of your seat as Hemera is screaming down the road. you can barely hear yourself over the roar of the wind - and the delicate tinkles of the piano music have all but disappeared. there's an expression of manic glee on your Dad's face, as the needle on the speedometer is straining toward its rightmost limit.

"What's this button do?" Hemera's voice booms out over the din.

and before you can say anything, he presses it.

wings sprout from the autozam, and you can feel yourself rising from the ground. you don't get far before you feel yourself lurching sharply.

"Dad! Pull up! UP!"

the autozam jerks, blows around, you see a tree imminently closing in on you.

"Pedals!"

Hemera slams his foot down just as the autozam sideswipes the tree, causing you to wince at the snap of branches, before you go blasting off again.

"How do I brake this thing?"

"Release the thrust," you gasp. then, once you've slowed down enough, you reach over and slide the lever from 'drive' to 'hold position.'

the howling of the wind stops. you steady your breathing.

"Fun flight. Do I get a turn now?"

both you and your Dad scream.

Eli leans over the backs of your seats.

"H-how--"

"Where the hell did you come from?"

"The trunk," Eli says matter-of-factly. "So...?"

"And what the hell were you doing there?"

"Would you have invited me along if I'd asked politely?"

you can't answer that question. you're honestly not sure yourself.

Eli snakes a hand through Hemera's hair, clamps index and middle finger around the grey-haired man's ahoge. smiles.

---

the good news is that you now know the autozam can do a barrel roll.

the bad news is that you now know what it feels like to be carsick.

Hemera is passed out in the backseat. you feel his pulse, fortunately still beating strong through his thick, meaty arm. Eli regards him with disappointment. "I wasn't even pullin' that many Gs."

"Uncle..." you stammer out between labored breaths. "I would like to go home."

"Sure thing." Eli reaches for the stick again. then his eyes narrow, as he's checking the instruments. "Um. Altair. Possible complication."

"What is it?"

"That one's the fuel gauge, ain't it?"

it's long past your bedtime when you hear footsteps approach the front door. you scramble to let Dad in. the chill wind blows, biting your cheeks.

you look for the cupcake.

"Did... you forget?" you say. "Today's my birthday."

he shakes his head, leans in close. "There's no money this year, son." you smell the vodka on his breath.

"What about Mom? When can we go see Mom?"

"Next year."

you retire to the couch, hungry and cold. through the window, you gaze into the long and difficult winter ahead.

but you will be strong,

after all, boys don't cry.

next prompt: it's not brain surgery

08. close call & response time
feat. eli / sequel to 06. how have you been?

---

you awake in the dark. the first thing you notice is that your head is pounding. you reach for it, and something presses back. it's pressing against you on all sides. you feel thick plastic against your fingertips. you're inside a bag.

your first instinct is to scream, but that's horribly unwise.

keep your wits about you. get out. but first, you need to breathe.

luckily, after feeling around for a bit (thank goodness all your arms and legs are in one piece, functioning, moving), you find a zipper. you slowly peel it back. a horrid stench reaches your nose, and you almost wish you didn't.

cautiously, you crawl out, clutching the side of your head. it's sticky with blood. and you realize where the stench is coming from.

rows upon rows of bags. some of them haven't been fully zipped. corpses, you realize.

you're in a truck full of corpses.

slowly, haltingly, you fumble your way to the far end of the enclosed space. it's a door, but it's locked. and lost and weaponless, you're barely in a state to think right now, much less to fight your way out.

there's a bag different from the others. a bag full of belongings. you grasp for a radio, and switch it on.

"Can anyone hear me?" you keep your voice a low whisper, so whoever's keeping you here doesn't hear you.

no answer.

you roll the dial to a different channel. "Can anyone hear me? I need help."

one by one, you try all the frequencies you can remember, until finally you hear static, chatter on the other end. "Can anyone hear me? Please. I need assistance. I'm hurt, I-- I don't know where I am, I'm being taken somewhere."

you breathe, in and out. you fight back the pain. finally, a voice comes through, clear and crisp.

"This is Sergeant Major Ryker, 39th Infantry. To whom am I speaking?"

"Nyx. My codename is Nyx. 227th Spec Ops, Air Wing."

"Nyx, what's your status?"

"I--" something jolts you violently, and you lay still, you listen, hear the rumble of an engine, the squelch of mud splashing over tires. "I think in the back of a truck. I don't know how I got here. Going maybe 30 miles an hour."

"Last known position?"

"Somewhere by Zun river." you squint, struggle to dredge back the memories. "My guys got the call in for auxiliary support. Took a hit from an AA missile. Had to land. Made my way through the jungle on foot." breaths are coming in gasps now. your head really hurts.

"Any hostiles around?"

you strain your ears, but you can't tell, over the sounds of the truck. "I--I don't know."

"Can you move?"

"Arms and legs work all good. But my head hurts. Think I took a nasty hit to the right temple." you're frantically checking on the other bags, even as you gag from the stench. "The others-- they're all dead, Sarge. Everyone else in the back of the truck is dead."

"I'm already talking to my scouts," Ryker says. "Sit tight, Nyx. We're attempting to locate your position. Don't do anything stupid."

you can only nod.

---

"And that's how you almost ended up causing a friendly fire incident with a civilian cleanup crew?"

"Good thing nobody died, huh?"

husband trying to teach me how an a/c works. notices my humanities brain pathetically squinting and reassures me "this is why I took thermo three times"

19. symmetry: a study in six faces
feat. altair and hemera, gayle, and eli

---

Hemera maneuvers his cavalier around your flank, and captures your archer. you sigh.

"You're so aggressive, Dad."

a multitude of different pieces lies scattered around the edges of the board, the casualties of rounds past. you think you've done a fairly good job of carefully positioning your troops to control as much of the battlefield as possible, but Hemera is relentless, ruthless. since the beginning of the game, he's been driving a wedge through the center and going straight for your commander. even at a noticeable material advantage, you still must be careful.

you assess your formation, answer with a pikeman, laying the cavalier to rest on its side.

"I certainly hope this isn't how you commanded when you were in active service."

"The verbiage is captured, right? Not killed?" you nod your head, thinking back to the first day he asked you to teach him this wargame. lining up your pieces, blue against red, in equal rows that soon descended into disorder, in no small part because of the bold gambits your Dad seems to favor.

"Then it's fine." he smiles. "I'll get them all back. After I capture your commander."

he pushes his wyvern knight up the center file. a formidable position, and well-protected. with your archer lost, any direct challenge is certain to end in failure.

"Apologies, Dad."

from behind the collection of fallen, you lift up a single, upright piece.

"Deep strike."

"You haven't deployed your assassin yet? But it's been--eighteen battle rounds!"

"You need to mind your flank, Dad." and you place the assassin directly on his back row, within charging distance of his commander.

"Your move."

---

you hold the mirror up to Gayle. "It looks beautiful."

they're all smiles, beaming as radiantly as the glitter that coats their eyelids. along the line of each eye is a series of pink rhinestones, adjoining curled lashes the color of midnight. they turn their head back and forth as they grin into the mirror, checking the pattern - not a single stone out of place, left reflecting right in crisp, even lines. as they apply their lipstick, you can see their nails flash in the light, the even coats of color and more rhinestones, perfectly centered on the middle three nails. a touch of blush on each cheek finishes the look, and they nudge some hair out of their feathers, patting it down.

it's more flashy than you personally prefer, but their joy is contagious, and you soon find yourself grinning as well. they're no professional, far from it. but you can't deny that what you are seeing is art.

"Now you."

"Ah... I couldn't." you flush. "I wouldn't look nearly as good as you in it." as though you could ever be an art model!

"Nonsense!" they're already flicking through their kit, holding up a pale blue mascara to your face. "Fabulous. This is definitely your color."

"I just don't want to look--" you struggle for the words. "Too different."

"Soft glam then? Yes. Juuuuust the right balance between naturale and couture." they nod, mutter under their breath as they fuss with their kit, and sometimes you can't even tell if they're actually talking to you or just thinking out loud to themself. before you realize it, they've taken your hand, stretched out your fingers, held them up against a pale peach polish, a delicate pink. "Pink, son? I think pink."

you're tempted to compare their stubbornness to a certain other parent. but you know they wouldn't take it well.

"Pink... would be lovely, Parent."

---

you and Eli don't speak much on these flights.

it would be difficult, in any case, with the wind roaring in your ears, but you soon discovered that your attempts at telepathy were - not ignored, but unnoticed, the thoughts coming through scattered and faint when they were transmitted at all. you're unsure why this is the case, but far be it from you to judge the seraph's apparent disability. in any case, you have ways to compensate.

you tilt a wing and drift downward. he parallels you wordlessly, intuiting that you wish him to follow. he lets you lead, keeping a steady distance from you, as you circle around on the currents - his body adjusting on the fly a split second behind your motions, no matter how sharply you swoop and turn - until eventually you angle for a high cliff. you alight, tuck in your wings, and begin shifting back. he stays in the air, swooping upward, allowing you your privacy until you're back in a humanoid shape.

then he drops out of the sky in a back handspring, effortlessly pushing off the ground and landing lightly on his feet.

Show-off.

you look out over the ocean. the sun is setting, the water shimmering with golden light. Eli watches silently with you.

it's times like this that you wish you had your sketchbook, that you could capture this moment in a painting. you say as much. as you lose yourself in your thoughts, attempting to commit as much of this landscape as possible to memory, you hear the click of a button, see a tiny flash of light.

Eli shows you the image on his phone. "Easy."

you shake your head mirthfully. "That's not the point."

"Then what is the point?"

"The point is-- to put some spirit into it." you sigh. "You're technically proficient, Uncle, but-- art is about more than that."

you don't try to explain it to him. truth be told, you don't know if you'll ever be able to explain it to him.

there are some things that simply can't be translated in words.

07. dollhouse: a study in three stories
feat. sylvana, poppy, and altair

---

as a little girl growing up in an upper-class family in the shining city of Verdra, of course you had a dollhouse.

truth be told, though, you never much cared for the dollhouse itself. it's static, the furniture glued to the floors, the painted pictures flat on the walls. you much preferred the dolls who lived there. they could be redressed for different occasions, their hair combed and styled, and you even made a few ultimately fruitless attempts at making them up. as girls do, you remembered the stories that you overheard at your mother's parties, and play-acted recreations of them with your dolls - inventing stories about who had snubbed whom for whose secret lover, who was jealous of who had jumped on the latest popular trends in doll clothing, and so forth.

sometimes, you even made them kiss.

you knew how babies were born - you had seen it happen, with your baby sister (and you were sure you never wanted to go through that yourself). you never got a clear answer as to how babies were made - though it didn't involve a man and a woman, necessarily, as your friend with the two mothers could attest. it didn't matter much to you, you glossed over the details as you added new dolls to your growing doll families, doting doll mothers and perfectly misbehaved doll daughters who would grow into the envy of the doll courts, in due time.

how long has it been, now, since you put the dollhouse away for the last time?

---

as a little girl growing up on Columbia's western frontier, of course you never had a dollhouse.

truth be told, though, you never much cared for dolls anyway. sure, you would occasionally catch a glimpse of one in a toy store - a rough-spun pioneer girl with her covered wagon, an elegant porcelain lady from Victoria and the castle she lived in, or even a wooden shrine maiden from faraway Higashi, staff with streamers in hand. the issue was not their construction, or even their price.

you could never enjoy play-acting house with the other girls. the dolls, all of them, were too unreal.

their hair and faces are remarkably free of dirt and dust - they're meant to be, you were told, in a cruel irony compared against their owners. none of their clothes are torn or patched. they don't eat, or sleep, or cry. they never get lonely when left neglected for long periods of time. they never get sick, wither, and die.

none of them have little rocks growing out of their arms.

---

as a little boy growing up in an upper-class family in the shining city of Noven Verda, of course you never had a dollhouse.

truth be told, though, that didn't stop you. as soon as you were old enough to accompany your parents to the shops, you were fascinated - not by the dolls themselves, but by the dollhouses, the shapes of the roofs, the colors of the walls and trims, pleasingly accented by a hedge here, a vine of ivy there. sometimes, in your sketchbooks, you drew houses, recreations of the ones you'd seen, eventually graduating to your own creations, the dream homes you imagined you might live in someday.

when you were young, very young to be assigned to supervised playdates, you had friends. some of those friends were girls. you asked to see their dollhouses, and they were all too happy to oblige, letting you see the inner workings you never could from the shop windows - the placement of a bedroom vis-a-vis a study, the way the staircases spiraled left (to give sword-arm advantage to the defender, a fact that you noticed with amusement once you were old enough to pick up a sword yourself).

the girls notice. the girls giggle.

"What's with him?" "I think he likes buildings more than people."

why is my crappy body intolerant to everything delicious

this is what 'the admins set the tone for the community' means.

if a good admin has bad members, they have the power to kick/ban them, or at least tell them to knock it off.

if good members have a bad admin, they can't exactly kick/ban that person off their own site. their only choice is to stay and put up with the toxicity, or leave, which can be difficult if no other existing site caters to the exact oc you want to play, your friends don't want to migrate to the new site with you, the fc you like is often taken/disallowed, etc.

Lol fellow weirdo here. My favorite staff duties (when I used to staff) were cleaning up claims, moving threads around, and (shudder) advertising.

As a discord PM fanatic who generally dislikes plotters, this is a really thoughtful perspective to hear from the other side.

I tend to take intensive plotting into PMs because if I'm doing a 1x1 plot with another member... I don't think anyone not involved in the plot wants to hear about it, and will be actually annoyed if I spam 50 messages into the public chat that are of no interest to anyone other than the 1 person I'm doing the thread with. Is that wrong? Especially if this is going on with multiple 1x1 plots simultaneously, so you just end up with a bunch of people talking past each other. Multiple plotting channels can help with this, but the more you have, the more the discord appears to be cluttered.

Chardev and character talk channels, on the other hand, yes good, all the community engagement please.



seconded that pharaoh leap is a treasure to the p2 community

befriend the regular activity sweep, imo

if someone hasn't posted on the discord nor on the site itself in the past ~3 months there should be no hard feelings about them being deleted off the server (unless they're undergoing an extensive hiatus period but specifically stated their intention to stay on and lurk, ig)

09. our futile wishes, to the moon
feat. eli and poppy

---

the city is full of light pollution. even from the roof of the hospital, one of the tallest buildings in the area, you can't see the stars.

you can, however, see the moon, full and shining down on you.

someone's joined you.

"Hey, Poppy."

"You're not supposed to be here." she's sipping a 5-hour, fighting the bags under her eyes.

you shrug. "Couldn't sleep. You?"

Poppy scoffs. "One of those 24-hour shifts. I finally get a chance for a break, and what do I spend it on? Chasing down an unruly patient."

"Say, Doc..." you look up at the sky. "You ever dream of going to the moon?"

"No." the hostility in her voice takes you by surprise.

"How come? I thought your people were all about that pioneerin' stuff."

"Oh, there've been efforts." she crosses her arms. "Selfishness and cowardice, the lot of it. People who've given up on the problems facing Terra, so they think they can escape to a little commune with their chosen few and start over."

you frown. "What's wrong with prioritizin' you and yours?"

"If everyone thought like you, nothing would ever get solved. There are bigger problems than 'you and yours', you know."

"Please. It's not like you're the picture of unselfishness, either. I don't see you writing off my bill."

"Obviously. I deserve to get paid a fair value for my work." she glares up at you. "What I don't do is discriminate between my patients based on how much I like them. Exempli gratia: Present company."

you flex the fingers in your bandaged hand. "You did real good, Doc."

"Eli. Go to bed."

"Don't wanna."

she produces an energy drink from under her scrubs. you reach for it with your good hand, only for it to slip away.

"If you're back in your room by the time my break ends in five minutes, it'll be yours in the morning."

"Done."

you shake on it. despite her small size, her grip is tight and firm, and your hand even protests a little.

"Y'know, Poppy... when I was a kid, I always dreamed of flying off into space. 'Course, when I grew up, I realized how stupid that was."

she tilts her head quizzically.

"Not because it couldn't be done. Not because the city I grew up wasn't a hellhole worth escapin'. I realized that no matter where you go, there's always gonna be people like me."

you smile. "It's not a bad thing. Keeps me in work.

"And it keeps people like you in work, too."

you've reached the edge of the roof. with a tilt of your head, a farewell salute, you drop off.

the last you see of her, she's gazing forlornly into the distance, up at the silent moon.

Possibly gonna get a bit ranty but here we go.

Yeah, I get it, we're all nerdy, shy, probably socially anxious and bad at keeping in touch for various nd-related reasons. But someone has to be the one to make the effort. Sometimes that person is me. When it gets to the point that I feel like I'm the only one making any effort to reach out, I have to remind myself to stop trying, to not get over-invested because it will only make myself upset, but there's still that small part in the back of my mind that likes to tell me that everyone else is having a grand old time private messaging with each other and ignoring me (which is absolutely their prerogative, don't get me wrong!) because I'm not actually liked or wanted anywhere.

anyway my rp confession is "rp friends? haha what's a friend"