This Was A Project And A Half To Make, I Took A Lot Of Breaks For A Reason@halfstack-smp

this was a project and a half to make, i took a lot of breaks for a reason @halfstack-smp

EDIT:  fixed some missing colours and changed her last name to match current one

To Be So Normal

Lynel listens to Fadir’s heart beat in the cage of its barreled chest, alive, alive, alive.

Content: adopted kids i guess, mushroom internet, IS THAT THE GRIM REAPER?, service animals, disabled characters (with accomodations!), nonbinary adults and children, fictional disabilities in a fantasy setting

TW: open discussion of chronic physical and mental disability, terminal illness jumpscare (it was not, in fact, a terminal illness), child distress, brief depictions of memory gaps/dissociation, local zombie thinks dead bodies are a perfectly fine discussion subject for children

Screen reader’s note: Contains passages in Hokkien english, Spanish. Use of gender neutral it/they pronouns.

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“Fadir!”

Lynel grumbles and turns over in their sheets, cracking open an eye to look out the window. It’s barely even twilight. Who goes out this early?

Another insistent knock rattles from outside the door.

“I know you’re home!” the voice insists. “And I know you don’t sleep!”

Lynel curls their hand into the blanket, only to meet the sudden resistance of solid muscle. There was never a blanket at all- just Fadir’s arm loosely cradling Lynel’s head with a sleeve colored like autumn leaves, and a dark wing spread across their back.

“Fadir, please,” the voice begs. “It’s almost sunrise. I’ll be stuck under your porch all day at this rate.”

Lynel frowns and looks up at the raventhing. Its eyes darting under its lids, yellow brows all furrowed as it whispers under its breath. Should they try and wake it up?

Something rattles out of the boxes by the hearth wall. A glowing blue creature with beady white eyes, papery wings flitting about, jostling the red ribbon of a bell collar. One of those freonds that always follow Fadir around- an allay, wasn’t it? As it floats closer, a thin blue frond peaks out from under a golden shawl and starts carelessly batting at Fadir’s face like a spoiled pet cat.

“It breached th’ Ore walls,” Fadir whispers, “we need t’ raise th’ bridge,  someone tell Queen-”

The allay roughly shoves Fadir’s head, practically bullying it back to its feet before dragging it towards the kitchen. Another allay, now disturbed enough to emerge from its own box, shuffles its tiny appendages over its mouth before going to pull the ribbon on the door, forcing the knob open.

“Ah. Muninn’s runnin’ the show today, then?” Heavy footsteps scuff against the welcome mat. “Can’t be helped, I suppose. I can wait.”

Lynel peeks over the back of the chair they’d accidentally napped in. There’s a tall human figure with puffy strawberry blond hair tied back into a scruffy ponytail, body swallowed up by a large green coat. Or maybe not quite human. Their nails are dark and thick, and their ears have a pointed, dog-like shape, swiveling as they turn around to lock eyes with Lynel’s scrutinizing gaze. Lynel stares back at a bearded face with white hairs, the milky pupils of green eyes squinting past a patchwork of raking scars.

…So that’s a dead guy! That’s- that’s definitely a dead guy!

“Are you… supposed to be here?” Lynel hesitantly asks, shrinking back ever so slightly.

“Ah, I’m just from up the road,” the (dead?) man dismissively says. They appraise Lynel for a moment before approaching to lean their body against the head of the chair, arm slung out the other side as if offering an awkward handshake. “Carlisle Carmilla. Cryptkeeper of Slovenguard. Someone’s gotta keep track of all those bodies they chuck int’ Pando’s guts.”

“They put bodies in there?” Lynel horrifiedly asks.

“Oh, loads!” Carlisle cheerfully answers. “Most times it’s just dead gods an’ players, but you get the odd lads ‘n the like who just walk in there ‘cus they ain’t keen to be buried the normal way.”

“Dead people in the backyard,” Lynel gravely repeats.

“Not the backyard,” Carlisle corrects. “More of th’ side yard, really. Or the front yard! I’d much rather trust a dead man to my front than my back, to be honest.” Their eyes flick to Fadir- Fadir in the kitchen, unfocused eyes staring down at a pocket watch while its allays hover nervously around its head. “Speakin’ of the dead. How long’s that whole show been goin’ on for?”

“Um- I don’t- I don’t know,” Lynel haltingly reveals. “Should… we call someone?”

Carlisle shakes their head. “It’s fine. Those episodes never last that long anyways.”

“Yi, jiu, qi, ling, yi, er, san-” A talon loudly clicks the pocket watch shut, and Fadir’s cloudy expression snaps into focus like a photograph. “Carlisle. You forgetting again your keys.”

“I did not forget my keys!” A pause. “This time.” A chubby black and white cat pops its face out of Carlisle’s bag, the white mustache pattern on its face giving its icy blue eyes a smug look. Carlisle gives it a consoling scratch on the chin. “One of your raven children walked off with the crypt keys when I went back in for my umbrella. Just snatched them right out the gate!”

“An’ you didn’t get your um-brel-la,” Fadir guesses.

“And I didn’t even get my umbrella,” Carlisle confirms.

Fadir sighs. “My children are better than that. Prob-ably one of the grandchild, le.” It roughly cracks its neck. “You stay here. Have phan-tom candy le. I steal your keys back.”

It swipes its hand at the air in front of itself, and a bamboo cane falls into its palm. It grabs at its jacket as it goes back out the door, tasseled hat left on its rack.

Carlisle snorts as they rifle through the cabinets, hand emerging with a paper bag. “Jokes on that guy, I’m takin’ its whole stash.” They offer the open bag to Lynel. “Daylight just takin’ the absolute piss outta me. Grab yourself a few before I eat you out of house an’ home.”

Lynel had never had phantom meat before staying with Fadir. Apparently avian origins eat it alot. The white wing flesh was all fatty and chewy like bacon, and when Fadir cooked it up, always pleasantly crunchy. Even drowning the stuff in sugar for storage did little to take away its filling taste.

“So you’re the new kid ‘round these parts, right?” Carlisle starts. “Lynel or summat.”

Lynel’s full cheeks puff with embarrassment. “I’m not anybody’s kid. I just live here.”

Carlisle’s teasing squint pulls at a scar tearing into one of their eyes. “If you say so.”

Lynel fidgets with their hands as Carlisle goes back to tearing into the snacks. “Um- do you, uh- do you know-”

“Don’t you dare assume I know anything on Ortet’s accursed earth,” Carlisle interrupts. “You wouldn’t believe how stupid I am.”

“That thing that happened to Fadir just now, I mean,” Lynel clarifies. “You knew what that was. What was that?”

Carlisle’s mouth flattens. “You don’t go askin’ me about that sort of thing. Mans is right there.”

Lynel sticks their tongue out. “Pbbt.”

“Think about it.” Carlisle leans towards Lynel’s seat. “You wouldn’t want me askin’ Fadir about your damage-”

“I don’t have damage-”

“You’re adopted,” Carlisle bluntly points out, “that’s damage enough. And I wouldn’t go askin’ around you for all the sordid details, now would I? Goes both ways. If you want to ask about Fadir, you’d best be gettin’ it from the old bird itself. Talkin’ around it is just mean.”

The door swings open again, and Fadir re-emerges with several ravens on its arm. “Ai, Carlisle, are you scarin’ children again?”

“Absolutely not,” Carlisle immediately answers, like they were some kind of liar who does, in fact, scare children on a regular basis.

“Mm.” Fadir jangles around a large metal keyring in one of its knobbly hands. “They were trying to play swords with it again.”

“You’d think they’d learn by now,” Carlisle flatly notes.

“Ah, but they do,” Fadir corrects as it tosses the keys into Carlisle’s waiting hands. “And then the new ones next year start it all over, le.” It waggles its now free hand at the bin by the door. “You take one of the um-brel-la to do your things. I take back later, hao ma?”

“Fair enough.”

Carlisle slaps the bag of phantom candy back onto the counter and stretches out their arms with a horrifying full-body bone crunch.

“I’ll be off, then.” Carlisle gives Lynel an awkward pat on the head. “Don’t be a stranger! You’re always welcome at the crypt, alive or dead.”

The cat in Carlisle’s bag stares at Lynel as they leave.

Fadir sighs. “They didn’t say anything bad, ne? Carlisle is not too bad, but- ehhhh- a little bad to talk to people. Death scares people away.”

You’d best be gettin’ it from the old bird itself. Talkin’ around it is just mean.

“Just, uh, dead people in the backyard,” Lynel decides to say. “It wasn’t anything bad.”

=[]=

So anyways, it was a little bad.

It wasn’t like Carlisle said anything bad. Carlisle was nice (kind of) (sort of) (in their strange, “what’s up I’m a dead guy” way), but they did accidentally point out a thing Lynel noticed was more than just, well, Lynel being Lynel again.

Something’s a little wrong with Fadir Ravenslove.

And it’s not the way it talks, or some of the odd expressions in its smile, or the way it laughs. Pretty much all of that can be chalked up to having a shakier grasp on Anglos and a face that doesn’t quite know what to do with itself- it was a raven once, or so it insists.

But its sentences will halt and stutter, interrupted with frozen smiles and lost expressions. Its eye will catch on the most random objects and linger, hypnotized, until its allays steer it away. It hardly ever sleeps, but when it does, it wakes up with foreign sentences crawling out of its mouth like spiders, the haunted syllables of some ancient ghost asserting itself for a moment before Fadir remembers what it is again.

It doesn’t happen a lot- never for long, never enough for other people to really notice- but it happens. And it keeps happening.

And then Fadir got that package in the mail.

The houses in Slovenguard are too far apart to bother putting up a mailman to ride to all of them, so they’ve got this sort of neighborhood box by the town entrance, close to the station. Fadir’s been having Lynel take the mail on the way back from school, just to get familiar with how things work around here.

烏鴉愛, Drakon Alchemical. That first bit is Fadir’s name in Quanhua, and then… Drakon. Like that crazy drug company? 

PATIENT: 烏鴉愛 (C-PTS) JD circuit-32 (x16) SSRI antipsychotic/neuropathic (x64)

Lynel understood some of those letters individually, but none of them can be good. There’s only one course of action left.

Stealing Mr. Carmilla’s computer.

…Okay, maybe not steal it. That would be mean. But they do have the motem box they use for putting in the death records, and Lynel’s been learning how to look things up at school, and somewhere over the course of thinking this Lynel realized they could literally just look this up at school instead of crafting a weird dead people motem heist.

(They may be stupid.)

After finagling with the school machine for a bit that yes, Lynel meant C-PTS, not C-PTSD, whatever that means, they found it some directory of mental illnesses.

Prophetic Tangent Syndrome (PTS) is a disruptive set of symptoms caused by overexposure to divination magic, creating an unending “tangent” state where any external stimuli can trigger dissociative space-time perceptions (prophetic tangents). This state worsens common divination side effects like anxiety, hypervigilance, and paranoia. PTS and prophetic tangent episodes are an accepted work hazard for diviners and usually don’t last for longer than two weeks. PTS is treatable with assisted care and removing prophetic stimuli.

PTS that lasts longer than one month, or keeps coming back without exposure, is classified as Complex Prophetic Tangent Syndrome (C-PTS). It is no longer a temporary sickness, but a chronic disability that can permanently damage a person’s memory, responsiveness, and awareness of their surroundings. Without assistance or treatment, a person can lose hours or days at a time to prophetic stimuli, or unexpectedly lose consciousness to sudden violent visions. Many diagnosed persons need the assistance of service animals, and some may be unable to live on their own.

Truly understanding this condition beyond legend and hearsay did not occur until around the 1940s, but early studies suggest that C-PTS may have had a 30% indirect mortality rate per year among its numbers-

Lynel didn’t read much after that. The words kind of melted together.

30%. That’s- that’s more than one in four. A one in four chance, every day of every year, to fall down and never get back up again.

That’s not fair.

That’s- that’s not fair.

It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair IT’S NOT FAIR-

=[]=

Most of the time, Fadir doesn’t get concrete visions. That’s not really how it works, not anymore. It’s like… a thought. A sudden strong sense to be somewhere, to do a certain thing, buy a specific piece of food at a stall. Shards of arbitrary nonsense, sauntering vaguely downwards towards a better future.

Like how Fadir walks out of its work room after lunch, closes its eyes by one of the window seats for a bit, and wakes up with its foot halfway out the door holding a very pointed train map to Lynel’s school in its hand. Because apparently fate is deciding to be unsubtle today.

It learns to trust these sort of things. The same way it trusts to take note of the yakimochi stand by the station as it exits, as if neither it or Lynel might be back in time for dinner at home. The way it trusts to perch on top of the call box in time for someone to consider using the thing- a teacher with nervous eyes, tense body startled by a raven’s long shadow.

“You were going t’ call me,” Fadir says.

The teacher opens their beak. “Mr. Ravenslove-” (Wrong.) Don’t press it. “-we were just about to call you.” Only you. The other wanted to send Lynel home on their own. “There’s- well, nothing’s wrong, honestly,” Liar. Polite. Doesn’t want you to panic. (So don’t.) “-just-”

The teacher- tengu- tiangou- it’s the tiangou who have those dog-like ears, who wear hanfu instead of kimono- Stalling. Talk.

“Where’s Ah-lai?” Fadir softly interrupts. “Where’s Lynel?”

The teacher said something about Lynel crying during the motem class, and Fadir felt its hand tense around its cane-

-and then it was staring at the clicking mechanism of its own pocket watch in a doctor’s office. School. Not a hospital. Lynel is sitting behind the divider doing the classwork they’re about to miss. (Their lunch box still has the chips left in it.)

Fadir doesn’t search for Lynel’s distress in the past or future. It maneuvers itself around the divider, knees protesting as it kneels in front of the child of the present, and opens its arms, just a bit.

Lynel shuffles off their seat and just- just walks into Fadir’s chest. And things make a little more sense.

=[]=

“It’s a slow day,” the school doctor says. “I can give you the room for a bit if you need to talk.”

Fadir might have nodded. Or not. Lynel can’t really tell. The door closes anyway, and the office goes empty.

Neither of them seem like they’re in a hurry to talk.

“The book said you were gonna die,” Lynel finally whispers.

“Not for a long time, le,” Fadir amends. “Cer-tain-ly not me, ne? Too old.”

Lynel whimpers and shakes their head, burying into Fadir’s shirt.

“It’s not so bad,” Fadir says. “Everythin’ dies. You an’ me, too.”

“But you’re not supposed to die.” Lynel’s voice has a cracking sort of shake to it now. “It’s not fair.”

Fadir stills for a moment. Pauses. “You saw something,” it haltingly surmises. “What did you see?”

“I picked up your meds in the post office,” Lynel admits. “And I couldn’t read it right, so I looked it up and-” Fadir’s body tenses, and their words get faster and faster. “-an’ I didn’t mean anything bad, I jus’ wanted to understand, and I-” 

Their voice cracks, splinters, shatters.

“Is it true, what happens to diviners?” Lynel softly asks. “You look too far one day and then- and then you never see anything again?”

This is the part where Lynel expects Fadir to lie- lie, the way everyone else does when things go wrong and little kids aren’t meant to know about it. There’s going to be enough firewood, winter will be over soon, and Fadir Ravenslove doesn’t have a 1 in 3 chance of dying every time it closes its eyes.

But that's not what happens.

“Time is a thread,” Fadir starts. “A line that keeps things movin’. Di-vin-ation is just lettin’ go of the line a bit so y’ can see all the yarns. And if y’ too it too much, too long… your hand starts t’ slip.”

“Is that what happened to you?” Lynel dares to wonder. “Your hand slipped off the thread?”

Past the frozen smile on Fadir’s face, its brows furrow at odd angles. “I never held the thread at all, le. I-” Its pupils shrink down to almost comically small black dots in its golden eyes, and the breath it takes could have been a despairing laugh. “I barely have the hands for it.”

Its hand shakes a little when it pushes its down out of its eyes.

“When th’ uni-verse gave me this body, it gave me time that could never run out,” Fadir explains. “An’ back then, it was death. Good as dead. Ain’t denyin’ that.” Fadir tilts its head, and its smile widens coyly. “But I am a little stupid. I don’t know I should be dead. So I talk to everyone like me, collect all their words an’ I walk up to a doctor like liho, problem for you, kamsia! That’s why I have all that medicine.”

Fadir takes Lynel’s hand and brings them toward the jade disk tied to its neck with red thread. “Makes everything less loud. And when there is too much at once-” It waggles the jade handle of its pipe. “Just turns to magic smoke! It is made that way.”

“I kind of just thought you did drugs,” Lynel bluntly confesses.

“Ay! Ni shi gin na!” Fadir presses down on Lynel’s head. “I can-not do that around you. Bad for you.”

“You still take those other pills, though,” Lynel mutters.

“Ach. Even I use things like these, still leftovers. Gets me scared outta my head for no reason. The pills take care o’ that.”

Lynel’s mouth flattens. “But not all the way.”

Fadir sighs. Lynel realizes, for the first time, that the feathered ears on Fadir’s head are all crooked. The one on the right always hangs a little limp, like a puppy that’s still too soft in the bones.

It’s always the right side. The right leg’s bones that click, the right foot that has that twitch, the right tail feathers that puff out, the right hand that shakes a little more than the other when there’s nothing to hold.

“Aye,” Fadir admits. “Not all the way, le.” It clacks its cane against the ground. “I need this so I don’t walk into things.” It gestures to the allays trying to get into the doctor’s candy box. “I still need those two t’ drag me out when my head lets go.” Its eyes shift with a gentle squint as its voice softens. “So I am very, very lucky. I am very lucky that so many things work so hard to put the thread back into my hands.”

It pulls Lynel close with a stilted, hesitant hug.

“I lived with this for a very long time,” it whispers. “Okay? I would not- I could not let you into my house if I thought I would not be here after you were gone.”

Lynel listens to Fadir’s heart beat in the cage of its barreled chest, alive, alive, alive.

(You, you, you are alive.)

“I wanna go home,” Lynel decides. “Can we get something to eat on the way?”

“Hao le,” Fadir easily allows. It braces its hands on its knees as it stands, back stiff as it carries through the motion. “Oish. Brisk.” It holds out its arm a bit, and Lynel takes its hand. “Come on, let’s go.”

=[]=

“Oi, Ki-bo!”

“HEWWO?”

“Ki-bo, wo men zai yi ge boba naicha, ni yao ma?”

“Fuckin’ uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-”

“We are having food right now. We can wait, le.”

“Is Lynel with you? At the boba?”

“Yes, le.”

“HEY! NIÑO! DID YOU KNOW-”

“Don’t-”

“DID YOU KNOW THAT BOBA MEANS-”

(烏鴉愛 has left VC.)

Im just a wittle art acount, PLEASE i haven't horny posted before, how'd they find me

the sexy girlbots are returning. nature is healing

(points) HOW DID YOU FIND ME

Op, you post links in halfstack that show your account AND you like or reblog 80% of the halfstack posts. I like checking the tags

Last night i was eating one of those big jawbreakers and i got it to a size that i fould fit in my mouth. Then i was suddenly haunted by Shane Madej and his fear of avacados. I got overwhelming nervous in that moment

POTS makes me nearly pass out at physical activity and causes me to be tired all the time but this mentality is what made me hesitate about using the word disabled for myself

sometimes i see posts that reduce physical disability to chronic pain or otherwise being in pain / seem to operating on the assumption that pain is integral to the physically disabled experience so...this is a gentle reminder that there are plenty of chronic physical conditions (illnesses or no) that don't inherently or always involve pain but can still be incapacitating nonetheless. being deaf or HoH don't (always) involve pain. blindness or other vision problems don't (always) involve pain. paralysis, numbness, weakness, and coordination problems don't (always) involve pain. not all deformities involve pain. lacking a limb doesn't always involve pain. additionally, a physically disabled person not (or only sometimes) experiencing pain due to their condition(s) doesn't always mean being better off than those who do experience it.