1 - 20 of 220 Works in Archive 81 (Podcast)
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A cult decides it's time to move up in the world and go from offering their demon overlord rabbits to offering him a full-blown virgin sacrifice. The issue is that their 'virgin sacrifice' happens to be one Nicholas Waters, their 'demon overlord' is actually just Static Man and they're a little unsure why he keeps laughing.
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“Alright, give it to me straight, Doc.” He flutters his eyelashes, still joking even now, when he can only move half his face. “What’s the damage?”
Chris wishes she could match his energy, tries to laugh, knows it falls flat with exhaustion. “Well, other than a thrilling new facial scar, most of your blood ending up outside your body, and the fact that I now know what your intestines feel like, I think we got off pretty easy.”
Lou tries to raise an eyebrow, winces, and Chris watches the wrappings across his face shift. “That scar,” he starts, bringing up a hand to feel around the bandage. “Roguish, or monstrous?”
“Depends on how it heals.” Chris doesn’t actually know if it sounds like a joke. She’s running on fumes, pretty sure that she’s going to crash any time now, and the shot of relief from Lou being conscious can only get her so far. “Hey, maybe you’ll be able to intimidate the next assassin who comes after you into only stabbing you once or twice, instead of-” She gestures towards him, all the wounds that she sutured with her own two hands, doesn’t choke on the words.
Series
- Part 27 of whumptober 2025
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“No luck with memories coming back?”
“Nope.” And, okay, Chris isn’t exactly being wholly honest about that. She gets flickers here and there, instincts resurfacing that she didn’t know existed in the first place, but none of it is tangible. None of it is the Christine Anderson who lived and adventured on this ship, the person that everyone wants her to be and she’s pretty sure is dead and buried.
Teddy fails pretty miserably at not looking let down, mouth downturned an almost cartoonish amount. “Well, we’re glad to have you back, whether or not you end up remembering your first time here.”
“Dude, you don’t have to-” Chris groans, leans against the curving wall of the ship, crosses her arms. “I don’t remember much, but I know that it’s weird as hell for you to be this nice to me, so.” She makes a vague gesture. “Sorry that I’m not the person you wish I was, but you can stop treating me with kid gloves or whatever.”
Series
- Part 24 of whumptober 2025
- Language:
- English
- Words:
- 1,111
- Chapters:
- 1/1
- Collections:
- 1
- Hits:
- 10
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“How can you make it - abate?” Dan said, using Rat’s phrasing to hopefully get to a solution faster. His legs were tired, his body sore and achy from tensing and untensing his muscles so frequently. He was sweaty, and his mouth felt dry and parched despite the extra saliva.
“I don’t know,” Rat said flatly, gazing down at Dan with razor sharp curiosity. “I think the only way to find out is to try everything.”
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Nicholas wiped his palms on his pants and sat up straight, leaning over so his elbows rested on his thighs and sighing. "I don't know what it is, exactly," he admitted. What it really was was embarrassing. It was a rabbit hole, a desperate measure. Following broken links on Reddit into broken links on Tumblr and then finding a thread on Twitter that read like a teenager's manifesto of the reality of ghosts. It sounded ridiculous, the way it was written, a tirade of promises of the otherworldly, how one could shift if they just dreamt hard enough. But Nicholas had known that enough of it was real to believe the reports by people in the replies, empty profiles with no profile picture and little to connect them to any lived experience, any proof of reality. The type of stuff that anyone browsing just learning about magic would write off as obvious fakes. Nicholas himself had fallen into this trap, but had learned better over the years. But you still had to be thorough.
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Nicholas doesn’t seem to find all this quite as funny. “Control yourself,” he mutters. “Or else I will.”
That shocks a startled laugh out of Static Man. “Seriously, dude? Scary Nicholas Waters, gonna-”
—
The void is familiar.
Series
- Part 10 of whumptober 2025
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As soon as the door swings open, Arthur lodges his complaint. “Morgan, I can’t believe that you gave me nostrils.”
A pause, and then a strained laugh that definitely isn’t his friend the bodycrafter, but instead one of her roommates. One of the Jessicas, he thinks? Not sure, they all sort of run together, but she definitely looks a bit perturbed with that opening.
Whoops.
~~~
arthur's still adjusting to having a real flesh body, morgan helps
Series
- Part 9 of whumptober 2025
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Chris comes awake with a gasp, and all that's left of the dream is sweat drying tacky against the plasticky motel sheets.
She drops her head back against the pillow with a groan. It’s not the first time she’s woken up like this, and she’s pretty goddamn sure it won’t be the last. The popcorn ceiling swims before her eyes, taunting, and she can almost make out the shapes in its texture, patterns rising out of chaos like the music from Loop Lady’s echoes.
A blink, and the spackle becomes constellations spread out across a foreign sky. A blink, and then there’s nothing but herself, a shitty motel room, and Nicholas turning over in his sleep on the twin bed on the other side of the room.
Series
- Part 5 of whumptober 2025
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Flesh will not be necessary for your consciousness moving forwards.
“Yeah, I heard that bit. No fucking clue what it means, though, like- am I gonna become a ghost? Is this just a weird, drawn-out way of saying that you’re killing me?”
You will not be killed, Payphone says. Perhaps you will wish you were dead, but that will not be the case.
~~~
Arthur's made some unwise deals, and Payphone's come to collect.
Series
- Part 4 of whumptober 2025
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“This world that we live in, it has a certain frequency that it sings with, echoing out into all those in-between spaces." Elise tilts her head, seems to settle into the rhythm of the words as though she has spoken them many times before. "The world that you seek, well, that one has a wholly different frequency, and those notes are quite discordant when you overlay them. Attempting to bring them in tune is unstable, and rarely pleasant for anyone involved. With this, however,” she says, twirling the tuning fork between her fingers, “it becomes possible to strike a chord, creating a much more...shall we say, workable combination.”
“Fascinating,” Nicholas says. He never had much of an ear for music, and—not for the first time—he is beginning to wonder if that may be a detriment in his chosen profession. “May I see it?” He extends his hand as he asks, only for Elise to pull the fork away.
Her smile twists, gesturing at sympathy without quite landing. “I’m afraid I’d like a bit of insurance, just for my own peace of mind.”
Series
- Part 1 of whumptober 2025
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"It doesn’t feel like catharsis,” he said through his teeth. He was clenching both of his fists so hard it reverberated pain up into his shoulders. “Why? Why me?”
“Now, Dan, I have a light, and I am going to ask you to follow it.”
“What?”
“I want you to follow the light with your eyes,” Rat said calmly, “and do not look at me. Look at the light. While you look at the light, I want you to think about those feelings. That anger, that resentment, the feelings about how people have treated you. The pain. The loss of autonomy.”
Dan opened his eyes. Rat pulled back, letting go of Dan’s wrist. In his hand was a small light, and he flicked it on but didn’t flash it. Dan looked at it, hesitated, and then nodded. He was still skeptical, but he didn’t know what could possibly go wrong. Anything Rat could do to him would be easier done through simpler methods, and it seemed like a waste of time to go the therapy method if he wanted to just make Dan more damaged. And if it didn’t work, it wouldn’t be the end of the world either.
- Language:
- English
- Words:
- 11,600
- Chapters:
- 1/1
- Kudos:
- 9
- Hits:
- 73
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“You should take a break,” Rat said. “Just! For a day or two. Clara and Lou will be okay.”
Dan still doubted Rat, considering how little he’d shown himself to care about them in the first place, but the idea of taking a break was appealing.
“Rat,” Dan said, slowly. “Can you get me a heating pad?”
It was another humiliation, but he thought it might be worth being subjected to that humiliation if he was able to procure something.
Rat’s face crumpled. “Oh, Daniel Powell,” he said, and then he shook his head slowly.
Dan didn’t ask again.
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“This isn’t about a body,” he said, and it would’ve been more honest to say it wasn’t just about a body, but it wasn’t like there had ever been much honesty to spare in this house. “This is about - we were kind of becoming friends, the three of us, and I know you felt it too. There was, you know, a connection.”
Nicholas turned to lean back against the counter, crossing his arms over his stomach, and fixed Static Man with an inscrutable look. Sometimes, when Static Man was really having trouble reading him, he felt like he was looking at one of those optical illusions. The two faces and the vase, the girl and the old lady. He knew there was something to see there - in the heavy, straight brows, maybe, or the deep-set dark eyes; or the tension at the corners of the mouth, its sharp Cupid’s bow beneath the carefully trimmed edges of the mustache - but he just couldn’t get his vision to focus right.
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Rat paused. He had to test the waters a couple of times before he could be sure; was Dan as easily susceptible to words as he believed, or would he resist at first? Dan was quiet for a moment, then said, “Is this supposed to be relaxing?” very quietly.
Rat giggled, under his own breath, and stroked his thumbs over Dan’s cheekbones. He was easy - even if not as easy as he could have been. Token resistance. It was common, in something like this; Rat was employing some methods that were traditional, based on emotional capacity of the person on the other side, and the rest was his own creativity and the right string of words. One could find anything, if one works hard.
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It was the way Rat asked him questions. How he framed everything in terms of Dan’s comfort or pleasure. How his voice had a liquid quality when he asked Dan about his masturbation habits, as he had recently. How often do you partake? he’d said, and Dan had sputtered and laughed because it sounded more like being asked about how often he smoked, or drank alcohol, but he knew that wasn’t it. Indulge me, Daniel Powell.
Honestly, Rat asking was better than Dan had expected. Frankly he wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that Rat listened to him jerk off. He couldn’t help but think that, anyway. Rat was there when he fell asleep, most of the time, and similarly he was there when he woke up. He had woken up one morning, very slowly, and realized he wasn’t dreaming - there really was something metal and cold pressed to his chest. The bell of a stethoscope had not been his first guess, and when he’d jolted awake Rat had hushed him and held him down and continued to listen to his - frantically beating, upon waking - heart.
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“If you want to say something,” Dan finally said, “just say it.” Rat was staring at him, openly but with an air of judgement, like some stain was on his face that Rat thought himself too polite to point out, but found disgusting regardless.
“It was cut from you with an untrained hand,” Rat said, blandly. He exhibited emotion by placing his palm on the rickety table and then clenching it into a fist.
“The new flesh,” Dan said, glancing down at his chest. Dan didn’t understand the magic, and he mostly didn’t want to, but he was still scarred, though most of the marks had faded. They were the same scars he’d had when Rat had cut him open, at least. Maybe that would be enough to provide Rat some small comfort.
“Yes,” Rat said, his mouth tight. Dan took a few more swallows of his beer, then pushed the can aside. “It is unfortunate to see so much of my precious work undone.”
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“How much longer can you hold it?” Rat asked lazily, tugging roughly at Dan’s hair as he dragged his fingers through it to the back of his head. He cradled him there, tipping Dan’s head back again so that he was looking up at Rat with half-lidded eyes.
“I don’t know,” Dan said, and Rat believed him this time but didn’t like the answer.
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the broom blooms bonny and the broom blooms fair by plutonianshores for santanico
Fandoms: Archive 81 (Podcast)
22 Apr 2025
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Fortunately, Michael Waters' collection has a ritual that dispel the curse Nicholas and Chris have stumbled into. Unfortunately, this ritual entails having sex, with each other.
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When a ritual requires Nick to sleep with a woman, Chris is more than willing to help. He is more willing to consider it than other options.
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He kept his hand there, hovering over the jewelry cuff on the lobe of her ear and then he said, nonsensically, “I never knew anything about you.”