A Cluttered Workspace

direct orders of "you really really need to kill this guy" ignored: 1

Each of the lyrics comes from an old-time hickory song for fiddles, and is a lyric from that corresponding song.

"Fire on the Mountain" --> "Fire on the Mountain, run boys run"

Fire On The Mountain - Fiddle Player POV

"The House of the Rising Sun" --> "The Devil's in the house of the rising sun"

House of the Rising Sun

"Ida Red" --> "Chicken in the bread pan peckin' out dough"

Ida Red - Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys

"Granny Will Your Dog Bite" --> "Granny does your dog bite? 'No child, no'."

FTC #149 Granny Will Your Dog Bite

And for your furthered education, The Mountain Whipporwill.

in a time before things like radios and record players, every time you heard music was because there was somebody in the room with you playing an instrument. and many, many, many social events involved dancing, which requires music. so, if you're planning any kind of gathering in the american south or appalachia, you need to find a fiddler. and the fiddler's job is to play music that everybody knows and likes and can dance to.

the mistake The Devil makes in his bet with Johnny is that he misinterprets the contest as being about technical ability, so he has this big flashy song. he plays fast and impressively with a band of demons playing unfamiliar instruments in unfamiliar rhythms. he's definitely more skilled at playing than Johnny, and thinks he has it in the bag.

I (32F) recently got a gig as a live in housekeeper for a haunted mansion. I'm like 85% sure the job posting was a scam to try and feed me to the house in order to stave off its eternal hunger for another decade or so. But it pays alright and I don't have to pay rent as long as I'm living here.

One of the ghosts (~250M(?)) possessed my body a few nights ago, but instead of, I don't know, making me climb onto a blaustrade or something, he got real quiet. I don't think he ever possessed a trans woman before and he just kinda spent the whole night staring at my hrt pill bottles.

Since then, he's still been wandering the halls at the stroke of midnight, shattering all the mirrors that mysteriously regenerate by morning, but it seems like his heart hasn't been in it.

(Are the mirrors symbolic of something???)

I've never seen a haunted house die before. I half expect the whole house to implode or something, that'd be neat.

But it doesn't.

I guess the flames are blazing a little more hungrily than they should given the thunderstorm that is currently drenching me.

I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. Well... not really, I'm relieved that this stupid house isn't going to be trying to kill me any more. I'm not looking forward to starting parallel apartment and job hunts tomorrow. I guess I kinda feel bad to see it burn for Minerva's sake (it's a working name, she still hasn't quite settled on any, but I can't just go around calling her "the ghost" now, can I?).

I'm not actually sure how she's feeling about this. It was her house, both living and dead, so there's a ton of baggage there. Maybe she's in shock. Maybe she's afraid of what happens next.

I don't know. I'm not afraid. I'm mostly tired. As far as I can tell, our little plan worked, so that's good.

I pull my eyes away from the house and squelch through the muddy lawn to my car. I pull the door closed behind me with a sigh and sit heavily.

I glance in the mirror where my face looks back at me with eyes that are the wrong color. That's going to take some getting used to...

"You okay?"

My reflection nods. She isn't okay, but that's expected.

I pat my own leg reassuringly.

She's free now. This whole shitty misadventure was worth it just to have had the opportunity to meet her and get her out of that place.

I open the door at 12:05 AM.

This is probably incredibly stupid of me.

Like... when I got possessed this weekend, it was just a dumb mistake on my part. This right now, this is intentional. I could be opening myself up to all manner of horrors here. I'm not a medium by any stretch of the imagination, nor have I ever claimed to be a genius.

I have no fucking idea what I'm doing.

But... I'm doing it anyway.

So here we are.

The good thing about ghosts (at least so far as I've read and observed since moving in) it's they're incredibly predictable in their movements. Like there's this incredibly strict schedule that they follow, like they're stuck in a time loop and they don't even know it.

(That's where I fucked up this weekend, snuck out of my room to pee and totally missed that these ghosts predate daylight savings time and have zero concept of spring forward)

Midnight came and went.

Like clockwork comes the sound of glass breaking.

Crash. Crash. Crash.

She makes her way through the house right on schedule.

Sean: .....yes. absolutely

Elijah: 100 percent.

The Shire is excellent farming country, with consistently good weather, and only one tough winter in living memory; hobbits like to produce large families; they’re resistant to disease, rarely violent, and encounter few dangers. It is usual for hobbits to produce many children, so that (for example) Bilbo and Frodo are unusual in both being only children, with no siblings, and not having children of their own. All of this should point to a population that increases every generation if not doubling outright. Young people (and their ideologies!) should rapidly outnumber the old with an ever-increasing effect and impact on society. However, the Shire has a surprisingly stable history; it never seems to increase or decrease greatly in population, and the bell curve of age seems… demographically balanced? There certainly isn’t a conflict from rising young bloods challenging the middle-aged reactionaries; there’s no unemployment; there are no housing crises or waves of emigration, or even a tendency for young people leaving home to marry. Meanwhile, not only does the Shire not suffer from internal pressures, but it remains obscure and hardly noticed in global politics.

What makes sense here is that adult hobbits form a loose group. Four parents in a polycule, between them all, may produce four children. All four parents claim to have four children. An outsider would assume this meant the adults had eight children.

Hobbits therefore are not especially fertile or fecund. They simply have large families. Much of their interest in genealogy is due to the complex relationships of blood-kin, hearth-kin, love-kin and pledge-kin, who must all be carefully tracked and measured - not just because you need to make sure that you don’t climb into bed with an un-permitted degree of blood-kin, but to track family alliances and carefully quantify the precise level of thoughtfulness to put into the proper present to gift your father’s lover’s lover (too much implies a degree of intimacy that might upset the polycule.)

Thus, while a hobbit matron may tell a startled dwarf that she has seven sons, she might only have borne five of them herself, and have one hearth-son by her wife, and a pledge-son of her first husband’s. There are between three and four fathers involved at various stages of production, from conception to pledge-duty, but there is debate about the precise number of fathers, as one child was festival-conceived and therefore provisionally pledged to the Brandybucks until more distinctive paternal traits should materialise. It’s expected that four of the sons will be uninterested in women, and their contribution to family life will be in raising hearth-children and pledge-duty. However, this level of detail is normally negotiated later in conversation, as a mutual overture of friendship. So she’s just clear and simple: yes, certainly, she has seven sons. Yes, they’re all hers. Yes, that’s fairly normal - yes, hobbits like big families. How big? That’s really hard to say! Well, about thirteen hobbits live in her house… er, she has forty-three nieces and nephews. Yes! She has nine siblings, that’s correct, but some of them are still babies themselves..

In this way, a bewildered dwarf might assume that hobbits are absurdly fertile, producing an average of seven children per couple, at an absurd pace.

When in fact, with about half of hobbits never bearing biological children, the population of hobbits is pretty much always the same.

Tl:dr, hobbit population works perfectly well, both internally and in the perceptions of outsiders, if the majority of the Shire is gay, they’re all polyamorous, and they all firmly claim to be parents of high numbers of children. Of course Frodo fathered Sam’s kids - he named them! They were pledge-kin but not hearth-kin, as Frodo needed a lot of quiet and stability in the home.

In short, all of the hobbits enjoyed achieving even larger families on their adventures, legally and without argument or debate. It’s free real estate. If nobody else is going to sibling these losers, we will. (The condensation of so many entanglements at once also legally made Pippin his own father-in-law.)

Gandalf never explained.

Inheritance follows parent-child pledge as the primary consideration, with matrilineal descent as the secondary. Pippin would have been bewildered to gradually understand that Denethor held his two sons in such odd and different standing :-/ hobbits don’t recognise kingship so it would’ve been very upsetting and disappointing to Pippin to understand how Denethor stood in position of sworn-father to a whole city of people without even being slightly fair to his younger hearth-son. Aragorn is demonstrably much better dad-material and therefore had Pippin’s vote. Pippin, by virtue of being an excellent father-in-law to a spectacularly promising young son-in-law, also considered himself a better candidate for king of Gondor than Denethor, by outranking him in Dad Competence - but was too busy by the time he realized this to point this out .

"Why are all crops Brassica?" is like asking "Why are all dogs wolves?": Because we found ONE very genetically manipulable species and pushed it into as many fun and exciting shapes as possible.

HOWEVER, Like how we also have Cats, Chickens, Horses, goats and Pigeons, we also have:

Nightshdes: Tomatoes, Potatoes, and every kind of pepper except black pepper. Like Brassicas, they need a lot of calcium, so you shouldn't put them in the same bed, and supplemmenting both beds with finely crushed eggshells will help.

Cucurbits: Summer and Winter Squashes, melons, cucumbers, Chayote, Pumpkins. Not as demanding about the calcium, do need the kind of sun that will literally Sunburn brassicas and nightshades to death.

Alliums: Garlic, Leek, Onion, Scallion. What are you doing if you don't have these???

Special shouthout here to CEREALS like Corn, Sogrhum, Wheat, oats and Barely, which *can* be grown in a backyard garden if you are insane.

BEANS: Look. There is some bean somewhere your family will like. Black beans, pinto beans, peas, lentils, chickpeas, and PEANUTS. There's also Carrots and parsnips, but they have weird sandy soil requirements so they require a similar level of dedication and research as cereals do.

And that's just vegetables! You also have "fruits" which for purposes of this post are "assorted sweet-tasting plant parts", including but not limited to:

Strawberries, blueberries, Raspberries, apples, pears, peaches, plums, currants, cranberries, and cherries all of which I've grown in my yard before.

You've also go HERBS, which are generally not related, but you can interweave them between larger crop plants to keep your biodiversity up and help prevent disease outbreaks by acting as physical barries between plants: Rosemary, Thyme, Dill, Sage, Parsley, BASIL, Savory, lemongrass, and Mint if you're nasty.

hardison: but have you considered it would be extremely funny and a dream come true?

eliot: it can and will blow your cover

parker: bold words from someone that's been made famous like at least seven times in your career

eliot: dammit parker you're not helping

Keep them safe (fight in a locked off comedy frame, of course)

Pay any musicians around to play something the two of them will like, which isn’t necessarily classically romantic stuff

Although, realistically, I think Eliot would have dueling motivations of 1) wanting to meddle and make their date perfect but also 2) being appalled and wanting to shut down any restaurant that would allow food to go out to a customer after a stranger got in the kitchen and meddled with it. For one, because what other safety issues are they playing fast-and-loose with if they let outsiders get away with barging in and mucking around with the food? And second, because he probably knows way too many ways to surreptitiously poison food that regular restaurant staff wouldn't know how to spot even if they thought to watch for it.

So perhaps the dichotomy is "restaurants where Eliot has managed to set up a cover that allows him to 'legitimately' barge in and do this" (in some cases to bemused or enthusiastic acceptance; in others to the great annoyance of the actual chef) and "restaurants where Eliot has no plausible excuse for getting in the kitchen to intervene." (Plus a niche third category of "restaurants with stories swirling about the most opinionated, meddling health inspector ever who didn't actually touch any of the food but kept trying to give flavor advice backed by an implicit threat of a bad rating" from before Eliot figured out which covers actually worked for his purposes.)

type 1: eliot still being in denial

@agape-emo-eros: #he would#and still pretend he doesn't want to date them

@siobhanhawthorne: #before all three start to date

type 2. appreciating eliot and what he would do

@benwvatt: #he also fixes hardison’s bow ties#and picks the mixtape for their group road trip

@velveteencryptid: Help Hardison pull off outrageous romantic gestures (most of which are just illegal but Parker finds them romantic)

@trashcan-trashfan: override their wine pairing choices

@caseys-breanna: #acts of service bf fr

@emilyarmadillo: #he's a romantic!

But! More than that!

Captions are Always On for their media - Parker has audio processing issues and Eliot has tinnitus and Hardison likes to read because it helps him stay focused on the media!

Grab bars next to all toilets/in all showers and tubs! Plus shower chairs that can be stowed away!

Parker has sensory corners everywhere - in the vents, a cocoon up in the ceiling, in a few closets, and in the main room!

Electric hot pads, rice bags, and ice packs are Always within reach! Weighted blankets on every couch! (Plus afghans from Nana)

Voice controls!!! Homebrew of course, but all the lights and stuff are set to respond to voice commands (locked to vocal signature) that vary based on the person! If Eliot makes a Very Distinctive Grunt the lights dim bc he has a migraine!!!!!

Ergonomic handles! None of those round doorknobs, levers Only!

Sound cancelling headphones are scattered for when the World is Too Much for Parker!

Fidget and stim toys all over the place for when Hardison or Parker need them! (Some make noise ans some dont)

BACK TO THE HEADPHONES some of them are Bluetooth enabled! So if Eliot needs quiet and Parker needs loud she can put them on and blast music and Eliot hears nothing! Also good for watching movies together with the sound off if someone (Eliot) has finally fallen asleep but the movie is good!

Blue blocker film on Every Screen Ever!