postcards from here

“Ghost Whale”

“I wasn’t aware it was wrong to send my sympathies to a group of teenagers in the hospital,” you reply curtly.

“It is when you put them there!” the leader snarls. “Thanks for letting me kick your asses, girls, hope I can do it again next week?”

Oh. Right. Fuck. “While I may not have considered the implications,” you concede, “I did mean it sincerely.” You honestly hadn’t expected to be able to take out the whole team. “Would an apology card have been better?”

The leader rips the card to shreds. “I thought you had a code! I thought you had standards! I wasn’t expecting you to go all-out against a group of children!”

“I didn’t know!” you shout back. Now it’s the leader’s turn to look vaguely ashamed. “Wait…is that why they’ve been so successful so far? Are you…asking all of the villains to pull their punches, and they lost to me because you forgot to send me the fucking memo?”

A girl darts into frame behind the leader. Her arm is in a sling but the bruises on her face have mostly healed. “Is that what’s been happening?” she asks.

“Of course not!” the leader says with a laugh that sounds forced. “After all, I’ve been training you for years, and—“

“Why are there flowers in the garbage?” the girl interrupts.

“They’re from me!” you answer. The girl turns to watch you on the video monitor. “I…wanted to apologize for how our fight went.” She gapes at you. “I thought you’d be tougher, especially since you’d beaten the others…”

She squares her shoulders. “Thank you for not holding back. The next time we meet, we’ll be ready for you.”

“Looking forward to it,” you tell her sincerely. “Incidentally, how much do you know about the team that came before you?”

“Before us?” she repeats. “We’re the first hero team in a hundred years!”

“Is that what you’ve been told?” you ask, eyebrows raising. “Listen, if you and your teammates ever want training from someone who’s going to be honest with you—“

☕️☕️☕️🫖🍵🍵🍪

Pause all dread an catastrophe to have a cuppa and some cookies for the next 15-30 minutes

Side note: when I meet someone and just Take Agin them, it is quite distressing because I cannot be dissuaded from my Agin Taking, even when I talk very sternly to myself (I'm usually, depressingly, eventually proved right *but that is not helpful in the moment or moments when my subconscious is yelling at me*).

So I know the difference between a (seemingly) irrational full-on aversion that is almost debilitating; and just indulging oneself enjoying a solid sesh of loathing people and things.

And the latter is a very seductive and slippery slope (oooer, Vicar) because once you do it once, the neurones are all "oh do we want to go down this pathway again? No worries" and then next thing you know, it's a fun thing to return to quite easily, again and again. Especially if there is no danger to anyone, no fallout. And peeps, in the past months I have seen where that silo of thought leads, and so this little tumblr moment has been very very useful in capturing why this is a really bad idea.