Le SAPISHHA

they were (are?) made originally by anyaboz on dA! they also make a lot of other fantastic stuff I mean I am in love with fuckin everything they do their work is stunning

and of Course there’s more of these guys

ok i will tell the tale

so im taking this spanish class, spanish professor wanted us to go out to eat to practice. im all prepared, i punch in the address and drive 2 the place. turns out this place isnt really a restaurant so much as it is a small habitable zone at the back of a vast, empty mall

there was dead silence and darkness. 90% of the outlets were shut down and blocked off

it was 2 o’clock on a Saturday, but this mall was COMPLETELY barren. an air of powerful curses hung in the air. none of the escalators were working, i had to hike up one like stairs

of course once i got to the restaurant i had a nice time and some p good food and a guy with a saxophone serenaded us with covers of pop hits

for the most part, it is still the creepy empty mall it has always been. but this time even less stores were open, even the columbian restaurant was closed.

the food court, which was slightly open before, was utterly barren, and for some reason slightly sped-up mexican sounding music played over the completely empty venue

Oh hey bc I’m sick and I don’t see this around a lot, let’s talk boarding school AUs! Because yeah, college AUs are good start, but there’s a few fun details that make boarding schools stand out:

First of all, everything you read in fanfic about situational gayness is true. I’m serious. When you’re set up to live, work, and play at school (and usually with strict controls preventing you from leaving campus) you start to seek affection wherever you can find it. One of the reasons I didn’t realize I was bi for years was how completely normal it was for people to cuddle regardless of gender or sexual preference. Packs of completely straight-identified dudes and even dating het couples would curl up and do homework on the regular. Imagine how confusing it would be for your OTP if they first met bc they were cuddling in a puppy pile along with tons of other potential partners.

Not all boarding schools are for the rich. Some are reform schools. Some are organized around a specific topic, like science or the arts. Some exist simply because students are spread out too far to commute back and forth. My school was sponsored by the government, so the most I had to do was pay for supplies and a train ticket up there once a quarter. (Yes, just like Hogwarts.)

The true enemy is the staff. Not that bullying doesn’t still exist, but when you live together 24/7, a funny thing happens. You might not always like each other, but you quickly start to realize you have a common enemy - the adults in charge of this zoo. And when you have a common enemy, it’s easier to get along. 99% of our teenage spite was redirected from each other to the security guards who prevented us from innocently taking each other’s clothes off in the bushes, which meant we didn’t beat the shit out of each other so much.

Related, everyone becomes an exhibitionist. Similar to the confusing lines around being gay/straight/whatever, when you’re trapped at school you have no place to go to get it on. So when people do become involved, they either have to find a super secret hiding place (like a jammed elevator) or get used to banging next to three or four other couples at the one makeout spot with low visibility. (Which may change weekly, given the aforementioned staff. I remember one time watching a lazy security guard mount a giant headlight assembly on a pole, stand back, and sweep the high beam back and forth over a hillside. Half-naked couples scattered like rabbits.)

You will probably almost kill yourselves once a semester, but it will be okay as long as no one notices. Unless you’re at one of the mythical rich kid schools where idk, everyone has their own helicopter, you pretty much have to invent your own fun. My school had restrictions around tvs and video games because blah blah “being healthy”, so we also spent a lot of time outside trying to figure out what the fuck to do. Protip to staff: this is actually way less healthy than video games and computers, because bored teens can and will fucking destroy themselves by accident. Example: one trend we came up with was human versions of all board games, not just chess. This sounds kind of adorable and innocent, until the incident where we attempted Human Jenga. Protip to everyone else: DO NOT PLAY HUMAN JENGA. Even if you’re being very careful about stacking people, eventually the sheer weight of the stack will start to smother the people down below even if you thought their chest was clear. And if they can’t breathe, they can’t let you know they are dying. We almost lost the bottom row over that. (No staff ever found out.)

Prank wars are real, and they get out of hand. Again, when well-meaning adults force you to make your own fun: fun is prone to escalate. Food fights become whole dorm events; nerds get revenge by fucking with goddamn everyone. One time some friends and I got access to a guy’s computer, put a back door in it, took control of his machine remotely and convinced him he’d created an emergent AI. Another time I got line of sight to a window in a rival dorm and took down their computer every time someone started a paper. In retrospect these are all extremely dick moves but uh I was not always aligned good in high school.

My roommate had a boyfriend who learned how to climb gutter pipes for illicit visits at night

Also we played Assassins a lot on campus which required both stealth and intense paranoid

Another time I was sneaking to my girlfriend’s room after lights-out. My dorm counselor (different one from previous story) was still awake and her office was still wide open. She was sitting in a chair watching TV. Did I mention the chair was facing the door? So, I recalled all the stories about no sudden movements blend into the background etc. I creeped by pretty as you please without her even noticing that I was there. 

 A friend of mine became the equivalent of a mob boss. She had people who owed/did favors for her and she monopolized the ramen and soda industry within the dorms. 

Other games we played included full-sized versions of kid’s games – like little kid’s games. Think red rover and shit. Red rover is that one where you form two lines with everyone holding hands, and then each line takes turns calling somebody out and daring them to break the opposition’s hold. Fun fact: this game has a very different outcome when you are sixteen and not six. We had kids barreling into the other line so hard people got benched with injuries; sometimes you’d have that one stubborn bastard charging forward while dragging like four other guys along. Similarly, crack the whip is a really bad fucking idea when you are near-adult sized. And doing it on a downhill. Everyone joins hands in a line and then spins around really fucking fast, like those fire bars in Mario. Unlike the fire bars in Mario, humans are subjected to real life physics, which can and will cause the person on the end to become goddamn airborne. 

You can get a job, but they’re not going to pay you. Again with the ‘boarding school: not just for rich kids!’ – our school required everyone to work a certain number of hours per week, which counted toward room and board. When you weren’t in class, you might be cleaning the cafeteria or inventorying equipment or any other task that didn’t involve hardcore chemicals. Receiving your task was a lot like The Giver - you had a bit of choice, but mostly you had to rely on fate.

You can take ‘weird kid’ to a whole new level. Yeah, you don’t have money and the staff prevented you from escaping, but in some ways you had a hell of a lot of freedom. When you don’t have parents or any kind of reasonable adult to stop you, there is no reason you can’t wear your Star Trek cosplay to school every. single. day. Or your Victorian frilly nightgown. Or dare someone to flush a grapefruit down a toilet. One time some dudes got into a macho pissing contest over (of all things) who was better at fixing a toilet – so they got a goddamn grapefruit and flushed the whole shebang to see who could plunge it. Unsurprisingly, the answer was ‘no one’. The entire toilet had to be ripped out of the floor to fix their bizarre scheme.

Even the cool kids hang out at the grocery store. Seriously. We were fairly isolated (despite being near a city), so without transportation the most rebellious thing to do was…cut class and hang out at the grocery store?  In retrospect this was really dumb, especially when you can’t get jobs or money. Points to my roommate tho, who one time snuck out in the middle of class, went to buy a baguette of bread, shoved the whole thing down his big coat sleeve, and returned to class to eat it out of his wrist. Professor didn’t notice for goddamn twenty minutes.

So, I’m up at my parent’s house to return the power tools I borrowed and say hi, and I’m out walking the dogs. Got a leash in each hand, dual-weilding doggos. It’s a bit tricky but they’re used to this and don’t tangle as much and I’m the only person with good enough knees to stop them when they see snackable wildlife.

Anyway, we’re on the North end of the Poudre River trail, by overland, you know where that long bridge is? And I’m disposing of dog waste right before the bridge like a responsible adult when I hear what sounds like an ice cream truck playing “Yankee Doodle” at roughly five times the speed it’s normally played at and see the following:

There is a gentleman rapidly approaching our location who is also dual-weilding doggos, but in his case he’s got a pair of malamutes barreling down the trail at full Iditarod speed, clearly having the time of their lives. They’re hauling thier human behind them, whom I will describe from the top down:

He’s wearing a helmet, which is the only sensible thing going on here. He also has a magnificent handlebar mustache that is flapping joyously in the unusual October rain. He’s wearing a full body Spandex suit of such intensely clashing colors that is physically hurt to look at, but most importantly

He is riding

A unicycle.

It’s not a normal unicycle either this gentleman is towering over us mortals in an unreasonably massive unicycle, like he’d lost the back end of a penny farthing and decided that was an acceptable means of transportation. I see a device attached to the seat that looks like a pedal-powered music box which explains why my ears are being assaulted with the speed core rendition of Yankee Fucking Doodle. I do not see brakes.

I realize I have half a second to grab my own dogs before they decide to join or topple this strange Traveller from wherever Dr.Seuss books are set. I gather each animal under my arms and stand there with a collective hundred pounds of writhing canine under my armpits as the malamutes pick of speed and as they pass the gentleman cheerfully bellows something at me that I don’t hear because Arwen has already partially broken my hold and is attempting to climb on my head, presumably to launch herself at him.

And then he is gone.

We stand there, staring bewildered in the direction of his last known trajectory, listening as speedcore Yankee Doodle fades into the distance. Even after it is gone I still wait, because the trail ends in half a mile from here and I expect to here a crash, possibly even see a fire explosion. But nothing comes, only the sound of October rain and confused dogs.

So if you know of this gentleman and if he’s still alive/on the material plane, can you ask him something for me?

The subject was something like a 12 foot long water scorpion

And Poppy, what you saw was an arthropod known as Pterygotus (it was actually featured in Walking With Monsters). Not only was it as big (or maybe even bigger) than your average human, it had a stinger the size of a lightbulb. REALLY glad that bugger isn’t around anymore.

Also, Megalodon deserves to be mention again, because just hearing its name makes me want to never be submerged in water ever again.

THAT IS A GODDAMNED LEAF-EATING SLOTH.

AMBULOCETUS WAS AMPHIBIOUS AND PRETTY BADASS

BASILOSAURUS WAS THIS GIANT REPTILIAN CETACEAN THAT PROBABLY SWAM LIKE A DUMB EEL BECAUSE OF ITS TINY FLUKES BUT THIS FUCKER WAS 60 FEET LONG AND AT THE TOP OF THE MARINE FOOD CHAIN

AND THEN THERE’S MY FAVORITE, ZYGOPHYSETER, WHICH WAS THIS HUGE EARLY SPERM WHALE THAT ATE SHARKS AND OTHER WHALES

IT WAS NOTHING BUT TEETH

How Many Earths Would Fit Inside The Sun

If The Moon Was Replaced By Saturn

Prop Used For Close-Ups In The LOTR Movies

United States Compared To The Moon

Traffic Light

Road Signs

Michaelangelo’s David

Great Pyramid Of Giza Compared To A Human

Size Comparison: Titanic Vs. Modern Cruise Ship

Humpback Whale And Diver

Salt Water Crocodile

Giant African Land Snail

A Full Grown Wombat

Leatherback Sea Turtle

Eagle Talon Vs. Human Hand

Gorilla’s Hand

“i’m serious,” he says, in Serious Voice, his hand on the door handle with white knuckles. “you can’t waste your time like this.”

“ugh,” i say, because, like ugh. he slams the door. i bury my face in pillows and like, “ugh” for a solid thirty second, limbs spread akimbo all over the place. without meaning to, i fall asleep. i told you i was tired, dad.

i don’t know what happens. maybe it’s all those times i had to stand in his office pretending to be official in white shoes and a pink skirt but when somebody grasps my hand, i grasp back. like lizard-brain response, i’m still half-asleep when i’m full-on up-and-down single-pump professional-style handshaking a demon. by the time i have bolted upright in bed and retracted my now-sticky (yet somehow also soggy?) hand, the voice is already speaking.

“you’re hired.”

excuse me? “I’m what now?” my voice in comparison is weak, slippery with sleep and fear, dancing all over the place.

i hear something shift under me. my heart is caught in my throat while there’s chuckles from the owner of the handshake equivalent of squeezing a taco bell meal. i’m having flashbacks to french kissing h.p. lovecraft in a bathroom in high school grade and i’ve never even done that. 

“i’ll have to look at your references, obviously, but that’s a hell of a handshake. i like you, kid.”

like but. for some reason, a giggle rises in my throat. like okay. like. this is normal. i’m like. it figures there’d be something under my bed. like, with how much time i spent in the closet? who am i to even, like, judge.

“of course, orientation will be difficult,” the taco bell meal tentacle continues, “but you wouldn’t be the first we’ve hired like you.”

“like me?” like a woman or a gay woman or like a gay woman who’s really good at making hot cocoa or like

“a human,” taco bell says.

i’m actually almost awake now. like i’m pretty sure i’m awake and i’m talking to the CEO of creepy, incorporated. certified possible demon. sock eating friend of cerberus. 

for a second i’m about to call for my dad but then i remember those white knuckles around the door handle and my white shoes and how much gas money is and how he once made me shake hands for an hour but didn’t give me a hug for the next four years.

i clear my throat. like, abuela told us about devils since she was old enough to threaten me with them and like technically i can’t “commune with spirits” but i also know enough not to upset a creature like this so i figure it’s in my best interests to take this in stride and maybe tomorrow throw a little bit more salt over my shoulder than usual. and like, i mean, at this point it’s just negotiating right. and if there’s something i understand from dad it’s negotiating business. 

“hours?” i ask, sitting up straighter. i can’t see more than a writhing something that barely extends beyond the edges of my bedframe.

“night shift, obviously.”

“salary?”

“competitive.” a pause. “lucrative, even.”

well like. what else is there. “i’m in.” 

“wonderful,” says taco bell, expressing with an accent i’m unfamiliar with and a form of joy that i’m uncomfortable with, “i’ll go get the contract. be back in a jiffy.”

like, the sound of hell opening up isn’t exactly a slurp-pop, but it does sound a lot like the way my seventh grade math teacher’s tongue used to sound when she was about to make a harsh comment about my homework. and like, for a second there i’m like. wait what the fuck did i just agree to am i in a horror movie is chucky gonna be my roommate now like does dracula sign my contract as a witness like am i really doing this. like? i’m a smart girl (don’t look at my love life) how am i even considering this.

it’s also when my dad opens my door. “ash?” even when he’s just woken up, he looks tidy. he’s wearing his wingtip shoes. never slippers on this man.

i’m like. coming around to my senses at this point. i hallucinated all that. i ate too many crackers with cream cheese and guava before bed. i listened to too many of abuela’s supernatural sightings. and like, i told you, i’m tired.

“dad,” i say, blinking in the light from the hallway.

“you were talking in your sleep, ” he says.

“oh,” i say.

“it is keeping me awake,” he says.

“sorry,” i say.

“you know i am a light sleeper,” he says.

“yeah,” i say, “sorry.”

“please control yourself,” he says.

“yeah … i… okay.” i say. “sorry again.”

“goodnight, ash,” he says, and he turns to go. he looks back at me and says “and ash?” and for a second, because i always have this moment, because i never learn, because i’m not a good learner, for a second i’m thinking - oh, he’s gonna say something nice, “in the morning, please get a job.”

“yeah,” i say, and my voice cracks and the door closes, “sorry again.”

i sit there, staring at the wall, saying nothing for a long time, or maybe no time at all. thinking about nothing. like the feeling you get when you’re thinking too much so it all just sounds like white noise.

then i hear it again. the crack-slurp of hell. i jump about like twelve feet. when i return from the space station my soul ascended to, i see the barely-defined outline of something, like the leg of an insect outside of a tentacle inside of a crab leg outside of the right back support beam of the eiffel tower. and like, a sphere of dull green light radiates directly above it, which, like, isn’t even the weirdest part of my night. 

“howdy!” taco bell nacho supreme is back, “sorry for the delay, i was checking with management.”

“uh,” i say. 

“just insert your hand into this here contract and you’ll be employed part-time, pending references.”

“hang on,” i say. i swallow. “you said the rate is… competitive?”

“we got wishes, monkey’s paws, souls, video game cheats… you name it, we pay it.”

“…. USD?” 

“666 an hour to start. we do love tradition.”

i choke. “like six dollars and sixty-six cents?”

taco bell laughs. “you know what i meant. and we do direct deposit!”

i swallow. i think of my dad. 

words tumbling out of me. “do i have to hurt anyone? is my soul forfeit? can i ever get out of this? am i gonna turn colors how many days a week do i work is there a retirement plan can i readjust the terms after signing is it permanent will it harm me in any way how many people die doing this when do i start what’s orientation who writes the checks and” i take a breath “is the boss nice?”

“no, no, yes! but two weeks notice. no, usually five, if you sign up for it, yes, no, probably not, not many people are doing it mostly we’re non-physical or extra-corporeal so you’d have to ask H.R? tomorrow if you want, loads of fun and free sushi, H.R again, and” taco bell takes a breath, “usually but particularly on wednesdays.”

i sit there and curl my knees to my chest. 

“all this… because of a handshake?”

taco bell is silent for a moment. well, like, kind of. if eerie silence had a twin brother, or like the silence of a fast food restaurant exactly four minutes before the lights are shut off.

“usually, we come if we’re called by darkness. we deal in darker things than needs. i don’t tend to show up when someone needs something. but sometimes… the lines get crossed, that’s all. instead of your need heading on upwards, it called me instead.”

“uh,” i say, “are you admitting to the existence of like… angels?”

“anyway,” says taco bell, “yesterday Georurng self-terminated.”

“oh my gosh,” i say, “is he okay?”

“oh yeah, no, he retired to live with his six hivenests in west Berlin. we need new blood,” taco bell says. “of course, metaphorically.”

okay. okay. like. i could say i was bartending? in a few weeks i could buy a used car. out of pocket. like. if i needed to i could always quit. and like. honestly, again, how many chances to make closet jokes. plus, time at the beach. plus like. okay like how cool would it be.

“okay,” i whisper, “okay.” i try not to shake as i reach my hand out to the contract. it feels like dipping my hand into the inside of a cold turkey. i repress the shudder that runs up me.

in an instant, the specifics of my job write themselves over my eyes. they burn into the back of my brain. everything is spinning. 

“see you tomorrow!” taco bell is saying. i want to puke. my ears are ringing. i barely hear the portal to hell open again. 

the fire of the contract’s words fade slowly until i am staring into the dark again. it’s not what i expected. it actually appeals to my sense of justice. taco bell was right about being called by something. i’ve just agreed to be the thing that goes bump in the night. the one thing left against the people nobody else can fight. i’m gay dracula. i’m both a lesbian dementor and the boggart. i’m a rainbow-flag-flying boogeyman and i have a long list of people who i got a bone to pick with. 

it takes me a moment to realize i’m smiling. sorry, dad, i’m gonna be like. ultra mega tired. but i got a job. doing what? oh, nothing.