Soothsayer Ch. 2, Pt. 2

Notes: So, this went in a completely unexpected direction and was getting veeery long. I had to cut it at a cliffhanger moment, but the day isn't over and I swear, explanations are coming! Also, no one is dead! Just, gosh, I got surprised, okay? Very surprised, and I had to run with it. Also, none of the pics are mine, I just felt they fit. The extra two are guys who show up in this part and may feature later on, I'm not entirely sure yet. Anyway, enjoy!

Title: Soothsayer, Chapter Two, Part Two

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“It's hard to walk away from a winning streak, even harder to leave the table when you're on a losing one.” 

― Cara Bertoia, Cruise Quarters – A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships

Back in the sixties and seventies, Colfax Avenue was the place to go in this city if you wanted to satisfy the four biological imperatives: feeding, fighting, fucking and, if you played your cards wrong, fleeing. You could do practically all of them at once if you went to the right bars. Those days were mostly gone now, washed away in the bubbly fervor of urban renewal, but there were still a few places around where a person could get in touch with their primitive side. I was jazzed with adrenaline, antsy and keyed up, and the only way I was going to work those bugs out of my system was with some serious exertion.

Soothsayer Ch. 2, Pt. 1

Notes: On to Chapter Two, where we meet someone new. Kind of. I'm building to the first big thing, guys, never fear, we'll get to the jumping off point with the next part. Until then, enjoy Cillian and his way of looking at the world, and also the included picture of him because I can't resist and wouldn't want to anyway. Not my pic, no rights, not claiming it, etc.

Title: Soothsayer, Chapter Two, Part One

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“Whatever love laws have to be broken, the first few seconds suffice. After that everything is a matter of time and incident.” – Amruta Patil, Kari

The alley behind the store was just wide enough for a decent-sized truck to drive down its cracked concrete, tufted here and there with surprisingly green weeds—it had been a wet summer so far. I leaned against the brick wall, tapped a cigarette out of the pack and pulled my lighter out of my pocket. The burn of the smoke in my lungs soothed me a little, distracting my mind with nicotine and giving my hands something to do that wasn’t crawling after fistfuls of imaginary pennies. I smiled to myself and shut my eyes, tilted my head back and blew the smoke toward the sky. It could have been worse. Once I’d read a murderer who liked to decapitate his victims with a butcher knife; I hadn’t trusted myself in the kitchen for a fucking week after that, cutlery kept finding its way into my hands without me realizing it.

Soothsayer Ch. 1, Pt. 2

Notes: Chapter One, Part Two! Damn, this got long, nearly 3k. But some stories just can't be rushed, and this is turning into one of them. Have a picture of Marisol in her fortune-telling getup, and fyi none of the pics except for the one with last week's story belong to me. I hope you enjoy:)

Title: Soothsayer, Chapter One, Part Two

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Step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly...

“Nothing prevents us being natural so much as the desire to appear so.” – Francois de La Rochefoucauld

You know what they say: dress to impress. The way you look has a lot to do with how you’re going to be treated, and at this point in my life I was better than a goddamn boy scout at being prepared. For most of the people in this business, your appearance is just part of the con. You look mysterious, exotic, special and strange, and you’re going to have more credence to the average consumer than a housewife in a terrycloth robe and hair curlers. I’m not saying I believed that, I’d had my ass handed to me by more than one unassuming face, but I did believe in the efficacy of the right presentation.

Soothsayer Ch. 1, Pt. 1

Notes: Here it is, the beginning to Soothsayer! I'm really excited about this, I just wish I could have posted it earlier, but I needed some time to recover. This story is the result of the prompt contest I ran back in June--huge thanks again to Lisa T for her excellent prompt! It's quite inspiring.

I'll be posting this story in chapters, and I plan to include various works of custom art along the way. The first is this beautiful banner courtesy of the very talented Caitlin Ricci. Remember, this story probably won't be on the blog forever, so read along and enjoy it now, darlins. Never fear, there's always more to come from me. Anyway, enjoy!

Title: Soothsayer, Chapter 1, Part 1

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“Sleep, those little slices of death—how I loathe them.” – Edgar Allen Poe

                Sleep was an insidious thing, in my opinion. It was bad enough that the body required you to shut down—forced you to drop your defenses and make yourself vulnerable to any old person who happened by. To compound that insult by giving your subconscious free reign, letting it sort through its damage and parade all your conflicts, shameful desires and unacknowledged fetishes through your head while you’re too out of it to resist…that was just goddamn sadistic. Whatever had made us, whether it was the slow crawl of evolution or some bored intergalactic deity looking for laughs, it didn’t have a concept of mercy. When your own mind was made to turn on you while you were at your worst, you couldn’t deny the heartless humor of it

Not that I had personal experience that particular cosmic joke, but the things that filled my head when I slept were more than awful enough to make up for missing out on standing in front of a class of my peers butt naked or having fumbling, awkward sex dreams that left my sheets glued to my crotch. Instead of providing a distorted window into my own mind, I dreamed about the things I’d seen in other peoples’. Not just their wants and desires, although those were bad enough, but their endings. The things they came to me to find out, what their future held, how they were going to die, or worse yet the things they were going to do on the way to that final end. I saw different things in everyone, but the one common denominator with my visions was this: whatever I saw, it was true, and most times the truth wasn’t going to be what you were hoping for.