One Christmas Eve I talked about my friend sleeping on the couch when we were kids to try to see Santa, and my young cousin decided HE wanted to sleep on the couch to see Santa, and as he said this to me, my uncle was behind him, desperately signaling at me to somehow dissuade him and I panicked and just looked at him very calmly and said
“it’s too dangerous to try to look at santa.”
“why?”
“well how fast do you think he has to be moving to get all over the world in one night? he’s so fast and full of magic, if you look at santa directly, your eyes burn out.”
what if, like bats, blood-sucking vampires actually represent a small percentage of the full vampire population and most horrible undead creatures of the night are adapted to eat bugs, fruits, and nectars
let
them
eat
bugs
You, a Ventrue: dignified, refined, drinks only the blood of virgins from a crystal glass
Me, a Nosferatu: vaccums up every bug in sight while screaming like the goblin I am
Me, a Toreador: Lounges dramatically on a fainting couch while beautiful people bring me beautifully arranged plates of various exotic fruits.
Me, a Malkavian: Sings the Song Of The Bug People, a song of my own creation that mostly consists of an aria of short, chitinous clicks and intermittent periods of screaming.
museum curator, watching steve waltz into the smithsonian, the memory of having the stolen cap america authentic howling commando era uniform returned dirty and ridden with bullet holes still fresh in their mind: hide the VALUABLES
steve, reaching over the rope to poke at something on display: it’s my goddamn stuff???
I’M SAYIN’, every single level of management at the Smithsonian must have had an extensively well-documented migraine after dealing with the colossal shitshow raised by such thrilling items as “sock (woolen)” pulled from the pack of one “Rogers, Steve G., 1918 – 1945 lol whoops he’s back″
like i said in my initial reblog… all the people building stories out of this make me laugh with delight, but smithsonian & dc museum people adding their tags give me LIFE
… also steven grant rogers would be KIND and COURTEOUS to the front-line museum staff and not ask them stupid questions and you will pry that headcanon from my cold dead hands thankyouverymuch
oh steven grant rogers is KIND and POLITE and CONSIDERATE to front-line museum staff, he will politely move himself to the side so he doesn’t cause traffic issues if he gets recognized and a couple kids want pictures, he apologizes to security for causing a scene (he didn’t mean to! he thought his baseball cap disguise would work, bless him). he returns his maps (sweet and so unnecessary but then one of the volunteers can take a map captain america used and will probably sign for them back to their grandkids so that’s nice). the docents LOVE him; he’s both a Nice Young Man and also from Back in Their Day.
the collections and conservation staff however have sworn a blood oath of pure vengeance against him and nothing he ever does will change their minds. the textile conservator (we’ll call her lorraine) who had to restore the old captain america suit spent THREE YEARS OF HER LIFE on that stupid thing and it’s still too unstable to ever exhibit again. lorraine went through FIVE INTERNS, two of whom CRIED ON HER. she had to spend a fourth year making a replica because everyone was writing their representatives that the captain america suit wasn’t on display and they MADE HER DO IT.
like if steve thought any debrief in wwii he ever had sucked lol try lorraine, who has given up trying to catalogue what the fuck happened to that piece of shit suit and finally tracked down his cell phone number after six months of this hell project out of sheer bloody mindness and desperation and tricks him into her office through a series of absolute goddamn lies about idk public programming or some shit that steve might actually care about and then corners him and makes him give her a play by play of what, exactly, the fuck he did to that suit.
cuz, okay, listen. blah blah save the world blah blah, but steven grant rogers* stole a priceless museum artifact, bled on it, set it on fire, dropped it into the potomac, dragged it (WHILE WET) through river mud and god knows how many plants and bugs and microbes, got melting plastic and metal and shrapnel and other people’s body juices and skin and hair embedded in it–the only reason he lives is because he can give the full and accurate account of what the fuck he did to it and answer questions of how the fuck it can be slightly, slightly unfucked. not saved! not made to look like it was! certainly not able to be put on a mannequin and exhibited again! but like she can get some more of the mud and that chunk of charred plastic out maybe. otherwise, lorraine would have murdered that dumb bitch in a fit of justifiable rage, and no amount of charming “sorry ma’am”s would fucking save him.
This first lullaby is a loose translation, in order to fit a modern musical meter. It can be sung to “Nettleton” (Come Thou Fount) or Joyful, Joyful (Ode to Joy) — I recommend singing lines 1-8, then repeating 1-6 and finishing with 9-10. A closer translation of the same text is at the end, followed by a different, longer incantation to help a crying baby sleep.
Little one, who dwelled in darkness, now you’ve come and seen the sun. Why the crying? Why the worries? What has made your peace undone?
You have roused the household spirits; you have scared the guardian-gods. “Who has roused me? Who has scared me?” “Little baby woke you up!”
May you settle into slumber, sweet as plum-wine, deep as love.
Per a request (and by the way, I love getting requests!), here is the Akkadian transliteration of the first lullaby, taken from Walter Farber’s “Magic at the Cradle: Babylonian and Assyrian Lullabies” (1990, Anthropos).
This has the same energy of the dash cam video of the Russian dude just lowering his sun visor to block the light of the exploding meteor thing a couple years back.