Pixie's Chronicle: Christmas Curse

Hello again, and I hope that you've all had a lovely holiday period and enjoyed your culturally relevant celebrations, and if you don't celebrate anything, then I hope you've had a lovely month in general. My Christmas was sort of sub-par like it always is. My usual Christmas curse remains in place, but I still try and make the best of it as much as I possibly can. Yeah, I'm unfortunately one of those people who get depressed around this period and it's a difficult time for me; a lot of bad memories and all that jazz. But still, despite everything bad that happened, I managed to have some fun and good times.

Picking up from last time, I didn't manage to get as much writing done as I would have liked, but at least I got some done. I was right about being overly ambitious. I managed to update Double Trouble which was my main goal, so yeah, if you haven't read the new chapter yet, you can do so by clicking here. That story keeps growing and growing in popularity, and it makes me so happy to see how many people are enjoying it. The story has now reached over 100 followers, both on FanFiction and on AO3. My Hellsing works seem to get more attention on AO3 in general, so I'm guessing that's where the fandom is most active. I suppose that makes sense given how strict FanFiction can be with its guidelines. I'm still paranoid to this day, especially since my friend and fellow writer, ChibiRinni, had a few of her stories deleted by the site. At least on AO3 you have protection from that and you're allowed to write pretty much whatever you want (within reason and with appropriate tags of course). 

I'm in half a mind as to whether I should risk putting the full version of some scenes of my stories on FanFiction, or if I should just censor them and link people to the AO3 version if they want to read it. I don't know; I can't decide yet. This is especially regarding future story ideas that I have. Yeah, the muses still won't stop harassing me. Jowy keeps having to keep me on the straight and narrow when it comes to focusing on the stories that I currently have published. If it wasn't for him, I would probably have half a million stories published by now and I would have overwhelmed myself. Still, I can at least make notes so that I don't forget anything. My poor notebook is filled with random ideas and scribbles. Hopefully I can try and get most of them published some time next year since I'll hopefully be focusing on finishing the stories that I currently have in progress. It all depends on how kind work decides to be to me. 

On that note, guess who had to work a bunch of overtime again during the Christmas period. As a general rule, we're not allowed to book time off during the week leading up to Christmas, which makes sense given that it would be unfair to everyone else. Yet somehow, my manager got away with booking that time off. The rest of us were a bit salty to say the least, especially since she's Muslim and doesn't celebrate Christmas, so she didn't have a million and one things to get done. It was a bit thoughtless, but what could we do other than get on with it? We just had to struggle on. It was a super stressful period, because literally none of us could balance the extra hours with Christmas plans. I missed out on a lot of time with my family as a result. I was too tired after my shifts to do anything, and once again, I was wrapping presents at the last minute. I was so tired and grumpy for the majority of that week. 

My grumpiness was made worse by a bunch of invasive medical tests, including my first smear test. Too much information? Probably. But hey, fellow ladies, get yourself seen to. I was terrified, and honestly, it actually wasn't that bad at all. It was just annoying because it took forever for the nurse to find my cervix since I'm deformed. Turns out it was resting on its side... somehow. But it was weirder for my friend who had one around the same time as me. One of her ovaries has gone missing. I have no clue how that happens either. Her ovary has literally drifted off somewhere in her body. Yet apparently all this kind of stuff is common? Why did nobody ever warn me? 

Honestly, sex education is so terrible. I don't know how much it's changed now, but when I was in school, we literally just got taught how babies were made, how and why periods occur and... that's it. We were never taught about sexuality, gender, how to look after your body and all of the stuff that can happen to it during puberty and when you get older. For the longest time, I thought women got pregnant by a guy's penis just literally touching the clitoris. I had no idea a vagina was a thing; it was never properly explained to me. I also thought that during periods, girls peed blood (again, because I had no idea a vagina was a thing.) That also meant that I thought babies came out of the urinary tract. It wasn't until I was like, 16, that I finally figured most stuff out. Even now, I'm still learning stuff. In my job, I've been trained on things like the menopause, and I literally had no idea about 90% of the process. I just thought a woman's period stopped and that's it. I had no idea a bunch of horrible stuff went along with it. Most women I end up advising and seeing to also have no idea themselves. I have ladies come to see me in tears because they have no clue what's happening to them, and they think they're going crazy. It's so sad to see. But I'm glad that I can use all of my new knowledge to do what I can to help them. If I was queen of the world, I would certainly make education a top priority.

Another horrible thing happened last week in the form of one of my cousins suddenly passing away. It was so shocking and out of the blue. She was found collapsed in her apartment after nobody had heard off her in a while, and she was rushed to hospital. They couldn't quite figure out what had caused her to collapse, but what they did know was that she now had a mass on her brain and had suffered a few strokes while she was passed out. They declared that if she ever woke up, she would pretty much be a vegetable. That was pretty hard to swallow because she was always so strong and tough. I wasn't super close with her, but it was still horrific since I had been close with her as a kid, and you wouldn't wish something like that on anyone. A few days later, she finally passed away. Death is always difficult to deal with, but you can at least get your head around it. However, what is impossible to get your head around is when you find out that she could have in fact been saved if it wasn't for her bastard of a landlord. 

Apparently, my cousin had been found by her landlord unconscious a few hours before. A) What was he doing in her apartment in the first place? B) Why didn't he f***ing do anything?! He claimed that he just thought she was passed out drunk, but even so, how can you not do anything?! He didn't know for sure! Plus, she wasn't even much of a drinker! He found her naked, passed out on her bathroom floor. How does that not raise a red flag?! How could he just walk off and leave her?! He left her alone and unconscious for 4 hours! She could have been saved within that time, and now we'll all always have to live with that uncertainty. I just... it baffles me how uncaring some people can be. It was like when my neighbour suffered that nasty fall and was pleading for help, and when one of my other neighbours found her, he simply stared at her for a few seconds before just walking off. How?! HOW?! 

Needless to say, my family will likely be pressing charges against him. I don't know how the law works in other countries, but here in the UK, failure to at least call and ambulance when someone needs help is considered an offense, usually an act of manslaughter if the person dies. You don't have to physically help the person yourself, but you have to at least notify the authorities. Makes sense and is simple enough to me. When I found my neighbour, I didn't just assume she was being pathetic, I called an ambulance! Because you just never know! When drunk of high lunatics come into my place of work, I always offer them help first.

Speaking of which, I ended up getting into a physical altercation with some drunk guy. When I say that I always offer help to drunk or high people, I'm also not naïve to the point where I don't realise that some people are just a lost cause. We get a lot of them where I work. People who literally just don't care, and are only interested in drugs and booze, and also have no problem hurting people along the way. These are the people who are proud of the fact that they have a problem and don't see anything wrong in harming others. Well... I ended up having to deal with one of those the day before Christmas Eve. 

I was just chilling at work. It was pretty quiet since Christmas was just two days away. I was minding my own business and sorting through a promotion pack when said drunk guy entered the store. I knew immediately that I needed to keep my eye on him so I offered him some help. Asking me random questions, he just started swiping stuff off the shelves in front of me, not even trying to be subtle. He then asked me what the most valuable items in the store were. Normally, I'm not a confrontational person, and if there's a shoplifter, I do the typical thing and simply ask if they intend to pay for the stuff they just swiped, and if they flee, I just have to accept that there's nothing I could do. This is what the company tells us to do due to the danger involved, yet they also get mad at us when stuff does get stolen. It's a lose-lose scenario. Get stabbed, or get yelled at. 

Well on that particular day, I was in the mood for a fight, and just the right person had no come along. This was just after I heard the news about my cousin, as well as the other stuff I had been dealing with throughout the week. I was tired, over-worked, and my depression had been really bad for the past couple of days. That's no excuse, I know, but it was the reason as to why I just saw red and launched myself at the guy. I didn't do anything too inappropriate, I was just trying to wrestle the medication off him. He didn't know what any of it did, he just wanted to sell it for drug/alcohol money. Some people really, genuinely needed that stuff and he was just helping himself. We literally wrestled out of the door, and I imagine the sight must have been quite comical to those outside. This guy was tall, drunk, tough looking, covered in scars and tattoos, and then there's me, a 5'2'' baby-faced woman in her work uniform just latched onto his back, screaming at him and trying to yank stuff out of his pockets. 

Unfortunately, he finally managed to shake me off and ran away, yelling that he hadn't done anything. I just shouted back, "tell it to the police!" and headed back inside where my supervisor was stood in shock before going into mother mode and making sure I was okay before yelling at me. It seems that I'm the baby of our team, and I literally call my manager and her finance 'mum' and 'dad' as a joke. My supervisor spent forever fussing over me and having a heart attack, begging me to never do anything like that again. She had literally just caught the tail-end of the fight on CCTV and ran downstairs just as the guy managed to break free of my clutches. We called the police, and the guy had stupidly left a can of beer outside which the forensics team managed to get a DNA profile from the next day. Yeah, spending Christmas Eve with the CSI wasn't exactly what I had been expecting. Everyone else found the story of me rugby tackling the shoplifter pretty hilarious, but again, I got into trouble for doing something so stupid. I know it was stupid, but I just saw red. I get sick and tired of horrible people getting away with their behaviour while the rest of us have to suffer the consequences. So I guess I was mainly projecting my issues onto him rather than actually caring about our stock. 

But it didn't end there. The moron actually had the nerve to come back in the next day. I was upstairs eating my breakfast when my supervisor called me down and did the universal signal for 'this guy is acting suspicious, please help.' He looked familiar, but I couldn't quite see his face. He was drunk again and mumbling to himself. I politely asked that he turned around and faced me, but he refused. So I ended walking around myself, and I recognised the bruise under his eye straight away. I immediately told him and get out and chased him from the property. He claimed he had no memory of what I was talking about, and to be honest, I believed him. I reckoned he was that drunk and off his face that he really did have no memory of what had happened the day before. 

I doubt the police will ever catch him since the police where I live never do their jobs properly. I think I might start coming to work with a spray bottle filled with water whenever these trashy humans try to mess with me again. I'll just tell them it's bleach, and they'll be so drunk and high that they won't know the difference. There's already one shoplifter who doesn't mess with me, so now I've hopefully added another to the list who won't be coming back while I'm around. I just have no time for these people. I can look the other way a bit when a desperately poor person is trying to steal something that they need, such as food, water, textbooks etc. but I very much doubt that guy was in need of expensive caffeine pills for athletes. He couldn't even walk in a straight line, let alone run across a pitch for hours on end. Who buys this stuff off these guys anyway? Who is their market? Because most genuine people probably won't trust a second hand sale of medication and supplements. He'll be too drunk to accurately make his way around the internet anyway. I just don't get it. 

However, it wasn't all doom and gloom for me; I did manage to achieve something positive. My supervisor wanted to take her youngest daughter to see one of those mall Santas - y'know, the ones where you sit next to them and tell them what you want for Christmas? She spent £25, and this Santa was dirty, scruffy, and didn't give a crap about his job. He kept trying to encourage her to take off her mask and tried to force her to eat a candy bar that she was allergic to. He didn't care about what she wanted for Christmas and didn't even ask. He just forced the chocolate on her and ushered her back out. Of course, she was devastated. Luckily, my supervisor managed to convince her that he was just one of Santa's helpers who was being naughty, but she was still disappointed. I told my supervisor that she should probably report the incident, especially since she was robbed £25. However, she was more panicking over where she was going to find another Santa at such short noticed. I then said that if she was struggling, I could probably ask my brother to do it since he was a professional actor who had been on TV shows and starred in movies (just minor roles, but still, I think it's pretty cool). That's when both of our eyes lit up with the same idea. 

Obviously due to the lack of time to find a costume, we would have to arrange this conversation to be over the phone. My supervisor told her daughter that one of Santa's elves had been in contact with her and left her their number due to the naughty Santa's helper. She was bit suspicious, but was more open to the idea when I sent my supervisor a text message. My supervisor had changed my name in her phone, so it came through as 'Santa's Elf'. I got way too into my role as 'Sprinkle'. But I did want it to be as believable as possible. I had so much fun with it, and it was definitely worth it to see how excited she got when she came to visit her mum at work. We're all very close where I work, and we're like a little pack of wolves. You mess with one member of staff's kids, then you take on the rest of us.

The actual message I sent

The next night was when the phone call took place. I called through first in order to introduce "Santa", and I surprised myself with just how good my voice acting was, if I do say so myself lol. My supervisor's daughter then got super excited over the fact that Santa's head elf was a girl, and I then handed the phone to my brother for his role of a lifetime. His improvisation game was strong, and in the end, she was fully convinced that he was the real Santa. My supervisor recorded the whole thing, and her reactions were so adorable that I was in tears. We were so proud of ourselves for pulling it off, and we really cheered her daughter up. She was happy and excited! It literally helped me get over my depression episode. We were so excited at work together the next day and we couldn't stop hugging and high-fiving each other. We were literally going around and showing everyone the video. It felt so good to make little girl happy at Christmas. She certainly deserved it after the nasty experience she had. People are now jokingly calling me 'Sprinkle' as a result lol. 

Of course, on Christmas Day, my main interest was the food. I ended up drinking an entire packet of custard. I'm not proud of myself on that one, and yes, I did feel sick afterwards. I never said I wasn't weak. My brother also got me a new trivia game for Christmas since those are always my favourite games to play... just not with my mother. She's not exactly... bright... when it comes to world knowledge. By the time we're halfway through a game, I feel like all of my brain cells have committed suicide. To give you a quick summary, here are some of her most notorious moments. According to my mum: Africa is a country; the city of Nairobi is a country; Detroit is the capital city of the USA; the Congo doesn't exist and I've made it up; Stone Henge was built in 1950; only 100 million humans have ever existed; the wheel was invented in the 1600s; the Amazon river is only 7 miles long. I could go on forever. Quizzes with her are never dull to say the least. Some of the stuff she believes and comes out with is hilarious. She's still convinced the Congo isn't real. I need to start making a note of these more often so I can keep embarrassing her in the future. 

Jowy literally got me the best gift this year: Universe Sandbox! I've been dying to get my hands on that game for years, but I've never had a laptop powerful enough to be able to handle it, but now I do! Of course, it didn't take long for me to accidentally turn the sun into a black hole. I've also been trying to build my own solar systems, but so far, I haven't quite got the hang of it. A bunch of my planets and moons keep getting flung out into the universe, so obviously I'm doing something wrong somewhere with gravity. Is this how God feels? I'd make a terrible god. But still, blowing everything up is cool. As a space nerd, this game is perfect for me. Oh, and there was also the Animal Crossing DLC he got for me as an early Christmas present. It's times around Christmas where I really miss Jowy's cooking. And yeah, and I suppose I miss you too, Jowy. But I miss your cooking the most lol. We spent most of the evening watching the Christmas with Sonic YouTube series together. I'd totally forgotten how funny it was. I love Silver so much in that show. 

What really made Christmas fun and hilarious though, was Alexa. Yeah. That Alexa. For some reason, Alexa seems to really love my brother. If there is an Alexa device within a hundred feet of him, it will lock onto him and respond to his voice. On Christmas Day, we were all just randomly chatting about the new t-shirts he had gotten when Alexa picked up on his voice and said, completely out of the blue, and I quote, "now showing results for the sex life of college girls." And then we died. It was so random and out of nowhere! Alexa has said weird stuff in my brother's presence before, but nothing this hilarious! I think Alexa has a secret crush on my brother. At least that means he should be safe during the inevitable robot uprising. Maybe I could use my relation to him as a form of protection. 

Something fun I also managed to do was that I finally met up with LycoRogue in Animal Crossing! We finally managed to find a time where we were both free! I think some of the stuff on my island concerned her, such as the skeleton that I had dumped in the middle of nowhere. Her island is super awesome and she has so much cool stuff! I finally managed to get some rare flower breeds off her since I'm too lazy to breed them myself. So woohoo! I finally have some blue roses! I just wish we could have spent more time in-game together, but I had a doctor appointment the next morning. Or so I'd thought. Turns out it was the day after I had the appointment, and I had gotten up stupid early for no reason. It was super embarrassing when I showed up and confused the receptionist. I wouldn't mind, but the appointment was only to check my blood pressure, and bus ticket prices have shot up again, so I'd literally wasted £5 getting there and back. I was not a happy bunny. 

Anyway, I think I've ranted on for long enough now. The next story I'm hoping to update is Reflection, and the new chapter should be out in a couple of days. It would have been updated sooner, but I injured my shoulder (in my sleep no less!) and I've pretty much had a hot water bottle glued to me for the past two days. So that means I fell behind schedule with everything. But in the meantime, I do have some new content on my blog for you. I'm posting sneak peaks of upcoming stories, as well as a look at some of the ideas I have abandoned. So yeah, keep an eye out on my blog for those popping up. 

I wish you all a very Happy New Year!

Reviews of the Month:

"Oh my god! This! This right here! This was my favorite chapter. I fucking loved everything about this chapter. I loved how you wrote about Alucard, especially his little breakdown. How furious and scared he was. It was just all so beautiful. I loved your description of how he was losing control. The image you managed to put in my head was beautiful and spine tingling. There is just so much I love about this chapter. Their little talk about mates and how he actually went as far as choking Integra when he found out his daughters were in trouble. I loved that that's what pushed Alucard to his limit and made him practically invincible to the runes. God, I just love this chapter so fucking much. I really, really want to read it again."

- Oxford Not Brogues, Double Trouble

"Freaking awesome chapter! Even though it is on the shorter end of things it got closed off at a good spot I'd say, looking forward to what you'll have happen next!"

- MasterReaper90, Amicus

"OH. MY. WORLD

I'm so glad to see a new chapter!OH MY GAWD DADDY ALUCARD

He finally knows about the girls! But there's still so much mystery. Poor Integra, she's bound to have a terrible migraine trying to figure out the whole situation... But seeing how Integra cares for Seras and how Alucard is so shy about his feelings is too cute!

(Hell yeah I'm so messed up in the head that I consider such a violent display a "cute evidence of shyness" lol)

What intrigues me the most is what Alucard said about the offspring needing both parents to survive...

I can't wait for the next chapter to keep solving the puzzle!

Now, I understand chaotic mess and overwork very well since that's my every day life... Thanks for your hard work and write when you feel like it, that way you'll continue enjoying it. Anyway, I hope everything goes well for you these holidays."

- Ukn.Unk, Double Trouble

"Dayum. I had this story on my list for reading for a damn long time, but I am usually not happy with the depiction of child character's especially when they are oc, but boy, did you pull that off!

I was hooked since the first chapter an read this all in one go, with the bitter sweet feeling that each chapter would bring me closer to the newest one.

Was it worth? Definitely!

I can't wait for the next one, I am definitely putting this on my following list! :)"

- Virea, Double Trouble

"I didn't get the notification for this, ahhhh. I really like the direction you are taking this. I can't wait to read more, but take all the time you need, no worries."

- Lady Mokki, Reflection

"rereading this again and it's just as good as the first time I want more"

- Shadowstep12, Madness Within