Promptober 2025 Day 25: Footsteps in the Dark

Using thepromptfoundry‘s Ominous October list.

Ira Carpenter is mine. Warren Caldwell is @asininestars‘s Chicago Spirit OC. Pure fluff. I’m inflicting you with the unspeakable wholesomeness that is Warren/Ira.

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Ira tugs Warren by the hand down the shortcut he’s found, their footsteps echoing off the brick walls of the alley. Warren casts a look around them, because Ira seems blase about this but Warren’s learned from experience to be wary of dark streets like this. “Are you sure about this?”

Ira’s grin glints in the shadows. “It’s fine! It’s short. You’ll see in a second.”

Warren squeezes that hand in his, just to feel its cherished warmth and weight better. It’s impossible not to catch a bit of that contagious optimism. He smiles back.

And sure enough, this time Ira’s assurances come through. The alley opens up, and they’re across the street from Humboldt Park.

Warren stops for a second, struck by how the branches and brush are limned in silver from the moon’s light.

Warren’s pause knocks Ira off balance and he turns back to look, kicking out a leg to keep his balance. Warren can see the light dancing in his eyes as he takes in Warren’s face. “I know, right?” He grins again and it looks a little dopey with fondness. Warren’s heart hurts. But just before he reaches out to grab, to pull that beloved face close, Ira tugs again. “But wait, just wait. We aren’t there yet. It’s worth it!”

And so Warren follows him, helpless with love, across the street and into the moon-veiled walking paths, even though the shadows it casts are inky voids where anything could be hiding. Ira squeezes back when Warren tightens his grip on his hand. How can the man be so fearless when he’s been through just as much as Warren? Warren’s never sure whether it’s courage or fecklessness, but the thought of convincing him to change is like a knife in his chest.

But again, this time, it pays off. It’s not more than a hundred meters or so before the park’s lagoon opens before them, down a little slope of tall grasses, late flowers and cattails at the water’s edge.

Ira pulls Warren close to wrap an arm around his shoulders and lifts a finger to his lips.

Warren widens his eyes at him in silent question. Are they hiding? But the crinkle he can see at the corners of Ira’s eyes is entirely playful.

They stand there at the edge, between the trees and the meadow and the water. The moon shimmers silver on the tiny ripples of the nearly-still lake. The breeze is too faint to do more than rustle the tips of the leaves and the grass. It’s pretty, and Ira is warm. Warren slips an arm around his waist and tucks tight against him.

After a moment, something blinks.

And then, a second later, another.

Wide-eyed, Warren watches as the fireflies come back out of hiding. In small groups and then waves, they blink into a sea of tiny golden sparkles as though the night sky has descended to earth around them.

It’s so beautiful he thinks he might cry.

For a little while—a long while?—all he can do is turn in place. In every direction, they’re standing in a bowl of the sky, ribbons of silver and spills of black shadow filled with tiny, flitting stars.

Eventually he manages to find his way back to himself through the wonder, and grabs Ira tight. “I love you so much,” he whispers, right in Ira’s ear so he won’t scare their little fairy companions.

He feels Ira’s laugh against him. “You deserve beautiful things,” he whispers back, and tucks a lock of Warren’s hair back behind his ear.

Warren shakes his head, because he can’t conceive of deserving something this beautiful but he’s too selfish to give it back, and resorts to kissing his gratitude into Ira.

#chicagoSpirit #fluff #gayRomance #iraCarpenter #lgbt #mlm #myFiction #myOriginalFiction #promptober #promptober2025 #romance #warrenCaldwell

Promptober 2025 Day 17: Demons

Using thepromptfoundry’s Ominous October list.

Ira Carpenter, having more sexy eldritch horror hijinks. Sexy but not sexual, if you get me.

CWs: eldritch horror, body horror, tentacles, eye trauma, penetration of eyes, ears & nose (not gory), possession

***

Standing at the railing of the elevated balcony, Ira admires the attendees of the winter masquerade swirling below and the really good wine they’re serving while he watches some kind of quiet drama happening near the far doors of the ball room.

It’s not his problem tonight. He’s not here to work. But it has been, plenty of times before, so he recognizes the dignified hustle and the veiled alarm in the hosts and a few staff members—somebody’s trying to quietly manage a crisis without disturbing the party.

For a moment, his curiosity almost sways him to go and ask. He could get away with it; he solved a case for the family last year.

But someone else catches his eye instead. In a swirling crowd of winter masquerade costumes, the woman in the harlequin ball gown stands out because her mask doesn’t match. Her gown makes her look like the queen of hearts; all bold red and black panels and gold tracing. Her mask is one of those Venetian-style full-face ones, with delicate seashell pinks and blues with silver filigree across the pearly white porcelain.

Her face is tipped up, and his notion that she’s watching him is confirmed when she raises a hand to give him the come-hither.

After a moment, he tosses back the rest of his wine and follows. Who is he to turn down serendipity?

She seems beautiful, at least from what he can tell. That’s one of the joys of a masquerade; anybody could be anything, really, if you just let them be. But it’s easy enough with her; she’s graceful and petite, with a nipped waist and an attractive sway to her hips.

She lets him catch up to her in a wood-paneled hall to the side of the library. She’s waiting for him when he comes acround the corner—stops him with a dainty gloved hand against his chest, close enough for her skirts to brush against his lower legs. Is he imagining the coquettish tilt of her head? It’s hard to tell with that mask.

Feeling cheeky, he lowers his head to delicately kiss the porcelain rosebud lips of her mask.

It seems to encourage her, because she steps forward and reaches up to pull his domino mask off. There’s something erotically hungry in the way she lets it drop, and he isn’t about to complain about the small price.

She reaches up to pull her mask off in return. Buzzing pleasantly with anticipation, it takes Ira a second to process the gagging sound he hears as it comes away.

The smooth curve of a cheek, a jaw, the edge of an eyebrow. A swaying stumble of her skirts. Long glistening mucousy strands of…something translucent and jelly-like slithering from her mouth and nose that he doesn’t reel back from fast enough before she’s pressing the mask to his face.

And then she’s falling to her hands and knees to the side of him, retching. And those jelly-like things are swarming into him.

They cram into his mouth and up his nose. Worm into his ear canals. He tries to shout and manages only a muffled grunt around them as he feels them probing at his eyelids.

He can’t pull the mask off his face. When he tries, the things hook into him so he can’t tear it free.

He trips backwards, flailing, clawing at the fucking things, and feels his shoulders bang against the wall. Squirmy wormy sensations force in beneath his eyelids and writhe in his eye sockets, deeper and deeper, till he swears he can feel them fucking twining around his optical nerves—

He thinks he hears a shout down the hall—something about a thief—before his hearing goes tinny and muffled as they worm behind his ear drums.

Into his brain. He gasps and whimpers, and suddenly the horrific parasitic squirming feels…so, so damn good. Full, thrilling, sensual explorations seething through his body to invade and explore him in ways he’s never experienced before.

Muffled behind the mask and with his mouth crammed full of tentacles, he moans.

His body pulls itself up off its knees with a grip on the wall’s paneling. He shudders and moans again with their wriggling thrusts deeper into his brain, and his hands tug his clothing straight, fix his mussed hair and brush himself off.

Shudders that feel like orgasms wrack through him and his legs step forward. He can’t see where he’s going; he can’t hear. But the mask can.

it stoops for a moment, reaching down with his hand to fish around in warm folds of…clothing? Folds that twitch and jerk away. The woman. Her arm knocks against his as she tries to scramble further away. His hand closes around something small and knobby and hard, about the size of his palm.

Trapped in his mind with it, blind and deaf, Ira feels its laughter, amused and delighted at his baffled, pleasured fear. It strokes his mind again to send another wave of inescapable pleasure through him, writhing again in his eyes and his ears and sinuses, as it makes him stride, helpless under its power, out of the party, tucking its loot securely away inside his waistcoat.

#bodyControl #bodyHorror #demons #eldritchHorror #eyeHorror #eyeTrauma #horror #iraCarpenter #mindControl #myFiction #noncon #nsfw #originalFiction #possession #publicSex #puppeteering #tentacle

Promptober 2025 Day 8: Dripping Blood

Did I forget to put day 8 up here? Using thepromptfoundry’s Ominous October list.

We’re back with my OC Ira Carpenter. CWs for BDSM, kinky consensual flogging and painplay. Female Domme, ayyyy.

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Ira tries to breathe through it as the rod comes down again. A trickle of blood is running down his flank. It tickles like hell and makes him want to squirm. Bad idea.

He doesn’t know why he does this.

The pain hazes out his thoughts. The hand in his hair—a woman, tonight, she told him she works as a baker and damn, the strength in her arms—pets, and tightens, and sends little trembles of euphoria through him. He grunts as another blow lands across his back, and then groans as the pain blossoms inside him, a great throbbing red flower spreading through his whole body.

Sometimes it’s just an urge. An itch he needs to scratch. He just needs someone to hurt him and make him thank them for it. Thank him for it.

It’s always strangers. The people he knows—lovers, friends, sexually-charged enemies…well, none of them are right. They don’t want to hurt him, or they aren’t interested, or…he doesn’t know. It just doesn’t work.

The whipping has paused. He lies there and breathes while the pain matures, creeping its sultry red tendrils throughout his body till it throbs in his toes and balls and sinuses.

The hand threads back into his hair, combing through his sweaty, clinging locks. He makes a sort of purring hum in acknowledgement. He can’t move. “Good pet,” she whispers in his ear. And then her nails claw down his back, over the welts, and he arches back and screams.

Her approving laughter wraps around him with the pain. For a bit, nothing needs to matter to him but this.

#bdsm #flogging #iraCarpenter #kink #myFiction #myOriginalFiction #painPlay #promptober #promptober2025

More of Ira and the SCP spinoff Chicago Spirit setting by Krakaheimr!

There’s a location in the setting called the Shepherd’s Crook, which is a little pocket dimension the gang was gifted and that one of their branches operates out of. Kraik said it’s an odd place to be in, so I wanted to play with a few thoughts about what that might be like.

***
You might think a pocket dimension undiscoverable by the cops would be the perfect place for a bunch of criminals to shack up. Better than coming and going, even, since the more in-and-out people do, the more likely they are to be discovered. But a few days in and Ira is beginning to realize why nobody else seems to live in the Crook.

He noticed the first day how things seemed to swim a little if he moved his head too fast, or took a corner too suddenly. As creepy pocket dimension side-effects go, that one was pretty harmless, even when he began to realize that when that happened, things looked a little…purple and twilit around the edges till they stabilized.

And then there was the thing where…well, the thing was, he kept getting lost. Couldn’t take a proper turn if it killed him, seemed like—and it almost did a few times, when he wandered into the middle of places he wasn’t supposed to be.

And that was weird, because while he didn’t have the best sense of direction, it was pretty average at least. Normally a guy got used to the feel of how a place twisted and turned after a few days. But it was maybe four or five days in when he left his room and headed left down the hall to that first intersection, and realized the reason he could never figure out which way to go was because the hallways kept changing direction. Not that you’d end up someplace different if you turned right. But that the hallway that went right kept changing angles.

He sat down on the floor at the corner there and watched it for a while.

Eventually Perch came and found him. Ira heard the step-tunk of his stride coming up the hall a bit before he came into view. And then he stopped and looked down at Ira. “The fuck you doing down there?”

The twisted-up confusion was such a normal expression on the face of a guy like him that Ira snorted a laugh. “Did you know the hallways move?”

Because sure enough, sit and watch long enough and you realized this turn in the hallway went right the way a river flowed south. That was, ultimately that was the direction the water moved in. But on any given turn you might be facing south or east or west—or even north for a bit on a real exciting loop—and furthermore sometimes the river jumped its bed and laid a new path.

Perch shot him a warier look at that. And then, he answered Ira’s question by shooting another over his shoulder, back the way he’d come. “Well come on. The Ol’ Man’s been wondering where the hell you got off to. Sent me to make sure you didn’t fall into a pit somewhere.”

“There are pits?”

Ira wouldn’t be surprised if there are pits. He hasn’t found any yet, but that doesn’t necessarily mean much.

You don’t see the hallways move, is the thing. There’s no sun in here, or stars. The Crook is just rooms and hallways, with their tobacco-stained whitewashed walls and cheap, battered wood flooring with rugs here and there thrown down to hide disturbing stains, and every once in a while a movie poster or something plastered to the wall, either because somebody got bored of the plainness or maybe to help them remember where the fuck they were in this place.

It’s impossible to see the place shift because they’re inside it, and there’s nothing to reference for bearings except the hallway itself. But pay close attention and sit still for a while, and you can *feel* the way you’re slowly being turned to face a different direction.

So yeah, he wouldn’t be surprised if the pits just haven’t found him yet.

But then there’s the day he takes a wrong turn—UGH—trying to come back from the kitchen and catches a hallway waking up.

He rounds the corner, and…for a second he thinks there isn’t a hallway there. But then, with a jerk like a cat startled awake, it opens up. There’s a split second that registers in his eyes like an after-image, spots floating in his eyes in the shape of streaks of raw universe weaving themselves, and then the scuffed white walls and battered floor are snapping into place, with a painting of some guys playing poker in hell, and an unattributable air of sheepishness.

He turns around and goes back.

https://www.prettyarbitrary.org/2023/10/09/ira-chicago-spirit-the-shepherds-crook/

#chicagoSpirit #fanfiction #iraCarpenter #myFanfic #originalCharacters #originalFiction #scpFoundation