#i do like the idea of the deputy being part of a court and have a big fuck you sword

[afarcryfrommymain]

I have this brain defect where I imagine characters in a fantasy/dnd type setting and go fucking nuts over it and then don't elaborate

I doodled Faith Seed encounter and even wrote a silly little narration for it like how I'd introduce her in that sort of setting and I don't know how to cope

#im talking now #far cry 5 #dnd #no i have no coherent idea for the other seeds #like its a vaguely similar plot to main game #but like #idk different at the same time #more castlevania energy but theres nit vampires its just a bunch of freaks who believe god chose them #also i like drawing her in a long flowy dress #i do like the idea of the deputy being part of a court and have a big fuck you sword #jacob can have a dire wolf as a traat #Joseph thinks hes a cleric but hes really a warlock #john. i like cant think of anything for that guy sorry. if yall can lmk but #kinda hard to place him #wizard? maybe? jacob can be a paladin

[nwnpofiction]

The Awkward Encounter

(TW: This entire chapter details a woman's scary interaction with an intimidating man. No SA though.)

Millie walked into The Save Point to begin her 7:30 shift. Several officers from the station, freshly off duty for the night, had gathered in the place and were sitting around a table in the middle of the room. Deputies Cash and Perez sat at the bar, exchanging anecdotes and engaging in general fat-chewing, with an increasingly inebriated, Aldo Terrell. There was laughter, cigarette smoke and carrying-on. No one was in a bad mood, and the soft spoken, English socialite was, as usual, doing his best, however unintentionally, to prove he could be louder than his American buddies. All of this was par for the course for Millie by this point. But she was still on edge.

The thing is that Aldo Terrell frightened Millie. He had done so since they first met, two years earlier, and things she’d come to learn about him in the intervening period didn’t help matters. The fact that he was a rambunctious drunk didn’t help either, and what helped least of all was him also being her employer. It was bad enough for him to be her husband’s best friend on the island. She did her best to suppress her issues with him; he had never actually done anything…to HER that is. Despite her anxiety around him, the two had managed to foster an almost brother-sister-like dynamic, and she was almost-ALMOST – accustomed to handling him and his eccentricities. But still, anytime she saw him rowdy like this, it was off-putting.

The gabbing was mundane and had an everyday-stupidness about it. Millie only overheard PARTS of the guys’ conversations.

“No, but see, I have a need to CHEW them!” Perez insisted, in response to Cash suggesting that letting a certain chocolate candy melt in one’s mouth was best. “They’re disgusting either way, gentlemen.” Aldo interjected. He didn’t much go for chocolate. “They literally taste like vomit.” “Oh come on, man!” Que more laughter. It really was all in good fun, and sometimes Millie really did find herself feeling bad. As if SHE was stuck-up. As if SHE was the crazy one. Everyone around her loved Aldo. And in their defense, he was easy to love.

The night dragged on. Aldo got drunker. The guys played darts. Aldo got drunker. Some of the older men from town came into the bar, including George Parsons from he butcher shop. He always stopped in before his walk home from work, to have a beer and often to give Aldo rent money, etc… There was a very, stereotypical, male-bonding, mafioso, bromance-y thing going on between Aldo and a lot of the men in town, and most of the women had some degree of a crush on him. Millie enjoyed seeing Cash and Perez happy; they’d been through so much over the last 8 months. But this Aldo-problem was a turn-off.

At some point, Aldo attempted to get Millie into his conversation with the deputies and Mr. Parsons. He tried bringing up a funny incident from her husband’s recent court case. “You should tell Georgy what Luke did the other day.” He suggested. It fell flat. “His client was, for lack of a better way to put it, not too bright. It is what it is.” She said. “Sorry I’m not so social tonight, guys. I have a lot going on right now.” She tried to excuse herself. Aldo’s expression very visibly went cold and dropped into a judging, disappointed glare, but only very briefly.

Mr. Parsons’ brief stop for a beer turned into him effectively partying with Aldo, and the officers, and before anyone knew it, several hours had passed. It was now about midnight. The rain outside was getting heavier as a serious storm was approaching, and the guys (most of them anyway) realized they’d all better get home before the storm hit. This was to Millie’s relief at first. She was tired anyway and wanted to get back to her trailer and away from Aldo. An earlier closing was going to work out just fine for her. Aldo, on the other hand, had different ideas.

The sloppy-drunk, Sheffielder was practically lying on the bar; he was leaning on his elbow, cupping his head in that hand, smoking a cigarette with the other. He wasn’t even remotely up for winding down at the moment, and he made that clear to Millie.

“Soo…What is this “stuff” you’ve got “goin’ on”, Mills…Millie…Mildred…?” He asked her, lazily, and slurring mildly. But his eyes were, in that very second, bright and crystal clear.

One of the things that unsettled Millie so much about Aldo was how difficult he was to read. Sure, he was drunk. She knew he was drunk. She personally saw him power through enough beverages to kill an army of horses. She definitely knew he was definitely drunk. There was also a possibility of other substances being involved. But occasionally, his underlying sharpness flashed, like lightning, through the alcoholic glaze over his eyes, as if to indicate he wasn’t as far gone as he seemed to be. Right now, his eyes rivaled the ACTUAL lightning outside. It was intimidating as all get-out.

But the other thing that got her hung up about him was the fact that he was nearly impossible to dislike. While her gut feeling was sounding alarm bells, denying he had the same affect on her that he had on everyone else was just Millie’s way of lying to herself. As I said before, Aldo Terrell was easy to love. Despite her serious reservations, deep down she actually found Aldo easier to talk to than Luke in some ways.

Millie was a weirdo, you see, and Aldo being strange himself, got that about her. In a way Luke couldn’t. It wasn’t enough to sow the seeds of any kind of romantic attraction. They really were more like siblings. But it was enough to leave Millie, not only torn on how she wanted to view him, but basically unable to talk her way out of anything with him without being an absolute *ss. And again, this man scared the daylights out of her; being an *sshole to him was NOT something she wanted to do.

“It’s nothing. It’s personal.” She said. “Uh-huh…” He responded, not buying it. “It’s getting late.” She advised him, hopping he’d take the hint. “We don’t close until 2.” He said. Aldo had in fact taken the hint…and ignored it. He ran his long-fingered, large hands through his long, messy, gel-slicked, brown hair, pushing it over his ears and back over his head, with an exasperated sigh. A couple shiny, slicked-up sections fell back down to frame his face, as he picked up his cigarette out of the ashtray once more. He leaned into his free hand, pressing his forehead into his fingers, covering his eyes. She could see the tell-tale signs of his oncoming migraines from a mile off. And with his headaches, came even more mental clarity, for some reason. He was tired and likely in pain, but he was by no means out of steam.

“Be a pal and fill this up, would you?” He asked, pushing a glass towards her. “Unbelievable. “She muttered. His alcohol tolerance was astounding. “Please, Mills.” He said, looking up at her, with a genuine vulnerability. “I need it for me ‘ead at this point.” He said. His accent always thickened back up when he was tired or stressed. Millie hesitated for a moment before noticing a few small drops of blood dropping from between Aldo’s face and his hand, onto the bar. “Oh sh*t, Aldo!” She said, grabbing a wad of paper towels and quickly pressing them to Aldo’s face. “Wha-oh. F*ck me!” He exclaimed, taking the paper towels into his own hands and holding them to his nose.

“That’s the third time this week, Aldo.” Millie said to him. “Third time you know of, Mills.” He said. “You need to see a doctor. It could be serious.” She said. “Mmm?” He chuckled. “You’re worried about me…” He said, grinning out over the paper towels at her, his voice slightly muffled. It irritated Millie that he found this amusing. “It always stops in like, five seconds.” He assured. “I’m fine.” After a few more seconds, he folded up his paper towels and used them to wipe up the mess he’d made on the bar. “I still want that vodka, Millie.” He said as he got up to throw the paper towels in the trash.

The nosebleeds always provided a little relief for the pain, and he was feeling an energy boost from said relief. So he decided to mess around for a while. He went into the office, behind the counter, and switched on the stereo system. Some Scandinavian, electro-organ-pop began to play, but Aldo was considerate and turned the volume down to a just barely noticeable, low. He then walked back into the main seating area and began messing with the dartboard. “And if you’re not gonna make conversation, you can go f*ck yours…” He stopped himself. “You can go back to work.” He said, picking up a bundle of darts.

Seeing this, Millie knew she was in for the long haul. Sure, she could leave and let HIM take care of the bar. It was his bar after all; he’d done such work of his own before. But she wasn’t sure he should be left to his own devices, with a freshly restocked supply of whiskey. She was also genuinely worried about him.

Millie was well aware of the issues Aldo had going on in his own domestic life, that would see him not wanting to go home despite the late hour and the bad weather. His fiance, Eva, was, to put it lightly, a snotty, stuck-up, and many suspected, ABUSIVE, b*tch. At the very least, the pair was totally mismatched. Millie knew Aldo had been stepping out on Eva as well, and tried not to get involved. She was also naively under the impression that HE was the problem in the relationship. It was none of her business and now it was interfering in her job. But she knew what relationship issues were like and didn’t feel like denying Aldo some alone time. So she decided to hunker down, and gave up on going home early.

She filled Aldo’s request for more vodka, and brought it to him, setting the glass down on the table, near the coat he’d tossed there earlier that night, and watched him hurling the darts into the board. Again, despite being drunk, Aldo’s aim and accuracy were frightening. Perfect. Another thing the freaked Millie out about him. His ability to remain so sharp under the influence, in her experience, meant nothing good. One by one, he managed to get all but one of the 5 darts he’d thrown, dead-center on the target. She sat down at Aldo’s table, continuing to watch him, feeling as if she had to keep an eye on him. There really wasn’t that much else she had to do, besides await the inevitable attempt to strike up a conversation.

“The Tarasov’s are getting a new addition. Did you hear?” She asked. “Yeah. Mike’s cousin…or nephew, or something. Comin’ in from Russia.” Aldo responded, as he continued pelting the dartboard. “I think his name’s Alexis…” She said. “Mm-mm. “Alexei”. “Aljosha.” He responded, cutting her off. ” ‘Alexei Tarasov’?” Millie repeated, finding the name funny. “I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.” Aldo said. “Mike’s family doesn’t strike me as the figure-skating type.” He said, turning around and sitting down. “What?” She asked. “Oh… Alexei was um… Oh never mind.” Said Aldo. He then began riffling around the pockets of his coat, looking for something.

“Does he speak English?” Millie asked. “How would I know?” He responded. “Ahha!” He’d found the pills he was looking for. “I mean he probably does.” He said, reaching for the glass of vodka. “Is this mine?” He asked. “Well it’s not mine.” She responded. Aldo downed a few of the pills dry, before basically gulping down the vodka, to Millie’s amazement (and not in a good way). “I speak a little Russian, so if Lex DOESN’T speak English, he’s at least got someone in town to communicate with him.” Said Aldo; the vodka barely down his throat. “Ya know…besides his uncle-cousin.”

“YOU speak Russian?!” Said Millie. Another thing about him that always caught her off guard was the fact that he was so full of surprises. “Mmhmm.” Aldo said, finishing up his drink. Millie just stared at him, questioningly and with apprehension. It made him slightly nervous. He turned and looked behind himself, almost jokingly, as if to suggest he thought Millie was looking at something behind him. “I’m not a spy.” He said. Millie’s expression eased up, as if him simply saying he wasn’t a spy was enough to put her more at ease.

“Seriously though. What’s up with you?” He inquired. “Here we go.” She thought. “I told you. It’s nothing.” She said, taking the now empty glass from him. “And um…Now it is getting late. So, last call, there, Bud.” She said, standing up. “What’s ‘last call’?” Aldo asked, sarcastically, as he looked up at her, gently but firmly grabbing her wrist as she tried to walk back to the bar. She looked down at his hand on her wrist, then back at him. “Sorry.” he said, letting her go. “it means I have to finish cleaning and lock up…So you have to get going now.” She answered, annoyed and nervously. “Oh, do I?” He responded. “Mmhmm.” She nodded. “I’m sorry. Don’t I own this establishment?” He said. She took this remark as an act of aggression; a formal declaration of war in this battle of nerve they had going. She didn’t know how to respond.

“I mean… I don’t particularly feel like going anywhere yet.” He continued. Millie then walked back to the bar, taking the glass and setting it down. The only way she could think of to deal with this was to just do her job and ignore him. She was kind of on autopilot. Aldo just watched her for a few seconds. He was also now on edge, but he played it so cool that even had she been trying to notice him, she wouldn’t have caught on. She would have thought he was just playing mind games with her. Which he was.

Aldo got up from his seat, picking up a single dart. He then walked over and sat at the bar, leaning over to see what she was doing. “You’re welcome to go if that’s what you want.” He said. “Be firm, Millie.” She thought. “Of course I am.” She said. His eyes were once again bright, and wide, as if excited for a challenge. She didn’t like that one bit. “I’m not going anywhere.” He declared. “And I’d think you’d welcome not having to rush right back to another night in a sh*tty trailer, alone, by yourself.” He said, his drunkenness showing. “I’m perfectly fine being on my own, Aldo.” She responded. “No you’re not. You’re chronically lonely.” Said Aldo, defiantly, looking straight into her eyes. following her as she moved. He was holding the single red, dart in his left hand, pressing the pin into the tip of his right index finger and spinning it around.

Millie stopped what she was doing, leaned over the bar on her arms and looked Aldo right in the eyes, practically getting in his face. This took him aback a little and she knew it would. “You’re projecting.” She said to him, knowing that in all likelihood he WAS projecting. “Ah…I’m also staying.” He said. “What’s going on with you and that stupid trailer, Millie?” He asked again. “None of your business.” She said. “Ow!” He said suddenly. He had been pressing that dart into his finger hard enough to hurt himself and just finally noticed that he’d broken the skin. “Would you please be careful, Aldo.” She said to him, genuinely concerned, if even a little annoyed. “Stop mothering me and answer my question.” He said, placing the dart off to the side. “You’re drunk. I need to close up. Go home, Aldo.” She said.

Advertisement

Aldo then leaned forward, getting into HER face. “It’s MY f*cking bar. And I am f*cking s t a y i n g.” He said. “Okay?” “Well, I’m not serving you any more alcohol.” She answered. “Fine.” He said. “That’s just fine.” He got up and came around to the other side of the bar. “That’s just fine with me.” He said, squeezing behind her to get to the whisky. “Jesus, Christ.” She muttered. “Me annoying you is not cause for blasphemy, madam.” He said. By this point he’d gotten what he wanted from the shelf and was on his way back to the stools.”What the f*ck?” She thought. “Aren’t you agnostic?” She asked him. “Oh…Shut up.” He replied.

He opened the bottle and began consuming its contents, getting out his phone and doing who knew what on it. Millie stood there staring for a moment before getting out the pink, corded phone they kept under the counter, placing it on the bar and starting to dial a number. “What are you doing?” Aldo asked her, noticing she had the phone. “It’s 2:05. I’m sure your fiance would like to know where you are.” “Oh, you’re worried about MY fiance now, are you?” He said. “That’s nice.” He added, putting down his phone and placing his hand on hers, stopping her from finishing dialing his own house number. “That’s very good of you.” He continued. He then physically picked up Millie’s hand off of the phone, placed his other hand on the phone and slid it away, off to the side, effectively out of her reach. He never broke eye-contact the entire time he was doing this.

Aldo had freaked Millie out before. But this was the first time he had PHYSICALLY handled her in any way. It was an egregious overreach. Beyond inappropriate. But she was all but paralyzed to respond. Her heart was racing. Still she tried to put up a brave front. It wouldn’t do for him to see the full extent of how terrified she was of him.

“You know what I’d like to know?”He asked. “Why don’t YOU want to live with your own husband? That’s what I’d like to know…Mildred.” He said to her. “It’s none of you’re business.” She said.

One thing she HAD to give him is that he truly did love Luke. She didn’t question that whatsoever. She didn’t understand WHY he cared so much about Luke. But she didn’t question that he did care. Like I said, Aldo was Luke’s best friend on the island.

“He’s a good guy, Millie.” He said. “I know.” She replied. “He’s a really good guy. And he f*cking loves you.” He said to her, actually starting to get misty-eyed. The alcohol sometimes had this affect on him. Or at least that’s what she tried to tell herself. Teary-eyed or no, he still scared the crap out of her. “I know he does.” She said. “You’re lucky.” He said. “You’re very f*ckin’ lucky. You know that c*nt I’m engaged to doesn’t even f*cking love me.” He said after a short pause. “She ‘ates my guts actually. Despises me.” He said.

Millie was shocked. For as uncomfortable a couple as Aldo and Eva were, Millie had never heard Aldo speak ill of Eva. NEVER. She never saw him treat her badly or disrespect her in anyway, besides the affair he was having. This affair had been written off as the product of an “open-relationship” , though no one knew for sure that was the case. She HAD seen her treat HIM like sh*t however. She just assumed that he was as difficult a romantic partner as he was an employer and that Eva’s irritability with him was a reaction to that. She never got the idea that their relationship was loveless on Eva’s part. If anything, Millie thought that Eva must have loved him, because she was staying with him despite how he was. Millie was wrong but she wouldn’t come to understand how wrong she was until much later.

“I’m sure that’s not true.” She responded. “Who took care of you after the accident, for all those months?” She said, trying to remind him of what she THOUGHT he had at home. “No. She CARES about me. A little. Because she HAS TO. There’s a big difference there.” Millie didn’t know how to counter that. She felt bad for him for a second though because she could tell that, at the very least HE BELIEVED what was coming out of his mouth.

“So what is it, Millie?” Aldo asked again. ” ‘Cause what you’re doing is sick. And selfish.” Whether she liked it or not, she knew in her heart of hearts that Aldo had a point. One she was forced to consider. Until he went too far.

“I’d think that you’d have learned from his little…”problem” in New York that it’s not good for him to be left alone so much.” Aldo had now crossed a line.

Again, she knew his concern for Luke was genuine. But it really was none of his business to bring THAT up. She also knew he was a master manipulator. So she responded the only way she knew how; by saying the most disgusting and hurtful, below-the-belt thing she could think of. She got up, walked around the bar, to Aldo’s stool, leaned in slightly and said:

“If you care about Luke being alone so much, why don’t YOU go see him some night?” Aldo looked back at her, stunned and disgusted. “It’s not like You’re the most loyal partner. I’m sure it wouldn’t surprise Eva anymore than that cow you’ve been screwing does.” Aldo’s mouth was agape, his eyes still moist, but now angry and indignant. Millie wasn’t normally the type to say things like this, and now she’d just insulted, not only her own husband (who was one of the closest things to above reproach Aldo had ever known), but a perfectly decent young woman whose only crime was sleeping with a guy in loveless engagement. Rebecca really wasn’t the whore a lot of people thought she was; he was fond of her for a reason.

“Go to hell, Millie.” He responded, after processing what she’d just said to him. He started to get up. “Oh, that did it, huh?” Said Millie, with an indulgent smirk, knowing she’d just won the argument. “Go to hell.” He repeated. He walked over to the booth he’d been at previously, grabbed his coat off the table, and started to leave. The rain was heavy. The lightning fierce.

“Aldo!” She called out, as he opened the door. “What?!” He snapped back. Millie held out her hand. “Your keys. Give ’em to me.” He was an *sshole but she wasn’t going to let him kill himself, on the road, in the rain, drunk off his *ss. “Ah ‘Friends don’t let friends drive drunk’, eh?” He remarked, halfway out the door. “Who the f*ck said WE were friends?” Millie replied. Aldo chuckled and shook his head; a vain attempt to cover being visibly hurt. “Alright. Here ya go.” He said, taking his keys out of his coat pocket. He then tossed them at the counter, inadvertently sending them sailing into the glass tip jar, which caused it to shatter. Millie jumped, startled. “Happy?” Said Aldo, before turning and slamming the door behind him.

Millie had won THIS battle, but now she didn’t feel so proud about it.

#creative writing #fiction #original story #original characters

[spirits-of-new-york]

❂ Welcome to Spirits of New York! Here you'll find updates and bts content for the Wolf Among Us fic: Heads Will Roll ❂

Heads Will Roll focus on the half human / half Fable Yenay 'Sunny' Fei. A former court stenographer who is given the position of Fabletown deputy in order to pay off her family's community service.

I'm CT (he/they/she)

My main OC blog is @/darth-caillic I'll follow and send asks from that blog

Character Masterlist HERE

Ship Masterlist HERE

General:

DNI: anti sex work, transphobes, homophobes or terfs not welcomed here

CWs: Heads Will Roll often describes violate situations (blood, body parts being torn/shot off), death and harsh conditions against sex workers. Please keep this in mind when going in.

Due to the nature of the story, this blog with be 18+. There's no full-on NSFW, but there will most likely be some light jokes here or there, but in that case, I'll be tagging it as #nsfw

There are no current plans for a taglist. I'll mostly likely reblog to my main with my current taglist

Other Links:

Update! Heads Will Roll officially has all its chapters posted (at least the book that covers the first Wolf Among Us) on Ao3 | Wattpad | FNN !

I don't have an individual Pinterest for Heads Will Roll, but I do have a general one if you're interested - HERE

Navigation:

#askcj - All answered asks will have this tag

#showerthoughts - ideas/random stuff I'm considering but isn't canon

#ocappreciation - All major edits and art

#high quality gifts - Stuff made by someone who isn't me

#reposts - stuff from old blogs

Want content for a certain character? Just look up their full name or their first name + inspo (i.e sunny inspo)

#pinned intro

[robininthelabyrinth]

Jgy and jyl couple, where meng yao asked for nmj help for courting her in the middle of sunshot campain, could we see the political shenanigans involving jgs being his scummy self and newborn meng ling

World 2 - continuation of Four Worlds (JGY/JYL) - ao3 link

-

“So, uh,” Nie Mingjue said, uncertain and tripping over his tongue a way he never typically did. “What’s your plan?”

Meng Yao blinked at him.

“For courting Mistress Jiang,” Nie Mingjue clarified. “Unless you’ve already reached an agreement..?”

A bowl of soup every night and some pleasant conversation did not, in fact, make for an agreement to marriage, so Meng Yao shook his head.

“Right. So you have a plan, then.”

Meng Yao did not have a plan. Meng Yao did not have anything, nothing but his father’s blood, the weight of his promise to his mother, and his own clever mind; all he had was the sudden and overwhelming conviction that if he let Jiang Yanli go her own way without him that he would never again find a woman who would truly see him as her equal.

There was that girl, Qin Su, that he’d rescued – but that had been artifice, deliberate. He who had access to all of the reports of all the spies in the Sunshot Campaign, who sent out correspondence advising people on what roads were dangerous and which were safe, how could he not know that she would find danger in the route she had chosen? He had deliberately manufactured to rescue her as a means of winning her affection, his eyes all the while fixed on the prize of her surname, her family, which was one of the strongest subsidiary sects of Lanling Jin. They had influence he would need in winning back his name.

And while he had succeeded in his goal – once he had some status, she would fight her father to marry him, he was certain – he still thought he could detect the slightest hint of pity in her eyes. She was a girl in love, claiming that she didn’t care who he was or anything about his past, but how long would that last in the face of sober reality? In the face of struggle, of bitter adversity, of the opposition and scorn of all?

“…would you like help?” Nie Mingjue said, possibly correctly interpreting the blankness on Meng Yao’s face as absolute panic for the first time in the time they had known each other.

“Can you help?” Meng Yao inquired. It seemed unlikely.

“Well, I can write to my brother,” Nie Mingjue said, which sounded far more likely than the infamously frigid Chifeng-zun abruptly developing an expertise in wooing women. “And I’m on good terms with Mistress Jiang personally, so I might be able to provide some insight –”

“Wait,” Meng Yao said, fixing him with a stare. “What do you mean you’re on good terms with her personally?”

Nie Mingjue blinked at him. “Exactly what I said..? We first became acquainted as children, and while we were never close, we were always friendly.”

“But – you only allowed her to stay at our warcamp if she agreed to work! You said you’d kick her out if she wasn’t useful!”

“Naturally,” Nie Mingjue said. “Otherwise she might suspect I pitied her.”

Presumably, Meng Yao reflected, that statement made some amount of sense in Nie Mingjue’s head.

“What does she like, then?” he asked, deciding to focus on the practical. “Cooking, her brothers –”

Befriending people who are so far below her that they aren’t worthy of touching her shoe.

“She’s never had much talent at swordsmanship,” Nie Mingjue said at once, because of course that would be the first thing he would pay attention to. “Not her fault – she’s like Huaisang, born with a weak body, only worse, since it affected her breathing. Too much exertion and she’d turn blue…she used to chew licorice for it, when she was very young; if I recall correctly, she developed a taste for it.”

“Licorice? She likes licorice candy?”

Nie Mingjue nodded.

“She also always enjoyed reading. Poetry, classic texts or light, she wasn’t particular,” he said, brow furrowed in recollection. “She liked puzzles. Was always doing something with her hands – not embroidery, though, not unless she had to. But other things.”

Meng Yao nodded, his quick mind already flooded with ideas, thoughts…he was going to need to be clever about this.

Worse – he was going to need to be honest.

Jiang Yanli deserved it.

-

Meng Yao went to Langya with Nie Mingjue’s recommendation letter in his pocket and the memory of two hands in his, pressing together tightly, and a “yes” that rang in his ears so loudly that he almost didn’t hear the sneers and disdain of the people around him.

His father refused to see him, his peers mocked him, his supervisor stole his achievements and called his mother a whore –

“Yes,” Jiang Yanli whispered in his ear. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”

Meng Yao ignored them all.

He figured out soon enough that Lanling Jin was getting him nowhere, and that without some tremendous achievement, he wouldn’t get the name he had promised his mother he’d have, the one he was starting to doubt he even really wanted.

His supervisor told him he’d be better off dead in the battlefield, implied that he’d see it happen sooner rather than later. Meng Yao considered killing him.

“I would be proud to be your wife.”

Meng Yao did not kill him.

Nie Mingjue might’ve, chasing him out of the battlefield the way he did, eyes red with rage at Jin Guangshan’s insulting pretense – if nothing else, he should have given Nie Mingjue face by accepting the letter, especially given how many battles Nie Mingjue had won for him – but Meng Yao did not.

“I have an idea,” he told Nie Mingjue once he’d had a chance to calm the man down. “You’re going to hate it, so I’m not going to tell you what it is.”

“Be safe,” Nie Mingjue said at once. “Don’t do anything stupid and widow Mistress Jiang before you even marry her.”

Meng Yao smiled, and closed his ears to the sound of Jiang Yanli’s voice. He would need it more than ever, where he was going, but more importantly, if he wanted to succeed, he needed he needed to be the sort of person he was without her.

“I won’t.”

-

It was, Jin Guangyao thought with satisfaction, a perfect strategy.

He had brought down Wen Ruohan with his own hands, saved Nie Mingjue’s life – “What part of ‘I won’t do anything stupid’ means ‘I’m going to go spy in the Nightless City’, you imbecile?” “Sect Leader Nie is happy to see me, then?” “Of course I’m happy to see you! Now get over here and let me break your legs!” – and even swore brotherhood with him and with Lan Xichen.

With such a string of achievements to his name, strong connections to the other Great Sects, and even a personal title, there was no way Jin Guangshan would be able to resist the idea of bringing him into the Jin family to steal some of his reflected glory, even if it meant he’d finally have to give his bastard son the recognition and the name he’d so long refused to grant him.

Oh, his father had gotten his dig in there, calling him Jin Guangyao and situating him firmly outside the line of inheritance for the next generation where he properly belonged, but a name was a name. He was Lanling Jin, now and forever; his promise to his mother fulfilled at long last.

“We will have to find something for you to do, I suppose,” Jin Guangshan said when Jin Guangyao rose to his feet bearing a new name, as though he was trying to place a distant relative into some position as a servant, the minor irritations attendant to the life of a sect leader. “You were a deputy once, weren’t you? Doing all sorts of administrative things. You can arrange the hunt that we will hold to celebrate the end of the war, at Phoenix Mountain.”

“It would be my honor to serve you in this matter, father,” Jin Guangyao said demurely, and even managed to avoid rolling his eyes at the way Jin Guangshan pretended he didn’t know exactly whose deputy he had been, even after Nie Mingjue’s rather impassioned and too-public lecture on the subject back in Langya. “I am pleased to be able to contribute something before I leave the family.”

“Before – what?” Jin Guangshan turned a little purple in his rage, embarrassed in front of all the people who had come to view the naming ceremony and who had all started whispering all at once. His wife, who had been glaring death, suddenly looked far more interested in the proceedings. “Leave? What are you talking about?”

“I’m engaged to be married,” Jin Guangyao said apologetically. “I agreed to marry in – you understand, I didn’t have the Jin surname at the time.”

“You have it now. The girl can marry into our family, instead!”

Jin Guangyao’s smile widened. “I’m so pleased to have your blessing upon my marriage, Father,” he said, bowing his head. A father’s blessing was critical to a proper wedding, so he wanted it to be clear to the entire room that Jin Guangshan had agreed. It would make it more difficult for him to recant later. “But her family is small, her parents and much of her sect killed in the war, and she has only one brother – I promised her that I would marry in to ensure that her parents’ legacy lives on, even if only as the collateral branch.”

“It does you credit to respect your future bride in such a manner,” Madame Jin said before Jin Guangshan could speak. Jin Guangyao had counted on her leaping to his aid: she must think that it was in her best interest that the one bastard that Jin Guangshan had finally legitimatized be immediately rendered utterly ineligible for inheriting the Jin sect, and that nothing else mattered. Her open support now would make it more difficult for her to recant later, too, when she discovered that he was foiling her plans for her own son’s marriage. “Quite romantic, even. It warms my heart to see such faithful love.”

Jin Guangshan’s face went even more purple. To be criticized in public like that – only Madame Jin could accomplish such a feat.

Jin Guangyao saluted and bowed deeply to them both once again. “Father and Mother honor me too much. With your approval, I will arrange the Phoenix Mountain hunt as a proud member of the Jin clan and leave the family to marry into my beloved’s family on the first auspicious date thereafter.”

“Fine,” Jin Guangshan said, his lip twisting into a sneer. He couldn’t understand why anyone would want to be part of Lanling Jin and then leave it behind – he probably expected Jin Guangyao to stay and beg for scraps of attention, to run around doing anything he wished, to scheme for an inheritance he would always be denied. He might not have been wrong, in another life where that was Jin Guangyao’s only route to power – he’d always been ambitious, and often a little too optimistic with it. “Fine. You are, after all, my son, and to marry you will be a great honor for whichever family you choose. We’ll pay for your wedding, and even endower you as if you were a bride worthy of the family you marry into – it is the least that we can do, for the great honor that you have brought to Lanling Jin.”

At least his father remembered that he’d made a contribution, Jin Guangyao thought, and bowed again. It was an insult to call it a dowry, as if Jin Guangyao was a woman, instead of simply bestowing it on him outright as a gift, and even that pathetic gesture was only being made because his father knew they were in public, surrounded by the sect leaders of the cultivation world that he wanted to impress. And even then, even then, he had still tried to be clever, to say he would only make Jin Guangyao equal to the family he married into.

No doubt he expected that the only family that would take him when he was Meng Yao was some bunch of nobodies, and that the wedding would therefore be small, cheap, and uninteresting, just as he no doubt thought Jin Guangyao deserved.

He was doomed to disappointment.

“Congratulations, brother,” Jin Zixuan said, and maybe even meant it. “Who is your intended bride?”

Jin Guangyao savored the moment.

“Mistress Jiang, of Yunmeng Jiang,” he said, and watched Jin Guangshan’s face go pale, Madame Jin’s twist in abrupt rage, Jin Zixuan’s eyes go wide in sudden envy.

There were those that said the best revenge was living well, and they had something of a point, only they had left out a bit.

The best revenge was living well – and rubbing your enemies’ faces in it.

#mdzs #jin guangyao #nie mingjue #jiang yanli #jin guangshan #my fic #my fics #sorry you don't get meng ling #but you get politics? #Anonymous

[sweaterkittensahoy]

Here’s a “fuck you, I’m over it” high school story I just remembered today.

This is a fun one. 

I grew up in a very small town in Arkansas, up in the Ozark mountains. I graduated high school in 2001. When I was in high school, rumors started going around that I was a lesbian because I was vocal about my support for lesbian and gay people being allowed to foster and adopt children (I was not out to myself at this time, but I also didn’t understand what was so bad about a loving couple WANTING a child). I was also rumored to have had an abortion because I was pro-abortion (the first time I saw pregnancy up close and personal, I was 12, and she was 14. And that made zero sense.). And then, because I vocally and unquestionably hated every member of the football team save maybe two guys because all the others got away with sexual harassment, bullying, and LITERALLY STEALING A FUND WE TOOK UP TO HELP A CLASSMATE WHOSE HOME WAS LOST IN A TORNADO, I was rumored to have fucked the football team. Because when the worst kind of teenage boy wants to try and shame a girl, he does it by making it about how much that girl wants his dick (I wanted none of their dicks; not even the two guys I liked just fine, and they didn’t want to fuck me, either. It’s why we liked each other.)

So, my entire senior year of high school was me turning to administration and going, “Oh, you think this is how shit is done? No, fuck you and your ideas of authority. No one owes you shit.” 

Administration included: 

1. The vice-principal who was also THE HEAD FOOTBALL COACH.

2. A new principal and a new superintendent who both talked a good game of “We respect students” while being fucking liars. 

Here’s a fun fact: At the time, my dad was a leading police officer for the entire state of Arkansas, and I absolutely believed that cops were good guys. My dad taught me everything about legal searches and individual rights and all that shit. 

And it blew up in his face my senior year when I said, “I get if the school searches my locker because that’s THEIR property, but my backpack and my car are MY property, so no, they don’t get to search those without probable cause and/or a warrant.” 

I remember Dad NOT LIKING that take. I remember the conversation being, “If your friend parks their car here, I get to search it because they’re on my property,” and I said, “Fuck you, no, you don’t get to search THEIR property just because it’s parked in YOUR driveway. Also, you rent, so this isn’t YOUR property.” 

(The fact my relationship with my dad took serious damage during the BLM protests in 2021 is NOT shocking in retrospect. He called them riots. I informed him that he didn’t get to lecture me on what the fuck was happening in my own city, and if the cops would calm the fuck down, the riots wouldn’t be happening; I digress.)

So, anyway, all senior year I was jabbing at administration. I had a journalism advisor who happily let me do my thing while also providing a guiding hand, and I got the new principal AND superintendent on record saying they wouldn’t be doing car searches or backpack searches without very good reason and a sheriff’s deputy to assist. 

Guess who caught them both out just trying car doors one afternoon while coming back from a different part of campus? Me. 

Guess who also loudly announced what was happening to the rest of the newspaper staff, who ran out to lock their doors, and then told all their friends, who also locked their doors from that point on?

Guess who was REAL mad at me? 

By the way, I approached them head on and asked what they were doing, and they tried to act like it was totally fine for them to just be opening cars and looking in them without any permission. Which fuck you.

Anyway, fast forward to graduation, when I’ve spent a year annoying middle-aged white men who are not used to teenage girls refusing to shut the fuck up because a middle-aged man said so. 

Part of our graduation practice included a final lunch made for the senior class by the lunch ladies. At the beginning of my senior year, the Arkansas supreme court had said, “Hey, no more praying over the announcement system at football games,” and I’d written a SCATHING editorial for the town paper calling the superintendent a hypocrite for giving a nice soundbyte to the local news about how “We’re going to do what is right in this town and do what we know to be the right choice” and then not showing the fuck up for the game that night. Rather than ACTUALLY stand by their supposed principles of praying over the system, they used the system to announce that anyone who wanted to join a pre-game prayer was welcome to do so. 

We lost 0 to 42. But I digress again. 

So, that’s how the superintendent first pissed me off. 

Here we are, sitting at lunch as a class for our final high school meal, and one of my classmates gets up and says, “I’d like to lead us in prayer.”

I rolled my eyes HARD but I also stayed quiet because I was absolutely an asshole, but I wasn’t an ASSHOLE. I looked down at my hands and stayed quiet and let it happen. 

Not 30 seconds after our heads came up, the superintendent rounded the end of the table. I was sitting on the end of a bench with a few inches left, and he sat down and basically tried to shove me to make room for him. 

My friends all sat up straighter because WHAT IS THIS THAT HE THINKS HE’S DOING TO GAYLE.

Like, imagine you stopped giving a fuck day one of your senior year of high school. And you have now passed all your finals, and you are only showing up to walk at graduation because your family really wants to see you do that. 

And you just had to sit through a fucking ‘class prayer’ that you disagree with but aren’t a big enough fuck to make a stink about. 

And a fucking hypocrite and liar who is a GROWN MAN IN HIS 40s drops down next to you on a bench and looks at you like he’s won something. 

IMAGINE.

So, he does this, and he looks at me like he’s very proud, and he says, “You weren’t praying.”

I was flabbergasted. “Excuse me?”

He says, “I was looking around during the prayer, and you weren’t praying.”

Keep in mind, by the way, that he’s mad at ME because I called him out for not showing up for the pre-game prayer back in AUGUST, and this is MAY.

“I don’t pray, but I stayed quiet because it was the polite thing to do. Why were YOU looking around to see who wasn’t praying during a prayer? Shouldn’t YOU have been the one who was praying?”

"You know, I could keep you from walking at graduation today.”

Readers, I was fucking FLUMMOXED. Like. WHAT. 

He was looking at me like he’d really proven how wrong I was. Like, VERY proud of himself. OBVIOUSLY walking in graduation was important to me. It was unquestionably important to my family, so I must be worried about it. 

After a moment, I got my shit together. “Does not walking in graduation stop me from graduating?”

The superintendent is now amused. “No.” 

BUT THINK OF MY FAMILY goes unspoken. Unfortunately for him, my family taught me to think for myself. And even if they haven’t always stuck the landing on that teaching, it’s what they fucking taught me. 

“Do it,” I say. “I’ll still graduate.”

After a moment of stunned silence because I had absolutely refused to bend to the expectation of the social norm, he got up and walked away. 

I heckled him through graduation practice. Which, in fairness, was a dick move. But also, he made us practice standing up and sitting down in unison. In 100-degree heat with 95% humidity with the sun beating down on us because unless there was a thunderstorm or tornado, we’d be doing this on the football field, and then made us practice WALKING ACROSS THE STAGE when he called our name. 

At one point a classmate turned and said, “Gayle, you only get one high school graduation,” and I said, “Good.” Which, again, dick move. I own it. But I was 18, tired of this ceremonial horseshit, and it was 100 goddamn degrees.

The last little speech we hear before we leave the TWO-HOUR graduation practice (what the fuck) is the list of dos and don’t for dress code. The men’s dress code is, of course, two things. The women get a MUCH LONGER list. And then, at the end, the superintendent goes into a story about how the school a few towns over had their entire senior class go NAKED under their robes. 

That school graduated 14 kids, who had all been to school together for 13 years. And they wore black robes. Our robes were school colors--green and white--and the white robes were fucking sheer and also what the women wore. 

I barked like a seal finding out the kids in St. Joe had decided as a group to go naked. I thought it sounded like an awesome perk of being in a micro school. I was a little jealous. 

I go home. I drink nine hundred gallons of water. I put on my graduation outfit. It’s the dress I wore when my parents got married (lilac with white and yellow flowers, cross-strap back, two-layer skirt), and my favorite fancy shoes (fully open, elastic-strap prom shoes with a 1-1/2″ square heel that will NOT sink into the football field mud  no matter how wet it might get. They are delightfully shiny silver.) My outfit meets dress code and then some. Notably, my shoes are WELL within dress code. This will be important.

My aunt French braids my hair and pins on my mortarboard. Mom and Dad drop me at the football field house where I am to wait for the ceremony with everyone else. 

My journalism advisor, who has always given me room to push boundaries and tell administration to eat shit, is one of the people on dress code patrol. She and I crack a joke about how it’d be REAL clear if I’d shown up naked as--again--my gown is see-through, but also, we both know I am entirely within dress code. If she’d seen me out of dress code, she’d have likely allowed me to fight for whatever I was wearing, but also, we both knew I wasn’t a total asshole. 

The superintendent is making rounds. He comes up to me as I’m chatting with my journalism advisor. He gives me a once over and stops at my shoes. 

“Those shoes don’t meet dress code.”

To this day, I will swear I heard my journalism advisor deflate like a balloon because all he had to do was NOT. 

I replied, “Yes, they do.”

He said, “...Well, they’re borderline. You should go home and change them before the ceremony.”

Me: “They’re not borderline. They’re not flip flops or stilettos or sneakers. I wore them to prom, and no one tried to send me home then.”

Him: “You live down the street. You could go home, change, and be back before the ceremony.”

Me: “I’m not doing that. They don’t violate the dress code.”

(Of note, in mid-April, when the seniors were a month from graduating, the entire high school had to sit through an assembly about how PEOPLE were violating the dress code, and by PEOPLE they meant GIRLS, and I responded by standing up and listing all the ways the BOYS violated dress code but NEVER got in trouble and how everyone fucking knew dress code didn’t come up until the WRONG girl violated it [girls administration didn’t like], and how, also, it was funny how administration was holding an assembly on dress code NOW after the school paper [of which I was the editor] did a full-on expose of how the student athletes NEVER got into trouble for obvious dress code violations [like wearing hats that said COCKS on them] but the moment admin saw any OTHER students [especially girls] in those hats, it was suddenly punishment time. Secondary note: I was not the mastermind behind the experiment and expose. It was all pitched, experimented, and written by other people on staff.)

Superintendent then makes yet another mistake and pulls out that trump card that failed him earlier: “If you don’t go home and change, you won’t walk.”

Me: “Okay. I’ll still graduate.”

He looked at my journalism advisor, and she stared back like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth (god, I love her), and then he left in a snit. 

I walked in the shoes I showed up in. I was supposed to accept my diploma from the superintendent with my left hand and shake his hand with my right. I did not offer him my right hand. I wish I’d had the money to buy that photo. 

This story is superintendent-heavy because he woke up and chose fuckboy on the day I cared the absolute least about his opinion, and I had never cared about his opinion. Looking back, I’m actually a bit embarrassed by what a dick I was to the principal on graduation day. He was a fucking asshole, too, but I mocked him for wanting to step up and present his own son his diploma, and fully grown me wants to smack angry-teenage me on the back of the head.

My full-on feud with the football coach / vice-principal is an entry of its own. It’s litearlly a multi-generational feud that started with my GRANDMOTHER. It’s amazing. Several years after I graduated high school, I popped in to say hi to a couple of former teachers, and Coach Fuckboy happened to come down the hall to hand out paychecks. I decided I would say hello and be polite because I was  no longer an asshole teenager. He not only didn’t look me in the eyes, he didn’t fucking answer me. 

#high school #fuckboys #i was an angry feminist queer #and i am glad for it #to be fair i didn't know i was queer #but i knew i was queer #if you know what i mean #sexism #idiots

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 22, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

CNN’s bombshell revelation of Trump loyalist lawyer John Eastman’s six-point memo of instructions for overturning the 2020 election—discussed in the new book by veteran journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa—seems to be sparking a reckoning with how dangerous the Trump loyalists are to the survival of American democracy.

Eastman responded to the story by saying the released memo was only a draft and then giving CNN the final version, which was longer but no less damning—just how damning was indicated by two separate things.

First, J. Michael Luttig, the former United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit whom Pence had asked for advice about whether he could overturn the election results, quickly took to Twitter to distance himself from the story, saying: “I was honored to advise Vice President Pence that he had no choice on January 6, 2021, but to accept and count the Electoral College votes as they had been cast and properly certified by the states…. I believe(d) that Professor Eastman was incorrect at every turn of the analysis in his January 2 memorandum.” Eastman had been Luttig’s law clerk.

Second, former president Trump promptly sued his niece Dr. Mary L. Trump, the New York Times, and three New York Times reporters, claiming they were part of an “insidious plot” to obtain and publish his tax records “to gain fame, notoriety, acclaim and a financial windfall and were further intended to advance their political agenda.” Although the New York Times articles accused Trump of tax fraud, the former president did not claim libel or defamation in the suit. Legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Joyce Alene White Vance noted that to win on that point, he would have to prove that the reporting about his finances wasn’t true, and he was all but conceding he could not do that.

Trump used a lawyer that he has not used before to launch the suit, which Mary Trump, whose doctorate is in psychology, dismissed as the work of a desperate “loser” who was “going to throw anything against the wall he can.”

Eastman was no fly-by-night; he is a senior member of the Federalist Society and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (as well as for Judge Luttig). Eastman’s standing in the so-called conservative movement makes it all the more astonishing that, to my knowledge, no leading Republican lawmaker has commented on the revelations of just how close we came to the installation of Trump instead of the duly elected presidential candidate, Joe Biden, in January.

Instead, Republican lawmakers are making headlines by refusing even to negotiate over the debt ceiling, simply saying the Democrats are on their own. They appear to be trying to replace one crisis with another, trying to turn public attention away from Trump’s attempted coup to the idea that Democrats are wild spendthrifts (although the Trump administration added about $7.8 trillion of today’s $28 trillion debt, and during his term, Congress voted to raise the debt ceiling three times).

It is impossible to overstate just how momentous are both an attempted coup and an attempt to force the U.S. to default on its debts.

Other news about the Trump administration and the January 6 Capitol insurrection is surfacing, as well.

On Monday, a federal court in Washington, D.C. unsealed an indictment alleging that, with the help of conservative author Doug Wead, Jesse Benton, a political operative from Kentucky closely allied with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), illegally directed foreign money from a Russian businessman to the 2016 Trump campaign. That the Department of Justice sat on the case for close to five years, even while the question of connections between the Trump campaign and Russians was white hot, suggests political interference with that department.

On Tuesday, the New York Times broke the story that in November 2020, when leaders from the Trump campaign began insisting before television cameras that the election of two weeks before had been stolen by George Soros and Venezuelans using Dominion voting systems, they had already circulated an internal memo debunking that entire conspiracy theory.

It seems they knew what they were alleging was false. The document surfaced in a lawsuit: Dominion has sued Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani for defamation. This memo will not help their case.

Today, Hugo Lowell, congressional reporter for The Guardian, reported that the House select committee investigating the 6 January attack on the U.S. Capitol is considering issuing non-negotiable subpoenas this week for Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and his deputy chief Dan Scavino, as well as Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale.

A far right Republican from North Carolina, Meadows helped to found the Freedom Caucus and was one of Trump’s closest supporters in Congress before taking the chief of staff job. Scavino ran Trump’s social media accounts—including Twitter—and was one of the former president’s closest confidants. Parscale was the Trump campaign’s digital manager after being replaced as campaign manager in July 2020. Subpoenas for the phone records or testimony of these three men would help the committee members figure out what was happening inside the Oval Office on January 6.  

Tonight on MSNBC, committee member Adam Schiff (D-CA), a former federal prosecutor who is chair of the House Intelligence Committee and was lead manager for Trump’s first impeachment trial, told anchor Nicolle Wallace that the committee is investigating the activities surrounding January 6 as “a conspiracy to commit a coup.”

Schiff warned that while Trump loyalists tried to undermine democracy on January 6, mounting evidence suggests that through voter suppression and the replacement of nonpartisan election officials with boards of Trump loyalists, Republican lawmakers are continuing that effort today.

"We're going to follow the facts," said Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), the committee’s vice chair. "What happened in the run-up to January 6, what happened on the 6th. What happened after the 6th."

—

Notes:

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/22/1039642768/trump-sues-niece-mary-new-york-times-over-tax-return-stories

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/nyregion/mary-trump-taxes-lawsuit.html

Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVanceThere is a good reason "Trump made no claims of libel or defamation against the paper or Mary Trump in the suit." He would have to prove that the NYT's reporting about his finances wasn't true in order to win. And, he all but concedes he can't with this. https://t.co/7qya7qXhuH

711 Retweets2,455 Likes

September 22nd 2021

https://electionlawblog.org/?p=124721

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/15/federalist-society-under-fire-after-leader-spoke-at-pro-trump-rally-before-riot.html

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/its-been-5-years-since-russian-cash-was-allegedly-funneled-into-the-trump-campaign-why-wasnt-it-charged-until-now

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/21/us/trump-campaign-memo.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/us/politics/trump-dominion-voting.html

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/16/trump-scavino-1327921

https://www.rawstory.com/adam-schiff-select-committee/

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/22/politics/january-6-committee-investigation-latest/index.html

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/21/capitol-attack-panel-trump-white-house-aides

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#political #attempted coup #corrupt GOP #criminal GOP #January 6 2021 #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #corruption #Civil War #US Congress #Debt Ceiling

[unohanadaydreams]

It’s the live blogging for the beginning of the Arrancar arc that I forgot to post after I read it. Just a warning that I talk way too much in this one.

Ichigo looks genuinely SO scared that Tatsuki can see his deputy badge. Not just shocked, but scared. He doesn’t want her to be a target, but as we know, she becomes one after not dying immediately after Yammy does his mass soul suck.

He just got back from the Soul Society and it’s like he’s just remembering ‘oh fuck, I’m home again and all the people I care about are still at risk. Saving Rukia didn’t suddenly change that’.

That one, big battle against Byakuya didn’t suddenly end everything. The world is still changed for him and for the people around him and the happily ever after didn’t come just because he won.

Not sure, because I haven’t gotten to when Ichigo actually takes Shinji up on his offer, but I’m sure what Isshin says is the Central 46 cover up version of things, because as we know, it’s not true.

And Isshin saying this is very funny, because you are ALSO a lawless ex-soul reaper, sir. If you stepped foot in the Seireitei, they would beat the shit out of you. The remaining Shibas would flower cannon their way in and join the party, too (mostly because that’s how they express concern, but yknow).

Real friendship is being so horribly gross to each other that you are embarrassed for yourself and each other. Shinji doesn’t even wanna do this, it’s just something he has to do, to preserve his shaken honor and to make Hiyori regret the day she thought touching his pancake ass was a good idea.

Okay, so I don’t have anything grand to say, just that I really enjoy how ALL of the Arrancars are introduced in the sexiest way possible on panel. Even Yammy looks great when he’s introduced. RIP to the ppl who only know these characters from the anime, because the optics of this arc was lost in translation, for sure.

Like, the designs of the Arrancar are literally so fucking good. Even the designs that ppl say are “ugly” fuck so hard. Kubo truly is un fucking beaten at making seggsy characters.

God this panel FUCKS. Not only the swaths of black that signify Hichigo trying his best to take control of Ichigo the moment he sees a strong opponent, but the way that Ichigo automatically looks to Orihime and Chad because he is genuinely scared that once he loses control, they will be as likely a target as the Arrancar.

It also makes his consequent instinct to push them both away later on, both in his reluctance to speak to Orihime and his insistence that Chad run away instead of fight beside him, more nuanced later on.

He’s not just guilty. He’s scared. He knows that Shinji is right, as much as doesn’t want to get involved with him. The idea that he would not just fail to protect his friends, but be the one putting them in danger pulls him back to how he felt in the beginning, when he was made to realize that his friends and family where at risk due to his spiritual pressure luring in hollows/giving them sight and powers.

And once again, Rukia forces him to understand its not something he can change. And it’s not something he can shoulder alone. Not just when she forces him to speak to Orihime with some fucking honesty in his voice, but also when she looks disappointed at Chad running the opposite direction of Ichigo when Grimmjow shows up, because there is only one reason he would do that (because Ichigo was scared and told him to leave).

Sometimes you just have to slap the self destructive tendencies out of your local human delinquent turned friend because he’s so used to aggression that its the way he’s most comfortable speaking about his baggage in any capacity.

Damn, ma, how’d you package all these onigiri? And don’t you fucking lie to me 🔪🔪🔪

The concept that there are soul reapers that don’t understand mass production is actually so fucking funny.

They go to the human world and treat malls like modern day castles. They are humble gods lording over their mall food court feast.

This is how I know the majority of shinigami know how to sew and cook, because there is no way they can just pop into some local convenience store or fast fashion shop.

Except for the 12th division/R&D. They eat like malnourished college kids trying to develop scurvy for the fun of it and wear embarrassing merch after they spill mountain dew on themselves.

I know some people don’t like that Orihime has so much time dedicated to her feelings of jealousy, but I think its one of the best handled parts of this arc, because her jealousy stems first and foremost from her insecurity that she no longer belongs--that for all her smarts and unique powers, it is not enough and will never be--she is not enough and never will be.

Orihime just got back from the Soul Society, where she feels she has done nothing of help, and she comments on this multiple times. She was not hurt, because she did not battle, and could not hear Isane call out the news of Aizen’s betrayal. She was not strong enough to help Uryu against Mayuri or Ichigo against Byakuya. 

She doesn’t view her contributions in Soul Society as valid, because she is not proficient in battle and above that, she does not want to kill people, even enemies. How could she possibly belong to the same world as Ichigo, Chad, and Uryu when the sight of complete strangers being blown to bits makes her crumple and her every attempt to fight is met with an immediate defeat.

This growing sense of insecurity is fully aggravated to something unbearable when the arrancars show up and Tatsuki, Chad, and Ichigo are all harmed and nothing she does is good enough to stop it. Not just that, but everyone seems to drift farther away from her afterwards. She knows its because they feel bad too, but it sucks. It feels like she’s lost her friends even when they’re right there, avoiding making eye contact with her.

And, I’m sure Orihime does feel jealous of the connection Rukia has with Ichigo, of her ability to make Ichigo stand up and look his fears in the eye, but that seems like the easier thing to admit than that she feels completely unimportant and useless as a person compared to someone like Rukia, who originates from the supernatural world that Orihime is struggling to navigate.

Not just that, but Rangiku is EXACTLY right. It is very human to reject those kinds of feelings or take those feelings and weaponize them in an attempt to put power over someone and therefore those feelings.

But, Orihime doesn’t do that. She is thankful to Rukia. She loves Rukia. She loves that Ichigo can depend on Rukia--that she and her friends can depend on Rukia.

She has emotional competence and strength that a lot of teenagers straight up do not have and she cries to Rangiku, convinced that she is irredeemable and weak for admitting that she wants to be more. That she wants to be grown up and graceful and strong and she doesn’t like herself compared to Rukia.

I also really like the full scope of what Rangiku says, because AGAIN, she’s right. The idea that you only need one person and that Ichigo doesn’t draw his strength from all his friends and family, isn’t true. The idea that Orihime is losing a competition and Ichigo has already chosen the winner isn’t true.

Calm down, Orihime. Keep doing your best for the people you love. Keep doing your best by Ichigo and he’ll keep doing his best for the people he loves. He’ll keep doing his best by you, too. Nothing’s been lost and nothing’s been won. You’ve seen the finish line already--death--and all you can do now keep trying to fight it.

I just really like how well they lead up to this moment, because Orihime does broadcast her feelings of insecurity, even when she dresses it up as her being silly and care-free through out the previous arc and beginning of this one. And how they execute it, as well.

#manga live blog #bleach live blog for the shinigami soul

[wtffundiefamilies]

From reddit user bubblegum1286.  What might have been for Josh.

I interned for a year as a counseling grad student for an SOTP (sex offender treatment prevention) program. Here's the help Josh should have received years ago...

The program I worked with had men from ages 16 up to old old men. It was a court-mandated program that was required as part of their probation or parole (depending on their sentencing). The crimes ranged from possession of child pornography to aggravated sexual assault and torture with a deadly weapon. Some guys had never served any actual time in jail, while one man had just been released after 45 years in prison. So we had a hodgepodge you could say.

The program in my local city is/was run by a PhD psychologist and a licensed marriage and family therapist who also happened to be a former sheriff's deputy who worked for twenty years in law enforcement. These guys didn't take bullshit. They were amazingly professional and working with them was an excellent experience for me. Only two graduate students were selected each year to intern in this program, and I considered myself very honored to get to work with them. It was eye-opening to say the least.

The primary aspects of the program have been explained by other snarky mental health professionals (I love that you guys came out of the woodworks to add to this). Accountability is huge.

We did six hours of group therapy sessions every single week. Every week, their POs would come by to make sure they were attending in person. Arrest warrants were issued for missing even one session. This was a very important aspect of the program.

Our sessions always involved open accountability in which we would revisit the nature of the crimes involved. We swept nothing under the rug. They went around the room every single week and stated why they were in attendance with this particular group of people. This isn't intended to shame them, but rather to keep their crimes at the forefront of their thoughts so they stay more closely connected with the nature of their crimes. Distancing oneself from the nature and weight of your own sins or compartmentalizing "that aspect of your life" causes you to feel like "I'd never do that again! That's in the past. That's so long ago, I don't even remember."

The victims will never forget.

So each session would go around the circle like this: "I'm Josh. I served three months in county and a year of probation for touching my underage sisters in their private places." The doctor would then say, "Please only use correct anatomical terms." And J would then say, "I touched my sister over her clothes on her vagina and under her clothes on her breast."

They would go around the room saying this. The new ones struggled very badly saying what they did or using correct terminology for body parts, but the guys who had been in the program for years would rattle this off like ordering from McD's.

We focused on all kinds of things in therapy- triggers, temptations, personal struggles that might weaken their resolve to never offend again, etc. For example, the loss of a job could send an offender into a mental tailspin where they start thinking about offending again. So those things were addressed and worked through.

Triggers were a huge topic of discussion. We used a method of cognitive behavioral therapy where the men would recognize their own thought patterns and stop themselves before they even began walking down that mental path. If there were certain smells associated with their sexual fantasies or certain songs on the radio or locations, whatever, we would work with the men to take these thoughts and triggers captive and be fully aware of them. If someone shared that they had a fantasy (sexual or violent in nature) about a woman at the grocery store, it was noted and reported to their PO. But then in the actual group session, it was dissected entirely. Not "what was she wearing." No. More of like, "What triggered your weakness? Were you taking care of yourself and your own thoughts? Have you been seeking out pornography lately?" That sort of thing.

Now, I didn't participate in the one on one sessions. The men were regularly given psychosexual polygraph tests if there was any concern that they were potentially re-offending. (I understand there's plenty of debate about the validity of polygraphs, but this is a fairly standard practice at finding out if someone has been reoffending in a counseling type setting like this one).

They also went through a kind of test called the penile plethysmograph where an offender would actually have a device put around his penis and he would be shown images and the device would read what aroused him. I, as a female intern student, never participated in these tests, but I was told all about them by the doctors at the facility. I had a lot of questions regarding how these men were held accountable outside of the group therapy sessions and PO check ins. From my understanding, this tool was used primarily on the child sex offenders, not the cases of adult sexual assault, but I could be mistaken. It's been a few years.

The program made a huge emphasis on accountability outside of the group. We kept in close contact with these men's families, bosses, and other people who would serve as accountability partners throughout the re-entrance to society process. We made a big emphasis on service. "Your brother allowed for you to move in with him after your release. What have you done for him this week?" I had one guy who got out of prison after a very long stint, moved in with his brother (who's home was approved since it was not near a school, playground, community center, or church), and he struggled to find a job. No one would hire a felon, much less a registered sex offender. So he spent that entire summer renovating his brother's garage. He built shelving, organized junk, built cabinets, etc. I could tell it was healing for him to give back to his brother for giving him this second chance. (He was one of the good ones who I walked away truly believing wouldn't offend again. It's been six years and so far he hasn't). We also checked in with these family members, friends, and employers so they were a big part of the process.

We frequently talked about improper or inappropriate or disrespectful kinds of attention. In other words, we were trying to teach these men to stop being creepy or stop being predatorial towards others.

We offered sex education in a healthy, rehabilitative way. We talked a lot about consent. We talked about how you can violate a person with your eyes even if you aren't touching them or talking to them.

These guys also have no internet, no computers, no smart phones, etc. That was also monitored.

This program was the end of the line. You don't come, you go to jail. You don't participate, you go to jail. These men had all been convicted, so this wasn't an alternative program to time served. I understand this may be more than Josh would have endured were he turned in appropriately, but I think he still would have endured a similar rehabilitation program.

I know people might jump on me because Josh was still a minor at the time of his crimes, and I realize that some of these methods wouldn't be utilized on a minor. However, my point is this: If he had been properly reported, the courts, counselors, doctors, etc. would have moved heaven and earth to try and rehabilitate him and to protect those girls.

I understand, as a parent, that the idea of your child doing something so unspeakable is stomach-churning. I can't even fathom how horrifying it was for Meesh to hear that he was touching the girls. However, I do not believe that all hope is lost for all sexual criminals - to a certain point. I worry that Josh is past the point of no return. To hear the descriptions of the porn he was viewing is sickening.

Unfortunately, we won't ever know what could have become of him if he had been dealt with sooner.

#Josh Duggar #JimBob Duggar #Michelle Duggar #sin in the camp #team legitimate rape #duggar family

[imaginealllthefandoms]

hello! can I make a prompt request for bash (reign) x femme self insert? #10 “I’m too drunk to have this conversation right now.” 💕

Characters: Female reader x Sebastian de Poitiers Fandom: Reign Warnings: alcohol consumption Word Count: 1072 A/N: Here you go, anon, thank you for requesting! Hope you like it 💖

Originally posted by allthefandom-imagines-blog

French Court had never been as alive as that night, with echoes of vibrant laughter and riveting music reverberating in the walls of the golden ballroom. Nobles from all France had come to the celebration and the royal family had made sure everything was as perfect and as magnificent as it could be, and indeed the noblemen seemed rather impressed, if not by the food and decoration, certainly by the rich wine and the graceful women flaunting their dresses and dancing happily in the center of the room.

The atmosphere was one of beauty and splendor, to the point where you were starting to think that even the stars in the sky outside would want to come inside to join the celebration. Or perhaps that was just the wine talking, you thought as you grabbed your sixth or seventh glass from a silver tray nearby.

“(Y/N)!” Lady Lola exclaimed as she watched you taking a long sip of the drink. The excitement of that night had replaced the blood in your veins with the sweetness of the wine, a much needed experience as you had lost count to how many noblemen you had talked to and rejected that evening. The only one you were interested in wasn’t there, off to fulfill some duty as King's Deputy as always. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough to drink for the night?”

“No, that lord over there has been trying to court me all night and he’s coming this way right now so…” you trailed off, bringing the glass to your lips again. But before the man could approach you and you could find another excuse to avoid him, you felt a shadow being casted over you and saw your friends Lola, Kenna and Greer exchanging rapid, meaningful glances.

“What?” You asked them, but instead of their answer a soft voice fell upon your neck, your spine protesting in gentle shivers when his breath fanned your ear.

“(Y/N), may I speak with you for a moment?” You turned around abruptly at the sound of that voice, almost bumping into Sebastian as he had leaned into you to talk over the loud music. You tripped over your own feet and felt the walls and the floor dangerously quavering as your head spun. Almost instantly Bash’s careful hands grabbed you, keeping you in your place as his green eyes bored into yours. They looked like those multicolored marbles kids played with in the gardens. “Are you alright?”

“Y-yes,” you stuttered, unsure if you were more stunned by the alcohol in your system or his sudden presence in front of you. “What do you wish to speak to me about?”

“Come,” he asked, tangling his arm in yours to drag you away from the confusion. You found a calmer spot by the entrance of the room and rested your back against the cold wall while trying to decipher what other treasures were hidden behind the emeralds in his eyes. There wasn’t a single part of you that didn’t love him, and yet you had no idea if there was even one of him that loved you back. “It’s about last night. I saw you leaving Francis’ chambers, and I’d like to know why.”

You rolled your eyes at him and scoffed. “Oh God, I’m too drunk to have this conversation right now. Can it not wait until like… never?”

“(Y/N)”, he called, and even if his stare was urgent there was a softness in his tone he rarely ever used with anyone but you. “Are you two together?”

“What?” You snorted, still feeling the taste of the wine in your tongue as blurry dots started to invade your vision. “You know Francis loves Mary.”

“What about you?” He asked, and his voice was now lower, almost insecure. “Do you love him?”

You brought a hand to your temple and massaged it, trying to ease the dizziness you were feeling. Alcohol could be intoxicating, but nothing compared to Bash.

“As a friend? Yes. Nothing more. Why do you care if I was leaving his chambers?”

“For nothing,” he answered, tone contained and veiled. There was a sudden urge in you to touch his lips with yours to see if you could make the veil fall. You knew he wasn’t telling you the whole truth. “I just care about you, that’s all.”

“As sweet as that is, I think you’re jealous.”

“I’m not jealous,” he countered. “I just need to know if there’s something going on between you and Francis because if there is I’ll need to… protect you. A King’s mistress is always—”

“I’m not his mistress!” You exclaimed, raising your voice. “I told you, there’s nothing going on between him and me.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you,” Bash said sincerely. “I just can’t think of any other reason as to why you’d be in his chambers.”

“You can’t?” You raised an eyebrow, suddenly tired of hiding it, of carrying all those feelings inside you and not letting them out. “Well, I can. It was supposed to be a surprise, but since you’re so curious and stubborn, I’ll tell you. I’ve been meaning to plan a boat trip for you, and Francis’ been helping me with it.”

“A boat trip? For me? Why?”

“Because I like you!” You blurted out, not even feeling flustered for finally admitting it. “And I wanted to do something special for you. To thank you for always being there for me. There, now you know.”

“I…” Bash brought his thumb to your face, caressing your cheek in the most delicate of ways. “I like you too, (Y/N). Very much.”

“You do?”

“Yes, how could I not?” He smiled. “But I’m not sure I deserve all that effort.”

“Of course you do!” You rolled your eyes at him. “Even if you ruined the surprise.”

“I’m sorry,” he chuckled, “I promise next time I’ll trust you.”

“Good,” you said, and then a playful smile bloomed from your lips as your hands grabbed his. “But if you were so jealous about me leaving Francis' chambers... how about I pass by yours tonight?”

Bash stared at you, red painting over his cheeks before he relaxed and gave you a dazzling smile.

“I’d love that,” he declared, then offering you a small smirk and leaning towards you to whisper in your ear. “But I don't think you'll want to leave my chambers anytime soon.”

#bash prompt #reign #requested #sebastian prompt #requests #reader insert #bash x reader #prompt #anonymous #sebastian x reader #female reader

[geeky-politics-46]

The Asgardian Candidate

Loki/The West Wing FanFiction Crossover

Chapter 1 - “Off To The Races”

“Where did this guy even come from?! How was he not even on our radar?! It's like he appeared out of thin air. I don't even have his last name yet, & what is the deal with those stupid horns?"

Josh Lyman, the deputy chief of staff, questoned as he paced back & forth in the strategy meeting for the president's re-election campaign.

He was just as frustrated as the rest of the west wing senior staff. How could they suddenly be behind in the polls? How had this snuck up on them?

An incumbent president whose popularity was the highest of his term, was now trailing to the mysterious candidate Loki. Sure he was tall, charming, & handsome; but he was a complete newcomer to the world of politics.        

“I have no idea, but I need to know what to tell the press about our numbers. We dropped 10 points to him since he entered the race 3 days ago. They'll also be expecting confirmation on the debate schedule too." C.J. responded, nervously tapping her pen against her briefing book.

She turned to Toby & Sam hoping for any hint of an answer. Toby was slumped in his chair staring into space, seemingly in disbelief of their current standing. Sam leaned forward holding his hands to his face wheels visibly turning in his head.

"Maybe it was a bad poll? Maybe we are at least still within the margin of error?" Sam offered, grasping at any straw he could find.

"Oh well that makes me feel better, maybe we are only losing by 3-5 points overnight. It’s The Washington Post Sam, not Cosmo. Even when they’re wrong they’re not that wrong." Josh snarked back, his fists clenching in his hair.

“Donna!!!" He bellowed without even turning to the open office door "did you find anything yet? Please tell me you found something on this guy".

Donna, his assistant, quickly scurried into the room carrying a manila file folder with papers sticking out from every angle. "As a matter of fact Josh I did." Before she could even extend her arm to hand him the file Josh snatched it away & began rifling through the papers. "Your welcome" she said sarcastically before excusing herself from the office.

“Alright, let's see... Full name is Loki Laufeyson. Family includes mother & father, mother is deceased, as well as an older brother named Thor. Not seeing anything about the horns. Originally from... Asgard. That can't be right can it? Is there an Asgard, Oregon or Kentucky or something I don’t know about?”

One by one they looked at each other in confusion. "Wait, does that mean he's not a natural born citizen? Doesn't that automatically disqualify him?" Toby asked with a sudden interest in the conversation.

“Don't get your hopes up to high on that." A voice interjected from the office doorway. Leo McGarry, the president’s chief of staff, had finally arrived at the meeting. Despite having called it himself a last minute call had kept him late. He already looked exhausted leaning against the doorway of Josh’s office.

“We are now in uncharted waters people. The Supreme Court just issued a statement confirming he is qualified to run for president. Because Asgard isn't technically another country they are allowing it. The chief justice wrote the majority opinion himself. Unless or until Congress can pass an amendment declaring Asgard & the rest of these new places or planets I guess as sovereign states & they are not subject to our national laws. He can run."

The momentary hopes of the staff now dashed, they shifted in their seats & settled in for a long night of oppo research. They still had the rest of the papers from Donna’s folder to go through. They wanted to learn everything the could about this Loki Laufeyson, & the sooner the better.

As he crossed his arms against his chest & dropped his head back, Toby pondered allowed "There has to be something we can use against this guy. We just have to find it. He may be new to politics, but everyone has a past. Everyone's got a weakness."

——————————

Reclined behind his desk in his campaign office, feet up & hands clasped behind his head. Loki closed his eyes & listened to the staffers in the other room busy scuttling about. 

If he had known it would be this easy he would have run for president years ago. He smiled at the thought of the chaos he had already caused. Just a few days into joining the race for president of the United States & the polls were already turned on their head. He hardly even had to use his magic. Many people had supported or joined his campaign willingly, even excitedly. It seemed the idea of burning the current system to the ground appealled to a surprisingly large sect of voters.

If it weren't for all the menial tasks of campaigning he probably could have done it single handedly, but the God of mischief had no patience or interest in making signs or phone banking. So he would tolerate the Midgardians doing that work for him. He liked to think of them as his own little army.

Really they were more like rats, or some other form of small bothersome creature, but for the time being they were what he had to work with.

They would help him finally ascend to his throne.

A sudden knock on the door snapped him from his thoughts.

"Sir, the White House press briefing s on." a small timid girl said through the barely cracked door before quickly closing it again.

The staff had already learned not to bother Loki in his office unless it was absolutely necessary, & for the most part to only speak when spoken to. Only a select few staffers were exempt from this rule. One staffer who managed everyone else. Relaying orders & crafting policy, something Loki had very little real interest in. Also two others who handled his press requests.

Loki sat upright in his chair careful to not disturb his golden horned crown, & straightened his emerald green waistcoat & well fitted black suit jacket. His clothing immediately made him stand out from the current president, & he was meticulous about his appearance. Call it vanity if you must, but Loki knew that he was his own best advertising.

He reached for the remote & turned on the TV in the corner of the room. His smile widened as he heard the topic of discussion was already about his own candidacy.

His competitor’s press secretary was breaking the news to the press that the Supreme Court had ruled in Loki's favor. That move had required a little magical coercion, but it was a pittance to pay to eliminate his only real potential legal challenge.

He listened more intently as the woman behind the podium, C.J. (at least he thought that was her name), began to wrap up.

"President Bartlet respects the court’s decision, & maintains that he welcomes the competition. He firmly believes the American people deserve to make their own decision about our countrie’s path forward. With that I can also now confirm that the president has officially agreed to the 3 pre-scheduled debates with Mr. Laufeyson. As you know the 1st debate is set for just over 3 weeks. That's it for today guys, thanks."  With that she closed her notebook & briskly exited, leaving the press shouting questions behind her.

Loki could tell he had Bartlet's staff on pins & needles already. He could practically feel their nervousness through the screen. They were right where he wanted them.

Even the press seemed to be ever aware of Loki's larger than life presence, even when he was no where near. 

“Glorious" he whispered under his breath as his lips curled into a chesire cat grin & his green eyes flashed with a bright gold shimmer. He was going to enjoy every second of this.

#marvel president loki #president loki #loki fanfiction #loki fanfic #marvel loki #marvel fanfiction #loki odinson #loki laufeyson #mcu loki #mcu fanfiction #loki disney+ #the west wing #west wing fanfic #west wing #talk politics to me #political fanfic #west wing fanfiction #josh lyman #cj cregg #leo mcgarry #president bartlet #bartlet white house #toby ziegler #sam seaborn #donna moss #president loki fanfic #president loki fanfiction

[3rwqfesaf]

the greater part of the strength of both houses had gone south with Robb

Schoettler were approved pursuant to this process.. Nothing burns calories better than swimming fast. He was one of the first newsmen to fly on B 17 raids over Germany launched from England. So I tried writing it GP style. It is fun, extreme and you will have a blast. Try some of these, and you might not have to do a thorough clean as often as you do now and instead do a little surface cleaning in between big cleans.. When he tried to scream, she spat their tongue out.. Having wide feet makes it essential to find the best pair of wide width high top basketball shoes. It was always dusk inside the base of the Great Pyramid. The candle burned with a dark red flame, she knew; for those with eyes, the corpse would have seemed awash in a ruddy glow. jeans moda 2015 donna amazonThis is not rhyme and on the other hand attraction of the city. Tyrion managed to avoid retching his way through all of this, chiefly thanks to the lack of wine. Cherish these times, make the most of them, because all too soon you'll try out your wings in the world and we are convinced the future will

salomon prezzi scarpe sportive

be yours for the taking.. Half the Umbers would be across the field with Whoresbane, fighting beneath the flayed man of the Dreadfort, and the greater part of the strength of both houses had gone south with Robb, never to return. He helped us identify neighborhoods to narrow down on, based on our style of living and desire for a short commute. It disgusts me that these researchers

Mens ADIDAS ORIGINALS

went to publication with such extreme findings without ever actually validating their conclusions. Navy Capt. I still want more answers. 3. She was out of New Ghis and returning there by way of Yunkai after trading at Meereen. When taking your skateboard onto the plane, take the wheels off and place the skateboard and wheels in a bag. Stood in line for about three hours and finally got in there, he said. I am liking our coach and manager tandem. Allie for him represents the ideal of innocence and purity and the world which he opposes to the false world of grown ups. I’ve noticed that before now, for a long time past. Sa passion a commenc trs tt: mickey egeres babakocsiJ'ai toujours t fascin par les chaussures de sport. You can even use an alias to create a shortcut to another hard disk.. The deputy found abrasions and a severe bite mark on the woman.. It was very tart, like biting into a lemon. I knew, too, that by now the prince was tired of her, and yet their relations had not been broken off. Back in Texas, the Wincott family Mom Pamela (Lauren Graham, totally underused), Dad Ray (Thomas Haden Church) and teenager Justin

jean coquelin

(Josh Wiggins) are grieving at the funeral when they meet Max, who, heartbreakingly, knows his boss is in the coffin. Hagel, in case you've been in a cave, is a former Republican senator from Nebraska, fairly conservative, but restrained when it comes to waging war. You check me out, pay for it, put the money in your pocket. BOARDMAN, Ohio Ten years ago, when Max Lee of Canfield was just six years old, his parents started him on the keyboard. Lord Snow, must I remind you? You swore an oath.”. Monday, July 14, Itasca Community Library, 500 W. Broken men, he thought. Your personal risk would at least have proved, that though a murderer, you nike pegasus 34 hombre sprinter were not a coward. If you mountain biking, you have to stay alert, and that really wonderful, Alderman says.. A manager simply cannot put a value nike air vortex desert sand on a player who is available week in, week out and Antonio is one of them. I was running toward my children. Prior to joining Scotsburn as director of finance in 2005, Burrows worked as a controller for two companies in Nova Scotia and in professional services with Deloitte's Halifax office.. The great hall was dim and smoky. In his college days, Poloniato played cornerback at Bishop's University while earning a Bachelor degree business administration degree with a major in entrepreneurship. Haldon nodded. I'll never forget the night we watched through the beams as Sputnik made its way across the sky.". Ortiz watched the gunman flee, and sat with Arellano while he lay dying. I will not do it. All sections of country have faults peculiar to themselves. “Down. Enjoying Mediterranean and Middle Eastern restaurants around Madison is a great way to explore our city's culinary diversity. Retropolitan's stock mirrors Amy's personal aesthetic pretty well: sharp and contemporary, but still feminine and sentimental. Ford calls it a crossover. 20 21.. After the Houston Rockets got 14 fast reebok reverse jam lowbreak points on Tuesday, Coach Flip Saunders commented on how Andray Blatche and JaVale McGee run differently depending on what end of the court they are on, leaving opportunities for opposing big men to get easy baskets. Installing the Catalyst 12.4 allowed the Radeon HD 7970 to play at 41.8 FPS. “I have sworn a vow,” he told Hildy wearily.. I learned to fight in this yard, he thought, remembering warm summer days spent sparring with Robb and Jon Snow under

cazadora vaquera tommy hilfiger

the watchful eyes of old Ser Rodrik. "The most significant production of them all," said Turbow, was Max Reinhardt's spectacle, Mendelssohn's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," performed at the Hollywood Bowl in 1934. Four, with a bit of scrimping. He will not refuse his own mother. The entire system is being held up with smoke and mirrors until 2012. From the

chanel ágynemű

eerie, bone white Exoskeleton made of resin and produced through 3 D digital printing by Janina Alleyne to the disco ballish silver sparklers without a heel by Giuseppe Zanotti (also Ban's); nary a style is left unrepresented by FIT.. (Ref 4). Sit, Ghost. Had very little to eat. Anyone with information should call Wiltshire Police via 101 or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 where information can be left anonymously.. In the Daily Virginian of Nov. She wanted to say something to me alone. He was the oldest of his three, the biggest, the fiercest. FRASER, Dorothy Dorothy Jean Fraser, 60, formerly of Stratford, passed away in the Maples Home for Seniors in Tavistock on Friday, December 13, 2013. Hugh Vermont had no such difficulties dispatching this one and Northern found themselves in a 7 point game. That much had not changed about him. So keep 1084MHz in mind, this is where the video card started out. It been a part of Tennessee culture for 20 years.". Why Rowling chose to write the screenplay, rather than trusting the team that made the movies, is a mystery. Even better yet have a neighborhood coat drive or a company coat drive enlisting your fellow employees to get involved and bring their coats in. He the team starting quarterback and safety, its captain and leader, a Harvard University commit and a Cadet Colonel, the highest ranking officer in the school.. 527 2173. DEAR HELOISE: A friend recently had a death in her family. Another great Yankees gift idea usually are personalized American nhl jerseys. The Time Standard will be holding a food drive during the challenge. “So when I got a letter today he had to run off at once to avoid meeting my eyes.

[newstfionline]

Saturday, July 31, 2021

Biden to allow eviction moratorium to expire Saturday (AP) The Biden administration announced Thursday it will allow a nationwide ban on evictions to expire Saturday, arguing that its hands are tied after the Supreme Court signaled the moratorium would only be extended until the end of the month. The White House said President Joe Biden would have liked to extend the federal eviction moratorium due to spread of the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus. Instead, Biden called on “Congress to extend the eviction moratorium to protect such vulnerable renters and their families without delay.” By the end of March, 6.4 million American households were behind on their rent, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. As of July 5, roughly 3.6 million people in the U.S. said they faced eviction in the next two months, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.

Evacuation flight brings 200 Afghans to US (AP) The first flight evacuating Afghans who worked alongside Americans in Afghanistan brought more than 200 people, including scores of children and babies in arms, to resettlement in the United States on Friday, and President Joe Biden welcomed them home. The evacuation flights, bringing out former interpreters and others who fear retaliation from Afghanistan’s Taliban for having worked with American service members and civilians, highlight American uncertainty about how Afghanistan’s government and military will fare after the last U.S. combat forces leave that country in the coming weeks. Family members are accompanying the interpreters, translators and others on the flights out. The commercial airliner carrying the 221 Afghans in the special visa program, including 57 children and 15 babies, according to an internal U.S. government document obtained by The Associated Press, touched down in Dulles, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C.

Not in control (NYT) Consider these Covid-19 mysteries: In India—where the Delta variant was first identified and caused a huge outbreak—cases have plunged over the past two months. A similar drop may now be underway in Britain. There is no clear explanation for these declines. / In the U.S., cases started falling rapidly in early January. The decline began before vaccination was widespread and did not follow any evident changes in Americans’ Covid attitudes. / In March and April, the Alpha variant helped cause a sharp rise in cases in the upper Midwest and Canada. That outbreak seemed poised to spread to the rest of North America—but did not. / This spring, caseloads were not consistently higher in parts of the U.S. that had relaxed masking and social distancing measures (like Florida and Texas) than in regions that remained vigilant. / Large parts of Africa and Asia still have not experienced outbreaks as big as those in Europe, North America and South America. / How do we solve these mysteries? Michael Osterholm, who runs an infectious disease research center at the University of Minnesota, suggests that people keep in mind one overriding idea: humility. “We’ve ascribed far too much human authority over the virus,” he told me.

Diasporas at the Olympics (Foreign Policy) Cuban athletes at the Tokyo Olympics are evidence of the exodus from the island over the years. By the Cuban sports journalist Francys Romero’s count, more than 20 athletes at the Olympics were born in Cuba but became naturalized in and are now playing for other countries. That’s a group almost one-third the size of Cuba’s own delegation.

Peru’s politics (Foreign Policy) Peru’s new President Pedro Castillo chose Guido Bellido, a congressman and fellow member of his Marxist Free Peru party, as his prime minister as part of a cabinet announcement on Thursday, setting up a tense confirmation battle with the country’s opposition-led Congress. Bellido courted controversy in a local media interview in April when he expressed sympathy for members of Shining Path—a Maoist guerilla group who fought a bloody insurgency during the 1980s and 1990s.

Death toll in Turkish wildfires rises to four, blazes rage on (Reuters) The death toll from wildfires on Turkey’s southern coast has risen to four and firefighters were battling blazes for a third day on Friday after the evacuation of dozens of villages and some hotels. More than 60 wildfires have broken out across 17 provinces on Turkey’s Aegean and Mediterranean coasts this week, officials have said. Villages and some hotels have been evacuated in areas popular with tourists, and TV footage had shown people fleeing across fields as they watched fires close in on their homes.

Three Jehovah’s Witnesses sentenced to six or more years in Russian prison for their faith (RNS) Three Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia were convicted and sentenced to prison for practicing their faith on Thursday (July 29). Vilen Avanesov, 68, was sentenced to six years, and his son Arsen Avanesov, 37, along with a third defendant, Aleksandr Parkov, 53, were both sentenced to six-and-a-half years. All three men have already spent more than two years in pretrial detention. “These men should never, ever have had to spend a minute in prison, and yet they’ve been locked up for two years,” said Rachel Denber, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia division. The three Jehovah’s Witnesses were detained in Rostov-on-Don in May 2019 and accused of continuing the operations of a Jehovah’s Witness organization that had been liquidated. All three were charged with organizing extremist activities. In January 2020, Arsen Avanesov was also accused of “financing extremist activities” by collecting donations to rent a room to meet with other Jehovah’s Witnesses. Near the trial’s conclusion, Arsen Avanesov spoke of his devotion to God: “I dedicated my life to him and did it sincerely. … I don’t want, I can’t and will not give up my promise.” The sentences for the three men are considered particularly harsh in a country where rape is punishable by three years in prison and kidnapping by five. The sentencing follows a 2017 ruling that categorizes the religious group as “extremist.”

Myanmar leaders ‘weaponizing’ COVID-19, residents say (AP) With coronavirus deaths rising in Myanmar, allegations are growing from residents and human rights activists that the military government, which seized control in February, is using the pandemic to consolidate power and crush opposition. Supplies of medical oxygen are running low, and the government has restricted its private sale in many places, saying it is trying to prevent hoarding. But that has led to widespread allegations that the stocks are being directed to government supporters and military-run hospitals. At the same time, medical workers have been targeted after spearheading a civil disobedience movement that urged professionals and civil servants not to cooperate with the government, known as the State Administrative Council. “They have stopped distributing personal protection equipment and masks, and they will not let civilians who they suspect are supporting the democracy movement be treated in hospitals, and they’re arresting doctors who support the civil disobedience movement,” said Yanghee Lee, the U.N.’s former Myanmar human rights expert and a founding member of the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar. “With the oxygen, they have banned sales to civilians or people who are not supported by the SAC, so they’re using something that can save the people against the people,” she said. “The military is weaponizing COVID.”

North Korea began the summer in a food crisis. A heat wave and drought could make it worse. (Washington Post) At the beginning of the summer, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un described the country’s food situation as “tense” after border closures caused by the coronavirus pandemic and crippling floods. By midsummer, a cycle of grinding heat and record-low rainfall could be a sign of a greater food crisis and hunger ahead. Temperatures in North Korea have climbed as high as 102 degrees in some areas this week—a shock in a country where temperatures do not often break 100 degrees. The heat wave has been compounded by a growing drought. North Korea had gotten 21.2 millimeters, or less than an inch, of rain as of mid-July. It is so hot that state media reports have been repeatedly warning residents about the dangers of dehydration and low sodium levels, especially for the elderly and those at risk of heart disease or stroke. They are urging residents to stay out of the sun, eat more fruits and vegetables, and drink more than two liters (about two quarts) of water per day, according to NK News, which monitors North Korea’s state media.

Hong Kong protester given 9-year term in 1st security case (AP) A pro-democracy protester was sentenced Friday to nine years in prison in the closely watched first prosecution under Hong Kong’s national security law as the ruling Communist Party tightens control over the territory. Tong Ying-kit, 24, was convicted of inciting secession and terrorism for driving his motorcycle into a group of police officers at a July 1, 2020, rally. He carried a flag bearing the banned slogan, “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.” Tong’s sentence was longer than the three years requested by the prosecution. He faced a possible maximum of life in prison. Tong’s sentence is a “hammer blow to free speech” and shows the law is “a tool to instill terror” in government critics, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific regional director, Yamini Mishra, said in a statement. The law “lacks any exemption for legitimate expression or protest,” Mishra said. “The judgment at no point considered Tong’s rights to freedom of expression and protest.” Defense lawyers said Tong’s penalty should be light because the court hadn’t found the attack was deliberate, no one was injured, and the secession-related offense qualified as minor under the law.

New Zealand rated best place to survive global societal collapse (Guardian) New Zealand, Iceland, the UK, Tasmania and Ireland are the places best suited to survive a global collapse of society, according to a study. The researchers said human civilisation was “in a perilous state” due to the highly interconnected and energy-intensive society that had developed and the environmental damage this had caused. A collapse could arise from shocks, such as a severe financial crisis, the impacts of the climate crisis, destruction of nature, an even worse pandemic than Covid-19 or a combination of these, the scientists said. To assess which nations would be most resilient to such a collapse, countries were ranked according to their ability to grow food for their population, protect their borders from unwanted mass migration, and maintain an electrical grid and some manufacturing ability. Islands in temperate regions and mostly with low population densities came out on top.

Ethiopian roadblock (NYT) Aid workers in Ethiopia claim that an unofficial Ethiopian government blockade has cut off the only road into the conflict-torn region where millions of Ethiopians face the threat of mass starvation. A relief convoy headed for Tigray came under fire on the road on July 18, forcing it to turn around. On Tuesday, the World Food Program said 170 trucks loaded with relief aid were stranded in Semera, the capital of the neighboring Afar region, waiting for Ethiopian permission to make the trek into Tigray. The blockade is intensifying what some call the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in a decade. The crisis comes during an intensifying war, which has deepened ethnic tensions and stoked fears that Ethiopia will collapse. The United Nations estimates that 400,000 people there are living in famine-like conditions, and another 4.8 million need urgent help. The Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, who won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, said last week that his government was providing “unfettered humanitarian access” and committed to “the safe delivery of critical supplies to its people in the Tigray region.” However, Mr. Abiy’s ministers have publicly accused aid workers of helping and even arming the Tigrayan fighters, leading to aid workers being attacked at airports, and even killed.

#headlines #news

[treatian]

The Chronicles of the Dark One:  Breaking the Curse

Chapter 9:  Birds and Bugs

Just because he was anticipating the breaking of the Curse didn't mean he was going to be stupid about it. There were things in his life that were important, things that he couldn't risk losing, and if a girl like Ashley Boyd could break into his shop, he had to assume others could as well. He'd disabled the camera so that he was safe, but the downside was that now he couldn't use it himself. So, his conclusion was: if it was important, it needed to be transferred elsewhere, somewhere he still considered safe. The morning after the robbery, he'd packed up Bae's shawl, Belle's chipped cup, and the long slim box that held his dagger. He'd gone home and taken those items with him. Now he had to decide what to do with them.

His house was a mess. It always had been. He had hazy memories of it being that way since his aunts died, which meant it had been that way since he'd arrived in Storybrooke. It didn't particularly bother him; he only lived in a few rooms. But it would have bothered Belle. She'd have set herself to cleaning it and keeping it organized. And so, he placed her cup nicely on a table that was more or less uncluttered, somewhere that was safe from his bad habits, a place he could see it every day, but it would appear to simply be a decoration to anyone else. Baelfire's shawl wasn't so much a shawl as it was a scrap of cloth. It looked like a rag, and when he reflected on the life that they'd lived before, he hated to admit it, but the truth was that it was a rag. He folded it as nicely as he could and then set it in a drawer in the kitchen reserved for the rags. It concealed itself.

But as for his dagger…that was going to be harder to hide. For now, it was stashed inside his pillowcase. He went to sleep feeling it beneath his head each night and woke each morning ever aware of its existence. There was something ironic and yet familiar about that. But the pillowcase wouldn't do, not forever. He needed to make alternative plans for it. Bae's shawl and Belle's cup were items he didn't want to lose. But losing the dagger was a lot more dangerous. And without magic, without the ability to constantly feel for it and be aware, he needed something much more creative for it.

He spent the next two days brainstorming ideas for where to hide the dagger and how to hide the dagger. Much like he'd found Maleficent if Regina was watching, he needed to come up with a time when he knew that she would be distracted. That should have been something easily handled, it should have been something he could rely on Dove for, but as of right now, he was having a hard time thinking he could rely on Dove for anything.

The previous night, he'd been in the shop when he'd felt the Earth shake, the power flicker, and heard the sounds of half a dozen car alarms blast to life. He'd sent Dove, who was still tailing Emma, to investigate, and he'd reported a few hours later that the explosion had been in one of the old town mines. Regina was using it as an excuse to finally shutter the mines. He'd thought nothing of it at the time. Something like that seemed too natural for it to be part of the Curse breaking. But he'd been shocked earlier today when Dove had sent him another message today. Henry had gone into the mines. Archie had gone with Emma and Graham to try and get Henry out of the mines when it appeared that somehow Archie and Henry had become trapped inside. Emma, along with half the town, was working to free the pair.

"And Regina is allowing such a thing?" he questioned through a quick text message.

"In all the confusion, I forgot to tell you. Emma Swan was the new deputy, appointed by Graham. Today's her first day."

That was all it had taken to anger him. He was paying Dove good money to watch the girl, paying him to be his eyes and ears. And he'd just "forgotten" to tell him that she'd found a job? A job working for the man that the Evil Queen shared her bed with? A job that gave her access to damn near anything and everything in Storybrooke?! If he'd had magic, Dove would have found himself on the other end of a tight fist. Fortunately for him, there wasn't magic. And he didn't dare show up at the mine site. He had a role to play. Being curious and caring were not words that were in Mr. Gold's dictionary. He couldn't show up at the scene because he wanted to watch, and he couldn't think of a reason to go down on his own.

Dove sent him messages throughout the day, messages that he must have thought he cared for. "Half the town is here working to free the boy." "They found an old shaft they're trying to use as access." "Boy and Doc pulled from the shaft." He didn't care for any of them except for the last one. "Going home," was all it had said. Going home? He nearly laughed out loud at that one. First, he'd forgotten to share crucial information. Then he'd decided to share unimportant information while being certain where the girl was. Now that she was going to be leaving, he was leaving her too. His thinking was backward. And now, to top the encounter off, he'd been sending messages to Dove telling him not to go, to keep watching the girl. Now that Henry was free, he needed to know what Regina's reaction was to her, what Henry wanted to do. But suddenly, Dove had stopped responding to him.

"Home," he'd said. It appeared that Dove needed some reminding of his job. Fortunately for him, he knew where Dove had disappeared to. And better yet, he owned the town, which meant that he happened to have a key to damn near everything, including Dove's apartment.

He sneered at the two useless puppets he kept in his shop, Marco's parents, not that he knew that at the moment. He kept that sneer the entire drive across town. He knocked once on the door, but there was no answer. He had a key. Legally he was the property owner, and if he was worried for the safety of his tenant, he was allowed access. For all he knew, the rush of water he heard coming through the pipes could have drowned out poor Dove's cries if he slipped in the shower. That would hold up in court.

Inside the apartment, he heard nothing but water running through the pipes. The shower was running. Dove's phone, listing his messages, and jacket were left haphazardly on the kitchen counter, along with a can of beer that appeared to have been pulled from the refrigerator. That was all good. That meant he'd be back before falling into bed.

And Dark Ones did love dramatic entrances.

He took a seat across the living room and waited for his time to come. He waited patiently. Patience was his gift, after all. Finally, the moment came. The water in the pipes stopped. There was a pause and then the sound of a door opening. Barely a second later, Dove strode out of the hallway, towel slung across his waist, still wet from the shower. He took it as an opportunity to turn the lamp by his chair on.

"Shit!" Dove cried, jumping nearly six feet and making a motion for his jacket. He preferred not to know, but he suspected he had a gun hidden there. "Fuck!" he cried again when he finally realized who it was. His shoulders relaxed a bit. He stepped away from his jacket. His chest continued to heave. "You scared the shit outta me."

He ignored the language. Nothing he hadn't heard or said before himself, though maybe not word for word. He refused, however, to smile gleefully at the result of his little surprise.

"Remind me why I hired you, Mr. Dove."

"What?"

"Why do I employ you?"

"Sir?"

"You see, I've been asking myself that question all day. Why do I hire you to give me necessary information, and why do I continue to pay you when you don't tell me that important information. Information like…like Emma Swan having a job."

Dove took a breath and shook his head, looking baffled. Did the boy not even understand what he'd done? "I only found out last night, after the mine explosion. Given the circumstances, I thought-"

"I don't pay you to think, Mr. Dove, I pay you to tell me what I do not know," he growled through his teeth. He held up Dove's cell phone, the one that had his unanswered messages on it. "I pay you to answer your phone!" he roared, throwing it at him. The boy managed to catch it before it could shatter on the wall behind him.

"I'm…I'm sorry. It was a long day up at the mines. I was filthy, I needed to-"

"You don't finish your work until I say you have," he interrupted, rising from his seat. "Emma Swan is your assignment. Instead of leaving her at the mine to handle your own…business, you left when she did. Do you even know where she is at this moment?"

"She was just as filthy as the rest of us. I assumed she'd rush right home and take a shower herself."

"This isn't a time for 'assuming,' Mr. Dove. This is a time for knowing. And I need to know everything about that girl. This is a warning…don't disappoint me again." And then, with his assistant good and rattled, he set his sights on the door and-

"Is there something going on?!" Dove shouted at him before he could leave.

He turned to face him again. "Something going on?"

"This is a sleepy town, Mr. Gold. And don't get me wrong, I love my job, but working for you is usually status quo, and now all of a sudden…this girl shows up in town. Storybrooke hasn't seen this much excitement since…I can't remember the last time it's ever seen this much excitement. It's just got me thinking there might be something going on…something you're not telling me."

"I was under the impression, Mr. Dove, that part of your employment included discretion. I don't ask you questions about where you get your information, and you don't ask me questions about the jobs that I have for you," he corrected. "If I'm wrong, perhaps it's time I found a new associate. One of your cousins, perhaps."

Dove stood up a little taller, a little prouder, a feat for someone wearing nothing but a canary yellow towel. "That won't be necessary, Mr. Gold. I'm just…curious."

"Curiosity killed the cat, Mr. Dove. Imagine what it'll do to a bird. Don't make me have to track you down again, Mr. Dove. I find it tedious work, the sort of work I'd prefer to pay you for."

Without another word, he left to go back to his car. But he didn't get far, barely halfway across the parking lot before he heard…crickets! Crickets! The sound caught him off guard, and for a few moments, he couldn't understand why until, off in the distance, he heard the clocktower chime the hour, a noise that was still foreign to him, and he realized. There had never been the sound of crickets in Storybrooke before. Coincidence? Like the mines? Or something more?

Angry as he was, he felt himself smile as he opened his door and slid into the driver's seat. First the clock, then David…now there were crickets. What next, he wondered. What next…

#Rumbelle #Rumple #Rumpelstiltskin #Dark One #Mr. Gold #Regina Mills #Evil Queen #Emma Swan #Henry Mills #Dr. Archie Hopper #jiminy cricket #ouat #ouat fanfic #fanfiction

[robininthelabyrinth]

Toxicity - ao3

- part 3 -

It was not too long after Lan Wangji’s visit – a month or two, no more, and in the timescale of war that was very short indeed – that Lan Xichen finally returned to his side.

Nie Mingjue gathered his courage. “Did you speak with your uncle?” he asked, reaching out to take Lan Xichen’s hand in his.

“I did,” Lan Xichen said, and his eyes were bright as stars. “You want to marry me, Mingjue-xiong? You haven’t even kissed me.”

“I do. I do want to marry you,” Nie Mingjue said, taking the question seriously even though it had been made in jest. “I am not asking for your agreement right now, but I would not begin the process of courting you without making clear my intentions.”

Lan Xichen softened, smiling. “Righteous and unyielding, straightforward and upright,” he murmured and reached out with his free hand to tuck some of Nie Mingjue’s hair that had fallen loose back behind his ear. Nie Mingjue might be sick and tired of that particular phrase, but he would hear it a thousand times from Lan Xichen’s lips. “Oh, da-ge, you really are always the same.”

Nie Mingjue shivered a little at the familiar, intimate term of address. “May I kiss you?” he asked, and watched as Lan Xichen’s smile grew wider still.

“You may,” Lan Xichen said. “If I may kiss you as well.”

Nie Mingjue tried to find a way to tell Lan Xichen about his upcoming fate, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it, not when Lan Xichen smiled at him so happily. The most he could do was remind him that their love had an expiration date, that it was better to marry and be done with it.

Lan Xichen refused, though. He said that he enjoyed their courtship, that he wanted the entirety of the experience for them both: the memories made together, the anticipation, the joy, and that they would wed when the war was over, in full view of both their families.

Nie Mingjue wanted that more than anything, and so he agreed…although in some respects, in his heart, he considered them already wed.

He did not intentionally keep his new relationship with Xichen a secret from his men – if he had not been so determined to treat Lan Xichen as he ought to be treated, with respect and honor, and feared the threat of distraction in the midst of battle, he would have shouted out the news of their engagement in the middle of the war camp. And yet he was also by nature a private man, inclined to be possessive of the few joys he had, and so while he did not hide it, he also did not go out of his way to mention it. It was already common for him to spend time cloistered with his guests, no matter who they were; in that way, Lan Xichen’s visits were no different from the rest, except in that Nie Mingjue enjoyed them far more.

It was not until months later that his camp discovered that their leader was courting, and naturally they discovered it in the most awkward manner possible: news coming of an imminent surprise attack at dawn that required Nie Zonghui to rush over to alert his sect leader without warning and thus finding him curled up in his lover’s arms.

“Can I help?” Lan Xichen asked as Nie Mingjue prepared himself for war, glaring at Nie Zonghui’s wide grin – the man has a fondness for gossip, and there would be no stopping him. “With the battle?”

“You may do whatever you wish,” Nie Mingjue said, leaning down to steal a kiss. “I trust you completely in all things, and not least of all your excellent cultivation. The attack is two-pronged – would you go the western front, while I take the east? We can meet in the middle. Take as many of my Nie cultivators as you think you might need.”

“No need,” Lan Xichen said. “There are a number of Lan cultivators in your camp, and the western side of the camp is guarded by a mountain ridge – we can ambush them there with musical cultivation and drive them running straight into the camp without their swords.”

Nie Mingjue nodded. “Nie Zonghui, you take command of the camp and half our cultivators,” he instructed. “When the Wen sect comes running towards you in their confusion, cut them off.”

Nie Zonghui saluted, humor gone from his face – postponed, not forgotten – and the three of them left.

Nie Mingjue hoped only to repulse the attack, but it ended as a complete rout, total victory, through factors neither side could predict: it turned out that the western ridge was housing one of the dragons that sometimes passed through the cultivation world, a celestial dragon in blue and white, and it took offense to the Wen attack, demolishing their ranks with fang and claw and song-magic that deafened the ear.

(Nie Mingjue wondered briefly if it was the same celestial dragon that had cursed him all those years ago.)

In the end, there was very little more than clean-up left over, with Lan Xichen leading his Lan cultivators to drive the remaining Wen sect cultivators into the waiting arms of Nie Zonghui’s forces, and most of them surrendered at once rather than risk being sent back to face the dragon’s wrath. With that battle concluded and the western front secured, Nie Zonghui and Lan Xichen were able to rush to Nie Mingjue’s side, providing timely reinforcement, and the eastern front was won as well.

Lan Xichen was totally uninjured and barely even winded, but Nie Mingjue kissed him out of joy in seeing him well nonetheless, heedless of the blood and muck on him, and after that, of course, everyone knew.

“Go talk to Nie Huaisang,” Nie Mingjue told Lan Xichen after that, ignoring the way he raised his eyebrows. “There are things you need to know, things I’ve been dragging my feet about telling you…I’ve tried time and time again to say, and each time the words stick in my throat. But he knows. He knows, and he’ll be able to tell you.”

“I will go,” Lan Xichen said, although he looked a little puzzled. “Whatever it is, though, we’ll face it together.”

“We will,” Nie Mingjue agreed. “Now go, let my brother pester you about wedding plans. He has ideas.”

Laughing, Lan Xichen left, and Nie Mingjue turned back to the business of war: planning out battles, considering strategy, securing their supply lines, communicating with allies and spies alike.

The next missive he received from Meng Yao told him to go to Yangquan.

Meng Yao’s information had been excellent up to that point, and Nie Mingjue had no reason to doubt him. The maps he sent, along with information about the enemies’ movements, had helped Nie Mingjue win battles and minimize casualties, and he thought to himself that he would be forever indebted to his former deputy for the sacrifice he had made in going to obtain it, for surely Wen Ruohan would not be a kind master.

And yet, when he went to Yangquan with only a small party – any more, Meng Yao had warned, and he might be noticed, when the goal here was to strike quickly and retreat quicker – he found himself unexpectedly outnumbered, surrounded and overpowered: Wen Ruohan himself had come to inspect the site, and he had brought his strongest guards with him.

Nie Mingjue was taken prisoner.

Tied in chains and dragged to the Nightless City behind Wen Ruohan’s carriage, choking on dust and beaten like a dog by any Wen cultivator who passed by, Nie Mingjue’s only thought was that he would die before he went mad, and he found some small measure of relief in that.

He regretted it, of course – he regretted not marrying Lan Xichen, not insisting, though he knew war was no time for it; he regretted not having seen his brother more, though he knew the battlefield was no place for him. He regretted that his death was likely to be gruesome and painful, given Wen Ruohan’s usual proclivities, and that his loved ones would know that.

But at least, he comforted himself, he hadn’t gone insane, turning against all he held dear. That fate he had spent his whole life fearing, it seemed, would not be his.

With that thought in mind, he was able to go with some sense of peace to the throne room of the Nightless City, but when he got there everything seemed – not as he had expected.

Wen Ruohan was standing, for one thing, and he seemed almost nervous, looking Nie Mingjue over to confirm that he was still alive, muttering to himself that there weren’t too many marks, that he was still mostly intact, that he shouldn’t be too angry –

“He?” Nie Mingjue asked, entirely at a loss. He was chained and bound, on his knees in front of his enemy, the man who had killed his father and whose son he had killed in turn; the situation ought to be clear and yet he was more confused than ever. “Who are you talking about?”

“Me, I expect,” Meng Yao said, walking through the door arrogantly, as if the Fire Palace belonged to him instead of Wen Ruohan. “Ah, da-ge, as usual I seem to have underestimated you.”

Nie Mingjue blinked at him, surprised – Meng Yao had never used such an intimate term of address for him, though he would have permitted it if the other man had ever shown any interest.

Meng Yao saw his expression and laughed.

“Or perhaps not,” he said, and the smile on his face was pleasant as always, and yet there was cruelty in it. “So er-ge hasn’t told you yet, has he? No, of course, he wouldn’t; he’d think he was being noble, protecting you from your own past.”

“I don’t understand,” Nie Mingjue said, his eyes darting to Wen Ruohan – but that proud man was on his knees, willingly showing reverence, and to Meng Yao of all people. “Meng Yao –”

“Jin Guangyao, actually,” Meng Yao said. “‘Meng’ was my miserable mother’s surname, for all the good it did her…I did tell you that my bloodline was the Jin.”

“You were acknowledged? Jin Guangshan –”

Meng Yao laughed. “Oh, da-ge, da-ge, still so confused! You never did understand anything. I really don’t understand why er-ge was so desperate to bring you back – he slept for over a decade after putting your soul into your mother’s belly, did you know that? A decade! We may be ancient, but time is still precious, and he wasted so much of it on you...oh, you stupid fool. You still don’t understand, do you?”

Nie Mingjue didn’t understand anything.

“Perhaps a visual demonstration would be best,” Meng Yao – Jin Guangyao, apparently – said, and the air around him shimmered as if he were a mirage induced by heatstroke.

A moment later, there was no Meng Yao, no Jin Guangyao, no human standing there, but instead the massive coils of a yellow-bellied flood dragon draped themselves around the throne of the Wen sect.

Nie Mingjue stared up at him.

“Now do you see?” Jin Guangyao hissed at him, eyes glittering. “Do you know now, what you have cost me?”

“How – you’re…you’re a dragon!”

“And not just me,” Jin Guangyao said. “Your beloved Lan Xichen is, too: my beloved er-ge, my sworn brother, and yours, too.  It was the three of us together – we were all brothers once, long ago, before you died…I never understood. Why does er-ge love you so much that he would hurt himself to retrieve your soul and give you new life? Enough to lower himself into the filth of humanity, to forget his former self, to learn to love you from the beginning as if you were a brand-new person – why? What’s so interesting about you? You’re the most boring person I’ve ever met. A righteous prig, and a fool.”

“You – Lan Xichen –” Nie Mingjue stuttered, still staring, disbelieving. “My parents – the curse –”

Jin Guangyao laughed.

“I always planned to tell you before the end, you know, da-ge. I wanted you to know,” he said conversationally. “I wanted you to know it was your fault that your parents died. Lan Xichen, my er-ge…he kept your soul after it should have passed into the wheel of reincarnation, and when your human parents came to beg for a child, he gave you the body he thought you deserved, taking years off his own life to do it – and when he had slept, that was when I came in, gifting you with my poison, the only thing you ever deserved to get from me. I infused it in your mother and father both just to make sure it got to you; if it wasn’t for you, they might have lived long and happy lives. And they thanked me for it!”

Nie Mingjue felt numb. “You killed them to get to me? I wasn’t – I hadn’t even been born!”

“Your soul is still your soul, da-ge, no matter the quirks of personality you developed through your upbringing,” Jin Guangyao said dismissively. “If you weren’t, er-ge wouldn’t have fallen in love with you all over again, would he?”

Lan Xichen was the celestial dragon, Nie Mingjue thought, just as Jin Guangyao, who he had once thought was called Meng Yao, was the flood dragon. Except his parents had been deceived: there was no price for him to pay for his birth, for his strength and cultivation talent, for Lan Xichen had willingly shouldered that debt. Instead, the poison Jin Guangyao had claimed would help them minimize the cost, making him suffer only one year in eight, was actually the source of all his ills – without it, he might have not had to suffer at all.

“Your parents must have made your childhood a misery, training you up to be tough enough to live through your first tribulation,” Jin Guangyao said dreamily. “And then you must have lived the rest of your life in fear, fear and distance, allowing no one to be close to you – I knew you’d hate the idea of turning on everyone you loved most of all. You even tried to turn Xichen down! You’ll never know how much I laughed when he told me about it: he thought you meant that you expected your mortal life to be short, you know, or perhaps that it was an early death due to war that you feared.”

Anger came easily to Nie Mingjue, an old companion.

“Well, if your goal was to separate me from Xichen, you failed,” he said. “He’s agreed to marry me.”

Jin Guangyao’s smile turned into a scowl at once, and his tail lashed out, smashing the pillars and walls of the Fire Palace – no wonder Wen Ruohan was on his knees, shaking in terror; there was no way a human could fight a dragon of such strength.

“How dare you?” he hissed. “How dare you even think of tainting him once again?”

“How dare you?” Nie Mingjue shouted back, ignoring the look of panic on Wen Ruohan’s face. He had already accepted that his death would come to him here, today, a slow and gruesome demise before he’d ever reached thirty; Jin Guangyao could do nothing to him than he had not already anticipated happening at Wen Ruohan’s hands. “You claim to love Xichen, and yet by your own words you went behind his back to sabotage what he tried so hard to do! For all your talk about the filth of the human world, you’re the one who crawled through the muck, all lies and deceit, writhing in it like the pathetic worm that you are –”

Jin Guangyao smashed walls in his rage, and yet he calmed too quickly: that pleasant smile re-emerged on his face, and he reached out to catch Nie Mingjue’s head with his claws, the long, scaly claws sliding through his hair, closing around him to rest the tips on his face, pricking his flesh.

“Always so judgmental, da-ge,” he said. “Always so quick to look down on me for not living up to your expectations. Perhaps that’s the heart of you, the part of you that you keep in every life – you were just the same when you were the great azure dragon, the mightiest of us all even if er-ge was of nobler birth. And yet, even in that past life, your strength, your might, none of that helped you, did it?”

He brought his face close to Nie Mingjue’s, the dragon’s head the size of half his body, the longest of his fangs extending the length of his hand, from fingertip to the base of the palm, his long and serpentine tongue extending to lick at his cheek and lips in vile mockery of the kiss of brotherhood.

“Let me tell you a secret, da-ge,” he whispered into his ears, the latent poison on his breath making Nie Mingjue struggle to breathe even though Jin Guangyao wasn’t yet actively trying to hurt him. “In your last life? It was me who killed you then, too. I poured my poison into the song you got from er-ge, the one you so treasured. The more you played it, the more it would hurt you; the greater your love for him was, the quicker your death would come…you died within the year, da-ge, screaming in agony, blind and deaf, your powerful body rotting away beneath you, and you never knew why.”

“You’re disgusting,” Nie Mingjue said, and Jin Guangyao forced his head back, his sharp claws digging in enough to cause small rivulets of blood to start dripping down his face. “Are you jealous? Is that it? That he sees you as his brother and nothing more, even once I was dead? Or was it some other petty dispute that made you feel the need to smile to my face while stabbing me in the back, to persecute me not only in one lifetime, but the next?”

“Perhaps it’s only that I enjoy watching you suffer,” Jin Guangyao said, and his smile was as chillingly pleasant as it had been the entire time Nie Mingjue had known him, the same calm collected smile Meng Yao used to deal with everything. The same smile he’d given Nie Mingjue’s parents as he poisoned them, no doubt. “Did you think that you had escaped the fate I planned for you by coming here? It’s my poison that causes your agony, da-ge, your agony and your insanity, and I carry it with me everywhere – I’ll pour my poison into your belly until you lose your mind and turn into a mindless beast just like you’ve always feared.”

His smile widened.

“And then poor Meng Yao, who doesn’t know better, will rescue you and take you home. Home to your brother who will run to greet you, to your sect that will not want to fight back against you, to your lover who will have no choice but to put you down for your own good…I wonder how many of them you’ll take with you before er-ge has to eradicate you with his own hands? For good, this time.”

“Don’t pretend to care,” Nie Mingjue said, even as his heart froze in fear within his chest. His arms were chained to his side, the pressure of the massive claw around the back of his head irresistibly keeping him kneeling, keeping him from moving. “You miserable, pathetic little – son of a whore!”

It wasn’t one of the insults he generally favored, but for some reason it rose to his tongue now, and it seemed to strike true for Jin Guangyao in a way he wouldn’t have expected it to: he reared back his head a little, glaring down at him, but it was only another moment or two before his eyes narrowed and the pleasant smile returned.

“Good-bye, da-ge,” Jin Guangyao said. “Perhaps you’ll have better luck in your next life.”

And then he pressed his heavy head to Nie Mingjue’s, that long serpentine tongue forcing its way into Nie Mingjue’s mouth and down his throat, choking him on it, choking him on the fumes and acid that came with it, poisonous and searing the back of his throat, and then there was that familiar pain that he remembered from his eighth birthday, his sixteenth, his twenty fourth – the eight-year pain that he had feared ever since he knew what it meant, what it foretold.

Pointless pain. The grudge of another lifetime, carried over into this one, and for what?

For nothing.

#mdzs #nie mingjue #lan xichen #nielan #jin guangyao #my fic #my fics #toxicity

[leverage-commentary]

Leverage Season 2, Episode 3, The Order 23 Job, Audio Commentary Transcript

Dean: Hi, I'm Dean Devlin, Executive Producer.

John: John Rodgers, Executive Producer.

Chris: Chris Downey, Executive Producer and Writer, and this is: The Order 23 Job.

John: Writer of this episode.

Chris: Yes.

John: That's right, this is number two written, number two aired.

Chris: Yes. Now- yeah this is- we meet our bad guy here, in this scene. His name is Eddie Maranjian, he's played by an actor Melik Malkasian, and Dean, you discovered him.

Dean: Well when we got to Portland, we wanted to see some of the local talent, so we went to an improv group and he was really one of the outstanding performers in the improv group. So when you wrote the part, I saw that it was Armenian; I remembered that I'd seen an Armenian actor and he came in and he just knocked it out of the park.

John: Now this is about affinity crimes this episode. And this- and by the way, this happens- takes place in the fictional town of Bellbridge, Massachusetts, which we chose for episode two. Bellbridge, Mass has become our fictional city in Leverage where just bad things happen. In the season finale it’s actually-

Chris: It's a cesspool of evil.

John: It's a cesspool of evil and corruption and remember we like- we're gonna do an episode where an entire town is corrupt. Well, we've already slandered Bellbridge; might as well get our money's worth. Tell me why you chose an Armenian villain here other than your hatred of all things Armenian.

Chris: Well, you know, we were very influenced by the Bernie Madoff scandal, and one of the things that came out of that was people asking the question: how were these people duped into investing all their money and losing it in a Ponzi scheme? And the original Ponzi scheme was named after Charles Ponzi who was an Italian immigrant in 1920 who preyed on fellow Italian immigrants in a scheme- in a Ponzi scheme; subsequent investors of the scheme pay off the previous investors. And so we wanted to kind of explore - how could people be duped like that? And we kind of decided, well let's do an Armenian bad guy, kind of arbitrary, just to sort of, take a little bit of that-

John: Well it’s the same close knit community, a lot of financial- many people don't know, but a lot of America- a lot of big developments in the Midwest are actually developed by Armenians.

Chris: Yes. Yes.

Dean: Well this episode was directed by Rod Hardy, who in season one directed the terrific episode The 12 Step Job, and he, again, knocked it out. He's an Australian director, friend of our DP Dave Connell who introduced us to him, and he's really become a great friend of the show and part of the extended Leverage family.

John: Now this show, interestingly, really shows off the glory that is Portland. Because we had a court house episode last year, the Juror Number 6 Job, where we built the courtroom on our soundstage in an old aluminium milling plant in the valley in LA. Where they’re probably shooting porn now.

[Laughter]

John: Meanwhile, the lovely city of Portland gave us access to all these government buildings, so we can do long walk and talks down massive government corridors.

Dean: And real courtrooms.

Chris: Many cities have the old federal courthouse- there are great stately federal courthouses built in the early 20th century, the 1920s, and then the new federal courthouse. And the old federal courthouses just kind of sit there, and we saw this when we did a location scout before the season started, and it was in the back of my head when conceiving this episode.

John: This episode was also born of one of the first ideas we put up on the wall of cards. If you listen to first season commentary, you know Chris and I - before we hired the writers - started throwing around- just throwing up cards on a wall of just stuff we always wanted to do on heist shows. And one of the things we were talking about was a great old Mission Impossible episode where they convince a guy that the end of the world has come.

Chris: Yes.

John: They do so through a periscope and some cunningly developed models.

[Laughter]

John: We realized that, probably, modern audiences were too sophisticated for the telescope, but we took the idea of convincing a guy that the apocalypse had come and kinda ran with it a very cool post-modern way.

Chris: I mean, if you look at, sort of, the headlines that were running at the time this was conceived, it was Bernie Madoff and swine flu. And that basically, this episode is the marriage of those two things.

John: So as you can tell, it takes really no training to be a television writer. Just pick two random things from the newspaper and combine them and then you have an episode. 

[Laughter]

John: They're talking about the cupcake, nice, soft federal prison he's going to. Interestingly, right after this, they stopped sending these guys to the prisons. Just because I think the idea that these guys had brought the entire world to the brink of financial ruin meant that they can no longer skate away- Bernie Madoff actually got into his first prison fight a little ago.

Chris: Oh, really?

Dean: In an argument over Wall Street.

John: Yeah, as happens. And how did we pick the Order 23? Where'd Order 23, the title, come from?

Chris: I don't know. I think it was, you know, just kind of a spooky number, I think it was, and we knew this- the con for this one was supposed to be built around sound. 

Dean: And as I was saying earlier, about this episode being directed by Rod Hardy, we are now being joined by-

John: Rod Hardy

Chris: Rod Hardy! Yay!

Rod: My apologies, Hollywood traffic is always tricky.

[Laughter]

John: And he's driving on the wrong side of the road; it's just bad.

Rod: You people drive on the wrong side of the road.

John: I know, you wanna- I'm having my traditional Guinness. Do you want one?

Rod: I'd love one.

John: We will see what we can do. So the gentleman- we've just met our feds and our gentleman- the gentleman playing the two security guards - who are they?

Chris: Yeah, it's Victor Morris playing Deputy Marshal Robert Corville, and Joshua Sawtell is playing Charlie Merrill. Little fact about this show - this show is cast entirely in the city of Portland; these are all Portland actors.

John: Yeah, that's right; we didn't fly anyone up from LA for this one.

Rod: The cast really stood up to the line of anything. I mean Melik in particular- we were very, in one way, keen to find someone locally for a whole bunch of reasons, but he showed a true, sort of, level of performance that I thought worked really well in this episode.

Dean: Absolutely.

John: There's two things in this sequence that are interesting from a writing standpoint - other than the fun of seeing Beth Riesgraf in a ventilation shaft. One: poison in the water is, of course, an homage to You Only Live Twice, the Bond film, and the wire, by the way, is digital.

Chris: Yeah. Well this part is real, but that part is digital.

John: This is digital and the whole drop down. But two: where did the villain speech come from? Who was explaining that?

Chris: Oh, this is kind of the psychology of hedge funds, and it was- I believe it was from a column my dad sent me from the Wall Street Journal. You know how your dad sends you articles and things? And, you know-

John: ‘This would be a good movie.’ Yeah, I get that all the time.

Chris: ‘This would be good.’ I was going through it, and this is be all about why people invest in hedge funds; about the fear that other people make more than them. And fear was kinda the theme of this episode, so it kind of, sort of set it up here.

Rod: And I'm sure you mentioned before, but to me the wonderful thing about this story that brought it into today was that it was the Bernie Madoff story. In a way you want him to be Bernie Madoff.

John: Well the first season was really the Madoff variation.

[All Laugh]

John: First half of the season- because, you know, the show got picked up and were like, ‘Oh, second season - what are we gonna do? We hadn't really thought about it.’ And then the world economic system collapsed and, you know, ready made villains began to fall out of the newspapers.

Rod: Yes. The thing about Malik’s performance that I always found appealing was, when you first did the audition, was the fear in his eyes. You know, underneath all the sort of men with great bravado, there's a wonderful sense of fear. Which I think our bad guys always come to the floor with, which is terrific. Here it is; look at those eyes.

Chris: I love this shot here, too. I love- I just love the way you composed this.

John: Did you digitally fog that or-? 

Rod: No, just put it out of focus. It’s easier; the DP is very good at that sort of stuff.

[All Laugh]

John: Oh, he's gonna be filled with rage. And then we take him- now this is interesting - this is one of the few locations. It really only happens in 2 locations: the courthouse and the hospital. And then we go back to the hospital.

Chris: The whole episode takes place- that was another thing I wanted to do, was do an episode that takes place entirely - not just in one day - but really in about 6 hours.

John: Now it was interesting - this was really the first episode where we started to hammer in on the second season theme, which we realize was the more you are constrained in time and space- because our team at this point is very, very good. People watched the first season; they know how incredibly talented they are. How do you challenge a super team? You have to keep throwing obstacles in their way. And rather than just complications, you kept making the situation more and more constrained. And this is also a great one. Tim really dug in on the whole ‘Oh, so I like hurting people this year.’ He really dug in on it. 

Rod: I gotta tell you, I look at the show now, and I look at the difference between the LA versions and the Portland version - and I love the Portland version. It just feels different, and has a different sense to it, which is great.

John: It feels bigger. 

Dean: And we have such access to such a varying architecture, varying designs. And we can shoot in places we would never be allowed to shoot in Los Angeles, and I think it adds to it.

John: Because of little things like safety regulations and employment laws. Meanwhile in Portland, we’re basically running a giant child labor camp and, yeah, starring the entire city of Portland.

Dean: I love your use of the bullet time here, and going down the hall, and through-

Rod: Well, so, it was your invention. And I just think it’s, unfortunately I do - when I go to work on other productions - never do I enjoy working on other productions better than this one, but I do try to steal that idea occasionally, because it is so clever and so wonderful.

[Laughter]

John: It just keeps the pace up and moving, because to a great- one of the things you do find in a show - it's a lot of people sitting around looking at computers. And in order to stop it- Now where- how did we wind up using sound so much in this? It was the-

Chris: Well the idea of this was, again, we mention it - great Mission Impossible where they convince somebody they were in a submarine or a bomb shelter. And the great thing about that is using sound. This was a con that was built around sound; about the noise in the hallway that was gonna slowly drive this guy insane, and-

Dean: You know, what's interesting about that, is when I saw the rough cut and we only had the temp sounds on it, I liked the episode, but it wasn't, for me, like, a super great episode. Once the sounds came in, it was suddenly, ‘Oh wow, this thing just took a big leap,’ because- well Rod, you had so well directed the actors to the sounds, that without the sounds there, it was like we were missing a character. And when the sounds came in, it was like the other character was in the room.

Rod: I say these days, sound to me brings in at least 70% of a movie. It's quite extraordinary. Where 20 years ago it was less than 50, now it's up above cause it creates the whole sense of where you are.

John: By the way, the speech that nurses don't wear the tight little white uniforms anymore, is actually a speech Beth gave up that we just wound up putting in the show.

[All Laugh]

Dean: Yeah.

John: Nice try guys. And this is one of the perfect examples of the bickering brother relationship. This really is the proto episode for that.

Rod: It’s that Lethal Weapon stuff which is great.

Chris: In my mind, they share an apartment with bunk beds and NFL [unintelligible.]

[All Laugh]

Chris: That's how I write it.

John: In your head, that's how they- they've been adopted by Mr. Drummond. Are they like the Different Strokes kids? Is that your theory?

Dean: I love this bit.

John: I also love the weirdly, and if we can talk about the actors for a moment, I love the weirdly disaffected face Beth always puts on when she's about to do physical harm to someone. Yeah, it really- if you ever notice in the ventilation shaft, she has poisoned someone and she is giggling; she is giggly. And in here, she's just kind of got these dead eyes when she's, ‘Oh, time to go give a man a skin rash to convince him he's dying.’ It’s another Thursday afternoon for Parker.

Dean: And these guys you got to play the cops are terrific. 

Rod: They worked out really well, didn't they? I did notice the priest in the background there. I really wanted to work on- the first episode, I wanted to have a priest or a nun in everything, and unfortunately, I couldn't find the right place, but in the hospital it was great.

Chris: There’s another great bullet time.

Dean: Yeah, that was a really great one.

John: This also was another thing we did a lot first season, where we really became part of the pattern this year, which is to split them up in twos and threes. Is to- you know, last year, if you look, a lot of times they kind of fold over and cross in each other’s stories a lot. Well this year, in order to give each character a little room to breathe, we really started building- not really B stories, but physically- simultaneously, but physically separated.

Dean: But this part right here is a very interesting deviation from what we normally do, and it worked really well, which- normally the heart and soul of our show is the victim and their story, but here it switches to a new victim that we’re introducing here. It was quite the surprise, I thought, and became a very emotional part of the story.

John: Well that's cause the victim was in Act 0 in this episode. I mean, you start in the courtroom, which is very difficult to get the emotional hit of a lot of our other episodes.

Chris: Well, one of the things I think that- it kinda-

John: Wait a minute, Rod’s afraid to pop a beer.

Rod: It's never a good time for this. Is it now? [Opens beer.]

John: It is- it is traditional on all of our commentaries to usually hear me opening that, so it's good to hear you taking that over for me.

Chris: I was gonna say that one of the things we have typically in the con, is that one of the members of the team gets, sort of, over invested in the con. That's- we've done that as a sort of a source of comedy, but in this case it's kinda like Eliot sorta becomes- he becomes a cop in a sense. You know?

John: Yeah.

Chris: So I mean, like, it's when they wear the costume - sometimes one of them actually, sort of, becomes that costume.

John: And it's also interesting to see how fans react to any sort of storyline like this, where they just assume you're trying to reveal something about the character’s past or some sort of subtle hints that we’re laying in. It’s like no, Eliot doesn't like guys who beat up kids. It's not- I mean there's plainly other stuff going on that Christian chose in order to base his acting around...

Dean: This was the episode, though, where we all suddenly watched the dailies and said, ‘Christian’s really taking it up a whole other level this year’. And then he did. Because it was this episode, and then Tap Out, he took the character that he had built in season 1 that we had liked and were familiar with, and he added these real interesting layers to it that just, I thought, really elevated it.

John: Ah, the [in a Boston accent] Revere Claw there you go. That is Gina doing the great Route 1. I’ll tell you exactly from where Route 1 she’s up on - she's just past Mike Clarke’s Comedy Club up on Route 1, with the dealerships. That hair right there, is the [in a Boston accent] Revere Claw named after Revere, Massachusetts, to establish a certain socioeconomic and strata one might say, except it's actually in Revere. At least when I was growing up, it’s teased out so finely it’s only 5 or 6 hairs; it's really insane - it's like a fish’s krill mask.

Rod: I would love to see- I'd like to see a reel at some stage of all these characters cut together from each of the characters. Put on one of these DVDs, cause it would be such fun to see the journey you take them on; it’s fabulous.

John: Well the fans do that. That's part of the fun of watching the YouTube fan videos.

Rod: Well done fans.

John: It’s watching like, ‘Oh, I'd forgotten how cool that moment was.’ Yeah, because we're gonna make any of these by hopefully the end of the run. Even at this point, we’re 20 hours in and it’s- there’s gonna be moments you forget.

Rod: You know, the tricky thing about this episode also was, and I know it happens a lot in the series, but for me, you'd shoot a scene like such we’re watching now, but at the same time you have to get that security, sort of, version of it. so it was always- Dean’s always makes what he shows - it was always that much more difficult; there's so much to be done, which is just interesting.

Chris: There’s a lot of layers. Well an interesting thing that made me think, looking at Melik here was, and I - and this I gotta say to Rod - we, in day one of this shoot, I think, Dave went on day one and day 2, Melik had to go from arrogant to literally- I mean, on the verge of insanity. And I mean, maybe Rod, talk about how you had to get him there over the course of the first two days of this shoot. I mean, that’s a lot.

Rod: I used an old director’s tool, which was basically, ‘you'll never work again if this doesn't work.’

[All Laugh]

John: Ah. [In an Australian accent/mimicking Rod] ‘Now the way I want you to have fear here, is to be actually afraid of the fact that we're gonna fire you.’ That’s really- use the sense memory of unemployment.

Rod: That’s right. That's all true. My god, I have the same fears every time I work. You know, what's interesting here was, Day 1 he had to go from the beginning to the very end of the thing, so for an actor to- by the way, who has done the terrific things in his time, but nothing as quickly as we make this show. So I might say all power to him for being able to keep it going right to the end of the day. But it made that first day of our shoot really a tricky one, and one of the hardest of the whole shoot in a way, because he had- you know, you can shoot this stuff very quickly, but it's not just about shoots, it's about keeping the performances alive and real on the same level, and he was able to do that. But you know what? The way I was able to talk to him about it, a good thing was, he listened.

Chris: Yeah.

Rod: He just listened, and that was really helpful. We do this together. I mean, that's what the journey is - you do it together.

John: Now there's- we breeze past the speech where Tim is explaining to Beth Riesgraf- or, pardon me, Nate is explaining to Parker how they're gonna do this. How they're gonna basically hypnotize this guy. How they're gonna drive him to the edge. And we’d- you know, you'd done a fair bit of research and we'd just started reading Jonah Lehrer which is a lot of neuroscience, and we got a really nice email, actually, from a neuroscientist which was like, ‘Hey, you know what? Usually I call bullshit on television, but pretty good theory; that would actually work.’

Chris: Yeah. I felt pretty good about that. We got really interested in neuroscience in this beginning of season 2.

John: Well especially Apollo Robbins, who was our consultant who had actually lectured at the big neuroscience convention, you know, as they were starting to understand that magicians and illusionists have a very basic understanding of how the mind and eye track objects and understand things and perceive things, that neuroscientists can only do through experimentation. So there's this weird, cool melding now of the two fields. And yeah, we got totally sucked into it, but that's the great thing about writing.

Chris: Yeah.

John: Anything you think is cool, you can use. Yeah, you're right - Chris has an awful lot to do here because he's got to also sell this ‘don't call anyone,’ and he really does. He really digs in on it.

Dean: Yeah, I'll tell you, when I started watching this on the dailies I was saying to myself, ‘Chris is digging deeper this year’. And speaking of that, we also just went through Gina's scene - Gina, who showed up this season 2 pregnant; had to deal with going through pregnancy-

John: None of us knew that, by the way, none of us had anything to do with that. Just put that out there.

[Laughter]

Dean: But, you know, going through-

Rod: DNA test results are coming, by the way.

Dean: But going through that for the first time, and yet she then also stepped up and brought her characters to a whole other level, and all the characters she created this year were phenomenal. And this one, we'd never seen her do anything like this, maybe a little hint of this in the season finale last year- no I'm sorry in Homecoming, the airport scene.

Chris: It's the first time we've had her do, what I would call a ‘low status’ character. Generally she plays very high status professionals and, you know, it was just interesting. Oh yeah, here- 

Dean: This is a great scene.

Chris: This is our ER scene.

John: This is actually- I actually- yes, you'll notice no one's running, which is a big complaint all ER nurses have; which is people always run in the scenes. I actually got food poisoning in college and this happened next to me. I remember us talking about this, yeah, the whole flatlining and shadows, it's a very-

Rod: You know what Chris? This is one of the hardest scenes I've done for a very long time, because it's all about perception. You know, the audience has to know one thing, but the character - who we have to really feel his fears is there thinking something else, and it was-

Chris: And then I love the way you frame this shot, just- You know, just him peeking out a little bit of the gauze and, kind of, now getting his POV.

John: It's very- this is a hard episode, very few spend this much time with the bad guy.

Rod: But you know what? I know I picked this episode up, and read it, and I could hear people saying, ‘this is the easy one; there's only two locations.’

[All Laugh]

John: This is one of the- that look she just gave is great. This is one of the times you have to remind Beth that Parker’s not as good of an actress as she is. It’s like, ‘that was perfect and Parker wouldn't be that good, but good!’ Now he's losing his mind. This- and by the way, this is- we've established in thief 101, each one has skills, and this was two fold: one, we love the fact there is a grabber claw-

Chris: Well that was- I have to give Apollo credit for that. I mean, we kinda ran this one by him and he literally sent me a picture of the grabber claw; there was a link on where you could buy it - he really supplied the whole thing.

John: Oh, well that's a lot of the tech people figure is unbelievable on the show. I remember they called last year about the credit card scanner on Beth’s thigh, and they said it was unbelievable. I said, ‘I have two on my desk. You want me to send you one?’ But the other one we needed to establish is - Hardison, can’t pick pockets. You know, each one has very specific uses, and even through the rest of the season, if you watch the DVDs, you can always see Gina or Beth does the lift - always. And it's always a handoff to Hardison or Kane. You know, it's- pardon me to Aldis and Kane. I'm only one Guiness in. I can’t -

[All Laugh]

John: I'm a lightweight. I have to go back to last year doing the commentaries. Get my levels back up. See last year we did these while we were shooting them and I drink while we shoot; that's my policy.

Rod: Now this is- What about this policeman with a ponytail? For god's sake. Truly, what is this?

[Laughter & Cross Talk]

Chris: The fun train is roaring down the tracks! 

Rod: Now this kid was just terrific.

John: Yeah, this kid was great.

Rod: We will see something of this boy again. No lines. Watch his eyes; he's got such an awareness.

Chris: Now what was it like casting? I mean, did you just-? Because I wasn't there when you cast him. Did you just immediately see this and-?

Rod: I think John was there.

John: Yeah, the kid just stood out. Very, very good.

Rod: He just came out. He was just there were people that just do or don't, and this kid had a real sense of it, which was just great.

Chris: And here we have all the sounds.

Dean: I love how you moved into that super close up where it’s almost fisheye; that's just great.

Rod: The good thing about our cast is you can get to those close ups and things are going on in their minds. All the time, there's something going on in their minds.

John: Well that's the tricky bit, where you have to see the performances up, because it’s a con or heist show, so at no point have they gone and talked to the suspect, and they're hanging out for coffee. The tension is always there in every scene. The con has started - particularly in this one, we’re up and running from moment one.

Chris: Tim, here, really loved a lot of the neuroscience stuff and he improved the almond tonsils. Which I guess is the term for the amygdala - the fear center of the brain.

John: And that's also where we get into Sophie's bizarre relationship with cruelty. I don't even want to start- I don't even want to go into what that started on the web.

Dean: But it did set in motion an arc for Tim, which is that he's going into a strange darker place now that he's sober, and we played that out for the whole rest of the season.

John: The whole idea is that he can never not be addicted to something, and if it's not gonna be booze- Well, and that's the idea, the first half of the season, he's really replaced booze with control and that feeling of superiority, that feeling of righteousness. So when he then starts drinking again, he actually has a factor that wasn't in the first season. And as a result, he's a thousand times worse in the second half of the season than he was all last season. Yeah, because now he’s not just a drunk, he’s a righteous prick who's a drunk.

Dean: By the way, we also breezed by the setup of using Star Trek as a warning device. That is absolutely- what was the origin of that idea?

Chris: That came out in the room. I can’t- did you pitch that?

John: No, it was a room pitch that somebody came up with it.

Chris: I wish I could remember. This is Steve Coker, who is more of a comedic actor, and I think this was, you know, one of his first, kind of, real dramatic roles as the abusive dad.

Dean: Terrific in the part.

John: Yeah, good job. And also the way- I liked the way this ends. Yeah, you fully believe he’s gonna throw him off. I like the way that this ends, which is you have to leave town. That was another thing we kinda hit this year a couple times, which is, you know, each one of these people is beginning to realize that the way they live their life - they've left wreckage, and they've blown out of towns, and they've gone on their lives.

Dean: That's a great shot.

Chris: Look at his feet off the ground.

Rod: Hitchcock! It’s Hitchcock.

John: Don't tell them where you steal from! And also, this is another thing which is - we call up a mini speech of evil here, which is each time the villain explains why he's not a bad guy in his own head. Because nobody's a bad guy in their own head. So this guy smacks his kid around, he probably got smacked around by his dad. He turned out ok; what's the big deal? And like he says eventually, you know, Eliot's gonna blow town.

Chris: And the other thing here was, he talked about how he would get out of jail in 5 minutes. It sets up, kinda, the power. You know, even a small story like this, there are power dynamics that you don't expect.

Dean: Right there - just that little reaction that Christian does, it showed a vulnerability that he never showed last year. That was really interesting. That- I'm not sure how you got that out of him, but it started a very good trend.

John: And also, the sort of realizing he has to choose a different resolution path here. Like he can’t- he would just kill that dude. Like 5 years ago? He would just break that dude’s leg. I joked later that-

Dean: Well it's almost as though his heart started working again. 

John: Yeah, and it's bothering him.

Rod: That's a good line; I like it.

Chris: That's another great shot. I mean, now he's really-

John: Okay, this guy. 

Dean: Where did you find this guy?

Chris: Talk about this guy. Talk about this casting session.

John: When we were auditioning- When you become a Hollywood producer and it’s like then there's gonna be a casting couch and a casting room where you get to get people naked, and I'm sitting there with Rod and the skinny guys were coming in and Rod goes, ‘I'm very sorry could you take your shirt off?’ And I was like, ‘this is not the people taking their shirt off I thought it would be.’

Rod: You were gonna have to have-

John: And he had these poor bastards like shitless and scrubbing themselves in terror in the middle of the-

Dean: This guy was awesome.

John: By the way, that is a- I am going to claim, because it was so eerily similar, that that was a visual reference to the great George Romero movie The Crazies. Because if it isn't an homage to The Crazies? It should be.

[Laughter]

John: That- the whole hazmat suit and-

Chris: That’s real rain folks. We got a- we don't have to pay for atmosphere in Portland; that's real rain.

Dean: Now those hardcore Electric Entertainment fans out there, if you remember the show we did, Blank Slate, this was one of the first times we stole music from Blank Slate and put it into an episode.

[Laughter]

John: Use all the parts of a buffalo in cable television.

Dean: We believe in recycling.

Chris: Now this was-

Dean: I love this scene.

Chris: I love this too. I love the way you composed this shot, Rod. Talk about that.

Rod: And let me tell you, we’re in the kitchen of a disused hospital that was suddenly becoming a mortuary. So it was a real challenge all around, and the art department did a nice job of putting that together. And we’re turning the supposedly the simple good cop into, now, the bad guy, which was a lot of fun.

John: I also love- I believe it was in the room- well what would be in a murderer's trunk? and I whipped out the five things, and you were like, ‘that was way too fast.’ That-

[All Laugh]

John: ‘We’re gonna go out and look in your trunk right now.’ No and the- this is one of the times- cause again, we have to play with the conventions of the show in the second season, he doesn't have the earpiece in. And who’s in communication, who’s not in communication often begins to be the things they hinge around. This is- a lot of stuff happens in this one.

Chris: It sure does.

John: We drive the guy crazy, we kidnap a security guard.

Dean: And there's an assassin that he has to deal with.

John: Turns out this is an assassin, there's an abused kid. The hell's going on?

Chris: For how many minutes? 40?

John: 42:30?

Dean: That's a nice act out?

Rod: But it's a simple little show to do in seven days.

[Laughter]

Dean: By the way, great fight scene.

John: Lemme ask, if this is a kitchen- 

Dean: Where do those come from?

Rod: We built those. Everything was put in; we kept sort of two or three of the walls and put in those.

Dean: The drawers.

Rod: The drawers. Yeah, only two of the drawers would open, but that’s okay; 

John: That’s all you need.

Rod: That’s all you need for this show.

John: This is a particularly brutal fight scene. I love the fact that he's like, ‘wrong day’. Yeah, slamming people’s hands in drawers, I think I took that from Queen & Country script. 

Dean: But it's just so great. He's in such a bad mood over this kid. He couldn't kill the other guy; this guy he can take out.

John: And then the spinning the bowl thing.

Dean: I love the Jackie Chan reference.

John: It’s very Jackie Chan. I'm fairly sure it’s from the one where he's a cook, I can’t remember the- Who Am I?- no it’s not Who Am I?, it’s a different one.

Chris: Rod, I think you said we need to put a body on this gurney here to throw him on. I think originally mine said empty gurney and you said let’s put a body on there.

Rod: If there's a fight in a mortuary, there's gotta be a dead body somewhere.

[Laughter]

Dean: And then throwing him on top of the body is just awesome.

Chris: Here it is on top of the body.

John: You know this like, nice person, has passed away after years of peacefully dedicated-

Chris: Oh, they were a terrible person.

John: We only dump our guys on terrible people.

Rod: Come back to the man screaming.

John: This one really ramps up.

Dean: Look at that. He went for it, he really went for it.

John: Is that the 10 millimeter that gives you the-?

Rod: Yeah it is, and a lot of actors, who were much more experienced than him, wouldn't have gone as far as he did, which is one of the reasons I knew he'd be right.

Chris: But I'm saying that credit to you, because I remember you getting there and you were like ‘man there’s- there's spiders on you!’ I mean, you really just brought him to the brink.

John: And then he threw the spiders on him.

Rod: Exactly the way I felt waking up in my hotel room you guys put me in. I understood his fear.

[Laughter]

John: His fear of dirt.

Dean: I love the whole fact that his nose is bleeding just off the suggestion-

John: Yeah, I've seen in hypnosis, boils have been raised, blisters. That's absolutely possible.

Dean: Tim was terrific in this part, too.

John: Tim loves- all actors love a death scene. Even if it's a fake death scene.

Rod: That's a good fall.

John: That's a good fall. Yeah, he's absolutely out of his mind at that point. 

[Laughter]

John: Handcuffed, people dying around him.

Dean: Look at the feet! The feet are what makes that shot so good.

John: Wait, was that a dummy or did we actually have a stuntie?

Rod: No, they were actual rubber feet.

John: And then getting yelled at.

Dean: Wrath of Khan.

John: Wrath of Khan, yeah. We actually went through on the day. It’s like, ‘now is the rule that the good ones are the alarm or the bad ones?’ We went back and forth for a while. I know it's the- it’s one of the little geek cred things you have to watch. Once you establish a character like Hardison is a geek - you can never let it go. Because I hate, as an actual geek, watching television and they've got some 1988 version of what a computer nerd looks like. You know, and that's so- he has to know his Doctor Who and he has to know his Star Trek pretty well.

Chris: This was like a change from the first draft to the second draft, I think. In the first draft- because I just had Nate die, it was like well, we’ve already seen Sophie die, so what's worse? 

John: That’s a repeated beat.

Chris: What's worse is that he's just being locked-

Dean: To die.

Chris: To die with this guy.

John: We've also built up - the army's coming. This is The Crazies, we’re doing The Crazies.

Rod: What other show do you get this kind of madness? For god's sake, it’s just-

Dean: In our writers room.

John: It's a very tiny writers room, with a lot of booze and heat, and it really creates this. Yeah, I just realized that this is The Crazies; this is now the army is coming to destroy- now actually, by the time you're hearing this, The Crazies the remake is already out, so you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. But there's a great, horrifying- an old George Romero movie from the 70s-

Dean: I love Tim’s switch right there. And done.

John: ‘And, I’m up.’

Dean: And this guy was great.

John: It’s kinda parallax feel, too. It's a very 1970s paranoid vibe to the whole thing. And look,  there's that walk again; that look when the emotions she's supposed to have as a human are gone. And what the hell? The hell’s going on?

Dean: And another great bullet time. And the head coming out.

Chris: The great thing is it gives you a sense of geography. You know, like, where he's coming.

John: Well, we actually talk about something in the show called the heist head. The hardest thing about writing cons in a heist is the geography; you have to understand the geography. It's like writing bedroom farce; it's all based on going in and out certain doors at certain times.

Rod: By the way, shows with two locations like we had, make it more difficult to shoot in a way; you gotta keep the audience aware of where they are, but at the same time make it more interesting. 

John: Absolutely. And that's the big challenge is resetting the geography so the audience doesn't have to stop and think, ‘wait, where are they?’ Because at that point, whatever emotional response is gone.

Chris: Now here- this is the scene I talked about; how this scene affected the shooting-

John: Yeah.

Chris: Afterwards.

John: By the way, these cops, I believe, he beats up in the season finale.

[All Laugh]

Dean: Christian really dug in for this scene, you know, and -

Rod: But it's what makes this show worth it. That these guys can go through all the Robin Hood stuff, but they get into that emotional line and that's what makes it really, to me, a fun thing to watch.

John: It's also fun, because if you know Chris Kane and you see kids around him, Chris basically- kids basically treat Chris like Batman. So seeing him interact with a kid in this way, is very much the way Chris actually talks to kids in real life. You know, he's very honest with them, he's very direct, and it's a very real scene; it's a better scene than I've seen in shows that this for real-

Chris: Yeah.

Dean: But there's a turn he makes here, which is really interesting. He starts off, like, really confident that he's just gonna solve this and talk to the kid, and when he realizes his impotence in this scene, it, again, his heart comes to the surface, which is something we hadn't really seen before with this character.

Chris: It's true. And his impotence comes out when Hardison touches him, I mean, you see his reaction then.

Dean: He's not used to not being able to handle something.

John: But this is a better version of this scene than I've seen in shows, like hospital shows, where you're supposed to be with the big orchestral moment. And yeah, this is a believable, great bit of acting by two very good actors. That kid is great. He actually didn’t have braces; we actually screwed those braces on him.

Chris: And right here, and I love this shot, too; him scared in the frame by the two of them. 

Rod: He's arm was broken, but we had to break it for the show.

John: Again, the great thing about shooting in Portland. You know, tax credits, but Oregon really looks the other way, I find. 

Chris: Now, and just in terms of the ending, there was another that was written that was more a traditional ending, where the team’s together and pays the victim the money. And after we saw the scene shot, I remember I talked with Rod the next day. You know what? That's the emotional high point of the show. Let's just- let's end it on closing that story and that's the end of the episode.

John: Yeah, I mean, that's to a great degree; a tough one on this, is that the B story kind of takes over most of it. But you never know that. You never know that until you see the performances; til you see the cut.

Chris: This is a great turn back for him, back to evil.

John: Back to- and he's evil again. He’s- you know, you can't keep a good evil man down.

Chris: Now Rod, please tell us- this is an amazing shot.

[Laughter]

Rod: This all came out of nowhere, with 20 minutes to shoot it and, I might say, the genius of our DP David Connell, added with my genius, and a long lens. Because you can create many things. 

Chris: It's a movie shot; that is a movie shot right there.

John: Also, this is the- I think this it’s referenced later, but it's unclear, this is the bad guy. This is the assassin’s car; that’s why there’s actually keys there, because they have set this up for him in order to- And did we shoot that with the suction cup mount while driving?

Rod: Yes.

Dean: And I love the jump cutting in there that just puts you on edge with him. This is a beautiful shot right there.

Chris: Oh and he really fell.

Rod: This guy threw himself into it so much .

John: Now there was also- and again this is super, super intimate. So he has hidden the money back from his trial back in this courthouse, right? And we make a point of the fact that there's, and she's learned to fight this year, too, which I love. And there's another episode where you show that Eliot has actually been teaching her how to fight. The fact that this place has not been refurbished is because this is a very low budget town, which is in a lot of financial trouble. And that's actually- in the-, although the scene that was cut, explained how he got the gun into the courtroom, because they had not refurbished the metal detectors. That's actually a plot point in the season finale that all the security that was supposed to go to the town was stolen.

Chris: Oh that's right, you’re right.

John: Yeah no, no I totally did that intentionally.

Dean: It's explained at the end of the things.

John: If you watch the season finale and this episode they actually- Bellbridge has a continuity.

Rod: This bit I love. When they let him go, I think is just so terrific.

Chris: And this is an iconic shot in the show, Rod. I mean, they- we used this shot of them-

Dean: A lot in trailers.

Rod: Is that right? Good.

John: And they know he's screwed. Look at the face like, ‘yes, yes your infinite raging, yes; and do exactly what we predicted.’

Rod: Fell and slipped again.

Dean: That shot right there.

John: And they all make a nice choice; each one of them looks at Nate in a different way. This is- and I love, by the way, that who on earth would think would work? ‘I'm in my underwear; I'm running around in the street; I've escaped from the police; who will believe me?’ Yeah, this is a very Twilight Zone, this a very William Shatner look out the window: ‘he's right there!’

Dean: It is, yeah.

John: It's all local actors for the cops.

Rod: Everybody in this show.

John: Yeah there was no one from LA, holy smokes.

Dean: It just goes to show what talent depth there is in Portland. We had no idea. Originally we thought we were gonna be bringing up 4 to 5 people per episode and we really averaged one.

John: And they bounced him hard off that. 

Rod: This show would be the only one you didn’t bring anybody into. 

Chris: Yes. 

John: But the other ones we only did really one role an episode.

Chris: I like the way you did this, too; how you came off his back and around tells the whole story. And then-

Dean: And then transition; terrific.

John: It’s like you thought about this. Like you spent hours preparing.

Rod: It’s like it was planned.

[Laughter]

John: Ahh gimmick security footage. Where would we be without gimmick security footage? Leverage relies on the fact that this is a surveillance society. And this is- we use this a couple times - the guy looking out the cop car window. It’s sort of that William Shatner looking at the thing in the window, that's exactly what it is

Dean: Well it's the rule we have in the show; it’s not enough-

John: This is Dean’s big rule.

Dean: Yeah, my big rule is the villain can't just lose, he must suffer.

Rod: Right. Yeah, yeah.

Dean: He must suffer, otherwise it's not good enough.

John: He’s humiliated.

Chris: And also the gloat; you want the gloat.

Dean: The gloat, you want the gloat. Now where is this-? This scene seems very you, the lawyer-

John: Oh, he totally wrote this. Every now and then on the law stuff, he digs in.

Chris: Well I was trying to marry the notions of the law and neuroscience, and I'm not sure it was entirely successful here.

Rod: Well can I just make a comment? I’m not sure if I understood what it meant.

[All Laugh]

John: He still directed the hell out of it.

Chris: It was about the nature of intent, really, in a crime and that’s-

Rod: I think we may have shot this about midnight or one am and I said to you, ‘what does this actually mean?’

John: It’s Latin, just keep moving.

Chris: It’s Latin, yeah, exactly.

John: And Parker has the money. This is actually- this is a character that Chris does on a regular basis when he plays roles. When he has Eliot doing the role, it's always an ‘aw shucks I'm just here to help you’ guy. He very rarely intentionally frightens people. You know it's a very interesting choice that is, ‘yeah I'm just your pal; this is all good news; we’re all- we just all wanna go home’. So this is- only two drawers worked, this one and which one?

Rod: That's it, the other side.

John: The other side.

Dean: I love this. I love that he smacks him. 

John: Yeah.

[All Laugh]

John: ‘We all saw that.’

Dean: I love their relationship.

John: Yeah, because, you know, he’s gotta make sure that as annoying as Hardison is, he's not gonna get hurt.

Chris: And the other thing that's not important here is another kinda late addition in the script, was we wanted to- you know they manipulate the US Marshals here, but we wanted them to have a win. We wanted to give them something, so that it’s not- they're not just chumps.

John: It's very tricky, in the room we talk about, when we manipulate innocent people, they should be rewarded.

Chris: Especially law enforcement.

John: Especially law enforcement. Because you know he's not- he didn't do a bad thing, you know. And in the end, he's a good Marshal and he's gonna bring the guy in. So, you know, we always wanna make sure they always fall on the side of angels. And it's not always easy. They leave wreckage behind, yeah, and this was also nice - the moment he gets the favor out of him.

Chris: Yeah, he owes him.

Dean: And what's nice is that he comes up with it as it's happening, as opposed to having this planned out. You see it really, like, you see the idea just enter his brain.

John: And there.

Chris: That's a great acting moment.

John: Now originally, by the way, Chris, you had the- I would like to note, the drivers license of the evil father found with the assassins car so that the-

Chris: I think I did. 

John: The evil father not only lost custody of the kid, but went down as an accessory for assassination and murder.

Chris: I think I did have that, that might've been- I think that was too far.

John: Your original payoff was a bit more ruthless. But he's great, by the way, that's Victor. He's great in that scene. Cause look, he’s warm with the kid and then he basically puts on the cop eyes, and it's like ‘do not even try. Do not even try’. Yeah, it's a great performance.

Chris: And then here this last bit was the- was what we added as the- as the new ending. Which was, we wanna make sure that the audience knows this kid is gonna be safe.

Dean: And I think the first time we ever ended on the show on Christian.

John: Yeah. I would like to know the first time we saw this, the lights came up and I said, ‘oh he's going in there to kill that dad.’

[All Laugh]

John: It's just like, ‘oh man he's going in there, he's gonna choke him into unconsciousness, shove a pretzel down his trachea, and make it look like an accident and let him choke to death on the floor. Ahhh, kid’s out of the way.’

Rod: This stuff happens at the end because you allow the story to unfold. And we talked about it as we were shooting, but you guys allow it to unfold, so it has a natural sort of tempo. I really liked it.

Dean: Well thank you, again, for being on the show season 1, 12 Step, my favorite episode. You killed it again with this. And thank you so much for being here.

Rod: I'm gonna be there for seasons 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11.

John: God bless - that’s 6 more than I'll be there for.

Dean: From your mouth to our accountants’ ears.

Rod: It was fun.

Dean: Thank you.

Chris: Thanks a lot.

John: Thanks a lot.

#Leverage #Leverage TNT #Leverage Audio Commentary Transcripts #Audio Commentary #Transcripts #Parker #Alec Hardison #Elliot Spencer #Nate Ford #Sophie Deveraux #Season 2 #Episode 3 #Season 2 Episode 3 #The Order 23 Job

[amphibious-thing]

The transaction between the Chevalière d’Eon and Pierre Beaumarchais acting on behalf of the King of France:

We, the undersigned, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, specially entrusted with the private instructions of the King of France, dated Versailles, August 25, 1775, communicated to the Chevalier d'Eon in London, of which a copy certified by me shall be appended to the present act, on the one part;

And Demoiselle Charles-Geneviève-Louise-Auguste-André-Timothée d'Eon de Beaumont, spinster of age, hitherto known by the name of the Chevalier d'Eon, squire, formerly captain of dragoons, knight of the royal and military order of Saint Louis, aide-de-camp to Marshal the Duc and to the Comte de Broglie, minister plenipotentiary of France at the Court of Great Britain, late doctor of civil law and of canon law, advocate in the Parliament of Paris, Censor Royal for History and Belles Lettres; sent to Russia with the Chevalier Douglas, for the purpose of effecting the reconciliation of the two courts, secretary of embassy to the Marquis de L'Hospital, ambassador plenipotentiary of France at the court of her Imperial Majesty of all the Russias, and secretary of Embassy to the Duc de Nivernais, ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary from France to England for the conclusion of the late peace, are agreed upon what follows, and have hereunto subscribed our names:

Art. I. That I, Caron de Beaumarchais, do require, in the name of the King, that all official and private papers having reference to the several political negotiations with which the Chevalier d'Eon has been entrusted in England, notably those concerning the peace of 1763, correspondence, minutes, copies of letters, cyphers, etc., at present deposited with Earl Ferrers, Peer of the Realm, and Admiral, of Upper Seymour Street, Portman Square, London, ever a particular friend of the said Chevalier d'Eon in the course of his misfortunes and law-suits in England, that the said papers, enclosed in a large iron safe of which I have the key, be delivered to me after having been initialled by me and by the said Chevalier d'Eon, and of which the inventory shall be added and appended to the present act, as a proof that the said papers have been faithfully delivered. 

Art. II. That all papers of the secret correspondence between the Chevalier d'Eon, the late King, and the several persons entrusted by his Majesty to entertain that correspondence, designated in the letters by the names deputy, solicitor, in the same way in which his Majesty himself was styled the counsellor, etc. . . . which secret correspondence was concealed beneath the flooring of the bed-chamber of the said Chevalier d'Eon, whence it was withdrawn by him, on October 5 of the present year, in my presence alone, being carefully sealed and addressed: To the King only, at Versailles; that all the copies of the said letters, minutes, cyphers, etc., shall be delivered to me, likewise attested with initials, and with an exact inventory, the said secret correspondence consisting of five portfolios or thick volumes in quarto.

Art. III. That the said Chevalier d'Eon is to desist from every kind of proceeding, judicial or personal, against the memory of the late Comte de Guerchy, his adversary, the successors to his title, the members of bis family, etc., and undertakes never to revive any such proceedings under whatsoever form, unless he be forced thereto by judicial or personal provocation on the part of some relative, friend, or adherent of that family; for which there can no longer be any apprehension, his Majesty having, in his wisdom, taken every necessary precaution to prevent the recurrence, in the future, of any such unseemly quarrels, whether on the one side or on the other.

Art. IV. And to the end that an insurmountable barrier be for ever raised between the contending parties, and that all ideas of law-suits or personal quarrels, no matter whence they arise, be permanently nullified, I require, in the name of his Majesty, that the disguise which has to this day enabled a woman to pass for the Chevalier d'Eon shall entirely cease, and without seeking to blame Charles-Geneviève-Louise-Auguste-Andrée-Timothée d'Eon de Beaumont for a concealment of condition and sex, the responsibility of which rests entirely with her relatives, and whilst rendering justice to the prudent, decorous, and circumspect conduct she has at all times observed in the dress of her adoption whilst preserving a manly and vigorous bearing; I require, absolutely, that the ambiguity of her sex, which has afforded inexhaustible material for gossip, indecent betting, and idle jesting liable to be renewed, especially in France, which her pride would not tolerate, and which would give rise to fresh quarrels that could only serve, perhaps, to palliate and revive former ones; I require, absolutely, I say, in the name of the King, that the phantom Chevalier d'Eon shall entirely disappear, and that the public mind shall for ever be set at rest by a distinct, precise, and unambiguous declaration, publicly made, of the true sex of Charles-Geneviève-Louise-Auguste-Andrée-Timothée d'Eon de Beaumont before she returns to France, and by her resumption of female attire; with all of which she should the more readily comply just now, considering how interesting she will appear to both sexes, alike honoured by her life, her courage, and her talents. Upon which conditions, I will deliver to her the safe conduct on parchment, signed by the King and his Minister for Foreign Affairs, which allows her to return to France and there remain under the special and immediate protection of his Majesty, who is desirous not only of according protection and security under his royal word, but who is good enough to change the yearly pension of 12,000 livres granted by the late King in 1766, which has been punctually paid to her to this day, into a life-annuity of the same amount, with an acknowledgment that the capital of the said annuity has already been provided and advanced by the said Chevalier d'Eon in furthering the concerns of the late King, besides other larger sums, the total of which will be remitted by me for the liquidation of her debts in England, with a copy on parchment of the deed for the said annuity of 12,000 livres tournois, dated September 28, 1775.

And I, Charles-Geneviève-Louise-Auguste-Andrée-Timothée d'Eon de Beaumont, hitherto known as the Chevalier d'Eon, as above styled, submit to the whole of the above conditions imposed in the name of the King, solely that I may afford to his Majesty the greatest possible proofs of my respect and submission, although it would have been far more agreeable to me had he deigned to employ me again in his army or in the diplomatic service, in compliance with my earnest solicitations and in accordance with my seniority. And because, excepting some exhibition of feeling, rendered in a measure excusable by a legitimate and natural desire to defend myself and by the most justifiable resentment, his Majesty is pleased to allow that I have always conducted myself bravely as an officer, and that I have been a laborious, intelligent, and discreet political agent, I submit to declaring publicly my sex, to my condition being established beyond a doubt, to resume and wear female attire until death, unless, taking into consideration my being so long accustomed to appear in uniform, his Majesty will consent, on sufferance only, to my resuming male attire should it become impossible for me to endure the embarrassment of adopting the other, after having tried to accustom myself to it at the Abbaye-Royale of Bernardine Ladies of Saint Antoine-des-Champs, Paris, or at any such other convent as I might select, to which I wish to withdraw for some months on arriving in France.

I declare that I entirely desist from all proceedings, judicial or personal, against the memory of the late Comte de Guerchy and his successors, promising never to renew them unless driven to such a step by judicial proceedings, as above stated.

I further pledge my word of honour that I will deliver to M. Caron de Beaumarchais all official and secret papers, whether concerning the embassy or the aforesaid secret correspondence, without reserving or retaining to myself a single document, upon the following conditions, to which I entreat his Majesty's approval:—

1. Seeing that the letter of the late King, my most honoured lord and master, dated Versailles, April 1, 1766, by which he insured to me the annual pension of 12,000 livres until such time as he should improve my position, is of no further service to me so far as the said pension is concerned, which has been changed, to my advantage, by the King his successor, into a life-annuity of like amount — that the original letter should remain in my possession as testimony of the honour the late King deigned to bestow on my loyalty, my innocence, and my irreproachable conduct during all my misfortunes, and in all matters he deigned to confide to me, whether in Russia, whilst serving in his army, or in England.

2. That the original receipt given to me in London on July 11, 1766, by M. Durand, minister plenipotentiary in England, in exchange for the secret order of the late King, dated Versailles, June 3, 1763, delivered to him by me, intact, and of my own free-will, shall remain in my possession, as authentic testimony of the complete submission with which I surrendered the secret order in the own hand of the King my master, which of itself justified my conduct in England, so often described as being obstinacy by my enemies, and which, in their ignorance of my extraordinary situation in relation to the King, they have even dared to qualify as high treason.

3. That his Majesty will deign, as a special favour, to satisfy himself at the expiration of every six months, as did the late King, of my being alive and of my whereabouts, to prevent my enemies from ever again being tempted to undertake anything to the prejudice of my honour, my liberty, my person, and my life.

4. That the cross of Saint Louis, won by me at the peril of my life, in combats, sieges, and battles in which I took part, where I was wounded, and served as aide-de-camp to the general, and as captain of dragoons and of volunteers in Marshal Broglie's army, with bravery to which all the generals under whom I served have borne witness, shall never be taken from me, and that the right to wear it on any garments I may adopt shall be conceded to me for life.

And if I may be permitted to add a respectful demand to these conditions, I would venture to observe that, at the moment I am about to obey his Majesty in consenting to abandon for ever my male attire, I am entirely destitute of everything — linen, clothing, and apparel suited to my sex, and that I have no money to procure even ordinary necessaries, M. de Beaumarchais knowing well to whom the amount destined in part payment of my debts is owing, and of which I do not wish to touch one penny myself. Consequently, although I have no right to expect further favours from his Majesty, I do not refrain from soliciting at his hands the gift of a sum of money for the purchase of my female outfit, this unexpected, extraordinary, and compulsory expense not being my own idea, but solely in obedience to bis orders.

And I, Caron de Beaumarchais, still as afore styled, do leave with the said Demoiselle d'Eon de Beaumont the original letter conferring so much distinction, which the late King wrote to her from Versailles, April 1, 1766, when granting her a pension of 12,000 livres, in acknowledgment of faithful services.

I further leave with her M. Durand's original document. Neither of these papers can be taken from her by me without a severity that would ill accord with the benevolent and equitable intentions at present entertained by his Majesty towards the said Demoiselle d'Eon de Beaumont. As to the cross of Saint Louis, which she desires to retain with the right of wearing it in female attire, I must admit that, notwithstanding the extreme kindness with which his Majesty has deigned to trust to my prudence, zeal, and intelligence in the conduct of this affair, I am afraid I should be exceeding my powers in determining so delicate a question.

Considering, on the other hand, that the cross of the royal and military order of Saint Louis has ever been regarded solely as the proof of, and reward for, valour, and that several officers who were thus decorated, having abandoned the military career for the church or the law, continued to wear on their new garments this honourable evidence that they had worthily performed their duties in a calling fraught with great dangers; I do not think that there can be any objection to a like indulgence being granted to a valorous maiden who, having been brought up in male attire by her parents, and having courageously fulfilled all the perilous duties imposed by the profession of arms, may not have been aware of the impropriety of adopting the attire in which she had been compelled to live, until it became too late to change, and is therefore not in the least to blame for not having done so until now.

Considering, also, that the rare example offered by this extraordinary maiden is not likely to be followed by those of her sex, and can have no consequences; that had Jeanne d'Arc, who saved the throne and the states of Charles VII., fighting in male attire, obtained during the war, as has the said Demoiselle d'Eon de Beaumont, some military reward or other decoration, such as the cross of Saint Louis, it does not appear that, her task being completed, the King would have deprived her of the honourable reward for valour when requiring her to resume the garments of her sex, nor that any chivalrous French knight would have considered the distinction as being profaned because it ornamented the breast and attire of a woman who, on the field of battle, had ever shown herself worthy of being a man.

I, therefore, venture to take it upon myself, not in the capacity of envoy, lest I should abuse the power confided to me, but as a man persuaded of the rectitude of the principles I have just enunciated; I take it upon myself, I say, to leave with the Demoiselle Charles-Geneviève-Louise-Auguste-Andrée-Timothée d'Eon de Beaumont the cross of Saint Louis, and liberty to wear it on her female attire, without, however, its being understood that I bind his Majesty to this act should he disapprove my conduct on this point; promising only, in the event of any difficulty arising, that I will plead with his Majesty on her behalf, and, if necessary, establish her right thereto, which I believe to be legitimate, with all the power of my pen and the strength of my heart.

With regard to the request made by the said Demoiselle d'Eon de Beaumont to the King, for a sum of money to enable her to procure a female outfit — although such a matter is not included in my instructions, I will not delay taking it into consideration, such an outlay being, as a fact, the necessary consequence of the instructions of which I am the bearer, to the effect that she is to assume the garments of her sex. I therefore allow her, for the purchase of a female outfit, a sum of 2000 crowns, on condition that she will not carry away with her from London any of her clothing, arms, or any male apparel, lest the desire to wear them should at any time be stimulated by the sight of them. I consent to her retaining one complete suit of uniform of the regiment in which she has served, the helmet, sabre, pistols, musket, and bayonet, as souvenirs of her past life, just as are preserved the relics of loved ones now no more. Everything else will be given up to me in London, to be sold, the proceeds to be disposed of in such way as his Majesty may direct.

And this act has been made out in duplicate, between us, Pierre-Augustin-Caron de Beaumarchais, and Charles-Geneviève-Louise-Auguste-Andrée-Timothée d'Eon de Beaumont, under private seal, giving to it, on one side and the other, the whole force and assent of which it is susceptible, and we have, each of us, affixed the seals of our arms, in London, the fifth day of October, 1775.

(Signed)

Caron de Beaumarchais.

D'Eon de Beaumont.

~ translated by Alfred Rieu, originally published in Un Aventurier Au Xviiie Siècle: Le Chevalier d'Éon by Octave Homberg & Fernand Jousselin

This document was actually signed some time latter, d’Eon wanted to backdate it to her birthday, as this was an official recognition of her gender she saw it as a sort of second birth certificate.

#chevalière d'eon #pierre beaumarchais #long post #this is one of those things that I think is super interesting but suspect others may not #queer history