#that 'do you consider yourself attractive' poll fucked me up

[i-wanna-b-yours]

me when I dont meet the societal standards of "attractive" because it is based on eurocentric beauty and I am indian:

#but also...i might not meet indian standard of beauty too... #NO FUCK THAT DRAUPADI LOOKED LIKE ME #SHE HAD CURLY THICK BLACK HAIR #SHE HAD ALMOND EYES BLACK IN COLOUR #SHE HAD A DARK COPPER COMPLEXION #DRAUPADI AND I SHARE SAME FEATURES FUCK WHATEVER A WHITE WOMAN HAS TO SAY ABOUT MY BEAUTY #but also....i kinda feel miserable about not actually being considered attractive by anyone #maybe its the societal expectation of being considered pretty at least by one person by the age that i am #but i want to know what its like to be wanted :( #that 'do you consider yourself attractive' poll fucked me up #i mean i do but to be honest not most of the times maybe 15% #god complex and pretending everything is fine and nothing can hurt you can only take you so far

[crystalelemental]

So, so glad Masters introduced that poll and is still talking about guilds and co-op and PvP, I will never tired of the idiotic discussions this will spark.

"Yeah, PvP would be so good, I like competition!" Not in gacha, you don't. Moreover, find me a singular way to establish PvP in a game like this. I'll wait.

"Yeah, PvP is stupid! But a really strong co-op system would be great!" Did we learn nothing from Dragalia? You want to spend hours just waiting to get in a match for one person to immediately fuck up and drop it? That's what you want? Because that's what you're going to get.

"Well it could be fine if they let you battle on your own, but as part of a guild your scores accumulate and then rewards happen based on how the guild performs!" Consider the discrete scenarios: guilds have infinite availability for new members, or guilds have limited availability. Now consider if Gauntlet became a guild-centric, rewards-based leaderboard. You know all the top performers know each other, right? They're the people who contribute to the solo count document. They all know one another. And they're all going to band together. Suddenly, there is a major guild that has all the top performers in one place. Revisiting our scenarios:

In scenario 1, everyone joins that guild, because who the hell else is going to stand a chance? Maybe you'll have a handful of others that matter, but eventually the whole system boils into just a few options anyway so what was the point?

In the more likely scenario 2, new players are now fucked. Everyone established, good at the game, and willing to pay into it is in the same guild. You are not going to dethrone them. You have like 3-5 options vying for the top rewards, while everyone else gets consolation prizes. And as a new player? Even the mid-tiers don't want you. Our spots are limited, bro, and we do not have space for someone who can't really contribute much. We're not here to babysit while you get established. But this is the moneymaker meta now, so a new player walks in, immediately gets presented with the choice of spending massive amounts to catch up quickly or be excluded, and promptly deletes the game because who is going to deal with that?

Gacha naturally trends toward the stingy. New gacha are always more enticing to play, because they're still in the phase where they're setting up the addiction trap of constant reinforcement. Even a good established gacha is going to lose their long-term players to burnout and breaks as they shuffle on to other, more "generous" games. The means of survival is attracting new blood; new whales who are fresh on the game and enjoying what's here for what it is, and paying into the system in place of the previous players who left. This is the only way to maintain. FEH only saw profits increase year to year when Three Houses was big and it was like all they focused on. Because it drew in a metric ton of new players, and some of them stuck around as new whales. Masters is on course to do the same with Paldea and Hisui introductions simultaneously. These were pretty popular games, and we're coming into a period where they might see a reversal of fortune.

But if you alter the state of the game to be centered around co-op, competitive, or guilds, you're increasing the odds of those players showing up, being unable to get established anywhere without paying into the system, and dropping entirely, because they don't yet have the attachment to pay in to stay with it. FOMO only matters if you care about what's missing. If you make a system that can't get its hooks in, it's going to do more harm than good. Which is what will happen if you're going to do something like this, because now you're opening yourself to competition. You want people to pay a small fortune for a competitive Pokemon gacha? Smogon is free, bro.

#pokemon masters

[1d1195]

A PENNY?!?! Sam literally how?! AND FOR JEANS?! but you know what I would try to achieve that high again too lol But yay for shopping! Hope you got some lovely stuff bestie!

Dealing with teens all day for the entire work week is CRAZY so I dont blame you for having constant headaches lol oddly enough my brother is the one that suffers from headaches lol Oh hormones for sure cause the stomach to be wack which is so unfair! this period will NOT affect you on your break!! A period is never fun but hope youre taking care of yourself!

ME TOO!!! I do not fit in those flared/bell bottom jeans thats trendy now which is tragic solely because that's all i ever see in stores!?! Im also not even close to being considered tall or petite and those just make me look so off too bahah So skinny jeans for me have always been the option where although not the best option, they are the lesser evil of jeans lol

AWW that's so cute! Little Sam was such an icon for that!(you still are obvi) You should for sure should revisit the marry janes for the fall!!! I am waiting for that day too! Sam I don't think you know how much of a HATER i am of electric scooters, i am fighting a battle everyday trying not to get killed by them on campus 😭 But I love that coleege was walkable for you! It must have been nice getting to know the area well!

I had a feeling you played softball at least! Idk if my mind was just projecting the Made to be Universe/storyline but softball seemed like something you would have done/enjoyed! But omg you were like a full on athlete?! That's so cool! Not the injuries of course but the rest is!

I tense up so quickly because im very awkward about my feelings😭SAM THERE HAD TO BE MANY THAT FOUND YOU HOT! i kid you not being smart is SO attractive! Plus a cute girly who is GOOD at math in a typically guy dominated field!? The puns seem like a very you thing and i love that honestly! I think its so cute when people do that!

ALSO THAT POLL😭 bestie I cant choose😭I need them ALL! I spent a good minute thinking about my vote lol very excited though!

Have such a lovely start to your break Sam! love you!-💜

If there is a coupon I will find it lol. I can't tell you how many times I've signed up for American Eagle text messages and then unsubscribed just to get 15% off every time. I think I had a crazy reward and then the jeans were already on sale. I'm pretty sure they have to charge you something in order for the sale to go through so I think they HAD to charge me something.

I'm already enjoying my break actually despite my period. Thank God for Midol tbh I think I would die without it. My body is very clockwork so after cramps for a FUN 24 hours it's usually much more manageable. I HAVE to take meds though even if I don't feel crampy right away. The second my body realizes I'm on my period it's like "TIME FOR CRAMPS" and again, if I don't take the meds right away I get behind the pain and I am FUCKED for the remainder of the 24 hours.

I am trying to relax as much as possible because May and June are going to be crazy with senior prom/graduation and stuff. Plus I've outsourced myself as well for lots of other projects 🙃 I really need to learn to say no (time to reread Dolcezza) But I plan on finishing this book I'm reading (I haven't done very well reading lately, but I'm telling myself it's okay because it's not a race and I read a lot early on.) I do have to do some lesson planning but I actually enjoy that because I find math soothing like a psychopath hahahahaha

That's amazing you like skinny jeans. I feel so ostracized sometimes when it comes to my jeans choices. All my friends and coworkers have moved on with the trends and I'm still in 2013/2014/2015/2016 hahaha. VERY controversial: I actually really like jeans. I always by jegging jeans so they're super stretchy and comfy. Obviously if I can wear leggings I will hahahaha.

I'm crying about the electric scooter. You must be on a sizable campus to have electric scooters that's so funny. People drove their bikes/skateboards around campus a lot but no scooters. I loved the area my college was in (I actually live down the street from it in an apartment now because I love this area so much) it's very much the setting behind My Friend's Toyota hahaha

LOOK AT YOU MISS DETECTIVE HAHAHAHAHA I didn't even realize that about Made to Be that's so funny and true. I tried a bit of everything tbh. I did swimming (mostly so I wouldn't die growing up on the beach) and tennis lessons which I wasn't good at either but I really enjoyed anyway. I suck at ice skating (do you know how often you use your ankles for pretty much every sport? 🙃) and idk what it is about basketball but I may as well just sit in the middle of the court it would be less harmful to those around me.

OH BESTIE SAME HERE ABOUT FEELINGS. Everyone around me told me my bf liked me before we started dating and I was like "No he doesn't he thinks I'm gross" ☠ if they found me hot and attractive I kinda wish they told me! 😭 it's selfish but it would have done a nice boost to my ego. I was never the 'looked' at friend if you will. I called myself The DUFF™ all throughout middle and high school I really did a number on my self-esteem 😭 I am probably a little toxic when it comes to being a STEM girly lol because I tried so hard in high school and college to prove I was just as smart as the boys (sometimes more actually 😉)

For the poll it's just about the order which I think is kind of fun! I hope other people are enjoying it--I find it really helpful! I thought I did a lot of my more "obscure" stories on the last round of voting so I thought it would be nice to bring back some of the more popular series. I almost threw Protection on there too but thought it was too much (and too mean to make that decision) hahahaha

💕💕

xoxo

#💜

[hotcoffeetransformation]

Jason swore loudly and had to resist the urge to throw his controller down, pissed that he kept dying cause of the game's stupid glitches (Also known as own mistakes). Still, he regained his composure, and smiled before saying

"Alright chat, we're gonna finish up this one and then we're gonna move on to another game. There should be a poll on top for what we do next"

Jason was a moderately successfully game streamer, averaging about 200 to 300 viewers a night, entirely based on his wit and skill. He knew for sure that they weren't coming for his looks, given his weedy, thin frame, overly pimpled face and large, nerdy glasses. Still, it was enough for him, and he was happy with the progress that he'd made.

As Jason got himself set up for the next game, he heard a shocking sound from above him. The victory theme from one of his favorite JRPGs was blaring through the speakers, and he came up, staring at the screen in shock. He knew what that sound meant. That meant someone had tipped him one thousand dollars, completely out of nowhere.

He looked in shock at the notification on the stream, seeing that it was from someone named JockBro69, with the simple message "Can't wait to get to know you better, cutie~"

Jason was completely stunned. Not only had someone actually redeemed the donation goal that he set as a joke (That being that whoever was stupid enough to tip 1000 dollars got to have a 15 minute private chat with him), it was also someone that he'd never seen in his chat before.

Thoroughly weirded out, but knowing that he had to honor his commitment, he sent the guy a quick private message.

"Dude, I don't know how to thank you enough! Guess I'll see ya pretty soon!"

With that, he sent the man his private zoom link, and said goodbye to the chat, who were still going wild over this turn of events, before pausing,the stream and hopping over to discord for the call.

Not two seconds after his stream stopped, he got a requested video call on discord from the guy, and he opened it up, giving a second for the video to load, but when it did, he was completely dumbfounded again. He was expecting the mysterious donator to be some fat, sweaty silicon valley nerd with too much and money on his hands, but instead what met him was possibly the hottest man he's ever seen, standing up and looking down at his webcam with a friendly expression.

"Fuck, bro! Its so good to finally fucking meet you, I've been such a big fan for a long time, and this is a really big deal for me~

The man had a deep, rumbling, pleasant voice, that shot straight down Jacob's spine and left him feeling strangely... inadequate. Like the fact that his voice wasn't as smooth or melodic as this guy's was his fault, and he should be ashamed of that fact. Still, this guy was pretty pleasant to look at, Jason had to admit. He wasn't gay, definitely not, but he could acknowledge when another guy simply looked good.

Jason scratched the back of his neck awkwardly, not entirely sure of what he should do or say. Still, this guy spent 1000 dollars on this meeting, so he had to try anyway.

"So, umm.... I see your username is jockbro69... What's your actual name thought? I don't think I've ever seen you in chat before..."

The other man actually laughed at this, before looking confused and saying

"What are you talking about bro? Its me, Ethan! I'm in your chat all the time! Man, I guess what they say about playing games so much is true, huh?"

At this statement, Jason actually went pale with shock. THIS was Ethan? This was the guy who's username used to be runningLink? Who was an active fan of the zelda series, constantly begged Jason to play them, and bemoaned the fact that no would date him? It just didn't seem right...

Still, Jason, ever the semi professional, continued on, pretending that he wasn't shocked at the news.

"Well, thanks for supporting me so much! Seriously, this means a lot to me... Ummm... so I guess tell me some of your favorite things about the channel then!"

The man laughed again, the sound coming out in a slow, dumb chuckle, before saying

"What's my favorite thing? Do I even have to say, bro? Its the amazing piece of eye candy I'm looking at right now. You're super hot, bro~"

At this, Jason was shocked, but he chuckled awkwardly while blushing, and said

"Really? I don't think I've ever heard a single person say that before. I guess I consider myself slightly below average..."

The guy looked confused at that, before pressing on

"Really, bro? You look super hot to me, you got those bright, blinding blue eyes that you can just get lost in~"

At this point, Jason knew the man was just messing with him. His eyes have always, and will always be a dark, muddy brown, hidden behind his massive frames. Jason was about to respond, when Ethan continued

"Yeah, and you got that super stylish haircut too, really makes you look super masculine~"

Now Jason was REALLY confused. The guy was right, he did always get complements on his eyes, the bright, shocking blue visible and striking even through his huge glasses. But his hair was always a long, unkempt greasy mess.

"Ethan, are you sure you're okay, you're not just seeing things? Cause I don't know what you're talking about"

Ethan ignored the comment, just continuing to press on

"And you've got that hot, manly face, with your strong jaw and amazing profile"

Jason was confused again. Sure, his stylish haircut did help him look much better, but his face had always been pretty androgynous, with hints of baby fat still present in his cheeks. Again, before he could interrupt, Ethan continued,

"And you've got that smooth smooth skin, that hot stubble, that sexy smirk of yours. You're the full package bro~"

Jason laughed at this. Ethan was clearly being way too complementary. Sure his face had a great shape to it, with strong cheekbones and a square jaw, but his skin was still acne marked as hell, his smile was crooked and awkward, and he'd never been able to grow any facial hair, no matter how much he tried.

"I really have no idea what you're talking about Ethan. Sure I've got some good features, but the overall package isn't much to write home about~"

Ethan smirked again, his eyes lighting up with humor, as if he knew something I didn't.

"Nah, bro, you're underselling yourself. Plus, you've got that body~"

"What about my body? I think its pretty average, though I guess I'm a bit on the skinny side..."

Jason looked down at himself, trying to contemplate what Ethan meant. Sure, he'd been blessed with an attractive, manly face, but it didn't change the fact that his body was still below average at best.

"Again, bro! Putting yourself down. You really think those massive logs you have for arms are below average?"

Jason looked down at his skinny arms, and said

"More like logs than twigs man, seriously."

"And what about your legs? You've spent so long working on em, you've got thighs and glutes to kill for~"

Jason laughed again

"I dunno man! Most people say the exact opposite. They say I spend too much time on arms and not enough on my torso and legs. What can I say though? I love having big, beefy arms."

"Of course you do, bro? Who wouldn't? Especially when right in between em, you got your big, pillowy chest, your sexy abs, and your super toned back~"

Jason was seriously starting to wonder if Ethan was on something. Anyone could clearly see from first glance that Jason's body was badly proportioned, his arms and legs being massive from months to years of work, while he neglected his back, pecs and ab muscles. Still, he thought he looked pretty alright honestly.

"And I especially love how you're not only super sexy, you know it and flaunt it~ I don't think I've ever seen you once wear a shirt. The most you'll wear is a necklace, and even then, not like that covers anything, bro~ Only makes you look sexier"

Now here Jason had to disagree. He knew that he had cultivated and developed an amazing body over his years of going to the gym, but that was all for his own personal satisfaction. He never flaunted it unnecessarily, especially not during a stream.

"And I love the fact that you're such a fucking bro, bro. Every other word out of your mouth is bro and dude, you can't go even five minutes without flexing and thinking of fucking, or going to the gym, or hanging out with your other hot bros. We all know that your brain is basically only good for working out and looking hot. No smart's up there. And you've got your deep, sexy voice, too. Makes it even hotter that you're a gay bro, just like me"

Jason HAD to laugh at that. What the guy was saying was just so ridiculous.

"What the hell are you talking about? Look, I know that I like to show off my sexy body a lot, but that doesn't mean I'm some kind of dumb jock. And I'm definitely straight, dude. Don't know why you'd think I'm gay"

Ethan pressed on, completely unabashed by Jason's last comments.

"But you know the best fucking part, bro? Its that power of yours. The fact that any weak ass nerd who looks at you and your huge fucking muscles grows into a hot, dumb bro like us within seconds~"

Jason was busy flexing, staring at his own bicep in awe, as if he was shocked by him impressive he was. He looked up at Ethan blearily, saying

"Sorry, bro, what'd you say? I guess I got a bit fucking distracted. Huhuhu. But who could blame me~"

"Nah, it was nothing bro. You don't need to worry about it. Now should head back to the stream?"

Jason gasped in excitement, having forgotten entirely about the fact that there was a whole stream audience full of lame ass nerds, just ready for him to make as sexy as he and Ethan were.

"You got it bro~ This is gonna be so fucking hot~"

Jason left the call, going back to the stream and restarting, glad to see that a full 300 people were still watching, even through the extended break. The second he turned his camera on, he could see that people were confused for some reason, saying a stranger broke into his house. How stupid could these people be? How did they not recognize him? Still, not like it would matter for long...

"Hey bros! How're we all fucking doing? Welcomes to today's stream..."

He trailed off, looking blankly at the camera, before saying

"You know what? Fuck video games! Who needs them when you can do this~"

And as his pecs bounced and bounced hypnotically, the chat slowly transitioned from messages like "What the fuck is happening?" or "Who is this dumb jock?" to "Fuck, bro! Your pecs look so fucking hot today!" and "Huhuhu, I love making my pecs bounce like Jace's~"

And so the stream continued, Jace showing everyone all the amazing things his body could do, while anyone that was watching, whether they wanted to or not, began to copy him exactly. And as the stream went on, the viewer count rose, and rose, and rose...

#musclegrowth #straight to gay #jockification #himbo tf #jock #muscle

[justanotherlifeff]

You hated Bakugou Katsuki with every single fiber of your body. Yes, at the moment, you were running around on the streets, trying to find the site at which Bakugou was currently fighting a villain. You had finally taken it upon yourself to stop the angry blond from ruining his reputation any further by intervening whenever he had to deal with the press. Which basically meant, you had to track him during his patrols, find out where the hell he is fighting a villain and be there to stop him from running his mouth. Thanks to that, the press has now recognized as ‘the mom assistant’ as the news articles said, much to Bakugou’s irritation.

“Bakugou-kun!” you yelled, catching the blonde’s attention as he was close to starting an argument with the reporter talking to him. “Why the fuck do you always have to butt in?” Bakugou yelled at you, clearly furious, possibly because of something the reporter said. “Well, cause you need to keep your mouth in check!” you snapped at him before smiling at the reporter and saying, “Sorry sir, we’ll have to cut this short” and pulled Bakugou out of the crowd. “Stop pulling me dimwit!” Bakugou barked, yet letting you take him away despite his ability to yank you off. “Well, do you think Deku-san is gonna yell at reporters? Why do you think you never cross him at the popularity poll? Fan votes aren’t everything you know. We both want you to be the number 1, Bakugou-kun” you lectured him, something that worked every single time somehow.

Bakugou only let out a small grunt in reply, liking the fact that you always told him that you wanted him to be the number 1. In fact, he started the argument with the reporter only to have you lecture him. He had been causing way more trouble for you than usual just to hear you say how much you want him to be the number 1, since his ego, which was as big as an entire dinosaur, did not allow him to just ask you to praise him. Little did he know, it only made you more overworked, more frustrated with him.

Yes, you were absolutely hopeless on how to deal with his PR issues. The fact that you had a rather personal connection to his antics did not help either. You were wondering whether your plan to spend more time with him was a mistake, but, you did not have the heart to stop all that meaningless cooking sessions, which were not really cooking sessions anymore, but more like just hanging out together at your apartment, watching random stuff on the TV while eating whatever food he helped you cook up. Sometimes, he would ask you to show up at his regular gym with food and you would just wait there and watch him work out. The two of you would talk, and sometimes he would help you work out as well since “you can’t possibly protect yourself with that noodle arms dumbass!”.

You were at home, at 12am, thinking about possible solutions to handling a way more troublesome Bakugou, when you got a call from the team leader of his PR team. “What the fuck did he do again?” you wondered as you picked the call up. “What did he do now?” you asked, frustration clear in his voice. “Check Chargebolt’s Instagram. We are currently contacting his PR team to take down the post but seems like Chargebolt hacked into it pretty well. I’m surprised that someone as dumb as him was able to do something like that. I need you to find Bakugou and Chargebolt and get rid of the post before any further damage is done.” Was all he said before hanging up. “Damn, it must be bad…” you muttered as you got into Chargebolt’s profile. And damn, it really was bad.

The picture was of a very drunk Bakugou, who was smiling smugly at the camera. However, that wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was the two girls on both his laps, two girls who had claimed to have slept with Bakugou in the past, something you had a hard time handling, both as an assistant and as someone who was unfortunate enough to be in love with Bakugou Katsuki himself. “OH, HELL NO! NOT ON MY WATCH!” You gritted your teeth, obviously tired of his bullshit, as you slipped into some decent clothes and ran to catch the train closest to the address of nightclub that his PR team texted you about.

As soon as you reached, the bouncer stopped you, as he thought that you were a random civilian trying to get into the heroes only club. “I’m Bakugou Katsuki’s assistant. I’ve got my ID card. I need to talk to him urgently.” You told him, showing your ID card. “I’m sorry ma’am, I’m not allowed to let anyone who’s not a hero in.” the bouncer answered calmly. “Well, then I’m sorry about this.” You muttered before making a run towards the entrance, without giving the bouncer the chance to catch you. For once, you were thankful to your brat of a boss for making sure you had the stamina to run fast, thanks to tracking him all over the city for the last few months.

Thankfully, you found him quite fast, still with those two obnoxious fangirls as you charged towards him. “BAKUGOU FUCKING KATSUKI, WE NEED TO FUCKING TALK!” You snarled at him. “Damnnnn, you get all the hotties don’tcha Kacchan?” you heard Chargebolt laugh from a chair nearby, having a drink. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Bakugou asked, not even hiding the blush as he found you being angry immensely attractive. However, you were not looking at him at the moment. In fact, you were glaring so hard at Kaminari that if you had an eye lazer quirk, he’d be dead five times over.

“You, delete that fucking post. NOW!” you scolded the now scared lightening hero. “Damn… Okay okay I’m doing it jeez! You’re scarier than Bakugou wtf?” Kaminari chuckled nervously as he deleted the post with shaky hands. “Good. I’ll make sure your PR team gives you hell if you pull any shit like this again.” You gave the nervous man one last glare before directing all your wrath to Bakugou.

For once, he was smart enough to ditch the fangirls, knowing very well that pissing you off now would not end well, no matter how hot you look at the moment. “You, are coming with me.” You told him quietly, venom in your voice. The bouncer finally found you at that moment and tried to apologize to Bakugou about letting you in, however, Bakugou muttering a small “it’s fine” to him told him all about you in an instant. The pro hero never spoke quietly, which only meant that you must be important enough to interrupt his night.

“You’re too drunk to drive. Gimme your keys.” You muttered as you got out of the club with a rather tame looking Bakugou. “You can drive?” he asked, to which you snapped, “Just cause I don’t have a car doesn’t mean I can’t drive, asshole!”. To that, he simply handed over the keys to his Lamborghini to you, which you used to unlock his car and get in. Bakugou got into the passenger’s seat and after a brief moment of uncomfortable silence, he asked, “So, where are we going?” to which you answered, “your penthouse.”. “How the fuck do you know my address?” he asked. “I’m your assistant, Bakugou.” You answered, not looking at him.

The rest of the ride passed in a tense silence as you finally reached the parking lot of his penthouse. After putting his car in the designated area, you decided that enough was enough. You did not want to deal with these feelings anymore. You did not want to deal with situations where he looked at other women the way you wanted him to look at you. You decided that you should rip the bandage then and there. “Bakugou, I wanna quit the job. I’ll bring the resignation letter tomorrow.” You muttered.

To say that Bakugou was in shock was an understatement. “What? What the fuck? Why?” he asked, not hiding the hurt expression on his face. “I can’t take this anymore. Do you even realize how much trouble you cause? Why did I have to show up at a random high class night club today, run from the bouncer, shout at another top pro hero to delete YOUR picture with some random women all because you can’t keep it in your pants? Why do you constantly cause all that PR nightmare? It’s only gotten worse since I started cooking for you. One moment, you try to show up at my home to hang out for no reason and then you go through all the effort to make life harder for me. What do you want from me, Bakugou? Have I done anything wrong? Honestly, this is exactly why Deku is the number 1 hero and you’re not. If I were Deku’s assistant, he wouldn’t have….” Your voice cracked but you were stopped by Bakugou.

“You’re not his assistant. Don’t fucking say good things about him. You’re mine, (Y/N). Not Deku’s, not anyone’s, but mine.” Bakugou growled possessively. “I’m not yours, Bakugou. Those girls you sleep with on a daily basis, they are yours. I don’t want to be with someone who fucks around with random women who throw themselves at them.” You snapped back and for once, Bakugou realized that he messed up.

At the beginning, Bakugou always did as he pleased as 1, his fans loved whatever the hell he did and 2, he got his dick wet so basically, it was always a win-win situation for him. After you fell into his life (quite literally), he found out that he should do as he pleases as 1, again, his fans loved whatever the hell he did and 2, his overinflated ego wouldn’t let him confess his feelings towards you, which is why, it started as him trying to deny his feelings by fucking someone else and later, when he realized that it wasn’t working, he stopped the fucking, but pretended that he didn’t stop it, assuming that you would get jealous and confess to him first. However, now he realized that he judged the situation completely wrong.

“I won’t change what I said, (L/N). You’re mine. I’m saying that, considering everything you just said to me.” Bakugou answered after a brief pause. “So, you’re trying to tell me that you did not sleep with anyone.” You asked him with a deadpan expression. “I stopped two months ago. Pikachu posted that picture because I asked him to. I wanted you to think that I didn’t stop. You can ask all my friends about it.” Bakugou muttered, looking clearly embarrassed. “And why the fuck would you want me to think you’re fucking around?” you asked him, clearly confused. “So that you confess first…” Bakugou muttered, looking away in embarrassment.

The two of you sat there in silence before you busted out laughing. “OI! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU LAUGHING ABOUT?” Bakugou yelled at you, his face completely red, making you laugh even harder. “My God, you’re such a tsundere!” you somehow choked out before wheezing due to laughter. Bakugou just sat there like a sulking child till you were done laughing.

“So, you’re mine. That’s settled right?” Bakugou asked you grumpily, as soon as you caught your breath. “You know, out of all the ways I expected you to ask me out, this was definitely not something I expected, and yet, somehow, this sounds exactly like something you’d do.” You chuckled softly. Bakugou only grunted as an answer. A rather comfortable silence fell between the two of you before it was interrupted yet again by Bakugou.

“So, you didn’t say if it was settled or not.” He grumbled. “Yessir, it’s settled.” You answered. A moment later, he asked again, “So, you’re not leaving the job, right?”. “Nope, I’m not.” You answered. Another brief moment later, he demanded, “Tell me that I’m better than Deku.”. “I will, if you behave.” You answered with a smile, to which he replied, “Fuck you”. “Well, then I won’t call you better than Deku” you answered with a sickly-sweet smile, making him pop a vein on his forehead. “Say it!” he barked, only to have you reply, “Deku is better than…” before you were cut off by a kiss.

You absolutely hated Bakugou Katsuki. Yes, you totally hated the fact that he won your heart. Right.

A/N: THERE WILL BE SMUT ON THE NEXT CHAPTER.

Taglist: @bonbonthedragon @the2ndl

#bakugou katsuki #bnha bakugou #bakugo x reader #bakugou x reader #bakugo fluff #bnha #bnha fanfiction #bnha x reader #bakugo katsuki #bakugou × reader

[monstersandmaw]

Male alien x nb human (nsfw)

Edit which I’m including in all my works after plagiarism and theft has taken place: I do not give my consent for my works to be used, copied, published, or posted anywhere. They are copyrighted and belong to me.

Here's the winner of the 'which monster to write next' poll (at least it was at the time I started writing it). It’s been on early release for Patreon folks for about a week now, and I was supposed to post it here yesterday, but I forgot. I hope you enjoy it!

Lex is non binary, and if they lived on Earth at the moment, would most likely be assigned male at birth. Tarann (alien) is male, an assassin, and didn’t have what we might view as a normal childhood by any standards. As such, there is an awful lot he does know, and a lot that he's completely unfamiliar with...

Content: fluff, the tiniest pinch of angst, plus mention of genetic modification and sterilisation, 'creation' of genetic 'super-soldiers', nsfw, tentacle cocks (plural) Wordcount: 8000

The dull, steady voice of his ship’s computer informed him that faster-than-light travel would not be viable with all systems in their current state of blaster-riddled repair.

He cursed.

It then informed him that actually, since barely sticking the landing in a crumbling red-stone canyon, Tarann would be lucky to take off again at all.

He let out a long string of curses, even switching languages a couple of times.

“That was creative. I even detected some Tch’larian in there,” Menot, the androgynous computer, commented. “Been a while since I’ve heard you use your native tongue, Tarann…”

“Go fuck yourself with a Savaranian spiked tuber,” he grumbled, to which the computer had no qualms responding that if they were not a mere collection of unfathomably complicated code - which he had had no hand whatsoever in creating, they sarcastically pointed out - they might consider the directive.

Tarann simply shook his head in frustration and used the lower of his two sets of arms to smash the bulkhead open by the button on the wall, and stalked through the smashed-up ship towards his cramped sleeping quarters. The Spark was hardly a ship built for comfort. She was utilitarian; designed for quick escapes and aerial combat, and short-range sorties. She’d been his home for over a year now, and he’d be lucky if he ever got her to limp into the upper atmosphere of this backwater planet, let alone space. An unhealthy layer of fine red dust was already clinging to her wings and the intakes would likely need some extensive work before he could get her air-worthy again.

Mounting stress made the old implant scar in the side of his neck throb and he trailed his three-fingered hand along it, his skin currently a neutral, dull grey. Barefooted, as nearly all Tch’larians preferred due to particular shape of their three-toed feet, with one additional thumb-like digit that didn’t quite meet the ground when they stood, he padded silently along the metal floors of the ship and began to check and clean his weapons back in his quarters. The familiar monotony of clicking, sliding metal, and the smell of gun lubricant always soothed him.

“Think,” he hissed at himself.

Menot’s voice sounded over the system twenty minutes later and said, “Incoming transmission from the Agency. Would you like me to play it for you?”

He closed his four yellow eyes and inhaled steadily. Reluctantly, he growled, “Yes.”

“Agent Triskelion,” the familiar voice of his handler rumbled. “We understand that your ship took heavy damage in a dogfight after completing your last contract.”

“That’s a fucking understatement,” he snarled but he didn’t interrupt the message further.

“While it was unrelated to the contract on the Red Flame, your unplanned skirmish with Invaranian Rebels did attract attention and we have intelligence to suggest that they might have attempted to trace you following your escape. You are ordered to keep a low profile and your open contracts have been reassigned to other agents until we can be certain that the Red Flame is no longer looking for you.”

The metal of his blaster creaked under his grip and he relaxed before he damaged it, taking another deep breath. He hadn’t had a contract reassigned since he’d first joined the Agency all those years ago. The humiliation of it forced his skin to change from the dusty grey to a vibrant blue, dotted with teal. Feeling like a teenager again, he forced his skin back to its neutral grey and set the blaster aside, reflexively checking the safety before it put it down.

Back at the bridge, though it was barely large enough for him to squeeze around the seat, he snarled, “Menot, record this and prepare to send it to HQ.”

“Very good.”

“Agent Triskelion, acknowledging receipt of transmission and instructions to lie low. Currently grounded in a canyon twenty clicks north west of a small mining town on a planet that’s so fucking tiny it doesn’t even have an official name.” Tarann steady himself and added, “But I’ll get Menot to send coordinates with this transmission. Ship’s pretty beaten up and I’ll probably need extraction at some point. I doubt this place has the parts I need, but I can look. I’m going to head into the town at sunrise and I’ll take Menot with me. And I’ll keep a low profile.”

“As low a profile as one of the galaxy’s finest killers possibly can,” Menot added, and Tarann cursed whoever had coded sarcasm into their system.

“Exactly,” he said. “A stranger rocking up out of nowhere in a town that tiny is hardly going to pass unremarked, but I’ll adapt.” He snorted a little at the irony of that, knowing that his rather unique genetic melange was designed for camouflage. Not for him was the messy application of paints and disguises, though he couldn’t actually change his bone structure beyond accelerated healing. “So yeah, for the love of all you hold dear, please don’t just forget about me here. End recording. Menot, send it to HQ.”

With that, he slumped into the pilot’s seat for a moment and sighed. Menot helpfully informed him that dawn was three hours away, and he told them to shut everything down save for the essentials and maintain a vigilant watch while he attempted to get some sleep.

“I’ll wake you if anything needs your attention,” Menot promised.

With the sun high in the sky, Tarann stalked across the dusty plain that formed a ring around the town. In fact, it was much larger than they’d initially thought, and Menot quietly informed him in his hidden earpiece that the town appeared to go down into the earth, perhaps following the original mine shafts.

“Puts a new meaning on going to ground for a while,” he snorted.

He was relieved as he passed through dirty, dusty, narrow streets, to note all sorts of lifeforms here - some familiar and many not. With limited biodiversity, he might have stood out like a sore thumb, but the place seemed stuffed to the brim with hopeless outcasts from all over the system. There were even some humans here, which surprised him. The temperature was hot and arid, not ideal for the creatures he’d only had brief dealings with. Earth was seen as a backwater, with the emphasis on the water. It was the kind of place people went to retire to, and that was… about it. Enterprising humans had left centuries ago and gone to the newly terraformed planets like Mars - if they still wanted to remain in their solar system - and many more had joined up with the Federation and scattered all over the known galaxies.

When he passed a bipedal, slender human male, he asked Menot to give him a run-down on the species. “Both surprisingly easy and surprisingly difficult to kill, can be self-destructively curious and reckless, capable of making leaps of logic insurmountable to many species while being unfathomably illogical at other times…”

“Baffling,” he murmured. “Sounds like Agent Luna,” he said with a fond smile.

The legendary assassin had assessed him upon arrival at the Agency for unarmed combat, and somehow despite looking so… breakable, had had him on his back in two seconds flat. She’d also been the one to give him his field name, Triskelion, given that a decent number of things in his body, except his two hearts and four eyes, seemed to come in threes - three fingers, three toes, three lungs… The only trio of anatomical parts she hadn’t seen first hand was, well… elsewhere.

The fact that Luna was a fraction of his size and weight hadn’t seemed to matter at all in combat training, and he’d been very wary (and more than a bit in awe) of her since she’d returned from a mission with an injury that even the best surgeons at the Agency had said would kill her. Six months later, she was back in the field. He shuddered. Humans were like Anthariacs, once you thought you had a lock on their size and shape, they could simply morph into something else. Or perhaps they weren’t anything like that at all.

Unsettled, he shuddered again and nearly crashed straight into a small vendor’s stall in the narrow alley.

He heard the scraping voice say something, at which the ear piece translated, “Watch it!”

Shrugging off the encounter, he moved through the streets until he came to what looked like a bar with a noticeboard outside. Most of the listings were mundane requests and adverts for various services, and the rewards were in a currency he’d never heard of.

It took him a month on the planet to earn enough cash to stop having to make the twenty click trek out to the Spark every night to sleep. He would have slept in a doorway in the town had he not witnessed on his very first evening what happened to people who were caught unprepared and exposed. The sight of the slender wings being yanked off a tiny creature with a scream powerful enough to rupture eardrums had stuck with him and he’d risked the local wildlife - largely dirty great lizards - and gritty wind-storms on a daily basis to avoid that.

His handler at The Agency kept contact to an absolute minimum, except to update him periodically on the investigation that the Red Flame was still conducting and to tell him to stay holed up there. Boxed in with nothing to do, Tarann became irritable and jumpy. It wasn’t that he was itching for the next kill - he didn’t do his job for that - but the constant vigilance and insecurity of taking short, messy, shitty jobs here and there was waring him down, so when some jackass in the bar made a comment about that ‘four-eyed hill varanus over there’, he snapped. He’d encountered a hill varanus on one of his long treks back to where the Spark was still stashed out of sight in the canyon, and the enormous lizard had been curled up beside a large boulder, minding its own business until it decided to make Tarann’s sensitive inner calf its business with a maw full of teeth coated in thick poisonous saliva.

He’d been hallucinating by the time he’d managed to get back to the Spark - miraculously without dropping off the ledge and plummeting to the bottom of the canyon - and his body had been rippling through every colour in the known universe, and maybe even a few more, before he’d finally stuck a huge needle full of universal antidote into his left heart. It had taken him a whole day to recover enough to leave the ship.

Being compared to a hill varanus then - yes, his skin had the same gnarled texture as a number of reptiles found all over the galaxy, and yes, his saliva was also poisonous to a huge number of species - had suddenly broken all his carefully constructed control and he’d lunged at the large, slug-like creature, all four hands going around the thinnest point of its neck and squeezing until its eyes bulged.

“Oi!” a relatively high-pitched shout went up from behind the bar and a moment later a short blast of sound shot through the room and everyone cringed. The high-frequency noise made his insides crawl and he let go of the offending creature and staggered back a pace, toes splaying to try and steady himself. His skin flushed a sickly green before he could stop it.

Tarann turned his head and saw that the sound had emanated from a small, hand-held speaker which had been plonked down onto the surface of the bar. Behind it, wielding control of the button on the top of the speaker was - and he could have sworn that he felt his right heart lurch a little in his chest at the sight of them - a human. They had a blaster in their left hand and looked prepared to use it, if not necessarily formally trained. Their stance was pretty shoddy, but the distance of only a few spans between them more than made up for that. If the human fired, Tarann would die for sure.

“No fighting in my bar,” they said, voice stern and steady. “You got an issue with someone, you take it waaaay outside, am I clear?”

Both Tarann and the slug-thing nodded and he decided he needed another drink.

Approaching the human while they still held the weapon was probably not a wise move, but when he leaned his lower arms on the counter, his upper pair hanging loose and relaxed at his sides, Tarann saw a smile on their lips. “You must be new,” they grinned amicably, reaching below the counter to stash the blaster and pulling out a glass in its place. They then turned behind them to fill it up. “Haven’t seen any Tch’larians in here for a long time.”

He liked the way the human almost got the click at the start of the word but not quite. Some humans were known for their incredible mimicry skills, but this one clearly wasn’t as proficient. He also had no idea how to address a human after they’d just threatened his life, so he settled for a curt nod.

“And you’re about as chatty as the last one. Whatever that bit of pond slime over there -” they gestured with a bottle of distilled alcohol at the creature who’d insulted him “- said to you, just ignore them. They’re… a regular in here, but they don’t have many friends, if you catch my drift.”

“I wonder why,” he said flatly.

“It speaks!” the human chuckled. “And you’re fluent in sarcasm as well as Federation Common. Here, on the house.” And a small glass was shunted his way, sloshing with a clear, ruby red liquid. “You’ll like it. It’s a kind of brandy made with a fruit that grows in the mines. At least, the last Tch’larian I knew liked it. I could be grossly stereotyping an entire race based on one data point. Still, free booze…?”

“You talk a lot,” he said before sipping it. It burned his neon blue tongue pleasantly and then left a sweet aroma in his mouth that went up into his nasal cavity, leaving him with the impression he might breathe fire if he opened his mouth again.

“Yeah, well, you don’t, so… one of us has to balance the equation.” After a beat they added, “I’m Lex.” They held out their hand over the bar counter and Tarann vaguely remembered something about touch not being a taboo for humans. Not that it was taboo for Tch’larians either, but with so many people mingling under the Federation’s relatively peaceful protection in the past few centuries, it was still easy to offend someone inadvertently.

He noted the strength in the human’s hand as he slid his own three fingers into the grasp, and smiled at how smooth their skin was. Their hair was cut short at one side and had been left to flop a little longer at the top of their head, and he’d always wondered what a human’s hair would feel like beneath the pads of his sensitive fingers. Agent Luna hadn’t exactly been the type to let him try. He’d known that Agent Luna was female, but he had no idea what this human went by, and he was unfamiliar with human naming conventions, so that gave him no clue either.

Eventually he realised that he hadn’t told them his name, and murmured, “Tarann.” It seemed fairly safe out here, and most of the people who might want revenge on him for his line of work knew him as Triskelion anyway.

“Where are you staying?” Lex asked as they got back to work, keeping their head turned towards him a little so that he could still talk to them while they polished glasses and took orders from the odd patron.

“Out of town,” he said.

Lex paused halfway through pouring a bottle of something frothy and blue into a glass the size of a small bucket. “There’s nothing out of town…”

“My ship’s out there. Dead in the water, as it were,” he offered, taking another sip of his brandy. “This is excellent, by the way…”

His compliment was met with a grin, but the gesture quickly faded. “You’re not seriously sleeping in your dead ship out in the hills, are you?” they asked.

“Why would that be a problem?”

“You’re lucky the scavengers haven’t found you and stripped your ship - and you - bare…”

He tilted his head and blinked his four golden eyes at them. “I haven’t seen any sign of anyone out there except me. And the odd varanus…”

Lex winced dramatically. “Nasty fuckers those…”

Tarann nodded, rolling his right ankle. “Indeed.”

After a pause, Lex looked like they were about to say something, but the crash of glass on the other side of the room stopped them. “Shit, not those two again,” they hissed, and Tarann looked around just as a fight broke out for real this time.

They grabbed the blaster he’d seen before and the little speaker that emitted the unpleasant noise, and strode off around the bar, ignoring him completely where he sat. He had eased his lean, muscular frame onto a bar stool to take the weight off his frankly rather bruised and sore feet. The unpleasant sound seemed to do nothing for these two as they scrapped - all arms and teeth and roars, and even when Lex shot a quick, low-energy blast into the stone floor beside one of their feet, they didn’t break it up.

He should stay out of it. The human had guts, for sure, but the two creatures that were fighting were large and aggressive, and he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. A stray flail of the tip of one of their tails caught Lex in the face and they staggered back, yelling and spitting curses.

Making his mind up, he slid off the stool and approached the brawling patrons. Grabbing the nearest one by the scruff of their reptilian neck, he yanked hard and backed towards the doors of the bar, clearly catching them completely by surprise. Top thugs never expected to be bested by anyone, and it gave him a good few minutes of stunned compliance. Tossing them out onto the street with a snarl of his own seemed to sober that one up a mite, and a second later the other creature was booted out of the door with another curse, leaving Lex framed in the open doorway, blaster raised, face slightly bruised and utterly thunderous.

Something happened then in Tarann’s body that he was not expecting. A sharp, unfamiliar pang of arousal shot down his spine and fanned out through his entire nervous system. He shivered, a low-frequency rumble escaping him without permission. There was something about seeing a creature that should have been vulnerable in this situation - could have been crushed - standing there with a bruised face and blazing eyes, staring down two enormous beings three times their size, that made him hot all over. It was like mating season, or at least, his vague recollection of it from a brief talk at the Facility to explain that none of them would ever experience any of that because they had essentially had it edited out of their DNA. He’d escaped the Facility and joined the Agency and had never experienced the slightest tinge of lust since a brief flare in his teens. He bit those memories down and looked back at Lex.

“Thanks,” they grinned as the two brawlers separated and headed off in opposite directions down the street, yelling curses over their shoulders in their various languages. “How’d you feel about another brandy?”

He nodded and followed them back inside, watching the way their legs moved - their legs hinged forwards at the knee, which was intoxicatingly the opposite way to his own, their hips swaying rather alluringly.

“Listen,” Lex said as Tarann closed his fingers around his second glass of fiery brandy that evening. “If you’d like somewhere to stay, I’ve got a job opening here for a bouncer. The last girl I had got into trouble with some bounty hunter and had to scarper, but it comes with the offer of a room, use of the kitchen out the back, and a steady pay. It’s not great, but if I get tips, I’ll share them with you.”

Tarann blinked. “You can’t be serious…”

“Why not?” Lex shrugged, refilling a container with a viscous, silvery sauce that crackled softly as it sank into the jar.

Barely suppressing a shudder at the offending liquid, he made a mental note to avoid that at all costs, whatever the fuck it was supposed to be or go with.

Lex caught him staring sidelong at the fluid and laughed. “One of a small number of things on the menu that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone except a hazmat droid, or an Efulgari bombardier -” they added nodding across the room to where a frankly enormous creature sat waiting patiently, presumably for the bucket of viscous gloop in Lex’s hands. “Now, do you have to get back to your ship tonight, or do you want to stay here and think it over? You can let me know what you decide in the morning.”

He scowled softly; wary and distrustful. “You’d just let me stay?”

Lex shrugged again. “You’ve already earned your keep for tonight,” they grinned, revealing hopelessly small teeth. How could they hope to defend themselves with those? His own, by comparison, were two rows of viciously pointed fangs that could rip open the jugular of most of the known species that didn’t have exoskeletons, and even some that did.

“Alright,” he said. “I’ll think it over.”

Lex left him in peace after that for an hour or so, but when the patrons began to trickle out into the night, they returned to him and asked, “Want to head up to your room?”

He nodded silently, and followed Lex through a door behind the bar and upstairs.

“That’s my room,” Lex said, nodding at a door with peeling teal paint which stood ajar on his right. “And this is yours. It’s not much, but it’s comfortable and I kept it pretty clean. There might be just a little bit of dust…”

Again, Tarann just nodded his understanding and set his small pack down gently beside the bed. The room was indeed humble, but that wasn’t an issue. He didn’t have many belongings anyway; just Menot in their portable device and some clothes and local coin. “It’s fine,” he said, turning round to find Lex leaning against the door frame in a way that spoke of casual trust and again made his skin flush hot. Embarrassed, he looked away, but Lex didn’t seem to mind, or perhaps they didn’t notice.

“Kitchen is downstairs - it’s the only other door than the one that leads to the bar. You can’t miss it. Help yourself. See you tomorrow, I guess?” they smiled, running a hand through their hair and messing it all up in a way that did nothing to help the rising temperature of his skin or the syncopated lurching of his twin hearts in his chest.

With a final nod from Tarann, Lex left him for the night.

He heard them closing up about an hour later, and then caught the steady tread of their footsteps on the metal stairs, the squeak and click of their door, the sound of clothes hitting the floor, and, another few moments later, the gush of hot water. In the corner of his own room was a sink, so he splashed the dust and grime off his face and decided to ask about a shower in the morning.

The rhythm of his life for the next few weeks was considerably easier than the first had been. Menot kept him abreast of activity both regarding his ship - nothing, mercifully - and the Agency. After three weeks working for Lex, the two had become the very thing he had always shied away from. Assassins don’t form attachments; they don’t form friends. Do the job, get out cleanly, and move on. That was how he lived, and yet, the regular ebb and flow of patrons - most of them familiar by now, a few of them new - and the easy manner of the ballsy human who ran the place lulled him quietly into a new life.

He constantly tried to remind himself that it was a borrowed life; a cover, almost. This cosy existence with its easy repartee between them and the comfort of a soft bed and regular meals was not his to keep, and he would have to shrug it off the moment that he was given the all-clear.

One evening, seemingly at random, Lex closed up early.

“What’s up, boss?” he asked as Lex politely shooed the last drunken creature out of the door and locked it behind her six scuttling legs. “What’s going on?” His natural instincts set him suddenly on edge all over again, perhaps because he’d grown so complacent of late. He didn’t like changes to patterns. It had taken him a little while to relax into this one, and even then, he didn’t exactly ease up on the vigilance.

Lex grinned at him like they’d won some kind of cash-prize, hands balled into fists at their hips, and announced, “It’s my birthday.”

He frowned. “What… What does that mean? You’re… You’re giving birth?” He looked at Lex’ body and couldn’t see any indication that they were carrying some form of offspring.

Lex gave a huge snort and bent nearly double laughing.

“Apparently not,” Tarann mumbled. “Apologies.”

“No,” Lex waved, straightening up again. “I’m sorry, it’s… that just… caught me off guard. No, I’m not giving birth to anything today or ever. It’s…” and then they fell quiet, almost sad, and said, “You really don’t know what a birthday is?”

He shook his head, feeling unsettled.

“Huh,” they mused. “Well, simply put, it’s a celebration of the day I was born. Back on Earth, we celebrate them roughly every 365 days because that’s one complete orbital cycle of our planet around our Sun. Roughly. Give or take a decimal point or two…”

They stared at him and he grew even more uncomfortable. Birthdays were not something celebrated at the Facility where he’d been… raised. The old scar in his neck where their implant had been throbbed and his skin changed colour quietly from grey to a dark blue.

Lex took a step closer and placed their fingertips on his upper forearm. It wasn’t the first time Lex had touched him, but it was the first touch like that; gentle, careful, concerned. “What does that mean?” Lex asked softly.

Tarann wanted to run, but instead he forced himself to ask, “What does what mean?”

“That colour change? I’ve worked out a few already. You go a kind of bright blue when you’re super embarrassed, but I’ve not seen you turn that colour before…”

“You noticed,” he said with a half-smirk, revealing all his dangerous teeth behind his thin lips.

Lex twitched a shoulder but didn’t let go of his arm. “It’s hard not to notice you,” they said voice shifting lower in pitch. “I love watching your skin change. You know, it reminds me of these old antique lamps back on Earth… they’re called ‘lava lamps’ but they’re not actually made of lava. It’s wax or something. Anyway, when you turn them on, they get hot, and the wax inside floats to the top of the liquid in a blob, and when it cools down a bit, it sinks down again. They’re super old and rare now, but some of them change colour slowly, and it’s kind of hypnotic. I remember going to a museum and staring at one for ages. It’s like that with your skin.”

They circled their thumb over a small area of his arm and he shuddered.

“I think it’s beautiful…” And then Lex’ skin flushed and he caught the way their pulse throbbed in their neck, the veins and arteries so close to the surface as to be impractically vulnerable, but they didn’t seem to want to protect it with armour.  “Anyway,” they blurted, releasing him so quickly that he actually swayed a bit at the loss of contact, “I didn’t mean to embarrass you. What was I saying?”

“It’s your birthday,” he croaked after a pause.

“Yeah, so, uh… I figured maybe we could do something? There’s an Earth recipe involving pasta that I’ve finally managed to get all the ingredients for and I wanna make it. You game?”

“Game?”

“You want to help me?”

“Oh. Sure.”

Lex deflated a little. “You can take the night off if you’d rather.”

“No,” he said firmly. It never hurt to add to his knowledge.

“Ok then,” they smiled, and he caught the way their shoulders dropped a little, the muscles relaxing again. He’d answered correctly.

In fact, the meal ended up tasting alright. Human food seemed strange to him, and perhaps a little bland, but after the protein blocks he’d been raised on, anything tasted alright compared to those. What really made his evening was Lex’ obvious enjoyment. Their eyes were sparkling and alive, like jewels, and they laughed a lot.

They also made some significant inroads into the fiery brandy afterwards, and ended up slumped against Tarann’s left shoulders, smiling softly and running their fingertips over the slight, flattened bumps in his skin along his forearms.

“I can’t believe you have four arms,” they said, their voice slurred and their eyes vague.

Tarann, who wasn’t drunk, shifted slightly and jostled them. They snuggled up again immediately in a new position which forced him to put both his arms around their shoulders as they lay against this chest this time, and giggled. “Why not?” he asked, because he wasn’t sure what else to ask. They were beautiful and strong and tough at work in the bar and during the day, but he got to see a different side before and after work. The fatigue, the loneliness, the gentle-heartedness was never on show for the patrons of their scruffy, homely bar, but for him, they showed all that and more. Now, unwinding even further as the alcohol took effect, Lex became even more talkative than usual, which was saying something.

“Because you’ve got four!” they exclaimed, as if it was blindingly obvious. “And four eyes. I like your eyes. They’re like crocodile eyes.”

Tarann had no idea what a crocodile was and wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or not.

“And you said you’ve got two hearts?”

“Mmm,” he nodded, feeling brave and bringing his lower hand to rest quietly on Lex’s stomach as it rose and fell. Their body was warmer than his and he liked the tingling that ran across his skin at the touch.

Lex fell surprisingly silent for a while, their fingertips still trailing idle lines along his skin, until they looked up into his face from their slouched position - now with their head in his lap - and asked, “What did you do before you came here?”

Faced with the utterly open honesty in those deep eyes, he found himself suddenly unwilling to lie or even bend the truth. “I was a contract killer. I am still a contract killer. I’m just… lying low for a while.”

Lex blinked. “That explains it,” they muttered, eyes turning back to his arms.

They hadn’t even flinched at the revelation, which set a different prickling running across his nerves. “Explains what?”

“The way you watch people. You don’t see people though, do you. You see soft bits and armoured bits, dangerous bits and weak bits. You see exits from a room and weapons where there shouldn’t be any…”

Inhaling softly, he nodded. “Yes. Does that bother you?”

They shook their head. “No. But it makes me sad.”

“Why?”

“Because you… you haven’t really lived… have you?”

“I don’t understand.”

Lex lurched to sit upright then, dislodging Tarann’s hands from their stomach and swivelling to face him, their eyes now blazing with intensity. “You don’t think I’ve noticed the way you react when I touch you?”

The leap from ‘not living’ to ‘reaction to being touched’ was too great a one for him to follow and he narrowed his golden eyes in confusion.

Lex’s face softened and they climbed awkwardly into his lap, swaying slightly. The sudden, warm weight of their body so close to his own stole his breath for a moment and he felt his skin change from grey to acid blue to a dull pink and finally back to grey in the space of a few heartbeats. “See?” they murmured, rolling their hips invitingly and smiling as a low-frequency mating rumble left him before he had realised what he was doing. “You come alive beneath that touch…”

“I…” he began but stopped when he realised he had no idea what he was going to say. It was perfectly true. He did feel utterly different when Lex was touching him. “I’ve never… There’s never been any need.”

“What do you mean?” they asked, placing their hands on his chest, one over each thudding heart.

Tarann became almost painfully aware of his rasping breathing, the way his body was heating up, the stuttering rhythm of his hearts, the tingling in his groin that he’d never bothered to explore, even alone… “I was created to become a weapon. I was incubated and hatched in a facility which created weapons. They sterilised us before we were even born.”

Lex did look shocked at that. “Fuck… that’s… that’s so heartless… But even so, I can’t have kids, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like to get my dick wet from time to time…”

Tarann, again, didn’t understand. Lex was speaking Federation Common, but the nuances that the human put into their words were frequently lost on him.

Seeing his confusion, Lex laughed, rolled their hips again, and this time Tarann noticed something a little different at the front of their pants, a hardness that hadn’t been there - or hadn’t been as prominent - a few minutes earlier. “I still like to have sex,” they grinned.

“Oh.”

“You don’t have to have sex though,” they went on. “I’m just saying, it’s ok to let someone close. And to enjoy that. However you want to.”

“Oh.”

Lex laughed and tipped their head back a little, looking free and relaxed again now that Tarann’s confusion had been cleared up. Being unsteady with alcohol, however, they kept tipping back until Tarann was forced to grab them with both sets of hands to stop them toppling off; one pair around the waist and another around the arms.

“Steady,” he smiled. “I think maybe you should have some water. And head up to bed.”

“You’re probably right. I had a good birthday though,” they added, gently peeling the three fingers of Tarann’s lower right hand off their waist and bringing it up to their lips. The gesture they left there Tarann knew was called a kiss. Humans weren’t unique among lifeforms in nuzzling intimate parts of their anatomy against the other’s, but the strangeness of it for his species held an instant fascination. How could their lips be so soft? How could he never have done that? How could he never have wanted to share this kind of experience with anyone before?

And before he could stop it, his skin flushed a deep maroon all over like a drop of ink on wet paper, splotched here and there with dark purple. He knew what that meant for his species, and the sight of his own skin changing to the colours of an individual receptive to mating made him freeze.

“Well,” Lex chortled amusedly. Apparently they knew what it meant as well.

“No,” he said immediately, though he wasn’t quite sure what it was he was rejecting.

With a knowing but slightly melancholic smile, Lex clambered out of his lap and stood up. “Night, Tarann,” they said as they walked away. Their hands brushed against the door frame as they left the bar, and he stared at the spot where their fingers graced the woodwork even as their footsteps vanished up the stairs.

His skin did not change back that night, no matter how much he willed it to change. Half an hour later, as he lay in his bed, the sounds of Lex pleasuring themselves reached his acutely sensitive ears. The tiny, muffled moans and grunts that left their body set his skin aflame all over again. He moved one hand cautiously, experimentally down his torso to the slit where, to his astonishment, he was slick and sensitive. He gasped at the touch, and the three delicate, tentacle-like cocks which normally never left the sheath began to unfurl almost curiously into his hand.

Ordinarily, this might have repulsed him, but the sound of Lex gasping and the slick sounds that accompanied the moans, made the tentacles of his genitalia coil demandingly around his fingers. He knew almost nothing about his own species’ reproductive habits because he knew he would never need them. ‘You will never be a breeder,’ they had said when he’d hit sexual maturity - the first time he’d even bothered to explore his body, and, until that night, the last - and that had been that.

Sparks of pleasure shot through his whole body and he began to croon, the sound deep in his throat, rumbling and vibrating like an idling engine, filling the room. He couldn’t stop it. Balling his fingers into a fist, he felt his three pale cocks coil around it instinctively, and he began to kneed exploratively at the inside of the flower-shape they made around his hand, a thin, extremely sensitive membrane stretching between them from the root to about a third of the way down. The pleasure that that elicited made his back arch of the bed and his toes scrunched up the sheets as he lifted his hips too, pressing harder at the centre of the three smooth, increasingly slick tentacles.

Forcing himself to focus back on the sounds of Lex as they apparently approached their climax, he felt a wall of heat building in him. Something was approaching, and he let it sweep over him until the three tentacles surrounding his balled-up fist pulsed, gripping his hand tight as a vice, and warm fluid spurted from their centre over his clenched fingers in a series of messy gushes. His vision went white, his body went rigid, and his mind went completely blank.

Tarann floated in a blissful haze for a long time before he could even bring himself to move, his cocks too sensitive, his hand covered in sticky, slick release, but eventually his cocks retreated back into the sheath in his lower abdomen and he felt able to sit up. His hand was a mess, his lower body too, and when he tried to stand, his muscles felt shaky and weak, as though he’d run the training simulation at the facility for an entire day without breaks.

With his skin so sensitive that it was hard to fall asleep that night. Lex must have finished during his own orgasm because he never heard another noise from their room that night. Shame curled in to replace the pleasure as he realised that he’d eavesdropped on something that was private and not meant for his hearing, and in the morning, he could barely look Lex in the eye as he entered the kitchen in search of breakfast.

Lex, however, smiled warmly. The effects of the alcohol the previous night seemed only to have made their voice drop a little and their reactions were groggy and slower. “I think I'm going to keep the bar closed today,” they announced as they poured themselves a hot drink. “You’re not hungover at all, are you?”

“No,” he replied. “It takes more than that to get me drunk, let alone hungover.” ‘Hungover’ was a term he’d only learned since working for Lex.

“So…” Lex asked a little while later as they cooked breakfast for the two of them the hob. “If you’re only here to lie low for a while, do you know how long you’ll actually be here?”

“No.” Apparently Lex hadn’t been so drunk that they didn’t remember their conversation last night. He paused and added, “But the last transmission the Agency sent me indicated that the people who were looking into the disturbance after my last contract were no longer investigating.”

“So… not long then.”

“Probably.”

Lex poked at the pan with a wooden spatula and sighed.

“Why do you ask?”

He could see the way Lex’s jaw worked from side to side for a moment and recognised it as one of their tells. They were upset. “You think you’ll miss me when you leave?”

“Of course I will,” he said. “You’ve been extremely generous to me when I did nothing to earn it.”

“Right.”

Tarann knew he’d said the wrong thing immediately, but none of his intense training had prepared him for this kind of situation. He backtracked through the conversation, searching for something he could have said differently, something he could have handled better. Lost, he asked falteringly, “Will… you miss me? Is that what this is about?”

Lex nodded without turning around. “Yeah,” they said, voice cracking slightly. They cleared their throat and poked at breakfast again. It smelled ready but they didn’t seem ready to turn around.

Tarann stepped closer, his feet silent on the stone floor, and placed his hands boldly on Lex’ hips. The human immediately eased and leaned back, resting their weight against his body, though their head barely came midway up his chest. Taking the opportunity at last and sensing it would be welcome, Tarann brought his hand up and stroked his fingers gingerly through Lex’ hair. It was every bit as soft as he’d thought it would be, and he watched his skin change colour beneath the strands as they brushed over his fingers. Lex moaned quietly.

When he lowered his hand and Lex saw the maroon fading back to grey, they smiled and turned around, switching the hob off as they did. They put their own hands on his chest and he ached suddenly to have nothing separating them; to remove his close-fitting space-suit top and Lex’ loose-fitting shirt. As Lex slid one palm tentatively up to his neck, he felt the touch in a wave of heat and closed his eyes. His fingers tightened on Lex’ hips and Lex moaned softly.

“I want you,” Lex murmured. “I thought about you last night.”

Tarann opened his eyes a crack and blinked softly. “I heard you,” he admitted.

“Yeah?” Lex laughed, looking part bashful and part turned on. “What did you do when you heard me?”

“I…” he flushed neon blue and stepped back, ashamed.

“Hey,” they breathed, chasing after him. “It’s alright. It’s… really hot that you did that while thinking about me.”

“You don’t mind?”

They shook their head. “If you wanted to try together…”

That mating call thundered through him and he lowered his forehead, bringing it to touch Lex’.

“That a yes?”

“What about breakfast?”

“I overcooked it all already,” they laughed. “It’s ruined.”

Grabbing his hand, they tugged him out of the kitchen and back upstairs to their room.

They shed their clothes in a tangle, and once again Tarann was left staggered and enchanted by the human’s body. This time it was the sheer vulnerability of it. He could also see their arousal plainly - there was no sheath to tease - and something about that made his own sheath throb so hard he let out another mating croon.

“Fuck, that sound is so hot,” Lex gasped, lying back on the bed and tugging him down atop them. “Look at you,” they added, running their fingers down his heaving chest and playing with his sheath as he collapsed atop them. “I’ve always found Tch’larians attractive, but you… the way you move, the way you shudder when I touch you, the way you fucking croon like that…” He did it again - entirely involuntarily - as Lex crooked two fingers and delved carefully into his sheath, catching the inner walls of his three cocks inside and making them unfurl even quicker than they had last night.

They wrapped around Lex’ fingers and Lex moaned. “I want those on my cock… please…” they gasped, and Tarann felt like he might die if he didn’t do as Lex asked. His body was so tight all over, his skin flushing from dusky pink to dark magenta with every deep, sonorous groan that escaped him.

With one leg on each side of Lex’ thighs, he lowered his hips down until they were touching, and his cocks immediately curled around Lex’ own hard cock, covering it in weeping, slick fluid. Lex let out a string of curses and flung their head back into the bed beneath them, rutting their hips up into Tarann’s grip. The pressure of the tip of their cock against the point where the three cocks joined inside him made him growl with pleasure, his maw full of teeth opening, his saliva starting to fill his mouth, bright blue tongue lashing behind them.

“You know…?” Lex panted, thrusting up into the wet heat of the grip that his tentacle cocks had around theirs.

“Know what?” he snarled back, shaking from the effort of holding himself upright over Lex.

Lex reached up to his face with a fingertip and trailed it around his drooling mouth before putting it in his own and sucking. The sight of it sent Tarann into a fury of lust for some reason, and only then did he recall that his saliva was poisonous to many species. Before he could warn Lex, the human grinned and their eyes went wide, pupils blown until their irises were a mere whisper of colour. Apparently he wasn't poisonous to humans. Quite the contrary if the way Lex fucked upwards into his body and filled him with sparking pleasure with each thrust was anything to go by.

“Fuck, I’m close,” Lex hissed, and Tarann felt his cocks contract around the hard length inside him.

He didn’t have the breath or the words to agree.

“I’m… I -” Lex cried out, and suddenly heat flooded the inside of Tarann’s sheath and he felt his own cocks clench and pulse rhythmically around Lex’ cock as he came too. He drew every drop from Lex that they had inside them as his own orgasm rolled through him and left him mute, panting, and thrumming all over.

“Fuck that was intense,” Lex chuckled some while later, when Tarann’s cocks had finally let go of their own softening cock. “Are you ok?”

“Mmm,” he rumbled from his new position, slumped on the bed beside Lex, his trio of cocks lying limply across his torso, splayed out and spent and utterly sensitive.

Lex sat up, heedless that their own body was covered in their combined release, and trailed their fingers down Tarann’s torso towards his still pulsing sheath. “Can I?” they asked.

Tarann didn’t reply but he responded with a shrug. He had no idea what Lex intended, but he trusted them. What Lex did was to lean forwards and take one of his cocks into his mouth and suck on it gently. Tarann’s whole body lurched and he bellowed at the sheer volume of the sensation as it thundered in his head and under his skin all over again.

“Too much?” Lex laughed.

“No?” he gasped, trying to steady his spinning head and suddenly racing hearts. “No. Definitely not too much. Just…”

“Intense?” Lex supplied.

“Do it again?”

Lex did.

—

I really hope you folks enjoyed this one! Don’t forget to let me know if you did enjoy it by leaving a like and/or reblogging it!

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#alien #male alien #alien x human #exophilia #alien boyfriend #monster boyfriend #non binary character #non binary human

[dlwritings]

Who Do You See? | Tom Holland

masterlist found here

pairing - Tom x reader word count - 2,086 warnings - SAD TOM IS SAD AND I’M SAD A/N - This was inspired by an excerpt from “I know What You Think of Me” by Tim Kreider for the New York Times -- this is for @your-1up-girl @little-elizabeth @racewife2004 and @tragicluver who voted for this!

summary - Sometimes all the comments get to Tom. All the press and the fans and that opinions coming in from the world. And sometimes, he just needs some of your wise words of affirmation to bring a smile back to his face.

You were the one who advised Tom to take a break from social media. You could see it was draining him, trying to please the fans all the time. He wasn’t good with technology, and constantly trying to figure out what to post and how to post it correctly was exhausting.

And people were just so critical of him. During Civil War, he wasn’t fit enough. During Homecoming, he was fit but not muscular enough. During Far From Home, he was too muscular. He felt weird in his own skin, knowing that people were scrutinizing every ridge and divot across his body. At what point did that become an interesting or appropriate conversation topic? Sure, he pretty much signed his life away to Marvel, but did that mean his body too?

And he hated talking to anyone about it, because things like that weren’t supposed to bother men. They weren’t supposed to bother him. Who cares what people say about his body, right? It shouldn’t matter.

But it did bother him, and you knew it. Some days, you would see him standing in front of the bathroom mirror brushing his teeth, turning his body at different angles like he was studying himself. He always had a little crease on his forehead like he was thinking too hard, which he was. He started to wear his shirt around the house way more than he used to. Some days he’d be in sweatpants and a sweatshirt even if it was hot outside (He would just crank the AC.) like he was hiding his body away. If he was on the couch scrolling on his phone and you walked past him, you could see he was reading comments on his Instagram pictures. Something that he used to enjoy now only made the crease on his forehead a touch more permanent. Tom wore his heart on his sleeve, and it was easy to see when he was taking things personally.

So you suggested he delete Instagram and Twitter from his phone for a while and block the sites on his laptop’s internet browser. “Just take some time away,” you said to him. You had caught him pity scrolling again and sat beside him on the couch. He rested his head on your chest, and you brushed your fingers through his soft curls.

“Don’t wanna upset anyone,” he mumbled. His eyes were closed, and he wrapped his arms around your torso.

“No one’ll be upset,” you said. “And fuck ‘em if they are.”

Well, Tom couldn’t argue with that.

And for a few days, it was good. He didn’t have any projects he was working on, so the two of you got to spend a lot of time together. Without being under the microscope of a million fans, you could tell he was more relaxed. He was back to your goofy boyfriend who was shirtless way more than he needed to be and stood beside you while you brushed your teeth just so he could wrap an arm around your torso and stare at your reflection instead of his own.

And then, it wasn’t good. He wasn’t good. Because Tom was still human, and sometimes the insecurities crept up when he least expected it: after a workout, after a date night, cuddled up with you on the couch, taking a shower, waking up, going to sleep…

And he couldn’t handle it. He couldn’t not think about it. What were people saying when he was offline? What pictures surfaced of him during his social media hiatus that caused the fans to analyze and critique him? He had to know. It was like an itching in his fingers that he could only scratch by scrolling.

The curse of growing up in the age of technology, he supposed.

There was no harm in googling his name. It wasn’t Instagram or Twitter. He probably wouldn’t even find any relevant hits. Nothing but his Wikipedia page and social media links, he was sure. So while you were out picking up lunch, he let his curiosity win out.

After the expected hits, he saw news articles. They all had something to do with his hiatus or a trip to the gym or do fans prefer Homecoming Tom Holland or Far From Home Tom Holland or or or-

So he locked his phone and went into the bathroom. He stood in front of the mirror, that familiar crease growing on his forehead. Had he gotten too muscular? Who did he prefer: Homecoming or Far From Home Tom Holland? Or Civil War Tom Holland? Or pre-Marvel Tom Holland? He knew, technically, he was currently Far From Home Tom Holland, but what did that even mean? Had his identity officially been reduced to what movie he was currently promoting? Or how big his muscles were during each film shoot? Honestly, looking at the news articles and fan polls, he didn’t recognize any of those Tom Holland’s. Even the one in the mirror felt like a manufactured copy of who he once was.

He wondered then which Tom Holland you saw when you looked at him. You had known him longer than anyone in his life, so you experienced every Tom Holland. Who did you like the most? Who were you most comfortable with? Who did you find the most attractive? Who were you in love with? Who did you see when you looked at him now?

You came home to silence. You expected the TV to be on or music to be blasting, but there wasn’t. When you left to get food, Tom was showering. Was he still getting ready? Or had he gotten lost in his mind again? You assumed the latter but hoped you were wrong. So you set the food on the counter and headed into your bedroom. Tom was still in the adjoined bathroom, standing in front of the mirror, and staring blankly at his reflection. His hands were gripping the countertop, his eyes squinting like he was criticizing every flaw, and that crease etching itself into his forehead.

“Was it Instagram or Twitter?”

Tom jumped when you spoke. He had been so wrapped up in his thoughts that he hadn’t heard you come home. “Neither,” he said, finally looking away from his reflection. He leaned up against the bathroom door frame and folded his arms across his chest. You raised your eyebrows at him, and he shrugged. “Google.” You sighed and walked over to him, wrapping your arms around his waist and burying your face into his chest. He hugged you back, but it wasn’t his usual tight bear hug. It was hesitant, like he didn’t want you close to him.

Like he was afraid you’d feel a ridge or divot you didn’t like.

You pulled away and put your hands on his shoulders. He hung his head so he didn’t have to meet your eyes. His curls fell in front of his forehead, so you brushed them away and urged him to look at you. Tom didn’t cry very often. When he was sad, he just looked exhausted. His eyes would get red (not teary, just red), and he’d be sporting bags under them. That was how he looked then, and it was how you knew that he wasn’t good again.

You pressed your lips into a tight line and took Tom’s hand, leading him back into the bedroom where you had a full length mirror. You sat on the floor in front of it and patted the ground between your open legs. “C’mere,” you said. He hesitated but did as you said. He faced the mirror, and you wrapped your arms around him and put your chin on his shoulder. You peppered kissed across his skin, and Tom hung his head again. Just as you were ready to say something, he spoke first.

“Who do you see when you look at me?”

You looked up at him and cocked your head to the side. “What do you mean?” you asked.

“I mean-” He sighed. “Who do you see? Everyone talks about Civil War Tom Holland and Homecoming Tom Holland and Far From Home Tom Holland, and I don’t even know which one I am anymore. Or which one I’m supposed to be. Or which one you want me to be. It’s like-” He cut himself off, annoyed for getting so emotional over something so stupid. Something that men were not supposed to be bothered by.

“It’s like what?” you asked, rubbing your thumbs across his soft skin.

He sighed again. “It’s like I don’t even recognize myself when I look in the mirror anymore. And I’m scared that one day you won’t like this Tom Holland. I’m scared I won’t like this Tom Holland.”

You were quiet for a long time. Tom worried he had said the wrong thing. Maybe you hadn’t thought about whether you liked this Tom Holland before, but now he brought it up and you were considering it. Maybe he had ruined everything just like that. He was preparing himself for you to say the worst.

“I read something once about a guy who dreamt about a weird invention.”

He hadn’t prepared for that.

“It was a staircase where you could go deep underground, and you’d hear recordings of everything people have ever said about you- the good and the bad. The catch was, you had to pass all the horrible things in order to get to the best things at the very bottom. I don’t even think I would make it four steps down, but the guy explained the logic behind it: if we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”

You brushed your fingers through Tom’s hair, and he relaxed against your chest. “You’re a star, Tom,” you said. “And you have to handle the really bad things in order to reap the benefits of being famous- as much as that sucks. And your staircase would be so much longer than mine because people think they have the right to say whatever they want about you. But if you want to reach the bottom of the staircase, you have to be secure enough in yourself to hold your head high through the horribleness.” You paused. “But you know what else?” He met your eyes in the mirror. “You’re not going down this staircase alone. I think that’s where it’s logic fails. It thinks that we’d have to go down on our own, but we wouldn’t. Because I know I’d want you to be with me when I heard whatever good things have been said about me at the bottom, because that’s a joy I wouldn’t want to celebrate alone. And you’d help me through all the horrible things, so it’d be worth it. And I’d do the same for you.”

You nuzzled your face against Tom’s neck and kissed him. Your thumbs were still rubbing soft circles on his stomach.

You loved all his ridges and divots.

“When I look at you, I don’t see Civil War Tom Holland, or Homecoming Tom Holland, or Far From Home Tom Holland. I just see Tom. I see my beautiful West London boy whom I love with my whole heart, not despite the flaws, but because of them. Because you’re not perfect-” You scoffed. “-and thank god, because I’m an absolute disaster.”

Tom laughed, the smile on his face more genuine than it had been in ages. He turned around to face you, so you were sitting with his thighs crossed over yours. You giggled and draped your arms over his shoulders, curling your fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck. The kiss you shared was so soft and so caring and you were both so so in love.

“C’mon,” you said, moving your legs from under his and standing up. You reached your hand out to him and helped pull him off the ground. “I went to the sandwich shop on the corner.”

“Yes!” he cheered, pulling you in for a playful yet bone-crushing hug before you hit his shoulders and made him let go.

“What a weirdo,” you said. He laughed and slapped your butt as you walked ahead of him to go back to the kitchen.

Sometimes, Tom just had to be reminded that, despite the films and fans and critiques and polls, he would always just be Tom. And he liked that guy more than any Tom Holland the world had opinions on.

----- ----- ----- ----- -----

TAGLIST

@bangtan-serendipity | @planetdemon | @the-singing-clown406 | @tomshufflepuff | @bluelalal | @grandloser | @jackiehollanderr | @mindset-jupiter | @bisexual-sk8r | @feel-like-gold | @runaway-apple | @miraclesoflove

#tom holland #tom holland imagine #tom holland x reader #tom holland fluff #tom holland angst #marvel

[sushigirlali]

If You Don't Love Me, Lie To My Face - Part I (Reylo Fanfic)

Part I | Part II | Part III | Epilogue 

Summary: Grifter!Rey helps U.S. Senator Leia Organa's son, Ben Solo, out of a jam when a couple of muggers invade her turf. Afterward, she debates robbing the rich American herself, but can she protect her heart while stealing his?

Pairing: Rey + Ben Solo | Finn + Poe Dameron

Rating: E

Continuity: Modern AU

A/N: For the first time ever, I’ve actually written most of the story before I started posting! I think it will be way less stressful since I don’t have to “keep up” with updates. New chapters will be posted each Friday. Enjoy!

Master list –> AO3 | ff.net | Tumblr

——————

If You Don't Love Me, Lie To My Face - Part I

By: sushigirlali

——————

Kennington, London

——————

There are moments in life that make you question everything that came before. A look from a stranger, an incident at your job, a terrible movie... things Rey Niima was usually able to push past without pause, but tonight, she was finding it extremely difficult to ignore the feeling that her life was about to change forever.

"Hey, give us your wallet!" A pair of brawlers had cornered a man at the mouth of a nearby alley, drawing Rey's attention as soon as she stepped out the back door of her favorite pub, The Black Prince.

"Excuse me?" the would-be victim responded indignantly. His voice was deep with an American lilt, his stature intimidating.

Did these fools really think they could steal from a man like that? But then, not all criminals were as intelligent as her.

"You heard me! I want your wallet!"

Rey hung back from the potentially violent situation unfolding before her, sizing up the assailants. Their outfits were all black, including the ski masks covering their faces, but she couldn't see any identifying marks or gang affiliations. "Must be lone wolves," she thought.

There was something familiar about the tall one doing the talking, but she couldn't place them. It probably didn't matter, though, because the redwood with the nice accent looked like he could take the both of them with one hand tied behind his broad back.

Still, for some reason, she was finding it hard to walk the other way. Definitely not because the man was the most striking person she had ever seen. No, it had to be due to the fact that these bums were causing a ruckus on her turf. At least, that's what she kept telling herself, frozen to the spot as she was.

"Listen, I just got done volunteering at a shelter all day and just want to get home. Please allow me to leave unmolested."

"Volunteering at a shelter?" she muttered under her breath. "Well, fuck. But it's not your business, don't get involved." Rey was turning around to go back inside the pub when the sound of a gun cocking drew her up short.

"Don't make me repeat myself again, pretty boy."

"Whoa, hey, there's no need for that!"

"Then empty your pockets! Now!"

"No," he said crossly. "Put that thing away before somebody gets hurt."

"Dammit," Rey groaned, retrieving the silver baton clipped to her belt. Sometimes, she really hated having a conscience; in her line of work, it was a real liability.

"Hey, get your hands off me!"

"Oh, for fuck's sake," she growled, resolutely stalking toward the turbulent scene. "Oi! You lot!"

The big guy and his sidekick paused to look in her direction. "What?" the leader said in a surprisingly feminine voice.

"Not a guy," Rey mused. "Based on your absolutely abominable bullying technique, I don't think you're getting that guy's wallet any time this century, so why don't you just leave him alone and move along."

"Excuse me?" the woman said threateningly.

"I'm sorry, did I stutter?"

"You move along, little mouse, this doesn't concern you!" the shorter guy spat.

"You do know who's neighborhood this is, don't you?" Rey said tauntingly.

"Yeah?" the first one said dismissively. "So what."

"So, knock it off! We don't need the fuzz coming down here because some hooligans are roughing up a foreigner."

"Hooligans?! And who the fuck are you?"

"Me?" Rey sneered, flicking the baton out to the side so that it extended into a long poll. "I'm no one."

"Phas," the skinny guy said nervously, obviously recognizing her at last, "we should go."

Rey had never been so proud of her reputation as a grifter who was just as likely to steal an expensive piece of art from the peerage in an elaborate heist as kick a thug's ass in the street.

"But the boss—"

"He'll understand."

"But—"

"Phas!"

"Fine. But don't think this is over!" the woman yelled before running off with her companion.

"Well," the American said slowly, "that was an experience I never wish to repeat again." He smiled at her. "Thank you," he said sincerely.

"You're welcome," Rey replied gruffly, still riding high on adrenaline. "Do you always walk around by yourself at night in a city not your own?"

"Do you always save unsuspecting passersby from thieves?" he retorted.

Her phone went off, but she didn't answer it. Up close, the man was even more attractive than she had initially thought. "Suit looks expensive, too… and is that a Breitling?" Perhaps it was her lucky night after all. "Only if they're handsome," she said smoothly.

"Oh, uh…" he flushed at her compliment.

"Hmm… not the reaction I expected." It was kind of refreshing, though. "Sorry, I—ugh, one sec," she said as her cell went off again. "My brother," she explained, checking the caller ID. "I have to take this or he'll just keep phoning until I pick up."

The man shrugged, "No problem, I'll just wait over here." He stepped up onto the curb and walked a few paces away.

Rey nodded and lifted the phone to her ear. "What?" she said shortly.

"Who's the stiff?" Finn asked without preamble.

"Nobody."

"Right," he huffed. "Are you working him?"

"Undecided, stop pushing."

"Whatever you say, Rey. Just be careful."

"I will. Where are you anyway?" she said, humored by his tough older sibling act.

"Hanging outside the pub, just around the corner. Why? You need me?" Finn teased.

"No, I'll catch you later. Don't wait up." She ended the conversation before he could respond and stuffed the phone into her back pocket. "Sorry about that, uh…?"

"Ben," the stranger supplied, moving closer again. "Ben Solo."

"I'm Rey," she said, holding out a hand.

Ben's lips quirked and he gave her a firm handshake, his huge hand dwarfing hers. Rey felt a shiver run up her spine at the brief contact, but she shook it off.

"So, what's that for?" he indicated the weapon still in her hand. "Joining the circus?"

"No," she grinned, "it's a bo staff. I use it for self defense."

"And the defense of others," he said warmly.

"On occasion." She folded the bo staff back into a baton before reattaching it to her belt.

"Can I get you a drink?" he nodded toward the pub. "To say thank you?"

"I was actually on my way home before I… bumped into you."

"I could… walk you home? If you want." He didn't sound desperate, but it was a near thing.

"I'm not from around here," she said evasively. She couldn't really bring him back to her base of operations, which was only a few blocks down the street, but she didn't want to stop talking to him either. "What a dilemma."

"No? Where are you from then?"

"Nowhere."

"Okay… Well, I promise I'm not a pervert or a serial killer or anything," he said earnestly, "so you can come back to my hotel with me if you want. It's late and I'd hate for anything to happen to you."

She crossed her arms. "Because I'm a woman?"

"Hey, I'm 6'3" and double your weight and I almost got jumped like ten minutes ago," he reminded her. "It can happen to anyone."

"Fair enough," she allowed, lowering her defenses. "Still…"

"I can call my security detail if you want verification that I'm not a psycho," he offered. "I'd just like the opportunity to get to know the woman who saved my hide."

Rey's interest sharpened. "That's sweet, but uh… security detail?"

"Yeah," he said nonchalantly. "My mother is a U.S. Senator. I'm in town on her behalf. She was supposed to come herself, but her re-election campaign is heating up and she couldn't spare the time."

"You disapprove," she said perceptively.

Ben's dark brows shot up. "Yeah, actually. You a mind reader, Rey from nowhere?"

"Something like that," she smirked. "I prefer the term grifter."

"Grifter?" he said curiously. "What does that mean, exactly?"

"Oh, you know," Rey winked for effect, assuming the privileged American was about to run in the opposite direction, "I swindle rich people out of their valuables by preying on their weaknesses. Basically, I'm a professional bad guy."

Ben looked hopelessly confused by her explanation. "But you just helped me."

"Well, sometimes I like to help out the little guy." Rey looked him over. "Little big guys too."

"Like Robin Hood?" he said, disarming her with a crooked smile.

"What? I wouldn't say I'm—I'm a hero or anything," she stuttered.

"Well, you're my hero," he said smoothly, holding out a hand. "That's my driver pulling up over there, in the black Jag. Join me? Please?"

"I… okay," she agreed, placing her hand in his, "but just for a little while." This time, she couldn't ignore the shiver.

——————

Alarm bells should be going off in her head, but Rey felt perfectly comfortable with her new companion. It was odd, considering her trust issues, but Ben didn't seem to be only interested in her looks. And she knew she looked good tonight, her dark leather leggings were basically painted on and her lacy bra was visible through a mostly sheer black tank top. Add on her subtle smoky makeup and half-up hair style that emphasized her cheek bones and...

"Rey?"

She loved the way he said her name, almost like a caress. "Yes?"

"Are you hungry? I haven't had dinner yet."

"Oh, sure," she said, never one to give up a free meal. Though she did kinda wish something else was on the menu… "What is wrong with you? You just met the man! Note to self: masturbate more."

"Chinese okay?"

Her mouth watered. "Perfect."

"What do you like?"

"Besides you?" she said without thinking. "Uh, I mean—anything, really. Noodles, if they have them."

Ben let her comment pass, but he was beaming. "I like noodles too. Maybe some kind of chicken? Orange?"

"Excellent," she seconded.

"You're easy," he said, but then caught himself, looking horrified. "I mean to order food for, not—"

"It's okay," she laughed, patting his thigh. "I know what you meant."

"Sorry, I haven't done this in a long time," he said sheepishly, catching her hand before she could remove it.

"This?"

"Gone on a date."

"Oh." Was this a date? Rey couldn't remember the last time she had been on one. Pretty much anytime she'd been alone with a man not her brother in the past ten years it was because she intended to rob them.

"Not that this has to be a date," he said quickly, releasing her hand. "Sorry, I keep saying stupid things."

Dammit, but he was cute. "You don't have to keep apologizing," she replied lightly. "Let's just have dinner and talk and see where that takes us." Maybe the night would lead to some fun extracurricular activities, maybe not, but at least she'd be able to case his place. Based on what she knew so far, the guy definitely came from old money. "Just keep reminding yourself that he's potentially a mark, not a boyfriend, Rey."

"Sure," he smiled, looking relieved. "Hey, Poe?" he said to the driver. "Can you pick up some food after dropping us at the hotel? We're starving."

——————

Ben fumbled a little opening the door, but quickly recovered and ushered Rey inside with a gallant sweep of his arm. The hotel was nice, but not extravagant, something she found odd for the son of a U.S. Senator. Then again, he had apparently been helping out at a shelter all day, so maybe he really was as down to earth as he seemed.

"The bathroom is through there if you need it," he pointed toward the bedroom.

"I'm fine, thanks."

"Okay, I'm just going to grab a quick shower. Poe should be back within the hour, so make yourself at home."

"Can I join you?" she was tempted to say. "Sure, I'll just watch the telly."

Ben nodded and left the room. A few seconds later, Rey heard the water start. Flipping on the TV, she left it on the cartoon channel before having a look around.

There weren't any expensive electronics or pieces of art in plain sight, so Rey could only assume that anything valuable would be in his room. "Oh, well, nothing gained, nothing lost. Better update Finn, though."

Yanking her cell out, Rey sent a quick text to her brother with Ben's name, the hotel's address, and a couple sentences about the modest state of his living room. He answered her almost immediately, sounding concerned.

Finn: Are you sure about this bloke? If you're not there to rob him, I assume that means you're interested in something else?

Rey: Yes? Maybe? I don't know. We just met, but…

Finn: At least text me later, okay? So I don't have to worry

Rey: I will. Love you 3

Finn: Love you too, peanut

Finn: ...check the room safe if you get a chance. Those types of hotels always have them and you never know what might be inside ;)

Rolling her eyes, but knowing he was right, Rey listened for a moment. It sounded like Ben was still in the shower, so she took the opportunity to pop into the bedroom and search his closet. A standard issue hotel safe was at the back, surrounded by some very nice black suits.

It wouldn't have been hard to crack the safe if she had her gear, but her heart wouldn't have been in it even if she did. She didn't want to rob Ben Solo, which was a first. Still, she did appreciate a challenge...

"Did you need something?"

Rey whipped around to see her host in nothing but a low slung white towel. "No, I—uh…"

"Would you like something to change into?" he inquired kindly.

Unable to respond with his magnificent chest and long thighs on display, Rey just shook her head in the negative. His brow creased and she felt like a kid who had been caught snooping for Christmas presents. "Shit, shit, shit, I've totally blown it!" Backtracking to the living room, she wasn't surprised when he followed. "What should I do? Oh, god, I don't want him to think…"

"Rey, what you said earlier… about being a… what did you call it? A grifter? Are you—mmph!" he started, unable to complete his thought as Rey impulsively reached up to kiss him.

But instead of pushing her away and demanding an answer, Ben threaded his fingers through her hair and dragged her closer. Taking his response as permission, Rey wrapped her arms around his waist, gripping his bare back as the kiss went on and on.

Somehow, they ended up next to the couch. Rey pushed Ben into a sitting position and climbed onto his lap, rubbing her clothed core against the tent in his towel. "Rey," he whispered, lips trailing down to her neck, "Rey, I want you."

"Yes," she responded as he reached for her waistband. Coming up on her knees, she growled when he yanked her leggings and underwear down her hips with one forceful tug. Things were getting out of control, going too far too fast, but she didn't care; she wanted him too. "Help me," she demanded, legs trapped by the constricting garments.

"I've got you," he huffed, reaching behind her to unzip her black combat boots and pull her pants the rest of the way off.

Meanwhile, Rey tore her top and bralette over her head before going to work on the towel barely covering his lap. "Wow!" she blew out a breath, zeroing in on his ardent erection when it was uncovered. He was big, maybe bigger than anyone she'd ever been with. Would he fit?

"Fuck," Ben sighed, sitting back to stare at her body, "you're beautiful, Rey."

Feeling weirdly shy about the sincerity in his sinful voice, Rey kissed him again in lieu of a response, reaching between them to spread herself for entry.

"Wait," he said, gasping for air, "what about protection?"

"Implant," she mumbled, rubbing her slit against the tip of his penis. "I'm clean, are you?"

"Yeah, I haven't—oh, god—uh, done it in a while."

"Good." She felt strangely possessive of him, this man she had just met. It pleased her that he didn't sleep around. "Fuck me, then. Raw."

Ben slammed his mouth down on hers again, positioning his dick with one hand and gripping her left buttock with the other. But he didn't ram himself home, instead he teased her hole, sliding only a fraction of the way in before retreating. He did it over and over, mimicking the action with his tongue until she was incoherent with desire, squirming, imploring him to fill her…

And then he was, and she found that he fit very well inside her indeed. His thick cock seemed to be made for her, hitting all the right spots and ones she hadn't even known existed until now. "Ben!" she cried, furiously pumping her hips in time with his thrusts. "This is—you're—"

"I feel it too!" he returned, palming her breast and teasing her erect nipple. "From the first moment I saw you, I—"

She licked his mouth, begging for entrance, not wanting to hear his sweet words even as they made her heart soar. He opened for her, but was obviously frustrated that she had cut off his declaration. Before she knew it, the hand squeezing her ass drew back and lightly smacked against her butt-cheek.

"Oh!" Rey jolted at the slight sting, but it wasn't in pain. On the contrary, she requested, "Again! Ben, do that again, please! I'm—"

Knock, knock.

"Oh, shit, Poe's at the—"

"Don't you fucking dare, Ben Solo," she growled, bouncing up and down on him with renewed vigor. But the driver started knocking harder, likely because of the guttural sounds erupting from Ben's throat. "Come on, man, can't you tell we're busy?!"

"But—shit!" Ben hauled her against him, no longer playing, just looking for relief before his friend broke the door down.

Rey found his soft grunts and swears endearing, so she took pity on him and increased her pace even further. "Come for me, Ben," she instructed, grinding down on him with all her might. "Come now and then we can eat. Or you can eat me, whichever you prefer."

The dirty talk seemed to work, because in the next minute, Ben was biting down on her shoulder, shaking with the force of his orgasm. Not far behind, Rey led his hand to her swollen nub, needing just a hair more stimulation to tip over the edge. Almost instantly, his trembling touch sent her into climax. Still vaguely aware of what's-his-name banging on the hotel room door, she pressed her mouth to Ben's pectoral to muffle her cries and came for what felt like ages…

"That—was—amazing," Ben panted, hugging her so tightly she thought she might pop. "The—best—I've—ever—had!"

"Me—too," she couldn't help but admit.

Loosening his hold, Ben cupped her cheeks and kissed her softly. "Thank you."

"Ah—you're welcome," she said, smiling like an idiot. Before she could lean in again, Poe resumed making his presence known.

"Ben? Are you okay? Answer me! Did that woman kill you? Your mother will be so pissed if you're dead." He hit the door again. "Either answer me in the next ten seconds or I'm going to get security!"

"I'm fine, great, alive, whatever!" Ben called back loudly. "And annoyed," he said to Rey. "Go into the bedroom for a minute while I get rid of him."

"Okay," she agreed, gingerly getting up. They both groaned when he slipped out of her, which Rey found gratifying. "Can I use the shower now?"

"Sure, there are towels under the sink. My sleep shirts are in the top drawer of the dresser," he offered.

"He wants me to spend the night?" she mused, feeling giddy and terrified all at once. "Alright," she said aloud, picking up her clothes and disappearing into the bedroom she'd been casing earlier, "call out if you need backup."

"Will do," he chuckled, "will do."

——————

Ten minutes later, Rey emerged from the bathroom feeling fresh and back in control. Picking a long sleeve shirt out of Ben's dresser at random, she pulled it over her naked body before toweling off her wet hair. The black cotton was as soft as it was big, but Rey didn't mind; it smelled like Ben.

Catching her reflection in the floor length mirror by the closet, she was amused to see that the garment fell to her knees like a sack, giving her already slender body exactly zero shape. "Oh, well, it's not like I plan on wearing it lon—"

A disturbance in the living room suddenly diverted her reverie. Sneaking to the door, she carefully cracked it and peaked out.

"You can't just keep her here!" Poe nearly shouted at Ben.

"Keep your fucking voice down," he snarled back. "You're not my boss or my mother and you can't tell me what to do. I'm a grown ass man!"

"Maybe so, but you're acting like a teenager! You can't just sleep with some chick you picked up off the side of the road when Leia is counting on you to—"

"I told you," Ben said through gritted teeth, "she saved my ass and I wanted to get to know her. I didn't hire her for the fucking night!"

"Could have fooled me," Poe scoffed. "For all you know, she could have been in on the attack and—"

"Get out!" Ben ordered, clearly at his wit's end. "I'll call you when you're needed again, if you are."

"Are you firing me?!"

"Not yet," Ben said grimly, marching to the door and flinging it open. "Just go before I forget that you're my best friend and say something I regret."

"Fine," Poe said, storming out of the apartment. "Let me know when you come to your senses!"

Ben slammed the door shut, then turned around and leaned on it. Scurrying back into the bathroom before he caught her eavesdropping, she started combing her hair, attempting to look natural in case he came in after her. When he didn't, she tried not to feel disappointed.

Leaving her damp hair hanging loose around her shoulders, Rey found him sitting at the dining table in his towel with several brown paper bags in front of him. He looked lost in thought and she hoped he hadn't taken Poe's opinion about her motives to heart. "Wotcher, Ben?" she asked hesitantly.

"Hmm?" he said, looking up at her. "Sorry, I was just...uh…" The arrested look on his face made her toes curl. "Wow, you look amazing."

"This old thing?" she joked, sidling up next to him. "I borrowed it from a mate."

"He has good taste," he said, opening his arms.

"I certainly think so," she said coyly, moving to sit sideways on his lap. Rey curled one arm around his neck and placed the other one on his chest. "Are you still hungry?"

"For food?" he choked, holding her so that she wouldn't slide off.

"Food," she nodded, leaning her forehead against his, "and other things."

One of Ben's large hands inserted itself between her thighs. "These kinds of things?" he murmured. "I think we can—fuck!" he bit his lip as he discovered that she wasn't wearing anything underneath his shirt.

"We can certainly fuck," she teased, "but—oh!" Rey gasped as he stood with her in his strong arms. "Ben? What are you…?"

Before she could get the words out, he'd pushed their dinner out of the way and laid her down on the table. Placing the backs of her knees in the crook of each arm, Ben pulled her forward until her butt was on the edge of the table and her pussy was level with his mouth.

"Having dinner," he said in the most ridiculously sexy tone of voice she'd ever heard, flipping his nightshirt up so that she was bare from the waist down.

"Oh, god!" she whimpered as he lowered his head. "Ben, you don't really have to—ah!" Gripping the back of his head as he started to lick her folds, Rey shuddered every time his long nose bumped against her clit.

"Enjoying yourself?" he said a little arrogantly. "Is this why you came home with me? Cause you wanted me to make you feel good?"

Considering how very well he was treating her, and the uncertainty on his face, she decided to play along. "Yes, Ben, I wanted you the second I saw you!"

He smiled slightly, then resumed tasting her. "So, does that mean you want to come?"

"That would be lovely," she sighed, enjoying the pressure of his wide mouth.

His mouth quirked at that. "Never heard sex described that way before."

"Then you're doing it with the wrong people."

"Oh?" his gaze turned hot. "And how many people have you been doing it with?"

"Not many," she said hurriedly, "and not in a long time."

"Good girl," he said silkily. "So, if I were to put my fingers inside you, would your cunt feel… full?"

"Yes!" she panted, so wet she was dripping onto the table now.

"Let's see then."

Arching her back as he slid two fingers inside her body, Rey realized that she had never really known sexual satisfaction until tonight. She was twenty-five and still basically knew nothing about sex and relationships. "Huh."

Ben stopped moving, lifting his dark head to look at her. "Rey? Is everything okay?"

"Yeah," she said dreamily. "I guess I've just never felt this way before."

He held her eyes for an extended moment, amber striking against hazel. "Yeah, me too." And then he was fingering her again, sucking and teasing her slick opening until she was crying out his name in ecstasy.

Afterward, he scooped her up in his arms and carried her to the bedroom, kicking the door shut behind them. Needless to say, they skipped dinner that night.

——————

Rey grunted as she felt Ben leave the bed the next morning. He had been her heater since the sheets and pillows were strewn about the room. "Come back," she said hoarsely, throat worn from use. "I'm cold."

"Just a moment," he laughed, opening the bedroom door to fetch something from the living room. "Your cell has been going off for an hour straight."

"My cell?" she yawned. Then, "Oh, no." She sat bolt upright. "Wait! Don't—"

"Rey?" Ben called in disbelief. "Who the fuck is Finn?"

——————

A/N: I love Kingsman and always think about Rey being a punk with a heart of gold like Eggsy. I didn't include the spy angle, but I was able to visit The Black Prince, where scenes were filled for the movie, a couple years ago and have fond memories. Anyway, reviews are appreciated! <3 

#reylo #reylo fic #reylo fanfic #kylo ren #ben solo #rey #modern au #my fanfiction #sushigirlali

[sunyoonandstars]

BTS mini series || Friday Night Club || You x (?), feat. OT7 as High School students || CHAPTER 1

This is an interactive (!) Breakfast Club kind of High School AU. For the sake of the story, all members are of similar age here. 

fluff, slice of life, hints of angst, future smut, and possible romance 

Pairing You x (?) || Will be decided by your choice/a poll after Chapter 1 

Word count  5.790

Synopsis You find yourself in detention on a Friday night in the middle of summer at a new school. And for company, you have seven equally handsome and troubled young men. Which of them will you decide to get to know better? Your choice might just as well change your life ...

"So, what you're going to do is pair up and confess your sins and secrets to each other. Nothing too naughty. Just whatever you're comfortable with. Up here, in front of everyone, in a back corner of this room or, if you like, in a broom closet or god knows where. As long as you do it. And I need you to be honest here, with me and yourselves. Also, I'm basically a human lie detector. I will be able to tell if you didn't do it, just saying. So, find yourself a partner and get started." Mr. Wong claps his big hands, full of zest for action. "Ladies first!"

Suddenly, all eyes are on you.

"Ms. Y/l/n, please stand up and pick your partner."

With a pounding heart, you push back your chair and get up, taking a last look around, staring directly into each of the handsome faces surrounding you before you decide to follow your instincts and make your choice ...

🎶 PLAYLIST 🎶

CHAPTER 1 

"Great," you mutter to yourself upon opening the door to the stuffy, almost empty classroom. A room full of clichés. And, apparently, you are one of them. 

You have no idea why Mr. Wong considered it to be necessary for you to join this sad circle. Even though you haven't been attending this school for long, a few faces already seem familiar, and not all of them earned their reputation by being straight-A students and class president, as did pretty boy Park Jimin in the far right corner of the room. His is the only name you remember as you make your way to a vacant seat without establishing eye contact, even though you can feel the seven boys staring at you curiously. 

"You're late," Park Jimin comments from his corner. When you turn around, he isn't even looking at you but instead fiddling with an expensive-looking silver pen. 

"To detention," you finish his sentence as you plop down onto one of the ridiculously uncomfortable chairs and let your backpack drop to the floor,  the very second Mr. Wong makes his presence known by demonstratively clearing his throat. 

"I thought I made myself clear, Miss Y/l/n Y/n," the teacher starts out in his soft, yet firm tone, a bland smile stretching his thin lips which, however, doesn't reach his eyes. "You shouldn't view this as detention. This is an opportunity for the eight of you to deal with your issues and be better students, maybe even find friends. Since all of you seem to have certain difficulties adhering to our school's high standards, I believe it to be a good idea to actually talk and find out what troubles you before we are forced to, well, adopt more drastic measures."

"But we are being detained against our will, right?" the guy to the far left of the room, seated where the daylight doesn't reach, raises his voice. Only now do you even really notice him. It seems, though, as if he didn't want to attract attention in the first place. Shoulders hunched, pale-faced, dark hair falling into his face, hood pulled up, he sits there, a smirk plastered on his, what appear to be naturally pouty, lips. You wonder why you haven't seen him before on campus. 

"Yes, Mr. Min, that's right, but -"

"So it is detention then." 

"No. It's -" Mr. Wong stammers, barely keeping his countenance by the looks of it. 

"So, I'm free to go?" the guy named Min cocks his head to the right, his eyes becoming visible for the first time as a strand of his soft hair shifts slightly. Those eyes, red-rimmed, appear to be infinitely tired but at the same time alight with life, dark and deep like bottomless wells, full of stories and ideas. 

"No, Mr. Min, you are not!"

Mr. Wong takes a deep breath to calm himself. 

"Anyway. Director Ko was ready to give up on you bunch of delinquents –" 

"That's a little strongly worded, don't you think?" the tall, silver-haired guy with the cute nose in the front row cuts his teacher off. You believe to remember him from the time he sat some girl's notebook on fire, by accident as he claimed. Kim something. God, why are you so bad with names? 

"Exactly!" Park Jimin agrees with him, suddenly agitated. "I don't even belong here with these –– people." 

"Ha! That was a close one, Park," the hooded vampire guy scoffs. "What did you wanna call us? Weirdos? Losers?" 

"You're pretty close," Park Jimin hisses back at him. 

"Come on, guys. This isn't much fun as it is. But do you really have to make it unbearable?" The slender, red-haired boy seated right in front of you turns around to glare at the both of them. "I know you're gonna hate me for saying this, but let's just make the best of this and get it over with, everybody." 

He winks at you as he notices you staring and throws you a gleaming smile. Now you remember. He's the dancer, famous all around town for his charm, skills and freestyling. 

"I can't believe I'm actually saying this," Mr. Wong continues. "But I'll have to agree with Mr. Jung. Let's all try and be civil and learn something from this experience. Otherwise, you will be back in this very same room next Friday after classes, as well. And the Friday after that, and the Friday after that."

"Yes, we get it," Min Vampire grumbles. 

"Well, then there shouldn't be any further issues," Mr. Wong darts him a glare. "Whatever happened to your uniform, young man? This may not be detention, but it's still not leisure time. Take off that ridiculous hoodie."

"But I'm cold."

"It's the middle of July, for God's sake! It's 32 (90) degrees in the shade. Take it off." 

"What if I don't?" Min Vampire provocatively raises a brow at him. 

"I don't know what has gotten into you lately, Min Yoongi. But if you keep this up, your behavior will have serious consequences. Don't you care about anything anymore apart from your precious music? What about your poor, troubled parents? Your grades? Your future?" 

"Will you stop harassing me if I take the fucking hoodie off?" 

"Language, young man! And I'm not harassing you," a despairing Mr. Wong objects, throwing his arms into the air. "I'm trying to help you, boy. Can't you see that?" 

"I don't need your help. And I don't want it." 

"Fine," the teacher eventually gives in, already busy packing up his things while ceaselessly shaking his head. "I see staying here with you is pointless anyway, so I'll turn my attention to tasks that will actually benefit from it. If you need anything, you can find me in the principal’s office. I will check on you regularly. Here is a list of assignments you're expected to complete in order to be able to leave this building later on." 

With those words, he takes a stack of papers from his bag and sets them down on the teacher's desk. 

"If even only one of you doesn’t complete these, all of you will be required to stay for the night or the whole weekend if that's what it takes. This is your last chance before expulsion, and next year all of you will be seniors. So, leaving this fine institution and transferring to another High School at this time will most likely have a severely negative effect on your final grade. I hope today you finally come to realize what your misconduct may cost you and change your habits."

Mr. Wong pauses for a few impactful seconds and tries to make eye contact with each of us. 

"Your parents have been informed and agreed to my methods. If you don't believe me, here are their signatures. I will be present to watch over you at any time. The end of the semester is closing in, so I have plenty to do around here anyway." 

"Mr. Wong, you must be mistaken. I'm not supposed to be here," Park Jimin objects once more, this time getting up from his chair. "I can't be. What I did can in no way justify expulsion. I've been an exemplary student ever since I started attending this institution."

"That may be true, Mr. Park. And I am well aware of your great contributions and outstanding grades. But your behavior clearly shows that you are highly lacking in the social department. Those anger issues of yours have no place in this school and none in society, either. If you don't change your ways, even your talents and intellect won't get you very far, I'm afraid. And no teacher I know is willing to put up with you any longer. So you better change your approach to the people around you, or the school board will have no choice but to expel you." 

"But –" 

"No backtalk. I'm leaving you to yourselves now. In about an hour I will be back. I expect to see results by then." 

Without looking back, Mr. Wong turns on his heel and leaves the room, locking the door behind him. 

"Great. Now we're his prisoners," Min Yoongi groans, shaking his head before he goes on to place it on the table top, using his folded arms as a cushion. 

Right. Finally, you remember him. He's the guy who's always sleeping in class but somehow seems to know the right answer whenever a teacher wakes him from his peaceful slumber, silently hoping he's going to make a fool of himself. You just never saw his face before. Because, well, he's always asleep. 

A sudden movement to your right demands your attention. It's Park Jimin, striding to the front of the classroom, his step determined and his expression almost solemn. You never quite noticed how well-composed his body is until now when he passes you so closely his elbow brushes your shoulder. You can tell by the confidence and fluidity of his movements that he is a dancer, too, although you've never seen him perform. Without further explanation, he picks up the assignments and starts handing them out. 

"Seriously?", Min Yoongi grumbles, barely lifting his head. "I'm not gonna do shit. This is illegal. He's not even allowed to keep us here in the first place. He locked the fucking door." 

"Well, I don't intend to spend the whole weekend here," Park Jimin shrugs, obviously unimpressed. "There's an essential maths exam to take place on Monday, and I didn't bring my learning material. But be assured that I'm not going to let you ignorant dumbass ruin my final grade." 

"What did you just call me?" Suddenly wide awake, Min Yoongi sits up straight, exasperation apparent in his widened eyes. 

"An ignorant dumbass," Jimin repeats calmly, leaning in closer with each word. 

"What the fuck!?" Yoongi gasps, getting up so abruptly, his chair falls over with an earsplitting bang. By the looks of it, he’s ready to fight and Jimin's posture clearly shows that he's only waiting for his opponent to throw the first punch. The tension building up between the two of them is palpable. 

"Enough now," a deep, smooth voice cuts through the nervous silence. Immediately following his words, the chem lab guy steps in the middle of the two squabblers and holds each of them at arm's length, maintaining a firm grip on their shirts. "You two were best friends before you decided to run against each other for class president, remember? You were basically inseparable. This is just ridiculous. Get over yourselves, or we'll be here till Monday." 

"He started it," Yoongi snorts, his eyes burning holes through Jimin's perfect visage. 

"Well, you basically asked for it," Jimin retorts with a grin. 

"Shut it! Both of you," chem lab guy silences them. "Pull yourselves together. We're not kids anymore, and this isn't the time for your bullshit. Didn't you hear what Mr. Wong said? This is our last shot. And I deserve being here just as much as you do, Jimin. I didn't even do anything, but here I am, and there's nothing I can do except for dealing with it. And I suppose you do the same." 

With one last pull at their collars, chem lab guy lets them go and returns to his seat. Jimin follows suit, sitting down with his arms crossed in front of his chest, still breathing heavily, whereas Min Yoongi merely puts on a pair of hi-fi headphones and apparently goes back to sleep.

The whole room falls quiet since everyone else grudgingly starts skimming the printout before them. Except for the redhead in front of you. Rocking his chair backward and forward, chewing on a pencil, a smirk playing on his rosy lips, he eventually leans back far enough so he can rest his arm comfortably on your desk. 

"That was Namjoon, by the way. Kim Namjoon. The guy who separated them," he whispers, pointing his chin in silver-haired-chem-lab-guy’s direction. 

"He seems okay. Why's he here?" you can't help but ask, your curiosity getting the better of you. 

"Oh, he keeps destroying school property," the redhead chuckles, watching his classmate go through the list of assignments. "Unintentionally, of course. Namjoon's just hella clumsy. He's really tall and grew so suddenly, his extremities just can't keep up, you know. But the teachers call it vandalism. They believe he does it on purpose, to get attention and to work through some issues they have at home. But, from what I know about him, there aren't any. Namjoon's a decent guy. His grades are just slightly above average, he reads grownup books and listens to Hip Hop. There's nothing wrong with him. He might be the only one of us who doesn't deserve to be here." 

As if he just now remembered he was even talking to someone, the redhead abruptly turns around and extends a hand for you to shake. You do so reluctantly. 

"My name's Hoseok, by the way. Jung Hoseok," he smiles at you gleamingly. "But my friends call me J-Hope. It's kinda my stage name." 

"You dance, right?" 

"Oh, you've heard of me?" he wonders aloud, genuinely surprised as it seems. 

"There's no way I didn't. You're kinda famous around here." 

"I guess I am," he shrugs nonchalantly, grinning goofily. "You want me to spill all the gossip? You're new to this school, right?" 

"Yes. How’d you know?" 

You can't hide your puzzlement.

"Well, otherwise I would've noticed you sooner, obviously. I only saw you a few times around campus, but you caught my eye right away. Not a lot of girls manage to do that." Again, Hoseok winks at you, causing a hot blush to creep up your neck and settle on your cheeks. 

"Y/n was the name? Y/l/n Y/n?" 

You nod your head yes, unable to speak, your throat suddenly as dry as a desert. 

"That's a pretty name. It suits you." 

"Oh, stop it," you mutter. "It's nothing special. And neither am I. But I'll gladly take you up on your offer." 

Hoseok questioningly arches a brow at you. 

"I believe you promised me some gossip. A quick who's who? I'd really like to know who I'm dealing with here." 

"Oh, sure," he agrees, slightly disappointed if you're not mistaken. "Where shall we start?" 

Exhaling a sigh, Hoseok takes a look around, still leaning on your desk. 

"Well, I don't think Park Jimin requires an introduction," he starts, lowering his voice to an almost inaudible whisper. "He's from a good household, a straight-A student, class president, one of our school's best athletes, a talented classical dancer, a mathematics genius, dangerously handsome and on top of that our resident number two crush boy, closely following the one and only Kim Taehyung as our school's ultimate heartthrob." 

"Kim Taehyung?" 

He points at 'Dorian Grey' how you have come to call him. You have seen him before, often times, roaming the school's corridors, untouchable, staring into space, his head always somewhere else, up in the clouds. This unreally beautiful young man with his shiny, caramel-colored hair and delicate hands who is currently seated in the second row, next to the shy boy with the starry eyes and the most adorable nose you've ever seen. The two of them whisper constantly, seemingly lost in their own world. 

"I'll come to him later," Hoseok explains. "Anyway. Jimin has trouble acknowledging his mistakes sometimes. He always needs to be the best, to be right. So, when teachers or students are 'too stupid for him to deal with', he, well, tends to lose his patience. He keeps aggressively correcting our math's teacher who does not appreciate Jimin's input. That's basically what landed him in here. But I think the anger isn't actually in his nature. Jimin surely has a temper. I believe, however, that these little escalations only happen thanks to his parents and the insane amount of pressure they put on him. You see, they want, no expect him to excel at everything. But it's kinda lonely up there on the top. Thanks to his competitive nature, Jimin doesn't really have friends. Sure, there are people circling around him like vultures, hoping his 'fame' will somehow rub off on them. But none of them have his back. He was friends with this Yoongi character for years. Don't ask me why, though. Anyway, they sort of drifted apart during the last election for class president. Ever since then, Jimin has been more of a loner, claiming he's too busy to have friends. But I think he just really needs someone to show him he's being appreciated."

"I see," you mumble, catching yourself staring at the gorgeous, full-lipped boy in awe. 

"Well, over there we have Kim Namjoon. I mentioned him before." 

While you listen to Hoseok's narration, your eyes wander to the prementioned who is currently immersed in the lecture of the worksheet before him. His chin protruding slightly, teeth absentmindedly gnawing at his lower lip, brows furrowed to a frown, he studies the printed lines intently, massaging his temple with the knuckle of his thumb. The dark, silvery grey color of his short hair complements his complexion and gives him the appeal of a mysterious intellectual. 

"He's another model student, in a way. His grades are not as good as Jimin's, and he struggles in certain areas, like maths or science. But he's a thinker, highly intelligent and very sensitive, even if you might not think so based on your first impression of him, especially judging by his strong build. He's excellent at languages, social studies, philosophy and just joined an art club. He's also widely read and knows a lot about literature. Namjoon spends most of his free time at the library or looking up music. We get along quite well. Actually, he makes an effort to be neutral, so he gets along with almost anybody, although most people consider him a geek, so he doesn't have a lot of friends, either. He's still very kind and generous with everybody and tries to help where he can. Last term, he saved my ass when I was about to fail my English class." 

"Then why's he in here?" 

"Like I said. Our Namjoon here keeps damaging, or rather demolishing, school property. By accident, though, I'm convinced. On his death roll are a couple of hairdryers, two doors, I think, a few Petri dishes and glass flasks, a window, a hand-towel suspender, three soccer balls, a tennis racket, a blackboard, a few TVs – I could keep going, but I believe you catch my drift."

You nod in agreement, unable to keep your lips from smiling while you watch Namjoon shift in his seat, still focused on his assignment. 

"Namjoon keeps pleading innocent," Hoseok continues, sadly shaking his head. "But both his parents and the teachers are confident he's acting up because he's in some kind of 'rebellious phase'. The guy is seventeen, for God's sake. He suddenly shot up like a palm tree. He's a teenager. His body can't handle the changes, so he's a little clumsy, sure, but he means no harm. Grownups can be so ignorant." 

"I couldn't agree more," you scoff bitterly, drawing circles on the bottom right corner of your assignment sheet. 

"So, who's next?" Hoseok mutters, more to himself. "Ah, right. Kim Seokjin. Mr. Worldwide Handsome, as he likes to call himself." 

You look up and in the direction Hoseok is pointing in. 

"Ah, right," you nod. "He's the guy all the girls want to marry when they get out of school." 

"That's right," Hoseok snorts. "Seokjin comes from a wealthy family. His father is some big CEO, and his mother is a former Miss Korea. That's probably where he got his good looks from. He's not precisely our school's brightest student, but that does in no way diminish his popularity. He takes up third place, right after Jimin, on our school's list of the 'most eligible bachelors', you might say. And he's the number one flower boy. All he has to do is blow them a kiss and the younger girls fall for him like cut-down trees."

Hoseok rolls his eyes. 

"Then why's he in here?" 

"I think, first and foremost, this punishment was encouraged by his parents themselves."

"What for?" 

"Because Seokjin keeps making jokes in class. He's basically famous for being our school’s top class clown and keeps rambling on about wanting to become a famous comedic actor or entertainer or something." 

"Oh," you think out loud. "I imagine his parents are not too fond of that idea."

"Yeah, especially not his dad. Seokjin once mentioned that they want him to take over his family's corporate empire some day. It's a shame, though, because he is good at what he does. He always makes everyone laugh, even the teachers, and you can tell it makes him happy. It's so sad that his parents can't see that and want to take away what's best for him. They even had him kicked out of drama club." 

Clicking his tongue, Hoseok slowly shakes his head, eyeing Seokjin sympathetically. Your gaze, as well, lingers on his amazingly handsome features for a few more seconds before it goes on to focus on Hoseok's next target. 

"Over there, you see the boy with the hazel coconut hair and the undercut? The one with the many piercings?"

"Yeah. He looks cute." 

"Oh, does he now?" Hoseok suggestively wiggles his eyebrows at you. 

"I meant nice," you quickly correct yourself, cheeks blushing furiously. 

"Yeah, sure." Hoseok playfully pokes your arm. "Anyway. He's kinda shy. His name is Jeon Jungkook. I think his friends, well, his only friend, calls him Kook or Kookie sometimes. Which really fits him, I think. Because you're right, he appears to be cute at first sight." 

„Appears to be?" 

"Well, he's got the soft baby boy looks, sure, but he isn't necessarily one. Partly he might be. But he's stronger and much fiercer than he lets on. Hidden underneath that oversized uniform of his are pounds of sheer muscle. Jungkook's our school's top athletes. A fast runner, a skilled boxer, a supreme weightlifter. He does parcours and stuff, too, and lately Jimin has been teaching him some dance moves, I think. The teachers like him because the poor boy is so insecure that he's always quiet and obedient in class. Jungkook basically only landed himself in here by being a good friend." 

"What's that supposed to mean?" 

"Him and Taehyung over there," Hoseok points to the duo sitting huddled together in the front, so close to each other their arms are touching. "They are inseparable, literally. Always have been. And even though Jungkook is a few months younger and clearly the shier of those two, he has this guarding instinct and protecting drive when it comes to Taehyung. You see, Taehyung is the dreamy kind. His head is in the right place, and he's not dumb, might I add. But his mind is a wandering one. He see's the world through some kind of kaleidoscope, you know. Differently than we do. More colorful and from an artistic point of view, I guess. He's an art nerd, by the way. Very gentle soul, romantic, may appear kind of cold at times. Taehyung is very sociable, but not always the most social, if you get what I mean?" 

"I guess, yeah," you shrug your shoulders, your eyes glued to Taehyung's gorgeous side profile. He seems to have some kind of power over you already. The longer you look, the stronger it gets. He's pulling you in like a magnet. 

"Anyway, our Taehyung isn't exactly the toughest when it comes to defending himself against the evil in this world and dealing with nasty comments made by those who are envious of his charm and beauty, seeking to put him down. So that's kind of Jungkook's role, you know. He's always by his side, there to protect Taehyung against any sort of abuse. Taehyung doesn't exactly come from the best of families. His folks are very poor, so he's always had to deal with bullying. He's only here on a scholarship because he's practically a child prodigy, that's probably why a lot of kids hate him. You see, Taehyung took part in one of Korea's most prominent art competitions about two years ago and won third place. And he was competing against grownups there, mostly."

"Really?", you gasp with wonderment. 

"Yes," Hoseok confirms, almost proud. "He's a special boy, although he usually keeps those magnificent thoughts of his to himself, probably because he's tired of being called an alien, freak or weirdo. But if you listen to him, I think you might learn something."

"So, why's he in here?" 

"Oh," Hoseok scoffs. "Because he's always late and keeps missing classes that aren't, you know, art." 

"Ah, I see." 

You can't help but be fond of the artsy boy. 

"And Jungkook? Why's he here?" 

"Oh, sorry," Hoseok giggles. "I kind of drifted off there for a second, didn't I? Well, Jungkookie here received this punishment because he keeps getting into fistfights, or rather starting them. Whenever someone attacks or offends Taehyung, Jungkook kind of loses it. He's very timid, usually, like I said, so he lacks the confidence to settle things verbally and doesn't know what to do with himself. That's why he lashes out, I guess. And those poor rich boys don't stand a chance against him. Oh, I forgot to mention. He's also here on a scholarship, as is Min Yoongi. Because our school makes a point of fostering exceptional talents, in the arts as well as in other fields. So, Jungkook came here as an athlete and Yoongi because of his significant achievements in science competitions."

"Oh, I see. I didn't know they were so generous with scholarships here. It's not exactly Korean standard." 

"No, it isn't," Hoseok agrees, leaning back so far now, he's basically lying on your desk. "But our principal also comes from a poor family. Everything he accomplished, he owes not only to his sharp intellect and spirit, but also to the generosity of people like himself who recognized his merit early on and saw to it that it was being nurtured. So, he took it upon himself to do the same for young people from similar backgrounds. If you don't mind me asking, aren't you here on a scholarship, as well? Sorry, if that was too direct. I just heard a rumor and got curious." 

"No, it's all right," you brush off Hoseok's concern with a gesture of your hand. "It's true. I'm here on a sort of literary scholarship, you might say. I wrote a few essays, poems and short stories that received positive feedback in competitions and apparently attracted some attention. One day, there was this letter in the mail, signed by Principal Ko. He invited us to take a look at the school, and, of course, my father insisted on going. Before we left, the Principal offered me a scholarship, and my father agreed immediately."

"You don't sound too pleased with his decision." 

"You're very observant." 

"Why, thank you!" Hoseok smiles at you, his beautiful features twisted into an adorable grimace. 

"So, why don't you like it here?", he goes on to ask, serious again in a matter of seconds. 

"We had to move and leave my hometown so I could go here. My father has to drive hours to work every day, I barely even see him. Our relationship was bad before that, ever since my mother passed away, but now it’s just – worse.“ 

"Oh," Hoseok gasps, one hand shooting up to cover his pink lips. „Your mother – I had no idea. I’m so sorry!" 

"It's all right," you lie, lowering your head, so your face is concealed by a protective curtain of hair, hiding the tears clouding your vision. "It's been years since she left us. Since then, we're not really a family anymore. I don't have any other relatives I know of, so it's just my father and me. And all he ever does is scold me and tell me to do better. The things he values most are money and reputation. I'm not like that, though. I wanna live. I wanna have adventures and write about them. I need to feel things. To see them, hear them, taste them. Everything. I can't lead the life he wants me to. So we don't get along all that well. Just last week he told me I shouldn't 'rest on my oars'. That I practically didn't even deserve this scholarship because all I did was lock myself in my room and write."

"Oh, damn," Hoseok sharply inhales through his teeth. "That's bad. How can he say such a thing?"

"It's what he believes," you shrug, attempting to appear unaffected. 

"Y/n, why are you here, if I may ask?", Hoseok breaks the awkward silence that had settled in between the two of you for a few minutes of you pretending to read the assignments given to you by Mr. Wong when all you really did was stare at the blank, white spaces in between words. 

"Me? Oh, you don't wanna know," you chuckle. "It's pathetic." 

"I do. I want to know. What did you do?"

"You see, we were given this homework," you begin, struggling to withstand Hoseok's straightforward gaze and maintain eye contact. "We had to write a thousand word essay about our life in English class. And all I wrote was 'My life sucks'." 

"But I thought it was a thousand word essay?"

"Yes. And I wrote 'my life sucks' three hundred thirty-three times."

"No, you didn't!", Hoseok shouts out, bursting into laughter, the sudden sound turning a few heads. 

"Yes, I did," you snicker, for the first time since the incident occurred actually feeling proud of your childish action. 

"Are you in Mrs. Kim's Engish class?"

You nod. 

"So, I'm sure she made you write it again." 

"Yes, she did. Two times. And I kept handing in the same text. When she asked me why, I told her the truth. That my life indeed does suck and that I hate it. Everything about it." 

"Wow, that sounds kinda black and white to me. I'm sure there are some grey zones. Stuff you kinda enjoy doing. Like writing. Writing's fun, right?" 

"No," you shake your head, steadily holding Hoseok's glance. "Not ever since I moved here. I've been writer's blocked, feeling uninspired. It's like torture to me." 

"Ah, I get it," Hoseok mumbles, giving you a sympathetic look. "So that's why I never see you smile." 

His statement hits you like a blow to the gut. 

"I wonder what it looks like."

"What?" you ask. 

"Your smile. Won't you show me? Just this once?" he tilts his head, placing his chin on your hand on the table and blinking up at you out of chocolate brown puppy eyes, lips pursed into an endearing pout. "Pretty please?" 

"We're in detention. There's no reason for me to smile."

"But it's summer. The sun's out. The weather is nice.“

"Exactly," you scoff. 

"I don't get it," Hoseok frowns. 

"I hate summer. I hate the sun. And don't even get me started on smiling." 

Your reply earns you a low chuckle from Min Yoongi whose face has now entirely disappeared under his sweater's hood. 

"Oh, you're one of those," Hoseok comments, feigning repulsion. "I'm kidding. You're okay. I kinda like you, Y/l/n Y/n." 

"Wow, was that supposed to be a compliment? Thank you so much! I feel like a whole new person now. I'm honored, really,“ you tease Hoseok who, in response, turns his back on you with a disgruntled nose scrunch. 

During the minutes to come, he doesn't turn around again, and you can't quite tell whether he's merely pretending to be offended or if you actually hurt his feelings. 

"Hey! Psst! Hey!", you hiss at him, trying to get his attention. "Hoseok! Jung Hoseok!" 

Jimin darts you an annoyed glance. 

"Hoseok! Come on, don't be like that." 

You reach out and tap his shoulder with the back of your pencil. 

"Come on. I'm sorry."

No response. 

After another futile attempt to get Hoseok's attention, you eventually take your worksheet and tear off the upper right corner to scribble a message on the blank paper. 

Hoseok. I'm sorry. I can be a dick sometimes. I didn't mean it like that. I'm really glad you started talking to me. You're the first person at this school who showed the least bit of interest and kindness. Don't take what I said too seriously. I'm an idiot. 

Quickly, you crumple up the note and throw it at him. It hits Hoseok's head before it lands right in front of his nose, in the middle of his spreadsheet. He hesitates before he reads it, all the while being carefully observed by you. His reaction still comes as a surprise to you. 

"It's okay, stupid," he grins in turning around. "I was just pulling your leg. But I'm glad you like me, too." 

"Wait, I never said –" 

Right then, the classroom door flies open and Mr. Wong enters, his step suspiciously light. 

"So, it's been almost an hour, time for your second assignment," he announces with a broad smile. 

"But I didn't even finish the first one," Taehyung objects, his tone whiny. 

"That's okay," Mr. Wong says. "The essay can wait. You may write it later, at home even. Now, however, it's time for a joined activity." 

"Oh, great," Min Yoongi grumbles from underneath his hood. 

"And all of you are going to participate. You, too, Mr. Min." 

The namely mentioned merely gives off a dissatisfied grunt. 

"So, what you're going to do is pair up and confess your sins and secrets to each other. Nothing too naughty. Just whatever you're comfortable with. Up here, in front of everyone, in a back corner of this room or, if you like, in a broom closet or god knows where. As long as you do it. And I need you to be honest here, with me and yourselves. Also, I'm basically a human lie detector. I will be able to tell if you didn't do it, just saying. So, find yourself a partner and get started." Mr. Wong claps his big hands, full of zest for action. "Ladies first!" 

Suddenly, all eyes are on you. 

"Ms. Y/l/n, please stand up and pick your partner."

With a pounding heart, you push back your chair and get up, taking a last look around, staring directly into each of the handsome faces surrounding you before you decide to follow your instincts and make your choice ... 

Who of the seven boys will you pick as your partner for this intimate assignment? Who of them do you want to get to know better? Who of them captured your interest? 

🗳 Vote here. Your choice will be crucial to the further development of the story. 

Thanks for reading and voting. I hope you liked it so far! ☺️💖

The next Chapter will be posted next Wednesday, at the latest. 

Here you can find the matching PLAYLIST. And, if you feel like checking out more of my fiction, my Masterlist. 🙃

NONE of the GIFs used are mine. Credit goes to the initial creators. Thank you for your hard work and dedication. 

#bangtan #ot7 #bts school au #bangtanarmynet #kpopwonderlandtag #bts x reader #ot7 fic #bts au #bts writing #coming of age story #bts imagine #bts series #bts scenario #bts au series #bts fluff #bts smut #bts romance #interactive fiction #bts fan fiction #breakfast club au #bts fic #bangtan fic #seokjin #yoongi #hoseok #namjoon #jimin #taehyung #jungkook #bts poll

[eldritchsurveys]

176.

part 6 of that weird long bzoink survey

Have you ever mowed the lawn? >> A couple of times long ago.

Do you get an allowence? >> No, I get an income.

Where do your parents work? >> ---

Did you ever know your great grandparents? >> No.

What does family mean to you? >> It doesn’t really mean anything to me. For all intents and purposes, Sparrow is the only person that counts as “family” because once we’re married that’s literally what we’ll be, legally. I have no connections to the people I’m blood-related to, and I’m not even interested in having “family” at this point because it’s been such a source of bullshit for me. I don’t even want “in-laws” lmao because her mother is always like “you’re part of the faaaaamily” meehehfhhhhhhh fuck that.

What does friendship mean to you? >> I don’t know. I’ve always had a hard time really understanding what a friend is supposed to be for me, which is partly how I ended up in so many bad friendships. I would like to be in a mutually beneficial friendship, but I’m really not sure how they work, and no one I’ve asked about it seems to have had any insight except, you know, “don’t be a dick”-type advice, which is largely general.

What does true love mean to you? >> Love is just behaviour, for me. A way of treating people that shows compassion, appreciation, and interest. I don’t really know any other way to think of it than that.

What's your favorite band/group/singer? >> I don’t know, man, I have a million.

What's your favorite movie? >> The Fountain. Also, Interstellar. Also, Sunshine.

TV show? >> I like a lot of tv shows, I don’t really have any stand-out ones.

What radio station do you listen to most often? >> I don’t listen to radio.

Do you get snow days often where you live? >> Yes, unfortunately.

Do you try to run from things that are bothering you? Does it work? >> I try to distract myself from things that I can’t do anything about, or feelings that aren’t productive. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Can you smell fear? >> I’m guessing not.

Would you ever pet a lion? >> If I had an opportunity and could guarantee not getting eaten, sure.

What's your favorite perfume? What's your favorite cologne? >> I like oils. Like from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab.

What's your favorite overall smell? >> I don’t have one.

What's your favorite sign? (star, heart, rainbow, skull) >> I’m not sure.

Do you know how to play marbles? >> I didn’t know there was a specific game related to them.

Do you know how to play jacks? >> I do now, but when I had them as a child no one taught me that there was a game you’re supposed to play, so I kinda just fiddled around with them.

Do you know how to play poker? >> I’ve forgotten by now.

Tape or tacks? >> Depends.

Plastic, wood, or wire clothes hangers? >> I prefer wood, but they’re more expensive.

Do you have a light in your closet? >> There’s a light in the main bedroom’s closet.

Do you collect spare change lying around the house? >> No.

Do you like the taste of Tums? >> Not particularly, but it’s not terrible.

How about Pepto Bismol? >> I’ve never tasted it.

Do you have a fast or slow metabolism? >> I don’t know. I’m guessing it’s average.

Do you drink coffee? >> No.

Is the room you are in right now a mess? >> Not really.

When you slip and fall do you laugh it off or freak out? >> I definitely laugh. Especially if it seemed like it probably looked comical to an observer (which a lot of falls really do).

What is your definition of feaking out? >> I don’t know, there’s a lot of ways to freak out.

Have you ever played in a refridgerator box? >> Nope.

Do you still draw with chalk? >> Nah.

Have you ever finger painted? >> I don’t recall having done so, but who knows.

Have you ever had a pie in your face? >> No, thank god.

Ever bobbed for apples? >> No.

Ever hit a piniata? >> No.

Played pin the tail on the donkey? >> No.

Have you ever been on tv/the radio? >> I’ve been on television.

What's your favorite number? >> 9, or 19.

What's your favorite letter? >> V.

What's your favorite color?  >> Gold.

(>0.0)><(0.0<) <- Is that cute to you? >> Sure. Looks like two Kirbys.

What's your favorite onomatopoeia? (Crash, bang, zoom, meow) >> Hmm... zoom is fun.

Have you ever been fishing? Is it really all that much fun? >> I’ve never been. I figure it’s probably more relaxing than fun, but I wouldn’t actually know.

Ever been minurature golfing? >> Yeah.

Are you a tennis geek? >> No.

Computer geek? >> I don’t really consider myself any kind of ‘geek’.

Video game geek? >> ---

Anime geek? >> ---

D&D geek? >> ---

Are you one of those people who watch Naruto? >> “One of those people”, lol. Okay. Anyway, no, I don’t watch it.

Do you agree that even Pokemon is better than naruto? >> I really don’t have an opinion.

Ninjas or dinosaurs? >> Hm.

Do you watch stand up comedy? >> Sometimes.

What's your favorite tv network? >> I don’t know. I don’t usually watch regular television.

Do you have one night that you could play on repeat forever and ever? >> Nah, I’m good.

Is there one dream you wish you could just live through once? >> Any of the ones I’ve had about Idris Elba, lmfao.

Do you think people with a British accent are hot? How about Australian? Irish? >> I’m really attracted to the cadence of some Irish accents. A person still has to be otherwise attractive to me for me to be attracted to them, though; the accent isn’t going to override everything else.

What is your ethnic background? >> As far as I know, Black American, Native American, and Haitian.

Do you eat ramen? >> Sure.

How about microwavable pot pies? >> Not so much anymore, but I do like them.

What's your favorite topping on popcorn? >> I like kettle corn.

Sweet or regular pickles? >> Regular. Every time I think I want a sweet pickle, just one slice is enough.

Have you ever tried pickled eggs? >> No.

What's the grossest thing you've ever tasted? >> Whatever it is, I don’t remember it now.

Have you ever lied about your age? >> No.

Do you look your age? >> Apparently not.

What age do you look? >> According to people I’ve polled in random places over the past few years, I seem to look somewhere between 21 and 27 to most.

What kind of dreams do you have most often? >> I don’t know, anymore.

Do you even dream a lot at all? >> I’m not sure. I don’t remember upon awakening. I guess this is the tradeoff -- I haven’t had sleep paralysis in months, but I also feel really distant from my dreamself now.

What is the name of your favorite teacher of all time? >> ---

What is your mom's name? Dad's? >> ---

Do you have any siblings? If so what are their names?  >> ---

When was the last time you threw up? >> I don’t remember. Probably at Gardella’s like 6 months ago or whenever it was.

What's the worst part about throwing up? >> The anticipation, I guess.

What do you do for personal growth? >> *shrug*

Do you wear jewlery a lot? >> I’m usually wearing it.

Would you rather die burning or die freezing to death? >> I don’t know how either feels, so how could I really choose?

In other words do you prefer the hot or the cold? >> At this point in my life I prefer the heat, even with my sensitivity to it.

Do you really believe that in 2012 we're all gonna die? >> Oh, so that’s how old the survey is.

Where do you think the Mayans went? >> I’m sure there are anthropologists and paleontologists that have some idea about this.

Who do you think built the pyramids? >> The people that lived there at the time...? Is there evidence someone else did? Or just conspiracy theories, as always?

If you could read anyone's mind who would be the first person you'd read? >> No, thanks.

Who's your number one on your friends list? >> ---

Do you know what the word Mollycoddle means? >> Yeah.

Do you think it's cheating to put questions on here that aren't real Qs? >> No, I just delete them.

Have you ever been dizzy without spinning? >> Yeah.

Do you like to make yourself dizzy? >> No.

Do you agree that milk cold is the equivilent of butt warmth? >> What.

Do you believe that if you want something enough you'll get it? >> No, because there still needs to be some effort put in, not just really hard wishing. But I do think that desire can be motivation to put in that effort, so in that sense, sure, yeah.

Have you ever wished on a star? Did it ever come true? >> No.

Have you ever thrown a penny in a wishing well? >> No.

What was your favorite mall ride? (mini carousel, pony, helicopter) >> Hmm.

Do you take care of your cuticles? >> No, I just leave them alone (which is better than young!me, who used to pick at them constantly).

Do you even know what a cuticle is? >> Yeah.

Do you believe that everyone has a soul mate? >> No.

If you could keep any person in the world as your pet who would it be? >> LOL nah, I like my inworld pets best.

How would you treat them? >> How I’d treat a pet would be determined by both their desires and their limits, and my energy level lol.

Would you put them on a leash when you went out? >> No, because I think that’s kind of... uncouth. Doing that sort of thing in public, I mean. There are plenty of discreet ways to be kinky without having to like... advertise it like that.

How would you punish them when they were naughty? >> That depends on what was agreed upon.

Are these inappropriote questions? >> For many people, they certainly would be. I just happen to not care.

I'm sorry. Have you ever seen Scary Movie? >> I’ve seen #3, but that’s it.

Which is bigger? The Godfather or Star Wars? >> Er...

What are your views on the second Godfather movie? >> ---

It sucked I think. Anyway are you inbred? >> Well, no.

What's your favorite text word? (lol, wtf, brb, g2g) >> I don’t know.

PC or Mac? >> I use PC.

#surveys #survey #random survey

[derenyanai]

Araquu Journal Session #10- So Here’s The Plan

Time: Sometime after Session 18 Characters: Maska, Cecily, Yue, Aldrid, Navi

Posts indented like this were typed by the GM.

Posts that were not indented were typed by the player(s).

After the incident at Floradai Park, the DISC Unit discusses what to do next...

Yue was laying on a couch in whatever meeting room they be in kicking her feet in the air as she lays on her stomach hands on her chin supporting her head, "Sooo, we're out of leads then huh guys? No more relics to go after then? Is there some Small crime going on we can handle then?" she wonders out loud.

Maska is sprawled on whatever table they have in the room, head resting on the hard wood. With a laptop in front of him i guess "I could look up news article of the past few days..."

Cecily is only standing up and leaning near a corner of the room, having her arms crossed. "I could call one of the council members and see if they have any more info on relic locations," she suggests, pulling out her phone.

"Is there any thing else we should be doing aside from relic searching?” Yue asks. “I feel like that's a fun pass time searching for relics and all, but isn't there some more important other things we should do? Like finding the person actually stealing the relics, then we don't have to waste time to look for the hard to find artifacts."

"I could look up the year they were made in," Maska blows his single strand of hair of his face, "What year was it again? 18 something?" He sits up and brings the machine closer to him.

"1944," Cecily corrected.

"Ah yes, the 40s" Maska said, in a mocking old timey voice "Where showing a single ankle was like hardcore porn to men" He typed up ‘City of Araquu, 1944′ on google.  

Some furious Google searching is enough to yield some rather interesting results. You have learned the following! • 1944 is the same year that the current Emperor became, well, the Emperor, having formerly been a part of the (then) council. • Several businesses and attractions were established in that year; Café Bleu de la Lune, Yinxiu Trinkets, Floradai Park, and Shimmering Fabrics are all familiar names. Attractions at the Park of the Lady, and a few recently discovered things (exhibited at the History Museum and Museum of Modern art) are mentioned. • Several powerful mage families also emigrated into Araquu at that time. Listed are the Summers family, the Noah family, and the Meyers family. 

"Woah what?" Maska gasp, "Wendy comes from family of mages?"

"This is Araquu, most families here are families of mages, why are you so shocked by this Masky?" Yue wonders.

"Even my father's side of my family are mages," Cecily offhandly mentions.

"Yeah, but they're pleabians" He opens the Powerful Mage families emigrations on a different tab, "Says here they're crazy powerful, this I gotta see."

Which one(s) are you looking into?

"Hrm, let's start with Wendys family" He clicks on the Summers Family.

The Summers family is currently composed of: • Mikhal Summers, aged 58. An expert at tracking magic and capable of using various other assorted magics. • His son, Matthew Summers, aged 26. Rather talented in the art of plant magics. • Matthew's husband, Mark Summers, aged 25. Rather talented in the art of song magics. • Their adopted daughter, Wendy Summers, aged 10. She's too young to practice magic.

"I'd expected the current family be bigger, then again Wendy’s fathers are gay" Maska rubs his chin, "Plant Magic, Song Magic and Tracking Magic... her grandfather's magic could be useful provided he lend us a hand, what do you guys think?" He turns to Yue and Cecily.

"Well we can certainly add that to the things to consider," she cuffed her chin. "...Check to see if there's anything else worth looking into to broaden our options."

"Let me check to see if I can find a connection to the Summers Family and those darn relics," Maska searches the entirety of family to see if there’s a link.

You search the article for a while but don't manage to find anything. Apparently it's not online for everyone ever to see?

"Nothing, let's check the Meyers Family" He goes back on the site and clicks on the Meyers "Never heard of these people."

You have learned that an old lady named Geraldine Meyers is the owner of Shimmering Fabrics.

"Oh hey, it's that old lady from Upper City" Maska shows Cecily the picture of Geraldine, "The one we got the pin from."

"I recall her," Cecily said, flattening her expression. "Reminds me of something else I plan on doing later. Anyways, see what it says about the family."

"Oh right, I should actually look up the actual history of the family." Damn it Maska, anyways he reads the history of the Meyers outloud.

Geraldine lives on her own with like, 50 dogs, she has no family.

"50 dogs? Living the dream right there, good shit." He looks over Geraldine's profile once again, "For someone who comes from a powerful mage family, doesn't seem like she has magical abilities."

"So you're saying that they're nothing to note besides working at one of the locations we've been to?" Cecily asks.

The problem is, no one really knows much about her. She lives on her own and doesn't socialize that often. There's not much information available online.

"Nope, well if you count that she had the relic in her shop and having come from a prestige family" He goes back and clicks on the last family to emigrated to Araquu, "But I don't think that's a connection."

THE NOAH FAMILY, aka Councilman Noah's family, probably his parents or grandparents? That's like all you can find, the council is pretty damn secretive.

"I forgot how secretive mages were with their history, it's really fucking annoying" Maska lets out a sigh with a grimace on his face. Fucking mages.

A sigh only comes from Cecily. "Great," she says. "In terms of people that doesn't leave us with much. How about any other places that relate to the date? Some we haven't visited?"

"Give me a sec, you know you can come and look see yourself instead of trying to blend into the wallpaper" He closes the tab of TreeAncestry dot com and goes back to the google one. He clicks on the page relating to the business that open during 1944.

Before you can investigate any further, the door opens and Navi walks in. "...WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK WHY IS MY HOUSE YOUR HANGOUT!?"

"Hey boo, we just invited ourselves in hope you don't mind" Maska waves at her.

"...if it makes you feel better, I brought food over," Cecily says, pointing to some left over donuts in a box. "You can help yourself."

Navi mutters something about having sworn she locked the door before going to grab a donut. "Any luck with those last few relics we don't know about?"

"No, but I did find out that Wendy’s gonna be a powerful mage when she grows up" Maska stretches a bit, "Right now we're looking into the business that open during the 40s."

Navi takes a few bites to eat her donut, munching as Maska searches. Unfortunately there are too many Dank Memes on the interwebs right now, so he can't find anything that they don't already know.

Cecily, it suddenly dawns on you that perhaps it wasn't so much businesses that were given relics, so much as people who were entrusted to take care of them and put together something they could use to hide it. A lamp at a cafe isn't something that draws attention; nor is a hatpin at a clothing store.

"...There is a connection I do notice," Cecily thought to herself. "Perhaps it's not so much as locations, as it's actually people we should be more concerned with paying attention to. Like, people the Emperor must of knew or trusted."

"Huh- oh uh" Maska quickly closes the Bill Wurtz video he accidentally clicked on, "Right Emperor, question; how do we figure out who he knew? The guy is a well guarded secret."

"That... is the tricky part," Cecily sweatdropped. "I mean, we could ask one of the councilmen. After all, Councilmen Noah is tied to the year 1944."

"Hang on I'm gonna check this article for a hot minute" He clicks on the search result on how the current emperor became as such.

It seems to be a 'picked by the council' thing; and they usually have a sort of trial of their own design to figure out if the person trying to become Emperor is capable of the tasks that would be set before them. Also, you've found a forum where people try and theorize what kind of magic the Emperor uses.

"They do a trial to see if they're fit to be the Emperor, huh i always thought it was more of  a 'who the most powerful mage of them all' cue lightning crackling-" He pauses at what he found "Oh hey! Look, conspiracy theorist!"

Navi groans. "Maska for the love of god no, when has anything useful ever come from conspiracy theories-" boom shakalaka

"Shut up! I'm listening to crazy people!" He clicks on the link to the forum.

Cecily facepalms. "...So, Navi," Cecily says, deciding to small talk while Maska is wasting time. Maybe he'll get back on track soon. "What have you been up to while we were in the Upper City?"

Maska, you can't find any signs of intelligent life here. There are approximately thirty different theories about what kind of magic the Emperor uses, although only two of them seem to be actually trying to present any evidence. There's also a running poll and betting pool about what gender the Emperor is, which is basically neck and neck for Male/Female right now.

"Mostly been runnin' deliveries and what not for Willow. Helpin' her out. She's expectin' a new shipment in soon and wants to be careful it doesn't get stolen again."

"Hm.... I should come back and bet on this when we find out," He mutters to himself and opens both theories that are at least trying their best in their own tabs.

"Robbed?" Cecily asks. "What was stolen?"

"It happened a while ago, she said it was some or other ingredients she doesn't actually sell 'cause they're usually illegal to hang onto," Navi explains. "Said she has permission to use 'em in her own private work though. Actually, she spoke to Aldrid 'bout it, I'm surprised he hasn't told y'all this happened."

 Maska, the two primary theories are that the Emperor either uses some form of Body Manipulation Magic (that is, manipulating their own body) or that they use some form of Time Magic. The argument for Time Magic seems to have more proof - various photos of things and locations in places the Emperor has apparently been that indicate time changed somehow - although a lot of the photos and things are "I took a picture here with my mom at this point in time, and then a thing happened and now it looks like THIS" or something similar so it's hard to verify the validity of any of those; on the other hand, Body Manipulation Magic has a very strong following and many people have pointed out that surely it HAS to be that because of all the photos of the various damaged areas from the scene, or the fact that no one fucking knows what the Emperor looks like so they have to be able to change themselves at will... tough to say, really! However, based on your own investigations of these things, you're more inclined to think the Emperor is some sort of time mage; a lot of the things being argued as going under Body Manipulation can actually be viewed as time magic if looked at from the right angle, and with how secretive the council is it's really no surprise that people don't know what the Emperor looks like either; especially if he or she could just, I don't know, pause time and go where they need to go and then unpause it or something similar!

"Pft maybe Wu Hou is the Emperor, or maybe related," He re-reads the time magic theory again. Hypothetically, a egg inside of Maska’s head begins to crack, crack, crack, and hatch to reveal a chick. Maska stands up and shouts "OH MY GOD WE NEED TO FIND WU HOE" frantically.

"AAAAH, JESUS!" Cecily replies, jumping a foot into the air.

"AAAAAHHH!" Yue falls off the couch and sits up looking around. “I'm awake totally.... what happened who's yelling?"

"It makes somewhat sense" He re-reads both theories on the forum he found "Maybe we really need to find Wu Hou..."

"Huh? Why?" Yue asks standing up and brushing herself off.

Maska explains to her the theories he found and his after thoughts on how the Emperor could be using it, also he brought her up to speed on what they had found out "...So, if we do find her, not only could we find more about people that are connected to 1944, we could find out more about the Emperor themselves."

"Assuming that this Wu person would be interested in even bothering to help us. What makes you so sure we can count on her?" Yue puts a finger to chin in thinking form.

"Same goals? Cecily did mention she was trying to 'save the city.'" Maska opens up a new tab and goes to youtube. Might as well get some music in the background, the silence is the deafening, "Besides, I trust this Hou person very little but I do trust Cecily's judgement. Most of the time."

"Huh, Well, glad to see you're not taking that at face value." she smiles, "I've run into so many people that claim the same thing in this line of work that it's hard for even me to trust everything someone says. Besides how would we find someone that could travel through time, and not alert HQ?" Yue sits down cross armed, "What about talking with the council again, maybe they can help us figure something out?"

"I think that’s the point, even if the Emperor would use time magic, wouldn't their magical signature already be notified by the police?" He clicks on some random music and lets it play on low volume, "And true we could take it up with them again, but remember they can't always help us. When was the last time we even met them again in person? Still, not denying that we could go talk to them."

"Did you have a reason to meet them again in person before now?" Yue wonders leaning in.

"Beside seeing Fira again, not really" He leans back on his chair and yawns, "So we can either find the Hoe person or talk to the councilmen."

"I feel like it would be in our best interest to go after the councilmen, if we wanna continue finding the relics. I feel like we could stop this relic running round thing easier if we go after the person hunting them down first. Any ideas on who we could try and track down?"

"I don't know about them anymore, it feels like we're going on a wild goose chase." Maska scratches his head. "What would that even accomplish? We have the Relics then what?"

"I don't think we should be collecting the relics right now." Yue flat out states.

“Well, what do you suggest we do then?” Cecily turns to Yue, while rubbing the back of her own head. “I know we’re a police force that also deals with small crime too, but that still doesn’t mean there’s no sense of urgency either.”

"No no, hear me out here, why would we need to collect all of the relics? Can't we use what we have now as bait to lure out the enemy instead of gathering all the trinkets to make things easier for the opponent?" Yue smiles.

"That sounds flawed, you want to use all of the relics we have to bait out the bad man?" Maska pipes in.

"Pardon my askin'," Navi pipes up from where she's cleaning up a bit, "But have we figured out WHY these guys want th'relics?"

“Nothing concrete if that’s what you’re asking,” Cecily groans. “The only thing I could think of is someone destroy them because of that ritual hiding warehouse we came upon. The relics are tied to the city, right?”

"The relics are tied to the shield that protect the city" Maska leans back on the chair, "If you destroy one the shield weakens."

"Finding the reason as to why they wish the barrier destroyed..." Aldrid starts to say as he walks in "May be part of our primary objective."

"I didn't say use all of the relics Maska, why are you jumping to that conclusion? We would only need to use 1 of them like my hairpin." Yue is stuck on that conversation, "It would help us try and figure out why they're going after these relics and determine if we'll be falling into their plans by just taking all of the relics ourselves."

Cecily crosses her arms and only looks downward. “It could also give us the chance in catching my mother as well...”

"So, we're doing that instead?" Maska rocks himself on the chair he was already leaning on, "We're going to lure out the baddies?"

"I don't see why not, and I have an idea on how to get the word out about the bait too." Yue smiles.

"I swear to fuck if you tell me you're gonna make a god damn video about it then I'm leaving."

“You’re gonna leave your own house?” Cecily deadpans.

"WELL WHY THE FUCK NOT YOU PEOPLE HAVE TAKEN IT FOR YOURSELVES"

"You seem upset," Maska observes.

“Were the donuts not enough as an apology?” Cecily asks.

"Yeah we brought you donuts, isn't that enough?" Maska asks.

Yue goes over to Navi, "Aw, come on, So, what's your bright idea then?"

“Correction: I bought donuts,” Cecily looked at him. “You just shrugged and walked about nonchalantly.”

"Yeah, but I got her this laptop so suck it" Maska that's your own laptop.

“I’m not sure Navi wants whatever you already have stored in there,” Cecily assumes.

Aldrid just kinda stands there, awkardly, like usual.

Navi lets out a deep and clearly frustrated breath through her nose. "We're trying to keep people from panickin', ain't we? Publically announcing something to an audience that may not even include who we're looking for isn't a great idea," she points out. "Also food as a bribe only really works when I actually taste things."

“Fine, I’ll just make it up to you another way then,” she sighs. “But... Navi does have a point. We don’t want a city crisis, and given your popularity...”

Yue sighs then smiles with a thumbs up, "Do you really think that I would state something like 'This is a relic, one that holds the city barrier together. Protecting us from the outside world. Hey baddies come and get it if you dare.'" she states the script like statement in the most sarcastic tone she could muster making sure to emphasize that if this is what you guys were thinking then you're kind of dumb. “I was going to make a video about showing off this pin that could resize clothing. It's a cool parlor trick and any bad guys that seem to know exactly what each of the relics are, would know that this is a relic. Also on the point of if they would watch the video, I have a big following in the city and people do talk about my videos, so while yes it is a long shot that the opponents would hear about this, it is still worth the shot. This way no one knows about any relics that shouldn't know, also they won't know about who the baddies are or heck about the barrier. There wouldn't be a city crisis or anything like that with this idea." 

“Okay, so stating you have a relic, but not flat out saying it is one,” Cecily followed along. “And the only people who would know about and make it known, that’s how we know the bait worked.”

"Well, the word would get around, and we would probably have to make a location known of where I'm live streaming or something... and we'll know if it works if the enemy shows up either at my home or on the stream, I guess really we'd have to wait and find out if it worked." Yue nods.

Navi stares at them. "...well, it's more thought-out than I thought it was, but it still seems stupid. Where would you be broadcasting from, first of all?"

"Unless you have a place, or we could use one of our houses," Maska rocks too far back and ends up flat on his back.

"Oh, I have a place we could use." Yue grins.

"Do y'all need me along or can I opt to NOT participate in this stupidity?"

"NO! You've been gone too long!" Maska struggles to get up a bit.

"It would be nice to have you along, Navi You're our friend, but if you don't want to join I won't force you." Yue says.

“We’ll need all the friends and help we can get,” Cecily says with a reassuring smile. “Please?”

Navi's eye twitches. "All right, all right, fine! I'll tag along on this stupid idea, but only so I can bail you idiots out when it backfires."

"Yay!" Oh he finally got up, "Thanks boo"

“We’ll owe you one if you have to,” Cecily smiles warmly.

"Can I use that to request that Maska never calls me 'boo' again?"

"Fine"

Yue does a quick hug on Navi, "Thank you, Navi. You're a true pal." she lets go with a smile.

"Let go of me," Navi bluntly says.

“Well in the downtime, might as well prepare for confrontation,” Cecily says, grabbing her sword and turning to everyone. “Need anything from me before I head out?”

"Let Eiriol know what's happening, then tell Willow I won't be able to make it to work for a bit, since I don't know how long this'll take."

“Sure then,” Cecily nodded. “Anyone else?”

"Nope, I'm good in fact I need to set up! See you around everyone." Yue smiles as she waves goodbye then leaves.

[[END OF JOURNAL SESSION]]

#text #araquu #journal session #maska #cecily #yue #aldrid #navi #magic and masterminds #magic & masterminds #mutants and masterminds

[remnantchoices]

Remnant Choices (A1S1P8): Recall

[Continued from here.]

Without hesitating, you yell, “Halina, let’s go! Everyone else, step back!”

You sprint forward, Halina right behind you.

The Grimm, unsteady on its feet, snarls weakly at you.

You leap towards its face, stretching your shield-arm towards the Grimm. You activate the Dust crystal at the shield’s core, then unleash a gout of flame from the shield. It gushes over the Grimm, disorienting it. But then everything around you glows with a soft lilac light. You feel your momentum halt, reverse, and you’re dragged backwards at a rapidly-increasing speed.

You’re hurtling through the air, and then you realize that Halina has used her Semblance on your entire body. You’re flying towards her, but just as you’re about to collide, she sidesteps out of the way and cuts off her Semblance. You fly past her, picking up speed, and then-

You see her grit her teeth and set her stance, and then she shouts as she triggers her Semblance again. She yanks you back hard, reversing your direction, tugging you through the air back to her.

As you pick up speed, you realize what she’s doing.

You hurtle back towards her.

At the last moment, she once again sidesteps you and cuts off the connection, hurling you back towards the Grimm at a speed you could never have achieved on your own.

You ready your blade-

You’re about to strike the Grimm like a bullet-

-and you plunge your blade and body forward, piercing right through the Grimm in an explosion of lilac light, flame, and shadow.

You corkscrew and slam into the ground on your feet, flame dancing along the trail of your trajectory.

Behind you, the Grimm erupts, spitting globs of shadow into the air.

The husk of its body collapses and dies, dissipating into the ether.

There’s a brief moment of pure, impossible silence-

-and then everyone erupts into cheers as you and Halina drop to the ground in triumphant exhaustion.

The new girl approaches you, smiling and shouting along with everyone else. She reaches out her arm to help pull you up, and you wrap your arm around her shoulders, letting her support your weight. Xia and Ulrich are both supporting a rather-battered Metim, and Pallav is helping Halina to her feet.

You all gather together, laughing and chatting eagerly.

“Your blocks during your duel with the Grimm were pretty on-point, dude,” Xia says to Metim, playfully slugging his shoulder. He rolls his eyes, but there’s a genuine smile on his lips. “-and when you dodged through its paw, that was like, I thought you were dead!” Halina exclaims to Pallav, who inclines his head in thanks, while Ulrich says, “Yeah, I mean, his timing gets better and better every year-”

The new girl turns to you, grinning, and says, “And how about that last attack? That was pretty flashy, wasn’t it?”

Halina laughs and joins in, saying, “Okay, maybe we were a little extra-”

“Yeah, but it was definitely worth it,” the girl finishes. “Really smart use of your Semblance, I think.”

“Wait, I’m sorry,” you say, turning to her. “We haven’t met-”

“Oh, I’m Ghislaine,” she says, smiling. “Corouille is my last name. Are you one of Xia’s friends?”

“Oh, uh,” you say, unsure of how to answer. Xia cuts in, lending you a hand. “Nah, we just met. I don’t think I’ve even seen you before?” She ponders, turning to you.

“No, I’m a new transfer to Aphelion,” you say, beginning to realize exactly how many times you’re going to avoid explaining your background to other students.

Ghislaine and Xia look surprised, but Ghislaine doesn’t press you for details. Instead, she says, “Oh, sure. Xia and I have been in a few classes together-”

“And we’ve helped each other train in combat classes,” Xia finishes, grinning.

“But that might end this year, if we’re placed on different teams,” Ghislaine quips.

“Teams?” You feel a brief flicker of worry in your gut, cutting off the glow of triumph. It really begins to hit you that you’re going to have to embed yourself in this school, in established groups of friends, in classes where teachers and students already have a working dynamic.

“Yeah,” Ghislaine says, shrugging. “Aphelion tries to make us more attractive to Huntress academies by having us form teams, since that’s what they do, I think.”

“And...how do they form teams?” When you ask, your voice is quiet.

“Probably based off how people have interacted in the previous years,” Xia says. She looks at you knowingly. “I wouldn’t worry about it, if I were you- I mean, when you fight with teammates by your side, you kinda all come to trust each other pretty quickly, you know? You’ll be alright.”

“Especially after all of this,” Pallav calls out, gesturing with his hand towards the scorch marks that you’ve left on the trampled field.

“Let’s just savor this for a bit, yeah?” Xia says, nudging you with her elbow.

“Can we savor this as we start walking to the campground?” Metim interrupts, continuing, “Some of us are a little more ragged than the others, and would prefer to reach our goal before any other really fucked-up Grimm show up.”

“Alright, alright,” Ghislaine says. “Let’s all head up together, then.”

Everyone turns, ready to resume the last leg of your journey. As you start walking, Halina steps quickly to your side, just like she did at the start of all of this. She smiles brightly at you, and in an uncharacteristically quiet voice, she says to you, “Hey, Ceri? Thanks for trusting me at the end, at that last moment.”

You nod vigorously, bouncing your curly hair around. “And thanks for trusting me at the beginning, when I jumped into your fight.”

She stops talking for a second, then she looks up, towards the sky. “You know,” she says, slowly, “I’ve been worrying about this year. About what comes after it, too. But, after all of this, I feel- I feel like I’m starting it the way we’re supposed to.”

“Yeah,” you say. “I feel like I have a bit of a direction now.” A bit of a direction, you think, and some people who know your name.

“By the way, Ceri?”

“What?”

“I have a good feeling about the team thing, for what it’s worth,” she says, turning to look directly at you.

You give her a little laugh, and nod. “I think I feel the same, Halina.”

You continue your walk, together.

By the time you all reach the campground, the sunset is streaking across the sky, smoothing crisp orange hues along clouds immersed in pink. There are dozens of students laid out in front of you, in various states of repose- some are napping, some are striking up conversations with strangers, some are boasting of their exploits, some are tending after wounds or weapons, and some are just staring skyward. Everyone is waiting for the event to officially begin, for your instructors to arrive.

As you stand at the periphery of the campground, Pallav and Ulrich turn to face the rest of you. “Well, everyone,” Pallav says, clapping his hand on Ulrich’s back, “it’s been a pleasure, but we’re supposed to meet up with some friends.” The rest of you nod, quiet, and you feel like there’s sadness lingering in the air- the imminent departure means that your group has served its purpose, and will now disband. 

Ulrich is looking at his feet, but Pallav keeps talking. “This turned out to be more than any of us bargained for, in a great way, you know? I’m sure we’ll see each other soon- seriously, I don’t.... even though we just met, I don’t want us to just all drift away.”

Ulrich looks up. “Yeah. We’ll, uh, we’ll keep an eye out for all of you. We’ve got your backs, especially if we end up in classes together.”

Pallav smiles. “Exactly. All of you, take care, and see you soon.”

You all wave, murmuring goodbye as him and Ulrich walk away, picking their way through the crowd, in search of their waiting companions.

“Well, we’re all free to go wherever we want, then,” Xia says, looking at Ghislaine.

Halina speaks up, saying, “Then, do you mind if I go check in on a couple of friends? I mean, if anybody wants to come with me, I’d be glad to introduce you!”

Ghislaine shakes her head. “Xia and I were gonna catch up a bit, so we don’t really want to join another group, you know?” Xia nods in agreement, but then Ghislaine looks at you. “But if anybody else here wants to chill with us, that’s also cool.”

You look at Metim, who just shrugs. “Quite frankly, I’m so tired, I could just sit right here and be happy. That being said, if you don’t mind, I’m willing to tag along with you, Ceri. It isn’t like anybody’s waiting to see me.”

You tilt your head and consider.

Who do you want to spend a little more time with?

1. Go meet Halina’s friends, and bring Metim.

2. Stick with Ghislaine and Xia, bringing Metim.

3. Just plop yourself on the floor with Metim.

Vote on what to say here!

To stay up-to-date on the latest Remnant Choices updates, follow the Remnant Choices Twitter and Tumblr.

The poll has closed. Read the next chapter here!

#rwby fanfiction #rwby fanfic #fndm #rwby game #rwby #a1 #a1s1 #a1s1p8

[omglr]

uh... prolife hypocrite and also a fascist

You're now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!

You both like abortion, feminism, and feminist.

You: hi

Stranger: Hi

Stranger: Feminist?

You: yes, you?

Stranger: No. I am not. Prolife/pro choice?

You: pro life, you?

Stranger: Yeah. Pro life, too

Stranger: Feminist and prolife. What an odd combination?

You: oh... lol, sorry i just woke up

You: i'm pro choice

Stranger: Haha... That's okay. I am prolife, by the way

You: yeah, are you a man or a woman?

Stranger: I am a guy

You: oh, ok

You: what are you doing to prevent pregnancy?

Stranger: condoms and pills!

You: have you considered getting a vasectomy?

You: condoms break

Stranger: Nope.

You: and pills fail

Stranger: Yeah, I know! I will get an abortion, then!

Stranger: for my girl

Stranger: If she wants to

You: guess so

Stranger: If we don't have inclination to raise the baby, the baby will never be raised in a good way but I am still pro life

Stranger: Pro choice only for me

You: ah... gotcha

You: so have you considered not being a hypocrit?

Stranger: I get that a lot!

You: and just being pro-choice?

Stranger: No. It's political now and as a republican, we need to win elections

You: ehhhhh...

Stranger: Do you think the republicans care about the baby and the democrats about the mother. They don't.!

Stranger: It's all political for them!

You: eh... there are people who care about mothers, not necessarily democrats

Stranger: Yeah but there are very less people. If more people become pro life, the democrats will flip their position and abortion rights will turned over in a single night

You: why vote republican tho?

Stranger: I believe in certain principles of the republican party and I like Trump

You: what's your take on the fascism of trump?

Stranger: He's far from fascist. Why do you think he is a fascist? Give me a one good reason

Stranger: Besides, I am naturally attracted to strong leaders by the way

You: disdain for human rights

Stranger: Where did he disdain human rights?

Stranger: Where did he violate human rights?>

You: identification of enemies/scapegoats for a unifying cause

You: yeah, he's targeting immigrants and queer people

Stranger: He is targeting illegal immigrants. They are not supposed to walk in the country without permission

You: they are allowed to walk in and apply for sactuary

You: that's actually how it works

Stranger: If we say no, they should go back

You: -Rampant Sexism

Stranger: How is immigration related to sexism?

You: Military Fetishism

Stranger: Let's go by one by one!

Stranger: So, What are we talking about? Are we done with immigration? I assume you are out of points to attack Trump

You: no dude i am going through the definition of fascism

You: and its pretty clear

Stranger: That's not fascism, dude! He doesn't oppress anybody and doesn't violate any human rights.

You: Controlled Mass Media

Stranger: Which media did he control?

You: well him and fox news are so tight

You: they are basically fucking

Stranger: What's wrong with that if all the others news are against him. Hillary clinton was shared debate questions .

You: its on the list

Stranger: Even fox news was against him but they have no choice but to cave after seeing his polls

You: -Obsession with National Security

You: "the muslim travel ban"

You: "the wall"

Stranger: What's wrong with being obsessed with security of his nation? That is his job as a president to protect his nation.

You: Corporate Power is Protected

Stranger: In my opinion, all muslims should be deported. I don't what's taking so long for Trump to do that

Stranger: Even country has borders and we need to have one, too

You: Labor Power is Suppressed

Stranger: If Corporate power is protected, why is michael bloomberg spending 500 million to throw Trump out of office?

You: that's been an effort of the states to suppress labour power for half a century

You: so trump doesn't have to do much there

Stranger: I don't what point you are making? I answered all your questions. I don't think he is fascist. It's just you are repeating orange man bad.

You: no dude

You: you are agreeing you love fascism

Stranger: If nationalism is fascism, let's go with it

You: you are atracted to a strong leader and you fell right for his racist antimuslim bullshit

Stranger: Well. Everyone has a opinion, I have mine.

You: nah bro, we are at the point where we need to come together as the human race and stop climate change

Stranger: So, We moved to climate change, now?

You: i am saying nationalism isn't gonna do shit

You: because orange man has mush for brains

Stranger: Do you think Trump is stupid?

You: and unless you are mega rich you aren't gonna survive what's coming

Stranger: I am not mega rich

You: well you're fucking yourself

Stranger: I can make my own decision

You: yeah

You: you can order a big orange dildo online too

Stranger: Yeah. If I need one, I will!

You: it'll be a lot more fun

Stranger: You are wasting my time. If you have no rational argument, It's time to move on

You: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/11/20/1452457/-Time-to-pull-out-again-The-14-Points-of-Fascism

You: i don't bud

Stranger: See ya, then!

You: all the people who fell for nazis

You: are ashamed of themselves now

You: consider a nuance rejection of their shit values

You: and save some face for later?

Stranger: Nope.

You: aight, have fun living with no real values

You: suck a fuck

You have disconnected.

[betsynagler]

Principle vs. Vanity, and Fear

I've had grey hair for at least the past six or seven years now. It shows up in the part on top of my head and in the front, around my temples. I've been lucky enough that, up to now, it's pretty much blended in. My hair is kind of a light brown, but there have always been just enough blond highlights that the grays can kind of hide in there and not be too obvious, for the most part.

It's not like I grew up with my hair being perfect or anything — Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha, no. In fact, I was kind of prescient about how much it (and by extension, femininity as a whole) was going to be a trial for me in that I completely refused to deal with it for the first twelve years of my life, allowing my mother to do what she wanted with it when I was little, and then wearing it in pigtails or a ponytail any time I was in public from pretty much second to sixth grade. Sure enough, once I started to pay attention to my hair, I struggled with it endlessly. Like most women I know, I found it to be yet another aspect of my appearance — along with my weight, my height, my nose, the circles under my eyes, my arms, my butt, my stomach, my front teeth…you get the point — that I forever was trying to wrestle into the perfect cultural norm, no matter how that cultural norm changed or conflicted with what it naturally wanted to be. In high school in the late 80s, hair had to be straight or precisely feathered, so my weapons of choice were a blow dryer and one of those round brushes, and, at one point, a curling iron, though I can’t really remember what I did with that other than burn myself. By sophomore year of college, it was supposed to be curly, so I got a perm that I kept through I think senior year, when I finally, at some point, gave in to the fact that my hair didn’t really get curly, even with a perm, it just got wavier. It was the first time it occurred to me that my life would be easier if I tried to work with it rather than against it, so I got a diffuser and tried to just make the waves do something I liked. This principle of just working with what I had (although not the diffuser, which I ditched soon after) became my MO for most of my 20s and 30s. It justified doing very little when I was going to work on set at 6 am, when I both didn’t want to attract attention to the fact that I was female and didn’t want to get up any earlier, and made it possible to go for a certain kind of wavy bigness when I went out that I deemed its most positive result, by using mousse, gel, spray, scrunching, finger-wrapping, blowdrying upside down, and whatever other techniques I saw or heard about other people using (I didn’t actually spend money on fashion magazines because fuck that scam, but I still queried my friends and hairdressers). At the same time, I was so obsessed with the obsession hair can be for women (and for some men) that I made my first documentary about it, exploring the connection it forms for many of us between appearance and identity.

Which of course led to me to deconstruct how my hair related to my identity even more, and some time in my late 30s, I entered my most recent stage of hair “care”: the stage of not caring. I stopped blowdrying my hair altogether, except in the winter, if I had to prevent it from freezing, then I basically stopped using product when I went traveling for weeks on end in Latin America and having it meant just having one more thing to carry. I did still want to attract people, because I was still single, so I would make an effort to do something with it if I was going out or had a date, but once I met my husband at age 40, that was pretty much the end of even that. In the past year or two, my intricate, personal hair ritual has become washing it every other day (this was a concession to the drying effect of the grays, but it also fit in nicely with my growing feelings of apathy), brushing it upside down (somehow that just stuck, even though I don’t think it does anything if you don’t use product) and then going right-side-up and making sure there’s something of a part. That’s it, and it takes all of maybe eight minutes, including the washing part — without that, it takes two. And that has seemed about right for a while now. On set, my job is really just to blend in, so I basically have to look just well-kept enough that nobody will think there’s something something seriously wrong with me, at least not in any way that would be distracting to the actors. So, yeah, that’s what I ask of my hair: just don’t make me look crazy. I do still have several bottles and tubes of product that I’ve acquired over the years, so when I’ve got to go to a wedding or a bar mitzvah or something, I might roll the dice and use one of those, even if it's expired. But in general I’ve felt like, given all of the other things going on in my life, this was expending about as much energy toward my hair as it deserved, and so I had to be okay with the results. Even when I saw pictures of myself later on and wasn’t all that thrilled, that's hardly a new experience for me, considering how, as you might have guessed, I have never developed an attractive look to present in photographs. Want examples? Of course you do. Here, here, here (based on how often I have my eyes closed and my mouth open in photos, I must both blink and talk more than other people), here (granted, it doesn’t help when someone is squishing your face — I doubt a Kardashian would ever allow that), and here (yes, I’ve just reached the top of Machu Picchu, and still I don’t look happy).

A couple of months ago, though, something felt like it changed — or maybe it was a combination of things. For one, I got a less good haircut than usual. Again, I have nobody to blame for this but myself, since I get my $35 haircuts from a local hairdresser that seems to be popular more as a barbershop-like neighborhood hangout than as a consistent, up-to-trend stylist, and I often don't pay attention to what's being done. This last time I was exhausted from work and so I was literally asleep at the wheel — I kind of knew she was parting it too close to the middle, but eh. For another, I bought a different shampoo than the one I’ve been using for maybe ten years plus, since they were out of it at the Park Slope Food Coop — again, my fault for relying upon the Park Slope Food Coop to be consistent with their stocking, and for choosing instead to try a “thickening shampoo” even though my hair isn’t thinning, because eh.

But honestly, I think the real culprit is just the gray. It’s reached a critical mass that can't really be ignored any more — not so much the color, as what it's doing to the texture. It's wiry. It doesn't behave. It looks messy and dirty, and in a way that no hipster could pretend was intentional. It looks bad.

When I realized this, I took an informal poll of my friends about their hair. Which means, I was at a wedding with my high school friends, and then a get-together with my college friends, and then looking at photos sent by my other college friends. And the upshot was, basically, everybody dyes. Out of all of my female friends who are at the age when I know that they must have gray hair by now, I seem to have only two who actually do.

That’s pretty crazy. I guess I was kind of hoping that by the time I got to be this age, we'd have all of this shit worked out already. I just thought we were going to take that final step forward and be the generation of feminists who were allowed to get old, who could truly accept ourselves for who we are rather than how society expects us to be – forever young and thin – and be valued for the wisdom, experience and skill that make us distinguished, the way we think of older men, rather than extinguished. When I looked at my friends on an individual basis and noticed they were dying their hair, I told myself, Well, she’s always been very pretty and it’s hard to let go of that, or, She works in an industry that’s very competitive, or, She’s someone who is very in control and it’s just another a way of expressing that, or, Well, she lives in Texas. But as I started to get more uncomfortable with the changes to my own appearance as I got older, I started to realize, No, this getting old shit is just hard, and it doesn’t really get easier, no matter how enlightened you may tell yourself you are. It’s kind of just one new hurdle after another, as one more aspect of your appearance starts to go. Now that it’s my hair that isn’t looking good to me, the idea of dying doesn’t seem so unthinkable. So maybe it wasn’t ever that I was more feminist, or less vain, or less…Texan than they were. Maybe I was just lucky.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, you’re not supposed to surrender your principles when they become inconvenient for you. In this political moment, that seems more important than ever. On the other hand, couldn’t I just fucking go easy on myself for once? Rather than trying to pretend that I don’t care about getting old, because I don’t want to care, shouldn’t I be entitled to whatever is going to make that process slightly less sucky? It’s hard enough having more people noticeably ignore you, knowing that means not only that the world doesn’t any longer think of you as attractive, but also doesn’t think of you period – meaning you’re far more likely to fail, not just because you’re old and you have less time, but because people will give you far fewer opportunities than you had when you were younger. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to do anything that continues to give me more of a fighting chance? But then my other mind comes back with, But where does that end? Am I going to decide that I next need Botox to make myself happy, or a full-on facelift, if that’s what my friends are doing? I know some people probably don’t see this as a continuum, but I can’t help it. Once you surrender to what society thinks you should be, rather than what you believe about yourself or aspire to be, where does it end? Am I going to be the friend who makes it okay for someone else to get a tummy tuck, because they tell themselves, “Well, Betsy did it, and she’s a feminist, so…”

These are hard questions to answer, and so I’ve chosen...spray-in conditioner. It’s helping to make my hair be less dry and unruly — in other words, it continues to make the gray continue to blend in. Is that on the continuum? I suppose that it is. If I really wanted to make the statement that women should be allowed to go gray, I’d just do nothing and let it be that way in all of its unruly glory. But I guess the personal compromise I’ve learned to make between the social norms of beauty, and feminism, and my identity therein, is to work with what I have — not trying to “fix” myself, but not ignoring wholesale what the world thinks either. Because you can’t. It’s in your head, it just is.

So I’m not here to judge how you do it — every woman has to figure out how to walk that line for herself. But I can also still dream of the day we won’t have to any more, can’t I?

[douchebagbrainwaves]

PEOPLE JUST IGNORE THAT—OR WORSE, IT'S HAPPENING

The route for the ambitious in that sort of environment is to join one and climb to the top. Raphael so pervaded mid-nineteenth century taste that almost anyone who tried to draw was imitating him, often at several removes. That's even rarer. In the third century BC Archimedes won by doing that. I haven't had to yet. They were all terrible. I believe all have either closed a round or are likely to soon. They could take everyone and keep just the good ones. A lot of the same things we said at the last two. Investors will probably find they do better when deprived of this crutch anyway.1 Facebook didn't, and they've done better than most startups.

Good design is often daring. And you know what? One reason is that to make Leonardo you need more than his innate ability. If the tests a society uses are currently hackable, we can study the way people beat them and try to plug the holes. Why do they do it? In some cases we may have to wait for startups to have traction before they put in significant money. Startups can be irresponsible and release version 1s that are light enough to evolve.2

Including, I hope, the problem that has afflicted so many previous communities: being ruined by growth. As a kid I had what I thought was a huge fleet of toy cars, but they'd be dwarfed by the number of startups in this country, at least to yourself, I could have thought of that. Actually we're the opposite: incubators exert more control than ordinary VCs, and we haven't yet evolved ways to protect ourselves from them. My vote is they're a bad idea. When oil paint replaced tempera in the fifteenth century. They want to get rich, but they may not always be true.3 Fortunately I discovered that when a startup needed to talk to corp dev when they're either doing really well, you can pick a time when you're not in the middle about some of the books.4 Though of course forbidding bad behavior does tend to keep away bad people, because they didn't have materials or power sources light enough the Wrights' engine weighed 152 lbs.5 Facebook didn't, and they've done better than most startups. Are meanness and success are inversely correlated. Why?

In the US this process still shows many outward signs of corruption. Ramen profitability is the least obvious but may be the most powerful forces in a startup depends mainly on how smart and energetic you are, and much less on how old you are or how much business experience you have. Good design is often slightly funny. Have one person talk.6 And it certainly doesn't matter how many of them there are, any more than we'd expect naive solutions for keeping heroin out of a prison to work.7 The aim is not simply to make a lot more people investing tens or hundreds of thousands than millions. If investors get too involved, they smother one of the things the internet has shown us is how mean people can be. If I spent half the day loitering on University Ave, I'd notice. It's good to talk about the needs of people you know personally, like your friends or siblings. Another sign of user need is when people pay a lot for something.8

Raphael so pervaded mid-nineteenth century taste that almost anyone who tried to draw was imitating him, often at several removes. In Florida, which Bush ultimately won 52-47, exit polls ought to be very hard to contain parents' efforts to obtain an unfair advantage for their kids.9 You feel this when you start to examine the question, it's surprising how much different fields' ideas of beauty have in common. Exception: If one of the founders is not competitors but investors. Most founders who get contacted by corp dev already know what it means. Whereas if you can choose when you raise money, you can pick a time when one failed to do something weird at first. Google, presented at some point to investors who didn't get it and turned them down. You don't have to interrupt working on the company isn't. In the big angel rounds that increasingly compete with series A rounds, the investors won't take as much equity as VCs do now.10 The biggest constraint on the number of startups in this country is a policy that would cost practically nothing. Comments have much more effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions.

The government could not do better than to piggyback on their expertise, and use investment by recognized startup investors as the test of whether a company was a real startup. And this illustrates another advantage of investing over hiring: our relationship with them is way better than it would be a good thing. Don't worry if your company is just a few months old.11 It's a crowded market, I remember one founder saying worriedly.12 In some cases we may have to wait for startups to have traction before they put in significant money. I were a boss making people work this hard. If you're ramen profitable, you're already avoiding these mistakes. The good things in a community site can do is attract the kind of people who could start a startup do. Chasing hot deals doesn't make investors choose better; it just makes them feel better about their choices.13 One forgets it's owned by a private company.14

However, that doesn't mean you should talk like some kind of zenlike detachment from material things.15 And now I have both an additional reason to crack down on it, and that would cost nothing: establish a new class of visa for startup founders. There's still debate about whether this was because of the Bubble, or because they saw a movie star with one in a magazine, or because they're a bad idea. Don't be Evil? Startups and yuppies entered the American conceptual vocabulary roughly simultaneously in the late twentieth century. Aiming at timelessness is a way to evade the grip of fashion. In short, the disasters this summer were just the usual childhood diseases.

Notes

I realized that without the methodological implications. The shift in power from investors to founders is exaggerated now because it's a hip flask. Thought experiment: set aside a chunk of time, default to some abstract notion of fairness or randomly, in one where life was tougher, the increasing complacency of managements. Com.

One YC founder told me they do the opposite way from the creation of wealth to study, because such companies need huge numbers of users to recruit manually—is probably a bad imitation of a running back doesn't translate to soccer. The real decline seems to be clear in our own, like selflessness, might come from.

Throw in the cupboard, but half comes from ads on other sites. It doesn't take a lesson from the CIA runs a venture fund called In-Q-Tel that is more efficient: the energy they emit encourages other ambitious people, instead of crawling back repentant at the mercy of circumstances: court decisions striking down state anti-takeover laws, they seem like I overstated the case of journalists, someone else to lend to, but I managed to screw up twice at the mercy of circumstances: court decisions striking down state anti-dilution provisions, even though you don't have the balls to ask, what that means the investment community will tend to use some bad word multiple times. This trend is one that we wrote in verse. For example, will be maximally profitable when each employee is paid in proportion to the writing of literary theorists.

According to Michael Lind, when politicians tried to shift back. Which in turn is why it's such a low valuation, or one near the door. Where Do College English Departments Come From?

You can get very emotional. If they're on the x axis and returns on the software business, and tax rates will tend to be redeveloped as a result a lot better to make a lot of investors started offering investment automatically to every startup we had to bounce back. There are circumstances where this is a significant number. Incidentally, this phenomenon myself: hotel unions are responsible for more of it.

Then it's up to his time was 700,000 legitimate emails. Many famous works of anthropology.

This is one of his first acts as president, and the fucking fleas. These false positive rate is 10%, moving to Monaco would only give you such a low valuation, that all metaphysics between Aristotle and 1783 had been Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard is significantly better than having twice as fast is better than their lifetime value, don't even want to get all the free OSes first—A Spam Classification Organization Program. There was one in a place where few succeed is hardly free.

We could be overcome by changing the shape of the next year they worked. Those investors probably thought they'd been living in cities.

Those groups never have that glazed over look. At first literature took a back seat to philology, which means you're being gratuitously troublesome.

If all the red counties. They hoped they were friendlier to developers than Apple is now. Now the misunderstood artist is a bit more complicated, because time seems to have lunch at the fabulous Oren's Hummus. If they really mean, in the twentieth century.

That you're not convinced that what you're doing is almost always bullshit. We thought software was all that value, counting users as active when they're on the side of being absorbed by the surface similarities.

This of course some uncertainty about how the courses they took might look to an associate cold-emailing a startup, and are paid a flat rate regardless of how hard it is certainly an important relationship between the Daddy Model, hard to predict areas where Apple will be interesting to consider behaving the opposite. The Sub-Zero 690, one of the things we focus on their utility function for money. The 1/50th of a press hit, but even there people tend to say that a their applicants come from meditating in an equity round.

Realizing that much to maintain their percentage.

This seems unlikely that every fast-growing startup gets on the Daddy Model may be that the angels are no false negatives. They'll have a different idea of happiness from many older societies. I never get as deeply into subjects as I make it harder for you, they have zero ability to solve a lot about how to appeal to investors. This is actually a computer.

Give the founders. In retrospect, we love big juicy lumbar disc herniations, but explain that's what they give it back. Financing a startup. The original version of everything was called the option pool as well.

Thanks to Steve Huffman, Dan Bloomberg, Ben Horowitz, and Trevor Blackwell for sharing their expertise on this topic.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #lot #Organization #Horowitz #sources #people #deeply #anyone #taste #incubators #theorists #Bush #policy #multiple #months #money #parents #Do #startup #Lind #beauty #Comments #users #forces #angels