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totallysharkycomplete · 4 years

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Bored and Nailed (Stan Pines x Reader)

After meeting the Pines family at your job as a nail tech you’re invited to a sleep over the the Mystery Shack. Stan has had his eyes on you though and decides to make the best of the night. NSFW Comission for @tv-zepeda

“Grunkle Stan, please! This is my future we’re talking about!” Mable begged as she trailed behind her great uncle. He was doing his best to walk away from the pleading preteen but to no avail. “If I don’t start my education now then I’ll become a criminal when I’m older and end up in jail!” Mabel had been reading Teen Heart Throb Magazine for Tweens when she came across an article about being a nail technician. She had her mind made up instantly, that was what she wanted to be when she grew up and she needed to start early. “Jail ain’t so bad kid.” He scoffed. “Helps build character.” “But Grunkle Stan!” She whined. “Please Gunkle Stan, just let her. She was like this with learning how to knit. She bothered our parents until she got a lesson.” Dipper sighed. Stan stops in his tracks and turns around to address Mabel. “Listen, if I take you to get your nails done you can’t ask me for anything the rest of the summer!” Mable squealed and hugged her grunkle. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” She jumped up and down before bolting to the door. “I’ll be in the car!” She yelled before slamming the door shut behind her. “Are you taking her right now?” Dipper asked. “No, but she’ll be alright in the car for a few hours.” Stan turns to walk to the gift shop. ---------- It's a beautiful sunny summer afternoon, so your job is absolutely dead. Only one customer had been in today, Lazy Susan, before her shift at the diner. Most of the residents of Gravity Falls would rather spend the first good day of summer outside and not getting their nails done. You couldn’t blame them though. If the choice had been yours you’d set your station up outside and be able to soak in the rays of the sun instead of standing in the fluorescent lights that hung above your head. Still you kept yourself busy with tidying and reading mass texts Tambry sent to everyone in town with a mobile phone. It was around one when the bell above the door chimed. You turned your head to see an older man and two older kids walk in. “Welcome in!” You greeted them warmly as you approached the front. The older man had a scowl on his face, while the young boys looked around aimlessly. The young girl however looked extremely excited, hopping from one foot to the other as her eyes darted from object to object. “What brings you in today?” “Kid wants her nails done, cheapest ya’ got!” The older man points his thumb over the girl and she frowns. “Grunkle Stan you can’t put a price tag on my future.” She scampers up to you. “I want to be a nail tech when I get older, I want you to teach me everything!” She beams. You giggle, and introduce yourself. “I’m not a trained teacher, but I can talk you through all my steps. Sound alright with you?” Looking back at the older man with a smile, he seems to freeze. “Uh, yeah, whatever,” He rubbed the back of his neck. The young girl cheers and begins introductions. “I’m Mable! The sweaty boy is my brother Dipper,” the boy made a noise of protest at the sweaty comment. “This is my Grunkle Stan.” She motions to the man beside her. You take a second to look him up and down. “Wait, aren’t you Mister Mystery?” “The one and only.” He smirks now and offers you his hands, you take it and he firmly shakes yours. It feels rough and large compared to your softer small one. “Please, call me Stan.” He rubs his thumb over your hand before pulling away. You can’t help the blush that creeps onto your cheeks. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you at the schack.” DIpper comments. “Oh, I haven’t gone in a few years, but it’s always fun to see the cryptids on display.” You can feel yourself still blushing. “Ah, anyways,” you turn to talk to Mabel. “Go ahead and pick out what color you want from the wall over there.” You point her in the right direction and she begins to ‘oh’ and ‘ah’ over all the color choices. You watch her with a smile then turn back to the others two. “Anything for you two today?” Dipper makes a ‘pfft’ noise. “I think I’m a little too manly to have my nails painted. Don’t want people thinking I’m girly.” “There’s nothing girly about personal hygiene.” You comment and Dipper blushes. Stan laughs. “Ha, she's right kid. It’d do you good to have a little more hygiene.” Stan looks at you with a grin. Mabel runs back over with three bottles in her hand. You lead them back to your station and Mabel sits in front of you, Dipper and Stan on either side of her. She had decided on alternating pink and purple with holographic glitter. You begin the process you normally do when giving a manicure but describing every step in detail. Mabel watches with wide eyes and eats up every word. Stan looks up at you occasionally from over one of the magazines provided. He’s impressed with how patient you are with his great niece, even letting her paint one of your nails for practice. Everytime you make eye contact with him his eyes flip back to the magazine and pretend he wasn’t staring. It’s hard for him to not to think about how your smile brightens the whole room. When you finish Mabel hops out of her chair. “I feel like a changed woman!” She cheers, splaying her hands out so she can look at her freshly manicured nails. “Who's next?” You smile, looking at Stan. “I don’t need a fancy manicure in my line of work.” He grunts. “Okay, how about this then?” You slide your chair closer to where he’s sitting and place your hands out palms up, signaling for his hands. “No paint or clippers, promise.” He looks over to Dipper and Mabel hoping for a way out of it, but Dipper is busy admiring Mabel’s nails. Begrudgingly he places his hands in yours. You guide his hands to sit on the table and push his sleeves back, and pump lotion into your hand, before taking one of his and begin messaging the lotion into his skin. “Are you getting your nails done too?” Dipper snides with a smirk. Stan gives him a warning glare and he silences. “What color did you pick?” Mabel came to his side to see. “No paint, just a hand message.” You inform her. “Boo, where’s the fun in that?” She pouts. “Well sometimes people come in and don’t want their nails painted. Just a manicure and a message.” You tell her. “You’d be surprised how many men come in just for that.” Mabel makes a comment about how that’s boring and walks over to Dipper who found the tv in the lobby. There’s a moment of silence and you look up at Stan. He has a light shade of pink on his cheeks. You smile and look back down at his hands. “You know, you can tell a lot about someone by their hands.” You say without looking up. “That so?” Stan grunts. “That is so,” you giggle. “For instance I can tell you’re a hard worker, who cares for his family. I can also tell you don’t use lotion often enough.” He watches as you try to take another pump of lotion when the bottle decides to betray you and squirt everywhere. The white liquid squirts up your forearms and your shirt. “Shoot,” you grab a tissue and clean yourself off. You notice Stan is watching you, wide eyed and red faced. Heat rises to your cheeks when you realise what the mess resembles. “You gotta a little,” Stan motions to your cheek, you quickly wipe it away and toss the tissues in the trash before taking his hand again. Stan clears his throat before he speaks again. “You seem really good with kids. Sure you ain’t a teacher?” “Pretty sure,” you joke, earning a smile from him. “I just know how to talk to kids I guess. It’s just always come naturally to me.” You look over at the kids then back to Stan. “I know they’re older but if you ever need a babysitter, you could call me.” He smirks. “Yeah, I might take you up on that offer.” You finish his other hand and set it gently on the table. He rubs his palms together giving them a look over. “That felt great, kid. Thanks” He has what you guess is a genuine smile on his face. “It’s no problem.” You stutter, walking together to the register. He pays for Mabel's manicure, and you slide him your business card. “Here,” you blush. “Just in case.” “Oh, uh, thanks, toots.” He stammers. Mabel reaches up and slaps a bumper sticker onto the counter for you, seemingly having pulled it out of nowhere. “Come visit us at the Mystery Shack sometime! Grunkle Stan would love to give you a tour.” She put a little too much emphasis on the word love and you giggled. “Thank’s Mabel, I’ll have to do that.” You thank her and they go to leave. You hear Stan grumble something about how bumper stickers don’t grow on trees. You look down at the bumper sticker and smile. ----------- A few days later you convince a few friends to go with you on the tour at the Mystery Shack. The bell above the door chimes as you enter and you’re welcomed by a teenager behind the counter who has her nose stuck in a magazine. “Could we get three tour tickets, please?” You ask when you approach the counter. She lowers the magazine and you recognize her. “Oh, hey, Wendy.” You smile warmly. She visited the nail salon often with her dad. “Hey girl!” She greets. “Are you really going on a tour?” She chuckles. “Yeah, me and my friends used to come here sometimes. Also I did the owner’s nieces nail the other day and she said I should come by.” You motion with your head to your friend’s who are looking around the gift shop. “You mean Mabel?” She asks as she rings you up. “Oh yeah, she was raving about her nails the other day. Shoulda known you did them.” She hands you three pieces of paper that have ‘tour ticket’ written on them. “Next tour should start in a few, Mr.Pines will be finishing up with the last tour soon.” You thank her and go look around the gift shop with your friends. You find them looking over the Mister Mystery bobbleheads. “Look,” one of your friends says teasingly. “It’s the silver fox.” You blush. “I can’t believe you remember me saying that. That was at least three years ago.” “Oh, well never let you forget.” The other says. You can hear Stan’s loud booming voice as he enters back into the gift shop with the last tour group. “Be sure to buy lots of gifts for your family and loved ones! Remember we put the fun in no refunds.” He doesn’t see you as he makes his way over to Wendy. “How many in the next tour?” He asks gruffly. “Just three,” she points over to you and your friends and you wave. He looks taken aback for a second before composing himself back into his Mister Mystery persona. “Greeting and welcome to the Mystery Shack!” He greets you as you and your friends approach the entrance of the tour room. He gives a whole speech about being prepared to see things beyond belief and what not. You and your friends share looks and nudge each other as he guides you through the tour. “I get what you mean, he kinda is a silver fox.” Your friend says a little too loudly. “He’s definitely your type,” the other teases. You shush them and pray Stan didn’t hear that. A certain taxidermied creature catches your attention and you stare at it, lost in thought. “Boo!” A hand grabs your hip and you jump with a yelp. You turn to see Stan giving a hearty belly laugh. “Sorry, kid. Had to. Keep up with the tour group please. I’m afraid to say some people have wandered off on the tour and never make it out!” He boasts in his showman’s voice, slowly sliding his hand from your waist. You stiffen a giggle. “Where do they go?” You follow him a few feet to where your friends are and they giggle too. “Only the Gods know!” He booms. He continues on with the tour, ever so often he touches your shoulder and points over it at the exhibit, or makes direct eye contact only with you while explaining what the creature before you is. You think maybe you’re just imagining the extra attention. When the tour ends he leads you three back into the gift shop where Dipper and Mabel have appeared. When Mabel sees you she squeals and makes a beeline for you. “I knew you’d come for a tour!” She smiled. “Of course,” you smiled back. Your friends told you they had to get going before they went off. Mabel grabbed your hand and dragged you over to where Dipper and Wendy were standing. “She’s been talking nonstop about her nails.” Dipper tells you. “Yeah, I was just telling Mabel and Dipper that me and my dad get out nails done by you.” Wendy says. Dipper chuckles. “You’re telling me Manly Dan, then the manliest man in Gravity Falls, gets his nails done?” Wendy frowns at him. “There’s nothing not manly about good nail health, Dipper.” Dipper blushes a deep shade of red and you laugh at him mumbling an apology. “Yeah, Dip!” Mabel cheers. “You should let me do your nails tonight when Grenda and Candy come over.” Mabel’s smile disappears and her hand comes to her cheeks as she lets out a loud gasp. “Oh my gosh! Grunkle Stan, can she come to my sleepover too?” Mable shouts across the gift shop to her grunkle. You turn to look at him with a confused smile. He was definitely already looking over at you before Mable yelled. “Fine by me,” He grunts and turns back into the tour room. Mabel cheers. “Mabel, you didn’t even ask her if she wanted to come to your sleepover yet.” Dipper scolds his sister. Mable scoffs. “Of course she wants to come to my nail salon themed sleepover!” Mable looks up at you with big puppy dog eyes, there’s no way you could say no. “Right?” You laughed. “I’d be happy to come to your sleepover.” ---------- “He was def checking you out.” “Did you see how he looked at your butt?!” “I can’t believe he just grabbed her waist like that. That was BOLD.” Your friends filled your group chat with messages as soon as they left. You didn’t even want to know how’d they react if you told them you would be staying the night at the Mystery Shack. You sighed pulling up outside the Shack later that evening, having returned home to have dinner and grab some pajamas and nail polishes you didn’t mind if preteen girls messed up. Locking your car, you made your way to the door and knocked. Almost immediately the door swung open and you were greeted by Mable and her two friends. They start to giggle and pulled you up the stairs as they talk about everything they have planned for the night. Although the girls are full of energy the three of them are passed out by eleven. You look around the door deciding on what to do, since you aren’t tired yet. Deciding on tidying up a bit you grab the pizza box and head downstairs to look for the kitchen. It doesn’t take long before you find it. You decide to leave the light off, and make your way over to the fridge. You have to move a few things around to make it fit. Leaning over you move somethings before standing back up and closing the door. Your heart leaps in your chest when you turn around and there’s someone else in the kitchen. To your relief you recognize it’s only Stan. You place your hand on your chest and let out a small laugh. “Geez, you scared me.” His eyes look you over before he replies. “Sorry, kid. Didn’t mean to.” He makes his way over to next to you. “Was there and pizza left?” You nod. “Although it might have some glitter on it.” With his attention on the pizza in the fridge, you take a second to look over him. He’s in nothing but a tank top and boxer shorts. You can’t help but notice how his arms flex everytime he moves his arms. “Too much glitter,” he decides, standing up and closing the fridge. He's standing right by your side. “Thanks for indulging Mabel and coming over tonight, you really didn’t have to.” “Oh, I don’t mind.” You smile. “I didn’t have much else going on.” “A beautiful young thing like you didn’t have any plans on a Saturday?” He smirks. You can feel yourself blush at his compliment. “My only plans were to come to the Mystery Shack for a tour.” You confessed. “And how was it?” He asks. Was he moving closer, or were you imagining it? “G-good,” You stammer. “It was good.” Your back is against the counter, Stan places his hand on either side of you. “You know, with ears this big I got pretty good hearing. Couldn’t help but hear what your friends were saying.” You look up at him from under lashes. “And?” You ask almost teasingly. He breathed out deeply, only inches from your face now. One of his hands moves to the back of your head to guide you to him and he gives you a hungry kiss. You’re happy to begin kissing him back just as eager, moving your hands to his chest. After a few more kisses his hands move behind you to grab your ass. He moves from your lips to your neck and begins kissing the skin there. You lean against him and whine. “You like that, kitten?” He smirks against your skin. You nod and he continues kissing your neck. He stops to suck a bruise into the skin where your neck meets your shoulder. Your hands bunch into his tank top and the wiry hair on his chest tickles your fingers. You moan his name as he begins kissing you again, his hands moving to the waistband of your pajama shorts. He grabs your shorts and underwear and pulls them down in one swift motion, leaving him kneeling in front of you. He inches closer and you can feel his warm breath on your folds. “Spread your legs for me, sugar.” He encourages by placing both his strong hands on the inside of your thighs and pushing them apart. You obey, and he pulls one of your knees over his shoulder before beginning licking and sucking your clit. Your hands bunch into his hair and you bite your lip to try and suppress the noises threatening to escape your mouth. “Go on, tell me how it feels. The kid’s can’t hear you all the way in the attic.” He assures you. He doesn’t have to tell you twice as you begin to whimper and moan as he pleases you. Without warning he slips a finger into your wet entrance, and your buck into his touch. One of his hands holds your hip firmly to keep you from moving as he slips another digit in. You can feel the tension in your stomach building more and more with every thrust of his fingers and lap of his tongue. Just as you’re about to snap, Stan pulls away. You whimper at the loss. “Don’t worry,” He kisses your cheek. “I’ll give you something even better than that.” His hands move to your hips and he pulls you flush against him, you can feel his hard member against your stomach. Suddenly he picks you up and takes a few steps across the room before laying you on the kitchen table. His hands slip under your shirt and you help him pull it off. He smirks and looks over your naked form, before removing his shirt as well. Leaning over your form he begins kissing you again. His hands touch all over your naked chest. You wrap your arms around his neck and hold him close. You moan his name and he groans. “You ready for more?” He asks, but you can already feel him pushing against you. You frantically nod and he pushes into you completely with one slow thrust. You didn’t get the chance to see him but you can tell he’s thick. You both let out sounds of please. His hands move to hold your hips, your hand move to his forearms, your nails leaving tiny crescent shapes in his skin. He pulls out slowly but quickly thrust back into you, and begins to set an unforgiving pace. Every thrust is deep and fast, his hands are holding your hips so tightly you’re sure there will be bruises tomorrow. You’re whimpering his name, which is definitely stroking his ego. “You feel so good,” He grunts. “So damn good.” He presses a bruising kiss to your lips. “Stan, I, I’m,” You try to tell him. He gets what you mean and picks up his pace. “Come on, I wanna feel you come.” His thumb comes between your leg to rub small circles to your clit and you lose yourself. Your back arches off the table and you cry out as his deep thrust helps you through. His pace doesn't falter as he turns you over onto your stomach. You grab onto the sides of the table to try and anchor yourself. His hands are still holding bruisingly onto your hips as he snaps his hips to thrust into you. Stan removes one of his hands before he brings it down hard to smack your rear. You cry out and push yourself back into his touch. He rubs tenderly over the reddening skin before he does the same again. Your head is foggy with all the pleasure you’re receiving, but you can feel the knot forming in your stomach again. You were close, but didn’t have the words to tell Stan. You hear Stan curse as he begins to praise you. “You’re so fucking perfect, making me feel so good. You getting close again, ain’t you? That’s so fucking good.” Every thrust of Stan’s becomes more erratic and you can tell he’s getting close too. His hands reach around to your clit and he teases it. “I want you to come again for me.” With a few more circles of your clit, the knot snaps and you’re coming again. Stan cusses and thrust deep into three more times before he pulls out, you can feel his hot seed spilling onto your back. Your head falls against the cool surface of the table as you try to catch your breath. You can hear Stan move away from you but don’t try to look, feeling too exhausted. You let out a hum as you feel a wet cloth run down your back. “You’re really something else, kitten.” He kisses your shoulder blade, and runs the cool cloth over your red ass cheek. He sets the cloth down and moves to help you up. Your knees feel a bit wobbly so you grab his arm to steady yourself. “You alright?” He plants a gentle kiss to your forehead. You nod. “Yeah, I’m good. That was good.” You blush. Stan chuckles and wraps his arms around you, you wrap your arms around his neck. “How bout we get you to bed?” “I’d like that.” You agree.

#stan pines x reader #gravity falls x reader

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thecassadilla · 3 years

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Change of Pace - Chapter 1

Pairing: Kristanna

Chapter 1 on AO3

Word Count: 3,292

Summary: With her sister’s blessing, Anna takes a step back from her royal duties and finds herself working for a ski resort nestled in the mountains. A chance encounter with the resort’s maintenance technician leads them down an unexpected path, as they must work together to plan the resort’s annual ball - and maybe fall in love in the process.

Author’s Note: Hi everyone! I’m trying something new here - I’m not really into writing multi-chap fics because I feel like my brain betrays me and I put it to the side and never look back. However, I’ve already managed to plan out the first 20ish chapters (and have written a ton of it), so I’m giving it a shot. This idea came to me back in September, when I was flipping through the television channels, and came across the summary for a Hallmark movie. Just from the description, I decided I wanted to write a fic based off of it. I did watch the first half of the movie and got some inspiration from that, too, though the ideas are mostly original. (If anyone’s interested the movie is called A Winter Princess). Rated T for the foreseeable future, but will eventually be M-rated. Anyway, I hope you enjoy!

In the two months since she had arrived at Valley Ski Resort, Princess Anna of Arendelle hadn’t stopped smiling. She greeted each day with a smile, worked with a smile, and whenever she thought about how thrilled she was to be experiencing life away from the castle and Arendelle, she smiled.

If she were being honest, she hadn’t stopped smiling since her older sister - and Queen of Arendelle - had approved her proposal of a sabbatical. She remembered the day she’d asked very clearly, as she was certain that her sister would reject her idea and she’d be stuck in Arendelle for the foreseeable future.

“Soooo,” she’d started.

“Yes?” Elsa had raised a questioning eyebrow.

“How would you say your mood is today?”

“My mood?”

“There’s something that I want to ask you, and I’m not sure how you’re going to react, so I’m trying to gauge if now is a good time or a bad time.”

Elsa had chuckled. “Anna, you can ask me whatever it is that you have to ask me.”

“Okay,” she’d breathed. “I wanted to know how you’d feel if I...went away for a while.”

“Went away? To where?”

“I was thinking of taking a sabbatical and finding work in another country - temporarily, of course. Just a few months where I could do something other than mope around the castle. I think it would be good to have some work experience under my belt, especially because your coronation is next year. I want to be able to do more than what I’ve been doing.”

Elsa had nodded. “I see. That makes...sense. Did you have something specific in mind?”

“Not yet,” she’d confessed. “I wanted to know what you thought about it before I committed to anything specific and got my hopes up.”

“There are a lot of factors to take into consideration. Your identity and your security are the first things that come to mind. But...as long as you’re back before the coronation, I really don’t see the harm in you -”

Before she could finish her sentence, Anna was throwing her arms around her sisters neck. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! You’re the best big sister, ever!”

It was some of the best news she’d received in her life. Not that her life had been dismal prior to her arrival at Valley Ski Resort, but it was rather...boring. Not boring in the traditional sense, as she had plenty of things to do. Horseback riding in the gardens, reading every romance book she could get her hands on in the library, and practicing piano at twilight. Regardless, her days felt empty, as if something was missing. She selfishly wished for more - travel, new friends, love.

So with her sister’s approval, the arrangements were made. With the exception of the general manager of the resort, her colleagues would remain unaware of her royal status, and would refer to her by her first name rather than by any titles or formalities. She’d stay on site, in one of the luxury “cabins” that the hotel rented to guests who wanted a more home-y experience, and set off to Valley in September, vastly unprepared for a life so different from the one she was accustomed to, but ready for anything. She had to learn how to do everything on her own; from cooking to cleaning to laundry, but she adapted fairly quickly to her new, “normal” routine and fell in love with her job as the assistant event planner for the resort. Two months in, and she was happier than she’d ever been in her entire life.

This particular morning had started the same as any other. In fact, when she woke up, she had a great feeling about how the day would go. She woke up feeling well rested before her alarm went off, had extra time to put on a little makeup, and was able to stop by the café on the first floor before making it to work with plenty of time to spare.

“Good morning,” she called, upon entering her office. She dropped her bag on the floor before shimmying out of her coat and hanging it on the rack by the door.

“Hey! Morning, Anna,” Holly, the administrative assistant, called back.

She glanced around and noticed that Holly was the only person there, which was rather unusual. Her boss always made it in before she did. “Jenny’s not here yet?”

“No,” Holly answered, running a hand through her chin length, raven-colored hair. “And it’s not like her to be late.”

She scooped her purse off the floor and walked over to her desk. “I know. Maybe she called out today?”

“She hasn’t been answering my calls or texts and I didn’t get an email from her.”

“Do you think Bonnie will know?”

“I’m sure she does, but she has more important things to worry about than one person calling out sick.”

“I’ll try texting her, too. I hope everything’s okay.”

“In the meantime,” Holly started, opening the top drawer of her desk and pulling out a box, “Look at what came in today!”

“Are those the invitations for the ball?”

“They are! Come look!”

Though she’d just sat down, she immediately hopped back up and ran over to Holly’s desk. She peered over her shoulder, at the silver and royal blue invitations. “Wow, those are gorgeous.”

“‘Valley Ski Resort cordially invites you to the twenty-fourth annual ball. Join us on Saturday, February sixth at seven in the evening for dinner, drinks, and dancing,’” Holly read. “Followed by the address to the hotel, of course, your extension and email for the RSVP, and the prices per head.”

“They’re perfect.”

“All you have to do now is finalize the guest list, print the name and address stickers, stick ‘em on and drop ‘em in the mailbox.”

“That’s it?” Anna teased.

“At least you don’t have to worry about hand-writing every name and address on five hundred envelopes.”

“It would give me an excuse to practice my penmanship,” Anna laughed. “My teachers always said my handwriting could go from neat to illegible in the same paper.”

“I know for a fact that your hand will be tired after sticking that many stickers to the envelopes, so don’t get too far ahead of yourself. At least the return address and stamp are already on there.”

“Less work for me,” Anna smiled, picking up the box and carrying it to her desk. “And I already have my work cut out for me.”

“Jenny is keeping you on your toes, huh?”

She sat down again, finally kicking off her snow boots and switching them for the flats she kept in her bag. “Just a little. I enjoy it though. I like keeping busy.”

“I know you haven’t been here very long, but you’re doing great,” Holly said. “Way better than any other assistant Jenny’s ever had.”

“Thank you, Holly. I really appreciate that.”

They kept up the small talk as they began their work for the day. As usual, Anna had plenty of emails to respond to and the talking helped to pass the time. A few hours into the day, the office door opened and they both turned around to see if Jenny had finally arrived for her shift. Instead, it was Bonnie, the general manager of the resort. “Good morning, ladies.”

“Good morning, Bonnie,” they responded in unison.

“How’s the planning for the ball coming along?”

“Excellent,” Anna spoke up. “We received the invitations this morning. The guest list will be finalized by early next week and the invitations will be sent out by the end of next week.”

“That’s wonderful,” Bonnie smiled. “Now, I’m afraid that I have good news and bad news for you both.”

“Oh,” Holly murmured, exchanging a worrisome look with Anna.

“I’m afraid that Jenny has resigned, effective immediately,” Bonnie stated matter-of-factly. “That’s part of the bad news. The good news is for Anna - congratulations, you’ve been promoted!”

Her eyes nearly popped out of her head. “I have?”

“Of course! Sure, you’ve only been here for two months, but you’ve been shadowing Jenny the entire time, you show excellent potential, you’ve never been late...I can go on and on, but it was one of the easiest hiring decisions that I’ve had to make in my entire career.”

Anna couldn’t help but wonder if she was being promoted out of sheer desperation, or if it was because Bonnie was the only person aware of her royal status and was trying to kiss up to her. “Thank you, Bonnie. I hope that I can exceed your expectations.”

“I don’t think you’ll have any trouble fitting into your new role. Now for the second part of the bad news - unfortunately, there won’t be enough time to hire a new event planning assistant in time for all of the upcoming events, between the Christmas season starting in three weeks, and then the ball the first week of February. I’m so sorry.”

Anna nodded slowly, trying to process everything that Bonnie had just told her. Not only had she been promoted, but now she’d have to take on the workload of two people by herself. “I’ll do my best.”

“That’s all I ask,” she remarked. “I know that you’re going to do great. Enjoy the rest of your day, ladies.”

Bonnie swiftly exited the office, and as soon as she was gone, Anna turned to face Holly. “What am I going to do?”

Holly stared for a moment, her mouth agape. “I...don’t know. This has never happened before.”

“I don’t think that I can do this alone! How am I supposed to do this alone?”

“Anna, I genuinely don’t know. I’m as stunned as you are. I mean, I’ll do my best to help you in any way that I can, but I only took this job because it came with a set, part-time schedule. I have a baby at home - I can’t be here for all of the events on the calendar.”

“Of course not,” Anna agreed. “That’s not fair to you or your husband or son.”

“Yeah, but this situation isn’t fair to you. Bonnie has plenty of time to find a new assistant, I bet she’s just being lazy.”

“I wonder why Jenny quit so abruptly.”

“I know! Jenny isn’t the type of person to do anything abruptly. I hope that she’s not sick or something.”

A wave of anxiety rolled through Anna’s body and she buried her face in her hands. “What am I gonna do?”

“Oh sweetie,” Holly cooed. “It’ll be alright. You’ll figure it out, I promise.”

Anna exhaled heavily and nodded.

“How about we go over everything we have to do for the rest of the season?” Holly suggested. “I know Jenny normally goes over the events on a week-by-week basis, but it may make you feel better to recall everything you’re dealing with in advance. Kind of like a quiz.”

“Okay,” she agreed. She got up from her desk and paced back and forth across the office; she often did her best thinking as she paced. The office was modest; the three desks were all lined up against the right wall, and the other walls were lined with filing cabinets, a bulletin board, and plants. Lots and lots of plants. Luckily, the plants were Holly’s responsibility, so Anna didn’t have to worry about keeping them alive - something she was sure that she’d fail at.

“So the cookie decorating is on the twenty-fourth. Do you remember the game plan for that?”

“Yes. We...I have to pick up the cookies at the bakery, bring them to the conference room - which I’ll try to set up in advance - and then sell the cookies until the event is over.”

“Do you remember how much each cookie costs?”

“Three dollars.”

Deciding to distract herself as she and Holly talked, she started to reorganize the bulletin board. A couple of the fliers were outdated, and they could use the extra room for the upcoming events.

“Take down the pictures with Jenny in them while you’re at it,” Holly replied. “Alright, what’s next?”

She began to collect the many photos of Jenny that had been posted onto the board. A few of them included her, from the events that they had worked on together. It was almost bittersweet to take them down; Jenny was her boss and mentor. They spent forty hours a week together for two months straight, and Jenny had taught her everything that she knew. “Um, that’s the last event that this office has planned for the month and December is maxed out.”

“Well, what events do we have in December?”

“So many,” Anna sighed, stacking the photos neatly into a pile. “Santa will be here every night in the lobby. A reindeer petting zoo will be set up outside. A few movie nights and Christmas caroling. On weekends there will be sleigh rides through the woods and hot beverage stands outside. Am I forgetting something?”

“There’s also going to be a story time and cookie decorating with Santa event on Christmas Eve,” Holly pointed out. “All of the kids will be wearing their pajamas.”

“Okay.”

“But other than that, that’s it.”

“Thank god,” Anna breathed, finally collapsing in her office chair and tossing the pile of pictures onto her desk.

“I’m actually really excited for the story time with Santa.”

“Are you bringing your son to that one?”

Holly nodded. “He’ll only be eight months old, but why not? It’ll be adorable.”

“I can’t wait to actually see him in person,” Anna smiled. “Now, is there anything that we have to do on Christmas Day or New Years Eve or Day?”

“No, not us. Culinary is going to have buffets - like the one they’re having for Thanksgiving - and then the hotel puts out extra televisions and passes out champagne for New Years. We actually have off on those days.”

“Really? I mean, Christmas Day makes sense, but New Years? That’s a little unexpected.”

“Well, we have put most of our energy into planning the ball, and there wouldn’t be enough time to throw three huge parties in a month. So, the holidays are ours.”

“I’m so thankful for the person who made that decision,” Anna laughed. “I may wind up here on those days, anyway, though.”

Holly clicked her tongue. “Don’t do that - enjoy your extra days off.”

“It’s not like I have anywhere better to be,” she shrugged.

“I’d offer for you to come over on Christmas, but I’ll be with my in-laws in the morning, and my parents at night. Baby’s first Christmas, and all.”

“Oh, no I wasn’t trying to invite myself or get you to pity me.”

“I know,” Holly nodded. “I just feel bad that you’ll be all alone.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll call my sister, like I always do when I have time off, and then I’ll come here and see what’s going on.”

“Maybe by then you’ll have a boyfriend and he’ll invite you to spend Christmas with him,” Holly teased, wiggling her eyebrows.

Anna felt her cheeks warm up at the thought. “Christmas is six weeks from today and I think we both know that that’s not going to happen. I’ve been here for two months and the dates I’ve been on haven’t been great.”

“I don’t think you’ve been looking in the right places.”

She rolled her eyes. “To be fair, I came here to work.”

“And now you have enough work for two people,” Holly reminded her. “You should try to have some fun in your free time.”

“I do have fun,” she remarked defensively.

“Oh yeah? Tell me what you do for fun.”

“I just got a Netflix account, so I’ve been trying to catch up on all of the shows that I’ve missed over the years.”

Holly cocked her head. “That’s not fun, that’s pathetic. Also - watch Grey’s Anatomy.”

“I’ll add it to my list. And I don’t think that you should judge what I do in my free time when you spend your free time tending to your infant.”

“Exactly! I don’t have any free time. I’m trying to live vicariously through you.”

“Don’t do that,” Anna laughed. “You’re only setting yourself up for disappointment.”

“What if we set you up on Tinder? Or Bumble?”

“Holly -”

“Ooh, I could set you up on a blind date! My husband works in the high school and he has a ton of young, single coworkers.”

“How about we stop talking about my dating life and finish talking about the rest of the events that are coming up?”

“Fine,” Holly groaned, looking down at the calendar. “January is pretty empty. A few movie nights scattered around, and two make-your-own hot chocolate nights.”

“Hot chocolate?”

“Yeah, the kids get a kick of being able to choose their own toppings and stuff.”

“Gotcha,” Anna nodded.

“And then the rest of our energy goes to the ball. January is crunch time. Making sure that everyone RSVP’d, making sure the menu is finalized, reaching out to the DJ, et cetera. It’s going to be a lot.”

“I’ll consider myself warned.”

“That’s the right attitude! Now for February - obviously, the ball is the first thing that month. There’s going to be a few events for Valentine’s Day - card and cookie decorating and a carnation sale.”

“Carnations? Why not roses?”

“Carnations are the flower of love,” Holly answered. “And they’re cheaper than roses.”

“Yeah, but roses are way more popular,” Anna pointed out. “Maybe we should consider ordering roses this year.”

“I’ll look into it,” Holly said, writing it down on her notepad. “Now for March. Easter is the first weekend in April, so the Easter Bunny will be in the lobby for the month. There will be egg hunts and egg decorating - basically, we’ll have eggs coming out of our ears - in the week leading up to the holiday.”

“Is that it?”

“Well, we hadn’t got that far for this upcoming year, but usually we throw in some cookie decorating, too.”

“Okay, that’s manageable,” Anna commented.

Holly frowned. “And then I believe we’re losing you, after that.”

“Yeah, I’m going home in April,” Anna sighed. “We can plan a few more events for that month, though. I won’t be leaving until late April.”

Holly smiled. “So I get a little more time with you than I thought.”

“Hopefully Bonnie will find her replacements by then. Or else you’ll be doing the work of three people.”

“Don’t remind me,” Holly groaned. “I don’t want to think of that as being a possibility.”

She wiggled the mouse of her computer and it turned back on. She signed onto her email, hoping to see an explanation from Jenny. Instead, she found an email from the manager of the bakery. She spun around to face her coworker. “Liz just emailed me and said that they were able to specially order the cookie kits that Jenny requested.”

“Finally, some good news today,” Holly remarked. “Not that the news of you being promoted was bad. But it was...a lot.”

“Tell me about it,” Anna laughed.

Holly’s phone rang, then, interrupting their conversation. “Hold on just a sec,” she started, before picking it up. “Hello, you’ve reached the event planning office, this is Holly speaking.”

Anna turned back to her computer and scrolled through her inbox, trying not to eavesdrop on Holly’s conversation.

“Oh, hi Bonnie! How can I help you?”

Bonnie? She glanced back at her coworker, who had a puzzled look on her face.

“I’m sorry...what? Are you kidding?...Okay, we’ll be right down,” Holly said, slamming the receiver down and standing up. “Come on, Anna, we have to go.”

“Wait, what happened? Where are we going?”

#kristanna #kristanna fanfic #anna #kristoff bjorgman #frozen #frozen fic #my writing

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thebibliomancer · 4 years

Text

Essential Avengers: Avengers #223: of Robin Hoods and Roustabouts

September, 1982

Apparently a “roustabout” is an unskilled or casual labor.

And lets admit the obvious that if Hawkeye is either of the two things, he’s a robin hood. And its not inaccurate but be nicer to Scott Lang.

Even if he manages to be even more hapless in this issue then in modern takes that leans into him being a fuck-up.

As for the cover? Pretty striking cover. I’ve been waiting for Hawkeye to shoot Ant-Man at someone. Its apparently an Iconic Avengers moment and to think it first happens in a filler.

Because I’m pretty sure this is a filler. Its written by David Michelinie alone instead of Jim Shooter getting a plotter or co-writer credit. It doesn’t really have anything from the dangling plot threads of Hank Pym or the Masters of Evil.

Between this and and the filler with the immortal child who badly wanted to die and all of the plotter or co-writer credits, you just really get a sense that Jim Shooter did not have time to devote to Avengers anymore.

So what kind of filler will this be? Weird? Impactless? Good Actually? Let’s see!

Well, apparently Hawkeye is going to the carnival so at this point, it could go either way.

I like that Hawkeye has a H belt buckle because that’s the kind of thing that he would do and that I can make fun of him for.

I know that it’s been a while since he’s mentioned kewpie dolls but Hawkeye came from the circus. He and his brother ran away to one when they were little and the Swordsman taught Hawkeye archery. The point being, “he’s come home.”

As in, this is specifically the carnival he used to work before he became very briefly a superhero, and then for slightly longer a supervillain, and then for much much longer a superhero for real.

Point is, he’s been away for a while. But he received a flyer in the mail and decided he just had to come.

Because someone wrote HELP! on the back.

Hawkeye figures that the previous owner’s daughter and current owner Marcy Carson sent it as a goof but heck if she’s going to go to that trouble, he’ll be happy to visit.

So he breezes past the workers outside the owner’s trailer and-

Actually they beat the shit out of him for trying to breeze past them. Goes to show.

When Hawkeye threatens to beat them up for this rude treatment, they get ruder and call him a rube. Can you believe! Him, a former employee himself being called a rube! Also they pull a fancy sci-fi gun on him.

So Hawkeye does buzz off. So he can change into his hawking eye duds and buzz right back on.

Roustabouts carrying laser pistols is very suspicious. And I guess Ant-Man isn’t the roustabout of the title. He’s moving up in the world.

MEANWHILE, Perfectly Ordinary electronics technician, ex-con, and Ant-Man Scott Lang is having a night out with his daughter Cassie. And they’re having a bit of a disagreement.

See, Cassie, future superhero, wants to ride the really cool roller coaster the Spin-’n-Heave. Scott Lang, dad with dumb views on gender apparently, insists that a roller coaster just isn’t ladylike enough and she should ride something more refined like the pony ride or ring toss.

Also, Scott is carrying the Ant-Man suit with him, loose in his pocket. And the helmet just drops out of his pocket and the damn fool would have lost it if Cassie hadn’t spotted it and mistaken it for a marble.

Geez, Scott! I stood up for you!

Scott’s attempts to dad by restricting what his daughter can and can’t do based on his own views on what is ladylike get dropped when he spots Hawkeye hauling ass across the carnival and decides that This Cannot Stand!

Scott Lang Ant-Man may not be an Avenger but dangit he can’t leave a fellow hero in the lurch! He must offer unsolicited aid!

So he caves on the Spin-’n-Heave issue because its a way to keep Cassie occupied for the length of exactly this issue.

Scott gives the operator a bunch of money and tells the operator to let Cassie ride until it runs out and then takes off.

Cassie is thrilled.

Meanwhile, Hawkeye has returned to the owner’s trailer but Marcy is gone and so are the two goons that were guarding the door. But he spots them marching Marcy through the crowd.

The goons are complimenting Marcy on being so cooperative but also say that if she’s not cooperative, her star acts are gonna get fed to the lions. And that might happen anyway once everything is said and done because their boss be like that.

Anyway, that’s when the two get hit by a KRAK THUBB arrow. Punch arrow? It looks nerf-y.

Hawkeye grabs Marcy and runs off with her into a tent so she can explain it all.

But first: he has to notice that she is beautiful. He has been gone a while so, y’know. People grow up or whatever.

Hawkeye: “There, that’s better! Now maybe I can get to the bottom of -- hey! You’re beautiful!”

Marcy: “I’ve waited a long time for you to notice that, ol’ buddy.”

Hawkeye: “Yeah, well, it’s hard noticin’ anything when you’re bein’ tripped into a pile of elephant dirt -- which, as I recall, used to be your favorite pastime!”

Marcy: “People change, Clint.”

Young Marcy sounds like a really interesting person. She certainly gave Hawkeye the business.

Anyway, she explains that it was pure luck that she was able to sneak that message out to him. And that the carnival has been taken over by some freak with powers.

Marcy: “Why, if he even suspected I was in touch with you he’d kill me deader than a Monday night in Des Moines!”

Off-screen Villain: “Nicely put, dumplin’! Should make you a dandy little epitaph!”

SCENE CHANGE TO PRESERVE SUSPENSE

Scott Lang has ducked behind some circus carts to change into Ant-Man.

Except he still has the whole shrunken costume piecemeal in his pockets so the process is one of slapstick. Scott goes digging in his pockets for the suit and accidentally drops it all in the straw.

Then he has to go digging around for the incredibly teeny pieces of gear while realizing that this was a stupid plan.

Maybe he should keep the suit in a tin. Like a mint tin or something.

But he finally gets all the pieces together and uses a safety pin to trigger the enlarging gas to full-size the outfit so he can put it on.

Huh! Enlarging gas! Early days in Avengers, they were all about the logistics of the shrinking and growing for Ant-Giant and the Wasp but it hasn’t been talked about in a long while. Wasp just changes size without the how being discussed.

But if it is Pym Particles, then I guess Scott isn’t at the point yet where his body naturally produces them so he has to use the gas canisters on the belt.

Scott does get dressed in his ant duds and uses the helmet to command some ants to find Hawkeye. And this is a carnival with a lot of dropped funnel cake and cotton candy so you know that there’s plenty of ants available.

SCENE CHANGE because we can only preserve suspense so far.

The mysterious off-screen villain hits the lights in the tent that Hawkeye and Marcy were talking in. Which reveals a bunch of gym and training equipment. It’d be nice if carnivals could provide such robust gym benefits to their workers but I feel that this is actually suspicious, finding this here.

Especially the combat flight simulator.

Hawkeye: “This place looks like a training ground for World War III!”

Off-screen villain, about to be onscreen: “And what better setting for the world’s greatest trainer? Namely... the TASKMASTER!”

Heyyy its the Taskmaster!

I forgot that he was a loose thread. He got away after the THREE-PARTER that introduced him. Then again, I guess since he’s the explanation for where villains get their armies of mooks, he didn’t really need to be tied up because that would defeat the purpose.

Anyway, Hawkeye wasn’t on the team for that three-parter but thankfully, the Avengers take thorough records.

Hawkeye: “Yeah, I remember readin’ about you in the Avengers’ files! You’re some sorta goon peddler!”

Taskmaster: “Watch yer mouth, bow-bender! What I am is a teacher!”

And then he recaps his goon, mook, henchman training business for the audience. He even clarifies that his series of secret academies are going great, thanks, but he’s trying to branch out with a mobile recruiting center.

Aka, this circus. And heck, according to Taskmaster, carnies already come off unscrupulous so having a bunch of goons hanging around won’t stand out.

THE PERFECT CRIME.

Actually. I don’t know if this is a crime? It’s not illegal to do combat training or learn how to fly a plane, probably. Then again, when 100% of your alumni wind up arrested for helping steal the Statue of Liberty, a legal goon school would get a lot of unwanted scrutiny. So best keep it secret.

And of course, extorting the owner and workers of a circus is definitely a crime. Pretty sure.

Anyway, the mobile recruiting center scheme is helped by Marcy telling anyone who asks that the new people hanging around are a new act that isn’t ready to open yet.

Hawkeye is sick of Taskmaster’s smarmy smarm and tries to shoot a grabber arrow? at Taskmaster.

Who just blocks it with his shield.

And takes the opportunity to brag about his photographic reflexes, where he only needs to see a sweet move once and he can do it perfectly.

He shows off by doing some Cap moves and then doing a Spider-Man move. Which he seems to do just to do.

And by Spider-Man move I mean hanging upside down from a line. Which, yes, Spider-Man does do that but it doesn’t really seem that necessary or helpful here and you’re totally doing it just to show off but really you look a little ridiculous.

Taskmaster even shows off some Tigra moves by kicking Hawkeye in the face. Its fun to me that he shows off Tigra specifically. Its for some acrobatics like flippy kick but there’s gotta be other acrobatic heroes. Like Spider-Man.

But Tigra was on the Avengers recently and briefly and dammit, he’s gonna show off what he learned!

Anyway, Taskmaster beats up Hawkeye until he gets bored of it and then just takes Marcy hostage to get Hawkeye to surrender.

He just really wanted to show off some of his sweet moves. And as soon as he ran through five different hero movesets (Cap, Spider-Man, Tigra, Daredevil, and Iron Fist) he’s just like ‘k I’m done’.

Meanwhile, back to Ant-Man ant-again.

He’s lurking around a corner trying to be inconspicuous while children are pointing and asking if he’s a clown. Perhaps realizing that he didn’t need to put on the full costume to use the helmet and that he’s just made himself look foolish.

But some of his ants report in that they’ve found Hawkeye so Ant-Man shrinks down to ride an ant into action.

Wait. Yeah. You could have just shrunken down and perched somewhere to wait for ant reports. You’ve made yourself look a fool and you fully had the power to avoid that in so many ways.

Meanwhile back to Hawkeye yet again, Taskmaster knows that killing an Avenger would attract notice so he’s going to make it look like an accident.

So he’s locked Hawkeye in an electrified cage with a lion, a normal situation that can accidentally happen to anyone. So now when Hawkeye gets mauled to death by the lion, nobody will suspect it was anything but an accident.

Taskmaster walks away because its villain tradition that you don’t watch the heroes you lock in the death traps. That’d just be gauche.

The lion sizes up Hawkeye and decides that he’s food and leaps for the kill!

And Ant-Man grows out from under the lion and throws it into the electrified bars, knocking him out.

Pretty good timing Scott! And that poor attempted man-eater lion! That poor five hundred pound lion! WOW SCOTT, do you work out?

I also feel that Republic Serial has aged poorly for more than just lion tossing.

Ant-Man and Hawkeye get each other on the same page. As it happens, Ant-Man actually has more experience with Taskmaster since he was actually in that three-parter. That’ll give them a tiny, tiny, tiny edge.

They’re still stuck in a locked cage and Hawkeye is like ‘gee whiz shrinking hero guy how can we possibly get out?’

Would you be surprised that Ant-Man just shrinks Hawkeye? Scott does muse that he could probably have picked the lock if he had the tools for it but shrinking just saves time.

Hawkeye does not care for it though.

I don’t know what he’s complaining about. Big sleepy cat even bigger now. You could live in the mane at that size.

You could be a tiny man living in a lion’s mane. Imagine.

Anyway.

Over in Taskmaster’s private tent, he’s telling Marcy she done fucked up calling for Hawkeye and she’s going to wish she was getting mauled to death by a lion in an electrified cage like Hawkeye was.

And Hawkeye does the equivalent of clearing his throat and saying ‘hey dingus, not dead’

Taskmaster reaches for a magnesium flare like he used against the Avengers but Ant-Man’s expert knowledge of meeting Taskmaster one time lets him warn Hawkeye who shoots it out of Taskmaster’s hand.

Taskmaster just questions why they didn’t go for a killshot when they had him surprised and then calls a goon squad on the heroes.

Of course, goon squads being called on heroes is just a setup to make heroes look really cool showing their stuff on some expendable targets.

“While the Taskmaster’s troops have been well-trained for normal combat, they fare woefully poor against these super-normal foes!”

And show their stuff they do. Like Hawkeye leaping around firing net and bola arrows!

And Ant-Man... shrinking down really small to punch a guy’s earlobe.

Look. He’s trying.

Also, Marcy is braining people with a juggling pin like some manner of alien clown because she is exceptionally irate at Taskmaster and his goons.

While the three beat up this crowd of goons, Taskmaster runs off to set up his “escape insurance.”

Ant-Man and Hawkeye chase him into the big top where there’s already a crowd watching the show. And waiting for the human cannonball act.

BUT! Taskmaster is apparently a cartoon villain because he’s replaced the human cannonball with a dummy full of explosives and he’s going to shoot it and blow up the grandstand, killing a couple hundred innocent lives.

Taskmaster tells them they can capture him or they can stop his ridiculous scheme.

Taskmaster: “Have fun decidin’, chumps!”

And then presumably he runs off giggling.

Hawkeye wants to go after Taskmaster and have Ant-Man take care of the nothuman cannonball bomb.

Ant-Man: “No, Hawkeye! There are too many lives at stake! And it may take both of us to stop that cannon!”

Hawkeye: “But we can’t just let that psycho walk! We can’t -- .”

Ant-Man: “Hawkeye! Think about it! Think! Please... !”

Hawkeye: “Yeah, I guess you’re right... blast it.”

Scott Lang has his heart in the right place to be a hero even if he is a bit of a goofus about it. I like you, Scott Lang.

Hawkeye runs back into the tent and shoots the goon manning the cannon with a bola arrow. he gets the goon but the goon falls on the button.

Fortunately, its the elevation control, not the fire button.

Unfortunately, there is no firing button, so the firing cycle is automatic.

Fortunately, hitting the elevation control accidentally made the cannon point up instead of at the grandstand. So the bomb is still going to fall and blow everything up but they have time and Ant-Man has an idea.

He has Hawkeye nock his fastest arrow and jumps on it.

Hawkeye shoots the arrow and hits the explosive filled mannequin in the neck right as it reached the top of its trajectory and hung very briefly in the air.

As the bomb starts to plummet, Ant-Man crawls up the arrow onto the bomb-man and to the detonator.

All too soon the bomb hits the ring

but doesn’t detonate.

Ant-Man managed to defuse the bomb!

And he also managed to survive the fall because of course! He’s not destined to die for a long while and only then in a really dumb way.

Thanks to Scott’s experience of watching Raiders of the Lost Ark twenty-seven times he’s a real expert on jumping from one speeding object to another.

Aka, from the falling bomb to a flying ant. Sure.

The heroes see that Taskmaster has escaped while all this was going on but Hawkeye decides he’ll get him next time.

Also? The audience has thought that this was part of the show the whole time so they’ve loved every second of this.

Soon the other Avengers arrive, too late to take part in the plot but in time to help clean up the goon operation.

Also, She-Hulk is in her tattered white dress outfit again. I really think there was some miscommunication here. Like with having her dressed like that on the previous cover and having her dressed like that here in this filler issue.

She doesn’t wear that anymore but its the Iconic outfit for her so if an artist needs a ref to draw her, they’re probably looking at a picture from her Savage She-Hulk series.

And Scott Lang gets the last page because whoops, he left his daughter on a roller coaster the whole time and forgot her in the heat of the adventure. DAD OF THE YEAR!

Scott runs to find her sitting outside the Spin-’n-Heave looking down, head in hands. Scott is worried that something is wrong with her but

Cassie Lang: “I’m a little tired right now, daddy *yawn* but can we come back an’ ride the ‘Spin-’n-Heave’ again t’morrow?”

Scott Lang: “Tomorrow? Again? *sigh* Kids.”

Hah, she tuckered herself out riding the roller coast over and over again but is game to keep doing it again tomorrow. That’s the Cassie Lang that will grow up to join the Young Avengers!

So, Avengers filler but it wasn’t weird or inconsequential. It doesn’t do anything with the ongoing plots but it feels like it does since Scott Lang has come back into the books recently because of the Hank Pym plot. And it follows up on Taskmaster who has gone unaddressed since his introductory stories.

Its just a nice story and by focusing on a guest star and one of the Avengers doing an impromptu team-up it has some fun energy.

Good times.

Hey. Follow @essential-avengers maybe? Its better than the Spin-’n-Heave! ... I can’t actually prove that. But also like and reblog this post because I’m a cool person. ... I can’t actually prove that either...

#Avengers #Taskmaster #Hawkeye #Ant Man #Scott Lang #some roustabouts #some robin hoods #essential avengers #essential marvel liveblogging #some avengers in a one panel cameo in their own book #ant man and hawkeye make a good team weirdly #i'm weirdly fascinated by the Spin 'n Heave #it has a waterfall

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bitchfury · 3 years

Text

LEGALLY BLONDE!!

*Spoiler Alert!

So.. i’ve decided to try getting off social media for a year (i know i’m on Tumblr, but i’m only allowed to post ;’( i’ve been off for 3 days now!) and now i’ve just been catching up on movies i never watched when they came out. this.. is a long variety of shows from ‘shes the man’, ‘what a girl wants’, ‘easy a’, and todays topic : ‘legally blonde’. so yeah, i guess you could say i’ve missed out on a lot.

so.. let’s get into my (biased) summary of legally blonde.

got a lot of tears left to cry

warner huntington iii is going to propose to elle woods. or, that’s at least what she and all of her sorority sisters think until he hits her with the “if i want to be a legal whatever by 30 i’m going to want a serious girlfriend.. we’re over.” in the middle of a restaurant. he talks all this and that about how he’s a law student and how his brother married a well known girl and how he’s got a really small dick and is too afraid to either tell her that he’s never loved her or tell his family that he’ll marry whoever he wants. come on.. this guy needs a wake up call.

heartbroken, elle spends a day locked up in her room until she sees warner’s brother and brother’s girlfriend in a mag and has a lightbulb : she’s going to become a harvard law student to get warner back

so she goes to harvard and chooses his classes and...

he’s married. ...to vivian kensington, the girl who gave off bad vibes with her first interaction with elle.

[luckily] there’s already a cute guy in the picture.. not saying that even matters though cause we don’t need relationships to fix our hardships, y’know? Anyways, elle starts studying, ew, and busting vivian and warners ass in class because she’s very awesome and super smart!!

*of course* there’s a scene where vivian embarasses elle, like the scene in ‘mean girls’ when catie comes into regina’s party dressed like a vampire, (but TBH, catie did that herself.) this time it’s not halloween, vivian just tells elle that she’s throwing a costume party when it’s not.

*there’s like, gifs for every scene so i’m taking the opportunity and running with it, ok?!*

surprisingly, at one point these two actually bond over warner’s incompetence. and yes, i believe i’m allowed to say that because this guy is !! rich !! and still doesn’t know how to do half this stuff.

and snap!

*okay.. so i’ve noticed that with some of my summaries i leave out some of the.. extra.. bits by that i mean the filler stuff that shows some character development or funny bits like that. so for this summary i’m going to include this little seg. if you want to skip, go to ‘professor callahan... you suck!’ *

after a stressful day, elle finally finds a nail place and walks in to meet a new friend! paulette, the nail technician who has a crush on the UPS guy. elle uses her knowledge passed down to her from generation to generation to teach paulette how to finally get boned! and get her dog back from a sucky ex.

that’s pretty much all i can say.. other than bend.. and snap! (but not the UPS guys’ nose.. which is something paulette did.)

professor callahan... you suck!

everything’s going great, elle finally realized her worth and that she doesn’t need warner anymore. she’s got some great friends including vivian and is on top of the world after a discovery in professor callahan’s courtroom class. (one of the witnesses is gay!!)

until.. it’s not

trigger warning : sexual assault

THIS STUPID PROFESSOR I HAD SO MUCH FAITH IN THIS GUY AND HE JUST..

he starts off by talking about her future in law and she ends it as soon as he tries to cop a feel by rubbing on her leg. vivian, of course has to witness this and slut shames her. she tells dream boat (boy gif) emmett that she’s quitting.

she also tells paulette and -- plot twist -- one of the ladies in the spa nail place is her mean teacher who says this :

YES!!!

she ends up staying, and takes over the case professor cunt was supposed to be on because everyone basically knows now. and she wins!

warner tries getting her back but.. if this girl wants to become a lawyer by 30 she’s going to need a boyfriend who’s not a complete bonehead. sounds like she’s going to need emmett. ;)

i feel like this looks incredibly rushed.. it’s not meant to be! if you haven’t gathered from my previous posts, my brain is completely slow/fast which means i have to write everything including my opinions down after i watch a movie or i’ll forget. and, well.. i watched this 2 hours ago ;_;

thank you all!

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stereostevie · 3 years

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The Rap Grammy Nominations Are Weird As Hell | Nov 25, 2020 11:12 AM BY TOM BREIHAN

The very first time that the Grammy Awards recognized rap music, it was an utter fiasco — a clear case of an aging pop-music establishment failing to understand this vital new youth music that had sprung up and rewritten the rules. For the 1989 awards show, the Grammys added one rap category, Best Rap Performance. DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince won it for “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” beating out LL Cool J and Salt-N-Pepa and Kool Moe Dee and JJ Fad. The show didn’t deign to recognize Public Enemy, N.W.A, EPMD, Slick Rick, Big Daddy Kane, Eric B. & Rakim, or Ice-T, all of whom had released classic albums within the voting window. The award wasn’t televised, and most of the nominees, Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince included, skipped the show, attending a “Boycott The Grammys” party instead.

Since that night, the history of rap at the Grammys has been a series of baffling, embarrassing decisions. It’s Steely Dan winning Album Of The Year over The Marshall Mathers LP. It’s Gretchen Wilson winning Best New Artist over Kanye West. “It’s weird and it sucks that I robbed you.” It’s also a history of rappers getting angry over the Grammys: “I never let a statue tell me how nice I am,” “You think I give a damn about a Grammy?” In 2019, Drake showed up to accept Best Rap Song. In his acceptance speech, he talked about how the Grammy voters weren’t necessarily the right people to define rap success. The broadcast cut him off mid-speech. Earlier this year, Kanye West, a man who once cared more about Grammy Awards than anyone else not named Neil Portnow, tweeted a video of himself pissing on one of his Grammys. (The Grammys still nominated West this year, for Best Contemporary Christian Music Album.)

Yesterday, the Grammys nominated Freddie Gibbs and the Alchemist’s Alfredo in the Best Rap Album category. That’s great! Freddie Gibbs is a great underground rap success story, a guy who bet on himself and kept doing great work in his own lane even after multiple major-label situations fell apart. Gibbs has never made a hit song in his life, and he’s gotten himself into a position where he doesn’t need to make hit songs — where he can just follow his instincts and keep his own style intact. Alfredo isn’t my favorite rap record of the year. (Even in the field of Alchemist-produced 2020 rap albums, I’d give the slight edge to Boldy James’ The Price Of Tea In China.) But the nomination for Alfredo is still a very cool surprise, the kind of thing that I would’ve never expected to see from the Grammy nominating committee.

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And yet Gibbs’ nomination doesn’t exactly announce a new golden age of Grammy rap consideration, a time when Recording Academy voters are finally figuring out how to approach the genre. Instead, his nomination points toward something else: An institutional recognition of middlebrow, middle-aged, respectable rap music.

All of this year’s Best Rap Album nominees are Black men between the ages of 35 and 47. The oldest nominee is Nas, who is now on his fifth Best Rap Album nomination and who has never won the award. (The Best Rap Album Grammy didn’t exist in 1994, when Nas released Illmatic, but there’s no way in hell that Nas would’ve won it anyway. The Academy would’ve given the award to Coolio’s It Takes A Thief or something.) The youngest nominee is D Smoke, a former high school Spanish teacher who is also the brother of the TDE R&B singer SiR. D Smoke made his way into Grammy contention after winning the first season of Rhythm + Flow, the Netflix rap-competition show. (Two of the three judges from Rhythm + Flow, Cardi B and Chance The Rapper, have won Best Rap Album themselves. T.I., the other judge, has been nominated three times and never won.)

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D Smoke isn’t exactly a revered or popular rapper, and I have’t seen anyone calling his perfectly-OK album Black Habits a masterpiece, though the man has certainly done better than anyone could’ve expected from a rap reality-show winner. But D Smoke raps exactly like a diet version of Kendrick Lamar, so his nomination works as a clear indication that the Grammy voters really, really wish they had a Kendrick album to nominate. D Smoke is also up for Best New Artist, alongside fellow rappers Chika, Megan Thee Stallion, and (I guess) Doja Cat. Presumably, Megan’s Good News would also be nominated if it had come out early enough to be eligible. Meanwhile, Chika hasn’t released an album, and Doja Cat is nominated in the pop categories, not the rap ones.

Instead, then, we’re looking at five guys hovering around the age of 40, all of whom are respected technicians with boom-bap inclinations. Jay Electronica, who’s nominated for A Written Testimony and who should probably be considered the front-runner, is technically a New Orleans native, but nobody thinks of him as a Southern rapper. (Jay-Z is all over A Written Testimony, to the point where anointing Jay Electronica feels a bit like throwing awards love to Jay-Z in a year with no Jay-Z album.) All the albums up for Best Rap Album are, at the very least, solid. A couple of them, Alfredo and A Written Testimony, are very good. But this is still a remarkably stodgy list — one that shows that the whole middle-aged respectability fetish that’s long plagued the Grammys is now embedded in its rap voting wing.

Freddie Gibbs and Nas and Jay Electronica and D Smoke and Royce Da 5’9″ are all gifted rappers who have done great work. Most of them could justifiably be considered legends. But none of them really show the world where rap music is, let alone where it’s going. By recognizing those albums, the Grammys have pointedly elected not to recognize something like Lil Baby’s My Turn, which is probably 2020’s most popular album in any genre and which is also a fine example of the 808-heavy depressive melodic-goo rap music that currently dominates the genre’s mainstream.

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Other hugely popular, artistically important albums are also absent: Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake, Roddy Rich’s Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial, Polo G’s The Goat, Gunna’s Wunna, Rod Wave’s Pray 4 Love. Instead, the rap albums getting nominated are the 2020 equivalents of the Steely Dan album that famously beat Eminem. That’s not an indictment of the nominated albums. It’s an indictment of the stuff the Recording Academy values. It’s also a cautionary look of how things might look if the Recording Academy ever gets its way, if rap comes to rely on accepted ossified skill-sets instead of its current state of constant, furious stylistic evolution.

As someone who’s around the same age as this year’s Best Rap Album nominees, I’m not all that amped to see emotionally troubled, pill-gobbling 20-year-olds dominating rap music. But those kids are crucially moving the genre past whatever old men like me might want it to be. Fortunately, there’s at least one Grammy category that has done a pretty good job capturing where things are right now, and that’s Best Rap Song. The list of nominations there — Lil Baby’s “The Bigger Picture,” Roddy Ricch’s “The Box,” Drake’s “Laugh Now, Cry Later,” DaBaby’s “Rockstar,” and Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage” — isn’t necessarily perfect, but it’s a fairly accurate representation of the kind of rap that moves people right now. I don’t know why the division between the Best Rap Album and Best Rap Song nominees is so stark. Maybe it’s a signal that the album is increasingly irrelevant. Maybe it reflects two different voting bodies. Either way, it’s striking.

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Look, the Grammys are weird. They are always going to be weird. Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters should’ve been the biggest lay-up in the world, but it isn’t up for Album Of The Year. Instead, the Academy’s voters went for Coldplay and Jacob Collier and a deluxe edition of a Black Pumas album that didn’t even come out in the eligibility period. “Rockstar” and “Savage” are both up for Record Of The Year, but Post Malone’s Hollywood’s Bleeding is the only album that’s even rap-adjacent that’s nominated for Album Of The Year this year. I thought for sure that Lil Baby’s My Turn would be the token rap album that would inevitably lose to Taylor Swift. Instead, we didn’t even get one of those, and My Turn got snubbed even in its own category. Nothing makes sense.

But this year’s Best Rap Albums nominations still show a weird alignment between Grammy Voters and a certain streak of real-hip-hop rap conservatism. Watch out for that. Nothing good, except maybe a Freddie Gibbs Grammy win, will come out of that.

FURIOUS FIVE

1. Roc Marciano – “Downtown 81” It’s not on streaming services yet, but Roc Marciano’s new album Mt. Marci is out in the world now, and it is marvelous. (I can’t tell you whether the digital download is worth the $40 that Marci is charging on his website. Make your own financial decisions.) Right now, the only song out for general consumption is one of the few that Marci didn’t produce himself. (It’s a Jake One beat.) But otherwise, “Downtown 81” is exactly the sort of laid-back, intricately worded deadpan splendor that you can expect to hear on the LP, whenever it goes wide. So maybe that’s worth the price of a full tank of gas.

2. Meek Mill – “GTA” (Feat. 42 Dugg)

Meek Mill released his Quarantine Pack EP on Friday, and the track currently getting the big push is the downbeat Lil Durk collab “Pain Away.” But the real thrill here is in hearing Meek and 42 Dugg getting bracingly urgent over a Detroit-ass bassline.

3. Chief Keef & Mike Will Made-It – “Status” Sosa and Mike Will have evidently chosen to name their new song after this column. Gentlemen, I see this tribute, and I appreciate it. I love you too.

4. Willie The Kid & V Don – “Mother Of Pearls” (Feat. Eto) This is pretty.

5. Statik Selektah – “Play Around” (Feat. Conway The Machine, 2 Chainz, Killer Mike, Allan Kingdom, & Haile Supreme)

Once upon a time, maybe 13 years ago, I was apparently such a recognizable and influential part of the New York rap press that Statik Selektah noticed me at an MOP show, introduced himself, and tried to get me to listen to his mix CD. All these years later, Statik is a globally acknowledged boom-bap specialist with enough juice to put three of the world’s greatest middle-aged rappers on a track together. I’m proud of Statik. I bet he gets nominated for a Grammy someday.

#alchemist #chief keef #d smoke #freddie gibbs #grammys #grammy awards #hip-hop #jay electronica #meek mill #mike will made-it #music #nas #rap #roc marciano #statik selektah #stereogum #willie the kid

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daesofthepen · 5 years

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So I really like KHR fics that make Namimori into a tightknit community of retired assassins, mafioso, etc. I would like to write a fic like that at some point.

Current ideas I’ve picked up from a variety of fic:

The idea that flames can be infused into items (I.E. rain flames into someone’s tea to calm them down or knock them out)

Like mentioned above, that Namimori is full of retired trained professionals. Added to this: You have to be Really Good in these professions to make it to retirement, so they’re all Pros in their fields.

Skies being able to harmonize with each other. I like the idea of each Sky being a “solar system” in a larger galaxy. Or at least, Skies harmonizing means everyone in both Sets gets a boost. They get even more boost if there are more than two Sky sets harmonized.

Kawahira and the Arcobaleno Curse isn’t the final boss antagonist of the fic. It could be aliens that arrive on Earth a la sci-fi movie, I just want it to have a different endgame fight. Not to mention, it would be cool if all that harmonizing-among-Skies power boosts had a proper antagonist to go against. Mafia-Earth vs Some-Aliens ftw! (Could also be, like, deep ocean species or underground species, but then I could feel bad cuz they already lived on Earth too...)

The girls of KHR getting more screentime. I’m tempted to have one of them be the protagonist of the fic tbh. I know some people do fem!Tsuna when they want a female protagonist, but there are perfectly canon female characters that already exist and don’t get enough screentime in both canon and fanfiction? I like Tsuna well enough, but I kinda want to write about someone else.

I like Haru, so it’ll probably be her. Plus some noncanon Sky Flames bc I want to experiment some with that.

Okay but like, consider a Sky in Namimori. They are young and civilian-raised, so they don’t realize they’re putting their Flames into the objects and locations they visit often. This means that when they visit the park, the playground emits Sky Flames for hours afterward. If they lay in the grass for long enough, the grass remains stained in Sky Flames for days. You could even go as far to say that their bathwater has Sky Flames, so it’s even in the plumbing of Namimori. Namimori becomes a town full of remnants of Sky Flames. The “harmony” element works to calm residents, similar to Rain Flames but less effective since it’s not what they’re for, and also increase their patriotism(?) for the town.

Consider: With Tsuna’s Sky Flames sealed, another Sky unknowingly gets claim for the town of Namimori without any other Sky contesting it. This is Namimori’s Sky.

Tsuna unlocks his Flames later on in life and -- even though he has stronger Sky Flames -- he doesn’t challenge for the claim. Tsuna’s personality always felt like someone who would enjoy following someone else’s lead more than leading himself. I can see him bowing to someone else’s leadership if that person wasn’t a murderous psycho out to kill him and his friends. Why fix what isn’t broken, after all.

Some thoughts on Flames and the quantity a person has: If a person has a parent who had active Rain Flames, that not only increases their chances of Rain Flames, but they would grow up to have more Rain Flames than some random schmuck without Flame active parents who just happened to unlock Rain Flames. And two parents with active Rain Flames would almost guarantee Rain Flames in their offspring AND their kids would have more of it. Yes, I’m taking the Naruto-chakra route.

So Haru, born of two civilian parents, would have less Sky Flames than Tsuna. To reverse on that whole only-follow-the-strong-and-”pure.” Sometimes the best guy for the job isn’t the strongest.

It’s also been forever since I’ve read KHR so I’m going by the wiki, which says Haru did gymnastics and went to the private all-girls school in Namimori. Probably will include some original characters to fill in as teachers and students to flesh out the town more. And -- of course -- the girls’ parents will all have backgrounds in all kinds of illegal activities.

Imagine: Haru goes to compete with another school from another town and most of the town shows up bc hell yeah that’s our Sky.

If I want the KHR girls to have more screentime, I might have them go to Haru’s school, too, or have non-school-specific clubs which they all join. It could be like a book club. Or a let’s-make-the-pervert-disappear Statistics club. The retired mafioso and assassin adults of Namimori would find it adorable and sometimes help by hinting at the best way to go about a plan.

On one hand, it makes sense that the seal on Tsuna’s Flames is done very well and doesn’t leak. On the other hand, Tsuna attracting Haru’s attention? Not that Haru would realize what is grabbing her attention for a long while. She might assume it’s a crush lmao just like canon.

They also meet earlier so Haru gets her crush sooner, so she can get over her crush earlier, too. :3

You know what let’s go full indulgent on this fic and also include Verde.

Let’s say that while most of the time Haru’s father is absent, maybe he works as a mathematician for a big tech company alongside engineers, he sometimes gets to go on work trips to Expos and conferences to help promote the company. After Haru’s mother died, Mr. Miura became determined to financially provide for their daughter, so she could go to whatever school she wanted and into whatever field she would choose to devote herself to.

Mr. Miura gets permission to take Haru to a conference, so she can look around, meet people, check out if any job descriptions interest her, etc. That’s where she meets Verde, who’s there pitching some of his inventions.

They talk, find common ground in their passions, and maybe -- completely by accident -- they harmonize.

I like to imagine Verde as a very straight-to-the-point kind of person, so through him Haru eventually starts learning about Flames and (to a lesser extent) the mafia.

Verde has many labs and hideyholes around the world, but he moves his main lab to Namimori. And because he’s a professional inventor, technician, etc., he isn’t just lurking. Verde gets contract work by the town of Namimori and maybe some other richer families around Namimori. It probably doesn’t pay as well as he deserves, but he also gets a direct say in the safety of his Sky, so. Also, he probably is hired online/overseas constantly. He’s, like, a working professional you guys.

But anyway, Namimori goes through a (not so) minor technological revolution. Hospitals get upgraded, there are now cameras with face-recognizing technology which keep track of everyone who goes in and out of Namimori. Official underground bunkers, We start getting sci-fi up in here.

Close to when Verde first arrives, he notices that Namimori is protected by Mist Flames, a barrier that just makes people notice Namimori less unless they were directly heading there. With some Flame sensors, Verde manages to track down the source/core of the system to Kawahira’s shop.

Verde figures out pretty quick who Kawahira is and, as an Arcobaleno, he HATES Kawahira. But Verde doesn’t try to kick him out of town because that Mist barrier? Super useful for protecting the town.

Through the combined efforts of Haru and the gang, Verde, and Namimori citizens, Kawahira and Verde agree to work together to try to come up with an alternative solution for the Arcobaleno curse.

Both of them have YEARS of notes, so it’s easier to figure out what they would need: Flame-based perpetual motion machine. The problem would be making a machine that works not just in theory. Gotta make sure that while the Flames cycle continuously through the machine, non is being lost because of subpar conductive metals, and the entire thing would need a material that is really good at keeping Flames IN the machine instead of being lost over time because a large surface area increases heat lost, etc etc.

Adding some money problems for realism. Not including Verde and Kawahira, who have a personal investment in this project, they would need to hire an entire team of engineers, mathematicians, maybe some electricians, and at least one accountant to keep track of spending. Most of which need to know about Flames already to not break omerta. And then on top of that, a lot of their prototypes will be experimenting with different materials for Flame conductivity, etc. This stuff gets expensive over time, even if they have a lot of money saved up.

But anyway, eventually they get a working prototype. It just happens to be absolutely minuscule compared to the size it will have to be in real life to support the entire PLANET. So Verde presents the prototype to Viper to ask for funding --because this small prototype would show that it IS possible-- and afterward, they have no more money problems. Plus, all the other Arcobaleno find out through the grapevine and all are more than happy to pitch in in any way they can.

So the project has the opportunity for smooth sailing.

And then the aliens arrive.

#katekyou hitman reborn #khr #katekyo hitman reborn #Fanfic ideas #this got long and it's barely at the aliens #i actually looked up perpetual motion machines #no one has made one that actually works in RL in case u're curious as to how hard it would be to make one #speaks #Sky Haru fic

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storyunrelated · 6 years

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Interrogator

I'm a fairly placid person in an 'apathetic/hollow inside' sort of a way.

But if I ever happened to encounter someone who could somehow intrude into my head and read my thoughts I would politely ask them not to. If they did anyway, I would likely rip their throat out with my teeth.

The very thought of another conscious being poking around inside my head fills me with intense, disgusted rage. It's a personal foible I'll admit, but it's one I have.

And it would be worse if they were clumsy about it, too.

[If you're innocent why would you mind us having a poke around?]

Vandella still couldn’t quite believe that there’d been a time when criminal cases had hinged on something as crude as physical evidence. The mere thought made her face twist in confusion and horror. What a terrible time to have been alive.

Nowadays of course they were far more advanced. Civilized, you might say. Developments in sympathetic neural-lacing had led to - among other things - an easy and efficient way of linking human minds and letting them talk directly Technology being utilised to finally allow people to communicate brain to brain! Swapping thoughts freely and easily!. A wondrous development and no mistake.

Initially though, the egalitarian nature of the technology made it largely useless for anything professional. You couldn’t reach in and rummage around in someone else’s head without them letting you do it, for example. This changed with rapid development though, and quickly a specialised version of the device was made that allowed one of the linked human minds to probe without fear of being probed back and to overpower whatever defences the probed mind might happen to put up.

The implications of this for justice were obvious and immediate.

As might well have been expected there was your usual round of bleating protest at the time. Privacy this, violation of human rights this blah blah blah. Such anti-justice talk died down eventually once it became clear that it wasn’t making a blind bit of difference and that they were in the minority.

While the notion of having someone poke around inside your own head might sit poorly with most people, the same idea of having someone poke around inside the heads of people who looked guilty and finding out that, yes, they were actually guilty was something those same most people felt much more positively about. Their support often bordered on the rabid.

That sometimes the guilty-looking people turned out to be completely innocent was expected, but often ignored. No-one liked thinking about that sort of thing.

From this and for this Interrogators were born, those individuals blessed with a natural affinity for delving into reluctant minds and pulling out that which others would rather keep hidden. Like whether someone had killed someone else or if they knew more than they were letting on. The people whose job it was to plunge into the brain of someone else and determine - without the possibility of doubt! - their guilt or their innocence.

Vandella was an Interrogator. Obviously. Quite a notable one, too. This was why she was waved through the security door with only the most cursory waft of her identification. They knew her, it was cool. She entered the restricted area of her local Justice Bastion (a questionable name but one the PR people said was top-notch) with casual ease and yawned as she did so, heading immediately for the kitchen to make coffee. Following this, she got changed into her uniform. Following this, she settled in to see what the day held.

It held interrogations, unsurprisingly. Even when confronted with technology allowing the guilty to be easily sorted from the innocent there were still people insistent on committing crimes. Something inherent in the human condition, apparently, but Vandella wasn’t going to question poor decisions that kept her in a job. The day bulged with those in need of probing.

The first subject on her list was accused of fly-tipping. Denied it up and down, of course.

That people still lied about their guilt in this day-and-age when ripping the truth out was a known fact of life baffled Vandella. Presumably they imagined that they might be able to hold their secrets close enough to defeat the efforts of the Interrogators, apparently failing to realise that the harder they held on the harder the Interrogators would be forced to go, which would only ever have negative consequences for the person being interrogated.

But that was people. Hope sprung eternal. Maybe they’d be the first person to resist. Maybe.

Probably not though.

Draining the dregs of her coffee and silently despairing at whatever bottom-shelf supplier they’d purchased it from Vandella got up to start the work of the day, heading away from her desk and down beneath the Justice Bastion (such a strong, powerful name!) to where the holding cells and the interrogation rooms were.

There, she was nodded at in greeting by various guards and technicians and other Interrogators already going about their business. By the time she arrived at her interrogation room the subject was already there and already set up. Vandella made a mental note to buy her support team some chocolates - they’d really outdone themselves of late.

The subject was a wispy slip of a man who looked even smaller than he likely was sitting in the large, one-size-fits-all interrogation chair. On seeing Vandella enter he started quivering harder than he had been to start with. Vandella just shook her head. His eyes bulged, swivelling fearfully to keep Vandella in sight as she pottered around the cell setting everything up to her liking.

As a rule, subjects were gagged. Prior to this the constant protestations of innocence, pleas for mercy and sometimes relentless stream of inventive insults had been quite distracting. The gag solved these issues, but could do little about the stares, which were often also quite distracting. Vandella just didn’t make eye-contact. This was as a result of experience.

Settling herself in the seat opposite the subject she fished around for the nerual-plug rather like someone in the backseat of a cat trying to find a seatbelt. She found it, blew off whatever dust had collected (it was cleaned daily, this was just a habit of hers) and then plugged it into the socket set at the base of her skull.

Vandella’s own neural-lattice was implanted, like all Interrogator’s were. The subject just had a special hat on to affect a connection. Rudimentary, but more than enough for a good connection and most importantly financially prudent. Coming up with names like ‘Justice Bastion’ didn’t come cheap so they had to cut whatever corners elsewhere that they could.

No sense in wasting any time.

Closing her eyes Vandella let her cast-iron hold on her own consciousness slip enough to allow herself to slide into the head of the subject. There was a nauseating tipping sensation, of the sort a drunk might feel when off-balance and falling over forwards, and then Vandella was crashing through a door.

Imagine you were pushing open a door with all your weight, expecting from experience that it was a heavy door that required effort. Only today it wasn’t, and all your effort and weight meant that you can floundering through the door far too fast and far too clumsily. It was like that. She closed her eyes, tipped, and was then falling through a door that shouldn’t have opened so easily.

And then she was in a filing room, in the dark, smelling the hot dust. She was in.

All visitors and intruders into another person’s mindscape perceived it as something comprehensible, but usually chaotic. Like a busy city during rush hour, or a vast supermarket full of angry shoppers. Something overwhelming and unhelpful but something they could at least understand. No-one would have been able to do anything with the raw view of the mindscape, even if it was possible to see it. Which it was not. The intruder’s brain would not allow it. It filled in, like with what the eye saw or more accurately what the eye did not see.

Interrogators - trained as they were - had more narrow scope and were only ever after memories. As a result they tended to see something they could work with. Vandella’s brother Vandal, for example, saw himself in a crockery shop, with all the memories and thoughts he needed painted onto commemorative plates. Their teacher at the academy Lochaim had apparently seen a beautifully tended garden and lovingly hand-reared, brilliantly coloured flowers on whose petals and stems was the information he needed.

Vandella, being a natural and a gifted prodigy, saw a filing room. A nice, easy filing room. Neatly organised cabinets sitting in neatly organised rows, waiting to be rifled through. All but one of the lights was broken so it was darker than it should have been, and all the drawers were rusty and broke when pulled out and some of the locks needed jimmying before they’d yield their contents. But other than that nice and easy.

The one consistent theme running through all of these ways of visualising the memories of their subjects was that everything was perfectly happy and settled until the Interrogator showed up, at which point disorganisation was inevitable. They tried to be delicate, they really did, but it just wasn’t something they could really do much about. Things were set up so that making a mess was the only possible option. Making a mess or leaving it alone, which just wasn’t in the service of justice.

Vandal would knock over cabinets of plates with wayward elbows or disrupt carefully balanced displays by nudging the wrong thing. Lochaim would have to trample those beautiful flowers to get to the ones he wanted. Vandella would have to pull files and bring them to the one functioning light to see if they were the ones she wanted and if they weren’t then there was no easy way of making sure they got back in the right place.

It was the same for everyone. It was just how it worked.

But they were professionals. They’d been trained and drilled to cause as little disruption as humanly possible. If anyone was going to be stepping into your head in search of justice you’d want it to be one of these guys, not just any amateur. An amateur might make an even bigger mess, and then where would you be?

Not as if the damage was long-lasting anyway. The brain put everything back the way it was meant to be in a week or so. Most of the time. Sometimes helped with a little therapy. Innocent subjects were even given a discount for the therapy so everything was completely fine.

Steadying herself, Vandella took a moment to adjust. No matter how many times she did it the jolt always put her off-balance, and every room was always a tiny bit different - enough to disorientate for the first couple of seconds. Squinting in the gloom and sweeping a practise eye around her surroundings she moved further in, moving whichever way her gut told her felt most right.

“Let’s see…” she said, one hand coming up in front of her, moving through the air that was not there, groping after something she could only barely sense. Like trying to find an air current.

As concrete and real as the filing room might have looked, it wasn’t. Obviously. Merely a projection of the information being received, adjusted to a form that Vandella could comprehend. The pull she was feeling, the one that was gently tugging her in one direction over any other direction, was one without any real-world analogue. The idea of following a breeze was just the closest approximation her brain could come up with. And so it was.

Her hand settled on one filing cabinet out of all the other ones present. She smiled. That was quick. Normally it could take minutes. Sometimes even longer. Today was clearly a good day. But narrowing it down to just the one cabinet was only the first step, there was still rifling to be done. Putting aside the possibility she was just plain wrong to start with, which could happen but which she decided probably wouldn't. Not this time.

Squatting, she took hold of the handle on the bottom-most drawer and gave the thing a wrench. There was a painful screech of protesting metal which put her teeth on edge and the drawer came halfway out. Another pull saw it coming the rest of the way. In the gloom - the light was behind the filing cabinet she was looking in, and so blocked - she could vaguely see files but no details. This was expected. Letting her hand wander as it may she picked one at random and pulled it out, standing up and moving closer to the light to have a better look.

The page had writing, but the words were meaningless. Looking at them gave no hope of reading them, but did still fill Vandella’s head with their contents. It was odd, rather like she was looking at something she’d seen already and was just remembering it. She saw a morning some days prior and pawed through the pilfered memory for any trace of a date, flicking through stolen images taken into her own head and quickly finding a moment when the subject had glanced at their phone. This memory was from a day or two prior to when the crime had actually occurred.

This was a start. Now to find something after the date of the crime.

Bracketing was a simple technique, though like all simple things to pull it off properly required practise and a certain level of innate talent. The idea was to find a memory before and a memory after the event you were interested in. That way you could limit whatever damage you had to cause in order to pinpoint the exact information. Basic stuff.

Returning to the drawer Vandella did her best to return the file to where she thought it had come from, closed the drawer and then moved one up. Again there was a brief spurt of effort and horrible noise as the cabinet had to be forced open and then Vandella was pulling out another file. A brief examination of another ransacked memory showed that this one was from perhaps three days before the crime.

She’d gone in the wrong direction. Everything in this filing room was backwards compared to the last couple she’d done. That happened sometimes, though agreeably not to her for a little while now. She’d got complacent.

“Oops,” she said, shoving the file back more-or-less in the place she’d got it from

Moving to the next cabinet and starting from the top she quickly found something of more use to her - a memory from the day just after. This was more like it. She couldn’t help but grin. Today was going swimmingly.

Her hand clenched involuntarily, a spasm that saw the paper she was holding crumpled to a ball. Regrettable and unfortunate, but one of those things. A foible of the neural interface. Nobody ever said it was perfect. Uncrumpling it she smoothed it out as best she could and put it back, hopefully somewhere near where it was meant to be.

She started to work her way backwards, dipping in here and there, getting closer and closer to what had been estimated to be the rough time of day the crime had been committed. With every memory she drank in she saw more and more that this subject had been nowhere near the scene of the crime.

It was looking increasingly likely that this subject was innocent. A pain, that.

Guilty persons were fairly easy. All you had to do was find that one memory of theirs that showed them actually committing the crime and you were done. Sometimes this was fiddly when that memory proved hard to track down, but once you got it you were basically done.

Innocent people, by contrast, you had to make sure about. You had to narrow down your search to find the general timeframe of the crime and then just keep narrowing it down and down and down until you’d completely proven that they had nothing to do with it. Memory by memory.

This took time and this made a mess. But the alternative was letting guilty people go and letting innocent people suffer for it. Well, suffer in an intangible, ‘injustice is intolerable’ sort of a way. The suffering that came from having someone paw through their thoughts was just an unavoidable part of the process and therefore didn’t count.

Laboriously did Vandella go through every single memory that the subject had on the day of the crime, absorbing them in their entirety and knowing - in the truest, rawest sense of ‘knowing’ that it was possible for a person to get - that the subject was totally free of guilt. Cramming the last memory back into whichever drawer was closest (she was grumpy) Vandella grimaced.

“Waste of time…” she said, sinking into a sulk and slouching slowly to the door, through which she exited the filing room and the subject’s head altogether.

There was a jolt and a blinding flash and Vandella was back in the interrogation cell. One hand dabbing away some of the blood dribbling from her nose the other went up to disconnect the neural link.

Across from her the subject - quivering, gibbering quietly and with arms spasmodically straining against the bonds keeping them in their seat - had soiled themselves. They did that sometimes, unfortunately.

Her support team were already in motion before Vandella had stood up. A hustling bustle of professional came bustling professionally in, unbuckling the subject and dragging them limply from the room as another member ran Vandella through a standard and light barrage of post-interrogation tests. She passed, obviously.

Not the most inspiring way to start the day, all told. She would have preferred someone comfortable guilty. Now she just felt like she’d pissed her valuable time up a wall. It’d ruin her mood all the way through lunch, she just knew it.

“Can I get someone in here to clean this up?” Vandella asked, gesturing vaguely at the puddle the subject had left on the seat and the floor below it. The team member who’d administered the test nodded silently and left at speed to go fetch someone to do that. Vandella sighed.

The smell would hang around for days, she just knew it.

END

#Interrogator #Amwriting #Writblr #Writeblr #Writing #Short #Short story

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kinaaadman · 3 years

Text

Dangerously in Love

r. rodriguez

photo by: Jan Kryciński

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent” – Isaac Asimov

In the world of wolvendom.. There once was a man named Lindow Amamiya, and he looked like a typical guy who gets all sorts of girls in the class although he can’t feel any sorts of emotions at all which is probably why he is single and had no relationship experience or whatsoever. He’s an orphan and he is an teacher in a magical academy. During his average daily life of wasting time away by reading books he was sitting around and is so relaxed as he read a book. Time passed and he managed to fall asleep. As he woke up he is awake in some place that is quite unfamiliar with him..

Lindow Amamiya’s POV

Lindow: “Where am I?” He whispered

I looked around the premises to get clues in regards where in the world am I

As I look around I observed that I am in a room in which the windows are all boarded up and bolted shut as if something monstrous would escape from the room in a way that its impossible to remove these boards. Although the windows are boarded up I noticed that there’s at least an electricity in the building and a light projected in the room that is bright enough to illuminate the room almost completely. I also noticed how precious the materials are and there are cameras inside the room. There are also chairs and tables across the room all scattered in an chaotic manner almost as if someone was in a hurry to get out of these place. It also resembled as that of a classroom.

As I looked closely on the boards I decided to try and communicate with the perpetuator behind these predicaments

Lindow: “It seems like I was dragged away while I was sleeping and locked me up in here.. Well these materials are precious and in which it is an honor to lock me up using such materials, Whoever hears me I’m not that strong you know? I know someone’s there because of the cameras installed in this room.” He said mockingly

Silence filled the entire room

Lindow: “I guess whoever is there is away..” He murmured

As I walked around and looked for answers in regards to where am I, I noticed an floating orb and it seems to be getting bigger and bigger. As I get closer a silhouette of a girl becomes clearer and clearer. The girl came out of the orb and managed to push me and we both fell onto the ground.

Hannah:” Ow.. Where am I? Who are you?” She asked in confusion

Who is this girl? Why did she came out of an orb? As far as I know there’s no magic that is able to distort time and space. These questions popped out of my head but I guess there’s only one way to find out..

Lindow: “Argh.. That’s my question. Who are you? Where are you from? You’re the one who came out of nowhere you know..” He said with a straight face

As I looked closely she’s blonde and looked like a typical girl that every man wished for. Well it’s not like I would know that, but it is according to my commoner’s dictionary.

Hannah Campbell's POV

Lindow:” Argh.. That’s my question. Who are you? Where are you from? You’re the one who came out of nowhere you know.. “He exclaimed.

That’s a good question.. Who Am I? Where did I came from? All I know is I came from an village and was talking with my friends and everything after that is so hazy..

Hannah: “I’m sorry but I was expecting that you would know that.. I do know my name atleast. It’s Hannah Campbell how bout you? What’s your name?” She asked energetically

Lindow: “It’s Lindow.. Lindow Amamiya. A pleasure to meet you.” He said with a straight face

This guy seems to be mocking me. Who says those words without energy or expressions at all anyway? Pleasure? More like a drag for this guy as far as I can tell but either way I need to know what’s going on so I need to calm myself.

Hannah: “So what’s with this place anyway?” She asked curiously

Lindow: “I was hoping you’d know.” He said mockingly

Lindow then proceeded to discuss what he knew about the situation and as soon as he was about to ask about why Hannah can’t seem to remember anything besides her name, something appeared in the illuminated light. It looks like a Robot Cyclops eye with bright red light came out of it with a sea urchin like figure that floated in midair. Just what the hell is that thing? The thing then began to spoke to us with a strange tone that seemed to be happy about what's going on.

Sea urchin like figure: “Hi and welcome to Magia Arcadia Academy I am program: Sea Urchin and if you would be so kind please step onto the particle accelerator to know more about your current situation. It’s the thing that shines light at the end of the room with some floating circles on it. It should be able to transfer you guys to me. Basically it is a magic teleporter. Hurry up now you guys don't want to be late nyehehe” says happily

I felt as if something fun is about to happen and so I immediately stepped onto the teleporter and Lindow on the other hand seemed to be stuck in his place and had no reactions or whatsoever that I ended up calling out to him right before I disappear.

Hannah:” Lindow c'mon hurry up we might miss something” She said excitedly

As I stand in the teleporter, I was enveloped by the light that teleported me and it was blinding enough that I had to close my eyes because it hurts. As I open my eyes I saw Lindow came shortly after. I looked around my surroundings and noticed quite a few people are gathered in here. The place has a stage, it is also an open area compared to the room earlier. The place looked like a beach now that I continue to gaze upon it. Shortly after my sightseeing, the sea urchin began to talk.

Lindow Amamiya’s POV

As Hannah called out to me before she steps into the teleporter the words that the robot said reeked like a trap all over the place. Whatever happens I guess even from the beginning of my capture we played in that thing's hands and there's nothing I can do about it. As I opened my eyes I saw people that seemed to be waiting for sea urchin to talk.

What's going on? Why is there a Cyclops that talked to us? Who is he? Why are we gathered? Why is the area open compared to the room earlier where they almost had no intentions to let us get away? Something's wrong.

Sea Urchin: “Hello there folks today we are gathered for such an important announcement.. I am certain that most of you that were in here ahead of time has figured out already that you cannot escape in this place due to the barrier and it is strong enough to dispel any magic attacks. Furthermore I have a proposal and that is.. a killing game. The rules are simple, kill a person that you're with without any witnesses and after the body is found we would hold a trial and if the killer gets away with it the killer gets to live while everyone who are innocent well.. they get to die.” It said menacingly

After the thing said those words I am almost certain that it is serious. Everyone was shocked by the proposal and they can't seem to accept it. Furthermore I may have been known as a genius but I don't have any magic but perhaps I can destroy the barrier with my anti magic..

Sea Urchin:” Oh and one more thing if the innocent discovered the killer well.. they can expose the killer and only the killer will die and they get to live. While if they both parties agreed to have work with them and the killer gets to live and so is the accomplice. Any questions?” It said jokingly

Suddenly a guy got pissed off and he had extraordinary strength that he managed to pick up a whole boulder and threw it at sea urchin. Everyone then started to be in chaos and started firing to one another but somehow another sea urchin is created. It was so clear that sea urchin was annihilated by the boulder because of the impact but somehow sea urchin managed to recover again with magic.. Wait something’s not right a device that is powered in magic can't control itself and always has a host as its source of magic. Which means one of us is behind these predicaments..

Sea Urchin then decided to kill the guy that tried to attack him. Everyone showed fear in their faces as they watch the guy burn away in smithereens that lead to death. In that moment, everyone realized that this is really happening. Lots of people died battling one another as well so much that half of us are the only ones left. We are 12 in total and one of us is the mastermind. Everyone then decided to introduce themselves for their own good. And of course it started with me.

Lindow: ”My name is Lindow Amamiya, I am the ultimate anti magic magician. A pleasure to meet you” He said with a straight face

Abby: “The name is Abby Hasunuma, The ultimate magic barrier magician.” He said formally

Kurt: “I’m Kurt Princeton, The ultimate swordsman.” He said seriously

Stella: “Stella Velvet, The ultimate fire magician” She said irritatedly

Jasper: “Jasper Kingston, The ultimate air magician and I'm looking forward to our future endeavors” He said enthusiastically

Jason: “ This is lame, I'm Jason Birmingham, The ultimate earth magician.” He said sarcastically

Michael: Projects text into a screen in his robot suit it says “I’m Michael Johnson, The ultimate technician. Nice to meet u ^_^”

Yuna:” I’m Yuna Priestess, the ultimate water magician” She said happily

Gordon: “I’m Gordon Wang Xiao, the ultimate chef and say no more to peasant’s food” He said boastfully

Yujiro: “I’m Yujiro Takamura, the strongest man in the world” he said horrifyingly

Finally it’s Hannah’s turn

Hannah: “I’m Hannah Campbell, well.. here’s the thing I’m no ultimates or whatsoever but all I know is I opened a portal through here and Lindow was a witness of that! And I don’t actually remember anything past that..” She said gloomily

Patricia: “I’m Patricia Mondragon, unfortunately I don’t remember mine either.” she said innocently

Everyone started to talk and they can’t believe that in these two people they can’t remember their pasts and what’s more is that Hannah opened a portal out of nowhere. In which it is a magic that doesn’t exist in our world and needed technology to do so but according to her she did it with shear mental will. I’ve also learned that she’s from a village far away and suddenly she’s just here. I wonder if that’s possible.. I believe there’s something more onto this.

After they discussed, they all agreed to explore the areas.

Days passed and not a single one of us found a possible way out. The area that we’re in isn’t so big either, it only consisted of an island with a big statue of sea urchin in it and two buildings that has rooms that we all sleep onto, it is divided into two buildings for males and females. We are separated from one another. The buildings also contained rooms for us based from our skills and abilities except for Hannah Campbell. It seemed that the perpetrator didn’t expect these circumstances. If so I bet that person observed Hannah, I must stay close to Hannah.

Hannah Campbell’s POV

Lately Lindow decided to stick around with me. It seems that he wants to be friends with me. That is nice I hope to make lots of friends in this adventure. Although it seemed that we have to kill one another in order to get out..

Nothing strange happened every day besides Lindow’s curiosity to be friends with me. Although it seemed like he don’t react or show emotions at all.. I wonder what’s wrong? I’d better ask him eventually.

At some point, Sea Urchin decided to call a meeting it states that we should all meet at the statue. We were there and everyone was given a some sort of record tape. Except for me.

Hannah: “Sea Urchin, How come I don’t have one?” She asked as she frowned her face

Sea Urchin: “You don’t need one after all that are your secrets and yours is revealed already.” It said with a straight face

Hannah: “Well I guess so...” She said as she frowned her face

We watched the record tapes that were given to one another in but we decided to share it to one another so that we would know everyone’s motives. It seemed that the contents of the tapes are about their families or someone important to them whom were taken away by Sea Urchin. Sea Urchin then suddenly showed up in front of us

Sea Urchin: “This are your motives to kill one another hehehe. After all of you manage to get out of this place, is when you would ever know what happened to them.” It said menacingly

After Sea Urchin spoke those statements everyone started to not trust one another but Lindow still decided to stick with me for some reason. He also seemed unfazed by the video that was given to him. Perhaps he trusts me and perhaps he believed that the individuals in the video are okay.

Few days later while I ate together with Lindow a body discovery announcement rang across the two buildings. There were two bodies it was Gordon Wang Xiao, the ultimate chef and Patricia Mondragon which later on Sea Urchin announced that her skills were of the Ultimate Assassin although she intended to keep it, someone knew due to her high position in the society and the culprit killed her because of it apparently. They were severely mutilated and my memory from that went hazy. My split personality took over and the trial ended subconsciously and apparently I turned into a detective all of a sudden and managed to win the trial. I grew closer to Lindow and understands him more because of what he told me after he narrated what happened in the trial. I later found out that he can’t feel emotions but somehow whenever I’m around, he felt something apparently. The culprits were apparently Jason Birmingham the ultimate earth magician and Stella Velvet the ultimate fire magician and their power were traced by me when my split personality apparently took over. They are also the ones who had a high position in their world that they are lived in so much that they concluded to kill Gordon and Patricia and it was later on proved that they were the culprits thanks to keen observation of Lindow and Hannah’s split personality. During the trial my split personality was interrogated and found out that I was jumping between habitable worlds since my world went into oblivion. I said that I couldn’t stand for it to happen again which is why I tried to save worlds as much as possible, Now 4 of us are dead there’s only the 8 of us.

Several trials occurred and my bond with Lindow grew stronger we managed to find out the mastermind before she manage to kill everyone. We later on knew that the world is still intact but several killing games has occurred at the same time that we were playing it. As we managed to expose the mastermind, the whole place collapsed and turned back into the room that we were in from the beginning and apparently it was made possible by simply running it with illusion magic that Yuna was so accustomed of. So much that it cannot be detected by magicians and she happens to be the mastermind. Lindow’s anti magic properties accidentally canceled some of the illusions which led to the capture of the mastermind. Lindow used his anti-magic to dispel the illusions and we managed to get out of the place. We managed to survive with 4 of us left excluding Yuna. It was Yujiro, Michael, Me and Lindow managed to survive. Me and Lindow’s bond grew exponentially big and we fell in love with each other during the struggles that we went through. We then created an organization against the terrorists across the world and locked Yuna for interrogation purposes and with the help of my power I read Yuna’s mind to locate where the other games are being held at. With the help of my friends and my love one we managed to stop the killing games that occurred across the world.

#creativewriting #12jotham_group_three #love #short story

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shalegas34 · 6 years

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Chapter 1

My case worker rang the doorbell and took a step back, narrowly missing the pot plants which lined the edge of the verandah. I imagined a family of vegans living inside. Okay. Not the weirdest I’d seen.

“G’day,” the father exclaimed as he answered the door.

“Hi Mr. Burkley. How are you?” my case worker initiated the formalities.

“Good thanks, how are you?” the father replied.

We entered the house.

“This is my wife, Lucie,” the father continued, pointing to a blonde woman in smart clothes packing lunches in the kitchen. They’d done this before. The inexperienced families always lined up to greet us at the door, which made me feel like I was about to be sentenced.

“She’s a teacher,” the father continued, leading us towards the stairs. “My name’s Rob. I work at the dairy plant a couple of streets that way. I’m a technician. And you must be–”

“Hey what’s up?” a voice much louder than Rob’s truncated his introductions. I looked up to locate its source just as Rob let out a weary sigh.

A short guy with thick auburn hair, not much older than me, was sauntering down the stairs two at a time. “I’m Macquarie. I’ll show you to your room, follow me.” He reached out his hand as if he expected me to take it and let him drag me into the light. I kept my hands in my pockets and shuffled towards the stairs. Rob turned to talk to my case worker instead.

“So what��s your name then?” Macquarie asked, as he slowed down so I could keep up. I could tell it caused him pain.

“Map,” I replied.

“Map?” Macquarie raised an eyebrow and laughed. “That’s weird.”

“Oh yeah?” I snapped. “It’s not like it’s my name or anything, that shit that’s all over my birth certificate.”

Macquarie shrugged, unfazed. “You should just change your name if you don’t like it.”

“Right.” I glared at him.

“You could literally call yourself anything,” he continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “We live on Kyrrah Street. You could be Kyrrah.”

“Yeah, how ‘bout I just go with Sydney? That’d put me right on the map,” I said, injecting some acid into my voice.

He was really oblivious. “You can’t be Sydney. That’s a guy’s name.”

“This my room?” I pointed at the only room with its door open, neatly arranged Ikea furniture visible within.

“Yep,” Macquarie said, throwing the door open even wider than it already was. “Just chuck your stuff on the bed.”

I placed my bag on the floor. He pretended not to notice.

“This is Atlas’s room,” he continued after a slight pause, indicating the next room down the hall from mine. “Atlas, come out,” Macquarie shouted, pounding on the door.

A tall guy with ratty blond hair emerged from within, a scowl defacing his features. “Fuck off, Macquarie,” he said. “Oh…” he continued, noticing me. “What’s up?”

“Hi,” I replied.

“Umm…” Atlas scratched at his neck, trying to think of something to say, but Macquarie had already moved on.

“This is Liberty’s room,” he said, pounding on another door. The girl who opened it looked just as sour as Atlas, and her room was littered with just as much garbage.

“Yeah, so, welcome,” Liberty said when she saw me. “You can come in here if you want to chat. Just knock first.” She pretended to whisper. “It’s the only good thing about him. He knocks.”

Macquarie led the way to the final room on that floor. “This is the parents’ place.” He cracked the door open to reveal another mess, this time atop a double bed. I frowned. What kind of person refers to their folks as “the parents”?

“Where’s your room?” I asked.

A strange look crossed Macquarie’s face.

“Um, upstairs,” he said. “Wanna see?”

“Whatever,” I replied. I didn’t care that much, but something seemed off about him, and my curiosity got the better of me.

“We gotta go to school soon. So I’ll just show you quickly,” he blabbered.

We ascended another flight of wooden stairs. It ended on a small landing, which itself ended in a closed door. Not just closed, as it turned out: a locked door. Macquarie pulled a silver key from his pocket and turned it twice in the lock. Okay, I’d been wrong about this place – I hadn’t seen weirder after all.

“Well,” Macquarie said. “This is my room.” He pushed open his door and light flooded the landing. I blinked a couple of times.

Macquarie’s room was a converted attic. The two sides of the ceiling sloped upwards to meet in the middle, and a row of skylights let plenty of sun in. This place was as big as half the second floor, and I felt like I’d just walked into a CEO’s office. Centre of stage was a big wooden desk, the papers on top meticulously arranged. Bookshelves and floor-to-ceiling wardrobes lined the wall on the left. The double bed looked like it had never been slept in. There was a fucking en suite. Not even the parents’ room had an en suite.

“You should go to your room, or downstairs, or something,” Macquarie said. “I have to get ready.”

He just about pushed me out and I didn’t need asking twice. I legged it back down the stairs, bummed the wifi password and a house key off Liberty, and shut my door. One by one, I heard the other kids, and finally Rob and Lucie, leave on their way to school or work. There was a slight scuffle as the door closed for the last time.

“What about Map?” I heard Rob’s voice from the verandah.

“I’ll ask the school about a place for her,” Lucie replied.

“We can’t just leave her alone,” said Rob.

“Take her to work. She can sit in your office. Just for today,” Lucie suggested.

“Really short notice, this one,” Rob complained.

I made my way downstairs and scribbled a note on the kitchen counter. ‘Gone shopping.’ I left via the back door just as the front one reopened.

---

I knew the area somewhat well. I’d lived all over Sydney by that point, even though I was only 14. I headed to the closest shopping centre and bought a bag of chips at Coles with my savings. I ate them in the park, and ended up sharing them with two homeless women who were camping there.

“Thanks hun,” one of them said.

“You should be in school,” the other one admonished.

I shrugged. I’d been in five different schools so far; this would be my sixth. I didn’t care much for it anymore, because starting again continuously was so tiring. Everyone pitied you, or they stared at you funny, or they took the piss. Whenever I did manage to make friends, I had to move away again. I just preferred not to get attached.

“I don’t give a shit about school,” I said, and it was half true.

“Isn’t that a truth,” the first woman said approvingly, but her friend frowned.

“Don’t encourage her. You should finish year 10 at least, easier to get a job that way.”

“I have three certificates from TAFE and I still can’t get a job,” the first said scornfully.

We finished the chips and I walked slowly back to the house. Lucie had added her own note beneath mine. ‘No worries. There’s food in the fridge if you want it.’

I heated up a portion of lasagne and sat in the garden, watching planes fly high overhead. There was a northerly wind today, it was warm and muggy. I wanted to be a pilot; that was a job which would suit me, I thought. Here one day, there the next. I couldn’t imagine anything different anyway.

#sydney backstory #sydmac

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midnightluck · 7 years

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@leafyxthiefy and I were discussing the sad lack of Disney aus, and then High School Musical mas au was mentioned, and well, look, I ain’t gonna write it, but here’s how it might be done, and if you wanna, please do and tag us?

Izo really loves theater, yeah? And Haruta. They used to put on productions of fairy tales in the living room and rope their siblings into being the cast, and Marco as the oldest ended up trying to direct/help/figure it all out for them, and he somehow just never got out of the habit? and they're in high school and yet he's still doing it and then we have Izo and Haruta as idk a real nice friendly casual ryan and sharpay?

and idk one of his other siblings, probably Thatch???? helps with the music sometimes and he's like, Marco, let's write a love story, and Marco is like nope, no thanks, let's stick to adventures like we do, kay? kay

Thatch is like, "noooooo we've never done a love story" "and I'm not gonna" "c'mon, izo would love it" "but it's a love story" "look we'll throw in pirates, too, okay?" "......" "you love pirates" "......no fair fine, okay"

and oh, it's the tale of roger and rouge

and usually he writes the roles for Izo and Haruta, yeah? with them in mind, which is kinda unfair because they're the stars of the theater dept now because of course they are, and they're amazing, of course, but it's hard for anyone else to compete when the main roles are literally written for them, you know? Only it's love story, and it's hard for Marco to wrap his head around for them, and he starts to drift, starts to go back to the fairy tales, starts to do typical prince/princess stuff.

Only, the princess is boring, so let her snark.

The prince is too perfect, so make him fail.

And somewhere along the line, he starts writing for himself, because he can only write what he knows. The princess becomes a pirate, Rouge, queen of the seas, embodiment of freedom, all sly smiles and snark and slippery, stealing and singing and leading a merry chase, and the poor guy, Roger, chases after her through a series of pratfalls, setting out to be pirate king and blinded by the stars she put in his eyes, and it's ever so fun, with quick teasing songs and a lot of playful exchanges and this one lovely slow duet on a beach in the moonlight

meanwhile, in the background, Ace and Sabo meet at, idk, karaoke. Because Luffy. Nah, wait, that's too au, hang on, we can fix this

they attended the same elementary school. Ace and Sabo were bestest friends and he ran away to their house all the time because his parents were never home so they didn't know, only one day they had to move and took Sabo with them

...he tried to run away and got hit by a car?

Ace heard, thought he was dead, but he was just in a coma for a while? forgot stuff? and his parents didn't notice because it's not like they've been around anyway?

So Sabo turns inward and studies, because college is the closest escape he can manage, and he's gonna get a full ride and not rely on his parents for anything. He's gonna disappear and be independent if it kills him

boom, science squad Sabo

MEANWHILE Ace likes Disney movies and reading, but his Grandpa wants him to join the military???? he doesn't want to, but Garp is like "ROTC or gtfo" so Ace compromises with sports, because still teams and activities

so he has to sports team, and boom, we get crouching jock hidden nerd, and he lowkey hates it, but it's life, whatever, and if he doesn't want it, well, there's nothing he wants more, so might as well, right?

Until. Until.

So Sabo has this grades thing down, right, but if his parents move him one more time, he's gonna have to start working his way up to valedictorian again, he hasn't got time for this. He needs something to look hella good on college applications, and it needs to keep him out of the house but not take up valuable time and not sports, ugh, teamwork? no thanks, and nothing that requires anything academic, so it's band or theater, really.

He goes theater, maybe he can be like a lighting technician and study in the booth or something, or learn a practical skill like makeup to hide scars; overall a lot more practical than music. So he joins drama and doesn't think twice about actually auditioning.

And that's all well and good except he leaves the library one day to go to drama club and he passes Ace in the hall and Ace doubletakes so hard he almost falls over. It can't be Sabo, it can't--but it looks like him, he walks the same, maybe--maybe???? so screw practice, he follows Sabo to the theater, where tryouts are happening today because plot convenience

"Sabo," he says, and the guy turns around. Same eyes, same face, same suspicious paranoia, same bags under his eyes, same stubborn frown--how could it be anyone else? "Sabo," he says, reaching out, and the guy steps back. "Do I know you?" he says, and Ace goes cold

And he walks away, so Ace chases him all the way to the theater. He gets into a shouting match with has-to-be-Sabo right in the middle on the auditorium, and the theater teacher sighs and says, "if you have something to say, come up here and say it. Obviously you're dramatic enough for the drama club."

Ace storms on stage and yells at Sabo and Sabo yells right back and falls into taunts as naturally as blinking, and it's so easy, and he knows just what to say to get Ace to go red and splutter and chase him, and he also knows the stage and the area because it's his domain, and he bounces around as Ace chases him, yelling at him to come back, and Sabo just taunts and like, hangs over the rail of the fake pirate ship, and Ace throws up his hands and stomps around and says things like, "Why did I even miss you?!" and "I can't believe you forgot!" and "Luffy! Remember Luffy????" and actually--actually Sabo does

Sabo goes soft and says, "Luffy?" and Ace folds his arms and says, "Luffy," and Sabo sinks down to sit, resting his head on the railing as everything falls into place behind his thought, and Ace stands there, looking up, his heart in his eyes, and the teacher yells "Scene!" and Marco stands up from the front row and says, "it's them or I walk."

and of course the problem is that Marco wrote himself a love story, and as Sabo tilts his head and smirks sideways and says the words Marco wrote, of course he'd start to fall in love, because that's what he wrote it for. And every time Ace laughs and gets back up, every time Ace has a passionate, poetic speech, well of course the words cut Marco to the heart because that's what he wrote it for.

And the fact that they work so well on stage is only compounded by their chemistry offstage, where Sabo will drape himself across Ace's back to read the script over his shoulder and Ace will run fingers through Sabo's hair and murmur in his ear on days when the eye-bags are particularly deep. Sabo won't talk about his scars but Ace can touch them, press his hand right up to them, and Sabo will just sigh and go limp. No one's allows to mention Ace's tattoo, but Sabo's allowed to trace the letters with careful fingers. For two high school guys who met a few weeks ago, they're amazingly close, and Marco can only watch it all happen and tell himself that it's good that they're like this. It'll make the play better. It's a love story; that's what he wrote it for, and he never once expected to want it to be his.

And, see, Sabo owes Ace his sanity and Ace owes Sabo his personality, but they both owe Marco for each other and neither one is ever gonna forget that

And Ace goes to Marco to try to "get to know his character" and Sabo goes to Marco to ask if this line needs more vibralto or perhaps this harmony is just--like, could we do it like this? and Thatch is in the background making these awful faces at Marco behind their backs and Marco is Ignoring Him Entirely

Leafy: Sabo being the highish classed boy that he is he may have learned the piano and one day, he could be sitting in the theatre room, his hands lazily playing some sort of ballad, his fingers just glide on the keyboard but like unbeknowest to him, Marco had snuck in because its free period for him too, to like practice some chorus lines for the play and the way that Sabo plays with his serene expression, just looking like he belongs and the way he makes the piano sing, it makes him want to be a part of that, he is captvated and wants to join but?? is he allowed? The pull of the music is too strong tho and before either of them know it, he's there too, his fingers also on the piano now, the little song becoming something more as it turns into a little duet and sabo is startled at first but also?? he has a high respect for Marco and his skills at the piano so its like an honor and all and he loves the sound they create together?? so maybe we?? can like keep doing this if you want, just play

and oh we could probably get a scene in there where Sabo keeps "messing up" in the moonlight duet and Marco sighs and is like, no, like this, and he has to step in to show them and he only meant to do the phrase but somehow he ends up singing the whole love duet with Ace while Sabo watches his every move--for the good of the play, of course.

And Ace just can't seem to get this one bit of choreography right, where he is supposed to pick "rouge" up off the deck and spin her around and into an underarm twirl and Sabo is like, "drop me again and I'll scream, Marco, come show him how it's done" and Sabo is really light on his feet and so responsive it's a pleasure to work with him and he ends up going through the whole number, with Sabo beaming in his arms and Ace's eyes heavy on his shoulders, because he really does have to learn this, you know???

sabo being like, "I can do this backwards in a princess dress and heels, Ace, c'mon" because Sabo probably had dancing lessons. Ace learned to fight from Garp

Thatch is miming throwing up off stage

Everything is happy until a fight, teach, idk, something goes down and the school calls their guardians

Leafy: they're both like "why are you doing this? what is a play going to do for you? study and get into whatever college" while Garp is like "are you slacking on me, if you cant abandon this silly excuse of a curricular activity then what about military school?"

Leafy: so then Marco has to make things right somehow, like not entirely for the sake of the play but also for like them!! because?? he was so used to being around them and now that they are no longer there he misses them and also, like his two best friends boyfriends are miserable and not in the play together and ?? can we not do all three things? so marco recruits his siblings who happen to be in whatever sport ace is in and sabo's science lab, together they are able to help them keep up with practice/work and the play??

And then the play happens and Luffy drags his cross-clique group to go see it and all the Whitebeard siblings and basically everyone and instead of being about breaking down barriers and stuff it’s a cute little love story about defying your parents’ expectations/being yourself????

idk I’m sure there are ~Morals~ but I dunno what they are

and it ends with mas all happy and Thatch being like, “See? See? I told you a love story was a good idea!”

#marcoacesabo #high school musical au #one piece #dumb crossover ideas #au for adoption

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davidsilvercloud · 6 years

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Terry David “Butch/Butch Naked” Silvercloud

"Step aside! I shall perform the necessary heroics" Comic Book Guy/The Simpsons

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." - T. S. Eliot

11.6 Million photo views, to date at http://ButchNaked.com. Thank you. At this time I'm getting about 100,000 photo views a week.

Again... thanks for the visits.

TELL EVERYONE. Free photo downloads at BUTCHNAKED.COM

My homepage is http://ButchBoard.com

I'm not your average can of beans.

Now keep reading.

THE DAILY GRIND... ARE WE THERE YET?

Friday, 1 Dec. 2017. Doctor appointment today for a Rx refill and a shot in the bum.

It has come to my attention that over 50% of adults, in Canada, now have post-secondary education. On the face of it, this seems like a good thing... except half those degrees aren't worth the paper they're printed upon and the people who have the degrees have little to show for their effort. Schools are becoming factories on the path to employment and nothing much of anything is being taught, anymore. A Bachelor of Arts is about as useful as toilet paper except it looks good on a resume... you might know how to wear a suit and tie.

We live in an era where nobody is left behind, everyone is as good as everyone else, and everybody wins. I don't give a flying fuck if you have a degree. I'll figure out if you have brains or concrete between your ears really, really fast. There's a reason I'm reclusive... the idiots are driving me insane. I need to stay away from them.

The best post-secondary education is in technical fields... learning how to do things for a particular business or function... electrician, plumber, auto technician, etc.

While I don't trust many doctors, anymore, one does need a lot of post-secondary education to be a doctor. Nurses are frighteningly ignorant of just about everything.

Our society has become much like the old Chinese Empire that depended upon the civil service exams... useless exams that did not help advance the country at all. It kept China hundreds of years behind the rest of the planet and they are, only now, catching up. The Canadian and American school systems have become very ill and are in need of a major overhaul. I can't speak for European schools as I am not familiar with them.

Private Universities abound and are filled with teachers who couldn't get a job doing anything else. They have become factories designed to meet paychecks of professors and the whole machine that is the school. Public education is constantly and chronically underfunded.

Smart people who really want to learn will find their way through the system but will have to compete with personalities who will simply lie and cheat their way to whatever they are after.

Some of the dumbest fucks on the planet, whom I have ever met, have had university degrees. I'm going to leave it at that and move on before my blood pressure bursts a vein.

I was an Officer in the Canadian Navy. When I was going to Officer School, in Esquimalt, B.C., we had to take Morse Code by flashing light twice a day... early in the morning before breakfast and, again, after even meal and before evening study period. There were about 100 of us and we teamed up in pairs on the Parade Square where we could all see the flashing light. One person would read the light while the other person wrote down what the letters were that were being sent.

I had been in the Naval Reserves for over 2 years and was a Signalman... Semaphore flags, Ship's flags, Morse Code, and voice radio communications. I was a highly trained signalman by the time I joined the regular forces and had completed half the entire communications training there was to be had. My partner, on the Parade Square, with whom I read the Morse Code from the lights, was a friend of mine from Naval Reserve days. He had been a Radioman and had gone to Communications School with me at Reserve Training Headquarters. We knew each other well.

The point of this is that both Bill, my friend and I, knew Morse Code in our sleep and the other Cadets didn't know any code. It was VERY boring to Bill and I because the letters were being sent so very slowly. So we were chatting with each other while reading the lights.

There was a Communications Petty Officer sending the signals. He was one of our training officers. After the session, one evening, he called out Bill and me for talking out loud and said he was going to send us a "special" test... we had to read the lights again and, this time, it was going to come at us very fast. The intention was for us to fail and be placed upon detention. And so we both read the lights... and we both scored 100% with zero mistakes.

The Petty Officer was pretty cool about it. He congratulated us and said he was wasting his time sending the light Morse Code and, from now on, my friend Bill and I would be in charge of sending the lights... we were both permanently excused from reading the lights, but would now be SENDING the code. My friend Bill would go on to flight school, but I remained with the surface officers in training and would become the 'go-to guy' if we had to do anything communications and signal related. I would go on to lead a flag hoisting team that no other cadet team could beat... so we were permanently disqualified from competing again against other cadets and would compete against trained Signalmen... who we also beat.

We could hoist and re-stow signal flags faster than the ship's qualified signalmen could do it. I trained two other cadets to be part of my team, taught them the layout of the flag locker (it has slots for two of every flag, one for each letter of the alphabet, the numbers 1 to 0, plus about a half dozen specialty flags with special meanings when used... one flag was called "Corpen" which means "standby to..."). We practiced the fastest hoisting and stowing procedures until we were lightning fast. Yup... if I take on a challenge, I like to be the best.

THIS IS THE END OF THE DAILY GRIND.

IF YOU HAVEN'T BEEN HERE, BEFORE, HERE IS MORE STUFF TO READ...

I'm a bit OCD and ADHD and go on like a dripping tap. Think Sheldon Cooper, if that rings some kind of bell. I quite simply assume everyone around me is a complete idiot.

http://DavidSilvercloud.com (Blog) (http://David_Silvercloud.Tumblr.com)

http://ButchNews.com (Video) (http://YouTube.com/ButchNews)

http://ButchNaked.com (Photo Stream) (http://Flickr.com/David_Silvercloud)

http://SeriousThunder.com (Art)

http://ElectronSpeed.Tumblr.com ...(Physics... The Speed of Light, Grand Unified Theory, Gravity, Dark Matter, Dark Energy... how the physical size of the Electron is the clock that sets the speed of light. Gravity is motion and a product of the fact that nothing ever sits still, combined with the magnetic properties of Dark Matter/Energy. Nothing can ever move in an absolute circle and rest is a relativity illusion.

Absolute rest is not possible... ever. The universe can not end. Time is change and is an illusion. It is always now, everywhere, all at once, all of the time. Proof of that is that ANY object MUST be HERE and THERE at the SAME time, no matter how large... even a Galaxy. It is always NOW on both sides... here and there, in space, of the Galaxy... all galaxies, everywhere. Waves can be either physical or electronic. The duality of the universe keeps it ongoing. DNA is the battery of life. When the chains can no longer co-operate, life ceases in the body. Life, itself, is a duality. Time measurement is a relativity convenience.) Time travel is impossible because time is not a place and nothing stays where it was. One year from now the Solar System will have moved about seven BILLION kilometres through space and will NEVER return to where it was... ever.

Earth travels through space like a long wave... it has NEVER, ever made an actual circle, nor ellipse, in space. The circle/ellipse is an illusion of relativity. Nothing can ever travel in an actual circle in space... NOTHING. Nothing can ever go backward. Backwards motion is an illusion of relativity. Time is a repercussion of change and has no fixed rate... things explode or move like a glacier. At best we can only compare rates of change. Our rate of change is called the second/minute/hour/day/month/year system.

WATCH VIDEO FOR EXPLANATION OF THE PATH OF EARTH THROUGH SPACE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPjohZCMwmI

Earth moves about 7 billion kilometers through space, each year... in a long wave. Earth NEVER returns to where it was before. Earth is NOT an island in space... one of the reasons why time travel is impossible. If you take a trip through space, outside the Solar System, Earth will NOT be there when you return... it will be far, far away. You will have to return to where it will BE when you arrive... remember, it's moving very, very, very fast through space in a long wave... never a circle, or ellipse.

http://The-Shape-Of-God.Tumbler.com Manuscript of my book... The Shape of God.

Butch, himself. Visual Artist, Photographer, Physicist (Particle, Sub/Atomic Physics/Relativity)

Inhibitions are just so inhibiting, I avoid them.

I'm a friendly, but pretty blunt, kind of guy. No time for beating around the bush. I like to say what I mean and mean what I say. I'm 73 years old. Time is not on my side. You don't have to like me. I'm a social recluse, anyway. I share my life, in photos, video, and words, to let you into my life and hope to inspire you to be a productive and useful human. I have old age issues but will continue to post, here, while I'm well and able. I talk a lot... I'm told it's part of my OCD and ADHD. Come direct at http://ButchNaked.com Sign in if you wish to see me naked.

If you don't know me, the following might help you get to know what kind of person I am. I don't expect you to understand me. I can be a bit OCD and ADHD.

"They've already got more blowjobs than we'll ever get" Steve Smith (American Dad), talking about college jocks.

"Now let us touch testicles and mate for life" Alien on The Simpsons

"It never hurts to have a second set of prints on a gun" Nelson Muntz, The Simpsons.

I'm here to teach you things. While I appreciate other people's opinions, I really don't much give a crap what anyone thinks. Until you prove your worth, I will be nice but you have to earn my respect. The moment you say a word, I'll be figuring you out really, really fast. You should assume that I don't trust anyone. I've not met a single trustworthy person in my entire life. I've met lots of nice people who aren't too bright... well-intentioned folk who know little about anything, people who are nice, most of the time until you say something that offends them. Honourable people agree to disagree.

Look up the phrase "CRITICAL THINKING" then learn to practice it. Most people leap before they look and judge before they listen to the facts. Most don't have enough knowledge, nor experience, to be experts in much of anything. You don't know what you don't know. I like to remind you of that, often.

The only other REALLY IMPORTANT thing to know about me is that I, totally, despise all religions, the teaching of religion, and religious institutions... I despise them as the evilest things on the planet. If you follow a religion, you CAN NOT BE MY FRIEND. THAT'S THAT. You are an ignorant idiot who is an ever-present danger to yourself and everyone and everything around you. Nothing, absolutely NOTHING, is eviler than religion. I don't stand for, nor sing, our National Anthem because it praises a fictitious and superstitious being called 'God'. Only a brain dead moron bonehead ignorant idiot would believe such a thing.

If you have a religion, I will not associate with you... period. You are a danger to be around. Yes, I insult religions... they are extraordinarily evil. I said it, I mean it. You have a right to be an idiot, but not around me. I have a right to defend myself against the horrors of religion and I will. Religion is evil. I can't say it enough times.

http://The-Shape-Of-God.Tumblr.com

I keep a homepage at http://ButchBoard.com

My main video page is http://YouTube.com/ButchNews go direct at http://ButchNews.com

You may come directly to my photostream at http://ButchNaked.com

You must sign in to see me naked. You may download and share nude photos of me... go nuts.

GOOGLE my name (Terry David Silvercloud or David Silvercloud) for more information.

#Artist #Photographer #Vancouver Artist #David Silvercloud #Butch Naked

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