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tatooedlaura-blog · 3 years

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Little Gems

Hi all ... it’s been awhile ... but i just can’t leave Mulder and Scully alone for long ...

Sorry about that ... the kid has a new baking business she’s running out of our kitchen (she’s 16, btw) ... we COVID-quarantine finished our basement ... I rewrote my entire third novel ... I’ve had things to do :)

Love and hug and enjoy ...

@today-in-fic

&&&&&&&&&&

Little Gems

It was the look that made her stumble on her words, stutter through two syllables, hesitate on the third before rallying to pull herself back to the courtroom. Face flaming hot in an instant, she hid her clenched fists below the wooden barrier and carried on, trooper that she was.

His look.

In the middle of her sentence, she’d looked at him, the quickest of glances to see his encouraging lip twitch or the barest of nods … instead, she’d gotten popping jaw muscle, flaring nostril, and furrowed brow. She’d done her stumble because, without thought to present day for half a second, she’d rewound the past two minutes in her head. What the hell had she done to deserve that pointedly angry look?

For the next 43 minutes, she steamed slowly while her demeanor revealed nothing, back to calm, cool, collected, cadence smooth, sentence structure sound. Finally free, she moved past Mulder, dodging the crowd in the hall and slipping through his fingers as he reached for her arm, elbow, to turn her, yell at her for not saying some theory or other of his that would have gotten the case thrown out but allowed Mulder the righteous indignation of his truth.

“Hang on.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

&&&&&&&&

Continuing through the crowd at a pace not meant for five o’clock on a Thursday afternoon near a Metro station, she didn’t care that he’d driven her there. She didn’t care that her ring of keys was in his pocket. She didn’t care that her stomach needed food, her brain needed a drink, her sweet tooth needed several dozen peanut M&Ms. She did care that she had approximately $10 in her pocket, which was more than enough to get her home and she had no room for anymore cares at the moment.

She always knew that house key tucked and forgotten behind her badge would come in handy.

She would be seeing his ass tomorrow and not a moment sooner.

Mulder, on the other hand, stood there watching her storm away. Not quite sure why she was so angry with herself over a few misspoken words but the set of her shoulders and the way she threw out the ‘see you tomorrow’ told him if he did indeed see or talk to her before tomorrow, he’d possibly and probably walk away with one less appendage, be it finger or more important things.

Watching her until she disappeared into the Metro Station, he noted it contained a Blue Line so, knowing she’d get home via either Foggy Bottom or Rosslyn station, he let her go, knowing she had a key behind her badge and her emergency cash behind that.

His mind wouldn’t let it go, however. She’d been good. Damn good. Until her stumble, which, for reasons unknown to him, had made her angry. She had hesitated on two words, taken a quarter second deeper inhale than usual before she gathered and continued. He highly doubted anyone but himself had noticed but given it was Scully, she probably imagined she’d screwed everything up completely.

He chewed on this as he returned to his car, unhurried because, regardless of if he ran or crawled, he’d still be stuck in some kind of traffic between here and there.

&&&&&&&&

Scully, for her part, hated the crowds in the Metro, disliked strangers pressed this close to her, shuffled together with the unwashed masses of society, tourist and native alike, all collectively tired from their day and frustrated same as she with the swaying train and the endless wait to put on comfortable clothing and take a deep breath.

And it afforded her time to analyze Mulder’s look.

Which is exactly what she did not need at this point in time.

&&&&&&&&&&

Both moved several times during the evening to pick up the phone, find out what the other was thinking but in the end, Mulder fell asleep on his couch, worried about her, and Scully fell asleep on hers, angry at him.

&&&&&&&&&&

He honestly thought the next day would be okay. She would have spent the evening picking apart her testimony and should have, logically, arrived at the conclusion that she’d done nothing to hinder anything. He would be telling her that today when she walked in, deciding at 5:42am, while shaving, that a little reassurance would be an appropriate thing.

She walked in still irritated but hiding it … not so very well ... but well enough to return his greeting and nod when he told her she’d done fine the day before and not to sweat the stumble.

Her mug got set no so gently down on the edge of the desk , tea splashing out the sides.

All right.

Plan B.

Waiting until she’d wiped up the carnage of her very own personal DC Tea Party, he handed her her keys from the day before, “come on. We’re taking the day off.”

With a sigh, “we can’t.”

“After your stellar week with Kersh and Skinner, you deserve diamonds and ice cream. Come on.”

Fuck it. It was Friday. Why not follow? God know, she could just as easily be irritated with him outside as she could be in the confines of the basement.

&&&&&&&&&

“Are you kidding?”

“When is the last time you touristed DC? I mean, like, looked around and went to stuff and stared at it and read the little signs and learned something from what you read on those little signs?”

Another sigh, “it’s been awhile.”

“Then come on.” They walked over to the Mall, then Mulder tuned them to the Museum of Natural History.

Seeing the building and the crowd, “Mulder, it’s going to be packed in there.”

“Not where we’re going.” Up the steps, weaving through throngs in shorts and gym shoes, flipflops and sunglasses, they stood out like a tandem sore thumb, leather heels and barely there hose, Trinity tie knot and tartan pattern socks.

They drew more than a few stares. Thank God he’d left his suit jack behind.

Once they’d dropped the donation fee and flashed badges for guns, he led her past the dinosaur bones and then up to the second floor. Even though she wasn’t exactly happy, she had to ask, “um, you realize you passed the T-Rex, right?”

“He’s not going anywhere, Scully. I’ll see him on the way out.”

She hadn’t been to the second floor since, well, she wasn’t even sure what was on the second floor or if she’d ever been there at all, to be honest. Mulder turned her when they got out of the elevator and before she knew it, she was in a quiet area, glass cases surround her, a few people milling but the majority still downstairs with the bones and fossils.

“There’s nothing like the gem room in the morning.”

She fell in love as she took her first good look around. Minerals and elements and crystals along the walls, lights dimmed in spots, a sign for the Hope Diamond beckoning. Looking up at him, “how long has this been here?”

He laughed, quietly of course, because the area felt akin to a church or other place where silence and low murmurs were preferred over screaming children and echoing chaos, “the building, since around 1910, but the contents,” pretending to do some heavy math, using all his fingers and some of hers just for fun, “longer than that.”

Her crank meter dropped like a rock but some remained, “one day I’ll find you funny.”

Taking her elbow and feeling happy she didn’t jerk away from him, he led her towards the wall, “first, I’m going to take you on a tour of the blue section.”

“Are we dispensing with scientific names today? Will it be the green shiny ones and the square yellow ones and the ones that look like table salt but will kill you instantly if you ever tried to put them on a piece of corn on the cob?”

“One day, I’ll find you funny as well.”

They wandered in somewhat comfortable silence, sharing the oft-comment of ‘this one’s pretty’, ‘this one’s three trillion years old’ …

“Three billion, Mulder.”

“Once you get above a couple million, it’s all just really damn old and doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Are you sure you passed your science classes in high school?”

“Cute girls helped me cheat.”

She didn’t doubt it.

&&&&&&&&

Round about an hour later, while looking intently at the diamonds, Scully finally had to ask, her anger drained away, an empty hole left behind waiting to be filled with some kind of explanation. Standing beside him, hand resting lightly on the edge of the case, she asked in a soft voice, “why did you get angry at me yesterday while I was on the stand?”

What?!

“What?!”

“Right before I humiliated myself by not being able to say the word ‘epiglotal’, I looked at you and you were pissed at me.”

What?!

“God, Scully, no. No. I wasn’t mad at you at all. You were doing great.” He was leaning into her at this point, the intensity radiating off him enough to send world leaders to their knees in fear and her cheeks to warm at his proximity, “I wasn’t mad at you at all, I swear.”

Still quiet, “then what were you mad about?”

Talking at the glass but catching her reflection beside him, he felt like an idiot but didn’t think this was the time to attempt a lie, “um, the little shit paralegal behind me was whispering to his buddy about things he could imagine doing to you if he could get you alone in the closet in the hall for a few minutes.” She stayed silent as he stood there, feeling his stupidity growing in leaps and bounds, until he had to do something. Moving his hand closer, he reached out until he found her pinkie, hooking it with his momentarily, “I didn’t mean for you to see that. I’m sorry I messed things up.”

Sliding her hand out from him a second later, she moved it to his back, running fingers along the indent of his spine, up and down, down and up, stopping to palm his side before letting her arm dangle between them, “it’s okay. I’m just glad you weren’t irritated with me. I should have asked you sooner, I guess, instead of letting things fester in my head.”

Her touch sent his skin buzzing, his hand always on her back, but hers rarely on his, and he knew she felt his quick breath in but both ignored that for now, “just to let you know, I’d have throttled him had we not been sitting in front of that many lawyers and the judge.”

She finally smiled, the left side of her mouth turning up, “I’d have liked to have seen that.”

Going for broke, he moved his hand to her elbow, then slid it down, working his fingers into hers, as he leaned in a second time, a little bit closer, a little bit quieter, “jealousy is an ugly thing, Scully, let me tell you.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about it.” Finally, finally, finally meeting his reflection, “I’m here with you, aren’t I?”

Now warm from head to toe, “since I’ve already showed you the diamonds, how about I go get you that ice cream now?”

“In a few minutes.” Wrapping her free arm around the one holding her hand, she whispered over to him, “I kind of like it here.”

#msr #xfiles fanfic #x-files fanfic #no mama scully but peanut M&Ms so that's something #i miss the smithsonian and dc and travel #diamonds and ice cream #i think i like it here too #My writing

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lia-writes · 4 years

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rose water & cherry lips

pairing: jaskier x reader

a/n: buckle up, because it’s rose water part two. but also, i rewrote this a couple of times and am nervous as heck to post it so hopefully, this sweet little love is enough to satisfy you!

;

Winter brings about a sense of stillness and the cobbled streets of Novigrad slowly become your home. The life you share with Jaskier becomes quiet – routine, even.

With the snow, comes new feelings. Foreign in the way they settle in your chest, nestled right up next to your heart.

He plays for the crowds at a few inns and taverns. Mostly, you join him. His popularity seems to grow larger by the week. The doting women, sniffing into their sleeves or handkerchiefs watch him play with love in their eyes. It makes your heart thumpthump a little harder from across the room each time.

Stolen kisses and chaste touches at your waist had woven itself between you, comfortably. Never any less, but neither of you seemed quite brave enough to take it that one step further. In your head, perhaps. His weight on top of you, beneath the bed covers. A dream that’s woken you in a slight sweat and the need for your hand to dip between your thighs on more than one occasion.

You’re in awfully deep, looking up at him with rose-tinted glasses.

This time, as the sun begins to sink behind Novigrad’s buildings, Jaskier heads down the street alone toward a large tavern called The Hearthstone. You’re left next to the fire, a new book in one hand and a cup of fine wine in the other.

It’s late when he finishes his performance, plays a round of Gwent and heads home to you.

Despite the frosted touch to the air, drunk men stumble down the street past him and a pair of ladies' whistle at him from the torch-lit doorway of a brothel.

He ignores them and presses forward, adjusting the lute’s case on his shoulder and his grip on the bottle of wine he won... or was gifted.

When he arrives back at your door, cheeks flushed and fingers stiff with cold he expects you to be sleeping. So, when he finds you in the bathtub, back to him and the rising steam making your hair curl, the wine bottle almost slips from his hand.

You throw a glance over your shoulder, cheeks rosy from the bathwater and offer a smile. He tells himself that it’s his return that’s brought the color to your face.

Placing the bottle of wine on the desk, he sets his lute down and wrings his hands together.

In a good way, you have the ability to make him nervous. You’re the blood within his veins. The ebb and flow of his life force and he, yours. Looking at you then from across the room, his words die in his throat. His complimentary half that makes his love feel whole and needed.

The gentle splishsplash of the water beneath your dancing fingertips draws him closer to you, body lowering to sit on the floor next to the bathtub.

He reaches out to let his fingertips skim across your arm, up and down and up and down as he gazes at you. “What’s keeping you up?” he asks softly.

“Nothing... Honestly.”

A head tilt and pointed stare from him makes you sigh.

“Okay,” you relent, “I was out at the market earlier today, while you were still sleeping and... I ran into an old friend.”

“Oh?” He expects you to tell him a tale of an old lover from younger years – after all, there was once a time where the two of you were mere strangers.

You shake your head knowingly, “A female friend. We grew up together and when I saw her... On the arm of her husband... she really did seem grown-up.”

He leans forward with his elbow resting on his knee and his chin falling into his palm.

“It made you feel like you were missing something?”

“Yes.” Your stare hits him like a sucker punch to the gut.

A gulp.

The pulse in your neck jumps.

“I can’t imagine my life without you,” he begins, eyelashes fluttering with each blink until you reach out to place a finger over his lips. He thinks about letting his tongue dart out to taste you then, the light scent of rose-scented soap on your skin.

“Please, don’t. If this is what you want, then it must be sincere, Jaskier.”

“Well, you certainly make a desperate fool feel loved.”

He doesn’t understand how this isn’t sincere, surrounded by the entirety of all the love he could possibly offer you.

This is your chance. This is your chance. This is your chance.

“The water’s still warm,” you say after a beat of silence.

“Changing the subject with your... Temptation?” His eyes drag up your body, mostly hidden beneath the water, cloudy from the soaps you’d used earlier.

Your laughter is soft. The affection that warms his grey eyes darkens with something a little more lustful and you chew at your lower lip.

His hand leaves your arm to pull his boots off – chucking them across the room toward the door. The jacket he wears follows quickly.

“My wife...” it’s whispered as he stands to undo his trousers and tug his shirt over his head.

“Mmmm.” You sigh, quite content with watching him undress.

The curve of your spine, and the damp tendrils of hair that spill over your shoulders makes him hold his breath as he climbs into the bath to sit behind you.

It’s easy to settle back against his chest and feel like you’re finally home.

“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says, breath warm and tickling against the back of your neck.

Letting your fingertips intertwine, you pull his arms from where they rest against the sides of the bath to wrap around your waist beneath the water.

“Just hold me,” you mumble and he tightens his grip on you, heartbeat thumping against your back. He wonders if you can feel it – skin to skin.

The water cools as the silence between you grows, comfortably.

"I didn’t mean to fall in love with you. It was entirely accidental.”

He chuckles softly, “you did try and fight it, huh?”

“I was tired of being lonely I guess.”

“Is that all?”

“You were it all, what life had promised me as a young girl, dreaming of her future wedding with her friends.”

A kiss pressed at the side of your neck.

“You’re too good for me,” between kisses that duck to your shoulder.

“I want you... More than anything I’ve ever wanted,” your head tucks against his chest, eyes gazing up to lock with his.

Suddenly, the water is boiling.

His hands trail up your sides as he stands then, pulling you to your feet with his grip under your arms.

Laughter. Loud and filled with the hope that love exists.

You exist.

And you’re the best life he could ever imagine.

This entire thing feels so under-rehearsed and your laughter reduces to soft breaths, letting him help you out of the bath, bodies silken from the soapy water and flush against one another.

“Tell me you want this,” he fumbles to find his voice, breath stolen by the look you keep giving him.

“I want more than this,” a quirk of your eyebrow, urges him onward.

“You kill me, you know that?”

The anticipation fucking kills you, slowly stealing your breath and making your heart jump all at once. Your desire for him is painful, both lodged in your chest and pooling between your legs.

It's you that kisses him first, lips meeting his with foolish energy.

Jaskier’s hands dance down the length of your spine, nails making your body curve against his. When they round your bottom, you jump and he catches you.

With legs wrapped around his waist, you’re hungry for his touch until he nips at your lower lip.

“Please don’t rush this, this is something I never get to relive.”

His next kiss is against your smile and you notice him stumble in the direction of the neatly made bed.

Your feet touch the ground as he reaches the side, hands remaining around his neck to kiss him again.

“Are you... begging me to be patient... Jaskier?”

The weight of his body against yours throws you back onto the bed. When he straddles your thighs, you’re painfully aware of his arousal and you jerk your hips up into him – his groan reverberates against your lips

His hands grasp yours at either side of your head and you swear your knuckles whiten when he rocks himself back against you

“Two can play that game, my dear,”

You’re about to pull your hands from his to let your nails rake up his back but he holds fast, palms melding to one another.

“Apparently not,” his lips travel downward, along the edge of your jaw and pause to suck a bruise at your pulse point.

Another impatient buck of your hips has him growl lightly against your skin.

“Jaskier,” a whine, the throb between your legs winding you higher and he shifts to rest his weight between your thighs, knees nudging at the soft skin.

Your legs are quick to wrap around his waist and his eyes draw up to meet you.

Red marks trailed along your collarbone. Another jerk of your hips and the heat coils firmly in your abdomen.

“You really love me,” he says between kisses at the top of the swell of your chest. Your breath heaves. His lips ghost across your breast, tongue darting out to swirl around your nipple, skin hot beneath his mouth.

“The anticipation is building.” you chuckle softly, hands tightening their hold.

“I can tell.” He glances at you again, distracted by the adoration in your eyes when you look at him. “Good.”

He kisses down your sternum before untangling one of your hands, letting his hand skim against the dip of your waist.

You make use of your free hand, nails scraping up his back to make him hum against your other nipple.

“Pretty please?” yeah, you’re begging now.

His hand reaches between the two of you, fingertips smoothing the skin of your inner thigh.

“Stop... teasing.” you eventually gasp, hand following his, to guide it firmly to the heat of your center.

“For me, sweetheart?” Jaskier’s eyes meet yours, the look within them a mix between humor and kindness.

“That’s what you do to me,” you give a crooked smile and he moves back to kiss you. He strokes his finger between your folds, a boyish grin on his face, before settling his thumb at your clit.

You’re whining against his lips between kisses. He swallows your moans and pitched cries with an eagerness you welcome, hand clutching his desperately

“Gods, I love you,” your chest heaves and he savors the neediness you have for him, dropping his head to lick a bead of sweat from your sternum, “cheeky,” you swat at the back of his head with a giggle.

After a moment, your hips twitch against his and your eyes flicker to meet his, pupils blown and dark with want.

A violently passionate kiss later and he drags his hand away from your heat to himself.

His first thrust is daringly slow and his lips roll into his mouth at the feeling of finally being able to love you so completely.

When your hand comes up to card through his hair, nails light against his scalp he buries his head at your shoulder.

But still, with your hips rocking to meet his, you’re holding hands. His name on your breath makes him groan into the crook of your neck.

“I’m yours,” Jaskier’s words, sweet like honey at the side of your mouth make your breath hitch. Another rolls of his hips, “...and I love you,”

The air between you thins, his scent mixing with yours like morning fog.

Your name, sung like a prayer on repeat when he hits that spot and you tighten around him. Throwing your head back against the pillows, he drops to kiss you hotly down your neck.

His hand drifts to brush over your clit between thrusts. You’re very much out of your head when your toes curl and your hand grips at his like a lifeline.

It’s a plummet to the high heavens when you finally peak, eyes shut tightly and the taste of him on your lips. Your shuddering pleasure coaxes the height of his own, a choked gasp breaking through a kiss and blood rushing through his head to render him senseless.

“Iloveyou,Iloveyou,Iloveyou,” over and over with the beat of Jaskier’s heart, his lips at your ear.

After a moment, he kisses your forehead and slips from between your thighs. The smile on your face comes naturally when he rolls onto his side to face you.

Your tongue darts out to savor the aftertaste of him upon your lips and you’re not sure if you’ll ever be able to pull yourself from his hold.

A shared glance has you both giving a light laugh and he reaches out to brush a strand of hair from your face -

“Is it fair if I ask you to wed me now?”

#jaskier x reader #jaskier reader imagine #jaskier imagine #the witcher #the witcher netflix #the witcher imagine #jaskier x you #jaskier romance #jaskier smut #lia-writes #lia also sins #and is going to bed straight after posting this so I don't die

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hugsfromdad · 3 years

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I've been mia on here, but not mia in the disaster bisexual front. So lemme fill you in

Okay, so idk if I've talked on here over the past few months about a cute cashier, but I can't seem to find it on my blog, so imma assume I haven't.

Back in mid August, I got my kitten. I got him 2 weeks earlier than expected, so the day before I picked him up, I had to run out and get his supplies. My friend was coming over that day, so we decided to hang out (outside) at my house, go get ice cream, and then go to the pet store for my stuff. after we got all that I needed, we went into Market Basket to buy some snacks so we could sit out in the parking lot and talk for a few hours. Well, that's where this story starts.

I looked hella fucking gay that day. (Striped button up UNbuttoned like halfway, my huge choker chain, and then my white washed levi's with a white 'Sisters' belt, and white converses. I can post a pic later if y'all want) so anyways, I was expecting to get some looks and stared. I did. Whatever. Well, were checking out at the speed aisle, and I notice eyes on me. I normally glace around when I'm checking out to see who is working, but I was met this time by the gaze of a cashier two rows back. I glanced down cause I didn't want to be rude, but when I check again, she was still looking at me. So I intentionally held her gaze for a few moments as I took note of what she looked like. Then I finished checking out and left with my friend.

While I'm a disaster bi and will focus and freak out over the smallest interraction with a cute person, I have become aware that most people (my friends) don't read into moments like that and will make fun of me if I do. That being said, I told myself it was probably just in my head and not that significant; that she was just checking out my outfit and clocking me as either a gay guy out with his girlfriend, (which was pretty much the case) or a couple getting some things.

WELL, so right as I was trying to not make anything out of it, my friend turns to me and goes. "Did you see that cashier staring at you? Like, she kept looking at you." And I was like "OKAY SO IT WASNT JUST ME" and she was like "no, she was really looking at you. She's really cute, too." And thus it began.

She's got a great style (also gorgeous even with a mask on, but I was more intrigued and attracted to her style). I told her that I liked her style a couple months ago and she repeated it back to me. She wears multiple necklaces, rings, and somehow makes her store uniform look cool. When I first really took note of her, my immediate thought was "she gives me west coast vibes." My best friend agreed with me when we were in the store together and she was there. And she might not be from the west coast, but if she told me she was from san Fransisco, I would believe it in a heartbeat. She got like a modern Marissa from the OC style. (I didn't watch the show, only those couple gay scenes with her character in it, so don't come for me)

So anyways, for the first 3-4ish months, my brain would short circuit as soon as we would lock eyes. Like, I can't describe it besides just a fog or a mental lockdown. I could like make eye contact, but I would just be in constant panic. I also couldn't imagine what to do next. Thus, I would panic and choose to go in a different aisle than hers for the first while. I didn't know what to do with a gorgeous woman who had eyes on me. (ALSO; I would like to state that her vibes and style are so immaculate, that I almost expect her to be gay. I thought she was clocking me as another gay person at first, but then I realized that we gays don't stare at someone of the opposite gender THIS much. So she could be gay. Idk. I'm good either way.)

Back to the panic: so it took me awhile to actually get the nerve up to choose her aisle when I could. Then we finally like interacted. I finally got her name, and I like asked her how she was. This happened like twice, and then there was a time I came in right after seeing my nephews(socially distanced). It was a slower day, so I didn't feel hurried in moving along. I asked her how her day was, and she answered and asked how mine was. I mentioner being happy cause I finally got to see my nephews after months of not. She then asked how old they were. We talked for a moment before I knew I have to go. It was as I was picking up my bag that I paused and looked at her and said "I've been meaning to say, I like your style." She like paused and said thanks, and that she liked mine as well. I then said something like "see you next time" and left.

From then, I'd see her when I went in, but almost every time she was in the wrong lane. We'd lock eyes as I walked in, and as I checked out and left, but we didn't get to like talk. That is, until I was tagging along shopping with my mum the day after fucking election night.

I don't think I need to say that I was more anxious and distracted than I had ever been when going in, and glued to my phone; refreshing google and watching the numbers come in. I don't think I even looked up when I walked in. I was in another place. I should also mention that I had noticed that the cute cashier (that's literally my nickname for her) usually worked on the weekends. This was a wednesday. So I was NOT paying sttention. I just followed my mum around the store while watching my phone and trying to do the math to see if there was a possibility that biden could win. Well, my mother eventually stuck us in line to check out, and asks me to get off my phone and help her unload, thats when I lift me head, and I'm staring directly into her eyes.

She was bagging for our aisle, so she was just standing there in my direct line of sight. And she has been watching me, waiting for me to fucking finally look up.

I'm sure I looked beyond stunned. Because I was. I honestly was so braindead from the day, that it took me a moment of staring back at to her process as to what was happening. I got it together quickly tho and bantered and talked with her a bit as she bagged and I helped load. She definitely was doing more than most, if that makes sense. I challenged her to fitting all of the groceries onto one cart cause she said she could. It was fun, and I think I again said "see you around* or something like that as we left.

And once again, once we got outside, my mother now goes "oh that bagger was cute." And I told her that that was the cute one I had mentioned before. THEN SHE GOES "oh yeah I picked up on that vibe of y'all." And I WANTED to ask her what that MEANT, but I didn't want to push it and then have my mother know/be able to make things awakrd.

ANYWAYS, 3 chapters in, lemme get to last months. I fucking got in anxiety meds. AND MY WORLD CHANGED. my mental block and fog was GONE. I could finally see a pathway through to like actually talking talking to her. SO, I pulled out a receipt, wrote down my number, and stuck it in my wallet for the next time I saw her.

Welp, the next time that was, she was in the wrong lane and teaching a new cashier what to do, so there was no way I was gonna try and insert myself into that situation. BUT, as I was walking both in and out, we locked eyes as usual, but this time as I was leaving, I did like a quick smile which caused me to squint my eyes for a half second. It almost looks like when a cat does their slow blink at you. I saw her respond to that and like smile back at me as I left. It was the first time I had ever done anything that was direct and nonverbally flirty.

So, I had to go again last night. And my parents were putting us in strict lockdown for the next 10 days, so we had to stock up. Before we left, I rewrote my note. And I told my best friends what was happening, and no matter what was the situation, I was gonna give her the note.

Well, she wasnt there. I was extremely disappointed.

Annnnd that leaves us here. It's gonna be a good 10-14 days before I'm allowed to go out, but youd better fucking believe it when I say that imma be giving her my number the moment I see her next. So wish me luck.

And also in case anyone asks; I don't want to try any dating apps cause I hate them. Also I'm half asleep now she don't have the energy to go back and edit this. Hopefully it's coherent.

So I guess I'll update y'all when I eventually get to leave the house and see her again

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annoyinglyjovialbird · 4 years

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Voltron: Next Generation

Impending Difficulties: III

Word Count: 3032

AN: Sorry about the delay! I rewrote the whole chapter today and almost ran out of time!

The neutral glow that illuminated the Coeus was steady. Non-changing. The crew was in various locations throughout the ship. Then, like a switch, the glow turned from neutral white to red. As quickly as they could, every teen packed the essentials. Keith, Kova, Caleb, and Shiro were in the transport bay with the Lions, suited up and ready to go. One by one, the teens marched in. In Kova's hand, a timer slowly counted down. First came Griffin, then Cake. They stood in silence for almost a minute when Allie ran in, panting for breath.

"Sorry, I tried," she said through pants. Griffin thought that was it. She thought this was their punishment. At the three-minute mark, Caleb and Kova still hadn't said a word. They only stared at the timer, which was now counting negative time.

"Are we done?" Griffin asked, earning her a look from Kova and an eyebrow raise from Caleb. Then, they heard it. Jingles. Metal scraping against each other. From the entrance of the transport bay, Kenny emerged. He had found or hung onto Allie's large backpack from the beginning. The comically large bag was filled to the brim. Kenny was leaning on the door frame, his small body straining every non-existent muscle to hold up the large bag. He still managed to form the line beside the three other teens, and Kova finally stopped the timer.

"The team fails the evacuation procedure." At least Kova was as blunt as always.

"It's Allie's fault, right?" Griffin asked. Allie's eyes went wide.

"No." It was Caleb's turn. "Allie made it within the appropriate time. She would've likely been first to board her Lion, so she checked on Kenny." At his name, the man stood upright. Kova approached him and showed the man her screen. It was -2:19.

"Kenneth, evacuation is carry-on only. Not the entire workshop."

"It is essential!" At his words, Kova poked a side of the bag. As it tipped off to the side, Kenny went along with it.

"If it's the money, I can understand." Kova began.

"But if it's random and easily replaceable parts from Allura knows where then I don't." Caleb finished.

"What would you know, Ladybug?" Kenny snarkily asked. Caleb didn't take this lightly. His bayard was in his hand in a heartbeat and taking a step towards Kenny and his humongous bag. Thankfully Kova was there to hold him back.

"While we're gathered here, I have the honor to formally introduce Keith Kogane to the crew of the IGF Coeus," Kova said in a monotone voice. With one hand, she was holding Caleb's collar and in the other, she was staring at her phone. The screen was running the ship's diagnostics, but she could've been looking at pictures of Cyrus if anyone cared.

Kenny turned around to stare at the man. At some point, the teens found leftover fabric from Caleb's chair cover that hadn't been defaced by black spots. Cutting a hole in the middle of the roughly circular fabric, Keith wore it like a poncho. It covered most of his body, still clad in his bodysuit, and unbearably thin. Liz and Allie found a spare brush for him to borrow, prepared his meals, and tended to the bruising and sores all over his body.

Even with all of that, it was still him. It was clearly him. It was his dad.

"Mr. Kogane—"

"Kova."

"Keith, I would like to formally introduce you to the crew of the IGF Coeus." Two stomps on the ground and the teens stood at attention. Kenny stared at them and followed, legs spread to better support the bag. "From left to right in order of entry, Cake Garrett, Eliza Griffin, Allura Smythe, and Kenneth Holt."

"Kogane." Kenny corrected.

"Kenneth Kogane." Kova turned to Keith, who was staring at the young man. Turning to stare at the two, Kova noticed they shared the same nose. Weird how genetics play out.

"What, this, no, it can't be." Keith was stammering. He couldn't find the words. "The last time I saw Ken was—"

"Almost ten years ago." Kenny dropped the bag. Allie and Liz dove behind Cake.

"No, you were sixteen. There's no way." Keith seemed adamant. This wasn't his youngest son. "Junior was twenty, and Ezrid was eighteen."

"Dad."

"No, there's no way."

"Everyone's dismissed. Continue regular duties." Kova ordered. The other teens nodded and walked back to their rooms to drop off their backpacks. Kova dragged Caleb to the training deck below. Shiro grabbed a hold of Keith and Kenny's shoulders and led them to the bridge, where he could explain what had happened. They were in there for about half an hour before they emerged.

The teens were in the cafeteria, eating away at the Arusian and Balmeran food. At least, the still edible parts of it. Cake wondered aloud about the restaurant in the mall. It used to be called 'Vrepit Sal's', but when it was taken over by Cake's dad, it became 'Garrett & Sons'.

"I thought you were the only son?" Allie asked. Cake's eyes went wide.

"If Dad's still alive, I'll be sure to introduce him to Talia."

"Can you guys stop talking about good food?" Liz complained, rubbing her temples. "I'm getting sick of the fruits."

"Your dad created his culinary empire with a play-on-words of the Galaxy Garrison?" Caleb asked. A nod from Cake. Caleb was going to make a quip, but Keith’s fist beat him to it.

"You aren't Hunk's son," Keith growled.

"Sure, and I'm Altean." Liz smiled, propping her chin into her hand.

‘Oh, uh, Varkon' requests telecommunication.

"Let's go change, guys!" Liz said, standing from the table. The other four followed her out, leaving Keith alone to stare after them.

———————

"Thanks again for the parking space!" Shiro said.

"Oh, it's no problem at all!" Varkon was amicable. "Especially for a former member of Voltron!" The kids waved their thanks from a distance and walked into the mall. It hadn't changed much, besides the blatant Voltron merch everywhere. Kova and Caleb walked away from the group for a minute to stare into a shop window. On display were plush versions of the Voltron Lions, as well as an action figure Voltron.

"Heh, don't these sell for cheaper on Earth?"

"Dude, I have four of them hiding in the closet."

"What?" Caleb stared at Kova. "No way! I've been in there so many times and I've never seen anything!"

"What were you doing in my closet?"

"What?"

"Can you two come back here?" Shiro's voice came over the earpieces. The teens took their time, interrogating and deflecting each other. Shiro was handing a colored bracelet to Kenny when they started running.

"NO!"

"DON'T PUT—" Kova began. Shiro saw their approach and slipped two last bracelets onto their wrists. From his arm, the bracelets became activated. Kova's right arm was pulled to Kenny's left, cutting across his body. Caleb's left arm also flew to Liz's right, but there was no cutting across bodies. Instead, Liz became flustered at being close to a boy, much less her captain. Cake and Allie were pulling at each other's arms, seeing how it wouldn't budge, and turned to Shiro for an explanation. The Shirogane teens had a bone to pick, though.

"You can't do this!"

"We're not little kids!"

“How old do you think we are?"

"You could've said something instead of resorting to the cuffs!"

Shiro clapped to gain their attention. Or to silence them. Whichever you prefer.

"The last time Paladins of Voltron were in the space mall, one was nearly arrested and detained by mall security, another was used as slave labor because he couldn't pay, and the other two stole coins out of a fountain to buy a game system and a cow." As Shiro was recounting his tale, the teens and Kenny quieted down. "The bracelets worked well for you two." He was staring at his kids. "They should work well with the other members of your crew." A growl escaped Kova's throat as she picked up the bag with the money from the Arusians inside. Shiro took it from her hands, handing her a handful of coins. At least she was wearing a sweater with pockets. Allie and Caleb received handfuls of coins too, stashing them away. Allie had a small purse that matched her white and blue outfit and Caleb was wearing his ladybug sweater.

"As long as we all have our earpieces in, we should be fine in case of an attack," Kova said, looking around. "Head to your respective areas, and try not to let the stares bother you too much."

"Food court for lunch?" Cake asked, to everyone's head nods. With that, they all left for their respective corners.

"What were those things?" Keith asked. Liz and Allie pleaded with Keith, then Shiro for Keith to stay onboard. They weren't sure if Keith could handle being exposed to a large crowd so soon after his discovery. Shiro agreed with their reasoning while Keith fought them on it. When it came out of Shiro's mouth, for some magical reason, Keith accepted it. His request was to get him some 'real clothes'.

"When Kova and Caleb were younger, they were impossible to keep track of," Shiro began his story. "So Curtis and Matt butted their heads to find a solution."

"And the bracelet cuffs were the answer?"

"Matt and Curtis didn't figure it out until Kova and Caleb were playing with fake handcuffs. Somehow, they got ahold of real cuffs and were stuck until the cop they took them from came back from a two-day vacation. We were almost sad to see them go."

"How old were they?"

"Eh, nine. Maybe ten. They were young but I remember Caleb talking, and that didn't happen until he was eight."

"As touching as the story is, can you not talk about it when we can't control channels?" Kova said. Shiro could hear the others either laughing or snickering.

"Yeah, okay." Shiro laughed.

Kenny and Kova were the first to arrive at their location. The shop was filled wall to ceiling with scaultrite lenses. They were somewhat organized. Oh sure, they were in barely distinguishable piles but at least they were organized by size. Did size even matter with lenses?

Even at the jingle at the front of the store, no one came from the backroom to the front counter. Kenny and Kova looked at each other and shrugged, looking at the various sizes. They settled on thirty-six 8" lenses. They had the money for double, maybe triple the price, but they stopped counting when they got to the price of thirty-six. An alien finally appeared from the back room at the sound of voices.

"Oh, hello!" The alien greeted. They looked generally sweet, with light blue skin and dark almond-shaped eyes. "Sorry about that! The bell sounds for everyone within a two-foot radius of the door. How can I help you today?"

"Yeah, can we get thirty-six of the 8" lenses, please?" Kenny asked. The worker nodded her head and stepped around the counter to grab them. Kova was lost in her mind, trying to figure out the problem with the bell.

"Anything else for you today?" The alien asked. Kenny shook his head and looked to Kova. The two stared at the girl until she finally noticed. She apologized and asked if the worker had a pair of pliers she could borrow. While confused, the worker complied. Dragging Kenny along wasn't fun for Kova, but she did it. The bell rang through the store again and the pair stepped back. Kenny, with careful steps, approached the door. He was three feet away. Then two. Finally one foot in front of the door. The bell didn't go off until Kenny was directly in front of it. The worker gasped.

"How did you do that?"

"The sensor range was too wide. I made it shorter." Kova explained and shrugged.

"How can I ever repay you?" The worker said. Kova started to say there was no need, but it was too late. The worker remembered they were there for the lenses. They wrapped the lenses up neatly and pushed them over the counter to them.

"No, it's really alright!" Kova tried saying, but the alien was hearing none of it. "Seriously, it was nothing!"

"Please, take it! Thanks to you, I don't have to listen to that stupid bell anymore!"

"You really don't have to!"

"Hold on! Just one minute!" Kenny shouted, getting the arguing pair's attention. "We're going to pay you." The worker opened their mouth to protest. "Ah, ah, ah, no. No. We're going to pay you. You can repay us by taking down a certain poster from around the mall."

"You saw them, too?" Kova asked. Kenny nodded. The worker nodded at the request. They were seriously excited about the bell not going off anymore.

"Anything! What poster?" The worker asked. Kenny pulled out his phone and showed the worker the ransom poster of Kova. The worker looked from the screen to Kova and back again. "You got yourself a deal." Kenny and the worker shook on it. As Kenny and Kova turned to leave with their lenses, Kova turned to look at the worker.

"If you ever want something from the food court, say Jax sent you. Many of them won't ask questions about it, even double the size of your meal." The worker yelled one last thank you as Kenny and Kova left the store.

On the other side of the space mall, Allie and Cake were enjoying the simple delights of finding snacks. Allie was looking at low-calorie and low-fat snacks to give to Keith and Cake was staring at the crackers with drool coming from his mouth. In the end, they got about three-quarters of the list of snacks down. The other fourth was food for Keith. Or Kova. They couldn't tell anymore.

About thirty feet away, Liz and Caleb were simply window-shopping, not really liking everything they came across. When Liz spotted Allie, she dragged Caleb along to Allie's side. It was almost lunchtime, so they were heading through the heart of the mall to get to the food court.

"Oh, Allura! That would look wonderful on you!" A girl exclaimed, making the four slow down.

"Oh great," Allie said quietly. She kept her head low.

"So, I uh, guess that Allura is a pretty popular name on Altea," Liz said.

"Yes, it is. The most popular for girls."

"What's the second most popular name?" Liz asked. Allie turned her head to face the girl and gave a dry smile before dropping it.

"June," Allie said, staring down at the list in her hands again.

"Those girls are Altean." Liz pointed out.

"Yep."

"Do you know them?"

"Unfortunately."

A loud dramatic gasp came from the trio of girls in front of a high-end store. At least, it looked high-end. And Altean.

"Allie? Is that you?" One of the girls almost yelled in the mall. Allie froze in her tracks and looked up as the trio approached. The girl in the middle had curly purple hair and fair skin with matching purple Altean markings. Her cronies on either side had a short blonde bob and black pixie cut hair with rose pink and lime green markings. Allie looked petrified but stood her ground. That was when the girl in the middle saw Allie's hand. It was entwined with Cake's to hide the fact they were essentially handcuffed.

"Allie, darling, I'm not sure if you know, but you're Altean." The middle Altean began to say condescendingly. As if Allie were a little girl. "He's a half-breed. You don't know what he would do to you if you made him angry." Cake's expression was the definition of 'Wanna find out?', but he said nothing.

"Hey, why don't you leave her alone?" Liz spoke. The middle girl looked surprised to see Caleb and Liz standing there. No matter, though.

"Allie is one of my good friends. Isn't that right, darling?" Allie didn't say anything.

"Seriously, can you stop? Your comments are so wrong."

"In what way?" The girl feigned ignorance.

"Seriously? You talk about our friend like he isn't even here and you're belittling another person in front of her friends." Liz thought this was simple. The girl had other ideas.

"Sorry, I don't speak human. Can you speak slower?"

"Sorry, I don't speak—"

"Hey!" Kova yelled. Her voice was only about ten feet behind them, but the yell came through just fine through the earpieces.

"Jax?" The girl now looked petrified, and Allie stood a little straighter.

"Star!" Kova said like she was greeting an old friend. "Are you bothering one of the members of my crew?"

"No, not at all. I was just remarking to Allie how her relationship could potentially be viewed on Altea. You know how strict families can be." Kova took a few steps closer to the girl. Kenny stayed behind her, letting her take center stage.

"Do you remember what I said to you last time?" Kova smiled sweetly. "Mess with other people's lives again, and you're done." The girl gulped, grabbed her cronies by their arms, and stalked off without another word. "Food court, anyone?"

At last, they arrived. They sat at a round table and enjoyed the food. Cake was glad to see Garrett & Sons still stood as the prime location to grab a quality meal. Allie was thankful for Liz and Kova's interruption with Allura. Shiro was disappointed with Caleb since he revealed that he found the store that was giving free cows with every purchase.

Kova needed to use the restroom, and Shiro removed the link between her and Kenny's bracelets. She never made it. A tall figure pressed the barrel of a weapon into her lower back while another grabbed her shoulders. She went along with it, not wanting to incite a panic. The figures led her to the loading bay and into a small ship. Still, Kova didn't fight. She followed them. It wasn't until she saw the massive ship did she realize what was happening.

Yorak had found her.

#voltron: next generation #voltron #voltron lions #keith kogane #hunk garrett #cake garrett #allie smythe #allura #kenny kogane #kovalia shirogane #caleb shirogane #yorak #sorry #im here #im alive #liz griffin

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thecomicsnexus · 5 years

Text

City of Bane, part 7

BATMAN #81 DECEMBER 2019 BY TOM KING, JOHN ROMITA JR., KLAUS JANSON, TOMEU MOREY AND FOR SOME REASON... MITCH GERADS.

SYNOPSIS + REVIEW

Welcome to another review of this sinking ship.

Back in issue fifty, we found out that all the plots in the book were part of Bane’s plan, even the ones that had nothing to do with him, or the overall plan. Well, it’s issue 81 now and it turns out... it was Batman’s plan all along, to fall for Bane’s plan.

Remember that time Bruce punched Tim in the face? It was all part of the plan! Because someone could have been watching them, so this punch in the face meant “let’s set everything up”.

Damian being captured was also part of the plan (but Alfred dying wasn’t). So if you still remember that horrible issue where Damian and Tim were fighting over whether going into Gotham could kill Alfred or not, well, turns out that Alfred actually escaped before that. But I guess they caught him and killed him. That is... a very strange loop you created King... it would have been interesting to see that, but I suppose you rewrote the dialogues over finished art.

So now the whole Bat-team (well, Tim, Damian, Batgirl, Batwoman, Duke, Huntress and Orphan), rescues Damian and try to put an end to Thomas, but they eventually get beaten to a pulp by him. Tim being stabbed by an arrow in the heart (it seems, but Romita Jr’s anatomy is ambiguous). I completely forgot Batgirl was in this issue by the way, she is not justified. Well, hardly anyone is justified.

Part of this crazy plan we never even heard about, started when Batman discovered Gotham Girl’s powers came from super venom, a very special strand created by Bane, just before he forgot how to make more. Batman’s plan was to go to Hawaii, in as very suspicious chain of events that only a precog could have imagined. That super-venom they intercepted was supposed to go to Gotham Girl and now I am not sure what they are going to do, but it is safe to assume that it will involve lazy writing.

The art is a mess. Half of the time I had to imagine what I was actually looking at, because Romita’s close-ups are too damn close to distinguish what you are seeing.

Look, I hate to be that guy, but this is what happens when you get an overrated team (I am going to let Klaus Janson and Tomeu Morey out of this discussions as they have proved to be very reliable and talented). Usually what really works with King’s run, is the art. But now it seems like King and Romita are dragging each other down. If I gave this plot to another team: “The bat-family fights Thomas Wayne to avenge Alfred”, it would probably be very cool and end up being one of the greatest moments in Batman history. But in this case you will probably remember how ugly it looked, and then you will remember all the money you wasted in this run. In fact, you will have learned a powerful lesson, do not invest in 85-issue runs written by a writer left unchecked. And while Romita’s art doesn’t fit the book, the thing that really makes it worse is the story.

As I said before, King had 85 issues to tell this story. Why are we getting the whole plot in caption boxes instead of flashbacks? Flashbacks could have made this nonsense work better. Instead he decided to do the war of jokes and riddles, and knightmare... that willie e. coyote issue, that story where the Penguin married an actual penguin...

I like his ambiguous writing but in a limited format, in stories that may or may not be canon. When he overextends his stories, things start to fall apart more easily.

The first thing I thought when I was on page two was... pencils, inks... all of them done by a team (or so I thought), yet the writer is only King. They should have paired him with another writer if they were too lazy to put capable editors in the book. 85 issues is too much. I would expect someone to actually check on his stories, just to be sure they make sense.

And then there’s those odd pages at the end by Mitch Gerads. I do not know what the point was, I assume it was a “Year of the Villain” “slice of life?”. Maybe Gerads could have used those pages to flesh out the flashbacks this story needed.

I feel like it’s too late to fix this thing. I can’t wait for this run to be over and discover it was all Alfred’s dream.

I give this issue a score of 2.

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signorformica · 5 years

Photo

Bibliothèque Infernale presents:

HOW ELEVEN CHINESE DEVOURED THEIR BRIDE (1926) —A grotesque, infamous short story by HANNS HEINZ EWERS

This is a story about sodomy and bestiality. Most people don’t understand such things and don’t like them. That’s all right, but, if you were born a Tartar there would be no question that sodomite stories are always very funny.

If a case comes before the court, the Judge, Public Prosecutor, clerk, Lawyer and curiously even the Justice of the Peace all see the humor in it. Only the public can’t see the humor. It is out of the question because the morality of the Public must not be endangered in any way.

So enjoy this mild story of our black gowned family. Naturally it is a light hearted story that will not seduce anyone into sodomy or bestiality. Especially when he sees how this abomination can get a poor devil stuck into prison for a couple years just for a small bit of pleasure.

That is still mild and humane says the Law. Things were not always so light. We read that our dear God rained both pitch and brimstone on the contaminated cities of Sodom and Gomorrah destroying them to the ground.

Only the noble Lot and his daughters were spared. His wife was turned into a naked pillar of salt simply because she once turned to look back toward these abominable cities.

Now the Lot family was not completely morally strong all the time. The behavior of the God fearing family was such that the one and only God sent angels to deliver them from this decline into abomination. How their countrymen desired these messengers and wanted to go out with them! Lot got them drunk and pleaded with them to take his daughters and use their blessed wombs instead!

How do you say, they looked pretty only after you had a few drinks?

Nevertheless this is a funny enough story in spite of all the pitch and brimstone. Funny too are the sodomite abominations in our time.

Yet they have been horribly punished. Sodomites have been crucified, quartered, drowned, broken on the wheel, burned at the stake and still they exist in all parts of the world. The weed of sodomy and bestiality is constantly new and blooming over the entire world. No pure gardener of high morals has ever been able to eradicate it from the garden of humanity.

Impassioned human lust will always explore all possible desires of the flesh. The beat of time appoints individuals across the country and in the city. Soon here, soon there, the false God, Sodom, needs a sacrifice.

The second half of the 11th century was a blooming period for sodomy and it existed in the Order of the Templars, the infamous secret sodomite society. A small group of sodomites existed as well in Sicily and the Abruzzo. The head of their organization was in India.

Today in southern China a pretty piece from Tunis and far into the Caucasus exists an abominable city of sodomy with a temple that holds all their secret love techniques. It has followers in all the large cities of the world.

In all countries, in one city or another there is a place where sodomy and bestiality are now blooming. First it is a bird, then a four footed beast that is strangely popular.

In the Rhienland in the old city of Mettmann the court is known for producing such amusing cases and almost as amusing punishments. The worthy citizens complain to the court and curse that which I applaud!

My friend, Justice of the Peace John, wanted to write his doctoral thesis about it.

“The Origin and Cultural Development linking the district of Mettmann to the second paragraph of Statute 175 R.-Str.-G.-B from the 12th century to today.”

But the Heidelberg Judicial Faculty had little sympathy for this theme. They suggested he choose to write instead about the indebtedness of the District Hubbelrath to the movement of the common people which is certainly very important but not half as humorous.

No one can deny that there is a humorous side to every single case of sodomy or bestiality. From the “Golden Ass” of Apuleius into modern times there is a long chain of droll and amusing anecdotes. These are all harmless crimes. It is a crying shame that medical knowledge never applies in these cases. In criminal law books all around the world the worst tortures known can be found.

These are promoted not only by the common people but by the higher class, the so-called educated rabble. The sturdy masses merely see these incidents as humorous. Boccaccio, Aretino, Voltaire, Goethe and Balzac all have highly polished jokes about it.

Heine’s sarcastic poem begins:

“Zu Berlin im Alten Schlosse

Sehen wir in Stein gemetz,

Wie ein Weib mit einem Rosse

Sodomitisch sich ergötzt.”

[Translator’s note:

“In an old castle in Berlin

We see chiseled in stone

How a woman with a steed

Amused herself through sodomy.”]

The Royal family has never forgotten this mockery of their illustrious ancestor depicted in this joke as a steed lustful woman. Who can really be further offended? Friedrich the Great had a great laugh over it even though he stopped work on Voltaire’s rough draft of him with his greyhounds because it was not to his taste.

He found himself in good company with Voltaire’s “Pucelle”, which depicted the virgin, Joan of Arc, after her conquest of Orleans riding an ass into a bedroom. Voltaire really intended the love as only allegory and the ass signifying the Catholic Church.

Such humor is known to date from the 18th century and while not appreciated by the common folk was by the Lords that ruled over them. They rewrote the language and revised an old judgment where a poor fellow that had been caught in obscenities with a goat should be burned at the stake. “The offender must burn,” so declared the Law. The clever Lords revised it to read, “The goat must burn”.

Friedrich the Great was an animal lover with a great sense of humor. When a cavalry member was caught making love to his mare he hung them both along with a sign that read, “The fellow wanted to be transferred to the infantry”. Today he would hardly be reported by his comrades.

The sodomy and bestiality in hidden bloom during World War I was so pervasive there were constant jokes about it. A cow is called Mrs. Sergeant-Major Lieutenant in the East and such four legged soldier wives exist in all armies around the world.

That is simply the way things are and no cleric or Judge can change it. Everyone knows that centaurs, fauns, and other mythological beasts come from the interbreeding of human and animal species. We all know they come about through this horrible obscenity but no one really sees any wrong in it.

It is the same with this incidentally full blooded adventure of the eleven Chinese that I will now relate. This story of strange love is not meant to be taken in an evil way.

So, there were these eleven Chinese in Chicago-

But no, I must begin it differently. My friend Fritz Lange lived in Chicago. He owned a laundry business. Really he was a land assessor and gambled on the hounds, but not in this story.

Over in America a man can do what he wants. He can be a waiter, dishwasher, bill poster, carriage maker or anything. Fritz finally had some luck and married the daughter of a Laundry owner. He began working there to learn the business so that when the old man died he could take over and do well with it.

Now he had built it into a mighty laundry business with a dozen pickup and delivery points scattered throughout the city. One day he came to me very excited. I needed to help him. Eleven of his workers had been arrested. Chinese naturally, they are equally the best and the cheapest washers in the city. I could help him because I knew the criminal Judge that had the case.

It was Judge Mc Ginty, whom I played stud poker with twice a week. Now Mc Ginty was a sociable man and liked to talk. He didn’t want the eleven fellows to get off easily and it would be hard to get them released. The eleven Chinese were confined because they had beaten up a God wretched pathetic red-haired fourteen year old Irish rascal named Jackie Murphy.

“Why did they beat him up?” I asked.

“He seduced the bride,” said Fritz Lange.

“That’s not going to be good,” I opinioned. “Judge Mc Ginty is very much a son of Erin and will certainly decide for the young rascal against the yellow brothers. Still, many a man can be persuaded by whiskey.”

“It is so dangerous!” My friend Lange cried. “The bride, that’s what my Chinese call her! The bride is not the bride of just one, but strangely of all eleven! To them she is not just a feminine being of white or yellow color! In short, the bride of the eleven is not human. To be entirely correct she is curiously enough a four legged sow!” “And Jackie seduced her?” I asked.

“Entirely correct,” nodded the land assessor. “The Chinese here live on nothing. They only save and save through the day and through the year until they have enough to go back home with a full purse. There is only one thing they can’t renounce and that is the desires of the flesh in any form. They are horny as apes and can’t stop themselves. They must have something so the eleven fellows went out and bought a pig. From an economical standpoint it is certainly a clever idea, you could scarcely find anything cheaper.

They all live together in a basement apartment and the sow lives there with them. Jackie, the son of the house manager, was hiding and saw the entire obscenity go down. Then, when my Chinese were at work he snuck into the cellar and climbed into the circular pen with their lover. With him it made an even dozen. When the Chinese found out the jealousy grew so strong in their love-struck fruitcake souls that they beat the red-haired rascal half to death.”

“Thunderation!” I cried. “That looks very bad. Does Judge Mc Ginty know all this?”

“Naturally he knows,” answered Fritz Lange. “Jackie’s father had the Chinese arrested. They apologized for the atrocity and for mishandling the boy but when they found out they were going to prison they started screaming that Jackie was the 12th and in league with them. That’s when he first learned from the Chinese what really happened.”

“What will the outcome be?”

“Twenty years in prison is the minimum according to the Law in the State of Illinois. They are not as mild here as they are across the ocean! And I have lost my best workers! But there is still a chance. The case is still with the police and has not yet gone to court. I’ve always been on friendly terms with the police. I need you to take this to Judge Mc Ginty.”

He reached into a bag and brought out a large piece of Nephritis, Imperial Jade, of the most glorious green color and wonderfully cut into the shape of an enormous turkey. It was easily worth more than a few hundred dollars.

“Here,” he cried. “The fellows have given me this. It is something very valuable that can possibly get them out of this jam. Take this to Judge Mc Ginty; I think he will talk with you.”

So I took the stone and went to Mc Ginty but he was not home. His wife greeted me. She was pretty and distinguished despite being fifty-four years old and she understood the situation. I gladly showed her my lump of jade and her eyes got bigger and bigger.

“I received this as a present,” I said weakly. ” I wondered if your husband was interested in it. I could really use a few dollars right now.”

At that moment Mc Ginty came.

“Buy it!” His wife cried out to him. “I’ve been wishing for a piece like that for many years. He’s letting it go really cheap, only-“

The Judge took the glorious piece and set it down on the table.

“Come with me,” he said. “I don’t want her to hear our little chat.”

He took me around back despite the pleading of his wife who stood with both hands clasped together in front of her.

“God, I’ve got fifty dollars,” she cried after us.

“What’s this about?” He asked me out on the street.

“It’s like this,” I said. “You know about those Chinese that were arrested yesterday. My friend Lange needs his workers and wants them released. The fellows gave him this stone to sell so they could get some money for their defense.”

Mc Ginty looked at me sharply.

“I know it’s not right-, “he began. “What do you know about this?”

“Nothing special,” I lied. “They beat up a fourteen year old.”

“Nothing else?” The honorable Judge asked.

He winked at me and gave me a poke in the ribs.

“Nothing that I can remember,” I laughed.

Judge Mc Ginty chuckled, and then he said. “Good, I will buy this stone because my wife wants it so badly. But I can’t give you more than ten dollars for it. There, that is enough for your defense. Go quickly to Jim Mc Namus, the lawyer, you know him. Give him the ten dollars-wait a minute,” He put down another. “There, he gets one for each. The rascal Murphy must defend his son because he is Irish, he won’t talk.

Tell Mc Namus to be in court at 6:00 this evening to get this over with quickly. Now, please excuse me. I must go to my wife and bring her this little thing she is so madly in love with.”

He played with the stone on the table.

Judge Mc Ginty knew what he was talking about. I was at the criminal court that evening. A policeman said that the eleven coolies had beaten the young Murphy. The rascal said nothing. The Chinese said nothing. The defense asked for a mild sentence.

Judge Mc Ginty ruled that each pay a dollar to the state and another in damages to the father of the youth. Fritz Lange immediately paid the twenty-two dollars and another twenty-five for the cost of the proceedings. Everyone went home happy. It didn’t take over five minutes.

A week later Fritz Lange stopped by. I should go with him to his Chinese, he said. They wanted to thank me. So I went with him. We went down into the cellar, all eleven were there and so was the young red-haired rascal Murphy.

They were very polite to me, offered me Saki and a little rice. Then the feast began. It was pork sausage. They had been taken in once and paid dearly.

“We are not doing that again,” they said.

So they slaughtered their bride, and consumed her with enviable appetites.

I like to think that I am moderately open minded and unprejudiced. I am no food critic, but it was a bit too much for me.

*Von elf Chinesen und ihrer aufgefressenen Braut. Hanns Heinz Ewers ~ 1926

“How Eleven Chinese Devoured Their Bride”: translation copyright Joe E. Bandel

Original German version, via Spiegel Online Kultur: gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/grotesken-7613/3

Image: Hanns Heinz Ewers, ca.1900: “Blood is Life”

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ren-c-leyn · 5 years

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Where does one acquire writing confidence?

Okay, the subject of this topic was brought up to me by @sxthernmisfit (along with a few other’s I’ll be working on writing) and it sounded like a particularly good one to cover since I had had that problem too. Actually, I still do.

There is no one answer to how to overcome confidence issues with writing. It could partly be the fear of being judged, (guilty) it could be the fear of accidentally taking another’s words, (guilty again), it could be that your writing isn’t even close to being on the level you want it to be (third time guilty), it could also be that you were told you couldn’t do it, that writing has be done in certain ways and forms, that you have to kiss a muse and howl at the stupid moon to be a true writer. Well, you can be a writer, and a damn fine one at that, with or without following a bunch of stupid rules or being someone you don’t have to be, and I’ll assure it it is easier than slaying a dragon, even though it doesn’t feel like it.

I’m going to tell you a story, a very real one. I had 0 confidence in my writing. It looked like garbage, it didn’t follow any writing rules, it barely followed basic grammar rules. I didn’t just think no one would want to read anything written by me, I knew it. I barely even showed my friends and family my writing, outside of my writing partner, and even then I didn’t show her much either, not compared to what I had written. Then, on a total impulse, I made this blog, and time and time again, people proved me wrong.

How did I get my confidence? I stubbornly clung to what I thought was garbage. I made a rule that I wasn’t allowed to delete anyone I wrote, not even the worst dribble or the cringiest poems. Then, I kept writing, and whenever I felt bad about my work, I would go back and look at my past work. It didn’t take long to see the improvements I had been making without even noticing. I wrote three full novels, one over 100k words, before I finally got the confidence to recently send one in to be published, and the one I got sent in was rewritten. What solidified my confidence enough to send it in, though, was I impulse made this blog and people were telling me that I did good. People who had no obligation to spend even one second of their time to read the small shorts I posted took the time to say they liked it, to reblog and like. I think the coolest and most motivating ones though was @thependragonwritersguild going out of their way to message me and tell me they loved the stories I made with their prompts. How do you get your own confidence? It starts with identifying why you’re scared to write to start with. The next, do things that will help it. If you’re scared of accidentally plagiarizing someone else’s work, there are plagiarism checkers out there that will check it for you. I don’t know much about them, since I’ve never used them myself. I recommend poking around and doing some research into them before feeding them your work. Always read terms and conditions and stuff. I’ve never heard of any of them being shady, but it doesn’t hurt to be careful. If it’s that your writing isn’t on par with you’re expectations, I want you to grab your favorite book, and read the first page. Now, I want you to think about the writer having the same doubts and struggles you did with the first page of your WIP, because I can almost guarantee they did. I can also guarantee that you are not reading the first draft of their work. They rewrote it at least once. More likely, they rewrote it several times and then had an editor shake their head at least once. You’re writing will never be publisher polished the first go around, but that’s okay. It’s perfect, actually. It gives you room to rework it, to make characters more lively than before, to add new subplots if you feel like it. Don’t hold yourself to perfection, it Doesn’t Exist. It Never Existed Nor Will It Ever Exist. Instead, hold yourself to fun, to love, to enjoying the adventure your characters are taking you on. Don’t worry about anything but writing what you love the first draft. If you’re worried about judgement, like what was my main crippling fear, then, as terrible as this sounded to me, you’re going to have to walk through that lion’s den. When I made my blog, I thought I was going to face all of these horrible trolls, but that wasn’t the case. Sure, there’s rude people in the world, and we can’t change that. But I want you to know that there are amazing people out there, and some of those amazing people want to read your work. Somewhere out there, there’s someone waiting for you to write their new favorite story. Somewhere out in this world of billions, there’s a person who needs that story you’re hesitating to write. And if you can’t believe there is, then try making your own belief to cling to. A little mantra you tell yourself whenever you get nervous. If you have friends or family you trust, maybe try showing them some shorts or poems you did. Their feedback can help boost your confidence or help you improve your writing to later improve your confidence. If someone’s told you you can’t, blow them off and write anyways. Show yourself that you can. Don’t worry about impressing them, just impress yourself. No matter what your confidence deficiency is caused by, keep writing and eventually you’ll start to see the improvements, start to feel the thrills of new turns of phrase, and love of new characters. Keep your best writing and worse writing on hand so you can see how much you improved, and that you are capable of writing something you love. Above all else, don’t give up. Keep working at it. Keep reading, learning new techniques, writing, scribbling down half-done plot ideas. Moving forward through fear is the only way I know to conquer it, and in the words of Mark Twaine “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” It’s okay to feel scared and nervous about writing and sharing your writing, as long as you don’t let it control you.

#ren's writing tips #Writing tips #confidence #dont give up #positive thinking #sharing the positivity #I hope this helps

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vexation-virgil · 6 years

Text

Escape

Word Count: 1122 Relationships: Toxic Prinxiety Warnings: Hostage like situation, forced relationship, angst, general Deceit warning (he’s not really mentioned but, you know, just in case) (If I am missing anything PLEASE do not hesitate to ask me to tag it, I am terrible at knowing what to tag) A/N: Hey, look, I wrote another thing for OCAT from @the-pastel-peach because I had a couple people ask and because I really wanted to. I rewrote it a couple times, but then there were more things posted and I had an idea! Enjoy!

Companion piece to Trapped

Taglist: @pendragonqueen09 , @bookmuncher15 , @justanotherlatinfander , @fireflysinmystomach , @candiukas

The tower was high, too far from the ground to be considered a safe jump by any means, and yet Virgil found himself staring, almost wistfully, out the window most days. The jump, the crash, seemed far more appealing than his other options at this particular moment. It seemed like the only way he was going to be able to escape the coming wedding.

Five days had passed, locked in his room, locked in solitude. The same two people cycled in and out of his room - the handmaiden and the servant boy, still unable to speak to him. The first day the handmaiden had presented him with the crown, Virgil had chucked it against the wall with the hopes to shatter it. It fell to the ground in one piece and when he crumbled down after it, she had reached for him, opened her mouth as if she was going to speak to him, only to retreat without a word. The servant hadn’t even done so much as to look at him these days.

Virgil needed a plan. He needed to get out of this room, needed to get Logan and Patton, needed to get to Thomas. Together, they could figure out how to fix this. Figure out how to get Roman back from whatever had taken over him. Who knew what would come to the kingdom if this got any further. If Virgil was forced to don the crown, would he become like Roman? Would he be himself anymore? It wasn’t something he enjoyed thinking about, but it kept coming back to his mind in his maddening loneliness.

With guards blocking his door, always blocking the door, he couldn’t just burst out of the room. It would take a distraction. And the only one Virgil could think of… Well, it could end very badly for him. He hadn’t used his magic in weeks, maybe months, he couldn’t even remember. But if he was able to start a fire, a small one, on the sheets of his bed, someone would have to open the door and fix it. Virgil could handle getting away from one guard, he was fast enough for that much.

Plan set and only half-formulated - he didn’t have time to figure out what to do next, he needed to get out - Virgil turned towards his bed, sucking in a deep breath. Focus. He stared at the bed, neatly made with too many pillows, and kept his eyes on a particular spot low on the sheets. He imagined a spark, trying, trying, trying desperately to get it to become real.

Nothing changed.

Virgil had wasted minutes staring and hoping for the flame only to be left let down and frustrated. He dropped against the wall of the room with a groan, squeezing his eyes shut tight.

”You can’t do it,” Roman teased, voice playful as he bumped against Virgil’s side. The field they were in was brightly lit, secluded, an old, crumbling barn in the center of it. Virgil had wanted privacy to tell Roman about his magic and had spent weeks building up the courage to tell him and finding the perfect place. And that was the reaction he got? You can’t do it.

Virgil glared at him. Even the fond edge to Roman’s voice annoyed him right now, something that usually made him more nervous, made him blush even. “I can. I just choose not to. It’s better that way.”

Roman snorted, shaking his head. “If you can, my dark and stormy Knight, why not put that poor building out of its misery?” The knight pointed to the barn and Virgil’s eyebrows shot up. “Now, now, don’t give me that look. The building is going to come down eventually anyway. Why not just… Hurry along the process? You say you can make fire, and yet, here we are with now proof.” The softness was still there in his voice and it was grating Virgil’s nerves. They stood there in silence, Virgil looking at Roman as if he had lost his mind and Roman giving Virgil the absolute smuggest face he had ever seen. “I knew you couldn’t do it,” he said finally, letting out a bark of a laugh.

“Fine!” Virgil shouted and the barn went up in flames with whoosh.

Roman blinked at the fire, then at him, another laugh falling out of his mouth. A soft, tinkling laugh that sent butterflies through Virgil. Roman darted forward, placing a quick kiss on the side of Virgil’s mouth. “I knew you could do it,” he whispered, their faces close. “Now, run, my love.” Roman burst immediately into a run, near the edge of the field before Virgil could even put himself back together.

Virgil chuckled at his partner’s antics and went off after him, knowing he wouldn’t catch up to him.

It was surprising to reach the castle and not find Roman waiting for him at the door.

When Roman finally did arrive, something was off about him. Virgil couldn’t name it but there was… Something.

And Roman had come with a handful of blood-red roses.

Virgil let out another loud groan and threw his head back against the wall. If he had just been a little faster, if he had just looked for Roman a little harder when he lost him in the trees, if he had just been /better/, none of this would have ever happened. The five of them would be sitting on Thomas’ balcony, enjoying each other’s company as they planned the future of Thomas’ kingdom.

Something was cackling and Virgil opened his eyes to see the bed - the frame, the sheets, the pillows - engulfed in flames. He screamed, surprised to see he had actually managed to do it and surprised by the size of the fire. It didn’t take long for the guard to come crashing through the door to help him.

It took even less time for Virgil to remember why he had set the fire in the first place.

With all the strength he could summon, Virgil ran through the door, shoving the guard half-blocking the door out of his way so that he could take off down the hall. He could hear the guard shouting and chasing after him, but ignored him as he ran. Out of sight, Virgil needed to be out of sight before he could tuck into one of the hidden tunnels. With all the armor, it didn’t take Virgil very long to outrun him.

And, still, he didn’t stop running when he reached the tunnels, didn’t stop running when he was deep in them, didn’t stop running until he was near the dungeons.

Now, to figure out the next part of the plan.

Save Thomas.

#sanders sides #sanders sides fics #my fics #ocat #prinxiety #toxic prinxiety #tw hostage #tsdeceit #roman sanders #virgil sanders #again no mention of #logan sanders #and #patton sanders

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wherespacepooh · 6 years

Text

Yuzuru Hanyu x Ice Jewels Special Interview (Vol. 7)

Translated by gladi. Please do not repost without permission. Thanks! (Aaagh need to catch a train D: Happy birthday-in-north-american-timezone, boy!)

Post-Autumn Classics

–––– Reflecting upon your first competition, what were the positive things that came out of the Autumn Classics?

YH I learned many different things. Recovery alone isn’t everything – that was something I felt keenly. Especially because, in that competition, all the point-getters were in the second half; in that sense, from the second half onward there was a driving sense that I must somehow [recover]. And since, at the time, my second half layout had started to become considerably stable, I also had confidence. Out of that, I ended up making a mistake on my first Toe Loop, and while I was thinking I had to do something one way or the other, I messed up my second [Toe Loop] as well. That sort of chaos and confusion is something unique to competitions, so while I think it’s good that I got a feel for that in the first competition, at the same time, I thought I must [manage to recover] one way or the other and, because of that, I ended up leaving behind a lot of points. I only did one Axel this time, but it was just that I had originally been constructing this program with my ideal layout. I didn’t want to ruin that program itself, so I was reluctant to change the layout. In that sense, it’s not a give-or-take but, in the worst case, when a lot is happening, attack alone is not a way to gain points––“to attack = to score” is not the case––this was a competition where I really felt that.

–––– With what aim in mind did you approach this first competition?

YH I had wanted to do the 4Lz in this first competition. To do the quad in the free, and the 4Lo too, then three quads in the second half plus 3A––my biggest goal was to try out this layout properly in an actual competition. Actually trying it out, I could learn positively how much burden this layout brings (to the foot) and how it’s necessary to be careful. Additionally, through training with the competitions in mind, my technique is improving immensely, and I’m also mastering many ways to jump. So, although I couldn’t do all the jumps, I was also able to study the process of reaching [mastery].

–––– There was the announcement that you would be proceeding with caution due to a knee problem, but have you also considered withdrawing from [ACI]?

YH I have this memory––almost trauma––of injuring my knee; [back] in the 2013 World Championships, and it ended up taking two months to heal this knee. You could say I was young and rash, but at the time, it got to a point where I couldn’t walk. I continued to do the Salchow, as well a lot of other things [thinking that] I must also raise my skating quality, and eventually I was left with this regret of injuring my knee. This time, if it were to get as bad as it was then, I wouldn’t even make it in time for the first event of the Grand Prix Series in October. If I don’t make the Grand Prix, then I will only have one shot with the Japanese nationals. And when the Pyeongchang Olympics is the competition following the Japanese nationals, definitely it would be too much to adjust. That was the greatest worry, so the decision to attend the competition this time wasn’t actually so easy.

World’s highest score ever in the SP

–––– Even so, you rewrote the world record score in the SP with a layout of lowered difficulty. How did you feel?

YH In a sense, I felt relief. In the worst case, if my physical condition weren’t great and the Loop didn’t fit as I had wished, but it was a competition that I absolutely must win––and that may be the Olympics or the Japanese nationals––if the time comes and I must win this solidly, I think I can win the short with this layout, I think I can lead… for an instant, I did think that. But in the end, looking back after the free, I just don’t have motivation without challenging myself after all. And that is something I felt immensely.

–––– You hit the world’s highest score ever with just the 4S. Even though it’s fine not to go for the challenge of a [more] difficult layout and that thought has crossed your mind, as an athlete, [you choose] to challenge.

YH Yes, of course. As a mental image in my head, beginning from the opening melody of “Ballade No.1,” a spread-eagle goes straight into a 4S that connects to [another] spread-eagle, after which I do the spins. It’s not that I can’t imagine this layout in and of itself, but it’s that I think it was being completed [then and there] as it was. Though, it may possibly have been completed in this competition. 　　But to my current self, “Ballade No.1” is 4Lo after all, and there are things you see only because of the Loop, or probably things that are different somehow. Although I think everyone perceives and feels in a different way, right now, that piece [stands] to me because of the Loop, and executing it without the Loop is out of the question. Whether I do 4S or not, do I feel that way or not––these are entirely irrelevant because that spot [in the music] has by now become 4Lo in my head, and my heart is completely set.

About the Quad Lutz

–––– After returning from the Autumn Classic, did you restart training with your original layout, with the 4Lz incorporated, right away?

YH It wasn’t immediate. First I had to confirm whether or not I was able to jump the 4Lz, and although I was also doing the 4Lo at the official practice, at most it was about once per day. So first things first, getting back to a form capable of pursuing [these things] was a must. After that, I’ve been gradually building up on training; because I hadn’t been jumping – couldn’t jump – for too long, I had the sense that I was quickly losing my mental image.

–––– The work of regaining [your jumps] must be difficult.

YH Although for the 4Lo, the feeling is close to “regaining,” in terms of the 4Lz, my body had pretty much no memory. In my mind too––I haven’t memorized the feeling [of the jump] to such an extent yet, so probably it felt more like “rebuilding” it.

–––– You were jumping clean 4Lz’s during this year’s ice show practices, weren't you?

YH I trained with good mental images during the summer and there was good technical support; I was able to practice my jumps with focus. At that stage I wasn’t yet in a hurry, feeling like I must run through the entire program or that I must do something, and since my drive to incorporate the Lutz was strong, I was able to focus. In a way, I think it was because all these conditions were present that––not only technically––I was also able to have the image [of the jump] in mind.

Post-Rostelecom Cup

–––– You took on your programs, returning to the original layout [you had in mind] at the Rostelecom Cup. What do you think about the FS with the new layout?

YH That it’s difficult, after all! Although, if I were to name one point of compromise (t/n saving grace?) in my mind, I think it would be that, great! Given around two mistakes, I still managed to be in first place. After [landing] the opening 4Lz, although I started to pop the 4Lo, I thought I saved it well with a triple. And regarding the 4S, I was glad that I didn't pop it despite the axis getting slightly misaligned.

　　I completely missed the timing of the second half 4T and doubled it, but that couldn't be helped. The three jumps that came after (4T+3T, 3A+2T, 3A)... in my impression, I finished them off in good form.

　　This felt completely different from how my first events have always been. This time, before the Autumn Classic, that I will be up against Vincent Zhou, or Javier Fernandez, or against Nathan Chen for this competition... I practiced with these assumptions in mind. We were crafting the programs really early on, and I think that led to this result.

　　Every single year, I tend to fall into the pattern of hastily starting out at the first Grand Prix event; I am aware of that. Also because of that, I understand that this is the period when most injuries happen, and I think it's really quite difficult to manage both training and preventing injuries, maintaining a good balance between the two. But, because I've been able to get somewhat further along into my skating compared to my usual, there is this feeling that my programs have slipped into my body.

–––– While you created your programs early, there was a lot of news coming in––other competitors getting great scores at the Lombardia Trophy and US International Classic of the Challenger Series, [so-and-so] did a quad, and so forth. How did you react to that?

YH I think there was anxiety. Because from my experience having skated for all this time until now, like it or not, I have been made to realize that I am a slow starter. But what I am really thinking about is the approximately 30-point increase here compared to my past first Grand Prix events thus far. Taking that into consideration, the quality of this season's training is completely different from anything thus far, and I think the significance of what I have so far come to accumulate is entirely different.

　 Be it training or my private day-to-day, I have been continuously pondering about how to direct everything for the sake of skating. Of course, there are also times, say, when results don't follow and it's agonizing. However, of what's been accumulated, there is this feeling [of certainty] that, without doubt, it's all building up.

Heading towards the Olympics

–––– Are there things that are different from usual particularly because this is the season going into the Olympics?

YH I keep thinking, let's build up the body soon. It was also the case in the Sochi Olympic season, but I feel that matching my peak to the World Championships in March is out of the question (t/n too late). If it doesn’t go well at the Olympics, [it could be] that I haven’t directed/thrown enough of myself into the skating and the lack of efficiency, or inefficiency in the way I raise the precision of my jumps too; I think there are many possible causes. The way it was when I was 16 or 17––Ban-ban! Jumping and falling and jumping and falling, but it’s fine because from then on the body will remember––something like that I must no longer do. I have to do what suits my current body after all. But I’m doing more difficult things than I was before. My ability to recuperate is also completely different. It’s essential to train while facing [the way] the body [is], and it is how well one will train that is crucial––something that I am sensing this season.

–––– Hanyu-senshu’s body has grown. Did the way you build up muscles change as well?

YH I haven’t been thinking about it though…

–––– There is the impression that Hanyu-senshu is slim, but you’re actually quite muscular and firm.

YH I haven’t been doing anything at all to bulk up like in weight training. 　　I’m slim in terms of build to begin with, and it’s perhaps exactly because I am not the type to build muscles that I have a narrower axis, resulting in beautiful jumps. But if we speak of stability, I think it is the type of skaters with a solid build and a low center of gravity who are advantageous in jumps, such that they are able to contain it with their core even when they are somewhat off-axis. 　　If I start doing that in jumps, although I’ll be stable, I’ll also have completely lost my own merits. My lack of stability is my weakness. My being twice more nervous than others, and feeling twice the pressure of others too, stem from the challenging conditions––how should I put it, the low precision at the actual event? Or more precisely, [the way] my jumps don’t come to be unless everything falls into place.

　　Even so, after worrying myself sick over many, many different things, what I’ve finally arrived at is that there is also strength in [what I am] after all. It works out somehow––putting together the conditions [that make it click]. Training my mind, taking care of my body, properly advancing and improving and so forth. In order to accomplish that, so many people take care of me. I thought that, should I change my build and give up on my own style of jumps in search of stability, most probably I would no longer be able to return to where I started.

–––– Do you go for stability or [your own] strength… it’s all about the balance, isn’t it?

YH It’s imperative to always keep balance in mind. Before I really used to forget myself. Until around last season, I would forget myself. But this time, when I decided to jump the 4Lz, I thought that I must seek stability after all. Watching various skaters’ performances, reflecting on questions like, when is a Lutz perfectly fitting in? The conditions are only too tough after all.

　My own way of expression is [like] pieces of glass. Really beautiful when they fit [together] successfully, but if they don’t, I could even break myself, and actually I have had the experience of injuring myself. If [these pieces] don’t fall smoothly into place, mentally I become a mess as well, and I can’t fully trust myself. But, without such shortcomings, I couldn’t have become stronger, and I think it is in overcoming this that I am strong. My own physique and the foundations of skating that I’ve learned until now… no matter how I struggle, these aren’t things that change within months. What I can change is in how far I could [knock at] these unsparing conditions, little by little, and make them easier. If I make them too easy, then I end up heading [solely] toward the direction of stability. So, even under unsparing conditions, to what extent can I stoically preserve my own self while acquiring, building up on various things––I think that is, to my current self, the most crucial point at the moment.

–––– You successfully landed the 4Lz in the free skate of your first competition. Did you feel relieved?

YH Thankfully retaining a 100% success rate in my first event (t/n - challenging a new jump), it feels like fate. (4T in 2011, 4S in 2012, 4Lo in 2016 – he has been successfully landing the various jumps in each season’s first event) I just really felt the joys of being able to go for something resolutely, after all. Different from a skate where I am thinking about something while skating––must hold back here, don't do this, must do that––being able to go decisively for a skate, being able to skate resolutely with trust in my own body, that really is a moment when I am glad that I am participating in this sport.

I was able to land the 4Lz in the free skate; and I have yet to skate clean in my short program with 4Lo in the layout but, actually, I’ve been continuously landing the Loop in the later half of last season. Since there’s no longer a sense of challenge in that (t/n landing the Loop in and of itself), I’ve a strong urge to go clean on this layout.

His experience in Russia

–––– It’s been a while since you’ve competed in Russia. What is your best memory from Russia?

YH My best memory was attending training camp (in the 2011-12 season). I have the impression that I went through very intensive training. It was during a really cold time, and my physical condition wasn’t so great either. But the scenery, Russian signs, or whenever I hear conversations in Russian, I think, truly, I’m glad I worked hard then.

If it weren’t for the World Championships then (2012), I definitely wouldn’t have gotten where I am now. Even now, when I skate to “Notte Stellata,” my exhibition number, I recall [those] lessons––express it this way.

I wasn’t even there for a full month, and I was only taught for about 20, 30 hours or so, but truly, truly, [that experience] is one of the bedrocks of my skating today.

–––– Do you feel that there is Russian tradition in [your skating]?

YH Is it Russian––or perhaps it is the fundamentals of coaches Natalia Bestemianova and Igor Bobrin’s way of thinking? I think I was able to learn a lot about the fundamentals of expression from them.

–––– What are the aspects where those lessons remain, even today?

YH Since I moved base to Canada, and because the Canadian and Russian ways of expression are completely different, I’ve been thinking what sort of expression suits Asians, who are neither Canadian nor Russian.

What I get from speaking to many different people is that, since I train in North America, there is a bit of “North Americanness” in me, but my way of expression isn’t purely North American in style. If anything, it’s Russian. I guess I’m in the Russian vein in terms of systems of expression, but it also isn’t that I’m only specializing in that. After all is said and done, it’s great [the way I am] because there is a fineness/suppleness in my jumps that are characteristic of Asians, and because every one of these [traits] are leveraged––so I’ve been told by quite a few people and for which I count my lucky stars as a skater. In a sense, one can be glad to have been born as a Japanese. Personally, I began my training in Japan, and my teachers in Japan have their various methods of teaching, so I have those teachers to thank as well; then after that I went to Russia, went to Canada… because I’ve really been soaking up a variety of things, I think there is a lot of different elements incorporated within me.

–––– You chose the Rostelecom Cup for your first event in the Grand Prix Series. It’s a different start to the season than usual.

YH What I’m most glad about––isn’t that I’ve landed the 4lz, nor that I’ve found issues to work through due to mistakes made in the short program. Rather, it’s that I got to skate before Bestemianova & Bobrin, who had taught me at training cap in Russia, and Tarasova-san, and then the fact that I was able to skate here in Russia.

Although I didn’t do well at all, nor was I able to meet with the three of them. Tarasova-san has been taking care of me, even now, and coaches Bestemianova & Bobrin are two people who’ve created my foundation. Without their mentorship, I wouldn’t have been able to get this far. In a season’s first event where I must bring out everything I have acquired so far, performing before such people––I could do more of this. I must also do more of that! I must pay attention to things like this! –– I was really sensing this all over again.

In both “SEIMEI” and the short program, I had to focus on the jumps. Especially since it’s the first event of the season, I myself was also [generally] highly focused toward jumps. But, speaking of the exhibition this time, I redid its choreography after the end of the free skate event. I was thinking to myself that I wanted to further develop my interpretation, and to bring it even closer to the artistic culture of this land that is Russia. To this extent, I learned and I was immensely stimulated. I really can’t help but to be glad that I got to skate here.

–––– There was so much applause during the exhibition.

YH I am so glad to be skating––the thought comes up when my challenges against boundaries and difficulties in jumps go well. More recently, though, people are clapping not only at jumps but also during other parts, and I am still so happy about that. The feeling during the spins, the feelings that are imbued in each movement in the performance––this may be something I learned from Mansai Nomura-san, but I really have this feeling that because there is meaning in each and every [expression], people responded with sensitivity, reacting candidly to it. In such moments, I think of how truly glad I am to be skating and, to me, Russia is probably the starting point of my being able to think this way.

#yuzuru hanyu #hanyu yuzuru #羽生結弦 #figure skating #ice jewels #his own words #2017

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dont-doubt-dopple · 6 years

Note

au ask: mythical creatures themed: 2. i got cursed and turned into an animal and taken to the shelter and ended up getting adopted by someone who is really hot OH NO. w/ohmtoonz?

AUs

Ryan was freaking out because he was human.

It wasn’t that he was normally a bunny and now has somehow grown longer legs and opposable thumbs overnight. No, he was freaking out over what Luke’s reaction might be.

See Luke was this really hot guy that had adopted Ryan when he was still a rabbit about 2 days ago. And Ryan would be lying if he said that he wasn’t head over the heels for the guy. He just had these really nice muscles and a nice ass, especially when it was squeezed into tight fitting jeans. Plus he just wanted to run his fingers through his beard and curl up against his toned body or to cup his his cheekbones as he kissed those soft lips. Just … oh, the things he could imagine.

But how was Luke going to react now that he was human again? The man was still sleeping, thank god. But it was getting late, it was nearly 11:30 if the alarm on the bedside table was to be believed, and the guy was going to wake any minute to some stranger on the floor where his bunny should be.

And how the fuck did he turn human in the first place? Nothing was really done differently than the previous night being here. They had dinner, Luke watched a movie Ryan had already seen, bath time, then a quick kiss before heading off to get ready for bed and Ryan was left to his own devices.

Wait, was it the kiss?

It could have been the kiss.

Fuck, it was the kiss.

He was about to slap when the annoying beeping of an alarm clock began to blare throughout the room. And Ryan now had something he wanted to slap even more than himself.

“Shit.” Ryan heard Luke mumble, as he turned off the alarm. The latter looked at the time, and his eyes shot wide open. If he wasn’t awake before, he sure was now. “Shit! Del’s gonna be here in 10. Fuck me!” He threw off the covers, quickly dashing out the bedroom door in nothing but a pair of boxers.

Luke paused, then took a few steps back to the entrance of his bedroom, where his eyes stared at the man sitting on the floor. Naked, he might add. “Nice ass.”

“Wait what?” Ryan looked down and, seeing him in nothing, proceeded to quickly grab the blanket hanging on the edge of Luke’s bed. He then turned to face the man in question, still standing in the doorway with a grin. “You saw none of that.”

“Yeah, if that will help you sleep at night. Now, who are you and where is my bunny? Ohm?!”

“Yeah, I’m Ohm.” Luke looked at him with disbelief. “It’s a long story and I don’t think you have the time to hear it. Didn’t you say someone was coming over in 10 minutes? Bel, was it?”

“Del, and Yeah. But ten minutes real world time is not 10 minutes Jonathan time.” Luke pointed to his dresser. “Bottom drawer is pants, top left is underwear. Sure there’s something in there that’s fits.”

“What about you?”

“Please, this is my best friend coming over. At least this time he gave me warning. I had to learn the hard way that he slept in his birthday suit.” Luke seemed to shudder at the thought. “Anyways, I’ll be out in the kitchen when your ready.”

Five minutes later, with a little trial and error, Ryan came out with a long sleeve that fit nearly perfect and some sweatpants that look like he could fit another person into them. Luke was at the counter, drinking a large cup of coffee. Somehow he’d thrown on some shorts and a white tee. Probably hid it somewhere in case of an unexpected visit. Ryan took a seat across from Luke, the man never leaving his eyes.

“So, Bunny boy.” He prefaced, resting his elbows on the counter and face in hands. “Tell me how exactly you managed that.”

“Okay, well, it all started with my ex-boyfriend. I thought he was a nice guy. Anyways, my ex had all these nicknames that he went by for various things and one of them was Hoodini. Like, I know he had this owl aesthetic thing going on but I never understood the Houdini part of it.”

“Wait, was one of nicknames Vanoss by any chance?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I know him.” Luke affirmed. “Well, sorta. Delirious has been talking about him nonstop since they met and he wants to introduce him to me. That’s probably the only reason he gave me advance notice about coming over.”

“Can I panic? I feel like now is a really good time to do so.”

“Finish the story, then I’ll lend you a paper bag to breathe.”

“My hero.” Ryan rolled his eyes. “Now, it’s a few weeks into the relationship and Evan thought I was seeing this other guy, Smitty. Which I’m not, by the way. I’m not that kind of guy. Anyways, Evan is getting really insecure about the whole thing because Smitty is also Canadian and he’s much younger that Evan and he’s really jealous and refuses to admit so.

“So one night Smitty invites the two of us over for movies but Evan was working that night and was going to be late. I show up, and we talk a little bit about how he’s crushing on these two guys, Fitz and John, and how he’s nervous about asking them to be Poly with him along with some other things and then we start the movie. It’s Jurassic World, and there’s this one scene where it’s all quiet for a moment before the Custom Dino, forgot its name right now, burst through the ceiling of the old building. The scene comes on and Smitty jumps into me, hands wrapped around my neck and everything. And that’s when Evan decides to show up.

“As expected he’s fuming. He’s screaming all these accusations at me; he’s so fired up and won’t let a word in edgewise. Smitty also trying to explain its nothing and it’s just everybody screaming and yelling over each other. Everything is loud and then suddenly it’s quiet again, well save for Chris Pratt’s voice on the movie still playing. Me and Smitty are moving our mouths trying to make sound come out and yet nothing. Turns out, Evan neglected to mention that he was actually magic. So he walks up to Smitty, knocks him out and then tells me he’s going to wipe all his memories of me in him.”

“And then he turns you into a rabbit.”

“And that’s how I ended up a rabbit.” Ryan concluded. “My question is how I was able to turn back so quickly. Evan made it seem like it was either him or miracle circumstances that I would be human again, and here I am sitting in your kitchen only a week and a half after being bunny-fied.”

“Well, did he tell you the circumstances?” Luke asked, slowly continuing his advances toward Ryan.

“No, he kinda just threatened me with how I was going to need him eventually and then knocked me out to wake up in the shelter.” The doorbell rang, signaling Luke had company. “Question: do you have any good places to hide?”

“How about we play with Evan a little?” Luke was right up in Ryan’s face at this point, the cheeks on the shorter beginning to glow red. “I mean, it’s pretty obvious you like me.”

“No.” Ryan whispered. Luke stared at him dead in the eyes until he cracked, which wasn’t long. “Fuck! The downfall of wearing my emotions of my sleeve.”

“Well then relax, Ohmie.” Luke purred before shouting toward the door. “It’s unlocked, Del! Come in!”

“Wait, wha…” Ryan didn’t get to finish his thought as Luke brought their faces together in a kiss. He was surprised by the sudden movement that, if Luke wasn’t holding onto him, he would have fallen out of his chair. It was confusing and unexpected, but it was everything he could of dream of and more. He couldn’t imagine anything else; the world right now was him and Luke. And when they broke away, reality had to take a second to catch up.

“Wow.” Ryan breathed, his hands clinging to Luke’s hips as he had wrapped them around during the kiss when he had gotten his bearings.

“You never told me you were a good kisser.”

“You never asked. And it’s been awhile. Thought I was a little rusty.”

“If that was a little rusty then I’d love to see you when you’re all warmed up.”

“Not in my Good Christian Neighborhood please!” Ryan turned to see Evan, wearing clothes and a dumbfound expression, and another man who he assumed to be Del. He looked ready to all but murder Luke. “Warn me Please next time!!”

“Call it even for your teddy bear practice.” Luke smiled.

“Ryan?” Evan asked, finally having everything registered to him. Ryan giggled a little.

“It’s a long story.”

~•~

Edit: Fixed now! Mobile sucks but I use it 90% of the time and I’m forced to use it. But I hope you enjoy! I rewrote the beginning about three times and I’m glad how it turned out in the end. 💜

#dopple work #bbs #bbs squad #banana bus squad #cartoonz #ohmwrecker #ohmtoonz #h2o delirious #vanoss #vanossgaming #vanohm #fanfic

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1921designs · 3 years

Text

My daughter and God

FOUR YEARS AGO, driving home from picking up our twelve-year-old daughter from summer camp, my wife reached into her purse for a tissue and lost control of the car. This occurred on a stretch of Interstate 10 between Houston and San Antonio, near the town of Gonzales. The accident occurred as many do: a moment of distraction, a small mistake, and suddenly everything is up for grabs. My wife and daughter were in the midst of a minor argument over my daughter’s need to blow her nose. During high-pollen season, she is a perennial sniffer, and the sound drives my wife crazy. Get a Kleenex, Leslie said, for God’s sake, and when Iris, out of laziness or exhaustion or the mild day-to-day defiance of all teenagers, refused to do so, my wife reached for her purse, inadvertently turning the wheel to the left.

In the case of some vehicles, the mistake might have been rectified, but not in the case of my wife’s—a top-heavy SUV with jacked-up suspension. When she realized her error, she overcorrected to the right, then again to the left, the car swerving violently. They were on a bridge that passed above a gully: on either side, nothing but gravity and forty vertical feet of air. That they would hit the guardrail was now inevitable. In moments of acute stress, time seems to slow. The name for this is tachypsychia, from the Greek tach, meaning “speed,” and psych, meaning “mind.” Thus, despite the chaos and panic of these moments, my wife had time to form a thought: I have killed my daughter.

This didn’t happen, although the accident was far from over. The car did not break through the guardrail but ricocheted back onto the highway, spinning in a one-eighty before flopping onto its side in a powdery explosion of airbags. It struck another vehicle, driven by a pastor and his wife on their way home from Sunday lunch, though my wife has no memory of this. For what seemed like hours the car traveled in this manner, then gravity took hold once more. Like a whale breaching the surface, it lifted off the roadway, turned belly-up, and crashed down onto its roof. The back half of the car compacted like an accordion: steel crushing, glass bursting, my daughter’s belongings—clothes, shoes, books, an expensive violin—exploding onto the highway. Other cars whizzed past, narrowly missing them. A final jolt, the car rolled again, and it came to a halt, facing forward, resting on its wheels.

As my wife tells it, the next moment was very nearly comic. She and my daughter looked at each other. The car had been utterly obliterated, but there was no blood, no pain, no evidence of bodily injury to either of them. “We’ve been in an accident,” my wife robotically observed.

My daughter looked down at her hand. “I am holding my phone,” she said— as, indeed, she somehow still was. “Do you want me to call 911?”

There was no need. Though in the midst of things the two of them had felt alone in the universe, the accident had occurred in the presence of a dozen other vehicles, all of which had now stopped and disgorged their occupants, who were racing to the scene. A semi moved in behind them to block the highway. By this time my wife’s understanding of events had widened only to the extent that she was aware that she had created a great deal of inconvenience for other people.

She was apologizing to everyone, mistaking their amazement for anger. Everybody had expected them to be dead, not sitting upright in their destroyed vehicle, neither one of them with so much as a hair out of place. Some began to weep; others had the urge to touch them. The cops arrived, a fire truck, an ambulance. While my wife and daughter were checked out by an EMT, onlookers organized a posse to prowl the highway for my daughter’s belongings. Because my wife and daughter no longer had a car to put them into, a woman offered to bring the items to our house; she was headed for Houston to visit her son and was pulling a trailer of furniture. The EMT was as baffled as everybody else. “Nobody walks away from something like this,” he said.

I was to learn of these events several hours later, when my wife phoned me. I was in the grocery store with our six-year-old son, and when I saw my wife’s number my first thought was that she was calling to tell me she was running late, because she always is.

“Okay,” I said, not bothering to say hello, “where are you?”

Thus her first tender steps into explaining what had occurred. An accident, she said. A kind of a big fender-bender, really. Nobody hurt, but the car was out of commission; I’d need to come get them.

I wasn’t nice about this. Part of the dynamic in our marriage is the unstated fact that I am a better driver than my wife. I have never been in an accident; my one and only speeding ticket was issued when the first George Bush was president. About every two years my wife does something careless in a parking lot that costs a lot of money, and she has received so many tickets that she has been forced to retake driver’s education—and those are just the tickets I know about. The rules of modern marriage do not include confiscating your wife’s car keys, but more than once I have considered doing this.

“A fender-bender,” I repeated. Christ almighty, this again.“How bad is it?”

“Everybody’s fine. You don’t have to worry.”

“I get that. You said that already.” I was in the cereal aisle; my son was bugging me to buy a box of something much too sweet. I tossed it into the cart.

“What about the car?”

“Um, it kind of . . . rolled.”

I imagined a Labrador retriever lazily rotating onto his back in front of the fireplace. “I don’t understand what you’re telling me.” “It’s okay, really,” my wife said.

“Do you mean it rolled over?”

“It happened kind of fast. Totally no big deal, though.”

It sounded like a huge deal. “Let me see if I have this right. You were driving and the car rolled over.”

“Iris wouldn’t blow her nose. I was getting her a Kleenex. You know how she is. The doctors say she’s absolutely fine.”

“What doctors?” It was becoming clear that she was in a state of shock.

“Where are you?”

“At the hospital. It’s very small. I’m not even sure you’d call it a hospital.

Everybody’s been so nice.”

And so on. By the time the call ended, I had some idea of the seriousness, though not completely. Gonzales was three hours away. I abandoned my grocery cart, raced home, got on the phone, found somebody to look after our son, and got in my car. Several more calls followed, each adding a piece to the puzzle, until I was able to conclude that my wife and daughter were alive but should be dead. I knew this, but I didn’t feel it. For the moment I was locked into the project of retrieving them from the small town where they’d been stranded. It was after ten o’clock when I pulled into the driveway of Gonzales Memorial Hospital, a modern building the size of a suburban dental office. I did not see my wife, who was standing at the edge of the parking lot, looking out over the empty fields behind it. I raced inside, and there was Iris. She was slender and tan from a month in the Texas sunshine, and wearing a yellow T-shirt dress. She had never looked more beautiful, and it was this beauty that brought home the magnitude of events. I threw my arms around her, tears rising in my throat; I had never been so happy to see anybody in my life. When I asked her where her mother was, she said she didn’t know; one of the nurses directed us outside. I found myself unable to take a hand off my daughter; some part of me needed constant reassurance of her existence. I saw my wife standing at the edge of the lot, facing away. I called her name, she turned, and the two of us headed toward her.

As my wife tells the story, this was the moment when, as the saying goes, she got God. Once the two of them had been discharged, my wife had stepped outside to call me with this news. But the signal quality was poor, and she abandoned the attempt. I’d be along soon enough.

She found herself, then, standing alone in the Texas night. I do not recall if the weather was clear, but I’d like to think it was, all those fat stars shining down. My wife had been raised Missouri Synod Lutheran, but a series of intertribal squabbles had soured her parents on the whole thing, and apart from weddings and funerals, she hadn’t set foot in a church for years. Yet the outdoor cathedral of a starry Texas night is as good a place as any to communicate with the Almighty, which she commenced to do. In the hours since the accident, as the adrenaline cleared, her recollection of events had led her to a calculus that rewrote everything she thought she knew about the world. Until that night, her vision of a universal deity had been basically impersonal. God, in her mind, was simply too busy to take an interest in individual human affairs. The universe possessed a moral shape, but events were haphazard, unguided by providence. Now, as she contemplated the accident, mentally listing the many ways that she and our daughter should have died and yet did not, she decided this was wrong. Of course God paid attention. Only the intercession of a divine hand could explain such a colossal streak of luck. Likewise did the accident become in her mind a product of celestial design. It was a message; it meant something. She had been placed in a circumstance in which a mother’s greatest fear was about to be realized, then yanked from the brink. Her future emerged in her mind as something given back to her—it was as if she and our daughter had been killed on the highway and then restored to life—and like all supplicants in the wilderness, she asked God what her purpose was, why he’d returned her to the world.

That was the moment when Iris and I emerged from the building and called her name, giving her the answer.

Until that night we were a family that had lived an entirely secular existence. This wasn’t planned; things simply happened that way. My religious background was different from my wife’s, but only by degree. I was raised in the Catholic Church, but its messages were delivered to me in a lethargic and off-key manner that failed to gain much traction. My father did not attend mass—I was led to believe this had something to do with the trauma of his attending Catholic grade school—and my mother, who dutifully took my sister and me to church every Sunday, did not receive communion. Why this should be so I never thought to ask. Always she met us at the rear of the church so that we could make a quick exit “to avoid the traffic.” (There was no traffic.) We never attended a church picnic or drank coffee in the basement after mass or went to Bible study; we socialized with no other families in the parish. Religion was never discussed over the dinner table or anyplace else. I went to just enough Sunday school to meet the minimum requirements for first communion, but because I went to a private school with afternoon activities, I could not attend confirmation class. My mother struck a deal with the priest. If I met with him for a couple of hours to discuss religious matters, I could be confirmed. I had no idea why I was doing any of this or what it meant, only that I needed to select a new name, taken from the saints. I chose Cornelius, not because I knew who he was but because that was the name of my favorite character in Planet of the Apes.

Within a couple of years I was off to boarding school, and my life as a Roman Catholic, nominal as it was, came to an end. During a difficult period in my midtwenties, I briefly flirted with church attendance, thinking it might offer me some comfort and direction, but I found it just as stultifying and embarrassing as I always had, full of weird sexual obsessions, exclusionary politics, and a deep love of hocus-pocus, overlaid with a doctrine of obedience that was complete anathema to my newly independent self. If asked, I would have said that I believed in God—one never really loses those mental contours once they’re established—but that organized religious practice struck me as completely infantile. When my wife and I were married, a set of odd circumstances led us to choose an Anglican priest to officiate, but this was a decision we regretted, and when our daughter was born, the subject of baptism never came up. Essentially, we viewed ourselves as too smart for religion. I’ll put it another way. Religion was for people who wanted to stay children all their lives. We didn’t. We were the grown-ups.

In the aftermath of the accident, and the event that I now think of as “the revelation of the parking lot,” all this went out the window. I was not half as sure as my wife that God had interceded; I’m a skeptic and always will be. But it was also the case that I was due for a course correction. In my midforties, I had yet to have anything truly bad happen to me. The opposite was true: I’d done tremendously well. At the university where I taught, I’d just been promoted to full professor. A trilogy of novels I had begun writing on a lark had been purchased for scads of money. We’d just bought a new house we loved, and my daughter had been admitted to a terrific school, where she’d be starting in the fall. My children were happy and healthy, and my newfound financial success had allowed my wife to quit her stressful job as a high school teacher to look after our family and pursue her interests. It had been a long, hard climb, but we’d made it—more than made it—and I spent a great deal of time patting myself on the back for this success. I’d gone out hunting and brought back a mammoth.

Everything was right as rain.

In hindsight, this self-congratulatory belief in my ability to chart my own destiny was patently ridiculous. Worldly things are worldly things; two bad seconds on the highway can take them all away, and sooner or later something’s going to come along that does just that.

Once you have it, this information is unignorable, and it seems to me that you can do one of two things with it. You can decide that life doesn’t make sense, or you can decide that it does. In version one, the universe is a stone-cold place. Life is a series of accumulations—friends, lovers, children, memories, the contents of your 401(k)—followed by a rapid casting off (i.e., you die). Your wife is just somebody you met at a party; your children are biological accretions of yourself; your affection for them is nothing more than a bit of well-engineered firmware to guarantee the perpetuation of the species. All pleasures are sensory, since nothing goes deeper than the senses, and pain, whether psychological or physical, is meaningless bad news you can only endure till it’s over.

Version two assumes that life, with all its vicissitudes, possesses an organized pattern of meaning. Grief means something, joy means something, love means something. This meaning isn’t always obvious and is sometimes maddeningly elusive; had my wife and daughter been killed that afternoon on the highway, I would have been hard-pressed to take solace in religion’s customary clichés. (It is likely that the only thing that would have prevented me from committing suicide, apart from my own physical cowardice, would have been my son, into whom I would have poured all my love and sorrow.) But it’s there if you look for it, and the willingness to search—whether this search finds expression in religious ritual or attentive care for one’s children or a long run through falling autumn leaves—is what is meant, I think, by faith.

But herein lies the problem: we don’t generally come to these things on our own. Somebody has to lay the groundwork, and the best way to accomplish this is with a story, since that’s how children learn most things. My Catholic upbringing was halfhearted and unfocused, but it made an impression. At any time during my thirty-year exile from organized religion, I could have stepped into a Sunday mass and recited the entire liturgy by heart. For better or worse, my God was a Catholic God, the God of smells and bells and the BVM and the saints and all the rest, and I didn’t have to build this symbolic narrative on my own. My wife is much the same; I have no doubt that the image of the merciful deity she addressed in the parking lot came straight off a stained-glass window, circa 1975. Yet out of arrogance or laziness or the shallow notion that modern, freethinking parents ought to allow children to decide these things for freethinking parents ought to allow children to decide these things for themselves, we’d given our daughter none of it. We’d left her in the dark forest of her own mind, and what she’d concluded was that there was no God at all.

This came about in the aftermath of our move to Texas—a very churchy place. My daughter was entering the first grade; my son was still being hauled around in a basket. Houston is a sophisticated and diverse city, with great food, interesting architecture, and a vivid cultural life, but the suburbs are the suburbs, and the neighborhood where we settled was straight out of Betty Friedan’s famous complaint: horseshoe streets of more or less identical one-story, 2,500square-foot houses, built on reclaimed ranchland in the 1960s. A neighborhood of 2.4 children per household, fathers who raced off to work each morning before the dew had dried, moms who pushed their kids around in strollers and passed out snacks at soccer games and volunteered at the local elementary school. We were, after ten years living in a dicey urban neighborhood in Philadelphia, eager for something a little calmer, more controlled, and we’d chosen the house in a hurry, not realizing what we were getting into. Among our first visitors was an older woman from down the block. She presented us with a plate of brownies and proceeded to list the denominational affiliations of each of our neighbors. I was, to put it mildly, pretty weirded-out. I counted about a dozen churches within just a few miles of my house—Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, United Church of Christ—and all of them were huge. People talked about Jesus as if he were sitting in their living room, flipping through a magazine; nearly every day I saw a car with a bumper sticker that read, Warning: In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned. Stapled to the local religious culture was a socially conservative brand of politics I found abhorrent. To hear homosexuality described as an “abomination” felt like I’d parachuted into the Middle Ages. I couldn’t argue with my neighbors’ devotion to their offspring—the neighborhood revolved around children—but it seemed to me that Jesus Christ, whoever he was, had been pretty clear on the subject of loving everybody.

This was the current my daughter swam in every day at school. Not many months had passed before one of her friends, the daughter of evangelicals, expressed concern that Iris was going to hell. Those were the words she used: “I don’t want you to go to hell, Iris.” The girl in question was adorable, with ringlets of dark hair, perfect manners, and lovely, doting parents. No doubt she thought she was doing Iris a kindness when she urged her to attend church with her family to avoid this awful fate. But that wasn’t how I saw the situation. I dropped to a defensive crouch and came out swinging. “Tell her that hell’s a fairy tale,” I said. “Tell her to leave you alone.”

The better choice would have been to offer her a more positive, less punishing The better choice would have been to offer her a more positive, less punishing view of creation—less hell, more heaven—and over time my wife and I tried to do just that. But when you’re seven years old, “love your neighbor as yourself” sounds a lot like “don’t forget to brush your teeth”—words to live by but hardly a description of humanity’s place in the cosmos. As the playground evangelism continued, so did my daughter’s contempt, and why wouldn’t it? She’d learned it from me. I don’t recall when she announced she was an atheist. All I remember was that she did this from the back seat of the car, sitting in a booster chair.

After the accident, my daughter spent the better part of a week in her closet.

From time to time I’d stop by and say, “Are you still in there?” Or “Hey, it’s

Daddy, how’s it going?” Or “Let me know if you need anything.”

“All good!” she said. “Thanks!”

There were things to sort out: an insurance claim to file, a replacement vehicle to acquire, arrangements to make for our summer vacation, for which we’d be leaving in two weeks. My wife and I were badly shaken. We had entered a new state: we were a family that had been nearly annihilated. Every few hours one of us would burst into tears. Genesis 2:24 speaks of spouses “cleaving” to each other, and that was what we did: we cleaved. We badly wanted to comfort our daughter, but she had made herself completely unreachable. Of course she’d be confused and angry; in a careless moment, her mother had nearly killed her. But when we probed her on the matter, she insisted this wasn’t so. Everything was peachy, she said. She just liked it in the closet. No worries, she’d be along soon.

A day later we received a phone call from the pastor whose car my wife’s had struck. At first I thought he was calling to get my insurance information, which I apologetically offered. He explained that the damage was minor, nothing even worth fixing, and that he had called to see if my wife and daughter were all right. Perfectly, I said, omitting my daughter’s temporary residence among her shirts and pants, and thanked him profusely.

“It’s a miracle,” he said. “I saw the whole thing. Nobody should have survived.”

He wasn’t the first to say this. The M-word was bandied about freely by virtually everyone we knew. The following afternoon we were visited by the woman who had collected Iris’s belongings: two cardboard boxes of books and clothes covered with highway grime and shards of glass, a suitcase that looked like it had been run over, and her violin, which had escaped its launch into the gulley unharmed. We chatted in the living room, replaying events. Like the pastor, she seemed a little dazed. When the conversation reached a resting place, she explained that she couldn’t leave until she’d seen Iris.

“Give me just a sec,” my wife said.

A minute later she appeared with our daughter. The woman rose from her chair, stepped toward Iris, and wrapped her in a hug. This display made my daughter visibly uncomfortable, as it would anyone. Why was this stranger hugging her? The woman’s face was full of inexpressible emotion; her eyes filmed with tears. My daughter endured her embrace as long as she could, then backed away.

“God protected you. You know that, don’t you?”

My daughter’s eyes darted around warily. “I guess.”

“You’re going to have a wonderful life. I just know it.”

We exchanged email addresses, knowing we would never use them, and said our goodbyes in the yard. When we returned to the house, Iris was still standing at the base of the stairs. I had never seen her look so freaked-out.

“God had nothing to do with it,” she said. “So don’t ask me to say he did.” And with that she headed back upstairs to her closet.

The psychologist, whom Iris nicknamed “Dr. Cuckoo,” told us not to worry. Iris was a levelheaded girl; hiding in the closet was a perfectly natural response to such a trauma. The best thing, she said, was to give our daughter space. She’d talk about it when the time was right.

I doubted this. Levelheaded, yes, but that was the problem. Doing a double gainer with a twist at 70 miles an hour, without so much as dropping your iPhone, was nothing that the rational mind could parse on its own. The psychologist also didn’t know my daughter like I did. Iris can be the most stubborn person on earth. This is one of her cardinal virtues when, for instance, she has a test and two papers due on the same day. She’ll stay up till 3:00 A.M. no matter how many times we tell her to go to bed, and get A’s on all three, proving herself right in the end. But she can also hold a grudge like nobody I’ve ever met, and a grudge with the cosmos is no simple matter. How do you forgive the world for being godless? When she declared her atheism from the booster seat, I’d thought two things. First, How cute! The world’s only atheist who eats from the kids’ menu! I couldn’t have been more charmed if she’d said she’d been reading Schopenhauer. The second thing was, This can’t last. How could a girl who still believed in the tooth fairy fail to come around to the idea of a cosmic protector? And yet she didn’t. Her atheism had hardened to such a degree that any mention of spiritual matters made her snort milk out her nose. By inserting nothing in its stead, we had inadvertently given her the belief that she was the author of her own fate, and my wife’s newfound faith in a God-watched universe was as much a betrayal as crashing their car into the guardrail over a minor argument. It was a philosophical reversal my daughter couldn’t process, and it left her feeling utterly alone.

My wife and I felt perfectly awful. In due course our daughter emerged, with one condition: she didn’t want to discuss the accident. Not then, not ever. This seemed unhealthy, but you can’t make a twelve-year-old girl talk about something she doesn’t want to. We left for Cape Cod, where we’d rented a house for the month of July. I’d just turned in a manuscript to my editor and under ordinary circumstances would have been looking forward to the time away, but the trip seemed like too much data. Everyone was antsy and out of sorts, and the weather was horrible. The only person who enjoyed himself was our son, who was too young to comprehend the scope of events and was happy drawing pictures all day.

The school year resumed, and with it life’s ordinary rhythms. My wife began looking around for a church to attend. To say this was a sore spot with Iris would be a gross understatement. She hated the idea and said so. “Fine with me,” she said, “if you want to get all Jesus-y. Just leave me out of it.”

It didn’t happen right away. God may have shown his face to my wife in the parking lot, but he’d failed to share his address. We were stymied by the things we always had been: our jaundiced view of organized religion, the conservative social politics of most mainline denominations, the discomfiting business of praying aloud in the presence of people we didn’t know. And what, exactly, did we believe? Faith asks for a belief in God, which we had; religion asks for more, a great deal of it literal. Christian ritual was the most familiar, but neither of us believed that the Bible was the word of God or that Jesus Christ was a supernatural being who walked on water when he wasn’t turning it into wine. Certainly somebody by that name had existed; he’d gotten a lot of ink. He’d done and said some remarkable stuff, scared the living shit out of an imperial authority, and given humanity two thousand years’ worth of things to think about. But the son of God? Really? That Jesus was no more or less divine than the rest of us seemed to me the core of his message.

We wanted something, but we didn’t know what. Something with a little grace, a bit of wonder, the feeling of taking a few minutes out of each week to acknowledge how fortunate we were. We decided to give Unitarianism a shot. From the website, it seemed safe enough. Over loud objections, we made Iris come with us. The service was overseen by two ministers, a married couple, who took turns speaking from the altar, which seemed about as holy as the podium in a college classroom. After the hokey business of lighting the lamp, they droned on for half an hour about the importance of friendship. There were almost no kids in the congregation, or even anybody close to our age. It was a sea of whitehaired heads. After the service, everyone lingered in the lobby over coffee and stale cookies, but we beat a hasty retreat.

“Well, that was awkward,” Iris said.

It was. It had felt like sitting in the audience at a talk show. We tried a few more times, but our interest flagged. When, on the fourth Sunday, Iris found me making French toast in the kitchen in my bathrobe and asked why we weren’t going, I told her that I guessed church wasn’t for us after all. “Thank God,” she said, and laughed.

In the end, as in the scriptures, it was a child who led us. To our surprise, our son, Tuck, had become a secret Episcopalian. His school is affiliated with an Episcopal parish, and students attend chapel once a week. We’d always assumed this was the sort of wishy-washy, nondenominational fare most places dish out, but we were wrong. One day, apropos of nothing, as I was driving him home from school, he announced that he believed in Jesus.

“Really?” I said. “When did that happen?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and shrugged. “It just makes sense to me. Pastor

Lisa’s nice. We should go sometime.”

“To church, you mean?”

“Sure,” he said. “I think that would be great.”

Just like that, the matter was settled. We now go every week—the three of us. St. Stephen’s is located in a diverse neighborhood in Houston, and much of the congregation is gay or lesbian. There are protocols, but very loose ones, and the church has open communion and a terrific choir. Pastor Lisa is a woman in her fifties with a gray pageboy who wears blue jeans and Birkenstocks under her robe and gives a hug that feels like falling into bed. She knows I was raised Catholic, and she laughed when I told her that I didn’t mind that she “got some of the words wrong.” I have my doubts, as always, but it seems like a fine church to have them in. My son finds some of the service boring, as all children do, but he likes communion, which he calls his “force field for the week.” He has asked to be baptized next fall.

Will Iris be there? I hope so. But it’s her choice. She has yet to go with us. I know this makes her sad, and it makes me sad, too. It’s the first thing the three of us have ever done without her.

Three years after the accident, in spring 2012, I failed a blood test at my annual physical, then failed a biopsy and found myself, two months shy of my fiftieth birthday, facing a surgery that would tell me if I was going to see my children grow up. Two of my doctors assured me this would happen; a third said maybe grow up. Two of my doctors assured me this would happen; a third said maybe not. We were spending the summer on Cape Cod, where we’d bought a house, and in late July my wife and I flew back to Texas for my operation. When I awoke in the recovery room, my wife was standing over me, smiling. I was so dopey with painkillers that focusing on her face felt like trying to carry a piano up the stairs. “It’s over,” she said. “The margins were clear. You’re going to be okay.”

Two days after my surgery, I was instructed to walk. This sounded impossible, but I was determined. With my wife holding my arm, I shuffled up and down the hall of the ward, gritting my teeth against the discomfort of the catheter, which was the weirdest thing I’d ever felt. The last two months had pummeled me to psychological pieces, but the worst was over. Once again the car had rolled and we had walked away.

From the far end of the hall, a woman was approaching. Like a pair of ocean liners, we headed toward each other in slow motion. She was very thin and wearing a silk robe; like me, she was pulling an IV stand. Some greeting was called for, and she was the first to speak.

“May I give you something?”

We were within just a few feet of each other, and I saw what the situation was. Her body was leaving her; death was in her face.

“Of course.”

She gestured downward, indicating the pockets of her robe. “Pick one.”

I chose the left. With an uncertain hand she withdrew a wad of white cotton, tied with a bow. She placed it in my hand. It was an angel, made from a dish towel. To this she’d affixed a heart-shaped piece of laminated paper printed with these words from the Book of Numbers:

The Lord bless and keep you;

The Lord make his face shine upon you,

And be gracious to you;

May the Lord lift up His countenance upon you; And give you peace.

When I first learned about my illness, a very smart man told me that I should select an object. It could be anything, he said. A piece of jewelry. A spoon. A rock. Since I was a writer, maybe something to do with writing, such as a pen. It didn’t matter what it was. When I was afraid, he said, and thinking that I was going to die, I should take that object in my hand and put my fear inside it.

Wise as his counsel was, I’d never managed to do this. I’d tried one thing and then another. Nothing had felt right. This did. Not just right: miraculous.

then another. Nothing had felt right. This did. Not just right: miraculous.

“Bless you,” I said.

Two weeks later I returned to the Cape to complete my recovery. There wasn’t much I could do, but I was glad to be there. A few days before my diagnosis, I had bought a ten-year-old Audi convertible and shipped it north. Iris had just gotten her learner’s permit, and after a week of lounging around the house, I asked her if she’d take me for a drive. The day was sunny and hot. We put the top down and sped north, bisecting the peninsula on a rolling, two-lane road. From the passenger seat, I watched my daughter drive. In the past year a startling change had occurred. Iris wasn’t a kid anymore. She was taller than my wife, with a full, womanly shape. Her facial features had organized into mature proportions. Her hair, a honeyed red, swept away from her face in a stylish arc. She could have been mistaken for a college student, and often was. But the difference was more than physical; to look at my daughter was to know that she was somebody with a private, inner existence. She was standing at the edge of life; everything was ahead of her. All she had to do was let it come.

“How’s it feel?” I asked. She had perfect motorist’s manners: hands at ten and two, shoulders pressed back, eyes on the road. She was wearing large tortoiseshell sunglasses that would have been perfectly at home on Audrey Hepburn’s face. “Okay.”

“Not scary?”

She shrugged. “Maybe a little.”

Our destination was a beach on the Cape’s north side, called Sandy Neck. From there, on the clearest days, you can see all the way from Plymouth to Provincetown. We parked and got out of the car and walked to the little platform built to take in the view. I knew we couldn’t stay long; even standing was an effort.

“I’m sorry if I scared you,” I said.

Iris was looking away. “You didn’t. Not really.”

“Well, I was scared. I’m glad you weren’t.”

She thought a moment. “That’s the thing. I knew I should have been. But I wasn’t. I actually feel kind of guilty about that.”

“There’s no reason you should.”

“It’s just . . .” She hunted for the words. “I don’t know. You’re you. I just can’t imagine you not being okay.”

She was wrong. Someday I wouldn’t be. Time and chance would do its work, as it does for all of us. But she didn’t need to hear that from me on a sunny summer day.

“Do you remember the accident?” I asked.

She laughed, a little nervously. “Well, duh.”

“I’ve always wondered. What were you doing in the closet?”

“Not much. Mostly watching Project Runway on my laptop.”

“And being mad at us.”

She shrugged. “That whole God thing really pissed me off. I mean, you guys can believe whatever you want. I just wanted Mom to feel the same way I did.”

“How did you feel?”

She didn’t answer right away. Boats were creeping across the horizon.

“Abandoned.”

We were silent for a time. I had a sudden vision of myself as old—an old man, being taken to the beach by his grown daughter. The dunes, the ocean, the rocky margin where they met—all would be the same, unchanged since I was boy. It was a sad thought, but it also made me happy in a way that seemed new. These things were years away, and with any luck, I would be around to see them.

“Are you doing all right? Do you need to go back?”

I nodded. “Probably I should get off my feet.”

We returned to the car. Three steps ahead of me, Iris moved to the passenger side, opened the door, and got in.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She looked around. “Oh, right,” she said, and laughed. “I’m the driver, aren’t I?”

She was sixteen years old. I hoped someday she’d remember how it felt, how invincible, how alive. I’d heard it said that one tenth of parenting is making mistakes; the other nine are prayer and letting go. “Yes,” I said. “You are.”

MEGHAN DAUM

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agent-jack-barrow · 6 years

Text

A Schott to Breathe, Chapter 1/?

ff: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12833457/1/A-Schott-to-Breathe

ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13800768/chapters/31729632

Summary: "Winn sat down at his desk. He felt slightly dejected about what just happened, I mean, he was supposed to be the resident techie here, right?" A new agent starts working at the DEO and disrupts Winn Schott's workplace, and quite frankly, his world. Winn-centric story, but all characters involved. Eventual romance.

A/N: Hello! I'm a huge fan of the character Winn Schott. I'm annoyed by how his character has been handled by the writers and this nine week hiatus we're embarking on, especially since it's prolonging the time to the long-awaited Winn-centric episode. This is my solution to keeping my sanity in the meanwhile. Hoping to update approximately 1-2x per week. Enjoy, and please give feedback!

Chapter 1

Winn pondered when the last time was that he had gotten a full night of sleep. He honestly couldn't remember. Between working at the DEO and helping Guardian, he only averaged 3-4 hours a night. Sure, the large soda he sipped on continuously throughout the day helped, but he was still exhausted. His back and neck ached and often it felt like his body was being drained of all of its energy. But what other options did he have? At the DEO he was needed to guide people in the field and, God knows, James would be dead by now if he wasn't guiding him in the van. People relied on him. Which, he admitted to himself, felt good. It gave him a purpose. But, as he so eloquently stated before, Winn was tired.

He felt himself nodding off behind the computer, so he stood up to stretch and take another drink of his soda. He heard someone walking up behind him, so he turned around to see Alex come up to him with someone he didn't recognize in tow. "Hey Winn," she started. "This is Agent Shapiro. She just finished with her combat training. She also has a background in computer engineering, so we thought we would have her work under you when she isn't needed in the field."

Winn looked over at the woman with Alex. She was pretty, in a non-overbearing sort of way. She had long, blonde hair that was pulled back in a braid, beautiful green eyes behind a pair of tortoise-shell glasses, and a professional, yet still kind, smile. He thought back to his days in college with other computer engineering majors, and none of them looked like her. He made a mental note that she probably was going to be like the other DEO computer techies. Competent, but not on the same expert level as him. But he wasn't going to complain, he could use whatever extra help he could get.

"Hi, I'm Agent Schott, but you can call me Winn." He shook her hand and noticed her long, toned arms. Probably further accentuated by all of the combat training she just completed. "Unless, ya know, you want me to really like you. In which case, call me Agent Schott," he joked.

"Nice to meet you, I'm Agent Taylor Shapiro. I'm excited to get started here."

"And it looks like you're about to get started right now" Alex said as she watched J'onn walk down the stairs towards them and Kara fly in through her DEO entrance. They both had that look on their face, it was a mix of concern and extreme focus, that always told her they were about to start a new case.

Winn quickly showed Taylor a desk area and computer she could use. "I'll start training you once I'm done dealing with whatever they have going on," referencing the team that now was building around the center of the room. "In the meanwhile, just make yourself comfortable," he smiled.

The informal meeting began, with J'onn filling everyone in about the latest crisis. This time it was a Fort Rozz escapee that seemed to be racking up the materials needed to make a bomb. And not just any bomb, one that was large enough to wipe out at least half of National City. Winn noted that when he first started at the DEO, that would be enough to send him into panic mode. But now, maybe because of his fatigue, or maybe just because of the amount of dangerous situations he's witnessed since working there, it seemed like just another day in the office.

"Winn, could you possibly figure out a way to track down this suspect?" J'onn asked.

"Yeah, I could set up a tracer to look for the materials he's taken thus far. But it won't be ready for another hour or two."

"I could trace that in a few seconds." Everyone's head turned to source of the voice. It was Taylor, who was typing something on the computer in front of her.

"U-uhm, o-okay. I mean, I'm pretty sure that isn't possible, but you can go ahead and try," Winn stuttered in response.

Just then, she gave Winn a coy look and on her screen were the coordinates of an abandoned warehouse about 10 miles from where they currently were. "Your guy should be here." Taylor stated.

"There's no way that could be accurate. How did you even do that?" Winn said, looking unbelieving at Taylor.

"It's simple really. I just enhanced the algorithm you already had to track down Kryptonite and rewrote it for the materials this guy has. Then I just cross-referenced to see what location had all of the materials present. So that's where your suspect should be," Taylor explained. Rolling her eyes with a tight-lipped smile she continued, "or you could do whatever you were going to do for the next hour or two. Probably going to come up with the same result though."

Winn glared at her out of the corner of his eye, but was silent, looking at her work over her shoulder. He didn't appreciate the cockiness, but she was right, it should work.

"Winn? Earth to Winn?" Kara said, waving her hand in front of him. It didn't seem to work, he was still staring intently at Taylor's computer.

"Agent Schott!" J'onn yelled exasperated. That seemed to snap Winn out of it. "Is it a reliable lead or not?"

"Y-yeah. It should work," Winn mumbled. Damn right, Taylor thought to herself.

"Well then. Good job Agent –" J'onn paused, looking at Taylor.

"Shapiro. Agent Taylor Shapiro, sir."

"Right. Good job Agent Shapiro," J'onn said. "Let's get going everyone. Supergirl, you lead the way. I'll have a strike team meet you there to support you, just in case."

Winn sat down at his desk. He felt slightly dejected about what just happened, I mean, he was supposed to be the resident techie here, right? But he chalked it up to beginner's luck and tried to move forward. He started pulling up blueprints for the warehouse Supergirl and the strike team were headed for as well as any security footage he could tap into.

"I already tapped into the security footage in the area," Taylor said over to Winn. "And the blue prints are downloading as we speak."

"Show off," Winn whispered to himself. Maybe it wasn't beginner's luck after all. He looked up to see J'onn glaring at him, no doubt having heard his small quip and possibly hearing some other not-so-nice thoughts passing through his mind. He looked away and decided to focus on getting the coms set up.

Twenty minutes later the rogue alien was caught and being checked into the DEO. J'onn briefly stopped by the tech bay to congratulate Agent Shapiro on a job well done. He laughed to himself a little bit when he sensed a bit of jealousy from Winn's thoughts.

Winn decided if he was going to make this work relationship a more positive one, he had to put forth a more positive attitude. He had enough on his plate without having coworker he disliked. So he made his way over to Taylor, who was focused on whatever she was doing on her computer.

"Taylor, that was really impressive for your first mission. Good Job!" Winn said.

"Agent Shapiro," she replied.

"Excuse me?"

"You can call me Agent Shapiro," she said, without glancing up from her computer screen.

"O-oh. Right, of course. Good job, Agent Shapiro!" Winn said, with a little less excitement. She made a tight smile, but said nothing in return. He walked, clearly deflated, back to his computer, thinking there was little hope for this to be a positive relationship after all. Seeing as the crisis was over and it was already pretty late, he decided to start wrapping things up. James would want to meet with him soon to get started on Guardian's night activities.

Taylor still stared intently at her screen, but she wasn't actually doing anything on it. She thought that maybe she was a little too harsh on Winn. Clearly, he was a fairly sensitive person. However, from her previous experience working in the field of computer engineering—a field so often dominated by men—she knew all too well that she had to earn respect early. Otherwise, she would just be seen as the dumb blonde that they could take advantage of. She had experienced it too many times before to let it happen again, and this was the only way she knew to escape it—being a little rough along the edges and making very clear boundaries. She began thinking about all of the previous jobs and cities she had blown through up until this point due to being undervalued. She really wanted this to be the job she finally landed on.

She closed her computer and made her way to the training room, hoping that spending some time hitting things would help clear her mind.

#winn schott #winn schott ff #winn schott imagines #a schott to breathe

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croik · 7 years

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Lots of TEW2 thoughts

So I finished The Evil Within 2 and I have a lot to say, but Seb can handle the short version.

To be honest the marketing had already put my expectations pretty low, so I can't say it was much worse than I already figured it would be? And I can see why the pro reviewers are scoring it as high or higher than they did the first one. And I'm also willing to accept that my opinions of the first game are probably biasing me a little. But despite a couple of cool ideas and segments, overall I didn't like the game and I think it was huge step backward creatively speaking. I can't think of a more generic and safe route for the story to have taken than what they gave us. Even without having ignored the two largest cliffhangers from the first game, they disregarded a few major plot points and rewrote entire character relationships? So much of the acting was terrible, most of the new characters were 1 dimensional, and I wasn't a big fan of the changes in gameplay. It felt like I spent half the game in crafting menus and the only improvements that were made to the weapons/combat options were things every other similar game has (especially using bottles like shivs from TLOU, sidequests across a limited worldmap with waypoints etc). Having just recently replayed TEW1 I can't say that the controls were much smoother and there were still a lot of performance issues (and one major crash).

When I played the first game I finished in 19 hours with 112 deaths, and I rated it a B-. I finished TEW2 in 13 hours (dunno how many deaths) and I'd give it a C+. The plus is for Kidman.

And the rest of my thoughts are spoilers so under the cut!

So to get this out of the way, the fact that neither Joseph or Ruvik are properly addressed is bullshit. And saying that "Joseph is alive we'll talk about it later" is not addressing it.

From the opening cutscene there's a very clear sense from the writing that they didn't particularly care about continuing or addressing major plot points from the first game, with the way Sebastian reacts to Mobius. For the first time in three years he has confirmation that Mobius exists, but prior to going into the machine he doesn't ask what happened to Joseph who has been missing the whole time, or to his wife, who he also knows was taken by Mobius. He doesn't spare a thought for Ruvik who has been on the loose all this time (but then again, neither did Mobius), and even when he sees a large specimen jar labeled with his daughter's name, his first thought isn't "that's just her brain in there." Because that's what it ought to be, given his experience with Mobius.

And then Seb is inside Union, and he can't stop talking about how much it's like Beacon while still acting like he's never been inside STEM. He calls out to civilians to make sure they're okay. He gets upset when Stefano kills roomfuls of "people" even knowing that those are NOT people, they're STEM ghosts whose real human bodies have already been disconnected. When he sees a vision of Myra in his own mind, giving him a pep talk, he knows (and WE know) that she is not the real Myra, she can't be, but he believes her anyway. He basically is talking himself into forgiveness and it works! He spends the entire game just chattering away to himself, repeating plot information we just learned, making bland jokes, not one bit of his dialogue challenging or interesting. It's like the writers heard people complain about how boring Seb was in the first game and thought the solution was just to have him talk a whole lot more about nothing. That's not giving him character, he's still the same tired hero cliché we've seen a million times. That's just highlighting his faults by putting them on display more often.

And it's basically the tent pole around which all the game's story problems hinge. With two notable exceptions, no one in the game makes any choices that take them outside the narrow box of their generic characterization. Sebastian doesn't do anything throughout the game that no one else in his position wouldn't do. He sets out to save his daughter, he does. All the Mobius goons are mostly loyal up until they realize their own life is on the line, and then they righteously rebel. Theodore and Stefano are power-hungry maniacs, just like the Admin is a power-hungry maniac, no complex thought required. In the first game, we had several different motivations at play, between Seb and Jo trying to escape, Kidman trying to save and then kill Leslie, Ruvik's revenge, Jimenez covering his own ass, Mobius and their whatevers. When Joseph realized he was losing his mind and tried to kill himself, that was genuinely unexpected and added another layer to the narrative—now Seb doesn’t have to just worry about him going nuts, he has to worry about him hurting himself, too. That plot line may have solved itself off screen in an unsatisfying way but at least it added a layer to the narrative. In TEW2, EVERYONE is either trying to save Lily or control Lily, and there's virtually no changing of sides or shifting motives. All the heroes accomplish what they set out to do from the start and even those that don't make it have their deaths telegraphed far in advance.

Everything is just so expected, every character boiled down to their most obvious character traits. Seb takes the brunt of it but I'd argue Myra is the worst offender. The game comes out and says that there's nothing left of her personality except for her maternal instinct. In the previous game we only got hints of Myra from Seb's journal and other items, but it was still enough that we got several aspects of her personality, not just "mom" but wife and detective and administrator. And now that we finally get to meet her all of that is gone in favor of generic overprotective mother figure. With her perfect bun and pearl earrings and mom sweater…. This game has more women in it than most so I can't complain too much about a female character being reduced to mother trope, but it is a disappointment that after so much speculation about Myra and her character and why she's in Mobius, that they went with the safest course and most one note characterization for her. Especially since they contradicted canon once again to do it.

So let's talk about contradicting canon!

When I was writing Myra meta after the DLC I noted how the description of Myra as a mother changed from Seb's journal to the flashbacks Kidman sees. In TEW1 Seb notes that Myra took a three year leave of absence from the force in order to be a stay at home mom for Lily, before then hiring a nanny. In the DLC, Seb notes that she stayed home for only a few months and wanted to get back to work as soon as possible. He expressed some disappointment in her not being more motherly than that. The DLC was also where we learned Myra was working for Mobius, and it seemed obvious that they were linking the two together in an ominous way. But now in TEW2 we have Sebastian tell us again that Myra was an amazing and devoted mom. If the DLC was made knowing a sequel was also coming, why add that detail of Seb commenting on Myra's lack of maternal instinct, when TEW2 is about nothing BUT? It's a such a small, thoughtless contradiction, but the game is full of them.

Seb's relationship with Kidman is another one. In Seb's original journal he describes Kid as a cold fish who he doesn't trust. In the DLC Kid describes Seb as "seemingly drunk all the time." But then in Kidman's flashback we see Seb's determination to train her, and in TEW2 the pair of them talk about being friends and working together as a team. So what is the truth?? Why is it so hard for the writers to keep straight how these characters feel about each other? In the DLC Kidman had no idea that Seb was ever married or had a child, despite being recruited and trained by Myra. In TEW2 we learn that Lily was intended to be the heart of STEM all along, and Myra recruited Kidman specifically to be part of her "fuck Mobius forever" plan. So did Myra send Kidman into STEM the first time without warning her about the dangers, that she was expendable? Or did Myra's intentions for Kidman only come into play after Beacon? Or did Myra really just hope that Kidman would get Leslie out, because then Mobius would use him instead of Lily? But that wouldn't allow her to go through with the plan of destroying Mobius.

And speaking of Mobius, what the hell is their problem??

They determine that STEM can only be core'd by a psychopath or a child (which ought to be the first clue that this is a bad idea). This a requirement that's not touched on at all in the original game, since Ruvik was the core first, and after modifying STEM only someone compatible with him would have been able to take his place. How Leslie would have fared as the core without Ruvik is left as a total mystery, because while his mental issues gave him a child-like demeanor, I'd argue that he's pretty much the opposite of an egomaniac, which is the defining requirement. But in any case, Mobius kidnapped Lily originally because she was just so smart and special, things you can totally determine about a 5 year old /s. Timeline wise we're not sure when this was compared to the main story. According to Seb's journal it was no more than a year or two before the beginning of the game, but in the DLC Kidman refers to those flashbacks as "way before I got here," and Seb and Jo are visibly much younger. So at what point relative to Ruvik sabotaging the machine was Lily taken? There are very few references to Ruvik in the game so we don't really know if Mobius determined STEM's supposed requirements before or after the first game.

I feel like the only timeline that makes sense is that Ruvik completed STEM, Mobius decided they wanted to use Lily as the core, and when Ruvik found out as much, he sabotaged the machine so that it would only work for him. They then had to put Lily on ice for a while, so to speak, while they de-brained Ruvik and tried to go forward with just him, then moved on to Leslie. And once the main STEM became totally useless, they went back to the original plan of using Lily. But that raises the questions of 1) Where they really planning to put Lily into the STEM as its core during the timeframe where Ruvik was using it exclusively to torture people? And 2) Why would Mobius ever allow Myra to join them under those circumstances?

Because we now know that the timeline is that Lily was kidnapped, Myra investigated, found Mobius, and was allowed to join. Which is out of this world, that Mobius is so powerful as to control a majority of the globe's politicians and media, while also being foolish enough to let a mother who is also a decorated police detective join their cult after having kidnapped her daughter. Hoffman insists that Lily wasn't mistreated but they had her sealed up in a jar for YEARS. The notes say that a Core can't be missing for more than a few hours before things start to go loopy so once Union was up and running she was in there pretty much all the time. Did they really think Myra would be okay with that? Especially when up until that point STEM was a torture device that killed anyone who connected to it?? Did they try to brainwash her and it just didn't remotely work? How do you let a police detective with a grudge against you join the ranks of your world domination cult and expect her to stand by idly while you perform inhuman experiments on her young daughter?? And not only that, within a very short span of time they promoted her high enough that she was recruiting and training agents of her own!

If Mobius is so cavalier about the kind of people they let in, why didn't Myra just recruit Sebastian once she was on the in? She went through the trouble of telling Lily that her father was dead, let him stew as a drunken waste for 3 years, and not once just suggested bringing him in? No one would have even noticed he was gone at that point. And if that was too dangerous, why not slip him more advance warning of what was up? She instructed Kidman to take Lily to Seb once they got her out, but didn't give him any kind of heads up even though he was a jobless wreck. Mobius is lax enough that Theodore, Myra, and Kidman were all able to meet in public and discuss their plan, so why couldn't one of them at least drop him a note to be ready of some kind?

In any case, these are all relatively minor quibbles when compared to the entirely faulty conceit of the game's main plot: the Wireless STEM.

A note in TEW2 explains that the STEM needs to log a certain number of people and the data that represents their consciousness before it can achieve a wireless state. This completely flies in the face of the previous game, because in that, the wireless feature was something that Jimenez simply installed himself based on Ruvik's original blue print. It had nothing to do with Ruvik connecting enough people physically in order to achieve wifi. He got MORE powerful the more people he connected, with references to his influence outside the machine, but all they had to do to go wireless was to turn the damn thing on. It makes even less sense because in the TEW2 note, it says that they need at least 20,000 people to have been connected at one point in order to have enough data, and there's no possible way Ruvik had that many people in STEM. I mean, I guess it's possible with help from Mobius, but damn. Did they really go through that twice??

There's also the issue of The Core. We don't know where in Union Lily was supposed to be that matters so much that her leaving that place sends the whole city haywire. We don't know at what point she stopped being the Core and Myra took over, or how Myra was able to accomplish that when she's neither a child or psycho (and her selfless devotion to her daughter is the opposite of the "unfettered ego" Hoffman describes as being necessary). We don't know why Hoffman was perfectly aware that the Core is a little girl named Lily, but O'Neal was baffled by the concept (even though Lily's name is literally printed ON the Core itself). Some of this might be explained in notes but we don't really know how Stefano or Theodore were able to wield Lily's power just by having her be near them, or how they thought they could achieve wireless by fucking up Union beyond repair. After all, Mobius stopped importing people on the regular into STEM as soon as there was a problem, so why didn't Theodore wait to make his move until wireless was ready? How did he expect to achieve it, just by the Admin putting in teams 5 people at a time until they reached threshold?

More importantly, why the fuck do all Mobius operatives have a kill switch in their head, INCLUDING the Admin himself? The chips are explained as being a protection AGAINST the influence of STEM, so that the high ranking can continue to monitor the system. Obviously the Admin doesn't want his mind to be at the mercy of a child. So how is it possible that a failsafe AGAINST STEM can so easily be manipulated into a murder signal by STEM itself? That is the OPPOSITE of its intended purpose, how was Myra able to change the programming on chips inside of people's heads enough to achieve that without anyone noticing?? Why did Mobius link up their global transmitters before the STEM had been fully realized, and why wouldn't they shut those off in the case of an emergency, given what happened with Beacon?

Gosh there are just so many ways that this new game contradicts the original (though to be fair it also contradicted itself a great deal). There are a million examples I can think of, on top of things that simply don't make much logical sense, scenes and characters that add nothing. Why did they imply in the first game that Tatiana was a Mobius agent only to completely discard that and make her Sebastian specific? How does Mobius retain control of the entire world supposedly when every Mobius agent you meet is willing to abandon ship at the first sign of trouble? Did Hoffman know that even if she helped you reach Theodore, Myra's killswitch would have killed her, too? Did Sebastian ever think about that later? Why don't you see Myra's body connected to the STEM tubs, why didn't Sebastian try to retrieve it? Why did Myra make a big deal out of telling Sebastian to go get Lily at the end of the game, as if it's a last goodbye, only to limp up to the house herself and do the entire scene over again?? Why is she made out of plaster, what is the significance? Why did Ruvik's notes at the end of the DLC about Kidman and the Admin having bits of his consciousness inside them not come to anything? Why is Seb's hand bandaged as to suggest he has one too, except not really, he just got in a bar fight or something I guess?? If the Mu church is of a Scientology-like standing how does no one recognize the symbol when it's all over Beacon, and if it was created as a front and not the actual origins of Mobius, why is it given such significance in Ruvik's mind?? And where the fuck is Ruvik anyway???

Where is Joseph, and more importantly, why doesn't Sebastian care!?

So yeah you could say I have a lot of questions, and I intend to New Game + so I can get all the files I missed and hopefully piece something together from this mess.

But it's not all bad. In the last part of the game, when Kidman becomes a total badass, that was AWESOME. Unexpected that we would get to play as her and kick ass. That was the most cinematic and interesting part of the game hands down. I found Seb's family drama to be overly cheesy but at least pairing it with Kidman's assault and urgency helped a lot. That was great stuff.

I also really liked Liam's little arc, such as it was. He's pretty much the only character that goes through character development that wasn't broadcasted a million years ago. Seb coming to grips with his guilt and saving Lily was the most obvious and safe route for him to take. Liam going from coward to pawn to sub-boss to repentant was really fun, and he looked fantastic as the hognose. The thought that he was going to motivate the plot through betrayal was a breath of fresh air after a slog of "find Lily find Lily find Lily." His death was tragic without being overstated. Good shit.

And of course, The Upgrade Chair <3 Sebastian's conversations with Tatiana were a lot more interesting than anything he had to say to the other characters, too. While everyone else is just blah blahing exposition at you the whole game, Tatiana's conversations had some mystery, some level of unease that called back to the first game in a way the rest of TEW2 failed to do.

Because THAT was what was so intriguing about TEW. As irritating as it was at times to feel like you were entirely in the dark with no answers in sight, that at least gave the game a sense of momentum. I felt driven to complete the game because everything was just so fucking weird and I was desperate to understand what was happening to the characters. That didn't pay off in an entirely satisfying way, but at least it was interesting, at least it made you really think. In TEW2 everything is spelled out for you and the only thinking that needs doing is "Did these people actually play their own game before writing the sequel?" Because I'm honestly not sure.

It's obvious whoever's doing the comic did not, at least.

So yeah. I'll be starting a new playthrough to get more things and take some notes, because if nothing else I'd like to determine SOME kind of workable timeline. Why does the article about Sebastian's mental health describe Lily's death as "recent" but Kidman says that Lily was taken "long before joined them." Was it recent, or long ago? Do the writers even know???

Ficwise I don't know what I'll be up to yet. I'm open to suggestion and I'll probably make a separate post about that later. And if anyone wants to talk about the game, please lemme know, there's still a lot on my mind I didn't manage to get out here.

#The Evil Within #tew meta #tew discussion #tew2 #this fucking game #i have so many questions #and a lot of rage

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ask-svt-hearteu · 7 years

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college! Minghao

requested by anon: “could you write a college au of minghao please? if you do, tsym (and please include a reader in it, i’m sorry if it’s too much to ask for)”

Admin note: I wrote and rewrote this and researched and rewrote and deleted and wrote this again so many times, it's not funny (ok maybe a little). I'm sorry if this wasn't any good, I legit had such a tough time with this one, well anyway, I hope you enjoy!

Minghao is a Performance Music Major

particularly with a dance focus

when he's not sitting around in some rehearsal room in the music building practicing his vocals or reviewing for the next postmodernism in dance exam

he can usually be found with the other music majors

usually sitting in the outside picnic area of campus

or running through some of the choreos created for the next final project out on the lawn with Soonyoung, Jun, and Chan

with Joshua (vocal performance major) playing guitar

or with Jihoon telling Mingyu to stop blaring rap long enough for him to finish composing

which causes Mingyu and Vernon (contemporary production majors) to both defend Drake as a musical artist

and that Jihoon should stop composing his boring classically arranged piece

which Jihoon says he can't because he's a freaking music theory and composition major and it's due soon

while the rest are debating the musical merits of the latest pop sensation and whether or not the hook is repeated over and over

"'Despacito' has the same chord progressions throughout" "Ok no, there's a modulation in the bridge..." "DEEESSPAAACITOO"

and Minghao's music major friends may seem a bit like a mess

but they're all really close friends

they host recitals every winter and spring

the whole music and drama department

and Minghao is always one of the front performers especially from the dance program

though someone should give him more vocal lines in the shows, why can't the professors realize his vocals are amazing and that he never gets enough lines smfh

Minghao's best classes outside of his major are those relating to liberal arts

especially lit and psychology

the only two courses you shared with him since they were mandatory for graduation

you both have talked before, but mostly just the universal complaining and groaning over homework assignments that characterize every college student ever

since your major was in media studies, his in performance arts

it was understandable that you didn't really get a chance to get to know Minghao, since students with the same majors normally spend a lot of time with people from their own departments

but that's how you always saw Minghao

since the media studies classes were in the humanities and social science building

which is a little past the music building

his group of music majors is always sitting on the lawn in between

and you've noticed little things Minghao does

like how he always opens the doors for the instrumentalists carrying in cases in the morning

or the way he acts like he's done with his friends 100% but then ends up buying them breakfast and making sure they eat

and while it seems as though Minghao is always rehearsing for one thing or another

you sometimes see him skating down the campus on his skateboard or reading in the library

stuff not even assigned to him by your lit professor

joined by Jun, Wonwoo, and Joshua, or other random music majors

they sort of claimed the back corner of the library

one day your lit professor decides it's been too quiet and boring

time to assign a huge project that could potentially make or break your grade

because college professors like torturing students as hobbies

and better yet, it's a partner research essay and visual presentation

which works for you because whoever your partner is, you can just borrow some equipment from the media productions classroom to get the visual presentation part done

and as the teacher starts reading off names

all you can think about is how you hope you don't get stuck with someone who won't do their work

the professor calls out Utopia by Thomas More

the one book on the list you really wanted

and then "Minghao, y/n."

jumping up and silently thanking the heavens for giving you such an easy book to work with

so many freaking things you could talk about, you're so excited

you almost forgot that you had a partner as you go up to collect the book and the directions

Minghao walks up to you quietly

"So when do you want to meet to work on the essay and visual presentation?"

"Oh uh, we can do tomorrow at the student café if you want." you tell him

"Alright."

the two of you meet the next day and split the work evenly in half before

"I have a postmodernism in dance exam tomorrow so I'll take-off first."

"That's fine, we have a whole month, we can chill." you said smiling

Minghao returned the smile and turned around to leave when

"Here, call me if you need help with your half, I'll finish my half of the essay by the end of the week, so we can begin the visual presentation."

he hands you his number and you just nod and assure him he can just leave

with Minghao off to study, you decide to go work on your half in the library

the library is usually open quite late anyway

you start researching the ways More wrote his socio-political satire

but with the amount of sleep you've been getting, you fall asleep on top of your laptop

and sure, the library isn’t for napping

but screw it, you’re running on 3 hours of sleep in the last two days, what else can you do?

Minghao walks into the library a little while later, looking for a global dance history book when he sees you sleeping on your laptop

hair cascading over the table as you breathe slowly in and out

he smiles unconsciously

he had noticed this before

but you’re really pretty

while the closest interactions you've both had together were the random jokes Wonwoo would tell you and Minghao in psych

he knew you were a really nice person, since you and the video production team would always film the shows and performances he did with the rest of his department

he had even seen some of your short student films, the ones that he could only describe as art from someone who must really love what they do

and seeing you calmly napping was cute

so he goes to the nearest vending machine impulsively and buys a can of coffee before he puts it behind your laptop that you’re using as a pillow

“What are you doing Minghao?” Jun says giving Minghao a sly smile while coming up behind him

“Nothing.” he laughs

“Doesn’t look like nothing.” Jun smirks

“We have a project for lit, she's my partner.” he said shrugging his shoulders while looking down at you

“Does she always sleep here?”

“Not sure.”

Jun nods his head slowly, an understanding look on his face

“Yea you like her, imma call it now.”

“Yah!” Minghao says punching Jun’s arm

“Hey I called it so remember this moment in the future and thank me later.”

Minghao shakes his head

“Well, Wonwoo and I are ready to go, let’s get something to drink.”

when you wake up and shut your laptop you see the can of coffee sitting in front of your closed laptop, with a post-it note

"Keep up the hard work partner! Fighting! -Minghao" you read

you laugh and take the can with you

over the next few weeks, you and Minghao work together on the lit project

and when it's done and you both get an A-

you both celebrate with ice cream from the student café

he’s cute

and funny too

he makes you laugh quite a bit by trying poorly to imitate the lit professor

the two of you kept texting about random hw assignments even after the project was over about anything like movies you wanted to see or concerts that were nearby

you got to know more about his dream to be a performer

he was so passionate about it

they way he talked about performing was the same way you felt about filming in media studies

each a form of art, but each a way to express it in your own style

by the time the winter showcase comes along, your professor assigns you to camera 3 on stage for the show

and you text Minghao

"Hey, break a leg at the concert :)"

"Breaking appendages would actually be a bad thing XD" he texts you back

"You know what I meant!"

"Yea haha, are you coming to watch?" your heart skips a beat a little reading his message

you watch as your phone shows that "Minghao is typing" message a few times before it stops

"I mean you don't have to if you don't want to"

"I'm filming so of course I'll be there ;)" you text back

"Oh ok lol"

you laughed at his short response

when you go to the performance hall the night before opening night to set up the audio systems with some of the other video production crew

you see Minghao and one of his friends running through a choreography

you stare at him amazed, the choreo included them dancing with a white ribbon connecting the two of them, which should have gotten tangled countless times but didn't

you didn't really want to intrude on the rehearsal, so you leave him a can of coffee with a post-it note on it by the stage

“I believe I owe you a coffee, don't forget to rest, I believe in you, fighting!-y/n :)”

Minghao is internally screaming at how cute you are when he reads it

“JUST ASK HER OUT ALREADY AND STOP BOTHERING ME.”

Jun's trying to work on the choreo and practically yells at Minghao who’s told the guys the story for like the fifth time

"Ok but isn't she so cute? 'don't forget to rest, I believe in you'"

"Minghao, I called this remember?" Jun say laughing

Minghao smacks him on the arm again

so Minghao decides to finally gather up the courage

with you sitting in the desk next to him in lit

your knees inches away from each other

“Hey y/n wanna grab a dinner after the show or something?”

“Depends.” you say heart beat steadily increasing

“On what?” Minghao says trying to keep his cool

“On whether it’s a date or not.” you want to scream at yourself, where did this courage come from?!?!

“And if it is?” he smiles

“I’d be happy to.”

and when you're filming the show that night, Minghao catches your eyes while waiting in the wings on stage left

and shoots you a wink

which nearly causes you to drop your camera

and you see him getting smacked by Jun

after the show, he brings you backstage

"Got the gardening club to get me these" he says handing you a small bunch of white carnations

"Aw they're beautiful."

"I ended up doing a lot of research on the significance of flowers thanks to a lit project, white carnations mean sweet and lovely." he smiles shyly

"They also mean pure love." you say smiling

"Yea, well... they're just flowers to celebrate a show well-done." he coughs blushing

"Let's go for dinner, shall we?"

when all the other music majors found out

it was chaos

"HONESTLY Y/N DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY MUSIC MAJORS HAVE ATTACKED ME TODAY WITH QUESTIONS?" your friend from the media production course asked you

"It's like some celebrity is dating you or something from this response!" she says shaking her head

and whenever you walk to the humanities building

Minghao bounds up and takes your hand

in front of both the departments

so you have the music majors screaming at Minghao

and the media studies majors cheering you on

it's a mess

but Minghao just shrugs it off and wraps an arm around you

"Want to grab a coffee before lit?"

"Sure" you laugh

and he holds your hand as you both make your way to the student café

and the both of you lay on the lawn after sipping your lattes

hands intertwined staring up at the clouds in the sky

"Look, they look like white carnations." you smile and point up at a cluster of clouds

just enjoying the light breeze of a spring day

when he pulls you closer until you're laying on his arm

and kisses your forehead

"Sweet and lovely just like you."

MASTERLIST

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podcake · 7 years

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Podcast Teatime: The Case of the Questioning Cheesecake

Hello and a happy August day to everyone. Welcome to a new Q&A to cap off the summer, starring the masterminds behind the adventures we’ve grown to love in The Penumbra Podcast.

As a loyal patron of the arts, I took it upon myself to do some of my own detective work for a change and see what’s going on in the heads of creators Kevin Vibert and Sophie Kaner .

(The following is a direct copy-and-paste from the email)

Question One: Let’s get the most pressing question out of the way first, at least for me: Is there any reason why you chose a hotel as a framing device for your stories? Was it always something you had planned?

Kevin: To start, Sophie and I were thinking that the Penumbra would be an anthology show, along the lines of The Twilight Zone or old radio drama anthologies like Suspense. The idea that the narrator would be a spooky, semi-omnipotent character voiced by the lead writer (hi) was Sophie’s, and is a very, very direct reference to Rod Serling’s narrator on The Twilight Zone. (“Shaken,” which is the one episode that remains mostly intact from this first view of the show, is full of Twilight Zone references — Louise’s surname “Serling” is not a nod to Rod Serling so much as a head-shake-so-hard-you-can-hear-our-necks-crack.)

As for the hotel itself: I have a real love of weird horror and descriptions of impossible places. House of Leaves, which is about ten billion things but one of them is a house that’s slightly bigger on the inside than the outside, was definitely bouncing around in my head as we were pitching ideas for the frame. So was The Shining, which is one of my favorite horror novels of all time, as well as Invisible Cities, which is a really bizarre collection of stories in which Marco Polo describes a bunch of cities that couldn’t possibly exist to Kublai Khan, saying they all lie somewhere in his empire. The description of the infinite hotel is definitely connected to that the most.

For season two we changed the game a bit, but I think even that has connections to this weird thing about places that are horrifying and impossible and kind of mundane — hotels and trolleys and things you see every day. I don’t know why I like making normal places scary. It is either a little bit of cruelty or a complete terror of everything around me, or both. Yeah, both.

Question Two: You have quite the talented cast to work with for your show. Did you have to look far and wide or was it a simple casting call? Or are these just close friends who happen to know how to act?

Sophie: Aren’t they great? It’s important to remember that the Penumbra Podcast was never intended to be a podcast in the first place; it was just going to be one radio play written for fun, except that one turned into two and then three and then we really let the whole thing get out of control. In any case, the first few people we brought on board (notably, the three actors at the core of the Juniverse: Joshua, Noah, and Kate) are old friends of mine from college, though I know them from a theater group, so it’s most accurate to say that I know them because they know how to act. We are always adding new actors, though!

I perform a lot myself, so I ask a lot of the talented people I’ve worked with in the past to join the show, and I’ve also solicited auditions from friends of friends. (I don’t hold open auditions: we are still too small a production for me to feel safe doing that.) One exception: last year I went to see a play with a friend, and the lead actor was so incredible that I said “THAT. That’s who I need on my show.” So I found him on Facebook and asked him if he would be interested in joining the production, and luckily he had not only heard of the show but was totally on board! (If you’re wondering, the actor was Matthew Zahnzinger, who now plays Ramses O'Flaherty in the Juniverse and Sir Damien in Second Citadel.)

Question Three: What is it that inspired Juno Steel’s adventures? Do you ever see yourself paying homage to Sherlock Holmes and the like or are you more interested in other media to act as a muse?

Kevin: This answer will be relevant in, like, two seconds. I promise.

Sophie has a theory regarding directing actors towards new voices that I really love: she likes to get people to do impressions of people they sound nothing like and then shape the voice from there. Leslie Drescher, who plays Sir Caroline, Valles Vicky, Cassandra, and Cecil, has thus far gotten the brunt of this: for Vicky Sophie sent her videos of Robert DeNiro and Jabba the Hutt, and they shaped a character from there. Cassandra was Joan Jett, Cecil was a French aristocrat and Scott Disick, and so on.

Anyway: the reason this works for voice acting is that you’re relying on the natural chemistry of getting someone to do something they can’t actually do perfectly. When Leslie imitates Robert DeNiro, she does not sound like Robert DeNiro. But she can use that approximation as a starting place to figure out how to sound like a tough, brusque crime lord, and that’s what we needed Vicky to be. And better yet: the voice she does it not one Robert DeNiro could do, and it’s probably not one any of us would have thought she should do until we asked her to do something way outside what she was used to.

We treat inspiration and genre in our stories similarly. In the Juno stories, noir and scifi are always what we go back to… but usually we start by looking at another genre or story that doesn’t quite fit, but that we really love. Juno Steel and the Train From Nowhere happened because we really wanted to write a Bond movie, and then we decided it would be interesting and new if Juno was the “Bond girl” instead. The framing device in Angel of Brahma exists entirely the way it does because I’m obsessed with the first section of the novel Dracula, in which Jonathan Harker is simultaneously a guest and a hostage in Dracula’s house.

It’s worth noting that neither of these episodes are very much like the source material, and that’s where the shaky line between “homage” and “inspiration” comes in. Very often we start with a story convention we love because we love it, and then over the course of outlining and drafting and editing naturally branch off in a new direction.

When I was younger I would get really self-conscious about having “original ideas,” and of course I still do — but it’s really important to remember that “original” is not the same as “immaculate conception.” Just because you can trace where an idea came from doesn’t mean you stole it. If I rewrote It or The Shining and changed the title to Juno Steel and the Day That Wouldn’t Die and tweaked a few names, that’d be plagiarism.

But if we read It and go, “Damn, I really wish I wrote this,” and then we examine what it is we like about the story, what we wish we wrote about it, what parts we don’t like and we’d take out, and what other influences we want to incorporate… suddenly we’ve made something brand new, even if the first thought was, “I really wish I wrote this story that already exists.”

Question Four: The Penumbra spans genres from mystery to fantasy and science fiction. Does it ever become a struggle to juggle so many different themes?

Kevin: For genre and theme, not really. The more difficult thing is bouncing between all these different characters.

Sophie and I talk incessantly about stories, and our interests dovetail really nicely for writing genre stories. I really like pulling apart plot structure and she’s obsessed with tropes; I like figuring out how a joke works and she likes figuring out how to make people cry.

So entering a new genre is never terribly difficult for us because chances are we’ve already had forty conversations about that genre anyway: that’s why when we wrote The Coyote of the Painted Plains, but we knew we didn’t actually like Westerns very much, we gave it all the structure and tropes of a swashbuckler instead, like Ivanhoe or The Three Musketeersand so on.

By the same token when I need to explain the Second Citadel stories to people, my shorthand is usually, “So there’s this fantasy world with knights and stuff, only the knights are kind of like superhero beat cops and the Queen is their chief, so it’s kind of a police procedural with a monster-of-the-week spin, and…”

So genre doesn’t tend to be an issue for us. But making new characters? That’s really, really hard.

Part of the reason we honed down to two main series in season two was because making new characters and getting an audience invested in them in half an hour was a good challenge, but completely exhausting.

I can’t tell you how many half-finished outlines we have for season one one-shots, just because we realized we’d never be able to get people invested in these characters quickly enough and also have time to complete an actual plot. We also just really fell in love with the process of diving deep into a few characters over a long period of time, honing in on the ones with conflicts unresolved and seeing where they go next.

Question Five: Would The Penumbra still be The Penumbra if it wasn’t audio? If it could be recreated in any other format, which would you pick and would it still feel the same? (By the way, I would totally read a novelization of Juno Steel mysteries.)

Sophie: Oh god, if we could make the Penumbra in another format, it would be a TV show–well, two TV shows, probably, one for Juno Steel and one for Second Citadel. And if we had the resources, we’d create an animated series with Penumbra artist Mikaela Buckley! But that being said, the Penumbra would definitely lose something in the transition from audio to visual. Many of the plot points were written explicitly with an audio format in mind (the abilities Juno gains from the Martian Pill, the Ruby 7 car chase, the action scenes in the Head of the Janus Beast), and other setpiece moments were designed in post-production without even being a part of the original script (Annie Wire’s death, the music at Ingrid Lake’s party, Sir Damien’s storytelling). Which is all to say that the Penumbra would be an extremely different show if it hadn’t been created as a podcast.

Question Six: How long does it usually take to make an episode? Including voice acting, sound editing, and of course writing, is it especially time consuming or is it something that can be knocked out in a day?

Sophie: This is a tough question to answer because the first part of the process–the dreaming up of the stories–is the part that can vary the most. Sometimes Kevin and I agonize over characters and plot points for months, but on some very special occasions, when we’ve been in a really great groove, we’ve been able to outline an entire episode in one day.

Once we have an outline, Kevin writes a draft, which can take anywhere from three days to three months (though both ends of the spectrum are very unusual). After that, we spend two to three weeks editing on our own and then with a few other people, and once the script is complete we can move onto rehearsal and recording.

This part is a ton of fun! Scheduling (handled by Noah Simes, our production manager) is a bit of a nightmare because the actors are all extremely busy, but we always do our best to have at least one rehearsal for everybody, and then 1-3 recording sessions. Those are usually long days, but we all love each other a lot, so it’s worth it. The final piece of the process is the sound design, which I usually spend about two full weeks on. I almost never think I’m going to get the whole thing done in time for episode release day, but so far I’ve always managed it!

BONUS: What are some future plans you have in mind? Without going into spoilers, can we can anticipate some new characters, exciting cases, and big reveals to come up?

Kevin: It is very much the Penumbra Brand to make sure all new information only raises forty new questions and makes everyone terribly upset, and so in that time-honored tradition I bring you this fun exclusive:

The structure of this Juno season — number of cases, number of episodes, plot structure, etc. — is so different from season one that we can’t even post a release calendar or tell you how many more you have left to expect, because it would spoil some major reveals coming up in… a few weeks? A few months? I don’t know. You’ll have to wait and see.

Thank you to Sophie and Kevin to taking time to answer my questions. If you haven’t already, check out The Penumbra Podcast yourself to get the scoop on Juno Steel and The Second Citadel as well as enjoying all the beautiful art provided by the talented @disasterscenario.

Another tea pot emptied and another case solved.

#the penumbra podcast #q&a #podcast teatime #juno steel gives me juno feels #sophie kaner #kevin vibert

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