#food court chinese just hits different

[cryoverkiltmilk]

tabletop rpg about horrors beyond comprehension but the horrors are actually mass production capitalism and the removal of independent businesses from local economies

Mall of Cthulhu

#terrible puns #call of cthulhu #i'm hilarious #capitalism #malls #my local mall actually has way more independent shops than the one near me growing up #shopping malls #food court chinese just hits different #tabletop rpgs #rpgs #tabletop games #tabletop gaming

[audreydoeskaren]

Abridged history of early 20th century Chinese womenswear (part 1: 1890s & 1900s) *improved version

Source here

*I’m fixing and reposting the first two posts of this series because back then I had no idea how Tumblr formatting functioned and they deserve better. I’m keeping the shoddy original versions for archival purposes.

*After some thought I think it makes more sense to group the 1890s and 1900s together.

Other posts in the series:

Part 1: 1890s (original)

Part 2: 1900s & 1910s (original)

Part 3.1: 1920s-silhouette

Part 3.2: 1920s-design details

Part 3.3: 1920s-accessories, hair & makeup

Part 4.1: 1930s-silhouette & design

Part 4.2: 1930s-hair, makeup & accessories

Part 5: 1940s

Part 6.1: 1950s-Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan & friends

Part 6.2: 1950s-mainland China

Intro & context

In order to understand early 20th century Chinese fashion we have to go back a bit into the past to have some clue about the context. When the Manchus conquered China and established the Qing Dynasty in the mid 17th century, Han Chinese men adopted Manchu style clothing but Han Chinese womenswear remained independent and separate from Manchu womenswear. Han Chinese women retained the habit of wearing a two piece ensemble as the outermost layer, unlike Manchu women, who wore a single floor length robe. I will be only discussing Han Chinese women’s fashion in this series.

In the 19th century, Han Chinese women wore 袄裙 aoqun, a two piece ensemble consisting of a robe and a skirt. The robe had a very low 立领, standing collar. In the second half of the 19th century, the robe in aoqun had a very generous and roomy cut and huge sleeves, a look which reached its peak in the 1860s and 70s. The hem of the robe hit the knees, the length in vogue since the 1870s. The collar of the robe is very low, only providing enough space for one button, likewise in fashion since the 1870s. The robe is closed with 盘扣 pankou, which in this era were always plain with either a bead or fabric knot tip. The robe closes at the side, usually at the right side at the 大襟 dajin, the side closure, however examples of robes with closures on the left also existed. Robes with closures on both the right and left were also a thing, a style called 双襟 shuangjin, double closure. Shuangjin robes were derived from a men’s riding vest, the 巴图鲁坎肩 batulu vest (batulu is Manchu for “warrior”), that could be opened from both sides, and would experience a revival in the 1920s. 

Source here

1870s/80s photograph of a group of women in aoqun, the two skirts on the left are the elaborate mamian style, the one on the right is plain.

In aoqun, the skirt was usually of a style called 马面 mamian, made of two long horizontal pieces of pleated fabric with two flat sections each sewn to a waistband with one flat section overlapping, creating a wrap skirt that once worn around the wearer’s waist, appears to have two unpleated sections, one at the front and one at the back. This skirt was very decorative in the 19th century, full of embroidery, tassels and elaborate trim, sometimes giving the illusion of a separate apron being attached (I’ve seen this weird stereotype that traditional Chinese womenswear has a separate apron at the front this is complete bogus). The robes were likewise heavily decorated around the seams, ceremonial outfits like wedding gowns could be so full of embroidery that the original fabric is hardly to be seen.

The combination of robe and pants, 袄裤 aoku, was also a common way of dressing since approximately the 1800s or 1810s. This combination would become the norm in the 1890s.

Source here

1870s/80s photograph of a woman in a ginormous ao, roomy pants and with bound feet.

Another noteworthy fad was bound feet. The middle of the 19th century was the pinnacle of foot binding and fashionable women had incredibly small feet, dubbed “lotus feet”. This was achieved by wrapping tight foot binding cloth around the feet since childhood and restricting the growth of the feet, I think also breaking a couple bones in the process. Women wore foot binding cloth and baggy stockings underneath their shoes, tied up with garters below the knees. Foot binding is said to severely restrict mobility and cause intense pain; I don’t doubt the pain part but I’m not sure about mobility since I’ve seen plenty of photographs of women with bound feet roaming about the streets.

Not every woman did foot binding though, it depended heavily on region, class and the individual family. For one, Manchu women all had natural feet. For Han women, an account from the 1850s said that in Beijing, every five or six out of ten women did not have bound feet, and that probability is three or four out of ten in the countryside. In the provinces along the southern coast, most women did not bind their feet (this probably has to do with the influence of indigenous cultures in the south, since foot binding was primarily a Han fashion), whereas in the northwest almost every woman had bound feet. By the way, I really don’t like how articles on foot binding describe it in the most sensational way possible, why is it so hard to approach history with peace of mind? And it pisses me off that all the articles containing 1890s photographs only talk about the foot binding as if there is nothing more of value in portraits of whole ass women.

Anyway, if you are interested in learning more about foot binding, check out  Cinderella‘s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding by Dorothy Ko, recommended by @thefeastandthefast​ . Or just anything written by Dorothy Ko tbh.

Silhouette

In the 1890s, the cut of the aoqun began to become more slender and form fitting, commonly believed to be a result of westernization. But I think it’s also because the wide sleeve look has also been in fashion for quite a while now (some 80 years or so) and people were getting tired of it. The robe inherited the knee length hem from the 1880s but was less baggy and took on a more straight cut silhouette. The collar remained quite low until the end of the decade. Pants were overwhelmingly more popular than skirts in the 1890s, I speculate this may be due to a rising interest in feminism and women wanting more mobility, but aoku was also very popular in the 1870s and 80s in general so it may have also just carried over. The pants were still ankle length and straight cut but less roomy than earlier 19th century models. Overall the 1890s just looks like a shrunken and simplified version of the 1880s.

Source here

The aoku as of the 1890s.

By the second half of the 1900s, the collar began to rise, becoming medium height. This was kind of reminiscent of late 18th century Han women’s collars I mentioned in this post on Chinese standing collars. The robe and pants shrunk further, becoming quite tight fitting. The robe was still around knee length. The pants were especially tight and could be considered skinny. Foot binding became less common and many women had natural sized feet. However, since foot binding is something that begins in the childhood, the fact that many women without bound feet appeared in the 1900s meant that many parents started to reject food binding in the 1880s and 90s. 

Source here

Ca. 1907 photograph of a group of women, possibly students, in tight fitting aoku.

Design details

The 1890s saw the mass disappearing of wide, embroidered trims around the seams, popular throughout the 19th century. The use of multiple rows of binding/trim from the 1870s and 80s was continued, albeit in a much more minimalistic and geometric way. I’ve seen a lot of plain white ao finished with multiple rows of black binding of different widths, it’s mighty avant-garde and elegant. Because clothes of the era were still constructed in the older Chinese method, they had a seam down the middle of the sleeves used to extend the length of the sleeves; this seam could be bound and decorated but it was not compulsory. Actual embroidery on the robe and skirt/pants was rare, if not non-existent; completely plain fabric was the norm. The ao of this era commonly had a 厂字襟 (厂 shaped closure), where the front placket is held up by one or two buttons and then closed by more buttons down the side seam. This style of closure was first popularized for Han women’s clothing in the 1800s and 1810s, before that Han women’s clothing closures were a straight line from the collar to the armpit. The pankou used to close the ao of this period became a lot more elaborate and the main source of decoration; I have a whole ass post on them here. A general air of simplicity, comfort and proportionality dominated the fashion of this era. In the mid 18th century, Han women’s robes started having folded cuffs (possibly borrowed from Manchu court dress), called 挽袖 wanxiu, and these became fake and represented by a piece of trimming in the 1850s. By the 1890s this design feature largely disappeared, leaving the sleeve edges either plain or simply bound.

Source here

Three women in aoku, late 1890s. I looooove the look on the far left, I will probably make it some day.

Going into the 1900s, the geometric trims became more simplified and austere, while the pankou became increasingly ornamental.

Source here

Late 1900s photograph. The robe is trimmed with fur and thin, geometric binding, and closed by very ornamental pankou.

Hair & Makeup

There were no significant changes in hairstyling in the 1890s, fashionable women would wear existing 1880s hairstyles but style them with bangs. A common style I’ve seen in photographs was long hair pulled back into either one big bun at the back or two smaller ones at the sides. The short bangs were usually very neat, precisely cut and sat closely to the forehead. Elastics did not exist, so Chinese women used strings and hairpins to tie their hair together. Hairpins of this era were usually very thick and sturdy, a single one was enough to hold all your hair into a bun. It was popular to use flowers and/or pearls to form a ring of decorations around a bun. 

Source here

Common 1890s hairstyle, for most people the decorations weren’t so elaborate.

A popular headpiece was this thin headband adorned with pearls worn at the place where bangs should be, although that has been around since the 1870s as well.

Source here

Ca. late 1890s. Some women wearing the pearl headband. 

Around 1905 the bangs began to grow in length but still weren’t long enough to cover the eyebrows. They were longer at the sides and shorter in the middle, creating this volume and curve at the forehead.

Source here

Photograph ca. 1905. Long bangs.

By the end of the decade these evolved into a being with a will of its own. Long hair tied into braids or low buns became fashionable instead of tight, high buns.

Source here

Calendar painting from 1911.

Fashionable women in the 1890s wore little to no makeup, because of the influence of female university students who were usually without makeup. In the 1870s and 80s, thick makeup was more common and was a trend popularized by sex workers in Shanghai, thus becoming increasingly considered indecent in the 1890s. I find this quite problematic cause respectability politics suck and there’s nothing wrong with wearing fashion trends invented by sex workers. All the straight male writers of the 1890s and 1900s praising female students for being “pure” and ”hygienic” in contrast to the supposedly nasty sex workers make me cringe to my core, it’s just pitting women against each other and setting us up for “I’m not like other girls” in my opinion.

The common makeup look includes white power, lipstick and blush. The lipstick shape was usually a tad smaller to the actual lips and blush was applied in large areas toward the outside of the face.

Source here

Standard 1890s and 1900s hair and makeup look. This drawing is probably from around 1902, it’s a bit more festive folk art than fashion plate so take the patterns with a dash of salt.

Undergarments

Unfortunately I don’t have many pictures for undergarments of the era but I can describe them to you. Since women commonly wore pants, they would usually wear another layer of pants (could be considered drawers) underneath that was of a similar construction but plain and easy to launder. Panties and such didn’t exist so drawers were the innermost layer, enough to protect women’s private parts. Likewise for the robe, another plainer, sturdier version would be worn underneath. In the mid 1900s, as the sleeves of the outer robe began to shorten, the undershirt became more form fitting at the wrists and could serve a decorative function. 

Chinese women in the 19th century bound their breasts with long strips of fabric to achieve the flat look. I’m not exactly sure how this is done but basically you wrap fabric tightly around your chest until the boobies are concealed. A famous undergarment of the Qing Dynasty was the 肚兜 dudou, which was actually unisex. The female only version was called 抹胸 moxiong, 袜肚 wadu or 袜腹 wafu, the latter two are etymologically similar to earlier words for “corset” or “a pair of bodies”. However, unlike what many later 20th century artists would like you to believe, wearing only dudou on the upper body was not legit underwear for grown up women, as it was usually worn in conjunction with breast binders as an extra layer of warmth. It was also worn very tightly around the breasts and waist, not tied loosely like in paintings or period dramas nowadays.

Source here

Dudou diagram.

Shoes

Women began campaigning against bound feet in this period and many drawings depicted women with natural feet. However, if a woman had her feet bound since childhood it’s difficult for them to return to their natural size, so some women who were born in previous decades would still have very small feet, even if they began to reject it at this time. Women’s shoes of Western construction weren’t yet so common so most women wore Chinese style shoes, which were commonly made of fabric and had a slightly upward pointing toe. Women with bound feet would use a long piece of ribbon/cloth to wrap their feet (to maintain the shape) and wear small fabric pumps with a white sole. These could be flat or have a teeny tiny bit of wedge heel, called 弓鞋 gong xie, bow shoes. Women without bound feet would wear normal sized pumps, likewise of fabric, with slightly upward pointing toes and a thick white sole. Embroidery on shoes was a huge thing in the 19th century and before but by the 1890s it started to disappear as well, and shoes in the 1890s were commonly plain. In the 1900s, Western leather shoes were increasingly popularized, but it wasn’t until the early 1910s that this popularity reached its height.

Source here

Foot binding cloth.

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Shoes for bound feet.

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Woman with natural feet wearing Chinese style pumps. Western style knit stockings were becoming popularized in the 1880s for women with natural feet as well.

Some editing afterthoughts

I’ve been looking more into 18th and 19th century Chinese fashion lately and I realized I held some deep rooted misconceptions about the Qing Dynasty. For some reason I always considered the 1870s and 80s look with the elaborate, big robes conservative or backwards, which is really not fair. Chinese women’s fashion was revolutionized in the beginning of the 19th century, going from the flowy, slender robes of the 18th century to stiffer, more structured robes with flared sleeves. Styles also differed dramatically from decade to decade, it’s just not very well studied and there’s a stigma around Qing Dynasty fashion so people don’t get into it as much. Because Han women were allowed to continue wearing Han style clothing into the Qing Dynasty, a lot of 18th century reproduction ensembles nowadays get mistakenly labelled as Ming style hanfu, which really isn’t helping... I was definitely not alone in this though, the perception of Qing Dynasty Han women’s fashion most people nowadays have is: in the first couple years Han women were allowed to wear Ming style hanfu, but then bam the late 19th century look was forced upon everyone. This view is super not nuanced and false on almost every level, but it is extremely widespread and I don’t blame you at all if you also think like this, this was me just two months ago too... A wise woman (I mean Karolina Zebrowska) once said that everything in fashion history happens gradually, which is also extremely true for Chinese fashion history. 

I’ve really started to question what modernity in fashion means because the elaborate 19th century Chinese look that white people back then considered the epitome of conservative Chinese clothing was actually new and exciting in the beginning of the 19th century. I can’t help but wonder if this view that Chinese clothing as of the 1870s and 80s was symbolic of Chinese culture’s “backwardness” and “stagnation” was a product of colonization and white imperialists’ efforts to demonize Chinese society and take things out of context. I would prefer to say that Chinese fashion westernized a lot during the 1890s and 1900s but not necessarily modernized because what is modernity. Fashions change and that is the most normal thing on the planet. 

If you read what white historians or politicians wrote in the late 19th/early 20th century about Chinese fashion or culture (which I highly recommend you don’t, that shit is detrimental to your mental health), it becomes obvious that the majority of them have no clue what Chinese fashion looked like before the 19th century and how we got to what we had in the 19th century in the first place, so they just assumed that Chinese fashion always looked like that and that we haven’t progressed as a culture in hundreds of years lmao. Bullshit pseudo-Darwinism at its finest. Oh or if you look up 18th century European Orientalist paintings depicting imaginary Chinese characters, the clothes they wore and the hairstyles they had were so far off from what actual 18th century Chinese fashion looked like to the point they felt racist and were uncomfortable to look at. I stumbled across so many of them when looking for 18th century Chinese painting and every time I see one it almost gives me a stroke. So I think it’s really important to acknowledge that Han Chinese fashion of the 18th century is a valid field of study.

In my original 1890s post I said that the elaborate embroidery and trimmings started to appear on Han women’s fashion around this time because of Manchu influence, I take that back because I’ve realized it’s a whack claim. I’ll explain it more when I make some posts on the 19th century later.

Reworked part 2 is coming soon as well :)))

#1890s #1900s #19th century #historic fashion #qing dynasty #vintage fashion #vintage hair #vintage shoes #chinese fashion #chinese history #abridged history of early 20th century chinese womenswear #清汉女装 #edwardian fashion

[1kook]

commercial break ; ONE

a netflix & chill drabble  this follows directly after disney+ and bust !

summary; Maybe Jungkook wasn’t always as cool and composed as you initially believed. But that’s okay, because you love him all the same. warnings; none unless u count yn bullying him as one miscellaneous; yn is regina george thats it word count; 1.3k

notes; u guys may be like “u feed us so well!” wrong i obsessively post bc I'm never satisfied with my work, like in d&b i really disliked the lack of resolution so here i am writing one the day after god bless lmk what u think xxxx

Because Jungkook is Jungkook and cannot go three minutes without profusely professing his feelings to you, the apology gets old real quick.

“I’m sorry, y’know,” he says in the middle of dinner, idly picking at his plate. It’s Chinese tonight, sprawled across the kitchen counter that overlooks your living room. The Bee Movie is playing on TV, a movie you hadn’t seen in years yet still managed to put a smile on your face. But you know what wasn’t putting a smile on your face? Jungkook ruining this movie experience with his fourth apology of the night.

You nod through a mouthful of rice, eyes zeroed in on the screen. “Uh huh,” you hum, foot idly bumping against the leg of your chair every few seconds. “That’s great, honey.”

He sighs. “I’m being serious,” he stresses. “I think, maybe you should like…” a long pause you use to shovel more food into your mouth while the bees on screen go to human court. It was a wild ride. Were they on crack when they pitched this idea? You would have been. “Punch me in the face or something,” he offers after a moment.

You quirk a brow in his direction, finally abandoning the film on screen in favor of turning to face him. “You want me to use you as a punching bag to help you get over your hurt feelings that you developed from being an asshole to me.” Jungkook nods. You shrug. “Okay.”

“Wait, really?” he says, face paling as you roll your shoulder around. “You’re gonna hit me? Like for real?” You raise your brows, as if that’s obviously what you’re going to do.

“Well, you asked for it,” you respond, giving your wrist one final flick before rearing it back. His eyes flutter shut tightly, pouty lips pursed together in a thin line. Your fist comes barreling, ripping through the air in an insane, Fortune 500-like speed, and then—

“No,” Jungkook groans, touching the spot where you lightly flicked his forehead. His bangs saved him from most of the impact, but even without it, it was barely more than a teasing poke of your finger against his skin. “You need to like, beat me up.”

You snort, turning your attention back to the screen. “You know, you’re beginning to sound a lot like me these days, Jungkookie,” you point out, fork scraping across the plate. Jungkook sighs, dropping his head onto the countertop in defeat. “Very childish.”

He lightly bangs his head across the faux marble, a strained whimper filling the air and ruining The Bee Movie. “Which is why you need to hit me or something, I don’t know. Make me pay for how horrible I was to you the other day.”

“I’m not gonna hit you,” you say, “because that would mean the next time you get mad at me, you’d hit me.”

“I would never!” he exclaims, eyes wide and round. Gone was the perfectly put together Jungkook, in was this sloppy mess of emotions. “Besides,” he says softly, cheeks a warm rosy color as he goes back to picking at his food, “you’d never wrong me like I did you.”

You hum, toying with the fork in your mouth. “Really,” you murmur, dropping the fork back on the table. You place your chin in your palm, lazily watching the movie now that you’ve missed a pivotal scene because Jungkook wanted you to beat him up. “I used your toothbrush the other day,” you mention.

Silence.

“You what?” he squawks indignantly. You glance at him from your peripherals. There’s an obvious expression of disgust on his features, eyes flickering from side to side as he digests this information. “Babe—that’s, that’s actually really…” He can’t even finish his sentence, mouth opening and closing as he finally seems to process the fact your mouth germs were on his beloved toothbrush.

“Yup,” you add. “Hope you don’t mind,” you babble on, “well, I mean, you really shouldn’t.” You glance at him, the mean streak in you crooning loudly in your ear the more and more uncomfortable he grows. “Considering you’re always spitting in my mouth.”

As wild as you and Jungkook liked to get in bed, what happened in bed mostly stayed in bed. It sounds gross to say it aloud, but he really has just been casually spitting in your mouth for the past few months. He was a dirty boy, and that fact makes him squirm.

“No, that’s different,” he frowns, obviously distraught by the valid point you bring to the table. “My toothbrush is my toothbrush.”

“I know,” you agree, nudging his foot teasingly. “Should I tell you about all the other mean stuff I do to your things that I never say sorry for?” He turns those frantic eyes on you.

“You’re lying,” he says, though there’s a question embedded within. You tilt your head to the side, as if to say, am I?.

When he doesn’t say anything more, you jump into a full novel recapture of every mean thing you’ve done and why. “And one time I was so pissed off that you finished my strawberry shampoo that I went to your house and drained the water from that stupid cactus’s pot. You know, the one Namjoon gave you?” Jungkook’s mouth opens and closes. “Why do you think it died so fast? I killed it.”

Before he can reprimand you for purposefully orchestrating the murder of his favorite senpai’s potted cactus, you’re intercepting him with yet another tale. “And another time, I was so sick of you polishing your awards all day that I went in and sprinkled a layer of adhesive pixie dust on them from the craft store, and I know it still bothers you to this day.”

“Jeez,” he sighs after a good ten parables. “It sounds like I piss you off a lot more than I think I do.”

You pat his shoulder gently, scraping the remnants of his meal into the trash can. “Yeah, but the difference is,” you say, finding your place beside him again. You don’t climb into your chair, just hover beside him until he’s begrudgingly wrapping his arms around your waist. There’s a cute pout on him, face squished against your boobs. “I routinely let out all my raging hatred against you instead of bottling it up.”

“Yeah,” he agrees sadly. “I guess so.”

Before you can let him off believing this much is fine, you intervene once more. “And also I never purposefully pick out everything you’re insecure about.”

“I didn’t know,” he cries, all traces of that suave gentlemen you love so much gone. But it’s okay, because in his place was this vulnerable puppy looking at you with the eyes of every rescue pop in those dramatic commercials on tv. Maybe Jungkook wasn’t always as cool and composed as you initially believed. But that’s okay, because you love him all the same.

“Well, now you do,” you reprimand, giving his nose a playful pinch that almost makes him sneeze. “And I think it’s only fair I get a turn.”

He pushes away from his hiding spot in your boobs with a frown. “So you won’t physically attack me, but you will verbally attack me.”

“Yes,” you respond without missing a beat. “Because you’re easy to bully and it’s probably because of the fact you didn’t have many friends in high school, which essentially made you the class loner, thus an easy target. Explains why Namjoon had to set you up on a date with someone as amazing and outgoing as me, otherwise you would have died forever alone because of your inability to talk to women and the fact you have an awfully picky personality that can be overwhelming at times. So thank me once in a while, yeah?” you smile.

Jungkook blinks. “I think I might cry,” he admits.

You cup his cheeks in your hands, puckering his lips obnoxiously for you to smooch. “Baby, you’re dating a retired Regina George. Y’gotta tighten up a bit,” you tease, relish in the tiny smile he tries to hide after your kisses.

“So is this going to be like a thing now?” he asks as you tug him over to the couch, where The Bee Movie is still playing loud and clear. He plops down and you follow, snuggling into his side. “Because I don’t think I can ever do that again. Hurting your feelings hurts my feelings.”

You snort, taking in his smell and his warmth beside you. Jungkook sinks into the cushions, pulling you close into his chest until the soft beats of his heart echo in your ears. “No— unless you want it to be?”

Copyright © 2020, 1kook on tumblr. absolutely NO reposts allowed.

#goldenclosetnet #ksmutclub #bangtanhq #jungkook fic #jeon jungkook fic #this is mostly just a very needed resolution for me lol #mine

[genshin-impacted]

empress of the first water // Zhongli x Reader (2)

Word Count: 1.8k

Palace/Harem Imperial Drama AU: You are a princess, soon-to-be-Empress, and Zhongli is the teacher invited by the royal court to show you the ropes before you ascend to the throne after a royal tragedy.

Notes: female + Princess!Reader, Teacher!Zhongli, mutual pining, fake politics, Zhongli POV

xiansheng - Chinese honorific translated to as “person born before another,” also used as a title to refer to persons of authority or skills; generally used to mean “teacher”

[Previous] [Next]

Zhongli’s duties as the Princess’ tutor, as spoken by the head noble-- a man who seemed to always have a sneer on his face-- was to fully and completely reeducate the Princess. He understands now why his room is so close to yours considering how they have asked him to spend the majority of your day with him-- and vice versa. You seem to take this schedule in stride, listening to his lectures with an apt mind and following whatever lessons he brings throughout the day, regardless of familiarity or novelty.

But you are quiet, and as appreciative as Zhongli is at a rapt audience, he knows you have more to say than what you are giving-- but he understands. Zhongli can’t imagine not having a moment of solidarity when the presence of others can be so oppressive in the face of grief. In the middle of his afternoon lessons, he excuses himself and allows you to have a break. He knows he has decided well when you shoot him a grateful smile and when he sees you deflate the moment he closes the sliding door.

“Has she not been raised as a Princess for her whole life?” He asks the noble politely as they walk down the long outdoor hallways of the palace. He had been called to meet up with him on his way to court with the intentions to review the Princess’s progress, only it seems as though the head noble had no intentions of listening. “Surely, there is no need for me to go so extensively into that sector of education," he presses.

The noble sighs. “Mr. Zhongli, with all due respect, the girl--” Zhongli can feel his brows raise at the lack of title used-- “...has never been properly prepared for the possibility to become the Empress. She was one of the last ones in line to inherit the throne, so no one thought she could amount to anything. Surely, you’ve seen the way she acts?” The noble lifts his round silk fan to his face, and Zhongli, despite all his efforts to not feel disdain for the callous noble, feels his patience wear thin. “It was such a surprise, you see, to all of us when that tragedy hit, but alas, she’s the only one left.”

“I see,” Zhongli replies coolly. “And so you would have me follow her and scrutinize her every action to make her fit to rule?”

If the noble took heed of his frosty tone, he does not react to it. Instead, he looks at Zhongli coyly from behind his fan. “I assure you, it will be best for both you and me to have her reeducated. To an extent.” The noble says, “I assume you know what I’m referring to? You’re an intelligent man, Mr. Zhongli. You come from a good family and know much of the world… but you could always, ah, possess more.”

“Knowledge is power, as I am sure you are aware,” he says, chuckling. Zhongli watches in silence as the noble walks away, waving a flippant hand. “Be sure to take care not to provide her with too much, Mr. Zhongli, and perhaps I’ll refer you to a different title someday.”

.

.

.

When Guizhong was chosen to become a lady of another country, Zhongli felt, for the first time in many, that perhaps there was more to life than a constant grapple for power and the legacy that it would lead. She had not wanted to leave as much as he did not want her to go, but he did not understand then that he held power in his mind and in his own actions to change the path in which his path would lead.

Despite his disdain for the lies and trickery involved with the power struggle, Zhongli knows he will keep his promise to his father to uphold his family honor. He has always been a man of his words, for he bound himself into fulfilling them as though they are contracts.

But as he watches the head noble disappear behind the court doors, Zhongli wonders if that is all he is capable of.

When he thinks of Guizhong-- when he thinks of you, who has lost so much and could lose so much more, he thinks that for how your world seems to be against you, he wants to be someone on your side of the ring-- despite how everyone pressures for the opposite. Zhongli does not know if he deserves it, but he wishes to have your trust. He has yet to know how to truly support you, but he wants to provide you the freedom of choice if he can-- even in the smallest of ways.

And so he gives you freedom in the only way he knows how.

“What would you like to learn about today?” Zhongli asks you the next day as the two of you walk quietly to the study room. He can’t help the smile on his face when you turn to him in poorly-hidden surprise. Despite how you may act in front of the nobles whom he knows has an ill-opinion of you as you of them, you cannot help the emotions that come to the surface. He thinks himself lucky, if he were honest, to know that he is at least in your favor enough for you to let down your guard to give him a glimpse of the Princess he had seen not a fortnight ago.

To this date, he has only seen you be as such with your lady-in-waiting, Amber, but he knows that in his presence, he has only barely scratched the surface to the depth of your relationship and personality.

“What would I like to learn about?” You repeat, looking out into the garden in thought. “I’m not sure,” you say, turning to him. “What do you want to teach me?”

Zhongli blinks. “Pardon?”

At his confusion, you laugh, and Zhongli cannot help how his chest flutters at your sound of joy, for how far off it seemed that you would ever express that again. Just when he thought he could not be surprised, you tilt your head and smile teasingly at him. “You and I both know that the nobles are the ones that have been controlling my schedule for the past week. I want to know what you would want to teach me personally.”

Zhongli feels his cheeks warm at the tone of your voice. “Princess, I--” His father would be horrified at his lack of composure, but Zhongli cannot afford to think of his family and their expectations when you look up at him expectantly without an ounce of impatience. He clears his throat and thinks deeply, much to your amusement, putting his hand to his chin. “I suppose… I suppose I could provide you the history of the glaze lilies that the garden has in abundance?” He says, watching as your eyes soften, “They’re quite remarkable-- able to bloom in a night and gone in the next, some even saying they possess a different scent if you sing to them.”

“I agree with them, whoever said singing to them creates a different scent,” you say, looking out into the garden by the bamboo where three glaze lilies lay unbloomed. “If you sing the Liyuen lullaby to them, it produces a very soft fragrance-- almost like baby powder.” You turn to him and smile. “They were my mother’s favorite,” you explain gently. “She always sang and picked one for me to keep in my room.”

Zhongli lowers his head in respect. “My apologies, Princess, I didn't mean to bring up such personal topics."

“No, no! Don’t worry about it,” you tell him, laughing. “It’s fine. It’s nice to think of something nice like that.” You brush your hair behind your ears, and if there was a nostalgic lilt to your voice, he does not throw attention to it. “I like it,” you say, “please continue. I’m curious about the glaze lily’s history.”  

And what was Zhongli to do for the Princess if not to continue?

Zhongli doesn’t know if you have committed his every word to memory, or whether you remember anything in regards to the dates he provided (you are terrible with dates, he has found out, much to your embarrassment; but much like everything he knows of you, he finds it endearing). But he watches as you walk through the garden with him, the most at peace he has ever seen you, and he continues to speak.

And Zhongli lets his voice rid of the garden of silence, your thoughtful hums and soft laughter as accompaniment. Soon enough, though, the sun sets and the stars begin to shine, and Zhongli leads you to your room where you will be served dinner.

You thank him for the lesson, and he nods gracefully, his hand upon his chest. When he raises his head, you are still smiling at him. (He thinks abruptly that he would like to keep that smile on your face, if only for a moment, and the next words tumble from his mouth.)

“If you are looking for a place by the sea,” he says, remembering your words from before, “‘where the wind blows and the earth is clean,’ then I believe that I shall make our lesson on that the next time we find ourselves free.”

You blink up at him, eyes wide-- lips parted as though awestruck until they widen into the kindest smile he has ever seen on you.

“Yes,” you say softly, “that sounds lovely. Thank you.”

Zhongli lowers his head again in respect, swallowing at the magnitude of your magnanimity. “Of course, Princess.”

He expects to be dismissed, but instead he hears you ask, “Would you like to join me for dinner, xiansheng?”

Zhongli wonders how many times a person can bewilder him one day. “Pardon me?”

“I’m asking if you, Zhongli xiansheng,” you say with a now-familiar lilt of amusement, “would like to eat with the Princess.” You laugh when he stands, tall as he is, gaping at you. “You can say no. I won’t take offense. Promise.”

And he thinks to himself that as generous as you are to offer him the option to deny your request, he doesn’t know if he ever would have.

Dinner consisted of the finest foods: Peking duck, the freshest peaches of Fontaine, the grains of Qingce Village, and bamboo soup that would have put his personal chef to shame. It is custom of the Princess to sit from a table distant from him, but in the confines of your inner chambers, you sit right in front of him, placing dishes in front of him for him to try. (Zhongli has a feeling you would pile food onto his bowl if you could.)

He has the delight of not only enjoying the foods you have offered but also the sight of your smiling countenance for the remainder of that night. And for once, he feels as though he has taken the reins on his own life-- for the better.

(He only hopes he can keep holding on.)

#zhongli x reader #genshin impact x reader #genshin imagines #zhongli #genshin impact zhongli #genshin zhongli #genshin x reader #sorry for the repost! tags r not workin w me #imperial drama au

[millenniumfae]

Video Game Cooking: Sugars (Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice)

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a standalone historical fantasy made by the famous people who also created Dark Souls and Bloodborne. It became an instant hit, and garnered massive critical acclaim. You control the broody shinobi Wolf as he battles entire armies and legendary beasts.

One of the many consumables in-game are the Sugars; Gokan’s Sugar, Ako’s Sugar, Yashariku’s Sugar, Ungo’s Sugar, and Gachiin’s Sugar. These candies are named and colored differently, and each offer a different effect. One raises your attack power, another makes you more stealthy, and so on.

Today, we’re gonna be re-creating these Sugars with our own recipe. And true to my tradition when it comes to Video Game Recipes, we’re gonna be taking our ingredients accurate to the setting. Which in this case is Sengoku period Japan. This recipe meta draws especially true to my own heritage, as a Taiwanese person.

Sekiro Senpou Temple Sugars: Recipe (makes 10-20 individual candies, depending on the size)

Base candy recipe:

3 3/4 cups granulated raw cane sugar

1 1/2 cups golden syrup/brown rice syrup

1 cup water

Corn starch for mold making (optional)

Confectioner’s sugar for dusting

Flavorings:

Fresh ginger slices (Gokan’s Sugar)

Dried lotus seeds (Gokan’s Sugar)

Red cherries (Ako’s Sugar)

Dried Astragalus (Ako’s Sugar)

Ginseng (Ungo’s Sugar)

White peaches (Ungo’s Sugar)

Sake (Yashariku’s Sugar)

Dried Cocklebur fruit (Yashariku’s Sugar)

Dried Orange peel (Gachiin’s Sugar)

Dried Goji berries (Gachiin’s Sugar)

Food coloring

(Sekiro won the 2019 Game Of The Year award, the first FromSoftware game to do so.)

To make our Sugars, we’ll be infusing a traditional candy base with various ingredients, unique for each candy. Every ingredient is based off of TCM, which is an acronym standing for Traditional Chinese Medicine. For those unacquainted with TCM, it can be hard to explain its influence. There’s no true western equivalent because it’s more than just ‘old household remedies’, it’s almost a given that Asian citizens take various TCM practices seriously to a degree. Like westerners do with honey lemon tea, or chicken noodle soup.

It’s also accurate to the game. Sekiro takes its setting very seriously. Everything from weapons, to hairstyles, to interior decor, even down to the kanji on Emma’s note in the beginning of the game is true to the Sengoku period, and some levels even go backwards a bit to the Heinan period, to reflect an ancient atmosphere. You can reasonably minus the historical inaccuracies on your own volition; giant snake gods, lightning powers, and automatic prosthetic grappling hooks weren’t indigenous to Japan.

Except there’s in fact one tiny detail that you might be surprised to learn is actually anachronistic; disk-shaped hard candies. The Sugars.

Hard candies aren’t traditional East-Asian treats. Sugar was always readily available in the form of sugar cane, true, but sweets almost always took the form of fruit, and candy-coated/infused ingredients. This is true worldwide until refining sugar into its white form became common, but East-Asia in particular wasn’t munching on lozenges while Marie Antoinette already had cough drops.

The Sengoku period stretched from the early Renaissance to the Baroque period. While Wolf was parrying his way through the Ashina Outskirts, the first King James Bible was published. There was plate armor and court jesters, but also firearms and photographs. Japan didn’t get access to matchlock firearms until 1542, and since the Sunken Valley clan seems to define themselves by the expert use of these guns, it makes sense that the intro to the game itself dates Sekiro as specifically taking place in the latter years of the Sengoku period.

All throughout this stretch of two centuries, Japan has been under constant war and political strife, lending to the Sengoku period’s alternative name, the ‘Warring States Period’. Japan consisted of separate nations, all led under Daimyo and warlords and various nobles that demanded their armies scramble for more land and resources. Living under this kind of conflict for so long means that innovations and education are rare. There’s no opportunity to invent the telescope when you’re all constantly worried about your lives.

This means that the food of Sekiro would have very much been the same it’s been since centuries beforehand. Even though by this point, the Columbian Exchange has been well underway and Europe was experimenting with tomatoes in their food, Japan wasn’t enjoying this same golden period. Any developments would have been weaponry, not candy making methods.

This means that, for our recipe, we’re not using anything that a Senpou monk wouldn’t have access to. No potatoes, corn, vanilla, etc. No beet sugar, or fruits that aren’t native to Japan. Even the raw cane sugar we’re using is pushing the authenticity envelope, because the ‘raw’ granulated sugar you find in grocery stores aren’t completely raw, they’ve still been refined using lye and carbon to strip much of the molasses. True raw cane sugar, when boiled down from its juice form, makes a traditional Asian ingredient called black sugar, which is very dark in color and not suited for making the brightly-colored candy disks that the Sugars appear to be.

(Shinobi aren’t samurai, but Wolf’s relationship with Kuro is so clearly samurai-ish that we can assume Wolf was being paid buckets as a high-prestige warrior. He also would have access to better food, including white rice; which, while already genetically modified through breeding by the Sengoku period, wouldn’t have looked like modern rice. Or maybe Wolf wasn’t enjoying the high life, because he dresses in rags compared to Genichiro and apparently didn’t know rice was supposed to be cooked.)

Knowing all that history about the Sengoku period, it’s almost silly to see candy consumables in-game, looking like they came right out of a bag of Werther’s Originals. The developers of Sekiro made many lengths to ensure everything was authentic, so why are the candies so modern-looking when they could instead have been a traditional Sengoku period sweet like something mochi-based, or agar (seaweed) jellies?

The lore behind the Sugars are that the evil Senpou monks were mass-producing these candies, and selling them all across Ashina to fund their crooked child experiments. They’re not just (presumably) tasty, they offer benefits to your health. That’s definitely in line with TCM culture, and gives us some inspiration for how to pursue replicating them.

One important note; the Sugars are some of the lesser consumables Wolf can use. Almost all other consumables are better, offering more powerful effects for a longer duration. So what if these candies were true to TCM and were mere treats infused with medicinal ingredients, only capable of giving you a small boost? Especially in comparison to the Divine Child’s rice, which would be like an Epi-Pen in this analogy.

But there’s even more depth to the consumables than that. Kuro gifts Wolf a ‘sweet rice ball’ at some point, which is almost certainly an Ohagi bun; made out of glutinous rice, red beans, and sugar, and its a traditional offering for the Buddhist observance of seasonal equinox. Eating it is sometimes said to bring protection. In order for Kuro to make Wolf this rice ball, you gotta give him some of that special rice from the Divine Child. Wolf offhandedly mentions that her rice is “sweet when you bite into it”, and Kuro realizes that Wolf has been eating these rice grains raw all this time, like the feral 5′5 goblin he is. Kuro vows to give his loyal protector something nice to eat, for once, and makes him three Ohagi dumplings.

The food of Sekiro is symbolic. The Divine Child is able to make rice out of thin air, like a deity of fertility. Kuro takes this divine rice, and his sweet rice ball is more powerful than the magical blessed Sugars because it was made with compassion. And eating Kuro’s lovingly-made rice ball reminds Wolf of once being fed a rice ball when he was young and starving, given to him by his assfuck of a father who’s compassion is heavily in question.

The Sugars are described as giving the eater a ‘benediction’ of power, and who knows what the translators were thinking, but the word choice reminds us of communion, and the flesh and blood of Christ. It’s not a true comparison; communion is about replicating and worshiping the Last Supper, reminding Christians about Jesus willingly dying cause humans are sinful. Consuming the ‘flesh and blood’ of Jesus in the form of bread and wine is very different than eating a candy apparently blessed by an ancient Japanese warrior. It’s not like communion wafers are supposed to empower you, or protect you.

Looking at the in-game image of each Sugar, you can see the likeness of a person behind it, likely the very warrior the Sugar is named after. We don’t know if these people actually had a hand in these Sugars, somehow transplanting their power into each individual candy, or if the monks just named the candies after them. Either way, the process of receiving the benefits of the Sugars isn’t just about crunching it between your teeth, Wolf also takes a moment to strike a‘warrior stances’, which, according to the descriptions, is a required detail to properly absorb the candy’s effects. Each Sugar has their own corresponding ‘stance’ that Wolf performs. It’s a weird detail, and raises even more questions about the Sugars, the monks, and the warriors behind the candy.

(Observant players will note that the five Headless boss enemies drop ‘spiritfalls’, each of which share names with the five Sugars, and offer upgraded versions of their corresponding Sugar; Ako’s Spiritfall is basically a better version of Ako’s Sugar, and so on. We can assume that the Headless are, in fact, the very same legendary warriors that powered the Sugars, especially since the game itself states that the Headless are undead remains of powerful individuals.)

True to FromSoftware tradition, details are included with purpose. And also at the same time, some details are just meant to be taken at face value. The various centipede-themed enemies in Sekiro are associated with kegare - spiritual defilement, death - explaining visually their willing abandonment from Buddhism. But there’s likely no lore explaining why Wolf can automatically hoover up all nearby enemy loot like a vacuum with the press of a button.

The inexplicable details of FromSoftware games are almost certainly because of gameplay convenience. Many characters are 9-10 feet tall for no reason, towering over Wolf, who’s already short to begin with. Lore-wise, it doesn’t make sense for so many completely human characters to be so gratuitously large. Gameplay-wise, it’s a lot easier to observe an enemy’s telegraphed movesets if their model is scaled up. Helpful, in a game like Sekiro.

The ‘stances’ of the Sugars might fall into both these categories. They exist for both gameplay and story reasons. The developers wanted a lag between consuming these powerups and being free to fight, so the player is forced to time these powerups carefully. You need to avoid enemies taking a free hit while Wolf’s animations are occupied. Then they storified this gameplay-based lag into a lore-based reason. Wolf has to take a ‘stance’ when eating these candies to receive its powers. For some reason.

I wasn’t able to further research the ‘stances’ Wolf strikes. Maybe they’re based off of known martial arts. But the description also offers some additional insight; according to the game, these Sugars contain ‘excess karma’ that is apparently the source of their power. Now, Buddhist karma doesn’t run in ‘excess’, a better choice of word would be ‘transfiguration’. One person can experience another’s karma through a variety of means.

“Bite the candy and take the Yashariku stance to impart its inhuman benediction.” In accordance with Buddhist folklore, these warriors are dead and imitating them can impart their previous life’s karma unto you. Our recipe won’t have magical karma powers, but we can certainly infuse our candies with medicinal herbs. You can just imagine the Senpou monks stirring up a big pot of sugar solution, and throwing in handfuls of dried Goji berries.

(This isn’t the first FromSoftware game that draws heavily from Buddhism. Dark Souls’ stagnant world of undeath is a rejection of Buddhist rebirth, clinging onto your legacy in a bid for immortality. Bloodborne decided to further explore the ‘time and madness’ angle of the same concept, while Sekiro went in the opposite direction to expand the ‘death and karma’ side.)

To make our Sugars; begin by first boiling the 1 cup of water with the corresponding flavor ingredients. Essentially, we’re making a batch of 10-20 candies with one flavor at a time, to make things easier on us. Ako’s Sugar requires you boil sliced ginger and dried lotus seeds, and so on.

After the water has been properly infused with the medicinal ingredients, strain the water and add it to another pot with the rest of the candy base ingredients, then boiling it all down until it reaches 300f. It’ll take a while, and you’ll notice that there’s gonna be a point where it seems like the temperature isn’t rising again. But keep at it; all the water needs to be boiled away. But the flavor will remain.

Once it reaches 300f, add the food coloring, and then keep boiling again until it reaches 310f. Then immediately take it off the heat and pour it into molds. Disk-shaped candy molds do exist, but you can easily make your own by pouring a lot of corn starch into a pan, then pressing a disk-shaped object (like another candy) into the starch to make indents. When you pour the candy mixture into a corn starch mold, you can use a spoon to gently and accurately fill each hole without distorting the powder. After perhaps three hours, the candies should be completely set and cool, and you can tumble away the powder and store the candies. Any mold method is gonna give the candies a flat side, but a true disk candy requires factory-standard molds that we don’t have.

We’re not using natural food colorings, ‘cause I tried my best to research natural alternatives that could retain their dye after boilings. And it was super hard, especially blue. Take it from me that Sekiro’s Sugars shouldn’t have been so brightly colored; intensely colored food did exist, but it was with things like powdered dried beets and matcha and pepper powder. Boiling these ingredients (rather than mixing it with dough or jelly) will change the colors drastically, sometimes completely bleaching it, or changing red to purple and so on.

As for the various medicinal ingredients; I took a gander in my mom’s soup-making cabinet and took stock of the medicinal herbs we ourselves use in our lives. The ones included in this recipe are some of the more commonly used ingredients of modern TCM.

Gokan’s Sugar, as a posture-retaining consumable, is described as a popular choice amongst shinobi hunters, a job that requires “a body with an unshakable core”. Ginger and lotus seeds are great for restoring energy through chi, a person’s lifeforce.

Ako’s Sugar raises your attack power. This candy actually proved one of the hardest to find medicines for, since, you know, most medicine is about preserving your health. Astragalus root increases energy and resistance to stress, and red cherries are a warming food according to TCM; warming meaning that its a yang property that further enhances your energy levels. (Keep in mind that food warmness-coolness is more about keeping those two in balance for optical health.)

Ungo’s Sugar reduces the amount of health Wolf loses. Very protection-centric, so we’re using ginseng, for longevity, and white peach slices for their heavy association with divinity. Both of these ingredients have some of the most well-known history in Asian food culture.

Yashariku’s Sugar is a double-edged sword, since it reduces both your health and posture so Wolf can be super powerful for a little bit. So you’re gonna add sake to the candy mixture around the 300f mark, and the dried cocklebur fruit is an immunity-boosting medicine ... but the plant is mildly toxic and can cause diarrhea. You know, Wolf gets super powerful and aggressive when taking this candy cause he needs to shit his brains out. Don’t worry; we’ve got this in our own pantry, and it personally doesn’t make my mom’s stomach upset, but it does me so it must range from person to person.

Gachiin’s Sugar makes you more stealthy, which I took to translate into ‘quieting your thoughts and emotions’. Like when you hold a baby and it can feel your own inner turmoil and starts to cry? Orange peel and goji berries restore your chi, your vision, an irregular heart rate, and stress.

Enjoy your candies! Pop them before tough situations like speaking before a big crowd, or having to wait in line at the DMV, or when you have to fight the Headless Ape for the first time. Tell your friends to stay away from the Senpou brand, so you don’t support their unethical practices.

#sekiro #sekiro: shadows die twice #fromsoftware #fromsoft #video game cooking

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ant, Uber, and the true nature of money

The US election news has largely overshadowed a seismic moment in global finance: Ant, a fintech company that spun out of Alibaba/Alipay, was scheduled to have the world's largest IPO, topping even Aramco, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.

Then Chinese regulators canceled it.

As Yves Smith writes in her excellent Naked Capitalism breakdown, the consensus narrative on this is capricious Chinese regulators changed their minds and jerked the rug out from under Ali's billionaire owner Jack Ma.

The reality is a lot chewier.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/11/china-takes-step-against-securitization-consumer-borrowing-with-suspension-of-ant-ipo.html

To understand it, you need to understand the difference between the Chinese and American "money story." In the US, there is widespread, unquestioning faith in the fairytale that money predates the state and is separate from it.

In this story, people come together to trade but are plagued by disparate goods: if I want to pay for your chickens with a cow, how do you make change? They spontaneously decide that something (gold?) is money and price their cows and chicks in it.

Then, governments come along tax our gold away, and then to add insult to injury, governments abandon gold and insist that paper is as good as gold, print too much of it and crash the economy!

This probably sounds familiar to you, but it's just not true.

The actual historical reality, supported by history, archaeology and anthropology, is that governments created money by creating tax. The first "money" was the Babylonian ledgers that recorded how much of their crops farmers owed to the state and their creditors.

Money took a leap forward with imperial conquest: emperors solved the logistical problem of feeding and billeting their occupying soldiers by charging the occupied a tax that had to be paid for in coins stamped with the emperor's head.

They paid the soldiers in these coins, and demanded that their conquered populations somehow get the coins in order to pay their tax, with violent consequences if the tax wasn't paid. So the people sold food and other necessities to soldiers to get the coins.

Money, in other words, is how states provision themselves, and it derives its value from the fact that you have to pay your taxes in it. Governments spend money into existence by buying labor and goods from the public, and then tax it out of existence once a year.

The money the government spends, but does not tax, is the public's money - the money left over for us to transact. All the money in circulation is the sum total of all the money the government spent but didn't tax - that is, the government's deficit is the public's asset.

When governments run "balanced budgets" (or budget surpluses), they remove money from the economy, leaving the public with less to spend. That can be a good thing - a way to fight inflation, which is when too much money chases too few assets.

Low government spending slows growth by taking away the private sector's ability to spend. When the private sector is at full employment, when it is buying all the stuff that's for sale, you need to do something to keep inflation at bay.

During WWII, the USG competed with the private sector for stuff and labor. Uncle Sam spent lots of new money into existence, paying people to build munitions - but then convinced people to buy war bonds, burying that new money for years to come.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/07/taxes-for-revenue-are-obsolete.html

But when governments run so lean that there isn't enough money in the economy for the private sector to buy the stuff it needs, it seeks out other forms of money, like bank loans (which generate interest income for shareholders - one reason the market likes austerity).

In theory, bank lending is tightly regulated. Banks are the government's fiscal agents, creatures of the state, only able to trade because of a government charter. But when there isn't enough money in the system, unregulated banks spring into existence.

Another word for "unregulated bank" is "fintech" (h/t Riley Quinn).

And now we're back to China and the money story. Chinese finance regulators have always treated money as a public utility, to be spent or withdrawn to accomplish public purposes.

During the country's rapid industrialization, regulators loosened the flow of money to allow for rapid capacity-building, directing the country's productive capacity to building factories that would multiply that capacity.

But when they shut off the spigot and told factory owners that their future growth would come from making and selling things, the wealthy rebelled and sought out money from unlicensed banks or banks that were willing to break the rules.

This led to a string of subprime debt crises over the past five years, as regulators crushed these wildcat money-creators as fast as they popped up.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-02-17/china-s-600-billion-subprime-crisis-is-already-here

China's 1% fought back. They emigrated:

https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2012/08/rich-chinese-flee/

They used cryptocurrency (aka fintech) to evade capital controls, inflating the Bitcoin price-bubble and the Vancouver/Sydney/etc real-estate price bubble as they laundered their money and stashed it in safe-deposit boxes in the sky:

https://www.ft.com/content/bad16a88-d6fd-11e6-944b-e7eb37a6aa8e

As China's shadow economy ballooned it also grew in criminality. There was the wave of Chinese debt-kidnappings, which became so widespread that hostage-taking was described as "China's small claims court."

https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/08/chinas-police-think-hostages-arent-their-problem/

No wonder regulators fought back.

China's regulators didn't win a decisive victory, but they retained enormous control over their money-supply, and that REALLY paid off when the pandemic hit and they suspended all debts, rents, and taxes and mothballed the entire productive economy.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/01/cant-pay-wont-pay/#jubilee-now

Contrast with the US where the finance sector is an industry, not a public utility. Finance flexed its political muscle and diverted nearly the whole stimulus to itself, then crushed the productive economy by demanding debt service and rents.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/09/michael-hudson-how-an-act-of-god-pandemic-is-destroying-the-west-the-u-s-is-saving-the-financial-sector-not-the-economy.html

The ability to use finance as a utility is one of China's crucial assets, and it defends that asset ferociously. And THAT'S why the Ant IPO got killed. Ant's major source of income is short-term, high-interest lending, what Chinese regulators call "pawnbrokering."

China's pawnbrokers are a $43B shadow banking sector, and the country's regulators have been cracking down on them for the past year.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-12/china-is-said-to-scrutinize-43-billion-pawn-shop-lending-boom

$43B is a drop in the bucket of China's shadow economy (valued at $9T!), but it has real metastatic potential.

Ant's innovation is to fintechify the pawnbroker industry, by tying it to apps (on the front end) and to a US-style debt-brokerage (on the back end).

IOW: Ant's business model is that desperate people use an app to request and quickly receive high-risk, high-interest loans.

Then Ant sells the loans to "investors" (AKA "securitization"). Converting debts into income streams for third parties is the true basis of the finance industry. It's the means by which socially useless intermediaries extract ever-mounting rents from the productive economy.

And as Smith writes in her breakdown, the fact that Chinese finance regulators weren't going to let Ant explode his mass-scale, app-based payday-lending pawnbrokerage is not a surprise. They've been telling Jack Ma this for MONTHS, publicly and privately.

Ma thought he could simply bull his way past the Chinese regulators - that because he runs Alibaba and its subsidiaries, that they would defer to him. But the whole point of a finance regulator is NOT to let the finance sector write its own rules.

That's because bankers will cheerfully set the whole economy on fire to turn a buck (see, e.g., America).

Ant was on track for the largest IPO in world history due to investors' appetite for converting Chinese money from a public utility to a private enrichment vehicle.

So yeah, you're goddamned right the Chinese regulator wasn't going to let him do it. Their whole JOB is to not let him do it.

If you read this far, you may be asking yourself why, if governments don't need taxes to fund programs, they bother to tax at all?

There are two important reasons. The first is to fight inflation, by removing existing money from circulation so that when the government spends new money into existence to pay for the things it needs, that money isn't bidding against the existing supply.

But the other reason is to deprive the wealthy of the power that money brings, lest they use that power to pervert policy. Jack Ma's billions are what got him to the brink of a disastrous IPO for his unregulated bank.

And the US election demonstrates just how badly public policy fares when concentrated money is brought to bear on it for parochial purposes. Take Prop 22, the California ballot initiative to allow Uber and Lyft to misclassify their employees as independent contractors.

No on Prop 22 is a no-brainer. Vast numbers of gig workers are full-time employees, not contractors, and Lyft and Uber and other gig economy companies have pioneered labor misclassification as a tactic for paying literal starvation wages.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/final_ver2/#prop-22

And yet, Prop 22 passed, thanks to the largest-ever spending on any ballot initiative in California history: $205 million ($628,854/day!), spent pn 19 PR firms (including Big Tobacco's cancer-denial specialists).

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/proposition-22-california-uber-lyft-gig-employee/

The spend included a bribe to the NAACP Chair's consultancy that made sub-minimum wage jobs with no benefits for people of color (the majority of gig workers) seem like a blow for racial justice.

All told, Uber/Lyft's campaign outspent 49 out of 53 CA House races COMBINED.

And it was a bargain. Lyft and Uber have stolen $413m from California's employment insurance fund since 2014 - and that's just one cost they ducked through this victory. Far more important are the savings they'll realize on worker safety and job-related death claims.

The gig economy companies are the epitome of the financial economy destroying the productive economy. None of these companies turn a profit, after all - all they do is destroy actual, profitable businesses.

Currently the entire restaurant sector is being laid to waste by Postmates and Uber Eats (even as both lose vast sums):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle

And the workers who lost out with Prop 22 are being "chickenized" - having all the risk of operating a business shifted onto their side of the ledger:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poesy-the-monster-slayer/#stay-on-target

(No surprise, one of Prop 22's signature achievements was denying workers the right to unionize).

The desperation of chickenized workers is downright dystopian:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/02/free-steven-donziger/#phone-trees

and chickenization (not automation) is the major cause of falling wages:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/17/on-face-interaction/#zombie-robots

Lyft, Uber, Postmates, and the whole gamut of gig economy companies are all haemorrhaging money. Uber alone lost $4.7B in the first half of 2020. That's how you can tell they aren't tech companies: tech companies profited during the pandemic.

Gig-economy companies aren't part of the productive economy - they're part of the finance economy. They rely on investors, not profits from delighted customers, to stay afloat. They make nothing. They destroy everything: workers' lives, productive businesses.

They will never be profitable. Ever.

Take Uber. The company only exists because the Saudi royals amassed so much money that they could bend reality. The "Saudi Vision 2030" plan calls for the creation of new sources of post-oil wealth.

To that end, the Saudis have poured money into the Softbank VC fund, which then supported global-scale, money-losing, predatory businesses in the hopes of securing a monopoly (or, failing that, unloading the company onto dazzled suckers).

When the company IPOed last year, it had already lost $10b. It loses $0.41 on every dollar you spend on your fare. And yet, the Saudis got away clean, off the backs of investors who assumed that a pile of shit this big must have a pony under it somewhere.

Some believed the company's lies about the imminence of self-driving cars. Uber is not going to make a self-driving car.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/30/death-to-all-monopoly/#pogo-stick-problem

Some believed the company's lies about profitability via growth. It can't grow to profitability. By its own disclosures, profitability depends on every public transit system in the world shutting down and being replaced by Ubers. #Nagahappen.

https://48hills.org/2019/05/ubers-plans-include-attacking-public-transit/

The Saudi strategy - and its punishing, economy-destroying reality-distortions - are exemplary of what happens when government let too much money accumulate in unaccountable, private hands. Prop 22 will kill and starve workers, and the public will pick up the pieces.

The businesses that profit from these deaths and immiseration will fail anyway, but not before their major backers and top execs make hundreds of millions or billions.

Recall: the Ant IPO was set to smash the existing record: Saudi Aramco (AKA the money behind Uber).

Meanwhile, all the blood and treasure squandered on Prop 22 - the $205m spent on the Yes side, the $20 spent by unions on the No side - won't save Uber or other gig economy companies.

Not only are they bleeding money, but as Edward Ongweso Jr explains, "Uber is losing legal challenges in France, Britain, Canada, Italy," turning drivers into employees or allowing "lawsuits reclassifying them as such."

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3annmb/proposition-22-passes-in-california-but-uber-and-lyft-are-only-delaying-the-inevitable

And other US states - NY, MA, NJ - are working to end the misclassification of Uber drivers and other gig workers.

Permitting Uber and other gig economy companies to flout the law did not make the economy better. All it did was transfer more money to the wealthy.

And the money they wealthy amass is converted to political power, usurping money's role as a public utility and converting it to a means to seek private gains at public expense.

#pluralistic

[muwi-translates]

Collar x Malice キャラクターCD ミニドラマ 「二人きりの湯煙譚」

Collar x Malice Shiraishi Kageyuki Character CD Mini Drama - A Hot Bath for the Two of Us

Spoiler free. Just a note that I used a Chinese translation as my main source, and did some light cross-referencing from the original audio. There might be some inaccuracies.

**Please don’t move this translation or claim it as your own.**

---

This is my wishful dream, or perhaps, possibly the future. No one knows right now whether this will become a reality or a dream though. But to me, this is undoubtedly a treasured moment. Being able to spend time with her, not bound by anything, where her kindness and warmth makes people fall for her helplessly. Even if I’m not sure yet, these feelings growing in my heart must be real.

Hm…? So this is the inn we’re staying in today…[Laughs] But I have to say, your taste is really primitive.

Even though travelling overseas is better you decided to go on a hot spring trip? Well, this is my first time at an onsen so I’m looking forward to it. If it wasn’t for you, I would never come to a place like this.

Alright, alright, you don’t have to pull me that hard. The inn isn’t going to run away.

Hm… now that we’re here, the first thing we should do is… was it a pillow fight?

No?

I see, that’s a night time activity.

Aah, wasn’t there a rose bath here? You kept staring at the photos on the pamphlet.

That one is for women only? Go have a soak and tell me about it after.

Alright then, put down your luggage and go try it out. I want to go soak as well, so let’s decide on a time to meet up.

---

So this is a hot spring… different places divide the hot springs depending on the spring’s quality and their effectiveness… This one is for… fatigue recovery, muscle pain and... beautiful skin? Does that mean her skin is going to be all smooth? Her skin already feels nice to touch though. I know! I’ll ask her to let me touch her afterwards. I never thought that a hot spring would be this relaxing, usually I think a shower is enough. The color and smell is different, and there’s that thing that spits out water sometimes over there. This is surprisingly interesting. But, it’s not quite enough...  it’s new, but it’s a bit boring being by myself.

She must be enjoying the rose bath now. It really is strange. To me, others are merely just people I can exploit for tasks, or things I can observe to sate my curiosity. It’s only natural that I’m alone, and I should be alone. When I’m with her, there are peaceful times, but also times where I’m restless. I have to think about how I word things, think about her, and worry about how to make her happy. Since I know it’s so I can communicate with her, these things are necessary even though they aren’t needed for survival.

Only her, I don’t want to let go. This is the one thing I don’t want to lose. I, who wasn’t allowed to have any desires, nor look back on my own life with nostalgia. I can’t go back to the ignorance I once had. Am I really broken? She’s the one who broke me.

---

Hah… she’s so slow, she didn’t fall asleep while soaking, right? There’s no way she would’ve.

But she said she didn’t get much sleep yesterday.

I’m getting worried.

I can’t exactly look inside the female baths...

Oh? You’re alright, that’s good.

No, you were just so slow that I thought something happened. Like maybe you fell asleep, or got involved in something when you were in a daze.

[Laughs]

What, you just took your time blow drying your hair?

Me? It’s okay if mine’s a bit wet.

Eh? You want to help me dry it when we go back to our room? Hm, that sounds luxurious. Looks like I won’t have to blow dry it myself from now on. Let’s go back then …Hm? This aroma...

I knew it, I can smell something light and sweet on you. It’s a nice smell.

That’s right, did your skin get any smoother? Eh? How am I supposed to know if I don’t get closer to you? I also want to know what it feels like to have a rose bath, how can I understand the properties of one without touching you?

So, hugging you would make this faster, wouldn’t it? If I keep holding you like this then the smell will rub off on me. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to match with you.

You’re embarrassed? Isn’t this level of contact normal? You’re the one who always surprises and embarrasses me by doing things.

Alright, alright, at least I got to see your funny expression.

We’ll be together all day, we can do that anytime we want.

Mhm, I’m happy. I’ve been looking forward to going on a trip with you.

I look the same as usual? You’re as dull as always. You’d know if you observed me more carefully.

---

It’ll be boring to stay in our room, going on a walk before dinner wouldn’t be a bad idea. What do you want to do?

Table tennis? [Chuckles] I do understand what table tennis is, you know. You take turns hitting the ball, right? It looks like this table is free for patrons to use.

Oh? You seem confident. I’ll be your opponent then. Okay~ pick up your racket.  

You serve first, don’t worry about me being a beginner.

How strange. This is rather average. I thought [BAM] … you could hit it like this.

It was so fast you couldn’t see it? But it was still in the court so it’s a point for me. Ah, you look like you’re regretting this.

[Laughs]

You always go all out for everything. Whether you win or lose, it’s not going to affect your life, so just deal with it.

Ah, stop. Let me guess what you’re going to say. If we’re going to have a match don’t go easy on me-- something like that?

Okay~ go ahead and serve the ball.

You want to win knowing that both parties tried their best, even I understand something like that. That’s why I won’t hold back.

He~eh, were you aiming for the edge? But now you can’t afford to miss from now on! Now, what are you going to do?

What’s that? The winner gets to tell the loser what to do? What is this, doesn’t this benefit me more? Doesn’t that mean I can do whatever I want with you? Wait a second-- do whatever-- ah.

You fooled me. You… doing that when I was trying to think is a low-- or not, after all, this was a competition.

It’s a victory where you managed to shake me up. But you won’t be able to use that trick anymore. I already memorised your eye movements, your habits and your style.

Sure, I’ll keep you company until you’re satisfied. It’s fun to see you get serious. Plus, since there’s a reward I’ll have to go all out!

---

Haaah, it’s the first time I’ve ever eaten that much.

Yeah, I used to only eat a minimum amount of food. But it was delicious, I really savoured it.

That’s right, I heard they make hot spring eggs here, I was surprised to see eggs that sticky.

Hm? You can make them at home? Then, can you make some next time? It would definitely taste better if you made them.

It’s a promise.

Now, since the futon is all laid out already, isn’t it time we do… that? It’s my first time as well, I don’t know if I’ll be good at it. I’ll try my best.

Hm! So… you just hit your opponent as hard as you can with this pillow, right?

Huh? What’s with that face? Aren’t we having a pillow fight?

…Oh, okay. I’ll put the pillow down for now…

Oh? I see. So it’s more normal for students to have pillow fights? Well, it’s dangerous to really hit someone with one. What else is there to do-- ah, perhaps some steamy action? I hear it's an established tradition when you're on a hot spring trip.

Or not. I see.

If you say it like that then… let’s just sleep.

Hey, it’s only 9. I can’t sleep, can’t we talk some more?

It was an overwhelming victory on my end for table tennis, so for my reward-- yup, I want to talk to you about a lot of things.

Why are you laughing? It’s a weird desire? But to me it’s a suitable reward.

Now then, where should I start asking?

Do you like meat or fish dishes? What was your favourite dish you ate today? Also, I want to ask what your favourite fruit is, and who do you like-- Hm? Oh, it’s not fun to sleep in a room where you’re being questioned like this?

What, this is also something students do? And I still had a lot of questions to ask.

I didn’t mean to analyze you, I just want to know more about you. I want to like the things you like, and if I want to do something for you, if I don’t know what colours and things you like then shouldn’t I ask you about it?

To be honest, I really don’t have any confidence. I can live on the lowest standards of human beings. But if I do, then you’ll tell me off. Remember when you’d pull my coat back in at the Shinjuku station-- Hah, you’re getting embarrassed thinking about it? Me too, when I think back, my heart gets all restless.

As Shiraishi Kageyuki, I’ve never once done anything to please others. That’s why I’ve been trying to figure out how to build a relationship with you. I didn’t really understand... how you thought of me then. But when you said “I don’t hate you”, my heart felt itchy… and I felt… happy. Since then I’ve... to you--

Did you fall asleep? You could have fallen asleep when I wasn’t at the most important part. Oh well, I’ll go to sleep too.

Ah-- what, you were awake?

Are we going sightseeing tomorrow? That wagashi store you circled in your guidebook, if we don’t go early then all the popular products will be gone.

Yup, I looked into it. Because I want to see you happy more than seeing the expression you make when you’re disappointed you couldn’t eat any. Talking like this makes me happy, but you’ll be troubled if you overslept tomorrow. It’s time we sleep.

Eh?

What do you mean “aren’t you going to do anything”? Isn’t there nothing to do? We just--

Ah, wait!

… Um, could it be… you can’t sleep if you don’t have someone with you? Coming over to my side… that’s what that means, right?

Ah, but it would be difficult if you did this with other men, so if you can, just for me--

O-Oh.. I-I see...

It’s because you like me that you want to do this.

Y-You came so close to me, I can’t calm down, what do I do…

Hey, can I hold you?

So warm…

This doesn’t feel like reality.

Reality used to be all artificial to me. Whatever the name, a place to return to, the feelings, it would have all been reset. Because I needed to become my assigned character. Love, friendship, if I needed it I would make it up. I took these things for granted.

But… it’s all because you would call my name. No matter how I pushed you away you’d always chase after me, even if you were hurt you would never give up.

Why? Why, for someone like me...

You’re… such a fool.

You’re so hopeless.

But it’s you I’ve hopelessly fallen for.

I’m not crying, but it’s your fault if I was.

This empty heart of mine was too full and it overflowed.

But, this is also proof that I’ve become human.

I feel really happy today.

Tomorrow too, if I can be with you, I know I’ll be happy.

I’ll laugh a lot, fill up my heart again, and love you more than today.

There’s still a lot of things I don’t understand, so I might trouble you but--

“It’s okay if you do“? Said without hesitation, huh? Then, can I test to see if you really won’t be inconvenienced?  

[Kiss]

Not just today or tomorrow, but if you’ll always be by my side in the future, I don’t think there will be anything that makes me happier.

But for that, I have to study hard. Until the day I’m ready to make you happy, when I can communicate that to you with words.

So wait for me.

Even if this is just a happy dream, I’ll definitely come back to you.

Alright, is it time to sleep now?

I hope that when I open my eyes, you’ll be by my side.

Good night, see you tomorrow.

#otome #drama cd #otomate #collar x malice #collar x malice unlimited #cxm #shiraishi kageyuki #mytranslations #drama cd translation

[twinkleallnight]

Marshmallow

(Part-9) Bewitched

Book: The Royal Romance

Pairing: Liam x MC, Drake x ??

For previous chapters: catch up here

A/N: This fic is my submission for this week’s @wackydrabbles prompt. The prompt is: “Okay, wow, you just dumped a lot of information on my lap and gave me no time to process it.” and will appear in bold.

A/N 2: Thank u @lizzybeth1986 Lizzy, your essays are amazing. Thank u for the quick brainstorming.

Tags: @ao719 @aloneautumn @charlotteg234 @choiceskatie @cordonia-gothqueen @cordonianroyalty @daisydancer12385 @drakewalker04 @gardeningourmet @gkittylove99 @glaimtruelovealways @hopefulmoonobject @hopelessromanticmonie @iam-the-kind-and-thoughtful @idontknowwhysblog-blog @islandcrow @jovialyouthmusic @jaxsmutsuo @kingliam2019 @lovablegranny @mrswalkers-blog @mom2000aggie @no-one-u-know @ntoraplayschoices @ritachacha @speedyoperarascalparty @shanzay44 @texaskitten30 @queenrileyrose @sanchita012 @theroyalheirshadowhunter @wackydrabbles @yourmajesty09-blog @xpandabeardontcarex

I stay back on the yacht, while Riley joins Max and Bertrand for the official speech and the opening ceremony of the Regatta- the ceremonial boat race.

I enjoy my time gearing up, listening to the music with my earphones on.

Riley climbs the yacht after about an hour with Max and Bertrand.

Bertrand seems to be in worse mood, and acknowledges my presence only with a nod before he starts handling the ropes.

“Did you hear that?” Riley has an astonished look.

“What?” I ask curiously.

“The king just now announced he is stepping down at the end of social season.”

“What?!” A whirlwind of thoughts flood my mind suddenly. All topped up with the thought of what Liam must be going through right now. He is being burdened with one responsibility after another since past year and this is a heavy one.

“Earth to Walker! Earth to Walker!” Riley’s funny robotic sound brings me back to present.

“Yes, Brooks.” I try to smile at her. “I am pretty much here. Let’s get ready for the show-off race.” Bertrand raises his eyebrow at me. I know he doesn’t like a word against the royal events but he is stuck with me right now.

The race starts with the king pulling the trigger of the starting pistol. The suitors stand on their yachts, while the crew struggles hard to make them win the short race.

Obviously with no trained crew we lose the race and Penelope from Portavira wins, having an upper hand with sea activities. Bertrand is upset again and disappears from the scene soon after the race.

The suitors and other nobles join Livy's yacht party to enjoy rest of the festivities. Official races are to begin soon. I excuse myself, to meet Liam at his booth at the harbour.

“Hey, you ok?” I ask him with concern. The announcement must have been hard.”

“Hmm… I don’t know. It is a lot to take in.”

“He did not tell you about this, earlier?”

“I had no clue. The news is as fresh to me as it is to you.”

“This will bring lot of change. Are you ready for it?”

“I don’t see that I have an option. I think I will speak to father after this day’s event.”

“I will be around. We can meet in the study after you talk to him.” I try to reassure him.

“That sounds good. I may need it.”

I pat lightly on his back and we both turn to face the sea. I see Livy's yacht is lively with the ongoing party. Some movement on another boat catches my eye. It’s Hana's yacht with just Hana and Riley standing there. I smile and look at Liam. His eyes are following the same.

“Your girl has a knack of walking against the wind.” I tease him.

“She is a fighter. You know, the media and press are very much impressed with her. I see a bright chance for her to claim this social season.” Liam speaks with lot of affection.

“That’s great! So, you may get to marry a girl you love and not just have a political alliance to call it a marriage!”

“Well it’s a very complicated situation. Being a crown prince, I can’t just express my love openly to anyone. But yes, I may have a chance, after all!” He says flashing a grin.

“But why are these two not with the rest?”

“Hana’s parents are quite pushing. They forced her to throw her own party. Since Livy is a local person, people know her better and so, they accepted her invite and not Hana's. I guess, Riley couldn’t let Hana be alone. So, there they are, just the two of them.”

“How is Hana related to Cordonia?” She is a mystery to me.

“Her mother, Lorelai belongs to a minor noble family of Cordonia and is married into a noble family from China.”

Just then the sound of a trumpet distracts us. The official race begins and we get busy with it.

The event is followed by a private beach party for the suitors where they get to interact with the prince. I leave Liam with Penelope, and join Max, Hana and Riley for the buffet.

After our food we relax down, I get ready for a swim. “ I am dipping in. Girls, are you coming?”

Riley tries to coax Max one last time to join us, “Max you sure don’t want to come with us?”

“Let him rest Riley, let’s go. Bye hippo!” I twit over his hidden tatoo and he glares back at me.

As we stride to the water Riley questions, “ Why did you call him hippo?”

I knew that would come up. Now I try to cover up. “ He was a chubby child and his mother used to call him that lovingly.” Though this was true too.

“That’s so cute.” Hana replies. “May be if I had a brother my mother would have called him panda!”

“Why panda?” I question.

“They have been managing a panda reserve since the time I remember. So, may be….” Her voice trailed into a sudden silence as her mind reeled into some thoughts.

Before I can react, I am hit with a splash of water by Riley. Soon, we three are swashing and plashing. Riley and I do our favourite thing together – The race! It’s swimming race this time.

After about an hours play we get back on the beach. Max whisks away Riley to meet others, while I relax down for a nice sunbath.

Hana settles down close by. I don’t know why I am so curious to know about her. May be because I know the rest suitors, who r all from Cordonia, I give myself a reasoning.

“So, Pandas huh?” I try to continue our conversation that was left.

“Xióng - māo”

“What mao?”

“Panda…in Chinese.”

“Chinese, hmmm, you are missing home?”

“A tiny little bit!” She gestures with her forefinger almost touching the thumb.

“How different it is to be here in Cordonia all alone away from your family?

“ I miss them but it’s good. I am getting a chance to experiment and explore. I have never done anything without their permission or out of the rule book.”

“Seems you hardly had fun as a child.”

“I have heard few of your stories from Liam and I can definitely say my childhood was unlike any of those fun moments you had. I never had anyone to play with.”

“How did you play alone then?”

“I was not allowed toys except for a tea set as that would train me to be a proper hostess. So, I had my own imaginary games with imaginary friends. Prince Snickerdoodles and Miss Lemon curd, Miss Napkin and Mr sock.” She sounds a bit embarrassed, her eyes down on the circles she is making in the sand with her slender fingers.

“That is some great fictional work there.” She raises her eyelids in surprised look at me. “Tell me more.” I encourage her.

“My childhood was more about grooming me to be part of the court someday. To be perfect at every skill that will help me win my love one day.” I raise my brow puzzled. “It sounds crazy, I know.” She continues, “ My younger years were full of all skill lessons like horse riding, ice skating, dance, music, culinary, you name it.”

It leaves me shocked to imagine a child being put through so much. I don’t know how to react. She is looking at me for some response. “Okay, wow, you just dumped a lot of information on my lap and gave me no time to process it.” I manage to say something sensible.

She gives me a weak smile “So, there was no running around the palace like you all did.”

“So, you never played tag?”

“Never.” She says with a frown.

An idea comes to my mind, and I jump up suddenly. “Get up.”

“What?”

“Get up!” I insist giving her a hand and pull her up. “It is never too late to have some fun.” I make some distance and get ready to run “Now, catch me. You are it!” while she processes what just happened.

She gives out a sweet laughter, and starts running after me, over the soft sand. As I take a lead, I hear her giggle.

There are few tall rocks ahead and I circle them and hide behind one of them. When she comes searching for me, I pounce and scare her. She lets out a scream and I catch her and pull her into me before she loses balance. We both are soon laughing and rolling on the sand.

We relax there catching our breath, both quiet, gazing up into the open sky. It’s a moment of bliss and we lose the count of time until there is a shuffling sound and then…

“No, you can’t come here.” Livy's sharp voice comes from behind us. We turn to see that it is coming from behind the rock, where we are lying, hidden away from her view.

“I know. I am missing you too.” It seems she is talking over phone. “I will call you as soon as I get back.”

I turn to Hana and open my mouth to speak. But she covers my lips with her small hand and gestures to keep silent.

“I love you more. Bye.” Livy finishes her call. Hana’s doe shaped eyes go wide and are transfixed on me.

I keep looking back into those honey almond eyes, Bewildered or Bewitched?

#pixelberry #drake walker #olivia nevrakis #playchoices #the royal romance #liam x riley #olivia #trr #trr fandom #hana lee #twinkleallnight

[duratrans]

Satoshi Mizukami Q&A, 3/3

Satoshi Mizukami recently took questions from the editor's desk, and publicly from write-ins, for an interview to celebrate the first volume of Solte going on sale (Jan 9th!). So I translated them all! It’s in three parts, so I’ll post them one by one.

Here is the third and final section, general questions of all kinds.

Q: I heard you were pretty impressed by Masakazu Ishiguro's Hero (note: Debut work in Gekkan Afternoon, 2000), and when you met him you said "You're my rival!" right to his face! Is there anyone that comes to mind you would still consider your professional rival today? A: Oof. I don't think I have that spirit in me any more. But, even while myself and so many of my friends are starting to slow down, when I see them putting out work, I do feel encouraged to stick it out.

Q: I've heard you started working to become a manga artist because you "wanted to live in a fantasy world" yourself. If you really could jump into a fictional world, what kind of work would it be? Who would you be in the story? The main character, or maybe the last boss? A: I want to live in a porno game. Somewhere with no danger or fighting.

Q: From any medium, can you think of one piece that you liked the most or inspired you? And can you explain why? A: There's probably too many to try and pick just one, but in terms of what really influenced me; For manga, late 90's Shonen Sunday and early 2000's Afternoon. Then, 90's new-wave light novels. For anime, Diebuster. In film, La Puta. A handful of Sega Saturn games. Some scifi stories on forums, and a bunch of other works on Shosetsu-ka ni Narou.

Q: What have you seen/read/played more recently that you liked the best? And can you tell us what you liked? A: Manga: Touge Oni. It was the first thing I read in a while that made me jealous. In books, The Three-Body Problem. I liked the second of the trilogy best, but they were just good page-turners. For anime, Karakuri Circus. The manga ended long enough ago that it felt like going in fresh again, so it hit just right. Really liked the OP too. Film: Interstellar. Tenet wasn't great, so I rewatched this again and still good. It's exactly the kind of movie I was wanting. Games: Ring Fit. I had the idea if I got a little bit in shape, I might get some motivation back. I feel like it might be working? Just the teensiest, slightest bit. Light novels: I Am the Only One Who Knows This World Is a Game. It's just the right amount of bonkers.

Q: If you had ultimate freedom to do any kind of manga you wanted, what would it be like? Would you want a long series, or something shorter? -Ruha A: I was going to say I haven’t exactly had any restrictions, but actually a few things did come up with Solte. But even still, I can fit in any ideas I really want to draw, so I think things are pretty good as they are.

Q: If you had to put yourself in a genre, what kind of manga artist do you think you are? Sci-fi? Or maybe romance? -Takeshi A: I'm a little surprised to see "romance", even as an example. If you ask me, you can categorize me however you want.

Q: Which character are you most attached to, out of all of your works? -Habu A: Anima from Biscuit Hammer.

Q: When you're designing your characters, how do you come up with a good balance when it comes to the composition and relationships in the cast? -Yoneko A: Oh, man. I just kinda... Feel it out.

Q: I've been a big fan of your work forever! I really like your drawing style. How do you make your art the way you do? -gum A: I dunno, that's just how it turns out when I draw. I've been telling myself "Wow, I need to work on my art" for 19 years, since the day I was first published.

Q: Has raising a child had any effect on your stories? -Tai A: It means I work less.

Q: I want to draw manga too, but I'm not very confident in my skills. Do you have any advice? -Tai Arima A: First, do you mean you're not satisfied yourself with the quality of your work, or you're just not confident enough to put it out there? Don't worry, this is always a fundamental issue for creators, things rarely come out just how you imagine them. It's like how you can only print out photos at a resolution as sharp as your camera can capture them. I recommend you start by just making something. Sit down, do it, and finish it, and you'll learn a lot from it. It'll be up to you whether you show that around, but when you start, I wouldn't necessarily make a big deal out of it, you can just work on it quietly without making a big announcement. That way, there's no pressure, and if it's not working out, you can still stop or take a break without feeling bad about it. You decide how to use your time the best.

Q: When I went to a promo event for Planet With at Loft, you and Rensuke Oshikiri (Hi Score Girl) both talked about how as you get older, you find it harder and harder to stay motivated. Have you found anything that helps you in that regard? -Tayu A: I listed to some cheerful music for a while last week and actually found it helped my mood a little.

Q: I love how expressive all of your characters are! Is there anything particular in your process for when you are working on faces and expressions? -Arbel A: I have to be careful I don't go overboard making the same expression I'm drawing.

Q: I write for a hobby, but I always have trouble planning out how the story comes together. Do you have any advice or a favorite method for composing a story? -Nigou A: I read and re-read what I've got, and anywhere I think it's getting dull, I change the scene or add some exciting development. Make the last thing you think would happen, happen. And don't worry about how to tidy everything up, that's a problem for tomorrow you. Today you just has to lay it out.

Q: Hello, Sensei. I've read all your works, and I'm a big fan, but what really impresses me is your dialog. I love how it always just flows off the page, it reads so naturally. So, my question is, when you are writing the dialog, do you just hear it unfold naturally in the character's voices, or do you write more deliberately like "oh, here they would probably say this?" That probably sounds weird to people who've never written manga, but I'd like to know about your process. P.S. Good luck with the Ring Fit grind. -Kiki A: First I decide how the dialog needs to play out in order to advance the story in the direction I want. Then, I just let the characters talk among themselves, and if it doesn't turn out right, I go back, shake things up, and try again. And sometimes I get good material, but it just needs to be trimmed or re-arranged just right.

Q: A lot of your stories have some sort of turning point where the back half really kicks it up a notch and things just keep getting more intense. Do you already have these developments planned when you start a manga? -TKO A: I usually have a few ideas but it's always pretty vague. I never know if I'm gonna wind up putting in or cutting certain scenes, so I don't worry about it too much.

Q: Do you have one favorite scene or a particular line from your own work? -yamatozo A: At the beginning of Spirit Circle volume 6, where the bad guy falls down the stairs and goes "I've made a lot of missteps".

Q: Do you have any idea of what genre you'd like to draw next? -Umehoshi A: I won't say no, but I don't want to give anything away (for my next work, or this one).

Q: If you weren't successful as a manga artist, where do you think you would be? -Ayuta A: Jail. But I'd be a model prisoner.

Q: How much longer do you think you'd like to continue as a manga artist? -Ayuta A: If I could pay the bills for the rest of my life with 24 pages a month, that's just what I'd do. At some point maybe I'll get to be unsatisfied with that and start to push myself to work more and more until I get sick of it, but no telling when that might come.

Q: How do you think of your character's names? -Takeshi A: They just come to me. I look at how I designed the characters and just imagine.

Q: I feel like some kind of forgiveness or absolution is something a lot of your characters go through. Does "forgiveness" have a special significance to you? -Bow-wow A: I'm not sure. Maybe it's me who is seeking forgiveness.

Q: Do you have a favorite phrase or motto? A: I like Shigeru Mizuki's (Gegege no Kitaro) 7 Rules of Being Happy. I don't really go around saying them or anything, but it's something I like to remind myself of, and helps me be mindful of other people. Also, I like "fortune favors the bold."

Q: You like frogs enough that you always draw yourself as one. What do you like about frogs? And do you have a favorite species? A: Frogs are cute. I like green tree frogs the best.

Q: You've drawn a lot of different youkai in Sengoku Youko, but out of all the youkai that most people know from stories, which is your favorite? Could it be the Chan Chu (chinese money toad), or possibly the oogama (monstrous giant toad)? A: My favorite youkai is Mizuki Shigeru.

Q: You've been doing Ring Fit, and eating oatmeal, are you doing anything else to help stay in shape? A: I put the Karakuri Circus season one and season two OP on a playlist and listen to it while I walk to work.

Q: If you were stranded all alone on a deserted island, what are the three things you would want to have with you? A: Really? Okay. I would bring two essential tools I can't find on an island, and a map.

Q: Do you have a favorite actor or celebrity? -Umehoshi A: Nope.

Q: What's the best kind of alcohol and snacks you've had? Where did you drink it? -Ikaninjin A: In the middle of a hellish summer and probably suffering from heatstroke at an amusement park with my kid, I had the best beer of my life in an air-conditioned food court. And the delicious spice to top it off was the bright sun knifing through the window that I just knew was tormenting everyone still outside.

Q: What do you want to be when you grow up? -Ayuta A: A youkai.

Q: What does your internal mindscape look like? -Rou A: An empty lot.

Q: Has anything happened recently that you're happy about? -Sanachan A: My son is starting to read and write.

Q: What kind of hotpot are you looking forward to this winter? -Tommy A: I'm not crazy about hotpot.

Q: I'd like to go to another event where we can toast again, would you consider it?

-Uta

A: If current events allow.

Q: How many times have you thought about quitting Ring Fit? -Honyarara A: 2 or 3 times. A week.

Q: I know you call it your "100-day Ring Fit Diary" on twitter, but since you've been taking breaks too, will you be going past 100? Will the illustrations be collected and published anywhere? -The Dieting Gentleman A: I'm going until I clear adventure mode, but it'll probably be finished by the time this article is up. I'll probably do some sets here and there. No plans for the illustrations.

Q: Do you have a favorite panel out of all your works? -Umehoshi A: You guys are really focused on my favorite everything. I have a lot of panels I like, not one in particular.

Q: Hi, I really enjoy all of your works, and there's one thing I think I notice (sorry if I'm wrong), and that's a love of glasses girls. Out of your manga so far, which is your favorite of all your glasses girls? Do you have a particular girl you've become a fan of recently? As for myself, I really like Yoru from Sanjin Sadou, so I'd love to see a story with her and her sister! -Bashi A: Glasses girls aren't particularly a thing for me.

Q: When you're doing authographs or sketches, does it bother you at all if people request characters from your past works? If I get a chance, I would probably ask for Hyou Shimaki from Biscuit Hammer, for instance. -Akasha A: If it's a promo event for a Mag Garden title, and you were to ask for a character from a Gahosha title, for instance, it might technically bump up against merchandising contracts, which makes it a little weird (I'm typically not allowed to to create any merchandise without going through the publisher), but my managing editors are usually cool enough about it. But if it's specifically a Sengoku Youko event, for instance, and I'm constantly getting asked for Biscuit Hammer drawings (let's say more than half), that would probably be an issue and they might make a rule against it for next time. Also, I tend to forget how the older characters actually looked. For personal reasons, I probably won't be doing any in-person events like this for a while, though. There's also the whole "current state of the world" thing, and my profitability and if bookstores actually want to do it, a lot of issues to solve.

Q: You usually draw Anima working out on Twitter, but did you have plans for any other characters to show up doing Ring Fit? (Like from Angel or Sanjin) -RYO A: I did, but forgot.

Q: Will you put together another oneshot collection, like Geko Geko? -Friday A: I don't know.

Q: Question! What is love? -Shirae A: To live is to love.

Q: How about this, do you have any questions you want to ask your readers? -Buriki A: Would you rather have: A. One series a month, from roughs to completion, all done by me B: Two series a month, with roughs by me and final touches by someone else

Q: I know thinking positive is half the battle, but what can I do about people who're determined to get me down? Can I give them a Samidare Punch? -Nondakure A: Your fist, and the choice of how to use it, belongs to you alone.

#mizukami satoshi #satoshi mizukami

[need-a-new-hobby]

And Back...

just a recap: William Hightower falsely confessed to the murder of 10 people, not including his own sister to bring attention to the recent abductions in Detroit, Michigan. The BAU is called in and they track down the real culprit, only to find out he’s a quadriplegic.

part i

Piper felt sick at the sight of the blood. But that was nothing compared to the shoes. In the dark, it was hard to see inside the garbage bin next to the pigsty, but the smell of rotting blood was inescapable, and she swallowed hard to stop the bile from rising up her throat. She couldn’t move until she found herself being pulled away gently by Spencer. She barely heard him ask her if she was okay, barely felt his arms around her. “The shoes,” she whispered. Not now. Spencer heard her shakily breathe against his chest and reluctantly he let her go. He expected her to break down, to start crying or yelling or just sprinting for her bike. But what she did was worse. She cleared her throat and spoke with a measured tone. “We’ve got work to do.” He just stood there for a minute as Piper moved past him to the others gathering around the large dumpster filled to the brim with rotten, blood-soaked shoes. “How many?”

“Looks like a hundred.”

“They all belong to victims?” Bedwell asked, slightly breathless, sounding like the air had been kicked out of his lungs.

“Possibly.”

“Why just the shoes? Where are the bodies?”

“I don't think there's going to be any bodies.” They turned to Spencer behind them, staring at the pigs. “Pigs are omnivores. They'll eat anything.” He looked back at his team. “By anything, I mean... Anything.”

“I think I’m gonna be sick. Hotch…”

“Go tell William what happened.” Piper nodded gratefully and jogged over to the SUVs. She uncuffed William and he turned to meet Piper’s fleeting eyes.

“What happened? Did you find Lee?”

“William, she’s gone. They killed her,” she said gently, watching tears well up.

“No…”

“I’m sorry, William.”

“How… how long—”

“2, maybe 3 days.”

“Can I see her?”

“William, take a seat, please.” Piper gulped. “There aren’t any bodies. Just…” She took a deep breath. “Do you know what kind of shoes your sister was wearing?” William sobbed, leaning his head into Piper’s shoulder as she rubbed circles on his back. They stayed like that for 10, maybe 15 minutes until he sobered. Piper squeezed his shoulder. “I’m sorry, William.” Piper squeezed his shoulder before grabbing a few bottles from the front of the car. As she approached the team, she threw a bottle to Derek half-heartedly before opening her own, drinking about a quarter of it down. “You find anyone in the house?”

“Mason Turner,” Hotch answered.

“Is he in custody?”

“Uh, not exactly,” he replied.

“But he's not going anywhere,” Rossi added.

“He's quadriplegic,” Derek explained.

“Paralysed from the neck down,” Spencer scoffed.

“JJ and Prentiss are in there with him right now,” Hotch informed and Piper nodded, taking the information in.

“Well, that's a pretty good criminal defence.”

“I'll go talk to him,” Rossi announced before leaving for the house.

“Morgan, do you have the contact number for the Detroit detective?”

“Benning? Yeah.”

“We're gonna need their open missing cases so we can make identifications on this property.”

“Right,” Derek walked off, pulling out his cell.

“I think that laptop is his sole communications device which means data files on hard drives, records. Bishop, will you let Bedwell know we’re going to need a warrant.” Piper nodded, shuffling off with her bottle.

“BAU Tech Centre, where you should definitely pay attention to the girl behind the curtain.” Hotch almost smiled at the optimism embedded in her voice, but it faded with the realisation of what kind of hellhole he was bringing her into.

“Garcia, I need you in Ontario ASAP at the farmhouse that the unsub's car was registered to.”

“Yes, sir. What should I bring?”

“We need forensic recovery from a laptop. I'll tell you more when you get here. I don't want this over the phone. And the next flight, Garcia.”

“Ok. On my way.” He turned the cell off.

“Reid, how long do you think it would take?”

“To get a warrant?”

“No. For the pigs to...” He couldn’t even say it.

“Depending on the size and condition of the body when it's placed in the pen, it wouldn't be quick. Why?”

“That means Kelly wasn't put in there. She's still here somewhere.” He gazed around the compound, eyes falling onto his team members returning.

“Benning’s on her way. She’ll be here by morning,” Derek updated.

“Court will most likely have the warrant ready by then.”

“Good. Garcia’ll arrive at Toronto at the same time. JJ, have an SUV arranged to pick her up.”

“Sir, when this hits the press, families of missings are gonna come rushing out here. I'm gonna need some uniformed officers to assist me.” Bedwell promised to help her with that before updating them about the search-and-rescue units and emergency response team.

“Morgan, I want you to supervise the evidence collection. I don't think the techs have seen a scene like this before.”

“Has anyone?” Emily scoffed.

“We have a picture,” Rossi announced as he marched down from the house. “This is Lucas Turner, Mason's brother. According to Mason, he's the unsub. Mason claims he's a victim himself.”

“Does mason know where Lucas would take the girl?”

“Claims he has no idea.”

“Right. Bishop, Reid, Lucas is your assignment. I want to know everything about him from height to mental state. Find his room, his things, anything that might tell us where he would go.”

“We’re on it,” Spencer confirmed, and they were about to walk away when Rossi called them back.

“One more thing. Mason warned me that his brother is extremely psychotic. Says he won't go down without a fight.” Piper nodded and the two doctors moved towards the barn. “Prentiss have JJ get the picture and the description out to the press. When they get here, put them to work for us. Somebody's gonna notice a man that big.”

“You got it.” The team dispersed again to their various fields of expertise. Spencer and Piper worked in overdrive, downing multiple cups of coffee as they examined the house, room by room. As midnight approached, they took shifts until they couldn’t come up with anything. At about 2 in the morning, Spencer’s eyes flickered open as he recognised Piper standing in the balcony. He noticed the slight breeze blowing through her hair and he padded over with his mismatched socks. He followed her gaze to the woods beyond the property line before looking back into her eyes, catching a tear before it fell.

“Careful. Those things are precious.” A small smile broke over her tear streaked face. “Come here.” She buried herself into his soft cardigan, breathing in the scent of new books and smoked wood. For the first time all day, she let her dam break, sobbing freely. “I know, Pipes.” He expected her to be terrified, or angry, or cry even harder, but instead she interwove her fingers in his hand and pulled him down to sit on the balcony floor, leaning on his arm, sighing.

“How are you doing?”

“I’m okay. I’m the king of okay.”

“Rubbish title.” Spencer breathed out a laugh. “Seriously, Spence. Aren’t you mad, or upset?”

“I am. But I can’t get emotional. None of us can.” Piper nodded.

“Can we talk about something else?”

“Like what?”

“I dunno. Anything.”

“Okay. When we get back, where should we go for dinner?” Piper smiled.

“One track mind, you’ve got.”

“It has been said that I have laser focus.” Piper kissed him softly, her free hand gently playing with his hair.

“Anywhere you want to go. Except Chinese. We order too much Chinese food.”

“Riight. Not because I can’t use chopsticks.” She smiled. “Sushi?” He felt Piper’s head shake vehemently. “You don’t like sushi?”

“Lucy had them once, puked it all back out in the car. As punishment, my dad took the long way home and we were stuck in the back with the stench of—”

“Okay, okay. I get it.” Piper chuckled.

“I always wanted to come to Canada.”

“Yeah?”

“Mhmm. It had everything I loved as a kid. Pancakes, snow, the woods, the mooses.”

“You mean the moose.” Piper raised an eyebrow at him. “It’s actually— never mind. Mooses.” Piper’s smile faded and she pulled on Spencer’s arm.

“It’s actually what?” He chuckled. “Tell me. What is it?”

“Well, the word ‘moose’ is derivative of Algonquian, a Native American language. It keeps the same plural ending it has in its original language instead of adopting the normal S ending of most English plurals. So, it’s the moose.” Piper beamed at him and returned to her position on his arm.

“So, like sheep.”

“Yeah, exactly like sheep.” He chuckled and she whacked him gently with her arm.

“Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not. It’s just…” Piper straightened, looking straight into his dark eyes. “You listen to me. Not like the others.” Piper nodded. “Elle would’ve chucked her shoe at me if I corrected her.”

“Elle?”

“SSA Elle Greenaway. Stopped working here just before you did.”

“Mmm? What happened? Why’d she leave?”

“She got injured, shot in her own home. She did everything right, but one day she just…snapped I guess.”

“So, where’s she now?”

“Somewhere tropical, I’d imagine. Barbados, Hawaii, I dunno.”

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled, sleepiness coating her words.

“For what?”

“I’m sorry you lost her,” she breathed out and Spencer noticed her breathing slowly for a few minutes before walking over to the couch and sitting down beside it. She leant down against the couch and fell asleep, giving him the couch.

In the morning, JJ handled the press and families, directing them towards different stations regarding what information they needed and what information they had to give. She’d prepared a statement to give to the press that night and gratefully accepted a cup of coffee from Rossi. Emily managed to find a pair of unclean overalls and flew down the stairs to find the search-and-rescue unit, her FBI windbreaker billowing out behind her. Derek walked over to the CSI teams who methodically set out 89 pairs of shoes ruined by blood and grime, gazing over at William who sat by the hay bales outside the barn, staring at his sister’s graduation picture. Piper and Spencer walked down from the house to find Hotch. “Mason says his brother sometimes sleeps on the couch in the living room or disappears for days at a time,” Spencer explained.

“He doesn't have a room?” Hotch’s eyes narrowed in thought.

“Not according to Mason,” Piper scoffed.

“Keep looking around. They've lived here their whole lives. There's got to be something here that gives us an idea of who he is.” They nodded, walking over to the barn. Piper tossed him a pair of surgical gloves which he pulled on. Piper felt sick as her gaze fell on the sheer number of tools in the barn.

“Despite the blood dripping from every cavity in here, he’s kept the place neat,” Piper noted.

“That fits, we profiled them to be organised.”

“No, this isn’t the same. He keeps each tool exactly where it’s meant to be, but doesn’t mop up the blood?” She looked back at Spencer. “Mason said he was practically terrified of him, but this says the opposite.”

“He’s methodical in terms of killing but messy when it comes to cleaning up.”

“And who needs 4 different saws?” Piper pointed to the 3 handsaws on the wall and the electric saw on the workspace.

“Piper.” She looked around and followed Spencer’s gaze to the roof. “Is that laundry?”

“Huh. Guess John Flanagan was right. People never really look up do they?”

“Who?”

“Ranger’s Apprentice. Practically devoured them as a kid. People don’t look up because they rarely perceive any kind of threat looming from the sky. Usually, they’ll look behind instinctively.” Spencer nodded as they climbed up to the rafters. He held out a hand for her as she climbed up the ladder.

“Watch your head.” Piper smiled as she grabbed his hand and climbed up. “Well, this is paradise.”

“Dr Reid, I do believe that was a joke,” Piper laughed, kissing him quickly on the cheek as he pouted.

“Caged rats, so, he had a warped sense of domesticated animals.”

“Or they were the only living beings that weren’t disgusted by him,” Piper murmured. “Look at these. Crayon drawings. Recent too.” Piper caught Spencer’s bemused gaze. “Lucas is what, almost the same age as us, maybe older. Kids grow out of drawings like these by about 8-9 years. Also crayon fades over time.”

“Pinning it up suggests he didn’t have a parental figure who pinned them up for him.”

“You should’ve seen our fridge when Danny was growing up.” Spencer moved over to the bed while Piper kept murmuring things. “The barn doesn’t have a bell tower.” She pulled a picture down from where it was hung. And that eye looks distinctly like Big Brother.”

“1984?” Spencer peered over. “Huh. Made sense in the book. Aryan ideology dictated that blue eyes were ideal for superior Germans.”

“Why do I get the feeling that he doesn’t know that?” She looked up at Spencer. “Did you catch Mason’s eye colour?” Spencer shook his head and Piper dialled Rossi. “Yeah, Rossi, you with Mason? What’s his eye colour?” She thanked him and slipped the cell back in her pocket. “Baby blues.” Spencer raised his eyebrows.

“So, he feels paranoid?”

“Sort of. He feels like he’s being watched by his brother. Could be in a protective way or a more perverted way that I really don’t want to think about.”

“Reid? Bishop? You two in here?” Hotch’s voice floated from below and he saw Spencer’s face pop out from the rafters.

“Hey, I found out where he sleeps.”

“So, Mason was lying?”

“I find it hard to believe he didn't know his brother was living in the barn.”

“Anything up there that's gonna help us find him?” Piper’s face popped up next to Spencer’s.

“I think he’s got some sort of neurodevelopmental disorder. There's a collection of drawings up here that suggest autism or moderate mental retardation.”

“Now, retardation and psychosis in the exact same subject is exceedingly rare,” Spencer added. “It's more likely he doesn't fully understand the acts that he's committed.”

“Anything to suggest a violent nature?”

“Nothing in the drawings. They do suggest someone's been watching him. Hotch, this guy is most likely the gentle giant types.”

“Like the BFG?”

“Yeah, exactly.” Piper scoffed at the reference. “He’s going to be very childlike, scared, probably confused. He’s extremely dependent on his brother and despite his size, he’s probably going to be submissive.”

“You think he'll fight?”

“Think about it this way. If Jack threw a tantrum, what would he do?”

“I don’t know. Throw things around, cry maybe.”

“Exactly the same with this guy. It could involve spectacular explosions of anger, frustration and disorganised behaviour as a result of being unable to cope with extremely stressful situations. You gotta approach the guy calmly, as though you’re talking to a child.” He nodded and turned, about to leave the barn when Spencer called out.

“Hey, Hotch. Do you ever get the feeling that a case isn't going to end well?”

“Reid, keep looking. This girl needs us.” Piper watched him sigh and turn back around.

“Spence, are you up for this?” He nodded and Piper rubbed his arm gently. “Let’s revisit their MO. Mason’s clearly the dominant one in the team, but he’s a quadriplegic. How does Lucas know what to do?”

“Doing it 89 times probably did the trick,” he scoffed. Before Piper could comfort him, he moved to the other side. “But it’s different this time.”

“How so?”

“Mason doesn’t have any way to communicate with him. Where does he go?”

“Alright. You’re a child, you can’t go home so where…” Piper’s gaze fell onto the woods.

“I know that look. What are you thinking?”

“After my mom… There were some really bad days. Anniversary dates, stuff like that. Dad would always be infinitely worse on those days, especially on Lucy.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying there weren’t a lot of safe hiding places from a city detective. So, when Daniel and I were old enough, we went to this debilitated shack on the beach. No-one went near it, like ever. We bought tons of little things with our pocket money, anything to make it comfortable. Little fairy light, pillows, anything.”

“You’re saying he has a safe haven.” Piper nodded. “Somewhere no-one would go. You’re a genius.” Spencer grabbed her forehead, kissing it, before he sprinted downstairs. “I’m gonna go tell Hotch,” he yelled, and Piper felt giddy for a small moment until she collapsed onto the mattress, gazing at the rats in their cages.

Meanwhile, Morgan and Prentiss took the woods with the search and rescue units, following the sniffer dogs. “You've been with this team what, 2 years, right?”

“Almost 3 already,” Emily answered, unsure of where Morgan was going with this.

“It's 7 for me. I mean, that's all I've been thinking about all day... is the entire time I've been with the BAU, working almost nonstop, having no real life, these brothers have been out here killing 89 people and we didn't even know about it.”

“Well, we know now. And we'll make them pay.”

“But how many others are still out there, Prentiss,” he hummed, “hunting and killing? I mean, the thing is, no matter what we do, no matter how hard we work, no matter how good we are at what we do, this is never gonna end.” Emily and Derek came upon the stream and Emily groaned, worried that that they would lose the scent.

Back at the house, Emily hummed Metallica as she cracked through Mason Turner’s safeguards. “Ha!” she exclaimed as he broke through the firewall, but the enthusiasm faded as she realised what she was looking at. She gripped the laptop, her heels clicking down the staircase to where Rossi, Reid and Bishop were standing.

“Pen, are you okay?” Piper rushed over, wiping away her tears. “What’d you find?”

“He’s…He’s been doing experiments.”

“Unsuccessful ones,” Mason interjected.

“For once in your life, just shut up and pretend you’re a decent person,” Piper snarled, trying to soothe Penelope.

“He tried to fix himself.” Penelope’s voice was hollow, finding no comfort in her friend’s attempts.

“Would it be better if it was all for nothing?” Mason’s voice was apathetic.

“They were human beings,” Rossi snapped.

“They were transients and drug users and prostitutes. They were useless to society. I gave them the chance to be part of a cure. To be of use.”

“Ohh, I’m about to break his face right now.” Spencer pulled Piper back and away from Mason.

“That's science.”

“No, it isn't,” Spencer turned and spat at him, loosening his grip on Piper.

“So, you got some information off my laptop. So what?” Mason’s voice gained confidence. “What jury's gonna believe I had the power to kill anyone? I haven't been able to move from the neck down for 7 years. Even if you could convict me of something... What punishment could be worse than the life I already lead? Find my idiot brother. Exact your pound of flesh and leave me the hell alone.”

“Sir,” Piper voiced, gritting her teeth, her eyes hardening. “Permission to kick his ass so hard that his vertebrae pop out of his mouth like a Pez dispenser?”

“Despite my every heartfelt desire,” Rossi sighed. “Permission denied.”  Piper took Penelope’s hands and led her upstairs and Spencer followed them up, watching Penelope sob into Piper’s shoulder. Piper mouthed for Spencer to leave them for a minute. 

He walked outside to find Rossi standing on the front porch with Hotch. “They were doing experiments,” Rossi sighed.

“Spinal regeneration,” Spencer explained. “He was definitely trying to fix himself with stem cell harvesting but the equipment's far too unsophisticated. There's no way it would have ever worked.”

“They would have kept trying.” Rossi inhaled deeply. “You were a prosecutor, Hotch. Could you convict this guy, a quadriplegic who clearly never touched any of the victims?”

“I don't know. We need to concentrate on Kelly. We can't worry about the other stuff right now.” Hotch walked away from the group to keep an eye on the evidence collection.

“He might actually get away with this,” Rossi told Reid, shaking his head as he started trudging back up to the house, oblivious to William by the side of the house.

“Oh, Rossi, wait up.” He turned around to see Reid. “Piper thought they might have a safe haven in the woods, probably from when they were kids.”

“He’s too smart to tell us that. We’re gonna have to try and track his phone.” Inside another room in the house, Penelope had managed to sober herself, trying to get back to work, Piper holding her the entire time.

“How’s it going?” Piper’s voice was soft but Penelope’s had hardened in reply.

“Just waiting for—” Garcia gasped at the blinking on her screen. “Oh, my god. The phone just turned back on.”

“What?”

“Lucas’s phone, it just turned back on.” Penelope held out the phone to Piper as she started her trap-and-trace program.

“Hello? Hello? My name is Kelly.”

“Kelly, this is Dr Piper Bishop. I'm with the FBI.”

“Oh, my god, you have to help me. I'm somewhere in the woods being held by a man named Lucas, and he...” Static poured over the line.

“Kel— Kelly?”

“And he's--oh, my god! Help me! Oh, my god! Please—” The line cut off.

“Garcia, tell me you got something.”

“Yes. I'm hooked into the system. I should be able to— Got it. It's just west of here, less than half a mile.” Piper leapt up out her seat, grabbing a spare Kevlar vest and a mic.

“Get the coordinates to my GPS and let Morgan and Prentiss know in the field. I’ll get Hotch and Rossi.” Piper kissed Penelope’s forehead briefly before sprinting down the steps, out the porch, yelling out the developments as she sprinted. In the woods, Piper followed the coordinates down a little hill. “It should be right here,” she said, turning to the rest of her team.

“There’s nothing here, Bishop,” Hotch cried, anger seeping into his voice and she passed him the GPS.

“There’s nothing here,” Piper started as she closed her eyes, tapping her foot against the ground as she walked, “because the point of a secret haven is that it can’t be…” Her foot tapped against something hard. Not soil. She swiped the leaves and soil aside with her foot, revealing a large wooden square in the ground with a handle. “Found.”

“What’s our strategy going in?” Rossi asked Hotch.

“Let me go in first,” Piper volunteered, holstering her gun.

“No. Absolutely not,” Spencer came up behind her. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it that ridiculous, Reid? I’m the one with the most experience. Have any of you dealt with adults suffering from mental retardation? Or kids with autism?”

“It’s too risky,” he hissed. “And they’re usually not deranged killers.”

“He’s not one either. You said it yourself, he’s scared, confused and probably doesn’t realise what he’s done.”

“I won’t have your compassion get you killed, Bishop.” Emily looked to Derek as they kept fighting. Derek merely shrugged.

“She’s right,” Hotch said quietly. “Bishop take the lead, Rossi, I want you in right behind her.” They nodded, Spencer fuming behind Emily and Morgan. Derek lifted the handle and Piper lowered herself slowly through the opening.

“Hi Lucas,” Piper started, palms held forward as she walked closer. “I’m Piper. This is a nice place you got here. Cosy,” she smiled, ignoring the upturned bottles and fallen over boxes. “I’m a friend of Kelly’s. Isn’t that right?” Kelly nodded aggressively.

“Friend,” Lucas mumbled, scratching the back of his head.

“Yeah. Friend. Lucas, Mason misses you.”

“Ma— Mason?”

“Yeah. Your brother wants you to come home. Would you like to go home, Lucas?” He nodded slowly and Piper held out her hand for him. She ignored the sweat on his large, grimy hands. “Let’s go home.” She led him slowly out to the sunlight, climbing up after him. “Hey, Lucas. Before we go home, Mason wanted me to give you something.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a surprise,” Piper said, forcing a smile. “But you have to do something for me first. Can you close your eyes?” He obliged her, bouncing and repeating ‘gift’. “Can you put your right hand up?” He obliged again. “Great job. And your left? Brilliant, Lucas. Now, turn around for me?” Piper’s heart pounded in her chest as she stepped back to let Morgan pull both hands down, slipping cuffs onto him as she slipped into Spencer’s embrace.

“Piper! Gift,” he yelled out. “I want my gift,” he cried. Sobbing, he was pushed up the hill as Piper leaned her head against Spencer’s shoulder. Rossi clapped Piper on the shoulder.

“You did a good thing, kid. You should be proud of yourself.”

“Then why do I feel like crap?” She made to follow the others as they left the clearing, but Spencer latched a hand around her wrist, pulling her up to him. “Spence, not—”

“I don’t care.” He pressed a gentle kiss to the back of her hand. “I’m sorry. I was just—”

“Worried?”

“Yeah, and I didn’t want—”

“Anything to happen to me? Spence, we work in the FBI, dealing with killers. I’m not going to just hang back and watch you all dive headfirst into danger.”

“I know. And I swear, I won’t do it again.” He kissed her forehead softly and she reached up, latching onto his lips sweetly. “We should get back before they suspect.”

“Really? What happened to Mr I-Don’t-Care?” He smiled into her kiss and they pulled apart. “Besides, we’d be idiots to think our team, the Behavioural Analysis Unit, hasn’t figured it out yet. Especially after your little insistence on me staying back.” Spencer grinned sheepishly.

“Ah, we knew they’d figure it out eventually.” Piper grinned and he interlaced his hand with hers as they walked through the woods while the sun set behind them. But that faded as they saw the quiet on the farm, Emily standing outside with JJ, the ambulance carrying Mason Turner, Hotch and Rossi pushing a handcuffed William Hightower to Jeff Bedwell, and Derek helping a crying Penelope to the SUVs. Where did we go wrong?

#criminal minds #derek morgan #penelope garcia #jennifer jareau #aaron hotch hotchner #bau #bau x oc #agent derek morgan #agent prentiss #agent jareau #agent hotchner #agent morgan #agent garcia #agent rossi #dr piper bishop #dr bishop #spencer reid #spencer reid x oc #reid x oc #hotch #doctor spencer reid #dr spencer reid #criminal minds x oc #garcia #hotchner #oc #emily prentiss #emily

[thestagthatlovedthewolf]

50 Questions

Tagged by @jeynewesterling for the 50 questions!!! Thank you!!!!

What is the color of your hairbrush?

Red

Name a food you never eat?

Liver - there’s more, but that was the first to com to mind

Are you typically too warm or too cold?

Both, but being too warm bothers me more

What were you doing 45 minutes ago?

No idea

What’s your favorite candy bar?

Not sure, I don’t really have candy bars, but I remember really enjoying twix, and kinder délice - people talk about kinder so often, but no one ever mentions this one

Have you ever been to a professional sports game?

Yes, I used to go to basketball games with my dad when I was younger, but we haven’t in years. We talked about going again before covid, since the club is playing again

What is the last thing you said out loud?

Most probable a response to one of the previous questions

What is your favorite ice cream?

Cookies & cream, or oreo

What was the last thing you had to drink?

Water

Do you like your wallet?

Yeah, I’ve been using a old one,I think I may have been 10 when I go it, but it’s so little and fits well into my pockets. It’s a nici wallet, and that brand has such good things

What is the last thing you ate?

I got some pork ribs and rice for lunch

Did you buy any new clothes last weekend?

No, I did not. I think the last clothes for myself was a fandom sweater just before lockdown, I think

What’s the last sporting event you watched?

The full game and not just highlights, it was probably one of the soccer games at the world cup two years ago

What is your favorite flavor of popcorn?

Here there’s really only sweet or salty - I normally go for sweet

Who is the last person you sent a text message to?

Not counting social media, it was my brother

Ever go camping?

Often, when I was little

Do you take vitamins?

Not often, sometimes closer to the winter, I take extra vitamin C

Do you regularly attend a place of worship?

No

Do you have a tan?

Yes, I tan very easily during the summer

Do you prefer Chinese or pizza?

Haha, just talking about pizza and not Italian food in general, I think I prefer Chinese food, at least what I normally get

Do you drink your soda through a straw?

Not anymore... I really don’t drink soda anymore, and also try to avoid straws.

What color socks do you usually wear?

Neutral colors, I think, and some tones of purple (also have some yellow ones for some reason)

Do you ever drive above the speed limit?

I don’t really drive

What terrifies you?

So many things, let’s say weird noises right now

Look to your left, what do you see?

My phone...

What chore do you hate most?

Dusting or cleaning - I have dust allergies, so it’s hard to do it

What do you think of when you hear an Australian accent?

“What accent is this?” - honestly I really can’t tell accents apart, I’m very bad distinguishing sounds

What’s your favorite soda?

Fanta. It’s the only soda I miss, but now when I try to drink it, the bubbles are too strong... I’m not use to it anymore 

Do you go in a fast food place or just hit the drive thru?

Normally just the food court at the mall (of course, that changed for the last few months)

What’s your favorite number?

66

Who’s the last person you talked to?

My dad or my mom at lunch

Favorite cut of beef?

Beef I’m not sure, I like pieces that have some fat

Last song you listened to?

I don’t remember... but I just listened to “Stronger (What Doesn't Kill You)” by Kelly Clarkson in a The 100 fanvideo

Last book you read?

I finished The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker a few days ago, and I really enjoyed it :) (even if warning be prepared there’s more Achilles than I wanted...)

Favorite day of the week?

Not sure, but maybe Saturday

Can you say the alphabet backwards?

Probably not

How do you like your coffee?

I don’t really drink coffe

Favorite pair of shoes?

My army boots with are a tone of purple and red!!

Time you normally get up?

I stay up late most nights, so not very early

What do you prefer, sunrise or sunsets?

Sunset, I think

How many blankets on your bed?

Just two sheets at the moment

Describe your kitchen plates?

Some white ones, but also some with cats, some orange/yellow ones - we have different sets

Describe your kitchen at the moment?

Quiet

Do you have a favorite alcoholic drink?

Sidra and Sangria

Do you play cards?

Not often, sometimes at the beach. And cards against Humanity online

What color is your car?

No car

Can you change a tire?

I know the rules but I’ve never tried it

Your favorite state?

Like American state?? no idea

Favorite job you’ve had?

The callcenter on slow days was really good - not when people insulted me - but slow days and nice people were good :)

Tagging: @xv12, @sandyd94, @zip001, @mylyannasnow and anyone else who wants to join :)

#jeynewesterling #personal

[taezhu]

at dusk, death came in the form of a man [thaumaturgy - lty]

→ grim reaper!taeyong but its chinese mythology, ft. nct → he’s lee taeyong. a king tasked in one of the courts of hell, with one brown eye and one blue. heart as cold as the ice that covers over yama’s heart. yet the blood dripping off the nails of the girl in front of him this time hits him differently.

[2/10] - dark content ahead, mentions of suicide and murder/death

Do you know me, Lee Taeyong?”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

Lee Taeyong pauses before he answers. “I’m the reason that you’re here.”

“Why am I here?” You ask. Another pause prolongs your conversation. Taeyong meets your eyes before looking away again and picking a blade of grass up. The colour starts to become darker the longer he looks at it. You don’t feel the fear you once did for conversations. “Lee Taeyong, I’m asking you a question.”

“You died. There isn’t much else to it.”

“You killed me?”

Taeyong shakes his head. “I can’t kill you.”

Exasperated, you gasp for your breath as you hit the cold surface below. You cry out from the blunt force against your stomach and chest, pain seeping through every bone in your body until you are rendered numb, hunched over from the radiationing feeling of death that washes over you.

You bring your hand to your stomach, which hurts you most of all. Your fingertips shake as you press them onto the bruised skin, another cry falling from your lips. You bring yourself to look down and see the pool of blood around you, fingers covered in the dark red which still seeps from the wounds.

Despite your pain, the paralysing feeling of your body giving in to death, your mind is alert. You know where you are, you recall walking down the street and being stopped by a man who pulled out a gun. Asked you for all the money you were carrying and wasn’t satisfied with the twenty you had on your person.

Shot you two times. Multiple contusions and a wound to the lung sustained by a firearm. Effects of hypoxia seen. Possible exsanguination due to open wound. Your condition is critical. You didn’t need to be a doctor to know that diagnosis. Your body complied with the hypoxia but not the mind. Critical? You’re not so sure.

If you were so critical you wouldn’t have been able to pull yourself to your feet, albeit by using the objects around you, and stand tall in the dark room.

He pulled you in here because he didn’t want anyone to see you both on the street. He grabbed your arm and forced you through the open doors, pointing the gun at you until you reached into your purse and showed him that you really didn’t have any money. He was frustrated.

He being a forty-something year old man who looked like he hadn’t showered in a few weeks and wore clothes from the last millennium. Probably lived with his parents or resided on the streets, no money to his name and jobless for a good while. You couldn’t recall his face, though he hadn’t shaved and likely hadn’t washed his face for a while. You could have picked him out if you were shown a picture - but how many people are there like him on the streets of the city?

Of course he would pick on the first girl he saw who looked like they had more than a bit of money. Blame your expensive looking clothes and pretty face on your parents, as well as your boyfriend’s. Without them you would have been fine walking at dusk. You’ve never had to worry about walking around at night usually but there were roadworks and you thought it was okay to take a diversion. That was clearly the least wise decision you could have made.

Though you’re in pain, you manage to pull yourself to the door which leads out of the garage and onto the street. It’s still open like he left it, the door blowing back and forth in the wind. You push it open so it hits the wall it’s attached to and scares the hell out of somebody walking past.

You’re comforted by the frightened yelp, eyes searching for the person it came from. As you look out of the door you can see the back of a younger looking guy that appeared to be somewhat safe. He’s walking quickly, likely frightened by you. He’s almost past you but you’re willing to take a chance, your only chance at making it out of here.

“Hey!” you call, swinging around the door frame that you grasp on to for dear life, “please can you help me! I’m here!”

Your head begins to throb as you lose sight of the boy as he turns the corner. You try to call again but don’t get anywhere. You’re left with the same hope that got you into this. I hope that the street lights work down there, or I might get killed by someone. I hope they have the eggs in the store this time. I hope he remembers the eggs so I don’t have to go out myself and get them.

You let your back slide down the concrete as stars start to fill your vision. It's as though someone has a hammer and is hitting the back of your head; there is too much interference for you to concentrate on even the slightest thing.

You miss the footsteps approaching you, but mistake the figure in front of you for a saviour. It wouldn't matter how dark it was, your faded consciousness would have seen it as good either way.

It's the last memory you have of that place for a while.

~

“Hold her wrists,” the voice in the background continues, drowning out the clock ticking that you tried to focus on.

You’re met with the feeling of cold hands around your limbs, holding you down and preventing any movement. A second later and more hands are around your ankles. There is a sinking feeling around you that this is not a good situation, but you couldn’t help but feel the atmosphere be pushed away be the serenity in your bones. There was no emergency that your mind perceived; you didn’t feel as though screaming and kicking would help you.

Your eyes don’t even open, glued shut as a paradise builds in your mind and you’re transported back to your living room, on your couch with Hui on your lap as you caught up on Search: WWW. You wish to be back there in the same state of calm. No conjuring feeling of darkness surrounding your each step.

How did you get here?

The thought lingers for a moment. You try to come to a conclusion but are jolted awake by the feeling of electric surging through your bones. You realises then that there was method behind your enclosure. They were fingers, iced to the bone, around her.

Your eyes are wide open, staring into the jet black eyes of who you assume to be your captor. You can’t speak, you don’t dare to breathe either - all your attention is on him and how he stares at your like you are the prey he had been hunting his entire life.

He states your full name carefully, sounding out every syllable for what did not seem to be the first time, “pleasure to meet you.”

You grit your teeth as you feel his hand fall over the lower of your bullet wounds. He presses down ever so slightly, not breaking your eye contact. You feel it start to burn, your entire chest beginning to feel red hot from whatever he is doing. You think him to be a witch of some sorts, coming across your lifeless body in the middle of the street and now using you for whatever craft he follows.

The heat becomes unbearable, similar to that of when your hand slips and you’re taking a hot tray out of the oven. You can barely handle his nails digging into your skin and just as you think you may break one of your back teeth, he stops. Your heaving is halted and your head falls back against the metal bed.

And there is no pain in your stomach anymore.

“I don’t believe you would know who I am,” he states, feeling his palm over your chest and to the other wound. He begins the process once again, your back arching into his grip. “I shall leave it that way. I was alerted to your presence and thought it necessary to intervene.”

You try to recognise him. The taunt at his identity presented as a challenge to you, especially with such a presence as dark as his. You didn't ever show yourself as being religious, you often found yourself avoiding the topic with a passion, though there was something about him that told you no faith would protect you anyway.

He hasn’t the face of a monster. It’s sweet, really - his hair that falls in soft waves around his face, dark as the sins of those condemned, a smile that would wake up the dead and inviting eyes that drew your in. His skin was flawless, jaw strong and arms toned beneath his black shirt.

No, there wasn’t a name you could put to that face in a million years. “Say your name to me.”

You swallow the blood you could still feel in your throat, so swollen that you couldn't bare to attempt to talk. Breathing felt like a chore for you now. You only watch the man, following his steps as he moved around to the other side of you, slight grin from ear to ear.

“Say your name to me,” he repeats, bring his hand to your shoulder. The ends of your hair are brushed from the bare skin, the tips of his fingers drifting over your skin and leaving a cold trail. His grip reaches your collar bone, continuing until he clasps his fingers over your neck. “I won’t ask you again.”

You tell him your name gently, voice only audible to him if anyone at all. His dissatisfaction is made known by the tightening of his grasp, restricting the flow of air to barely a scrap. You try your best to speak louder like a dog who hasn’t seen food in days, repeating it for him.

He hums as he releases your neck. “Shot twice and lives onwards as one of us.”

Your mind ponders over his words. You look across to the men around you, each of them resembling a human. Much like him, with his words pronounced like a man who walked earth his entire life. One of us. His eyes don’t leave you, watching your every movement like you were the only light left in the room.

“Let me show you around,” he tells you, holding a hand out for you to take.

The pressing feeling at the back of your mind that it is truly wrong of you to follow him is dismissed when you take his hand. There is some hesitation since your entire life you had been told to never trust strangers. Though the man feels as though he has been with you his entire life, never once leaving your side and watching your every movement.

His skin is soft, but cold. His touch is somehow still comforting to her, reminding you of when your boyfriend would hold your hand when you were scared.

Your boyfriend.

Oh god, you forgot about him for a while. He must be panicking a little, not hearing from you for a while was so unlike you both as a couple. They would talk all the time and usually text if there was a problem. All he’s going to find out is that you're missing and if by chance they do find the garage you were in, they’re not going to find anything useful to him. A pool of blood will scare him more than anything.

"I'll only be like, twenty minutes," you states, pulling your coat from the chair you had thrown it over, "you can stay on the phone to me the whole time. I just want some cheetos."

You're met with a disappointed voice. “We don’t even need cheetos.”

“Yeah, but I want them,” you tell him, “so I’ll bring you back a reese's cup and some fruit loops. Stop complaining.”

Lucas, the boyfriend, had been in your life since a few years into secondary school. You were friends with a few people who introduced Lucas into their friendship group and you always noticed that he was really quiet around you. Thinking he hated you, you confronted him about it and he confessed to you that actually, he had a thing for you the whole time. A few dates later you kissed and a few kisses later you were dating. It all worked out well for you both given the origin of their relationship.

Except now you're... here.

“Am I dead?” you ask your company with curiosity.

He turns back to you with a dark gaze and raised brow. You are both being followed by his ‘followers’who stop behind the pair of you, ready for anything you may do. “Dead is a very ambiguous term.”

“But I am dead?”

He nods, gesturing for you to follow him once again. He wears a jacket that falls down to his ankles and commands respect with each of his steps. You would have mistaken him for a king if in a different position, though you would come to learn that you weren't far off with that comment, from his overall demeanor.

If he was dead too then he must have been someone important. You try to think though your history lessons to anyone he looks like but draws a blank. Not that anyone who would have been important enough to be him would have also been alive when you could also take pictures or realistic paintings.

“My name is Yuta,” he tells you, showing you into a dark room. His men stop at the door and he closes it behind them. Just you and Yuta in the room alone. The thought should scare you. “To answer your earlier questions to who I may be.”

“Yuta. Sounds fancy”

He hums at how you pronounce his name. His castle, home, whatever it may have been, was desolate and empty. Nothing on the walls and barely any lights apart from candles that lined the walls. There’s an opening behind him that appears to be a balcony that shines over an open hall.

“What am I?” you ask, loitering behind the tall man in fear of him. You press further with his lack of response. “What are you? What is all of this?”

Yuta looks back to her, pleased with himself. “This, my dear, is the afterlife.”

“Afterlife?”

“You died after being shot twice. I thought you had realised that this was your fate after such an ordeal.”

You shake your head. You look across the sea of people sat at tables, talking to one another, all which Yuta has control of. Do you fear the power he has? No, not at all. “So all of these people…”

“They died, too,” Yuta tells you, “and now they reside here, to serve me.”

“So you’re a god.”

Yuta is amused with your description. He turns his back to his people, leaning against the stone balcony and cocking his head to the side. “You believe me to be a god? Well, you aren’t too far off. I’m one of the kings of hell.”

“Kings of hell?” you question. “Like Dante’s levels of hell? We covered that in philosophy…”

“I don’t know who Dante is, but I am King Yanlou of the fifth court of Hell. I will tell you more if you submit to me and follow me. All you have to do is say you do.”

“I do?” you repeats.

“Great!” Yuta returns, pulling himself from the balcony and smiling widely. “All we have to do now is get you to Meng Po and you can give you the five flavoured tea. Then we can go ahead with my plans. Come, follow me!”

“I wasn’t…”

You follow him nonetheless, since Yuta was the only person here who actually paid attention to you. They are dead… maybe you shouldn't be so harsh. Your eyes meet that of the dead around you who look away without thinking, as if they are scared of you.

There is a looming feeling around your that they're afraid of the man you are with. Something about him screams power that doesn't play fair. A God. He must believe it to command that much power in the room over people who are nothing to do with him.

Yet the men, and they were all men, don't look like they are much different. A group of people who wish they were more than they actually are never mix well.

"Meng Po is this way," Yuta tells you. Though he is frightening, his smile is so inviting. To everyone but you, he appears as a force of evil and to your he is no different to the father that walks you down the aisle on your special date. "I'm sure you will enjoy her company. You are a lovely woman."

Like a kid at Christmas Yuta almost runs towards the painted red doors that stand out in the guarded hallway. The two men who stand either side notice him a bow, not daring to meet his eyes. You attract their attention instead, intense stares falling on your as you turn to look around and try your best to read the scriptures on the walls.

Meng Po sounds about as sinister as Yanlou does.

Yuta knocks once on the door, before standing back and looking down to the ground. He doesn’t spare another look in your direction, opting to observe the ground that fell before him. There is a shout from behind the door before cogs begin to turn and the doors, ever so slowly, begin to open and reveal what lies behind them.

You only get to see the very back wall, covered in what seems to be an ancient scroll or wall hanging, depicting ancient scenes that look to be directly from a textbook.

The only true part of the room you get to see is the number of gifts strewn across the floor in front of Meng Po, of whose identity is still remains a mystery. A lady, as far as Yuta called her, though you didn’t expect someone who looked like yourself.

You believe yourself to be the most human out of everyone who is here. Or, not here. You would have to explore your new afterlife vocabulary.

Though you wish to catch sight of Meng Po, you're stopped by a guard that runs to Yuta, whispering about something which completely changes Yuta’s disposition.

He looks up to the man with a questioning look and matters something incoherent to him which is responded to with a nod. Yuta is unable to hide the fear in his eyes but immediately calls for the doors to be shut. His command is obeyed without any questioning. Though, he rushes out off without sparing your a second glance.

You watch with a hint of confusion as you are left with the two previous guards who only look to you with intrigue. You offer a smile, forced nonetheless, but are met with the reaching for what appears to be a weapon from the left guard. Fearing what he could do, you look away and begins to walk the path which Yuta had already taken. Your steps almost exactly match his, though you are met by another man at the door who blocks your path.

So, you find yourself trapped in the hallway with all parties involved seeming to threaten you with a weapon or whatever else they carried in their pockets.

You are saved by the bell - or more accurately, the sound of an explosion from somewhere else in the building which sends Yuta’s men, guards, into panic mode. This means you are subsequently left alone once again.

Though that does mean that you're free to go wherever you want.

Alas you do not approach the wooden doors of the famed Meng Po and instead try to recall your steps to where you came from. The halls are desolate now despite the sound of others near to you, shouting from one to another. It’s like a battle cry from a lone soldier, separated from the unity between them all being with Yuta.

You wonder in your haze from being declared dead, if there really is all of this stuff going on around you or if you are insane. It is quite likely given your state. You could have easily passed out and forgotten the ride to the hospital and now you are laying in bed, sedated to high heavens, with Lucas beside you.

That, my dear, is lucid dreaming.

And you definitely aren’t dreaming you think.

God is that Yuta’s voice in your head already?

You step into a door that isn’t guarded to avoid being seen by another pair of lurking men. It’s only a small room with the usual stone walls and flooring, except this one has a window!

Your eyes practically light up as you gently close the door behind you and approach the tattered, broken window. You refrains from touching the rotten wood and chipped paint job, but peer out onto the water surrounding the place.

You are immediately reminded of Castle Volkihar, which reinforces the idea that you are, in fact, dreaming. The next explosion which shakes the ground beneath you tells a different story.

You have a moment to stop and think. Wow. You are calm considering that you are supposedly dead and that you’re currently with the possibly self proclaimed King of the fifth court of hell but is tryingto escape from him. You have to calm down and just breathe.

Which is highly unlikely - you can probably die twice in whatever realm you reside in.

Following that logic, You decide to ignore the horrified feelings of what had been on that window sill and decide to pull open the window with no immediate plan of action.

You peer out of the window, fearful that the wood may come crashing down on you, to see the water below. You must be about 200 and something feet from it, which alone terrifies you. There are no waves, just the calm water gently flowing into the corroded rocks and coating them.

You look back at the door and sigh to yourself. It feels like there has been an hour or so since you got here but the reality of it is there has been no more than two minutes since you entered the room.

Decisions, decisions andmoredecisions.

More to the point, you consider if it was worth trying to die again so that you are sent to another level of hell (or, whatever this must be) and can possibly live with a different hoard of imaginary creatures which were far more appealing than the ones you’re around at the moment.

Deciding to take a risk at finding your new fantasy world, you climb up onto the window sill so that your legs are dangling down the side of the building and you are sat on the ledge. You take a deep breath as you stare down below and shut your eyes. Yeah. You can make it to the water. Probably.

Possibly if you push yourself as far away from the wall as you could get yourself.

Because you are already dead, right?

It really wouldn’t matter if you hit the rocks. Except that you, sorry, your body would be severely damaged and you would have to find Yuta to fix your again. So you would be right back to square one.

Fuck it, you only die once.

Applying earth logic.

~

You sit up in a panic for the second time today, gasping for breath as you regains the consciousness you had already lost. Your heart is pounding, skin deathly cold.

Today? The possibility of time in the afterlife is something you will ponder over at a later date.

A moment of catching your breath passes and you begin to take in your surroundings. You’re no longer in the hell you were before and instead you lay in a bed of grass and other things. You run your fingers over the tips of the blades and feels them wither beneath you. The land around you is barely lit up by the moon but it’s enough for you to see the very basics.

Your bed is one of dead flowers, with the grass around you following the same fate.

You withdraw your hand, keeping it on your lap as you take another look around you and sees another beside you. He’s sitting next to you, knees brought up into his chest as he plays with a dandelion which slowly loses its bright colour.

He doesn’t notice you at first, attention solely on the flower he holds until you shift your body towards him and alert him. He looks up to you, eyes wide as he drops the dandelion. He seems scared of you, as though you had a power he could not yet decipher.

“Who are you?” You asks, fearing your safety when you recognise the same feeling with him as you had for Yuta. You think him to be one of Yuta’s followers that still saw you as a recruit and watched you try to make your escape. “You don’t want to tell me?”

He shakes his head, dropping his knees so that his legs are crossed in front of him. “Lee Taeyong.”

“Are you with Yuta?” you ask.

“Yuta?” he repeats with a questioning tone, “no, I’m not with Yuta.”

You nods twice before looking down to the ground. You feel familiar to the boy before you, his mismatched eyes reminding you of something that has happened in your life. Of what, you aren’t sure, but it’s not good. He doesn’t try to talk to you, instead opting to watch you until you meet his gaze again and he looks over into the trees behind you.

You try to bring his attention back to you but aren’t that lucky. “Do you know me, Lee Taeyong?”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

Lee Taeyong pauses before he answers. “I’m the reason that you’re here.”

“Why am I here?” You ask. Another pause prolongs your conversation. Taeyong meets your eyes before looking away again and picking a blade of grass up. The colour starts to become darker the longer he looks at it. You don’t feel the fear you once did for conversations. “Lee Taeyong, I’m asking you a question.”

“You died. There isn’t much else to it.”

“You killed me?”

Taeyong shakes his head. “I can’t kill you.”

“Then why are you the reason that I’m here? I feel like I haven’t slept in a few days and my body hurts all over and that guy, Yuta, whatever his name is, he touched me and got rid of whatever wounds I had on my body and now I feel fine. Part of me thinks that this is one of my worst nightmares but god, this is worse than any nightmare my unimaginative brain could conjure up. So please, Lee Taeyong, for the sake of my own sanity can you make some damn sense?”

“I am making sense, You,” Lucas tells you softly, pouting when you meets his gaze. He reaches for your hand brings it to his lips, pressing a solidary kiss to your knuckles. “Let’s just run away and we can get married and forget whatever life we have here. Open up a boarding kennels in the mountains and look after animals.”

You roll your eyes. “You can hear yourself, right?”

“Yeah, and I know it sounds far fetched but I love you. We do that kind of thing for people we love. I don’t want to listen to my parents or be stuck in a job I hate forever. Mark did it! He moved to Japan and forgot everything here. Let’s do the same thing.”

“And what money do we use?” You question. Your seriousness brings some doubt to Lucas, his childlike persona forgetting to mitigate any risk like you would. He acted in the moment and you looked ahead. It just worked for you together. “We share this place and our rent takes most of it. You can’t ask your parents to help us out again just so that we leave and never speak to them again. I want to, Lucas, and I would if I knew we wouldn’t be homeless and broke by doing it. It’s not a retirement plan, we’re in our twenties!”

“Yeah, but…”

“You’re dead. I came to take your spirit to Diyu to be judged as good or bad. Now you’re here,” Taeyong informs you. His black shirt blows in the wind that surrounds them now, the wind being the only noise that you can distinguish from your pounding heart. “I’m Wuguan, the xie of unnatural deaths. You were shot twice and it was unnatural. Therefore I was to take you to Diyu.”

You run your tongue over your teeth as you try to suppress laughter. “Right, so why am I here? This looks like earth to me. Whatever afterlife Yuta had me in looked a hell of a lot different to this.”

“Because…” Taeyong’s full attention returns to you when he realises that this is serious. He bites his tongue, he can’t reveal much. He could take your soul to the afterlife now and this would be resolved yet there was something about your which he couldn’t let go of. Think, Taeyong. Think about it long and hard. “You never made it to the afterlife. I didn’t take you to the afterlife.”

“What?”

Taeyong’s lips part when he hears that you don’t take it as well as he hoped, the sour tone filling his ears. “I--”

“You didn’t take me to the afterlife? I’m… what? I’m a wandering spirit? Like purgatory? Is this serious? I must be on some high dose of morphine right now beacause--”

“I couldn’t take you,” Taeyong interjects, “you asked me to help you and I did. You should be grateful.”

You scoff and turn to him fully. “I should be grateful? I should be grateful for you stopping me from seeing my ancestors and being able to live a long and happy life! How was I supposed to know that you were death, huh? You’re not scary, you look like you would maybe break my finger at best!”

“I’m not death! Did you even listen to my introduction?”

“I’m sorry for getting your title wrong, Lee Taeyong! Next time I’ll remember to call you by you full title. Wuguan, xie of unnatural deaths, I wish for you to take me to the afterlife so that I can rest peacefully and not be stuck as a… as...”

“Yon Hun Ye Gui.”

“Yeah, whatever that is! I don’t want to be that!”

“You are both honestly tooloud,” a voice behind you interjects. He sounds less fearsome but it’s enough to send a shiver down your spine. You turn your head back to see who speaks with you now. A boy, looking to be the same age as Taeyong, with his hair combed back over his head and attire completely black. The only way they matched was the back shirt and pants. He smiles at you and holds his hand out to you. “Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul. Or call me Ten. King of the tenth court. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

You only roll your eyes and uses his hand to pull yourself from the ground. He appears to find amusement in you. “If I’m really dead, it doesn’t matter what you do to me. I’m not scared of you.”

“Are you a descendant of Songdi?” Ten, which you will call him since you didn’t catch his name properly, asks. You meet his question with a glare and he hums to himself. “Well, if you wouldn’t have been murdered and Taeyong wouldn’t have been in the area then I’m sure Johnny would have come for your soul.”

“Yuta already tried,” Taeyong states, looking past you and directly to Ten. He stands too. “She was with him until I found her.”

“I’m righthere.”

“She isn’t a soul that Yuta can collect, though?”

“No, she hasn’t done anything wrong for her to be followed by him. Yuta is taking in lost souls which means he is more powerful now.”

“He’s trying--”

“I appreciate that this is a private conversation but please can you explain to me what is going on?” You interject, looking between the two of them with narrowed eyes. You pull on the sleeves of your top so that they show your arms and then pulls your top’s neck down. “Yuta, whoever he was, healed where I was shot and introduced me to all the people at his… his whatever. I just want to know what the fuck is going on because I miss my dog and I hate to say it, but I miss my boyfriend. So can you explain?”

The pair share a look, one of slight confusion, before Ten turns back to your with his brows furrowed. Taeyong moves closer to you in a protective stance, though still refrains from speaking to you. “You remember your life from before you died?”

-----------

a/n: remember you can read this in third person with Taeyong x Minjee on my ao3! this is another intro chapter type thing to introduce the other main chatacters here. I feel like it may be a bit rushed but I have been stuck on this for so long that I can’t change any more 0.0

#taeyong smut #taeyong scenario #taeyong reaction #taeyong scenarios #Taeyong reactions #nct smut #nct scenario #nct scenarios #nct reactions #nct reaction #nct drabbles #nct fake texts #nct #taeyong

[ladyhistorypod]

Episode 5: Is a Woman’s Place Really in the Kitchen?

Sources:

Amelia Simmons

The Atlantic

Connecticut History

Michigan State University Libraries

Smithsonian Magazine

Further Viewing: Amelia Simmons’ Thanksgiving Dinner – YouTube

Buwei Yang Chao

“Chinese linguist, phonologist, composer and author: oral history transcript / and related material, 1974-1977”

Chowhound

Brown University

Brown University (YouTube)

Open Recipes Openly Arrived At: Mrs Chao’s How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (1945) and the Translation of Chinese Food

Chow Chop Suey: Food and Chinese American Journey (book by Anne Mendleson)

New York Times

Mary Mallon

Annals of Gastroenterology

History Channel

National Geographic

Smithsonian Magazine

Discover Magazine

Attributions:

Drum Roll

Stove Clicks

Food Vectors

Click below for a full text transcript of the episode!

Alana: I hit my step count for the first time in quarantine today because I was walking all up and down northwest Washington DC looking for brisket five days before Rosh Hashanah. By the time this comes out we’ll be well past Rosh Hashanah, we’ll be like into Yom Kippur kind of area.

Lexi: Yeah. We will.

Alana: But oh my god. I'm so tired. I'm not used to doing that much walking… but… all over… But I found one! I found one.

Lexi: Where’d you find it?

Alana: Trader Joe’s.

Lexi: Of course!

Alana: Trader Joe's, man. I looked at the farmer’s market but they were sold out and that was really sad because obviously…

Lexi: People probably preordered to the farmer’s market.

Alana: That's the thing I only thought about it like Thursday, and the preorders needed to be in by Wednesday.

Lexi: Ooooh.

Alana: So… walking all around northwest Washington. I checked the farmer’s market stand to be like oh maybe they brought extra and I went early like I get there at 10:30 now and they were sold out.

Haley: It’s kind of like Thanksgiving for it, like where you have to preorder your turkey or ham. And I'm kind of terrified for that moment because I'm hosting Thanksgiving. But I need like an eight to ten pound turkey, nothing like– I’ve seen thirty pound turkeys when I was researching this. Like how big is a brisket?

Alana: It depends. The brisket that I got was three pounds. Three point one pounds.

Haley: And that's it for you or for like others?

Alana: It's for me and for my extended quarantine household. Shout out to Maureen and Paul, I don't know if they're listening to this episode but they said they were gonna listen to the first two, so… 

Lexi: But you can make a lot of brisket if you want to.

Alana: Oh yeah, I'm gonna make all of it. It reheats really well.

[INTRO MUSIC]

Alana: Hello and welcome to Lady History; the good the bad and the ugly ladies you missed in history class. I'm in the virtual studio with my spice wife Lexi. Lexi, do you want to explain how we got spice married?

Lexi: Well for one we're both really spicy people, um, so that's got to be the first reason. When you put two spicy people together equals a spicy marriage. But no what happened was I was moving out of DC and I had a collection of spices because I love spices and I needed someone to take my spices so Alana took them. And then the other day Alana was cooking and talking about all the spices she uses and it happened to be a combination of the spices from both spice cabinets so it was a spice marriage.

Alana: We shared our spice assets.

Lexi: And hopefully someday we will live together, and our spices can stay together forever.

Alana: Someday.

Lexi: Or they'll expire. But spices last a long time. 

Alana: Spices last a while. Also here, “here” in air quotes is Haley. Haley, do you have a favorite dish to cook?

Haley: I love making anything with mashed potatoes. I really like find it just calming to peel potatoes and then chop them up and then watch them boil. I like those like specific steps I can go through.

Alana: I’m inviting you to help me make latkes because that's the worst part. This has been a very Alana is Jewish episode already but I'm inviting you to make latkes with me so that you can peel all the potatoes because I hate doing that.

Haley: I've never had a latke before so I don't know how much help I’ll be.

Alana: Didn’t you live in New York?

Haley: Latkes have eggs. I've never had a latke sans eggs, so.

Alana: I’ll find a way. For you I will find a way to make latkes sans eggs. And I'm Alana and my friends call me a Trader Ho because I grocery shop almost exclusively at Trader Joe's.

(Haley laughing)

Lexi: Which friends are that?

Alana: My internet friends. My sunshines.

Haley: I was like… we don't call you that. You have other friends?

Lexi: You have friends that aren’t us?

Lexi: Okay so the theme today is cooking and because of this theme I would like to dedicate this episode to my great grandmother Eleanor Delucia, who we called Nana most of us call Nana. But the reason I would like to dedicate it to her is because she spent a hundred years of life cooking and living through history and so I think it's very fitting that this episode would be dedicated to her. And because of that I want to ask you guys if there's any family recipes that are weird or unique to your family.

Alana: Yes I do have a very special recipe, actually I have a couple, from my Grandma Louise. I recently started– oh my god Alana’s going to be Jewish on main again– I started making challah every week from scratch and I'm using my grandmother's recipe that is so incredibly complicated. And like you– you have to boil water, but you can't boil water too much, like it has to be exactly 110 degrees when you use it. And then you have to rise the bread– like rise the dough at exactly 90 degrees, and it's so complicated and so I've started using that recipe and I'm crushing it. I’m crushing it. It was my first time making challah by myself and I used this recipe that was super complicated and I nailed it. I nailed it. And then the other one is, I started making a potato zucchini soup and– like when I was a teenager. And I made it for my grandparents at their house once and my grandmother was like “you know what would give this a really beautiful green color is if you left–” like you peel the zucchini but if you leave the peel in the bowl– not in the bowl, in the pot while all of the vegetables are cooking together, the soup will be more green. And it'll be like– the color will be more pronounced and– oh my god, she was so right. And so now that's like how I make it. So those are my fun family stories.

Lexi: That's so beautiful.

Haley: I don't think we have like a distinct recipe or sets of recipes. We will cook Cuban or Persian food. And I've noticed with my mom and myself since we're both like lazy, lazy beans, we’ll take the complicated recipe, like Alana was saying, with all the ingredients, all the different measurements, what you have it, and just make it into a Crockpot friendly, or like one pot friendly recipe, versus making it a three hour long process. Because so many times I’m like I really want Persian food and it wasn't until a few months ago where a Persian restaurant opened down the street from me. And every time I open like one of my marked Pinterest tabs it would be like eight to ten different ingredients that I could not get at my local supermarket. And then thirty plus steps, culminating into three to four hours of cooking, which I just do not have, especially writing a thesis at the moment.

Lexi: I think for my family it's a dessert heavy situation, like on both sides. My mom's family has these German rollout cookies that we make for Christmas, sometimes other holidays– we made little George Washingtons for my graduation party, which was cute, but they're just flat cookies. And then on my Italian family’s side, the thing that we do at weddings as we have a table where all the aunties bring cookies and then it's like a place of privilege or pride to be the best auntie with the best cookies for the wedding, which is really cute. So I think cookies are a big deal in my family.

Alana: Cookies are– are a big deal in my family too, and I find it– like, my grandmother died three years ago… just over three years ago– and I find like, making cookies so spiritual. That I'm like this is something that we used to do together. It's one of my favorite pictures of like little baby Alana and Grandma Louise and she's teaching me how to use a cookie cutter and it’s so cute.

Haley: Okay I have to amend mine because we've brought up desserts. Like I just said probably five minutes ago I'm real allergic to eggs so my Christmas like cookies all egg free, or like before we could do the– the substitutes were oreos like dipped in chocolate. But my birthday cake was a homemade Rice Krispies treat like cake. My mom would just make like a ginormous one and like decorate it. So all my– just because like what were you gonna do with a child that couldn’t eat her own birthday cake? That's just sad and depressing. So my mom basically was like we're gonna have a Rice Krispy treat or we're going to have ice cream cake. So that– I guess that is heavily unique for my family.

Lexi: So cookbooks emerged as a status symbol, and in 15th and 16th century Europe, cookbooks were filled with recipes from palaces and courts and they were favored by kings and queens. And the wealthy loyal followers acquired these cookbooks as a sign of their devotion, eating like royalty… it brought them closer to being royalty. Gradually, as access to print books became more common and literacy rates rose, cookbooks became a staple in households all around Europe. But one cookbook in particular changed the way a nation ate. And that’s the cookbook we're gonna talk about today. In the year 1796, Amelia Simmons wrote the United States of America's first ever cookbook. In doing so, she forever changed cookbooks, shaping a future in which cookbooks were used by people from all walks of life. Amelia’s book was called “American Cookery, or, The Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry, and Vegetables.”

Alana: Can you spell that?

Lexi: V-I-A-N-D-S. 

Alana: I hate French.

Lexi: It was published by Hudson and Goodwin in Hartford, Connecticut. While it was not the first cookbook printed in America, it was the first one written by an American. It was a unique cookbook. It was distinguished from its British counterparts for its attention to more practical methods of cooking and it provided recipes that can make large quantities of food for families on tight budgets. When I say large quantities, I mean the ingredients were prepared in huge, huge quantities. One of her cake recipes called for two pounds of butter. Amelia also believed in saving time, and one of her recipes called for the person making the recipe to milk a cow directly into the mixture. Amelia's cookbook resonated so successfully with America's home cooks that it was reprinted for thirty five years after its initial publication. Amelia's recipes may not be as commonplace in American households as they were during her lifetime, but they are a great resource for analyzing and understanding how food and language are related in history. Some of them you use terms became commonplace in American language such as calling pancakes slapjacks, referring to lard and butter as shortening, coining the Americanization of the Dutch word “Koekje”– I might have said that wrong– which would eventually become the word “cookie.” She actually spelled it like C-O-O-K-Y not I-E like we spell it today. Her legacy continues in her home state of Connecticut, where her recipe for “Election Cake”– a floury bread cake baked in large quantities– became a common after-voting snack for Connecticut's residents and remains relevant today. Plus, Amelia’s recipes let historical chefs recreate and taste recipes, experiencing the history of America through the flavor of food people the past preferred. And, so I guess in summary, Amelia kind of started the whole trend of American cookbook culture. She established the means by which American women make their food– and American people in general I guess not just women– but at the time she definitely was writing as a woman for other women because the recipes were so practical and focused on how a mother might cook for their kids or wife might cook for their husband or how you might cook for a family so definitely she was a woman writing for women but I really think it’s an interesting and fascinating story that she created the first cookbook, and it was a woman who did it, and that's really really cool.

Alana: I like how you said like cookbooks were status symbols and I'm thinking about cleaning out my grandmother's kitchen and there were just like cabinets full of cookbooks and I'm like oh, hello, yes, I am the aristocracy.

Haley: I actually have a question about the cookbooks, Lex, cuz I couldn’t find this in my research. But could you find like what constitutes as a long time for being an in-print cookbook.

Lexi: So, nothing I read said like thirty five– because because thirty five years was how long hers was printed for.

Haley: Right.

Lexi: Nothing said that that was the longest or that that was normal. It was notable but it wasn't a record. So…

Haley: Right.

Lexi: You know. I don't know exactly how long recipes last, but when you think about how trends change so much and how we don’t really eat things today that my grandma used to cook at dinner parties in the seventies. I'm sure cookbooks don't last that long and when we think about Amelia's methods and then we think about what people ate even in the mid-1800s it was totally different already, so even fifty sixty years later so. Yeah.

Haley: That’s the exact train of thought I was using because I've noticed when I was just researching different women to see who I wanted to dive into, a lot of the cookbooks if they weren’t out for those like thirty year chunks, it was revisions. Every few years here's a revised copy. And that's like a thing in our academic world as well where new trends happen, new events happen. And recipes and also just work needs to be updated. So I like that like the thirty years but also that she's just still relevant.

Lexi: Yeah. So we don't know that much about her. Like, all we know is that she was an orphan and that's literally it. We don't know about her personal life, we just know that she wrote this book. There's no other records of her in any way. Yeah, and there's actually a Youtuber I'd like to shout out named I believe it's Townsend's I think that's how you say it– it's like the word “town” and the word “end”– who does these recipes that Amelia put in the book. And he does other historical recipes too, and other historical videos but if you want to see an entire playlist of Amelia's Thanksgiving dinner recipes check out that channel.

Haley: Well that's a great segue into my gal because we're gonna keep going on the cookbook train and also kind of I want to say revolutionizing the American kitchen, in a sense, but we're going to do with Chinese food now. Not necessarily like the American food, which I got from Amelia, sensing it’s more of a not necessarily British take but American classics.

Lexi: Establishing American classics.

Haley: There we go. Yep, that's awesome. So I'm going to preface this, I calling–

Lexi: Something I forgot to say on that, she used like corn and stuff which was not available in Britain so… 

Haley: Oh, I love that. That's. So good for what I'm gonna be talking about. So she is Dr. Buwei Yang Chao. And I'm gonna do a little side note: I’m not going to be pronouncing these Chinese words, phrases, whatchahaveits, correctly because I do not speak Chinese. And yes, you heard it, Doctor. But don't worry we'll get into that. Born in 1889 in Nanjing, China Buwei was a Chinese-American physician and writer but most recognizable as a person who brought us, as Americans, potstickers, stir fry, and essentially the first cookbook of Chinese-American food. Before we begin, I just want to go over what potstickers are because I didn't know what potstickers were and I'll get into that more but potstickers are type of Chinese dumpling usually with a crescent shape, pan fried on one side, simmered in some sort of broth. And full disclosure part of the reason why I didn't know what potstickers were because I've only had them from Trader Joe's. I.E. that whole egg thing coming back in. So back to Dr. Buwei. As a female doctor in China, she did have a Japanese training as a surgeon and gynecologist and she actually pioneered the use of birth control for women in China which blew my mind. I was reading like a New York Times article and got into a whole wormhole of this doctor’s just life and bam, coming out with pioneering in birth control and medicine of that nature. And she definitely had a mix of Chinese medicine and then also like Western school medicine because a lot of the Western schools were in Asia so she got the mix of both. And she was credited with that sense of bringing Western medicine to China as one of like the first females to do it. And a lot of the time, her medical like knowledge was noted as quote “new style” and also as a side note I believe that in her entry exam essay it was about women's education, which I thought was really cool. Like how educating women was a good and powerful thing. And I only found that only one article so it might not be true, but I'm praying that it is true because I was just so baller to go into med school with your entry essay being about women's education and like the right that women have to be educated at such a professional level. So why did I bring this all up, because come on Haley we're here to talk about food. Well, while she was in Japan and studying at Tokyo Women's Medical College, she started cooking her own meals because she didn't enjoy the Japanese cuisine. It just didn't sit right with her. Totally different, she wanted the comfort of home and since Japan didn't have–

Alana: Raw fish? I’m with her. I’m with her. I don’t do the raw fish.

Haley: Exactly. Like if we went to Italy and for me, the eggs in all those pastas, I would be going out, buying my own pasta, making my own carbonara, sans eggs. Totally natural. But Japan, kind of like what Lexi was getting to, Japan didn’t have all the traditional ingredients, so she would modify her traditional Chinese recipes to fit in with what she could get from the Japanese markets. And when she returned to China in 1919, she opened the Sen Ren Hospital, and after a few more years, marriage, blossoming career, she was offered to teach at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thus we get into her time in the U.S. And her and her husband like there are a couple of years where they go back and forth teaching, practicing medicine, living their life. So when she was writing or just before she was writing her first cookbook which is “How to Cook and Eat in Chinese” and that came out in 1945. She would try and test out her food. This was also often in the U. S. so with ingredients that her readers would have, and she added these elements to her everyday cooking. So this wasn't like “I'm going to write this cookbook for people to buy it and make money off of it but not use it myself.” She fully invested, saying “look, if I'm gonna produce something for people to read, I have to use it in my everyday cooking. I have to live by this.” which I really respect. So in a history perspective, 1945 was the tail end of World War II, and for writing cookbooks– writing cookbooks takes years to do. If you saw the movie “Julie and Julia” you kind of get a glimpse of that, where you first write about the outline, what you want to cook. You want to have appetizers, mains, and desserts. And then you get it to the publisher, they say “cool, do these work?” You test and test and test, just years and years and honestly I could be totally getting this timeline wrong. This is just my preliminary knowledge. So 1940s, we’re in World War II, it was also a difficult time for cooking and food in general in the United States because not just having the native Chinese cultural food that she was used to, and now she had to supplement in the U. S., they’re are also going through food shortages and kind of restrictions from food stamps and just what was available during World War II. So she really used some innovative and creative thinking when writing this masterpiece of hers. And a lot of it also came from, just the New York World's Fair happened in 1939, and I don't think this had a direct impact on her writing the cookbook but I think it had an impact on her selling a cookbook and becoming like this wide sensation because that World's Fair was about showcasing food from around the world and pushing having new cuisine in US culture. And then a few years later, we have this cookbook about Chinese food. And on overall note, Buwei’s cookbook was not the first Chinese cookbook in the U. S. in terms of being published in English, but it was more the first that was universally understood in the sense of getting the food, understanding the writing and measurements, it was very comprehensive and accessible to a wide audience. This OG cookbook in 1945 “How to Cook and Eat in Chinese” also had expanded editions in 1949, 1956, and 1968. So what I was asking Lexi before, she kind of kept up with the words, terms, recipes, and just… I tried to find some of the cookbooks but all of them are out of print at this point. Regardless, it brought new terms and techniques to US kitchens and over two hundred different recipes which included terms, ingredients, techniques, tools, but also like etiquette. So how to use chopsticks, what are the polite ways you should be eating dumplings vs fried rice; which I thought was really cool, and I tried to look through like the two cookbooks I had in my apartment and I couldn't find anything where it was like “here's the etiquette you should use.” Granted, they were more US based cookbooks, it wasn't one targeted for a certain cuisine. And she also acknowledged the help from her husband and daughter, Rulan. She would cook and her daughter would write down in English, usually translated from Chinese to English. So if I may dazzle you with a quote from– I believe this is from The New York Times– and also just culmination of an audio source that I found. It was like an interview and I saw– there's just so many, so many things of her using like this quote and a mo– mashup of this quote: “I am ashamed to have written this book. First, because I am a doctor and ought to be practicing instead of cooking. Secondly, because I didn’t write this book. The way I didn’t was like this. I speak little English and write less. So I cooked my dishes in Chinese, my daughter Rulan put my Chinese into English.” And this quote has so many variations, but it's basically saying that she can't take full credit because she was still a doctor, she couldn't necessarily write in English the way that US publications wanted her to, and she needed a lot of help, which is so fair for any cookbook or any writing source. And I just thought that was amazing. Like I kept finding clips and even when people were kind of telling her story years later, we're saying like she was ashamed to like have written this cookbook and taken away from her medical studies. But also values how great of an impact this cookbook had on the U.S. Now you know how I said that she coined the term stir fry and potstickers. Well it's because “cha’ao” and “guotie”– again, we don't speak Chinese, please don't come after me– really didn't have English translations. Like the term Chinese food is really just like a US word. It's not something that's used in China. You can't– you won't go to China and just be like “I want the Chinese food. I'm going to Chinese food restaurant it's because the way Chinese food is broken up in China is regionally so they they don't group it up as one whole country as we do and how someone of this cookbook does it's very specific to where you are in China and it's not a representation of the country as a whole like unit but for this cookbook and us as Americans we just say Chinese food and that's again coming back to what is available in each region so for the US and for this cookbook this is what's available in the U. S. not what's in available in northern versus southern China and there are a ton of other words that were in this book that didn't even stick in our English macular so like that's what is really interesting trying to find a copy but alas I couldn't find one online because I feel like if we re read this we wouldn't understand as shafts not just like with the vernacular but just the way it was written and the way some of the food kind of was presented she also just to wrap everything up she wrote two more books afterwards of how to order in each Chinese and then another autobiography called an autobiography of Chinese women put into English by her husband your friend child so she still just fantastic amazing woman like this blew my mind especially being in San Francisco that's my story of Dr. Buwei.

Alana: So I am going to be talking about Mary Mallon, and there has been a lot of talk about her recently and we'll get to why she's been in the news. So she was born on September 23rd, which is my mom's birthday and also yesterday on the day this comes out, in 1869 in a poor area of Ireland called the Cookstown in County Tyrone. And I am like a little bit familiar with Irish geography, like I know the names of some counties in the Republic of Ireland. Like we've talked about County Mayo, we talked about County Cork, County Kildare, if you know it then you know it. And I was like I've never heard of County Tyrone and I know there are like twenty-eight counties in the Republic of Ireland but– so I was curious, I was like where is that. It's actually in Northern Ireland so it's technically in the U.K. So Mary Mallon immigrated to New York City as a teenager in 1883 or 1884, about then. And she starts working as a cook, around the turn of the twentieth century and she is famous for her peach ice cream. In 1906, she was hired as a chef for the family of Charles Warren, who was a banker in 1906 so they have cash cash. And they go on vacation in Oyster Bay and Mary comes with them to be their chef. Several members of the Warren family contract typhoid over those couple weeks. And typhoid is considered at the time a poor people's disease, because you contract it mostly from contaminated water. Imagine thinking that like, only rich people deserve clean water. Like call me a socialist, but I really think that everyone should have access to clean water. And Warren’s landlord is concerned about being able to rent the property the next summer because there was this outbreak. And so he has hired a sanitation engineer named George Soper, and he's been an expert in tracing the outbreaks, and he tests all the pipes, and he tests everything. There's nothing. So he focuses on Mary. Turns out, several other families that Mary had worked for have also had typhoid outbreaks. And this is where, listeners if you haven't guessed, Mary Mallon becomes… Lexi put in a drum roll here please…

(Drum roll)

Speaker 1: Typhoid Mary. I can see Haley like laughing in her Zoom but they’re on mute so that's fun. So George Soper goes after her. Asks for samples of everything and she chases him out of her kitchen with a fork. Like a– like a barbecue, two pronged fork. Not like a… like a dinner fork.

Lexi: I have a tiny fork are you scared of me?

Alana: Like a FORK. So he returns with cops to have her arrested. And Mary hides under a floor board, but some of her dress is caught. And so they find her, and they arrest her and they force her into quarantine for three years on North Brother Island, which is a quarantine facility– a little dot of an island in the East River near the Bronx. She is tested up and down for typhoid and they all come back positive for salmonella typhi, which is the bacteria that causes typhoid. But she has no symptoms. She's the picture of health. She is released in 1910 on the condition to never cook again. In 1915, there is a typhoid outbreak at Sloan Maternity Hospital in Manhattan. And the health department is called, and the hospital is just like how– like, we’re a hospital, everything is so sanitary, how did this happen? And the health department says who… who's doing your cooking? And the nurse– the nurses are just like “oh, this lovely Irish immigrant. Her name is Mary Brown.” She had changed her name to keep working as a cook. And that sounds kind of like irresponsible, but what else could she do? She had no other skills, she's not married, she originally immigrated with her aunt and uncle but they've died, and she's an Irish immigrant during a time of very high anti-Irish sentiments. She really didn't have another choice. But they catch her, and they forced her back into quarantine for the rest of her life. They’re… say that she could have had a gallbladder removal surgery and they would have let her go, but she didn't want it. And I was like why wouldn’t she want it? But also, the doctors imprisoned her, essentially. And she even referred to herself in a letter to her lawyer as “the kidnapped woman”. So I do kind of understand why she'd say no. And then she died in 1938 of a stroke. And only nine people attended her funeral, which– this is another like Alana’s Jewish kind of thing but I'm like “that's not even a Minyan how are you going to do anything??” Lexi is rolling her eyes at me. But in pop culture she is demonized, she's the butt of jokes and cartoons. But there are other asymptomatic carriers at this point, all over the country and even in New York. So I think she is demonized particularly because she's a woman, particularly because she is unmarried, and particularly because she's an Irish immigrant at a time of anti-Irish-ism. I don't know if that's a word. But she's been in the news recently. A lot of my sources are from like June. People talking about Typhoid Mary because… talking about asymptomatic carriers and being super spreaders. 

Lexi: I think that's so fascinating how people are tying her story into our current situation.

Lexi: You can find this podcast on Twitter and Instagram at leading history pond our show notes and a transcript of this episode will be on lady history pot dot tumblr dot com if you like the show leave us a review or tell your friends and if you don't like the show keep yourself our logo is by Alexia Ibarra you can find her on Instagram and Twitter at LexiBDraws. Our theme music is by me garage band and Amelia Earhart; Lexi is doing the editing. You will not see us, and we will not see you, but you will hear us, next time, on Lady History.

Haley: Next week on Lady History, we're talking about our suffragists. Women's right to vote and remember everyone, register to vote please and thank you.

[OUTRO MUSIC]

Haley: I really don't understand eggs on a fundamental level.