#fun fact i wrote this while waiting to get matched in rank

[fandom-blackhole]

Hi, are you still taking AU requests, and if so: can I get a 77 & a 94 with Agent Whiskey?

I am ALWAYS down to take more of the AU/Tropes! In fact, I should really reblog that post again because I'm in a bit of a writing stump...

Also, this gives me a chance to really test out my Agent Whiskey writing skills, and I wrote this as a little intro into the world I have planned out for a Whiskey fic

77. In Vino Veritas (I am ashamed that I had to google this...)

94. Hair Brushing/Braiding

Send me an AU or 2??

October. It was already October, and  you were only a few weeks shy of having been with the Statesmen for an entire year. It seemed like yesterday that you were recruited. You could still see the glinting eyes of Champ as he asked you to join his rank of agents. You'd thought he was mad at first, playing along just for curiosities' sake, but one thing lead to another, and for all the coincidences out there you joined the Statesmen and started working on October 31st, Halloween day. Which was a bit laughable if you considered your line of work heavily involving human direction, being a forensic pathologist and all.

A year... you still couldn't really wrap your head around it. But then again, you were still getting used to this job, after all it seemed like the places was was made to keep you on your toes at all times.

"Cherry, darling, you have got to stop staring at you computer like that. Gonna strain those pretty eyes of yours if you keep that up," speaking of keeping you on your toes, you jumped slightly and your eyes jumped from you computer's digital calendar up to meet those of your favorite, and least favorite, fellow agent.

"Whiskey," you sighed out, "Please tell me your here for something more than just to pester me. I do have work to do."

Whiskey only grinned, and pulled out the chair in front of your little desk before sitting down and leaning back into the chair.

"Now, I would never do something like that to you, darling! I just wanted to come check in on you, make sure you're not stressing yourself over your work."

You sigh harder, and run your fingers over your temples, before looking up giving the man across from you, whose eyes were sparkling with playfullness but sincerity, and you couldn't help but shoot a small smile back at him. "I am fine Agent Whiskey, and I appreciate the concern, but I do have quite a bit to do."

"Oh come on, its almost lunch, let me take you somewhere to get something, on me."

He was smirking now, and you were just shaking your head softly. "No, thank you for the offer, but I did pack a lunch, and I plan to eat right here so I can get through the paperwork that has been piling up."

"Please darling?"

You only shook your head again, and sent him a look of, "this is not a fight you're gonna win", and Whiskey sighed before slapping both legs with his hands and standing up, "Well, I guess I won't argue with you this time, but the offer stands whenever you want to take it."

And with that he left you alone in you office as you sigh and relax back into your chair, a soft pang of regret echoing through your chest before you turned back to you computer, this time to actually get work done.

---

He stayed away from your office for a few days. Something that surprised you a bit considering how much he loved to show up and distract you while he wasn't away on a mission. You didn't hate Whiskey, not at all. In fact, you found yourself constantly fighting a loosing battle with how much you were falling for his charms and teasing. He was a good man, and you new that, but it didn't change the fact that he was a serial flirt, and he probably only came to you for how you flustered and reacted to his advances.

When he walked into your office this time, all swagger and shiny white teeth, you had been gathering your things to head down to your lab, nearly running into his chest as you opened your office door.

"Now, Cherry, had I known you were so eager to jump into my arms, I might have come by sooner."

As always, you sighed and felt hear creep onto your face, before taking a step back and clearing your throat, "Agent Whiskey, please, I have to get to my lab, I have work to do."

He just stood there, smirk plastered on his face, before he held his arm out, and said, "Well then, let me have the honor of escorting the pretty lady?"

You just rolled your eyes and shouldered past him. "Agen-"

"Darling, we both know you can just call me Whiskey, you don't have to be all proper with the agent each time."

Shaking your head you started walking down the hall, listening as his booted footsteps followed after you with a slump of your shoulders. "Agent Whiskey, don't you have work you need to be doing, instead of following me down hallways?"

He only chuckled in response, stopping next to you as you stopped in front of your lab's entrance. "Ok ok, i know when I'm unwanted, I just wanted to make sure you knew about the yearly Halloween party, and make sure you're going this year."

You knew about the party. It was one of the few things the Statesmen did together as a way to let loose and hang out with their friends and fellow agents. You'd been invited to come the year before, but considering you went even officially apart of the organization yet, and you knew no one but Champ, you had not gone to the party. And in all honestly, you were planning on doing the same this year. You still felt to new to really enjoy partying with people you barely knew, having only a few people you did actually converse with, and you meant to tell exactly that to Whiskey, but the second you made eye contact you were a goner. He was looking at you with some sense of eager hope, one that made you ache with guilt for even think about telling the man no. Damn those puppy eyes.

"I....I guess I hadn't really thought about it until now. I guess I could show up for a little while."

The grin that spread across Whiskey's face, highlighting his singular dimple in one cheek had you fluttering under his apparent happiness. "Wonderful! I cant wait to see you there, darling. Find me and ill buy you a few rounds of drinks!"

Still grinning he took a step back, before grinning out, "and don't forget to dress up, it is a Halloween party after all."

And with a wink, he turned and left you cursing your inability to withstand his charms as you shakily pulled yourself into your lab.

---

You shouldn't have agreed to this. You felt silly, and standing outside the party venue you found yourself repeatedly pulling on stupid black gloves that went with your "mad scientist" costume. This is ridiculous, you should just turn and leave and just sit on your couch and watch Stephen King movies all night as you eat far to many fun size candies.

But you were already here, you were already wearing this joke of a costume with black smudges painted across your face as proof of a failed experiment, so you just sighed and yanked on the labcoat dress before taking a deep breath and walking into the party.

Your arrival wasn't late, but you certainly weren't early either. The party had already been in the swing of things for a little while as Purple People Eater rang out across the venue. It was obvious that a few of your fellow agents had already been going after the drinks as they partied, and you couldn't help but cringe a bit at the sight of so many people moving about.

You were debating over staying or leaving again when you heard a loud, but very familiar laugh echo from your right. Turning your head, you had to bite your lip to stop from laughing as you seen Whiskey saddle up beside you. You thought he'd been the living embodiment of a cowboy before, but now, there was no doubt about it. Whiskey had really played into the stereotype, doning a pair of chaps with fringe along the sides, a lasso loosely wrapped around the shoulder of his pearl snap button down shirt, a vest matching his chaps fringe and all, and of course his stetson and his usual cowboy boots now paired with spurs for good measure.

"You, darling, really look every part of a beautiful mad scientist, and id love to be put on the mission to take you down," he finished with a wink, and this time you could help the small giggle that escaped you.

"Please, I didn't think you could look anymore like a cowboy, yet here you are looking like you step out of an old western! Where have you parked the horse? Out back?"

Whiskey chuckled, smirk spreading as you teased him, and his eyes lighting up as he leaded down and whispered, "No horse, but you know what they say, save a horse, ride a cowboy."

Rolling your eyes, you scoffed, looking around the room before you turned back to Whiskey and saying, "I remember you promising me some drinks?"

Grinning, Whiskey motioned for you to walk first as he followed behind to the closest bar. If you were being honest with yourself, you could feel your hands shaking with nerves. You'd never really teased Whiskey back like that before, and while you had enjoyed it, and could tell he had liked it as well, you couldn't shake the nerves that seemed to be following you, the nerves that always followed you when Whiskey was near.

You downed the first drink Whiskey had gotten you, even as he chuckled in surprise before ordering you a second as he only sipped on his own iced whiskey in his hand. The two of you talked, well Whiskey mainly talked, telling stories about past missions and what heroing things he's done, though some seemed a little far fetched to believe no matter how much he insisted upon them. You laughed, and teased him a few times, and as time ticked on and you finished more and more drinks, you found yourself enjoying the party and happy that you actually came.

Then, as you started swaying a bit back and forth from the amount of alcohol you had consumed, Whiskey leaned forward and said, "I think its time I get you home. I think you've have enough fun for one night, darling."

You wanted to put up a fight, you were having fun and going home meant that your time with Whiskey would end, that all this false confidence you had gotten from your liquid courage would fade and you'd be back to just flustering at his teasing words as he followed you down the halls or sat in your small office, and you didn't want that.....you were having fun...you were having fun with the man you liked... a lot...."

Looking up, Whiskey was staring at you, deep pools of brown swirling as he took in your face, which only confused you, was there something on your face? But then Whiskey smiled softly at you, and said, "Come on, I'll drive you home," and you could only melt at his soft words and expression as he guided you out of the party and towards his vehicle.

The second you were seated, you felt your eyes dropping, the weight of the day paired with the alcohol finally making you sleepy, making you slur your words as Whiskey asked for you address, but you eventually got it out as you leaned against his side.

You fell asleep on the trip to your home, only waking as Whiskey nudged you and helped you walked to your home. He even took your keys, opening the home for you as you stumbled inside, not even bothering with changing clothes as you walked to your bedroom and collapsed onto your bed.

"I know you're tired, darling, but you need to shange into something more comfortable, or at least get these boots off, Cherry."

You just whined and rolled onto your back, lifting your leg trying fruitlessly to yank the boot off, before you heard Whiskey chuckle and walk over to help. Gently, you unzipped and pulled off your boots one at a time, making sure to lay your legs back onto your bed softly. He stood there for a few seconds looking over you, before asking, "Anything else you need?"

It took you a few minutes, but in your intoxicated state, all you could think about was how ratty your hair must look, and how you didn't want to deal with it in the morning, so with puppy eyes and a slight piut on your lip, you asked, "Brush my hair for me?"

Whiskey startled, not expecting that to be your answer, but he smiled and nodded, "Of course."

Gently, he sat you up on the bed, before sitting behind you with the brush in hand. "Tell me if I brush to harshly, ok darling?"

You just nod, and sigh when you feel the first knots coming free from your hair. Whiskey was so gentle when brushing your hair, treating you like you'd break if he applied too much force, and after each brush stroke, he let his fingers slide through the untangled locks of hair, occasionally brushing against skin and making you shiver. By the time hed finished, you'd fallen asleep from the soothing movements.

---

The next morning you woke up to a glass of water and some aspirin on your bedside table with a note from Whiskey that just said, thanks for coming last night and little drawing of a cherry, and no memory past Whiskey mentioning something about an electronic bull from hell the rest of the night and getting home a blur with only a soft voice and white teeth.

While when Whiskey woke, all he could think about was your words you had not meant to say aloud,, right before you both left the party, "you were having fun with the man you liked... a lot...."

Permanent Tags: @mysticalgalaxysalad @phoenixhalliwell @moodsare @perpetual-fangirl900 @night-snows00 @dumbass-simp-for-fredweasley @stargazingthenightaway @meabravo @just-here-for-the-moment @masteracewindu

Pedro Boys: @blackmarketmummy @djarin-junk @littlemisspascal

Also tagging @writeforfandoms because I thought you might like this.....

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#au tropes asks #in vino veritas au #hair brushing/braiding au #agent whiskey x reader #jack daniels x reader #let me know what you think of how I wrote whiskey ....please?? #is it 2.30am? yes #should i be asleep or studying? yes #but whiskey seemed more important 🤷‍♀️😌

[wovenstarlight]

YWBK update: chapter 25 + liner notes

yesterday will be kinder has updated! you can read chapter 25 here, or start from the beginning here

okay, on to notes and commentary! first time i’m doing these, let’s hope this works out. commentary under the cut to save people’s dashes

Hamin laughs. “Given how bad you are at not being suspicious, that’s understandable.” “Oh, come on, I’m not that bad.” Hamin screws up his whole face in a squint. “Okay, so maybe I’m a little bad.”

this part was really funny to me when i wrote it because i was like “hmm reasons for DHM to understand why HHJ wouldn’t work in the guild” and then i was like Wait. Their Whole First Meeting, Dude. DHM was lowkey convinced for the longest time that HHJ was like, on the run from the KR version of the mafia, and got plastic surgery to look like his little brothers, and is possibly in some sort of witness protection program??? or something??? how else does he not have cops on his ass this man is so suspicious all the time

“I don’t think… They said the dungeons were, like, different worlds? Did they find people there?”

mafia theory second place. dungeon theory first place

“Like, humans? Um. No, no humans.” “So then you can’t be from there. Okay.”

dungeon theory shot down. mafia theory back in the running

“Hey,” he says cautiously. “I’m— I’m gonna go get us some water, okay? Why don’t you… take a minute.” “Okay.” “The bathroom is over there, if you need it.” “Okay. Thank you.”

after four years working alongside a guy you start to notice when he’s feeling a little out of it and needs a bit of a break... but as JHW mentions later you also learn to be a little subtle about giving him one

jung heewon What’s with your typing? It reads like Jihye’s [HYJ]’s fine. Very energetic Too energetic? He’s going to burn out. How do I make him calm down

Epic Burnout Man makes a reappearance! when translating sclass one of the things that makes me want to shake HYJ most is his habit of constantly adding things to his to-do list while he already has 1 billion things on his plate. and all the time he’s whining about “UGH there’s SO MUCH WORK to do” No One Asked You To Do It

Anyway. the point is. HYJ isn’t about to be beat by HHJ at Developing Issues 😔

jung heewon I haven’t spoken to him directly about this because if he’s anything like you he’ll take it as an insult You wtf whts tht supposed 2 mean quit typing jung heewon Better not say shit, mr “No, I can’t take days off and cater to my interests or go out with friends or on a date, I’m too busy taking care of the kids and making sure their needs are met, no I don’t care that there are thousands of people out there balancing personal enjoyment and romance and work AND kids at the same time, are you suggesting I be a BAD GUARDIAN to MY KIDS?”

see above re: not being too direct with pointing out when HHJ’s having Issues because he doesn’t react well

You wht but our eyes r fine jung heewon Even if having glasses doesn’t run in the family, you should still get him checked, just in case

top 10 funny time travel moments: referring to you and your past self as “us” (our = my eyes are fine), but other people think you mean “our family” (our eyes are fine = no family history of long/shortsightedness)

Also. Sooyoung-ie says hi [Attachment: 20XX1213_144516.jpg] 

ok no lie this was one of the parts that pissed me off the most, even though it’s Literally One Line, because. i love chat exchanges. i really do. when done right they’re a lot of fun to read. But Do You Know How Long It Took Me To Figure Out A Calendar For The Events In This Fic. now everything’s TIMED i have to count HOW MANY DAYS IT’S BEEN since XY event so i can CORRECTLY NUMBER the FILE ATTACHMENTS!!! this sucks!!! it took me fucking forever to pin down a timeline just so i could write this chapter plus the few before and after it!!!!

anyway i gave up when i reached year. i just put 20XX. fuck it. we are running on fairy tail time now. (actually i think that’s XXnumber number? XX76? or was it X796. something like that. Who cares i stopped watching fairy tail forever ago)

Fuck it! Hamin will understand!! “If you Awaken you should come work with me,” Han Hyunjae says all in a rush. 

“HAMIN WILL UNDERSTAND” => he literally was cool with me giving zero context for half a dozen absolute balls to the wall nonsense bullshit things i’ve done before. he’ll be fine with this too. dog_in_burning_house_this_is_fine.png

“You already know about the guilds, those are going to be for dungeon Hunters, but I was thinking of forming something like an independent group of contractors. Awakened people with skills that aren’t useful for combat, but that might… that will be generally useful. It’d be you and me, and maybe one other guy I met recently. Probably more in the future.”

given that HHJ has no idea currently that peace exists (i’m so sorry baby i’ll find a way to shoehorn you in soon i miss you so much) he’s got no intentions to start a kiseungsu business yet! he mostly wants to live quietly while just acting as a manager for other Awakening-related services, like YMW’s forge and DHM’s tracking service, along with the information exchange/lowkey spy ring that he’s planning on setting up with JHW and the bar. since HYH is fine associating with him in this timeline, HHJ’s thinking he can get a foot in the door that way, then eventually spread out into dealings with most major guild leaders

RIP to this plan. you were well-made but you will not last long.

“Please, I can’t tell you how I know that, I really can’t, it’d put me and my brothers in danger if it got out. But—” “No need.” Hamin looks slightly alarmed, and Han Hyunjae feels himself settle at the obvious concern in his eyes.

MAFIA THEORY RAPIDLY RISING TO PROMINENCE??? THIS IS NOT HOW DO HAMIN WANTED HIS GUESS CONFIRMED

“I spoke to the Task Force Head and she said that there’s been discussion about hosting a meeting for the nearby high-rankers, where they’ll announce the guild proposal and see who else is interested in trying it out.”

“they’ll announce” i’m sorry king 💔 you deserved a nap

(OH ALSO FUN FACT choi eunyoung is a canon character, not an OC of mine! she appears in uhhh i think late 140s? 150s? something like that)

“I think there’s… probably only one other S-rank who’s Awakened right now?”

Hehehehehehehehehehehehehhehe

Hamin beams. “No, they’re doing great! Spookie’s taken really well to the new housing situation, but I think Spots might miss the store…”

shoutout to @daemonic-dawn​ for letting me borrow a pet name, love u king. i had a much longer ramble about pet names here but i finished typing and realized it was all entirely off topic so i removed it for convenience

Hyunjae makes an annoyed noise in the back of his throat. “Don’t— I mean.” He huffs, visibly taking a deep breath, and Yoojin frowns reflexively. [...] “Is everything alright?” Yoojin kind of wants to be annoyed at his tone on principle, but he forces his shoulders to relax, matching Hyunjae’s posture. Though he can’t stop himself from being a little short when he answers.

things the brothers have learned in four years living together: getting confrontational often leads to arguments that just fizzle out anyway, so it’s way fucking easier to consciously tone down their combativeness in advance when talking to each other about things they have problems with, instead of screaming their heads off and then having to calm yoohyun down afterwards to boot

“I guess. Whatever.” Yoojin slumps. “Can I…” “Hm?” Hyunjae blinks at Yoojin as he gestures to the spot on the bed beside him, then jolts. “Oh! Yeah, sure, c’mere.” He opens his arms, and Yoojin goes over and flumps on the bed, head in Hyunjae’s lap. Almost immediately, Hyunjae starts stroking fingers through his hair, and Yoojin relaxes into the touch, listening as Hyunjae continues speaking.

cuddles 🥺🥺🥺 sorry i don’t have any other commentary here just. cuddles. extremely and overwhelmingly comforting for a man who spent the better part of 8 years(?) with no major positive relationships, and a kid who spent 12 years of early life basically abandoned by his parents. you had best bet they gave up on not hugging each other 1 year into this whole mess

Yoojin hums in acknowledgement. It’s not like he’d ever let himself get hurt; he has too many responsibilities to his family and friends. If he wants to be good enough to keep up, he can’t afford to fuck up like that. But… hyung will worry if he keeps working so hard. He can slow down a little for him. 

Problems disorder man when will you stop. the way he sees “getting hurt” as an inconvenience and an obstacle to his duties rather than a danger to himself. the way he doesn’t really care if he himself gets hurt, but if it’ll worry his family, then it’s a no-no. it’s just. wow. i know i wrote this but i hate him

“Not really. I talk to Myeongwoo about it sometimes.” “Ah, right, Myeongwoo.”

haha gays

“Don’t be weird about him,” Yoojin warns[...]. “I won’t, promise.”

if the “i won’t” line had a dialogue tag it’d be “Han Hyunjae lied”

“Is Eunwoo still in his relationship?” “Mhm, happy as ever. Apparently they’re trying long-distance, now that Eunwoo’s gone off to university abroad.”

three guesses for who eunwoo’s dating and you won’t need the first two

Hyunjae raises his hands like he’s going to deny the accusations levelled against him, so Yoojin seizes him by the collar and shakes him until he cries for mercy

oh my o/rv ass struggled so bad with not writing “shakes him like a man betrayed” here. it killed me not to. but in the end i prevailed (against, uh, myself. don’t think about it too hard.)

“Jeez, okay, he’s an F-rank!” “Eh?! Then why—” “He’s also got an SS-rank potential skill,” Hyunjae admits[...].

play-by-play of this scene because god if i draw any scene in this fic it would be this one just for the sheer hysterical nature of HYJ’s reaction:

YOOJIN: I HATE YOU WHAT THE FUCK WHY. TELL ME HIS RANK

HYUNJAE: HE’S AN F

YOOJIN: WHAT? WHAT THE FUCK?

HYUNJAE: he’s also got an SS-rank skill,

YOOJIN:

#star.txt #work: yesterday will be kinder #writing commentary #my writing #making impulse decisions today. very tired. godonight i hope you enjoy but also you'll have to enjoy without me

[lovelytsumu]

‧₊˚✧ ཻུ۪۪ ᵕ̈ ART

chapter 2 — “sunflowers„

sakusa kiyoomi x reader | mlist

is having a soulmate necessary? — a bunch of connected stories.

Soulmate AU; if you write something on your skin it will appear on your soulmate skin too.

wc: 1,3k | no trigger warning

Some days have passed since the first drawings on his arm and the small conversation with his soulmate. Still, he didn’t know where she was, but, if he didn’t want to have a girlfriend, why did he have to worry?

He was staring at his volleyball yellow and green uniform, hanging from a hook on the wall, thinking about the incoming game of tomorrow.

Should he had to tell his soulmate to not draw on her arms? Or it wasn’t that important?

“Hello” he wrote down on his left wrist “Tomorrow can you not draw big flowers on your arms, please?” trying to be as polite as possible.

“Uh, okay, if I can ask you, why?” she asked a little time after.

“I have a volleyball match tomorrow, and I prefer to not have drawings all over me...”

“Is it a coincidence that I’ll go to a volleyball game tomorrow, too? Anyway, don’t worry, I’ll keep my pens and colours down” then she added a smiling emoji, sign that she didn’t mind stopping drawing for an evening.

Sakusa didn’t reply, hoping his soulmate would be quiet during the whole game. He didn’t mind her. Also if he started to properly write to her just a little time ago.

On the other hand, also ___ was enjoying it. She didn’t expect to find someone who gave her compliments for a sunflower drawing. The girl thought a way to thank him in a better way, and despite she promised to keep her pens down for that evening, she couldn’t help it. She was an artist, after all.

— 🌻 — some time before the game starts

Sakusa was patiently waiting near the lockers room, wearing his usual mask and the team uniform. He also had his jacket on, hands stuffed in the pockets. Iizuna came out of the door with some of his other teammates, “The game’s starting”.

___ walked through the hall, there weren’t too many people, maybe the game had already started. Maybe her soulmate had already noticed what she did, maybe not. Pulling her hoodie up, she walked towards the stairs.

Luckily, the game hadn’t begun yet, but noticing the only few seats left, she knew that would be an interesting game.

Honestly, she didn’t know that much about volleyball, it was just fun and entertaining. The year before, when she was in another school, one of her few friends took her to a volleyball game, mainly because her boyfriend was in the team. She didn’t care about it and ignored her almost every time she shouted “Nice kill!” to him.

Also if she had changed school, her habits were difficult to change. She still had the habit of spending some time alone in the art room after the lessons, going to volleyball matches, sitting in a less crowded place during lunch... some little actions that reminded her life was beautiful, also in its bad things.

___ sat in an empty seat, one of the nearest to the corner, most of people had already took the best seats, but she didn’t mind. She wasn’t rooting for anyone in particular, of course, she would have been a little bit happy if her school’s team won.

Itachiyama was literally a powerhouse school in Tokyo prefecture, only a couple of other schools could be considered “a big problem” by the members of the team.

“Is this seat taken?” a girl asked ___, pointing to the seat near her. She has gorgeous black, straight hair, dark eyes and round eyeglasses. She was cute. “No, you can sit if you want” the other girl replied.

“Thanks! I’m Mayu, second year at Itachiyama” she said, smiling. “I’m ___, also a second year at Itachiyama” “Really? I think I’ve never seen you around” “I think it’s because I’m new, I’ve changed school last year” she explained.

“I hope you’re feeling good here!” Mayu smiled. Her personality reminded a sunflower. The sunflower ___ wanted to be. A sweet, caring, smiley girl. “Yeah, I love being at Itachiyama”. The black haired girl couldn’t reply, since the match was about to begin.

“Itachiyama and Fukurodani! This will be an interesting match!” announced the girl next to her. “Do you know anyone who’s in our volleyball team?” asked ___, trying to get some information about those boys. “Well, Iizuna is the setter and the captain, but I don’t know much about him... Then there’s Komori, the libero. He’s ranked as the top libero in high school, and would probably be ranked as one of the best friends a person could have. The ace is Sakusa, I don’t know much about him too, he’s a very reserved person, I heard he hates crowds and being touched. Anyway, he’s one of the top three aces in the nation, so...”

“I heard Fukurodani’s captain is in that top too, but he is in the top five” ___ said, looking at her new friend. “Yep! He is! This will be a very good game. Anyway, did you know that Sakusa has a soulmate?” asked the girl beside her. She just stared at her in the first moment. “Are you his soulmate?” joked then. “Nope, but someone said his sweet half is an artist! Don’t you think that is great? I mean, a talented artist and a skilled volleyball player!”

There was no way that she was Sakusa’s soulmate. Hearing what they said about him, he probably wasn’t the best matching for a person like her. While Mayu was watching the game, where Itachiyama was in the lead for a couple of points, she raised her left sleeve, to reveal a new sunflower.

This time it wasn’t an outline, it was directly painted with the professional colours she uses for art class. It wasn’t big or detailed, but she added a “Good luck” under it. Also if she had broken a promise, she hoped her soulmate didn’t mind it.

During the first time out, while he was taking his water bottle, Sakusa noticed the thing that appeared on his wrist. Another bunch of paint on his skin. He would probably had freaked out, but something stopped him.

“Good luck”.

Maybe, for this time.

“Sakusa? Is that another sunflower on your wrist?” asked Komori, taking his bottle, pointing at his cousin’s hand. “Don’t point at me. It’s rude.” “I see your soulmate really likes drawing on you”

“Yes, I think so too.” “Don’t you hate the fact that someone you have never seen in your life is ruining your skin?” the libero asked again. Honestly, Sakusa has never thought about it. He was expecting that, in a certain point of his life, he had to be paired with someone he didn’t even know existed. The only unexpected thing was his soulmate’s character.

It was strange, the girl the fate paired him with wasn’t one of those exroverted and dyinamic, neither one of the emo-type, if that was a decent term of comparison. She was quiet, but you could notice her. She didn’t write that much, but she drew. A lot. And that was enough.

For this time, he accepted the little gift.

Sunflowers have always been recognised as the flowers of loyalty, fortune and vitality. They’re always staring at the sun, and that’s why they never see shadows.

Point after point, spike after spike, the teams were at the last set of the game. Mayu and ___ were watching and cheering for their school’s team, until Iizuna touched the ball, placing a set for their ace. Sakusa spiked it perfectly.

Itachiyama won the match.

[to be continued]

sorry for not updating this fic, a lot of things happened recently.

🌻 Taglist : @itsmattsunshinehere @dinonerdsimp @mintgrumpy @yams046 @macaronnv

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[ddaenghoney]

chapter two

masterlist link in blog description.

As a successful songwriter, you want nothing more than the acknowledgment that the chart-topping musical pieces are your own creations. But contracts, relationships, and the difficulty of facing the stakes involved head on, keep your mouth shut until pressure builds too much.

Pairing(s): Park Jimin x Y/N, Min Yoongi x Y/N

disclaimer: any characters depicted do not represent the actual personality of the respected idol in real life.

Series warning(s)/genre(s): Chapter-based written fic, Slow-burn relationship(s), Fake-dating, Unrequited love, Songwriter/producer!oc, idol!Jimin, idol/songwriter/producer!Yoongi, friends with benefits, drama, romance, smut, angst, fluff (updated as needed)

Chapter warning(s): minor intoxication, .

Word count: 5421

if you enjoy please, please let me know!

In the tiny meeting room, you scribble a few notes into a crummy notebook close to the end of untarnished pages. The four other girls are mostly talkative, casual as they look over the two songs found into their group’s use after Jimin’s crew decided against them and to pass on. You care little of the fact, honestly agreeing with the better suitability of the particular songs aligning to this group’s upcoming softer, warmer, early-spring concept.

Their manager exited already, leaving them to utilize the space for lunch while he handled other miscellaneous affairs.

“Ms. Y/N,” Your eyes met the youngest member as she leaned her head closer to the table so you would pay attention to her words. “Are you going to the club later too?” Your eyebrows furrow at the title, wondering why it would not leave no matter how many people you told to remove the formality.

“Doubt it.” You shrug, then tense as the leader of the group makes a shocked gasp, her long black hair whipping as she turns and faces you.

“What? But I wanted to buy you a drink for helping us so much.” She frowns. The expression is joined by the member sitting beside her equally upset. You glance between the two, then the youngest, and the one beside you.

“I,” You pause, thinking of an excuse other than not being interested in seeing Jimin interact with everyone as if he didn’t know you as more than a friend in the company.

“You,” The girl beside you grips on your shoulder, overtaking the sentence, “Could tag along with us.” She smiles meaningfully, and your lips tighten into a line. Frankly you assumed no one would question the absence, seeing as their had yet to be a question to you joining in the nightlife excursion beyond Jimin’s half-hearted inquisition. “Our makeup artist was going to help us get ready here at the company; I bet she’ll do your makeup too, if you want?”

An assistant enters after a knock, arms weighted from two large bags full of food. He sets it down and leaves, waving off the thanks from the members who immediately begin unpackaging.

“It’ll be fun; a lot of new people from the merger are going,” The youngest member explains to you as if creating reasoning for you to agree. She opens the top on a container of freshly cut fruit, and leans it in your direction. You gently shake your head smiling at the offer,

“I don’t know. I haven’t really had a weekend without doing things for work in a while.”

“Even more of a reason!” The leader nods at you with her cheek stuffed with a bite of a large wrap. “Perfect opportunity to let loose and have fun. Besides you’re a writer, I’m sure it’ll be a great way to get inspired, right?”

“I want to get into songwriting too.” The youngest member says across from you. Her other members make dramatic sounds before bumping into each other's' sentences to support her idea, a couple of mutterings here or there about wishing to do the same.

You wonder about it for a moment, trying to recall the amount of songs artists of the company wrote for themselves. You visualize a disparity in the actual self-sufficiency of them all. To the media, it is perceived that the idols contribute greatly, highlighted by the falsified credentials. Really though, most of the production isn’t up to them; across the board you can only think of a few artists or groups who did more of their own work than not. But they are the minor profiles of the company.

Stepping up from your seat, you collect your notebooks into your bag. “I’m going to head out; text me if you guys have any more comments on ideas you want to see in potential comebacks.”

“Wait, you’re not going to eat?” The member sitting beside you gestures her utensil to the food prepared. It wasn’t ordered for you in the first place, and considering how much these girls work on their performance aspect, you didn’t want to take the calories from them.

“No, I ate breakfast late, so it’s fine.” You wave to them as you walk to the door, trying to reply to their goodbyes with some of your own. Happy you avoided the topic of the club, but contemplative of the lingering thoughts building in your head about their desires to try and create songs independently.

They would undoubtedly need to okay from the company for any production to happen, but did the same need to be said of yourself?

“Oh, good timing,” The door shuts behind you as a voice to your left calls out. Turning to the person, you catch your sight instantly on light blonde locks arranged in slight waves on top of Min Yoongi’s head. They were black days before when you bumped into him last. “Can you give me a hand with this?”

You become aware of the box he’s balancing in one hand and the cylindrical container tucked under the other arm. Though the idea of help isn’t foreign, you can’t help but glance past yourself to see if he was talking to someone else. “Uh, yeah sure,” You agree, reaching as he gives you the light, lengthy container. “I’m sorry for bumping into you the other day, by the way.”

“Oh, was that you?” Yoongi asks you as you follow his pace down the hall, the box repositioned in front of his torso now. The words are calm, genuine in the lack of memory. Somehow the fact makes you nibble the side of your tongue while your gaze hardens in consideration towards the back of his head. A pair of headphones are useless around his neck, bumping into the subtle bounce of his hair with each step. “Don’t worry about it. It’s probably busy running around this place all day.”

You wonder if Yoongi remembers any other times you had interacted with one another. The very first time he seemed more reclusive than how he is in front of you now. During a tour of the building with his shoes following the CEO and her assistant around, you remember their group intersecting with you and Jimin moments before you left that day. He only said a greeting to you both then, despite the clear desire made by Yerin for more casual conversation to occur between Yoongi, his previous company’s golden face, and Jimin who ranks high in the charts since his debut as well.

“So,” Your mouth opens in the quiet that begins to feel uncomfortable when your memory paints the picture of his evasive hardened expression during that first interaction. An attempt to try and patch up any awkwardness that you got around him came out as you asked with an uncertain tone, “This place nicer than the last building?”

Yoongi doesn’t reply right away, not even with a nonverbal queue. You begin thinking he ignored you, especially because your walk behind him led you with no way to see an expression. With that in mind, you look down at the object he asked you to carry along, contemplating an apology for no reason.

“It’s hard to remember the layout.” Yoongi speaks thoughtfully, and you look back up at him. “I guess that’s just because I’m used to the old place.” His voice drifts with that line, softer and if you let yourself assume you would say he seems downcast. “My studio’s bigger here though.” In a way it sounds like he’s weighing his pros to the cons, only happenstance allowing his statement to be timed as an answer to your inquiry. “Ah, but this place isn’t bad.” A cover-up. Quicker spoken than before and Yoongi glances back towards you as his pace slows slightly. He speaks when you reach his side, “Have you worked here long?”

“I guess almost five years at this point.” You answer absently, curious about the change in his replies along the way. Yoongi nods, looking ahead as he comments,

“Long time. Assistants are treated pretty well here, huh?”

You stop in his tracks as the words flow in your ears. Yoongi continues one, two more steps then pauses as well, turning back to face you. Confusion growing in the furrow of his brows and slightly pouting lip. Your expression is certainly incredulous, and you almost want to laugh at the ridiculousness of his perspective. “I’m not an assistant.”

His lips part to speak, but he doesn’t, pondering what about the misunderstanding was causing your face to become visibly frustrated, and your tone to become entirely vexed. Nevertheless, Yoongi faces you properly, bowing his head a little as he speaks, “Ah, I’m sorry. I guess because I always see you with the artists, I thought you were.”

His explanation is fair and you know it. That irritates you the most. Your grip on his item grows more forceful from the frustration, but you sigh to release the senseless anger aiming at his innocent container.

“Then,” Yoongi begins again, though your gaze drifting towards the floor between you both makes him wish he stopped before the next innocent question drifts from his mouth, “Are you dating Jimin-”

“No.” You’re quick to deflate the claim. Yoongi pauses at the rather loud statement that cut into Jimin’s name matching the glare in your eyes when they flick back to him. Your head shakes and you continue walking, “Where’s your studio?”

“I didn’t mean to upset you; I’m sorry-”

“It’s fine, it’s nothing. You wouldn’t know, why would you?” You ramble, eyes searching from plaque to plaque as if you also forgot the layout of the company. “I work here, though. I’m not some random person.” You felt a strong desire to yell the fact, or throw the cylinder in your hand if only to release how annoying it is that he, or anyone, has no reason or way to know whom you are.

“Ah, so,” Yoongi’s stuttering slightly as he thinks of something to say that won’t further serve to irritate you, “What do you do here then?” He briefly considers the idea that you are someone incredibly important and perhaps even someone he should not be acting so casually with, but your abrupt groan pushes him against that. If only because you seem genuinely unable to answer him, but Yoongi couldn’t think of a reason why.

The companies merged, you know that, and Yoongi would be under every legal obligation to not blab to the public about your position as a prominent songwriter in the company that is to remain unnamed in every way. However, you don’t want to say it. In your mind every thought wishes he already knows about you, but that is completely unfair considering reality.

“This one’s your studio?” You come across the door with a scribbled paper taped to it reading SUGA. The design clearly short-term, but as long as you could get away from the embarrassment of having to explain your stupidity in how you are involved with the company, you don’t care. “I help in song production.”

Yoongi notices the spite in your statement, but doesn’t comment on the fact as you place his packaged artwork against the wall. The corner of his lip bunches back into his cheek in consideration, but you’re oblivious to his visible discomfort of how he has upset you. He watches you stare at the stage name presented on the door to signify it being his space and wonders why he believes he sees a longing in your eyes.

“Thanks for helping me.” Yoongi says instead of anything else. He doesn’t know you. It’s not his place, and frankly not something he feels the need to bother with. Considering the amount of unloading that remains to make this place feel anything remotely like the last, he would rather the situation end. In any case, he figures that you want him to stop talking about anything regarding you any further.

You only nod losing focus of the room he has earned with a title to prove it as you glimpse back towards Yoongi to offer a small polite smile. You wave your hand and say goodbye, feigning the energy of contentment and hoping none of the envy prickling in your chest pokes through your irises. If it does, Yoongi doesn’t mention it and begins entering into his studio after you walk back from where you came from.

The second time in the same week that you can’t speak properly for yourself and it has your throat teeming with frustration. Maybe Namjoon is right, maybe you should leave once the contract is over. But then what? You’re in the elevator staring at the number listing the floor become lower. If you leave you’re sure to start from the ground up with nothing able to go on your resume other than vague mentions of song production like you mentioned to Yoongi. Sure, you could dress the phrasing and use the five years to make it sound moderately impressive, but why should you?

The glistening tiles you step on in this building that everyone moved into a year and a half ago were purchased through your efforts. The songs that chart, the artists that are gaining acclaim with every passing day, even the mixing on a good number of songs were all thanks to you. SoundWave Entertainment’s drastic rise in success is due to a handful of people, but you’re one of them. The world just didn’t know that.

What would happen if they did?

“You’ll get sued.” Namjoon’s voice is flat through the speaker. You scoff at the fact, blending foundation while trying not to glare at your reflection. “Sorry,” Now sheepish, but unapologetic despite his words. Realistic. “Even if you tell the press afterwards, I don’t think another company would pick you up-”

“Why?” You interrupt actually shocked at him then. You wait for Namjoon to answer while he’s clearly drifted into telling one of his employees something about a reservation for the following week.

“Even if you’re in the right to have everyone know you wrote all of those songs-- produced some entirely too,” Namjoon begins again calmly, though he’s drawing scribbles on the margin of his calendar while he explains his perception. “If you’re the one who talks to the media about it, any other company is going to think you’re unloyal. Also, you’re going to lose your royalties from all the stuff you’ve made because that’s a part of the deal. You can’t say anything.”

There’s silence that follows. Namjoon allows you to have it, knowing his words didn’t set you at ease or uplift you in the slightest. But with you starting the call by telling him you intend to go to the club party this evening, he feels like you shouldn’t go in completely impulsive. Especially with how set against the event you had been up until that phone call.

“Start over completely then, huh?” Rhetorical tone. Sadder too. Namjoon frowns at his desk. “It’s what I get for signing the contract then. I just wanted something to help with college crap, and look where it got me.” He listens to you sigh, tapping the tip of his pen on the square in the calendar for the current day.

“Yerin took advantage of you.” His voice is icy; conviction unwavering for if you try to give yourself anymore blame. “It’s not like you won’t get work elsewhere.” A pause because he knows the idea implies practically starting over just as you said. “Or… You could try getting the contract adjusted when it’s time to renew.”

“What if,” You dip a small brush against a shade of eyeshadow. Your voice is deceptively calm given the severity of your sentence, “She won’t even want to renew?”

“Why?” Now Namjoon is thrown off from your words. He couldn’t remember a story about yourself in the company that could logically warrant dropping you.

“Min Yoongi works there now too.” You pause before beginning to apply the eyeshadow. His repertoire crosses through your mind. “Songwriter, producer,” You scoff, “Plus he’s actually an idol.”

“He’s not going to let them use any of his stuff without credit though.” Namjoon cancels the worry he hears seeping into your voice. “They’ll still want their idols to look self-sufficient and he’s not going to play along with no credit. You know what he’s like.”

Namjoon is referring to the stoic persona pictured in magazines, and the straight-forward answers in interviews. The captionless posts on Instagram, and passively-aggressive tweets. The newly bleached hair that you believe will look just as imposing in paparazzi shots as his previously black style.

You consider the instant apologies Yoongi gave you hours earlier and the thanks. You remember him trying, and failing, to change the topic of conversation into something that would even out your lowering disposition.

“Yeah, I doubt he’d let them walk all over him.” You murmur, recollecting your thoughts to finish your makeup. “It’s just me that didn’t consider the long-term problems in that contract.” You’re laughing cynically while Namjoon audibly huffs on the other side. Slapping the palette shut, you scoot the chair of your desk back and rise. “I’m no doubt going to end up at your place sometime tonight.”

“I’ll let you use the bed instead of Jin then.” Namjoon says already imagining the ear full to be received from Seokjin at the prospect. The bed in question is still in a couch-form across the room from Namjoon. “Call me if anything weird happens, okay?”

“I will.” You leave the phone on your desk, calling loudly as you step away to the closet.

“And,” Namjoon hesitates, biting his lip. The tension doesn’t lessen when you ask him what he wanted. “Don’t let anything about Jimin get you down tonight, if you can avoid it.”

You pull out the dress to wear as Namjoon’s request completes. His tone is utterly soft and you know it comes from the best intentions, but it scrapes your ears to hear it. Namjoon likes Jimin, knows you like Jimin too much, and doesn’t like the relationship you and Jimin have. Believes it won’t work for either of you with how it is. You waver in agreement, but you always tell him it’s nothing to worry about.

“Doubt I’ll even run into him. People to impress and all.” You don’t specify, but Namjoon rightfully assumes you’re referring to Jimin.

Like other parties organized by SoundWave, there’s some chaos going on outside of the club. Under the cold December air, eager partygoers arrange themselves in the queue, groups of friends huddled closer to shield from any brisk air. You imagine by midnight the majority of those unable to get in will have left to other venues, but you unfortunately don’t think the same for the few cameramen set up around the street. They’re hoping for something scandalous as if they forgot the whole event is sponsored by an idol company; it’s ridiculous to assume anything surprising will happen where all the celebrities are aware of their presence.

You pass the queue on the sidewalk, clutch in hand while you hurry from the taxi to indoors where it’ll undoubtedly be warmer than outside. Your name is on the list and you roll your eyes at the fact that this is the extent of where your reputation gets broadcasted. Disregarding any of the questioning voices from those around you, you simply walk inside and let them assume whatever about your identity in relationship to the celebrity world. The coat counter is a small mess of people trying to sign in their items, and you’re grateful that you opted against the outerwear.

“Y/N!” Your eyes don’t have time to survey the colorful, loud room before a familiar voice catches your focus. Seokjin waves at you while exiting from behind the main bar, keeping his clear drink level as he meets you. “You did show up after all, huh?” He halfway hugs you, then begins in the walk back towards the bar, sipping gingerly at his martini.

“You know, I get impulsive when I’m spiteful.” You say jovially, smiling when the words cause him to laugh.

“Like when you dyed your hair because I joked-- very jokingly said I couldn’t imagine you doing it.” He shakes his head when you nod proudly at the memory, though the blue lasted about a month before you needed to go to a hairdresser to fix that mess you made. “What’ll you have? Remember you don’t have to pay for anything while you’re here-- well, don’t get the giant bottles of champagne though, those things are kind of pricey.”

“I’m not trying to dry out your supply, don’t worry.” He gives you a thumbs up and goes to mix you a drink you didn’t specify but as he reaches for the bourbon, you know he remembers your usual anyways. You thank him for the icy drink then very gently clink yours to his and take a long sip. A small burn in the throat that’s mostly warm. “You see anyone interesting so far?”

“I don’t know.” Seokjin shrugs, setting his empty glass down and you watch it quickly be whisked away by a dishwashing employee. “I feel like celebrities start to all look the same when I’m here all the time.” He leans his elbows onto the counter, smirking softly as he speaks, “By the way, I’ve seen quite a few looks in your direction since you walked in. Winning outfit tonight.”

Seokjin’s coy expression grows into amusement when your eyes widen from his words. Your hands shift a bit tighter around your glass as the single piece of ice floats to the top. You glance over your shoulder in wonder, biting back any satisfaction from your expression, but Seokjin knows better. “Hey, quit playing it off; you know you look hot, I saw your instagram story post-”

“Can you not?” You laugh at him and he joins in. Fitting a thanks to a bartender that gave him a new martini, he continues in his laughter while you go on. “So you liked the picture, huh?”

“I sent you the heart emoji face.” He grins, content with your relaxation as you take another drink. You shrug off his words.

“Excuse me,” The familiarly light voice drifts in your senses, as the seat next to yours becomes occupied. Your eyes find Jimin’s as he makes himself comfortable. Dusty rose colored hair styled up out of his face, and his lips are as springlike when he smiles gently at you, then turns his attention to Seokjin. “Can I order a drink?”

“He’s the owner.”

“I’m the owner.” You and Seokjin speak over each other, making him scoff, then continue as Jimin’s obscured hand finds the top of your thigh where your dress ends. A beat in your heart feels heavier. “But yeah, I can get you something. Jimin, right?”

“Yeah, and thanks. Gin and tonic, please.” Jimin speaks respectfully, turning his hand upwards as yours searches for his. Seokjin casts you a glance, noticing your very small shrug, he walks down the bar refraining from laughter. “You came?” He turns on the stool to face you, letting his boot settle on the footrest of your seat beside your heel.

“You can see me can’t you?” Your teasing earns his hand to squeeze your own. The action creates a ripple in your chest, growing larger as Jimin smiles wider.

“Lovely, don’t tease me. I’m just happy you’re here; I didn’t think you’d come.” You nod, but think against telling him about the reasoning behind your change of mind.

“Just thought why not.” You say simply, biting your lip as Seokjin places a drink beside Jimin. Seokjin then points his middle and index fingers to his eyes then towards you as he steps off once more.

“Did I interrupt something potential?” Jimin asks you catching the final bit of the actions. His tone is slightly lower than before, clearly curious above all.

“Friend of mine.” You settle any of his worries, even though there isn’t a defined obligation to do so. Jimin raises an eyebrow, surprised for a moment before eventually nodding,

“Ah, that’s right. Jin is this Seokjin.” He continues to nod, rubbing his neck with his hand sheepishly. You smirk softly and he sees it. “What?”

“Jealous?” Your tone drips with a joking sound, to ensure him that he didn’t need to take you seriously, but a piece of you hopes he would.

“Not jealous,” He says easily, eyes drifting to his untouched drink and you nod. As expected. “Maybe if he made you laugh longer.” You look at him. His expression is contemplative towards his drink. Calm, but something about it feels feigned. Jimin finds your eyes, losing himself for a second in the focus of your own. He scoots towards you, knee grazing yours as his face leans to speak tiny vibrations to your ear, “Why don’t we go to the VIP booths, baby?”

---

The majority of the crowds and dancing occurs on the ground level, while offset by half a story exists the VIP area that privately overlooks the club. Nothing particularly luxurious about it, other than its own set of employees to take orders for drinks. The nights you and Namjoon came with friends, Seokjin allows your group to use one, and you’re used to the tinted glass wall that filters away some of the pulsating music. Jimin mentions some other idols from the company being a part of the group with him that use the table he sits with you at, but also them all being far more interested in partying to be there for any longer than makeup touch-ups or a glass of water.

The knowledge makes the five drinks ingested throughout the next couple of hours hit differently. You know he’s had a similar amount of alcohol, but like you you don’t get affected as vigorously as other people. Nevertheless the lull in your head makes the slow kisses more frequent than other times when you and him were out in public together.

“I like this dress.” Jimin says as his hand runs along your side, feeling the smooth material against his skin and the small fidget of your waist when your grip settles along your hip. A smirk plays along his lips that end up against your neck, languidly pressing ministrations to the skin. “I’m glad you came.”

“I was thinking you didn’t really care if I did.” You admit though you gasp softly, gripping the silk of his top when his mouth travels over a sensitive spot. Jimin hums in thought, feeling your grip tighten from the sensation, then more so when he nibbles at the skin, sucking with the intent to leave it a reminding blotch,

“Of course I want to see you whenever I can.” Jimin says simply, almost a stung timbre in the words, as he pulls away finding your gaze for a passing moment then kissing your lips softly like words aren’t enough for him. You arms stray to wrap around his neck, letting him tug you closer to lengthen the kiss until you’re short of breath. “Did you say that because we haven’t been able to go on a date lately?”

Your chest rises and falls as it takes in air, arms remaining positioned around Jimin while he keeps his grip protective on your waist. Eyes searching through yours with worry cracking through. “No,” You shake your head, pecking his lips gently. “I was just saying something dumb. It’s been a weird week and all.”

“With,” Jimin’s voice stutters while he recalls everything that’s gone on the past week. “It was just the meeting, wasn’t it, baby?” He frowns when your eyes avoid his face to favor a stare towards the table. “Hey,” A hand cups your cheek, coaxing you to look back towards him as concern presents itself, “Lovely, you don’t have to hide things from me. Do you want to talk about it?”

“I don’t.” Flatly said. Jabbing at Jimin’s composure as he feels you metaphorically pulling away from him. “It’s nothing important.”

Nothing you think he’ll want to talk about. Jimin doesn’t like talking about your contract, he’s never let that topic stick around for more than a couple of back and forth sentences. If your growing dissatisfaction with your treatment is something he truly cares about, he would’ve spoken in your favor. You swallow air at the swordlike thought.

“If something’s bothering you-” You both startle as boots clack directly behind you. Shifting from Jimin he lets his hands fall from you when you move away. Turning to look over your shoulder you watch blonde hair walk away from you two, down the stairs towards the main floor. You smile bitterly, finding this whole thing ridiculous as you mumble,

“I have to hide making my songs, and I have to hide being with you.”

“Y/N-”

“We should call it quits for tonight, right?” You look back at Jimin wondering if the stinging in your eyes is visible to him. His expression appears to be at a loss, lips a line, and his hands clenching.

“Why are you bringing all that up?” Your heart drops at the question, and the disconnect from him continues as Jimin appears to grow stoic.

“You asked me if something was wrong, and then you say that?” Your voice feels hot and you sigh hoping it’ll help alleviate pressure in your throat. You remove yourself from the booth thinking he may stop you, but Jimin stays still watching you grab your clutch. “I don’t like how things are right now.”

Despite the vague pronoun, Jimin registers the firmness in your voice, and how you’re visibly upset with more than just his insensitive question. He bites his inner cheek, watching you take the first step away before he’s bolting from the booth to grab your hand.

“Baby,” His pleading tone makes the stinging in your eyes more unbearable. “Please don’t go. Let’s talk-”

“If I tell you I hate my contract what are you going to say?” You don’t look at him when the questions trembles from your lips in frustration that fizzes painfully in your head. “That,” You feel his grip loosen before you’re able to continue, “You’re going to help me change it?”

You hear the lively voices, and a fast-paced song dominating the air, but Jimin behind you remains quiet. Tugging your arm from his grasp takes little effort, like he was ready to let go. Let you leave. Unwilling to answer and put truth in the air.

You want to know why when you turn to face him but Jimin’s expression stops your open mouth from speaking. Like he’s resigned to himself, eyes matching with yours to show hardened seriousness. You step towards him while he follows your movement, looking down at you. He’s successful at hiding from you how much his heart hurts at the sight of your building tears.

“Jimin,” The tremble in your voice stabs into his mind more, a pensive barely there frown the only thing that lets you into his thoughts at all. “Don’t you think I deserve to have my name in the credits?”

His shoulders shrug uncertainly and still not a word. You’re unable to understand why he closes away every time this discussion comes up. Why is he on the side of Yerin to keep things as they are? A bud in your brain feels pulsing at the thorn of implications that question could lead to and it makes you feel desperate for something out of him.

Jimin’s palm finds your waist to stable himself when your hands reach for his top to pull him towards you, lips attaching themselves to one another if only to get him to remember that he cares about you despite whatever ridiculous persona he’s trying to play at. Kissing him makes him responsive and it’s as though he’s letting the hidden emotions out; you feel the longing as he tugs you closer to him so that your body is pressed to his and he’s hugging you.

When your tear connects with his cheek Jimin pulls away, a surprised expression mixing into his longer breaths for air. You let the next few droplets leave your eyes, because he didn’t break the wall gaping between you two. You release your hands from his shirt and walk away.

Jimin lets you.

if you enjoy please, please let me know! i hope you enjoy the series, i’m working really hard on it! : )

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[bluephoenixdruidicprincess]

My 2019 Blog Review

Today's the last day of 2019, so I thought it would be fun to dig through my archive and reflect on my blog activity over the past year. I am doing this on my phone but once I have access to a computer again, I'll put this all under a cut. I just can't do it on my phone.

Jan 2019

- Tumblr's background color changed and apparently I'm the only one who liked the change.

- Kingdom Hearts 3 release -- of course, this was a huge thing in my blog at the time. Afterall, I'd only been waiting 15 years for this game. And while I definitely had problems with the game, it also had some very memorable moments that I loved...like Sora punching Davey Jones (I never ever want to forget that moment).

- I began my adventure of learning Japanese. I'm doing pretty good so far.

- The Mummy (Brendon Fraser) appreciation. Occamshipper apparently doesn't like these movies but I love them. I met some great people because I told occamshipper that whereas they didn't like The Mummy Returns, it is in fact one of my favorite all time movies.

- Lots of rambling about my love for Lucy Heartfilia and the Nalu ship from Fairy Tail.

Feb 2019

- BoA Appreciation. I love K-Pop and BoA is one of my all time favs.

- The Vic Micnogna scandal. Honestly, I don't really care about what's going on with the trial, what bothers me is the stain that was left on Funimation because of it. The voice actors really alienated the fanbase in this scandal and I didn't like that.

- Power Rangers appreciation. I love Power Rangers and unironically, too. My favorite power ranger is Adam from Mighty Morphin.

- Within Temptation's new Resist Album dropped and I loved it. I love these epic stories they tell with their albums and the vibes they give.

- I watched the Mythica franchise and my appreciation affair for Zombie Girl began.

- Ronon/Keller appreciation. I loved this pairing so much and I'm super sad the show never did more with them.

- Legacies Reviews. Apparently people find me funny? I have a sense of humor that people enjoy?

Mar 2019

- Emily Bett Rickards revealed she would not be on Arrow for its final season. I was really depressed a out that and I got a lot of hate from comic book fans for daring to say that I like the character of Felicity Smoak.

- Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles appreciation. One of my favorite anime/manga of all time.

- I was a victim of credit card fraud because of Creation Entertainment and then they tried to deny they were at fault despite hundreds of their customers reporting credit card fraud all at the same time. They eventually retracted their statement but because of this, I will probably never go to a Creation convention again. They're way overpriced and I certainly will not entrust my important info to them again.

Apr 2019

- Shadowhunters final season started airing and they went from irritating to just plain boring. Seriously, the season's biggest crime isn't how misogynist and racist it was, it was that it was completely nonsensical and boring for me.

- The release of Taylor Swift's and Brendon Urie's collab of ME! and I seem to be the only one that seems to legitimately love that song (even the "spelling is fun" part, RIP you beautiful lyric, alas, you were too good and pure to last in this hateful unfunny world of judgemental culture).

- The X Family appreciation. This is one of my favorite Taiwanese dramas and definitely my favorite series in the KO franchise.

- I broke up with the main SPN meta community (otherwise known as the Positive Police). We just didn't see eye-to-eye. I didn't appreciate them lording over the fandom telling people what they should and should not ship, telling people what they should and should not like...and they didn't appreciate me saying so. Lots of blocking went on and I'm still eternally sorry for the people that got blocked by these big fish because they simply liked my posts.

May 2019

- Game of Thrones crappy ending. What is there to really say about it? It was terrible and misogynist AF.

- Ezra appreciation from the Natural Oneders TFS at the Table D&D campaign. Ezra Lockwood was my favorite character and I'm not okay with how he was written out of the campaign.

- I was quite angry about Dean destroying Chuck's guitar like Dean was a 5-year-old child angry that he didn't get his way (seriously, Dean needs to be sent to time-out).

Jun 2019

- Quicksilver and Dadneto meta commentary from FOX 's X-Men franchise. So much lost potential there, unfortunately (thanks, Dark Phoenix).

- Orca appreciation. They're beautiful, majestic creatures and I love them, they might be my spirit animal.

- Someone unfollowed me because I wasn't giving enough attention to real-world problems. Essentially, I wasn't woke enough I guess. But I'm sorry, if I want to feel all righteous and justicey, I'll watch the news. Social justice and politics are not primary focuses of this blog.

- Godzilla King of Monsters was fantastic.

- Chuck TV Series appreciation. I love this show and I miss it dearly.

Jul 2019

- Veronica Mars Season 4 discourse. Essentially I hate what happened to Logan and what it means for Veronica's character moving forward.

- Played Love Island The Game and had way more fun than I probably rightfully should've had.

Aug 2019

- Re-watched Sailor Moon and then watched Sailor Moon Crystal. Both shows are so much fun. Plus, I love Sailor Jupiter. I love Jupiter's personality and her power aesthetic is badass to match her personality.

- Taylor Swift's Lover album dropped. I might be in the minority but it actually ranks pretty low on my list of Taylor Swift albums.

- Skillet's Victorious album dropped a d ot was a huge disappointment for me.

- I found watermelon to be my new favorite post-workout snack.

Sep 2019

- I watched The Untamed and I absolutely adore this show. I started watching more chinese dramas because of this show. And whereas I haven't found something I enjoyed quite as much from the chinese drama list, I've still greatly enjoyed a lit of the shows...but they still have nothing on The Untamed. The Untamed is just so good.

- Lover Fest was announced. And it was real shady the dealings that were going on with this. It actually kind of made me wary of actually wanting to see Taylor live.

Oct 2019

- I began the Korean drama, Extra-Ordinary You. I haven't finished it yet, but I plan to. I wanted to wait until the entire series was done airing. It does really interesting things with tropes and I greatly enjoy this show and can't wait to to return to it.

- Sherlolly appreciation. Rediscovered my love for the Sherlock/Molly ship from Sherlock.

-Leverage appreciation. Absolutely fantastic show. Highly recommend it.

Nov 2019

-Psych tv series appreciation. Another one of my favorite shows of all time.

- I wrote a Dean Winchester endgame meta. It was fun.

Dec 2019

- Kamen Rider Den-O appreciation. My favorite from the Kamen Rider franchise. I've been re-watching it and it's so much fun. Sato Takeru is amazing in it and the fact that this one of his first acting jobs and he's able to pull off doing so many different characters is seriously amazing.

- SPN finally brought us an angel/vessel dynamic in the form of Adam and Michael and it was amazing.

- The Jumanji re-make appreciation. I love it and The Next Level is just as good as its predecessor and I'm anxiously awaiting the next film in the franchise.

- My thoughts on why I'm single. Mainly because I'm lazy and I just don't feel like doing through all of the work involved in dating.

There you have it. That's 2019 for me. It had its ups and its downs but blog wise, I think I had a pretty good year.

#2019 review

[spackeets-written-madness]

One Scholar to Another

A small gift to a friend that wanted to learn more about Cyssa Scourgepaw’s general personality so I wrote this. Something that happened in the past.

Description: Midona both loves and hates Trehearne, her niece, Cyssa Scourgepaw sets out to talk with the other scholar and form a deal. Fandom: Guild Wars 2 Characters: My own, Moma and Surinus ( @nonsense-with-sottises ), Midona, Auderen and Kyrus ( @the-bubble-opera ) and Trehearne Setting: Core, 1325 ae Words: 2214

It was not often that the two warbands met, but when they did, Midona Strifeheart, Pact Commander and Legionnaire of the Strife warband insisted on cooking for all of them; and made sure that there were seconds as well as plenty of space. The other warband in question was the Scourge warband, a skeleton warband much like Midona’s own and run by her niece: Legionnaire Cyssa Scourgepaw. Midona herself also brought some additionals with her: Surinus Ripmind and Paulina Ripclaw, both from another warband and having been invited by Midona to meet the rest of her ‘family’ and have dinner.

Cyssa Scourgepaw was standing next to her own partner, Moma Scourgewind as they both watched Surinus talk with Midona and Kyrus. The pink-haired charr turned to her ruddy-furred partner. “Bet you he doesn’t last three days with her,” she commented. Moma simply chuckled and nodded. 

Unfortunately her comment was heard by another of her warband and Faustus Scourgefang included himself into the conversation. “You don’t have to be mean,” he said as he walked closer to the pair.

Cyssa turned to her bandmate with a done look and slightly raised brow. “Have you met my aunt?” was the only thing she asked with a slight hint that he might have missed a point.

Faustus thought a bit. “Hmmm, well...She ain’t so bad, rough around the edges - though the same can be said for most charr. She’s also kind, motherly, endearing and -” he paused and looked at Cyssa’s expression. It clicked. “Ah… You meant her enemies.”

“Yes I did you blockhead, are your horns too big that they hamper brain-space?” the young necromancer insulted the engineer.

Faustus ignored the insult since it was not the first time he had been insulted by his Legionnaire. “One of these days, I’ll pick up when you mean one thing and not the other,” he commented. 

“And I will celebrate that day.”

Any other conversation was interrupted by a loud snarl conjoined with a sudden and terrified yelp, the three standing around turned their heads to see Paulina holding Fabias Scourgetail by the front of his shirt. “Normally I’d threaten to step on your tail, but I see that you’re a few inches short.” They heard Paulina snarl into the face a very scared looking charr.

Faustus kind of looked at the scene and seemed to pale at seeing his brother in trouble. “I-I’m going to go save my brother,” he said and quickly walked towards the larger female charr that held his brother. 

“Good idea,” Cyssa agreed. She still looked done. Very. She scanned the room they were in, Auderen was snooping around, Lunia was helping Faustus with Fabius and Decima was talking with Maximus. She then looked away because Kyrus called her name to say hi, then looked back and found Maximus’s head in a vase. Cyssa’s face screamed ‘are you kidding me?’ Decima was already trying to get her bandmate’s head out of the vase.

Cyssa spun on her foot in the opposite direction and began to walk away. “Midona, I’m going to my study, call me when dinner’s ready,” she said loud enough for her aunt to hear.

“Alright, dear!” Midona called back after putting a brief pause on the conversation she was having with Surinus. She then went back to her conversation as her niece slipped off to leave her idiots alone.

Dinner soon came and too quickly in Cyssa’s opinion as she wanted more time studying her books on Orr. But here she was, sitting down and eating her dinner. Moma was seated directly next to her on her right and her aunt was to her left. There was a lot of conversation around the table, and a lot of it Risen and Pact based since well, they were at war with Zhaitan.

Some things said by Paulina and Surinus were more Pact as a whole, what they were doing, war efforts, all that fun stuff. Cyssa wasn’t paying attention because she was currently listening to Midona rant about Marshal Trehearne, and the slyvari’s tendencies to go on Priory-esque historical rants about Orr in field while they were doing something rather important. It of course annoyed the soldier since she didn’t particularly care about the history of the place she was killing things in. Cyssa listened to her aunt rant about this guy that she both loved and hated for the duration of dinner until it ended.

Dinner came and it went, then they cleaned up and went to bed to be well rested in the morning.

When morning had come, Midona and her warband were already gone along with the two Rip warband members. After Scourge warband all got ready for the day and packed up their stuff for travel, they all waited outside with some haveing done some stretches.

“Soooooo, Legionnaire? Where to? Fields of ruin? Caledon Forest? Somewhere else fraught with danger and things to introduce my magic to?” Decima asked Cyssa. Decima Scourgemind was the warband’s mesmer and their tower since she was the largest in the warband.

“Depends, how for it are you guys to going to Fort Trinity to help with the invasion?” Cyssa countered.

Her whole warband cheered and started chanting ‘battle! Battle! Battle! Orr! Orr! Orr!’ like a bunch of crazies. After they had checked their Asuran tablets to see if they had the waypoint discovered, they poofed to the fortress. After they arrived, Cyssa instructed them to get familiar with the place before they headed off since she mentioned that she needed to see someone.

It did not take her long to find Marshal Trehearne’s office and she stepped into the open spaced location. 

Guards stopped her before she got any further. “Halt, only the Commander, officers, or those with appointments are allowed to speak with the Marshal,” one said.

“State your name, rank and placement in the Pact,” the other ordered.

Cyssa didn’t seem troubled by being stopped, in fact, she looked ready for that. “Cyssa Scourgepaw, Priory scholar, ex-Legionnaire to the High Legions and niece to Pact Commander Midona Strifeheart,” she said. 

The two guards looked at eachother, then her. “How do we know you’re not pretending to be her niece?”

“I can go get her if you’d like, but you wouldn’t like the scolding that follows.” Cyssa snapped.

They didn’t take too kindly to her threat and were about to call more guards when a sylvari came up to investigate the situation. “What is the problem, gentlemen?” Marshal Trehearne asked as he walked up to the entrance.

The two guards saluted him. “Sir! This charr is claiming to be the Commander’s niece!”

Trehearne paused to take a thorough look at Cyssa, he then seemed to recognise her. “Are you, Cyssa Scourgepaw?”

“That’s what I told Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee here,” Cyssa replied.

The slyvari’s face lit up with a small smile. “Ah, Midona told me quite a lot about you! And that your most distinguishing features were your bright pink wardrobe along with matching pink hair. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, I’m Marshal Trehearne,” he introduced himself.

Cyssa nodded. “I see that she tortures you with lectures about me as you torture her with lectures about Orr’s history,” she jabbed.

He took the jab well, in fact he just looked a bit sheepish. “Well, I do suppose that’s fair.”

“Speaking of Orr, that’s why I’m here. I wanted to compare notes on the history of Orr with you. Mostly as a trade to get your lectures off my aunt’s back before she chucks you into the ocean,” Cyssa said.

“She had also mentioned that you commonly want things by trade for something else. Usually benefiting yourself and another close to you,” he mentioned. The Marshal didn’t seem too annoyed at what she said. He just beckoned for the shorter charr to follow him.

Cyssa followed him. “Oh but sometimes my trades benefit everyone. Sometimes,” she admitted while she sat down on a chair, and placed her books down on the table. Trehearne sat down across from her after he grabbed his own books.

They ended up trading and comparing for nearly thirty minutes before Trehearne had to get back to work, but he promised that he wouldn’t prattle to Midona about Orr for awhile as long as Cyssa kept coming back for them to continue trading knowledge. After that, Cyssa went back to collect her warband and get started with killing dead things. She found them after some searching since they were all scattered throughout the fort, but she had found them and off they went to Orr.

The Scourge warband set foot on the plagued dirt of the risen lands, the call of undead birds filling the stale, briny, ashen air, almost always seemed to follow them as they walked over the sodden dirt. Despite the land being up for years, the dirt never dried, which resulted in it being very akin to a swamp. As they walked over the slightly dried path, they all had their weapons out and at the ready, scanning the rocks and dead coral for any Risen. The land itself was dead, but it also wasn’t, risen just like the army that shambled over it.

The seven charr in the warband had both pairs of their ears trained for noises that would betray Risen. Auderen - being a sylvari - mostly waited for the cue from the others since they had far better hearing than himself.

The minutes ticked by.

Suddenly Lunia let an arrow loose, at the same time, the rest of the warband launched their own ready spells at what would have been a Risen ambush. Lunia’s salamander drake, Ember, also launched herself at a Risen. It was glorious chaos. The warband ended up separated slightly but still in view of each other while they beat back the attempted ambush.

Moma and Maximus in typical elementalist fashion, had set everything aflame and also caused the earth to fight back as well. Decima had made clones of herself to explode and help her focus her magic beams on the various walking corpses. Fabius and Faustus had set up some turrets in record time to assist the warband, Lunia had made it rain arrows and Auderen had picked off stragglers. Cyssa had ended up wandering a little further than intended, since she wanted to make sure that she’d kill everything in the immediate vicinity.

After several more minutes, everything was well and truly dead. Again at least. This allowed the warband to take a breather and made sure that they were all accounted for. No one was badly injured, a little scrape here, a bruise there, but they were able to move along. 

Decima was doing a headcount and realised something. “Uhhhh, guys? The Legionnaire is still missing,” the mesmer said and at once everyone paled and immediately began to look for her trail.

It didn’t take long until someone called out. “I found a Risen downed by some very familiar corruption!” Auderen shouted slightly, which caused everyone to abruptly run over.

They followed the trail a bit further along. Then they heard the voice of the one person they didn’t want to meet right at the moment: Commander Midona. “Scourge warband! Where is your Legionnaire?” Midona asked as she runs up to them with a small entourage of Pact soldiers with her. She kept it formal for now.

The warband all kind of look at each other and quickly got into an argument about who was going to tell her. This resulted in the Commander looking very done as she listened to them banter. 

Maximus stepped forth after a few more moments of arguing. He saluted her first then he spoke, “Commander Strifeheart, we were almost ambushed by Risen, took them down but Legionnaire Scourgepaw wandered off in the battle and we’re following her trail.” He gestured to the dead Risen that had the tell-tale marks of Cyssa’s specific magic. 

Midona said nothing as she quickly took over the group as they continued to search for her niece. They followed the trail to a clearing that had a number of dead Risen that surrounded a rock. On that rock sat the familiar pink clothed necromancer whom didn’t seem to concerned that she had nearly given several people heart attacks. She was jotting something down when they appeared, after she was done, she closed her field journal and stood up from the rock, grabbing her staff. “About time you guys found me, I didn’t leave small crumbs,” was all Cyssa said to the group. Then she decided to give Midona a loose salute after she noticed that there were Pact soldiers with her aunt.

Midona looked like she was about to strangle her own niece, but decided against that for a very heavy and frustrated sigh. Moma shared a similar reaction.

“So, what’d you find?” Fabius asked.

“Oh I found an Orrian tablet that I hadn’t read about before so I stopped to study it,” she answered casually. She then walked past her aunt to head back to the trail. “Oh yeah, Commander, I got Trehearne of your back about his lectures. You’re welcome,” she called over her shoulder as she walked past and led her group off to no doubt continue to down Risen.

#guild wars 2 #guild wars fanfiction #trehearne gw2 #orginal characters #gw2 #gw2 charr #gw2 sylvari #Scourge Warband #Commander Midona AU #keiran writes

[ramblinganthropologist]

Writober 2020 - 24 (ink)

Summary: Everyone loves a fan meet and greet, right? Well, Ray doesn’t, especially when she winds up on staff at her own event. What’s an idol supposed to do when her fans don’t show up? Apparently, the answer is manning the line so nobody acts up for her senpai. At least she’s useful that way.

(Sunburst Idol Unit)

---

“Hey, thanks for stopping by today!”

“You're going to be the next head of the Zodiac for sure, Lena-chan!”

Lena was all smiles as she finished shaking her fan's hand. “Here's hoping anyway. Keep your eyes out for me!”

Somehow, she made it look so easy.

Ray shook her head as she glanced at the line in front of her. All of them were wearing some form of red, and plenty were sporting bandannas. It was easy to see who they were here for, and just why they were waiting so long.

Thus... there she was helping out.

“Hey, next person c'mon up.”

Some kid not much older than her breezed past and started chatting with Lena about something related to school. Ray didn't really parse much of it as she kept her eye on the line. They were pretty full, so the time limit was strict today. While she wasn't quite Seiza Academy level bouncer, she could get the job done just fine.

As long as... you ignored she was technically part of this fan meet event as an idol and not staff.

Her own line was... empty. It had been since she had gotten there. Nobody had come to see her to get an autograph or to shake her hand. That last one she didn't mind all that much, but it was still … well, it sucked. There was no other way to put it besides the fact it fucking sucked and she hated standing there. But running away to the bathroom wasn't an option, and Lena needed the help. So she just pushed it down.

Later, when she got home... that wasn't going to be fun. Hooray, rejection sensitive dysphoria rearing its ugly head.

“Shoot, my pen's out of ink.”

Lena's voice carried over the din of the waiting crowd. Ray was already on it, reaching into her pocket in order to toss a new one. It was one of the red ones, not the pink one she kept in her left pocket. That one was hers.

“Heads up, senpai!”

Even though she had been a soccer player, her fellow idol caught it. “Thanks, Raychi!”

A few in the crowd gave her approving looks as she stepped back into her spot at the side of the line. Of course, it didn't exactly make them jump over to meet her, so that didn't really mean much. Luckily, Ray was good at projecting a neutral face as everything crumbled to pieces inside of her. Nobody was the wiser as she assumed the position.

Would it have killed them to come see her after, though? She wasn't asking for much...

It didn't matter. The line kept going, and fans kept wanting to meet their idol. Most of them were more than happy to abide by the rules. The few that didn't... well, a glare from her put them in their place just fine. No need to chuck people on their ass when a giant lesbian is watching the line.

If this idol thing didn't work out, she clearly had a future in crowd management. No doubt by the time she was fully grown she would even tower over the crowds back home. What that would make for her in Japan, she wasn't sure.

But she was happy to think about it. The alternative was just depressing.

“So uh... whose that other table supposed to be for? Is someone else from Seiza coming later?”

One of the fans with a bandanna around their neck was whispering to someone in a bright red t-shirt. They were both pointing over at her table, where a plain sign said that the line began a few feet behind it. Nobody was exactly running up to it, all things considered, so no doubt it probably looked weird.

T-shirt fan was more in the know as Ray tried to avoid the conversation by staring blankly ahead. “No... that's the line for Ray Jones. Guess nobody showed up.”

“Wait, is that why she's here? I thought it was just because Lena-chan knew she could keep people in line.” They had the nerve to glance her way, then look back just as quickly. Smart. “She's handling it pretty well, I'd be crushed if that was me.”

Bandanna nodded to this sentiment. “Same. Guess she's used to it.”

No, she was just good at faking it. Ray resisted the urge to grit her teeth as she motioned the next in line along. It probably made her look even scarier to those who would consider misbehaving, but maybe that was for the best. If she couldn't be an idol, at least she was a deterrent.

Once the clock struck 2, Lena got up. “Hey, everyone, I need to take a fifteen minute break so I can stretch my wrist and eat something! I'll be right back, so don't go anywhere!”

A large amount of fans responded with hopes she had a good snack break, to which they got a wave in return. Given the fact her own stomach was rumbling, Ray took this as a sign that maybe she should break too. She glanced at the line before shrugging her shoulders.

“Yeah, same...”

Nobody heard her as she headed off to where the vending machines were. She caught Lena in front of one, the idol happily feeding change into the slot so she could get her snack. Right then, she was in her own world as Ray stalked the machine that had Monster in it.

Was it healthy, no, but fuck it. With the day she was having she didn't feel like being healthy.

“Here, to thank you for helping me out.” Lena was nudging something into her side – looked like a cream cake. Ray was never one to turn down free food, so she accepted it as they sat down to eat their snacks. Much like her, her senpai wasn't being very healthy either – the sugar would've killed somebody, but she needed the calories.

Ray just needed something to do with her hands so she didn't punch a wall.

“Thanks.” She popped the top on her Monster and took a long sip. “Looks like you've got a full house going on out there. That'll make you look good to Seiza for the Zodiac ranking, right?”

Lena nodded as she drank from her can of soda. “Yeah, I think I should be heading up to the final three this week if I keep it up.”

“Kick her ass.”

She didn't know the evil Nana, of course, but if Lena hated her then she had to be bad. The idol didn't hate anyone, she was like a freaking puppy. Anyone who failed the love you test was pure evil, at least by her account. Then again, she wasn't exactly someone to go to for better judgment.

Much to her surprise, Lena's expression turned sheepish as she picked at her own cream bun. “Listen uh... I'm sorry that you had to stay behind. I know you have that thing with-”

Ray shook her head as she started to eat her own snack. “RSD isn't your problem, senpai. Nobody showed up for me, that's just how it is.”

“Yeah but at least you could've gone home or something. You're stuck here with me.” Lena was frowning now. “I appreciate and all, don't get me wrong... but I'm worried you're doing this to hurt yourself.”

As she spoke, she was flexing her ink-covered hands. They were both left handed, so ink smearing when they wrote was part of the job description. The side of her hand was absolutely scarlet – it was a miracle she wasn't getting it on her fans. Honestly, it kind of looked like a murder scene...

“Raychi?”

Ah. She was doing it again, wasn't she? Picking up on tiny details to ignore the thing that was actually bothering her.

Ray finally allowed herself to frown as she sipped at her energy drink that really didn't do much in the energy department. “Self harm isn't really in my pathology description, senpai.”

“Maybe not that, but... you know. You're really hard on yourself, I don't want you to do this as a punishment or anything.” Lena sighed as she finished her bun off and licked her fingers. “Though your fans are dumb if they don't come. Just plain dumb.”

That got her snickering into her drink. “Thanks, senpai.”

Their time was growing close to an end – she swore she could hear the muttering on the other side of the wall. So, Ray finished up her energy drink and tossed the can. Lena was right behind her, also disposing of her trash. After a quick trip to the bathroom to freshen up, both were walking back into the main hall.

“Hey, everyone, I'm back!”

Lena had shifted back into idol mode as she took her table once more. Ray returned to her position by a nearby column, arms folded across her chest as she leaned back. They still had plenty of fans to get through if they wanted to finish on time. No wonder the other staff were really harping on that time limit.

Speaking of... one was coming her way.

“What's up, need something?” She shifted positions, returning to her full height. To the woman's credit, she didn't cringe as much as others did. Definitely looked a little unnerved by the giant foreigner, but she covered it well.

Maybe they wanted her to move or work the merch or something...

“Oh, uh... we need you at your line.” She gestured towards a small line practically dwarfed by the bandanna-wearing army. “Your fans are waiting.”

Ray felt her heart pound in her ears as she managed a nod. Now, it was the staff leading her to her table, where the first person was already waiting for her. It was a girl, maybe a few years older than her, still wearing her school uniform. She had a bright pink bow in her hair that matched her image color perfectly, and in her arms was a rolled up poster.

Shit, she brought merch with her.

“Oh, uh... sorry it took me so long to get over.” She nodded her head. “Uh... wow. Hi?”

The girl smiled at her. “Am I the first?”

“Yeah... you are. Forgive me that I suck at this.” Ray rubbed the back of her head. “You uh, want me to sign that for you?”

The poster was unrolled – it was from her first single. Just seeing it on the table made her heart pound as she found a spot to sign her name in the neon pink pen she had brought with her. For once, the ink didn't smudge as she worked, sighing in relief once it was dry. She hadn't messed it up.

“Man, I was worried I was going to smear everything.” She handed it back. “Thanks for supporting me...”

Her school-girl fan giggled. “It's Nami.”

“Thanks, Nami. Way to restore my faith in humanity.”

They shook hands briefly, and then her fangirl moved on. However, Ray wasn't done just yet. A small crowd was starting to trickle in, some of them dressed as though they had just come from a mosh pit. All of them had something pink on – buttons, shirts, a few ribbons on people with hair long enough to hold it. They looked excited to be there as they stepped into line, talking animatedly. It wasn't quite the size of Lena's line... but it was hers.

She had fans.

The staff who had walked her to the table was back. “They printed the wrong time on the poster. Seiza corrected it, but nobody told Sunburst.”

Well... shit.

Despite that, Ray found herself snickering as she got her pink pen ready for more. “Well, then I better get started.”

Her next statement came loud enough for her line to hear. “Alright, y'all, you coming or what? Get your shit ready because I'm probably gonna babble a lot!”

She got cheers in response, and a few chuckles. While some of the red line looked disturbed, her pink party was down to clown. Ray definitely caught Lena smiling and giving her a thumbs up as she prepared for the next person in line, pen at the ready.

No doubt by the end of this, the side of her hand was going to be absolutely fluorescent pink. Well, at least a few people would get a hand print with their signature. That had to be worth something, right?

Hell if she knew the merch game, she was an idol. A very busy idol who now had to work her way through a fan event. Good thing she had a few extra pens in her jacket, because she got the feeling she was going to need them.

#writober2020 #sunburst idol unit #ramblinganthropologist's writing #Ray Jones Sunburst Idol Unit #Tsukamoto Lena Sunburst Idol Unit

[televinita]

Zoo 3.11, “Cradles and Graves”

Maybe, you’re gonna be the one that saves me

I don't know if I'm more upset that this show had the gall to unironically use (a cover of)“Wonderwall” for dramatic effect, or that after 3 days of my inability to stop watching this episode, it's actually working for me.

I distinctly remember bursting out laughing when the first lyrics hit my ears, and now I'm like, teary eyed and nodding sagely through that whole montage. "Wow. So deep. So profound and meaningful."

------

A list of things I did not care for this week: the IADG bullpen unless Tessa was talking. Now that we've got that out of the way... Some things I like about the first 5 minutes -Imagining the Darkest Timeline version where they are all already dead by the time Clem finds them. -The (unintentional?) hilarity of the fact that Jackson's blood waits for the exactly perfect moment to ooze under the door for maximum dramatic effect -The fact that Mitch is found on the stairs instead of where he was shot, which suggests to me that he got to feel the full horror of seeing both Max and Jamie on the ground before he succumbed to his own wound (which is probably just an irresponsible directing choice because if he had, I'd think he'd be a little more grateful about the whole them-not-being-dead part, but it's fun to think about! Otherwise I just get bogged down again in wondering about the logistics of GSW injuries.) Ctrl + Z I loved it, but my parents and I could not stop laughing during the entire resurrection scene. "So I guess everybody's actively dying and no one can help us, but it's cool. Just gimme some of that tank serum (totally valid medical term) and mix it with water (just your basic home remedy recipe), and then we'll suffocate them back to life and five minutes later their mortal wounds will be fine and we can get on with the real problems." A.K.A. So there's example 57 or so of an entire episode's worth of possible plot being pushed aside because this show refuses to take a breath. We could have wrung so much more emotion out of Clementine, whilst ignoring her own signs of labor, trying to triage her father, grandfather, adoptive mother, surrogate uncle I'm pretending she is already attached to more than I'm sure she is, and other surrogate uncle who is also her best chance of saving her baby, the most important of all, if something goes wrong in delivery. ...and GDI now I gotta go find a special episode of Grey's Anatomy to get my mass tragedy fix. But I'm grateful that even at Zoo speed, they still gave me a little taste (in two flavors!) of people suffering the after-effects of injuries the serum couldn't fully fix. You're Responsible, You're the One to Blame, It's Your Fault :( to everyone being too busy hating her to notice Jamie cradling a clearly injured arm. But I love absolutely every sentence in this 7-way argument, including but not limited to Mitch's strangled "are you full term? how long was I out?!", the group-wide reveal of when exactly Mr. Duncan disappeared, Jackson's deadly-quiet anger, Jamie's valid defense of her actions, Mitch trying to take his daughter and blow this popsicle stand at a doubled-over limp, Clem taking her sweet time mentioning the quarantine, Max and Jamie's "oh" realizations about the plane, and Mitch's fabulously cranky echo and "what now" attitude. Last but far from least, the disgusted "I can't even look at you" was kind of my favorite part? I dig it when one member of an OTP is that intensely furious at the other out of hurt. (see also: Castle at the end of season 4)

A+ Comic Relief Laughing for 1 million years at Clem hopping off the exam table pantsless while all the men in the vicinity double take and look away* (except for Sam, whom Mitch hilariously whacks on the arm for his impudence, in my favorite sight gag since "Special Consultant") *the fact that Abe also does this, while understandably instinctive and appropriately respectful, is also kind of hilarious given where he just was 

Oh My Darling(s, Sam &) Clementine (who can't make a good shipmanteau to save their life) I don't have enough interest to do it myself, but it sure sounds like the story of how they met would make a pretty great YA novel plot. Anyone who doesn't actually want to spend the month trying to be a paid author need a NaNoWriMo prompt? Particularly someone who likes world-building, because this show leaves things wide open to fill in the details of U.S. society outside New York and the plane. Speaking of which! Did Clem happen to share with him the part of her backstory about being raised as an orphan basically the same way for the same reason? Because that seems like it would decently bond them. I like this parallel. Also update, I am getting a lot fonder of his face, mostly because he shut up and stayed out of the way except when I needed him to chime in to be sweet and supportive of Clementine (or side with her dad about ranking her over the baby on the priority list). He seems like he's really tried/is trying to be a good partner, and I'm impressed that he holds his ground despite a faceful of largely unwarranted hostility from her. I might actually be okay with him being the head of his family, even though up until now my head has danced with visions of Clem raising her baby under Mitch (and Jamie)'s purview and/or roof, Last Man Standing style. (although I guess there's always Reba-style, where both young parents are under that roof) (I realize I'm making a lot of assumptions about everyone's ability to stay alive and/or live a semi-normal life)

Beta Ship 2.0 / My Wonderwall** There's something immensely funny to me about the juxtaposition of Jackson being in his Brooding Cave Of Isolated Despair while Tessa is in a brightly ilt location, in the middle of the hustle and bustle and basically being like, "Buck up and stop being so melodramatic." (Jackson: The prophecies have spoken. Food turns to dust in my mouth. A great wave shall fall upon us all. // Tessa: is your plane out of groceries again?) But on a serious note, I love so much that he's thisclose to broken until she pulls him out of it that I'm not even gonna whine about him asking Tessa to do the same thing he's punishing Jamie for. Though in his defense, he did say "stop" her and not "kill her,” which is an important distinction for him. **My friend once wrote a Jim/Pam (The Office) parody of Jim/Pam stories using this title, and that is at least 50% of why I can't take this song seriously even though I actually have always loved it. 

I Don't Know What To Do My Whole Brain is Celebrating "How do you know the name of Jamie's scorpion?" "Because my son and Jamie have, uh, very lively pillow talk."** !!!!!!!!!! NO BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE.

The fact that Abe pipes up despite a sucking chest wound just so he can help take the mick out of Mitch is glorious. The cranky and ineffectual "shut up" in response is THE BEST. I love that Mitch has just always blatantly refused to publicly acknowledge how he feels about Jamie, despite the fact that everyone and their mother is like,  "Oh yeah, I know Mitch. Snarky scientist, walks around with hearts in his eyes to match the one on his sleeve?" (Mitch, in the distance: I do not LOVE her, okay, I just...miss her when she's not around, think about her all the time, and I imagine us one day running towards each other in slow motion and I'm wearing a brown suede vest.) I doubly appreciate this exchange because I was wondering when the hell these people actually sleep and I was getting worried there was no recognizable place in canon that they might have both had a chance to go to bed at the same time. **This writer could not have more clearly been flagging us with a fic prompt. Max Morgan, Love Doctor My very favorite of the small moments in this ep is Max insisting that Mitch let him patch him up. I was all on board for some serious injury, but I loved the subversion of his attention being caught by the scars I thought the show had forgotten about instead. "Oh, Mitch."

That just kills me. I want to unpack their relationship right here so much more, but also, it's 7pm on the night of new Zoo. Suffice to say Mitch isn't the only parent who suffers over the thought of his kid being in pain tonight, and that's beautiful. And gosh do I love him quietly, individually, nudging Mitch and Jamie back towards each other. The promise that Mitch will understand eventually was an immediate balm upon my soul. If Max says a thing about my ship, it must be true! Mitch + Being A Mess of Emotions About His Daughter (if anyone wanted to make a gifset off of this theme I would not be opposed) Words cannot express how thrilled I am that Mitch gives zero bothers about Sam's baby daddy rights and takes up prime positioning to stroke Clementine's hair nonstop throughout the whole labor,* even stealing the requisite final "you can do this" encouragement. He also gets to be the first one to hold the baby and it's amazing.

* and makes some pretty wonderful faces over how hard it is to see her in pain and not be able to do anything about it -- and remind me I've got either some meta or a story scrap about how this is what Audra was on the front lines for all those years he selfishly hid away, telling himself it was for the best P.S. As much as I love that Mitch just falls apart in full Worried Dad mode and can't seem to process a single medical term or physical symptom as it pertains to pregnancy, you know that if Abe weren't a sex doctor and the writers weren't butts, Mitch would absolutely be whipping out the stethoscopes and telling us all about the time he delivered a baby gorilla so this is basically the same thing -- I imagine Clem would take loud offense here -- while roping in Jamie as a delivery nurse to follow his instructions to the letter (because there are some things fathers just should not do no matter how brilliant they are). Things I would like to know Why Mitch -- who apparently had a through and through -- is the only one whose gunshot wound is still bothering him Why Clementine didn't once ask where Jamie was. (at which point I'd really like to see Mitch try and explain that one.)

It is straight up ridiculous to me that 19-year-old girl in labor, surrounded by men, would not want a woman with her, particularly one she loves. This is the most "what...man...[wrote] this" moment I have ever had about TV.

Did I just miss it, or is it kinda weird that Sam doesn't bat an eye upon finding out Charles Duncan is actually a different person and his girlfriend's father? 

Leftover Thoughts

This show is so nuts, I am just now realizing I didn't even stop to wonder how the hell Abigail reanimated herself last week before now.

Mitch being a testy bitch @ Abe is a thing that just does not get old. ("You put hybrid goo in my daughter? Was that not worth a little chat?")

Aww @ Mitch's mini pep-talk about being a good parent, followed by the "OK time to go" and the sweet "I'm having this baby?" / "You are having this baby."

I also really enjoy Mitch deciding to be cranky about Sam just because he's there and he can. It's kinda like sniping at Logan, but more fun and with way better reasons. (Which I hope is exactly what Mitch says when Clementine inevitably tells him to knock it off)

"Goodbye frequent flyer miles" lmao

I love that instead of shutting down the beacon by cutting the wire, they multiplied its effect by a thousand and destroyed a city, to which the response is basically, "Whoops."

"You've been good for my son. Take care of him for me." So I LOVE THIS, but also: dammit Max that is not what "die for our ship" means.

But I love the moment where Jamie and Max, individually, hear the baby crying. The joy dawning on their faces is so pure it actually makes it worthwhile that they're not present at the birth itself.

(I know we're especially mad about Jamie. But honestly, if it means All Mitch All The Time, that's an OK trade to me.)

tl;dr if something is not mentioned please assume I loved it

COMING SOON:

(will be links shortly) Mini essays analyzing Jamie V. Jackson, Mitch/Jamie and Max's death.

In conclusion: I spent my entire night writing this, but it was worth it. Future Me is gonna love looking back.

#cbs zoo #episode reactions #zoo 3.11 #2200 words AND THIS ISN'T EVEN ALL OF IT #most of the Mitch and Jamie analysis is yet to come

[runawayforthesummer]

Chapter 7: Gauntlet (Or Handkerchief?) Thrown

The ball is still going on; Hamilton has resorted to drinking.

After taking his leave and bowing to Eliza Schuyler, Alex went back to drinking mulled cider from the Schuyler orchards spiked with apple brandy from the Pastures’ own trees and followed that, perhaps a bit unwisely, with French wine spiced with cinnamon and cloves.

He is a lightweight.  It’s not just canon.  It’s fact.

Still, he smokes cigars and drinks whisky like he’s Don fucking Draper.

Taking advantage of the general’s lavish hospitality

Why am I the only one who remembers Philip Schuyler told a 20 year old soldier to sleep in a barn?

...

OMG

Then Hamilton refers to two of the girls surrounding him as

Comely lasses

I want off this train!!!

He thinks these other girls might be fun at another party, but he can’t get over those Schuyler sisters.

Angelica, regal and self-possessed, even next to her less-than-graceful partner…Peggy, laughing vivaciously and looking as though she was dancing with a French court rather than an awkward lad…But above all there was Eliza, wearing a dress more suited to the schoolroom than the ballroom, who had insulted his name and rank at every turn, and had even stepped on his foot—and who made him want nothing more than for her to step on the other.

Why? She’s a bitch.

THE THING IS I have a hard time believing Ham would at all like a girl like this (let alone that I don’t think Eliza was at all like this).

This guy was enormously sensitive about his station and rank and I imagine there were plenty of rich girls who DID insult all those things, and to his face.  There’s a reason he married one of them who didn’t.

To me, de la Cruz seems to be lacking of understanding of who either Alex or Eliza were, and what drew them to one another.  And that’s why this book is so bad.

And idk again maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t reading it in the context of what I know.  But then again, she chose to write historical fiction.  You gotta expect this shit will happen.

What was it about the sharp-tongued lass wearing a homespun gown, a modest cotton dress that touched his heart in its bold demonstration of her alliance to the patriot cause?

What bold demonstration?  She’s making heart eyes at John Andre! What are you even talking about, Hamilton?  What have you seen her do that shows her being a patriot at all?  And I’ve talked enough about her dress, so I won’t, but GOD.  This book is stupid.

And why on earth was she dancing for the third time with that blasted British office, Major Andre?

GEE HAMILTON B/C SHE WAS MAKING HEART EYES AT HIM.

Some soldier interrupts Hamilton’s dance with one of the Dutch girls he’s using to distract himself from Eliza.  Hamilton tries to be kind to the fellow soldier, who has lost a leg in the war.  And AT FIRST I got excited that Gouverneur Morris was somehow here.

Instead, it’s a man who decides to insult Hamilton’s background.  Fun!

“Normally you would except the son of gentry to shirk the battlefield.  But in this case it is the nobody commoner who flees glory and hides behind a clerical duty or some other equally flimsy excuse while the nobleman defends his country’s honor.  But then, it isn’t really your country now, is it?”

Hamilton, leave.  Go into town.  Find a place to crash.  Do not put up with this bullshit. 

Hamilton tries to save face (without starting a duel) but it takes Stephen van Rensselaer getting involved for “Peterson” to back down.

“Everybody knows you got ‘injured’ when you stabbed yourself in the ankle with your own bayonet while you were loading your gun, and then you fell down drunk in a latrine and got it infected so that it had to be amputated.”

IMAGINE being read like that by a child! Amazing. 

Awwww!  John Church also stands up for Hamilton! Yay!

Brother-in-laws!!!! (one day)

However, Peterson is not feeling this either.

“You! A lobsterback! You dare to insult me in my own house.”

Eliza, who had been silent throughout the whole exchange, spoke up.  “Actually, Mr. Peterson, Mr. Church is not a soldier and hence does not wear a redcoat, and pray I remind you, the Pastures is my father’s house.”

Well at least she wasn’t heinous for once in this book.

Anyway, all the rich people at the party gang up on Peterson and shame him for being an ass.  Can they do that to Philip Schuyler next?  And then Eliza?

Peterson, though, has some words for Eliza. 

“And you, girl.  If your mother thinks you will make a rich match, she’s sorely mistaken.  No one is interested in a girl afflicted with intellect and opinion and a small dowry! It’s why you only have a redcoat and a clerk as your dance partners this evening!”

Actually, it was pretty common in the area Eliza’s from for girls to be educated.  The idea being that she should be smart and able to discuss issues of importance.  Yes, it was to help her husband do his job better, but it still mattered that she be well-versed in subjects of the day, especially the war. 

There was a shocked silence from the assembled, until Alex spoke, his words cold as the first frost: “You will apologize to the lady.”

“Apologize? For telling the truth?” Peterson sputtered.  “Why?  Is she your paramour, is that it?  Oh, Colonel Hamilton, do not protest—everyone has noticed your interest in the girl.  You can barely take your eyes off of her.”

You know, if Eliza weren’t such a demon in this book, I’d really love that Ham is the one more into her than she is into him.  Too bad.

Anyway, whatever, this dude storms off. 

Eliza turned to Alex.  “Thank you,” she said quietly.

Good.  Now apologize for being awful earlier.

“It is an honor to come to your defense,” he said with deep sincerity, his heart hammering under his uniform.

“And I must commend you on your restraint.  An ugly situation could have grown much uglier had you not shown such decorum.”

Alex smiled.  “Those are the kindest words I’ve heard all evening.”

Eliza looked as if she was going to take them back, but she held his gaze and didn’t look away from him.  He wished he could tell her how he really felt, but somehow he understood it would not be welcome at this juncture.  Alex stepped back with a gentlemanly bow, watching Eliza walk away on the arm of a British major.

:(.  You know how normally I only care about women and men are only useful as far as they make that woman happy?  I sort of feel like that, except I just want Alex to be happy.

Oh god, hours later, Hamilton is taken to the barn.  Apparently he’d thought before that was mostly a joke! :(((((

THIS IS AWFUL.

The interior of the lofty barn at the foot of the hill was no less cold than the November night outside.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, PHILIP SCHUYLER?!

“With the house so full of guests, Mrs. Schuyler was unable to find a spare blanket, but there’s plenty of hay,” Rodger said without sarcasm.

One time, when I was like just out of college, my friends and I got to go to a really fancy New Year’s Eve party at a legit billionaire’s house.  It was great until we basically couldn’t arrange a ride home due to the Rose Parade the next morning and the host was like “well you can sleep on the floor.  Here’s a blanket for the six of you to share.”   I thought THAT was pretty cold.  This is so awful.

Before he leaves, Rodger hands him what turns out to be the handkerchief Eliza stuffed down her bra earlier. 

It smelled like her perfume, and he inhaled its sweet scent, bringing it to his nose, just as a scrap of paper fluttered out of it.

He’s so gone.  He’s so gone! 

The note reads:

Wait for me.  The hayloft.  After the ball.

If Eliza is just tricking him, I’m going to give up reading this book.

Knowing that she wants to see him makes up for having to sleep in a fucking barn. 

She would be here soon.  It was after the ball.  What would he say to her? …

And now she was on her way. 

He fought sleep, waiting.

And waiting.

This poor guy.

He falls asleep and wakes up alone in the morning.

I hate her.

I mean, real talk, probably someone else wrote the note, not Eliza, so Hamilton is going to harbor ill feelings for no reason.

But whatever. 

Right now, I hate her and feel legit awful for him.

#alex & eliza a love story #melissa de la cruz #live blogging

[sporkfosterfan]

Photographs

A story I wrote for two of my OCs. It captures various moments of their lives through the photographs they took together. I own all the characters. Any resemblance to real life people is coincidental.

**********

“Mrs. Avauss, say hello to your two baby girls.”

The words of the doctor caught Mrs. Avauss’s attention, and when she looked at the twins in her arms, she felt her heart swell with joy.

Her husband, Mr. Avauss, stepped next to her. He watched, wonder clear in his eyes, as the doctor carefully handed the newborns to them. “We ran some tests. They’re both breathing well and are in good shape. If you feel ready, then you may bring them back to your house.”

“Thank you,” Mrs. Avauss said, practically beaming.

“You’re welcome,” the doctor replied. “What are you going to name them?”

She exchanged a glance with her husband before pointing to the babies and saying, “This one is Lilian, and the other is Layla.” Lilian was looking around at her surroundings while Layla slept.

“Lilian and Layla?” repeated the doctor, writing them down on a notepad. “Good names. I’ll add them to the records.”

Mrs. Avauss smiled down at her daughters and whispered to her husband, “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

“I agree,” he said. “Hold on, I need to get a photo of this.” He walked up to the doctor and held out a camera. “Would you?”

“Sure,” she replied, taking it from him.  

“Thanks.” He then walked back over to his wife and leaned over her, smiling.

The doctor held up the camera and took a picture of the new family. It would be the first of many.

 **********

“Happy birthday, Lilian and Layla!”

The two girls leaned forward and blew out the candles on their birthday cake while their friends cheered around them. Mrs. Avauss was standing off to the side, ready to cut and serve the cake. At the same time, Mr. Avauss sorted the large stack of presents into two piles.

Unbeknownst to the twins, their parents had teamed up with some of the neighborhood adults and planned a surprise party for them. Originally, they were only told that they were going to play in the park for their special day. They never anticipated that their friends would be there, along with cake, presents, and colorful balloons. The wide grins on their faces let the parents know that they had done an exceptional job.

Lilian and Layla got their cake first since they were the birthday girls. While the other children talked among themselves, Lilian said, “This is the best day ever.”

“Yeah,” Layla agreed, eating a bite of cake. “The cake is yummy, and I can’t wait until it is time to open presents.”

Just then, Mr. Avauss walked over with two gifts boxes in his hands. “Your mother and I wanted you two to open these first. We got them just for you.”

In a flash, Lilian and Layla were tearing the packages open. They gasped at the shiny new cameras and hugged their father while thanking him excitedly.

Mr. Avauss laughed and said, “Yeah, happy birthday, girls. Make sure you take care of those, as they are brand new.”

He walked away, and Layla asked, “What are you going to use this for first?”

Lilian thought for a moment and then pulled Layla close. “Smile,” she said, taking a photo.

“Hey,” Layla protested. “You should have warned me. I didn’t get to smile.”

Lilian snickered and said, “Fine, I’ll take another picture, since you asked so nicely.”

The two sisters scooted closer and posed with frosting covered smiles. This time, Layla was the one to take the picture. It was a snapshot of a joyous and innocent time.

**********

“Ugh, these high heels are impossible to walk in.”

Layla laughed as Lilian yanked off her shoes and looked for a place to put them. “You should have worn flats like me,” she remarked. “Or at least gotten shorter heels.”

“Shut up,” Lilian said in a halfhearted manner. She eventually gave up and decided to set the shoes down on the floor. With that out of the way, she turned to her sister and asked, “So where did your guy go? Is he off talking with his friends?”

“He’s putting his jacket in the car,” replied Layla. “I don’t blame him. It’s getting really hot in here, what with everyone gathered in one place.”

“Really? That sounds like a good idea.” Lilian gestured down to her shoes again. “I would have done that, too, except I don’t want to have to walk over gravel with bare feet.”

A dark haired man walked over to the two and said to Lilian, “Hey, Layla. I’m back.” He then noticed Layla standing behind him and blushed, saying, “Oh, sorry. You’re Lilian.”

Both girls laughed as he tried to cover up his mistake. “It’s okay, Mark,” Layla said. “People mistake us for each other a lot.”

“That’s not surprising,” Mark said. “You two look alike, and your dresses are even matching.”

Hearing this, they compared their dresses and realized that they were both the same shade of purple. The realization caused them to laugh more, and Lilian said, “This is golden. I’m taking a picture of this.”

She pulled out her phone and aimed the camera towards her and Layla. They both smiled, and a bright flash emitted. Lilian said, “Well, I’m going to rejoin my group now. They’re probably wondering where I am right now.” She waved before turning away and leaving.

Mark stood to the side, not wanting to interrupt. Once Lilian left, he said, “Your sister is a lot like you. You two could be twins.”

“We are twins,” Layla responded. “Identical twins, to be exact.”

She laughed as Mark’s expression turned to one of realization. He then asked, “Anyways, there’s still some time left before the dance is over. Want to go back?”

“Sure,” Layla said, grabbing his arm. “Let’s.”

 **********

“Congratulations, class of 2008. You have all graduated successfully.”

Applause erupted from the audience as the university president concluded the graduation ceremony. All the new alumni cleared out of the stadium and began meeting up with their friends and family members.

Layla had just finished congratulating some of her friends when her sister tackle hugged her from the side. “Congratulations,” Lilian practically gushed.

The ecstatic greeting earned an eye roll from Layla. “Don’t act so shocked.” She then grinned and hugged her back. “Congratulations to you, too.”

They separated, and Lilian asked, “So are you excited for grad school? I heard that the university is really nice, and there’s a noodle restaurant nearby.”

“That is correct. Honestly, you should be the one going there, you and your love of noodles.” Layla turned serious and said, “I am excited as well as nervous. I heard that the school work is a lot more difficult there than here.”

“Aw, don’t be. You’re smart, you’ll do well.”

“Easy for you to say when you’re ranked as best in your department.”

Lilian smiled and said, “Thanks, but seriously, you’ll be fine. Besides, you’re not the only one going to grad school.”

“I know,” Layla said. “So we’re going to have to endure yet more years of schooling. Fun.”

“Exactly,” Lilian said. Her eyes widened, and she exclaimed, “Oh! I almost forgot.”

“What?” Layla asked, sounding concerned.

Instead of answering, Lilian pulled out her phone and said, “Cheese.”

By this point, Layla had gotten used to this sort of behavior. She smiled, and Lilian held out the phone before taking a picture.

Just then, their parents walked up to them. Mrs. Avauss said, “Congratulations, dears. You’re finished with college.”

“Yeah. We knew you could do it,” Mr. Avauss agreed. He looked like he was about to say more, but then his expression turned serious.

“What is it, dear?” asked Mrs. Avauss, noticing the sudden shift in mood.

“I forgot to repay the meter,” he said, fear in his tone. “We need to hurry back, or I’ll get a ticket.”

His wife face palmed while the two girls laughed. They luckily made it back before the meter maid showed up: a small event that added to the already glorious day.

**********

“Merry Christmas, Lilian. Now come in here. You must be freezing.”

Lilian stepped over the threshold and out of the bitter cold. Layla closed the door behind her, and the two entered the house that they had grown up in. Her parents could be spotted in the kitchen, preparing the large feast that would be consumed at dinnertime.

Mrs. Avauss glanced up from the vegetables she was chopping and hurried over to greet her daughters. “Hello, dears. It’s been a while. Bill, get over here.” The last sentence was directed at the father, who was still obsessing over the sweet potatoes. He was soon standing along with them, and after the exchanging of hugs, Mrs. Avauss asked, “How have you two been?”

Layla was the first to speak. “Well, I’ve been doing well. Work has certainly been interesting. Right now, we’re studying a species of sea turtle and its habitat.”

Mr. Avauss gave a thumbs up. “That’s my girl, always seeking out new facts.”

“What about you, Lilian?” Mrs. Avauss asked.

Lilian had an expression of repressed excitement. She said in a controlled tone, “Okay, so you heard about what the department’s planning, right?” The question was addressed to her father.

“I’ve heard bits and pieces, yes,” Mr. Avauss replied. “Something about an interdimensional portal.”

“Really?” Mrs. Avauss asked skeptically. “That sounds like science fiction to me.”

“I know it does,” Lilian said, impatient to tell the rest of her story. “I thought that, too, but I watched them test it out with remote cars and robots, and it really works. The best part is that they’re sending a person to use it, and they chose me!”

“No way!” Layla exclaimed. “That is awesome. You’ve got to send pictures of what happens.”

Mr. Avauss also seemed thrilled at the news. “Are you going to be recording what happens, or are you taking notes? I imagine that the lab will want data from your explorations.”

“Neither,” Lilian said. When it seemed like they were going to interrupt, she explained, “I won’t have to. They built a device that allows me to project a hologram here, allowing me to give first hand reports of what I witness. I wear it over my head, and I can see and hear into this dimension. I can also make it so they can see and hear me. I’ve tested it out already, and it works like a charm. I can’t wait until the actual tests start.”

Mrs. Avauss did not seem as enthusiastic as the others. “Are you sure it is safe?” she asked, concern evident in her tone. “They did thorough tests of the equipment, right? Made sure that everything was running properly?”

“Yes, they did,” she replied. “Don’t worry, mom. It’ll be safe.”

She nodded and said, “If you say it’s safe, then I trust you. Just be careful, okay?”

“I will,” assured Lilian.

“A projection device,” Layla said contemplatively. “Would you happen to have a picture of what it looks like?”

“Even better,” Lilian said. She reached into her purse and pulled out a complex device that resembled a cross between a pair of ski goggles and headphones. “I got a prototype. This one doesn’t work, unfortunately, but it looks exactly like the real one.”

“Amazing,” Mr. Avauss said. “Put it on quickly. I’ll grab the camera.”

As he rushed off, Lilian put the device on her head. He returned shortly, and Lilian and Layla stood side by side, smiling as usual.

“Say ‘cheese’,” said Mr. Avauss, snapping the photo. He started fiddling with the camera, but then a loud beeping noise sounded. “Oh, that would be the oven. Don’t want the food to overcook.”

He sprinted back into the kitchen, and Mrs. Avauss followed at a calmer pace. Lilian and Layla shared a glance before heading towards the kitchen. Their father, as intelligent as he was, still struggled with the oven, and they would have to make sure he didn’t burn the house down in his quest to conquer his long time enemy.

**********

“I’m so sorry, Layla. Your sister… She didn’t make it.”

That was all that Layla processed. As the man explained just how the tragic incident had happened, she felt her world collapse around her. Her twin – her best friend – was gone forever. The work phone slipped out of her hand and hit the ground with a crash, but even that went unnoticed. A colleague who was walking past grabbed the phone and handed it back to her. She took it numbly, still in shock over the bombshell that had just dropped.

“Layla. Layla?” the colleague asked, sounding far away. “Are you okay?”

She looked at him and realized that she’d been staring blankly into space for the past minute. “I need a break.”

He nodded, seeming to have picked up from her body language that she’d just received tragic news. “Okay, go then. I’ll tell the supervisor about it, no problem.”

“Thanks,” she said, giving a weak smile.

He nodded in return and walked away. Layla took off her lab coat and goggles, hanging them on her spot on the wall. In a daze, she walked out of the research institution. Some of the other employees gave her inquiring looks, but didn’t bother her. Likewise, she took no notice of them. By the time she refocused on her surroundings, she found herself sitting on a bench outside a café. It was completely dark, and the streets were empty.

Once Layla confirmed that she was alone, she allowed the wall she’d carefully constructed to collapse. Tears streamed down her face, and she slumped forward, wrapping her arms around her knees.

She lost track of how much time had passed, but she caught sight of someone outside her peripheral vision. At first, she wasn’t going to acknowledge them, but then she heard a familiar voice say, “I’m sorry, Layla.”

Her head snapped to the side, and she almost tripped running over to the speaker. “Lilian!” she shouted, her arms out.

To her horror, her hands fazed right through as though passing through air. She stopped abruptly and barely managed to avoid face planting on the concrete. She turned back and stared wide eyed at her sister.

Lilian looked exactly like she did the last time they talked. She wore a long white lab coat, a red shirt, and a pair of jeans. What was different was the grave expression that replaced her usually cheery look.

In a voice barely above a whisper, Layla asked, “How are you here? What happened?”

“It’s a long story,” Lilian said. “So Douglas called you already? What did he say?”

It took a while for Layla to remember the name. Eventually, she answered, “He said… he said that you died, that you didn’t make it.”

Hearing this, Lilian said, “Well… that is only half correct.”

This struck her as off. She took a few breaths to steady herself and repeated, “So what happened? How did you end up like this?”

“I’ll tell you. First, we need to go somewhere else. I don’t want anyone eavesdropping.”

Layla nodded in understanding and headed back the way she came. Upon returning to the lab, she explained to her supervisor that she’d received news of her sister’s death. The supervisor apologized and told her she could have the rest of the night off.

Once she headed back outside, Lilian reappeared next to her. “So where are we going?”

“My apartment, I guess,” Layla said. “It’s the most private place I have, and the neighbors are out for the night.”

It was a quick drive back, and once they were inside, Layla collapsed on the couch. Lilian stood awkwardly nearby. “So anyways, I guess I should tell you the story.”

Layla listened as Lilian explained what had gone wrong. Apparently, the energy generator had overheated, causing a series of malfunctions and threatening meltdown. Lilian had still been in the portal when it collapsed, and now she was trapped in the gap between dimensions with no means of getting out. Throughout, Layla merely listened, not wanting to interrupt.

Once she was fairly certain that the story was over, she asked, “How could they let that happen? They should’ve made sure the equipment was functioning properly.” Her voice began to rise steadily. “They shouldn’t have been so careless. Not when your life was on the line!” By the end, she was nearly shouting.

To her surprise, Lilian looked guilty. “Don’t blame them. I am also partially at fault.”

“What?” The question was packed with incredulity. “How can you blame yourself for this?”

Lilian shuffled her feet and said, “I didn’t follow protocol. I was only supposed to visit nearby dimensions, but in my curiosity, I went farther than I was supposed to. If I had just done what I was told, this wouldn’t have happened.”

Layla could not respond, too shocked to speak.

“When Douglas figured out what I was doing, he gave me a stern lecture and warned me not to do it again. Instead of listening, I snapped at him that he needed to lay off and quit worrying. That was the last time we spoke face to face. What I would give to redo that conversation.”

At that moment, Layla regained her ability to speak. “You promised Mom that you’d be careful,” she whispered. “You promised!”

“I know I did!” Lilian retorted. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that since I ended up here.” She sighed and said once more, “I’m sorry. Mom, Dad, Douglas, you: I’ve failed all of you.”

Despite knowing that her sister was not physically there, Layla reached for her hand. “I’m sorry, too.” A lull entered the conversation. Then, she asked, “Have you told Mom and Dad yet?”

“No, I haven’t,” Lilian answered. “Better that they think that I’m dead. I don’t want to get their hopes up just to crush them.”

Layla blinked. “Then why did you tell me?”

“Because you’re my twin. We grew up together, and I don’t feel right keeping this from you.”

Although she didn’t agree with not telling their parents, she decided not to press the matter. For a while, neither of them said anything. A melancholic mood blanketed the air.

Finally, Layla asked, “So, you still didn’t answer how you are here. Did you become a ghost?”

“No,” Lilian said. She pointed to her forehead. “Remember the device I told you about last year? I’m using that in order to project a hologram here.”

“Oh, right,” replied Layla. She thought for a moment before pulling her phone out of her pocket.

“What are you doing?” Lilian asked curiously.

“I want to see if you can show up on camera. Besides, you were always the one who loved taking pictures.”

Layla opened up the camera app and switched it to the lens facing her. She started when Lilian suddenly reappeared behind her.

“Sorry,” Lilian said. “Still getting used to this.”

Instead of replying, Layla smiled weakly and turned back to the screen. The camera picked up both of them well enough, even though Lilian looked slightly fuzzy. She pressed the snap button and took a picture. With that done, she continued to lay on the couch before eventually falling into an uneasy sleep.

When she woke up the next morning, Lilian was gone. She could have almost convinced herself that it was all a horrible nightmare, if not for the photo.

**********

“The winner of the Dylan Walter fellowship award goes to Dr. Layla Antonis.”

Hearing her name called, Layla stood up and walked on to the stage, where she received her award and shook hands with the heads of the Marine Biology Association. She returned to her seat and politely applauded her colleagues and other researchers as they received their plaques. Once the ceremony was over, the head principal said that there would be a reception in the conference room with food and drinks.

At the reception, Layla was congratulated by many of her friends and lab associates. Her old supervisor in particular told her that he was proud of her having accomplished so much since she worked under him. She thanked all of them between bites of chocolate chip cookie.

Later, while talking with an old friend from college about her most recent research project, she realized that her drink was empty. She pardoned herself and left to search for the drink table. On the way, she spotted Lilian standing in the lawn outside. The drink now forgotten, Layla exited through the nearest door and approached her sister.

“Hi, Lilian,” Layla greeted. She was about to hug her but then stopped at the last minute. “I didn’t think that you would show up.”

“Of course I was planning to come,” Lilian replied. “After all, you just won an awesome award. Who would I be if I didn’t support you?”

Layla smiled and said, “Good point.” She then finished the rest of her cookie and asked, “I didn’t see you in the auditorium. Were you sitting in the back?”

“Actually, I was in the front row, seated just above the man with the green tie.”

The answer caused Layla to laugh. “Really? I’m pretty sure you would have stuck out if you had.”

“Hey, I don’t have to always make myself visible.” To prove her point, she disappeared and reappeared a few times. “Benefits of this hologram device.”

“Be careful,” Layla said, trying to sound serious and failing. “Someone might see you.”

“No, they won’t. Everyone’s too busy at the reception right now. I doubt anyone is wandering off.” She decided to change the topic and asked, “Can I see the plaque you got?”

Layla held out the plaque for inspection. Lilian studied it carefully, her gaze scanning over the inscribed words. Eventually, she exclaimed, “Sweet. You should take a picture with it. I’d do it myself, but I don’t have a camera with me.”

“Sure. I have my phone with me.” Layla grabbed her phone from her blazer pocket and held up the plaque so it showed up in the picture. This time, she did not flinch when Lilian suddenly reappeared next to her. She took a snapshot and set it as her new phone background as a reminder of the exciting day.

**********

“Come on, kids. Time to meet your nana.”

The two boys and one girl ran up the walkway and hugged Layla, who was waiting on the front porch. Their parents walked behind them, carrying the luggage along.

“Hello, Amelia. It’s so great to see you again,” greeted Layla while hugging her daughter. She then hugged her son-in-law. “You, two, Eric. It’s been so long. How have you been faring?”

“It’s great to see you, too,” Amelia replied. “We’ve been doing well, thanks for asking. Katie just started kindergarten, and Milo joined a soccer team.”

“That’s wonderful,” said Layla. “Anyways, I have the guest rooms prepared. You all can head it and set down your luggage. I’m sure you’re tired of carrying it.”

The children started to whine, “But Nana, we want to stay outside with you.”

Amelia smiled and said, “You guys can stay out here for now. Your father and I will be inside.” She leaned down and kissed each of the children’s foreheads. “Make sure you behave.”

After the parents disappeared inside the house, Layla turned her attention towards the children. “So how is school going?”

“School is fun,” Katie said with a wide grin. “We draw and play games and sing songs and a lot of other fun stuff.”

Layla was about to respond, but then she noticed a figure in the backyard. She stood up and said, “That sounds great. Now hurry inside. I need to take care of something.”

Without bothering to see if they would obey, she stepped off the front porch and slowly headed towards the backyard. She wasn’t sure who it was, but she didn’t want to take any chances. Once she was close enough, she saw that it was Lilian. Relief flooded her, and she walked over to where her sister was standing.

“Hey, Lilian. What brings you here?”

Lilian turned towards her sister and her expression lit up. “Hi, Layla. I just thought it would be a good idea to check up on you. It feels like forever since we last talked.”

“What do you mean forever?” Layla asked. “We met up a few months ago during Christmas.”

“Months?” Confusion was evident in her expression. It was replaced by realization and she corrected her mistake. “Oh, right, only a few months have passed in this dimension. I forgot.”

Before Layla could say anything, she was vaguely aware of being watched. When she turned towards the house, she spotted the three children trying to spy on them from the windowsill. They immediately ducked down, but she’d already seen them. She walked up to the window and tapped on the glass, causing them to glance up.

“Kids,” Layla said, putting her hands on her hips. “What did I tell you about spying on others?”

Katie pointed towards the boys. “I tried to tell them, but they didn’t listen.”

“Nuh-uh. It wasn’t our fault.”

Although Layla was attempting to look stern, she couldn’t help but reflect back on the antics that she had gotten up to with Lilian when they were younger. She’d gotten so lost in thought that she didn’t notice when Lilian appeared next to her until she said, “Wow, those are your grandkids?”

She nearly jumped and said, “Yes. They’re my daughter’s children. I believe that you’ve met her already.”

“Yeah, but last time I saw her, she didn’t have kids.” She leaned forward until she was at face level with the children. “Hello. What are your guys’ names?”

Katie was the first to speak. “Hi. My name is Katie, and these are my brothers, Scott and Milo. Scott’s the taller one, and Milo’s the one with the funny hat.”

“It is not funny,” Milo protested.

“Nice to meet you, Katie,” Lilian said. “Wow, you have two brothers. That must get interesting.”

“It does,” Katie replied.

Scott appeared to carefully study Lilian before asking, “So who are you? Are you a friend of our nana?”

Lilian laughed under her breath, too quietly for the children to perceive. “Why yes, I am. I’ve known your nana since she was a little girl.”

“How is that possible?” Milo asked. “She’s so much older than you. Unless,” he gasped, “Are you a time traveler?”

“I suppose you could say that.”

“Cool!” Milo exclaimed. “I read a book about that once. It talked about a superhero that could travel through time and space. It was incredible. Can you do that?”

This time, Lilian didn’t bother to hide her laughter. “Something like that, although I’m not a superhero, as I don’t have powers.”

“That sounds neat,” Milo said. “I would want to go back to when the dinosaurs lived. Then I could see them in person like in that one movie.”

“I want to travel back to when we took that Disneyworld trip,” Katie said. “It was so much fun meeting the princesses and riding the rides.”

Before the conversation could go any further, Layla gestured to Lilian that she wanted to speak with her. Lilian straightened up and turned away from the window, and Layla did likewise. “What are you doing?” she whispered. “I thought that you didn’t want anyone to know.”

“Relax,” Lilian whispered back. “They’re only kids. Besides, if they tell their parents that they talked with a time traveler, they’ll just dismiss it as childish antics.”

Layla had to admit that they had a point, but she knew that she couldn’t hang around here any longer. “Alright, as fun as this has been, I’m sure she has other things to do, and I need to start making dinner.”

“Aww,” Scott complained. “But I didn’t get to say what I wanted to do.”

“You can tell Milo and Katie later on. Besides, I’m sure this won’t be the only visit.” Layla then got an idea and said, “But before she goes, would you like to get a picture taken with her?”

The three children cheered, and Layla took out her cell phone. The siblings huddled together to get in the frame while the twins flanked the window sill. As soon as the picture was taken, Lilian said, “Anyways, I’m going to go now. It was nice catching up with you, Layla.” She turned back to the window and waved. “Bye, guys.”

“Bye,” they replied in unison, waving excitedly.

Lilian waved back and walked away from the house. She waited until she was out of their range of sight before disappearing.

Layla looked at the photo, a smile on her face. Then, she put her phone away and circled the house to the front porch before entering inside. She still had dinner to make.

 **********

“We got the results back and we’re sorry to say that you only have a few weeks left.”

Hearing the doctor’s words, Layla could only nod and thank him for informing her. She’d known that this was coming for a while, what with the visits to the emergency room becoming more common. Despite that, a feeling of dread still flooded her being at the news that she did not have much longer to live.

For the next few months, visitors frequented her room. Family members came to say hello while they still had the chance and some of her old friends from the lab wanted to catch up on recent activities one last time. Between hospital sessions and visits, she either watched TV or read the books that the nurses dropped off per her request. The whole time, Layla was waiting for a visit from a certain someone, and as the days passed with no sign of her, she started to worry about whether she would get to see her.

It was nighttime, and Layla was reading a new novel that she had requested. The nurse was cleaning up the room and checking her vitals on the nearby machine. To Layla’s relief, she did not pry or ask questions, instead leaving as soon as she finished her task. Hushed whispers could be discerned outside the door, but Layla paid them no mind, determined to finish her book on time.

“So it’s true.”

Layla nearly threw the book in the air out of fright. Instead, she merely dropped it on her face and struggled to put it on the nearby stand. When she looked towards the foot of the bed, she saw Lilian standing there, looking the exact same as she did 54 years ago.

“What do you mean?” Layla asked, taking a moment to prop herself up. She suspected that she knew what Lilian was talking about, but she wanted to hear her say it.

“You’re going to die.” Lilian’s voice was barely above a whisper. “I went to your house earlier, but you weren’t there. Then I overheard your daughter on the phone, and she mentioned you being the in the hospital with only a few days left.”

“And you thought that she was lying?” She didn’t intend it to, but the question had an accusatory undertone.

“No, not at all,” Lilian said. Her voice started to crack. “It’s just that I’d hoped she’d been wrong.”

Layla felt her heart break, and she gestured for Lilian to come closer. “I’m sorry,” she consoled. “I shouldn’t have said that.” She sighed, lying back down against the mattress. “I wasn’t happy to hear the news, either. Unfortunately, death is inevitable, and it was only a matter of time.”

“Knowing that doesn’t make it any easier, sadly.” Lilian’s form flickered briefly, something that only happened in times of strong emotion.

In response, Layla merely nodded. Both women fell silent, and the sound of the hustling in the hallway leaked through the closed door. Neither of them knew what to say, and the air was practically suffocating.

Out of nowhere, Lilian asked, “Do you still have them?”

Layla was confused by the ambiguity and asked back, “Have what?”

“The photos we took over the years. Did you keep them?”

“Of course I did,” Layla answered. “They’re records of our times together. Before, I didn’t get your obsession with taking them. Now, I’m starting to wish I had taken more.”

Lilian hesitated and asked, “Well, we could take one last photo. You know, for old time’s sake?”

Without answering, Layla reached into a drawer and pulled out her cell phone. It took a few tries, but eventually she was able to unlock it and pulled up the camera app. Once again, Lilian appeared behind her and gave a sad smile for the camera. Layla took the photo and set the phone back on the nearby stand. 

As soon as that was done, Lilian straightened up and said, “Well, I guess I should get going. The nurse will likely come back soon and I don’t want to have to deal with that.” Then, to Layla’s shock, she leaned down and wrapped her arms around her. “Goodbye, Layla.”

Layla tried to hug back, but it felt like she was holding air. Warm tears flowed down her cheeks, and she barely managed to whisper, “Goodbye, Lilian.”

The two separated, and Lilian disappeared just before the nurse came in. She noticed that Layla’s eyes were slightly red as if she’d been crying, but did not comment. Likewise, Layla did not mention the recent visit, instead choosing to focus on finishing her book. Eventually, exhaustion took its toll, and she fell asleep.

**********

“In Loving Memory of Layla Antonis. Born April 5, 1986. Died August 18, 2070.”

Lilian stood in front of the newly installed headstone for what felt like hours, reflecting on past memories. Six months ago, she’d attended the funeral ceremony, making sure to stay invisible throughout it. While the pain of losing her sister had dulled over time, seeing the grave again reawakened old feelings.

Her train of thought was derailed by the sound of a man clearing his throat behind her. “Excuse me, miss. Could you move to the side for a moment?”

When she turned around, she saw a tall young man with a camera strapped around his neck. “What’s the camera for?” she asked, pointing to it.

“I’m a photographer for the local newspaper. I’m taking pictures of newly placed headstones for the obituary column.” His gaze flitted between the headstone and the woman in front of him.

“Oh, okay,” Lilian said. She was about to move out of the way when she thought of an idea. “Hold on. This is one of my relative’s graves. Any chance you could take a picture of me with it?”

The man appeared to think for a moment before shrugging. “I don’t see why not.” He turned the camera on and brought it up to his face. “So how do you want to pose for this? Are you going to stand next to it or behind it?”

Lilian thought about it for a moment before moving to the left side of the headstone. “I’ll stand next to it. Am I in the frame?”

“Perfect,” the man said. He clicked the shutter button. A snap sound was faintly heard, and he said, “Alrighty, then. I’ll get this picture to the office, and it may appear in the upcoming newspaper. Keep an eye out for it.”

“Awesome,” Lilian said. She smiled at him and added, “Thanks.”

“No problem,” the man replied, attention fixed on the camera. “Oh, I almost forgot. What’s your name? If the firm decides to use this picture, then we’ll want a caption including your name along with that on the tombstone.”

He glanced up, but Lilian was already gone. A chill traveled down his spine as a possible explanation for the mysterious woman entered his mind. He quickly dismissed it and moved on to the other new headstones, snapping photos of them.

Unbeknownst to the man, Lilian was still standing there, having simply chosen to become invisible again. She turned to look at the headstone one last time, taking in the details of the engravings and the smooth granite surface. In a voice barely audible above the wind, she said, “I’ll miss you,” before flickering out of existence.

#my writing

[youngshiney]

My Top 20 of 2020

Its the end of the year so here’s my obligatory top 20 songs that came out this year. These are in no particular order; I honestly probably couldn’t rank them if I tried since these are all songs I absolutely loved this year. Under the cut since I’m putting my explanations

1.) Criminal- Taemin: out of the three songs for this Never Gonna Dance Again era, I think Criminal is my favorite. The music video aesthetic is really interesting, and the song itself is a lot of fun to listen to. I think of the 3 titles I listen to this one the most often.

2.) Mmmh- Kai: I’ve been waiting for this for a while now and it was everything I imagined it would be and more. Everything about this album and song were incredible. Every song is really fantastic and they all flow into each other well, the album film was so well done and honestly did look like a movie. The film really captured his strengths as a performer as well as the key vibes of the songs. The actual mv was beautiful and it was nice to see his own style while also shouting out to EXO with his powers and the inclusion of Xiumin and D.O.’s badges at the end.

3.) Ice Age- MCND: This is one of my favorite debuts ever and easily my favorite boy group debut of this year; I honestly can’t think of a debut song that makes me this happy. It’s a fun song with a decent set and design which is all a debut should consist of imo (anything like an overarching storyline like EXO is just a bonus). Also for a debut, the song is decently balanced distribution wise which is really nice to see. 

4.) La Di Da- Everglow: Everglow has had really consistently well done comebacks and they just keep getting better and better. Adios was a great song, Dun Dun was really fun to listen to and had nice visuals, and La Di Da is both of those things combined. Its a standout song.

5.) Do Or Die- AleXa: This was the first AleXa song I ever heard, and it’s one of my favorites. The song alone is really catchy and has a lot of elements in it that I like, especially the chorus. The music video is really interesting to watch with the concept and storyline.

6.) 1 Billion Views- EXO SC: I love EXO-SC and I especially love this song. I think it matches Chanyeol and Sehun’s styles well (considering they wrote it and the rest of the album) and it’s a lot of fun overall. The pre-chorus/chorus is really catchy, the lady featured does a great job, and the music video is really pleasing to watch. 

7.) 100 Ways- Jackson Wang: 100 Ways is a really satisfying progression of Jackson’s music career and a true example of him finding his own style. The song itself is nice and catchy, but the true standout part is the music video with its gorgeous visuals and interesting story.

8.) I’m in Trouble- Nu’est: I really love everything about I’m in Trouble, but my favorite part is the music video. I love story concepts so any MV with a plot is right up my alley and this is no exception. I loved the visuals of each member and the intrigue as they come together. It was so well executed.

9.) Lit- Lay Zhang: Similarly to 100 Ways, Lit is a well crafted song that shows off Yixing’s talents and style. The music video is even more impressive with its visuals and concept. In fact of all his music videos, I think this is probably the most impressive yet.

10.) Summer Breeze- SF9: Summer Breeze is one of my favorite songs and it just makes me so happy every single time I hear it. I also really like the visuals of the music video, especially in the bar scenes. That style of architecture and design is one of my favorite aesthetics. 

11.) Howling- Victon: Victon is a really fantastic group, and Howling is hands down my favorite song from them. I think the way the vocals lead into each other and the soft verses leading to the choruses and not to mention Hanse’s rapping all make for a fantastic song. 

12.) Open Mind- Wonho: This is something I really have been waiting for for a while now. I never stopped hoping that he’d come back in whatever way he could and Hoseok really did not disappoint. His vocals were one of my favorite parts of his performances alongside his dancing and this debut gave us both of those. The lyrics aren’t particularly interesting or meaningful, at least not to me for this song, but I hope he gets to find his songwriting groove as he continues especially since Neol Hada and From Zero are two of my favorite songs ever. Also the music video had nice visuals and the snakes gave me major Want by Taemin vibes; the only thing I kinda wish was that he had covered up a little more because I worry people will only see him for his muscles and not his talents, but that being said he did always choose to dress fairly revealing in MX so if it was his choice then who am I to go against that.

13.) Boca- Dreamcatcher: I really love Dreamcatcher and I think they may be one of the most unique girl groups right now. Their sound is a lot different from anyone else I’ve heard, and their music videos always have really interesting visuals and storylines. Boca continues that trend and I can only anticipate what they’ll do next especially since Handong is back from China. 

14.) Alien- Lee Suhyun: I first saw Suhyun in a web show called Part Time Idol and I instantly liked her. I think she has really nice vocals and a cute style which Alien showcased. Alien was the perfect song for her; I can’t think of a better debut for her.

15.) Stay Tonight- Chungha: Chungha is an amazing soloist and I really, really enjoy every comeback from her. Her songs this year were all fantastic but Stay Tonight really hit me and stuck with me hence why it’s here.

16.) Star/Voice- Loona: Star is one of my favorite bsides from Loona and is so much fun to listen to. Loona’s strength is that they have incredible bsides and this is no exception. The english and Korean versions are both good, and I like them a lot. 

17.) To Be or Not To Be- Oneus: Oneus is one of the best fourth gen groups and that’s a fact. Their songs are really fun to listen to, but what makes them great is their music videos. Most, if not all, have interesting storylines that draw viewers in and TBONTB is the best example. It picks up the vampire storyline that Twilight starts and is heavily explored in Come Back Home, and it just brings it to a whole new level. The visuals are incredible, the choreo is awesome, and of course I really love the concept and story. 

18.) Yours- Chanyeol: There’s nothing much to say about this song beyond how pleasant it is to listen to and that the simplicity of it and the MV are very refreshing. I have to give a special shoutout to Lee Hi because her vocals fit the track so well and blended very nicely with Chanyeol’s.

19.) Gunshot- KARD: KARD is one of my favorite groups ever. They all work really well together, and I’m always impressed with their discography. Gunshot is especially amazing from its message and lyrics to the catchy chorus to the visuals of the mv. Everything about this comeback is perfectly KARD. 

20.) What Do I Call You- Taeyeon: I’ve really gotten into Taeyeon this year and I think of all her songs in 2020, this one is my favorite. The aesthetic of the music video is really nice, especially in the scenes where she’s with the scientists and the flowers are all over the floor. I also really love her vocals and the plot of the song/mv are very relatable.

Honorable Mentions: 

#GirlsSpkOut- Taeyeon

What You Waiting For- Somi

Pporappippam- Sunmi

Nanana- MCND

So Bad- StayC

Thanxx- Ateez

Losing You- Wonho

Wednesday- #GUN

Take It Off- Wooks

DawnDiDiDawn- Dawn

#about me #the honorable mentions are songs i really liked but not as much as the ones on the list for one reason or another #i had to put Losing You here bc if i tried to talk about wjat it means to me id start crying

[ciathyzareposts]

The Deal of the Century (or, The Alliance of Losers)

+

= ?

I think [the] Macintosh accomplished everything we set out to do and more, even though it reaches most people these days as Windows.

— Andy Hertzfeld (original Apple Macintosh systems programmer), 1994

When rumors first began to circulate early in 1991 that IBM and Apple were involved in high-level talks about a major joint initiative, most people dismissed them outright. It was, after all, hard to imagine two companies in the same industry with more diametrically opposed corporate cultures. IBM was Big Blue, a bedrock of American business since the 1920s. Conservative and pragamatic to a fault, it was a Brylcreemed bastion of tradition where casual days meant that employees might remove their jackets to reveal the starched white shirts they wore underneath. Apple, on the other hand, had been founded just fifteen years before by two long-haired children of the counterculture, and its campus still looked more like Woodstock than Wall Street. IBM placed great stock in the character of its workforce; Apple, as journalist Michael S. Malone would later put it in his delightfully arch book Infinite Loop, “seemed to have no character, but only an attitude, a style, a collection of mannerisms.” IBM talked about enterprise integration and system interoperability; Apple prattled on endlessly about changing the world. IBM played Lawrence Welk at corporate get-togethers; Apple preferred the Beatles. (It was an open secret that the name the company shared with the Beatles’ old record label wasn’t coincidental.)

Unsurprisingly, the two companies didn’t like each other very much. Apple in particular had been self-consciously defining itself for years as the sworn enemy of IBM and everything it represented. When Apple had greeted the belated arrival of the IBM PC in 1981 with a full-page magazine advertisement bidding Big Blue “welcome, seriously,” it had been hard to read as anything other than snarky sarcasm. And then, and most famously, had come the “1984” television advertisement to mark the debut of the Macintosh, in which Apple was personified as a hammer-throwing freedom fighter toppling a totalitarian corporate titan — Big Blue recast as Big Brother. What would the rumor-mongers be saying next? That cats would lie down with dogs? That the Russians would tell the Americans they’d given up on the whole communism thing and would like to be friends… oh, wait. It was a strange moment in history. Why not this too, then?

Indeed, when one looked a little harder, a partnership began to make at least a certain degree of sense. Apple’s rhetoric had actually softened considerably since those heady early days of the Macintosh and the acrimonious departure of Steve Jobs which had marked their ending. In the time since, more sober minds at the company had come to realize that insulting conservative corporate customers with money to spend on Apple’s pricey hardware might be counter-productive. Most of all, though, both companies found themselves in strikingly similar binds as the 1990s got underway. After soaring to rarefied heights during the early and middle years of the previous decade, they were now being judged by an increasing number of pundits as the two biggest losers of the last few years of computing history. In the face of the juggernaut that was Microsoft Windows, that irresistible force which nothing in the world of computing could seem to defy for long, it didn’t seem totally out of line to ask whether there even was a future for IBM or Apple. Seen in this light, the pithy clichés practically wrote themselves: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”; “any port in a storm”; etc. Other, somewhat less generous commentators just talked about an alliance of losers.

Each of the two losers had gotten to this juncture by a uniquely circuitous route.

When IBM released the IBM PC, their first mass-market microcomputer, in August of 1981, they were as surprised as anyone by the way it took off. Even as hackers dismissed it as boring and unimaginative, corporate America couldn’t get enough of the thing; a boring and unimaginative personal computer — i.e., a safe one — was exactly what they had been waiting for. IBM’s profits skyrocketed during the next several years, and the pundits lined up to praise the management of this old, enormous company for having the flexibility and wherewithal to capitalize on an emerging new market; a tap-dancing elephant became the metaphor of choice.

And yet, like so many great successes, the IBM PC bore the seeds of its downfall within it from the start. It was a simple, robust machine, easy to duplicate by plugging together readily available commodity components — a process made even easier by IBM’s commitment to scrupulously documenting every last detail of its design for all and sundry. Further, IBM had made the mistake of licensing its operating system from a small company known as Microsoft rather than buying it outright or writing one of their own, and Bill Gates, Microsoft’s Machiavellian CEO, proved more than happy to license MS-DOS to anyone else who wanted it as well. The danger signs could already be seen in 1982, when an upstart company called Compaq released a “portable” version of IBM’s computer — in those days, this meant a computer which could be packed into a single suitcase — before IBM themselves could get around to it. A more dramatic tipping point arrived in 1986, when the same company made a PC clone built around Intel’s hot new 80386 CPU before IBM managed to do so.

In 1987, IBM responded to the multiplying ranks of the clone makers by introducing the PS/2 line, which came complete with a new, proprietary bus architecture, locked up tight this time inside a cage of patents and legalese. A cynical move on the face of it, it backfired spectacularly in practice. Smelling the overweening corporate arrogance positively billowing out of the PS/2 lineup, many began to ask themselves for the first time whether the industry still needed IBM at all. And the answer they often came to was not the one IBM would have preferred. IBM’s new bus architecture slowly died on the vine, while the erstwhile clone makers put together committees to define new standards of their own which evolved the design IBM had originated in more open, commonsense ways. In short, IBM lost control of the very platform they had created. By 1990, the words “PC clone” were falling out of common usage, to be replaced by talk of the “Wintel Standard.” The new standard bearer, the closest equivalent to IBM in this new world order, was Microsoft, who continued to license MS-DOS and Windows, the software that allowed all of these machines from all of these diverse manufacturers to run the same applications, to anyone willing to pay for it. Meanwhile OS/2, IBM’s mostly-compatible alternative operating system, was struggling mightily; it would never manage to cross the hump into true mass-market acceptance.

Apple’s fall from grace had been less dizzying in some ways, but the position it had left them in was almost as frustrating.

After Steve Jobs walked away from Apple in September of 1985, leaving behind the Macintosh, his twenty-month-old dream machine, the more sober-minded caretakers who succeeded him did many of the reasonable, sober-minded things which their dogmatic predecessor had refused to allow: opening the Mac up for expansion, adding much-requested arrow keys to its keyboard, toning down the revolutionary rhetoric that spooked corporate America so badly. These things, combined with the Apple LaserWriter laser printer, Aldus PageMaker software, and the desktop-publishing niche they spawned between them, saved the odd little machine from oblivion. Yet something did seem to get lost in the process. Although the Mac remained a paragon of vision in computing in many ways — HyperCard alone proved that! — Apple’s management could sometimes seem more interested in competing head-to-head with PC clones for space on the desks of secretaries than nurturing the original dream of the Macintosh as the creative, friendly, fun personal computer for the rest of us.

In fact, this period of Apple’s history must strike anyone familiar with the company of today — or, for that matter, with the company that existed before Steve Jobs’s departure — as just plain weird. Quibbles about character versus attitude aside, Apple’s most notable strength down through the years has been a peerless sense of self, which they have used to carve out their own uniquely stylish image in the ofttimes bland world of computing. How odd, then, to see the Apple of this period almost willfully trying to become the one thing neither the zealots nor the detractors have ever seen them as: just another maker of computer hardware. They flooded the market with more models than even the most dutiful fans could keep up with, none of them evincing the flair for design that marks the Macs of earlier or later eras. Their computers’ bland cases were matched with bland names like “Performa” or “Quadra” — names which all too easily could have come out of Compaq or (gasp!) IBM rather than Apple. Even the tight coupling of hardware and software into a single integrated user experience, another staple of Apple computing before and after, threatened to disappear, as CEO John Sculley took to calling Apple a “software company” and intimated that he might be willing to license MacOS to other manufacturers in the way that Microsoft did MS-DOS and Windows. At the same time, in a bid to protect the software crown jewels, he launched a prohibitively expensive and ethically and practically ill-advised lawsuit against Microsoft for copying MacOS’s “look and feel” in Windows.

Apple’s attempts to woo corporate America by acting just as bland and conventional as everyone else bore little fruit; the Macintosh itself remained too incompatible, too expensive, and too indelibly strange to lure cautious purchasing managers into the fold. Meanwhile Apple’s prices remained too high for any but the most well-heeled private users. And so the Mac soldiered on with a 5 to 10 percent market share, buoyed by a fanatically loyal user base who still saw revolutionary potential in it, even as they complained about how many of its ideas Microsoft and others had stolen. Admittedly, their numbers were not insignificant: there were about 3 and a half million members of the Macintosh family by 1990. They were enough to keep Apple afloat and basically profitable, at least for now, but already by the early 1990s most new Macs were being sold “within the family,” as it were. The Mac became known as the platform where the visionaries tried things out; if said things proved promising, they then reached the masses in the form of Windows implementations. CD-ROM, the most exciting new technology of the early 1990s, was typical. The Mac pioneered this space; Mediagenic’s The Manhole, the very first CD-ROM entertainment product, shipped first on that platform. Yet most of the people who heard the hype and went out to buy a “multimedia PC” in the years that followed brought home a Wintel machine. The Mac was a sort of aspirational showpiece platform; in defiance of the Mac’s old “computer for the rest of us” tagline, Windows was the place where the majority of ordinary people did ordinary things.

The state of MacOS added weight to these showhorse-versus-workhorse stereotypes. Its latest incarnation, known as System 6, had fallen alarmingly behind the state of the art in computing by 1990. Once one looked beyond its famously intuitive and elegant user interface, one found that it lacked robust support for multitasking; lacked for ways to address memory beyond 8 MB; lacked the virtual memory that would allow users to open more and larger applications than the physical memory allowed; lacked the memory protection that could prevent errant applications from taking down the whole system. Having been baked into many of the operating system’s core assumptions from the start — MacOS had originally been designed to run on a machine with no hard drive and just 128 K of memory — these limitations were infuriatingly difficult to remedy after the fact. Thus Apple struggled mightily with the creation of a System 7, their attempt to do just that. When System 7 finally shipped in May of 1991, two years after Apple had initially promised it would, it still lagged behind Windows under the hood: among other failings, it relied on cooperative rather than preemptive multitasking and still lacked comprehensive memory protection. For all that Mac users loved to mock Windows for its lack of surface elegance and manifold user-interface infelicities, from a programming perspective it remained the more robust and modern of the two, even despite being built upon the rickety foundation of MS-DOS (another thing Mac users loved to mock and jeer).

The problems which dogged the Macintosh were typical of any computing platform that attempts to survive beyond the technological era which spawned it. Keeping up with the times means hacking and kludging the original vision, as efficiency and technical elegance give way to the need just to make it work, by hook or by crook. The original Mac design team had been given the rare privilege of forgetting about backward compatibility — given permission to build something truly new and “insanely great,” as Steve Jobs had so memorably put it. That, needless to say, was no longer an option. Every decision at Apple must now be made with an eye toward all of the software that had been written for the Mac in the past seven years or so. People depended on it now, which sharply limited the ways in which it could be changed; any new idea that wasn’t compatible with what had come before was an ipso-facto nonstarter. Apple’s clever programmers doubtless could have made a faster, more stable, all-around better operating system than System 7 if they had only had free rein to do so. But that was pie-in-the-sky talk.

Yet the most pressing of all the technical problems confronting the Macintosh as it aged involved its hardware rather than its software. Back in 1984, the design team had hitched their wagon to the slickest, sexiest new CPU in the industry at the time: the Motorola 68000. And for several years, they had no cause to regret that decision. The 68000 and its successor models in the same family were wonderful little chips — elegant enough to live up to even the Macintosh ideal of elegance, an absolute joy to program. Even today, many an old-timer will happily wax rhapsodic about them if given half a chance. (Few, for the record, have similarly fond memories of Intel’s chips.)

But Motorola was both a smaller and a more diversified company than Intel, the international titan of chip-making. As time went on, they found it more and more difficult to keep up with the pace set by their rival. Lacking the same cutting-edge fabrication facilities, it was hard for them to pack as many circuits into the same amount of space. Matters began to come to a head in 1989, when Intel released the 80486, a chip for which Motorola had nothing remotely comparable. Motorola’s response finally arrived in the form of the roughly-equivalent-in-horsepower 68040 — but not until more than a year later, and even then their chip was plagued by poor heat dissipation and heavy power consumption in many scenarios. Worse, word had it that Motorola was getting ready to give up on the whole 68000 line; they simply didn’t believe they could continue to compete head-to-head with Intel in this arena. One can hardly overstate how terrifying this prospect was for Apple. An end to the 68000 line must seemingly mean the end of the Macintosh, at least as everyone knew it; MacOS, along with every application ever written for the platform, were inextricably bound to the 68000. Small wonder that John Sculley started talking about Apple as a “software company.” It looked like their hardware might be going away, whether they liked it or not.

Motorola was, however, peddling an alternative to the 68000 line, embodying one of the biggest buzzwords in computer-science circles at the time: “RISC,” short for “Reduced Instruction Set Chip.” Both the Intel x86 line and the Motorola 68000 line were what had been retroactively named “CISC,” or “Complex Instruction Set Chips”: CPUs whose set of core opcodes — i.e., the set of low-level commands by which they could be directly programmed — grew constantly bigger and more baroque over time. RISC chips, on the other hand, pared their opcodes down to the bone, to only those commands which they absolutely, positively could not exist without. This made them less pleasant for a human programmer to code for — but then, the vast majority of programmers were working by now in high-level languages rather than directly controlling the CPU in assembly language anyway. And it made programs written to run on them by any method bigger, generally speaking — but then, most people by 1990 were willing to trade a bit more memory usage for extra speed. To compensate for these disadvantages, RISC chips could be simpler in terms of circuitry than CISC chips of equivalent power, making them cheaper and easier to manufacture. They also demanded less energy and produced less heat — the computer engineer’s greatest enemy — at equivalent clock speeds. As of yet, only one RISC chip was serving as the CPU in mass-market personal computers: the ARM chip, used in the machines of the British PC maker Acorn, which weren’t even sold in the United States. Nevertheless, Motorola believed RISC’s time had come. By switching to RISC, they wouldn’t need to match Intel in terms of transistors per square millimeter to produce chips of equal or greater speed. Indeed, they’d already made a RISC CPU of their own, called the 88000, in which they were eager to interest Apple.

They found a receptive audience among Apple’s programmers and engineers, who loved Motorola’s general design aesthetic. Already by the spring of 1990, Apple had launched two separate internal projects to study the possibilities for RISC in general and the 88000 in particular. One, known as Project Jaguar, envisioned a clean break with the past, in the form of a brand new computer that would be so amazing that people would be willing to accept that none of their existing software would run on it. The other, known as Project Cognac, studied whether it might be possible to port the existing MacOS to the new architecture, and then — and this was the really tricky part — find a way to make existing applications which had been compiled for a 68000-based Mac run unchanged on the new machine.

At first, the only viable option for doing so seemed to be a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of a computer, containing both an 88000- and a 68000-series CPU. The operating system would boot and run on the 88000, but when the user started an application written for an older, 68000-based Mac, it would be automatically kicked over to the secondary CPU. Within a few years, so the thinking went, all existing users would upgrade to the newer models, all current software would get recompiled to run natively on the RISC chip, and the 68000 could go away. Still, no one was all that excited by this approach; it seemed the worst Macintosh kludge yet, the very antithesis of what the machine was supposed to be.

A eureka moment came in late 1990, with the discovery of what Cognac project leader Jack McHenry came to call the “90/10 Rule.” Running profilers on typical applications, his team found that in the case of many or most of them it was the operating system, not the application itself, that consumed 90 percent or more of the CPU cycles. This was an artifact — for once, a positive one! — of the original MacOS design, which offered programmers an unprecedentedly rich interface toolbox meant to make coding as quick and easy as possible and, just as importantly, to give all applications a uniform look and feel. Thus an application simply asked for a menu containing a list of entries; it was then the operating system that did all the work of setting it up, monitoring it, and reporting back to the application when the user chose something from it. Ditto buttons, dialog boxes, etc. Even something as CPU-intensive as video playback generally happened through the operating system’s QuickTime library rather than the application actually employing it.

All of this meant that it ought to be feasible to emulate the 68000 entirely in software. The 68000 code would necessarily run slowly and inefficiently through emulation, wiping out all of the speed advantages of the new chip and then some. Yet for many or most applications the emulator would only need to be used about 10 percent of the time. The other 90 percent of the time, when the operating system itself was doing things at native speed, would more than make up for it. In due course, applications would get recompiled and the need for 68000 emulation would largely go away. But in the meanwhile, it could provide a vital bridge between the past and the future — a next-generation Mac that wouldn’t break continuity with the old one, all with a minimum of complication, for Apple’s users and for their hardware engineers alike. By mid-1991, Project Cognac had an 88000-powered prototype that could run a RISC-based MacOS and legacy Mac applications together.

And yet this wasn’t to be the final form of the RISC-based Macintosh. For, just a few months later, Apple and IBM made an announcement that the technology press billed — sometimes sarcastically, sometimes earnestly — as the “Deal of the Century.”

Apple had first begun to talk with IBM in early 1990, when Michael Spindler, the former’s president, had first reached out to Jack Kuehler, his opposite number at IBM. It seemed that, while Apple’s technical rank and file were still greatly enamored with Motorola, upper management was less sanguine. Having been burned once with the 68000, they were uncertain about Motorola’s commitment and ability to keep evolving the 88000 over the long term.

It made a lot of sense in the abstract for any company interested in RISC technology, as Apple certainly was, to contact IBM; it was actually IBM who had invented the RISC concept back in the mid-1970s. Not all that atypically for such a huge company with so many ongoing research projects, they had employed the idea for years only in limited, mostly subsidiary usage scenarios, such as mainframe channel controllers. Now, though, they were just introducing a new line of “workstation computers” — meaning extremely high-powered desktop computers, too expensive for the consumer market — which used a RISC chip called the POWER CPU that was the heir to their many years of research in the field. Like the workstations it lay at the heart of, the chip was much too expensive and complex to become the brain of Apple’s next generation of consumer computers, but it might, thought Spindler, be something to build upon. And he knew that, with IBM’s old partnership with Microsoft slowly collapsing into bickering acrimony, Big Blue might just be looking for a new partner.

The back-channel talks were intermittent and hyper-cautious at first, but, as the year wore on and the problems both of the companies faced became more and more obvious, the discussions heated up. The first formal meeting took place in February of 1991 or shortly thereafter, at an IBM facility in Austin, Texas. The Apple people, knowing IBM’s ultra-conservative reputation and wishing to make a good impression, arrived neatly groomed and dressed in three-piece suits, only to find their opposite numbers, having acted on the same motivation, sitting there in jeans and denim shirts.

That anecdote illustrates how very much both sides wanted to make this work. And indeed, the two parties found it much easier to work together than anyone might have imagined. John Sculley, the man who really called the shots at Apple, found that he got along smashingly with Jack Kuehler, to the extent that the two were soon talking almost every day. After beginning as a fairly straightforward discussion of whether IBM might be able and willing to make a RISC chip suitable for the Macintosh, the negotiations just kept growing in scale and ambition, spurred on by both companies’ deep-seated desire to stick it to Microsoft and the Wintel hegemony in any and all possible ways. They agreed to found a joint subsidiary called Taligent, staffed initially with the people from Apple’s Project Jaguar, which would continue to develop a brand new operating system that could be licensed by any hardware maker, just like MS-DOS and Windows (and for that matter IBM’s already extant OS/2). And they would found another subsidiary called Kaleida Labs, to make a cross-platform multimedia scripting engine called ScriptX.

Still, the core of the discussions remained IBM’s POWER architecture — or rather the PowerPC, as the partners agreed to call the cost-reduced, consumer-friendly version of the chip. Apple soon pulled Motorola into these parts of the talks, thus turning a bilateral into a trilateral negotiation, and providing the name for their so-called “AIM alliance” — “AIM” for Apple, IBM, and Motorola. IBM had never made a mass-market microprocessor of their own before, noted Apple, and Motorola’s experience could serve them well, as could their chip-fabrication facilities once actual production began. The two non-Apple parties were perhaps less excited at the prospect of working together — Motorola in particular must have been smarting at the rejection of their own 88000 processor which this new plan would entail — but made nice and got along.

Jack Kuehler and John Sculley brandish what they call their “marriage certificate,” looking rather disturbingly like Neville Chamberlain declaring peace in our time. The marriage would not prove an overly long or happy one.

On October 2, 1991 — just six weeks after the first 68040-based Macintosh models had shipped — Apple and IBM made official the rumors that had been swirling around for months. At a joint press briefing held inside the Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Francisco, they trumpeted all of the initiatives I’ve just described. The Deal of the Century, they said, would usher in the next phase of personal computing. Wintel must soon give way to the superiority of a PowerPC-based computer running a Taligent operating system with ScriptX onboard. New Apple Macintosh models would also use the PowerPC, but the relationship between them and these other, Taligent-powered machines remained vague.

Indeed, it was all horribly confusing. “What Taligent is doing is not designed to replace the Macintosh,” said Sculley. “Instead we think it complements and enhances its usefulness.” But what on earth did that empty corporate speak even mean? When Apple said out of the blue that they were “not going to do to the Macintosh what we did to the Apple II” — i.e., orphan it — it rather made you suspect that that was exactly what they meant to do. And what did it all mean for IBM’s OS/2, which Big Blue had been telling a decidedly unconvinced public was also the future of personal computing for several years now? “I think the message in those agreements for the future of OS/2 is that it no longer has a future,” said one analyst. And then, what was Kaleida and this ScriptX thing supposed to actually do?

So much of the agreement seemed so hopelessly vague. Compaq’s vice president declared that Apple and IBM must be “smoking dope. There’s no way it’s going to work.” One pundit called the whole thing “a con job. There’s no software, there’s no operating system. It’s just a last gasp of extinction by the giants that can’t keep up with Intel.” Apple’s own users were baffled and consternated by this sudden alliance with the company which they had been schooled to believe was technological evil incarnate. A grim joke made the rounds: what do you get when you cross Apple and IBM? The answer: IBM.

While the journalists reported and the pundits pontificated, it was up to the technical staff at Apple, IBM, and Motorola to make PowerPC computers a reality. Like their colleagues who had negotiated the deal, they all got along surprisingly well; once one pushed past the surface stereotypes, they were all just engineers trying to do the best work possible. Apple’s management wanted the first PowerPC-based Macintosh models to ship in January of 1994, to commemorate the platform’s tenth anniversary by heralding a new technological era. The old Project Cognac team, now with the new code name of “Piltdown Man” after the famous (albeit fraudulent) “missing link” in the evolution of humanity, was responsible for making this happen. For almost a year, they worked on porting MacOS to the PowerPC, as they’d previously done to the 88000. This time, though, they had no real hardware with which to work, only specifications and software emulators. The first prototype chips finally arrived on September 3, 1992, and they redoubled their efforts, pulling many an all-nighter. Thus MacOS booted up to the desktop for the first time on a real PowerPC-based machine just in time to greet the rising sun on the morning of October 3, 1992. A new era had indeed dawned.

Their goal now was to make a PowerPC-based Macintosh work exactly like any other, only faster. MacOS wouldn’t even get a new primary version number for the first PowerPC release; this major milestone in Mac history would go under the name of System 7.1.2, a name more appropriate to a minor maintenance release. It looked so identical to what had come before that its own creators couldn’t spot the difference; they wound up lighting up a single extra pixel in the PowerPC version just so they could know which was which.

Their guiding rule of an absolutely seamless transition applied in spades to the 68000 emulation layer, duly ported from the 88000 to the PowerPC. An ordinary user should never have to think about — should not even have to know about — the emulation that was happening beneath the surface. Another watershed moment came in June of 1993, when the team brought a PowerPC prototype machine to the MacHack, a coding conference and competition. Without telling any of the attendees what was inside the machine, the team let them use it to demonstrate their boundary-pushing programs. The emulation layer performed beyond their most hopeful prognostications. It looked like the Mac’s new lease on life was all but a done deal from the engineering side of things.

But alas, the bonhomie exhibited by the partner companies’ engineers and programmers down in the trenches wasn’t so marked in their executive suites after the deal was signed. The very vagueness of so many aspects of the agreement had papered over what were in reality hugely different visions of the future. IBM, a company not usually given to revolutionary rhetoric, had taken at face value the high-flown words spoken at the announcement. They truly believed that the agreement would mark a new era for personal computing in general, with a new, better hardware architecture in the form of PowerPC and an ultra-modern operating system to run on it in the form of Taligent’s work. Meanwhile it was becoming increasingly clear that Apple’s management, who claimed to be changing the world five times before breakfast on most days, had in reality seen Taligent largely as a hedge in case their people should prove unable to create a PowerPC Macintosh that looked like a Mac, felt like a Mac, and ran vintage Mac software. As Project Piltdown Man’s work proceeded apace, Apple grew less and less enamored with those other, open-architecture ideas IBM was pushing. The Taligent people didn’t help their cause by falling headfirst into a pit of airy computer-science abstractions and staying mired there for years, all while Project Piltdown Man just kept plugging away, getting things done.

The first two and a half years of the 1990s were marred by a mild but stubborn recession in the United States, during which the PC industry had a particularly hard time of it. After the summer of 1992, however, the economy picked up steam and consumer computing eased into what would prove its longest and most sustained boom of all time, borne along on a wave of hype about CD-ROM and multimedia, along with the simple fact that personal computers in general had finally evolved to a place where they could do useful things for ordinary people in a reasonably painless way. (A bit later in the boom, of course, the World Wide Web would come along to provide the greatest impetus of all.)

And yet the position of both Apple and IBM in the PC marketplace continued to get steadily worse while the rest of their industry soared. At least 90 percent of the computers that were now being sold in such impressive numbers ran Microsoft Windows, leaving OS/2, MacOS, and a few other oddballs to divide the iconoclasts, the hackers, and the non-conformists of the world among themselves. While IBM continued to flog OS/2, more out of stubbornness than hope, Apple tried a little bit of everything to stop the slide in market share and remain relevant. Still not entirely certain whether their future lay with open architectures or their own closed, proprietary one, they started porting selected software to Windows, including most notably QuickTime, their much-admired tool for encoding and playing video. They even shipped a Mac model that could also run MS-DOS and Windows, thanks to an 80486 housed in its case alongside its 68040. And they entered into a partnership with the networking giant Novell to port MacOS itself to Intel hardware — a partnership that, like many Apple initiatives of these years, petered out without ultimately producing much of anything. Perhaps most tellingly of all, this became the only period in Apple’s history when the company felt compelled to compete solely on price. They started selling Macs in department stores for the first time, where a stream of very un-Apple-like discounts and rebates greeted prospective buyers.

While Apple thus toddled along without making much headway, IBM began to annihilate all previous conceptions of how much money a single company could possibly lose, posting oceans of red that looked more like the numbers found in macroeconomic research papers than entries in an accountant’s books. The PC marketplace was in a way one of their smaller problems. Their mainframe business, their real bread and butter since the 1950s, was cratering as customers fled to the smaller, cheaper computers that could often now do the jobs of those hulking giants just as well. In 1991, when IBM first turned the corner into loss, they did so in disconcertingly convincing fashion: they lost $2.82 billion that year. And that was only the beginning. Losses totaled $4.96 billion in 1992, followed by $8.1 billion in 1993. IBM lost more money during those three years alone than any other company in the history of the world to that point; their losses exceeded the gross domestic product of Ecuador.

The employees at both Apple and IBM paid the toll for the confusions and prevarications of these years: both companies endured rounds of major layoffs. Those at IBM marked the very first such in the long history of the company. Big Blue had for decades fostered a culture of employment for life; their motto had always been, “If you do your job, you will always have your job.” This, it was now patently obvious, was no longer the case.

The bloodletting at both companies reached their executive suits as well within a few months of one another. On April 1, 1993, John Akers, the CEO of IBM, was ousted after a seven-year tenure which one business writer called “the worst record of any chief executive in the history of IBM.” Three months later, following a terrible quarterly earnings report and a drop in share price of 58 percent in the span of six months, Michael Spindler replaced John Sculley as the CEO of Apple.

These, then, were the storm clouds under which the PowerPC architecture became a physical reality.

The first PowerPC computers to be given a public display bore an IBM rather than an Apple logo on their cases. They arrived at the Comdex trade show in November of 1993, running a port of OS/2. IBM also promised a port of AIX — their version of the Unix operating system — while Sun Microsystems announced plans to port their Unix-based Solaris operating system and, most surprisingly of all, Microsoft talked about porting over Windows NT, the more advanced, server-oriented version of their world-conquering operating environment. But, noted the journalists present, “it remains unclear whether users will be able to run Macintosh applications on IBM’s PowerPC” — a fine example of the confusing messaging the two alleged allies constantly trailed in their wake. Further, there was no word at all about the status of the Taligent operating system that was supposed to become the real PowerPC standard.

Meanwhile over at Apple, Project Piltdown Man was becoming that rarest of unicorns in tech circles: a major software-engineering project that is actually completed on schedule. The release of the first PowerPC Macs was pushed back a bit, but only to allow the factories time to build up enough inventory to meet what everyone hoped would be serious consumer demand. Thus the “Power Macs” made their public bow on March 14, 1994, at New York City’s Lincoln Center, in three different configurations clocked at speeds between 60 and 80 MHz. Unlike IBM’s machines, which were shown six months before they shipped, the Power Macs were available for anyone to buy the very next day.

The initial trio of Power Macs.

This speed test, published in MacWorld magazine, shows how all three of the Power Mac machines dramatically outperform top-of-the-line Pentium machines when running native code.

They were greeted with enormous excitement and enthusiasm by the Mac faithful, who had been waiting anxiously for a machine that could go head-to-head with computers built around Intel’s new Pentium chip, the successor to the 80486. This the Power Macs could certainly do; by some benchmarks at least, the PowerPC doubled the overall throughput of a Pentium. World domination must surely be just around the corner, right?

Predictably enough, the non-Mac-centric technology press greeted the machines’ arrival more skeptically than the hardcore Mac-heads. “I think Apple will sell [a] million units, but it’s all going to be to existing Mac users,” said one market researcher. “DOS and Windows running on Intel platforms is still going to be 85 percent of the market. [The Power Mac] doesn’t give users enough of a reason to change.” Another noted that “the Mac users that I know are not interested in using Windows, and the Windows users are not interested in using the Mac. There has to be a compelling reason [to switch].”

In the end, these more guarded predictions proved the most accurate. Apple did indeed sell an impressive spurt of Power Macs in the months that followed, but almost entirely to the faithful. One might almost say that they became a victim of Project Piltdown Man’s success: the Power Mac really did seem exactly like any other Macintosh, except that it ran faster. And even this fact could be obscured when running legacy applications under emulation, as most people were doing in the early months: despite Project Piltdown Man’s heroic efforts, applications like Excel, Word, and Photoshop actually ran slightly slower on a Power Mac than on a top-of-the-line 68040-based machine. So, while the transition to PowerPC allowed the Macintosh to persist as a viable computing platform, it ultimately did nothing to improve upon its small market share. And because the PowerPC MacOS was such a direct and literal port, it still retained all of the shortcomings of MacOS in general. It remained a pretty interface stretched over some almost laughably archaic plumbing. The new generation of Mac hardware wouldn’t receive an operating system truly, comprehensively worthy of it until OS X arrived seven long years later.

Still, these harsh realities shouldn’t be allowed to detract from how deftly Apple — and particularly the unsung coders of Project Piltdown Man — executed the transition. No one before had ever picked up a computing platform bodily and moved it to an entirely new hardware architecture at all, much less done it so transparently that many or most users never really had to think about what was happening at all. (There would be only one comparable example in computing’s future. And, incredibly, the Mac would once again be the platform in question: in 2006, Apple would move from the fading PowerPC line to Intel’s chips — if can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right? — relying once again on a cleverly coded software emulator to see them through the period of transition. The Macintosh, it seems, has more lives than Lazarus.)

Although the briefly vaunted AIM alliance did manage to give the Macintosh a new lease on life, it succeeded in very little else. The PowerPC architecture, which had cost the alliance more than $1 billion to develop, went nowhere in its non-Mac incarnations. IBM’s own machines sold in such tiny numbers that the question of whether Apple would ever allow them to run MacOS was all but rendered moot. (For the record, though: they never did.) Sun Solaris and Microsoft Windows NT did come out in PowerPC versions, which also opened the odd possibility of running them on Apple hardware if one wished. But their sales couldn’t justify their existence, and within a year or two they went away again. The bold dream of creating a new reference platform for general-purpose computing to rival Wintel never got off the ground, as it became painfully clear that said dream had been taken more to heart by IBM than by Apple.

But if the PowerPC enjoyed success in only one area, that’s more than can be said for Kaleida or Taligent. The former burned through $200 million before finally shipping its ScriptX multimedia-presentation engine years after other products, most notably Macromedia’s Director, had already sewn up that space; it was disbanded and harvested for scraps by Apple in November of 1995. Taligent burned through a staggering $400 million over the same period of time, producing only some tepid programming frameworks in lieu of the revolutionary operating system that had been promised, before being absorbed back into IBM. In 1998, a radically downsized, radically re-imagined IBM sold their share of the PowerPC to Motorola, who settled thereby into the role they had wanted all along: that of the sole provider of CPUs for Apple’s computers. So, IBM became the biggest loser in the alliance of losers, the only one to get nothing at all out of it. Alas, that had long since become a familiar role for them.

But there is one final fascinating footnote to this story of a Deal of the Century that turned out to be little more than a strange anecdote in computing history. In the summer of 1994, IBM, having by now stopped the worst of the bleeding, settling by now into their new life as a smaller, far less dominant company, offered to buy Apple outright for a premium of $5 over their current share price. In IBM’s view, the synergies made sense: the Power Macs were selling extremely well, which was more than could be said for IBM’s PowerPC models. Why not go all in?

Ironically, it was those same healthy sales numbers that scuppered the deal in the end. If the offer had come a year earlier, when a money-losing Apple was just firing John Sculley, they surely would have jumped at it. But now Apple was feeling their oats again, and by no means entirely without reason; sales were up more than 20 percent over the previous year, and the company was once more comfortably in the black. So, they told IBM thanks, but no thanks. The same renewed taste of success also caused them to reject serious inquiries from Philips, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle. Word had it that new CEO Michael Spindler was convinced not only that the Power Mac had saved Apple, but that it had fundamentally altered their position in the marketplace.

The following year revealed how misguided that thinking really was; the Power Mac had fixed none of Apple’s fundamental problems. That year it was Microsoft who cemented their world domination instead, with the release of Windows 95, while Apple grappled with the reality that almost all of those Power Mac sales of the previous year had been to existing members of the Macintosh family, not to the new customers they so desperately needed to attract. What happened now that everyone in the family had dutifully upgraded? The answer to that question wasn’t pretty: Apple plunged off a financial cliff as precipitous in its own way as the one which had nearly destroyed IBM a few years earlier. Now, nobody was interested in acquiring them anymore. The pundits smelled the stink of death; it’s difficult to find an article on Apple written between 1995 and 1998 which doesn’t include the adjective “beleaguered.” Why buy now when you can sift through the scraps at the bankruptcy auction in just a little while?

Apple didn’t wind up dying, of course. Instead a series of improbable events, beginning with the return of prodigal-son Steve Jobs in 1997, turned them into the richest single company in the world — yes, richer even than Microsoft. These are stories for other articles. But for now, it’s perhaps worth pausing for a moment to think about an alternate timeline where the Macintosh became an IBM product, and the Deal of the Century that got that ball rolling thus came much closer to living up to its name. Bizarre, you say? Perhaps. But no more bizarre than what really happened.

(Sources: the books Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh by Steven Levy, Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company by Owen W. Linzmayer, Infinite Loop: How the World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane by Michael S. Malone, Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM by Paul Carroll, and The PowerPC Macintosh Book by Stephan Somogyi; InfoWorld of September 24 1990, October 15 1990, December 3 1990, April 8 1991, May 13 1991, May 27 1991, July 1 1991, July 8 1991, July 15 1991, July 22 1991, August 5 1991, August 19 1991, September 23 1991, September 30 1991, October 7 1991, October 21 1991, November 4 1991, December 30 1991, January 13 1992, January 20 1992, February 3 1992, March 9 1992, March 16 1992, March 23 1992, April 27 1992, May 11 1992, May 18 1992, June 15 1992, June 29 1992, July 27 1992, August 3 1992, August 10 1992, August 17 1992, September 7 1992, September 21 1992, October 5 1992, October 12 1992, October 19 1992, December 14 1992, December 21 1992, December 28 1992, January 11 1993, February 1 1993, February 22 1993, March 8 1993, March 15 1993, April 5 1993, April 12 1993, May 17 1993, May 24 1993, May 31 1993, June 21 1993, June 28 1993, July 5 1993, July 12 1993, July 19 1993, August 2 1993, August 9 1993, August 30 1993, September 6 1993, September 27 1993, October 4 1993, October 11 1993, October 18 1993, November 1 1993, November 15 1993, November 22 1993, December 6 1993, December 13 1993, December 20 1993, January 10 1994, January 31 1994, March 7 1994, March 14 1994, March 28 1994, April 25 1994, May 2 1994, May 16 1994, June 6 1994, June 27 1994; MacWorld of September 1992, February 1993, July 1993, September 1993, October 1993, November 1993, February 1994, and May 1994; Byte of November 1984. Online sources include IBM’s own corporate-history timeline and a vintage IBM lecture on the PowerPC architecture.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/the-deal-of-the-century-or-the-alliance-of-losers/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

[mikemortgage]

The Real Madrid Way: A Canadian sports exec tries to win over — and sell —an iconic Spanish soccer club

Dave Hopkinson remembers Nov. 1, 1994, quite well: it was his 24th birthday and his first day hawking season tickets for the Toronto Raptors, then a professional basketball expansion franchise in a diehard hockey town.

Hopkinson and 23 commission-hungry recruits sat in a room on the 14th floor of a building overlooking an arena construction site. Each was armed with a phone, desk and chair, and all competed to make a sale and ring the six-inch brass ship bell that their boss, Raptors founder, John Bitove, had mounted on the wall as a motivational tool.

The top four sellers were promised full-time jobs. The rest would be let go.

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“Dave was determined, fearless and fun,” Bitove recently recalled. “And he was just a kid, in his early 20s, but he would never give up, which is one of the things I loved about him. He would cold call anyone. He would work the phone. He would work his personality.”

Hopkinson would keep ringing the bell and look over at Bitove’s desk afterwards with a big, aw-shucks-boss-I-did-it-again grin on his face, which drove everybody else in the room halfway nuts, but earned him a full-time sales position.

The entry level job was a toehold on the sports business ladder that he has kept climbing: from selling the Raptors to selling just about everything for Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd. — owners of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Raptors, FC, Argonauts and more — including a 20-year, $800-million deal with the Bank of Nova Scotia to rename the rink formerly known as the Air Canada Centre.

The deal — the largest of its kind in North American major professional sports history — reverberated internationally. Hopkinson, long sought after by NHL and NBA teams but never sold on a move, became a hot international commodity.

An executive recruiter in Los Angeles called and, this past June, Hopkinson left MLSE to become the global head of partnerships at soccer giant Real Madrid, the third most valuable sports franchise on the planet, behind only the Dallas Cowboys and Manchester United (the Maple Leafs are not among the top 50).

Dave Hopkinson, the former COO of MLSE, has been drafted by soccer juggernaut Real Madrid to market the Spanish team abroad becoming global head of partnerships.

The move to Europe means Hopkinson has to apply the skills he honed at MLSE over two decades to a new continent, while also bringing some of the Old World back home. One of his chief mandates: selling an iconic Spanish club, not just to the true believers, but to the soccer holdouts in North America and China.

“With Real Madrid, Hoppy has stepped up to a whole new level that we simply don’t play at in this country,” said Brian Burke, a friend and former colleague at MLSE. “He is in the penthouse suite in terms of working for a professional sports team. Hoppy is a heavyweight.”

Hopkinson, known as Hoppy since Grade 7, was raised in Toronto, had only ever worked in Toronto and certainly wasn’t expecting a call from Real Madrid. He didn’t even speak a lick of Spanish. But Real Madrid was “Real Madrid,” he said, “ a magical opportunity,” a professional roll of the dice too good to pass up.

The new hire was in the bathroom of his new home in Madrid on a recent November evening, filling the tub after picking up his eldest of two daughters from dance class — a mundane, dad-at-home moment in what has been a whirlwind few months.

“I’ve already bumped into a couple of pointy objects around the office and stepped on some landmines, but I’ve also had some small wins,” Hopkinson said. “I sort of sympathize with what it is going to take to be successful here, and how to be successful around here.”

Real Madrid is valued at more than US$4 billion by Forbes magazine and generated over $1 billion in revenue in 2017, according to Deloitte UK’s annual Football Money League report. Almost 50 per cent of revenues came from merchandising and sponsorship deals. (By comparison, the Leafs, hockey’s second most valuable team next to the New York Rangers, are worth US$1.45 billion and had US$232 million in revenue during the 2017-18 season, according to Forbes.com.)

Money, though, isn’t necessarily the most appealing business aspect of Real Madrid. Part of what sold Hopkinson on the move was the team’s ownership structure. Instead of being lorded over by an egomaniac billionaire or some soulless profit-driven-corporate entity, the 116-year-old club, much like the NFL’s Green Bay Packers, is owned by its fans, about 93,000 community members known as “socios,” who each pay a $185 annual fee.

Many socios have been members for more than 50 years. Collectively, they wield a corporate hammer, electing the team president and board of directors, approving annual budgets and disciplining wayward bosses who stray from the community’s wishes.

Steven Mandis, who spent parts of two years interviewing Real Madrid executives, players past and present and frontline employees for his 2016 book, the Real Madrid Way, believes “community values” and culture, two airy-fairy and hard to define things, are what underpin the franchise’s enviable success, on and off the field.

“It starts with Real Madrid getting the world’s best players that match the community’s values — to play an attacking beautiful style of soccer with class, to win championships and capture the imagination and inspire the current and potential global audience,” the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker tuned business author/academic wrote in his book. “Since Real Madrid’s values are inclusive and universal, appealing to a global audience of all ages, the community grows globally.”

A fan waits the start of a Real Madrid match. The football club has a unique corporate structure that some argue adds to its global appeal.

Mandis’ belief is both elementary and revolutionary. Sports fans are inherently tribal, soccer fans perhaps the most rabidly so, which occasionally results in hooliganism and pitched street battles between rival supporters. But Real Madrid’s tribe isn’t just shelling out for tickets and merchandise, or throwing the odd knuckle or two, it guides the club’s direction.

The results are telling: Real Madrid wins — a lot. It is the three-time defending UEFA Champions League winners and has captured a record 33 Spanish domestic league titles since 1932. Its excellence and fan involvement boosts annual revenues, enabling it to cherry-pick global stars, such as Cristiano Ronaldo (recently decamped for Juventus in Italy), which begets more winning, further accelerating the growth of the international fan base and the crush of sponsors worldwide clamouring to get a piece of the action.

Which is where the guy from Toronto comes in.

Hopkinson understands how flaky talk of “values” sounds, especially to a North American sports audience, and especially around his hometown, where the greed of former Leafs owner Harold Ballard scarred a generation of hockey fans, and a pint at Scotiabank Arena sells for $12 a pop. But after three months in Madrid in a job he parachuted into in part to walk the tightrope between taking a storied franchise in some new business directions and observing its old traditions, he has bought in.

He is taking Spanish lessons, working with a language app and sees Real Madrid’s values reflected in everything from the tenure of its employees — people get hired and they don’t leave — to the tiniest of personal touches. For example, sending out company wide emails to announce an employee celebrating a birth or mourning a family death, regardless of corporate rank.

Dave Hopkinson with his family at the Real Madrid field.

“I don’t see these values articulated anywhere — there is not some plaque in the lobby saying, “This is our way,” he said. “But it is something that is understood around here; it’s palpable.”

Of course, as a sales guy, Hopkinson wakes up every day thinking about the value of money and how he can squeeze more revenue for Real Madrid out of a globalized sports industry.

“Dave has no problem putting a big number on the table and justifying it,” said Brian Cooper, chief executive of MKTG, a Toronto-based marketing/sponsorship company that represented Scotiabank in the MLSE naming rights deal.

A lifetime ago, Cooper was a Raptors executive when Hoppy was a “ticket sales grunt.” In many ways, Cooper said, Hopkinson has grown by bounds, but in others he is the same kid with the easy smile that he was from the start: smart, well-prepared, relentless, quick to remember a name or a fact, keen to network and able to make everybody feel as though they are part of the team.

“Dave’s team at MLSE would do a tremendous amount of work up front on who you are and what your needs are — and who your target audience is,” he said. “And he is going to bring that sophistication to the Real Madrid brand.”

Hopkinson, like almost every executive in every industry everywhere, sees Real Madrid’s greatest potential for growth in China and the United States.

“Despite the fact that football is the world’s most popular game, it is underdeveloped in the two biggest markets,” he said.

Real Madrid already has an office in Beijing, and will open one in the U.S. sometime before U.S.-Canada-Mexico host the 2026 World Cup.

Hopkinson gives a purely imagined example of how Real Madrid might crack into China’s corporate coffers. Take a hypothetical Chinese domestic brand — a toque, an electronic gizmo, a you-name-it — that is manufactured in China and, as with many such brands, nobody in the West has ever heard of.

Enter Real Madrid, sports behemoth, with more than 200 million followers on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), only about three per cent of whom actually reside in Spain, plus a Champions League final television audience of around 165 million viewers annually. (The average Super Bowl draws about 100 million viewers; the Cowboys count around 13 million followers across social media platforms.)

Marry all those eyeballs, tweets and likes to a Chinese toque on an imagined Real Madrid player’s noggin and that brand suddenly goes from having zero international profile to the big leagues. The big leagues, in theory, give a company licence to charge a premium for its goods associated with Real Madrid’s superstars and, naturally, give Real Madrid licence to charge the company a fortune to be associated with its trusted, winning narrative.

“If you look at the statistics of the value of Real Madrid, plus their numbers in terms of fandom and fan behaviours, then you start to realize the magnitude of what they are talking about,” said Cheri Bradish, a sports marketing professor at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Although consumers have never been more adept at ignoring advertising messages — the average human’s capacity to delete or ignore pop-up ads, videos, television commercials and email-marketing blasts is by now well honed — getting attention from existing fans isn’t a problem for Real Madrid.

The team’s fans aren’t looking for less, they always want more, which has led to some inventive new twists in corporate partnering. For example, every Real Madrid player gets presented with a new Audi (other major sponsors include Adidas, Emirates, Hugo Boss and Nivea Men) at the start of the season, an event sparking much fan speculation: What car is player X going to pick? How about player Y? What does the car say about the player who drives it?

The Audi draw becomes a media/social media story, well covered by the club’s website, with the vehicles as props and the players as characters. Players who subsequently elect to drive a vehicle other than an Audi to the team’s training facility must park in a remote lot surrounded by a high hedge. The Audi drivers’ park in high visibility spots close to the front door.

“Does everybody care about what kind of car the players drive? No,” Hopkinson said. “But lots of people care about Luka Modric, Gareth Bale and Real Madrid.”

What he means is: soccer-loving automotive geeks get what they want, while the greater mass of Real Madrid fans get something, too — a glimpse of their heroes doing something other than playing soccer. Audi, of course, gets a bunch of famous athletes driving their cars to work every day.

But getting attention in the U.S. is different. Football — soccer on this continent — has been trying to conquer the U.S. ever since Pelé and the New York Cosmos burst onto the scene in the 1970s. Major League Soccer has 23 teams, including three in Canada, and its fans are enthusiastic, but the sports pecking order list still reads: NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL … MLS.

Dan Mason, a sports professor at the University of Alberta, argues pecking order isn’t what it is important. Real Madrid doesn’t need to convert Joe NFL Fan. It simply has to convince U.S. multinationals interested in boosting their profile overseas to harness the Real Madrid brand power to do it for them.

Real Madrid isn’t exactly a non-entity in the U.S. market. Fox’s English and Spanish broadcasts of Real Madrid’s 4-1 victory over Juventus in the 2017 UEFA title game drew a combined three million viewers, or about a million more than the average MLS championship game.

“Just because Major League Soccer isn’t as successful as the other major sports leagues in North America, it doesn’t mean that Real Madrid isn’t a valuable brand in North America,” Mason said.

Hopkinson declined to disclose any Real Madrid state secrets, but one imagines the likes of General Electric Co., Verizon Wireless, Coca-Cola Co. and more should expect a call from Spain soon.

Hopkinson, meanwhile, turned 48 on Nov. 1, the last in a cascade of family birthdays since the move to Madrid in September. To celebrate, he and his wife, Lawrie, took their girls, Miranda, 15, and Claire, 10, to Paris for the weekend. They got an Airbnb, went up the Eiffel Tower, strolled along the Champs-Elysées, ate great food, drank it all in.

What had started as a job offer had become a family adventure, and a fresh challenge for a veteran sales guy with a knack for ringing the bell the Hopkinson way.

“You know how they say there is some magic about the 90-day mark at a new job?” Hopkinson mused, from his bathroom hideaway. “Well, I feel the magic is happening. I am getting dangerously close to figuring this all out.” Financial Post

• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: oconnorwrites

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[writingsubmissions]

Fights to Make: UFC 209

Tyron Woodley (beat Stephen Thompson) vs. Demian Maia/Jorge Masvidal (May 13) winner: Well...a win’s a win, I guess. I’m struggling to think of a UFC main event title fight that was worse than Woodley/Thompson, and it’s kind of impressive UFC hasn’t had one this bad in years, but none of that really helps the fact that this was an awful, awful fight. I wrote last week that Woodley’s draw against Thompson was an excellent fight that helped legitimize Woodley’s title reign, but this pretty much set fire to any thought left of Woodley as a fighter people want to see, and even worse, all of his most exciting opponents are now coming off losses. Demian Maia’s obviously the next top contender, but UFC pretty much forced him into taking a fight against Jorge Masvidal at UFC 211 - if Masvidal wins that fight, he’s also obviously the next contender, so I guess Woodley should just wait things out for whoever comes out on top there.

Stephen Thompson (lost to Tyron Woodley) vs. Donald Cerrone: As damaging as this fight was to Woodley, it was probably just as much for Thompson, who’s gone from a potential star that everyone’s pretty much excited to see to, well, just another guy. Thompson needs to get back in a fun action fight stat, and given that Donald Cerrone somehow hasn’t gotten a new booking in the last month, he’s the perfect man for the job.

Alistair Overeem (beat Mark Hunt) vs. Derrick Lewis: I kind of figured Overeem would beat Hunt, but I thought it would be one of those fights where Overeem suddenly relies on his grappling and grinds out a fairly nothing decision. But instead, this was a surprisingly resilient performance by The Reem, taking place mostly on the feet, as Overeem got rocked a few times before coming back and surprisingly knocking out Hunt with some brutal knees. Overeem’s definitely among the top contenders at heavyweight, but the whole title picture is just completely muddled, and frankly, Overeem’s probably near the back of the line given that he just lost to champion Stipe Miocic. If Miocic drops the belt to Junior dos Santos, who Overeem knocked out at the end of 2015, I could see him getting a title shot, but for now, let’s make Overeem the guy to welcome Derrick Lewis into the ranks of heavyweight contenders.

Daniel Kelly (beat Rashad Evans) vs. Johny Hendricks: Never count out Judo Dan. The affable Australian has, fairly rightfully, been an underdog in all of his UFC bouts, but he just keeps winning, and here he nipped out a narrow decision over Evans that, honestly, probably says more about how Evans should retire rather than anything else. But Kelly’s certainly an interesting fighter at middleweight, although once he reaches the top ten or so the athleticism gap will certainly get him slaughtered - but for now, let’s just keep the weird fights going, and I like the idea of Kelly taking on Hendricks, since it’d be a chance for Kelly to get another win over a former UFC champion trying to figure his career out at 185.

Rashad Evans (lost to Daniel Kelly) vs. Nate Marquardt: So...now what? At light heavyweight, Evans looked slow and seemed to have problems with his durability, and while Kelly is an excellent judoka, he’s also probably the slowest and less of a finisher than any credible middleweight Evans could’ve faced. Evans honestly should probably just retire at this point, but if he doesn’t, he still has enough of a name that you can’t really put him against, say, Ryan Janes or some sort of random fighter pulled off the deep undercard. I guess the best option is...Marquardt, I suppose, since he’s another vet with a name that’s in the latter stages of his career, but even then, I have a ton of worry that Marquardt still packs enough power to knock Evans out.

Mark Hunt (lost to Alistair Overeem) vs. Anthony Hamilton: Hunt rocked Overeem a bunch, but couldn’t finish him, and while there’s no shame in losing to Overeem, Hunt’s now lost two straight, is suing UFC, and is coming up on his 43rd birthday, so it’s a little bit hard to know where he goes from here. Hunt’s fought pretty much every other veteran contender in the top ten, so it’s hard to find a next fight that would be fairly interesting, so I guess let’s just have him smoke Anthony Hamilton and then figure out the rest later.

Darren Elkins (beat Mirsad Bektic) vs. Jason Knight: I certainly didn’t expect one of the biggest stories coming out of UFC 209 to be Darren Elkins, for a number of reasons - for one, he was facing probably the best prospect in the sport and figured to lose pretty handily, and for another, if he did in fact turn out to be a tough test for a talented, if inexperienced fighter, Elkins really never wins exciting or does much interesting at all. Well, that all changed, as after getting annihilated for a good ten-plus minutes, Elkins scored one of the biggest comeback victories of the year and knocked Bektic out in the third. So...uh, now what? Elkins has already lost handily against some of the better fighters in the division, so I still sort of like him as a gatekeeper, and let’s put him against Jason Knight, whose high-volume striking and aggressive grappling make for a fascinating interaction with Elkins’s straight-ahead style.

Iuri Alcantara (beat Luke Sanders) vs. Aljamain Sterling: Elkins’s win meant that Alcantara’s sudden kneebar win over Luke Sanders was only the comeback win of the year for about, say, twenty minutes, but it was still an impressive task for the Brazilian vet. Alcantara’s basically been UFC’s bantamweight gatekeeper extraordinaire the last few years, but this, combined with his blowout win over Brad Pickett, should probably earn him something more interesting - I like him as sort of a reverse-gatekeeper for Aljamain Sterling, who needs a win after two straight losses; Alcantara’s the sort of solid test who can beat Sterling if the New Yorker hasn’t fixed all the holes in his game, but is also a winnable fight.

David Teymur (beat Lando Vannata) vs. Paul Felder: The cancellation of the Nurmagomedov/Ferguson fight meant that Teymur suddenly found himself in the co-main event, and the Swede had a showcase performance, beating the much more hyped prospect in Lando Vannata and doing so in a really fun striking match. For someone who wasn’t all that impressive during his days on TUF, this marks a huge win in an overachieving UFC run, as at the very least, Teymur projects to be a solid action fighter for the next few years to come. Paul Felder’s settling into that role, and should provide a solid litmus test - if Teymur’s able to style out against a tough vet like Felder, that suggests he may be on his way to becoming a fringe contender.

Lando Vannata (lost to David Teymur) vs. Polo Reyes: No loss is all that good, but Vannata doesn’t really seem to be hurt by dropping a decision to Teymur - it was still a fun fight that allowed Vannata to show off his exciting style, and he’s pretty much the best 1-2 UFC fighter you’ll find. I like the idea of just throwing Vannata in action fights until he refines his style, and a bout against Mexican boxer Polo Reyes should be both a winnable fight and just absolute madness.

Mirsad Bektic (lost to Darren Elkins) vs. Ryan Hall: Well, Darren Elkins got the comeback win, but the good news is that Bektic was beating him so badly that it became one of the bigger comebacks in UFC history. It’d be a fun, weird fight, besides, but I do think UFC’s gonna book someone like Bektic against Ryan Hall, since Hall’s standoffish grappling style has probably earned the ire of the company, and as tricky as Hall is to fight, there’s just as good a chance that Bektic absolutely smashes him so they can cut Hall.

Marcin Tybura (beat Luis Henrique) vs. Aleksei Oleinik: I seemed to be the only one that enjoyed Tybura/Henrique, a weird, sloppy little fight where both guys had their moments, only for Tybura to eventually get the better of Henrique and pound him out for a third-round stoppage. It’s an impressive win, although I still do fear that Tybura is going to struggle with bigger heavyweights. There’s enough other fringe-top fifteen guys to put Tybura against that you could go in a bunch of different ways, but I’ll go with veteran Russian grappler Oleinik in a fight that UFC can do on whatever European card.

Tyson Pedro (beat Paul Craig) vs. Darren Stewart/Francimar Barroso (Mar. 18) winner: This was a really good win for Pedro - he’s a raw-as-hell Australian, and given the reputation of that circuit, I had some questions as far as how his physicality and wrestling would translate to the UFC level. But Craig’s a really solid, well-tested fighter, and the fact that Pedro didn’t really have much trouble dictating the terms of the fight before the finish really showed a lot. I wouldn’t rush him just yet - he’s still raw, and he’s still super-young, so the winner of the Stewart/Barroso fight in England would be a solid next step, pitting him against either an undersized, powerful athlete in Stewart or a giant grinder in Barroso.

Cynthia Calvillo (beat Amanda Cooper) vs. Jamie Moyle: Amanda Cooper is pretty much the perfect opponent for someone like Calvillo to look good against, but for being only six months into her pro MMA career, it was still impressive to see Calvillo more or less style out on an over-aggressive opponent and score a quick submission win. Strawweight’s a bit like men’s flyweight, where UFC’s division is fairly thin in terms of numbers but gets really tough, really quickly, so I wouldn’t rush Calvillo into a bigger fight just yet - instead, Moyle seems like a pretty natural opponent, since both went the same route of long amateur careers and are both interesting, grappling-based fighters.

Paul Craig (lost to Tyson Pedro) vs. Igor Pokrajac: This was a disappointing loss for Craig - he’s come into UFC more or less as a complete product, and Pedro’s the type of raw prospect that you’d hope the affable Scot could get a win against. But since Craig has a good personality and a good look, he’d still be someone I’d look to maximize if I were UFC - so rather than put him against another tough prospect, I’d give him a chance to stay afloat against someone like Croatian vet Pokrajac, who was pretty much only re-signed since UFC was running an event in that country.

Luis Henrique (lost to Marcin Tybura) vs. Chase Sherman: Henrique’s loss to Tybura was a mixed bag - he did look limited enough that he’s probably still a ways off from being a real concern at heavyweight, but he did look like a tenacious wrestler, and he’s still just 23, which means he’ll still be considered a young heavyweight come, say, 2024. I’d just keep feeding Henrique lower-level heavyweights and hope he wins enough to stay afloat as he develops, so let’s go with Sherman, a tough, aggressive striker who Henrique might be able to just bull around.

Amanda Cooper (lost to Cynthia Calvillo) vs. Angela Hill: Cooper’s over-aggressive grappling figured to get her in trouble against Calvillo, and, well, that’s exactly what happened. I’ve never been particularly high on “ABC”, so I like her as an opponent for former Invicta champ Hill, who could use a win coming off an awesome fight against Jessica Andrade, to get a rebound win against.

Luke Sanders (lost to Iuri Alcantara) vs. Davey Grant: Well, Sanders probably had his fight against Alcantara won until throwing a stupid, blatantly illegal knee when Alcantara was on the ground, which gave the Brazilian time to recover and eventually hit a miracle kneebar for a comeback win. I wouldn’t mind if UFC kept moving Sanders up the ladder, since he’s already in his thirties and still looks like a solid prospect, but I’ll instead throw him a bit of a rebound fight against Grant, a fairly one-dimensional British grappler.

Albert Morales (beat Andre Soukhamthath) vs. Ian Entwistle/Brett Johns (Mar. 18) winner: Morales got a good win to stay afloat in the UFC, but the short-term outlook hasn’t really changed - Morales is still an interesting athlete with a bunch of different tools, but is still a ways off from seemingly putting it all together. So I’d keep him in lower-level prospect bouts, and a fight against either Welsh prospect Johns or British leglock specialist Entwistle could work.

Mark Godbeer (beat Daniel Spitz) vs. Cyril Asker: Godbeer won a decision over newcomer Spitz, and the world collectively shrugged - the British vet needed the win, but he didn’t really show a ton to make you think he’d be a going concern on the UFC roster. But you can probably feed Godbeer enough lower-level heavyweights that he can rack some wins up and maybe become a bit of a thing, so let’s put him against France’s Asker, who got a knockout over the completely awful Dmitrii Smoliakov but hasn’t really proven much else.

Andre Soukhamthath (lost to Albert Morales) vs. Kwan Ho Kwak: Soukhamthath’s debut performance was fine - he looked a bit lost as a grappler, but he’s a solid enough action fighter that if he wins enough to hang on, he could be a little bit of a thing. A fight against Korean prospect and fellow 0-1 UFC fighter Kwak would be a fun striking match, and given Soukhamthath’s Laotian heritage, it’d be a natural for an Asian card like the one coming up in Singapore.

Daniel Spitz (lost to Mark Godbeer) vs. Justin Willis: There’s stuff to like about Spitz - for a giant dude, he’s really athletic and has some solid striking basics - but he doesn’t really have much going defensively, and he might just be too slow to do much of anything in UFC. If Willis is still under UFC contract after becoming the first guy anyone can remember blowing weight at heavyweight this past February, that’d be as good a fight as any to make to see if Spitz can hang at this level.

#ufc209 #ufc 209 #ufc #mma #matchmaking

[duanecbrooks]

On Not-At-All-Sloppy Seconds     Now that you know what are my all-time favorite literary offerings, I'll fill you in on what is my all-time second-favorite literary work--and keep in mind when you get wind of same, as you did when you got wind of all my all-time favorites, that I, as I've said before, am and throughout my adult life have been a card-carrying geek a la Meghan McCain. My all-time second-most-cherished literary work is...again, a tie, here between that bitchin'-hot-blonde Goldfinger chick Shirley Eaton's personal/professional memoir Golden Girl and the Playboy Magazine darling Vikki LaMotta's ("with" Thomas Hauser) memoir Knockout!: The Sexy, Violent, Extraordinary Life of Vikki LaMotta.               I should say here that, in coming to said decision concerning these books, there was, as always when compiling these rankings, a hell of a lot that I had to overcome. In the case of Eaton's tome there was at first my deep and long-standing resentment of aesthetes grabbing to their bosoms and swooning over anything and everything British, of those who (so they profess) admire Quality--whatever that is--gushing and cooing over every single solitary scrap the Brits come up with. Yet after careful reflection I've come to fully realize that my admiration of--indeed, my love for--Golden Girl transcends the usual if-it's-British-it-must-be-good dogma. In the case of LaMotta's book there was at first the suspicion that my intensely strong favoring of it was based not so much on the merit of the tome itself but on the circumstances surrounding it--the aforementioned tome was never, ever the subject of any politically-correct negative reaction or, indeed, any reaction at all, thus, for me, it had approval; LaMotta herself had no genuine professional cachet, her sole claims to fame being 1) she was Playboy Magazine's first middle-aged pictorial and 2) the Playboy Magazine issue in which she appeared was and to this day remains said publication's highest seller among women, the said facts concerning her giving her, to me, a fiercely enticing air of independence and individuality. Yet upon careful pondering I've come to the full realization that I dig LaMotta's tome because of the book itself, not because of any external facets of that tome or of its author.               Having covered all that, I shall now detail just why the aforementioned books rate so highly with me.                 .Neither of their authors, at any time in their tomes, make any great claims regarding themselves or their books. While Eaton freely bows to the fact that it is her role in Goldfinger that has provided her with cinematic immortality ("I am the girl covered in gold paint in Goldfinger and, in a sense, I always will be...Every week I still receive fan letters from round the globe and although the writers mention the many other film roles I have played, the part they most often refer to is the Jill Masterson cameo in Goldfinger. There clearly is something about that image that has struck a chord with...women as well as men"), never, ever in her tome does she thump her chest, does she indulge in grandstanding concerning the part that, as she herself concedes, put her on the cultural map. And LaMotta, for her part, while she freely recounted the impact that her Playboy Magazine spread had (among other things, one woman wrote to her saying: "Our exercise instructor put a photo of you on the bulletin board as a goal to work toward"; a Niagara Falls high-school senior sent her an invitation to his then-upcoming prom), you easily get the sense that she was sincerely proud of the impact that her pictorial had, that she was genuinely pleased that she inspired others, not just that she dug calling attention to herself (I should say here that I'm referencing LaMotta in the past tense because, alas, she died in 2005).               .The prose style of both books is consistently intelligent and sensitive. No matter where you turn in either tome, you quickly see that both were turned out by women of obvious depth and dimension, by girls of considerable maturity and considerable spirit who know (in LaMotta's case, unfortunately, knew) how to express themselves and are in no sense bimbos. At the end of both books, you feel uplifted by having spent time with fully rounded, fully centered females who, happily, have marvelous insight and marvelous perspective regarding their lives.               .Both of our authors have led greatly individualistic lives. Eaton in her tome unashamedly tells of her decision to retire at 32, making her the youngest celebrity/entertainment adult to do so (she ingratiatingly and intelligently relates her post-showbiz doings, which includes being good buddies with her former co-star's successor as 007, Roger Moore, and his wife Luisa and having built and moving to, with her husband, this glorious French palace, which they called "Rose Grange," which was "the French equivalent to the name of our family house in Hertfordshire 'Rose Barn'"; also: judging by the various contemporary photos of her, including an especially mouth-watering one of her wearing a black leotard, matching fishnet stockings, and in her bare feet, she's still one damned sexy dish) and LaMotta in her own book not only told of the fact that after she did her layout she turned down literally all offers to do films, including a particularly tempting offer from Home Box Office which she wound up saying no to because of the script's excessive (for her) nudity, but disclosed her feelings about aging ("I'm not a fifty-seven-year-old woman with dreams of being thirty again. I'm a fifty-seven-year-old woman trying to act fifty-seven...[L]ook at a baby; any baby. We all start out knowing nothing and we learn") and about Being Recognized ("[W]hen [myself and my admirers are] done, if they smile and say, 'I can't wait to tell my husband I met you' or 'Wait till I tell the guys at the bowling alley,' I feel that both of us have lived a shade better").             And both of our memoirists conclude in grand fashion. Eaton at the conclusion of her tome answers the question of whether of not she'd like to go back into acting by asserting that she'd say: "I'm contemplating two offers at the moment. If they are interesting or fun, I will accept them, as now all my doors are open," And after coming out with this quite humorous saying referencing her world-famous cameo--"James Bond never dies and neither does gold paint!"--her absolute final words are her quoting this rather lovely poem.                                              "There is nothing as sweet as promise,                                     What is to come before it comes.                                           The dream, the idea, is rich with pleasure,                                       It has no end that we can measure."         And LaMotta's absolute final words genuinely melt the heart: "Life is wonderful. I want to live it." The book itself ended with these mega-moving comments from LaMotta's surviving son Harrison: "I'll always miss [LaMotta]...My mother was full of life and she taught me to enjoy life. I love the fact that I never saw her talk down to or disrespect anyone. And even in her seventies, she was still a knockout."               It was Meryl Streep who, upon being awarded for Lifetime Achievement during the Golden Globe Awards telecast, concluded her legendary acceptance speech by quoting "my friend, the dear, departed Princess Lela [Carrie Fisher, of course]": "Take your broken heart, make it into art." Shirley Eaton and Vikki LaMotta both took their hearts, which in their pasts were broken--the former's by her beloved husband lingering death due to cancer, the latter's first by the vicious beatings she was forced to endure at the hands of her father, then, much, much later, by the also-vicious beatings she was forced to endure at the hands of her boxer husband Jake--and turned them into not art but often incisive, frequently touching, always stylish autobiographies. And it is we readers who should fervently thank them for having done so.

#Meghan McCain #goldfinger #shirley eaton #Golden Girl #playboy magazine #vikki lamotta #Knockout!: The Sexy #jill masterson #cameo #Meryl Streep #the golden globe awards #acceptance speech