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berrynarrybanana · 3 years

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Mrs. Styles - Honeybee Extra

A/N: I would like to let you all know that I don’t know what happened here. I started writing at the beginning of my shift and I just didn’t stop and then bam, this happened? I have links to the outfit and other things mentioned in the fic below. I hope you enjoy the visual trip and the journey of this fic as it is a whirlwind ride. Please let me know if you enjoy this and please tell Harry to stop trying to kill me if you see him, kay? I love you all and I’m here if you need to talk!

Rental House | Outfit |

Word Count: 3k+

Warnings: Daddy kink, impreg!kink, roleplay

November 2020

The second the photos broke, I lost it.

Harry wearing a wedding ring on the set of his new film sent me reeling in a pit of lust and wanting unlike any other. I spent my entire afternoon clenching my thighs together and avoiding small talk with coworkers. I was meant to fly out on Friday afternoon to visit him for the weekend, but I was struggling to hold it together. The wedding band on his finger was taunting me from two thousand miles away and I was caving. Anna had no problem with me disappearing a little early, so long as I had my laptop with me and my articles submitted.

My flight was switched for Thursday morning instead of Friday evening as originally planned. I had to jump through some hoops to ensure no one actually saw me entering JFK or leaving LAX. Having pap photos taken of me would certainly ruin my surprise. I spent too much time hatching my plan for a group of sleazy men with camera’s to ruin it.

“Why are you dressed like that?” Harry rubbed at his eyes, his voice scratchy and his brain groggy due to the early hour. “You look like you’re going on a run.”

“I’m doing a bunch of errands for Anna today, so I decided to dress casual.” I shrugged, shifting around in my private lounge seat at the airport. “I’m waiting for a friend of hers to get off their flight before I take them into the office.”

“Thought you were hopping on your flight a little early to surprise me.” He pouted, his eyes shining under the dim lighting. “Made my heart race a little.”

“I wish I could, darling.” I said softly. “I miss you so much already and it’s barely been two weeks.”

“I know, it sucks.” He inhaled sharply, shaking his head. “Only one more sleep and then we’ll be together for the weekend.”

“I can’t wait, squid.” I said softly. “I’ll talk to you later today, okay? Don’t be upset if I can’t answer a text or anything, I’ll be so busy with Anna’s errands-”

“S’alright, honey.” He gave me a reassuring smile. “I’ll be on set so I might not be able to text as often either.”

“Alright.” I said. “I love you.”

“I love you.” He blew a kiss to the camera and I caught it, pressing my fingers to my cheek with a soft giggle. “Have a great day, honey.”

“You too, squid.”

After I hung up with Harry, I jumped into planning mode.

I already had the address to the rental house and a copy of the key. Harry had sent it to me the moment he got one himself just in case I ever wanted to come visit. We both knew that flight times and his filming schedule might not line up perfectly, so it didn’t hurt to have a key just in case I had to drive from LAX to Palm Springs on my own. I planned on stopping at the Malibu house to steal Roxanne from the garage. It would take me two hours and a half hours to get from Malibu to Palm Springs once I finally started my solo road trip.

As I switched over to a calming playlist that Harry made for me on my birthday, I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths.

I knew that it would be a fun trip, but I could only hope that Harry really liked his surprise.

****************************

The sun was beating down on my bare legs as I leaned against Roxanne.

I anxiously twirled the set of keys around my perfectly painted fingernails. I picked one of the most infamous shades from the 1950’s to match my hair, makeup, and outfit. I rubbed my painted lips together nervously, taking a shuddery breath as I watched the gate of the production set carefully. I thought that it was going to open four times before, but no one had stumbled off set yet.

They were all set to do a two hour lunch break today and that gave me plenty of time to do what I wanted with Harry back in his rental home. I spent most of my time getting ready there, following several tutorials on vintage hair and makeup before I dressed in my adorable outfit. It was something I saw on a show about a female comedian in the fifties. I adored her style throughout the whole show, but I really loved this outfit on me.

It was a pair of black and white check shorts with a matching, three quarter sleeve blazer. I went through Harry’s closet, in search of his ivory silk shirt that I’d seen him wear in a pap photo years ago, to add a little special touch to the outfit. It had his last name stitched on the pocket to compliment the fake wedding ring I’d slipped on my finger.

That was the part I was nervous about.

I didn’t want him to think that I was insane for finding a piece of costume jewelry to match his own fake wedding ring. I got the idea on the flight over from New York, my mind racing with ideas and scenarios to play out. I ultimately decided that if he could torture me with a wedding ring, then I could torture him with one.

The gate finally opened as I started to contemplate picking my nails, a loud screeching sound pulling me from my thoughts as I gripped the keys to the benz in my hand tightly.

Florence was the first out, and while I was delighted to meet the girl who was spending so much time with my boyfriend, I didn’t care to meet her just yet. I watched her turn back, letting out a charming giggle as my boyfriend followed suite behind her. Olivia Wilde was next, a bag on her shoulder and a wide smile on her face. A few other familiar faces trailed out after Harry, and suddenly, my nerves had skyrocketed. A lot of famous people were about to see me in a classic fifties get up with a car scarf around my curls and my legs exposed.

My nerves were soothed for just a moment as I looked at Harry’s freshly cut hair, slicked back in a style that I thought I would hate on him. As per usual, he looked like a daydream. My breath caught in my throat when he looked over at me, his eyes growing wide and a smirk pulling at the corner of his lips. Florence caught on to his line of sight, following his gaze until her eyes landed on me. I gave him a quick wave as everyone else turned to look at me and I felt my face grow hot. He pressed a quick kiss to Olivia’s cheek and then Florence’s before jogging my way.

“What the hell is all this?” He gripped my elbow gently, leaning down to press his lips to mine with a wide smile. “Beatrice, you look so good.”

“I know.” I hummed against his lips, brushing my fingers over his cheek. “Hi.”

“Hiya, honey.” He cooed, wrapping his arms around me. “Fuck me, you’re gorgeous.”

“I thought I’d do a little something to surprise you.” I wrapped my arms around his neck, tossing my head back when he pulled the scarf from my head. “Harry!”

“You did your hair and makeup, too?” He kissed my cheek. “Come on, I want you to meet Olivia and Florence. They’re going to love this.”

“I don’t want her to think I’m mocking her movie.” I glanced down at Harry, causing him to frown slightly. “I did it because I knew you would love it and I had a lot of fun dressing up, but I don’t want to offend her.”

“You won’t.” He reassured me. “She’ll probably make you an extra.”

“Shut up.” I rolled my eyes as he pouted. “Fine, I’ll go over there.”

“Thank you.” He set me down, grabbing my hand before tugging me along.

“Olivia, Florence,” Harry glanced back at me with a giddy grin. “This is my girlfriend, Beatrice.”

“Hello,” I stuck my hand out between us and they both went for a shake. “It’s really nice to meet y’all.”

“You too.” Florence beamed back at me with a smile that was almost as bright as the sun. “I just want to thank you for letting me borrow your boyfriend. He’s such a lovely person and a dream to work with.”

“Try baking with him, you’ll change your mind.” I squeezed Harry’s hand, letting out a soft chuckle. “He’s like a toddler when he gets in the kitchen.”

“I can’t imagine him in an apron.” Olivia laughed. “We have to see that.”

“I have pictures, I’ll make sure to give him a framed one for his trailer.” I pressed my lips together as Harry squeaked out.

“Alright, I didn’t think you’d all gang up on me.” He said playfully. “I wanted to show you off and here you are, teasing me for baking.”

“I’m teasing you because you steal the batter on a spoon, not because you’re baking. I love baking with you.” I bumped my hip into his, smiling up at him. “But I’ve got to keep you grounded, don’t I? Your head will inflate and I’ll have to tie a cinder block to your foot to keep you from floating off.”

“Haha, you’re so funny.” He scrunched his nose up and I tossed my head back, letting out a loud laugh. “Anyways, what do you think of her outfit?”

“Oh, Harry, don’t-”

“It looks great, actually.” Olivia said. “Did I see that on the set of the Marvelous Mrs. Masiel?”

“Yeah, you did.” I nodded. “I love that show and all of her outfits so much.”

“It looks adorable on you.” Florence said. “You work for Vogue, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “I did a piece with one of your Little Women co-stars not too long ago, actually.”

“I thought you seemed familiar.” She exclaimed. “You came on set one day, didn’t you?”

“I did.” I nodded. “It was an honest to god, out of body experience for me. I loved Little Women so much as a girl. I seriously wanted to change my name to Josephine after reading it.”

“And then the film was so bloody amazing!” Florence exclaimed. “Harry, why have you kept her away from us for so long?”

“S’not my fault she has a job.” He rolled his eyes, chortling playfully. “I tried to convince her that being a housewife was much more fun, but I think she read the script and decided against it.”

“Yeah, I sure did.” I laughed softly alongside Olivia and Florence. “We should do dinner or something this weekend. I don’t know if you all have plans, but Harry’s rental house has a table that seats like, eight people.”

“That sounds wonderful.” Olivia said. “Just let us know the details and I’ll pass it along to the other main actors.”

“Sounds great.” Harry said. “Well, I’m going to steal my girl away if you don’t mind. I’ll see you in two hours?”

“See you then, Harry.” Florence waved before she took off in the direction of her car. “Bye, Beatrice!”

“Bye, Florence.” I waved back at her with a giggle before turning to Olivia. “It was really lovely to meet you. I’ll make sure to get him back in time.”

“Thank you.” She laughed. “Have a great lunch, you two.”

“Thanks.” Harry and I said at the same time.

When Olivia was gone, Harry looked down at me with a smirk.

“Do I get to fuck you now?” He asked, his dimple popping out.

“It depends.” I said slowly. “Would you, by chance, like to partake in a little role play?”

“It depends.” He said back. “What do you have in mind?”

I walked forward, smoothing my hands over his t-shirt covered chest. I pressed up on my toes, bringing my lips as close to his ears as I could get them.

“Do you still have your wedding ring from set?”

********************************************

“Honey!” I heard Harry’s voice from where I was lounging on the sofa, a magazine draped over my thighs. “I’m home.”

I smiled, flipping through my magazine without actually paying attention to it.

I heard Harry’s footsteps moments later, his dress shoes tapping along the concrete floor of the house. I tilted my head up when he moved in front of me, his eyes trailing over my body.

“You look comfortable.” He said, reaching for my magazine with two fingers. “You didn’t answer when I called out for you.”

“Sorry, darling,” I hummed out when he pressed his lips to mine. “I was invested in an article.”

“You and your articles.” He breathed against my lips. “It’s been ages since I’ve seen you. Are you just going to sit there?”

“I was planning on it, sweet pea.” I brushed my thumb over his bottom lip. “I’m relaxing my feet.”

“Now, I’ve been gone on business for six days, honey. I would like the chance to properly greet my beautiful wife.” He smirked, setting his briefcase to the coffee table behind him.

“Mr. Styles,” I twisted my legs off the couch, standing up between the furniture and Harry. “I don’t know what you’re insinuating, but I’ve got far too much to get done today. I’ve still got grocery shopping to do and well, I have to call your Mother.”

“I have a better plan, doll.” He roughly gripped my hips, his fingers digging into my sides harshly as he yanked me against his chest. “How about we sneak off for a little afternoon delight?”

“Harry Styles, I don’t think so.” I mocked offense, swatting his shoulder. “I’m far too busy.”

“Make time for your husband, honey.” He cooed, brushing his knuckles against my cheek gently before he gripped my chin. “Make love with your husband.”

“Mr. Styles, you do drive a hard bargain.” I whispered, my breath catching in my throat as our eyes connected in a lustful gaze. “I do have something I’ve been wanting to show you.”

“Mrs. Styles, what have you been up to while daddy’s been away?” He hummed out as his lips brushed against my red painted lips. “Have you been naughty?”

“No,” I smirked. “I’ve been an angel.”

“Prove it.” He whispered moments before our lips collided.

He kissed me just like they did in the old movies, his body wrapping around mine. I moaned against him when I felt his tongue slip over my own, giving me a taste of what I had been craving for two weeks now. I let out a giggle and then a squeak of surprise when I felt his hands under my bum, lifting me up into his arms. I wrapped my legs around him, holding on tight as he walked us from the living room towards the bedroom. He dropped me on the bed before grabbing my right ankle, holding my leg up as my ankle rested on his shoulder.

“These heels…” He started to fiddle with the clasp, finally pulling the strap loose before he slipped it off. “They’re new.”

“Just bought them.” I gripped the duvet under my fingers. “Do you like them?”

“Yes.” He kissed my ankle before gently resting my right leg on the bed. “Did you buy them with daddy’s money?”

“I did.” I bit my lower lip as my core clenched, my walls fluttering at his tone. “I bought them for you.”

“You didn’t even ask daddy before you bought them.” He tutted, reaching for my left ankle. “You’re getting bold.”

“I just wanted to surprise you.” I said.

“I’m very surprised.” He gave me a soft wink, one that let me know my Harry was still in this version of him that we’d quickly created in the car.

A business man with a daddy kink in the 1950’s that wanted to knock his wife up after a long business trip. It was a simple plot, but it combined quite a few kinks into one scenario, so we didn’t really mind. I giggled when he reminded me that daddy was a common nickname in that time period, something girls called their husbands in a provocative setting.

When both of my heels were off, Harry brushed his hands up my bare thighs until they landed on my hips. He gently guided me towards the center of the bed before kneeling over me. I lifted both hands up, cupping his cheeks as he leaned down to kiss my lips.

“Mrs. Styles,” He hummed out. “I’ve been thinking?”

“About what, Mr. Styles?” I pressed my lips over his cheek, sliding my fingers towards the back of his neck.

“I think it’s been quite lonely around here.” He said. “I can’t imagine you’re enjoying all of this time alone when I’m away on business.”

“I get by just fine.” I said softly, dropping my head back to the mattress. “Do you want to get a dog, Harry? Is that what this is about?”

“I don’t want to get a dog, darling.” He chuckled, brushing his nose over mine. “I want a baby.”

“A baby?” My eyes grew wide. “Isn’t it a bit soon, darling? We’ve only been married for five months.”

“That’s more than enough time, doll.” He whined. “I want us to have a beautiful little baby to love and to dote on. I want to show her off in front of my friends and my family-”

“Oh, Mr. Styles.” I sighed, shaking my head. “Don’t you know I’d do anything for you, darling.”

“Is that a yes?” He smirked, his eyes lighting up.

“Yes.” I gasped out when he rutted his hips forward. “Please.”

He wasted no time, stripping me from my blazer and then my tiny shorts. He tossed them aside carelessly, his hands falling to the buttons on the silk shirt that I had stolen from our closet.

“S’this mine?” He glanced up at me with a confused smirk. “Haven’t seen this in ages.”

“S’yours.” I nodded, holding the lapel to the side to show off his name. “S’got your name on it and everything.”

“Cheeky girl.” He cooed out, dropping his head to press a kiss to my stomach. “It’s our name.”

I let out a low whine in the back of my throat, shifting my hips as Harry made it to the last button towards the top of the dress shirt. I watched his face carefully as he pushed it to the side, his eyes scanning the black, vintage set that I had purchased for today.

“You’re trying to kill me.” He gasped out as his fingers brushed over the skin of my stomach to my breasts. “Fucking….I can’t take this anymore. I need to be inside of you.”

“Then get inside of me, Mr. Styles.” I lifted my legs, spreading them apart slightly so he could see the cut out area on the crotch of the panties. “You don’t even have to take everything off.”

Harry’s eyes were on mine, burning a dark shade of emerald as he licked over his bottom lip. I giggled when he started to unbuckle his trousers, tanking the zipper down before he tucked his hand in. He pulled his cock out, giving it a few firm strokes before he hovered his body over mine. Seconds later, I felt the stretch of my walls around his cock, causing my body to tense.

“There’s my girl.” He grunted out, pushing himself in as far as he could possibly go before pressing a few, sloppy kisses to my face. “So snug around me, aren’t you?”

“Harry.” I dropped my hands to his back, digging my nails into the cotton of his shirt as he pulled out slowly. Seconds later, he was pushing back in and I was gasping for air. “Fuck, that’s nice.”

“Mrs. Styles, you have such a filthy mouth.” He smeared his lips over mine before both of his hands found their home by my ears. “Who taught you to talk like that?”

“You.” I let out a breathless chuckle that quickly faded as the tip of his cock massaged my g-spot.

“Yeah?” His eyelids fluttered shut as he continued to work his hips in a steady rhythm. “No other blokes have been hangin’ round here?”

“None.” I shook my head as my nails drug down to his lower back and eventually to his bum. I pushed my fingers down his pants, digging my nails into the flesh there. “Just you.”

“You’re my girl.” He gritted out as a single curl fell to his forehead. “Only mine.”

“Only yours.” I whimpered, biting at my lower lip. “You feel so good, Harry.”

“Can’t wait to see you pregnant, honey.” He let out a whine of his own, clenching his eyes. “It’s gonna be so beautiful, seeing you round and full while you carry my baby..”

“I want it so bad, Harry.”

“And after this baby,” He let out a strangled moan, delivering another sharp thrust that had me gasping. “I’m gonna put another one in you, and then another.”

“Please, I want it.” I nodded, sliding my fingers back up his back. “Want you closer.”

He pressed his body into mine, his hips moving in desperate thrusts and his pelvis applying pressure to my clit with each move. I tossed my head back, silently asking for his lips to press against my throat. I felt him latch on as his thrust started to get sloppier. I knew that he was close by the little whines pulling from his throat and the puffs of air hitting my skin.

Harry’s hand slipped between our bodies in no time, rubbing my clit with an urgency that I’d never experienced before with him. I felt my body flush warm and my walls tighten around him as he delivered three final thrusts. We both cried out when he spilled into me, filling my walls with his cum until it dripped out onto the black panties still settled onto my hips.

“You bought yourself a ring?” our chests were both heaving, his body still pressed into mine.

I tried to let out a giggle, but he was heavy against my body and it came out wheezy.

“It’s costume jewelry.” I brushed my hand over his back. “Just thought it would be fun after I saw you wearing that ring on set. I saw the pictures online and they nearly killed me.”

“Mhm, you’re just trying to seduce me into proposing earlier than I planned.” He lifted his head, pressing his lips against mine in a sweet kiss. “Hello, honey.”

“Hiya, darling.” I lifted my hand, tugging gently on the curl that fell over forehead with a fond smile. “I love you.”

“Love you, too.” He whispered. “I love you and everything you do for me. I don’t tell you enough how much I appreciate you for being the best girlfriend out there.”

“Harry-”

“Don’t deflect or play it down,” He said sternly. “I mean every word from the bottom of my heart, Beatrice. I...no one else on set has had a spouse or partner come visit them on the weekends. No one else had flowers sent to their trailer or daily facetime calls and inspirational messages. You make me feel so loved and so special on a daily basis and that means the world to me. So thank you for being you, honey. I love you with all of my heart.”

“I love you, too.” I sniffled, blinking rapidly as a few tears fell down my temples, into my hair. “I hope you liked your surprise. I didn’t want to freak you out, but I thought it would be fun.”

“It was.” He brushed his nose over mine. “It was a lot of fun, actually. I think we should mess around like that more often.”

“Not too often, though.” I chuckled. “One of these days, I’ll actually end up pregnant.”

“Wheat’s wrong with that?” He hummed out.

“One step at a time, darling.” I patted his shoulder. “Oh, just so you know, we won’t be having a girl first.”

“Excuse me?” Harry hissed when I pushed at his shoulders, causing him to slip out of my walls. I guided him to his back before I climbed on top of him, pressing my palms to his tummy. “I don’t...what?”

“You said ‘her’ earlier, but we’re having a boy first.” I said casually. “I know it.”

“How do you know it?” He chuckled as his brows creased. “Did you make a deal with Stevie at one of her witch things?”

“I didn’t need to make a deal, I just know it.” I patted his cheek. “Gonna name him Ellis.”

“Why Ellis?” He tilted his head to the side. “Where did you hear that?”

“Ellis Island.” I smiled. “We took our first vacation together in New York and the ferry to Ellis Island was one of my favorite parts of that trip. It’s a piece of our history.”

“I love that.” He said softly. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” I giggled, leaning forward to press my lips against his. “Round two?”

“Why, Mrs. Styles, I like the way you think.”

#harry styles smut #harry styles writing #harry styles blurb #harry styles fic #harry styles X ofc #honeybee #extra

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star-birthmark · 4 years

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Silent Saviors: 4taro x Fem Reader

Finally... FINALLY IT IS DONE! This is infernal ask that has been in my inbox for so long!!! Thank you to @stardustbrosaders for the request all those months ago lol. This was the request: “Heya! Would it be possible to write a P4! Jotaro x Female! Reader where the reader gets her stand under stress from a battle? The group almost gets defeated but the reader’s stand appears and she beats the enemy, saving everyone? For the readers stand type could it be close range like SP and CD?”

I also drew the reader’s stand for this fic. You can find a link to the stand info here.

This is a long ass fic btw. It’s literally 11 THOUSAND WORDS. I don’t know what compelled me to make the fic this long. I really don’t. But I did and here we are. I hope you like it, no matter how long it is!

Quick content warnings: General violence and angst, strangulation, murder (duh)

Without further ado: Silent Saviors: 4taro x Fem Reader (11k words)

A dark force was afoot in the town of Morioh once more, but it had just been a long day, and no progress had been made to capture that force. The team’s morale was low. The exhausted high school students stumbled home to catch a good night’s rest, thoughts of ongoing danger in their small town looming over their heads. The young manga artist Rohan Kishibe grumbled to himself about his failures, wondering how a genius like him could not decipher this mystery like he had last time. You felt a heavy air of unrest lay over the town as you awkwardly shifted in your seat on the ride to the Grand Hotel, looking over at your travel mate as he silently ran over the facts in his head. He shook his head in frustration. None of this made any sense. All the victims had been killed in the same way, so it must be a stand, one that didn’t leave behind any evidence, one potentially even more dangerous than Kira.

A dark force was afoot in the town of Morioh once more, but you didn’t know anything about the first monstrous event that had occurred. The small town’s silent saviors all agreed with one another to seal their lips and tell no one what had really happened. Not that anyone would have believed them.

But you would have. Your travel partner didn’t know anything yet, but the more time you two spent in this strange town, the crazier you felt you were becoming. You were seeing objects levitate in the air, you were seeing arms stick out from these bizarre teenagers. At this point, you’d believe anything just to make it all stop. You stumbled inside from the taxi, convinced this small town was driving you insane.

Your partner turned to you in front of your hotel room, his own room right next door, and placed his large hands on your shoulders.

“Are you alright (y/n)? If any of this investigation gets to be too much for you, just tell me and I’ll send you on the next flight back home.”

You snort tiredly. “Too much for me? Jotaro you look exhausted… You haven’t been taking breaks from the case at all… You’re always so anxious. Do you promise you’ll actually go to bed this time?”

Jotaro looked down at you and moved his hands from you, sighing heavily. “Yeah… I promise…”

You give him a shy smile before shrugging. “Besides… you need me, don’t you? Weren’t you the one that said I’m the only one that calms you down?”

Jotaro gulped and broke eye contact with you, his own silent way of admitting that you were right. You chuckled and opened the door to your hotel room, giving him one last look and goodnight before you left to go to bed. You would wake up about two hours later from the sound of your partner’s shuffling about in his room next door. You slipped on a thick crew neck over your thin tank top and shorts and open to the door connecting to the two rooms.

You peaked your head past the door to find a familiar sight before you. Pictures were tacked onto a corkscrew board, red thread connecting the dots to draw the group one step closer to solving the crimes. Files were splayed out over the desk, a map of the small Japanese town resting on the nearby bed, etched with red Xs displaying the sites where several young men and women met their demise. Amongst the mess, you found the broad shoulders of a tired Jotaro Kujo hunched over the desk, the young man still looking at the mountains of documents, eager to find the path to justice. It was hidden in those pages, he was sure of it. It had been your third night together in that hotel, and it was evident that you two would be there for much longer.

---

“Miss (L/N) it says here that you have received your degree in zoology and graduated at the top of your major.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And it says here that you recently led an academic study of marine biology that went very well back home.”

“Yes sir, and it would be an honor to join this esteemed team of scientists here at SPW.”

It was the year 1998, and you were interviewing to work at the Speedwagon Foundation. You had graduated atop your class, and had a passion for your work that few possessed, as well success that few could show for. You prayed that this interview was going well. The Foundation was the utmost important center of scientific research in the world and you didn’t want to waste an opportunity to work there. You watched the smile on your interviewer’s face as he reviewed your credentials before setting the paper down.

“Miss (L/N) I’d like to welcome you aboard our team. I believe you will contribute much to our efforts.”

Your face lit up in excitement and you rushed to shake his hand. “Thank you so much sir, I won’t let you down! If I could ask what position you’re hiring me for?”

“You see we have an opening for an assistant with the Kujo lab. Since you’re just starting off here- you’ll be assisting him in meetings and in bench work-”

“Excuse me... the Kujo lab? As in Jotaro Kujo? Isn’t he my age?” You interrupt nervously.

“Why yes miss… is there an issue?”

“Well no sir it’s just… I thought perhaps I’d be working under an esteemed professor… I didn’t think someone fresh out of grad school would already have a lab to himself… Not to sound ungrateful of course, I just didn’t realize I would be working under one of my contemporaries…”

A sigh came to the man and leaned back in his chair, thinking about how to explain the situation.

“Miss (y/n), the reason I’m placing you in Kujo’s lab is that I feel the two of you would work well together, given your similar backgrounds and parallel personalities…” You furrow your brow, unsure what the supervisor meant until you were face to face with Jotaro Kujo himself a few days later.

You still remembered the day well. You hung your coat up on a nearby hook and looked about the lab. Documents were piled over every available surface with no particular organization. A large fish tank stood in the far corner, a wild variety of fish encased within. Anatomical posters of aquatic life were all over the walls, and right by the window sat Jotaro. He hadn’t looked up when you came in. Approaching his desk, you stared down at the mass of black hair on the top of his head. Soon clearing your throat, the young doctoral student’s head shot up to look at you blankly. You opened your mouth to speak, taken aback by his unemotional expression, nervously turning to a notebook you had on hand.

“Uh… um… My name is (y/n) (l/n), your new coworker. I would like to thank you for allowing me into your lab. I had been going over your most recent papers on the social patterns of starfish on the eastern-most coast of Japan and I was just wondering if-”

“I’m sorry, who are you?”

You looked up from your notes and into the young man’s deep blue eyes, your breath catching in your throat. You struggled to form a sentence under the intense gaze, your breath shuttering out from your lips, and you looked back down at your notes.

“I’m (y/n) (l/n)... your new coworker.”

Jotaro nodded slowly, considering what you had just said. You watched as he removed his large white overcoat and leaned back in his chair, donned in a fitted black t-shirt.

“Why did they hire you?” You lean forward confused, your ear facing him.

“I’m sorry?”

“Why did they hire you?”

You look away for a moment, considering his now nervous expression, his nervous tick of chewing on his lip, his small twitches of the eye, his clenching and unclenching of his jaw. You looked down, finding his leg bouncing anxiously against the floor. A small, sweet smile came to you, and you opened your mouth to speak, alerting his attention.

“You and I apparently have parallel personalities… according to them.”

You watched as Jotaro’s lips curved into a shy smile and he got up from his seat, grabbing a notepad from a nearby drawer. He then turned to you and extended his arm out, pointing. You followed the direction of his hand and saw a separate desk facing his at the other end of the office. You turned back and quickly nodded, rushing to set your things down and then turning to face him once more.

Jotaro nodded courteously at you. “Have you read my most recent work?”

“Yes, I just told you that I did that-”

“Good. Come to the meeting with me then.”

You followed after him into a nearby boardroom, unsure of the situation about to befall you. The meeting began. Executives discussed their most recent funding prospects, deciding whether or not to continue their spending, depending on how successful the trials had been. You sat patiently in your chair, listening to the others argue frankly amongst themselves. A steady, fast tapping upon the table commanded your attention and you turned over to see Jotaro staring off into the distance, his fingers rapidly tapping on the desk, his whole form shaking with sensory overload.

“Mr. Kujo? And you?” You watched as Jotaro’s head shot up and he looked around the room. He hadn’t been listening, his mind had been too overcome with anxieties.

“I um… I uh… W-what were-”

You watched nervously as this man came undone at his seams. You cleared your throat and tapped the table next to his notepad. Getting the message, Jotaro grabbed the notepad quickly and anxiously flipped through its pages.

“Um… sorry about that. I would like to further my research- wait no this is on the wrong page. Wait no it’s not… wait-”

You looked around as the listeners began to get frustrated, looking at each other in jest of one of their top researchers. You chewed nervously on your finger, hoping Jotaro would pull himself together. It was your first day working with him, and it was already troublesome.

“I would like to further the research done in my penultimate paper. Or was it my most recent...”

“Mr. Kujo, we would have liked for you to have prepared for this meeting…”

“No no… I did. I did. Wait-”

With a quick motion, you reached over and placed a hand on Jotaro’s shoulder, calmly taking the notepad from him and then turning to the group. Jotaro looked away, still visibly shaken.

“Mr. Kujo clearly states in his most recent paper that he plans to continue his research, at a different coastal region, comparing more behaviors there to make sure that this past successful trial wasn’t any sort of spontaneous fluke. He writes in his goals of perhaps inspecting the regional colonies of starfish around S-Town… Following that, he plans to remain in contact with the genomic department and track genetic similarities between human and aquatic life that may explain the similar social patterns between the two.”

You explain to them all, having memorized the paper. Turning to the notepad, you saw what Jotaro had written in preparation for the meeting. You then turned back to the investors.

“Mr. Kujo kindly asks that you aid him in his funding so that mankind as a whole may find a better understanding of the natural world… That’s all he wanted to say. He just couldn’t find the right page. Sir.”

You reached back and placed the notepad back near Jotaro’s shaking hand. You returned your hand back to the other’s shoulder, squeezing gently to reassure the scientist that he was alright. The young man turned to you in a bit of surprise, not expecting your presence to calm him oh so much. The executives all took in your words and the head of the meeting slowly nodded.

“Well… thank you for your assistance, miss…?”

“(l/n).”

“Right well thank you… We will consider Mr. Kujo’s work for a second trial.”

“Thank you. He appreciates it.” With that, you let go of Jotaro’s shoulder.

The meeting soon adjourned, You got up to leave your seat when you felt Jotaro’s hand grab your shoulder. You turned around to see him slowly stand up from his chair.

“Thank you. I’m not a big fan of speaking to them…”

You nodded quickly. “Yes… of course…”

From that day on, the two of you were inseparable. Having experienced the horrific acts done to him and to those he loved back in his teenage years, Jotaro was convinced that you were the only one who could calm his constant nerves and anxieties. You became his most powerful tool against the outside world. You understood his work perfectly, understood his mannerisms perfectly, and respected his need for silence in the office. You knew how to say things the way he would himself, and you had no fear discussing them to other people. The two of you became much closer over the months of your working. Jotaro became much less of an enigma in your eyes. It would be a few months until Jotaro would unwillingly reveal his more “secret” projects.

The first time you saw the arrow, Jotaro did not want you to see it. But still, what happened that day would forever change your relationship with the young scientist. You had arrived early, hoping to surprise him with a hot breakfast and a smile. You turn the corner to walk into the lab, yet when you go to open the door, you find it locked. Strange. Looking inside the room, you find Jotaro hunched over his desk in focus, in the same clothes as the day before, having not yet unlocked the door. Even more strange. You knocked on the door, only for him to leave the room with another door in a hurry, ignoring your pleas. With a grumble, you dug for your keys, figuring his weird behavior was just fatigue, and that he probably slept over at work again. When you finally get into the lab, you place your things down, and that's when you see it lingering underneath his desk in a rushed hiding spot.

Encased within a thickly walled wooden box, an arrow remained, barely hidden from your gaze, as Jotaro had had no time to hide it from you. The latch was undone, another sign that Jotaro had run away from the scene.

Jerk. Didn’t he trust you enough to show you something like this? It’s just a bow and arrow! Why was he hiding it? You called out for him to return to the room and explain what the bow and arrow was for. Hearing no response, you turned back to the wooden box, reaching your hand in to inspect the bow and arrow.

It all happened so fast. In the blink of an eye.

There were no in-between movements. One moment you had pricked your finger on the razor sharp tip of the arrow, the next moment you were standing up, the box had been tightly locked, and Jotaro stood right in front of you, chest to chest, intensely staring you down. Your breath became ragged as you maintained eye contact with him. What just happened? You didn’t even hear him come in. The box was right before your very eyes, and you didn’t even see that it was locked. How did he even turn you around without you knowing?! A chill went down your spine as you hesitated to speak even a word to the man before you.

“Do you see what was in there?”

Jotaro asked you calmly. You felt a cold sweat form on your forehead. Jotaro, ever the impatient man, grabbed your jacket collar, shaking you out of your scared daze.

“I’m asking you now (y/n)! Did you see what was in there?!”

“No, I didn’t see anything! I don’t know what just happened! I swear! I saw you run away from the room and went to see what was in there and the next thing I knew you had come back and it was all so fast and I don’t understand and I-... Jotaro… you’re scaring me.”

Your body convulsed at his rough contact, your hands reaching up to push him away, but his tight grip on your jacket remained steadfast. Pure instinct had compelled you to lie to him about seeing the content of the box, but the terror and confusion you had displayed was genuine. You still didn’t understand how he was able to move that fast, or affect you with you even knowing. Just who was this man?

Jotaro stared down at you for a moment longer, before releasing you from his grip and taking a few steps back. You stumbled back, grabbing the edge of his desk to stabilize your fall. Your heart continued to race in your chest as you heaved, still struggling to make sense of what just happened.

Jotaro silently called out Star Platinum, having his stand hover right in front of you as you kept staring at him in confusion. Your expression didn’t change once he called out his stand. So you were telling the truth. You really hadn’t seen the arrow. Or at least, hadn’t touched it.

Jotaro sighed, rubbing the side of his head with a groan. He hadn’t stopped time in so long, but it seemed he was worried over nothing. “I’m sorry to frighten you, (y/n).”

You finally straightened yourself out, gulping. “Who the hell are you? Really?!”

“...I’m Jotaro Kujo. That is all.”

Another chill ran down up your spine, but you played it off. If he wanted to continue things as per usual, you’d have to do the same.

“Right… I brought breakfast. And there’s a morning meeting in half an hour so freshen up.”

You walked past him to retrieve the food you had bought for them. Looking down to pick it up, you noticed a red blood stain on your jacket. It must have been from your bleeding finger when you’d pricked it on the arrow. However, when you turned to look at the finger itself, you found that it was fully healed, not even scarred, even after such a precise and direct cut. Jotaro politely asked you for the food, claiming hunger, and you rushed to take your coat off and hide it away. You got the sense that he’d question further if he saw the fresh blood stain.

After that fateful morning, things continued on as per usual. You still had your questions, but after a few weeks had passed without another incident, you resolved that whatever that bow and arrow were must have been top secret for the Speedwagon Foundation. You figured no company could be as powerful as they were without keeping a few secrets. And this was one of them.

So you resolved to ask no questions about that one day. The same way you didn’t put up much of a fight when, in the summer of 1999, after months of you two planning to stay there together, Jotaro told you that he would be going to Morioh alone to research for his PhD, without you. You were furious, enraged how the two of you could become so close since you began working there, yet he still didn’t trust you to go with him. You argued with him the night before he was set to leave, but his resolve never crumbled. You weren’t going to Morioh, that was final.

In the three months that he was gone, Jotaro regularly sent you his findings, and you sorted them back at Speedwagon Headquarters. When he finally came back, more visibly shaken than he was before, you could only wonder what the coworker you had grown so attached to had experienced in Morioh in the summer of 1999.

Circling back to the present day, it was the winter of 2000, and there was yet again a dark force afoot in the town of Morioh. Only this time, Jotaro would not go alone.

“You have to let me come with you this time.”

“Explain why. Explain why I have to let you come with me this time. I did just fine on my own before.”

You gritted your teeth at the other’s stubbornness. “Will you please just listen to me? Jotaro when you came back from Morioh, you were even harder to deal with than before! Any sound in the office set you on edge and you screamed when someone set off fireworks near our building! And you still haven’t explained to me what happened there! Now let me come with you! I can help!”

Jotaro turned his attention away from his work, finally looking at you for the first time in that conversation. He hadn’t realized just how attached to you he’d become, how much you meant to him. You were his ticket into communicating with the world to his fullest, and after recalling several confusing conversations with Josuke, Okuyasu, and Koichi, Jotaro realized he actually needed you in order to articulate himself to the others without getting too anxious or angry.

“Alright fine. We’re leaving tomorrow at 2. You better be ready.”

But nothing could have prepared you for the horrors you were about to encounter in that small town. To your shock and disgust, you learned that aside from his research, Jotaro was investigating a murderer. And then you met Josuke and the others. That was when you first felt that you were going crazy. When you saw glimpses of third arms extend out from these teenagers, saw one of them heal a broken leg with ease, saw another erase space itself. People all over this small town were vanishing in thin air, and the incidents were happening more and more frequently. It didn’t make any sense, but no one was commenting on it, so you felt you were just imagining things. The same way you must have imagined Jotaro moving at lightspeed that morning you pricked your finger on the arrow.

Finally, we return to the current scene of Jotaro hunched over his desk, his room in the Morioh Grand Hotel littered with documents, the board nearby covered in photos and string, the bedside clock reading 2:33 am. You approached him carefully in the tense silence, knowing not to startle him whenever he was in deep thought.

“...Jotaro-”

“Dammit dammit dammit! I’m sick of it! Where the hell is he?!”

Jotaro slammed his fist down on the desk, his chest heaving in frustration. Why did this keep happening to him?! He just wanted to live a normal life, and he thought after Kira, he could. But like so many times before, Jotaro Kujo was wrong. Perhaps it was his destiny to be unfortunate. Perhaps there would always be another person stabbed by the arrow that would have it out for him and the others. Perhaps he was always destined to have a target on his back. Jotaro turned around to see you there, your form shaken from his sudden outburst. You’d never seen him that angry before. He met your gaze, unaware that you were sensing a vague presence of a being just above the man’s shoulder.

He sighed, walking over to you. “I’m sorry to scare you (y/n). I’m just getting frustrated by all this.”

You hesitated to speak for a moment, flinching when Jotaro placed his hand on your shoulder. You look up at him with a glare. “Tell what you haven’t been telling me.”

“You’ve been with me in Morioh this whole time (y/n). We both know the same things about this case I-”

You shoved Jotaro back, the surprised scientist bumping into his desk. “Don’t play dumb with me Jotaro! There’s something you’re not telling me! Do you think I’m an idiot?! Do you think I can’t handle it?! Tell me why you and a bunch of fucking kids have to be the ones taking down a killer?! Why can’t you just leave it to the police like a normal person?! Just say it! I… I can help you!”

But Jotaro couldn’t tell you. You wouldn’t understand his world and the horrifying stands contained within it. He had to keep you safe. The moment you find out anything more will be the moment you die.

“No… I can’t tell you (y/n).”

“But that’s not fair I-”

“(y/n), I’m sorry, but if you ask me again, I’ll be forced to send you back home and have you fired from my lab. Try to understand me, I’m doing this for your own safety, but I can’t have you be near me if you don’t cooperate.”

You stood there in shock. Would he really do that? Didn’t he know how much working for him at the Foundation meant to you? How much care that you put in for him and his work? And he’d throw all that away just to protect some stupid secret!? Who did he think he was?!

Your whole body began to quiver in rage at the other’s behavior. Just when you thought there was something between the two of you, something more than just a young professor and his assistant, he makes it clear that you mean nothing to him, and you never have. You watched the man before you, turn away from your gaze to focus back to his work. With a huff, you reach for the door to leave, your hand touching the handle.

Then, it all went white.

Your hand touched the handle, feeling the metal scalding to the touch. Before you could flinch back and yelp at the pain, a hand circled around your neck and another crept around your waist, the grip keeping you flush against another body. You look around the room, watching the color and furniture dissolve from your view until all you could see for miles was a white void. The only thing you could feel was the man with a locked grip on your neck, blocking your airway. You kicked to set yourself free, until you felt a ghostly presence cling onto your legs to hold them together. That same feeling washed over your wrists to bind them as well. The man holding onto you within the void leaned down to bring his mouth to your ear.

“No human on Earth is unable to feel pain.”

Your whole body shuddered at the deep growl in his throat. “W-who are you?! What do you wan-”

“I’m the one talking (y/n)!”

With that, his hold on your neck tightened ever more. How could he have known your name? You all had made a point to only use names in private in case the murderer was lurking around. So that means… A pang of realization hit you. He’d been hiding in this hotel room, listening to you and Jotaro was however long. Black spots appeared before you in your line of sight, your head was feeling lighter and lighter. You were becoming weightless.

“In the split second that a human being first feels pain, that is when they are at their most isolated. At the first sign of pain, it’s every man for himself. When a man is shot, in the first moment he feels pain, he isn’t thinking of the man next to him that got shot in the brain. He’s thinking only of himself. The fight or flight response is activated, all other surroundings become useless. That selfishness, that hunger to be healed, that desire for self preservation, is what fuels Foreigner’s God, my stand!”

Your eyes shot open at the last word. “A...stand?” You choked out.

“My stand, Foreigner's God, extends that initial moment of selfishness that comes with pain. No longer are there distractions that can bring someone back to care for others. No longer are there healers that can take that pain away. Your hand is still burnt from the handle that I heated up, so…”

He turned you both around and you saw through your hazy view, a body appear in the white void. It was Jotaro, the man frantically calling out your name and rushing between his room and yours in a search for you. At one moment, the two of you even seemingly made eye contact, and you saw the absolute fear in his eyes at the realization that he might have just lost you. Your mouth quirked up in a smile, and tears began to form in your eyes.

Jotaro took a step closer, maintaining your gaze, and you felt relief in your heart that he could really see you. Until suddenly, he rushed to the night stand, fazing right through you and your assailant, not even noticing your presence in the room. You struggled to shout under the choking pressure as you saw him panic, reaching to the phone to call Josuke.

“Wait! Jotaro! I’m right here ah-”

“Didn’t I tell you (y/n)! At that critical moment of pain, it’s every man for himself! It’s just you and me in here! You’re in my world now, sweetheart. I allowed you to see Jotaro’s image, but he cannot see or hear you!”

The killer turned your head to the side, ready to snap. But he had to wait, for his stand would deactivate the moment you were killed, and then he’d be left vulnerable to a furious Jotaro in that hotel room. He needed information about his opponents’ abilities, and Jotaro was playing right into his hands by calling his friend.

“That’s it… That’s it Kujo! Call Josuke Higashikata! Call him! CALL HIM!”

You trembled under the rough grip, struggling to call out for Jotaro, hoping he wouldn’t call anyone and reveal any secrets.

And then amidst the silence, the click of Jotaro hanging up the phone filled your ears. You watched the look of reflection on his face. Somehow, maybe it was because of years of battle with monsters just like this man, but Jotaro Kujo realized that you hadn’t run away. Someone was keeping you from him. And he was now more alert than ever.

“Shit! He’s smarter than I thought! He must suspect there’s a stand attack going on.”

The murderer grumbled before dropping you to the ground. He couldn’t kill you, not without proper info on how to defeat Jotaro and the others. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t hurt you. With a sharp kick to the back, the assailant managed to knock you away, breaking bones in your spine and leaving you immobile. Recalling his stand ability, the murderer managed to escape out a window without a trace, figuring you would lose consciousness. With a gentle thud, you toppled to the ground, right next to the open window.

“(y/n)!”

Jotaro rushed to the sound, seeing you lay there, gasping for breath. He turned to the open window seeing no one around. He had disappeared. And right under his nose too. How long had the man been in the room with them?! How dumb could he have been?! Reaching up to Jotaro, you muttered that the man had broken a few bones in your back and that you couldn’t move.

“I’m sorry Jotaro. I didn’t get a good look at his face…”

“Don’t worry about that! I’ll get help right away!”

You looked up with hazy eyes as Jotaro rushed to the phone to call Josuke. After everything between the two of you, after everything he’s said to you, it was surprising to see just how much he truly cared about you. Holding the phone to his ear, Jotaro frantically told Josuke your condition and for him to get over here as soon as possible. Glancing down at your arm, Jotaro’s eyes shot open at the black ink that painted your skin just a few centimeters beneath your wrist. In all caps, as if the murderer was playing with you all, the ink wrote,

“Foreigner’s God - AS.”

- - - - -

“Honestly Mr. Joestar, where does that grandson of yours get off running me and the others ragged like this? He sees one person with the initials A.S. in a phonebook and he sends me out across down to read them with Heaven’s Door.”

Rohan Kishibe sat drinking his tea, absently working on Pink Dark Boy, waiting for Jotaro’s next move. His companion, Joseph Joestar, took a sip of his drink at Rohan’s rude accusation.

“Hush now Rohan. We all put Jotaro in charge of his operation, given his connection to our main victim. All he’s doing is using your stand to its full capabilities.”

The old man raised an eyebrow and Rohan got the hint. Mr. Joestar was the only one of the group that the snarky artist fully respected, so he would follow the seasoned stand user’s lead.

A heavy set of footsteps entered the room, followed by a more uneven pair lingering behind. The two stand users looked up to see you and Jotaro enter. You were looking better since the attack. Josuke had healed your back of the broken bones, but the bruises and intense pain of walking remained. Moving with crutches, you slowly stepped out from behind Jotaro as the two of you entered the room. Jotaro, his face darkened in a mixture of unhealthy fatigue and intense bloodlust, approached Rohan’s table and slammed down a stack of papers.

“Names, addresses, ages, and criminal histories. All here. I want you done with it within the next two days.”

Rohan grumbled, standing up. “You’ve got a lot of nerve talking to me like that Jotaro. Not even a hello, not even an acknowledgment of your grandfather. He’s the only reason I’m letting you push me around like this you-”

Jotaro took one step closer to Rohan, staring the smaller man down in silence. A chill went down the artist’s spine. Shown plainly in the scientist’s eyes was a haze of dark intent, of evil desires. He wanted this person dead, and for them to suffer. Joseph flicked his gaze up at his grandson, recognizing the expression from the other’s climactic fight with DIO. A tinge of worry filled the old soul.

They needed to catch him, and catch him soon.

“Jotaro, come on. We told Josuke and the others we would give them an update soon.”

At the sound of your voice, raspy still from the attack, Jotaro’s face softened into its usual composure. He turned around to face you, and you gave him a tired smile.

“Right, let’s go. Rohan. Two days, please. I’m counting on you.”

Tipping his hat over his eyes, Jotaro held out an arm for you as you both walked to the rendez-vous point to meet with Josuke.

Rohan still felt lost in the other’s murderous expression. It had been three days since your run in with Foreigner’s God, and Heaven’s Door’s user was one of the first to arrive at the scene in order to search for clues. He remembered reading a page drawn from your unconscious body; you had blacked out soon after Jotaro made the call for help. Josuke was working on your spine, and there was a tense silence about the room. A silence soon interrupted by the crash of wood hitting the floor. Everyone looked up, seeing Jotaro standing deathly still in his spot, meanwhile Star Platinum had escaped and had thrown the table over and smashed it into the floor. The rampaging stand turned to the board and knocked it over with a fierce punch, wood scraps and documents flying everywhere.

“Hey Jotaro stop it! We need those!”

Josuke yelled, drawing out Crazy diamond to hold Star back. In his blinded rage, the stand took a mindless swing, punching Crazy Diamond in the jaw and sending both him and Josuke flying into the opposite wall.

“Josuke!”

Koichi and Okuyasu rushed to their friend. He wasn’t injured too badly, surprisingly no bones broken; nothing a bandage or two couldn’t fix. The four of them, the three teenagers and the artist all turned to Jotaro in shock, who by this point had absorbed Star Platinum into his being. Turning back to face them all, they all got a look at it.

The truly furious face of Jotaro Kujo.

The calm and collected scientist now wore the face of violence, a face he hadn’t worn since Egypt. His eyes shone bright with a horrifying lust for vengeance. Those eyes looked away from the frightened stand users, towards your unconscious body. Without a word, Jotaro left the room, and the others let out a shaky breath in the tense air. Those eyes. It had been three days and those eyes were still ever present. Rohan shook away his discomfort and waved goodbye to Mr. Joestar, understanding now.

Jotaro was not in this for justice. If Kira had hurt only you those months ago, Jotaro would have worn the same face. You were the key to Jotaro’s psyche and wellbeing. That was a fundamental truth about Jotaro Kujo. It was that day that Rohan Kishibe learned another fundamental truth.

Sometimes, the universe places an answer in your hands when you need an answer the most.

Half an hour later, it happened. It was in the middle of a secluded street, inhabited by only three people at that moment. A man. A woman. And the young artist, who had been so enraptured by his goal of locating the first name of his list that he barely had the time to react when it happened. And when it did, it only took an instant.

The man in front of him quickly drew out a pocket knife from his jacket, driving its blade into the woman’s shoulder, unaware Rohan was behind him seeing the act in its entirety. Before the woman had any time to scream in pain, the pair vanished into thin air before the artist’s very eyes, and into the man’s stand realm. Rohan held his breath, frightened at the pair’s sudden disappearance. A stand user. It must have been. Was this him? Reaching quickly into his bag, Rohan Kishibe phoned his first line of defense.

You had been sitting with Jotaro and all of the Morioh teenagers when Jotaro received his call from Rohan.

“What is it?”

“I found someone. It’s either him or another one Jotaro.”

Jotaro shot up from his chair, eyes blown out in stress. “Are you sure?! How do you know?!”

Josuke, Okuyasu, and Koichi all grew the same expression of fighting spirit on their faces and you were sure danger was ahead for you all.

Rohan tried to remain calm. “I’m not sure… Come over here with the others. We have a better chance of taking down whoever this is together. I’m by Owsen, two streets over…”

Inside Foreigner’s God’s realm, the man grabbed on tighter to the struggling woman’s neck as she gasped for air.

“Please, please don’t kill me! Please don’t k-kill me!”

But the man was hardly paying attention to her cries. He had brought a vision of Rohan into the void and was watching the artist’s movement’s while still strangling the woman as she writhed in pain.

He didn’t like what he was hearing. With a grunt, the man turned the woman around to face Rohan’s vision, his hand still tight around her neck.

She whimpered at the sudden motion, tears streaming down her face, meanwhile he stared boredly at Rohan talking on the phone with Jotaro and the others.

“Hey bitch, who is that?”

The woman just kept crying. “Please don’t kill me!”

Gritting his teeth, the man smacked her upside the head and tightened his grip around her neck. “Tell me who that is!”

Her vision hazy, the woman took a good look at the eccentrically dressed man. “I-I think th-that’s Rohan Kishibe. A famous manga artist…” She sputtered out.

The man’s eyes widened. Rohan Kishibe. He was at the scene of Kira’s death. Could he be another of them?

A fit of laughter took over him and he cackled, his jubilation mixing uncomfortably with the woman’s struggle for her life. Continuing to holler, the man dropped the woman to the ground and she remained there, coughing to catch her breath.

“Oh that’s great! I’ve heard he’s good too! You ever read any of his stuff?!”

She looked up at him confused, watching his face twist in excitement as he realized that he, a lowly stand user, was about to kill a man that helped take down the mighty Yoshikage Kira. Staring down at the ground, she shuddered at the sound of the maniac’s voice.

“Hey.”

A chill went down the woman’s spine. Suddenly, the man wasn’t laughing anymore. She turned her head to find a way to escape, seeing nothing but white everywhere. Why couldn’t anyone see what he was doing to her?! The man on the street with them, Rohan, why wasn’t he stepping in? It’s like they weren’t the real world at that moment.

“...I asked you a question.”

Tears filled her eyes again as she met his bored gaze. “W-what?”

Drawing closer to her weak form, and kneeling down on the ground, the man before her grabbed a fistful of her hair and she screamed at the sudden jerking pain.

“I’m asking if you’ve ever read any of his stuff!”

The woman felt a crushing pain in her chest, as if a mysterious force was stepping on her.

“N-no! I haven’t! But please don’t k-”

“Hmph.”

In a split second, the stand’s hands came around the woman’s neck and snapped it, and Foreigner’s God’s ability ceased. The man quickly his himself out of sight, seeing Rohan standing alone in the street.

Rohan turned around at the thud of a body hitting the ground behind him. He looked over to see the dead woman, her eyes blown out and a thick ring of bruises around her neck. Just like what you had gone through. And there it was, the same tag that had been on your body after your attack.

“Foreigner’s God. - AS. ”

Bringing his phone shakily to his ear, Rohan muttered, “It’s him Jotaro. He’s just killed someone else. Get over here now!”

Jotaro felt the same dark intent sweep over him as he heard Rohan speak those words. “Do you see him?”

“No. He hid himself somehow. He’s nearby I bet. Waiting to get me… Come soon. I’m hanging up.” With that, the artist turned his phone off, staying on guard for any attackers.

Jotaro hung up the phone call with Rohan and turned to the others to come with him. You stood up as well to head to the scene when you felt Jotaro’s hand roughly shove you down into your seat.

“No.” He ordered plainly.

“No?! You expect me to be useless again?! I’m the one he attacked first! I wanna see him go down and I wanna help do it!”

“I’m not having you go over there! You can’t get hurt again!”

You stared up at him, shocked at the concern plastered all over his face. But still, you were stubborn. That’s one of the things he loved about you.

“What about you?! What makes you sure you won’t get hurt?! Or even die Jotaro?!”

��I’d rather that than you die (y/n)! The world needs you more than it will ever need me! And I can’t watch someone I love get hurt right in front of me again!”

You stood there frozen, your legs feeling like they were about to give out at those word.

“...What?”

Jotaro felt a hand grip his shoulder, turning to see Josuke motion for him to get going. They needed to catch this guy. And fast. Giving a quick glance to your shaken form, he knew you understood why you needed to stay behind.

You did, of course, know him and his words better than anyone else on Earth.

Jotaro began running with the others towards the scene and when he was a few feet away, you heard Koichi ask your beloved lab partner if he had any idea what kind of stand they were dealing with.

Your mind flooded back to the words that man had spoken to you. A stand. That was the word he kept using. A stand. AS. Those were the initials of the man that nearly strangled you to death. Foreigner’s God. He said that was the name of his stand. A stand. Stand.

Your mind kept repeating that same word over and over again in your head as you stood there in the crowded Morioh street. All of these people. The people you had come to love. Josuke and the others. The strange lives they lived. Jotaro. The strange life he had drawn you into. They were all working to save the thousands of people that lived in this small Japanese town.

You thought back on all they had said, all that you had overheard over the course of the investigation. Things you didn’t understand now flooded your mind. They spoke about the first trip, the killer. Killer. A man named Kira. Killer Queen. Killer Queen must have been his stand. A stand. Is that why you think you’ve been going crazy? Are those third arms stands? ...Did Jotaro have one?

“Gimme… gimme… gimme… GIMME!”

Your whole form awoke from your deep train of thought at the sound of someone calling out to you. You turned around, looking at all the people that were walking nearby. No one was even looking at you. You sighed. You supposed this town really was driving you crazy. You reached for your crutches and took one step forward-

“GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME!!!”

The loud voice rang violently in your head and you fell to your knees from the shock. Covering your ears, you foolishly tried to block out the sound. Your whole body began to feel weak, your whole being heating up. It felt like your blood was boiling, your muscles were tensing, an unwanted rage consuming every cell in your form.

“What’s going on?! What’s happening to m-”

“GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME!”

“Who are you?! What’s going on?!” You thought to yourself, panicking. What was this voice?!

“GIMME GIMME GIMME!”

“Go away…” You muttered under your breath as you knelt on the pavement.

“GIMME GIMME GIMME!”

“Go away…” Your voice subconsciously raised, drawing others’ attention.

“GIMME GIMME GIMME!”

“GO AWAY!” You let a shrill yell, grabbing violently at your hair in terror, causing a crowd of people to form around you.

And then the voice stopped, a quiet renewing in your head. You sat there, gasping for air, your throat still burning from the attack days before, and your screaming had not helped it. You looked up at everyone staring up at you in shocked worry. In a calm daze, you stood up, grabbing your crutches and began to walk away from the others.

Jotaro. Jotaro would know what it means. What that voice was.

- - - - -

Arata Sone had been Yoshikage Kira’s only friend as long as the killer had been alive. He was the only person in the world that Kira confided in. He remembered the night he met the blond murderer. One evening, the normal man came home from a very late night at work to a silent home, his wife sleeping upstairs. With a heavy sigh, Sone was about to enter his bedroom when he heard his wife let out a sudden shriek, before the sound immediately ceased into a renewed silence. Panicked, the man swung the door open to find another man about his age, standing in the middle of the room, a dismembered hand in his grasp. The hand was dripping blood onto the carpet, and Sone’s wife was nowhere to be found. Putting two and two together, the man felt a chill slither up his whole body. He remained stuck in his spot as he watched the blond man draw closer to him. Then something strange happened. Arata Sone knew that he should be afraid, knew that he should be begging for his life, knew that the proper thing to do was flee. But what he did shocked both himself and the murderer before him.

Arata Sone laughed harder than he ever had before.

Cackling loudly to an unsettling degree, he even managed to throw the calm and collected Yoshikage Kira off guard. After several minutes, the laughter died down and the man looked at the other before him with a wide smile on his face.

“Thank you.”

For the first time in a long time, Kira felt a shudder rush through his body.

“Thank you?”

“I was waiting for a good moment to kill her myself.”

In that moment, both men felt one of the great pleasures of life, a pleasure that can only come from being shunned for one’s desires for so long, and then to finally have that desire recognized by another being. The two men called out their stands and both fell into fits of laughter and joy at their shared murderous trait. A new friendship had been born.

A few years later, Arata Sone saw on the news the gruesome image of his beloved friend’s face crushed beneath an ambulance. Seeing what he could only guess were other stand users at the scene, his ever present lust for murder grew within him to a boiling point. Foreigner’s God’s user made a promise to himself. To kill those who had killed his friend.

And today was the day to make that happen. The killer watched from his hiding spot as Jotaro and the others ran to the scene to see a very shaken Rohan Kishibe, who was wondering why the killer had yet to show himself. What none of them knew, was that their attacker had grown as a stand user. He was about to apply what his dear friend Kira had once taught him, and was merely hiding to get them all in one place.

Sone waited for the group to get within his stand’s range.

You slowly made your way on your crutches towards the scene. You needed to know these answers.

“Just a little farther…” He thought as he waited for Jotaro and the others to be within his grasp.

“Just a little farther…” You muttered to yourself as you turned the corner, two streets away from Owsen. An ominous feeling crept over you, making you feel sick to your stomach.

Finally, they were all together within his stand’s range. Arata Sone waited for the right moment, a sick smile on his face.

Jotaro went to speak. “Any sign of h-”

And then the attack was sent into motion. In that split second, each of Morioh’s fighters looked down to see a small mass of white matter form around their ankle. With the snap of his fingers, the matter exploded, taking a chunk off each person’s leg with it. Jotaro, Josuke, Koichi, Okuyasu and Rohan all collapsed to the ground as the street became consumed in a white void the moment they all felt that same sting of pain.

“No human on Earth is unable to feel pain.”

They all looked up from writhing in pain as the man they had been hunting down showed himself, the twisted smile on his face more present than before.

“When a man feels he is at his most cornered, that is often when the most opportunities arise for him. My st-”

In a flash, Jotaro lunged forward, landing a punch to Sone’s face. The smile went away.

“I suppose I’ll take your hand next.” He grunted, grabbing Jotaro’s arm and slamming his whole body to the ground. The moment his hand made contact with the ground, another white mass formed around Jotaro’s finger and exploded, and Star Platinum’s user once again hollered in pain.

“Jotaro!”

The other Morioh fighters called out to their injured friend and all of them got up to attack their enemy together. The moment they took another step, white matter formed once more around their feet and exploded again. The five of them were squirming on the ground in pain once again.

“As I was saying before you so rudely interrupted me, Jotaro Kujo. My stand feeds on that first moment of selfish pain and extends it, trapping others in a blank void without distraction from their pain. It’s a terrifying ability when used properly, though I will admit, back when I attacked your little friend, I wouldn’t have been able to take you all on at once, and that’s the only reason I spared her life…”

He looked down to see Jotaro’s face overcome with rage at your mention. It was a fruitless effort, but Jotaro lunged at his enemy again, only to be knocked on his back. The moment his body touched the ground, several bubbles of the same white substance engulfed the scientist’s back and exploded, leaving bleeding indents all over the tall man’s frame and causing him to gasp at the pain.

“But you see. I have grown as a stand user. You may remember from the tag on your beloved friend’s arm the words Foreigner’s God. Well that my friends, is the name of my stand. Or no… this is something different. A new ability that I’ve learned. A swan song to my dear friend, Yoshikage Kira!”

Their eyes shot open at the mention of that hardly forgotten name. “Kira?” Josuke muttered.

“Oh right… an old friend of mine. I figured when I would be taking revenge for his death, I would use some of that explosive power of his that I loved so much. You see everyone, normally I would only be able to keep one person at a time in my realm. You can only hurt some many in one instance after all!”

It was in that moment, Foreigner’s God revealed itself in its humanoid form right beside its user. Lunging forward, the stand attacked the stationary fighters, knocking them all to the ground. At the very second their bodies touched the ground, the same miniature explosions went off, extending their pain and keeping them in the dangerous realm.

“Gimme gimme gimme…”

You placed a hand against your ear trying to block out that annoying voice that was seemingly coming out of nowhere. You weren’t far from the scene, your mind still running wild, asking a thousand questions as to what a stand even was, what that voice just then was, who were the others really dealing with, what was this man capable of. You weren’t sure of what you would be able to do, but something within you drew your body closer and closer to the street where your friends were currently writhing in agony. You didn’t care about what Jotaro wasn’t telling you. You didn’t care that there were still questions that needed answered. You just wanted to help, anyway you could figure out how.

Staring down at their battered and bleeding bodies, Arata Sone let out another burst of jubilation amidst the void.

“I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of this before! If you haven’t already noticed, my once empty void has now been combined with its own type of landmines. You cannot move without a new one setting off, and extending that pain further. You’re going to be stuck in here until you bleed out, with no one to hear you or see you! That is it the secret to my new ability, Arsonist’s Lullaby!”

With that cry, the stand stormed through the five of them once more, knocking them to the ground once more, causing new land mines to set off, all to the tune of its user’s laugh-filled joy. It was then that white walls of the void were beginning to fade, and the scenery of that Morioh street was starting to fade back into view.

“Hmm… it appears this ability takes up more of my energy than I thought. I suppose I can’t kill all five of you at once and remain invisible at the same time. No matter, I can’t sense any other stand users around, just the six of us. I don’t care who sees this! I’ll just kill the witnesses after I kill you!”

It was then that Arata Sone made a fatal mistake, and just like his friend Yoshikage Kira, let his hubris take over. Removing the hiding nature of his stand, but doubling the landmines, the man watched as the five powerful stand users struggled to even get close enough to him to land in a hit. New landmines keep going off, new injuries created.

They were dangerously close to bleeding out, all in plain sight of another stand user. You.

You turned the corner to see the carnage ahead of you, finding your whole group in the enemy’s grasp. You couldn’t even tell what you were seeing. The moment one of your friends moved, they would immediately flinch back in agony. Drawing your attention to the man standing over them, a familiar chill went through you. That was the same man that had attacked you days before. And seeing what he was capable of doing to the people you had grown so close to, you were now more scared than ever of him.

But you noticed something. Amidst the pleasure that this monster was reveling in, there was a distinct look of concentration plastered all over his face. You watched his expression twitch with each time an attack went off on one of your friends. He must be doing something with his mind to attack them. He was focusing. His focus. You needed to capture his focus.

Steeling yourself for what was to come, you dropped your crutches and took a deep breath in, something in you knowing the dangers you were about to face, and the rest of you stupidly seeming not to care.

With a small ounce of bravery, you shouted at the top of your lungs. “Stop it! I won’t let you hurt them!”

Sone turned around at the sudden distraction, surprised that someone was taking notice. His eyebrow raised in intrigue. That could only mean one thing. You were another one.

Jotaro recognized that voice. No… no no no. Looking up, he saw your frightened body shaking and staring straight into the enemy’s eyes without a way to defend yourself.

“No! (y/n) get out of here! You can’t be here! He’ll kill-”

The killer turned back around and punched Jotaro straight in the gut with his stand, sending him flying back into a tree.

“Jotaro!”

You shrieked. All five of them were dying right in front of you, so close to bleeding out. And now his focus was on you, and it had taken all your courage to simply call out and distract him from the others. You watched as the man drew closer, ready to kill another. The same giant smile came over his face again.

“(y/n) huh? And here I thought you were a smart person. Smart enough not to beg for me to hurt you again. But sorry, there’s no escape this time!”

“(y/n) no! Run away! Get out of here!”

You didn’t have time to register whose voice had called out to you before you saw the attacker lunge right at you. You put your arms up over your face as your body collapsed to its knees, your eyes shut in fear, and a horrified scream uncontrollably left your lungs.

“Now die!”

And then, you felt weightless.

“GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME”

As you felt a massive weight being lifted from your body, your eyes shot open to find someone new standing over you. Actually, you weren’t sure if it was someone new, or something new. This new thing, it didn’t seem real.

“GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME”

Your face lit up in shock. Attached to this new thing was the same voice that you had been hearing in your head before. You watched as its fists fired off in a flurry of punches, all hitting their marks on the man’s body. You were mesmerized by its appearance. Its body, about the same size as yours, looked as if it were made of glass. Swirling around within that glass was a pool of different colors. Different blues, purples, oranges and pinks flowed together seamlessly, all encased within the glass structure as it pummeled the enemy before you.

“GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME… A MAN!”

With one last, hard punch to the enemy’s chest, the glass figure stopped its attack and turned around to face you. You shuffled back on the ground, your chest heaving in fear from what had just happened. The figure before you, without speaking a word, drew its arm forward to point at Sone, who was now frozen in his spot before you. Then, everyone watched as small ripples began to form over the man’s whole body. All over his arms, legs, and chest, it looks as if the flesh was moving, as if someone had dropped a pebble into a lake. Then the ripples began to glow brightly, the full spectrum of colors radiating out, and tearing their way from the inside of his body outward. The enemy let out a painful shriek as the searing pain overtook him, more and more light spilling out of his body as the flesh around it became torn and melted. Finally, less than a second later, an explosion of white light burst out of the man’s body. And once that flash was gone, so was he. Foreigner’s God had been defeated. And this thing that you could tell was a part of you, it had been the thing to kill him.

Shakily, you stood up, holding on tightly to your crutches, keeping your gaze on this figure that had erupted out of you.

“...ABBA?”

Still confused, all you knew was that something in your body told you to say that name. The figure turned around to face you and gave you a shy smile before coming closer and embracing your shaking form in a hug. Surprised you could even touch it, you wrapped your arms around ABBA as well, finding to your disbelief that the glass like material felt soft and warm to the touch. You looked down its back, eyeing the pattern of jagged lines all over its body, as well as the swirling colors within. You felt your eyes well up with tears. Something about holding onto this being, one not entirely separate from you, felt so right. It felt like it had been welling up inside you for so long, and you couldn’t help but love it now that it was out.

“A stand…” You muttered. It was all so clear now. Your stand.

After a few moments, ABBA stood up and nodded towards the group of your injured friends. Holding you up, both you and your stand rushed over to Josuke. The teenager’s eyes opened with a pained groan, looking up at you and seeing ABBA at your side. His face lit up in surprise and he tried to sit up before the crushing pain forced him back down onto the ground. He muttered weakly for you to see if Rohan was alright, and you did.

Suddenly, a small white figure burst out of the artist’s body and punched Josuke in the arm. You watched, intrigued as a section of the teen’s arm unfolded like a book. The white figure leaned in, writing in Josuke’s arm the words, “I currently do not have any injuries.”

You watched in awe as the bleeding wounds all over Josuke’s body slowly began to close. Within a few minutes, Josuke was up and mobile as ever. He had several questions to ask you, but first, he had some healing to do. You watched as a pink and blue being, you assumed Josuke’s stand, flew out of his body and hovered over all of the other injured, healing them nearly immediately. They all stood up, groaning from the shadows of pain still left behind from the attacks. One by one, each of them looked up at you, each of their faces growing an expression of surprise and adoration. You felt small under their gazes, looking up at your stand standing next to you. As small as you felt, there was something about ABBA that made you feel powerful. Especially considering what it had just done to defeat the enemy.

“(y/n)... is that your stand…?”

You looked over at Koichi before quickly nodding. “Yeah… I guess it must be right?”

You tried to shrug it off with a nervous laugh, but even you were still in awe of this new ability. Finally, you turned to Jotaro, watching his face for a reaction. The gentle giant stood frozen at a loss of words, unsure of what to say. His gaze turned to ABBA, a melancholy look of admiration and love spread over his features.

“Come on Jotaro… say something. Don’t worry. I’ll understand-”

You muttered softly before Jotaro rushed forward and cut you off with a tight hug. You rested your smaller body against him, tears of relief streaming down your face, grateful that everyone was still alive. You looked up to gaze into Jotaro’s blue eyes, seeing that he had begun to tear up as well. Then something caught your eye. Looking over the tall man’s shoulder, you saw a purple skinned spirit faze out of your partner’s body and float over to ABBA, starting deeply into your stand’s face. ABBA, who had before been so calm and collected, now shrunk back a little bit with a childish giggle at the sight of the handsome stand before her. As ABBA held her face in her hands, you felt your cheeks flush bright red. Your eyes widened and you pushed Jotaro away from you, turning to your stand.

“H-hey wait a minute! ABBA, it’s not like that!”

“Gimme?”

ABBA asked innocently as she grabbed Star Platinum’s hand tightly in her own. Jotaro now felt his face heat up and turn bright red. With a heavy sigh, he watched as his stand wrapped yours in its arms, chuckling a bit at your embarrassment.

“Sorry about all this. His name’s Star Platinum, and he’s definitely more… emotional than I am.”

Your eyes widened at what that could possibly mean. Wait… did they think that you and Jotaro were…

“W-wait it’s not like that! He and I are just… “

“Gimme?”

“No! W-well I mean I care about him but I-”

“(y/n).”

You turned around to face Jotaro as he calmly took his hat off, revealing the jet black hair that you loved seeing.

“I’m so glad you’re okay (y/n).”

Your heart swelled at his words and you slowly turned around to see ABBA and Star Platinum holding each other lovingly, a warmth erupting throughout your whole body at the sight. The feeling of Jotaro grabbing your hand caught your attention and met his gaze once more.

“He’s the personification of my thoughts and well… it seems like your stand, ABBA right? It seems like she’s the personification of yours.”

The two of you watched as your stands talk to one another in their own little language, each enamored by the other’s presence. You turned back to Jotaro, seeing that his face had drawn closer.

“Yeah… I guess... you’re… right.”

As you breathed out that last word, Jotaro closed the gap between the two of you, your lips connecting in a sweet, long awaited kiss. You wrapped your arms around the fellow scientist’s, and now fellow stand user’s, neck, giggling slightly as he lifted your body off the ground to hold you tightly in his arms. When you two broke for air, Jotaro quickly kissed you again, holding you up like his life depended on it.

When he finally set you down, Jotaro Kujo placed a hand to the side of your face and wiped away your tears. With a small laugh, he turned over to your stand.

“Hey ABBA, what took you so long huh?”

“...Gimme.” ABBA shrugged a little bit and pointed at you.

You smiled, wiping your tears away. “She said she wouldn’t appear until I was either ready for it, or I really needed her.”

Jotaro rolled his eyes at your stand. “Well you really waited for the exact moment that she needed you huh-Ow!”

Jotaro grumbled a bit as Star punched him in the arm, annoyed that his user was making fun of this new pretty stand. ABBA grinned mischievously before looking around at the rest of the group, and seeing all of the other stands.

A feeling of happiness swelled within the stand’s heart. Ever since you had pricked your finger on the arrow, for so long she had been growing, becoming more and more trapped within you. It had been lonely seeing you struggle without her help. It had been upsetting to see you not yet be ready for her to show herself. But now, eyeing all the others, Heaven’s Door, Echoes, the Hand, Crazy Diamond, and especially Star Platinum, ABBA really didn’t feel alone anymore. And seeing now how the other stand users of Morioh rushed over to hug you and vocalize their shock at you having a stand, ABBA could tell that you didn’t really feel alone anymore either. With a sigh of content, your stand fazed back into your body as you followed the rest of the group away from the scene and back to the hotel to get some much needed rest.

You leaned against Jotaro’s frame as he wrapped as a strong arm around you. “Come on. Let’s get something to eat everyone! Tonio’s, my treat!” He said with a bright smile.

Josuke and Okuyasu cheered, “and (y/n) can meet Tonio’s stand!”

You turned back to the teens in shock as you all walked ahead. “Tonio has a stand?!”

Koichi gave a firm nod. “Yeah. So does Hazamada.”

“That weird kid?!”

“My girlfriend Yukako too.”

“Damn… I had no idea…”

You all shared a laugh as you left to enjoy a well deserved victory, the sun setting over the beautiful town of Morioh, another dark force defeated by the town's newest savior.

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sirpoley · 4 years

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On the Four Table Legs of Traveller, Leg 1: Mortgages

Mongoose Traveller's starship mortgage-payment-system is the most brilliant game mechanic I've ever encountered, as a DM. It's also the first rule I'd ignore if I wasn't consciously trying to play the game exactly how it's described in the book.

A Bit of Background

I've been involved in two Traveller campaigns in the past as a player (both with the same DM), and am currently DMing a third. All of them are using Mongoose's first edition. I've never played any other edition of traveller, and know almost nothing about the history of the game. I don't know which mechanics are unique to this edition of Traveller and which have been around for decades.

In the campaigns in which I was a player, I think the DM was continually frustrated with the rules of the game. He wanted to run a tight, story-focused campaign and picked up Traveller assuming it would be, essentially, D&D in space. For his second campaign, he chopped out huge chunks of the ruleset and replaced it with homebrew ones, removing space travel and Traveller's quirky character creation entirely. This worked for the game he wanted to run (he's an extraordinarily talented DM), but I think we all came away feeling pretty lukewarm about the actual rules.

Bored out of my mind in lockdown, desperate for anything to shake up the daily routine, I picked up the copy of Traveller that had been sitting on my bookshelf, untouched, and skimmed through it. In a mood of "I'll humour this weird rulebook," I followed the random subsector creation chapter to the letter, creating a surprisingly-well fleshed out chunk of space to play around in.

It was then that I realized I'd never actually played Traveller. So I dragged my partner along in an experiment: let's play Traveller, exactly how it is described in the book, no matter how flat-out insane the rules seem to be. I will only consider houseruling or changing a rule once we've both figured out what it's for. I learned a ton in this experiment, so, during my kid's naps (oh, right, I have a daughter now, that's where I disappeared to, Internet), I'll write about what I've learned.

(The Carlia Subsector. Not pictured: along with this map is a LONG word document describing the atmosphere, gravity, population, tech level, cultural quirks, government, etc. of the main world in each of these systems, plus a huge table of the price of dozens of trade goods on each planet. These, it turns out, are crucial game aids. I'll get into them later.)

Traveller, I've learned, is a table held up by four legs: Finances, Character Creation, Patrons, and Random Encounters. If you remove any of these legs, the rest of the game stops working. Following them, as described, gives you a rip-roaring swashbuckling adventure of fighting pirates, escaping bounty hunters, smuggling, jailbreaks, and all that good stuff you want in a campaign—but it happens spontaneously. I'll get into it more in detail, but for now, we're going to talk about finances in Traveller.

Yes, the Game Is About Mortgage Payments

The central driving mechanic of Traveller is making mortgage payments for your starship. The assumption is that the player characters are part-owners of an FTL-capable starship that's more expensive than any one person, or any ten people, could ever afford outright. The game (thankfully) provides a quick way to calculate your starship's mortgage payments (something like the value of the ship/240 per month), and for all of the example ships in the book, gives them to you pre-calculated. In the case of my solo campaign, my partner owed the bank a whopping 500,000 credits a month for her Corsair. For scale, that's the exact same price as the single most powerful gun in the game (the "Fusion Gun, Man Portable"), owed monthly. In D&D terms, she had to raise the equivalent of a +5 Longsword every. Single. Month.

(In addition to mortgage payments are smaller fees: life support (i.e., food and water), crew salaries, fuel, and ship maintenance, but the mortgage is by far the largest single expense, so that's what I'll focus on).

I started my partner out with a fueled up and fully-crewed ship (we used pre-generated NPC stats from the middle of the book for her crew, plus an NPC who was generated during her character creation, which I'll get into later). Character creation started her with 10,000 credits, and I told her she had until the end of the month to multiply that by fifty times.

Debt Leads to Trade

The fastest way by far in Traveller to make money is to interact with the very well fleshed-out trade rules. Each spaceship has a certain amount of tons of cargo it can carry, and each world has a list of trade goods for sale at various prices. So the clear way to raise that 500 grand was to speculatively buy trade goods, pick up passengers and freight, deliver mail, and so on. These rules are generous; by stacking modifiers, it's possible to reliably quadruple your principal every time you reach a new planet (which happens every week).

I think my old DM severely nerfed the trade rules (he also didn't enforce mortgage payments, leaving them on the cutting room floor like D&D's Encumbrance rules) due to this seemingly-unbalanced generosity. Again: the best gun in the game is 500,000 credits—so how on earth can a system that lets you make hundreds, even millions, of credits by trading stand?

Well, it turns out, the bank simply taking 95% of your player's earnings every month severely dampens potentially-snowballing nonlinear growth, so my partner and I never saw the kind of wealth explosion that looks inevitable from the rules as written, despite her scraping together everything she could do maximize profits. In all the time we've been playing, despite having already made millions of credits, she actually hasn't been able to buy a gun better than her starting laser pistol, or, in fact, any armour at all. I'll get to why in a moment, because the most important thing about the trade system is that…

Trade Leads to Travel

Garden worlds sell cheap food. High-population worlds buy food for a high price. High-population worlds sell manufactured goods that are in high-demand on non-industrial worlds, and so on. In a quest to maximize profits, the party was locked into a continual tour of the subsector I generated earlier, constantly moving from place to place. Staying put for any length of time meant letting time trickle away (time that could be spent raking in cash for crippling mortgage payments), so that wasn't an option. What wound up happening was that the party went on a self-guided tour of the subsector, stopping in at colourful worlds I'd generated earlier. This happened entirely without me, as DM, having to dangle bait in front of the party the way that I always have to in D&D. Travel is good, because…

Travel Leads to Conflict

I've already spoken at length on the subject of random encounters here, but Traveller really builds the game around random tables in an elegant way. Every time the party jumps from one world to another, there's a chance they'll get waylaid by pirates (the rulebook has a fun, albeit hidden, 'pirate table' that describes different tricks and hijinks that pirates use to attack). 'Pirates' in Traveller are spaceship owners unable to pay their mortgages by legitimate means, so turn to piracy. The fact that the party is always carrying their life savings in trade commodities whenever they travel around makes them a prime target for piracy, and leads to combat with stakes beyond "fight till everyone's dead." The pirates aren't orcs, and don't want to kill the players for no reason. They want to take their cargo and get away as quickly as possible, suffering the least damage as possible, and the players want the opposite. Thus: pre-combat negotiations, tricks, hijinks (my partner, carrying a cargo of "domestic goods," chose to have her crew throw individual toasters out of the cargo bay each in different directions to ensure that the pirates had to engage in lengthy EVA-missions to catch them each, thus allowing her ship to escape without suffering damage).

Traveller's starship battle rules are fun (and integrate into boarding actions that results in player-scale combat), and are triggered primarily just by moving around. Conflict is fun by itself (that's why combat rules are most of the rules in most games), but in this context, have the added advantage, as…

Conflict Leads to Tradeoffs

It became clear to my partner after her first run-in with pirates that her ship and crew were under-gunned. While buying powerful weapons and armour is trivially cheap compared to the amount of money she was raking in through trade (most weapons cap out at a few thousand credits, and she was moving hundreds of thousands a week), actually getting her hands on some was another matter.

Good weapons in Traveller are advanced ones, which have a high-TL (tech level) rating. These weapons are only available on high-TL worlds (each world has a TL rating generated in subsector generation). Making a detour from trading to buy 'adventuring equipment' wound up being an extremely costly endeavour, taking the party weeks out of the way of the most profitable trade route. The closest world in which these weapons exist also outlaws all weapons (various laws are generated procedurally as well) which means engaging in black market smuggling (which is fleshed out in the rules) and risks run-ins with the law.

Compounding this problem was that her Corsair took minor damage in the combat with the pirates, and the nearest world with a shipyard capable of repairing the ship was different from, and out of the way of, the high tech world with fancy fusion guns. Also, getting the ship repaired meant that it would be in drydock for days or even weeks, which incurs an opportunity cost of almost a million credits that could have been made during trade…

Tradeoffs lead to Debt

In her case, she wound up getting her ship repaired, forgoing arming herself and her crew, and skirting dangerously close to bankruptcy kicking her heels as her ship was patched up. There isn't an easy answer to what she 'ought' to have done, which was fun as hell. Further, as a DM, I wasn't annoyed that she was 'messing up the plot' by staying put (or frustrated that she wasn't going to my elaborately-plotted narrative that would occur when she tried to buy black market weapons) because there was no plot. Everything that came about emerged procedurally.

The 'Loop'

The beating heart of a Traveller sandbox campaign is this loop:

Without DM intervention (or Patrons, which are sort of procedurally-generated adventure hooks), this loop can sustain a campaign pretty much indefinitely. What this means as a DM is that any DM-interventions (i.e., adding in pre-written adventure hooks or encounters or whatever) can be attached to any of these steps to allow it to come about during play. It also means that if you don't have any pre-scripted content (to choose an example completely at random, let's just say your hypothetical one-year-old threw your notes in a toilet) you can just sit back and let the loop above take care of providing entertainment.

To bring this back to mortgages, if your players don't have the threat of having their spaceship repossessed by the bank hanging over them like the Doom of Damocles, then the whole system breaks down, and the DM has to do all the heavy lifting of providing character motivation to go explore new planets.

Next, we'll talk about how Traveller's patron system ties into all of this.

#TravellerRPG #Traveller #FourLegsofTraveller

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ask-de-writer · 4 years

Text

LOST TIME (part 2 of 3) A fantasy of Flocking Bay.

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LOST TIME

De Writer (Glen Ten-Eyck)

5556 words

written 2003 by Glen Ten-Eyck

Reproduction in any form, physical, electronic or digital is prohibited without the express written consent of the author or proper copyright holder.

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Morton Hewitt did not last. He bought the house for back taxes in 1944. He lived there for a week. He painted the hardwood floors and then hanged himself in the garage the next day.

Byron Thomas bought the house from Hewitt’s estate. He was a grave digger for Trinity Graveyard. He updated the plumbing and lived there quietly for several years. Apparently he liked his work a little too well. He buried two people who were not yet dead. One of them lived. He was adjudged sane at his trial and hanged for his crime.

Mark Altman bought the house next. He was a reclusive sort and lived there for a quite a number of years before it was discovered that he’d had some visitors who had never left. He died in prison while awaiting trial. There was an interesting hand written note attached to the autopsy report which stated that the coroner had ruled out both suicide and homicide but refused to pronounce the death natural.

Dora Greene got the place next. She was Mark’s sister. Like Mark, she lived there quietly for years. One day she walked into town and set fire to the school, killing five and maiming six more. She spent her last years in a lunatic asylum, setting three more fires and killing two more people. She herself died in her last fire.

While she was in the asylum, one Tony Fisk, age twelve, urged on by several other urchins, had thrown some stones at the windows of the Vekin place. He had missed. Becoming angry, he took careful aim and they all watched the flight of the stone. In the young malefactor’s words, “It went away without falling.”

It would not have been worthy of a news story, except for the fact that each of the children who had watched the stone had gone severely and permanently cross-eyed. In a small town like Flocking Bay, that many kids going cross-eyed at once could not be hidden.

George Abbot bought the house and rented it at a very low price to a Michael Farley. The two had been feuding, down-state, and the house was supposed to have been a peace offering. Farley stayed only a few weeks. He went out and dynamited Abbot’s automobile. Farley was quite mad and lived out his life in an asylum for the criminally insane. The county coroner ruled Abbot’s death to be suicide. After all, he had known the history of the house and had knowingly rented that house to an enemy.

Cornelius Baker took the house next. He upgraded the kitchen and installed modern wiring. He lived there quietly and apparently got on well for about five years. He was a long-haul truck driver. Bodies followed him about the country. Finally, he was caught with one in his truck. He drove his truck into a bridge abutment at over ninety miles per hour rather than be taken alive.

Now, I had the place. I mentally withdrew my blessing. He had not been a good man at all.

Lois saw that I was finished with the file and making good inroads on my sandwich. She asked, “Did you sleep there, last night?”

“Yes, I did. Most restful sleep I have had in years.”

“What is your full name?”

“Vandervekken,” I replied, getting out my driver’s license. I was used to this. “No first name or middle initial. Just Vandervekken.”

“How old are you?”

“I don’t know, at least seventy.”

“You don’t know how old you are? Seventy? You look like you’re in your early twenties,” she said incredulously. “I told you that things connected with the Vekin place get interesting.”

“I got a head-wound during the war. Traumatic amnesia.”

“Viet Nam wasn’t that long ago. It would only make you in your fifties.”

“Not Viet Nam, Lois. WW II. Apparently, I was helping the French Underground.” I handed her the military fingerprint record. Her eyes widened as she realized that I was serious. “The amnesia’s been permanent, so far. I have language skills . . . too many. I’m a fluent, accentless polyglot. I even speak Basque. I know how to do an amazing number of things . . . no trace of name or personal past. No ID either.”

“Couldn’t they trace you by these fingerprints or something?”

“They tried. I was found among the bodies of a wiped-out unit of the French Underground during the German withdrawal from Paris in 1944. Someone from another unit was able to say that I was an American volunteer with a name that he could neither remember nor pronounce ... something sort of Dutch. That inspired my current name. I got back with a temporary ID and that military fingerprint record, which I still carry.”

“That’s sad, and eerie, too. What’s it feel like?”

“I’ve thought about that a lot. I think the best way to describe it is like a house that’s furnished but nobody is home. Empty. Alone.”

“So, how does that relate to your choice of name? You must know what having only one name does to our systems for indexing things and people.”

“True. I want to stand out, in case somebody recognizes who I am. As for Vandervekken, he was the Flying Dutchman, who swore that he would take his ship around the Cape of Good Hope, against a gale, if it took until Judgment Day. That was in the Seventeenth Century and he is still sailing. His ghost is seen as a Dutch East India Co. galleon with all sails set, sailing into the teeth of a gale. He can’t get home either.”

“I see,” Lois said, adding to her notes. “What brought you to Flocking Bay?”

“I was just passing through. I like small towns, so I avoid the main highways and big cities whenever I can. I liked the atmosphere of Flocking Bay enough to inquire about the possibility of settling here.”

“Look, we both know that small towns are dying. You could have had your pick from any of a dozen houses. Why the Vekin place?”

“I was shown fourteen places, actually. I know that it seems a bit forbidding at first, but it felt good. Like a warm glove on a cool morning. Have you ever actually been there?”

She shuddered, “No, and before you, I have never heard of anyone who said that the Vekin place felt good ... You say that you are a writer. What have you written?”

“Charles said it very well, ’Pseudonyms are great for privacy.’ My own writing aside, I do translations but you won’t find my name on most of them. Archaeologists like to take credit for their finds. I mentioned that I’m a polyglot? I sight read ancient languages as well as modern.”

I extended my hand to Lois and invited, “Would you like to come and see for yourself this house of dark history? I promise that you will find it worth your while. In all of those stories, not once was the interior of Vekin House described. Do come.”

“I have to return the file and get my camera,” she responded gamely.

“I shall await you in my auto, in front of the Voice,” I answered. As I walked her back across the street, I had the pleasure of seeing her stare at Lilitu.

“If that’s what I think its, I’ll ride with you anywhere!” she called over her shoulder as she entered the Voice’s office. True to her word, she emerged in a few minutes with a camera. Not one of those tiny little cameras that have become fashionable, but a business-like press camera. I opened the car door and gave her a hand up.

As I got into the driver’s seat, she asked, wonder in her voice, “Is this really a Packard V-12 Touring Car?”

We pulled away with the almost uncannily quiet, vibration-free ride that the car was famous for. I replied, “You bet she is. Lois, meet Lilitu. Lilitu, meet Lois. After the war, there were still quite a few of them to be had, and I liked both the ride and the durability, so I hunted one down and had it fixed up like new. I’ve kept her that way ever since. She’s only had two owners in over two-million miles. The first owner only put on about sixty-thousand of them.”

“You drive a lot,” she stated.

“I was looking for something ... I think that Flocking Bay has it. My turn for a few questions , if you don’t mind.”

“Fire away. If I don’t like the question, I won’t answer it.”

“What did you do before you took up the Voice?”

“The same thing that I still do. The stock and futures markets. I’m good at it. I got out of college with a degree in the sociology of medieval witchcraft. I got a job as a waitress on the strength of my looks. I put my first fifty dollars in tips into a risky stock that kited way up. On a hunch, I dumped it three days after I bought it. It nosedived shortly after I sold out. After commissions, I had three hundred and fifty dollars. I rolled it over the same way. The rest is history. So far, my hunches have always worked for me.”

“What brought you to Flocking Bay?”

“Like you, I was passing through. I was on my way to Lakeside Resort about three years ago. I got a hunch that I should stay, so I did. The Voice was failing. When a small town loses its paper, the end is in sight. I didn’t want the end to come, so I bought the paper. Here I am.”

“And here we are,” I said with a flourish as I pulled up in front of the house. We both stared. The yard was neatly trimmed, though the bushes and trees still retained a slightly forbidding aspect. Going up the path to the front door, I noticed that the flagstones had been leveled, the weeds removed and the joints and refilled with fresh sand. The iron fence and balustrades had been cleaned of rust.

“You’ve been busy,” was Lois’s comment.

“That’s just it,” I replied, puzzled. “I didn’t do it. I thought that stocking the fridge and setting out a snack last night was something that the real-estate agent arranged. Sort of a welcome wagon. This is beyond the call of duty.” Opening the front door, I felt that comfortable, welcoming feeling that had caused me to buy the house in the first place. Impulsively, I said, “Hello, house, you certainly look nice today.”

Lois looked at me quizzically and asked, “Do you talk to everything, or is this special?”

I thought for a moment before answering, “Actually I only talk to things that have personality enough to warrant a name, like Lilitu, my car, or Drachen, my typewriter.”

“Typewriter? You do like antiques, don't you? What are you going to call the house, then?”

“I’m not sure,” I answered. “Something good ... What does the place feel like to you?”

“The place actually looks and feels . . . well . . .” Lois groped for the right word, “I’d have to say . . . happy. Not what I expected, at all. It feels like what you see when a pup that loves its master is greeting him. No wonder you slept well, if it feels as good to you as it does to me . . .” She sort of trailed off. “I wouldn’t normally say this, but I’m getting a hunch about this place . . .” she trailed off again.

“I guess that the house was just waiting for the right kind of person,” I responded. “It was pretty rough on everyone else. I’m glad that you like it too.”

“Look at these floors,” she mused, “They were beautiful before Hewitt painted them over. You can still make out some traces of the parquetry patterns. If he hadn’t already hanged himself, I’d help you to do it.”

<==Previous Next==>

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Return to Flocking Bay

#LOST TIME #Part 2 of 3 #Flocking Bay #Written by De Writer

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noonachronicles · 5 years

Text

Everlong Pt. 5

Kwon Jiyong/ G Dragon X Reader

Word count: 5.5k

Warnings: mild language

Genre: Hades/Jiyong. Greek God AU. Fantasy.

A/N: Sorry for the wait!

Update Tag: @kathrynwynterbourne , @astarlitworld, @blue-lungs

Moodboard by bae @memoiresofaneternaldreamer

Sleep had eluded you all night, save for a couple of hours between when the sun had come up and when it was time for you to start getting ready for work. It was absolutely due to the fact that your brain wouldn’t stop racing with about a thousand different thoughts. You weren’t sure what was really going to happen when five o’clock hit that evening. You were completely uncertain about what you truly believed would happen when you went with Jiyong, wherever he was actually going to bring you. There was maybe, you felt, a ten percent chance you’d actually see the underworld. That percentage was only so high because you had a bad habit of believing that anything was possible despite everything that had happened in your life. Even this highly unlikely, very improbable thing.

On the off chance that you were actually going to the underworld, and on the even slimmer chance that you were going to meet Hades and somehow find a way to bring home Jiho, you cleaned the apartment. A full scrub down of the entire one bedroom, loft apartment. The tiles in the bathroom were glistening, actually glistening, which they had never done the entire time you’d lived there. You swept the stairs and behind the refrigerator. About midway through you became unsure if you were cleaning so that Jiho had some place nice to come home to or because you calculated that there was a fourty percent chance that what Jiyong meant by bringing you to the underworld was that he was going to murder you. If that was the case you wanted to make sure things looked nice for whoever came to empty your things from the apartment when you never came back. Maybe they could lease it out, fully furnished.

You didn’t write any goodbye letters, you didn’t feel like you had anyone to write them for. Jiho had been your best friend, the closest person you had to family, the most important person in your life for the last several years. Most of the other people in your life that you considered friends were only your friends because they were friends of Jiho or they were coworkers. None of them were very close to you, not close enough that you thought it would be worth it to say goodbye or explain your choice to run off to the ‘underworld’ with a man that you’d never spent time with outside of your job and was in essence a stranger. That thought just made you depressed. The realization that you were completely alone in the world. It was a sad and horrible thought but you also realized it was probably the only reason you agreed to this insane proposition in the first place. Why say no when you had nothing tying you to this life anyway.

It had been overcast and raining all day which you’d felt was strangely appropriate given your slightly morbid plans for the afternoon. Work had gone by slowly at first because you were so tired. As the clock inched closer to the end of your shift, and you sipped down your third triple shot latte, time seemed to pick up. It had gone from two in the afternoon to four-fortyfive in the blink of an eye. Not long after that you were standing outside of the bakery. Underneath the red and white striped awning, you leaned against the cold brick of the wall as you waited. Still exhausted you stared out at the cars splashing up puddles of rainwater from the street as they passed by. A parade of people with umbrellas were marching by you like undefined blurs. Finally, after what felt like days, there wasn’t a single thought in your head but it was a short lived feeling of relief.

“I didn’t know you smoked.” Jiyong said from where he stood beside you, also leaning against the brick wall. Having been so dazed with exhaustion you hadn’t noticed him walk up or even noticed at all that he’d been there.

“I-I don’t.” you stammered with confusion at the comment.

He hummed with a curious interest. Your breath hitched in your chest as he placed his hand on your forearm. Goosebumps blanketed your whole arm while he slipped his hand down towards your own. You thought maybe he was going to hold your hand as his fingers passed your wrist. He continued moving his hand down the back of yours until it was completely encompassed by his. He looked over at you as you stared wide eyed at him, a small smirk played on his lips. As he pulled his hand away from yours you felt a tug from between your fingers. He raised his hand and you eyed the half burnt down cigarette that he’d pulled from your hand.

“You sure about that?” he asked before lifting the cigarette to his lips to take a long, slow drag. The cherry burning a bright orange against the gloomy gray background of the day.

“Oh,” you muttered as you started to remember. Your coworker had spent some time watching you and mentioned that you’d looked stressed out so she offered you a cigarette to calm your nerves. It’s why you were outside waiting for him in the rain instead of inside the warm bakery drinking even more espresso. “Chae gave it to me, she thought I looked stressed. I came out here and lit it and then forgot it was in my hand. I don’t usually smoke.”

He took another drag before offering over to you. You shook your head to decline but ended up reaching for the cigarette anyway. He looked at you, just slightly concerned, “And are you? Stressed? We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

“I’m not stressed.” you argued, slightly irritable from lack of sleep, “I’m nervous, I think that’s valid given the circumstances.”

“You just seem...angry.” he said cautiously and then asked again, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“I’m not angry, I’m just tired.” you sighed, exasperated, and then looked over at him sternly, “Are you trying to get out of this? Was this all just some fucked up lie and now you’re trying to back out of it because you think I’ll be pissed? I will be, by the way, if this is a joke, I will be livid. It’s not even funny.”

“It’s not a joke, and I’m not trying to get out of anything.” he grabbed your chin between his fingers and turned your face towards him so you were actually looking at his eyes and not at his chest. “I keep asking because this is incredibly serious, you need to know that. I need to make sure it’s what you really want. This isn’t some fun road trip, it’s dangerous, and I honestly don’t even know what’s going to happen when we get there. I need you to trust me. I would like for you to feel comfortable with me and to feel safe with me. I don’t want to bring you there with even a chance that you’ll have an ounce of regret once it’s done. So if you think for even a second that you might not want this, tell me now.”

He was standing so close to you, inches away. You knew it wasn’t what you should be thinking about. He was being so serious and he was looking at you with eyes that begged you to take this moment seriously as well. You knew all this and even still all you could think about in return was how you could feel the warmth radiating off of him as your eyes moved back down to his chest. It had been so cold outside from the rain but you hadn’t really noticed just how cold until he turned his toasty body towards yours and it felt like someone had turned on a space heater. The only things running through your mind were thoughts about was how good your freezing fingers would feel curling into the black sweater he was wearing under his dark grey, wool overcoat. And how how insanely good he smelled. There was an initial layer of cologne but beneath the musky scent was something else, chocolate and cinnamon. It was making your mouth water, he was edible.

“Y/n,” he said quietly, his finger hooked back under your chin, you inhaled deeply, and he lifted your face to his again, “Tell me what you want.”

Your cheeks warmed with a blush and after a brief pause you said, “I want to go with you.”

It was a whisper of a response, but it was loaded nonetheless. You hadn’t said that you wanted to go to Jiho. You didn’t say you wanted him to take you to the underworld. It was, I want to go with you, and you said exactly what you’d meant. Even if he didn’t realize the meaning behind the words you said. Even if you hadn’t actually realized it right away yourself, not until after the words left your lips. Once it clicked however, you felt it with your whole chest. What you really wanted was to go wherever Jiyong was. No matter where that meant you were going. Something passed over his eyes, something that you would swear looked like disappointment. It left a crack in your heart to think that he didn’t want what you wanted, not even a little bit.

“Well, if you’re ready, let’s be on our way.” he said with a sigh.

He took one long last drag of the cigarette, that had been silently passed between the two of you several times, before dropping it on the sidewalk and smashing the butt beneath the heel of his shiny black shoe. You followed him as he pushed himself off the wall and started to casually stroll down the sidewalk.

“My car is just around the corner.” he said stuffing his hands in his pockets.

“You have to drive to the underworld?” you asked skeptically, “There isn’t some weird magic you do where just like open any door and walk through to hades. There’s no...portal that you can open up?”

“No, you’ll see.”

You took a deep breath and released it, letting go of the ache in your chest and replacing it with a wave of unexpected excitement. This was actually happening, well maybe. There was a slight pep in your step as the pair of you rounded the corner and you started to take the lead, forgetting that you didn’t exactly know where you were going.

Jiyong watched as you walked ahead of him with amusement, moving so confidently though there was no way you could know which car was his. He’d been a little disappointed at first, that you still wanted to go to Jiho, but he couldn’t help how happy he felt that he was going to get to spend this time with you. Most of his night was spent worried that this wasn’t going to work, that he wouldn’t be able to get you where you wanted to go. Even if he was the god of the underworld getting mortals that weren’t dead to cross over was a difficult task, especially in the gentle way he was doing it with you. It was an almost impossible task, which was why he rarely accepted offers of exchange. He figured if he helped you through as much as he could, you would make it but you had to be persistent. You had to really want to cross. It still wasn’t promised, but he hoped it might work.

The rest of his night had been spent thinking of how to stretch out the trek to the palace as much as possible if you got there, once you got there. This was both so that he would be able to spend the extra time with you and also because he hadn’t yet figured out how he wanted to tell you that he was in fact Hades. He thought of every place he could take you. All the things he could show you that he thought you might like. Part of him even thought or hoped that if he made the underworld seem appealing enough that you might ask to stay with him. Even now, as you walked down the sidewalk in front of him, he wondered if maybe just possibly there was a chance that you would be interested. Interested in the underworld. Interested in him. Suddenly you stopped, and he was left surprised when you halted in front of his car without him having to say a word.

You turned with a disgusted look on your face, “Ugh, look at this horrendous display of overcompensation.”

“Overcompensation?” He asked, eyebrows furrowed.

“If he has to show off how impressive his wallet is, you can probably bet he has a very unimpressive dick.” You said dragging a finger over the reflective gold hood of the car as you spoke.

Jiyong cleared his throat, and you looked over at him as he pulled a set of keys from his pocket. You froze, saying a quick internal prayer that those keys were not the keys for this car. He pressed a button on the FOB and the Lamborghini released a series of alarm beeps.

You bit your lip, face turning maroon in embarrassment as you looked back at him. “I-“

He moved passed you and opened the door for you. Leaning in, his lips excruciatingly close to your ear, he whispered, “I bet you, you’re wrong.”

“I’m- I probably am.” You choked out quickly before dipping into the car.

In your whole life you’d only ever been in one car and it had been your grandmas ancient station wagon from what you’d assumed was the beginning of time. It topped out at thirty-five miles per hour and usually took at least a full minute to get there. However it always got her from point a to point b and she only ever used the car once a year anyway, preferring to walk when she could. Every summer she’d take you on one trip, wherever you wanted, as far away as you wanted to go. The catch was that you had to plan the whole thing. She’d give you a map, a budget, and a timeframe of when you had to be back home.

It was one of your favorite things to do, planning your escapes. Imaging how far you could go and all the things you could see on the way. When she died your mom sold the car for some extra cash and since then you hadn’t traveled by anything that wasn’t public transportation. Living in the city you didn’t need a car, none of your friends had one either so it wasn’t a big deal. Your sense of adventure never really died but with every day that passed it got buried deeper and deeper beneath reality.

Jiyong’s car couldn’t have been further from your grandmas old wagon. The seats were comfortable, mind blowingly so. They were like movie theater seats, but the nice ones, the ones that reclined. Although this one did not recline. As you sunk into the passenger seat you literally sighed like you’d landed on a cloud. The seats, which you were admittedly obsessed with, were not the only difference. Next thing you noticed, as Jiyong slide into the driver’s seat next to you and turned on the vehicle, was the ridiculous sound system. As soon as he turned on the car you were thrown back in your seat from the blaring sound of whatever had been playing when he shut the car off originally. He apologized profusely after turning it down to a much gentler volume, more of a background noise than a deafening blast. The last and main difference you noticed was the speed of the car.

When Jiyong maneuvered from the parking spot and into the road you were thrown back into the seat once more, this time due to the fact that the car had gone from zero to one hundred in about three seconds flat. The way he took the corners of the city streets going no less than eighty miles per hour made you feel slightly sick to your stomach. You were almost sure you had whiplash by the fourth turn. With your eyes as wide as they could possibly be you turned your head to the driver’s seat where Jiyong looked calm, content, completely unbothered by the fact that one wrong move could end both of your lives.

“Please,” you muttered reaching your hand out to grab the hand he had on the stick shift. “If you don’t slow down...I’m going to throw up in your car.”

The car slowed from one hundred twenty to a slow coast at fifty. Finally he looked over at you, white knuckling the seatbelt at your chest. He let out a small laugh, “Are you okay?”

“Is this your plan?” You asked getting your bearings back. “Are you going to drive this car straight into a brick wall and then we die and that’s your big plan to get to the underworld? Because I don’t like that plan.”

“It’s not the plan.” He laughed, outright this time, “I’m a good driver, you shouldn’t worry.”

“Can you just...chill?” You asked taking a breath. “Are we leaving the city?”

“Yes.”

Finally, you’d thought, something resembling an answer about where you were going. “Well, when we get out of the city you can drive like a lunatic, but not with all the corners. Please. For the sake of my guts, and your upholstery.”

He just grinned and turned the music up a little bit more as you settled back into your seat. When you weren’t in fear for your life, it was actually a really nice drive. Instead of the blaring rock music he’d had playing earlier Jiyong had changed the music over to something softer, with a jazzy, r&b vibe. It was sensual and intimate. The mood he’d set with it did not go unnoticed by you. You watched out of the window as he passed the street where your apartment was and continued to stare out at the passing view until the city turned into the suburbs. At that point your eyelids had gotten too heavy and you fell asleep against the window.

It only took a couple hours for Jiyong to get where he was going, where you needed to be, but he’d seen how tired you were earlier. Instead of waking you up right away after he’d parked the car he sat quietly beside you. He flipped idly through his notebook. Reading and rereading your page and the pages of the people in your life. Finally, after a little more than an hour, he closed the book and looked up through the windshield to see the sun was about to set. It would be better to start before the sun was down completely, he’d have to wake you up.

When he looked over at you, he was still hesitant to disturb you. You’d moved during the ride so many times that you were were no longer leaning against the window. Now, facing the driver’s seat, one leg propped up so that your knee was practically at your chest, your arms were wrapped around the head rest of the seat like you’d have had them wrapped around a pillow. He didn’t know how you could possibly be comfortable like that, but the look on your face was peaceful. Slowly, he lifted his hand to your face and pushed the hair that had fallen against your cheek behind your ear. His fingertips slid gently behind your ear and down your neck. You started to stir and he quickly pulled his hand to his lap.

“We’re here.” He said quietly as your eyes blinked open.

You gave a hearty yawn and looked out at the view from the window. “The beach?”

“Yep.” he smiled over at you, “Ready?”

“Are you going to drown me in the ocean?” you asked casually, stretching out as much as you could in the compact sports car.

“Will you stop?” he asked, “You don’t really think I’m going to kill you. Do you?”

You chuckled, “Even if I did, it’s too late now right? Never go to a second location.”

He groaned as you laughed again and got out of the car for a real stretch. As you did what he could only describe as yoga stretches in the otherwise empty parking lot he leaned against the hood of the car and watched. You’d felt so much more like yourself even just from the small nap in the car. And a thorough stretch had you feeling near one hundred percent. Once you were finally settled you were glad you’d worn a sweater. The rain had stopped but it was chilly, especially near the water. You looked out passed the sand to the water and watched the sun setting on the horizon. The sky was painted in swirls of soft purples, pinks, and oranges. You knew this beach.

“I’ve been here before.” You said quietly moving your hands to your sweaters pocket. “My grandma brought me once. She let me walk all the way down that pier to the lighthouse at the end.”

Jiyong looked over at the lighthouse you were talking about. It was decommissioned now, but still standing and well maintained. Even the black stripes looked freshly painted from where you were. He pushed himself off of the car and looked over at you. Eyes glossed over, he thought you looked emotional, like you might cry. “We should go, it’s getting dark.”

You nodded and looked over at him with a tiny smile. “So, are you going to tell me how this works now?”

“We’re just going for a walk.” He said finding a naturally worn path in the embankment that led from the lot down to the beach.

“A walk to where, Ji? Are we going to the lighthouse? If we go inside is there some button you push that makes it take off like a rocket? Or do we plummet like a faulty elevator? Wouldn’t that be ironic, crashing down into the underworld in a broken elevator like...nevermind. Do we just walk straight into the water? Are we going to sacrifice something to Poseidon? And when he shows up we ask him to give us passage to the underworld?” You rambled as you followed him.

“Would you stop asking so many questions and just trust me?” He asked, though you could tell he was more amused than annoyed.

“Listen,” you responded, grabbing his hand as he helped you down the steep bank and into the sand. “if things are about to go the way you say they’re going to, I’m gonna have a lot more questions. Get used to it.”

“For right now,” he said leading you towards the waters edge, “we’re just going to walk, okay? Just enjoy the sunset and the fact that the sky has cleared enough to see it.”

Falling quiet you walked beside him on the left, the side closest to the incoming tide. The urge to take off your shoes and feel the sand beneath your feet was strong, but you knew it would be freezing, so you fought it. That wasn’t the only urge you fought. There was something about walking along the beach that made you ache to hold Jiyong’s hand. It seemed romantic. It seemed like the thing to do, like something couples did as they walked along the beach at sunset.

However, you reminded yourself painfully, you weren’t a couple. You weren’t exactly sure but you thought you might still be in a relationship with Jiho. You’d been thinking that if where you were going was really hades, and Jiho really was there, and you were really able to bring his soul back to life he’d be coming back as your boyfriend. So technically, you figured, he’d still be considered your boyfriend now. Even still, if Jiyong’s hand wasn’t stuffed in the pocket of his wool coat, you weren’t sure you’d be able to stop yourself from slipping your hand into his. It was though, hidden away by the dark grey fabric, so you shoved your hands in your own pocket and tried to enjoy the view.

The whole time the two of you had been walking in the opposite direction of the lighthouse. Away from anything at all. Just following the coastline as the sky grew dark. It was harder to see after a while, though the moon was full and showered the earth with an ambient light. It seemed to reflect off of the light colored sand making the earth beneath you look like it was glowing. Looking ahead you could see what looked like a wall of mist. You thought maybe you were walking into a cloud. As you reached just outside of the thin veil of fog you stopped.

“Jiyong.”

He stopped and turned to look at you, “Are you okay? We’re getting close.”

“I…I can’t see anything that way.” You said and turned around.

Behind you, while still dark from the night, you could still see the sand, and the water creeping up to the shore. The stars in the sky. If you looked hard enough you could catch a glimpse of the lighthouse at the end of the pier. Looking around again, ahead of you, all you could see was the wall of gray mist and nothing else.

“We have to go this way.” He said gently.

“I know.” You sighed shakily, “Will you hold my hand? I don’t want to lose you.”

He pulled his hand from his pocket without question and held it out to you. You felt a warmth flow through you the moment your palm collided with his. Instantly you could feel confidence wash over you, an assurance that this was okay. That you would be okay. Squeezing his hand gently with yours you started to walk again towards the wall of gray.

As you moved into the mist you realized it wasn’t as bad as you originally imagined. You could still see Jiyong in front of you, you could still see the sand beneath your feet, and if you looked to the side you could still watch the water coming in. Those small comforts slowly started to disappear as you continued walking.

First the water was no longer visible, you couldn’t even hear the slosh of it as it reached the shore like you did before. Then it was the sand beneath your feet. You watched as the fog inched upwards. Hiding your feet, your ankles, up to your knees, like you were being eaten by a giant snake. Disappearing by the second, you had to look away, so you looked ahead. Jiyong was next to disappear. It rolled over him like a blanket of inching lava. His face was gone first, which made your breath hitch. And then it rolled over his body until all you could see was the hand you held in yours. Before long, you knew, even that would be gone too.

“I’m scared.” You admitted as the gray seemed to completely encompass you finally. Fog so thick you couldn’t even see Jiyong anymore not even your own hand holding his. The only way you could tell he was there was a gentle squeeze around your fingers, “Don’t let me go.”

“I won’t.” There was still laughter in his voice, “I couldn’t even if I wanted to the way your grip is.”

Your chest tightened, it was like suddenly being blind. “Fuck. I can’t stand this anymore, I want to go back. I have to go back.”

“Hey, it’s okay.” He assured you. “I have you.”

“I can’t breathe. I can’t… I really can’t. I feel like I’m dying. God Jiyong, don’t let me go.” Your chest was so tight you couldn’t feel air getting to your lungs even with your panicked breath. As if the gray fog was seeping into your lungs like concrete.

“Stop. Listen to my voice okay?” He was so calm. “I want you to close your eyes.”

“What?!” You shrieked, “How is that supposed to help?”

“Trust me. You’re just scared because you don’t have control. You can’t see because of the fog, right? So if you close your eyes, you won’t be able to see because you made that choice. You’ll have the control. Do it.”

You closed your eyes. “What now?”

“Tell me what you see.”

“Fucking nothing, Jiyong! My eyes are closed.” You growled.

“What was the last thing you remember seeing to your left?” He was still calm in tone, but internally he was nervous.

This would be a real test for you. As a living mortal you weren’t supposed to even get this far. By now you should have had a sudden loss of memory. Completely forgotten what you were doing in this place and turned around. Instead you were here with him. With your memories of him and the plan to get you to the underworld still intact. Now if you could only see.

“I...I remember seeing the water moving up the sand towards us.”

“Good. Now, eyes closed, look to your left. Clear the fog with your mind. See the water moving up the sand.”

You did as you were told. Eyes closed, you turned your face to the left. You wanted to complain to him and say something about how stupid that this was. Instead you tried, you imagined the fog clearing slightly and the way the waves would look inching towards you before sliding back again. “Oh fuck. Okay… I see it.”

“Good, now look forward. Clear the fog. Tell me what you see.”

Looking ahead once more the fog had returned. You tried again. You focused on your hands, wrapped around his hand and wrist in a death grip. Slowly your hands became visible, and then his heavy coat sleeve. Your eyes travelled up his arm to his shoulder. He was looking back at you with a smile.

“I see you.” You said finally.

“Do I look handsome?” He joked, you could picture exactly the way his face would look saying it, smug.

“You’re the worst.” You groaned, “Yeah, Jiyong. You’re flawless as always.”

“Good job. Now, look passed me” he directed, “I mean… if you can drag yourself to look away from my flawless features.”

You took a deep breath, ignoring his comment and looked ahead. The fog began to disperse, easier than before.

“This isn’t right.” you muttered in confusion.

“What’s not right?” He asked showing no concern, only interest.

“I must be disoriented.” You felt a bit of anxiety fill your chest again. You’d barely realized that you hadn’t been panicked this whole time.

“Come on, stay with me. You have to tell me exactly what you see.”

“Um. It’s different. We’re not walking along the beach anymore. We’re walking...I don’t know what that is. Maybe a lake? No. It’s a river.” You said making out the way the water was flowing in one direction instead of ebbing forward and back against the shore. “We’re walking towards a river. There’s a boat. We’re walking towards a boat on the edge of a river.”

“Tell me what it looks like, the boat.”

“Dark wood, maybe black? It’s small, like a rowboat.”

“Good.” He stopped waking just in front of where you imagined the boat to be and you pictured him turning to look at you, lifting his free hand to your cheek. “You can let go now.”

You raised one of your hands to the one on your cheek in surprise that it was really there. Then you blinked. You didn’t know how long your eyes had been open. How long had you been describing exactly what was in front of you instead of what you thought you’d imagined?

“Woah. How’d you do that?” You asked looking at Jiyongs face.

He looked almost proud of you. “You did that.”

Turning around you couldn’t see the fog anymore. You were standing on a stretch of sand and rocks at the base of a tall cliffside. It shouldn’t have been there. There was no visible opening, no pass that you could have been walking through. You had no idea where you’d just come from.

“This is the River Styx.”

You turned back around to Jiyong and then looked over at the water. It was dark but that didn’t really mean much as everything around you was covered in the layer of darkness that the night had brought. You stepped up to the edge of the water and tried to peer in. It was too dark to see anything.

Your mouth tugged to the side as you kept trying to get a good look and then you turned back to him, “Aren’t there like...dead bodies floating in there?”

“No.” He scoffed, “Get in the boat.”

#kwon jiyong scenario #g dragon scenario #big bang scenarios #kpop scenarios #Everlong

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katiebug445 · 6 years

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Katie says goodbye to the Supernatural cons.

Alright, so, I’ve been putting off writing this post for a couple days, because exhaustion hit me like a freight train and I’ve been feeling icky and sickly for awhile, so bleh. But okay. Time to get emo on main.

So about five years ago, around this time of year, actually, i finally got the chance to go to my first ever convention. me and some friends at the time were all planning on going to the Salute to Supernatural convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota in August of 2015. I was so excited to finally get to do this, because I’d been wanting to go to a con since 2011. This was my chance to finally go, and see Richard Speight Jr, and make a dumb dream that kept me alive for a long time come true. And it was, without a doubt, the most magical, and important experience of my life to date.

Around this time, I was beginning to come up in the fandom. i had a really good following, my fics were getting a lot of attention, i was in with a group that was insanely popular, and life was actually really good. The show was the most important thing in my life, and i had countdowns going until it came back on in the fall. i was in very deep in the fandom, and it was my main source of happiness, so going to this con was going to be fucking HUGE for me.

^^ freshly turned 20 year old Katie out there living the best life she could at the time. she was trying her best.

So we get to Minneapolis on that Thursday, and we’re walking around, and it hadn’t exactly sunk in yet that I was there. Like, I knew I was going, and I knew what was all going to happen, but I hadn’t been like “oh god this is happening” as of then.

I remember the moment that it did sink in, though. We were sitting in our seats, Richard and Rob were up on stage doing the rules and regulations, and I kind of came back into my body and realized that i was shaking a LOT, and i just remember looking around the auditorium, and then back up to the stage, and hearing Richard’s voice. I thought to myself “You did it. You made it here. You stayed alive for this moment right here. You fucking did it.” and that’s when everything sunk in completely for me.

i remember crying a lot after that.

The con was everything I imagined it would be. I laughed a TON, i got to spend time with some - at the time - really good friends, and I was very swept up in the magic of the whole weekend, and I never wanted that feeling to go away.

Then on Sunday, I got to meet Richard in person.

I won’t go into details, and I’ll spare the sob story that lead up to all of it, but I will summarize and say that Sunday at Minncon 2015 remains one of the most important days of my entire life. there was so much personal feelings wrapped up in all of that, and I still have no clue how i managed not to break down crying as soon as i saw him.

I love that man more than just about anything else, even to this day. richard is still a driving force to me to keep on going with life no matte what happens, and i owe him so much for that.

anyways, i loved the con. I loved the show, the cast, the whole experience. I walked away from that with some of the best memories that i will keep with me forever. I’ve said this a thousand times before over the last several years, but Richard Speight makes those conventions an incredible experience. The effort he puts into them, the way he treats his fans, all of it makes the cons so special for me. I thank him so much for being such a wonderful person, and making me want to go back again and again and again.

And i wanted so badly to do just that. I wanted to see Richard again. I wanted to do the cons, and hang out with friends more, and just do the whole fucking thing. Because that was peak happiness for me. it still is, in some ways.

Between the ending of 2015 and the beginning of 2017, i had a bad falling out with the people i went to Minncon with. i lost a lot of my popularity, i backed way off of all of the corners of the fandom that I’d made a name for myself in, and i kept my head down. I did and said some really stupid stuff that I’m not exactly proud of, and I paid the price for it. As a result, i started backing off.

But I still loved Richard, and i wanted to see him again.

So I saved. And saved. And saved even more. And in February of 2017, I got the chance to do it all again. I got to meet and hang out with a BUNCH of friends on that trip, and I got to spend a lot of time with two people who have become so important to me, and who I love dearly.

i owe that to Nashville.

^^ 21 year old Katie, had experienced a lot of bullshit and was living a her goodest life, but not her best. Still trying to get through some shit and attempting to grab life by the balls once more.

Nashville was... an experience.

the company that puts on the cons ended up doing a mega price raise, and everything went up by a lot of dollars (i’m too tired to math now, but it was a fucking LOT of money and even more stress by the time i got to buy tickets). I was really mad about it, and decided that nashville would be my second and last con.

i decided to go ahead and go all out with it since nobody would ever see me again.

I got to see richard right out of the gate again on that Friday, and actually got the chance to talk to him for a moment (i use that term very loosely, seeing as my “talking” is just me stuttering out two or three words and running away) and by some fucking miracle, richard actually fucking remembered my dumb face, and that made my entire life up to that point worth living (still kinda does tbh). I hurried out of the autograph line with my buddies, found the nearest chair i could plop down into where he wouldn’t see me, and i cried. i cried real ass tears (thanks for putting up with me, that day, christy!)

I actually got called up to do karaoke this time with one of my absolute best friends and favorite people, and we fucking rocked it. for four minutes, we were rockstars and it was fucking great. we got to act like idiots and get yelled at by Matt Cohen (KAZOO KREW FOR LIFE!) and ugh. it was just incredible.

Saturday was good. tt’s kind of a blur of ups and downs and photo ops, but overall, it was a good day. Same with Sunday. I know a lot more tears were shed by a lot of people in our group. And christy and brandi screamed at misha collins. That was fucking hilarious.

Nashville was a fucking great con, and despite all the crap that happened during and after, i wouldn’t trade it or change a single thing about it. I loved that con, and the people i got to go to it with. we all had an incredible time.

And part of me still, despite everything i told myself, wanted to go again.

Between February and May of 2017, i underwent a huge change in my life: I somehow got talked into watching anime with a - at the time - good friend of mine, and realized “wow. this is actually a lot better than what spn has done for a long time.” and it kinda pissed me off because WOW THIS IS WHAT SHOWS COULD BE LIKE WITH WELL WRITTEN FEMALE CHARACTERS THAT DON’T DIE!!!!! (thank you, fma for helping me see that light!). i was mad, but i was still devoted to spn, and yadda yadda yadda.

in May of 2017, i watched the finale of season 12 at my friend Cas’s place, and the finale left such a bad taste in my mouth, that i decided that was it. i was angry, i was hurt, i was completely done. i stepped completely out of the fandom, i muted all the fan accounts i followed on twitter, i spent that whole summer getting farther into the weeb side of life, and farther away from my spn roots.

and i’ve never fucking regretted it since.

I started looking into conventions for anime around my hometown, and ended up finding one that looked fun. And Ohayo was a fucking BLAST - but that’s a post that’s been sitting in my drafts since january that i haven’t written up yet. I’ll finish writing that eventually...

but i was so done with spn by that point that i wasn’t even upset that nashville was the last con for me.

I had started getting back into the fandom during s13, started writing fic again, and THEY ACTUALLY BROUGHT MY HONEYBEAR SON, MY PRIDE AND JOY, MY EVERYTHING, MY FUCKING WAFFLE CHILD BACK AND EVERYTHING WAS RIGHT WITH THE WORLD. I WAS HAPPY. I WAS BACK. I WAS LIVING MY BEST FUCKING LIFE.

and then... then they took him away from me again. for nothing more than shock value.

and then i said nope fuck this im out im done fuck you all i’m going full ass weeb. FUCK IT ALL. i doubled down on my belief that i was doing no more cons, no more anything.

And then the fuckers announced that there would be a convention in cleveland, OH. Which I had been single-handedly campaigning for a con here for YEARS. When I finally get out of the fandom, they give us one. Absolute bastards!

So, with a defeated sigh, i decided “one more. one more and then it’s over for real.”

besides, i really, really, really, REALLY wanted to see richard again.

So i decided, why not get the remaining members of the gang back together, and go out with a fucking blast? that kinda worked. i got one member of the gang to come with me, and the other was there in spirit.

Richard cancelled about a week and a half before, which meant that my main reason for going was gone. and then misha cancelled until sunday, which meant my other reason for going was gone. but i still wanted to go and say goodbye to the cons and what little bit of the cast was there.

so we get there on friday, knowing full well friday is the only day we’re going, we didn’t buy tickets, we didn’t do anything to give creation our money, and we went in AOT cosplay because we’re cringy cool like that. and it was... surprisingly freeing.

^^ 23 year old Katie, who at this point has seen so much shit it doesn’t phase her anymore. Living an even better life than 2015!Katie. much more confident in herself, and a lot happier in general. Still trying her best.

the con itself was a shitshow. it was an absolute shitshow. but i had every bit as much fun hanging in the lobby with my friend as i did actually doing the panels and stuff. i knew this was my goodbye, and having the con be so higuhgieh actually made it a little easier to say goodbye to it. karaoke was a fucking blast, and i shouted and danced the entire night, and my poor voice suffered.

you’d think i just saw my best friend get eaten by a titan right in front of my eyes by how gone my voice was by the end of the night. -cough-

on the way back to the hotel is when it hit me that it was officially over. i cried the whole 20 minute drive back, knowing that this was the final time i’d ever see any of it. my last karaoke. my last chance to see everyone. my last spn con. it was so bittersweet, because i had such a blast, but it was done. it was all done.

and i didn’t even get to say bye to the man that i owe everything to. that’s what hurt the most about the whole thing.

i wouldn’t trade the cons for anything. i spent some of the best (and worst) years of my life doing them. the experiences and memories i have from these conventions are ones i wouldn’t give up, even if i could spare myself some heartache or stress. i am so grateful for these opportunities to meet these incredibly talented people, and get to see my friends there, and just have the time of my life. there isn’t one thing about any of those cons that i regret.

i am so sad to be giving them up, but i know it’s for the best. the prices keep going up, and it would take even longer to afford them, and i just can’t keep doing it to myself. the stress is crazy enough as it is, and there’s a lot i’ve missed out on trying to afford these things.

Not only that, but I’ve grown and evolved so much from that 19 year old doing everything she could to save back for her first con - and out of state trip. i’m not anywhere near who i was back then. i’ve gained much more confidence in myself, i’ve gained much more self worth, learned to control my anxiety/depression, and learned what i will and will not put up with from people. i’m a MUCH happier person than i was back then, and i’ve gained a lot of life experience and a lot of new interests over the last few years. so much has happened so fast, and almost everything has turned on its head.

but one thing that hasn’t changed for me is my love for Richard Speight Jr. I have said it in this post alone several fucking times, but i adore Richard. He is without a doubt one of the funniest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting, and he makes these cons so special for a lot of people - myself included. he’s the reason I kept wanting to go back, the reason that i kept pushing through the bad times, he’s been my reason to “Always Keep Fighting”. I am so blessed to have so many memories with him, and they’re the ones i talk about more than anything when talking about the cons. He will always have a huge and special place in my heart, and he will still continue being one of the big reasons why I keep pushing, and keep going, even when i don’t want to. he has absolutely no idea how important him just existing has been for this dumbass, and i really wish that he did. i hope that he knows the impact he’s had on my life, and that he’s always been my favorite since the trickster first announced that he had more ass than a toilet seat. richard has been one of the biggest inspirations to me for the last 6 years, and i literally owe the man my life. i’m so happy that he exists. it makes things a little easier knowing that he does.

I’m going to miss him so much that it hurts, and I hate that I didn’t get to see him or get to hug him one more time. that’s the hardest part for me about saying goodbye to the cons.

it’s so bittersweet going forward now, because there’s this huge part of my life that’s over, and i don’t know how to fully express all of it, but im so glad that i got to be on the ride as long as i did.

hopefully in the future, things will continue to be as fun as the last four and a half years have been. i can’t wait to see what future conventions hold for me and my friends.

#kaytastrophes #i started crying talking about richard and now i can't stop #im going to miss him so much you guys. so fucking much.#thank you so much to richard speight for making life worth living #i don't think a single thing in this post is coherent but it's 3 am and i'm sad and emotional and i wanted to get some of it out #katie cons

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jerxsnapjesus-blog · 4 years

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don't let the shades keep you from admiring the sunshine

The chimes of the school bell awakes me from my daily slumber. Of course, I am the last one to leave, and deal with the glare of my english teacher. I never felt hate or anger, but more frustration as each week progressed. "I won't need this in life" I uttered to her each time she bombarded me with questions about my indifference. I never thought the ability to use words to my advantage, to structure sentences precisely would be of any help. Where is the money in that? School had ended, and while my grades weren't effected by my sleep in this class, my teacher still felt the need to nag once more about my wakefulness, "With effort and time, you really could have something special". I forced a smile and thanked her for a good year. Sunshine and freedom was among us, oh how beautiful. That was until I ran into you. I am sorry, I was changing songs and before I knew it your books tumbled to the floor. I figured someone who was reading about Edgar Allen Poe, wasn't quite right in the head. As I blocked the sun with my hand I gazed into the eyes and immediately lost my train of thought. This was normal, but I felt frozen almost. It was as if any wrong word spoken manifested itself onto a part of my body and severed the nerves. I apologized and walked away uttering to my self the stupidity that had engulfed my personality at the moment. This wasn't the last time however, it was as if that meeting sparked a cycle that kept her within my view. Whether it was the grocery store, the mall, the park, you were there. "Why hadn't I seen you before?" "Why hadn't I realized your existence sooner?" were a handful of the questions I asked myself as I stared through my ceiling. The leaves were starting to depart from their trees, temperatures began to cool and yet, some part of me remained curious. School was once more, and here I was. No english class so my sleeping days were over. This, however, was replaced with daydreaming, except no clear images arose only blurs accompanied with intense flashes of emotion. I couldn't describe it, at it was driving me insane. This was because she was there, two seats forward and to the right of me. She wore her hair down most of the time, I liked it because it flaunted its length. She was never quick to answer a question, yet when picked always provided insight that out shined others. We soon spoke, through the awkward manhandling of group projects. Her favorite color was yellow because it reminded her of how beautiful the sunflowers looked in the spring on her way home. She loved scary movies and often laughed at them, I am telling you she was psycho. She liked swinging at night staring at the cars driving by wondering what is going on in their life. I learned more about her than the causes of the civil war that year. It was fine, I was fine. We didn't exchange numbers until the end of the school year. It was gold in my hands, yet I didn't know what to do with it. Do I text first? Do I wait? Is there I book I can read to help answer these questions? Luckily she was nice enough to engage first. We sent thousands of texts and used hundreds of minutes on the phone. I realized her voice was soothing, it brought forth a type of relaxation that left you reminiscent. Anytime she caught me being quiet she asked what was wrong, yet I never told her it was because I just wanted to take in how lucky I was. Only because I didn't know how to word such emotions. I wanted to present it to her as a gift with an extravagant bow tied to it. I wanted nothing but the best. I pushed it off, with no intention of learning how to convey my feelings. Days, weeks, months went by yet here I was still in the same position as if a treadmill had replaced the ground I walked on. I still loved her, there wasn't a doubt in that, I just never expressed this. Her being was like a sunflower striped of its water, wilting as time passes. Soon she was too weak and she left. We were still friends, yet I was lost once again. It was as if my world what was once filled with intense color had faded to black and white once again. I found satisfaction in other things, and she soon grew apart from me. I can blame myself for such an action, yet I blur it from my memory. However, one day I ran into my english professor, a year after my break up. She had asked me how I was doing and if college was treating me okay. I shook my head and mutter out "uhuh" however it wasn't convincing enough for her. I had this urge to talk to her about my issues after she stared me down. I soon opened up, and she laughed. In confusion I almost walked away at the thought of me being made fun of. She stopped to explain. "Jeremiah, I wasn't being hard on you for fun". "Your potential and passion in your writing reminded me of my husband. He won me over with a pen and a napkin and will never let me forget about it." Lastly she uttered out something that just caused my brain to click "Writing isn't only for projects and assignments, its physical manifestation of your own physical thoughts. Learning the proper ways to write will strengthen your writing and your view on life. When you stop to view the world, thinking about all the beauty that lies and learn how to incorporate that into writing you start to appreciate life more." I stood there as if I had been given the golden ticket for the chocolate factory. I thanked my teacher once more and left. I stayed up all night thinking about her words. I hated myself, for never paying attention, for ignoring the help, for ignoring my girlfriend's beauty. I soon built myself back up, placed the glasses back over my eyes and saw the world in color once more. I spoke to her once or twice since we broke up. I spent my time traveling and seeing the beauty God created. I played songs that she used to play for me, I listen to them and wonder if, where she is, she is listening to it too. Distance separated us, yet I felt closer to her than ever. I don't think we will be together, but whats life without wonder.

-SJ

#snapjesus

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samtheflamingomain · 4 years

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why i rate stuff

Here's another post inspired by a random tweet I found on tumblr dot com.

The tweet goes "Shoutout to people who rate and review things, cuz I don't like to rate or review things, but I like to know how things are rated and reviewed".

This is weird to me because I rate and review everything. Even a 5-minute cab ride. And I always take surveys.

And I've never wondered why, because I know why: I want people to want to know what I have to say.

It all started back in the nineties, when I was born into a family that constantly told me to shut up and that nobody cares about anything I say or do.

Anyway, that's primarily why I always rate and review stuff. If it's like, "How nice was the guy that delivered your pizza?" I'll write a few words. If I buy a chair and I love it, I'll write a paragraph. If I buy a chair and I hate it, I'll write several. And people will read it, and they will want to read it.

Sometimes YouTube channels, mostly the bigger ones, will have occasional surveys they ask viewers to fill out, ranging from 5 basic questions on my demographics to 50+ in-depth questions about my views on abortion and gun control. I fill them out dutifully.

That's another part of it, now that I think of it. I feel like I have a sense of duty. Just like I really didn't want to leave the house on my one day off to go vote for someone who I knew wasn't going to win the election, it's my duty. Adulthood has many privileges, but also responsibilities. I never shirk my societal responsibilities.

I'll use an example. A few years ago I had a lot of money saved up and decided to go absolutely insane buying art supplies. I'm talking several thousands of dollars. It started out fine but quickly became an addiction.

That was a long time ago, but during that time, I'd receive a package almost daily for months on end. I loved the hit of dopamine when I'd open it and see what I got.

And when I had thoroughly experienced the item, I'd jump on my computer to leave its review. Everything. Stickers, washi tapes, stamps, fuckin erasers, all got reviewed.

At that time, I was duty-driven. The first time Amazon prompted me to review a purchase I said to myself, "I'm going to let people know this is overpriced. I have the money to throw away, but many others don't." I felt it was my responsibility to let those people know their $40 is best spent elsewhere.

But even on purchases I did like, I'd say, "I should let people know that this has a lot of versatility in its use, I wish I'd known that before buying it or I wouldn't have also bought [another item with the same function]".

So while I rate and review for others, I also do it, in a way, for myself. Because I'd want other people to rate and review important details so I can make an informed purchase. Golden Rule and all.

In a way, I kind of see reviews as a near-utopic level of our society. We all decided collectively that if we buy this thing, we should tell people who might want to buy the thing what pros and cons it has. It helps others, and ourselves. True society at work.

There's been more than a few times where I was about to buy a 4-star item when I found the lone 1-star review that pointed out my one fear: it was flimsy, or it was too dark a color, or it wasn't big enough. (Talking storage boxes, mind outta the gutter, reader.)

So I think there are many, many reasons people rate and review: a sense of duty, a selfless way to help others, or simply a way to have your voice heard, even if it's something as simple as how hard it was to put together that shoe rack.

And to once again reference the tweet that got me started, I actually have no problem with people who *don't* rate and review things. It can be time-consuming, and even frustrating. Not everyone has time to deeply and thoughtfully consider if their purchase was right for them. That's totally fine.

If enough people are doing it (and I believe maybe like 1/3 of people or so probably do, and that's probably enough) then a few "leechers" off the "system" doesn't break it down. (In an opposite vein, I never seed torrents, so in that way I am a literal leecher lol).

To end this random-ass post, one thing I never review: restaurants.

Cabbies, pizza guys, items, even certain experiences. All fair game. The people, they have one job and one chance to "wow" me - i.e. bring my pizza and be polite. Drive me home and be polite. Hit those 2 boxes? 5 stars, 20% tip. Objects: does it fulfill its purpose as stated on the website? Great. 5 stars.

But a restaurant... I don't think it's quite fair to only give a restaurant one chance for you to then write an extensive review on. Like, I get that first impressions matter, but they're not everything.

The first time I went to the bar I now work at, I had an odd time, and the wings I ordered took a long time to come out. But as I later learned, I'd come in right at shift change, thus why I had 2 bartenders who didn't remember my drink tab and why the wings took a while. If I hadn't come in a second time, I wouldn't have known that crucial information, and the review I would've written wouldn't have really been fair.

Anyway, that's all I wanted to talk about. Reviewing is something that's very automatic to me, so to see it pointed out that most people don't immediately review everything they buy was kind of a shock.

Stay Greater.

#reviews #sam

0 notes

trippinglynet · 4 years

Text

Bonfire of the Techies | Time Magazine, August 25, 1997

Originally published in Time magazine, August 25, 1997

Hordes of Playful Digerati Assemble for a Hallowed Annual Rite

On the last weekend in August, my two young daughters and I will pack our suburban minivan with 2 1/2 gal. of water per person per day and head off to northern Nevada. There, in thousands of square miles of pure desert nothingness, 20,000 cheering, dancing celebrants will circle a towering, two-legged wooden sculpture and burn it to the ground.

It happens every Labor Day. Burning Man, as the festival is known, is an annual outbreak of techno-tribalism that has the makings of the next great American holiday. If this year's party is like past ones, the immense desert flats will be teeming with offbeat stunts, weird art, flamboyant performances and bizarre, gasoline-powered contraptions. When we pulled up to Burning Man for the first time several years ago, we were greeted by a fat guy riding a large, furry rabbit motor scooter. He sat behind the ears. Across the desert we could see a truck hauling a mattress behind it, stirring up a huge, blinding vortex of dust. Three passengers in gas masks were reclining on the mattress, waving insanely.

It gets even stranger. Each year a do-it-yourself city appears overnight. On one makeshift street, a three-story tower of scaffolding grows like a high-tech mushroom; draped with a parachute, it becomes an instant cafe. At a table, generous folks with a spare gallon of blue body paint offer to turn you into an alien. Behind them, two guys have built a house out of old wooden doors hauled in on a yellow rental truck. Inside you hear hypnotic techno music. The house will be gone 48 hours later, as will the rest of the instant city.

This premillennial Woodstock got started 12 years ago when an unknown artist, Larry Harvey, built a wooden statue on a foggy beach near San Francisco and then set it on fire. For Harvey it was a catharsis to heal a broken relationship. For his friends it was a soul-energizing blast, and Harvey decided it should be an annual ritual. He cast a single brilliant rule: no spectators. What he wanted, he said, was to create "a Disneyland in reverse." Everyone had to be a participant and march in the electric-light parade.

In succeeding years, Harvey's wooden statue became a 40-ft.-high man; the flames leaped higher, and the crowd grew ever more animated and theatrical. The intensity eventually taxed even the beatnik- and hippie-hardened San Francisco police, who asked Harvey and his acolytes to move off the beach. The Zen of the desert beckoned.

Once on the public lands of northern Nevada, where the rules are few and the possibilities infinite, Burning Man blossomed into a full-fledged happening. By word of mouth, via friend of a friend, with photocopied flyers posted in music stores, Burning Man quietly gathered a tribe of hundreds each summer to partake in the meaningless but mesmerizing ritual. And there, in its seclusion, it might still be, if it weren't for cyberspace.

News spreads quickly and efficiently via E-mail, and when the digerati got wind of Burning Man, something clicked. The pierced and tattooed young Netizens of Silicon Valley and the Bay Area spend their workdays and worknights making little decentralized theaters of do-it-yourself creativity on the World Wide Web. Burning Man and its temporary city are material manifestations of the same creative urge. It was a perfect fit, a perfect way to celebrate a year of laboring on the Internet.

And so the Netizens flocked to the desert, where Burning Man's neo-tribal vibes were amplified with the technology of the digital revolution. They set up Burning Man Web pages and E-mail lists. They started two Burning Man radio stations, broadcasting live from ground zero in the desert. From a laptop they produced a daily Burning Man paper.

If you build it, they will come--and they have. The population of Burning Man doubles every year. Last year it was just shy of 10,000. Its cheery inventiveness pulls in mid-40-year-olds like me, who load up the family minivan and find a spot--any spot!--in the vastness to camp and cavort.

I would make the trek just to see the guy whose obsession is a jet engine the size of a truck muffler bolted to go-cart wheels; he sits in front of the glowing, screaming toy and zips across the alkali flats. It's nothing like piloting a computer. And there's the elaborate camera obscura some thoughtful person usually sets up, big enough to walk into and see the desert upside down. And this year, if my girls can be talked into it, we'll squish in the mud of nearby hot springs and wander around as dried-mud people, just like everyone else.

Burning Man almost did not rise from its last pile of ashes. Two of the key organizers quit last year after one young man died in the chaos and dust storm churned up by thousands of vehicles driving every which way on the roadless flats of Black Rock Desert. The karma of mayoring such a bohemian city was more than they bargained for. But Larry Harvey, a visionary in the classic sense of the word, is undaunted. "They told us it would fall apart at 1,000 people," he says. "Then at 5,000. But we could have a million people and still make it a positive, uplifting experience."

He may yet get his wish. The location is kept vague, and tickets (to pay for portable toilets and the like) are best found via the Web. By not advertising the event and making finding it a rite of initiation, Harvey gets his crowds and his harmony. By now, it's self-feeding, bigger than Harvey or anyone else. Its main draw seems to be its utter lack of meaning.

Anything lacking meaning will be assigned one. My bet is that Burning Man will be the holiday for deskbound, no-collar workers. Not only does it offer the usual American pastimes--fast cars, parades, costume balls, picnics and all-night music--but it also provides the more contemporary attractions of survival camping, neon lights, nudity, performance art and staged extravaganzas. It's got the sun-dried culture of postmodern road warriors: deep ritual without religion, community without commitment, art without history, technology without boundaries. As essayist Bruce Sterling writes in the only book about the event, Burning Man (HardWired; 1997), which I and others at Wired magazine had a hand in producing, "It's just big happy crowds of harmless arty people expressing themselves and breaking a few pointless shibboleths that only serve to ulcerate young people anyway. There ought to be Burning Men festivals held downtown once a year in every major city in America."

Why? It's hard to say, precisely. Even after a day spent visiting the various tribes at the event--the pyromaniac camp, the rave camp, the wind-surfers camp, the rainbow camp--and then standing before the terrible heat of the very big fire of the neon-lit man, the answer is not any easier to articulate. Harvey, in the sly coyote logic of a true desert mystic, puts it this way: "If we didn't burn it, we wouldn't be able to burn it again next year."

Kevin Kelly is executive editor of Wired magazine and the author of Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization

#Time Magazine #1996 #Burning Man 1996 #Burning Man 1997 #1997 #Kevin Kelly

0 notes

fesahaawit · 7 years

Text

My Life (And Finances) After Escaping a Cult

[Hey guys! Please welcome Ava to the blog today – a newer blogger on the scene with an INCREDIBLE backstory. She blogs over at MillennialMoneyChallenge.com and is on a mission to go from cult survivor to financial independence by 40 (!). I was blown away after stumbling across her “about” page last week, and asked if we could republish a bulk of it here which she graciously allowed. Let this help motivate you if you’re currently stuck in a rut with something. You can overcome it!!]

******

Hi, I’m Ava. I’m a US citizen, but up until 16 I had never been to the US.

I was born overseas into a fundamentalist religious cult, and spent the first 16 years of my life living in over 10 different countries, while my parents and other cult members tried to spread the group’s weird version of Christianity to the world.

The group was founded in 1976, and initially spread a message of salvation, apocalypticism, spiritual “revolution” and happiness, as well as extreme distrust of the outside world, which members called “The System”.

The group tried hard to publicly pass themselves off as an active missionary movement. During its first decade, many members left the US to establish mission posts (i.e. communes) in countries around the world. By 1977, there were almost 800 communes in 73 countries. By the end of ’77, members had distributed over 3 million pieces of cult propaganda, and recruited tens of thousands of new members.

My Childhood

My childhood and that of my 6 siblings was extremely difficult. We lived in abject poverty in communes around the world, and grew up in an extremely restrictive and abusive environment.

I mean this when I say beatings, exorcisms, starvation as punishment, and sexual abuse were everyday events for many kids in the group.

The level of abuse depended greatly on the geographical location of the commune, as well as what kind of caretaker was assigned. Those who were born and raised abroad, like me, had it far worse than a kid from one of the communes in California, for example.

I barely saw my parents, which was normal in the cult. We were separated into groups by age and placed with an assigned caretaker. Kids were often sent to live in different homes away from the parent, sometimes in different countries.

My mom was a senior leader in the group, and was too busy traveling to pay us much attention. On a good week, we saw her on Sunday for “Family Day”. Sometimes we went months without seeing or hearing from her.

She never perpetrated any abuse, but she never stepped in to stop it. She stayed with my dad for years even after realizing how horrible he was to us, and other kids. She’s still in the cult.

My first memory of my dad was pure terror. I was 3 at the time, and I was told he would be coming home later in the evening from a long trip away. I didn’t remember what he looked like or why I was afraid of him, because I hadn’t seen him in almost a year. I simply knew he was very dangerous, and I had to stay away from him.

I learned at a young age to carefully avoid any adult male in the group, because you never knew what they would try to do. I gravitated to the ‘safe’ individuals – usually women, the ones who had joined the group innocently at a young age, and were too dependent or brainwashed to leave.

Most of us had zero formal education, and limited connection to relatives or people outside the group. We were required to memorize Bible verses and read the group founders’ writings for hours and hours a day. This brainwashing took the place of formal education, and was how most of us learned to read/write.

Instead of being in school or enjoying our childhood, our days were usually spent cleaning, cooking, watching younger kids, and doing laundry and other chores for the group members. We also spent hours every day proselytizing for the group to spread the religion, as well as going door-to-door asking for donations (i.e. begging for money) from businesses or homeowners.

No one in the group worked for their money: they survived off of donations that people sent, the majority of whom falsely believed that group members were Christian missionaries doing humanitarian projects around the world.

There were harsh punishments and frequent beatings from adults if we didn’t do as we were told.

There was an unusually high occurrence of child abuse within the group. Not every adult was abusive, but many were.

The group was investigated multiple times for child abuse by Child Services in numerous countries, as well as by the FBI. We were constantly moving countries and houses to avoid the “anti-Christ authorities”.

Group members, including my parents, referred to these investigations as “religious persecution”. All of us kids were trained on how to react and what to say if anyone asked what our life inside the group was like.

Leaving The Cult

I stayed in the group up until about 14, when shortly after my birthday my brother died unexpectedly and tragically. My brother was my best friend in the world, and his death was devastating to me.

To this day his death and the truly insane circumstances leading up to it are all still very hard to talk about.

I had already privately stopped believing in God and any of the group’s teachings at about age 6. But after my brother died, I openly rebelled against the restrictive environment, oppressive group leadership, my abusive parents, and the neglect we all suffered as kids.

I was furious at the cult life and packed up my few things and moved out to live with a close friend my age, who also had a rebellious, independent streak.

I lived with my friend for almost 2 years.

I didn’t attend school, of course, but worked several jobs to pay for living expenses as well as to raise enough money for a one-way plane ticket back to the US.

Even at that age, I knew I wouldn’t get far without an education. I wanted to save enough money to move to the US and go to school.

Looking back, I get goosebumps thinking of myself as a naïve 14 year old girl, on my own for 2 years in a 3rd world country, without any adult guidance or supervision.

From the places I traveled to the ‘friends’ I hung out with – hardly any of it was appropriate or safe for a child. I’m extraordinarily lucky I didn’t end up with a similar fate as my brother.

I didn’t have much contact with the group or my parents for those 2 years. Leaving the group meant I was a “spiritual outsider”, and I was viewed with a mix of distrust and disdain.

Life After The Cult

I have an older sister who by all accounts saved my life. She is the reason why I’m a well-adjusted (sorta!), and successful adult after everything I went through as a kid.

She had left the group several years before, moved back to the US, and was working 2 jobs to make ends meet while trying to get her GED.

It was because of her that when I moved to the US at 16, I had a safe place to live while I went to high school.

She also motivated me to apply for and go to college, no matter what the cost. She was the reason I was able to get an education and drastically improve my quality of life.

Moving to the US on my own was a very isolating and scary experience on the one hand, but on the other, I was SOOOO elated to be free of the cult!

I imagined myself in 10 – 15 years as a successful and happy adult. I could not wait to get to that point in my life, no matter how difficult.

Getting Through High School

I knew nothing about personal finance when I left the group at 14. By the time I moved to the US at 16, however, I was used to working, paying for all of my living expenses, budgeting, and living frugally.

Right away after moving to the US, I got two minimum wage jobs to make ends meet. I somehow also managed to enroll in high school even though I had no proof of having ever gone to school.

High school was hard at first. I tested into Honors English, but I had to start over in every other subject. Eventually, I excelled in school, made friends, and joined lots of clubs.

I blended in fairly well in high school, aside from the fact that my friends and teachers thought it was pretty odd that I had lived abroad all my life, that my family lived in a country halfway across the world, that I lived with my sister who was still a teenager herself, and that I worked SO much outside of school.

I tried to be a normal teenager, and didn’t tell anyone about my background.

When people asked, I had a carefully worded story that focused on only the positive aspects of my life: I traveled the world as a kid, spoke several languages, and had “an amazing, big family that I missed terribly”.

I worked around the clock in high school to pay for basic living expenses, health and dental insurance, a cell phone, and phone cards to call my siblings. I was also trying to save up money to learn how to drive, buy my first car, and for college applications.

I worked as hard as I could academically to cram many years of missed education into 2 years of school. Somehow I graduated almost at the top of my class, with Honors.

Attending University: Hello Student Loans!

My sister encouraged me to apply for college. Neither of us were sure how I was going to pay for it since I would be the first one in my family to attend.

It was important for me to not attend community college. I was under the impression that my education would be worthless if I did. Looking back, I can appreciate what a big mistake that was.

For someone like myself with ZERO money or parental support, community college would have been the smart choice financially. I could have transferred after 2 years into a great 4 year school with my grades.

I applied to expensive private universities because I mistakenly though the education would be superior and would translate into a high paying salary.

The school I chose to attend had an annual cost between $25-$30k, and offered little financial aid.

I chose to live on campus for all 4 years. I couldn’t live with my sister anymore, and I wanted to make friends since I had no other support system.

To this day, I could just kick myself looking back on the financial impact of the choices. I really had no idea what I was getting into!

Since my parents did not pay taxes while living abroad, I had no proof of our low income. Since I was still technically a dependent at 18, I almost exclusively qualified for high interest private loans.

I got two jobs to cover living expenses and books, but even while working 30+ hour weeks in school, I graduated with $75k in student loan debt. The fact that my private student loans were all unsubsidized certainly didn’t help.

Grad School: Even More Debt!

I graduated in 2008 at the height of the financial crisis.

Jobs were scarce, and I was also convinced that my long term career prospects were grim with just an undergraduate degree. I was sure that the entry level salary I commanded at $35k would never be enough for me to live on, and to pay off my hefty student loans.

Of course, my solution for this was to go back to school and rack up even more student loan debt!

I went on to get an MBA in Finance, also at an expensive private university. While in school, I made another big mistake of deferring the interest payments. Because my loans were unsubsidized and private, I continued to rack up staggering amounts of accrued interest.

Even though I worked almost full time in college and through grad school, by the time I finished school I had $140k in student loans.

On the one hand, I was extraordinarily proud of myself for graduating with both my undergrad and masters, coming from a background with almost no education.

On the other hand, I was terrified that I would never pay off this crushing debt.

But wait, there’s more!

All through school, I drove beat-up cars. No joke, I once bought a car for $250 bucks off Craigslist. It amazingly lasted for over a year, but I did keep AAA on speed dial. The stupid thing was always breaking down on my way to class or work.

I decided after graduation that no one would take me seriously unless I drove a newer vehicle. I went out and financed a brand new $20k car. At the time, I was pretty pleased with myself, thinking I had made a wise investment.

So at 25, I had managed to rack up $160k in debt. My heart still stops a beat just thinking about it.

Living With 6 Figure Debt

Fast forward about 5 years later, and I’m now a successful consultant. The car is paid off, however, I still have $111k worth of high interest student loans.

My goal is to pay off ALL of my debt by the end of 2018.

Living with a mortgage sized amount of student loan debt has been an overwhelming experience.

At times, it’s been an emotional nightmare that I would never wish on my worst enemy. I’m determined to get rid of this debt once and for all, and to do it in 18 months or less.

Over the past 5 years, I’ve read every personal finance book, article and blog I can get my hands on. My relationship with money has changed. I am far wiser now when it comes to living frugally, avoiding debt, saving and investing.

Looking back, there are many things that I could have done to avoid getting into this kind of debt. Some of the obvious ones are:

I could have gone to community college for 2 years

I could have applied to much less expensive schools, and not lived on campus

I could have made it a priority to look for schools that offered more scholarships and student aid

I could have worked full time, and attended school at nights part-time

I could have paid interest accrued on the loans while in school

In hindsight, I could have legally emancipated myself at 16 from my parents. I would have then been considered an independent, and qualified for tons more aid options

I could have made it an absolute priority to learn as much about personal finance as I could

Even with all the mistakes I’ve made, I’m incredibly proud of what I’ve achieved financially so far:

I got the education I wanted!

I have my own dream house, which will be paid off in 14 years

I earn a decent six figure salary

I’m slated to pay off all my student loans in 18 months

Most importantly, I’m able to help my siblings out financially while they transition from the cult, or while they cannot help themselves

My dream is for all of my brothers & sisters to finish college, be 100% free of the cult, and live independent, happy, successful lives.

My short term goals for the next 18 months include:

Paying off ALL of my student loan debt

Increasing my emergency fund from 6 months of expenses to 8

Maxing out my 401k for 2017 and 2018

Continuing to pay down the mortgage at a 15 year payment rate

My goals for the next 14 years include:

Saving between 60-70% of income after tax

Reach a net worth of $500k by 35 (in 4 years). This is total investments and cash plus equity minus the mortgage

Reach a net worth of $1.8 million by 40

Reach a net worth of $4 million (including the value of the paid off house) by 45

My long term (after age 45) goals include:

Retire and live on 3% of the passive income which my portfolio generates each year

Start a foundation to help kids who are transitioning on their own from a cult, or an extremely restrictive religious environment. My goal is to provide a support system and financial help until they can get on their feet.

Travel the world!

Never worry about money again ;o)

Although I grew up under very grim circumstances and suffered quite a bit as a kid, I was able to achieve my dream of getting an education and forging a successful career for myself. I’m also able to take care of the people I love most.

The next step is to pay off the debt as fast as possible, and start saving for an even better future!

******* Ava is a cult survivor and personal finance/lifestyle blogger over at MillennialMoneyChallenge.com. She’s on a mission to pay off $111k of debt in 18 months, hit financial independence by 40, and officially retire early at 45. You can also find her on Twitter @Ava_Millennial.

My Life (And Finances) After Escaping a Cult posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnwIdQ

0 notes

heliosfinance · 7 years

Text

My Life (And Finances) After Escaping a Cult

******

Hi, I’m Ava. I’m a US citizen, but up until 16 I had never been to the US.

My Childhood

My childhood and that of my 6 siblings was extremely difficult. We lived in abject poverty in communes around the world, and grew up in an extremely restrictive and abusive environment.

I mean this when I say beatings, exorcisms, starvation as punishment, and sexual abuse were everyday events for many kids in the group.

She never perpetrated any abuse, but she never stepped in to stop it. She stayed with my dad for years even after realizing how horrible he was to us, and other kids. She’s still in the cult.

There were harsh punishments and frequent beatings from adults if we didn’t do as we were told.

There was an unusually high occurrence of child abuse within the group. Not every adult was abusive, but many were.

Leaving The Cult

I stayed in the group up until about 14, when shortly after my birthday my brother died unexpectedly and tragically. My brother was my best friend in the world, and his death was devastating to me.

To this day his death and the truly insane circumstances leading up to it are all still very hard to talk about.

I was furious at the cult life and packed up my few things and moved out to live with a close friend my age, who also had a rebellious, independent streak.

I lived with my friend for almost 2 years.

I didn’t attend school, of course, but worked several jobs to pay for living expenses as well as to raise enough money for a one-way plane ticket back to the US.

Even at that age, I knew I wouldn’t get far without an education. I wanted to save enough money to move to the US and go to school.

Looking back, I get goosebumps thinking of myself as a naïve 14 year old girl, on my own for 2 years in a 3rd world country, without any adult guidance or supervision.

I didn’t have much contact with the group or my parents for those 2 years. Leaving the group meant I was a “spiritual outsider”, and I was viewed with a mix of distrust and disdain.

Life After The Cult

I have an older sister who by all accounts saved my life. She is the reason why I’m a well-adjusted (sorta!), and successful adult after everything I went through as a kid.

She had left the group several years before, moved back to the US, and was working 2 jobs to make ends meet while trying to get her GED.

It was because of her that when I moved to the US at 16, I had a safe place to live while I went to high school.

She also motivated me to apply for and go to college, no matter what the cost. She was the reason I was able to get an education and drastically improve my quality of life.

Moving to the US on my own was a very isolating and scary experience on the one hand, but on the other, I was SOOOO elated to be free of the cult!

I imagined myself in 10 – 15 years as a successful and happy adult. I could not wait to get to that point in my life, no matter how difficult.

Getting Through High School

Right away after moving to the US, I got two minimum wage jobs to make ends meet. I somehow also managed to enroll in high school even though I had no proof of having ever gone to school.

High school was hard at first. I tested into Honors English, but I had to start over in every other subject. Eventually, I excelled in school, made friends, and joined lots of clubs.

I tried to be a normal teenager, and didn’t tell anyone about my background.

I worked as hard as I could academically to cram many years of missed education into 2 years of school. Somehow I graduated almost at the top of my class, with Honors.

Attending University: Hello Student Loans!

My sister encouraged me to apply for college. Neither of us were sure how I was going to pay for it since I would be the first one in my family to attend.

It was important for me to not attend community college. I was under the impression that my education would be worthless if I did. Looking back, I can appreciate what a big mistake that was.

I applied to expensive private universities because I mistakenly though the education would be superior and would translate into a high paying salary.

The school I chose to attend had an annual cost between $25-$30k, and offered little financial aid.

I chose to live on campus for all 4 years. I couldn’t live with my sister anymore, and I wanted to make friends since I had no other support system.

To this day, I could just kick myself looking back on the financial impact of the choices. I really had no idea what I was getting into!

Grad School: Even More Debt!

I graduated in 2008 at the height of the financial crisis.

Of course, my solution for this was to go back to school and rack up even more student loan debt!

Even though I worked almost full time in college and through grad school, by the time I finished school I had $140k in student loans.

On the one hand, I was extraordinarily proud of myself for graduating with both my undergrad and masters, coming from a background with almost no education.

On the other hand, I was terrified that I would never pay off this crushing debt.

But wait, there’s more!

So at 25, I had managed to rack up $160k in debt. My heart still stops a beat just thinking about it.

Living With 6 Figure Debt

Fast forward about 5 years later, and I’m now a successful consultant. The car is paid off, however, I still have $111k worth of high interest student loans.

My goal is to pay off ALL of my debt by the end of 2018.

Living with a mortgage sized amount of student loan debt has been an overwhelming experience.

At times, it’s been an emotional nightmare that I would never wish on my worst enemy. I’m determined to get rid of this debt once and for all, and to do it in 18 months or less.

Looking back, there are many things that I could have done to avoid getting into this kind of debt. Some of the obvious ones are:

I could have gone to community college for 2 years

I could have applied to much less expensive schools, and not lived on campus

I could have made it a priority to look for schools that offered more scholarships and student aid

I could have worked full time, and attended school at nights part-time

I could have paid interest accrued on the loans while in school

In hindsight, I could have legally emancipated myself at 16 from my parents. I would have then been considered an independent, and qualified for tons more aid options

I could have made it an absolute priority to learn as much about personal finance as I could

Even with all the mistakes I’ve made, I’m incredibly proud of what I’ve achieved financially so far:

I got the education I wanted!

I have my own dream house, which will be paid off in 14 years

I earn a decent six figure salary

I’m slated to pay off all my student loans in 18 months

Most importantly, I’m able to help my siblings out financially while they transition from the cult, or while they cannot help themselves

My dream is for all of my brothers & sisters to finish college, be 100% free of the cult, and live independent, happy, successful lives.

My short term goals for the next 18 months include:

Paying off ALL of my student loan debt

Increasing my emergency fund from 6 months of expenses to 8

Maxing out my 401k for 2017 and 2018

Continuing to pay down the mortgage at a 15 year payment rate

My goals for the next 14 years include:

Saving between 60-70% of income after tax

Reach a net worth of $500k by 35 (in 4 years). This is total investments and cash plus equity minus the mortgage

Reach a net worth of $1.8 million by 40

Reach a net worth of $4 million (including the value of the paid off house) by 45

My long term (after age 45) goals include:

Retire and live on 3% of the passive income which my portfolio generates each year

Travel the world!

Never worry about money again ;o)

The next step is to pay off the debt as fast as possible, and start saving for an even better future!

******* Ava is a cult survivor and personal finance/lifestyle blogger over at MillennialMoneyChallenge.com. She’s on a mission to pay of $111k of debt in 18 months, hit financial independence by 40, and officially retire early at 45. You can also find her on Twitter @Ava_Millennial.

My Life (And Finances) After Escaping a Cult published first on http://ift.tt/2ljLF4B

0 notes

lettersfromleslie · 7 years

Text

SNOWED IN ONCE AGAIN / HAIL TO THE CHEETO / SQUARING OFF WITH THE CRO-MAGNONS? / I SURE HOPE NAZIS FEAR COLLAGES

Good God, where to begin? What a laugh - what was I saying again over the summer? …Oh, hum, yes, ominous ripples in the zeitgeist, eh? Well boyo, those ripples ain’t gonna cut it no more for a metaphor - I’d say by now it’s something of a typhoon… Christ, I doubt if bigger water metaphors are even gonna cut it at a time like this… More like a banshee wail of the collective psyche, eh? And there are no signs of it letting up anytime soon. Jesus, strange times! Clearly some sort of reassessment is necessary - reassess what, dammit?!

“COME AFTER ME, YOU FASCIST LOOFAH-FACED SHIT-GIBBON!” tweets the state senator, tagging the president. Is this real life, or are we living in a Hunter S. Thompson story? The initial unreal feeling has been shifting to a feeling of a sustained bad dream - in which even the manic gasps of people reminding one another that nothing is normal become a part of the daily routine. It’s creepy as hell. Life chugs on, of course, for better or for worse, and superficially little changes for those as of yet unaffected. As for myself, I’ve been protesting, hysterically following the news, but the day-to-day is largely unchanged… The only outward difference you’d notice about me, passing by in the subway, is a little sign saying “TODAY: 10% of earnings donated to the ACLU!” I’ve had that one up for a week now and I’ll be wiring over the balance every couple weeks… Hell, but how much good does that really do the psyche? More abstractions… And look at me now, I’m talking like the years have laid dust over this shit, it’s been what - Three weeks! Mother of God! Has it only been three weeks?!

And another thing, goddamnit! I forgot how cold this fucking place of mine gets in the winter! Return of the goddam igloo! I thought I was through with this crap! Right now it’s late at night and there’s a last gasp of a blizzard on, my windows are filled with snow and frost, icicles drip, drip, the gale goes whomp, whomp, on the thin glass, rattling the panes. A few seconds after every whomp I can feel the cool air emanating across the room from the surface of the glass and the cracks around it. I’ve got me a bottle of red wine wine to keep me warm and keep me company - quiet times like these get precious when you’re feeling so goddam unbalanced about things.

I didn’t start writing this just to bitch about politics, mind, but it tends to sorta froth out once you start opening up… Hell, might as well say it, I don’t feel fuckin good this winter! Not one bloody bit. That “bloody” was a forced concession. I’ve started swearing like an American, have you noticed? Can’t help it, Americans seem to swear more... vigorously somehow. So yeah. You goddam swine. I mean, of course winter’s always a bummer… but man, both generally and personally the year thus far has been downright sinister - aside from the fascist apocalypse there’s been a severe lack of funds, depressing dead-end romances, an unusually desperate homeless situation at my favourite busking spot… And then throw in the further complication of a wild attempted escape to New Orleans that went pretty much to hell… I couldn’t afford it, for one, but sometimes you gotta - so I scraped the bottom of the barrel and said my prayers and bought the ticket. First impressions: hallelujah! Not a bad word to say about the place, as far as I can make out Nola is as good a city as they come. Never been anywhere so instantly lovable. In fact I found myself falling head over heels pretty much the minute I arrived, although even now I’m not sure if I was falling for the city - its humid, mossy, cracked wonkiness, its big brown river with the weird foreign-named boats and rotting industrial swampage, the public drinking, bums and tubas and tambourines, etc - or whether I was falling for the girl who’d invited me.

I mean, both, I suppose, but it didn’t work out too well with the girl - stillborn lil romance, that one turned out to be. She went off one morning on a boat! Sailed off at the crack of dawn. Suppose there’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s what I tell people and it ain’t a lie. Oh well. I give her points for style. Let’s be real, I used to be the same way when I was on the road. Anyway, as a result I wound up arriving back in New York unexpectedly alone, stony broke, on the very day the goddam fascist shit-gibbon - I mean, these people know how to swear, man - on the very day the shitgibbon in chief got inaugurated. So with that delightful ambience surrounding me, I had about ten days to raise a thousand bucks busking in the subway, or I’d be badly in the hole… And just to make absolutely sure I drove myself completely bonkers along the way I also set myself the task of giving all the mixes for Sunny Kindsa Lies a facelift. And for good measure I spent the nights flinging a total of about thirty thousand or so words of sentimental drivel at the old diary. Whenever I’d have time during the days I’d join the good people in protesting the escalating drama of mr. Cheeto Benito. What a life!

Ten days of that and I was able to enter February a perfect model of miserable discipline. Rent paid, work done, deeply stressed-out and entirely wracked with nerves. Recovered from my holiday, in other words… Ha. We’re a week into February now and the only thing that’s changed is I haven’t been working so goddam hard and to tell the truth I don’t feel a hell of a lot better as a result. Snap out of it, boyo!   I know what the thing to do is, and that’s to write it all out and make things that are Good and Real and True and all that jazz. I mean, I’m trying, to an extent, but to my intense irritation all that seems to come out is the usual self-involved melancholia, which is just about the last thing I want to give into right now. How do you write a protest song, exactly? Anyone? It doesn’t seem to be just me - I’ve yet to see any good protest music come out of this thing just yet. (I hate Father John Misty, so don’t come at me with that rubbish.)

Then again, all this protesting… As much as the voice in my head hisses “privilege!”, I suppose there is - or at least I have - the option of reading things at a more cosmic scale. I’m not really American, after all… I don’t have to deal with this shit, necessarily. Take Henry Miller. World War II breaking out didn’t have at all the usual effect on him… In his words,

”The thought of war drives people frantic, makes them quite cuckoo, even when they are intelligent and far-seeing … And it has another bad effect - it makes young people feel guilty and conscience-stricken. In Corfu I had been studying the antics of a superbly healthy young Englishman, a lad of twenty or so, who had intended to be a Greek scholar. Now he was running around like a chicken with its head off begging to have someone put him in the frontline to blow him to smithereens…”

Who knows, maybe the kid did get blown to smithereens. A bunch of healthy young Englishmen did, and fuck knows I’m grateful - who knows what the hell kind of lives we’d be leading right now if they hadn’t. But Miller just took one look at it all and decided the world had gone fucking bananas... An extremely sordid bout of temporary insanity… An embarrassment, in short. Clearly he didn’t want to be killed; he didn’t want to kill anyone; better hole up somewhere in Greece a while till it all blew over a bit. I’m sure he got bawled out for it plenty, the usual charges, “coward,” “hypocrite,” “traitor”… But if you read his books it’s perfectly obvious that he never really considered himself to have any allegiance to his country anyway, or even his epoch - or any epoch, for that matter. I reckon he’d consider himself to have as much of an allegiance to America as he had an allegiance to the Babylonians, or the Romans, or the Cro-Magnons. There’s something to that, although I can’t square it, myself… I mean, I don’t think that’s me, I reckon I do have that headless-chicken empathy and tribal solidarity that we all value in a good healthy young citizen… But all the same, part of me feels Miller’s way is the right way. Once you take the cosmic view it does all get a bit daft. None of that would make for much of a protest song, though. You don’t write songs for those who have the luxury to leave when the flames get too hot. You write songs for the burning.

I was reading that book when I was in Greece, by the by, while I was writing you about those ominous ripples. The Colossus of Maroussi. Fantastic book - Miller’s best, in my opinion, or at any case his best-realised. Oh, God, I don’t know. I’ll be here, in New York I mean… I know I will, selling my booklets of collages and lyrics, singing my songs, scrambling at the rungs of that greasy ol ladder. What else is there? And spring’ll be soon and that’ll be a whole other thing. Etc, etc, etc.

0 notes

fesahaawit · 7 years

Text

My Life (And Finances) After Escaping a Cult

******

Hi, I’m Ava. I’m a US citizen, but up until 16 I had never been to the US.

My Childhood

My childhood and that of my 6 siblings was extremely difficult. We lived in abject poverty in communes around the world, and grew up in an extremely restrictive and abusive environment.

I mean this when I say beatings, exorcisms, starvation as punishment, and sexual abuse were everyday events for many kids in the group.

She never perpetrated any abuse, but she never stepped in to stop it. She stayed with my dad for years even after realizing how horrible he was to us, and other kids. She’s still in the cult.

There were harsh punishments and frequent beatings from adults if we didn’t do as we were told.

There was an unusually high occurrence of child abuse within the group. Not every adult was abusive, but many were.

Leaving The Cult

I stayed in the group up until about 14, when shortly after my birthday my brother died unexpectedly and tragically. My brother was my best friend in the world, and his death was devastating to me.

To this day his death and the truly insane circumstances leading up to it are all still very hard to talk about.

I was furious at the cult life and packed up my few things and moved out to live with a close friend my age, who also had a rebellious, independent streak.

I lived with my friend for almost 2 years.

I didn’t attend school, of course, but worked several jobs to pay for living expenses as well as to raise enough money for a one-way plane ticket back to the US.

Even at that age, I knew I wouldn’t get far without an education. I wanted to save enough money to move to the US and go to school.

Looking back, I get goosebumps thinking of myself as a naïve 14 year old girl, on my own for 2 years in a 3rd world country, without any adult guidance or supervision.

I didn’t have much contact with the group or my parents for those 2 years. Leaving the group meant I was a “spiritual outsider”, and I was viewed with a mix of distrust and disdain.

Life After The Cult

I have an older sister who by all accounts saved my life. She is the reason why I’m a well-adjusted (sorta!), and successful adult after everything I went through as a kid.

She had left the group several years before, moved back to the US, and was working 2 jobs to make ends meet while trying to get her GED.

It was because of her that when I moved to the US at 16, I had a safe place to live while I went to high school.

She also motivated me to apply for and go to college, no matter what the cost. She was the reason I was able to get an education and drastically improve my quality of life.

Moving to the US on my own was a very isolating and scary experience on the one hand, but on the other, I was SOOOO elated to be free of the cult!

I imagined myself in 10 – 15 years as a successful and happy adult. I could not wait to get to that point in my life, no matter how difficult.

Getting Through High School

Right away after moving to the US, I got two minimum wage jobs to make ends meet. I somehow also managed to enroll in high school even though I had no proof of having ever gone to school.

High school was hard at first. I tested into Honors English, but I had to start over in every other subject. Eventually, I excelled in school, made friends, and joined lots of clubs.

I tried to be a normal teenager, and didn’t tell anyone about my background.

I worked as hard as I could academically to cram many years of missed education into 2 years of school. Somehow I graduated almost at the top of my class, with Honors.

Attending University: Hello Student Loans!

My sister encouraged me to apply for college. Neither of us were sure how I was going to pay for it since I would be the first one in my family to attend.

It was important for me to not attend community college. I was under the impression that my education would be worthless if I did. Looking back, I can appreciate what a big mistake that was.

I applied to expensive private universities because I mistakenly though the education would be superior and would translate into a high paying salary.

The school I chose to attend had an annual cost between $25-$30k, and offered little financial aid.

I chose to live on campus for all 4 years. I couldn’t live with my sister anymore, and I wanted to make friends since I had no other support system.

To this day, I could just kick myself looking back on the financial impact of the choices. I really had no idea what I was getting into!

Grad School: Even More Debt!

I graduated in 2008 at the height of the financial crisis.

Of course, my solution for this was to go back to school and rack up even more student loan debt!

Even though I worked almost full time in college and through grad school, by the time I finished school I had $140k in student loans.

On the one hand, I was extraordinarily proud of myself for graduating with both my undergrad and masters, coming from a background with almost no education.

On the other hand, I was terrified that I would never pay off this crushing debt.

But wait, there’s more!

So at 25, I had managed to rack up $160k in debt. My heart still stops a beat just thinking about it.

Living With 6 Figure Debt

Fast forward about 5 years later, and I’m now a successful consultant. The car is paid off, however, I still have $111k worth of high interest student loans.

My goal is to pay off ALL of my debt by the end of 2018.

Living with a mortgage sized amount of student loan debt has been an overwhelming experience.

At times, it’s been an emotional nightmare that I would never wish on my worst enemy. I’m determined to get rid of this debt once and for all, and to do it in 18 months or less.

Looking back, there are many things that I could have done to avoid getting into this kind of debt. Some of the obvious ones are:

I could have gone to community college for 2 years

I could have applied to much less expensive schools, and not lived on campus

I could have made it a priority to look for schools that offered more scholarships and student aid

I could have worked full time, and attended school at nights part-time

I could have paid interest accrued on the loans while in school

In hindsight, I could have legally emancipated myself at 16 from my parents. I would have then been considered an independent, and qualified for tons more aid options

I could have made it an absolute priority to learn as much about personal finance as I could

Even with all the mistakes I’ve made, I’m incredibly proud of what I’ve achieved financially so far:

I got the education I wanted!

I have my own dream house, which will be paid off in 14 years

I earn a decent six figure salary

I’m slated to pay off all my student loans in 18 months

Most importantly, I’m able to help my siblings out financially while they transition from the cult, or while they cannot help themselves

My dream is for all of my brothers & sisters to finish college, be 100% free of the cult, and live independent, happy, successful lives.

My short term goals for the next 18 months include:

Paying off ALL of my student loan debt

Increasing my emergency fund from 6 months of expenses to 8

Maxing out my 401k for 2017 and 2018

Continuing to pay down the mortgage at a 15 year payment rate

My goals for the next 14 years include:

Saving between 60-70% of income after tax

Reach a net worth of $500k by 35 (in 4 years). This is total investments and cash plus equity minus the mortgage

Reach a net worth of $1.8 million by 40

Reach a net worth of $4 million (including the value of the paid off house) by 45

My long term (after age 45) goals include:

Retire and live on 3% of the passive income which my portfolio generates each year

Travel the world!

Never worry about money again ;o)

The next step is to pay off the debt as fast as possible, and start saving for an even better future!

My Life (And Finances) After Escaping a Cult posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnwIdQ

0 notes

fesahaawit · 7 years

Text

My Life (And Finances) After Escaping a Cult

******

Hi, I’m Ava. I’m a US citizen, but up until 16 I had never been to the US.

My Childhood

My childhood and that of my 6 siblings was extremely difficult. We lived in abject poverty in communes around the world, and grew up in an extremely restrictive and abusive environment.

I mean this when I say beatings, exorcisms, starvation as punishment, and sexual abuse were everyday events for many kids in the group.

She never perpetrated any abuse, but she never stepped in to stop it. She stayed with my dad for years even after realizing how horrible he was to us, and other kids. She’s still in the cult.

There were harsh punishments and frequent beatings from adults if we didn’t do as we were told.

There was an unusually high occurrence of child abuse within the group. Not every adult was abusive, but many were.

Leaving The Cult

I stayed in the group up until about 14, when shortly after my birthday my brother died unexpectedly and tragically. My brother was my best friend in the world, and his death was devastating to me.

To this day his death and the truly insane circumstances leading up to it are all still very hard to talk about.

I was furious at the cult life and packed up my few things and moved out to live with a close friend my age, who also had a rebellious, independent streak.

I lived with my friend for almost 2 years.

I didn’t attend school, of course, but worked several jobs to pay for living expenses as well as to raise enough money for a one-way plane ticket back to the US.

Even at that age, I knew I wouldn’t get far without an education. I wanted to save enough money to move to the US and go to school.

Looking back, I get goosebumps thinking of myself as a naïve 14 year old girl, on my own for 2 years in a 3rd world country, without any adult guidance or supervision.

I didn’t have much contact with the group or my parents for those 2 years. Leaving the group meant I was a “spiritual outsider”, and I was viewed with a mix of distrust and disdain.

Life After The Cult

I have an older sister who by all accounts saved my life. She is the reason why I’m a well-adjusted (sorta!), and successful adult after everything I went through as a kid.

She had left the group several years before, moved back to the US, and was working 2 jobs to make ends meet while trying to get her GED.

It was because of her that when I moved to the US at 16, I had a safe place to live while I went to high school.

She also motivated me to apply for and go to college, no matter what the cost. She was the reason I was able to get an education and drastically improve my quality of life.

Moving to the US on my own was a very isolating and scary experience on the one hand, but on the other, I was SOOOO elated to be free of the cult!

I imagined myself in 10 – 15 years as a successful and happy adult. I could not wait to get to that point in my life, no matter how difficult.

Getting Through High School

Right away after moving to the US, I got two minimum wage jobs to make ends meet. I somehow also managed to enroll in high school even though I had no proof of having ever gone to school.

High school was hard at first. I tested into Honors English, but I had to start over in every other subject. Eventually, I excelled in school, made friends, and joined lots of clubs.

I tried to be a normal teenager, and didn’t tell anyone about my background.

I worked as hard as I could academically to cram many years of missed education into 2 years of school. Somehow I graduated almost at the top of my class, with Honors.

Attending University: Hello Student Loans!

My sister encouraged me to apply for college. Neither of us were sure how I was going to pay for it since I would be the first one in my family to attend.

It was important for me to not attend community college. I was under the impression that my education would be worthless if I did. Looking back, I can appreciate what a big mistake that was.

I applied to expensive private universities because I mistakenly though the education would be superior and would translate into a high paying salary.

The school I chose to attend had an annual cost between $25-$30k, and offered little financial aid.

I chose to live on campus for all 4 years. I couldn’t live with my sister anymore, and I wanted to make friends since I had no other support system.

To this day, I could just kick myself looking back on the financial impact of the choices. I really had no idea what I was getting into!

Grad School: Even More Debt!

I graduated in 2008 at the height of the financial crisis.

Of course, my solution for this was to go back to school and rack up even more student loan debt!

Even though I worked almost full time in college and through grad school, by the time I finished school I had $140k in student loans.

On the one hand, I was extraordinarily proud of myself for graduating with both my undergrad and masters, coming from a background with almost no education.

On the other hand, I was terrified that I would never pay off this crushing debt.

But wait, there’s more!

So at 25, I had managed to rack up $160k in debt. My heart still stops a beat just thinking about it.

Living With 6 Figure Debt

Fast forward about 5 years later, and I’m now a successful consultant. The car is paid off, however, I still have $111k worth of high interest student loans.

My goal is to pay off ALL of my debt by the end of 2018.

Living with a mortgage sized amount of student loan debt has been an overwhelming experience.

At times, it’s been an emotional nightmare that I would never wish on my worst enemy. I’m determined to get rid of this debt once and for all, and to do it in 18 months or less.

Looking back, there are many things that I could have done to avoid getting into this kind of debt. Some of the obvious ones are:

I could have gone to community college for 2 years

I could have applied to much less expensive schools, and not lived on campus

I could have made it a priority to look for schools that offered more scholarships and student aid

I could have worked full time, and attended school at nights part-time

I could have paid interest accrued on the loans while in school

In hindsight, I could have legally emancipated myself at 16 from my parents. I would have then been considered an independent, and qualified for tons more aid options

I could have made it an absolute priority to learn as much about personal finance as I could

Even with all the mistakes I’ve made, I’m incredibly proud of what I’ve achieved financially so far:

I got the education I wanted!

I have my own dream house, which will be paid off in 14 years

I earn a decent six figure salary

I’m slated to pay off all my student loans in 18 months

Most importantly, I’m able to help my siblings out financially while they transition from the cult, or while they cannot help themselves

My dream is for all of my brothers & sisters to finish college, be 100% free of the cult, and live independent, happy, successful lives.

My short term goals for the next 18 months include:

Paying off ALL of my student loan debt

Increasing my emergency fund from 6 months of expenses to 8

Maxing out my 401k for 2017 and 2018

Continuing to pay down the mortgage at a 15 year payment rate

My goals for the next 14 years include:

Saving between 60-70% of income after tax

Reach a net worth of $500k by 35 (in 4 years). This is total investments and cash plus equity minus the mortgage

Reach a net worth of $1.8 million by 40

Reach a net worth of $4 million (including the value of the paid off house) by 45

My long term (after age 45) goals include:

Retire and live on 3% of the passive income which my portfolio generates each year

Travel the world!

Never worry about money again ;o)

The next step is to pay off the debt as fast as possible, and start saving for an even better future!

My Life (And Finances) After Escaping a Cult posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnwIdQ

0 notes