#if we arrange stuff right you could probably have an entire basement to yourself

[deepwoundsandfadedscars]

.

#who wants to move to a medium aized town in canada and be my house mate #i really like living alone but goddamn #I'm getting by but literally all my paycheck goes directly back into house payments and bills #i get nothing left over for any sort of personal use #getting a house mate is probably the way i need to go but i dont trust any fuckers that live in this town already #i need someone who's either lgbt or a definite ally #cause I've done the whole living with someone who doesnt accept me and i cant talk to about that sort of stuff #and it fucking kills me #i want to feel safe and accepted in my own home and i don't know anyone around here who would give me that #also must like cats but not have any pets coming with cause i have two cats and they already dont get along #if we arrange stuff right you could probably have an entire basement to yourself #kee speaks #this is half joke half serious

[harryhooksgazebos267]

Broken Trust~ Part Six

Paring: Bang Chan x reader; Mark Tuan x reader(arranged marriage)

Genre: Mafia au, angst, little bit of everything honestly

Warnings: Cursing, mafia life and shizzle

A/N: Some parts aren’t gonna make sense right now but they will in the future!

MASTERLIST

“Deal I guess, it’s not like I really have a choice,” You stated with a roll of your eyes.

“Good girl, I’m glad you made the right decision,” Chan smirked while standing up from his seat and began to leave the room.

“Hey where are you going? I’m still tied up you know?”

“Aren’t you used to that?” He joked as he exited the room without even looking at you.

To say you were left speechless would be an understatement. Looks like Chan had a big cup of “confidence juice” this morning. So you kind of just sat there for a few minuets, trying to figure out how to get the hell out of the basement when all of a sudden, the door opened up and eight bodies entered the room.

“Chan why did you wake me up just to come down here and see her? I was getting my beauty sleep,” Hyunjin complained.

“Nice to see you too,” you mumbled out causing him to glare at you.

“Damn, why the bad blood?” you thought to yourself rolling your eyes.

“Don’t be rude to our new member Hyunjin,” Chan fake scolded.

“I can’t believe she actually joined,” Jisung piped in, giving you a huge smile.

“I’m not, she’s selfish and only does what’s in her best interest,” Hyunjin sneered out, “and will you stop smiling like an idiot, she’s not our friend.”

“Who the hell hurt you?” you questioned while shaking your head.

You honestly didn’t understand what you had done to make all of the hate you so much, well all of them except Jisung. The ten of you used to be so close but I guess not anymore.

“Is y/n really going to be a member Chan?” Jeongin asked out of the blue.

“Yes, well, I wouldn’t really say she’s joining us, She’s just giving us information for the time being.”

“And what do we plan to do with her after she gives us information? How long are we even going to keep her here? This entire plan makes zero fucking sense! I say we just kill her,” Hyunjin fumed out.

“Hyunjin!” Jisung yelled while hitting him.

“What? I say it’s karma,” He shrugged out.

“We don’t even have proof and you know it!”

“Proof? I heard the phone call! What more proof do you need?”

“Maybe you just heard wrong or maybe it was a different y/n,” Jisung suggested.

“How many times are we gonna go through this, stop being in denial! If Chan can get over it then so can you!”

“Enough!” Chan barked out, causing the two younger boys to bow there head as they still shot each other icy glares.

“What phone call?” You asked, hella confused.

“Don’t play dumb y/n, it isn’t cute,” Hyunjin mumbled out.

“I’m not playing dumb! I legit have no idea what you’re talking about,” you defended yourself, growing angry.

“Sure you don’t,” he stated while rolling his eyes.

“Seungmin, Jeogin, go take Hyunjin with you and cool him off,” Chan commanded while walking over towards you.

The three of them left the room as Chan untied you.

“Now y/n, let me make something very clear. We aren’t here to be friends, you’re simply here because you can be useful to us. If you weren’t, we would do exactly what Hyunjin said and we would kill you. Luck for you, that isn’t the case. With that being said, we can’t trust you considering who you’re the daughter of and where your loyalties lie. You’ve made that very clear. So, you aren’t allowed to be alone, ever. If you want to go somewhere, you have to be with one of us, if you’re making a phone call we have to be in the room, no exceptions. Until we feel as though you can be trusted, that’s how it’s gonna be. Do I make myself clear?” Chan stated while crouching down in front of you with his head tilted.

“Yeah I guess.”

“Good, Felix?”

“Yeah?”

“Take y/n to her room please.”

Felix nodded his head as he turned his gaze on you.

“Come on, lets go.”

So with that, Felix led you through the the big ass mansion to your room. Once you arrived, you sat down on your queen size bed and looked around the room. 

“Y/n?”

“Yeah?” You said while looking back at Felix who looked a little uncomfortable.

“Do you....do you really not know what phone call Hyunjin was talking about?”

“No? I mean, I’ve had multiple phone calls in my life time,” you joked trying to break the tense air.

“The call with JYP y/n, that call,” Felix urged on while taking a seat next to you.

“Like I said, I’ve had many phone calls with him.”

You both sat in silence for a bit.

“Felix, do you hate me?” You decided to ask, the question eating you up.

“I don’t know.”

“Do the rest of the boys hate me?”

“It’s not that we hate you y/n, it’s that we feel betrayed,” he sighed out, shifting so his body was facing yours.

“But what did I do to betray you?” You questioned.

 Felix hesitated for a moment.

“Please tell me or at least tell me why you guys faked your deaths,” you pleaded, taking his hands in yours.

“It’s not my place to tell you. Chan should.”

“But can’t you tell me anything? I mean after all this involves you to.”

“Can I ask you a question instead?” 

“Of course, go on.”

“Did you honestly love him? Please tell me the truth, there is no reason to lie.”

“Why does everyone keep questioning that? Why the hell would I marry someone I didn’t love?” you sighed out.

“Isn’t that what you’re doing right now?” Felix pointed out.

You sat and thought for a moment.

“Unless you love Mark.” He stated a little confused.

“What? No it’s not that. It’s just, it’s different Lix. Yeah I don’t love Mark like that but I don’t have a choice, I have to marry him. There aren’t any other brothers for me to marry. With Chan, if I hated him I could have picked Jae or Mark over him. Well, when Jae was alive I could have picked him. There was no reason or need for me to stay with him if I didn’t want to. With Mark it’s a different story. I have to marry him for my family and our mafia.”

“I always forget the two of them are related,” Felix chuckled out while shaking his head.

“Me too, they’re polar opposites,” you agree while shaking your head.

“I just, I don’t get it though,” Felix trailed off.

“Don’t get what?” You asked, causing him to hesitate again.

“Before I ask you this, you have to swear on your life you wont lie to me and that you wont tell the others I asked,” Felix told you sternly.

“I promise.”

Before Felix could ask you the question, you were interrupted by Chan entering the room.

“Y/n, I think you have a phone call to make,” He stated while closing your door.

“Felix you can go now,” he added.

Giving you one more look, Felix quickly left the room, leaving Chan and you alone.

“Well what are you waiting for? Give lover boy a call.”

“I don’t have my phone,” you stated while staring at him blankly.

“Oh right, how could I forget? Here,” He said while handing you your phone.

“Now as much as I hate to do this,” he said while pulling out his gun and pointing it at you, “I just want to make sure you don’t do anything funny.”

“You’re such an asshole, you know that,” You stated, taken aback.

“It’s a business baby girl, I’m sure you would do the same if you were in my shoes. Now enough talk, make the call.”

Rolling your eyes you looked at your phone and went to Marks contact and hit call, switching it to speaker so Chan could hear the call. Mark immediately picked up.

“Y/n, are you all right?” Mark’s worried voice rushed out.

“Yeah I’m fine.”

“Do you know where you’re at? Irene is the only one who remembers what happened and she said that Chan took you-”

“Mark”

“You know what, it’s okay, you probably don’t know where you’re at. What the hell am I talking about, just hold on, I’ll trace your location and I’ll be right there with the rest of the boys. Just wait and I-”

“Mark”

“I can bring all of JYP, and maybe even SM just to make sure-”

“Mark! Please calm down, there’s no need for any of that.”

“What?” 

“Chan gave me an offer and I decided it would be smart to take accept it.”

“What offer?”

You glanced over to Chan who gave you a blank stare, showing no emotion at all.

“He wants me to join Stray Kids.”

“What? No fuck that, I’m coming to get you.”

“No no no, Mark listen to me please, it’s a smart idea, I can get information on them and try to stop whatever plan they have. I can make sure that you and everyone else stays safe.”

“Yeah and what about you? How do you know they aren’t just using you?”

“I’ve known them my entire life Mark, I can tell when they’re lying and when they aren’t. Plus Chan and I had a conversation and he told me that he still loves me.”

“He still loves you?”

“Yeah I guess he does.”

“.......”

“Mark?”

“Do you still love him?”

Once again, you looked up at Chan to see the same expression on his face. Only this time, there looked to be a hint of interest in your answer.

“No, I don’t.”

The lie detector test determined, that was a lie.

“Good. Very well, I suppose this plan could work. You have to promise me, the second things go wrong or they start to get fishy of you, you’ll call me. You know what, fuck it, call me every night so I know you’re safe.”

“Okay, I will.”

“If you don’t call, I’m going to assume something is wrong and I’m going to find you.”

“Okay”

“Y/n?”

“Yes?”

“I...I...ummm.”

Chan tapped your leg and mouthed “end the call”.

“Mark, I can’t stay off the phone much longer.”

“Of course, yeah alright just be safe and I umm, ᵢ ₗₒᵥₑ ᵧₒᵤ“

“What?”

“ᵢ ₗₒᵥₑ ᵧₒᵤ“

“Mark if you aren’t gonna talk loud I’m gonna-”

“I said I love you!“

And with that Mark hung up, leaving you speechless. You looked up at Chan who seemed to have the same face as yours. In the blink of an eye, his face went back to emotionless as he quickly stood up.

“I have stuff I have to do, I’ll send someone else in to watch you,” Chan stated while hastily leaving the room.

In a few seconds, Felix was back in the room and sat in his original spot.

“Now, back to where we were.”

“Oh yeah right, what was it you wanted to ask me?” You questioned.

Felix sat still for a second, thinking over how he wanted to phrase the question.

“Y/n, you loved Chan and you loved us?”

“Yes, we’ve established that.”

“Then why did you help JYP try to kill us?”

TAG LIST (feel free to send me an ask if you would like to be added to the tag list or if you would like me to send a private message every time I update <3): @elenaramos1 

Part seven

MASTERLIST

#broken trust #stray kids #stray kids mafia au #got7 #got7 mafia au #chan #bang chan #chan x reader #bang chan x reader #mark tuan #mark tuan x reader #day6 #day6 mafia au #jae #red velvet #red velvet mafia au #irene #seulgi #wendy #joy #yeri #felix #jisung #hyunjin #jeogin #seungmin #i.n #minho #changbin #woojin

[touchingoldmagic]

Day 8 - Non-Canon Ship

Day 8 of the 30 Day Ghostbusters Challenge! 

Author’s Note: Ray/Egon and Ray/Egon/Peter. SFW, just angst and cuddling. I might work up the nerve to share my NSFW stuff someday but today is not that day...

With only one light on in the lab and a desk lamp on in the bunk room, the firehouse second floor was dark. Ray lingered in the doorway to the lab, watching the stiff back and squared shoulders of the physicist focused on his work. Or at least, the appearance of working.

Awkwardly, Ray couldn't find the words to disturb him and so he stood there in silence.

On days when he was truly focused, Egon wouldn't notice a nuclear war going on in the next room. Tonight was not one of those nights. Ray had a feeling he knew he was there--they were all hyper aware of each other at the moment. (Even subconsciously Ray knew he was keeping an ear out for when the sound of the shower stopped running.) The silence hanging around the room like an odor existed entirely because both of them were bad with words.

A small screwdriver rolled off the top of the table and Egon didn't even make a grab for it. He did however jump when it hit the ground--Ray did too.

"Egon," he blurted out, like the sound had broken some sort of hold on them. The physicist paused but didn't look up. "Egon," he said again, gaining courage and emphasis. He could tell by the tilt of the man's head that he was listening. "I know the lab is how you decompress. I don't mean to interrupt you. But it's late. And we need to get up early and get to the hospital tomorrow. Will you come to bed?"

Egon finally glanced at him and Ray tried very hard not to look like he was pleading.

"Of course," Egon said stiffly. His glasses had been broken earlier and he was wearing his spares. His face was closed down and carefully controlled, a look he only got when he was really upset. "I'm sorry."

"You don't have to apologize." Ray's response was immediate. He shifted his weight. "I should be the one apologizing."

"Unfortunate incidents happen in our line of work. A bad bust is not your fault--"

"I need to watch where I'm going. I didn't think, at the time, that I was taking chances but--"

"Raymond."

Ray's mouth closed with an audible click. Egon left his tools on the desk and came over to his partner and teammate. He frowned as he studied Ray's face. Ray knew he was looking at the road rash across his chin and left cheek from where he'd fallen on the concrete basement floor of the old house they had been in earlier in the day. He'd already checked himself out in the mirror; it was very visible and unfortunately in an awkward place for a bandage. It was going to be a painfully visual reminder of the incident for a while.

"It looks worse than it is," Ray promised him, voice low.

Egon nodded. "I wish to point out again that Winston is not seriously injured and is only being kept overnight for observation due to his concussion."

Ray sighed. "I know." The knowledge didn't make it any better.

Egon hesitated, then gestured toward the bunk room and Ray turned and retreated there with relief. After this disaster of a day, his only goal was to make sure everyone was okay and then to (hopefully) sleep.

They changed into their night clothes in silence. Ray glanced anxiously over at the physicist more than once, but Egon's gaze was blank and unreadable.

Ray said quietly, "Are you okay?"

His tone broke through Egon's thoughts and he met Ray's worried gaze with his own, attempting to be reassuring. "I'm not upset." He changed the subject by asking, "Do you wish to push two of the beds together?"

Ray brightened immediately. They still had separate beds, mostly because they all tried to keep a measure of professionalism in their work space. Bad days sometimes made it a hard choice to live with. "If you don't mind," he replied.

"Quite the opposite. I'm also aware in these situations that you sleep poorly if you can't reassure yourself of our presence."

Ray colored with embarrassment. "Well," he said, but then didn't have anything to finish it with.

They pushed two of the beds together and Ray collapsed onto them. Physically, he hurt all over. Mentally his brain wouldn't quiet down, and emotionally he was exhausted. It was going to be a long night.

Egon fussed with the arrangement of the blankets (much to the shorter man's amusement), covering Ray before climbing under them himself. Ray gently stole his glasses and set them on the bedside table, since half the time Egon forgot to take them off when he fell asleep.

As usual Egon slept on his back. Ray curled up against his side, allowing himself to relax a marginal amount with his head resting on the other man's shoulder, listening to the steady heartbeat against his ear, reassuring. The shower was still running. Peter had taken a flung metal bucket to the ribs during the bust. He insisted he was fine, but he was taking a while. Ray wasn't going to sleep until he got out.

Egon could feel the tension that still remained in his body. "Would talking about the matter help with your own decompression?" he asked, reusing the word Ray had used earlier.

A sigh gusted from the engineer's lips. "There's not much to say," he muttered.

"You fell," Egon pointed out. "Thankfully without sustaining serious injury."

Ray winced. He couldn't bring himself to add to Egon's statement, with the memory still so vivid. The bust had taken place at a large old house upstate with multiple ghosts, but the first floor hallway had a trap door, unexpectedly propped open (most likely by one of the specters). Ray had leaped back to dodge an attack, but had instead fallen through the open trap door and down the stairs to the small, cold root cellar.

Quick-thinking, Winston had jumped down after Ray, which meant it was Winston who took a rotting two-by-four to the head trying to defend Ray, while he collected himself and tried to get to his feet. Egon and Peter had followed in time to help with the fight, but the small size of the basement left them little room to dodge, and the litter of old wood and other home debris that had been stored down there, ripe for the flinging, meant it was a very nasty battle. They had all been knocked down and flung around before it was finally over.

Into the silence of the bunk room, Ray finally muttered, "I'm fine with the dangers of the job, Egon, but it's different when someone else gets hurt because I screwed up."

"This is not the first time it's happened," Egon pointed out. They had all had their share of busts gone wrong.

"I know, but it doesn't get any easier."

"This is true." Egon cleared his throat. "Seeing you and Winston disappear... worried me greatly."

"I know. I'm right here." He leaned over and kissed Egon's cheek gently, careful of bruises.

None of them had escaped the house without injuries, though only Winston had to be hospitalized. The first aid kit in Ecto had been enough to patch them up while they waited for the ambulance. Then, after many hours waiting at the hospital just to be told Winston would be kept overnight, they had finally gotten home very late.

"So what were you working on?" Ray asked, hoping for something to discuss that was a little less emotionally harrowing.

Egon was happy to launch into an explanation of his latest experiment, and Ray was happy to have something to fill the silence. Slowly he relaxed further, letting it sink in that everyone was as safe as possible at the moment. Egon's voice was slower and quieter by the time his explanation concluded. Soon his eyes were closed and Ray thought he was probably asleep, though it was hard to tell. The physicist had a very slow, steady breathing rate even when awake.

At one point the sound of the shower stopped and Ray listened intently for several long quiet minutes until it was replaced with the whir of the hair dryer. Ray waited, slipping in and out of light sleep. Finally there was silence and the bathroom door opened. He roused from his light doze at the sound of footsteps approaching his side of the bed.

"We need a bigger bed," Peter announced.

Ray objected sleepily, "I like it when we're closer together."

Peter snorted. "Of course you do, blanket hog."

"Hey, I do not--!"

Egon covered his mouth. "Shh." The sound was a mumble and the physicist sounded mostly asleep.

Ray grinned apologetically and kissed the hand that was trying to block his lips from moving. "Sorry, Egie." He scooted over closer to Egon so Peter could crawl in. The psychologist turned out the bedside lamp and then did so, sliding a possessive arm over Ray's hips.

"Are you actually going to sleep, or is this an all-night discussion situation?" Peter's warm voice ghosted across the hairs on Ray's neck. He sounded as exhausted as Ray felt.

"I can sleep if you're here," Ray promised him.

Peter was quiet a moment. Ray's sincere attachments to his partners and willingness to say so still caught him off guard. Then his flippant tone returned and he said, "Good to hear." His arm tightened around Ray.

There was silence in the darkened room for seven seconds. Then, "I swear from now on I'll be more car--"

"Ray!"

"Raymond."

"Right. Sorry."

#ghostbusters #ghostbusters movie #ghostbusters 1984 #ghostbusters 2 #ghostbusters fanfiction #ghostbusters fanfic #ray stantz #egon spengler #winston zeddemore #peter venkman #ghostbusters shipping #ray x egon #ray x egon x peter #sorry this is just fluff #ghostbusters 30 day challenge

[nigelgodrichproducer]

Nigel Interview w/ The Grammys

SOURCE: https://www.grammy.com/grammys/news/producer-nigel-godrich-quite-absurd-six-year-road-ultra%C3%ADstas-new-lp-sister

Nigel Godrich likes to make music that sounds like you can see it. “Everything is very visual to me," he says in a recent interview with the Recording Academy.

..."I don't set out to [leave a fingerprint], but I also have my own agenda on what I want from something," he says. "I regard all projects as collaborations really. I'm not trying to get what somebody else wants at all."

As Godrich notes, with both fascination and mild shame, the record took over six years to gestate—nearly the equivalent of the Beatles' entire studio career. And that's partly due to the project's piecemeal construction. After touring behind their self-titled 2012 debut, the producer regrouped with singer Laura Bettinson and drummer Joey Waronker for sporadic jam sessions he patiently whittled down into finished tunes. Each musician was busy in their respective careers: Bettinson as a solo artist, Waronker as a session player, Godrich's stage and studio work with Radiohead's Thom Yorke. But every so often, the producer would dig into the recordings and sculpt them like Play-Doh—building tracks from surgically extracted drum beats or looped basslines.

Bettinson and Waronker carried on with their lives with no expectation of when an album might emerge. But Godrich’s jigsaw slowly fell into place around 2018. "All the things that have happened in the process of making this record," he says, "it's quite absurd really."

The producer spoke with the Recording Academy about more on the six-year journey to Sister, the exhilaration of transforming jams into actual songs, his evolution as an instrumentalist and Radiohead's upcoming 20th-anniversary package of Kid A.

You sculpted much of this material through improvisations, a technique you've used in the past, like with Atoms For Peace's 2013 LP. Can you walk me through that process? Did everyone bring in grooves that you jammed on, or did you walk into the room with a completely blank canvas?

You're right in that it's a technique that's quite recurring in a lot of stuff I've done, with Thom [Yorke] too and even Radiohead or whatever. That was the foundation of The King Of Limbs, all that kinda weird [stuff]. It's like a home studio mentality, where you create loads of stuff, go back to it later and find a piece that works. It's something I'm used to doing and it's the easiest way of making tracks, really, because you can create a lot of stuff and you don't have to think too hard in order to make a big noise.

Ultraista only toured once, around 2012. Did some of the ideas originate around then?

We found, doing more and more shows, there were little gaps between songs and extended bits of songs that we kept playing. The way we had our equipment set up, we could just make music in the air. We just went into my little basement studio in L.A. and just played for nothing, with no ideas. No sort of basis for anything. It's easy for me to build a loop and a keyboard sound and Laura to build a vocal loop and Joey to play along—to create these little soundscape things that are used as building blocks. But they did sort of sit around for quite a while.

They also didn't function exactly how they were designed. There are a few things like that. I might hear one element and think it's good, but it didn't work that way, so [we'd] replay it or create it in a sequence and start again. But as a kind of seeding workshop, it's a great way of working. It's sort of leisurely, the way we've made this record. We had the luxury of taking some distance and looking at some things we made and going away and writing lyrics over things. It happened a lot of different ways, but the core of the intention was to do exactly what you said.

The challenge, though, is to take those little sequences and turn them into songs.

It's very easy to make cyclical things, but then you have to somehow hang music on them, which means going away and thinking about changes and chords. That exercise is done in a different kind of setting, and that's the bit that takes ages: forming them into coherent songs that are gonna hold your attention—which we never tried to do before. That was the big difference between the two records. The first one was supposed to be cyclical; It was intentionally dumbed-down in that way. Just to do something else, we thought it would be nice to make more conventional song structures.

Unlike most of the projects you've worked on, you weren't working with a deadline or any real sense of expectation. At what point do you put that internal deadline on yourself? Did you at some point say, "OK, we have 75 percent of an album at this point, so let's finish off this thing"?

It's a very, very good question. You're hitting on a very good point, which is that you can only sit around in the bath, picking out the fluff from your navel, for so long. And then you're like, "Uh, if we're gonna do this, I guess we've gotta get on and do it." That moment was relatively recent, probably a year and a half ago. It's like, "OK, let's finish this. It's really unfair for everybody to keep saying, 'Oh yeah, this track we did is really good. Let's nail it down and get it all done. Let's get this music out.'" We're very lucky to be able to sit around not finishing things. That's a privilege to sit around on music that's not finished. That did happen. It was like, "OK, if I've this time. I'm going to focus on all these strings and little bits and bobs I've got. I'm in the same country as Laura." We got the songs down, and then we got Joey back and did some more work with him. That's it. That's how we did it. It was a lot of navel-staring for like six years. [Laughs.] Not due to a lack of activity. Jesus Christ, it was such a busy time for all of us and we were doing lots of other things. It was a pleasure to go back and finish this stuff. And now that we've got it, it's really fun to talk to you about it and go promote it and play some songs and play some shows. It's a happy place.

You were in a unique position as a producer. You're the gatekeeper to this music in a way. How did the other two handle that? Were they checking in every so often, like, "Hey Nigel, what's the status of these songs? Any progress?"

No, not at all. We'd see each other socially anyway, so we're all in each other's lives. In all honesty, it was more like me trying to sell a second-hand car: "Guys, you know what, this song is actually good. I swear!" It's that up until a point, and then it's like, "Let's do this." We're quite content people. [Some artists are] signed to a major label where you have high-powered people pushing you to finish your album to a deadline, but nowadays there are musicians who can make music at home or in their own studios and make a living if they can manage that. There is no imperative; it's your own pace. It's a strange phenomenon that's not really existed before. In the '60s, people didn't sit around with songs they've written for five years, did they? They had entire careers. In fact, the Beatles had their entire career in the space it's taken us to produce another record. That's not a very good commendation, is it?

It's easy to forget how much artistic ground the Beatles covered in such a short span.

That's a marker I use: I measure things against the Beatles' entire career. It's only six or seven years, really, of the recordings.

Since the last album, you've performed live with Atoms For Peace and alongside Thom Yorke in Tomorrow's Modern Boxes. I assume that's changed you as a musician—you have to be a bit more practiced up on your instruments and that could also give you a different view of yourself as a musician.

I was a player when I was a teenager and then I didn't really pick up a guitar for a long time. But I remember thinking and feeling, after all that time in the studio working with other musicians, that I was a better musician when I picked up the guitar again. I was a better player. It was quite odd. I don't know why. I'd just watched and been around so many great people, great players. On the first Ultraista tour, it was a new thing to be on stage and play this stuff. Since then, you're right, playing with Atoms and even stuff with Thom now—I'm a different person than I was 10 years ago, but I'm more certainly more confident as a performer in front of people. I think I probably was a better player when I was 17, to be honest because I was playing all the time. But mentally, I'm certainly more confident now. We change over time. I think we're able to learn skills later in life too—I think I can do things I couldn't do 10 years ago. You think about things differently. So much about performance is about feeling and feel. I don't know—I feel like I focus on that more now.

I'd like to dig into the creative process behind Sister. "Tin King" is built around a hypnotic bass that runs through most of it. Did you just pluck out that riff from your pile of jams and start building from there?

The very basics of that were from the original jam for the first album but very, very skeletal. The only thing that actually survived is the bassline. And the idea was to write a song that's one-note. It's an exercise, a word game; three people contributing different lyrics and then choosing the note and taking it from there. I picked it up and said, "OK, something has to happen. There has to be a B section." So you write a refrain and it somehow solidifies some meaning in what's going on. The abstract imagery—it's all just words. It's something about an internal dialogue: "Am I in the right hands? Am I in the right hands?" It's funny how one injects one's own premise into a pile of things and it sorts them all into rows. The other thing was to make some sort of arrangement so the second half of the song could just blossom. So, I wrote the chords and extrapolated them from the middle onwards and then it reaches a sort of climax through Laura's performance at the end. Suddenly you have this arc and it makes sense. It's a track.

I love that concept of building a vocal around one note. Laura's performance, like the bass, has a kind of trance-like effect.

It's actually a really, really well-used and overused technique in songwriting. It's better to change the chords than the melody sometimes. It's funny how that works and it's funny how compelling it is. You wouldn't think that one note would hold your focus, but it depends on what's going on around it.

There are some lovely strings at different points in the album and the most definitive example is the surging, repetitive part on "Anybody."

That is from one of the jams in my basement. Joey and Laura making the vocal loop "I could be your anybody; I could be your nobody," that's the jam that went with the drums. The bassline is part of that jam too. That thing kind of existed and was arranged and knocked around and it had this amazing instrumental section from the middle part where it goes off into a sort of dreamscape. That's essentially the shape of the jam. When you do something and you're like, "Something really cool happened there," you fight to preserve the moment by building the song around it. Then Laura came up with the lyrics and the strings were the very last thing to go on because it felt very skeletal.

How did you end up recording those?

Actually, it's a good story: My friend Xavier Veilhan, a French artist who was representing France in the Venice Biennale, built an installation that was a recording studio. And I helped by basically giving him all the equipment. I sort of set up my studio as part of his exhibit. So there was this studio in Venice for like six months and they had artists coming through like every few days—from very esoteric electronic people to more well-known people. As a part of the deal, I had a few days to record some things. We decided to record our strings at the Venice Biennale in front of people walking in and out.

People would come in halfway through, watch, look confused and walk out. We somehow managed to do it without interfering with the recordings. [Laughs.] It's an overlooked story. It's pretty cool. It was just an opportunity to record the strings on our own. With the string line on [“Anybody"], I wanted something driving to push it along, some kind of Steve Reich-ian, Phillip Glass-type repetition. It's played. It sounds impossible to play, but it's played. It's just mathematical. But it's not a synthetic thing. It's ten people playing that part.

Yeah, it sounds like it could be a looped sample or something because it's so precise.

It's a weird story. It just goes to show—you reminded me, like, "Oh yeah, another thing: We recorded that at the Venice Biennale."

Blurring the line between organic and synthetic is a signature of your work. One of my favorite moments on the album is Joey's drum part on "Bumblebees," where the groove sort of flips over on itself. It's disorienting but also super funky.

The reason [for that] is because he's actually playing to something else. The track is constructed around him and, basically, it's backwards. Sometimes it's a really good place to start—move the downbeat of the drums by a beat or a 16th early. What happens is that, rhythmically, things shake up and interesting things happen. You're quite right—it is backwards. But it's supposed to unseat you. There's nothing more boring than something very straight rhythmically. It's supposed to keep your brain moving and it sort of does. He plays beautifully and that's what's really lovely. In that instance, he might be reacting to something else going on that you can't hear. It's a good trick really.

That makes a lot of sense, actually.

It'll ruin it for you now! You've gotta forget I've told you. [Laughs.] [With Waronker], it's raw material to work with. One is spoiled really. That's one of those instances where it's like, "Move this here, move that there." Musically the basis of ["Anybody"] was from a jam, but it was lifted out.

This is a big time for the Radiohead family: Thom Yorke released his third solo album last year; you have the Ultraista album coming out, and guitarist Ed O'Brien is releasing his first LP really soon. Radiohead fans have been waiting a long time for this Ed album—he's such a sonic innovator, but when you're in a band with a writer as strong as Thom, there isn't really a window for your writing. Have you encouraged him much over the years or had many conversations with him about his songs?

Yeah, for sure. He'd done demos and we'd listen to them and talked about them and stuff. You're absolutely right: It's quite an intense, crowded field with Radiohead, with so many heavyweight things going on. You have to understand that these people have been together since they were in school. Everybody needs to flex their muscles and have an outlet and that's part of your self-definition. I think he's followed it, which is great. Good for everyone. He [has a tour scheduled], which is great for him to stand up and be a frontman. I think he's really looking forward to doing that.

Thom Yorke has talked a lot about prepping a 20th-anniversary package of Radiohead's Kid A, and the guys have been digging through the archives for that project. Have you been involved at this point?

I can't speak for them, but we're all sort of working on possibilities. There's all this archive stuff and the Public Library just opened and that's a big platform for all those kind of things. Beyond that, there's always plans afoot, but I'm afraid that'll be all I can say about it really.

Let's end on a random note. You have a cameo as a Stormtrooper in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. How did that opportunity arise?

I know [director J.J. Abrams] through a very good friend of mine, Edgar Wright. I've spent a lot of time with J.J. and he's a music fan and also a very kind, generous person who allowed me to live out a childhood dream.

#nigel godrich #ultraista

[howtohero]

#249 The Death of Your Nemesis

(Note: This is Part Two of a three part story. Part One. Part Three.)

Uh. Ok, so your nemesis has died. The person you’ve gone head to head with for years and years. The enemy of yours who, without fail, always strives to make things as personal as possible, is gone... Good! You’ll be better off, and the world will be better off with them. You can finally dedicate your time to dealing with more systemic ills in your neighborhood. No longer will you have to alienate everyone you love because there’s always the slim chance that on any given day your nemesis could discover who you are and take vengeance on your friends and family. When your nemesis dies, that’s a reason to party. You’re free of them! Forever! Huzzah! You may not have been able to kill them due to some complicated moral code that only allows you to kill their henchmen, but that doesn’t mean you can’t celebrate their demise!

(Oooooook buddy, why don’t sit this one out. You’re going through a lot right now.)

I’m fine! Why shouldn’t I be fine! My nemesis, Dr. Brainwave, a convicted supervillain who was living, rent-free, in my basement, is dead. I’m free of him. I’m doing great!

(All right, totally. We can all see that you’re handling this with dignity and poise. Why don’t you let me deal with this one.)

Well I suppose I have been training you as my apprentice so that you could one day write blog posts on your own...

(Sure, that’s what our relationship is. So why don’t you go outside, take a breather, and let me handle today’s entry.

What the man says is true. Dr. Brainwave is dead and I guess, technically speaking, he was our nemesis. He’s threatened our lives more times than we count. {We are notoriously bad counters though.} He’s destroyed our home, our place of work, our garden filled with one-of-a-kind miracle veggies. {Immortality radishes, vampiric celery, tasty kale.} And yet, he’s always been there, and I think we kind of just assumed he always would be. You see, a nemesis is not just another supervillain that you’ve got to fight with alarming frequency. They’re a major part of your life. Oftentimes your nemesis will know you better than anybody else in your social circle. Sure, they only took the time to get to know you on this deep level so that they could inflict all manner of psychological torture upon you, but still, it’s kind of nice that they invested that time in you.

A superhero’s relationship with their nemesis is always going to be complicated. You’ll usually see them more than you see your family. You’ll see them at their highest {when they believe that they’ve killed you} and at their lowest {surprisingly enough, after they’ve succeeded in killing you and find their life to be devoid of all meaning and purpose} you’ll occasionally find yourself fighting alongside them and yeah, in some twisted way, you’re going to form a kind of meaningful relationship with them. So what are you even supposed to do when they’ve died? Granted, you’re not as fanatically dependent on them for your continued existence and purpose as they are on you. There will always be crimes to stop and evil to vanquish. But any superhero would be hard-pressed to deny that their lives would be a little bit emptier without their nemesis. Perhaps that’s the real reason why so few superheroes actually kill their nemeses.

If you feel like you need to mourn the passing of your nemesis, that’s ok. You should allow yourself to space to do that. Do something that they would’ve loved. Hold a {vacant} bridge hostage, kick a {robot, stuffed, already dead} puppy into the sun, burn yourself in effigy! If you’re worried about getting attacked by other supervillains if you attend a funeral or memorial service for your nemesis don’t worry! Supervillains usually are not friends with one another. That funeral is gonna be hella empty. You can go there with no problem. Besides, supervillain funerals have been poorly attended ever since Lady Richter used her “funeral” as an opportunity to drop many of her fellow supervillains into a bottomless chasm. Ever since then, supervillains have had a hard time believing that any of their colleagues are actually dead. If any other supervillains attend your nemesis’ funeral, they’ll be lugging around giant ladders in case a bottomless chasm opens up beneath them, and they will be too exhausted to fight you.

The whole How To Hero crew {me, Parentheses Guy, Zach, Lawyer Guy, Dr. Brainwave’s Greatest Shame, Diego A. Wayghosts, Todd The Bomb-Disposal Bot} attended Dr. Brainwave’s funeral and, lo and behold, the only other person in attendance was Dr. Brainwave’s other nemesis, Professor Brain-Scrambler. {There was also, of course, a large contingent of mutant alligators.} He actually spoke quiet beautifully about his mad scientist colleague, after which we pulled him over to the side and told him that he was a hack and that he could suck it, in line with Dr. Brainwave’s final wishes. All in all it was a very emotional 2 am-4 am. {Supervillain funerals almost exclusively take place during this time which is colloquially known as “the witching hour.”} The funeral home was a bit cold, and I would say it was definitely haunted, but overall, it was a pretty solid funeral I’d say. 

Once you’ve spent some mourning the loss of an important and ever-present figure in your life, there is some housekeeping that you need to do. Reach out to your nemesis’ loved ones and express your condolences. The last thing you want is for their loved ones to vow revenge on you and beginning the cycle anew. If you can, talk with their loved ones, estranged family members, sidekicks, or unholy creations and make them understand that you were not responsible for the death of their loved ones. The quicker you do this the better. Blaming a superhero for the death of a loved one is 17th most common supervillain origin story. {number 68 is having your coal company run out of business by windmill farms but number 33 will blow your mind.} In our case, we sat down with Dr. Brainwave’s legions of mutant alligators and several hours of teeth baring and jaw snapping, a fragile peace agreement was forged. {The alligators for their part, behaved remarkably well. Not a single bared tooth or snapped jaw among them!}

Once that is taken care of you must attend to the rest of your nemesis’ personal affects. Their goons will be directionless, and this is a great time to many of them off the board. Have your friends in law enforcement scoop them up before they can find employment under a different supervillain. Or, if you really wanna get wild, invent a new identity for yourself, pose as a new supervillain, take control of your nemesis’ cronies, and then have them perform tasks that seem like crimes, but actually good deeds. Stuff like, “this old woman is an ancient evil spirt, help her cross the street” or “this is my territory now, nobody else is allowed to commit a crime here. If you see another villain doing crimes here, stop them!” Arrange operations against your nemesis’ lairs and begin systemically dismantling their operation. Since they were your nemesis you have the unique advantage of knowing where they’re likely to have kept most of their really cool stuff. And remember, in the souvenir game, it is first come, first serve. So lead the operation against their main fortress or stronghold yourself and claim all of those spleen-discombobulators and parasite helmets for yourself! For us, that just meant going into our own basement and, honestly, reclaiming a lot of stuff we thought we’d lost! We also blew up all of Dr. Brainwave’s stuff, as per his last will and testament. [Hi, again, a hastily scrawled note scratched into a chalkboard that says “destroy all of my Earthly things in the same manner in which I died” is not a will.] Well, we did it! And it was awesome! We didn’t even need to buy any explosives, it’s astounding how much of his stuff was already made out of bombs! {You know what? It’s actually pretty alarming how many explosives there were just under our house this entire time.})

Wait, how many bombs were there?

(I thought I told you to take the day off because you were being weird!)

You’re being weird! How many bombs did you find in Dr. Brainwave’s room?

(I don’t know, probably around 660. What do you think Curly?)

{I’d say around 664, maybe 665.}

Oh you have got to be kidding me.

(See, you’re being weird again. Buhbye! Now, any real superhero can’t exactly be without a nemesis. People will start to talk. “Oh yeah, that guy? He’s not really very superheroic, he doesn’t even have one evil person whose sole purpose in life is to destroy them. Poor guy.” So you need to find a new nemesis! {We recommend reading our advice for finding your first nemesis.} Try calling up all of your old enemies and see if they’d be interested in engaging in an eternal struggle between good and evil with you. Or, just go through the supervillain phonebook and pick a name that kind of seems like an inverse of your own name. {Or, if it’s still too soon for you to even think about replacing your dear departed nemesis, just prank call about of villains until you’re all cheered up.} Without Dr. Brainwave gone, we’ve obviously needed to start looking for a new supervillain correspondent... and, well... I guess just take a look at some of the auditions we’ve received.

Al “Da Boss” Marconi: “Ayyyy, da best way to save da world is to stab a twerp right between the eyes and laugh as he bleeds out on the pavement!” {Factually incorrect.}

Dr. Python: “So this job comes with a free room right? My last roommate turned out to be Ultiman so obviously that wasn’t going to work out and I kind of very badly need a new place to live.” {Seems to believe that living with Ultiman is a bad idea because he is a superhero but living with us is fine. Which leads us to believe he either doesn’t really get who we are, or does not respect us.}

Giorgio the Evil Mime: “...” {This guy was Zach’s top choice, but he is clearly grieving and not in his right mind. He seems to have forgotten that our supervillain correspondent needs to be able to speak and make intrusive comments on our blog posts.}

As you can see, we have been having some trouble, but luckily we’ve got interviews with Jhonny McBarn-Burner, Mustard Man and the dreaded Karalaxus who is actually a very pleasant guy once you agree to give up your free will and join his horde of mindless zombies. So hopefully one of those guys pans out.)

Stop everything! We don’t need a new supervillain correspondent. (Dude, for real, you need to take a break. You’re going a bit cuckoo you know?) No, I’m serious, and your face is a bit cuckoo actually so how about you step the heck off.  (Rude.) We don’t need to replace Brainwave, because I don’t think he’s actually gone {What are you saying! Wait, did we actually all die in the explosion? Was he the only to survive? Is he mourning us? Which of us did he mourn the most? Me?} No, I believe that he’s dead. But I also believe that he died on purpose. (Well sure, we all saw him unrepentant supervillainously sacrifice himself so that we could live!) I don’t think he sacrificed himself at all actually. I think he planned on dying, and that he planned on benefitting from it in a way that none of us could have foreseen.  (Ok, you’re gonna have to walk us through that.) Ok, so remember when we went through Brainwave’s stuff, we found a grand total of 665 bombs right?  (I guess?) {We are notoriously bad at counting.} True, but I think we got it right this time. I think that there were only 665 explosive devices in Brainwave’s lair/our basement. [Only?] Yes only! What kind of fanatical supervillain builds so many explosives but stops before hitting 666! The devil’s number! I think he did have 666 bombs, until he mailed one to our office! (Wait, what? You think Brainwave sent us that bomb? That seems like a stretch.) Oh? Does it? The most evil person that we are acquainted with sent us a bomb? That seem awfully farfetched to you? (Well, when you put it like that...) And he was wearing rocket boots the whole time! We could’ve strapped the bomb to one of his rockets and launched it through the skylight without him having to carry it! {That reminds me, our landlord called and said that we definitely lost our security deposit because of that skylight.} (Ah DANG IT!!!!) I think that he waited until the timer was low to reveal that he was wearing rocket boots so he could make his sacrifice play. And hey, he knew that the time on the bomb was displaying the wrong time and yet he knew exactly when the bomb was actually going to go off. That isn’t suspicious to any of you??? (Look, if I made a big deal about everything I found suspicious our coworkers we’d never get anything done!) {Is this about my outstanding deal with the devil?} (No, actually.) And Parenthesis Guy, you even said that the funeral home seemed haunted during the funeral! What if that was Dr. Brainwave! What if he devised this whole scenario so he could die and become a ghost!  (Why would he do that? And doesn’t this all seem a little convoluted.) Yeah, dude, he’s a supervillain! Something the rest of you seemed to have lost sight of. Of course he would come up with an absurdly complicated plan to become a ghost. From a supervillain’s perspective, being a ghost would be way better than being a frail old human with the physique of a scientist.  (I don’t know man, I’m just not seeing it.) What! It makes total sense. He freaks us out with a bomb. Classic supervillain move. He puts us on an emotional rollercoaster by making us think he sacrificed himself to save us, causing us to question everything we thought we knew about the sort of person he was. All while shedding his physical form in order to commit crimes as a ghost. It’s a classic Brainwave move!  (I think maybe you should lie down buddy. You’re starting to go a bit crazy. And not in a fun way like the rest of us.) {Yeah when you make us look like the sane ones you’ve gotta throw in the towel man.} Yeah. Yeah ok, maybe you’re right. (Yeah, maybe we’re right. Let’s call it day, we’ve still gotta go feed the mutant alligators.) You guys go ahead I’ll catch up. {Ok, remember to put on your armor before you enter the alligator pen this time.} Yeah, yeah I’ll remember. All right Brainwave, the others are gone. I know you’re here.

<Uch fine. You got me.> You absolute bas- <Listen, you’re right. I’m every name you’re about to call me. But can we do this later? Right now, I need your help.>

#superhero #superheroes #comics #comedy #humor #funny #hilarious #Dr. Brainwave #creative writing #advice #long post #A How To Hero Event #Professor Brain-Scrambler #Dr. Brainwave's Greatest Shame #Todd #Diego A. Wayghosts #ghosts #Al Da Boss Marconi #Dr. Python #Ultiman #Giorgio the Mime #Karalaxus #Mustard Man #Jhonny McBarn-Burner #mutant alligators

[taexual]

EXO / Mafia AU - Their S/O finds out they’re in the Mafia [PART ONE]

REQUEST: I loved your exo mafia scenario! Do you think you could write one where they tell their girlfriend they're in the mafia and when she finds out she tries to leave, and how they'd react to that?            

disclaimer: this is a Mafia AU but is is not a part of the Arranged Marriage series! :)

PART TWO of this request is here

OTHER MAFIA AUS: BTS / EXO / GOT7 / MONSTA X / SEVENTEEN

warning: angst, strong language, & violence

Xiumin

You’ve seen the signs. He disappeared for days sometimes. Other times he came home with bruises on his face as if he’s gotten into a fight.

But then the climax of the story happened. Your suspicions were proven to be – sadly – correct.

Minseok came home with a bullet in his shoulder.

Whenever you remember opening the door to reveal your bleeding boyfriend… whenever you remember the way he could barely stand on his feet… whenever you remember him whispering that he’s sorry to you before losing consciousness, you feel like you’ll get a panic attack.

You didn’t even remember yourself trying to catch him so he wouldn’t smash his skull into the floor. You didn’t remember dragging him inside of the house and hyperventilating when you saw an actual, literal hole in his shoulder. And you certainly didn’t remember calling an ambulance.

What you remembered, however, was crying your eyes out in the hospital while you waited for the doctors to finish the surgery on him. Then, crying again while you waited for him to wake up. And then saying goodbye for the last time.

You know it was extremely cruel of you to leave when he was chained to the hospital bed by various wires and couldn’t stop you – but that is exactly why you did it. If he had grabbed your hand and begged you to stay, you probably would have.

You didn’t even need an explanation from him. Just the knowledge that he was involved in some mess that posed a threat to his life was enough for you to leave before you got your heart broken.

However, three weeks after Minseok woke up from his surgery to see you leave him, someone rang your doorbell. Ever since that night when Minseok got shot, you were cautious about opening the door to anyone.

You glanced through the peephole and your heart almost stopped at the sight of Minseok. This time, he wasn’t shot. One of his hands was in a cast, and he held flowers in the other one.

“Y/n, I know you’re home,” Minseok suddenly spoke. “Please, let me in. I need to talk to you.”

“I can’t, Minseok,” you said, closing your eyes. “Please go away.”

“I’m not leaving,” he said. “I want to explain everything to you. I promise you I’m not going to ask you to stay with me. I just want you to know what happened.”

“I don’t want to know what happened.”

“But I want you to know,” Minseok said. “Y/n, please.”

Feeling yourself tear up, you realized that even though it’s been almost a month, Minseok’s words still had an impact on you, as your hands – basically without your brain’s permission – moved to unlock the door and let him in.

Suho

Your friend was convinced that her father was played by the Mafia. He had signed a contract with them a few years back, and now he lost all of his money – and almost lost his life, too – because he missed the deadline and didn’t transfer money from his account to theirs.

You listened to this story with skepticism but your friend had a way to prove it. Her father was apparently supposed to have a meeting with one of the associates of the Mafia at a restaurant in a couple of nights. Naturally, your friend invited you to follow her father and watch what would happen.

Having nothing better to do – because your boyfriend was working – you agreed to this plan. And so, a few nights later, you and your friend both dressed up in all black and got into her car to follow her father to the restaurant.

“This feels stupid,” you told your friend once the two of you parked the car a few meters away from her father’s and sneakily followed him to the door of the restaurant. “The man he’s meeting will probably be in a suit and we will have no idea who—oh, hey, look! That’s Junmyeon. I didn’t realize hew as working here tonight.”

Your friend frowned at the sight of a man in a suit and was a little surprised to learn that this was really your boyfriend.

“Does he have a meeting here or—” she started but stopped once she saw Junmyeon sit down at her father’s table. “Oh. Oh.”

“Oh what?” you asked, looking inside of the restaurant and seeing the same view your friend just saw. “Okay, that’s… stupid. I told you your father’s just meeting a random businessman.”

“Y/n, he’s not,” your friend told you, turning to look at you with panicked eyes. “I swear to you, my father went here to meet up with the Mafia.”

“Right. Then why is my boyfriend sitting across from him?” you asked, scoffing.

“Well, I can only come up with one conclusion.”

“That Junmyeon’s in the Mafia?” you raised your eyebrows. “Oh my God, your conspiracy theories are getting out of hand. Come on.”

“What are you—” she didn’t get to finish her sentence because you grabbed her hand, dragging her inside of the restaurant. “Y/n, no!”

“Y/n, yes,” you answered sarcastically and headed right to your boyfriend’s table. “Hi, I was—”

“Y/n?” Junmyeon jumped up from the table. “W-what are you doing here?”

“I’ll explain later,” you dismissed it. “Tell me what you’re doing here because my friend here, as much as I love her, seems to think that you’re in the Mafia.”

You saw color drain from Junmyeon’s face and his mouth open to say something, but he couldn’t come up with any words.

“Junmyeon,” you said, feeling your hands start to shake. “Tell me she’s not right.”

“I’m…” he tried but then sighed and shook his head. “Listen, can we talk about this some other time? I’m kind of in the middle of something right now.”

Not believing the words you were hearing, you took a huge step back, a horrified expression on your face.

“Don’t bother,” you told him. “I’m leaving.”

“Y/n, no! Wait!” he called out but you ran out of the restaurant, and he couldn’t chase after you because your friend stopped him.

“No,” she told him. “If you’re not who you say you are, I don’t want you anywhere near her. She should have been your main priority, not your ‘let’s talk later, I’m busy with more important stuff and oh, by the way, I’m also in the Mafia.’ Let her go, Junmyeon.”

Lay

You found out after a news report about a Mafia war broke out. In the few hours before the media realized that writing about the Mafia without their permission was dangerous and took the articles down, you managed to read enough.

You were always curious about this seemingly mythical Mafia, so you opened the first articles as soon as it was posted. Needless to say, you didn’t expect your boyfriend’s face to pop up under the caption ‘Leader’. Frowning, you scrolled down but didn’t see him mentioned by name.

Thinking that this was just an eerily similar looking guy, you chose to open another article before you jumped to any conclusions even though your heart was already beating against your rib cage ten times harder.

When the second article captioned the same picture with ‘Leader, Zhang Yixing’, you felt like you were going to have a panic attack.

The article mentioned that the leader was currently treated in the hospital. Grabbing your phone, you dialed Yixing’s number, hoping that he’ll answer in his cheerful tone and laugh at the fact that you could believe that he was in the Mafia.

“Y/n… I can’t talk right now,” Yixing answered his phone in a groggy voice.

You closed your eyes, inhaling sharply. “Yixing, I know.”

“What?” he asked slowly. “What do you know?”

“Everything.”

The line went quiet and for a moment you thought he hung up but then you heard his breathing and decided to keep talking.

“I’m leaving,” you told him. “I don’t want you to call me ever again.”

“Y/n—”

“I’ve heard you’re in the hospital,” you said. “Hope you get better. Goodbye, Yixing.”

You hung up the phone before he could say anything else and quickly gathered every essential thing from your and his shared apartment. You took the first cab away from there. You were sure you were never going to come back. Not after the news of Yixing’s true occupation in life.

Baekhyun

You felt like the most stupid person on the planet after you found out what Baekhyun really did for a living. Sadly, it happened after the wedding. You spent the entire night after you found out tossing and turning in your bed, trying to decide if you should confront him first and then leave later, or if you should just leave.

“Babe,” your husband’s voice suddenly interrupted your thoughts. “Why are you awake? It’s six o’clock.”

“I know about you,” you said before you could stop yourself.

“Are you sleep-talking?” Baekhyun asked with a quick laugh.

“I’m not,” you said expressionlessly.  “I know what you do. I know about your shooting range in our basement. I know everything, Baekhyun.”

Sleep completely escaped Baekhyun and he sat up in bed, watching you with wide eyes.

“What are you going to do?” he asked you.

“Leave, obviously,” you said. “But I—”

“You can’t leave.”

You frowned. “What the hell do you mean? Yes, I can.”

“No,” Baekhyun said strictly. “We’re married. And you know. You can’t leave.”

“Right. But I’m going to.”

“No, you’re not,” he disagreed, testing your patience. “Trust me, you don’t want to leave. If the others find out that I let you leave, we’ll both be dead.”

“The others?” you questioned, now beyond frustrated.

“The other people that I… work with,” Baekhyun explained awkwardly. “I’m just protecting you, Y/n.”

“You’re protecting me by forcing me to stay with you,” you told him. “That’s far from protection.”

“No, look, I’ll explain everything to you,” he said. “It won’t seem as confusing anymore, and you won’t want to leave.”

“Don’t tell me what I’ll be feeling, Baekhyun,” you said. “I don’t even want to look at you right now. God, I thought I knew you for more than five years, but turns out, I didn’t know you at all.”

“You do know me, Y/n. You know me better than anyone.”

“Uh-huh. So being in the Mafia is just your secret hobby that you would have mentioned to me sometime soon if I hadn’t found out, right?”

Baekhyun stayed quiet, not really having anything to say to that. Huffing loudly, you got out from the bed.

“Where are you going?” he called after you

“I’m leaving,” you said.

“I said you can’t!”

“Try to fucking stop me.”

You left the house knowing very well that your life was in danger. Not just because of Baekhyun, but because every single possession you owned, remained in the house. But you didn’t care about your belongings anymore. You just wanted to get away from there and hide, if you had to. You couldn’t possibly continue to live with Baekhyun after everything that you found out.

Chen

You came home earlier than you intended, just in time to hear Jongdae talk to someone on the phone. He hadn’t heard you unlock the door, so he kept talking.

“Well, you shoot the fucking asshole, then,” Jongdae was saying. You stopped in your tracks, suddenly confused. “No, we don’t forgive. And even if we did, the fucker’s been in debt for over three months now. You have my permission to fire on the spot when you see him. I don’t care about other casualties, just—”

And then Jongdae’s eyes met yours. He stared at your shocked face for a moment.

“I’m going to call you back,” he said into the phone and threw the phone on the couch. “Y/n, I—”

“No, don’t explain,” you shook your head. “I don’t want to know why you just gave your permission to kill someone and why you don’t care about casualties.”

“Y/n, you’re misunderstanding the situation,” Jongdae said. “I was just… playing a game.”

“Right. What game?”

He hesitated. “The Sims?”

“I’m going to go, Jongdae.”

You turned around to leave, but he grabbed your hand. “You can’t leave!”

“Yes, I can, and I will—”

“No, I mean, you literally can’t,” he said, making you frown in confusion. “You’ve heard too much.”

“Oh, so now you’re going to kill me if I want to leave?”

“Technically, I’d have to.”

Your heart skipped a beat. “You’d really kill me?”

“I’d have to,” he said, his eyes leaving yours. “But that doesn’t mean I’d want to, Y/n. Which is why you can’t leave.”

“Don’t you think the fact that, in case of a break-up, you’d have to kill me, is a good enough reason for us not to be together?” you said, getting your hand out of his grip, finally. “And if you knew that from the beginning, why did you even pursue me? Why did you ask me out? So you could trap me here?”

“So, you don’t want to be with me? You feel trapped?”

“I do now,” you stated.

“Okay. I see,” Jongdae said, his lips turning into a straight line. “Well, in a case of a mutual break-up, there’d be no threat to your life by me, or by anyone else. You’d be free and—”

“Well, in that case,” you said. “Consider this a mutual break-up.”

You turned around to leave again. This time, he didn’t grab your hand but you did hear him groan.

“Y/n, don’t be difficult,” he said, watching you approach the door. “Let’s sit down and talk about this.”

“What is there to talk about, Dae?” you said, already feeling the tears. You had hoped they’d come once you left the apartment and Jongdae was no longer there to see you. “You threatened to kill me. I think we’re done here.”

“Y/n,” he breathed, noticing your wet eyes. “I love you.”

“Yeah. Sometimes that’s not enough.”

Chanyeol

You just wanted to take a shortcut. You didn’t want to end up in the most dangerous neighborhood of your town when it was already dark outside.

Clutching your handbag tighter to you, you basically ran down the street that wasn’t illuminated, and therefore every single shadow that passed you, made you flinch.

“Well, well, well,” you suddenly heard. “This one is actually pretty.”

Feeling your heart jump to your throat, you started to walk even faster but soon saw a guy stop right in front of you, blocking your way.

“Please, I’m in a hurry,” you tried to say but upon noticing the grin on the guy’s face, you understood that there was no use.

Wondering if you’d have enough time to dial 911 on your phone, you turned around and were met with three others guys, who were approaching you like predators.

“Look, I’m not supposed to be here,” you said. “I just wanted to get home faster.”

“Oh, baby girl, we’ll take you home,” one of the guys said. “We’ll take you all the way to—”

“Stop right fucking there.”

With your entire body shaking, you turned around to look at the owner of the new voice and almost passed out at the sight of your boyfriend. What was he doing here?

“Oh, Mr. Saves-The-Day is here,” one of the guys said, making his crew laugh.

And then suddenly, Chanyeol pulled out a gun. Gasping, you watched the four guys all raise their hands and start walking backwards.

“Hey, man, we’re just playing,” one of them said.

“You have exactly three seconds to get the fuck out of here,” Chanyeol said in a low voice. “Or I’ll fill your brains with lead.”

The four guys exchanged looks with each other momentarily and then the next thing you saw was them running at the speed of light in the opposite direction, away from Chanyeol, and away from you.

But they weren’t fast enough.

Chanyeol fired exactly four shots. And one after the other, the four guys who harassed you, dropped like flies. Dead.

When you turned around, your boyfriend was already standing in front of you. Not giving you a second to take a breath, he wrapped his arms around you.

“God, baby, are you okay?” he asked.

“Chanyeol…” you whispered, shocked beyond belief. “You just shot those guys.”

“Yeah. They attacked you,” Chanyeol said.

“Well, yeah, but now they’re dead,” you said, pulling away from his embrace. “Where did you learn to shoot like that?”

“Lucky shot, I guess,” Chanyeol said slowly, watching panic in your eyes. “Y/n, I’m so glad you’re okay—”

“Chanyeol that was not a lucky shot,” you said, taking a step away from him. “You killed those guys in the blink of an eye. God, I can’t even understand what just happened. You just killed someone.”

“Y/n… you have to understand, I have never harmed innocent people.”

“But you’ve harmed people who weren’t innocent?” you asked, horrified. “Chanyeol, you’ve killed before?”

“I mean…” Chanyeol started but then couldn’t find his next words. “Y/n, look, let’s just go home. It’s unsafe here.”

“Hell yeah, it’s unsafe. With you!” you said. “I’m going home.”

“Y/n, don’t—”

“Don’t even talk to me, Chanyeol,” you said. “I need to be alone. I need to figure this out. You can’t just expect to kill people right in front of me and then get me to go home with you.”

Chanyeol still followed you. “Y/n, please, there might be guys worse than these four here, you—”

“Chanyeol, the only guy worse than the ones who harassed me, is you,” you told him with a straight face, making him stop in his tracks. “Now let me go.”

And he did. As he watched you walk away from him, no longer daring to follow you, he felt his heart break, and the inevitable decision arise: he’ll have to choose between his career and the love of his life.

D.O.

When you found out about what Kyungsoo was really doing during the days that he wasn’t home, you packed all of your stuff from your shared apartment and moved in with your best friend without giving him a warning.

Needless to say, Kyungsoo didn’t like that. He was knocking on your best friend’s door less than five hours after you moved.

“Y/n’s not home,” your best friend said after opening a door for just a millimeter to see if it was really Kyungsoo causing such a ruckus in the hallway.

“Don’t give me this bullshit,” Kyungsoo said, opening the door wider and forcing his way in. “I know she’s here.”

“You can’t just enter my house like that—!”

“I can do whatever the fuck I want to do,” Kyungsoo roared, running around the house like a madman in search for you.

Hearing a lot of noise, you slowly opened the door of your bedroom, and gasped when your eyes met Kyungsoo’s furious ones.

“Y/n! Fuck, I’ve been looking all over for you, I thought someone kidnapped you or something!” Kyungsoo said, running towards you to wrap his arms around you, but you stopped him by closing your door right before he could reach you. “Y/n..? Why are you doing this?”

“I found out about your real job, Kyungsoo,” you said. “And I can’t believe you’ve lied to me about something this big for three years. I can’t even look at you.”

“Well, this is exactly the fucking reason why I didn’t tell you sooner!” Kyungsoo said, suddenly losing his patience again. “Open the goddamn door, Y/n.”

“I’m not opening the door. You can leave right now.”

“I’m not leaving without you.”

You groaned. “I don’t want anything to do with you, Soo. You’re a murderer!”

“It wasn’t a problem when you didn’t know what I did!” he countered, slamming his fist against the door, causing you to flinch away from it.

“Because you didn’t tell me you killed people for a living!”

“Jesus, Y/n, just open the damn door, let’s talk like adults,” Kyungsoo said, trying to calm himself down.

“It’s impossible for us to talk like adults because you lose your temper every time I mention the fact that I’m not staying with you,” you replied.

“Well, maybe it’s because I love you! Have you thought about that?!” he yelled again.

“Are you even capable of love?” you retorted. “You’re heartless. You kill in cold blood. I don’t believe a single word coming out of your—”

“Y/n! Fuck!” Kyungsoo shouted, slamming his palms on the door again. “Just come out, for fuck’s sake. Stop doing this.”

Scared of the things he might do when he’s angry like that, you made sure your voice was softer before you spoke again. “Leave, Soo. Please.”

“I’m not fucking leaving,” he said. “I’ll guard this apartment 24/7 until you finally come out. I’ll have my men watch your every step. But I will get you to come out of this fucking room.”

Closing your eyes at the realization that every single thing he said was actually possible, you sighed. “Why are you doing this? Just let me go.”

“I can’t let you go,” Kyungsoo said. “I fucking love you.”

Kai

You were on your way home from the store when you stopped to tie the shoelace of your shoe. It proved to be difficult to tie it with your gloves on, so you took them off, and as you looked down at your shoes, your eyes caught something else.

Small droplets of blood painted the snow next to your feet red. The blood wasn’t yours, obviously, and as your eyes followed the pattern, you realized that it traveled further. In fact, the blood trail lead you to your house.

With a heavy heart, thinking that something happened to Jongin, you ran inside of the house and found him in the living room with his back turned to you.

“Oh, thank God you’re okay!” you said, exhaling deeply.

Jongin hadn’t expected you to walk in so suddenly, and he dropped the gun that he was cleaning in surprise.

For a moment, both of you just stared at the pistol on the carpet of your living room.

“Is that a…” you broke the silence, watching the gun that you’ve never seen before. “Where did it come from?”

“It’s, uh, mine,” Jongin said, awkwardly bending over to pick the gun up.

“How long have you had a gun?” you asked. Having grown up in a semi-pacifistic household, you disagreed with any type of violence and despised guns strongly.

“Not very long,” Jongin answered after a moment’s hesitation.

Suddenly coming up with a crazy theory, you swallowed before talking again. “Do you, um, by any chance know why there’s a blood trail leading to our house?”

Jongin had gone pale. You’ve never seen him like this before. And even though he didn’t answer your question, his frightened eyes told you everything you needed to know.

“Okay,” you said, turning around. “So, I’m going to go and pretend I did not just see my fiancé with a gun after having found blood outside of our house.”

“Y/n, no, it’s not what you think,” Jongin said, making you stop for a moment.

“Oh? What is it, then?”

He took a deep breath. “Okay, so I did just kill someone but—”

“You just killed someone?” your eyebrows shot up. “That is even worse than what I thought! Jongin, what the hell?!”

“Listen, I can explain,” he said, slowly approaching you.

“Do not come anywhere near me with that thing in your hands.”

He realized he was still holding the pistol and slowly placed it on the coffee table in the living room before turning around to look at you. “Please, just listen to me, okay? I’m not a monster. I don’t kill people for fun. It’s just my job.”

“Just your job,” you repeated. “I didn’t realize you were God, Jongin.”

“Y/n, I promise you, this is the last time you see something that reminds you of what I do,” he said.

“Jongin, your face reminds me of the fact that you just admitted to me that you kill people as a job. I can’t believe you’ve never told me this. I can’t believe it took me four years to even find out about this…”

Seeing you so obviously hurt broke Jongin’s heart. “I’m sorry you found out this way, Y/n.”

“Just answer me this one question,” you said. “If I hadn’t walked in on you with a gun and blood on the snow outside of the house, would you have told me about this?”

Jongin just watched you for a moment, considering every possible answer, and then understanding that there just wasn’t the right one.

“No,” he admitted defeatedly.

“Thank you for your honesty,” you said, turning back around to walk out through the door.

“Y/n, no, wait, you can’t leave!” he jumped after you.

“Stop,” you said, stopping for a moment before he grabbed you and pulled you back inside. “Let me go, okay? I need time some space. That’s the least you can give me after you’ve lied to me for the past four years.”

Sehun

It seemed to Sehun as if you completely disappeared off of the face of the Earth after you accidentally found out that he was in the Mafia. He couldn’t reach you on your phone, none of your friends knew where you were, and even his employees couldn’t locate you.

He knew you were hiding. And he wasn’t going to give up until he saw you again.

You were staying in the one place you knew Sehun would never look for you. You had never told him about your secret hideaway in the woods outside of your parents' house. You and your friends have found a little shack here years ago, and you spent so much time there, that your parents renovated it, turning it into something that resembled a loft… in the middle of the woods.

Here you could get away from it all but still had your family with you.

“Y/n, dear,” your mother said one night after she came to visit you with a bag filled with food for you. “Sehun has been sending flowers to our house ever since you left him. That boy’s really broken-hearted.”

You didn’t know about the flowers but chose to ignore it. “Mum, I don’t care.”

Your mother sighed. “Look, I don’t know what went down between you two because you stubbornly refuse to talk to me about it, but it’s obvious that he regrets whatever he’s done very much.”

“He should have seen it coming. I mean, there was no way he expected to just keep this lie up for the rest of our lives,” you said. “He had to come clean to me sooner or later, and he chose later. He chose to tell me the truth when I confronted him. Does that sound like regret to you? The only thing he regrets is me finding out.”

“For the love of God, what had he done that left you so broken you refuse to leave the woods?” she asked you.

“Have you ever loved a person so much that you imagined spending the rest of your life with that person?” you asked. Your mother nodded with a small smile. “Well, I had that with Sehun. And then I found out that this person I loved so much is not at all who I imagined. He’s a completely different person.”

“So, you’re saying you’ll never find it in your heart to forgive him?”

“There’s nothing to forgive,” you said. “Sehun is not the same person that I fell in love with. In fact, the person that I fell in love with doesn’t even exist.”

“So… you would hate me really much if I told you that I called him?” your mother asked slowly.

“You called Sehun?” you jumped up from the bed that you had been sitting on. “Mum! Why?”

“It killed me to see you like this,” she said apologetically. “He told me he was on his way. Actually, he should be here any second. Please talk to him. The least you could do is listen to what he has to say.”

“I’ve listened enough, mother,” you said, crossing your arms over your chest. “And now thanks to you, I’m going to have to find a different place to hide in because there’s no way in hell I’m facing Sehun again.”

“Y/n, honey, you’re—”

“No,” you stopped her, grabbing your traveling bag from under your bed. “Please, mother, don’t ever try to solve my problems for me again. You’re only causing more of them.”

The sight of your distressed face as you rapidly threw your clothes into the bag told your mother that what Sehun did to you was really indescribable if you weren’t going to give him a chance to explain himself. And yet she didn’t regret calling him and hoped that he’d manage to get here in time to see you. She knew you two were meant to be, and she could only hope that you’d solve this together.

Sehun – speeding down the streets to get to your house because he knew there was a chance you were going to run away from him again – was hoping for the same thing.

#exo #exo mafia au #exo reactions #exo imagines #exo scenarios #kpop reactions #kpop imagines #kpop scenarios #kpop mafia au #exo xiumin #kim minseok #exo suho #kim junmyeon #exo lay #zhang yixing #exo baekhyun #byun baekhyun #exo chen #kim jongdae #exo chanyeol #park chanyeol #exo d.o. #do kyungsoo #exo kai #kim jongin #exo sehun #oh sehun #writing

[lillaxtrigger]

The ghostly maid: Maddening Monogamy

Pike rushed through the front gate, past the front yard and into the manor. He ran into the living room, saying: “Trevor. You said you needed me to get over here. Did you find Jewely ye-”. He stopped talking when he saw both Trevor and Jenny sitting on opposite ends of the coffee table. “Oh, hey Jenny. You here to help us out?”. Pike asked. “Pike…You may wanna sit down.” she said. “Why? What’s the matter?”. Trevor clapped his hands and said: “Pike. We’ve been friends for a long while now. You were one of the first friends that I’ve made since I was allowed to go off on my own. We’ve been through a lot since then and have come back from the brink more times then I can count. I’m willing to go so far as to say that your my best friend. Which makes breaking this to you all the more...painful.”. “Trevor, do you have cancer?”. “What the- No! No. Why would you-Why would you jump to that? Anyway, my company’s CEO have made an arrangement with Jenny’s mom, who you probably figured out by now, owns another successful company. They plan on merging both of our companies so that they can one big super business. And there’s only one way they can do that?”. “...No.”. “Yep. They’re going to make Trevor and I go through an arranged marriage.”. “What!? No! No! They- They can’t do this! This can’t be legal.” Pike stated. “Unfortunately, when you can make enough money to turn the entire Utah desert green, whether it’s legal or not is an after thought.”. “Well still, they can’t make you two get married. We’re all like what, 14. That’s way too young.”. “We’re not getting married now. They’re gonna make us wait til we hit 18.” Jenny said. “It’s a shame too. I wasn’t really planning on being with anybody. I mean if I had to, Jenny, of all people, wouldn’t be my first choice..” Trevor commented. Jenny looked over to him and said: “And what does that mean?”. “Oh nothing. It’s just that I wish I could end up with somebody who wasn’t so...pushy.”. “You got something too say about me?”. “Oh nothing really. It’s just that I like people who manage to keep themselves clean. I can still see the mud stains on your shorts.”. “Well at least I go outside and be active. Whenever you have free time, you just sit on your butt playing video games for hours on end.”. “I only have so much free time and I’d like to enjoy myself!”. “Guys!” Pike shouts. Both Trevor and Jenny look at him as he says: “Look, I get it. Neither of you want this to happen. Both of you are as compatible as ketchup on ice cream. But we shouldn’t be arguing with each other. Instead we should be arguing with whoever running this whole gambit.”. “Tsk, good luck with that. When my mom has something she wants to do, there’s almost nothing that can stop her.”. “Yeah, and I doubt I’m gonna change the executives minds anytime soon either.”. “Well I dunno. We have four year, so it might happen if we persist enough.”. “Don’t count on it. Both of them are signing a contract tomorrow that’ll seal the deal. Once that happens, we might as well be hitched right then and there.” Jenny says. “Not if we manage to stop them. We have til tomorrow, I’m sure we can come up with something.”. Trevor thought to himself for a moment before saying: “Hey, why don’t we just us the lamp. I still have one wish left on it.”. “Oh yeah, right. Forgot about that.”. “Hold up. You guys had a magic lamp and didn’t tell me?”. After going down in the basement, they dug around to try and find the lamp. 30 minutes pass and they still have yet to find it. “I don’t get it. I threw it down here somewhere.” Trevor states. “Hey, Coopol! I know you can here me? Quit napping or whatever and show yourself!” Pike shouts through the basement. “Yo, lamp monkey! Quit sniffing your owns fart and get out here!” Trevor screams. Although both their voices echoed far, nothing happens. Pike groans and says: “Looks like that plans out the window. Hey, why don’t we try using that 10 leafed clover you got a while back? Maybe all that luck could help us out.”. “Um...I lost it.” Trevor begrudgingly admits. “...What!? How!? How do you lose something so powerfully lucky like that!?”. “Well, for starters, being lucky and winning at everything is so boring. Hardly anything’s a challenge when you can’t lose. So I put it away…uh, then I lost it. I, uh...I probably should have kept somewhere safe, shouldn’t I’ve?”. “Can’t Jewely do anything? Where is she.” Jenny said, causing Trevor to look down. “Jewely is...not with us right now.” Pike says. “Long story short. She found out some dark secret about her past and ran off. I don’t know where she might be.” Trevor recounts. “Well then let’s get out and find her, then.” Jenny said as she was about to run off. She stopped when she heard her boyfriend says: “We already looked around the whole city. We haven’t found her anywhere.”. Jenny sits back down, looking at the ground and kicks away a piece of junk in frustration. “Well, crap...What do we do now?”. As all of them sat down, looking defeated, Pike caught a whiff of something in the air. “Do you smell that?”. “Despair?” Trevor says. Pike got up and started running after the scent saying: “No, Come on.”. “Wait! Hold up!” Jenny said as both she and Trevor raced after Pike. All of them traversed through piles of miscellaneous junk, following the scent that Pike had caught. As they pushed junk away, Jenny said: “Pike, where are you taking us?”. “I don’t know. I’m just following this smell.”. “Can we go back up now? Some of this junk is starting to scratch my hands.” Trevor said. “Wait a minute. I think I’m starting to smell it too. It smells like the sea foam shampoo my mom always uses.”. Pushing a big pile of junk aside, they stumbled across a wooden shack. Some bottles with glowing colorful liquid stood perched atop the windows ledge. “Is that a house?” Pike said. “Wh-What? What!?...Why is their a wood hut...in my basement!? How long has this been here!?”. From the front door of the shack shuffled out a rather elderly woman with a broomstick. She spots the three of them and shouts: “What are you doing here!? Get off my property!”. “Your property!? This is my basement! Your on my property, you old hag!”. “Lady, are you okay? What are you doing down here?” Pike asks. “I live down here.”. “Well obviously but, why down in this basement?”. “Because my mystic machinations are too much for the world above to handle. So I must hide myself and my practice.”. “Mystic you say? What kind of stuff are we talking about? Like potions maybe?” Trevor asked. “That’s none of your business! Now leave this place, and never come back!”. “Ugh, fine, Whatever. Come on, guys. Maybe we can try and look for Jewely again.” Jenny says. As they walk off, they stop when the old lady says: “Wait, stop!”. Trevor turns back and says: “For god sake, lady. Make up your mind.”. “Young lady, what was that name you just said?”. “Jewely?”. “That little ghost maid. I haven’t heard of that name in years. Are you my chance her new master?” the old lady said as she approached. Trevor was about to speak, but saw the old lady grasping Pikes hands and saying: “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I do hope you’re treating the girl quite well.”. “Umm...Actually, I’m not her master.”. “Pardon?”. “That would be me. I’m her new master.”. The old lady looks over to Trevor and says: “Oh...Well that’s rather unfortunate.”. “Lady, how do you know Jewely?” Jenny asks. “Oh, we go a way back. A rather long way back, so to speak. Poor girl was on her death bed when she was brought to me.”. “Hold on. Does the name Hazel ring any bells?”. “Well it certainly does. That is my name after all.”. “No...”. “Wait, what’s going on?” Pike asked. “Guys, that’s Hazel. She’s the witch that made Jewely into a ghost.”. “What?”. All of them looked over to the old lady, who said to them: “How is Jewely doing these days?”. “Um...”. Inside the cottage, Trevor, Pike, and Jenny sat down around a wooden table, with Hazel preparing tea in the background. “So that’s what happened. Rather unfortunate to say the least. Poor girl didn’t even live past 20. But I can’t entirely blame them. It was such an amorous time back then, not helped by the fact that it all took place in France of all places. Everybody was with everybody. Even I got to get few lucky shots in”. “Eww!” Pike says. “This all my fault. I should’ve just burnt that book when I had the chance.” Trevor says. “Would that have really made things better? Destroying something that has such sentimental value? Being the only thing left of her once beloved.” Hazel asks. Trevor sighs and says: “No.”. “Don’t worry. Jewely is a very loyal young lady. I’m sure she’ll come back in her own time soon.”. “Well unfortunately we don’t have soon. Both My mom and Trevor’s CEO’s are signing that contract by tomorrow. If Jewely can’t help us, then we need to think of something else.”. Pike looked around the shack and saw some bottles with glowing liquid in them atop one of the shelves. “What are those bottles full of?”. “Oh those. Those are magic potions. That’s sort of my business I run here.”. “I’m sorry, but how can you run a bracket in the dwellings in my basement?”. “Simple, really.”. Hazel grabs one of the bottles off the shelf and hold it up in front of them. “I make the potions.”. She waves her hand around the bottle, making it vanish in a sparkly flash, surprising all of them. “Then deliver them use my own special brand of sorcery.”. She then puts her hand out as a bag of gold coins appears in a flash of sparkles and lands in her palm. “Hmm...Hey, maybe we can use one of those potions to help us out. Waddaya say Hazelnut. Can ya lend us a bottle?” Trevor asks. “First, don’t call me that. Second, my potions are the best in the business. They don’t come cheap sweetie.”. “We will literally pay you anything to get out of this mess.” Jenny said. “Alright, we can discuss payment later. Right let’s see what kind of potions you want. What exactly are we dealing with?”. “In short, both of them are being set up in an arranged marriage and all of us want it stopped.” Pike elaborated. “Hmm. I may have something that could work. Give me a second.”. Hazel walks over to a chest and digs around for a moment. “Ah ha! Here it is.”. She pulls out a small veil full of blue liquid and says: “This is my most valuable potion I’ve ever created. Concocted using only the rarest of the rare ingredients. The conceding serum. Whoever drinks this dangerous potion can’t help but do whatever they’re asked. The word no will no longer exist to them.”. “So, it a mind control serum?” Pike asked. “Basically, yes.”. “Awesome. This’ll be perfect.” Trevor said as he got up and reached for the veil. Hazel swiped it out of his grasp and said: “Hold it. Do you honestly think that I’d give up something this dangerous...for free? Na ah, baby. You gotta give me some real dough for something this strong.”. “Name your price. Money is no object to us.” Jenny asks. “Got any gold?”. Our three heroes turned to one another, with Pike saying: “Excuse us for a second.”. They then all run out of the cottage and back upstairs. All of them looked around the mansion to try and find any gold they could give. After a while, they meet up in the living room to show what they found. Pike held out his hand to show a gold watch. “I uh, found a gold watch.”. Jenny showed what she found and said: “I found a couple gold coins.”. Trevor put out a bag of shining yellow dust and said: “I found some gold dust, but I’m not sure that this’ll all be enough.”. “Hmm...Oh hey, how bout we give her that golden bookcase you have in the library.” Pike suggests. “No way. That thing is a Juda family heirloom used to house the family for generations. I can’t just give it up.”. Both Jenny and Pike look at Trevor with contempt. “...Come on! W-why can’t we give her something of Jenny’s? I’m sure she’s got some gold stuff lying around.”. “My mom is already watching me like a hawk. I can’t get anything past her. The only reason she’s letting me be here is so that I can get to know my soon to be “husband”. “Dude, just use a regular bookshelf. It’s not like it’s gonna matter what your family books sit on.” “Di-...I...But...Fine.”. All of them carried the golden bookcase back to the witches hut. As all of them were catching their breathes, Hazel admired the shiny shelf. “My my. This is something I’d never thought I’d see.”. She looks around the bookshelf, saying: “Excellent glossy finish.”. Looking at the fancy carvings in the shelves, she says: “Fine craftsmanship detail.”. Seeing the golden swirls on the sides, she says: “And I love the extra touches.”. “So...do we have a deal.” Pike asks. “Yeah, sure.”. The witch tosses the veil to them, where Pike barely catches it. “Just add a drop to whatever the poor sap is drinking and they’ll be completely submissive.”. Jenny walks into her kitchen to see the butler preparing coffee. She sees a special green marble cup beside a blue glass one on a fancy black plate. When the girl sees the butler pour the coffee in both cups, she quietly rushes over and adds a drop of serum into the green cup. The butler takes the plate and walks out of the kitchen. She follows the servant into the dining hall, where her mom and dad were sitting at the table, looking down at their tablets. Jenny watches as the butler hands them their coffee, with her mom taking a sip in her green cup as she closes her eyes. “Perfect.” she whispers. The girl walks into the dining room, she sits in between her mom and dad. “Uh, hey mom.”. The mother opens one eye as she finishes drinking and says: “Yes, Jenny. Is there something you want to say?”. “It’s-...It’s just I-... Do-do you honestly expect me to just marry some guy that I barely know?”. “I do. (sips coffee) And I expect you to behave yourself. Going through with this deal will expand our business assets.”. “This isn’t fair! You gotta cancel the deal. This my life were talking about.”. “Jenny, there’s no talking me out of this. End of discussion.”. “Dad, do something! Please.” Jenny says as she turns to her father. “I-I-I’m sorry honey. We let you have basketball practice, but now is the time to buckle down and think about the future. You’ll understand when your older.” he said in a sympathetic voice. The girl gets up and walks out of the dinning hall, saying under her breath: “I don’t understand now.”. Trevor snuck into his company’s main office and makes his way to the office kitchen. When the room became empty, Trevor rushed in and puts a couple drops of the serum into the coffee maker. After a while, he peeks into the executive meeting room to see all the CEO’s sipping on their coffee. He bursts into the room, saying: “Hello boys.”. “Trevor, for the last time. We’re not changing our minds on this.” one of them says. “Are you sure about that?”. “We are positive.”. “Why not? This is getting pretty personal for me. You guys are trying to hitch me with somebody I barely know. Shouldn’t I get to choose if I want to get married?”. “If you knew this was so personal, you’d realize that by doing this, we can expand both parties business’ and gain an even larger profit. Our employee’s are starting to strike due to gradual pay cuts. Partnering up with another can ensure that all those employee’s can get their earned salaries.” “You wouldn’t want all those people to lose their jobs, would you?”. Trevor thought for a moment before saying: “Fine.”, then walking out of the room. He then peeks back in and says: “By the way, random question, where do you guys get your coffee?”. “We have it delivered from a coffee shop nearby. (sips coffee) Why?”. Trevor hisses to himself as he retreats back. In a nearby room, a guy in a suit was interviewing a potential employee. The nearby giant window shows the view of the entire city from so high up. After looking at her papers, the guy took a sip of his coffee and said in the suit said: “Hmm...Well Ms. Raspberry, everything seems to be in order here. You’d seem to be an excellent employee working under us.”. “Thank you so much...Um...by the way. Nothing about this was mentioned in the job application, so I’m just wanting to ask… What going to be my wage?”. “7 bucks an hour.”. “What!? Are you serious!? Get outta here!” she angrily shouts. The man starts feeling woozy before shaking his head and eagerly saying: “If you say so.”. He then jumps out the window, the lady looks down to see the man plummet all the way down and crash into a car, it’s alarms blaring loudly at impact. The woman covers her mouth in horror as Trevor zips past outside the door. All of them go back to the small cottage under Trevor’s basement. “I want my bookcase back! That potion you lent us didn’t help at all!” Trevor demands. “Yeah, I poured some in my moms coffee like you said and it didn’t work.”. “Sorry. All sales are final.” Hazel announced. Trevor growled in frustration as he saw his once beloved golden bookcase being used as potion shelves. “Strange though. I made the potion perfectly. Young lady, does you mom happen to be from supernatural descent?” “Not that I know off. No.”. “Forget it, let’s just try a different potion. What else ya got?” Pike said. “Hmm...I may have something stronger...Wait right here.”. Hazel dashes into the backroom, the rest here heavy shuffling with the occasional sound of glass breaking. She come out moments later and pulls out another veil, this time the purple liquid inside shined brighter, lighting up half of the basement. “What is that?” Jenny said in concern. “This is a much stronger variation of the conceding serum. One that I’ve been developing in my spare time. Whatever drinks this can’t possibly resist the effects. I could maybe let all of you test it out...but not for free, obviously.”. “Lady, we gave you a golden bookcase! What more do you want?” Pike said. “Ah ah ah! Not a price. All I want in return is a favor later down the road. Do we have a deal.” Hazel asks as she sticks out her hand. “Fine, whatever. We have a deal.” Trevor says as he shakes the witches hand. She hands him the bottle and as they start to leave, Hazel warn: “Be careful with that stuff. It’s quite experimental. Remember, only a drop.”. As all of them walk back, they stare at the glowing, bubbling, concoction in Trevor’s hands. “So, what’s the plan? Spiking the coffee didn’t work. What else can we put it in?” Jenny asked. Trevor looked at the bottle for a moment before saying: “I got an idea.”. The boy was stirring a bowl full of batter in the kitchen. Both Jenny and Pike watch as Trevor stirs. “So you’re plan is to give a batch of home made muffins spiked with the serum as a gift to Jenny’s mom?” Pike elaborates. “That’s the plan.”. “Okay, but how do you know she just won’t throw them away.”. “Mom really likes her muffins. In fact, I’ve seen her tear a mans hand off just to get fresh baked cinnamon muffins in the morning.”. “...Really?”. “No, not really. (giggles) Though I wouldn’t put that past her. She’s crazy for them.” Jenny says. Trevor sets the bowl of batter on the counter and takes out the mind control serum. He starts pouring the entire bottle in the bowl. “Um…Trevor, Hazel said to use only one drop.”. “Can’t take any chances here. If one drop didn’t work, then we have to use the entire bottle.”. After Trevor finished baking the muffins, he sat them down on the counter to cool. As they stared at the baked goods, Jenny said: “I think I might be having second thoughts about this. I don’t know if these thing might mess up my mom’s head or something.”. “Jenny right. Maybe we should test them?” Pike suggests. “But on what.”. They then hear the sound of something breaking. All of them look out and see Tracy trying to sneak through the hallway, backing up from a vase he knocked over. “Perfect.” Trevor whispers with a sadistic smile. Tracy quietly came around the corner, doing his best not to get spotted. Trevor put one of the muffins on a small table at the end of the hall. As soon as he saw the muffin, Tracy looked both ways, then back at the muffin. “Don’t mind if I do.” he said as he picked up the baked good. As he ate the treat, Tracy said: “Mmm...Weird flavor.”. The ghost hunter then fell down, convulsing violently on the floor as he started rapidly saying gibberish. Trevor, Pike, and Jenny came out of hiding and could only watch as Tracy twitched violently on the floor. They then saw as his limbs went stiff, then completely limp as he stopped moving entirely. All of them approached Tracy’s body, Pike poking his stomach. “Is...Is he dead?” Jenny asked. “I think so.” Pike answered. A moment of silence passes before Trevor says: “Whelp, that once less problem on my mind.”. “Trevor!”. “Alright, I know. Listen, I got some acid in the garage. We can dissolve him and get rid of any trace of-”. Just then, Tracy started to slowly rise from the floor. He lifted his head, with his eyes glowing purple and aiming right at them. All of them, started backing up, fearing what Tracy might do next. He took a deep breathe and shouted: “Helloooo masterrrrrr!? Whaaat caan I dooo for yooouuu!?” in a dreamy tone as he stretched and bounce around the hallway. Pike breathed a sigh of relief and said: “Okay, he’s not dead. Great.”. “Perfect, now that we know that this stuff isn’t lethal, we can send them off to your mom.”. “I don’t know. This stuff seems kinda strong. Maybe we should think of something else.” Jenny worried. Tracy began to dance aside them, his limbs weirdly flailing about as he made noises. Trevor groaned and said: “Jenny, we don’t have time to think of something else. They’re signing that contract tomorrow and this is the best bet we got.”. Tracy danced uncomfortably close to Trevor and asked: “Issss there anything IIIII can doooooo????”. Trevor pushed him aside and said: “I don’t know, man. Go play in traffic or something, I don’t care.”. “Caaaaaan Dooooo.” Tracy says as he runs off, whimsically skipping away. He turns back to Jenny and says: “If we don’t do this now, we’ll both be doomed into matrimony.”. “It’s you’re call. Whaddya say?” Pike asks. Back at her house, Jenny just handed her mom a basket full of the muffins. “Muffins, huh?” the mother questions. “Yeah, he said that it was like a welcome to the family kind of gift he wanted me to give you.” Jenny said, trying to pull of a genuine smile. The mom looked at the basket of baked goods for a moment before gleefully saying: “Well. I’m glad to see that this Juda boy is giving us such a warm welcome and taking all of this with some degree of maturity. Why can’t you be more like him, Jenny?”. The girls fake smile almost breaks at the last remark. “You know,...I think I might see what dad is up to.”. Jenny starts walking off, saying under her breathe: “Hope you cough on those muffins.”. “What was that?”. “Oh, just saying that I hope you enjoy those muffins, hee hee.”. Jenny walks around the corner, then lightly peaks from behind the wall. “Come on. Eat one.” she quietly says. She watches as her mom picks one of the muffins from the basket and starts to carefully look at it. “Wait. What’s she doing?”. The mother stares at the muffin with an unblinking gaze. Jenny starts to sweat along her forehead. After staring at the treat for a while, Jenny’s mom finally takes a big bite out of it. Jenny quietly breathes a sigh of relief and starts waiting in anticipation for the serum to take effect. She watches as her mother gets down on her knees and passes out on the floor. The girl slowly approaches her mothers body and shakes her, saying: “Mom?...Mom?...Oh no.” Jenny backs up when her mom starts to rise. The woman begins to breathe heavily. Jenny starts to slowly approach again and say in a more concerned tone: “Mom?”. Her mothers breathing starts turning into deep growl, like a lion would make when an inferior predator walks into its den. Jenny start backing up again and watches as demon wings and a tail sprout from her back. The womans size starts to double, tearing her clothes apart from her body. Her skin start turning a dark shade of pink. Red horns start to sprout from her head. Finally, she lets out a loud demonic roar that shakes the foundation of their house. The demon then jumps up and crashes through the roof. Jenny runs out and sees her flying towards Trevor manor. “What?” Jenny meekly said. Trevor and Pike were sitting in the living room, watching TV. A bonking noise followed by a guy screaming came from the TV, prompting both of them to laugh. “Hey, how long has it been since Jenny left?” Trevor asked. Pike pulled out his phone and said: “About an hour.”. “Huh, didn’t think hypnotizing somebody would take this long.”. “Maybe I should call her. See what’s going on.”. Just then, Pike phone range. He looked at it and saw that Jenny was call. “Well, speak of the devil.”. He answers it and says: “S’up babe...Huh?...What!?...Slow down. You said you’re mom did what now?”. Pike began to walk away as he was talking. Trevor looking at him from behind the couch and then shrugging as he went back to watching TV. Just then, the wall behind the TV suddenly burst, the dust and rubble scattering revealing the huge demon. The monster roared at the Trevor, followed by the boy screaming as he ran for his life. The beast gave chase as Trevor ran through the hallway, picking up what he can reliably throw as he passes by and chucks them at the pursuing demon. Ranging from vases, end tables, pictures, and others expensive décor, nothing seemed to slow the monster down. The demon chased Trevor through a door into the kitchen to see that the boy had disappeared from her site. She lumbers around the kitchen, trying to check everywhere she can. As she lifting the fridge, Trevor slowly rises from behind the counter with a pan in hand and throws it at the beast. After the pan hit her head, she turns around and gaze at him. Trevor readies another pan, but before he could throw it, the monster spews out a fiery laser at him. The boy ducks and the beam its the pan. Trevor sees that the only thing remaining of said pan was the handle with a melted end. He makes a break for the other door, dodging fire beam after fire beam as he ran. Trevor found himself running through the dinning hall. He hides under the long table, before the monster could burst in. As the beast lumbered through the halls the boy crawled his way under the table, inching closer to the corridor near the end of the hallway. The demon looks down and growls as it spots the poor boy. Trevor get out from under the table and sprints for the exit. The beast jumps after him, missing and crashing into the wall. Hazel comes out of the basement door and shouts: “What is going on out here!?”. She then sees Trevor run past her along with the demon chasing him. The witch then slowly retreats, closing the basement. As Trevor runs for his life, he find himself in thought, thinking: “This isn’t good. Usually Jewely has my back in these kind of situations. With her around, this stuff wouldn’t happen.”. He turns the corner, barely dodging a scorching fireball that breaks through the wall. “Hold on, I’m near the backyard right? I’m on the second floor too. I think I have an idea. Just gotta find the right window.”. The demon was starting to catch up to the boy. Just as she was about to blast him, Trevor jumps out a nearby window. The demon breaks through the wall and looks below, but saw nothing except the light glistening from the pool. The beast flies ahead to the rest of the backyard. When the monster was out of site, Trevor came out from the poolside, catching his breathe as he surfaced. He sees the demon land in the garden and a shovel stuck in the ground. The boy pulls it out to show its narrow sharp end and starts slowly approaching the demon from behind. When the beast was about to look back, Trevor dived behind a low hedge. He crawled along the ground as the monster walked around. Trevor manages to get behind the monster and was about to steak the beast in the back. He then hears somebody screaming aside him from afar: “Trevor, Stop!”. The boy look to the side as the monster turns around and sees Pike peeking out one of the windows. “That not just a demon! It’s Jenny’s mom!”. “What!?” Trevor says, before the demon in question punched him aside, sending him flying into the side of the yard. As he tried getting up from the dirt, he saw the monster approach and say in a slightly deep feminine voice: “You thought that you could try and take control of me and get away with it. I’ve had sleazy people try and use legal loopholes to extort my business. I’ve had some of my competitors try and buy my company from under me. I’ve even had death threats sent to my own family. Do you know what eventually happened to all of those people. Those people who lie in their attempts to try and control me?”. Trevor starts to slowly back up as Jenny mom approaches. Before he could run away, the demon grabs Trevor and lifts him to her face. “They have all met with the same fiery fate as many others who’ve tried to cross me. Just like you will.”. The demon opens her mouth and is about to blast Trevor into oblivion, until she hears Pike shouting: “Hey!”. She looks behind her and sees the boy through one of the windows. “I was that made those muffin! Come and get me, you red winged crone!”. “Pike, what are you doing!?” Trevor shouts. Jenny’s mom throws Trevor aside and starts flying towards his friend. Pike quickly retreats and runs before the beast crashes through the wall. Trevor starts limping back inside and finds Jewely’s broom closet. As he digs through the cleaning supplies, he thinks: “I know Jewely keeps some magic stuff in here that might help. Where is it?”. He shoves some disinfectant aside and sees a secret compartment labeled: “In case of demon attack.”. Opening it reveals a whole mess of occult items. He pulls a book out from the space whose cover read: “How to capture demons 101.”. He flips through the table of contents and says: “Come on, gotta have something.”. Trevor points to something inside the book and said: “Ah ha. This might help.”. Pike runs up the stairs and notices a grandfather clock at the top. Jenny’s mom flies up and sees the boy pushing the clock down the steps. “Sorry about this.” he says as he pushes the antique down. The demon burns the clock into ash before it could hit her. Seeing this, Pike sprints away as the beast gives chase. As the monster chases the boy, she says out loud: “I knew letting Jenny have a boyfriend was a bad idea. But when has that girl ever listened to me.” She shoots out fireballs at him that he narrowly avoids. “I’m just trying to give my daughter the best possible future and apparently she thinks I’m the bad guy. Me!”. The boy sees a set of descending stairs and jumps down as he evades an oncoming blast. “I should have just destroyed you back in that dinner date. I won’t make that same mistake again.”. Pike notices his phone ringing and pulls it out to show that Trevor was calling. He answers and says: “Kind of busy running for my life here, Trevor.”. “Lead her to the entrance hall. I have an idea.”. When his friend hung up, Pike dashed forward to try and gain some distance. He managed to find his way in the entrance hall running down the steps on the side. The demon flew after him and was quickly closing the distance. In a desperate bid, Pike jumped down the side of the steps and lands on the hard eggshell marble floor. The boy groans in pain as Jenny’s mom lands, crawling away as she walked towards him. “I guess I should thank you for making my daughter happy for as long as you did.”. Pike sees her large shadow from behind and turns around to see that the monster was right in front of him. “For that, I’l make your death swift and painless.” the beast says as she reaches for him. Just before she could reach him, a red tinted light stops her. “What!?”. She puts her hand up to the shield and sees the light surround her in a circle. “No!?”. Pike watches as the beast tries to break free from it’s newfound prison. After spouting flames at the barrier to no effect, she shouts: “What have you done!? What is this!?”. Trevor comes out from the corridor and says: “That, you murderous hellspawn, is a sealing circle made from chalk that I etched in the floor, specifically designed to entrap ravenous demons like you.”. Jenny’s mom looks down and barely sees the chalk etchings. She pounds on the barrier and shouts: “Let me out of here!?”. Trevor walks over to pick his friend up and asks: “You okay?”. “Yeah, I’m fine, its just...everything hurts, ahhhg!”. “I got smacked 20 yards across the side of my yard. How do you think I feel?”. Pike looks over at the demon that just tried to kill him and asks: “What are we gonna do with her?”. “Dunno. Didn’t think that mind control serum would equate to transforming somebody into a rampaging beast. But, I guess that’s life when ya experiment.”. “Maybe Hazel has something that can fix this.”. Both of them started heading down the corridor, but turn around when they hear the sound of cracking glass to see the barrier breaking. “I thought you said the barrier was designed to trap demons.” Pike says. “It is. I followed every step. I don’t know what’s happening.” Trevor answered as he flipped through the book. He got to the page where he found the seal and read the note at the bottom aloud. “Results may vary depending on the demon in question. High level demons may escape.”. The boy closed the book and said: “Well crap.”. The monster shatter the seal, pieces fall to the ground as they dissipate with her gaze fixed on the boys. She starts to slowly approach the both of them, backing up as the demon draws closer. “I’d say run, but my leg is kinda broken.” Pike says. “Yours too huh? Kinda hoping you’d carry me.” Trevor responds. “This has gone on long enough. Its time I put this meeting to rest.”. She takes a deep breath, readying one final blast. Both of them see the light coming out of her mouth. “Well Pike, this rides been fun while it lasted. Honestly I’d never thought I’d go like this.”. “I did, but I didn’t want to say anything.”. Just as the demon was about to kill the both of them, somebody burst through the door and shouts: “Stop!”. The demon looked behind her and saw her own daughter through the door. “Jenny, what are you doing? Can’t you see that I’m busy.”. “You can’t just kill them like this. They’re my friends.”. “Do you know what these two tried to do? They tried to forcefully control me and ruin our lively hood. And worst off, they used my favorite snack to do it.”. “No, they didn’t.”. Jenny got in front of Trevor and Pike, blocking them from her mom. “I did. We all did.”. “What!? Young lady, you better have a good explanation for this. Using a mind control drug on your own mother.”. “What else could I have done? You never asked me if I was okay with this. And when I did brought it up, you always just turn me down. You never think about what I wanna do, how I feel.”. “You don’t know how you feel.”. “You’re wrong.” somebody said. All of them looked to the side and saw Jenny’s father. “Honey, we can’t do this. We can’t force our own daughter down a path we set. She has to be free to make her own choices.”. “What do you mean? I had aspirations just like her once and I’ve never manage to fulfill any of them. I was forced to survive the very streets and claw my way to the top for me and my family and all I did was put my dreams behind me. I’ll I’m doing is making sure our daughter doesn’t suffer like I did. Her happiness shouldn’t matter.”. The father took a moment before saying: “Do you remember the night we first met?”. “It was new years day, the final hour of the night passed and the old year left behind. Both of us were attending the annual new years gala. While everybody was celebrating the beginning of the year. I saw you out on the balcony, all alone. I asked why you were out here by your lonesome. Do you remember what you said? You told me that new years didn’t really mean anything to you and that you only attended for business. I asked why you stayed. And you told me that you’ve never seen fireworks in person before. I was surprised. Say how can somebody well off enough to be invited in this gala never seen fireworks before. It’s because you worked so hard and barely had time for pleasures. However the fireworks were rather late and you’d considered heading back. I begged for you to stay, saying that the show would be worth the late wait. You thought about it for a moment and could have ignored me and left, but you didn’t. You choose to trust me. That night, the star filled sky lite up in a beautiful spectacle of dazzling colors, blazing through the air like exploding meteors launching from the depths of the earth. As they were going off, I looked back at you to see you had the most starstruck gaze I have ever saw, as if you stared off into the edge of the universe. After the show I asked what you thought of the fireworks. You said that seeing them in pictures and TV could never do them justice. I then introduced myself, as did you. When the party was over, I asked if I could see you again. That I could show you all kinds of wonders that you were missing. Ever since then, you have let me into your heart, time and time again. You never regretted any of those times, did you?”. “My point being is that nobody force me to go to that party, just like I didn’t force you to stay. You have left me and went on with your life. But you stopped for me. It was all your choice.”. All three of them looked back to find the mother in tears. “While it is true that we cannot control everything in this world, no matter how hard we try, there are somethings that we can control. You need to let our daughter have that control. Just like you had when you first met me.”. The demon walked over and hugged her husband. “I was just so focused on what was best for Jenny, I never realized what I what I was doing to her.”. All three of them watched the beasts hugged her tiny husband. “Aww.” Pike said. “Out of all of the stuff I’ve seen. This is the weirdest site I’ve laid my eyes on.” Trevor remarked. “Say anything and I’ll break your leg.” Jenny threatened. “...Hate to break it to you but somebody already beaten you to the punch.”. The couple in front of them broke of and Jenny’s mom approached her, crouched down to her level and said: “I’m so sorry Jenny. I-I never meant to hurt you like this. I just wanted what was best for you. I never realized that the best choice to make for you was to let you choose for yourself.”. “Wait, so does this mean that your not making me get married?” the daughter asked. The she demon stood up and said: “The contract is terminated. The union will cease.”. The three started cheering, with Jenny hugging Pike and lifting the boy in the air. Trevor approached Jenny’s father and asked: “Sir, aren’t you the tiniest bit concerned that your wife turned into a demon?”. “Oh no no no no. To tell the truth, this is her true form. She can just turn herself human.”. Jenny heard this and drop Pike in shock. “I’ve known even before Jenny was born.”. “Hold up, so if your a demon, does that make me like a half demon?” Jenny asks. “I was going to tell you one day, I jut didn’t think it’d come so soon.” her mom said. She looked at her hands and said: “Cool, wonder if I can shoot fire.”. Jenny, cast her hands out as if she was shooting something from her palms, but nothing was coming out. When she looked at her hands in disappointment, her mom said: “Don’t worry. I can teach you the ropes when you get older. Now let’s go home.”. Both her husband and daughter got on her back and started flying off. “Bye Pike, see you later.” Jenny said as they flew away. Both of them watched as the family flew off into the sunset. “Well that was sweet...and terrifying...and...painful...Imma go to the doctor to fix my leg. Wanna come Pike?” Trevor said. “...Yeah sure.”. After which, Trevor was called in by the executives at his company to report to the main office. He walked into the meeting room and said: “Hey guys, how’s it shakin?”. “Trevor. I’m afraid to tell you that the deal with Mrs. Hemingway fell through.” one of the executives said. “Oh, what a shame. Who could have saw that coming?” the boy said with covered sarcasm “Yes. Without her support, we don’t have enough finance to support our employee payroll and had to have taken drastic measures.”. “We had to lay off one of our executive employee’s.”. “That sucks. Whose the pour sap that got fired?”. All of them look at the boy with contempt. Trevor realized who was being fired and said: “What!?”. “We’re sorry Mr. Juda. But I’m afraid that you are no longer required at this establishment.”. “You...You can’t do this! The company is in my family’s name! I own it!”. “No, you don’t. You never did. Your mother did. After her death, the right’s fell into our hands. We would have dumped you outright, but were contracted under obligation not to.”. “We’ve tried everything we could to break you. But no matter how hard we push, you just would not quit.”. “We know you must have done something to change Mrs. Hemingways mind. And in your actions, have put this business in jeopardy. Giving us legal right to be rid of you.”. “As of now, this business belongs to yours truly.” the man in center with a slick haircut said. Trevor was about to run up to the table and punch them, but a security guard grabbed him and started to drag him out of the room. “You won’t get away with this! I’ll find where you guys live! I’ll make sure you pay!” he said as he struggled in the guards hold. “At least take comfort in this fact Mr. Juda. Your absence will save this company.”. The doors to the office close.

#The Ghostly Maid #lillaxtrigger

[stunudo]

That Got Away: A Criminal Minds Fan-fiction Part 9

Inspired by: Katy Perry’s “The One That Got Away”

Foo Fighters “Monkey Wrench”

Featuring: Spencer x Reader   Rating: Teen    Setting: Season 4

(I know this pic is from season 5, but come on!) A/N: What does it mean when you make yourself cry while writing? Angst. Let’s see if the team can make up for the crappy hotel security... xoxo Stu

I do not own any of the lyrics, characters or images.

Part 1   Part 7    Part 8

Emily saw the envelope sitting neglected on the desk. The unsubs had the BAU rolling around this hotel like a tangled ball of yarn betwixt the claws of a pack of sadistic kittens. She grabbed a pair of gloves from a uniformed cop at the desk, knowing in her gut it was exactly like the one found at Reid’s hotel room that morning. She opened the gently pronged seal, a single sheet of printer paper with typical Times New Roman Font stared back.

Regarding: A Trade

When: At your earliest convenience

Who: Dr. Reid for Agent Jareau

Where: To Be Determined

How: Please have Dr. Reid pick up the security desk phone and dial #999 to receive further instructions

Don't wanna be your monkey wrench One more indecent accident I'd rather leave than suffer this I'll never be your monkey wrench

You felt like you were trapped in a bad after school special about abstinence. How could your dad; your sweet, goofy, dork of a dad be this controlling?! You were an adult. You had lived on your own for an entire year of college. Why was it so bad to finally have a boyfriend? Even in your memories you could hear the whine of your voice in your thoughts. You had never felt so alone and angry before. What could you do with all these emotions?

You blasted Dave Grohl through the sound system and threw your stuff around your bedroom.

“JJ, can you see an exit? Can you get out of there before she catches up to you?” Hotch did not want to risk heroics, he wanted JJ back with the team.

“Yeah, Hotch, there seems to be a door at the end of the other hall. If I make it through, I will work on getting above ground.” JJ had controlled her breathing, yet she was still determined to move on to the next step of escaping. “If I don’t come back to the phone, take it as a good sign.”

“JJ, be careful.” Hotch stayed on the line, until he heard the other phone rest into the cradle.

Spencer was agitated, “Hotch, did she see Y/N? Were there any other doors she could have tried?!”

Hotch looked at Reid with his serious, yet blank face. “You can ask her when we get her back. Right now, we know Dr. Y/L/N is not in any real danger. Also, one of the unsubs have been taken down with ease.”

“And one of them is walking amongst us.” Emily Prentiss had arrived with the next clue from the suspects. “We have another note. This time it is an invitation for Reid.”

Every member of the local and BAU team present exchanged glances as Spencer rushed toward Agent Prentiss. She held up the page for him to read without touching it. His eyes ran over the note, it was impossibly short. He read it three times. “Hotch, make sure Garcia is on the trace.”

Spencer walked calmly back over to the security desk and picked up the phone.

Morgan and Rossi were in the conference room staring at the wall. There were three “known” unsubs: Kurt Hansen, Unsub Mail Carrier (female) and Unsub Prison Guard (older female). The available pictures and generic descriptions were on sheets with details of the profiles below each part of the team. This group was organized, willing to take high risk victims and had resources to pull this off.

They were pointing to the one keeping watch of JJ and Y/N as the leader, this was personal for her. They were looking into ties with both Dr. Y/L/Ns to build a suspect list. Y/N was injured while JJ was not, was this about her from the beginning? Had the father’s murder occurred because the original target, Y/N was not yet in Pasadena?

Kurt Hansen was muscle and accessibility. He probably didn’t know much about the other members of the team, but he liked their bankroll. How did Y/N end up choosing a room at this hotel? Did they know that the BAU would be staying here as well? How far did their research go?

The mail carrier unsub was fearless. She made no attempt to hide her features besides knowing where security cameras were. She helped develop the games that Reid and Y/N were battling. She was intelligent, probably a sociopath, and also had a personal vendetta against Y/N.

The room behind your wall had a tussle. You hoped JJ was alright, Auntie Miriam could have a mean streak about her. You tried to get her attention after you heard her door, followed by a yelp. Yet again you were greeted with silence. You began reciting Nonnus’ ‘Dionysiaca’ because right now you could really use a god of wine.

Bring me the fennel, rattle the cymbals, ye Muses! put in my hand the wand of Dionysos whom I sing: but bring me a partner for your dance in the neighbouring island of Paros, Proteus of many turns, that he may appear in all his diversity of shapes, since I twang my harp to a diversity of songs. For if, as a serpent, he should glide along his winding trail, I will sing my god’s achievement--

It was not your favorite epic poem, but it was flowery and the dank cell you were in needed such fantastic color. You returned to sitting on the cold floor, your lack of underwear a constant reminder of how far you had fallen over the course of this short, yet arduous day. You smiled against the desperation, you had spent the night with ‘ton chevalier’ and those memories were worth reliving.

Too soon reality returned. After some time, you began to accept that you had gotten your father killed by being a terrible niece. Aunt Miriam needed something from you and apparently Spencer also. What you two could offer her, after years apart was the largest puzzle piece. You hoped Spencer was safe, wherever he was. That his team would protect him, as they tried to protect you. After all, he didn’t deserve to be hurt by your family again.

All this time to make amends What do you do when all your enemies are friends Now and then I'll try to bend Under pressure Wind up snapping in the end

This was Spencer’s third pass down Dr. Y/L/N’s office in an hour. The young doctor knew the older man was studying him, he just couldn’t have foreseen their conversation.

“Spencer, why don’t you come in for a sec?” Dr. Y/L/N’s wide face beckoned through his casually open office door. Spencer set his last box of materials on the floor near the door. He plopped down on one of the same uncomfortable brown laminate chairs that were found throughout the building. He waited, his breathing still labored from his repeat trips to his next research hub and he didn’t know what Dr. Y/L/N wanted.

From his spot, Spencer could see a framed photograph of Y/N. She was probably eight or nine, in the background was the Colosseum. Her front teeth elephantine to her features. Spencer wondered if that was before or after Dr. Y/L/N’s wife had passed. For someone so fortunate to travel the world and absorb such varied cultures and history, Y/N had been through many hardships. Spencer smiled, knowing just how the world hadn’t truly seen Y/N Y/L/N yet.

“Spencer,” Graham sighed, “I have been watching you fall in love with my Y/N/N for a year now. And I am sorry for that.”

Spencer’s brown eyes bulged in embarrassment, he cleared his throat. “Sir? While I have known Y/N for one year, two months, 6 days and eighteen hours, I would not say my feelings,” his voice cracking, “were as that involving the complex chemical and hormonal mixture that is romantic love until most recently.”

“Spencer, when you are an old man, such as I am,” Dr. Y/L/N continued. “You will witness young love quite clearly as you can never have it like that again. It is fleeting and priceless.” His large form rose to sit on the edge of his fine desk, taking a casual aside in this formal setting. “I have turned a blind eye these past few weeks, because she is, you both are so special to me. But I can no longer ignore the potential ramifications from such summer flings.”

Spencer’s mind soared while his stomach dropped to the floor. The worst was the shame he felt, it gave him a searing jolt; silencing his usually generous words. His mouth opened and closed before he could articulate, “Sir, I, um we have not done anything that could endanger your daughter. I, mean, sir I wouldn’t hurt her.”

“Even so, I have made arrangements with my sister. Y/N will be spending the rest of her summer with her Aunt in San Francisco. She is leaving tomorrow morning. You are welcome to say goodbye, if you would like.”

Spencer stood. Like an animal released from a pen, he could no longer sit in one place. He picked up his research box and dropped it, twice, before looking back at his mentor. Then all he saw was the man that was oddly breaking his heart. “I will, I will call Y/N and set up a time, sir. Thank you, I must, <cough> go now and finish up in my new department, sir.”

JJ made it to the doorway at the end of the narrow hall from the captor’s base. The wide push release at waist height engaged, allowing her passage. She found another short hallway, it’s floor descending. It was lined in cinder blocks and ended in a ladder like a service entrance. She turned, trying to retrace her steps, but there was no handle on the exterior of the door she had used.

JJ squared her shoulders and began to climb up the cold iron rungs. The buzzing lights of the basement were lost as she ascended into warmer air. The sounds of machinery and voices urged the agent onward. People were near, people are her specialty, she can work with people. Her exhausted, undernourished mind kept thoughts at a minimum. Suddenly she couldn’t climb anymore, her hands and head bumped into a heavy stone hatch.

After ensuring Garcia was on the line and tracing the call, Spencer pushed the code through. The answering rings were clipped, more mechanical than he expected. On the fourth chirp, she answered, rather breathy. “Dr. Reid I presume.”

“Why did you give up on the prose?” Spencer started, “Was it for efficiency sake or couldn’t you find your muse? Perhaps that little errand girl you have roaming the lobby didn’t meet your deadline and you had to improvise.”

“No matter, Dr. Reid.” The older woman appeared to be talking, a notable accent the more she spoke. “As you now have Agent Jareau, how would you like to proceed?”

Spencer looked to Hotch, JJ wasn’t here. What did this woman want after losing her trading jewel? Hotch shook his head at Reid, knowing it wouldn’t convince him anyway. “Miriam, Miriam Y/L/N?” Spencer held his hand over the mouthpiece, and stage whispered, “The unsub is Y/N’s aunt!”

Hotch was floored, “Reid, are you sure?” Spencer nodded, writing on a pad beside the phone: ‘same accent as Graham’ in his stylized scribbles.

The team regrouped, Emily called Morgan to continue with the profile. Garcia flew through her research getting any information that could take this brother-killer down. Hotch continued to watch Reid and Y/N’s monitor. Someone had entered the room with her, but Hotch wouldn’t draw Spencer’s eye away from the phone.

Part 10

@sparkle-dinosaur, @dontshootmespence @reiding-and-writing @speedreiding @reid-my-fortune @sapphire1727 @holagubler @cherry-loves-fanfic @lookingforgalifrey @miss-gleek-freak-geek @criminal-minds-fanfiction @reidbyers @sortaathief 

#Criminal Minds #criminal minds fanfiction #criminal minds fanfictions #spencer reid #spencer x reader #spencer imagine #jj ftw #teen angst #ugh what is happening #Dr Reid #smart is the new sexy #no go for trade #knowing the unsubs #bau #oh my god #history dork #sap #some fluff too #so many tears #katy perry #foo fighters #dave grohl

[sinceileftyoublog]

Pile Interview: Lighten Up

BY JORDAN MAINZER

As I talk on the phone a couple months ago with Pile frontman Rick Maguire, he’s blocks away. I’m in my apartment; he’s just scarfed down a plate of poutine at Chicago Diner, with a Soul Bowl coming on the way. We could meet up, but he’s got a show that night at Lincoln Hall to prepare for. Plus, as I learn later in the call, he likes being alone.

Pile’s new album A Hairshirt of Purpose, out tomorrow, sees Maguire coming to terms with this solitude. A decidedly mellower affair that still finds room for the rockers like the ones on the previous You’re Better Than This, the new album is a sign of growth for a band that’s been at it for almost ten years. At this point, they’re split playing houses and clubs (a cancelled Wicker Park Fest set last summer saw them instead play a house), but their new material is certainly more friendly to a venue. Unlike lead single “Texas”, which could have fit on any of their previous albums, the second single, the string-laden “Dogs”, is par for the course with A Hairshirt of Purpose. This time around, they’ve proved they can deliver their reliably nervous music all with a sense of humor and melody.   

During our conversation, Maguire shed light on his and the band’s intentions with A Hairshirt of Purpose. He also talked about his and the band’s growth over the years--including becoming a bath person. Read the conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.

Since I Left You: A Hairshirt of Purpose shows an expanded sound in terms of pace and instrumentation. Was that a conscious decision?

Rick Maguire: Yeah. Most of the records we’ve done in the past were documents of us as a live band, so we tried to do something we couldn’t reproduce live. We weren’t sure what form that was gonna take, but we were still open to those ideas.

SILY: Your live show tends to be abrasive. Is that gonna continue with these songs?

RM: Yeah, for some of them. Some of them will probably stay on the mellower side to add a little dynamic to the live part. A lot of the older stuff is aggressive, so it’d be nice to balance.

SILY: Did you play these songs live for a while before sitting down to record them?

RM: Not too much. What we’ve done on the past is go on tour with new material and then go right back into the studio. Some of them this time around we hadn’t played in front of anybody before.

SILY: Tell me about the string arrangements on “Dogs”.

RM: Our friend [Elisabeth] Fuchsia plays viola. It’s kind of a dramatic song, so I thought we’d have a string arrangement on there. She was the one who went into the studio and layered one after the other.

SILY: Your vocal register on “Worms” is almost a country western twang. On other songs, you hit a higher register. What were you trying to do on this album as a singer?

RM: I wanted to do stuff a little differently. I’ve done the yelling and screaming thing on the past couple records, and there’s obviously some of that on there, but I’m more focused on melody.

SILY: Thematically, the record touches on solitude. But with the album’s title, specifically the use of “hairshirt,” were you going for any themes of self-punishment?

RM: It’s mostly sarcastic as far as the punishment part of it goes. The hairshirt of purpose is that it’s awful to have some objective of yourself. As for being alone, I enjoy being alone. I was being sarcastic in reference to earlier stuff where I was a bit hard on myself. It’s a sarcastic way of telling myself to lighten up a little bit.

SILY: The album art has that sense of humor in it.

RM: I just really like the image. I thought it fit with the title.

SILY: Are you a bath person?

RM: Yeah, I would say so. I actually took an epsom salt bath for the first time ever. Up until a week ago, I would have said no. But I enjoyed it. I took pictures of myself in the tub and everything.

SILY: With your lyrics, are you conveying a feeling rather than autobiography?

RM: Yeah, kinda. A lot of it is pretty vague, which is obviously intentional. It’s equal parts autobiographical and equal parts observation. It’s putting myself in it and taking myself out of it.

SILY: Is the “Leaning on a Wheel” line “Let’s have a baby to save the marriage” a reference to something that happened in real life?

RM: Oh, no. Not actually. It’s sort of what people do when they see something that’s failing and rather than walk away or assess it rationally, they double down.

SILY: That is a hairshirt of purpose in a nutshell, right?

RM: Yes [laughs].

SILY: How do you think you’ve grown since the last record, and how do you think you’ve grown throughout your entire lifetime?

RM: From the last one to this one, we were more prepared, intentional, and deliberate in recording. Being able to manage stress personally has been a big thing. I’ve grown in that way. I used to not really be able analyze that sort of stuff. I was much more anxious.

As a band, I think were just trying to explore different avenues. We’ve been doing the loud rock band in a basement thing for a long time. I’m content to continue doing that to an extent but it’s fun to try stuff out, see what we’re all capable of. We’re just as committed to playing with each other as we were when we started. I’m really grateful for that.

#pile #Interviews #music #a hairshirt of purpose #exploding in sound records #rick maguire #chicago diner #soul bowl #poutine #lincoln hall #you're better than this #wicker park fest #elisabeth fuchsia

[cryptswahili]

Living on Bitcoin Day 1: “That’s Not Going to Work”

“The point is to get people to think about bitcoin, not spend it. I don’t think it’s good for that. It’s not meant to be used like cash,” Jeremy Gardner, founder of Ausum Ventures, advised me.

“Satoshi created a decentralized store of value,” probably encapsulates his thesis that bitcoin is best unspent — better to hoard it like gold. To Gardner, using it as a currency is not only impractical. It is counterintuitive.

Well, I’m trying it anyway.

After all, journalist Kashmir Hill experimented with living on bitcoin as early as 2013, so it should be easier now, right? Well, it is and it isn’t. Nearly six years later, I’m discovering that, while bitcoin’s payment infrastructure has advanced, its use as a method of payment, at least in San Francisco, has seemingly regressed.

Before reporting to the conference I’m attending here in San Francisco, I had something important to do: I had to pay my respects to the pioneer.

Before leaving my home in Nashville to start my experiment, I reached out to Kashmir Hill, a former Forbes-gone-Gizmodo journalist who did this in 2013 (and again in 2014). She graciously took me up on my request to meet up so I could pick her brain and seek advice.

Getting to her was my first unbanked transaction. Transportation was a problem in her own experience until she got a bike, and even then, San Francisco’s hilly landscape is unforgiving, so it still wasn’t easy. It’s a way to get around, though, and I like the idea of being bike reliant for transport.

All of my attempts to buy or rent one on Craigslist haven’t come to anything yet, so that’ll have to wait.

I do have Paxful to buy Uber gift cards. Opting for this, I signed up for the exchange (where I had to give a phone number for authentication but no name) and transferred $25 worth of bitcoin from my BRD wallet. After executing a quick trade with one “Marxsmith,” I found myself with 25 bucks worth of Uber credit on my account.

Hill arrived at La Boulangerie shortly after my Uber dropped me off, immediately recognizable, thanks to the turquoise highlights that accentuated the tips of her hair.

When I thanked Hill for agreeing to meet with me, she replied she was naturally sympathetic to anyone who made the decision to live solely on bitcoin for a week. So sympathetic, she offered to pay my meal forward (the bakery doesn't accept bitcoin). I insisted on repaying her for the cheese danish and latte, but she said that she'd need to see if she remembered her Coinbase login to give me her public address.

"I wrote the articles and pretty much forgot about bitcoin," she joked.

It was during the first major media cycle that came along with the 2013 bubble that Hill experimented with living on bitcoin. Not many people knew what bitcoin was yet. A few mainstream journalists were starting to pump out articles about what was, to many, a novel experience in itself: buying bitcoin.

Hill's editor wanted to take the novelty farther: “Don't just buy bitcoin. Live on it for a week.” So she did.

"It was really on the fly — I got pretty lucky," she laughed, calling the planning and execution "lackadaisical."

If her approach was lax, the execution was anything but. She attended one of San Francisco's famous “Bitcoin at $100” meetups (along with Ross Ulbricht of Silk Road fame), she shacked up in the crack-house-turned-hacker-hostel/cypher community, 20Mission, and she even toured Coinbase when it was “three guys in an apartment," she put it.

As she mentioned this, a waiter brought our lattes. They were absurdly served in literal bowls about as big as my face.

At the end of it, she remarked that she had very much been assimilated into this community. Using the bitcoin that the community had tipped her throughout the week, she took about 50 or so of them out to a sushi dinner, an 8-something BTC meal that, in a few years, would have been worth an Ivy League education.

When I lived on Bitcoin in 2013, I treated a bunch of strangers to a sushi dinner that cost 10 bitcoin. At current valuation, that was a $99,000 sushi dinner!

— Kashmir Hill (@kashhill) November 28, 2017

The crypto community in 2013 was devout but scant, and so were the places Hill could spend bitcoin. Her entire experience was punctuated by a sense of getting by. This is best encapsulated by the final line of her 2013 series: “I survived.”

I compared notes with her about what I foresaw as being my biggest obstacles for the week, making mental notes to see if I could do more than “survive” and if 2013 might have actually been an easier year for the experiment.

As our conversation came to a close, Hill left me with a nugget of advice that I’d adopted as a mantra for my own iteration of the experiment.

“Don’t make the focus about yourself. Make it about other people, who the experiment allows you to access.”

Leaving La Boulangerie, I took an Uber back to the conference venue, where I made arrangements with Jeremy Gardner to visit a new project he’s working on and, of course, tour the infamous Crypto Castle.

We had a tight time frame; he was leaving for Park City, Utah, that night to go snowboarding.

“You can come by the castle tonight. Or later in the week, someone will let you in, show you around — I don’t care.”

We eventually settle on a 4:00 p.m. meeting outside of Monarch, a popular club wedged between San Francisco’s Mid Market and Tenderloin districts that accepts bitcoin by-the-bottle. It’s within walking distance of the conference which is good because my Uber credit was running low and the conference didn’t have any Wi-Fi for me to get on Paxful/Bitrefill to top it off.

The rest of the early afternoon was spent prepping for and moderating a panel, after which I scrambled around, looking for a USB-C charger to juice my phone and keep my financial lifeline alive (I had lost my charger that morning, of course). The conference tech staff was nice enough to lend me a charger, one of many acts of good will that seems to continually grace my experience.

When the time rolls around, Jeremy meets me with one of his business partners, Micah, who owns Monarch and another bitcoin accepting club in San Francisco, Great Northern. We hop one building over to their new project: a pawn shop that serves as the front for a speakeasy, both of which will accept bitcoin.

The shop had been a pawn for a while, Gardner said, buying, trading, selling and even offering loans and collateral for years before it shut down.

“All the snakey stuff,” he intimated.

Jeremy latched onto the speakeasy idea without much hesitation. He was disappointed that San Francisco only has two to its name and thought that the city ought to share with the rest of America in an emerging cultural trend (even Nashville has four or five).

“It’s more intimate and comfortable. It’s not the constant in-and-out traffic like at bars, so people stay longer.”

The pawn shop, with its display cases of cheap jewelry, tarnished silver and surprisingly intact china, is just a front, of course, but it adds an authentic element of secrecy to the bar. Jeremy wants to give the front its own distinguishing appeal. He wants it to only accept bitcoin.

“I’m imploring people to do that,” he said, breaking into a smile.

Micah scurried around, jotting notes and measurements before coming over to me and Jeremy and pouring us a glass of white wine (I’m not refined enough to know which type).

“Sorry, it’s just white,” he said.

“It’s alcohol, and that’s all that matters,” Jeremy replied.

Micah ran off to keep working, leaving Jeremy and me to a conversation on my experiment.

“Yeah, it’s an interesting one. People have done it before,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s good for that. It’s not meant to be used like cash but as a store of value. People don’t like volatility. They want certainty in their currency.”

He didn’t understand why I would spend my bitcoin and not hold on to it, and I told him I don’t see it as spending bitcoin but spending money I would otherwise have to on basic necessities. Jeremy said he’d be interested in a wallet that rebought spent bitcoin, but otherwise, he clings to the maxim that it’s better to hold than spend.

“The point,” he believes, “is to make people think about bitcoin — not spend it.”

We carried the conversation into an Uber on the way to the castle.

I asked Jeremy whether he considered himself a Bitcoin minimalist (he had made the somewhat common comparison between Bitcoin and Friendster earlier in our talk).

“Nah, I’d say I’m more of a shitcoin minimalist.”

Finally, we arrived at the castle. It lived up to its reputation. The outside was as unassuming as any of the nicer, multi-story boarding houses in the city’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, but the inside belied the true spirit of the castle: an eclectic, anything-goes hub of itinerant millennials who live free-of-charge thanks to a benevolent but prodigal 27-year-old member of the crypto riche.

“We had a self driving AI car startup here.” Jeremy gestures to the basement when we enter. “They got a couple mill in funding and moved out,” he added casually.

Up the staircase, the second floor hallways curled away from the stairwell with innumerable ownerless rooms.

“Vitalik has slept in this room a bunch of times,” Jeremy told me as he’s no doubt told countless before me.

“Bu this is where the magic happens,” he said as he came to the third floor. Up top, a lounging area with felt couches, a gas fireplace and a kitchen with a sticker-covered refrigerator that intrigued Business Insider and the New York Times when they profiled the place during the 2017 bullrun. The walls were hung with various print pieces, including a few of Banksy’s. I nearly asked, as a joke, if they were originals but held my tongue.

Jeremy had left to pack his things when Liz, a young realtor boarding at the house, joined me and Rachel, another border. Neither of them were particularly involved in crypto.

“Some of us don’t do anything with it, but others do,” she tells me. “It’s a healthy mix.”

We get on the topic of the experiment, and I bring up Jeremy's latest venture. Rachel, who is seemingly Jeremy’s romantic interest, apparently had no idea and congratulated him when he returned to say goodbye.

“Oh yeah, it’s pretty cool,” he enthuses. He leans in to give Rachel a peck on the cheek.

“When will you be back?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “Probably one to two months.”

Later, I asked Rachel if Jeremy meant what he said as he rushed off to catch an Uber to the airport.

“Absolutely. He means everything he says.”

Liz, aka the Queen of the Castle, has given me permission to stay a few days, and I think I’ll take her up on it later in the week. For the remainder of my initial visit, though, I charged my phone (still struggling here) and used Bitrefill to get more Uber credit. This was much quicker and easier than Paxful. The most KYC they ask is an email, and you can send the bitcoin from any wallet to retrieve the gift card code (Paxful requires you to deposit bitcoin into your account's wallet to trade).

I spent the remainder of the night with my buddy and coworker Christian, who bought me dinner at the Irish Bank, a pub which I erroneously thought accepted bitcoin (I did pay him back in bitcoin). The goodwill of friends and fellow crypto geeks has been essential and I anticipate it will continue to be so throughout the week.

The rest of the night was a blur of exhaustion as we finished dinner and headed back to Christian’s apartment. I had been up since 6:00 a.m. From coffee with Hill to the conference to Jeremy’s speakeasy and Crypto Castle to pub to apartment, I had covered a lot of ground and met a great many people — some interactions and people I haven’t had time to cover in this sprawling account, including a few Crypto Castle residents who were building a rig to mine grin.

I got around, but I spent little bitcoin — unfortunately, none of it directly with any merchants. Hill covered my breakfast, though if she gives me a wallet address, I intend to reimburse her. The conference covered lunch. Bitcoin did buy me dinner, even if indirectly through Christian, and it did buy me Uber credit for transport — another indirect use, but as Christian pointed out to me, I was still supporting a use case and infrastructure.

I crashed on the couch around 12:30 a.m. and was content to know that I would have access to coffee in the morning.

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

#cryptocurrency

[ellahmacdermott]

Living on Bitcoin Day 1: “That’s Not Going to Work”

“The point is to get people to think about bitcoin, not spend it. I don’t think it’s good for that. It’s not meant to be used like cash,” Jeremy Gardner, founder of Ausum Ventures, advised me.

“Satoshi created a decentralized store of value,” probably encapsulates his thesis that bitcoin is best unspent — better to hoard it like gold. To Gardner, using it as a currency is not only impractical. It is counterintuitive.

Well, I’m trying it anyway.

After all, journalist Kashmir Hill experimented with living on bitcoin as early as 2013, so it should be easier now, right? Well, it is and it isn’t. Nearly six years later, I’m discovering that, while bitcoin’s payment infrastructure has advanced, its use as a method of payment, at least in San Francisco, has seemingly regressed.

Before reporting to the conference I’m attending here in San Francisco, I had something important to do: I had to pay my respects to the pioneer.

Before leaving my home in Nashville to start my experiment, I reached out to Kashmir Hill, a former Forbes-gone-Gizmodo journalist who did this in 2013 (and again in 2014). She graciously took me up on my request to meet up so I could pick her brain and seek advice.

Getting to her was my first unbanked transaction. Transportation was a problem in her own experience until she got a bike, and even then, San Francisco’s hilly landscape is unforgiving, so it still wasn’t easy. It’s a way to get around, though, and I like the idea of being bike reliant for transport.

All of my attempts to buy or rent one on Craigslist haven’t come to anything yet, so that’ll have to wait.

I do have Paxful to buy Uber gift cards. Opting for this, I signed up for the exchange (where I had to give a phone number for authentication but no name) and transferred $25 worth of bitcoin from my BRD wallet. After executing a quick trade with one “Marxsmith,” I found myself with 25 bucks worth of Uber credit on my account.

Hill arrived at La Boulangerie shortly after my Uber dropped me off, immediately recognizable, thanks to the turquoise highlights that accentuated the tips of her hair.

When I thanked Hill for agreeing to meet with me, she replied she was naturally sympathetic to anyone who made the decision to live solely on bitcoin for a week. So sympathetic, she offered to pay my meal forward (the bakery doesn't accept bitcoin). I insisted on repaying her for the cheese danish and latte, but she said that she'd need to see if she remembered her Coinbase login to give me her public address.

"I wrote the articles and pretty much forgot about bitcoin," she joked.

It was during the first major media cycle that came along with the 2013 bubble that Hill experimented with living on bitcoin. Not many people knew what bitcoin was yet. A few mainstream journalists were starting to pump out articles about what was, to many, a novel experience in itself: buying bitcoin.

Hill's editor wanted to take the novelty farther: “Don't just buy bitcoin. Live on it for a week.” So she did.

"It was really on the fly — I got pretty lucky," she laughed, calling the planning and execution "lackadaisical."

If her approach was lax, the execution was anything but. She attended one of San Francisco's famous “Bitcoin at $100” meetups (along with Ross Ulbricht of Silk Road fame), she shacked up in the crack-house-turned-hacker-hostel/cypher community, 20Mission, and she even toured Coinbase when it was “three guys in an apartment," she put it.

As she mentioned this, a waiter brought our lattes. They were absurdly served in literal bowls about as big as my face.

At the end of it, she remarked that she had very much been assimilated into this community. Using the bitcoin that the community had tipped her throughout the week, she took about 50 or so of them out to a sushi dinner, an 8-something BTC meal that, in a few years, would have been worth an Ivy League education.

When I lived on Bitcoin in 2013, I treated a bunch of strangers to a sushi dinner that cost 10 bitcoin. At current valuation, that was a $99,000 sushi dinner!

— Kashmir Hill (@kashhill) November 28, 2017

The crypto community in 2013 was devout but scant, and so were the places Hill could spend bitcoin. Her entire experience was punctuated by a sense of getting by. This is best encapsulated by the final line of her 2013 series: “I survived.”

I compared notes with her about what I foresaw as being my biggest obstacles for the week, making mental notes to see if I could do more than “survive” and if 2013 might have actually been an easier year for the experiment.

As our conversation came to a close, Hill left me with a nugget of advice that I’d adopted as a mantra for my own iteration of the experiment.

“Don’t make the focus about yourself. Make it about other people, who the experiment allows you to access.”

Leaving La Boulangerie, I took an Uber back to the conference venue, where I made arrangements with Jeremy Gardner to visit a new project he’s working on and, of course, tour the infamous Crypto Castle.

We had a tight time frame; he was leaving for Park City, Utah, that night to go snowboarding.

“You can come by the castle tonight. Or later in the week, someone will let you in, show you around — I don’t care.”

We eventually settle on a 4:00 p.m. meeting outside of Monarch, a popular club wedged between San Francisco’s Mid Market and Tenderloin districts that accepts bitcoin by-the-bottle. It’s within walking distance of the conference which is good because my Uber credit was running low and the conference didn’t have any Wi-Fi for me to get on Paxful/Bitrefill to top it off.

The rest of the early afternoon was spent prepping for and moderating a panel, after which I scrambled around, looking for a USB-C charger to juice my phone and keep my financial lifeline alive (I had lost my charger that morning, of course). The conference tech staff was nice enough to lend me a charger, one of many acts of good will that seems to continually grace my experience.

When the time rolls around, Jeremy meets me with one of his business partners, Micah, who owns Monarch and another bitcoin accepting club in San Francisco, Great Northern. We hop one building over to their new project: a pawn shop that serves as the front for a speakeasy, both of which will accept bitcoin.

The shop had been a pawn for a while, Gardner said, buying, trading, selling and even offering loans and collateral for years before it shut down.

“All the snakey stuff,” he intimated.

Jeremy latched onto the speakeasy idea without much hesitation. He was disappointed that San Francisco only has two to its name and thought that the city ought to share with the rest of America in an emerging cultural trend (even Nashville has four or five).

“It’s more intimate and comfortable. It’s not the constant in-and-out traffic like at bars, so people stay longer.”

The pawn shop, with its display cases of cheap jewelry, tarnished silver and surprisingly intact china, is just a front, of course, but it adds an authentic element of secrecy to the bar. Jeremy wants to give the front its own distinguishing appeal. He wants it to only accept bitcoin.

“I’m imploring people to do that,” he said, breaking into a smile.

Micah scurried around, jotting notes and measurements before coming over to me and Jeremy and pouring us a glass of white wine (I’m not refined enough to know which type).

“Sorry, it’s just white,” he said.

“It’s alcohol, and that’s all that matters,” Jeremy replied.

Micah ran off to keep working, leaving Jeremy and me to a conversation on my experiment.

“Yeah, it’s an interesting one. People have done it before,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s good for that. It’s not meant to be used like cash but as a store of value. People don’t like volatility. They want certainty in their currency.”

He didn’t understand why I would spend my bitcoin and not hold on to it, and I told him I don’t see it as spending bitcoin but spending money I would otherwise have to on basic necessities. Jeremy said he’d be interested in a wallet that rebought spent bitcoin, but otherwise, he clings to the maxim that it’s better to hold than spend.

“The point,” he believes, “is to make people think about bitcoin — not spend it.”

We carried the conversation into an Uber on the way to the castle.

I asked Jeremy whether he considered himself a Bitcoin minimalist (he had made the somewhat common comparison between Bitcoin and Friendster earlier in our talk).

“Nah, I’d say I’m more of a shitcoin minimalist.”

Finally, we arrived at the castle. It lived up to its reputation. The outside was as unassuming as any of the nicer, multi-story boarding houses in the city’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, but the inside belied the true spirit of the castle: an eclectic, anything-goes hub of itinerant millennials who live free-of-charge thanks to a benevolent but prodigal 27-year-old member of the crypto riche.

“We had a self driving AI car startup here.” Jeremy gestures to the basement when we enter. “They got a couple mill in funding and moved out,” he added casually.

Up the staircase, the second floor hallways curled away from the stairwell with innumerable ownerless rooms.

“Vitalik has slept in this room a bunch of times,” Jeremy told me as he’s no doubt told countless before me.

“Bu this is where the magic happens,” he said as he came to the third floor. Up top, a lounging area with felt couches, a gas fireplace and a kitchen with a sticker-covered refrigerator that intrigued Business Insider and the New York Times when they profiled the place during the 2017 bullrun. The walls were hung with various print pieces, including a few of Banksy’s. I nearly asked, as a joke, if they were originals but held my tongue.

Jeremy had left to pack his things when Liz, a young realtor boarding at the house, joined me and Rachel, another border. Neither of them were particularly involved in crypto.

“Some of us don’t do anything with it, but others do,” she tells me. “It’s a healthy mix.”

We get on the topic of the experiment, and I bring up Jeremy's latest venture. Rachel, who is seemingly Jeremy’s romantic interest, apparently had no idea and congratulated him when he returned to say goodbye.

“Oh yeah, it’s pretty cool,” he enthuses. He leans in to give Rachel a peck on the cheek.

“When will you be back?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “Probably one to two months.”

Later, I asked Rachel if Jeremy meant what he said as he rushed off to catch an Uber to the airport.

“Absolutely. He means everything he says.”

Liz, aka the Queen of the Castle, has given me permission to stay a few days, and I think I’ll take her up on it later in the week. For the remainder of my initial visit, though, I charged my phone (still struggling here) and used Bitrefill to get more Uber credit. This was much quicker and easier than Paxful. The most KYC they ask is an email, and you can send the bitcoin from any wallet to retrieve the gift card code (Paxful requires you to deposit bitcoin into your account's wallet to trade).

I spent the remainder of the night with my buddy and coworker Christian, who bought me dinner at the Irish Bank, a pub which I erroneously thought accepted bitcoin (I did pay him back in bitcoin). The goodwill of friends and fellow crypto geeks has been essential and I anticipate it will continue to be so throughout the week.

The rest of the night was a blur of exhaustion as we finished dinner and headed back to Christian’s apartment. I had been up since 6:00 a.m. From coffee with Hill to the conference to Jeremy’s speakeasy and Crypto Castle to pub to apartment, I had covered a lot of ground and met a great many people — some interactions and people I haven’t had time to cover in this sprawling account, including a few Crypto Castle residents who were building a rig to mine grin.

I got around, but I spent little bitcoin — unfortunately, none of it directly with any merchants. Hill covered my breakfast, though if she gives me a wallet address, I intend to reimburse her. The conference covered lunch. Bitcoin did buy me dinner, even if indirectly through Christian, and it did buy me Uber credit for transport — another indirect use, but as Christian pointed out to me, I was still supporting a use case and infrastructure.

I crashed on the couch around 12:30 a.m. and was content to know that I would have access to coffee in the morning.

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

from InvestmentOpportunityInCryptocurrencies via Ella Macdermott on Inoreader https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/living-on-bitcoin-day-1-thats-not-going-to-work/

[junker-town]

‘The Bachelorette’ bios are out and all the contestants want you to know they’ve had sex before

Congrats, men!

The three biggest events in a season of The Bachelor or Bachelorette are Draft Day, Opening Day, and the Finals. Or, translated out of Sportspeak and into English: The day the bios of the the idiot-bozo-morons looking for D-list fame love are released, the first episode, and the last episode, when one of the idiot-bozo-morons gets chosen as the future spouse of the person they met ten weeks ago.

Wednesday was Draft Day: Yesterday, the good people over at ABC introduced us to the men vying for the heart of Bachelorette Rachel Lindsey, an accomplished lawyer who loves Prince, Michael Jackson, basketball, and is probably far too good for any of them.

I know this because Rachel was one of the final three contestants from last season, and she’s funny, smart, interesting, beautiful, and way cooler than most of the people who churn through this franchise’s fame-making gears. She was 100% too good for Nick “handsome software salesman” Viall, whose essence was that of a corn muffin that didn’t get baked for quite long enough.

But here we are, and, in an act of selfless service journalism, I read through the bios of the dental hygienists and marketing managers so that you don’t have to. They’re all here for the Right Reasons: a couple hundred thousand new Instagram followers. Sorry, I mean true and everlasting love. Here are 13 takeaways:

1. Of course we have two “Blakes”

Blake K. ...

.... was a marine and Blake E. ...

... is an “aspiring drummer” who says his ex-girlfriend was “crazy.” So right out of the gate I can tell you that Blake E. is the lesser Blake, which is saying something, because they’re both named Blake.

2. Congrats on the sex!

The biggest thing I gleaned from reading the bios of these men — who, though more diverse than past seasons, still manage to look all alike — is that they really want us to know they’ve engaged in sexual intercourse before. Check it out:

One of the Blakes (I can’t remember which, and let’s be honest, it doesn’t matter) said he wants to watch the new 50 Shades of Grey movie because he loves “taboo sexy stuff.” Newsflash, Blake: 50 Shades wasn’t even that sexy. Dakota Johnson and whats-his-name who played Christian Grey had about as much chemistry as a pair of two-by-fours who happen to be in close proximity. I bet Blake is bad at sex.

Bryce says he once caught a girl's hair on fire once while having sex with her, and that he’s like a “fresh drink of water with a jolt of lightning” in the bedroom. MAYDAY, RACHEL: Don’t have sex with Bryce, because you’ll get electrocuted and die.

Dean doesn’t want women to bite him in the bedroom. This seems like a risky thing to say off the bat, because what if Rachel’s into that?

Diggy wants us to know he once went on a trip to Cancun on Spring Break where he participated in a "sexual positions" contest. Sick, dude, nice.

Jebidiah says he once had sex off the continental divide on a glacier in the mountains, which seems like a sneaky way of telling us he’s rich.

Jonathan says he “usually lasts a long time (in a good way.)” I just ... these guys are the worst.

Kyle had an ex who was into “BDSM and introduced me to being a dom. Interesting, but don't like hurting people, so it's weird. Fun with her though.” Stop pretending, Kyle. You loved it.

Mohit says Tabasco is the wildest thing he’s ever done in the bedroom. I don’t know whether he means he put hot sauce in some places hot sauce shouldn’t go, or that he once ate a burrito in bed. I would respect the latter more.

3. Everyone loves the rock and matthew mccoughney and denzel and elon musk

This is the most predictable thing about any season of this goddamn franchise: Dudes love The Rock and Elon Musk. Usually they throw in Mark Cuban, too, but this time the majority went with Denzel or Matthew McConaughey.

4. WTF?

Here’s a list of messed up shit from the bios:

Alex once ate a live salamander.

Diggy was stranded on a toilet for hours in 5th grade. This sounds avoidable. Like, just get up.

Diggy also once spent all day with a girl, had sex with her, then pretended to be asleep when she found out her brother was missing so he wouldn’t have to help her.

FREEZE FRAME, RECORD SCRATCH: WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL!? WHAT KIND OF MONSTER ARE YOU, DIGGY?

Grant says his favorite magazine is Playboy, and he added a “;)”.

Why is Jack Stone’s name Jack Stone? Is he the only one who gets to have a last name? Or is his first name two names, and those names are Jack and Stone? I’m confused.

Jebediah says he likes South Africa because of its “great coffee, tea, wine, fruit, food, beautiful animals and landscapes, amazing people and very real problems like HIV and violence.”

Kenny once gave a woman different Edible Arrangements every day for a week.

Lucas says his least ideal date would be going to a funeral.

Mohit isn’t here for the Right Reasons: He says he wants to be on the show because “everyone tells me I'm made for TV/movies. Doesn't mean I'm out here hoping for that, but I would like to break into writing or acting.”

Calling it now: Mohit is going to be the first person other contestants turn on.

5. Adam deserves a swirlie

Adam says his favorite actor is Jennifer Lawrence “because she is every girl's goal,” which is patently untrue and makes me want to punch a wall. The most romantic gift he ever received was a threesome because it was his birthday.

6. I don’t know what any of these guys’ jobs mean

The contestants’ jobs all sound like ones you’d give yourself on a fake LinkedIn account to convince your parents you actually have a career and aren’t just smoking weed in the basement all day long. Except for Jonathan, who says his job is a Tickle Monster, which is a noble profession.

We have: an Information Systems Supervisor, an Aspiring Drummer, an Education Software Manager, a Startup Recruiter, an Executive Recruiter, a Consulting Firm CEO, and a Whaboom (I don’t think it’s a thing).

Michael was a professional basketball player, but apparently he just played in Bulgaria for a few years. This reminds me of when Jordan Rodgers said he was a pro football player because he got cut from three NFL teams and played for a real in Canada.

Peter is a moron. He says he wants to be professional football player for a day since “it is my favorite sport with an awesome paycheck. They're superstars for playing a sport, a game. It just seems so easy.” NARRATOR: It wasn’t.

7. Everyone loves their mom

This does not mean they’re feminists, but I guarantee some will try to tell you it does.

8. These asshats need to relax

Bryan wants to be Bill Gates just because he's so selfless and charitable.

Bryce feels like handwritten letters “are one of the purest forms of materialized emotion.”

Demario says he’s perfect.

Iggy’s favorite magazine is the Harvard Business Review

Jamey would be someone less fortunate for a day so he could “appreciate his life more.”

Jebediah’s past dogs were all half wolf, so you know he’s tough.

9. Future storylines

Blake E. was engaged for 48 hours, so he’s probably capital D damaged with plenty of trust issues. Blake K hates sharks, so the producers will make him swim with them. Dean doesn’t believe in marriage — thinks it’s an “institutionalized sham” — so that’ll definitely be a point of tension. Demario loves Prince, too, so he and Rachel will go on a Prince-themed date and everything will be purple. This is going to sound callous, but several of these guys have mothers who’ve died, so that’ll be A Thing.

10. There are some weird clothes opinions

Brady likes Lululemon, so I’m going to call him Lululemon Brady for the entire show. One of the guys — I can’t remember who and there’s no way I’m going back through all of the bios to find out — says he used to wear JNCOs.

Here’s a picture of JNCOs:

11. Today, in low-key sexism

Bryan thinks sisters need brothers to protect them.

12. Predictions

Calling it now: Anthony wins. He taught in Indonesia and we know he knows how to read, because he’s says a Haruki Murakami book is his favorite. I also know someone he used to work with, and she says he’s a good guy, so it’s Anthony’s basket into which I’m putting all my eggs.

13. One last thing

One of my coworkers has a theory that being the Bachelorette isn’t about looking for love, it’s about figuring out which of the contestants won’t murder you. And when you look at it that way, the show makes a whole lot more sense.