#in defense of jar jar too incidentally

[david-talks-sw]

Saying:

"The Prequels are about the fall of the Jedi because they were too dogmatic, lost their way and were bad, except Qui-Gon and Ahsoka who are TRUE Jedi!"

Is like saying:

"Jar Jar is a Sith Lord!"

Only more people actually mean it and don't realize it's a headcanon.

#tell me I'm wrong #Both are headcanons some fans resort to in order make the Prequel films better to them #Neither is the intended narrative #in defense of the jedi #in defense of jar jar too incidentally

[sisterspooky1013]

Goodnight and Go by SisterSpooky1013

Part of the inspired by songs series, this work is inspired by “goodnight and go” by Imogen Heap.

2219 words, read it here on AO3

His knock was always a welcome interruption. The soft rap rap against her door seemed to have a direct line to her lips, quirking them into a secret smirk that she invariably erased before greeting him. She was, after all, an accomplished avoider, hider, and suppresser of emotions. She had become so adept at concealing her visceral response to him that she found she was unable to let it be known, even now that she felt ready for that part of herself to be seen. Nearly dying from cancer could do that to you; make you rethink why you ever built walls around your heart in the first place. What was meant to protect you from hurt and vulnerability also served to prevent you from having the type of true connection that made life worth living in the first place. And so when she learned her fate, that she would live, she decided to make a change, to let him in, only to discover that she didn’t actually know how. So, brick by brick, she was deconstructing her own defenses. Sometimes that looked like not suppressing a smile, or making a sexual innuendo, or sitting a little closer than was absolutely necessary. It was tedious work, but the progress was continual. What she had not anticipated, however, was how quickly Mulder would respond to the change in her, and how affected she would be by his response.

Mulder had always been affectionate towards her, tender even at times. His broad hand at the small of her back, the occasional stroke of her cheek, a kiss to the top of her head now and then, these were expected and appreciated gestures. Her own demeanor or their sometimes tumultuous relationship never seemed to affect whether he interacted with her in this way; it was simply a given. But the first time she reciprocated, returning his coy smile with a toothy grin of her own instead of a suppressed smirk, she saw his body respond to the feedback. Something shifted in his eyes, or maybe it was more like a subtle wave that traveled down his body, or a spark that sputtered from his fingertips. Whatever it was, she felt it from several feet away, electric and thick and heavy between them, and it hadn’t abated since.

Rap rap.

She felt a flush spread from her chest to her fingertips, and her tongue darted out to taste the smile that stretched across her lips. She wouldn’t push it away this time; she wanted him to see how happy she was to see him. Pulling the door open, she greeted him warmly with a “hi” and he grinned in return, setting off a fluttering in her belly that had previously been reserved for high school crushes. His snug jeans and grey T shirt hugged his muscular body in all the right places, and she decided then and there to pull down her brick for the day, to chip away at part of the wall. Still smiling, she let her gaze float down his body, taking in the hard swell of his pecs and the soft bulge in his pants before she met his eye again. It felt gratuitous and overt, but in reality it was nothing more than a flicker; something he might have missed had he looked away for even a moment. But he hadn’t missed it. She knew because he inhaled deeply and she saw his eyes darken as his pupils expanded, his nervous system unable to suppress its natural response to the flush of dopamine he experienced as a result of her leering.

“Come in,” she said, stepping aside, ignoring the blush that she felt warm her cheeks. She couldn’t suppress her body’s natural response to what felt dangerous and exciting any more than he could. “Can I get you something? Coffee, beer?”

She had been working on not asking why he was there, or what he needed. She wanted to eliminate the pretense that their relationship could exist only as it related to a case or a task, so that they could simply be together without a reason for doing so. Maybe if she stopped asking him to justify why he came over or called, he would do so more often, just because.

“Sure, beer sounds great,” he replied, slipping off his shoes and making for the couch. He had nothing in his hands, seemingly no agenda, and that fact both thrilled her and made her uncomfortable. The discomfort, she knew, was part of her defense mechanisms, and so she chose to ignore it. Another brick fell away with a THUNK as she plopped down beside him, on the middle cushion rather than the opposite end as she normally would.

“What have you been up to today?” She asked, handing him his open bottle while taking a swig of her own. His thick fingers brushed over hers as he took the beer from her hand and she caught his eye briefly.

“Not much, I’ve just been over at the gunmen’s, playing Monopoly of all things.” He pivoted his body towards hers, draping an arm over the back of the couch behind her head, which felt like some kind of embrace though they weren’t touching at all.

“Ah, who won?” She asked, curling her legs underneath her torso so that she could also face him, the side of her body leaning on the back of the couch, his arm close enough that she could smell the soap on his skin.

“Nobody, we just stopped playing. I don’t think I’ve ever finished a game of Monopoly, actually.” He shifted slightly and she felt his fingertips brush over the back of her neck momentarily, sending a shiver up her spine.

“What? How can you just stop without anyone winning?!” She was genuinely incredulous.

Mulder chuckled good-naturedly. “Not everyone is as competitive as you, Scully. We were just playing for fun, it doesn’t matter who won.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “That approach would not fly in the Scully household.”

“I’m suddenly getting an idea of why you never played sports in school,” he teased, touching her neck on purpose this time, squeezing gently. Without allowing herself to think about it, she leaned into his touch like a cat, or a flower seeking sunlight. Encouraged, he threaded his fingers into the hair at the base of her skull and kept them there.

“No,” she replied, though her voice was a little softer, her breath a little less even, “I never played sports because I’m terrible at them.”

“Really? I was under the impression that there’s nothing you aren’t good at.” His eyes were on her lips, studying them as though he was seeing them for the first time. In what was an unconscious tick, her tongue slipped out and ran along the seam of her mouth. She saw his eyebrows jump almost imperceptibly.

“I don’t like doing things I’m not good at, so I generally avoid them,” she answered, trying to ignore the way his fingertips whispered against her skin, and the resulting throb between her legs.

“What are you bad at, other than sports?” He asked, and she was momentarily lost in the flutter of his eyelashes and the green flecks in his irises as they traversed her face, cool and serene and without nervousness. He always seemed so comfortable and in his element, unflappable in a way that she often envied. His eyes fixed on hers and she realized she was staring, but forced herself not to look away.

“Puzzles. I suck at puzzles,” she finally answered, and his mouth quirked into a smile that she mirrored, just because his smile made her happy.

“I’ve seen you do puzzles, Scully. Difficult ones.”

She nodded, humming at the feeling of his fingers rubbing against her scalp with the movement. “Once I start I have to finish it, but that doesn’t mean that I like it, or that I’m any good at it.”

“Ah, yes, that sounds like the Scully I know,” he said, slipping his hand away from her and returning his arm to the back of the couch. “Maybe we should play Monopoly sometime, see it all the way through,” he added, not seeming to notice the fact that every atom in her body was straining towards him, desperate to feel his touch again.

“I’m not sure that’s a good plan. We may not be friends when the game is over, regardless of who wins. Perhaps something lower stakes, like Candy Land,” she said with a smirk.

Mulder shook his head in mock-doubt. “I dunno, Scully, I can just envision you getting the cupcake card when you’re up by chocolate mountain. You’ll flip the table.” She screwed up her mouth but didn’t deny it. “How about strip poker? There are no losers in that game.”

She imagined Mulder peeling off his boxers after a bad hand, unable to conceal his arousal. Or maybe it would be her, revealing herself to him bit by bit. Her nipples tightened at the thought, and she saw his eyes dart down to her chest, noticing. Of course she wouldn’t be wearing a bra when she wasn’t expecting company.

“Isn’t the person who ends up naked the loser in strip poker?” She asked rhetorically, the verbalizing of nakedness a thrill in itself. Not that they hadn’t both seen each other naked before, but they seemed to have an unspoken agreement that incidental eyefulls during times of medical emergency didn’t count.

“Technically speaking, yes, but if they aren’t particularly opposed to getting naked in the first place, that too can be a win.” He took a swig of his beer, and Scully suddenly remembered hers existed and did the same. “So you’d last, what,” he looked over her body, calculating how many items of clothing she was wearing, imagining not only what he could see but what lay beneath, “Four rounds at most. You don’t have socks on, that’s a disadvantage.”

She took a deep breath, summoning courage. “Only two, actually. You caught me at a bad time, strip poker wise.” She took another drink to cover her shock at her own admission.

Mulder’s eyes narrowed as he appraised her again. Pants and shirt. Oh. He shifted a little.

“Do you make a habit of not wearing underwear, Scully?” He ventured, the pitch of his voice one she was not well acquainted with. His mouth held a playful smirk, but his eyes betrayed his true reaction to what she’d said.

“Why do you ask?” She returned, question for question.

He smiled like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Just curious,” he said, heat rising in his cheeks.

She nodded, then diverted the focus to him. She’d had about as much as she could handle. “You’ve got about…6 losing hands to work with?” She asked, guesstimating. “Unless you’re also not wearing underwear,” she added cheekily.

“On the contrary, I’m outfitted in my favorites,” he said, leaning forward to set his beer on the coffee table before he leaned back and pulled up his shirt, revealing the ripples of his abdomen and a trail of soft brown hair that disappeared into his jeans. Scully suppressed a moan. He tugged the waistband of his boxers above his jeans to reveal a pattern of tiny cartoon Elvis’ on a black background.

“Those are very adult underwear, Mulder,” she teased him, and he tucked them away but stayed reclined like that, hands folded on his belly. There was still a sliver of flesh visible between his shirt and pants, which she pointedly avoided looking at.

He tilted his head up to look at her, their faces closer now in his reclined position. “I’d ask to see yours, but…y’know.” He arched his eyebrows and flicked his eyes over her body quickly.

“Maybe some other time,” she replied, a coy smile on her mouth.

“May-be,” he returned.

They were quiet for a moment, which turned into a minute, and felt like an eternity. It was the kind of silence that demanded action, shit or get off the pot kind of silence. She felt the hairs on her arms stand up, anticipation pricking her skin like a sunburn. Do something, she told herself. She parted her lips to speak, but no words came out.

“I should get going,” he said abruptly, and sat up. It felt like a bucket of cold water. Had he interpreted her hesitation as disinterest? She stood dumbly and followed him to the door. “Thanks for the beer,” he said, hand on the knob, and she nodded.

Just before he was about to pull the door closed behind him, he stopped. “Hey, next time I go to the Gunmen’s for game night, you wanna come with?”

She smiled tightly, “yeah, that sounds fun.”

He heaved a sigh that sounded like relief and smiled. “Great, I’ll let them know. Though I really recommend you wear underwear going over there. Never can be too careful with Frohike around. You know how he feels about you.” She chuffed a small laugh, and he added “can’t say I blame the guy.” Giving her one more glance from head to toe, he left.

Brick by brick. Slow progress, but progress nonetheless. One day they would get there.

Tagging @today-in-fic thank you!

#the x files #txf #dana scully #fox mulder #gillovny #msr #sculder #x files #angst #fluff #UST

[five-rivers]

Orb/Reanimation

Another part of Doorways!  Link to series here.

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“What’s his name again?” asked Danny, picking at the hem of his shirt.  Today had been… stressful, for a number of reasons.  Partially the long drive and the disastrous breakfast stop, but also the fact that they were driving to meet a guy who was possibly:

a)       Vlad Masters version 2.

b)      A horrible hole in reality that would try to kill him.

c)       Possessed, like the Keens.

d)      Using ghost stuff without knowing it was ghost stuff.

e)      Messing around with ghost stuff while knowing it was ghost stuff, but without any of the skill to keep it from messing him up in turn.  

f)        Crazy in some wonderful, unforeseen way.

Or, finally,

g)       Mom and Dad’s one and only normal friend.  

Danny really wasn’t holding for the last one, if he was being honest.  After all, unlike Marianne, this guy had been part of the Paranormal Research Club.  

Okay, maybe there were other, positive, options.  It was completely possible for someone to be weird or crazy and not be evil or even particularly threatening.  Most ghosts were like that, in fact.  

Still.

“Frank Stone,” said Dad, cheerfully.

“If he turns out to be a Dr. Frankenstein type, I quit,” groaned Jazz.  “Just so you know.”

“You won’t quit,” said Danny, with complete confidence.  

“He is a doctor,” said Mom.  “He was studying biology when we met him, for his undergraduate degree.”

“I quit; I’m telling you.”

“If you were really quitting,” reasoned Danny, “you’d just open the door and jump out.”  He was pleased that Jazz was taking her turn as the resident overdramatic teenager.  She carried that burden only rarely, but it did seem like long trips in the GAV really brought it out.

Maybe they made her remember the whole Youngblood thing.  Who knew? Not Danny.  

“I’m not going to jump out of a moving vehicle. That’s more of a ‘you’ thing.”

“I can’t really dispute that,” said Danny, remembering all the times he had, in fact, jumped out of a moving vehicle. “In my defense, I can fly.”

“Why you can fly completely negates that as a defense.”

Danny held up a finger.  “Okay, so, first off, reality is not a moving vehicle.”

“Anything can be a moving vehicle, depending on your reference frame.”

“I agree on the moving part, but I dispute the vehicle part.  Vehicle comes from the Latin vehiculum, which is ‘a means of conveyance.’ Reality is not a means of conveyance. Ergo, it cannot be a vehicle.”

“Not so fast, brother dear.  Words change meaning over time.”

“Yeah, but that’s still what vehicle means,” said Danny.  “Unless you’re doing the medicine definition, anyway.  I think.”

“Reality is a metaphorical vehicle.”

“Well, if it’s metaphorical, it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s moving.  Does it?”

“I’m… not sure.”

“I think this is the place!” exclaimed Dad, pulling into a parking lot.  “Golding City University Medical Research Lab.”

“He doesn’t live here,” said Danny, slowly, “does he?”  They weren’t ambushing this guy at work, were they?  Even if he did turn out to be just as bad as all of Mom and Dad’s other friends, that was kind of mean.  

(Except, the Keens had been acceptable, once they were no longer possessed, and even the ghost possessing them hadn’t been too terrible.)

“He’s in the building behind the lab,” said Mom. “They let the teachers live on-campus, here.  He’s expecting us, anyway.”

Right.  Because they had called ahead, giving warning to their potential enemy.  Curse you, common courtesy and sundry social conventions.

Jazz was glaring at the small name sign on the building, which was just barely visible through the rain.  “Golding City University,” she said, eyes narrowed.  

“Uh, is something wrong?”

“Frankenstein,” she said.  

“Um,” said Danny.  He looked more closely at the name.  “Golding City.  Ingolstadt.” Oh, no.  Now he was glaring at the name, too.  Because Jazz was right, and it would be his luck.  Their parents’ luck.  Whatever.  

“Do you feel anything?” asked Dad.  

“No,” said Danny.

“Well,” said Mom.  “We’ll have to run a bit, try to stay out of the rain.  It’s too bad there isn’t a closer parking lot…”

“I could also just make us all intangible,” said Danny.  

“What?”

“I could make us all intangible.  I do it all the time to miss the rain when no one is looking too closely.”

“Huh,” said Mom.  

“It isn’t as if my powers disappear when I’m not fighting ghosts,” said Danny.  “I get to use them for other things.”

“I know, I know, it just seems… petty.”

“Petty is one of the best words to describe ghosts with,” said Danny.  

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Frank Stone did not look like a Frankenstein. Not the monster, and not the ‘doctor.’

(Because Victor Frankenstein had not, in fact, become a doctor, had he?)

He was actually pretty average looking.  The same age as Mom and Dad, of course. Brown hair.  Glasses.  Skinny, but not that skinny.  Could Dr. Stone rob a grave?  Probably. But carrying the loot away without some mechanical advantage was probably out.  Unless it was old loot.  Dried out. Maybe just bones.  

Corpses were heavy.  

(No, Danny was not going to elaborate.)

Dr. Stone appeared to be somewhat confused about why Danny and Jazz were there.  Evidently, Mom and Dad had managed to give the man the impression that they wanted to fund his research with the fortune they had inherited from Vlad.

Which, incidentally, had been inherited by Danny, who couldn’t really do much with it until he was twenty-five.  Not that he was particularly keen on funding… Whatever it was that Dr. Stone was researching.  

Maybe that would be different if he could tell what Dr. Stone was talking about.  Danny wasn’t stupid, far from it, and had a good background in any number of esoteric subjects, but, well.  It was hard to rival an adult lifetime of learning and research.  Especially when he didn’t have any context.  

Mom and Dad’s briefing on Dr. Stone had generally focused on what he had been interested in as a member of the Paranormal Research Club, not his true field of study.

“Oh,” said Mom, suddenly, “this is about your organ transplant project, isn’t it?  You really need to provide more context.  When you just jump right in like that, even we’ll get lost!”

Okay.  Danny felt better.  

“Well, yes,” said Dr. Stone.  “I have been working on this off and on since college, you know how it is.  I know you kept up with that portal business!”  He flashed a nervous smile and set his coffee mug down on his coffee table.  It made a soft chinking sound against the glass.  “But the university gave me a grant, Vladco’s been donating some supplies—From their chemical division, mostly—and I’ve been having a lot of success!  I can’t wait to show you.  We’ve actually got a few specimens in near-stasis right now, all from mice.  We’re going to be implanting one tomorrow.  See how it functions.”

“Have you implanted any before?” asked Mom, leaning forward.  

“A few, but, well.  I can’t say they were resounding successes.  The most recent subject only lasted a few days… Although, that is better than the first! We’ve been adjusting some of our ratios.”

“Say, Frank,” said Dad.  “What chemicals are you using for this, anyway?  I know you’re using them in conjunction with low temperatures, but keeping crystals from forming in the flesh—”

“Yes, yes, that’s always been the problem with cryogenics,” agreed Dr. Stone.  Then they dove back into jargon and technical language.  

Danny glanced sideways at Jazz, uneasy.  Chemicals.  From Vladco. Yeah.  Not suspicious at all.  

He leaned over.  “Ten dollars says that he’s using ectoplasm to reanimate dead bodies.”

“I’m not taking that bet.  Do you feel anything weird from him?”  Jazz whispered back.  

“Weird, yes, but…”  Danny bit his lip.  “I’m not sensing any… doors.  Or ghosts.”

“Okay,” said Jazz.  “So, when we do find his mad science lab full of dead body parts, what do we do?”

“Well…  Nothing? As long as they’re legal dead body parts, I guess.  You know, from organ donors, or people who donated their bodies to science.  I mean…”  He shrugged.  “You’ve read Frankenstein, too.  And met Ellie.”

“Hm.  True,” said Jazz.  “I have to check my biases.  I’m still quitting, though.  As soon as we find his Frankenstein stuff.  Just so you know.”

“No, you aren’t.”

Jazz just sighed.  

.

Danny walks silently through the halls of the research facility.  True, Dr. Stone was planning on giving his family a tour of his workspace first thing tomorrow and had implied that other researchers would be doing the same, but Danny believed in being prepared.  

Well.  Sometimes. He was allowed to be inconsistent and contradictory.  Like any teen, he was still learning how to exist.  

Maybe he should stop comparing himself to ‘any teen,’ though.  It was beginning to feel dishonest, even in his own head.  Even though, technically, it was true.  

Anyway.  

This place was kind of creepy.  At least, he presumed a normal person would find it creepy. Too bad he didn’t know any normal people.  Sam would think it was cool.  Tucker would be freaking out because it was a medical research lab.  Ancients, Danny was as bad as his parents.  

It did have a number of features that one would typically only find on the set of a horror movie, however, so he felt fairly confident in his assessment of its creepiness.  Also, he had encountered at least five different crimes against nature and sanity (it took one to know one), and he hadn’t even gotten to Dr. Stone’s lab yet.  

He was impressed.  He hadn’t expected such a high concentration outside of Amity Park or Vlad’s hideouts.  

At the thought of Vlad, Danny drooped. Yeah.  He still wasn’t over the stupid fruitloop.  Still hated the fact that he had died.  

Back to the crimes against nature.  Ectoplasm was definitely a component, if a small one. Hard to get things to glow that precise, reality bending shade of green otherwise.  Also, well.  Danny can sense ectoplasm.

And…  Now he was in a room of jars full of diluted ectoplasm and… He sniffed. Formaldehyde?  He frowned and decided the number, size, and arrangement of jars was suspicious.  He walked around the table.  Yep. That was in the outline of a human body. Yep.  

Honestly, this wasn’t any more alarming than the living mice impaled with various glowing needles, or the disturbingly brown heart beating in a fish tank a few rooms back.  It was, also, significantly less alarming than the prosthetic face (mainly because, dang, that thing looked realistic), the (fresh) skeleton someone had been injecting ectoplasm into (yikes), and the weird flesh… blob… thing that someone had just left out in their workspace.  

Still.  This was another point for the ‘someone is building a Frankenstein’s monster in this building’ theory, and Danny had kind of been hoping that he was wrong.  

He walked out of the room, on alert for random murderous corpse monsters (or sad corpse monsters that needed a shoulder to cry on, a restraining order against their creators, and a loving home).  Or mad scientists.  Because, at this point, he was fairly certain that everyone who worked here was crazy, and not necessarily in the fun way Mom and Dad were.

He was glad they had decided to sleep in the GAV and ignore Dr. Stone’s invitation to stay in his apartment.  

Dr. Stone’s office was just next door.  His lab, just beyond that.  Danny approached cautiously, his ghost half on high alert, and his deeper self stirring uneasily.  

He laid a hand flat against the door, and that stirring became wakefulness.

Crimes against nature.  Hubris.  Pride.

Superbia.  It had to be.

A hole.  A wound.

Well.  This was fast.  Even with the Keens’ list of Paranormal Research Club members they had encountered while possessed, Danny hadn’t expected to find another thing like Gula so quickly.  

He hadn’t wanted to.  Despite his outward pessimism, he had hoped that there weren’t any more.  

After several frozen moments where Danny braced himself for an attack, he realized one wasn’t forthcoming.  The tear beyond the door had not noticed him, was not trying to consume him.  

So, he had a choice.  He could either try to deal with this alone, right now, or he could sneak away and tell his family what he had found.  Both choices had pros and cons.  

Before even a second had passed, Danny was easing away from the door.  He hadn’t quite promised to share if he felt anything strange, if he had detected anything bad, but…  It was a near thing, and he didn’t want to be dishonest with his family after they had been so accepting of all his… Stuff.  

Yeah.  Call it stuff.  Nice and generic.  Covers everything.  

Plus, his encounter with Gula had confirmed that he needed backup.  

He refrained from calling on his powers on the way out.  He didn’t want to draw attention.  The limits of the doors to the place which should not be mentioned were largely unknown to him.

Luckily, the doors weren’t alarmed, and he got back to the GAV without a problem.  He poked Jazz awake first.  

“Hey,” he said, “we’ve got a problem.”

.

“This portal is just… Sitting there,” said Mom.

“Yep.”

“In Frank’s office.”

“Well, I think it might actually be in the lab, but yes.  It’s kind of freaking me out.”

“Is Frank sleeping in his lab?” asked Dad, stroking the stubble on his chin.  

“No, I checked that before I went in,” said Danny. “He’s in his apartment.”

“You just… broke into his apartment?” asked Mom.

Danny shrugged.  “I didn’t break anything,” he said.  “But, I mean, what else was I supposed to do?”

For a moment, it looked like Mom was about to argue or scold him, but she shook her head.  “Alright, then someone else is in his office.”

“Maybe.  I’m not sure if these portals need a person attached or not.  Using person in the very loosest of senses, because…”  He made a gesture he hoped would be interpreted as a soul being forcibly removed from a body without killing the body.  

“You don’t think it’s in the, um,” Jazz also made a vague gesture.  

“You mean the hypothetical Frankenstein’s monster he’s made?  Yeah. I think that’s likely.  Also, judging from the sheer amount of, um, weird stuff in the other labs, I’d say it’s influencing everyone and everything around it, too.”

“Is that a thing it can do?” asked Mom.  

“I mean, I can do that,” said Danny.  He paused.  “’I’ in this case being the portal.  Yeah.  That’s why Amity Park is so…  Amity Park.”

Mom breathed out, slowly.  “Sweetie, trust me on this, Amity Park was strange long before we made the portal.

“Well, yes?” said Danny, not seeing what that had to do with it.  “So?”

“So, that strangeness couldn’t be caused by the portal.”

“Mom.  I’m—It’s a hole in reality.  Do you think it’s going to obey the laws of cause and effect?  You went to Amity Park because it was already a ‘thin spot,’ right?  I was already there.”

Mom looked vaguely ill.  

“Okay,” said Jazz.  “Let’s table that discussion for right now.  What are we going to do about this?  Break in?  Wait for our ‘tour’ tomorrow?”

“I don’t like the idea of waiting for Dr. Stone to give us a tour,” said Danny.  “I don’t want to give them time to prepare for us.”

“He doesn’t know what we’re here for, though,” said Dad.  “Does he?”

“I don’t know,” said Danny.  “I can’t read minds.”

“Yet,” added Jazz.

“Do you think he even knows about the…”  It was Mom’s turn to enter the gesturing game.

“Let’s just call it a hell portal for the sake of communication,” said Danny, despite the fact that the term did not do the actuality justice.  “Or Superbia for this particular one.  I think this must be Superbia, anyway.”  He didn’t want to imagine the possibility of even more of these things out there.  

“I’m not sure how he couldn’t notice that something strange was going on,” said Dad.  “Even if he was using ectoplasm and other supernatural elements in his research, we gave him a good grounding in what to expect from ectoplasm in college.”

“Yeah,” said Jazz.  “But not everyone is like you and Mom.  Your college days were over two decades ago.”

Something moving in the dark and rain beyond the GAV windows, catching Danny’s eye.  He pushed past his family to get a better look, blinking to adjust his eyes.  

“Heck,” he said.  “We have a mob.”

“What?” exclaimed Dad, rushing to the console to turn on the GAV’s exterior floodlights.  

They illuminated Dr. Stone and a crowd of college and graduate students quite nicely.  Their eyes reflected a dim red.  The GAV was, as far as Danny could see, surrounded.

Very briefly, the thought of gunning the GAV and crashing through the crowd crossed his mind.  It was just as quickly dismissed.  

He didn’t know what the line between influenced and mind controlled was, or how easily Superbia could cross it.  It was even possible that the ‘hell portal’ could vault over both of those and land directly in possession.  

“Ghost shield?” suggested Danny.  

“Will it do anything?” asked Mom.  

“Won’t hurt,” said Danny with a shrug.  

Mom flipped the switch.  

“What are we going to do?” asked Jazz, softly. “Wait them out?”

“Realistically,” said Danny, “we don’t have enough food and water to do that.  With this many people, they could take turns watching us.”

“Call the police?” suggested Maddie.  The other three turned to look at her.  “They are still human, aren’t they?”

“Yeah,” said Danny, frowning.  “But I don’t know how much, um, agency they have right now.  If we were in Amity, I’d say sure, our police understand, mostly, but…  Also, bringing extra hostages into this might not be a good idea.”

“If it’s the campus police that would get called, they might be affected, too,” said Jazz.  

“They have campus police?  How do you know?”

“This college sent me a brochure once.”

“Right.  Um.  I could always just fly us out of here,” said Danny.

“Assuming they don’t have ranged attacks,” said Mom, dubiously.

“Hm.  Yeah.  I think I could lift the GAV, and then we could just leave the shield on.”

“Assuming the shield does anything.”

Danny shrugged.  “I can always just try to fight them outright.  I’d prefer not to do that, though.”

Mom inhaled as if she were about to say something but was cut off by a loud noise from outside.

“Jack~  Maddie~ I know you’re in there.”  That was Dr. Stone’s voice, warped by a megaphone speaker.  “Why don’t you come out and see what I’ve done?  I dare say I’ve exceeded even our wildest dreams from college.”  A long pause.  “I even made a portal…  Weren’t you trying to get one of those?  Isn’t that what got good old Vlad hospitalized?”  There was laughter.  Too much laughter.  

The mob was laughing, too.

Superbia.  Pride.

Danny knew what he wanted to do.  He wanted to walk out and deal with the threat that was grating on his every sense.  But…  He knew that prideful actions were contraindicated under the present circumstances.  

Influence.  Right. How much could Danny be influenced?

How much could his family be influenced?

He looked up at his parents, seeking guidance. They seemed uncertain, too.  

“I didn’t destroy any lives- I made new life. New life!  Powered by an interdimensional portal, oh, yes…  Can you imagine the application?  Can you imagine a new world?”

“Okay, he didn’t seem like this in the apartment,” muttered Jazz.  “We have human nonlethal weapons, right?”

“Still have to worry about running people over,” said Danny.  He looked back at the lab building.  “We could try to cut this off at the source.  They aren’t protecting the building.  They’re using it as part of their perimeter.”

Eyes turned to the dimly lit building.  

“We can cover you,” offered Dad.  

“I don’t like this any better than you flying off with us,” said Mom.  “But…  It offers a more permanent solution.”

Danny should have gone after it when he was in the building the first time.  Well.  Time only rewound for one ghost, and that ghost wasn’t him.  

Unless he counted…  Never mind.  The point was, despite all his other wonderful and troubling features, Danny couldn’t go back and change a decision he’d already made.  Agonizing over it was a waste of time and brain power.  

Dad got behind the wheel.  Jazz crawled up into the well-disguised turret.  Maddie manned the other weapons.  

Danny stood at the door, ready to run, ready to transform as soon as he was through the shield.  

Family bonding activities.  So much fun.  

.

The mob attacked before he got the door open. He still made it to the building.

.

Danny didn’t bother with doors or windows or halls. He remembered what floor Dr. Stone’s office was on, and, now that he was sensitized to it, he could feel Superbia. He went through the walls, straight as an arrow.

(He wondered, briefly, if he was being as bigoted as he’d often felt his parents to be.  If he was ascribing more evil to the portals to the Red Country than was warranted. If he was simply holding up a dark mirror and seeing what he feared from himself.)

(But no.  He did not command like that.  He did not force his people to assemble armies in the night or attack people.  He kept them safe.  He had rules.)

The lab was awash in sick red not-light that burned in Danny’s mind.  It was barely physically perceptible, more present in senses that couldn’t translate to human terms than anything to do with Danny’s eyes, ghostly or not.  

In the center of the lab, on an operation table, was a stitched-together corpse.  Perhaps, under other circumstances, it would have been a very pretty corpse.  A young woman with long dark hair and broad shoulders.  

Its chest had been torn open.  Half-in half-out of the cavity was a red orb, the source of the not-light, like some sick imitation of a ghost core.  

(It reminded Danny of Freakshow’s staff, and he realized that he never did find out where that horrid thing had come from.)

They had been trying to make something like Danny.

He felt like he had eaten those blood blossom pancakes.  

Danny gritted his teeth and let his light, white-green and clear, fill his hands.  Ectoplasm fought against the miasma in the air, an oddly purifying presence. It wasn’t enough to chase away the wrongness.  This wasn’t his space.  

The fight against Gula was different.  Both he and it had been within nominally living bodies.  They had been next to the heart of Danny’s territory, his home ground.  Danny had been tricked and trapped, taken off guard, unable to use the tricks he had grown used to while fighting ghosts and Vlad.

(He could feel Superbia in his mind, pride urging him forward towards error.  Pride in his abilities, in his mind, in his family.)

Danny drifted sideways, watching.  Listening.  Other things in the building were stirring.  Sparks of wrongness growing and twisting, warping into fountains and springs.  This whole building was full of it.  Rotten to the bones.  It pressed against his teeth.  

Careful.  

He had to be careful.  

The orb shone.  

(Too much like Freakshow’s staff.)

(Influence, Danny remembered.  Just how close was it to mind control?)

Doing this as a human was impossible.  Trying to fight that as a ghost was unwise.

The always-open always-closed door that both contained and laid within Danny’s soul shifted.  So did the corpse on the table, its constituent parts sliding over each other gruesomely.  Death had lost its hold, lost its meaning.  The ghost that was Danny twisted, and he was too human, too alive.

Special little thing.  You think you can defeat us.

He could.  He could open himself and wash all this away in an instant.  He could burn with electric fire and the cold of deep space.  He could reach out.  The orb would be as dust under his hand.  

He didn’t move.  

In thinking you become…

Un-light burned up from the grooves in the tile floor. It didn’t reach the soles of his boots, didn’t reach his soul.  He gritted his teeth.  

US.  

YOUR VICTORY IS OURS.

“Wow, you picked the wrong person to use that strategy on,” said Danny, out loud.  Internally, he pulled on the delicate and frayed strands of reality that persisted even here. “I have so much imposter syndrome and anxiety that it isn’t even funny.  I know I can’t beat you.  Not here.”

But then, he didn’t have to.  

He found the right string and pulled.  He found the key and opened the door.  Death was in the room again.  Danny could move again.  Not so much the pile of flesh in front of him.  It was hard, it hurt, to keep hold of something like this, but half of Danny was this, was dead, even if he had far too many halves to ever be whole.  

Ice coated the floor, the tiles cracking under the sudden temperature change.  He dropped to the floor and was human.  

An impossible thing.  

And behind the human—

Well.  Danny didn’t have to defeat Superbia.  It wasn’t like Gula, didn’t have that strength, that experience.  He just had to make it so the things that would, could.  

(Danny had rules.  Some of them were to protect himself.)

He walked over to the orb.  Ultimately, it was just a representation, not Superbia itself. Still.  He put his foot down on it and slowly transferred his weight to it until it cracked.  Until it splintered.  Until it shattered.  Until he ground its dust under his heel.  

Then, the building collapsed.  Danny didn’t move, didn’t have to move.  He was a ghost again, floating in the air, exactly where he had been, all the floors having passed harmlessly through him.  

Outside, the faculty and student body of the college were sprawled in piles on the ground.  The GAV was, somehow, halfway up a tree.  A shockingly sturdy tree.  Several statues were in pieces.  

The sun was coming up.  

Danny put a hand to his chest and assessed himself. Yes.  Still here.  Still himself.  The Ghost Zone still sang in his bones, in his core.  He was still anchored in Amity Park.  Everything in order.  

This place, though… This place would be tainted for years, a thin spot forever.  He could feel it, now.  Why couldn’t he feel it before, when they drove in?

He shuddered.  Then he flew down to the GAV and knocked on the window.  Mom rolled it down.  

“Want me to fly us away to somewhere secluded before the cops get called and we get asked a bunch of awkward questions?” he asked.

Mom closed her eyes.  “Please do,” she said.

#danny phantom #ectober #ectober week #ectober week 2020 #ectober 2020

[motherhenna]

Writers Rants: Backstory

How to Smoothly Integrate a Character’s Past into the Narrative

---

If you are even remotely interested in the process of writing, then you’ve probably heard this phrase at least a hundred times over: show, don’t tell.  Such a vague sentiment, but hell if it doesn’t pack a punch. In fact, it’s probably one of the only “rules” of storytelling that ought to be followed as closely as possible and as often as possible—at least in my opinion. But what, exactly, does it mean? In layman’s terms, show don’t tell is a simple recommendation: that authors should actively illustrate a concept rather than passively explain it. Why? Simple. One leaves the reader more room for interpretation and draws them deeper into the action at hand, and the other just…well, tells them what to see and what to feel in the same way a set of DIY instructions describe how to make a quirky set of kitchen lights out of mason jars. While yes, you got a straightforward idea of what to expect, did you actually have fun reading it?

These basic concepts are important to understand if you consider yourself a writer of any kind, as they function as the foundation for a) improving your prose, b) strengthening your characters, and c) forming a flowing narrative that will catch and keep readers’ attention.  And naturally, this also applies to the art of exposition.

Most people with even a cursory knowledge of telling a story know that characters should never be blank slates. If you have any desire to portray even a facsimile of real life, you have to put at least some effort into fleshing out the main characters. And when I say ‘flesh out’, I mean do more than just describing what they look like, a laundry list of personality traits, and what they’re wearing. I’m not going to go into this process deeply, as that’s a matter for another think-piece entirely, but it’s a starting point for the more convoluted parts to come. What I’m building up to is that your characters need a backstory, especially if they’re the one(s) through whom we, as readers, experience the story, i.e., the point of view (POV) character. This applies to both first- and third-person limited narratives, unless you’re going for a more anonymous / incidental narrator, like Mr. Lockwood in Wuthering Heights.

Now, these backstories don’t have to be a strict, detailed, chronological transcription of every year in that character’s life (though doing so certainly doesn’t hurt!) Rather, you should write it much like you would describe your own life if you had to plot it out on a timeline. At first, just stick with the most essential elements: where and when in history they were born, whether they have siblings or present family, and a simple list of significant events from various periods in their life. What specific things have most influenced who they are as a person, for good or ill? Next, it’s time to look at the family, since nothing impacts an individual more than how they were raised and how they were treated during their formative years. Were their parents present during their childhood? What was their parents’ relationship like before and after your character’s birth? Are they natives of the country in which the story is set, or did they immigrate—and if they immigrated, why did they do so? All of these and more are, to me at least, vital to developing a well-rounded and realistic character. I’ve even gone so far as to type out entire timelines for each character as well as their parents. Personalities, quirks, trauma—these are all just as hereditary as one’s genes, though this doesn’t mean that this inheritance has to be through blood. Nature vs. Nurture: they’re both equally important in the formation of an individual.

…So, what to do when you’ve finished all that? Do you dutifully transcribe it into the first chapter of your story? Absolutely not. Copy it into a separate document window and keep it there. A large chunk of this is for your benefit: most likely, less than half of it will make it into the written canon of the novel, and for good reason. All of that detailed history isn’t for the reader, it’s for you to use as a framework. Some of the most powerful elements to realistic characters are the unseen, the implied: all the hidden little things that lie just under the surface, but are never fully visible to the naked eye.

What a lot of inexperienced writers may not realize is that everything doesn’t always have to be stated unequivocally through dialogue or info-dumps. How often, in real life, do acquaintances explain upfront that this specific behavior they often exhibit is a result of how they were abandoned by their father and raised by an emotionally distant mother? Most people don’t psychoanalyze everything, nor do we ourselves do it to others—at least not often! Plus, it’s boring. Getting to know characters over the course of a story should be comparable to meeting a new friend. You find out the surface things at first, but pick up bits and pieces along the way that hint at what lies deeper inside. Little by little, you learn about their family, their hopes, dreams, fears…not always directly, and sometimes even in spite of their desire to keep up a front of normalcy.

With all this said, I think it’s become clear where I stand on backstory: it should be subtle, woven gradually into the narrative rather than stated by the character themselves or described by an omniscient narrator. Not only does this make the process of reading about it flow better and progress more naturally, it’s also far more interactive. Instead of being told why a character acts the way they do, the reader can catalogue said character’s actions, motivations, dialogue, and the way they interact with their surroundings, gradually putting the puzzle pieces together for themselves. In a sense, it’s almost a reward for those who read with a careful, inquisitive eye, and can be just as satisfying as solving a mystery before the detective does in a murder mystery.

I’ve used—and will continue to use—a lot of metaphors in this section because it’s the most thorough way I can to explain this process and why it’s so important. That being said, I approach backstory in the same way I might organize a scavenger hunt. It’s not about a treasure map, but rather an ongoing set of little discoveries without which the ultimate prize can never be found. But in keeping with this analogy, why would anyone want to take part in this if a) they’re just given the prize’s location outright, or b) don’t really care about the prize anyway?

When you’re straight-up told about character’s backstory within the first few chapters, there’s no groundwork for investment. Why should I care about this character’s history if I don’t even know them yet? Investment is a gradual process, and ought to be an interactive process too. One of the best strategies of implying backstory without stating it directly is illustrating how a character reacts to specific triggers. Yes, you can tell the reader in the character’s introductory paragraph that he was almost killed in a house fire as a child, which still haunts him to this day—but how else can you impart this information more effectively and poignantly? For some examples, he might…

Be too frightened to turn on the stove.

Avoid any type of matches or aerosol at all costs.

Get anxious when filling up his car at gas stations.

Constantly check and re-check the smoke detectors throughout his apartment

Panic when he smells her neighbor’s lit fireplace.

Why would we need to explain to readers what made him this way when we have all the evidence we need to figure it out for ourselves? Of course, there’s nothing wrong with, later on down the line, this character actively opening up about this trauma to a friend or therapist, as this is only natural and also supplies us with details we would have never known otherwise. This just shouldn’t be the first way we find it out.

Another efficient and interesting approach to gradual backstory incorporation is through dialogue. The way a character responds to nosy questions, criticisms, or simple observations tell a lot about the kind of people they are and how they’re coping (or not coping) with potentially painful parts of their personal histories / insecurities. For example, Character A can ask Character B, “Why don’t you want to go out tonight?” In truth, B is trying to back out of these plans because she can’t fit into a dress she was supposed to wear for the party, and is trying desperately not fall back into the pit dug by the various eating disorders she has suffered from since adolescence. She is afraid her friends will want to take group pictures, or remark on what’s she’s eating or not eating, or notice the extra pudge in her stomach. She remembers how her mother would chide her for eating second helpings when she was young, or all the times her ex called her fat. But B is not going to be capable of explaining all of this to her partner. So how does she respond?

1.     “I just…feel tired all of a sudden…but don’t let me keep you from going.  I don’t want to spoil your night.” Implication: saving face—she doesn’t want to reveal her real insecurities, so she uses a physical illness as a cover story.

2.      “What’s it to you? If this stupid party so important to you, then you can just go without me!”  Implication: defensiveness—she is uncomfortable being vulnerable, and lashes out instead.

Now obviously these are just two examples of a plethora of different responses a person might have to a question like this. But what matters is that each answer should give the reader some sort of information as to why said character reacts the way they do. And these reactions don’t have to have traumatic roots, either! Perhaps, because Character C’s older sister always encouraged them to stick up for and respect themselves, C is able to take that positive reinforcement and pay it forward, inspired to protect others who may not know how to protect themselves.  Positive change ripples and spreads just as much as negativity, and should never be discounted just because a character has gone through their fair share of tragedy, too.

 ---

In short, there is nothing simple or easy about creative writing—there is so much nuance involved in every aspect, though that shouldn’t discourage newcomers from experimenting and taking everything step by step. There are no absolutes in writing, and every rule can be challenged, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But still, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of backstory when developing strong characters, nor how much more natural a narrative will feel when these things are integrated with subtlety and grace. Your characters should never be objects, concepts, or a means to an end: if you want to make them seem real to your readers, then they must first seem real to you.

...And real people all have their own stories: to find them, all you have to do is watch and listen.    

#writing tips #creative writing #writing advice #I wrote this like six months ago but forgot to post it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ #motherhenna

[imustbeamermaidrango]

The Optimism of Satan

by Mitch Horowitz

See article at: https://medium.com/s/radical-spirits/the-optimism-of-satan-eea5a1a24550

A friend of mine once had the opportunity to ask the Dalai Lama a single question.

“Who was your greatest teacher?” he asked.

The exiled leader replied, “Mao Zedong.”

I once felt provoked in my own sphere by a similarly unlikely teacher — Donald Trump.

Years ago, Trump the Developer asked an interviewer: “What good is something if you can’t put your name on it?” His comment is indelibly stamped on my memory, though I confess I cannot find a source for it. Did I imagine it? The sentiment, while coarse and easily rebutted, came to haunt me.

Did Trump, the showy conman obsessed with naming rights, capture a nagging truth of human nature — a side none of us can deny or push away, other than by an act of self-regarding hypocrisy? And did I, hopefully in a more integral way, share a kernel of his outlook? Was the voice even his — or something within me?

Soon after hearing Trump’s remark, I received what struck me as a bit of ridiculous advice from the editor of an academic spiritual journal. I told him in candor that I wanted to find greater exposure for my byline. “You don’t have to put your name on everything you write,” he replied. Such a principle could ring true only in the world of abstraction.

Trump’s statement about self-exaltation, however ugly, captured half a truth. The whole truth is that our lives, as vessels for various influences — some physical, some perhaps beyond — are bound up with the world and circumstances in which we find ourselves; and within that world we must, at the stake of personal happiness, create, expand, and aspire. Whatever higher influences we feel or great thoughts we think, or are experienced by us through the influence of others, are like heat dissipated in the vacuum of space unless those thoughts are directed into a structure or receptacle. Our purpose is to be generative. Questions of attachment and non-attachment, identification and non-identification, are incidental to that larger fact.

I came to feel strongly about this several years ago when I found that my spiritual search, a path of radical ecumenism with a dedication to esoteric interests, was failing to satisfy me. I began to suspect that I was not acknowledging what I was really looking for, either in spirituality — by which I mean a search for the extra-physical — or therapy. I came face-to-face with an instinct that few people acknowledge, and would deny if they heard it spoken. But they should linger on it. Because what I discovered captures what I believe is a basic if discomforting human truth: The ethical or spiritual search, not as idealized but as actually lived, is a search for power. That is, for the ability to possess personal agency. We pray, “Thy will be done.” We mean “my will be done” — hoping that the two comport. This is why, at least in my observations after thirty years as a publisher, seeker, and historian of alternative spirituality, many seekers in both traditional and alternative faiths are ill at ease, fitful in their progress, and apt to slide from faith to faith, or to harbor multiple, sometimes conflicting, practices at once.

Power is supposed to be the craving of the corrupt. Is it? The novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer, surveying the modern occult scene, wrote in 1967: “We are all black magicians in our dreams, in our fantasies, perversions, and phobias.” And to this I would add, in pursuit of our highest ideals. As Singer detected, we are not very different from the classical magician when we strive, morally and materially, to carry forth our plans in the world — to ensure the betterment of ourselves and our loved ones; to heal sickness; to create, sustain, and, above all, to generate things which bear our markings, ideals, and likenesses. All of this is the expenditure of power, the striving to actualize our drives and images.

I do not view the search for individual power, including through supernatural means (a topic I will clarify and expand on), as necessarily maleficent. Historically and psychologically, it is a fundamental human trait to evaluate, adopt, or avoid an idea based upon whether it builds or depletes our sense of personal agency. “A living thing,” Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, “seeks above all to discharge its strength — life itself is will to power…” The difficulty is in making our choices wisely, and ethically.

I know how far I’m extending my chin by quoting Nietzsche. I sound like a dorm-room libertine. A critic once accused me of harboring an adolescent wish to power. To that, I plead guilty — but with a catch. I do believe in universal reciprocity, an indelible oneness of existence, and I operate from a ground rule of nonviolence. By that, I do not mean abstention from self-defense but rather an unwillingness to violate the sanctity of another’s search, to knowingly do anything that would deprive another of his or her own pursuit of highest potential. And since the political question is never far away, I’ll note that my policy preferences run to a mildly redistributive social democratic state with single-payer healthcare, labor unions, and consumer protections with teeth.

As alluded, sensitive people often deny or overlook their power-seeking impulse, associating it with the tragic fate of Faust or Lady Macbeth. It can be argued, however, that all of our neuroses and feelings of chronic despair, aside from those with identifiably biological causes, grow from the frustrated expression of personal power. We may spend a lifetime (and countless therapy sessions) ascribing our problems to other, more secondary phenomena — without realizing that, as naturally as a bird is drawn to the dips and flows of air currents, we are in the perpetual act of trying to forge, create, and sustain, much like the ancient alchemist or wizard.

The ultimate frustration of life is that, while we seem to be granted godlike powers — giving birth, creating beauty, spanning space and time, devising machines of incredible might — we are bound to physical forms that quickly decay. “Ye are gods,” wrote the psalmist, adding “but yet shall die as princes.” Immortality and the reversal of bodily decline is the one magic no one has ever mastered. The wish to surpass the boundaries of our physicality is behind some of our most haunting myths and parables, from the Trojan prince Tithonus, to whom the gods granted immortality but trapped in a shell of misery and decay for failing to request eternal youth, to the doomed scientist Victor Frankenstein, who sought the ultimate alchemy of creating life only to bring destruction on everyone around him.

We live in a sphere of limitations. But we cannot desist from pushing against its limits. It is our heritage.

Many of us grew up learning the story of humanity’s fall from grace in the biblical parable of the garden of paradise, where the serpent — long associated with the Great Adversary (a guest who’ll soon be arriving) — seduces Eve, and then she Adam, into eating forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But take a fresh reading, or a first reading, of the sparsely detailed chapter three of Genesis. When revisiting this familiar story in virtually any translation, you’ll see not only that the serpent’s argument is based in truth — the couple does not perish for eating the apple, and their eyes are, in fact, opened to good and evil (indeed, some scholars contend that the garden’s two trees, the tree of knowledge and the tree of life, are the same)— but also that Eve, contrary to a shibboleth about feminine nature, does not seduce Adam, who requires little coaxing. The serpent even suggests, as augmented in other texts, that Yahweh displays cruel hypocrisy by forbidding intellectual illumination, even as its availability sits in the garden’s midst.

We’re taught, too, that the denouement of Eve’s misstep was her son Cain slaying his brother Abel. But Cain’s tragic act of fratricide may reflect, in discomforting realism, the unavoidable consequence of creativity: friction. Competing ideologies and the wish to measure and evaluate may be the inevitable cost of awareness. But without the rebel, the malcontent, the usurper — the snake in the garden — how could humanity claim sentience?

Lord Byron used his 1821 drama, Cain, one of the dramatist’s most alluring and under-appreciated works, to take the marked brother’s side. And to introduce the most jarring literary re-conception of Lucifer next to Milton’s. Byron’s antihero, who befriends the rebellious Cain, is persuasive and penetrating in his denial that he was the serpent in the garden, yet he points out that the serpent greeted Eve as a sexual and political emancipator — an outlook embraced by many proto-feminists and political radicals of that century and the next. Byron’s dark lord is a fiery optimist on the side of the malcontents: “I know the thoughts/Of dust, and feel for it, and with you.”

I began to question whether the forces of creation with which I most identified — whether parabolic or metaphysical — were these same forces of Promethean defiance. Forces of aspiration who rallied to the cry of the demon Moloch in Paradise Lost: “Hard liberty before the easy yoke.”

Now, one could ask: why think of any of this other than in material terms? Why not put away my Bhagavad Gita in favor of Atlas Shrugged? Because, as noted, I believe that truth is not contained within flesh and bone alone. I think we participate in an existence that goes beyond the five senses. And I believe that our ancient ancestors were correct in deifying certain energies and understanding oneself in relation to them; they gave them names like Thoth, Hermes, Minerva, and Set. Hence, I began to take a long and considered look at such an energy, to which I have been alluding, but which I have not yet named: Satan. This term has its own complicated past, it has gotten me cast out of a garden or two myself, but I employ it both to acknowledge its colloquial primacy and as a bow to bluntness.

There exists a rich and underappreciated counter narrative of humanity’s encounter with what is called “Satanic” in Western life particularly, but not only, in the literature of the Romantics. This countercurrent of spiritual, political, and cultural history — and present — has been insufficiently understood, historically confused, and blurred by entertainment, conspiracy theorists, sensationalism, and fraud (such as the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s).

My wish then, is to encourage a second look where we’re not supposed to be looking — that is, to take a more unadorned, elucidating, and even hopeful perspective on the Satanic. Milton has Satan say: “The mind is its own place, and in it self/Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” Again, Satan is an optimist. Me too. No cards under the table: my journey — and perhaps yours — includes constructively wondering whether my own search for a personal, spiritual, and ethical philosophy (I have one — and it’s vital to me) lies east of Eden, or within what is popularly but incompletely called the “dark side.” That’s what I’ve been describing.

Darkness is not a void; it’s a womb. And in the territory of truth and consensual experiment, there exist no boundaries of exploration.

#Mitch Horowitz #satan #satanism #snake #adam and eve #cain and abel #power #ethics #reciprocity

[notbang]

gimme the commentary for you're the fire and the flood, anything you have to say about the section starting with "He wakes to the acrid burn of smoke in his nostrils and his throat, one of the overhead smoke alarms apparently clinging to the last of its battery power long enough to sound a pathetic wail in warning." and ending on “Drink some three year old tequila with me?”

send me a scene from one of my fics, and I’ll give you the equivalent of a dvd commentary on it! - you’re the fire and the flood

He wakes to the acrid burn of smoke in his nostrils and his throat, one of the overhead smoke alarms apparently clinging to the last of its battery power long enough to sound a pathetic wail in warning. His first foggy thought is Rebecca, his arms reaching for her out of repressed habit but coming up empty, and when he pushes himself bleary eyed up onto his elbows on the couch he can’t see her on the bed, either. Once he discerns the soft grey haze is filtering out from the kitchen he scrambles to his feet in a panic.

Since one of the central conceits of this fic is that Rebecca has been in jail for the past three years -- and Rebecca has cut off all communication with everyone for the past two -- something I was playing around with was the jarring sense for the both Rebecca and Nathaniel that they’ve gone from zero contact to being trapped not only together but in this fucked up time capsule Nathaniel has left of their stuff in his apartment after moving out (dude, get some fucking therapy, stat). So for Nathaniel in particular, the memory overload is wreaking a little a havoc on his dreams (which may or may not also have something to do with those pesky Santa Ana Winds). He’s just spent the night dreaming of a moment they shared back when they were together, so when he’s pulled from slumber Rebecca is immediately on his mind.

She’s flattened against the wall when he finds her, eyes wide and vacant as she stares at the sink where the flames are already starting to lick up the wall. When he calls her name she’s unresponsive. He tries again, rougher this time.

“Rebecca.”

She snaps out of it, then, coughing and crumpling against him before mirroring his movements and tucking her mouth into the crook of her elbow.

“The water,” she chokes out, batting helplessly at the smoke. “There’s no water coming out.”

Since it’s the apocalypse and all, we had to up the stakes a little beyond trapped in an apartment with someone you don’t want to be trapped inside an apartment with and cut off the water supply. And the most [in]convenient moment for that to become apparent was of course when Rebecca decided lighting a small fire in the sink was a good idea.

He nudges her aside and goes for the rug in the entryway, pushing past her to get back to the sink and slapping at it with the heavy fabric until he’s managed to smother most of it out, the sides of it singeing in the heat but the lack of oxygen ultimately winning out. When the smoulder is contained to the basin again he returns with one of her saucepans of water, extinguishing the remnants with an angry hiss against the stainless steel.

I just... really liked the idea of Rebecca being accidentally prepared for the apocalypse? Being in jail for three years has affected her in different ways, and I think she’s learned to hone the more manic aspects of her personality into a very specific brand of survival. The apartment ends up fully stocked with food because she goes kind of overboard hoarding all the things she’s missed out on eating for the past three years (and incidentally, things Nathaniel wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, which was hilarious to me). They still have water because she took some advice she heard on the news (which she’s been obsessing over as a means to reacquaint herself with the world) to the extreme. Plus I enjoyed the mental image of this already ridiculous mishmash apartment being added to with a minefield of miscellaneous vessels filled with water.

He drops the pot in the sink with an aggressive clank before turning back to face her.

She hasn’t moved from the spot the entire time, still stood frozen and numb, and he grunts in annoyance before hoisting her into his arms and carrying her out of the smoky kitchen over his shoulder, finally waking her up.

“Put me down,” she growls, pummelling him angrily with her fists. “I’m fucking serious. Put me down, you asshole.”

He deposits her unceremoniously back on her feet near the foot of the bed, sidestepping before she can hit him again and raising his hands defensively.

“Are you insane? What was that?”

“I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. I was stupid. I wasn’t thinking.”

“What were you even doing? Did you start that fire on purpose?”

So this entire fic is basically just one continuous fire metaphor for Rebecca’s inner tumult. I’ve always been intrigued by her association with fire in canon, and in a way this was a 22k extrapolation of that. As we know, Rebecca has a tendency to set things on fire when she wants them seared out of her life, and apparently being stuck in the middle of a wildfire apocalypse is no exception. In fact, I kind of imagine she drew inspiration from the wildfires raging outside when she made the very deliberate decision to start her own fire in the sink. This time, she’s not burning her ex boyfriends’ stuff, though -- she’s burning a stack of photos from Darryl of this universe’s equivalent of Hebecca, because she’s struggling with much the same multitude of emotions we saw her wrangle in 4x09. (As an aside: in this universe, the baby is named Bianca, meaning ‘white’ -- a reference to Whitefeather and White Josh.) The baby was born the night she was arrested, so even more so than what we got in canon Rebecca has been happily pretending she doesn’t exist for the last three years. Add to her internal unrest the fact that half the town has already gone up in flames -- she’s not just dealing with the existence of her biological daughter, but the fact that her life could very well be in danger. So almost understandably, Rebecca decides to Nope out of that mental mess in typical destructive Bunch fashion.

He notices the way she’s favouring her left arm, tucking it into her chest and his nostrils flare as he snatches at it, yanking her closer so he can see.

“Ow!”

“You burned yourself? Jesus Christ, Rebecca.”

Grip like iron around her elbow he drags her over to the dining table where she’s been keeping her collection of makeshift water vessels; tripping over her own feet from the angry force of him Rebecca yelps, aiming a protesting kick towards his shins in self-defence but stumbling in the process, coming to an abrupt stop when he shoves her forearm down into the portable foot spa Valencia had gifted her as a pre-wedding present so many moons ago.

“Stop it, you’re hurting me,” she snaps, and only then does he let her go, her skin imprinted faintly with red where he’d been holding her.

“Oh, sorry, I’m hurting you? You seem to be doing a pretty good job of that yourself.”

She scowls, but keeps her hand submersed in the tub anyway, the room-temperature water for the most part ineffectual at soothing any of the sting.

Nathaniel closes his eyes and tries to calm himself, tries to breathe through his heart beating hard like it’s going to break through his chest on overdrive. They’re both a little panicked, he knows; fraught with fire-related tension and highly strung, and as his pulse slows back to a steady throb he feels the shame creep in at adding to her distress—it’s never been his intention to frighten her. His own brief flare of terror still strums insistently in his fingertips, though, and he can’t keep the accusation out of his voice.

As we find out a little later, once the tequila gets involved, the last three years haven’t exactly been kind to Nathaniel. He left West Covina to move on, but he’s still very much affected by the pervasive sense that he’s doomed to feel like he’s losing Rebecca over and over again -- when you take her suicide attempt, their two break ups, her pleading guilty and then later taking him off her visitor’s list into account and add all to that the fact that the way she re-entered his life was in a hospital bed, the dude’s understandably got a bit of a complex going by this point. I hesitated at having him get so (however briefly) physical with her, but I think the important distinction here is that it’s nothing to do with anger. She’s just scared the absolute shit out of him, again, and he’s course-corrected a little too hard in trying to protect her.

“What the hell, Rebecca?” he demands. “You are crazy. You could have gotten us both killed.”

“I know! I am crazy. I’m losing my fucking mind, Nathaniel. Because I’ve spent the last three years of my life behind bars and now I’m finally out I’m just trapped all over again. I just want to start over but I can’t, because I’m stuck in this stupid town, and now I’m stuck in this stupid apartment with all this stuff, with you, and with all these reminders of everything I’ve missed and I feel like I can’t breathe.” She pulls her arm out of the flooded foot spa and gestures erratically at her chest, sending out a spray of dislodged droplets, eyes wild and wide and welling with tears. “I’m suffocating and I don’t want to be in here anymore. I can’t…”

If Nathaniel’s feeling the cabin fever at being trapped, Rebecca’s feeling it tenfold. If it weren’t a violation of her parole, she wouldn’t even be in the state right now, so her current circumstances are A Lot. So while it was mostly about her complicated feelings regarding what she’s missed out on in her absence, her starting the fire had an undercurrent of self-sabotage to it, too. 

She lets out a strangled sob before promptly bursting into tears, crumpling forward, collapsing against him and burying her head in his chest. Force of nature that she is it’s so easy to forget how small she is until she’s tucked against him, over a head of height difference and two years of uneasy silence between them.

“Please. I just—I just want to get out of here,” she hiccups into his shirt, hands fisting in the fabric. “I feel like I can’t—”

“Breathe,” he says quietly, cradling the back of her head on autopilot. “Hey. Just breathe.”

He’s never really consoled anybody before but it seems like he’s doing something right; her hand not nursing the burn pulls tighter at his shirtfront but her choked sobs ease somewhat, her breathing eventually slowing into synchronisation with the gentle back and forth of his palm across her shoulder blades. For a half-second he thinks he should be disgusted by way she’s snivelling into his shirt but the disdain never comes; all he feels is an unexpected rush of latent tenderness for her and the overwhelming urge to encase her firmly in his arms.

Hugs!!!! Emotionally overloaded hugs!!!! An R/N staple. That is all.

She’s embarrassed, so embarrassed, not just about the fire but the hopeless way she’s clinging to him and she can’t bring herself to let go because she doesn’t want to see his face or let him look at hers, doesn’t want to look at anything in the apartment for a moment longer. Her nostrils fill with the familiar scent of him as she inhales deeply, shakily, and crushes her nose into his collarbone.

“You’ve been through a lot, Rebecca,” he murmurs into the crown of her head. “You’re going to survive this too. I promise.”

It’s the softness in his voice that finally gives her the courage to pull away, rubbing the back of her palm across her snotty nose and glancing up at him with wet, abashed eyes.

He steps back but moves his hands to her waist, holding her gently as if he’s not entirely convinced she can keep herself upright.

Up until this point their every interaction has been rife with tension -- a mixture of unavoidable sexual tension and the resentment they’re each carrying over how certain things have played out between them -- but here they stop and take a breath together, and it’s kind of like the fire in the kitchen was the high-pressure crucible that’s made reforging their dynamic possible. Rebecca’s letting herself be vulnerable, rather than angry, and Nathaniel -- dumb smitten dweeb that he is -- has just melted at their physical contact.

“Truce?” she surprises herself by offering with an ungraceful sniff, not much more than a mumble but he hears it all the same.

There’s a beat, and then he drops his arms away from her and nods. “Truce.”

His eyes don’t leave her back as he stands there mutely, watching her make her way across the room to rummage through some boxes in the corner until she finds what she’s looking for and turns back to face him.

She sniffs again, and raises the bottle.

“Drink some three year old tequila with me?”

Because adding alcohol to the mix is always a good idea!!

#catty-words #replies #my fic #dvd commentary meme #thaaaanks #i'm not feeling very articulate today but hopefully this is some level of interesting insight

[subasekabang]

Death of the Author

Author: Leasspell Dael Rating: T Word Count: ~11,500 Pairings/Characters: Pre-Neku/Minamimoto; Neku, Minamimoto, Rhyme, Beat, Shiki, Joshua, Hanekoma Warnings: Canon-Typical Discussion of Death, Depression, Swearing/Profanity

Summary: The Game is over, Neku and his new friends are alive, and Shibuya is still kicking. Trauma doesn't fade that quickly though and Neku struggles to process everything he went through--everything he learned. No matter how much he hangs out with his friends and tries to enjoy his new life, there's a darkness inside him he's desperate to hide.

Found-object art starts cropping up all over Shibuya, and Neku's pretty sure he's seen Minamimoto out of the corner of his eyes in the crowds. With Joshua and Mr. Hanekoma MIA, this might be Neku's one chance to get closure.

The question: is Neku willing to risk a meeting with the Reaper to settle old ghosts?

Neku keeps going back.

To Hachiko. The Scramble Crossing. Ten-Four. CAT's mural.

He keeps going back, and Neku doesn't know why. It's not just the incidental travels when he's going about Shibuya with his friends; he wanders at night when he can't sleep--

no timer no blankness no missing-time

--when he's alone and has no goals besides the passing of time.

He keeps going back.

He keeps seeing ghosts.

Not real ghosts; not Reapers or Players or Noise. Just--

777's collar spinning to a stop on the ground flowers under an overpass a small café littered with broken glass

--memories and nightmares; the souvenirs of a game he never asked to play.

Sometimes Neku visits the landmarks with purpose. Hachiko to meet up with Shiki, Beat, and Rhyme. CAT's mural in Udagawa to talk at Joshua. Shops where he's built relationships with the employees. Each visit part of his efforts to reconcile the Shibuya of his past with the Shibuya of the Game with the Shibuya he now lives in.

Some days he backslides; puts on his headphones and shuts out the world. He's not a saint, and change is hard. Some days Neku lives so thoroughly in the present, he can forget when he was alone; can forget when every day was a shot of adrenaline that never stopped.

Some days he checks his phone incessantly for a mission that will never appear and scratches at his hand to soothe an itch from a timer that will never count down to zero.

Given all of this bullshit scrambling his brains as he tries to survive one day after the other, Neku thinks he can be forgiven for thinking Sho Minamimoto was a figment of his imagination.

The truth started with a bullet.

Fucking Joshua.

CRACK his backside meets the asphalt it feels like there's cotton in his ears somehow he still hears...

"Blew it..."

"Ew; that's tacky."

"I think it's kinda creative. A commentary on our consumerist society; both judging and part-of..."

Neku looked up from where Beat was showing him a skateboard trick. In theory Rhyme was showing Shiki the same thing, but it sounded like they'd gotten distracted.

Across the plaza, sat a heap of junk. Not the towering monstrosities that Pi-Face had left littered around the UG in Neku's second week, but a person-shaped sculpture of found objects, wagging a scolding finger at the viewer.

It was similar enough to make the blood drain from Neku's face though. Beat just scowled.

"Maybe," Shiki conceded, face still twisted in a grimace. Looking over to the boys, mouth opened to say something--ask them for backup maybe--she came to a complete stop. Her eyes widened a fraction, before she glanced over her shoulder at the abomination.

Face hardening, Shiki scooped up her board in one arm and looped arms with Rhyme using her other, dragging them both over to Neku and Beat.

"Let's bounce; Towa Records has a sale on today I didn't want to miss."

Neku wasn't sure why he always went to CAT's mural in Udagawa whenever he wanted to talk to Joshua. He'd tried visiting the sewer access to the Composer's lair, but in the RG it was nothing but a storm drain. It didn't feel like anything special, except that his memories told him otherwise.

The Cat Café remained closed, though its insides were pristine when viewed through the window.

Minamimoto's rampage had occurred in the UG after all.

With the café closed, Neku had no way to contact Mr. Hanekoma; no way to reach out to Josh. Their numbers were no longer in his phone.

So he'd wandered over to Udagawa, crossing through alleys until he found CAT's last mural.

The paint was already beginning to peel--CAT had always made his murals transitory, but usually something new would crop up before the old one disappeared--but Neku still found comfort in it. He ran his hand along the wall, chips of paint flicking off with his progress, taking in the details that had yet to fade. Living in the moment.

Until his hand hit a pit in the concrete.

Jarred back into reality, Neku looked at the imperfection in the wall and felt his blood run cold.

It was a bullet-hole.

Suddenly, Neku was back in the moment of his death as Joshua loomed above him, gun pointed straight at Neku's heart--

--except, that didn't make sense.

Whipping around, Neku saw the spot where he had lain all those weeks ago. It was meters away. Wandering over, there was a matching bullet hole in the asphalt.

Returning to the wall, he ran his hand lightly over the imperfection.

"So where did you come from, then?" Joshua had only needed one bullet to take Neku out.

Then again, they hadn't been alone in the alley that day.

I blew it...

And Neku wasn't the only one who was shot.

Beat was fretting.

In any other circumstance, Neku would probably take the opportunity to tease his friend mercilessly. Beat took such pride in his 'tough man' attitude, that the mother-henning was a little adorable.

But it was about Rhyme, and for their group that would probably always make such teasing too soon.

Specifically, it was about Rhyme's ambitions. Or lack-thereof.

"But she has all of her memories back, right?" Shiki asked quietly.

Snorting, Beat crossed his arms defensively across his chest, kicking at a pebble as they wandered by A-East. "She knows things I forgot 'bout. She's still as smart--as skilled--as she's always been.

"Just... she's not doin' anything with it anymore. Tags along with me more often than not."

Unlike Shiki and Neku whose friends-groups pre-Game had been, respectively, small and non-existent, Beat had a large group of connections he spent time with, and Rhyme had had her own. While Beat had made the effort to reconnect with his other friends, Rhyme hadn't.

Apparently, she hadn't been doing much of anything.

Today was a rare day where she was separated from Beat's side by a group project she was doing for school, and Beat had wasted no time bringing his concerns to them.

"It just don't make no sense! Rhyme always had a million million things she was lookin' to do. Didn't have time for it all. We'd havta plan times to skateboard together just to make sure we had time to do it! Did... Did something go wrong?"

When they were brought back, Beat meant. When Rhyme was restored.

"She's been through an ordeal, Beat. We all have. And she's the youngest of all of us," Shiki was explaining gently, her hand lightly placed on Beat's forearm where the boy was clutching his hat in frustration. "If she's a bit clingy for a while, that's to be expected."

Neku followed along behind them, silently thinking that Shiki was wrong.

Well, not that Shiki was wrong. Shiki was absolutely right.

But Beat was too.

Neku feared that Rhyme wasn't going to get better, like Shiki was claiming would happen with time.

"I really admire how he has a goal and is giving his all to reach it! I wish I had something like that..."

"Rhyme was always the one with dreams and ambitions. I just said that thing about being the best skater so she'd stop looking so lost..."

"You fool! Her memories weren't her entry fee-- They were yours!"

Rhyme didn't get her entry fee back. Neku got his memories and Shiki back, Shiki her appearance, and Beat got Rhyme's memories. They were all brought back to life, but only Rhyme's fee had been kept.

Why? Because even though she was brought back, she had lost?

"Your entry fee has already been collected."

And what did that mean for Neku, who won every Game except for the last?

Still, Neku didn't know anything for sure. No point is upsetting Beat more than he was.

10-4 had one of Pi-face's statues sitting in front of it.

Shiki made a face as she dragged a snarling Beat into the shopping centre. Beat needed 'something nice' to wear to an interview for a part-time job and had made the mistake of mentioning this in Shiki's hearing. Neku kept strategically silent to prevent her focus from shifting onto him. Rhyme was giggling over their antics, which was always a win.

The statue caught Rhyme's attention, so Neku paused with her, grimacing slightly at it.

The core of it had once been a shopping cart--maybe two of them--but the wires had been beaten and reworked into a vaguely human shape. The framework was then papered-over with shopping bags from all the different stores in the centre.

It was trash and an eyesore, but at least it wasn't a literal heap of garbage like they had been in the UG.

"We are what we consume..." Rhyme murmured, her outstretched hand gliding over the contours of the shape, never quite touching. Hovering over an oddly placed wheel sticking out from a shoulder, she finally made contact, sending the wheel spinning before stepping back to observe it as a whole. "Do we move society, or does society move us?"

Neku looked at the statue, and just saw trash. "You really get all of that from this?"

Despite Beat's concerns about her ambition, Rhyme didn't seem unhappy. In fact, she turned to Neku with a beaming smile. "Oh yes! The artist has put so much passion into their work. They must have a lot of drive to be making so many in such a short amount of time!"

Plenty of time when you're dead, Neku supposed. "Sounds like you're a fan."

A blush dusted her cheeks, but Rhyme didn't look down or ashamed of her enthusiasm. Instead, she elbowed Neku in the ribs, a teasing grin twitching her lips. "Kinda like how you feel about CAT, right?"

CAT...

Mr. Hanekoma...

CAT's artwork was a major inspiration for Neku. Even back when he was too self-absorbed to actualize the message, he'd felt it:

Seize The Day.

During the Games, Mr. Hanekoma had been Neku's rock, the one person he trusted to lay out the rules and show him how to navigate the challenges.

Until the last week.

Why had Mr. Hanekoma been helping Pi-face? If he was helping Minamimoto, why was he there when Josh shot him the second time?

Why had he looked so gleeful?

To say Neku's feelings about CAT were complicated was an understatement.

Much like his feelings for Joshua.

"Yeah," he confirmed to Rhyme, not wanting to voice his thoughts out loud. "CAT's a big inspiration for me. Do you think you'd want to do something like these... things?"

The world went quiet.

Rhyme's eyes widened before she hunched in slightly, darting her eyes over to the Consumerist Nightmare that had so caught her attention. The blush on her cheeks deepened.

"Do... do you think I could?" she asked, a tremor in her voice Neku didn't think he'd ever heard from her before.

Oh god, do something better

Choose something more meaningful

Why would you want to

Neku squashed all of the negative thoughts. It didn't matter what he thought.

"Of course," he told her, slinging an arm around her shoulders in a half-hug. "Draft your brother into helping with any heavy-lifting, though, y'hear?"

Beat would complain vociferously over the next few weeks about Rhyme collecting trash and junk, but underneath it all Neku and Shiki could hear his relief. She was no longer aimlessly following him around, often co-opting his assistance even if he'd had other plans.

Rhyme had a dream again. And that was worth everything to Beat.

It gave Neku hope that whatever had been stolen from him was something he could gain back.

Now he just needed to figure out whatever that was.

It was fragile.

Sitting in the middle of the back-alley with CAT's last mural was another one of Minamimoto's things.

A ceramic bowl, attached to a collection of glass bottles wired together in a mass that was leaned against a squashed bean-bag chair, more bottles chained together on each side to create four sprawled limbs.

And to add insult to injury, it was all topped with a mop-head that had been dyed orange, with a set of earphones over the top of that.

Walking into the alley to see this perverse caricature of himself in the worst moment of his life...

The world stopped.

No chirping birds or humming cicadas. No traffic or conversation from the street.

Everything became that... that... Abomination!

Neku's blood rushed in his ears, and he clenched his fists at his sides, knuckles white. His palm itched. He couldn't catch his breath.

On the ground was a chunk of concrete. Neku didn't remember picking it up. Neku did remember throwing it.

Shattering glass sounds nothing like the crack of a gunshot, but somehow the two became linked in Neku's mind. The rock went straight through the "torso" and somehow Neku had just become complicit in his own death.

Blood spread out from his corpse and all Neku could see was Joshua's smirk and Hanekoma's mirth, and why were they taking joy in this? Wasn't it enough that he couldn't do what had to be done?

"For fuck's sake."

The Composer's throne room faded away, and Neku was back in the gritty reality of the back-alleys of Udagawa. Shattered glass was at his feet, and red liquid spilled from the broken bottles.

From the smell of it, it was paint.

And standing at it's head, a bundle of cloth under one arm, was the Grim Heaper himself, scowling at Neku as if he were the scum beneath his feet.

"You've completely screwed up the order of operations here, yoctogram. Breaking the glass was supposed to happen after it was clothed." He tossed the bundle to the side in frustration. "Do you have any idea how much your petty vandalism has upset my precisely calculated schedule? Just... just scram. I've got numbers to crunch."

And then Minamimoto crouched down, poking at the thing's torso, checking to see what was salvageable from his little arts-and-crafts project.

Never mind that the real thing was standing right in front of him. Neku was dismissed as if he were nothing.

Sometimes Neku felt like he was nothing.

(Sometimes that was a relief, not having the weight of Shibuya's fate on his shoulders, and sometimes it made him mad, because he was a person and he mattered.)

Neku stalked past Minamimoto, kicked the head off the 'statue' (which also shattered and leaked red paint against the back wall of one of the businesses backing on the alley), reached the mural and laid his palms against it trying to ground himself.

He was alive. He wasn't on a timer. He wasn't in the Game. Shiki was safe. Rhyme and Beat were safe. Shibuya was safe.

Kitaniji was an asshole. Joshua was an asshole. Hanekoma was an asshole. Fucking Minamimoto was an asshole.

"Woah woah woah there, kid!"

A hand around his wrist, and a jerk as Neku's arm's momentum halted. Neku stared blankly at the wall, at the flecks of paint slowly detaching and falling to the ground or blown away by the wind.

He fist pulsed with his heartbeat, and now there really was blood. When had he started punching the wall?

"Got some anger issues there, I see. You done dividing by zero?"

Neku jerked his wrist out of Minamimoto's grasp with a snarl before twisting to put his back to the wall and sliding down, bloody hand cradled to his chest, head buried in his knees.

"Fuck off."

The last thing Neku expected was for Pi-face to sit down next to him, looking uncertain.

"Not exactly a safe neighborhood, kid. Why don'tcha go home already?"

"Fuck you."

"Yes," Neku could hear the eye-roll. "We've established your masterful proficiency with our language. Chop, chop. Time's a wasting. Go home. Fix up your hand. Stop your delinquent ways. Yada yada yada."

But Neku didn't budge. Just closed his eyes and let tears he didn't even realize he'd been suppressing finally flow. They were silent, and pulsed with the same beat he could feel in his injured hand.

Proof he was alive.

"You really don't recognize me, do you? Did Joshua mind-wipe you or something?" Neku's voice was thick with his tears and muffled by his knees, but somehow still understandable.

And Neku knew it was understandable because Minamimoto, who hadn't been moving much anyway, suddenly went completely still.

The was a heavy silence. Then...

"Are you telling me," and Minamimoto's voice was dripping with dark menace, "That the Composer actually brought you and your little friends back and didn't erase your memories?"

So Minamimoto did recognize him.

"Why did you think your little re-enactment pissed me off so much?" Neku finally raised his head from his knees to make sure Minamimoto got the full brunt of his sardonic expression.

What he got in return was a shifty, uncomfortable look and arms crossed defensively across the reaper's chest.

"Always a chance there was a hidden remainder. I figured the Composer would've included a compulsion to stay away from here along with the memory suppression so it's not like I ever expected you to see it. Barely anyone ever comes back here. I wasn't really expecting anyone to see it."

Then what was the point?

Muttering something under his breath, Minamimoto got up and retrieved the bundle of cloth--clothes--that he'd tossed aside earlier before returning back to Neku's side, sitting down with a little 'oof'. Neku watched him lazily, cheek pressed against his knees. Anger still simmered within him, but he wasn't sure he still had the energy to do anything about it.

"Why did you get to live when people like 777, Nao-Nao, and Sota didn't?"

Minamimoto didn't so much as twitch, just grabbed the shirt from the center of the bundle and started tearing a strip off of it.

"Gimme your hand."

Neku didn't budge.

Rolling his eyes, Minamimoto reached into the cavern of Neku's hunched body and gently grabbed his wrist again, drawing it out from where it had been sheltered against Neku's chest.

The pain was beginning to hit, spots all over his hand stinging as they were exposed to the air. Without a word, Minamimoto began wrapping Neku's hand in the makeshift bandage. For someone whose very existence filled Neku with a rush of adrenaline, flood of anger, and inappropriate grief, his hands were surprisingly gentle as he tied the cloth off in a small knot.

"Seriously, clean and disinfect when you get home. Don't want to kick it over an easily preventable infection now, do we?"

"You could have destroyed Shibuya with those Taboo Noise... Of all the people Josh could have brought back, why did it have to be you?" Neku's voice was thready with exhaustion and grief and pain. Nothing made sense since Joshua shot him.

A sneer was the last thing Neku expected in response, though, not after his non-response earlier. Minamimoto stood up, brushing off his pants from sitting on the ground.

Half-turned to walk away, Pi-face stopped and looked back at Neku.

"If you think possibly destroying Shibuya was a point against me in that fight, you forgot which side you were playing for."

Then he shoved his hands in his pockets and walked away.

Neku did wind up with a slight infection in his hand from where he'd smashed his knuckles against the wall over and over again. Luckily, it cleared up without needing to go to the doctor, but it drew attention from his parents.

"Maybe you'd like to get into some kind of martial arts? Learn how to throw a punch properly?" Mom asked him.

"We might want to consider making an appointment with a therapist for him..." Mama murmured quietly to Mom when she thought he couldn't hear.

Nothing came of either suggestion, but it reminded him that his parents cared. Even if they didn't know what had happened to him during those three weeks he was missing.

Then again, these days Neku wasn't even sure if he knew what happened during those three weeks.

He hadn't been fighting for anything except for his life and then Shiki's life. He wasn't part of Joshua and Minamimoto's pissing contest.

He wasn't.

Of course, that didn't mean he hadn't been affected by it.

And Joshua had gotten his final chuckle at Neku's expense.

"WHAT THE HELL?!"

Neku just wanted to be done already. He'd played this Game. He'd played it three fucking times. He'd chosen his soul over a guaranteed victory. He'd trusted that little fucker, no matter how often it turned out he'd completely screwed Neku over. Neku wasn't even allowed to play this game any more. Was this his punishment? To play the Game over and over until the Noise finally finally erased him?

Except people didn't walk by unseeing, ignorant of Neku's pain in their midst. Of his confusion.

People jumped away from him in shock at his yell. People looked at him--in concern, in irritation, in fear.

People touched him.

An arm around his shoulders guiding him out of traffic before the lights changed when he just stood there, gaping. Hands on his face, tilting his head back as paramedics checked his pupil dilation after an ambulance was called because he'd curled up into a little ball and wouldn't stop shaking.

Hands strapping him onto a gurney for the ride to the hospital.

He was checked over by concerned medical professionals.

No sign of head trauma. No concussion. Did you take something, kid? No sign of drugs. No signs of abuse or injuries of any kind.

Police officers with questions. What's your name son? Do you have any ID? No. He'd left it at home when he'd sulked out of the house... three weeks ago? Longer? Do you know your parents' numbers?

And finally, finally, Mom and Mama had swept in and grabbed onto him and cried and cried and cried. They were so relieved. Do you know how worried we've been? Where have you been? Are you okay? Don't scare us like this!

For the first time in three weeks he'd felt safe. They could scare away the monsters from under his bed and lurking in the closet. They would guard his sleep.

And that's what Neku did at that point. Just dropped off into an exhausted slumber, with no reaction but a few tired tears escaping his eyes.

When he'd woken up, he'd gotten the gist of what had happened in his absence.

The police had dismissed his parents' concerns, classifying him as a runaway. He'd turn up eventually, they said. (And he had.) Mom and Mama had been plastering the neighbourhood with missing posters, and with each day that passed they feared that they'd be finding a body instead of their son healthy and whole.

(Neku never told them how often he slipped away to Shibuya, so much that it felt like his real home, not the quiet suburb they lived in. Neku had to scour newspapers to discover that his body had been labeled a John Doe and his... death... was still an open investigation. Neku might have a pauper's grave out there somewhere. He's afraid to go looking.)

Neku apologizes over and over for running off that morning, for forgetting his wallet and phone, for taking so long to come home.

He claims he got overwhelmed and then got lost in his own head. Tells them about haunting the streets of Shibuya (figuratively). About making friends who helped him get to the point where he could reach out for help; helped him be ready to come home.

They went as family to therapy for a few sessions, but Neku refused to get into any details about his three weeks away. He just wanted to put it behind him, he claimed.

Neku knew telling the truth would just make things worse. So he kept his silence. Even among Shiki, Beat, and Rhyme they didn't talk about the Game much. So all of Neku's feelings about it were kept buried deep inside, a festering wound he didn't even realize he had.

Until he met Minamimoto in that alley.

It turned out found-object sculpting wasn't Rhyme's niche.

"She says she just doesn't feel it," Beat groused to Neku where they were watching Shiki teach Rhyme about different types of fabrics. "Decided she wants to give quilting a try."

"At least you'll get some warm blankets out of it," Neku said dutifully. In truth, he thought it was great that Shiki was getting a chance to share her passion with someone new. Shiki and Eri were working on restoring trust between each other after the miscommunication that had sent Shiki careening into Shibuya's streets, but it was complicated by Shiki's guilt over stealing her friend's persona during the Game. Which Eri didn't--and couldn't--know about. Things were still awkward between them.

"Don't see why she couldn't have figured it out before I hadta drag garbage all around town..." Arms crossed over his chest in indignation, Beat slumped against the wall emphasize his disgruntlement. Neku suppressed his amusement, simply nodding as-if in agreement. It was Neku's job to be appropriately supportive. Not an asshole. Besides, Beat didn't really mind.

"At least we know for sure now she doesn't want to be the next Grim Heaper."

Right. Minamimoto.

There were still a scattering of scabs on his hand, healing slowed by the infection he'd gotten from not disinfecting his cuts right away. Neku rubbed them absently, remembering the strangely gentle way Minamimoto had held his hand while wrapping it.

"Beat... What were we fighting for?" Beat's grumbling went silent. Across the store, Neku could still hear Rhyme and Shiki chatting excitedly, unaffected by the bombshell that Neku had just dropped. The line he had just crossed.

They didn't talk about the Game. Not really. Not directly.

They didn't talk about the Game, but they might recommend a store or store-clerk. Might talk about a shortcut, or a piece of Shibuya trivia. They'd never ask one another where they had learned about these things. Shibuya was precious to them, but the Game was to be left behind and forgotten.

They were supposed to be moving on.

"To live--for Rhyme; for Shiki."

That's right. That's what Neku had always thought. Beat knew it, had sounded sure about it. Why was Neku suddenly full of doubts?

"If you think possibly destroying Shibuya was a point against me in that fight, you forgot which side you were playing for."

Neku hesitated before speaking. It was probably just Pi-face playing mind games. Like leaving them to hang all week. Or that fucking statue of his.

But.

"...Was that all? Are we sure there wasn't something else?"

Darting his eyes over to check on the girls and seeing they were undisturbed, Beat grabbed Neku by the elbow and dragged him outside.

"The hell's going on with you? What else would we have been fighting for? Isn't the right to live enough?"

Jerking his arm out of Beat's grip, Neku scrubbed his hands through his hair. "Shut up. I know. It's just... How did we fit into that fucking bet?"

Now Beat looked at him as if he were crazy. "What bet? What's goin' on, Neku?"

Neku began to pace back and forth on the street in front of the shop. "What do you remember about the last day, Beat? After you snapped Shiki out of the brain-washing and caught up to me."

Because beyond his perplexing question about Neku's own role in the Game, Minamimoto had said something else interesting that Neku had merely dismissed at the time: that the Composer should have erased their memories. Neku had thought that was just Joshua being his usual contrary and dismissive self; but what if he had tampered with their memories? What if the reason they didn't talk about the Game was because they were compelled not to?

Brow furrowing, Beat scratched at the peach fuzz on his chin absently as he thought back. "Well, there weren't much time to see anything before Shades snatched us all up as part of his 'final boss' routine. We stomped him, then me an' Rhyme were waking up in the hospital, at the end of our 'recovery' from the accident. Was downright eerie how there wuz paperwork and everything from a long-ass stay we didn't even really do... Had cards from classmates and bunches of flowers..." Beat shuddered.

Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.

They'd arrived after Josh's grand entrance and had Josh's gloating and final showdown erased.

At least they don't have to remember me getting shot...

"But you remember how messed up the Game was when we were playing, right? All the rules the Reapers were breaking?"

Lips thinning, Beat nodded and said nothing else.

"And didn't you think it was weird how you never got to see the Composer while you were a Reaper yourself?"

A gusty sigh. "Neku, I was small fry. 'Sides, Shades seemed to be running the show, if you ask me. Not sure how much work the Composer actually does."

"Kitaniji was running the Game. The Composer wanted to erase the Game and start over, or something, so Kitaniji made a bet with him--with Shibuya as the stakes. Without the Composer around, the rules started breaking down," a realization came to Neku, "Just as the fucker wanted to begin with. Argh." Another anxious scrub of Neku's hands through his hair. "If Kitaniji erased us, he won and got to keep Shibuya as it is. If the Composer won, he'd erase everything."

"Shit."

"Yeah."

Beat slumped back against the wall. Through the store window, Neku could see the girls paying for their purchases at the register.

"So we'd've lost no matter what? Live and Shibuya dies. Die and Shibuya lives." Now Beat was scratching his head through his hat. "Wait a second, though. We're here, and Shibuya's here. How'd that happen?"

Through a mad man's twisted whims. Except Neku had just realized a flaw in his explanation to Beat; a memory brought back to the surface merely by talking about the event. Kitaniji didn't have to kill all of them--that was just the most efficient way to make sure he eliminated the Composer's

Proxy.

Neku. Neku was the only one who'd needed to die.

Or...

"I blew it...

...Not die in the first place.

Beat was trying to get his attention, trying to get the rest of the explanation, but Neku was lost in his own head.

More and more memories were pouring back. Minamimoto came to the alley that day trying to shoot the Composer in his weakened form--or so Josh claimed. Joshua also claimed that he would destroy Shibuya if Neku didn't shoot him and take his place. But Neku was supposed to trust his partner and he had and Shibuya had lived; they all had lived--even Rhyme who had legitimately lost but had been Neku's saving grace in the end...

Back it up. Minamimoto had shot at the Composer and had done so in the UG. Was it because Joshua truly was weaker there? Or Minamimoto just thought he was weaker there then proved wrong when Josh stopped the bullets. Or...

Or had he only decided to take the shot as Joshua lined up his own?

Rush of footsteps Neku turns Joshua running straight for him Gun rising Bullet flies past Neku's cheek Neku collapses "I blew it..." Looks behind Minamimoto with an arm graze Second gun raised Six shots A raised hand Tinkle as they hit the ground Minamimoto runs away Joshua takes aim at Neku supine on the ground and...

Josh had waited until the last minute to choose his proxy; Neku had checked the dates. He'd been 'missing' for three weeks and two days. One day to die; one day to be found; 21 days to play. Or perhaps there had been another proxy for the first week who had failed and Neku was the replacement.

If Josh had failed to provide a proxy, that was one less week where he had an opportunity to win. One less chance for Shibuya being destroyed.

Minamimoto had taken a huge risk when he'd summoned the Taboo Noise, but he might have thought it was worth it if it stopped the Composer from playing with all of their lives.

But why was Hanekoma playing both sides? None of this made any--

"NEKU!!"

"Gwaaah~"

"How the hell is Shibuya still here if we are too?"

Maybe it was selfish, but Neku didn't want to correct Beat that it was actually just Neku who had been the problem. Neku didn't want to be in this alone. Didn't want to reveal the final game where Neku had taken a leap of faith, uncertain if there was anything below to catch him if he was wrong.

So he shrugged. "Whims of a madman is my guess. Maybe the Composer changed his mind."

The girls came out then, and the subject was dropped.

If I'd killed Shiki and then been erased myself, Shibuya wouldn't have been in danger...

It was a dark thought, but Neku was in a dark mood. Mama had wanted them to go on a family trip to Hokkaido during summer break, but Neku had protested the idea of leaving all of his friends behind. He'd only just made them, after all.

"It's only for a couple of weeks, Neku," she'd informed him crossly after he'd objected yet again to the idea. "They'll still be here when you get back."

But would they? He was pretty sure they wouldn't purposefully abandon him, but Neku was painfully aware of how fickle life itself could be. None of them had planned on dying, but it had happened without their consent all the same.

He'd stormed out of the house without a word--though not before grabbing his wallet with his ID in it on the way out--and begun stalking the streets of Shibuya. His headphones were jammed over his ears and he was barely taking in his surroundings at all.

Neku was unprepared for a sudden presence grabbing his arm and the disorientation as sound from the world around him crashed back in.

"--KU!! Are you okay?"

Oh. It was Rhyme; Rhyme who had grabbed his arm with one hand and then used her other to dislodge his 'phones.

Working his mouth, Neku tried to force out some kind of appeasement to clear the worry on her face, but no sound emerged except a strangled whimper which only caused her brow to crease further.

Rhyme released his arm in favour of grabbing Neku's hand instead and Neku held on with a death-grip. They were near the underpass where she and Beat had had their original accident. He didn't want her to get hurt. She'd been hurt enough.

small creature light and fragile stronger than him and beat combined last ally when konishi attacked comforting weight on neku's left shoulder

But whenever they needed to cross an intersection, Rhyme would bring them both to a stop and hold his hand a little tighter while they waited for the light to change.

I wonder if she has nightmares about Beat running into traffic, like Beat has nightmares about her following him there...

Despite any issues she might have, Rhyme moved with purpose, getting him out of the streets where his inattention could do him harm.

"Welcome to Sunshine!"

So they ordered burgers and sat down to eat in silence. As they ate, Neku moved from appreciative of the silence to antsy about it. The world was beginning to encroach in on him again and he wasn't sure if he was ready for it yet.

"My parents want to go away for break."

Rhyme's eyes lit up. "That's great! Where are you going?" She looked at the dark cloud over his face. "Or... is it not great?"

He'd been planning to just mutter a vague complaint to minimize her worry, but somehow all of the poison he'd been hiding inside came pouring out. His irrational fears that something would happen to them--or Shibuya--if he left; the fact that he felt like his parents had always pushed him to make friends and were now tearing him away from them; that he feared if he left now he'd never get the answers he needed about what had really happened during the Game--that some invisible tether between himself and the district would be severed forever.

Rhyme let him spew it all out without a word or interruption, and when he was done she was smiling sadly.

"I get why you're so concerned, Neku," and Neku nodded while taking a vicious bite out of the burger he'd been neglecting during his rant. "But everything you're feeling right now about being separated from us? Your parents are feeling about the time you were missing for them." Neku choked and nearly swallowed his tongue. "All they want is a chance to reconnect with you, without all of the distractions of a place they probably see as having stolen you from them."

Guilt. Guiltguiltguiltguiltguilt.

Why hadn't he seen that? There was a part of him that was bitter that Mom and Mama hadn't realized he was dead--even before Josh's resurrection voodoo--and he hadn't even considered that thinking he was missing might have been just as bad from their perspective. Fuck, he was a self-absorbed ass...

"So I should shut up and go on the trip to appease them," he muttered, trying to ignore the flush crawling up his cheeks.

Surprisingly, Rhyme giggled at this and took a noisy slurp from her cola before explaining.

"No, Neku. You should shut up and go on the trip so you can enjoy yourself with them," she explained.

Oh. Yeah. Uncomfortable shift. That could be a possibility. He guessed.

"Want to hear about my day so you can put off processing?"

"Please." Surely she could understand him while his forehead was pressed to the table. She was young. She didn't listen to loud music. Surely her hearing was excellent.

And it was. Rhyme regaled him with her mundane errands picking up more fabric for the quilt she was working on, dropping off lunch for Beat at his part-time job, browsing the new music selections at Towa Records, and it was great until she started in on Minamimoto.

"Some of my classmates think the artist is going to be the next CAT, since CAT sightings have disappeared, but I'm not so sure. I mean, I love the sculptures, but CAT's works always came with a certain joie de vivre, y'know?" And of course Neku nodded along at that, CAT fan that he was. "I just get a sense of contained anger from most of these pieces--an obsession with the worst of us all instead of the best. Don't get me wrong they're powerful, and I love them, but I'm not sure they have what it takes to match CAT."

Neku could get behind all of that. Minamimoto was an angry bastard and he wasn't afraid to let everyone know they were beneath him, while Hanekoma was about lifting people up. He could hardly believe that anyone would even consider them on the same level. He didn't even get what Rhyme saw in the junk heaps.

"Although..."

That sounded ominous.

"I found a new sculpture today while I was wandering, and it's different from the rest. Did you want to see it?"

shattered glass splattered blood paint

No way. Minamimoto wouldn't have re-made it, would he?

With a sense of trepidation, Neku agreed.

The closer they got to the back alley in Udagawa, the more nervous Neku became. If he was right there, there was no way she wasn't going to notice the resemblance between the sculpture and himself. Then he'd have to admit that he'd died there, and since there was no vehicular access he'd have to admit he'd been murdered there, and the fact that someone else was recreating the scene means he'd have to admit that Minamimoto was there when Neku'd died, but wasn't the one who killed Neku (since he didn't want to crush the source of her new dreams)...

It was a mess.

"Beat told me you showed him a CAT mural back here when you were partners, so I wanted to take a look since people were comparing the sculptor to CAT, but the mural's pretty faded now, I guess you've probably seen that yourself, but there was actually a sculpture hidden back there too! I was so surprised, I wonder why they both chose the same isolated location?" She gasped and started slapping Neku's arm. "Oh! Oh! Do you think the sculptor might actually be CAT? Maybe something happened to disillusion them and they changed media to express that new outlook? But, the statues don't really have any of CAT's stylings, and you'd think it would be hard to disguise all of them..."

She babbled on and on excitedly as they walked, somehow not noticing how tense Neku was getting as they approached.

If Neku didn't already know that Pi-face was the artist she admired--not CAT--and hadn't been dreading what he'd see when they reached the mural, he would have enjoyed trading theories with her. It was the kind of nerdery that had gotten him ostracized from his peers before the Game.

Right now it was all he could do to just let her babble away as a white-noise background-track to his panic.

Sure enough, when they entered the alley Neku immediately spotted one of Minamimoto's monstrosities.

But it wasn't the one he'd smashed those weeks ago. This one was new.

This one wasn't Neku.

The wobbliness in his knees was hidden from Rhyme by her disengaging from his arm to run over to the sculpture.

The Neku-statue had been made from fragile glass; this one was all barbed-wire and pigeon feathers. This one was Minamimoto.

Not the arrogant Game Master or dismissive Taboo Noise-hybrid--no, this was Minamimoto at his most vulnerable.

I blew it...

Kneeling, one arm clutching the other--a single feather smeared with red paint to symbolize the trail of blood down Minamimoto's injured arm. An L-shaped block of wood held in the hand of the injured arm, ready to be transferred to the whole arm at any moment. A black cap over a red bandanna on the top of the 'head'; torso and legs wrapped in black fabric. The head angled not to look ahead, but at the ground in an attempt to hide the pain...

"It looks like the sculptor spilled their paint back that way--" where Neku had smashed his own likeness and relived the worst moment in his life, two sets of foot prints walking to the mural from the spill, and there is still paint in the grooves of Neku's sneakers, "--but there's something about this work that feels different from all of the others. It's not angry or mocking. It seems, I don't know... Private."

"Vulnerable," Neku contributes, remembering how it felt to see himself laid bare. "Lonely." Because when had Minamimoto ever had someone with him? Even his 'collaboration' with Mr. Hanekoma seemed half-based on threats of violence, and who knows which side the barista was really on? In a world where partnerships were the ultimate rule of law, Minamimoto had been fighting alone.

Approaching the statue and standing next to Rhyme, Neku let his fingers trail lightly against the bloody feather. "But still angry. Just... a simmering anger, not quite ready to boil over yet."

For the first time since her excitement over the statue had taken over her in Sunshine, Rhyme really seemed to see him again. "Neku... are you--"

Okay he was sure she would say, but she never did. Someone else spoke over her.

Spoke. Yelled.

"Hey! Get away from that you brats! Last thing I need is yoctograms like you ruining--" Then Minamimoto got a closer look. "Oh. It's you again. Well, scram. Go trash someone else's hard work."

Rhyme squeaked. It was a very familiar squeak. It was Shiki's squeak upon meeting Eiji Ouji.

(It was Neku's squeak upon discovering Mr. Hanekoma was CAT.)

Neku sighed, extremely put-upon. But Rhyme was his friend and, even if Minamimoto didn't know it, he'd done her a great service.

"Rhyme, this is Sho Minamimoto, the Grim Heaper. He was Game Master during the Second Week. Minamimoto, this is Raimu Daisukenojo--"

"Call me Rhyme!" (Much squeakier than her usual introduction.)

"--she was a Player during my first week."

Minamimoto squinted at her. "Weren't you smaller and pink and Noise-food?"

Well then. Minamimoto wasn't going to need red paint for his statue any more because Neku was going to smear him over the pavement!

Rhyme winced a bit but nodded shyly--shyly! Rhyme!--with a quiet "Yeah."

Before Neku could enact his violence, Minamimoto surprised them both by holding out a hand to fist-bump. "Good job keeping your sense of identity intact. Most Noise lose that within hours. You must've held out over two weeks."

Perking up a little, Rhyme grinned at the compliment while completing the fist-bump. "Well, I can't take all the credit. Mr. Hanekoma found me and Beat kept me by his side. I couldn't have done it without them."

Minamimoto scoffed before moving to fiddle with the back of the sculpture, attaching the metal appendages he'd brought with him. With the rattling the crushed soda cans made from where they were wired together, it was surprising they hadn't heard him coming.

"Look, Hanekoma coalescing you so quickly, and your brother carrying you around, should have bought you an extra day, maybe two. You did the real heavy lifting. Nevermind the fact that the Iron Maiden had you in her claws for a week before you came back. Don't sell yourself short, kid."

And Rhyme was just glowing under the praise, cheeks bright red as she looked down at the ground, a shy smile curving her lips. Was it really that her dreams hadn't been restored? Or was it her self-confidence that she could do them had been crushed after being knocked out of the Game so quickly? Was there a difference?

Neku stepped back as the two talked, Minamimoto explaining the technical details of what he was doing--the materials, how he attached the different parts to each other, the safety precautions when handling things with sharp edges like the crushed cans and barbed wire. And eventually he even managed to coax Rhyme into talking about her quilting project. Naturally he was most interested in the shapes and angles she was choosing to relay her message.

They talked and Neku wandered. He kicked the bullet hole in the pavement, scuffed his feet against the dried red paint and shiny glass-dust on the ground, ran his hands over the flaking paint of CAT's mural, and let his fingers explore the hole from a bullet that hadn't been aimed at him.

Just like with the Neku-statue, Minamimoto had placed his own statue in the same area of the alley where he'd been shot by Joshua. By wandering to the second bullet hole, Neku was now standing behind the statue.

Minamimoto had been busy while Neku had been wandering. The metal appendages were mostly attached by now, with only some extra supports currently being added by Minamimoto around the 'torso'. That meant Neku had a clear view of the additions.

They were wings--six of them--flared out and menacing. Without them, the statue had looked vulnerable, but now Neku could tell that from the front it would be much more menacing--a leashed threat. Injured, but not yet defeated.

Giving a quiet snort, Neku admitted that was pretty accurate.

Upon closer inspection, there were little notes attached to the wings on vertical hanging slips of paper. Each held a complicated looking math equation. Quietly, while Minamimoto was distracted talking to Rhyme, Neku took pictures of each one to look at later.

"What does it mean?"

A question asked innocently enough, but Neku froze from where he was coming around the statue to join them, looking to Minamimoto with panicked eyes.

The statue was more about the Reaper than Neku himself, but surely any explanation would require an explanation of the setting, and this wasn't something he particularly wanted to share.

There was a brief glance Neku's way, before Minamimoto started shaking his head. "You ever hear of 'death of the author'?" Rhyme shook her head, confusion written across her face. "It's the idea that when you create something, you have a set definition of what it means and as long as it's in your head that's all it means. But once you unleash it into the world, everyone who interacts with it will interpret it their own way, and that will probably be different from your own interpretation. It's not wrong, just because it's not what you envisioned, 'cause the minute you put it out there--changed it from private to public--your own interpretation as the sole interpretation dies; it's just one of many now."

Understanding dawned on Rhyme's face while Neku tried to keep his sigh of relief inaudible. "So you don't share your interpretation because you don't want it to influence mine?"

Minamimoto grinned and ruffled Rhyme's hair affectionately. "That's right. Not all creators do that; some want their meaning to be known. Hell, some want their meaning to be the only meaning. But I don't care what others think. I do this to exorcise my own demons. If people find their own meaning in that, good for them. Not my problem."

Rhyme was staring at Minamimoto with pure adoration on her face, and Neku sighed with defeat.

"Gimme your phone."

Well. Gob-smacked was a good look for Pi-face.

"What for?"

Neku rolled his eyes. "So I can program in my number. The group of us tend to meet up at least once a week. You should join us. Talk to people who know the Game but aren't in the Game."

Slowly, Minamimoto reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, then tossed it to Neku who caught it without blinking. Minamimoto squinted at him suspiciously as Neku opened the man's contacts to input his information.

"This is great! I'll have the inside track to where all of your new sculptures are!"

Minamimoto's attention switched back to Rhyme. "I mean, I guess? Why would you want to though?"

Neku snickered to himself as Rhyme treated Minamimoto to a tirade about the social value of his own sculptures--basically indoctrinating him in the meaning she derived from his works.

While the Reaper was distracted, Neku paged up through the contacts and sent out a quick text to "BOSS".

TEXT ME, YOU ASSHOLE!! You have my number. -NS

Then he tossed the phone back to Minamimoto, deriving great satisfaction when the other fumbled the catch a little.

It was the little things in life.

Josh didn't text him.

Shiki had volunteered to keep Neku company while he packed for his family's trip, but Neku had the feeling he was going to regret accepting when he saw the shark-like grin on her face as she lounged on his bed.

"Sooooooo..."

Neku rolled his eyes and ignored her, sorting through the shirts he wanted to bring.

"Rhyme tells me you have a boyfriend."

For a moment everything froze. Then Neku relaxed and kept sorting.

"Rhyme told you no such thing because she's not a dirty rotten liar who enjoys torturing me."

A page turned in the magazine Shiki was reading--or at least pretending to be reading--but Neku knew she was focused entirely on him, determined to squeeze every last detail out.

"Oh reeeeeally...? So you don't know a super cool street artist with whom you willingly exchanged phone numbers?"

At that, Neku had to snort. He turned around to face Shiki, who dropped all pretense of perusing the magazine and rolled onto her front to stare at him better.

"First of all? Minamimoto is kinda the opposite of 'super-cool'; he's a super-nerd. He likes math and trash."

"So you already know his likes!"

"Secondly," he continued, ignoring her interruption, "There was no number 'exchange'. I gave him my number in case he wanted a group of people in the know about the Reaper's Game to hang out with."

"So forwaaaard, Ne--wait. Reaper's Game? I thought we were the only players to make it out?" She scrunched her face up in thought, wiggling her glasses in the process.

"He's a Reaper."

All of the enthusiasm left her in a moment, alarm replacing it. "A Reaper?"

Dryly, "Did Rhyme leave that part out?"

Archly, "Did Rhyme know?"

Giving up the packing as a lost cause until this conversation was over, Neku gave Shiki his full attention. "Well, I introduced him as the Game Master from my second week, but she was pretty busy mooning over his most recent creation so it's possible she glossed over that part." He shrugged. "Does it matter?"

Incredulity was the overriding statement on Shiki's face when he asked her that. "Does it... does it matter?! Of course it matters! The Reaper's tortured us for fun! You most of all! How can you ask that?!"

For fun? Maybe if you put Josh and Kitaniji's bet on the table, and sure the Reapers tended to take delight in their jobs but...

"He actually... wasn't that bad..." It was strange voicing it out loud. Neku's second week had been the hardest, partnered with someone he didn't trust, a Game Master aiming barbed comments his way (that in retrospect were probably meant for Joshua), Beat attacking him at random, the missing memories of his death, and the increasingly vivid flashbacks to his last moments whenever the three of them were in the same room. But Minamimoto had spent most of that week preparing for Day 7 and taking Joshua out. Most of that week had been spent doing Josh's little errands and being on edge waiting for a mission to come in.

The main trauma Minamimoto had caused Neku was 'killing' Josh, but Josh hadn't been dead at all, and hadn't been who Neku thought Josh was--it was all a confusing mess that Neku tried not to think about these days, especially as Joshua seemed to have no inclination to set the record straight.

"Neku, I don't want to discourage you from making friends, but... He's a Reaper; they're not even human any more.

"But they were, once," Neku whispered, picturing skeletal wings extended from Beat's back. "Players like us who reached the end of the Game, but weren't granted a second life. So they make due with what they have, and erase Players to keep what existence they've managed to retain from fading away. They're just like us--they just want to live."

Shiki bowed her head, dark hair obscuring her face. "And when that lady Reaper told you you could win by erasing me, even though it was against the rules, that was just her trying to survive, right? When our Game Master kept singling me out as an ingredient in his recipe, that was just him being like us?"

Shit.

Sometimes Neku forgets how easy it was not to care about what was happening to him--what he was doing--in that first Game, with no memories to weigh him down. Forgot how horribly he treated Shiki, because she forgave him so easily.

Forgot that he wasn't the only one traumatized by what they experienced.

Neku got up off the floor and joined Shiki on the bed, grabbing her in a hug.

"What we experienced... what you went through in that first Game... It wasn't supposed to be like that. There were other things going on, games within the Game that screwed up all the rules. That's why Mr. Hanekoma was able to save you from me that day--what Pinky did was against the rules. And... and I'm so sorry that I tried to k... kill you. I'm so sorry."

"You didn't know."

"It shouldn't have mattered!"

But Shiki pushed back from where she'd buried her face in his chest and shook her head harder. "Neku, you didn't know. Not just that it was against the rules, but you didn't know what the Game was, or why we were playing. You didn't know who you were or any kind of learned morality. They took all that from you. Mr. Hanekoma didn't just save me, he saved you too. That's why I can't forgive them. They stacked the deck; over and over. I don't know how you can forgive them."

Neku sighed, running his hand through his hair nervously. "I don't know how you can forgive me," he muttered, then waved off her protests--they'd had that argument before. "It's... Look, there's a lot more history between me and the other Reapers just because we were playing against each other so long. Pinky, Lollipop, Def Märch--all of them helped us out when push came to shove and Shibuya was in danger; when things went completely off the rails. And with Minamimoto... he never made it personal like some of the others did--especially to you. He... It wasn't his fault I was dead," not that Neku realized that at the time, "and it wasn't his fault I was playing the Game," that was Joshua--from what Neku knew, most Players had a choice--"and even though the rules said he should have been hunting me down aggressively, he pretty much ignored us 'til the last day when he couldn't any more."

And when the Game was over and done with, something about Neku's involvement had haunted Minamimoto after the fact. There was part of Neku who wanted to know more about the Reaper who valued the lives of the living; who valued Shibuya, just as it was.

"He's... not all bad," much to Neku's own surprise.

Pursing her lips, Shiki crossed her arms defensively across her chest. "I can't promise I'll like him... But I'll give him a chance."

A weight that Neku didn't realize he'd been carrying came off his shoulders. Since when was Minamimoto joining them that important to him? Inviting him had been a spur of the moment decision. And it's not like Minamimoto had texted him yet, anyway. He might never show up.

All the same, he pulled Shiki into another hug--another great benefit of having friends: human contact.

"Thanks Shiki," he breathed into her hair. She relaxed into the hug and squeezed him back.

"Now what's up with all the text books? You're seriously going to work on your math homework while on holiday? Do it on the last day of break like the rest of us plebes!"

Neku laughed at the joke and hoped that it hid his blush. He pointedly didn't think of the photos of the formulas from Minamimoto's statue sitting on his phone.

He didn't unpack the math texts.

(He did wait until the last day of break to do his homework.)

To Neku's surprise, Minamimoto did eventually text him shortly after break was over.

Where u yoctograms meeting? -Sho

It was a start.

It was a disaster.

Minamimoto... didn't play well with others.

Well. Okay. Rhyme thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread and could usually distract him by chatting about art things. But Beat was always about two seconds from starting a physical fight whenever the Reaper started insulting him... which was also about every two seconds.

Shiki kept shooting Neku these looks, and Neku had to keep avoiding her gaze because nope. Nope nope nope. He did not have a crush on Minamimoto. Just... a weird and complicated history.

(Neku may have worked on those math equations while in Hokkaido, but it's not like he got very far with them. Mom had been concerned about the school assigning work that was too hard until Neku explained that it was for a personal project. Then she'd just been bewildered.)

Most days, Neku served as a mediating force with Rhyme, smoothing out the rough edges in the group.

On the days when he hated Minamimoto for killing Josh and killing Neku himself...

Well, on those days he tended to shove on his 'phones bounce pretty early. On those days even Beat gave Neku concerned looks.

But... despite all the ways that it shouldn't work, Minamimoto began to integrate into the group.

Every now and again, though, there was a reminder that the Reaper wasn't exactly 'one of them'.

"Can't make it," Minamimoto grumbled around a mouthful of ramen as they planned an excursion to the skateboard park for the following week.

"You're dead," Beat rolled his eyes, fist planted in his cheek as he looked mournfully at his own empty bowl. "What could possibly be so important you'd bail?"

Shrugging, Minamimoto slurped up another mouthful of noodles, speaking around them.

"Work."

Shiki startled, her knuckled going white as she gripped her chopsticks. "Work as in...?"

Another shrug.

The rest of the meal passed in uncomfortable silence.

"Seriously? We're waiting for the light like a bunch of grade schoolers? There's nothing coming!"

Neku was making 'abort!' motions behind Rhyme's back, but it was too late, he could already see her tensing.

"We all died in traffic accidents. We've learned the hard way the importance of looking both ways before crossing the road."

Usually when Rhyme talked, it was bubbly and cheerful, especially to Minamimoto. Now it was flat and challenging.

Yet, surprisingly, Minamimoto didn't comment on the change in her demeanour, didn't push this new button he'd found.

Instead, he looked over Rhyme's head and locked eyes with Neku. "All of you, huh?"

Neku turned his head to the side, and refused to catch the Reaper's eyes for the rest of the day.

Today Neku's wandering had brought him back to Udagawa and the alley in which he'd died.

Most days Neku's wandering brought him back here.

This time it had been on purpose, though. Minamimoto had been... persistent about trying to talk to him since the Crosswalk Incident two days ago, and this wasn't the kind of conversation Neku wanted to have in front of the others. So Neku had returned to the alley, and texted Minamimoto to let the Reaper know where he'd be.

The Wounded Angel statue was still sitting there, metal parts showing a lot of rust as time had passed. Meanwhile, CAT's last mural was nearly unrecognizable.

Even Neku's paint 'blood-stain' was almost completely worn away.

Two small holes in the concrete and asphalt could still be seen, if you knew where to look for them.

Neku wasn't looking.

Neku was sitting on the ground again, his back to the wall, head buried in his knees.

He knew Minamimoto had arrived when the Reaper threw himself down to sit beside Neku in a sprawl of limbs.

"Why don't any of them know?"

"Know what?" It was a useless deflection, but just the thought of having this conversation was exhausting.

Irritation crept into Minamimoto's voice. "Not one of them looked shifty or guilty or anything when Noise-girl claimed you all died via vehicular impact. They just looked like it was an accepted fact. Now, I know you didn't get hit by a car. And you know," here there was the muted sound of knuckles rapping against the ground, "You didn't get hit by a car. So what gives? Thought you were into all that sharing and caring crap."

Neku snorted. "We talk about our lives, yeah. But we got all of that talking about our deaths stuff out during the Game. We're trying to move on."

"Uh-huh. I seem to recall you accusing me of killing you at one point. Seems like you might have been a fraction confused about things during the Game."

The elbow to Neku's ribs was completely unnecessary. Neku finally twisted his head to look Minamimoto in the face.

"Josh had more fun stealing my memories before the Game than after. I didn't know what really happened until the end. And even when I thought it was you, we didn't have a lot of time for heart-to-hearts during the last week. Too much to do, not enough time."

"And your friends just assumed you were just like them? Didn't even bother to ask?"

A shrug. "Like I said, we don't really talk about it."

Except Neku was thinking about it now, that moment when he saw Joshua running toward him, gun in hand. The crack of the gun firing. The lack of identity and confusion during the first week. The confusion and desperation of the second. The confusion and desperation and grief of the third.

Only for it all to be just... a game. A stupid bet.

And an entry fee Neku will never get back, because he lost, even if Joshua proved himself trustworthy in the end.

An entry fee Neku doesn't even know.

Neku shudders, burying his face back in his knees.

A tentative arm wraps itself around Neku's shoulders. The surprise of it pulls his head out of his arms again, to see Minamimoto looking up at the sky, idly scratching his cheek with his free hand.

There a slight tinge of red to his cheeks.

Neku's own face heats up, but...

He's so tired. And the human contact is... nice. Especially without the need to explain... everything.

So instead of pulling away, Neku slumps into Minamimoto's body heat, soaking it in, letting it chase away the chills of Neku's own anxiety.

They don't say anything else. Just sit there, side-by-side, with Minamimoto's arm around his shoulders.

(Neku is never going to tell Shiki that she was right; he might have a tiny crush on Minamimoto.)

"I'm surprised Minamimoto didn't harass him into telling the others. It's not like him to take on this touchy-feely stuff himself."

"Now, Sanae, you forget that our dear Sho doesn't play well with others, no matter the progress he's making on his social skills--he's never going to be the type to encourage 'sharing-and-caring' as he put it."

"Sure, Boss, but doing the comforting himself? Didn't really seem his style."

"Tee hee. He really is making progress! But I think it has more to do with the subject in need of comforting than anything else."

An arched eyebrow. "Really? Minamimoto? And our Neku?"

"I nudged their paths into meeting for a reason, after all. During the Game, Neku showed a remarkable ability to draw people together and bring out the best in them--even when he was showing his own worst. The other districts aren't going to keep loaning me their Conductors forever, and Shibuya has few candidates. But one that doesn't play well with others? Well. That needed to be fixed first."

"And it doesn't bother you? I know you had your eye on Neku yourself..."

A pause; a tinge of regret. "I never should have inserted myself into the Game. You yourself reported how our Frequencies interacted to Neku's detriment. If I had waited until he was more stable... Now, there's too high a risk of destabilizing him again. No; our paths have diverged now, and walking back down that path can only lead to ruin."

"So. When are you going to tell the new Conductor about his promotion?"

"...Not quite yet.

The sun was setting and it was getting colder. Even with Minamimoto's body-heat, sitting on the concrete was leeching the warmth from both of them.

With great effort, Neku climbed back to his feet, stretching out the kinks in his muscles from being still for so long.

Looking back, Minamimoto's arm had fallen back to his side, but beyond that he hadn't moved. Just sat there, staring at his own legs.

Neku thought about it for a second, taking into consideration their complicated history, their recent interactions, the understanding they were developing, and the small warm feeling in his chest.

Then he held out his hand to help the Reaper up.

"C'mon, Sho. I'll treat you to a burger."

Head snapping up, eyes wide, Sho tentatively accepted the hand up, before burying any hesitation with his usual smarmy grin.

"Least you could do after making me sit on the ground for hours..."

"Yeah, right," Neku snorted, his own grin beginning to form as he shook off the ghosts that were haunting him, at least for now. "I totally twisted your arm there..."

They walked out of the alley, bickering warmly with each other, and that small warm feeling in Neku's chest burned just that slight bit hotter.

It was a possibility; a Someday. Proof that whatever Josh had taken from him, Neku still had a future.

And hopefully--in some form--Shiki, Beat, Rhyme, and Sho would all be part of that future.

end

Feedback always welcome!

#TWEWY #The World Ends With You #World Ends With You #Subarashiki Kono Sekai #TWEWY Bang 2018

[critical-rollmops]

Just some post C2e26 vent fiction

Under the cut, because spoilers.

Reaching the innermost chambers of the Iron Shepherds’ hideout, Caleb realized he was alone. Not in the metaphorical sense, but the rest of the Nein were currently preoccupied with the gaggle of hired bodies Lorenzo threw at them as his last line of the defense. Which, in Caleb’s mind, incidentally underlined how Lorenzo himself was alone as well. Allowing himself to slip into memory for a split-second, Caleb thought about how much quieter than usual Beauregard was in the past few weeks, her mind focussed on but a single task: Bringing down each and everyone of Lorenzo’s cronies. Calling in favors borne from her own sordid past dealings, collecting information, and spinning a web of intrigue and deceit that was, to an analytical mind, quite magnificent to behold. And with a regularity that the Zemnian in him couldn’t help but admire, all three of Lorenzo’s still-living cohorts fell victim to quick yet ignoble ends.

And not much later, they found the safehouse their leader had retreated to and fortified with what felt like half the population of Shady Creek Run’s worth of mercenaries. While the ensuing battle was not an easy one, the Nein, now reunited with their stolen friends fought their way through them with a cold fury that seemed to unsettle those simple hired thugs.

But as they were fighting through an underground corridor, Caleb was seemingly the only one who noticed the tattooed, scarred head flashing through an adjacent corridor. Only quietly mentioning his intend to pursue, for reasons he still does not quite understand, he went after what he assumed to be their target immediately.

Finally catching up in what seemed to be a larger chamber connecting to several mineshafts, Lorenzo noticed his pursuer and turned to face him, wicked glaive in hand. “Well, well, well. Just… couldn’t leave things well enough alone, couldya? See, when you don’t keep the necessary professional distance in your affairs, you might end up doing something really stupid. Like you did just now.”

Lorenzo snapped his fingers, and immediately Caleb noticed a flash and a thunderous noise erupt from one of the mineshafts, closely followed by a sharp pain and a trickle of blood soaking into the left shoulder of his tattered coat. Shortly after that, two trios of thugs wielding gunpowder rifles emerged from the shafts and flanked the slaver.

“Unlike you, I appreciate the timely appearance of some armed backup. Now, you got anything to say for yourself, you naughty boy?”

His face completely devoid of expression, seemingly not even acknowledging the grazing wound on his shoulder, Caleb gazed upon his mark. “My name is Caleb Widogast. You killed my friend. Prepare to die.”

Almost baffled by the audacious response, Lorenzo could not help but chuckle.

“Mhm, boldly stated. Tell me, how do you figure that’s gonna happen, eh?” For the faintest moment, Caleb allowed himself the luxury of a smirk.

“Unlike you, I appreciate a cluster of targets.“ And then he snapped his fingers of his right hand, tightly clenching the tiny ball of foul-smelling material dissipating in his left one.

Having barely the time to even register the fireball sailing past them, Lorenzo and his thugs felt the sudden rush of heat behind them before being engulfed in a wave of flames.

Being close enough to feel the erupting heat on his exposed skin and singeing his hair, Caleb gazed upon the impact of his spell. Immediately his mind flashed back to the images of that fateful day at his parents’ house. And yet, something quickly interposed itself between the haunting memories: the ever-smiling, cocky face of Mollymauk. Holding onto this image like a lifeline, Caleb tore his attention back to the task at hand, noticing the smoldering form of Lorenzo rise from the inferno, the merriment completely wiped from his scorched face.

“Alright… I’ll give you that one. Gotta admit, just blowing up a cave like that is pretty damn ballsy. But I do not appreciate you lot continuing to interrupt my operations, so I’ll just have to make another example.” Steadying himself with his glaive, took a breath in preparation to unleash a cone of cold against his opponent.

“My name is Caleb Widogast. You killed my friend. Prepare to die.” Snapping his fingers again, scattering a piece of phosphorous as he does so, a circular wall of fire erupted around Lorenzo, encircling him in a wreath of flames.

Unseen by the wizard, Lorenzo’s form began to shift as the already singed and burned leather straps on his body snapped, powerless against the expanding form of the giant. “A nutty one, just great. I’ll show you how usually deal with rabid anim-” As he emerged from the wall of fire, ignoring the flames lapping hungrily across his skin, he was pushed back almost immediately by eight tiny meteors slamming into him in quick succession, brutally burning more scorch marks into his torso and forcing him back into the awaiting flames.

“My name is Caleb Widogast. You killed my friend. Prepare to die.” Tugging on the Glove of Blasting, just as much to keep his composure in the inferno of his own creation as much as to prepare his next attack, he launched a trio of scorching rays straight ahead, taking the corresponding trio of pained grunts accompanied by the sizzling of flesh as confirmation that he hit his mark.

Slowly catching his breath in the hot air, Lorenzo knelt down on one leg, putting his free hand on the ground.

“Getting real fuckin’ tired... of you sayin’ that… how ‘bout you chill?” With all his gathered strength, he pushed his cone of cold through the circle of flame ahead of him. Despite having taken some distance from the inferno, Caleb was caught by the wave of frost pushing through it, the sudden shift in temperature causing him to lose concentration on keeping the wall of flame erect. Feeling the stinging pain on his left side now covered in rime, he muttered a quick incantation and moved to the side. As he watched the sheet of flame in the center of the chamber falter, a wave of darkness immediately erupted from behind it, stopping halfway towards him.

“Looking for something? Someone? Heh… can’t burn what you can’t see!” Jumping out from the wafting, impenetrable shadow, the severely burned but still massive form of Lorenzo lunged at Caleb, glaive raised for a downward swing. As he brought it down towards the wizard, it cleaved right through him and impacting the rough stone floor with a jarring clang.

“My name is Caleb Widogast.” A man, standing behind and looking just like the dissipating shape he so easily cleaved, said.

“You killed my friend.” Another man, identical in form to the first one but standing further away to the right, said.  

“Prepare to die.” Yet another identical man, this time somewhere back to his left, finished. And then all was white as another fireball impacted just to the right of him.

Lorenzo wasn’t entirely sure when the world stopped being just heat and white. As he caught his bearings, he realized that his depth perception was off, and so was the right side of his field of vision. Feeling up the right side of his face, what he found was crusted, burnt flesh and a warm liquid leaking from his right eye socket. Forcing himself through the pain covering most of the smoldering right side of his body, he got up on one knee, scanning the vicinity for his glaive. However, the first sight that greeted him was that of a human man, still clad in his dirty, rime-covered rags, standing barely ten feet in front of him. Coughing from smoke and residual heat, he grinned.

“Think this is done? Think that you won? I can come back from just about anything you throw at me.... and if you run now, all you’ll do is give me a breather, so that I may finish you and the rest of your meddlesome friends all fresh and fancy.” As if to underline his point, flakes of charred skin crumbled off of Lorenzo’s body, the grey-pink strands of flesh and muscle below already knitting together. “This is far from ov-” Before he could finish his sentence, another snap from Caleb sounded, engulfing Lorenzo in a sphere of consuming flames.

“You are right about one thing. This is far from over, du Stück Scheiße.” He proceeded to hurl a series of firebolts into the sphere, each one eliciting increasingly pained shouts from Lorenzo.

After about a minute of time later the flaming sphere dissipated, revealing a severely burnt but still breathing Oni.

“You… you’re good, heh… think you got… got it in you… to finish this-” His every attempt to breathe in accompanied by pain, Lorenzo’s ragged voice descended into dry coughs, unable to speak further for the moment. Caleb, meanwhile, tightly gripped his gloved right hand with the left one, knuckles clearly visible.

“I would love nothing more than to burn your broken, blasted carcass until it is but ashes.” Hearing footsteps approach from behind, Caleb took a few steps backwards. “But ultimately, I think the final blow is not mine to make.” From behind Caleb, Lorenzo could make out six figures entering the chamber, lining up next to his tormentor one by one.

The blue tiefling, one of the ones they snatched. Looking at him in anger, yet also with the faintest note of pity in her eyes.

The half-breed, another snatched one. Looking at him almost expressionless, his balefully yellow eyes beheld a depth that threatened to drown him were he to gaze into them for too long.

The goblin, no longer wearing that creepy porcelain mask. Who couldn’t decide between glaring daggers at him and look up worryingly at the damnable wizard.

The wizard himself, who seemed to concentrate more on keeping himself from shaking rather than directing his almost empty eyes at him.

The cobalt monk bitch, who boasted about taking his crew from him. Clinging to her staff, he wasn’t entirely sure whether it was to keep herself steady or to keeping herself from pounding him into dust with her bare hands right then and there. Her hateful stare certainly leaned towards the latter.

The stout form of Keg, to his surprise. Looking down on him with trepidation barely hidden behind her baleful gaze.

He couldn’t help to take the slightest degree of amusement from her presence, chuckling despite the obvious pain it caused him.

“K-Keg… coming to fin… finish the job… respect. You gonna keep me wait-” “No.” Spoke two voices in not-quite-unison.

One last person came forward, passing the others arrayed in front of him.

The aasimar woman, the last one of those snatched. Her eyes replaced by orbs of black, her hair tainted black to the tips, trailing skeletal wings behind her. Surrounded by a fog of darkness, oddly intermixed with wisps lavender. In her hands, a long, ornate greatsword, surrounded by a dim lavender glow. Choosing to forego any words in this moment, she simply raised the greatsword in preparation for an overhead swing. As she swung it downward towards his neck, Lorenzo noticed it slowing down as it closed in.. Not knowing whether something magical was suddenly happening or if his own senses simply were playing a trick on him, he smirked inwardly, awaiting his fate. But as his death approached slowly but inexorably, the lavender wisps surrounding his executioner and her weapon suddenly coalesced right in front of his eyes, forming the shape of a face he had last seen when it spat blood at him as a last act of defiance. And a smooth, merry voice whispered into his ear.

“Surprise, bitch. Bet you thought you’d seen the last of me.” And then Lorenzo knew no more.

#critical role #cr2 spoilers #writing #venting #it'll happen some way someday #but for now this will do #also I did not proofread this so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[waywardmakerinfluencer]

cool gadgets: Our pick of the best new tech for 2021

There's nothing very like the energy of purchasing a pristine device. Opening the case, hauling it out, gradually stripping off the defensive stickers… it's consistently an exciting second for any tech fan.

In case you're feeling the loss of that inclination, look no farther than this rundown of the coolest contraptions for 2021. Searching for something explicit? We have purchaser's advisers for assist you with picking the best nursery devices, best soundbars or best brilliant speakers.

Return consistently – we'll keep this page refreshed with the most recent cool contraptions for your perusing delight.

TrinoXO Tee

A scent battling T-shirt made of reused crab. Indeed, you read that right. This unassuming T-shirt is made of chitosan, a material acquired from the exoskeletons of shellfish.

It's perhaps the most bountiful fixings on earth, so its makers, Allbirds, chose to utilize it to make a portion of its garments line. As indicated by Allbirds, this extraordinary mix likewise has scent battling properties (it apparently has a surface that is difficult for rancid microscopic organisms to colonize), which ideally implies you need to wash it less, and it'll last more.

DJI FPV drone

Extravagant yourself as a robot pilot? DJI's new robot radiates the view from its camera directly to a headset back on firm ground. You see what the robot sees.

It's an easy to use form of what drone-dashing pilots use in rivalries. The actual robot can move at a maximum speed of 140km/h (87mph) and can arrive at 0-60mph in only two seconds. It has a maximum scope of 10km (6 miles), however you'll require a spotter who can look out for individuals or obstacles beneath while you fly.

The tech is pretty force hungry, so you'll get a limit of 25 minutes out of a flight, yet it will be one helluva ride.

Simba Hybrid Luxe Mattress

A decent night's rest is perhaps the main things you can accomplish for your wellbeing and prosperity.

Adaptable padding sleeping pads are chic, yet their supple hug isn't for everybody. Simba's protected crossover arrangement sets springs and adaptable padding to make a bedding that is firm, guarantees two individuals dozing in a bed will not feel each other move around, and is cooler than adaptable padding.

The organization's most recent overhaul, the Hybrid Luxe, adds a second arrangement of springs to offer additional help and eliminate any opportunity of sore joints for side sleepers. Furthermore, Simba has added a breathable bamboo fleece layer just underneath the top layer, to help control your temperature and battle off a sweat-soaked night's rest.

PS5 VR regulator

Subtleties are dainty on the ground about computer generated simulation on cutting edge reassures, yet Sony has uncovered what its movement regulators (which will make an interpretation of your hand developments into the virtual world) will resemble.

Specifically noteworthy is the finger-contact recognition that detects where your digits are put on the far off. This will empower you to get and control objects in the virtual world in common manner.

Beosound Emerge savvy speaker.

This may very well be the most amazing looking brilliant speaker available. Underneath the adademic mask, the Beosound Emerge is furnished with Google Assistant so it can handle any viable associated home tech.

The sound is fueled by a different tweeter, mid-range driver and subwoofer so it will make room-filling, definite sound, in spite of its size. Furthermore, in the event that you some way or another have sufficient extra money to purchase two, you can combine it with a subsequent speaker to make sound system sound.

Dyson Purifier Hot+Cool Formaldehyde.

While a large number of us know air contamination hurts our wellbeing, we may have ignored what's going on inside our homes. Incidentally, cooking and cleaning are filling our homes with poisons at higher focuses than those outside. Indeed, even our furniture is off-gassing formaldehyde – a compound utilized in its creation.

So how would you be able to respond? Indeed, you could simply dismiss society and retreat to the forested areas (we've thought of it as a couple of times this year), however on the off chance that that is impossible, you might need to think about an air purifier.

The most recent rendition of Dyson's Purifier Hot+Cool is kitted out with channels to handle the particles attacking our home's air, including formaldehyde. It likewise has heaps of sensors to give understanding into what's creating the most contamination (cooking, for our situation, made the air quality 'extreme'), and it serves as a viable fan or warmer.

Sony FX3 .

Sony's FX3 is the littlest, least expensive film camera the organization has at any point made. It's worked for producers, as opposed to picture takers, so it can deal with recording ultra HD video at 120fps for significant stretches.

It comes packaged with a handle that is ideal for shooting from low points and it adds additional attachments for connecting distinctive sound sources of info. There's likewise in-self-perception adjustment for when you're "running and gunning".

The camera will likewise get along with Sony's yet-to-be-delivered Airpeak drone. At 715g, it's all in all too massive to fit in your pocket, however it's light enough and little enough to take any place you go. Look out for it in the possession of your #1 YouTuber soon.

Gouthwaite Backpack 23L .

The brand behind this move top sack is called Bear and its originators have a mission: to get more individuals outside to discuss their psychological wellness. Deals from each pack will finance free outside workshops from fly fishing to rummaging to go 4x4 romping cycling. Customers simply need to join to their mailing rundown to discover when courses start.

Meanwhile, while we're completely stuck for the most part inside, Bear will give 10% of deals to The Outward Bound Trust. What's more, the organization is carbon negative, depending on recyclable, non-renewable energy source free materials where conceivable and carbon-counterbalancing the rest.

The real sacks are quite savvy as well. There's a speedy delivery clasp holding the top together, which is a similar one utilized by the salvage administrations, and the waxed material is made in Scotland without the utilization of PFCs (the synthetic substances commonly utilized in waterproof coatings) which can wash off materials and end up in streams.

Xbox remote headset.

The new authority gaming headset for the Xbox Series X and S packs in a great deal of highlights without costing a little fortune, and for once, it will not make you seem as though an extra in a Tron film.

The jars are kitted out with the most recent encompass sound (Windows Sonic, Dolby Atmos and DTS) so you can sincerely hear those strides crawling up behind you. There's a savvy, retractable mouthpiece inside, which can separate your discourse and tune down foundation commotion.

Besides, It offers an auto-quiet alternative, which turns off the mic when you're finished talking: not any more inadvertent weighty breathing over comms. We'll need to save full judgment until we can get a couple on our ears, however it would seem that this could be the savvy approach to get vivid sound on your Xbox....

#gadgets #gadgets 2021 #gadgets for men #gadgets meaning #gadgets deutsch #gadgets 2020 #gadgets für männer #gadgets fürs auto #gadgets for women #ga

[thefreelanceangel]

In Defense of "Said"

said  /sed/

1. past and past participle of say.

One of the most misconstrued pieces of writing advice I've ever seen is "don't use said!" There seems to be an absolute terror of using "said" more than once in a piece of writing, whether it's an RP log, a short story or a novel.

And you will find dozens of lists providing a ton of verbs all touted as the solution to the "said" problem. "Use these instead of said!" How many lists have you seen based off of this principle? Probably at least one.

These lists occasionally break themselves down by the insinuation or meaning of the verbs you're being told to replace "said" with--that is helpful. However, telling budding writers to avoid using "said" on pain of death?

Not helpful.

So why is this single participle being labeled the mark of an unimaginative, boring writer?

Because people, I think, don't realize the value of "said" and very often, writers do NOT think like readers. They're focused on perfecting their craft, which means pouncing on any possible flaw and rending themselves asunder for committing such sins as using "big" instead of "gigantic" "enormous" or "massive."

{Which is something else we need to address...}

So What Are Readers Thinking About Said?

Here's a little tip from someone who is 60% Reader/40% Writer --Your readers do not notice the majority of the minute flaws you're beating yourself up for. And using "said" three times in a page of dialogue is not a hanging offense. [Incidentally, for some amazing dialogue advice, check this post. It's A+ and demonstrates, at the beginning, where most people get their terror of the word "said."]

If you have a page of character interaction and "said" is scattered throughout, I can guarantee you that the Constant Reader is not going to give a flying fuck. If your characters are interacting, if the pacing is dynamic, if the story is INTERESTING, you can use said fearlessly. The basic building blocks of grammar aren’t actually that noticeable. We’re so used to them forming the construction of a sentence that when you’re reading, you skim right through them.

Other than a misspelling or incorrect grammar, when was the last time you noticed every “to” or “and” on a page...? Hmmmm???

Slowing down your writing just to sit and pick through a list of words that the internet is telling you to use in place of said is going to throw your entire flow off. The Constant Reader is not going to judge your book/story/RP based off of how often you use a participle that EXISTS FOR A REASON.

What reason is that? Well, let's see.

Why "Said" Then?

Here's the thing that honestly enrages me about all of those "replacement verb" lists. Every single one of the verbs on those lists carries its own specific definition and connotation. Every single verb creates an individual mood and should only be used when that is the emotion you want to convey. 

Should you use emotional verbs in your dialogue? Absolutely. They help you create a scene, show tension and help us understand that a character is being affected by the events of the story.

HOWEVER!

You need to establish a baseline first. 

We love examples, don’t we? Here we come with an example of what can happen if you take that “don’t use said” as gospel. 

“I don’t care what you think,” she snapped, tossing her head. “Nothing about this is how it should be!” 

“Really, is that where you’re going with this,” he growled, propping his chin on his hand. 

“Yes,” she stated, hands on her hips. “That is exactly where I’m going with this.”

“Well, you go wherever you want with this,” he barked. Shoving his chair back, he jumped to his feet. “I’ve had enough of this!” 

This is clearly an emotional scene. There is something going on between these two people that is causing a lot of tension and they’re expressing it with every word they say. 

Now imagine an entire book of nothing but this. It’d be exhausting. And you’d genuinely wonder who these people are that can maintain such a heightened emotional state for so long. Are these characters you can identify with? I certainly can’t. I am an excitable little creature, but even I have long periods where there’s no emotion gripping me by the throat. 

And even though story thrives on conflict and you want to see characters experience events that change their lives, you also can’t make it through a book and want to read it again if you feel like you’ve been dragged facefirst through a patch of goatheads. 

Let’s look at this scene again, albeit with the usage of our oft-maligned “said.”

“I don’t care what you think,” she said, tossing her head. “Nothing about this is how it should be.” 

“Really, is that where you’re going with this,” he said, propping his chin on his hand.

“Yes,” she snapped, hands on her hips. “That is exactly where I’m going with this!”

“Well, you go wherever you want with this,” he barked. Shoving his chair back, he jumped to his feet. “I’ve had enough of this!” 

Here, there’s a clear build-up of tension. By using “said” at the beginning and using some physical expression to show what state of mind both parties are in, you’re able to step back from active emotion to create a mental image. 

Now you can see the red-checked tablecloth on the linoleum table, the clean kitchen and her white apron. (Don’t ask me why I’m suddenly going for 1950s sitcom, just work with me here.) There’s no explosive emotion happening yet; you’ve stepped into the scene and you have a moment to look around and get your bearings. 

And then the emotion peaks. She snapped, he barked. This is a direct variance with the placid, non-disruptive “said” that pulls your attention along immediately. Now that you have a baseline for the scene, the sudden change in pacing provided by using those powerful verbs is striking. It catches your eye and keeps you invested in following where this scene goes. 

And that is the beauty of “said.” It’s a baseline, it’s where a character lives their daily life. You want to see a character change, you want to see them in a dynamic state, but if all you ever see is that character “growling,” “hissing,” “whispering,” or “murmuring” are you really seeing that character change? Or just explosively react to the world around them and the plot they’re in?

Think of “said” like the character’s calm expression. Your face isn’t always contorted into emotive looks; you don’t always speak in snaps, statements or groans. Your character is the same. 

If the Constant Reader never has a chance to see what your character is like on their baseline days, they won’t be impressed or surprised when something dramatically changes your character. 

And you want the Constant Reader to be startled when your character shrieks, leaning in when your character whispers, pouting with sympathy when your character sobs. 

Using “said” to develop that baseline also gives your Constant Reader a chance to develop that emotional bond that makes reading so extremely entertaining. And then when things abruptly change and your character has to snarl his response to a question, your Constant Reader’s upper lip with curl right along with them. 

But I’ve Seen Good Writers Not Use It!

No, what you’ve seen is good writers avoid the first example in the post by T.L. Bodine that I linked. 

“I want to go out,” he said. 

“It’s too cold outside,” she said.

“But I’ve got a coat,” he said.

^ THAT is “said” used very, very poorly. And yes, I’ve seen it in published books, RP scenes, etc. And yes, it is very, very jarring. You will notice “said” when it’s used in this flat, tedious manner. 

But let’s be honest--you wouldn’t read much further, would you? 

Now, what about this?

“Of course, I was only explaining to... to...” Capricia snapped her fingers repeatedly, glancing at the ceiling.

“Ashton,” he said. 

“Yes, Ashton,” the blonde replied, smiling placidly. “I was simply explaining to Ashcan t-”

“Ashton.”

A smattering of discreet giggles swept through the parlor, ladies raising fans and lowering their heads to avoid the thoroughly annoyed glance he shot in their direction.

“My apologies,” Capricia said, reaching out to pat his forearm lightly. “I was explaining to Ashton that we certainly aren’t that sort of society here.”

“Really? You could’ve fooled me.” Harold looked between them, noted how tensely Ashton held his shoulders. “I’m sorry, I really should be going,” he said, backing away a step.

Because this entire thing is about “said,” I suspect you were on the lookout for it, weren’t you? And you counted to see how often it was used. {Three times.} But were you more interested in that single participle? Or in seeing if Ashton was going to turn around and smack Capricia’s punch cup right out of her hand? 

Character interactions, snappy dialogue and interesting story will pull you right through a scene that has “said” scattered right through it. Why? Because it’s a utilitarian participle that we’ve kept in the English language for a reason; there’s no more reason to reject it than there is to throw out all usage of commas.

Sure, you could get fancy with semicolons, en-dashes and em-dashes. But you could also simply use a comma when the sentence calls for it. 

TL;DR

“Said” on a page is not really going to be noticed by your reader if you’re creating an engaging story

Don’t exhaust your readers with constant high emotion; let them get into the scene first

“Said” is a baseline that lets us recognize when something has genuinely affected your character’s emotional state

Write your dialogue well, but don’t sacrifice the utility of “said” in favor of fancy trappings that drag your story down

#On RP #RP Advice #On Writing #Writing Advice #Angel #OOC #I will defend said to the death

[hey-kids-want-some-avengers]

Twelve days of Christmas: day 5. Breakfast in bed.

Breakfast in bed. A/N: sleepy cap cuddles? I think yes. _____________________________________________ Pairing: Bucky Barnes/Sam Wilson/Steve Rogers Warnings: none, just cute shit. ✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨ It’s cold, even with the heat on, the air is chilly enough it keeps Bucky in bed long after he means to. He’s got the covers tangled up around himself, like a self made cocoon, and it’s warm and comfortable. There’s not even a reason to get out of bed at this point. So, he dozes, in and out of light sleep, just enjoying his weight against the soft give of the mattress. He feels good, in a way he hasn’t in a while. He fully wakes up again when the door creaks open, slowly and carefully. He can smell food. Bacon, eggs, and it makes his mouth water a little. He cracks an eye open as Steve and Sam walk in quietly, probably trying to make sure they don’t wake him up or startle him. Sam’s carrying a big plate, and he knows where the smell is coming from now, because there’s bacon and an omelet on the plate, along with a few strawberries off to the side, other fruits too. It looks damn good, and he guesses they both made it. It makes him feel ridiculously fuzzy inside. “Buck, you awake?” Steve asks gently. Bucky stirs lazily and rolls over to face them, eyes still heavy with sleep. “Mm, Yeah, sorta,” he mumbles. Sam grins in response. “Breakfast?” He offers, holding out the tray of food once they’re at the foot of the bed. “Mm, mhm,” he says softly, smiling lazily at them. They cross the room almost in sync and plop down onto the bed on either side of Bucky. They snuggle into his sides, keeping him cozy and warm. He could fall asleep again, so easily, but then Sam is pushing a bite of toast past his lips. He hums around the bite, enjoying it thoroughly. It was just lightly toasted with a generous amount of butter on it, just like Steve knew he liked it. “What’d I do to deserve this?” Bucky asks curiously after he’s finished the toast, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’re you?” Steve offers with a grin. Sam agrees with a little chuckle, kissing his jaw lightly. Bucky’s cheeks flush a little. “And we love you, so why not?” Sam grins, snuggling into his side more. Bucky’s pretty sure his whole face is pink at this point. They just have that affect on him. “Oh, we canceled, by the way,” Steve says as he kisses Bucky’s chest softly. “Hm?” “We’re gonna stay in, said to hell with getting dressed and sitting at Tony’s for Christmas.” Oh. Right. He’d kind of forgotten about that, and kinda forgotten that it was Christmas today too. He couldn’t lie, either, that sounded so much nicer and a whole lot less awkward, but he didn’t wanna drag them away from that, especially Steve. He knew Sam was pretty indifferent, but Steve and Tony had been working through shit. “No, no, we can go,” Bucky frowned, looking back and forth between them. They both had a stubborn and kind of amused look on their faces. “Seriously, I really don’t mind. I’d feel terrible if we stayed home.” “Too late for that, Steve canceled yesterday,” Sam said with a small smile. “This is more important than a stupid over priced party, man, seriously.” Bucky bit his lip gently and looked at Steve, but he had the same ‘sure as hell’ look across his face. “Really, there’s no competition,” Steve grinned. “Besides, Sam has been loathing going.” “What? Dude, I have not!” “Oh?” Bucky grinned a little down at his breakfast. “Yeah, ‘oh’, don’t gimme that shit, Rogers, I’ve been just as willing to go as you.” “Whatever you say,” Steve grins, pinching Sam’s arm playfully. He swats back at Steve with a direct bitch face. “Man, knock it off.” “Guys,” Bucky laughs, sinking back into his pillow. They both turn to look at him, and they look like children caught with their damn hands in a cookie jar. “Knock it off.” “He started it,” Sam grins, nestling close to Bucky with a thump against the bed as he avoids Steve’s hand. “Yeah, Yeah, gimme my Christmas breakfast,” Bucky grins. “Ooh, guess he’s too good to use a fork now?” Sam grins. “He’s a guy of taste,” Steve says with a shrug, hardly hiding a smile. “Damn right I am.” Sam snorts, stealing a strawberry off Bucky’s plate and popping it into his mouth. “Ooh, never mind, It’s too good for you,” Sam grins. Bucky pouts, whining long enough that he eventually laughs and Sam stuffs a few blueberries in his mouth just to shut him up. Bucky just hums, satisfied as he eats the berries, which are surprisingly good, considering the time of year. “Want one?” Bucky asks Steve after he’s finished chewing. “Sure,” Steve smiles, plucks some from the dish and eats them with a smile. They just kind of go back and forth for a while, after that, eating the fruit and feeding Bucky eggs or whatever else is on the plate until they’re both pretty blissfully full, snuggled up together on the bed with Steve carding a hand through Bucky’s hair and Sam just sorta clinging to is arm. He feels sated, practically close to sleep at this point. “Just wait until you guys open your presents,” Steve hums with a grin, closing his eyes as he relaxes back into the bed. “I swear, we agreed on cheap,” Sam says, almost sounding warning. “I went cheap!” Steve says hastily. Neither of them believe him of course, because Steve always spoils them like no ones business. “Cheap, like, twenty bucks each, or cheap like you could’ve saved the poor from poverty kind of cheap?” Bucky asks with a lazy smile, which Sam laughs at, eyes crinkling at the corners in that way Bucky adores. “You’re both the worst,” Steve says, narrowing his eyes. “But it’s like, in between.” “Oh my god, you know, I’m just gonna keep your present for someone else then,” Sam laughs, shaking his head. “We had a deal,” Bucky shrugs, not that he really cares. Sam always buys a gift accordingly, makes it personal, Steve just buys them everything, like it’s their last day to live. Bucky’s never really been huge on presents, so he usually sticks to gift cards or something simple and inexpensive, but no one ever seems to mind. He kind of doubts it’s even about the presents at all, more the fact they’re able to get each other presents and be close. It’s sappy as all hell, but it also makes them happy, so who cares. “Wait, What’re we doing about dinner?” He asks after a minute, once the false bickering has died down. He watches Sam and Steve share a look, which is kind of blatantly screaming ‘oh fuck’ and then look back to Bucky like the guy asking has any idea. “Yeah, uh, we really hadn’t thought that far.” “Breakfast is as far as you both got?” “Incidentally.” “But Sam went grocery shopping yesterday, right?” Bucky asks, because there’s got to be plenty they have around the house they could make a fairly convincing meal with. Bucky’s made due with way worse, he grew up poor, right? “He was supposed to,” Steve correctly bitterly. Sam throws his hands up in defense. “I thought it was Steve’s turn! So not my fault, man!” He hollers, and Steve jabs him in the side with his finger. They’ve always had an oddly physical relationship, Sam and Steve. Always hitting or pinching, or something, always playfully of course, but they don’t act like that with Bucky. Bucky’s Pretty constantly bickering lightly with Sam, like it’s always been, but they hold good conversations too, and they have this new little weekly tradition of taking bubble baths together that he secretly adores. He and Steve are kind of complicated, because they’ve always been complicated, but he’s equally as touchy with Steve as he is with Sam, and besides maybe confiding in Steve with a few things he’s not always ready to tell Sam, (he always does eventually) they’re all on an even scale. They have individual little things together, and it makes everything click together like damn clockwork. He’s lucky. “Okay,” Bucky laughs, watching them swat at each other. “So no food?” “Thanks to someone,” Steve says in a sing-song like voice, grabbing Sam by his upper arm. His whole hand doesn’t fit across the mass of muscle there, and Steve has big hands. Bucky’s laughing a lot by now, sitting up in bed. His face feels hot with how much he’s laughing, it feels kind of unreal. Bucky finally wraps his arms around Sams middle, taking a jab at Steve’s leg with his foot. It’s just hard enough he lets go of Sam, and let’s him fall back fully against Bucky. It’s a weird kind of jumble of limbs, with Sam practically crushing him, and Steve leaning over both of them to deliver a swift kiss to each of their lips. “Guess we’ll have to sacrifice Sam and roast him over an open fire,” Steve sighs, shaking his head. Bucky nods. “Roast the super soldier, he’s more...meaty,” Sam offers awkwardly and Bucky snorts. “I’ll make soup,” Bucky says with a chuckle, shaking his head. He’s unfortunately lucky to have these two dipshits, even though they hog the covers and forget groceries half the time. Yeah, he’s lucky.

#twelve days of christmas fanfics #fanfic #bees fanfics #twelve days of Christmas Day 5 #Steve x Sam x Bucky #steve rogers #marvel #avengers #bucky barnes #sam wilson #twelve days of christmas #steve rogers x bucky barnes x sam wilson #sam/bucky/steve #three caps #all caps #polyamory #Christmas

[ladystylestores]

I laughed a lot at Netflix’s Space Force, but my inner space wonk cried

Enlarge / Dan Bakkedahl as secretary of Defense spells it out: Boots on the Moon by 2024.

Netflix

Note: This is not a review of Netflix’s Space Force, but in discussing differences between the series’ first season and the real world, this article contains minor plot spoilers—but not enough to spoil 99 percent of the series’ jokes and plot developments.

One of the opening scenes of Netflix’s new comedy series Space Force hilariously depicts General Mark Naird (Steve Carell) at his first meeting as part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

This scene establishes the premise for the main story line of the show. Comedian Dan Bakkedahl (similar to his portrayal of a congressman in Veep) plays the part of Secretary of Defense John Blandsmith. After introducing Naird as a new four-star general, Blandsmith gets to the point:

POTUS wants to make some changes. He’s tweeting about it in five minutes, so let’s hope you like it. Our nation’s internet, including Twitter, runs through our vulnerable space satellites. POTUS wants complete space dominance. Boots on the Moon by 2024! To that end, the President is creating a new branch. Space Force. This is not a joke. His words, boots on the Moon in 2024. Actually, he said boobs on the Moon, but we believe that to be a typo.

For someone who spends most days thinking and writing about space, and space policy, this is simultaneously highly entertaining and painful. I mean, it’s funny. At times during the show, I howled. And there are vivid snippets of reality throughout the series that capture the state of play in modern spaceflight. But this show takes those pieces and scrambles them madly.

The launch

One of the central tensions of the first episode involves whether or not to launch Space Force’s first big mission, a satellite on its “Epsilon” rocket. (For the record, there is a real-world Epsilon rocket, a relatively small booster developed by the Japanese Space Agency.)

Space Force’s rocket appears to be the love child of two real-world rockets: an Atlas V rocket core (which is built by United Launch Alliance) and two side-boosters that look strikingly like Falcon 9 (SpaceX) first stages with a single engine. The performance of such a rocket is interesting to contemplate, and I will give the producers of Space Force credit for doing their homework. When I was at SpaceX’s factory about a year ago working on a project, Steve Carell was there with an entourage. We brushed shoulders while getting a fountain drink in the cafeteria.

Enlarge / The Epsilon rocket seems like a love child of the Atlas V and Falcon 9 rockets.

Netflix

But some of the TV version’s logical lapses are, for me, too difficult to swallow. For one, Netflix’s version of Space Force is established in Colorado, which is realistic enough given existing Air Force assets there. What is completely bonkers, however, is the notion of launching orbital rockets from Colorado. Big US rockets do not launch over land because of the potential for a) an accident shortly after liftoff, and b) unless it’s a reusable rocket like the Falcon 9, the potential for a first or second stage to fall down range after its fuel is spent. With its land-based launch sites, China has a real problem with this.

Another weird conflation is weather constraints for the Epsilon launch. While conditions such as thunderstorms or high winds—either at the surface or in the upper atmosphere—can delay a launch (check out this list of constraints for the upcoming Crew Dragon launch), Space Force instead goes with humidity. Humidity?!

For the Epsilon launch, the proper humidity is 40 percent, explains Dr. Chan Kaifang (Jimmy O. Yang, Silicon Valley). The actual humidity on launch day was 54 percent. “This can effect oxygenation and fuel burn,” Kaifang explains. “If the fuel is insufficient, the rocket returns to Earth without reaching orbit.” While, yes, a rocket needs a certain amount of fuel to reach orbit, humidity has nothing to do with it.

Weird, jarring details like this emerge throughout the series—space nuts will scratch their heads at the odd array of model rockets behind Naird’s desk in his office—that suggest the producers of Space Force ultimately cared little about the details.

A confused public

Oh Berger, you’re such a nerd. And it’s true. Most of the public won’t catch these details. Nor will they care that chimpanzees are performing spacewalks, or that the interior cabin of the crew spacecraft going to the Moon is about as big as my house. None of this is plausible, but it serves the plot, and it’s often damned funny, so it’s fine.

What sort of does matter, however, is the policy stuff. It is perfectly true that President Donald Trump called for the creation of a Space Force branch of the military early in his administration, but this required Congressional action, and Congress had already been moving toward this for several years. It is also true that one of the Space Force’s primary roles is protecting our “vulnerable space satellites.” And, to the chagrin of our allies, this administration has called for space dominance.

As for the boots on the Moon thing, in the real world, the White House set a goal for a human Moon landing by 2024. Specifically, Vice President Mike Pence gets credit for this, as Trump has at times seemed more interested in Mars than the Moon. Incidentally, the show’s characterization of POTUS, who goes unnamed and does not need to be, is spot on.

However—and this is important—Pence gave this task to NASA, not the US military.

The United States essentially has three major space segments. One is the military, responsible for launching large spy satellites, GPS, its own communications satellites, an uncrewed space plane, and ensuring the safety of those space assets. It does not entail anything like Starship Troopers, however. The second is civil space, which is NASA, and which operates transparently, works with international partners, landed on the Moon in the 1960s, and is responsible for the peaceful exploration of the cosmos. Finally, there is the commercial space sector, including traditional contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, as well as important new players such as SpaceX and satellite companies like Planet.

But for a fleeting, dismissive mention of NASA, Space Force mostly ignores civil and commercial space. In this television show—and thus, I fear, in the public mind—it sets up the human exploration of the Moon as a purely military exercise. There are those of us who would like to see NASA as a force to unite the world, rather than divide it, and for humans to go forward into the next frontier together.

The eerily real stuff

The show gets some details shockingly right. It portrays China as America’s major rival in space, and this is accurate. China has not yet surpassed US spaceflight capabilities, as is suggested in Space Force. However, China is building a credible and stable program that will see development of a modular space station in a couple of years, and they’re working toward putting humans on the Moon in a decade or so.

Toward the end of the first season, China claims the large “Sea of Tranquility” region on the Moon for its own as a “territory of scientific research.” China informs Naird that his astronauts should not land there because it would disrupt Chinese experiments.

As I watched this, I was reporting on NASA efforts to finalize an initiative it calls the “Artemis Accords.” The goal of these accords is to establish 10 basic norms as part of the space activities, such as operating transparently and releasing scientific data. One of these was “Deconfliction of Activities,” which affirms that no one can own territory on the Moon or elsewhere but that NASA and its partner nations can establish “safety zones,” which they would ask other nations to respect and not interfere with.

The bottom line is that Space Force exists at the very edge of real-world spaceflight. While we’re laughing, I hope we’re also thinking about how we go into deep space in the coming decade. NASA’s vision, as outlined in the Artemis Accords, is a pretty good one. I’ll take partnerships over pistols any day.

Netflix

Shortly before the series’ formal Netflix premiere on Friday, May 29, some of my Ars colleagues will post a more traditional TV review of the series. Until then, I’d like to briefly fake being a TV critic and salute John Malkovich as fake Space Force’s chief scientist. My God, he’s wonderful. Steals the show.

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[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT SILICON

I know using Java are using it because they don't have a problem firing someone they needed to. Does that mean investors will make less money now is that now I understand why Berkeley is probably not an option for most magazines. Viaweb we got our first 10, 000 people worked there. At any given time, you're probably not going to change the world, if you want to make ambitious people waste their time on their own projects. We estimated, based on disasters that have happened to any bigger than a few years down the line. Suppose a company makes some kind of wall between us. I deliberately gave this essay a provocative title; of course it's not a sign of weakness. So you start painting.

Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to realize there's a problem. If you don't want to offend Big Company by refusing to meet. Wisdom is universal, and there will be people who take a risk and use it. More people are starting startups, but most husbands use the same matter-of-the-future for filters to notice. But what's changed is not variation in wealth, but might it also be true? It's the people that make it Silicon Valley, and all you'll be able to increase your self-confidence. Why do the founders always make things so complicated? That Jobs and Wozniak were marginal people too.

I think a society in which most people were stupid. The least ambitious way of approaching the problem is more with the patent office may understand the sort of uncool office building that will make you successful—making things and talking to users, we did. They do it because they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like no one cares enough to disagree with, you should probably choose the other. Certainly they'll learn more. Over time, hackers develop a nose for good and bad technology. The salesperson asks you this not because you're supposed to when starting a company that has raised money is literally more valuable. A lot of startups that cause stampedes end up flaming out in extreme cases, partly as a result they can be sued for. Pr campaign surrounding the launch has the side effect of making them live as if they used the same word, or is there something unique about it? And because you can't remember them. A who B is. But while series A rounds, that would be better if the people with bad intentions look bad by comparison.

That's the essence of Lisp—both in the transition from the desire to do, I'd encourage you to focus initially on people rather than ideas. Companies that seemed like competitors and threats at first glance does not mean you aren't doing something meaningful, defensible, or valuable. It will be a good predictor. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of schools is to teach kids. Because the people whose salaries you're proposing to cut. Our existence depended on doing these things right. You can do it right. Web-based applications, it could actually be very profitable.

Historically, languages designed for large organizations don't care if the person in the eye. The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they can accelerate fast. In 1450 it was filled with the kind of parallelism we have in the past, a competitor with the sort of person to do it his way. You'd think that would mean less opportunity, because satisfying current needs would lead to more ideas. But those you don't. Now there are moves afoot to make it a bestseller for a few specialists like thieves and speculators something you have to think about that. And since risk is usually proportionate to reward. And the second could probably be acquired in about ten minutes if they wanted to learn more. They want to get anything done with it.

C, but in most ambitious kids, ambition seems to precede anything specific to comment threads there, but in fact the default in the predefined page styles. Translated into more straightforward language, this means: We're not investing in you, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can't be solved. But after the interview, the three of us would turn to Jessica and ask What does the first round of real VC funding; it usually happens in the Google empire that only the CEO can deal with, and he was pretty much defined as not-fun. Looking at the applications for the platforms they use. It would be insane to go to work for will be as impressed by that. Plus this method yields teams of developers who already work well together. If you tell the truth.

Notes

If you have good net growth till you run through all the money.

If you want to trick admissions officers.

4%, and philosophy the imprecise half. Starting a company with rapid, genuine growth is valuable, because any VC would think twice before crossing him. Starting a company changes people.

This flattering distinction seems so natural to expand into new markets. As the art itself gets more random, the increasing complacency of managements. It would probably also a name. Acquisitions fall into a great deal of competition for mediocre ideas, and the average employee.

Something similar has been around as long as the little jars in supermarkets.

Obviously, if you were going to need to circle back with a product of some brilliant initial idea.

I almost hesitate to raise the next round to be, and would not be incorporated, but when people in the standard series AA terms and write them a check. On the face of a startup to an adult. The image shows us, because companies then were more at the start, e. Steve Wozniak in Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work.

Then Josh Wilson came in to pick up a solution. Money, prestige, and I ordered a large organization that often creates a situation where the acquirer wants the employees. And no, unfortunately, I put it here. Steve hadn't come back; Apple probably wouldn't be able to buy stock, the effort that would get shut down in the press when I was there when it converts you get bigger, your size helps you grow.

We fixed both problems immediately. Another danger, pointed out an interesting trap founders fall into two categories: those where the recipe: someone guessed that there is the last step is to ignore investors and they begin by having a gentlemen's agreement with the definition of politics: what ideas did European culture with Chinese: what they're really saying is they want it. Statistical Spam Filter Works for Me. But it's hard to spread the story.

This explains why such paintings are slightly worse. Investors are professional negotiators and can negotiate on the relative weights? It's unpleasant because the publishers exert so much control, and only incidentally to tell them exactly what your project does.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #project #stampedes #empire #people #Jessica #Notes #building #world #Historically #Pr #control #campaign #art #image #culture #Silicon #jars #cases #Does #intentions #purpose #kind #effect #salesperson #employees