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#only two classes one time because of a power outage
hotxcheeto · 2 years
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Hello,can you please do a smut/nsfw piece of sub Ellie?I would die for one of those.Thank you.
━ 𝐃𝐄𝐒𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐓𝐄 𝐂𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐈𝐍𝐆
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𝙥𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜(𝙨) - Ellie Williams x G/N!Reader 
𝙬𝙖𝙧𝙣𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙨 - Cursing, smut, fluffy/dom loving smut, fingering ( el receiving ), oral sex ( el rec ), minor hair pulling, dom/sub vibes, slight dubcon, slight degradation?, biting, kissing, dom!reader, sub!ellie
𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙤𝙛𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙙 ? - Yeah/Nope
𝙖𝙪𝙩𝙝𝙤𝙧'𝙨 𝙣𝙤𝙩𝙚 - This might be very bad because it was written over a course of 3 power outages and classes starting up again, I haven't felt the best lately so it'll be a bit before requests open once again as I'm still finishing some very old ones! Butttt Abby smut coming soon...
REBLOGS ARE EXTREMELY APPRECIATED
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It was quiet, the cold fall afternoon keeping you inside, reading a romance book with your nail between your teeth. The moment intense between the two characters keeping you sucked into the pages inhaling the nice scent of the candles you'd lit earlier.
It wasn't late, but it wasn't early. You and Ellie spending your first day off just hanging about with each other, enjoying one another's presence while doing a few things around the small home.
It felt nice.
Not only that, your mind buzzed from the joint you had shared with Ellie just a few moments before. Deciding on cutting it off after you'd gotten fuzzy minded and a bit focused on other things, telling her to do the same before walking off.
You knew her better, but you weren't thinking too clearly.
Now you sat on the bed, knees pulled up, hands loosely holding the book to keep it propped up. It blocked your view of most of Ellie's room, especially the end of the bed. Your girlfriend having been sitting at her desk before appearing at the foot of the mattress watching you silently as you flipped the page.
"Y/n."
You didn't even hear her in the moment, continuing to read the lines while biting on your painted finger, eyebrows furrowing at the plot and the way the characters spoke back and forth.
"Y/nnn..." She dragged it out this time but still it went unheard by you despite the silence of the room, sitting in the same position while flipping the page once again, it was comical, or would be if Ellie wasn't so frazzled and crossing her legs over each other.
Then she got a bit desperate.
The bed dipped which you brushed off, until her head suddenly popped up underneath your book and between your knees. Green eyes finally meeting yours as you quietly giggled at her childish antics, moving so she could get closer to your face.
"What are you doing?" "You weren't answering me." "I was reading, thank you."
She smiled up at you, the whites of her eyes now resembling a bit of a cherry color complimenting the greens, but Ellie had gotten bashful and looked away.
Laying her head down right on your chest having decided to make herself comfortable; snuggling into your shirt and huffing like a bored toddler.
"What is it?" "Talk to me." "About what?" You laughed, trying to continue reading but it was hard when your girlfriend continuously shoved her face into your chest and then peaked up at you with a glare.
"Anything. M'bored." You hummed.
Dragging your nails through her hair continuing to read, a tiny groan filling your ears. Ellie then shifted once more digging her face into your neck, staying still for another moment hoping you'd say something else.
"Ells, let me finish this chapter and we can hang out, m'kay?" You could hear her mumble, allowing you to return back to your book before you began to feel little pecks feathering across your skin.
It made you smile a bit, laying your cheek against her head. Only knowing her to be endearing and to remind you she was still there while you read.
Again you flipped the page, continuing to read on. That was until the kisses turned into small nips along your neck.
Then as you finished the other side you felt her really take a big bite from the side, laughter tumbling from your mouth before you even got to process what she'd done to gain your notice.
"Stop it, I'm almost done you baby." "Y/nnnn..."
The little grumble and a few disappointed murmurers beside your ear finally caused you to turn to face your girlfriend. Grabbing your bookmark from beside you on the bed much to your frustration but adoration for the moron laying against you.
"Alright." You sat up and tossed the book onto the bedside table and leaned on your arm looking down at her laying back beneath you.
"Did you smoke more?" You quietly asked, bringing your hand over to push back her baby hairs from her face, then bringing it down to caress her cheek.
You knew the answer, you just wondered if she'd tell you.
"Yeah." She whispered, doe eyes staring up at you the entire time like a lovesick puppy while you dragged your nail across her jaw.
"I told you not too." You then stated softly, tucking her hair behind her ear while she mumbled out some excuse still admiring your face instead of hearing your words.
"You had more too." "But I don't get all discombobulated when I smoke."
You were high and so was she, you did it all the time, but you knew Ellie when she'd smoke, especially more than you'd give her.
And you knew how clingy she'd get and how much she'd bug you to be with her, and you never minded, you loved her, but she was Ellie.
Which is why you always cut her off, so the poor girl wouldn't send herself into a spiral because you had to leave to pee for a minute.
"You need to start listening to me more." You leaned down and pressed a kiss to her lips, quickly pulling back to sit up nearly missing her disappointment.
"Babe." "What?" You peaked over your shoulder at her seeing her sprawled out on the mattress, shirt rode up and sweats low on her hops.
"Don't leave me." You laughed quietly, laying beside her on your pillows, face to face with the girl.
"Just take a nap, I'll be here when you wake up."
Ellie had other plans though, moving forward to kiss you, rolling her entire body towards your own.
"Ells.." "C'mon please.." She begged, kissing you once more while you smiled. "I told you not to smoke any more of it." "I won't." "Too late.."
She continued pushing at you though, continuing her small pecks to your lips. Swinging on of her legs over yours to keep you close to her while you only continued to smile down at the girl, silently teasing her about what she was doing and how badly she wanted you without quite saying it.
"You need to start listening to me." Your nails tickled the skin just beside her eye before you booped her nose. But it was like Ellie wasn't hearing you, instead kissing you once more while you pulled away with a chuckle.
"And be good." You grabbed her face to squish her cheeks, laughing as you did it when she gave you a face. "Got it?" She nodded while you pecked her squished lips.
But it quickly became more than just a peck, her fingers creeping up and underneath the bottom of her shirt before pulling it off to reveal her black sports bra.
"Way to ask for what you want." "Please?" You blinked a few times, trailing the collarline of her bra before letting out a sigh. Though you had already decided your answer a long while ago.
"You're lucky I love you."
Your hands the moved down to the strings of her sweatpants making sure you moved slowly letting the moment dwindle and her to wallow in the moment.
Untying them in a messy manner letting the pad of your thumb run along the waistband and graze her skin.
"After this you're taking a nap.." You smiled, dragging her pants down her legs to show off her matching boxers, leaning down to kiss and nip at her inner thighs. Her laughter filling your ears.
"Yeah, yeah." Ellie then jumped when you harshly bit at the fat of her skin, licking over it to help with the delicious pain she felt. "Don't start or I'll leave you like this." She didn't respond, a little noise passing her lips instead. "Can I take these off?"
You tugged at the leg of one of her boxers seeing her nod.
"You're so quiet when you're needy..."
You pressed a kiss to her knee, pulling down her underwear to finally expose her aching cunt. Her legs mindlessly widening when you tossed the garment away, laying down on your belly right between her two limbs to gaze at her.
Admire her.
"...aren't you?"
You teased, hearing her whine as her head lolled forward to look at you, green irises meeting your own.
"You should really stop smoking.." You giggled, leaning in as she went to give you another snarkish reply, instead her mouth falling open as you look a long stride up her slit.
One of her legs hiking itself up onto your shoulder, tongue swirling around her clit while her little noises soon flooded the small house.
Your grip creating white indents in her freckled skin as you continued to toy with her sensitive bud. Sucking harshly to get a louder response from her lips.
"Y/n..." She then whispered. "Maybe I'll get up and leave you hanging?" Your finger inched towards her hole, little 'no's' passing her lips at the idea you'd said out loud.
Your poor girlfriend so high she resorted in begging you to keep going, desperate as your first finger pushed right into her cunt. Pressing a light kiss to her clit earning a nice jolt from her body.
"Then you should listen to me." She nodded quickly, eyes stalking you while her mind prayed for movement. "Okay?" "Okay, please fucking move babe, please–" You grinned before moving back in, adding another finger while beginning to pump in and out. The tip of your tongue kitten licking her most sensitive part.
"Wider." You tapped her other leg causing her to move it a bit, but nonetheless you had to shove it aside making your fingers sink even deeper.
A throaty grumble coming from her mouth then a few girlish whines, her hand coming down to rest right on your head, short nails digging into your scalp but it didn't even hurt, it felt good as she tugged on your hair.
"You taste so good Ells.." "Fuck Y/n.." You went a bit faster, watching her face the entire time while keeping your tongue on her clit. "You look so pretty too."
Her shaky breaths and red face keeping the smirk on your face, adding a third finger into her, moving at a pace she couldn't keep up with. Thighs trying to close around your head but you wouldn't let them.
She hated it when you'd watch too, the way your fingers moved in and out and then you'd look back at her while you played with her clit.
It drove crazy.
"Aww, Ells, you getting close?" Your fingers rested on her lower belly, thumb pressing her clit for every time you came up to mock her again.
"Ye–yeah." You grinned at her jumble of words that followed the confirmation. Sweaty and sticking to her while fucking her to the point of her mind going fuzzy and foggy.
Reaching for you as she finally began to tip over edge letting out a much loader moan that sounded so whiney and melodical that it made you just have to lean up to kiss her, I mean you couldn't resist.
Still finger fucking her when you met her damp lips, swallowing up her sounds, the wet squelching sound coming from between her legs still so audible for you both.
Finally you pulled back, slowly leaving the place between her thighs. Moving slow, a few more quiet whimpers tumbling from her lips and out into the air.
You brought one hand up pushing her sweaty hairs from her sticky forehead and the then the other hand, placing your fingers in your mouth.
Forcing her watch you lick them clean before kissing her once more allowing her to taste herself on your tongue.
"You did so good Ells." You then kissed her forehead, holding her as she came back down and looked around with foggy, blown out pupils.
After a moment of quiet, of kissing her cheeks and tracing the pretty bridge of her nose. You whispered a few more things to her getting her cheeks to turn a light scarlett until you told her you were gonna clean her up.
Moving to go off to grab a rag and new boxers for her but the girl had other plans. Tightly wrapping her arms around your waist to keep you there.
"Babe, I gotta clean you up." She groaned instead of using words but nonetheless her grip was released, letting you leave and come back, going as quickly as you could manage.
"No more extra smoking, or I'm not being nice next time."
You spoke, spreading her legs to clean her up.
But she didn't answer, eyes flickering up to her face while you grabbed her fresh underwear. Seeing her half asleep, but her puppy dog eyes were still trained to watch you, even if she had no fucking idea was you were saying, only basking in you taking care of her.
"I love you, you know that?" "Mhm." "Good."
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ladylynse · 5 months
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Hello! I love your works, they're all so cool! I especially love your rc9gn ones because it's my current hyperfixation. Do you think you can make some (even your 3-sentences ones would make me really happy!)? I have a bunch of prompts!
Prompt 1: Viceroy trying to create a robot, but something went wrong (Bash/McFist/a robo-ape probably messed it up) and it caused an electric short-age to the whole town
Prompt 2: There's a thunderstorm at the end of class and everyone was advised to wait out the storm before they could get home, shenanigans ensues
Prompt 3: (contains human!Nomicon) the Nomicon thinks about all the good and bad things his current student has done
I have more, but I don't want to spam you with all of them, so here's all I'll give! It's fine if you can't do any of it, I'm just thankful for the work you've alr done!
Thanks so much, Anon! I'm sorry I'm getting to this so late, but I am delighted you like what I've written. I really appreciate you letting me know!
These prompts are best for ficlet prompts (specific scenarios always are), and unfortunately my ask box isn't open for that at the moment, but I'll turn them into three sentence prompts: blackout, stormbound, and human!Nomicon AU, reflections. I'm specifying what I'm boiling the prompts down to because I don't take specific scenarios for three sentence fic prompts anymore, so I ask for a word or two (along with the AU if it's an AU) for those, and this is how I'm going to list them in my three sentence fic list. (I'm still going to do your scenarios because I'm assuming you're new and don't know what I've been doing more recently, but this will give you an example of how a prompt can be boiled down.) You are welcome to still share any ideas you have, though! (It's always fun to see what people come up with.) I just won't necessarily turn them into ficlets.
Prompt 1 - Blackout
“Viceroy,” McFist growled in the sudden silence that seemed all the louder for the absence of any hum of machinery, “what did you do?”
Viceroy pinched the bridge of his nose—of course he’d get the blame for this when McFist, in all his enthusiasm, had been the one to activate the prototype before it was ready—but somehow summoned the patience to say, “It seems premature activation caused a power outage that, if the view out the window is any indication, is affecting the entire town; if you had waited—”
“The Ninja was right here,” snapped McFist, his words nearly—but not quite—covering up the sound of a pair of feet hitting the floor behind Viceroy and their owner no doubt dropped from above, “and if he’s going to show his face under my own roof, I’m going to send every WND we have after him!”
Prompt 2 - Stormbound
Randy didn’t think it would be too long before the rain let up enough for them to safely leave, but Howard—and clearly Heidi—had other ideas, since Howard had his phone out and was willingly watching Heidi’s Me-Cast, where she was saying, “Hey, N-villers, Heidi here with the DL on the downpour; the storm has us all stuck in school, so I propose a contest: first person to—hey!”
“First person to discover the real secrets of Norrisville,” continued Debbie, her face only partly in frame and the entire camera bouncing as she scrambled to keep the phone out of Heidi’s reach, “will win the prize. So how about it—who wants to unmask the Ninja with me?”
Prompt 3 - Reflections, Human!Nomicon AU
He would be lying if he called Randy his best student or his most skilled one, but Randy may well be the one who most embodied what it meant to be the Norrisville Ninja; he had a heart that wouldn’t fail him, and when he dealt with the likes of the Sorcerer and now the Sorceress, that was the most valuable of all.
Of course, he also had more luck than the last ten Ninjas combined, and at times like these, it was hard to accept (despite ample supporting evidence) that that luck was entirely natural and not the result of a magical artefact altering the luck of others and bending fortune to his own favour, no matter how well that would explain the current predicament.
“Yo, Nomi,” called Randy, since Randy had insisted on calling him that once he’d realized he wasn’t speaking with the one he called First Ninja, “now that you’re, like, a person and not a book, this is a perfect time to teach me how to do the Ninja Dragon Fist, so how ‘bout it?”
-|-
see more fics | more RC9GN fics
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smarterinabsentia · 6 months
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Snow on Snow
The Company owns your info. It owns everyone's. That’s how you can have your outfits chosen, your eggs cooked to perfection, your days arranged with enough precision to leave you two full hours of free time. They won't reveal it, certainly not in any way that jeopardizes earning potential.  The Company adheres very closely to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. 
Content needs to eat.
Corporations may be people and everything, but real people are now legally defined as ‘authors’ under U.S. Copyright Law. Which means that "Specific and individuated expressions" of an idea are their exclusive property. As a result, whatever comes through the Listeners can only be sampled. A song made up in the shower, a spat about power outages, a new recipe for linguini with shungiku pesto that was dreamt up because it was too cold to go to the market. There’s so much out there, so much of the same, nobody can recognize themselves in the end.
Only six narrative arcs. Five types of rhythm. 
You used to think otherwise.
You were a DJ once. Had some notoriety in clubs from Santa Ana to Echo Park. You specialized in what you called Paleo-Trad, a mix of chest-rattling techno beat and ‘the artifacts,’ you called them, ‘of primitive violence.’ Your battle record was of the clicks and scrapes of a flint-knapping session you’d sampled from an undergrad paleontology class. You were exposing the creature under the creature comfort, you said. The same old stories. Stone age and age old. 
But you did well, which means moderately well. You broke even on a recording once, but your life wasn't going anywhere.When your girlfriend left you for a Newport Beach accountant, you took stock of the threadbare sofa in your rent-controlled apartment and the chipped dining set you’d lugged from your dorm room five years ago. You knew things had to change. 
That was right around the time they recruited you. 
The Company has its tendrils in everything from streaming holoshows to leather-bound books--now making a comeback. They’d heard one of your dubplates, they told you. Thought maybe you were what they were looking for—someone to sift the gold from all that monotony. You only heard ‘gold.’ 
The universe is listening—that’s the mantra of confirmation bias. 
The Company has a monopoly on cacophony, and it’s your job to sift through that dissonance for the sweetest, darkest, most relatable strains of the human experience: quotable moments, the sad tinkle of a dishwasher being loaded after the guests have gone home, a revealing whisper in a wedding hall. It’s a brave new world out there and you’re getting paid to eavesdrop. 
You bring order. Turn bits of lives into profit. 
Now, you have a new ‘sofa.’ You’re careful to call it that because it cost twice your rent, and when you sit down in it, you almost feel like an adult. You kind of like the girl you took to dinner last night, even though she was squeamish about the sashimi and texted during dessert. You didn’t mind. You could pay for it. You can keep paying for it if you make them happy. 
One of your co-workers, a graphic artist named Damien in a shirt with mock pit stains, nudges you in the corridor.  "Good time to stand out,” he says. “They usually cut some folks come January. That way they can fire up the newbies just in time for Valentine's."
You thank him for the heads up and knuckle down in your home studio, the one they fitted with a console and a Listener. The Listener scans the country 24/7, eavesdropping on whatever keywords, pitches, or sounds you plug into it. They were initially developed for market research: how many women are talking about facial waxing? Are Chris Byres and Metal-Hex really household names? 
Tonight you'll think kind thoughts. Start simple. You punch in the words "Christmas, snow, jingle,” and “child" to start with and land on an argument between a husband and wife. She asked him to replace the batteries in the baby monitor a week ago. He jokes that it’s nice not having to hear the kid squawling for a change. 
"That's not funny”, she says. "Shhh," he says back.  It’s a moment you capture more and more frequently: authenticity slipping into caution. 
You move on to a group of mothers, newly arrived home from a shopping-cum-playdate. They're blending margaritas and chatting while their kids watch Thomas the Tank. 
You find your head bobbing to the music and almost miss it when a woman named Maureen starts boasting about a tryst with a guy at the post office. 
"His..." she starts. 
Shunting trucks and hauling freight. 
“…just huge.”
You hear one of the kids—hers?—ask a question that gets muffled by the other women’s laughter. 
"Nothing,” Maureen tells him. “We’re having a great big chicken for dinner. Watch the movie."
Guffaws.
You think about the proximal zone of development: How adults speak to children just above the level they will understand. 
How far of a leap is it from a chicken to a man's junk? 
You lower the slider and jump to another part of the city, tuning in to—although you're really not supposed to do this—a young het couple having sex. You think that maybe they'll whisper something spicy, some starry-eyed phrase during the act that you can maybe set to Nina Simone or Julie London, but they don't talk enough. You tune in on a lesbian couple, but they talk too much. 
Do you talk that much? 
God, you hope not. 
You pour a finger of the scotch you can now afford and remind yourself to be patient. When you were a DJ it took days, sometimes weeks for the right breaks to come to you, to find the right outro, to muscle down on a balancing level in a room built from drywall and light weight blocks. 
You must have forgotten to turn off the Listener because when you come out the next morning, she's there.
In the bleak mid-winter long ago…
It's an old song. In the public domain, which means that maybe you can use more of it if you disguise her voice enough. But it’s that voice that gets you, intimate yet far away, as silky as that pricy tofu you still can't bring yourself to buy. You're at your console even before you ask the Listener to switch on your coffee maker.
Snow had fallen… snow on snow… in the bleak mid-winter long ago.
Sad, but hopeful, so full of a loose and languid joy. 
She has an accent, Spanish maybe, although you like to think it’s Portuguese because her voice is like the greatest Fado you’ve ever heard. Her doorbell rings and there's a knock, loud and sharp, and she stops. You frown at the interruption and rewind her, play her back again and again until you finally hit upon an idea. 
You program the Listener to scan through the most compatible captures of Christmas songs, or even just love songs—you're not picky. At first, you think you'll patch it together with others singing the same thing, like when they mashed a bunch of dog barks into an approximation of Jingle Bells. But everything you find is off key and using hervoice like that? That would be a waste.
She makes you want to reach through the speakers and touch her, to reassure her that whatever it is, she’s going to make it. Anyone who hears this is going to feel this way, you think. You spend hours, patching together bits and pieces from other households, different songs, sung in backyards and living rooms, in choir rooms and in grocery aisles. You bring a whole goddamned community together, all of them bending over backwards to make her happy, to sing her out of her lonely funk. 
You take it in the next Monday and pitch it to your boss, a guy who wears a jewel on his lapel. He thinks it's brilliant. You think it's brilliant.
Within a week Snow on Snow is on the air.
Two days after that, the accompanying video—a mash up of beautiful people singing karaoke and shaking snow domes—goes viral.
By the time Christmas rolls around, other companies are mimicking your idea. Some goofus even slapped together a New Year's song from a bunch of Midwestern bingo parlors. It fails, of course, because they’re just not as good as you. 
You get a huge commission check and a pay raise. You buy a Miyabe knife set and try to prepare Peking duck from scratch. It comes out chewy and pink. The girl you've invited to dinner tells you she's vegan after the fact. 
It's right before Valentine's Day when you see the security guard dragging a woman toward the door of the lobby. She's trying to pull herself out of his grip, but this guy is a smirking pit-bull. He swivels her around like a desk chair and shoves her through the hydraulic doors. As they close, her hand swipes at the glass, fingers leaving a trail in the condensation. "You can’t do this! I'll sue you mother—"
That voice. It's her. 
You meet your boss in the elevator. He confirms her identity, although he won’t give you a name. Then he rolls his eyes. "Read the fine print. Best and most ignored advice."
"She want money?" you ask and a brief fantasy flickers through your mind. You think about running after her and writing a check right there on the corner. At least for the same amount you paid for your sofa. 
He shakes his head. "She wants us to pull it. As if we could. She's claiming repeat emotional distress. Apparently, she was singing that little ditty right before she got notified of her husband’s death in a car crash. Has to relive it everywhere she goes now. Can't turn on the TV or the radio. Can’t even go outside some days.”
Your face goes pale. You only sampled the song, you say.  
 He slaps a hand on your shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. They all know the rules and you followed them.” He shrugs. “I'd almost feel sorry for her, but who the hell doesn't associate a few unpleasant memories with a song?"
Unpleasant? 
You go back to work, try to wipe her from your mind by sampling farts. For real. You're compiling the ultimate musical scale of people's flatulence for some jackass keyboard app, but not even this distracts you from what you saw in the lobby. She was as pretty as her voice. She was alone. And she obviously couldn't afford a lawyer despite her use of the "S" word.
You go back home and pull up her samples, pouring yourself more of that scotch. You listen to the whole thing this time, to her humming while she slices vegetables, to the call she takes from a sister who teaches art at South Coast Community College. Then she gets another call—from him. She asks him to pick up some vegetarian consommé at the Costco. She complains good-humoredly about having to make a meal for a carnivore and one for her sister. You can't hear what he's saying on the other end, but it's a happy conversation. Before she hangs up, she says, "I love you."
It takes another hour or so to get to the part where she sings, and you savor it even more this time because you haven't corrupted it yet. When you hear the doorbell ring, you don’t stop. You hear the knock, contrasted by lightness in her voice as she calls out "just a minute!" the creak of the oven door, the sound of her hands swiping against the rough cloth of her apron, or maybe, her jeans.
You hear her footfall across the softly squeaking floors. You hear her flipping up the latch, turning the knob, and the sound of a heavy door as it brushes the carpet. Then you hear a man's voice, muffled and subdued. He asks her a question. Two maybe. There's a silence. Then you hear her scream.
You shut it off and down the scotch even though you're a sipper. You try to distract yourself with more farts, a couple fighting, and what you think might be a major drug deal. You used to think you were lifting the gold out of the mud, but it’s never that easy. Mud sticks.
You decide, an hour later, that you're going to find her. 
You don't have her name. The Company wouldn't give you that, but you have a face and a voice. On the phone, she'd mentioned the Pritchard Costco and her sister's job at South Coast. You go to their website and find the sister in the faculty profiles, or a woman who looks like her. You do a likeness search and within two minutes, pull up a photo of the two of them at Huntington Beach. They're both holding up surfboards, squinting into the sunlight, their arms slung loosely around each other’s shoulders. It’d be nice to go surfing with her, you think. 
You can’t surf.
You locate the house and what you see makes your stomach sink in shame. There's already a moving van out front. You think that maybe that's your fault. 
You park out of sight and wait, then follow the truck to an affordable housing unit in Costa Mesa. She's moving back in with her mother.
It takes you a week to think up a pretext. It's ridiculous really. You follow her into the building's communal laundry room with a basket full of smelly socks and the T-shirts you use for cleaning rags. Then you pretend to read a magazine and wait for her to sing. Who wouldn't? It's a coin laundry after all. The acoustics are great. 
When she does, your hands shake and your mouth goes dry. This is a good thing because you sound sincere when you work up the courage to speak to her. You tell her you like her voice. You tell her you’re a DJ and would she be interested in singing on a few tracks? You'll pay her. She’ll even get credit. 
She doesn't find this creepy in the slightest. You're a woman, after all. 
And you do pay her. Maybe even enough to consult a lawyer. You want her to fight even though you know she won't win. You want to at least give her that chance. Instead, she drops the money in an IRA and puts the rest down on a car. 
You're happy to see her happy. 
You think up other jobs, other reasons to keep seeing her. You even help her with her taxes.
You fall in love.
And yeah, when she finds out you were the one who mixed that song, she freaks out and runs home to her mother for a while, but it's a predictable dramatic arc. Only six of them. She comes back. 
You'll never be certain it wasn't for the financial security. She is four months along with her husband's child. 
You don't care. You're happy. 
So happy that a year later, when you see your life story on one of The Company’s up-and-coming streaming sites, you just shrug and enjoy the show. It's a rom-com or maybe a pilot. You don’t know. In this version, you're a dude—some arrogant one hit wonder who really needs to get his shit together. She's a waitress whose dreams of Broadway are nearly destroyed when her director boyfriend dies in a car accident. She doesn’t see it as she sits next to you on the sofa, the baby fast asleep in her arms. Or if she does, she doesn’t say anything.
But you know it's you. There is nothing you can do about it. All you can do is see yourself in the narrative. 
That's all you can ever do.
Six types of story and five kinds of rhythm. 
Snow on snow.
This story previously appeared in the UK magazine Visions and was later published in translation in the Bulgarian zine Shadowdance. I'm not in the mood to scour for reprint markets atm, but I wanted to put it out there.
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sreegs · 2 years
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I’ve been GMing Cyberpunk games for about 4 years now with a regular group of people with others cycling in and out. My first campaign took 3 years to complete (lol) with about 50 sessions at about 3 hours each, though there were a number of side quests I made up along the way. That started off as a Cyberpunk 2020 + Homebrew rules, but 2/3rd of the way through we switched over to RED and converted everything since it was much faster session play.
That campaign was a slog, but it was a lot of fun. It started out very local (PCs were a group of friends in Northside who foiled a robbery on their favorite hangout) and blew up into an adventure that crossed state lines into Nevada, and eventually ended up in orbit with a climactic battle against the big baddie. It was worth it for the experience of just completing a grand campaign from start to finish. I started out with lots and lots of prep and by the end, I got my system down.
Though I short-circuited the plot a bit to save on time, I ended up being able to tell the full arc. It was a satisfyingly cyberpunk story: shadowy org of rich people using drugs to disperse nanites into people to control their behavior. This, of course, was unraveled bit by bit by the players. Started with “hey what’s this weird new street drug” and ended up in space. Bog standard, right?
Anyhow, I’m excited about my new campaign. Start from scratch, Cyberpunk RED, year 2045. We’re only two sessions in, but I’m trying something very different. I found that what I enjoyed most about Cyberpunk was the character arcs, rather than some big plot. This campaign is very different. I have no grand story to tell. Instead, it takes place almost entirely within a high-rise, all-in-one megabuilding in Night City. A place called “The Sydney” that promises to cater to your every need without having step out of the building. Apartments, retail, restaurants, etc. All under one very, very tall roof. Like V’s apartment in the Cyberpunk 2077 game.
Of course, the promise of luxury living in a cyberpunk dystopia is never going to be fulfilled. The building is a microcosm for the city at large: class divide amongst the lower and upper floors. Gangs fighting for turf from one floor to the other. Schemers and schemes abound.
I’m a heavy map maker. I think I really enjoy mapping more than anything, because I often find myself unable to start writing a story until I see the space in which it takes place. So what’s great about such a large recurring setting is that, I can re-use existing maps multiple times, the players become familiar with the map, and I can have empty floor plan templates to take out the groundwork of every new map. I’m using Foundry VTT hosted on the Forge. I used to do Roll20, but I found Foundry to be a much better virtual tabletop.
Here’s a screenshot of (some) of the players’ floor. My players are on Tumblr so I can’t spoil much in my posts. Here, three PCs (the tokens without names, top right) are standing outside their elevator in the central shaft that runs up the whole building. Some residents are hanging out near the edge of the terrace. There are apartments along the left and top edge of the screenshot.
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I write every session as a one-off, with the goal of letting my players fill out their characters story the way they want. They’re usually simple stories. My first session was about the players’ floor experiencing power outages, it turned into an investigation to figure out who kept tripping the breaker, and it was a crypto scheme that they decided to break up with the help of a cyberpsycho.
The next session is soon, and the inspiration for the story struck me from just regular, daily life I experience living in my own apartment building IRL. It’s an interesting setting and I’m excited to see where it goes.
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paigemathews · 2 years
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Okay, so I ended up accidentally spiraling into a thing about everyone’s combat abilities, but then Prue’s got so long that I’m splitting them up. This mini-series of posts are gonna be a combination of canon and headcanons (look, I’m insisting that some of these people take a defense class, it makes sense), but Prue’s is entirely canon. I’ll eventually come back and link all of them together somehow.
Prue Halliwell
Initially, Prue is actually the sister seemingly most reliant on her powers when fighting. During the first two seasons, she primarily uses her powers to fight and only resorts to any type of hand-to-hand or self-defense when her powers are no longer an option, such as when she’s attacked by the Dream Sorcerer or dealing with Nicholas in season one. Furthermore, her focus tends to be getting away from the fight rather than full on fighting.
It’s really only after she gets her astral projection, a power that leaves her without her telekinesis, that she begins to deal with more nonmagical fighting. When she first realizes that her astral projection leaves her without her powers, she attacks Drazi with a block of wood in Heartbreak City.
Pretty much immediately after that episode, she begins to integrate some nonmagical aspects into her fighting style. What’s really interesting to me is that she mostly seems to be integrating the hand to hand in scenes where she’s reasonably sure that she can handle her opponent without magic. For example, she kicks one of the guys in Animal Pragmatism and does limited hand-to-hand combat with the Film Geek under a spell in Chick Flick, but has also already or does use telekinesis to win the fight.
The other times that she uses hand-to-hand when fighting is when she doesn’t have her powers and has no other options. Notably, she isn’t focused on winning the fight in those situations but getting away from her attacker. This includes her and Piper knocking the shelf over onto Cryto in How to Make a Quilt Out of Americans and her kicking one of the horror movie villains in the face and running in Chick Flick.
Season three is when Prue really incorporates hand-to-hand in her fighting style and also becomes such a skilled fighter. She uses telekinesis and nonmagical fighting in The Honeymoon’s Over, taking on multiple opponents at a time and winning. She uses her temporary empathy in Primrose Empath to augment her powers and fighting ability, kicking Vinceres’ ass in a super satisfying fight scene. There’s also the Wrestling with Demons match with Phoebe.
Prue continues incorporating hand-to-hand into her fighting style in season three, including kicking Belthazar in Power Outage and her interactions with Krell in Sleuthing with the Enemy. She demonstrates increased agility in Blinded by the Whitelighter. She’s flexible and does backflips or other acrobatic moves when fighting, as seen in both Primrose Empath and Wrestling with Demons.
She also demonstrates a passing knowledge of guns, being able to use them incredibly quickly in the Good, the Bad, and the Cursed when she and Cole go to the past. Along with guns, Prue has used knives several times and also used a crossbow.
By the end of season three, her fighting style incorporates both her powers and hand-to-hand combat and she appears equally comfortable with both. While she didn’t demonstrate a lot of fighting ability before roughly halfway through season two, I feel like it’s probable that Prue took some kind of self-defense or fighting classes previously, in part because of her personality. She’s one of the best fighters of the entire cast and of the Charmed Ones. Realistically, she seemed to surpass Phoebe, but due to Phoebe not dying in season three and Phoebe’s entire journey, I’m going to say that Prue is actually the second best fighter.
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yelyahnaloj · 1 month
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Blog 45
General: I haven't updated this since the end of last year. Two days ago was Valentine's day.
Yesterday was a power outage that took most of the day until 4pm, because of a "snow storm" which resulted in falling trees and branches the night before. I didn't notice it at first until I left the room and noticed all the lights were off, which explained why I couldn't connect to wifi.
On Valentine's day I went to the dentist for a cleaning because I have periodontitis. I also had lost my debit card recently and had to get a new one. I brought my brother with me because I might as well because the bank was on the same side of town that he always likes to go to anyway. We got breakfast and coffee and I got him a couple books.
Particulars:
(Yesterday)
I have a friend from a class last year that I sit with at lunch or breakfast about every day. It is routine. Yesterday was a snowy day. It was slippery. We walked over to see if the library was open. It wasn't. We walked to the housing community center. He was concerned about slipping and falling, so wanted to hold my hand for stability. He is 20, about the age of my youngest sibling, so I kind of treat him like a sibling at times. I shake the end of my coat to cover my hand and allow him to grab onto my sleeve. It was still awkward and I was relieved when we got close enough to the destination where he could let go.
That morning, as usual, I sat at the long counter with tall stools, next to my friend. But the question that morning was which side of my friend? I noticed that a classmate from my algebra class last quarter was sitting one seat away from my friend. She seemed nice, perhaps I could sit by her. On the other hand, I don't interact with her much, so perhaps I should sit away from her to give her space. I ended up choosing that as the safest option. Though, I reflected that from the other perspective, I had deliberately avoided someone. Which would make sense that I come off unfriendly if my first instinct to any social ambiguity is to avoid people all together.
At some point my previous classmate joined in to the conversation I was having with my friend, probably about the power outage and the surprise that the cafeteria was still open for breakfast. My friend introduced himself and me to the other person, not knowing that we already knew each other. He told her about how he has autism and ADHD, I got up to get more coffee as I already knew all that. As I was walking away, I heard her say that she also has autism and ADHD. They compared advisors. I reflected on the coincidence and how that coincidence seems to happen to me a lot. but at the same time there are a lot of people who are autistic and/or have ADHD here at my college, and also the bar stools tend to be where people who don't have a friend group sit. I found out that she had initially planned out being an astrophysicist, but the math was too stressful so she is still trying to find her college focus. She also is the head of the astronomy club. I offered to let her borrow an astronomy textbook that I have, which she briefly considered but told me she better not because she doesn't tend to finish things so it would just sit with her stuff.
I went back to the cafeteria for lunch, but it was only open for half an hour before it closed down because they didn't have water. The cooks shouted for the customers to get whatever the rest of the food was there so it didn't get thrown out, and that the place was closing. My friend kept telling me that the place was going to close. I felt pressured to get up and leave even though I had just got settled with my plate. I think I was in the middle of making a tumblr post as well, so it was disrupting my focus. We got a to-go container and piled food in it. My friend, my brother and I walked back to the community center. My friend let a passerby know that the cafeteria closed early and that we didn't have water. She seemed to freak out a bit, which stressed me out a bit too. When we went to the community center, it was more crowded with people and we didn't have places to sit, so we set out food containers on the floor by a pole. For a moment I was going to cry because I was overwhelmed by being around people. My brother and I went into the convenience store which was also inside the building and he tried to get coffee but it barely filled half the cup, which was annoying because he also barely got coffee at the cafeteria because that ran out, too. He did get it for free, though.
I wanted to go home because I didn't care too much about the power outage, but I didn't like being around the people. People had the stuff spread out on the floor as they charged their phone and laptops in the community center, which was being run by a generator. My room, which doesn't have a working heater anyway, felt about the same as it normally does. At least I could be in my bed. I decided to try to read Winnie the Pooh, but then tried calling my mom instead. The signal kept cutting out worse than usual so I had to wait until enough bars came back. When I got a hold of mom, she vented about being cold and struggling to get the wood stove fire going. She was running out of paper to start the fire, and felt guilty using printer paper. She also felt very isolated as her cousin who also lives and works on her farm is the only in-person individual that she talks to. She didn't have much to say otherwise, and silence would lapse. She told me she wished I was there in person so we didn't have to come up with things to talk about in order to enjoy each other's presence. A bit of melancholy filled the air. I filled the silence by reading Winnie the Pooh to her, until my voice and my eyes got tired and it got harder to say words in the right order. We both felt a bit better and ended the call.
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brindlestorm · 5 months
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One thing I love doing in DnD is trying to understand the science of magic. Arcane magic makes the most sense to me, the Weave is essentially the building "blocks" for the universe. Each thread is like a pure element that can be manipulate into a spell.
Druid/Ranger magic is similar, neither class can manipulate the Weave's threads, but they can amplify the tangible elements into something else that still follows the elemental coding
Sorcerers carry the blood of dragons, creatures born from the weave, so they're essentially Wizards without trying. They have that innate ability to manipulate the weave as easily as breathing.
Warlocks do not manipulate the weave so much as they are handed the threads by their patron, but their bodies aren't trained to handle that much power so that's why they only get two spell slots.
Listen I haven't figured out bards yet, but what I'm going with is that they're so self assured they will the threads to form what they want
And then we get to Divine powers, Paladins and Clerics Similar to Warlocks, their powers come from an outside source that is part of the weave, but its their faith and devotion to their patrons that allows them to become conduits of their power.
In one of my campaigns, we were on a flying ship known as the Spirit of Moradin, the engine was called the Heart of Moradin. One of our wizards figured out that the entire ship was dependent on a single cantrip to keep it afloat, Sacred Flame. Naturally, this caused most of the party to panic briefly, except for my Cleric/Rogue.
It's faith and devotion that gives clerics and paladins their powers, so it makes sense that an eternal Sacred Flame (the flame never died out, and likely won't unless someone interfered with the flame) could keep a flying ship flying, provided that everyone aboard held the same belief in Moradin.
There were many times when the ship's power would fail, and I believe its because not even the dwarves commanding the ship had complete faith in the ship, which by name was pretty much a Vessel of Moradin, and no one in our party sans our NPC Warforge identified with Moradin as a patron. Basically what I'm saying is that my party's entire lack of faith and devotion was what caused the power outages and caused all the problems we had to creatively circumvent.
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d3mon-ology · 7 months
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On Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Finding Roaches in Your Apartment During a Black-Out:
This is the third time this year I have lost power for multiple days. For all of Metro-Detroit, our energy is serviced by a singular company: DTE Energy. As of August 25th, their stock prices went up by 0.47%. Their yearly revenue is approximately 19 million dollars. This summer, they decided to raise their rates. There is no other choice for us — it is DTE or bust. We were still vocal about the hike in prices, commenting on the proposal’s official posting, You want to raise our bills because you’ve already fixed our infrastructure? Then why did I spend almost a week without power this February? Or something of a similar rhetoric. This summer, some people reported that they began paying 4-digit monthly bills. Personally, my bill jumped from $50 to $170.
For those who do not live in Michigan, please know our summer has been the mildest and weirdest one I’ve experienced. It is August, typically the hottest, most humid time of year, and it has been overcast, wet, and cold, like it is November already. The past two days have brought us terrifying, violent storms where lightning cracked. I thought we’d lose power that first night. Instead, it was the strip of apartments facing ours. I remembered thinking, Finally! This winter, my strip of apartments lost power first and was fixed last. I thought it fair, almost, that they lost power and we got to keep ours. Our neighborhood, clearly zoned for low-income housing and apartments, was always the last to get power back, but instead of paranoia about this resonating me, it was the idea that DTE chose to bless the other apartments. As though a couple hundred dollars in rent per month was the determining factor of who deserved heat in the winter or light in the summer.
So I rejoice our luck — we got to keep our light, our air. Until yesterday morning, when I woke in a sticky sweat to silence and a depthless black. Having always been afraid of the dark, I scrambled for my phone. I tried my lamp, though I knew exactly what had happened. I got up to look out the window at the rain, and I grumbled at the sight of the other strip’s twinkling porch lights. I couldn’t help but resent them, which my neighbor noted later when she lent me her flashlight.
I reported our outage on my DTE app. I tried to go back to bed, but I am in the midst my biannual, irrational fear that mice and cockroaches were infesting my kitchen. Making homes out of my stove or the empty pizza box we left out because we didn’t want to throw it out in the rain. The pitch black only worsened this, so I waited for the sun to rise with my phone’s flash light on and my battery draining. It occurred to me then how soft and plushy I was, how I would not survive long without the accoutrements of my life. Or maybe I would, I thought, and I would have to just get over myself. Become a heroine of my own design.
So my mind wandered in the early morning, looking out for the first sign of light. Eventually, before I fell asleep, I thought of the book assigned for this semester’s course: Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie.
The lives of Ifemelu and Obinze have been eye-opening and a delight to read. Their romance was, in my opinion, a bit spottily rendered, but I didn’t care about their romance. I enjoyed Ifemelu’s portrayal. Adichie avoided a pitfall many Western authors, even the most bra-burning, Bechtel-testing, still fall prey to: the madonna-whore complex. Ife was a woman who was sexual, who had desires beyond men but who saw them as another delight in the wealth of life’s bounty. Following her middle-class Nigerian life and her immigration to America and then return home, I thought Ife so refreshing to read, relatable but also wholly unique in her perspective. She was human, but there was also something a bit invincible about her. It was not that she was able to overcome anything, but rather that she never once wallowed in her weakness. She found something else to sustain her, and I admired that quality. It made her my favorite character, honestly. Reading her story was like reading the life story of a family friend you considered an older, more enlightened aunt who had traveled the world and treated you like a sister.
In particular, she was unfazed by roaches during her first night in Brooklyn, noting that if she had been at home in Lagos she would’ve gotten the broom and killed the fucker without much thought at all. But she didn’t, claiming this American roach as different, as though the weight of a new country had softened that brazen edge to her.
This moment in the book came to me when I finally gave up on sleep. I dressed in the dark, and I decided I was going to drive around. My phone was nearly a corpse, and frankly, I just wanted to sit somewhere and watch my Webkinz iceberg video in peace. I didn’t want to think about mice scratching to escape my pillowcase, roaches emerging from under my sink, or bed bugs, which my coworker recently got and who I, selfishly, worried had given them to me. More so, I was tired of that unhinged feeling that repeated intrusive thoughts instills in me. Like if I did see any of these things, I would be hallucinating, and it would go beyond just idle superstition into a territory where in-patient seems mighty necessary.
So needless to say, I lost it when I walked into my kitchen and saw a cockroach, grasping a small crumb in between his pinchers. He’d just left the pizza box and was ambling across the floor. Much like Ifemelu, I did not kill it. Unlike her, it was not because I felt defeated or so out of place that to interact with my environment felt sinfully wrong. It was because I had never had to. Despite my history of infestations, roaches had never actually crossed from the ephemeral into the real.
Aristotle, who I fucking hate but has a few things of real merit, said that wisdom comes from experience. That’s why it is so valuable in learning virtue. Having lived on my own at 17, half homeless and without any adult supervision, I have grown to see adulthood as a list of first experiences that are necessary but ultimately shift one’s paradigm with each “first.” When I totaled my first car, I learned the wisdom of not leaving your car in the impound lot for five days, of how it is okay to trust scrappers on occasion when they are sweet boys who give you an extra hundred because they recognized struggle and pitied it when they saw it, and of getting back into a car after you realize how fucking stupid you and other drivers are. Dealing with roaches is another one of those “first” experiences, accompanied by a growth spurt, but much like totaling my car, it’s not one I want to learn how to overcome.
So I panicked. I woke up my partner, told him to come quick, annoyed when it took him a minute to clamber up. By the time he followed me into our small kitchen, the roach was gone. This was when I burst into tears, feeling all the weight of the past 48 hours — the sleeplessness, Ifem’s first days submerged in Americanah, the weeks of paranoia that had crescendoed to a singular moment that confirmed all my worst fears. I had felt inspired by Ifemelu’s resilience, balmed by her depression in those first few American months. Adjusting to a new country and being an adult are such disparate experiences that the Venn diagram between them is two circles, but it is a testament to Adichie’s writing that I found connections nonetheless. Learning the nuances of American English follows the same structure of learning a new “first”: you learn by a series of experiences. I calm down, I stop crying, and I think with hope and dread that this is life. After all, Ifemelu has to relearn the nuances of Lagos life after returning to Nigeria. And the same applies to each reoccurrence of a “first.” Life is a series of wisdoms being gained, and I think this is why I admired Ifemelu’s resilience.
So I look at the roach’s mangled body. I hug my partner, tell him we’re getting a closed-top garbage can tomorrow. “Some spray, too,” I add. I put down some diatomaceous earth. I turn off the flash light, and I watch the window. The sun comes up, and I go to sleep.
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lookwhatilost · 10 months
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I'll link rob henderson's entire post about luxury beliefs for reference, but for the purposes of this post I'll be focusing on his brief definition:
Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.
henderson talks about luxury beliefs like ssc’s barber pole theory of fashion and uses many of the same examples. put shortly: "once a signal is adopted by the masses, the affluent abandon it."
he also frames it as a costly signal of wealth: "They can afford to (defund the police), because they already live in safe, often gated communities. And they can afford to hire private security... Expressing a luxury belief is a manifestation of cultural capital, a signal of one’s fortunate economic circumstances."
there are two contrasting claims here. the first is that luxury beliefs impose a genuine cost on the believer that he can afford, like a wastefully pronking gazelle. the second is that the believer does not actually suffer that cost because of his existing position. the wealthy people in all-white gated neighborhoods on private islands bear no additional cost after all the criminals are released on the streets of a far away city.
imo henderson is wrong that these beliefs are a luxury of the upper classes, and that they are rather highly costly expressions of loyalty from an upper-middle-class “outer party”.
henderson's income chart for defunding the police has three categories: <$50k, $50-100k, and >$100k. thanks to rapid income growth and inflation, these categories no longer separate neatly into lower, middle, and upper class. most of the people with incomes over $100k are not the estate-dwelling ultra rich, but urban professionals in precarious social and economic positions. crime vulnerable city dwellers are almost three times as likely to support defunding the police as rural people.
the most radical beliefs expressed in the 2020 blm protests came directly from the most precarious and poor members of high status white collar classes: journalists, teachers, librarians, adjunct professors, social workers, petty officials, job hopping employees of bloated tech companies. none of them were aping obama or other members of a higher class. and all of these people suffer serious costs because of their beliefs, whether from direct violence from the underclass or indirectly from general social breakdown.
the day after john kerry bought a beachfront mansion next to obama's (his martha's vineyard one, not his hawaii one), a woman in tech told me she had led a costly project to remove their business from the state she lived in "because that part of new jersey will be underwater soon, thanks to the climate crisis."
obama installed a 2500 gallon propane tank and whole mansion backup generator. she had her husband destroy the portable generator that came with their new home, and suffered winter power outages in dignified silence.
obama's children (and the children of all his class) live completely normal lives, just with more polo lessons and hedge fund internships.
henderson says "Once a signal is adopted by the masses, the affluent abandon it." but obama and the ultra wealthy didn't create or model these "luxury beliefs," only to abandon them once they became déclassé. they are entirely the product of a desperately status-poor and precarious outer party in a society where climbing the social latter requires winning a red queen's race of radicalism, caught in an increasingly rapid purity spiral. those at the top don’t pay much attention to the crab bucket below them, except perhaps to nudge the ladder a little further out of reach.
so why should we care? because i think charging these people with hypocrisy is counterproductive, unless their job title is "mayor" or higher. Most of them are not benefitting from these beliefs, and would be much happier not suffering under the constant pressure to one up each other in expressing them.
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servin-up-surveys · 1 year
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survey #120
When was the last time you spent over $100 in one transaction? What did you buy? Uh... I don't remember? I'll do that soon though for my first tattoo appointment.
Do you sleep with a stuffed animal? Would you judge a grown adult for doing so? No to both.
Would you rather read an erotic novel or watch an erotic film? I mean, honestly neither, but if I had to pick one it'd be a novel.
Do you still have both of your parents? Thankfully, yes.
Do you play video games? Yeah, but not nearly as much as I did as a kid and teenager.
Does your significant other boss you around a lot? Hell fucking no, he knows I wouldn't allow that and I also know he doesn't want to do that to me.
Have you ever been put to sleep for surgery? Twice, yeah. I recently learned that I WON'T be able to be put to sleep for my wisdom teeth extraction because it is just impossibly expensive for us, and one especially HAS to come out because it has a very deep cavity that is going to kill the tooth and cause me hell if it stays in.
[TW: SUICIDE] Have you ever attempted suicide? Yes.
Have you ever skipped class before? No, not just one specific class. I'd rarely skip school by staying home, almost only ever because of mental health or more rarely being absolutely insanely tired, but Mom normally wouldn't allow that. Oh, I think I also usually did get to stay home on my bday.
Who, in your life, makes you feel discouraged? Myself, more than absolutely anyone else. I don't let (other) people stay in my life anymore that do that to me.
Have you ever lost anyone close to cancer? Well, my grandmothers died of different cancers, but neither I was very close to at all (I actually hated Mom's mom) for multiple reasons. Did Dad's dad die of cancer too? I can't remember, but I barely knew him either.
Have you ever been in a car accident? Yeah, when I was way younger. We actually got real close to big trouble on the road Friday; we were the first in line at a stop light and across from us, an 18-wheeler carrying some metal stuff turned in front of us, but way too sharply, and he tipped entirely onto two wheels, very barely managing to get back upright. Both Mom and I nearly had a fucking heart attack and both of our anxieties were very elevated for a while, like she was about to shift the car into reverse to back the hell up.
What was the last film you watched, that made you feel emotional? I have no idea. I basically never watch movies.
Does anyone you know ever recommend books to you? No.
What traits/behaviors do your pets have, that you find cute? Strongest is Cookie's tendency to get EXTREMELY excited when she merely suspects Mom or both of us are leaving. She is crazy for car rides, and she'll immediately start running between us, pushing our legs, doing this weird hyperventilation thing chihuahuas do when they get so excited their tiny bodies basically can't handle it haha, and will jump right into her carrier and stare at Mom, waiting to be picked up. Cookie also tends to prefer toys that are bigger than her, and watching her try to beat up like her big sloth or cow is the cutest shit. As for Roman, when we get home, he'll saunter into the living room and just plop down onto the floor in this uniquely content way, like he's just happy we're home and wants to chill with us. He stretches out and will frequently start rolling around/playing on the floor basically, lol. Also since being a kitten, he loves to sleep like as close to my face as he can get, normally. Lastly, Venus. This isn't exactly super unique to a snake, but it's still cute: when I handle her, oftentimes she loves to try to go into my shirt to be against my skin and stay warmer (I'm very convinced this literally saved her life once in a power outage we had), and back when I used to use my laptop in bed, she was great about snuggling up against me and just chilling there for basically ever, lol. She's a sweet girl.
Is there anyone who "likes" a lot of your posts online, but you don’t talk? Yeah, ig.
What was the last song that you recall singing along to? Pretty sure it was "Love Stuck" by Mother Mother the other day.
Have you ever been in your kitchen naked? No.
This time last year, what was your relationship status? I was still with Girt.
Did you reject or accept your last friend request? Reject, I think. Pretty sure it was some random guy I'd never met and had no mutuals with, gotta love those.
Are you sure of your sexuality? I AM sure I'm at least queer, and while I'm quite certain I am specifically pansexual, I don't think I'd ever truly know until I had a legit sexual experience with a feminine person.
What was the last compliment that you got? The person who worked with me for PT today told me I did great.
Do you know anyone with a really weird name? In almost all cases, I don't like to think of names as "weird," because generally they are given with great love and consideration and are important to those who named them, so I think it's pretty mean to consider someone's name weird. Now yes, there are exceptions, there are rare cases where names are given carelessly or even as a "joke," but generally, you get my mindset.
Has a boy/girl ever cheated on their boyfriend/girlfriend for you? Basically.
What’s the worst hangover you’ve ever had? I've never had one, actually.
Who in your family are you closest to? My mom.
Ever sat in someone’s lap because there were no more seats in a vehicle? I remember doing this with Jason once.
What do you tend to drink a lot of? Flavored carbonated water.
If you were going out for a meal, what restaurants would you typically AVOID going to? Seafood and foreign, generally. There are times I'm fine with some foreign food, but on your average day, if you ask where I wanna go, I'm gonna pick American cuisine.
Name a song you enjoy that’s in a language other than English. Basically Rammstein's entire discography lmao but for this question I'm gonna go with "Zeit," I think the vocals are fucking fantastic and sincerely beautiful in it. I feel like German has a rep for being an ugly-sounding language, which I don't agree with in general, but I cannot imagine someone calling the vocals "ugly" in that one.
Did you ever have head lice as a child? Quite positive no.
Do you like/listen to Queen? Do you have a favourite song by them? I adore Queen; Freddie Mercury is my favorite vocalist to ever live. This is probably like, EVERYONE'S answer, but I adore "Bohemian Rhapsody," but also "Killer Queen" and "Headlong" are high up on the list.
Do you have any idea when you’ll next attend a wedding? Whose will it be? Nope, but if I had to guess I really do think it's probably gonna be my own lmao. Girt visited his grandmother two days back and she's officially joined the party of asking when we're getting married haha.
What was the best job you’ve ever had? I've never had a job I even liked.
Do you have a troublesome medical condition? Above all, severe depression and anxiety. My AvPD is also very noteworthy with how it affects my life, and I still deal with the effects of relationship trauma. OH, I was so focused on my mental stuff that I almost forgot uh hey, my leg health also MAJORLY affects my life and what I can do, etc. Lastly, my weight plays a massive part in my poor self-image and super severely contributes to my depression.
Magenta, aqua, or coral? Coral; I consider that my second-favorite color. I love all of these, though.
Do you like the color orchid? Yes! I love basically every conceivable shade of pink, haha.
Would you rather be a wedding photographer or a nature photographer? It's my literal dream to be a nature photographer. Once upon a time I was aiming for wedding photographer, but only for the pay; I'm just not social enough for that shit.
Have you ever had an ulcer? None other than those you sometimes get in your mouth from like, biting your cheek.
Do you enjoy writing essays? I actually do, quite a lot.
What is your favorite name that starts with a "Z?" Probably Zane.
Do you believe that God’s plans for you are better than you could ask, think, or imagine? "God's" plan involves giving kids cancer and allowing pre-teen girls to be knocked up by rapists, fuck his "plans."
Would you want your first child to be a girl or a boy? If I decide I want children, I want a girl so much more than a boy that I'd almost be tempted to do IVF so long as my husband was still the biological dad, I've no idea how the rules of that process work. Super unlikely I'd actually do it though because I don't care quite enough to invest money in that.
Do you think you have what it takes to be a good salesperson? I've been in this position and I can ASSURE you I am the worst salesperson imaginable lmao.
Which name do you like better: Jessica or Jennifer? Jessica.
To you, what is especially distracting? People talking when I'm trying to count something. I physically cannot do it. Numbers just DO NOT store in my damn brain.
Have you ever contemplated cheating on anyone? Nope.
Who do you go to when you need comfort? Mostly Girt or Mom. Sometimes Tez and Mazzy.
Has anyone you know started a new job recently? Do they seem to enjoy it? Uh I feel like somebody has, but idr who.
Have you seen a butterfly at any time recently? No.
Have you drunk any fruit-flavored beverages today? Yes; the water I drink is usually strawberry-flavored.
What carbonated beverages do you have in your fridge at the moment? None, not even my aforementioned waters right now.
Has anyone you know got into a new relationship lately? Um maybe, idk.
Do you have any sisters? How is your relationship with them? Ashley, Nicole, Katie, and Misty. Katie and Misty don't live here and I barely ever see them, but I am A LOT like Katie (more than any of my other siblings) so connect to her a lot, though we don't talk enough. I like Misty enough, but she can also be incredibly fucking stupid and self-important as hell. I get along fine with Ashley and Nicole too, but we also don't talk a lot and I've never in my mature life known how to properly interact/connect with them. Nicole and I were very close as kids, but not anymore.
What was your favourite class in high school? Art.
Do you have any plans to buy any furniture in the near future? No.
Do you know anyone who has a matching tattoo with someone? (including yourself)? I'm sure I know more than I think I do. I know Ashley and her husband Nick got each other's first initial tattooed on their ring fingers on their honeymoon. Colleen and I each got "ohana" tattoos dedicated to each other (which I now want to rip directly off my fucking skin, especially when you consider I don't even believe in unnecessary loyalty to family just because they're family), but they were styled entirely differently and in different spots.
What type of milk do you like to drink? Either 1%, 2%, or whole.
Do you have a first aid kit at home? Yeah.
Are your parents dog or cat people? Is that different or the same as you? I know Mom's a dog person, and I think Dad is too. Since leaving us though he's never owned another, just cats because of Kim, and he's loved both of them very much.
Are there sounds that bother you on a visceral level? Vomiting.
Would you ever get a matching tattoo with someone? I will never, ever, get another tattoo that will lose meaning if that person leaves my life. It's a terrible fucking decision. I'm perfectly fine with getting one with somebody that will still be a perfectly relevant, important tattoo to me if our relationship spoils, though.
What would be worse for you, unplanned pregnancy or cancer? Gah, I guess cancer, but both would fucking suck. I'm pretty sure the abortion I would inevitably get would traumatize me, but cancer could straight-up kill me.
Have you ever popped another person’s zit? oh my fucking god no
Have you ever told a friend to dump their SO? Did they? Yes, and eventually, yes. She was my best friend and her boyfriend (who I knew via school) was an ABSOLUTE piece of shit. Summer's always had a thing for people who aren't good for her... Even now, her partner she's been with for many, many years is complete trash, but it really does look like they're staying together no matter what.
What do you think is the coolest piercing on someone else? Generally lip kinds.
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rivers50ravn · 2 years
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How To Defeat The Silent Killer, Sleep Apnea
If you've been diagnosed with sleep apnea, you may be in a state of confusion. Not knowing what to do is the hardest part about dealing with any affliction. If you're looking for information, you've come to the right place. Keep reading for some of the best tips for dealing with sleep apnea. Try playing a wind instrument. Playing the trumpet or a similar musical instrument should help you strengthen your throat and help you control your breathing. Your upper airways should become stronger and remain open throughout the night, which would make the symptoms of sleep apnea disappear or at least reduce them. Alleviate you sleep apnea by loosing weight. Many studies have demonstrated that sleep apnea can be significantly improved or even eliminated when patients slim down. You can go to the gym, join exercise classes or just get out and walk. Taking off the extra pounds will help you sleep more soundly. Try yourself to sleep on your side. If you fall asleep on your back, gravity can make it easier for your tongue and/or tonsils to fall back into your throat and obstruct your windpipe, causing apnea episodes. While it may be hard a first, as time passes, however, it will start to become second nature to sleep on your side. If you have sleep apnea and were just prescribed a CPAP, keep trying different masks until you find the one that fits you just right. Some masks may not be the right size or shape for your face. If festival trolley is leaking air into your eyes all night or rubbing the skin on your forehead raw, ask your sleep center to prescribe a different mask for you. If you are one of the millions of people who suffer from sleep apnea, you need to avoid caffeine and large meals before you go to bed. Stop eating and drinking any caffeinated beverages at least two hours before you go to bed. Both of these are linked to sleep apnea and should be avoided before bedtime. If you use a CPAP machine, make sure the mask fits well. Most people who quit using their CPAP machine usually say it is because the machine is uncomfortable. There are a number of different masks available, so you are not forced to use one that causes discomfort. Try out many different styles to find the right one. Do not sleep on your back if you have sleep apnea. Most people with sleep apnea tend to snooze lying face-up, and this can cause the airways to be more susceptible to interference. Prop yourself on your side using pillows or cushions. One great tip for people who sleep with an apnea sufferer is to use a white-noise machine. While this won't target the problem at all, it does at least help the partner to get a good night's sleep. Remember to use the same sound every night in order to sync the noise with relaxation. Do not drink to excess if you suffer from sleep apnea. If best sleeping bags drink, your throat muscles will relax too much, which will block your airways and cause snoring. You should either cease drinking alcohol or reduce your consumption to no more than a couple of drinks before dinner. That way, your sleep will not be affected. Even though festival packing list want to sleep better, do not take sleeping medication if you suffer from, or have a history of sleep apnea. What you may think will help will only make the condition worse by relaxing your muscles even more when you sleep. If you suffer from insomnia along with sleep apnea, speak with your doctor. Keep a generator at home. If there is a power outage, your CPAP machine will stop functioning. Some CPAP machines have a battery that will kick in if the power goes out but you should invest in a quality generator in case you have to remain without power for several hours. Now that you've reached the end of this article, you can see that there are things you can do about your sleep apnea. You don't have to simply accept it. Use what you've just learned to get a handle on this problem. You deserve to get the sleep that you need.
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solis32monaghan · 2 years
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How To Defeat The Silent Killer, Sleep Apnea
If you've been diagnosed with sleep apnea, you may be in a state of confusion. Not knowing what to do is the hardest part about dealing with any affliction. If you're looking for information, you've come to the right place. Keep reading for some of the best tips for dealing with sleep apnea. Try playing a wind instrument. Playing the trumpet or a similar musical instrument should help you strengthen your throat and help you control your breathing. Your upper airways should become stronger and remain open throughout the night, which would make the symptoms of sleep apnea disappear or at least reduce them. Alleviate you sleep apnea by loosing weight. Many studies have demonstrated that sleep apnea can be significantly improved or even eliminated when patients slim down. You can go to the gym, join exercise classes or just get out and walk. Taking off the extra pounds will help you sleep more soundly. Try yourself to sleep on your side. If you fall asleep on your back, gravity can make it easier for your tongue and/or tonsils to fall back into your throat and obstruct your windpipe, causing apnea episodes. While it may be hard a first, as time passes, however, it will start to become second nature to sleep on your side. If you have sleep apnea and were just prescribed a CPAP, keep trying different masks until you find the one that fits you just right. Some masks may not be the right size or shape for your face. If your CPAP mask is leaking air into your eyes all night or rubbing the skin on your forehead raw, ask your sleep center to prescribe a different mask for you. If you are one of the millions of people who suffer from sleep apnea, you need to avoid caffeine and large meals before you go to bed. Stop eating and drinking any caffeinated beverages at least two hours before you go to bed. Both of these are linked to sleep apnea and should be avoided before bedtime. If you use a CPAP machine, make sure the mask fits well. Most people who quit using their CPAP machine usually say it is because the machine is uncomfortable. There are a number of different masks available, so you are not forced to use one that causes discomfort. Try out many different styles to find the right one. Do not sleep on your back if you have sleep apnea. Most people with sleep apnea tend to snooze lying face-up, and this can cause the airways to be more susceptible to interference. Sleep App on your side using pillows or cushions. One great tip for people who sleep with an apnea sufferer is to use a white-noise machine. While this won't target the problem at all, it does at least help the partner to get a good night's sleep. Remember to use the same sound every night in order to sync the noise with relaxation. Do not drink to excess if you suffer from sleep apnea. If you regularly drink, your throat muscles will relax too much, which will block your airways and cause snoring. You should either cease drinking alcohol or reduce your consumption to no more than a couple of drinks before dinner. That way, your sleep will not be affected. Even though you want to sleep better, do not take sleeping medication if you suffer from, or have a history of sleep apnea. What you may think will help will only make the condition worse by relaxing your muscles even more when you sleep. If you suffer from insomnia along with sleep apnea, speak with your doctor. Keep a generator at home. If there is a power outage, your CPAP machine will stop functioning. Some CPAP machines have a battery that will kick in if the power goes out but you should invest in a quality generator in case you have to remain without power for several hours. Now that you've reached the end of this article, you can see that there are things you can do about your sleep apnea. You don't have to simply accept it. Use what you've just learned to get a handle on this problem. You deserve to get the sleep that you need.
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f1 · 2 years
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'We are Formula One drivers': Lewis Hamilton leads criticism of Monaco Grand Prix start
'We are Formula One drivers': Lewis Hamilton leads criticism of Monaco Grand Prix start as he says the weather is 'not a good enough reason' Sergio Perez won an incident-packed, wet-dry Monaco Grand Prix  The start of the race was delayed for an hour after a downpour of rain  Lewis Hamilton does not believe that there should have been a delay  By Press Association Reporter Published: 15:40 EDT, 29 May 2022 | Updated: 15:40 EDT, 29 May 2022 Lewis Hamilton said the start to Sunday's Monaco Grand Prix should not have been delayed because of rain, declaring: 'We are Formula One drivers'. The sport's most famous race was pushed back by nine minutes and then by an additional seven after a downpour. Two laps followed behind the safety car before race director Eduardo Freitas, officiating just his second F1 event, suspended the grand prix. Lewis Hamilton said the start to Sunday's Monaco Grand Prix should not have been delayed A power outage then knocked out the starting lights, leading to a further 45-minute hold-up, with the seventh round of the campaign eventually starting - albeit behind the safety car - one hour and five minutes later than advertised. In a statement, F1's ruling body, the FIA, said: 'Race control was monitoring a severe downpour that was rapidly approaching the circuit, and as it arrived during the start procedure, the safety car start and its associated procedures were implemented. 'This was done for safety reasons in consideration that there has been no wet running this weekend.' Hamilton, who started eighth and finished eighth, said: 'You think they didn't do a good job? I was not saying it was a mistake - I don't know the reason for them not sending us out at the get-go - but we are Formula One drivers so (the weather) is not a good enough reason. The sport's most famous race was controversially pushed back due to rainfall  'That is what I was saying. I was like 'let's go' when it was just drizzling a little bit at the beginning. 'We will talk about it in the drivers' briefing but we should have started the race.' Freitas, who is sharing the F1 race director duties with Niels Wittich following Michael Masi's dismissal, also governs the World Endurance Championship. Danish driver Kevin Magnussen said: 'If the conditions are OK, we should start.' He added sarcastically: 'Maybe give us a crash course in wet-weather driving. We can go and take classes. 'This is Formula One. It is not WEC.' Portuguese Freitas also took eight minutes to red-flag the race for a second time following Mick Schumacher's heavy crash at the Swimming Pool chicane. Schumacher's split-in-two Haas needed to be removed while the barriers had to be repaired - and with a three-hour time limit, only 64 of the allocated 78 laps were completed. A rolling restart, rather than a standing one, followed amid fears the starting lights were still not in working order following the earlier outage. There were also concerns that some drivers would lose out if they started off the racing line and on the damp side of the track. Hamilton added: 'We could have done two standing starts. (The stewards) are doing their thing, and I am focused on getting our car through the tough period we are in right now.' Hamilton finished 50 seconds behind winner Sergio Perez, spending the second half of the race stuck behind Fernando Alonso's Alpine. He is 75 points - the equivalent of three victories - behind championship leader Max Verstappen. The 37-year-old concluded: 'I am praying that the car doesn't feel like it does here at the next race in Azerbaijan because it was the worse that it felt so far with the bumps, and I am looking forward to that going. 'My teeth and jaw was moving the whole time and I am done with the shaking.' Advertisement Share or comment on this article: 'We are Formula One drivers': Lewis Hamilton leads criticism of Monaco Grand Prix start via Formula One | Mail Online https://www.dailymail.co.uk?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=1490
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saltnpepperpaladin · 3 years
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I am trying to convince my mother to write me an excuse paper for school so I don't have to attend it tomorrow to watch CR in the morning and spare my poor mental health
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goldenraeofsun · 2 years
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Day 23: Undone
When Cas was convalescing in the aftermath of Rowena’s attack dog spell, Dean told him, "Stick to socially acceptable binge-watching. You know, The Wire, Game of Thrones.” And when Dean got back from the lead on Amara, he actually wrote out a list. At the very bottom, he included Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Angel.
After Cas watched both series, he concluded that Spike was an idiot. Spike said he loved Buffy, but when he came back from the dead after saving the world for her, he refused to go to her. All because he went out in a blaze of glory - he couldn’t top that exit.
Suffice to say, five years later, Cas no longer considers Spike an idiot.
After Jack pulls him out of the Empty, human as ever, Cas returns to Broomfield, Colorado, under the name Emmanuel Allen. Thankfully, Daphne had already moved on to live on some sort of spiritual retreat in California.
Cas gets himself a credit card the way Sam showed him and finds himself an apartment. He applies for jobs, and lists Garth Fitzgerald IV as his reference because he assumes word of his death didn’t get that far outside of the immediate Winchester circle.
Sure enough, his risk pays off; he gets the forty-eighth job he applies for, a position at the local library. It’s part time and suffering from endless budget cuts, but it’s something to occupy his day.
He checks out cookbook after cookbook at the library and finally learns how to feed himself and resolves never to buy a previously-frozen burrito again.
He attends the library classes on computer literacy because, while he knows how to hack into traffic cameras and police records, those very specific activities are not very relevant to the daily life of a part-time librarian.
He doesn’t contact the Winchesters at all. This way, Dean will remember him fondly. He won’t have to deal with any of the messy reality of having a best friend - if Cas even deserves that title any more - who loves him.
Cas can’t risk it all being undone by crashing back into Dean’s life. He accomplished something special with that final speech; he feels it in his bones. But if he reenters Dean’s life, who’s to say Dean wouldn’t start to fear him and feelings, resent his presence, and doubt everything in their friendship leading up to that point? It could unravel everything he built with Dean. Cas will not be a constant, festering disappointment. Not if he has anything to say about it.
When Christmas comes, Garth sends him his only Christmas card, and Cas tapes it to his fridge. It makes him smile every time he walks past it.
On Dean’s birthday, Cas sends a card to their PO Box in Lebanon. He doesn’t sign it, but he wishes Dean well and includes fifty dollars.
In May, his coworkers surprise him with a small cake for his one year work anniversary and put him in charge of their upcoming Pride month display.
Cas had thought he had experienced human dignity and the satisfaction of a job well done at the Gas ‘n Sip, but that was nothing compared to how it feels at closing on May 31, staring at his mid-sized display of books with queer themes, both fiction and nonfiction.
But, of course, the next morning, the sky opens up and walnut-sized balls of hail rain down. Cas, already in the library, watches with dwindling hope as fewer and fewer people pass by the doors. Nobody stops inside for the whole first hour.
Cas checks his phone, frowning as he opens an email from Anisha explaining that she’ll be late because of a local power outage. She suspects the hail messed with a powerline in her neighborhood.
Sighing, Cas sets down his phone and picks up his latest book, a paranormal romance between two vampires over the centuries. It’s amazing how many ways humans have spun the vampire myth. It seems like the only thing they all have in common is the blood drinking.
The door opens just as Cas reaches the first sex scene, and Cas looks up.
A figure with his jacket raised over his head hurries into the library, swearing under his breath. Once safely inside, Dean Winchester lowers his coat, staring around.
Cas ducks behind his book.
“Hey,” Dean calls, his footsteps getting closer. “Rough weather out there.”
Cas’s pulse thunders in his veins as his mind clouds with panic. What he wouldn’t give to have his wings back so he could simply fly away.
“The blackout fried my laptop,” Dean continues, “so can I use one of yours?”
Cas steels himself. Cas can do this. He can pretend Dean is just another patron.
Cas lowers his book, forcing his gaze away from Dean’s (beautiful) face, and instead at the blank space over Dean’s right shoulder. “Of course,” he says. “Do you already have a login and password?”
Dean doesn’t answer, and Cas finally has to look at him.
Dean’s mouth has fallen open in shock, and all the blood has drained from his face. His knuckles clench his folded jacket with bone-white knuckles.
Cas coughs lightly. “Are you alright?”
Dean blinks rapidly a few times, his lips pressed tight together. “Fine,” he says through gritted teeth. He sucks in stuttering breath. “The login?”
“Of course,” Cas says quickly, grateful for the excuse to focus on the computer and answer the queries the library program requires for temporary computer usage. He writes out the credentials on a slip of paper and hands it over. “Use this username and password for 30-minute access. If you require the internet for longer than a half hour, please come back to see me and I can renew your session.”
Dean nods stiffly, spins on his heel, and takes off in the direction of the computers.
Cas lets out a silent sigh of relief and picks his book back up, but he might as be reading it backwards for all the sense it makes. Over the edge of the pages, he watches Dean sit at a computer on the far side of the table, so he almost faces Cas at the checkout desk.
It doesn’t take Cas long to figure out Dean is sneaking peeks at him over the computer monitor just about as often as Cas does over his paranormal romance.
At the end of an excruciating thirty minutes, Dean makes his way back to Cas. “I need to renew my session,” he says gruffly.
Cas nods.
As he clicks through the renewal process, Dean asks, his voice almost casual, “I’m new in town, but have I seen you around before?”
Cas shakes his head. A little too quickly, judging from Dean’s expression.
“Are you sure?” Dean presses. “Maybe somewhere in Kansas?”
Cas just stares, trying to keep his expression as blank as possible.
“Look, I don’t know-”
Dean breaks off as the door opens, and Anisha comes rushing in. “So sorry, Emmanuel!” she shrugs off her coat and ducks behind the counter. “First was the power. Somehow getting the kids ready for school takes twice as long in the dark. Then the car died. And will you believe a sinkhole opened just as I was leaving the house?” She swipe a hand through her dark hair.
After a beat, Cas says, “That sounds arduous.”
“You’re telling me,” Anisha says with feeling. “I’m just gonna go get coffee across the street since it seems like you’ve got everything handled,” she says, gesturing around the empty reading spaces, except for Dean. “You want a latte or something?”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
As Anisha leaves, Dean blurts, “Your name is Emmanuel?”
Cas tries to look offended instead of terrified. “Yes?”
“You’re serious?” Dean demands, taking a step closer, his eyes narrowed. “You’re name is - are you fucking with me?”
Cas swallows. “I am not fucking with you,” he lies.
He’ll have to leave. Once Dean vacates the library, Cas will escape town. How the hell Dean stumbled across him, Cas has no idea and no intention of ever figuring out, just as long as it doesn’t happen again.
Cas’s plan sounded so perfect at the outset. Leave Dean with all the good, none of the bad. Never contact Dean again.
But he never, ever, contemplated Dean finding him anyway. The United States is so vast, what are the chances Dean would ever return to Bloomfield, Colorado?
Dean opens his mouth, probably to order Cas to stop pretending, but his phone rings instead. He pulls it out of his pocket, frowning at the screen. “We’re not done,” he says to Cas, “but is there somewhere I can take this? Where I won’t get concussed by falling ice cubes?”
Cas nods to the storytime room, obviously empty of young students and toddlers. “Feel free to take your call in there.”
“Thanks,” Dean mutters, already accepting the call.
Cas once again picks up his book, but he can’t focus on a single word with Dean in the next room over.
“Maybe possession?”
Cas frowns. He would have noticed if there were signs of demons in his city.
“’M telling you, there’s something weird going on. First, I come to check out the haunting of a house that doesn’t goddamn exist.”
Cas can say with pretty much all assurance that there is no ghost activity in Broomfield.
“Then this freak hail storm knocks out the power in my motel, so I head to the library - yes, bitch, I went to the fucking library. It’s free. If Starbucks’ wi-fi didn’t cost a ten dollar cup of coffee, I’d go there instead.”
Based on the movement of his shadow, Dean is pacing in the storytime room.
“I guess it could be amnesia, again, but I can’t just up and call Rowena for a memory spell or something.”
A pause.
“Or maybe he is just pretending to get me out of his hair as soon as possible,” Dean says, his tone low and rough. “It looks like he’s been here a while, calling himself Emmanuel. Like last time, which makes me think it’s not a mind wipe situation.”
Cas leans over his desk, straining his ears.
“I can handle him -”
Cas flinches.
A long pause, and, “Who the hell would he be hiding from?” Dean demands. “No angel has bothered us for a whole year. No demons either. Who else but us? But me?” He makes a noise of pure disgust. “No, no, don’t fly back from Ireland - Eileen would kill you. I can hold my own. If,” Dean’s breath hitches, “if it does turn out to be Cas, I’ll let you know.”
Cas barely has time to pick up his paperback before Dean stalks back out of the storytime room.
“You never gave me the renewal code,” he says shortly as he stops in front of Cas.
Cas clears his throat. “You don’t need a new code,” he says. “I’ve already authorized your computer to start another session.”
“Oh,” Dean says, “thanks.” But he doesn’t move back to the computer table. Instead, he stays where he is, staring at Cas like he can figure out Cas’s true identity by memorizing the slope of his nose and exact shade of his eyes.
“Is there anything else I can help you with?” Cas asks tentatively.
Dean purses his lips. “Not really - it’s just you look just like an old friend of mine.”
Cas mouth goes dry, a lump forming in the back of his throat. “Oh?”
“Yeah,” Dean says, meeting his gaze squarely. “I thought he died about a year ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Cas says because that is the sort of thing humans say in these situations.
Dean huffs a sigh. “Yeah, well, I was really broken up after he went.”
Despite his better instincts, Cas has to ask, “You were?” which is just an objectively stupid question. Of course Dean was upset - they had been friends, best friends for many years. Cas basically knows the answer already, but that doesn’t stop him from needing to hear it from Dean’s mouth himself.
“Course,” Dean says, giving him a funny look. “He - well,” he restarts, “before all that, he dropped some pretty big bombshells. I - uh, didn’t exactly catch on quick enough to tell him all the things I should’ve before it all went down the way it did.”
Cas leans forward. “Like what?”
Dean’s eyes flash. “Like the fact that he was such a fucking dumbass - more dumb, definitely more ass - for keeping all that shit to himself for so damn long.”
Cas reels back.
But Dean’s just getting started. “I can’t say that I would have held hands and skipped off into the sunset, but he didn’t even give me a chance! Yeah, I probably would have smashed some furniture and poisoned half my liver, but, newsflash, buddy, I did that anyway. And by the time I got my head screwed on straight, came to terms with a bunch shit I never thought I could, guess what? He was still fucking dead.”
Cas drops his gaze. “I’m sorry.”
“Are you sorry?” Dean says, rapping his knuckles on the counter and making Cas jump. “’Cause it seems like you’re just living some fantasy life in goddamn Colorado.” He rubs a hand down his face, stepping back like he can’t even stand to be in Cas’s personal space anymore. “So what was it, Cas? Were you lying the whole time, or did you just plain change your mind?”
“Change my mind?” Cas repeats, his brow furrowing, only catching his slip after the words left his mouth.
But Dean’s angry expression doesn’t waver, even in getting Cas to crack. Admittedly, it didn’t take long. “Yeah, since you obviously don’t care enough to drop a fucking line that you’re not stuck in some hell dimension.”
Cas blinks. “That’s why you think I didn’t contact you?”
“Why else?” Dean demands, a challenging glint to his eye.
Cas opens his mouth, trying to find the right words for probably the most ridiculous plan he ever made in his long life. “Well, it sounds stupid now.”
“Try me,” Dean says, his expression stony.
Cas sighs. “Do you remember Buffy the Vampire Slayer?”
Incensed, Dean snarls, “What the fuck does Buffy the Vamp-”
“Do you remember or not?” Cas asks testily.
“Of course I do.”
“You remember, in the season finale, Spike dies for Buffy? He sacrifices himself so she can live and continue to save the world. The next season, in Angel, he comes back from the dead.”
“Uh huh,” Dean says, so far looking mostly unimpressed.
Which is fair, Cas probably shouldn’t have read this deeply into his parallels with a television show geared for teenagers whose brains are not nearly finished developing.
“He doesn’t tell her he was resurrected because he didn’t want to undo all they had together.”
Dean slams both hands down on the counter, glaring. “Why the hell would telling me you weren’t being tortured by a primordial entity for all eternity undo jack shit?”
Cas sighs. “Because once I told you I was back, you’d have to deal with the reality of knowing me. Wholly and completely, for the first time.” He isn’t sure he’ll ever be ready for that. “And who’s to say if you’d be able to separate this version of me from what we had before? We had a good thing, Dean. I couldn’t stay to watch it all fall apart.”
Dean stands there, stunned. “You’re right, that is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he declares.
Cas slumps back in his seat.
“I love you, you moron,” Dean says with a grimace, as Cas jerks his head back up. “And I had to figure it all out alone. Fat lot of good it did, since by the time I could admit it to myself, you were long gone,” he pauses, finishing in a disgusted voice, “to Colorado.”
“I had no idea,” Cas says faintly.
“Not a huge surprise, flight risk,” Dean says, rolling his eyes.
“Do you mean it?”
“I can’t prove it by getting sucked into hell, so you’re gonna have to take my word for it,” Dean says gruffly.
“Dean-”
“Look, if that’s your only hangup on coming back,” Dean says over him, “Will you come home?” He shifts his weight to his other foot, looking nervous. “It’s not gonna be perfect, and I’m probably still going to fuck it up - not as bad as you just did, by the way - but I’d like to try. Get to know the real you, although he doesn’t seem all that different from the guy who saved me in that basement.”
Cas cautiously reaches out to cover Dean’s hands, still braced on the counter, with his own. “I’d like nothing better.”
“Great!” Jack says, appearing out of nowhere, making Dean jump. “I thought I was going to have to snow you in - in June, can you believe it?” He glances at the two of them, smiling. “Do you want to get breakfast? I’m feeling waffles.”
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daydreamingleclerc · 3 years
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Hiya! A fluffy mason request where it’s a rainy day where him and the reader spend it in bed being lazy, cuddling, slowly kissing and just innocently running their hands on each other? Thank you ♥️
this is literally all i want in life 🥺🥺 once again, i kinda changed it *slightly* where the reader is at uni and they have a skylight window that makes the rain excruciatingly loud. i promise this isn’t based on my uni house at all...
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save it for a rainy day | mason mount blurb
much to your annoyance, the thunder and hammering rain woke you up at four o’clock in the morning, and you knew it would be a struggle to try and go back to sleep. thunder was your mortal enemy, the sound absolutely terrifying you with every rumble, and now it seemed that the rain hitting the skylight seemed to be your mortal enemy, too.
the heavy weather and floods across the country had cut short any chances of mason going to training for at least the next two days, and thanks to the excessive thunder and lightening all of your classes had been cut short due to power outages, so he wound up at your front door in the pouring rain for some well needed time with you.
as much as you didn’t want to wake him up — and the fact that you were totally infuriated with his ability to sleep through anything, even the sound of rain and hail pelting at the skylight in your bedroom — you did, snuggling yourself closer into his chest as he shifted onto his back, peeling one eye open to check up on you.
“you okay?” he mumbled, his voice raspy and deep from sleep.
“the weather’s keeping me up,” you sighed, bringing one of your legs up so it draped across his thighs as you lay in one another’s embrace. he kissed your temple, “can’t sleep.”
“hm, i’ll stay awake with you,” he offered. “we can just spend the day in bed watching movies and eating shit food.”
you obliged his request, even though you knew he was still exhausted, and while you jumped up for a wee, he snuck downstairs and made you both a cup of tea. he arrived back with the two cups in his hands and the painfully large biscuit tin full to the brim of treats that only university students would own. the rain pelted the skylight harder as you scoured streaming services for something to watch on the laptop, the both of you coming to an equal decision to watch captain america: the first avenger, shaking hands in a deal that solidified that all three captain america films were going to be watched that day.
you laid in his arms as his finger tips swirled strands of your hair around, lifting your head occasionally so you could press your lips to his. within the kisses there was nothing but love and adoration, no ulterior motives, no want or lust of anything more. you found yourselves moulded like that for a while, in each other’s arms as your lips passed the time, forgetting about the horrible weather that had gone on outside.
on days like this, brunch was a favourite of both of yours because it was something to cook together. you’d cook the breakfast side of things, while mason would cook and plate up the lunch side of things, and the two of you ended up with an array of dishes that you craved. his hands were around your waist as you cooked the pancakes, tucking into the pockets of your hoodie or encapsulating you in his grip so you couldn’t move your arms, which ended up in fits of giggles until you gave him enough kisses for him to be satisfied — only for the same thing to happen five minutes later.
after both of you eating pancakes and toastie’s until your eyes became bigger than your bellies, you found yourself curled into mason’s side once more, just as captain america: the winter soldier had ended and captain america: civil war was about to start, your lips separating from his as he ran his fingers up and down the side of your body, causing light goosebumps. you hummed at the feeling, and mason kissed your shoulder.
“go to sleep, sweetheart, i’ll be here when you wake up.”
“the thunder’s getting louder again,” you mumbled, and mason chuckled.
“i know darling, but i’ll be here to hold you the whole time.”
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