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#or a someone refusing to be accountable or grow from her mistakes using a hundred layers of denial and rationalizations
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Please Fix the Story pt 11- Fantasy World
Here it is! The last part of the Fantasy World! 
Master post linked here. 
Enjoy!
___________________________
Liam and I stared at him in shock.
“Stella… the Chosen One meant to save the world… took the forbidden dark magic artifact?” I rubbed my forehead. “What is she thinking?”
“Well obviously she isn’t the savior that the prophecies have made her out to be.” K’llean laughed bitterly. “They got a lot of things wrong now, didn’t they?”
Ignoring him, I threw on a cape over my sleeping clothes, grabbed some boots and headed towards the village center. Liam and K’llean trailed behind me silently, keeping a good distance between them.
As I reached the back room where the artifact had been kept, I paused in the doorway, staring at the empty pedestal where the amulet had rested.
Why would Stella take it and run off? Isn’t it the Dark Lord who is supposed to want the amulet? How far off course is this story?!
“K’llean.” I turned slowly to face the elf, who couldn’t meet my eye. “Did you plan this?”
His face paled, and he backed away from me a few steps. “Belaire, I…”
“After your plan to force me to form a life oath with you, to exile Liam or join him with someone else… Did you plan this next? As a way to force me to bond to protect everyone?”
“NO! I wouldn’t put the forest at risk like that…”
I grabbed his arm, stopping him from backing away further. “Then why do you look so guilty?”
“It’s not... I mean...” He trailed off staring that the ground.“Because…” 
“Because what?!”
“BECAUSE IT’S MY FAULT!!” The words burst from him as he finally met my gaze, the pain in his eyes shocking me into releasing his arm. “I was supposed to make sure no outsiders could enter… but in the end… I left her alone next to an unguarded room.” He looked over to the empty pedestal where the amulet had sat and groaned. “I failed in my duties, practically handing over something that could destroy our home. I ran away.”
I shook my head. “Why…?”
“If I had stayed in here any longer, I would have taken the artifact instead.” He whispered, crouching down, covering his face in his hands. “It spoke to me in my head, offering me everything I ever wanted: home… a family…” he looked up, guilt distorting his features. “…you.”
“So you ran.”
“And put us all at risk.” He stayed crouched down, seeming too tired to stand again.
K’llean… Stella… these characters are broken. I sighed as I stared down at the desolate elf. Is it all my fault? Did I change the story too much?
But… it’s not like I can just sacrifice myself for them like the original story called for.
“Get up.” My words were cold, but K’llean almost seemed relieved as he jumped to his feet.
“Belaire…”
I interrupted him. “Gather the best warriors you’ve got. We’ll track down Stella before she can do anything bad with the amulet.
“Priestess, bad news!”
Dangit! Curse my foreshadowing mouth!
I looked over, surprised to see Violet the fairy, waving her hands anxiously as she called out to me. I reached out to her, and she landed on my shoulder collapsing and trying to catch her breath.
“Violet, what’s going on?”
“The Dark forces are rising deep in the forest.” Her small hands clutched by hair, trembling as she spoke. “The monsters are gathering.”
I felt my stomach drop. “how many?”
“Too many to count!” Purple colored tears dripped from her eyes. “They destroyed our flowers!”
“And they’re on their way here.” Prince Henry walked in behind her, his face grim. “My men have confirmed it. A shadow monster horde. Larger than anything we have ever seen.”
“Stella?”
He winced at the name. “She’s… leading them. Her magic has converted to dark magic now, but it’s much more powerful than it ever was in the past.”  
To my surprise he fell to his knees in front of me, bowing his head in shame. 
“I’m sorry, Priestess. We brought the enemy right through your doors, claiming her to be the savior. I ignored her willful and selfish ways, spoiled her shamelessly, always thinking she was the one spoke of in the prophecies that would save us all.” His head slowly raised. “But I was wrong.”
I grabbed his hand, pulling him to his feet. “We all make our own choices, prince. And we will all face our own consequences for them. I won’t hold you accountable for her mistakes.”
“Thank you.”  A small smile flitted across his features. “I almost wish you were from another world. You are definitely someone I could trust with the fate of us all…”
I felt my smile stiffen in place as I turned towards Liam who winked at me, frowning back at him. Ignoring him as he broke into laughter, I finally met K’llean’s uncomfortable stare.
“Gather all the warriors, as well as everyone who can use magic.”
“Will we be able to defeat them?” He asked quietly.
“The horde? Definitely. Stella? It depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“Depends on just how much magic that amulet gave her.”
Taking a deep breath, I headed back towards my home.
“Where are you going?” Liam caught up with me.
“Changing clothes. I refuse to die in my pajamas.”
“…How about not dying at all?!”
I grinned, touching his face. “Of course. I haven’t kept my promise to marry you yet.”
“Belaire.” His voice was serious, catching my attention, forcing me to a halt. He seemed to be struggling to find the words to say, reaching over to pull me into a tight hug. “What if we’re not strong enough to beat them?”
“I’ll find a way.”
“But a life oath would multiply your strength ten times.” My face was pressed against his chest so I couldn’t see his expression, but his voice sounded near tears. “I can’t…”
“Liam.” I pulled back from his hug, reaching out to hold his face between my hands. His eyes widened at the short distance between us. “I won’t betray you.”
“But…”
“No buts.” I leaned forward, kissing him gently on the lips. “Stay by my side.”
“Okay.” Nodding with a helpless smile, we headed back to change.
Despite my confident words however, I felt a growing sense of dread. My mission was to push back the darkness without sacrificing the life of the priestess. It would have been fine if it was the original Dark Lord from the stories, but this was the Chosen One. She had already been powerful before encountering the dark artifact. If I wasn’t strong enough to take on Stella and the amulet alone…
You can’t escape your fate.
I shivered, feeling cold despite the summer’s warmth.
___________________________
“They’re coming.”
I stood at the main gate of the Elven Village, K’llean, Liam and Prince Henry at my side. Behind us were all the elven warriors, the rest of Stella’s party, as well as a few human guards that had come on the prince’s Request. We numbered less than a hundred, a pitiful few compared to the force we were facing.
I smiled at Liam. “Let’s move forward. I’ll keep a ward around the village, while everyone who can fight can try to take out as many monsters as possible.
“Wait.” Prince Henry frowned. “Why not just stay behind your ward if it’s so effective?”
“First, I don’t have infinite magic, and shadow monsters don’t tire like normal creatures. They would still be here long after my ward is down. Second, although it is a very powerful defense, I don’t know how much stronger Stella has gotten.” I gestured to the dark, shadowy forms in the distance. “She’s doing us the favor of sending her army in first, so we need to take the opportunity. If I have to face her and the monsters together…”
The prince grimaced, nodding his head. “Great, just great.”
“Regretting joining with us yet?”
“Give me a minute, I’m trying to find a suitably diplomatic answer.”
I laughed and walked forward, pulling Liam beside me. K’llean called out an order to the warriors behind us, and the elves marched behind, brandishing their weapons. I caught him glancing at me in the corner of my eye, and seeing my attention, he looked away uncomfortably.
“Don’t get hurt.” Mumbling softly, he drew his large sword, checking it over carefully.
“Same.” I closed my eyes briefly, finding my magic source and bringing it to reality. A light-filled dome surrounded the village, closing in behind the warriors that stepped forward. I opened my hand, and a sword made of light magic formed in it. Ready for battle, I watched, my heart racing as the twisted army approached.
One of the lead monsters, a seven foot long centipede-like creature with bright red eyes and large fangs, lifted its head up to the sky and let out a terrifying scream. The surrounding monsters, more than I could count, roared back, and then charged towards our small force.
The fight for survival had begun.
___________________________
I leapt forward, blade raised, slicing off the head of the centipede before slipping between the first line of creatures. Every step I was avoiding an attack, each movement a close brush with death. I struck left and right, leaving most of my technique behind. The monsters were so tightly crowded that even wild swings had a large effect. With each attack of my blade, light magic moved out in waves, burning and destroying the creatures around me.
To my right I could see K’llean, swinging his sword with both hands, taking out multiple creatures at a time with ease. The harsh training he had undergone, working tirelessly day and night to get stronger shined brightly, his movements flawless as he attacked in every direction. He coated his sword in light magic, occasionally sending out beams of it to assist some of the elven warriors who looked overrun.
Even in battle he’s still looking out for them.
Liam hung back, avoiding getting in the way of our light magic attacks. His bow drawn he shot arrows made of dark magic into the crowds. The arrows disintegrated each of the bodies it passed through, a wholly deadly force. It seems like as long as the dark magic is strong enough, it is definitely deadly even to shadow creatures, same element or not.
ROAR!
The angry cry of the creature in front of me brought my attention back to my own fight. Slowly, as I danced in between the monsters, I slipped into a comfortable mentality, one I hadn’t used since coming to this world. This was the me after Liam’s death in the zombie apocalypse. A warrior. Something that only existed to destroy all the monsters around me. I gave myself over to it, fighting on instinct, rampaging through their ranks.
I lost track of the hours, continuing to fight.
“She’s coming!” Violet’s whisper in my ear broke my daze, I sent out a wave of light magic, clearing enough space for our remaining fighters to fall back. As we gathered at the edge of my ward, I took gauge of our losses, feeling a pang as I realized that a quarter of our warriors were gone.
This wouldn’t have happened if I had formed a life oath. I wouldn’t have had to reserve my magic in fear of fighting Stella.
Selfish. Cruel.
Pushing these thoughts back, I had K’llean bring the fighters within the ward and turned back to see the situation.
Hundreds of shadow monster corpses littered the ground, splintered and broken. With my last magical attack the main wave had broken, the monsters fleeing back to hide behind their master who was walking slowly towards us.
Stella.
She looked the same but different. Dark mist surrounded her, moving restlessly along the ground, killing every plant it touched. Her body seemed unreal, as if the edges of her form were pushing against the air, breaking the reality around us. Her eyes glowed a bright red, the light in them pulsing in time to the glowing black jewel hanging around her neck.
She came to a stop a 50 yards away, speaking normally but her voice echoed in my ear as if she were right beside me.
“Belaire. I bet you weren’t expecting me...”
“Hey Stella. Going for a walk?” I smiled as I greeted her nonchalantly. “That’s great! Good for the health, you know, get outside, and breathe in that fresh smell of the rotting corpses of your evil minions.”
“YOU…!” Stella’s face distorted with rage, but I interrupted her swiftly.
“By the way, love the new look! The glowing red eyes really suit you!” I glanced down, grimacing. “Can’t say the same about your accessories, though, your taste in jewelry is just awful.”
“…”
“…”
Prince Henry sighed. “Please don’t antagonize the new Dark Lord before the final battle priestess.”
“What? I’m complimenting her!”
Stella couldn’t stay silent at that. “Shut up! I won’t let you annoy me this time around, elf!”
“Really?” I tilted my head quizzically.   “Cause it sure seems like I’m annoying you.”
“SHUT UP!”
Prince Henry turned to Liam. “Can’t you rein her in a little?”
He shook his head. “No. I like her like this.”
“Don’t bother with them, Henry.” K’llean exited the ward after helping the last of the injured across. Ignoring Stella, he came to stand on the other side of me, shaking his head. “I’ve been trying for years to correct their bad attitudes without success. Something small like the end of the world wouldn’t be near enough to set them right.”
“Ah, I’ll bow to your superior experience then.”
I shrugged at Liam. “Why are they acting like we’re the strange ones?”
“Beats me.”
“STOP IGNORING ME!” Stella’s voice was inhuman, a monstrous roar that echoed through the forest. Her power soared. The skies started turning dark as all the surrounding areas filled with dark magic.
Ooh, that struck a nerve. Looks like becoming the new Dark Lord didn’t rid her of her inferiority complex.
I made sure Liam was out of the way, and then enlarged my ward to protect all of us, pouring as much of my magic as I could into it.
“You think you can beat me now?” Stella laughed excitedly. “You have no idea!” Her magic continued to grow, the trees and grass between us and her completely died as the space condensed with darkness. I felt the pressure against my ward, it bent inwards against the pressure.
The dome of my magic glowed brightly, but I could no longer see beyond it, everything outside my ward was filled with darkness.
She’s… a lot stronger than I was hoping she’d be.
A hand wrapped in dark magic could be seen just outside my ward, the fist coming down to strike it with a large ringing noise. I felt a stabbing pain in my head at the blow, forcing myself to stay focused, to strengthen the ward.
Stella’s eyes shone through the darkness as she stood just outside my protective spell.
“Do you know what wish the amulet granted me?” Her whisper traveled across the space louder than a shout. “My greatest desire was to be strong enough to utterly destroy you.” Her fist slammed against the ward again. I swayed in place.
Crap.
BAM! Her fist struck the ward again, fine cracks appearing at the blow. I hastily repaired them.
Is this really it?
BAM!
All those years of work, of getting stronger, of slowly feeding my life force to grow my magic, and she can be twice as strong with a WISH?!”
BAM!”
I felt a strong rage building within me; a frustration against the world that only gave benefits to the heroine, evil or no.
I hate main characters.
BAM!
“Belaire.” Liam’s pained cry distracted me for a moment. I could barely see through a red haze that was filling my vision, I felt something warm dripping from my nose. I reached up to wipe it with my hand, and it came away bloody.
“You can’t beat her.” His voice was filled with agony, as if he were the one Stella was attacking with her fist.
BAM!
“I can handle it.” I struggled to talk, blood spitting out with the words.  My head was splitting, the pain increasing with every blow.
I have to save everyone from the Dark Lord to finish the mission. If I fail…I wasn’t sure what would happen, but I felt in my heart that it would be worse than death.
But the mission also states I can’t sacrifice my life like the previous priestess did. Given how powerful Stella is now, it would take every ounce of life force I have to beat her.
Is there really no way?
“Belaire.” K’llean sighed stepping in front of me, his face hazy in my blood stained vision. “She’s too strong.”
BAM!
Blood was dripping constantly on the ground, I pressed my hands against my head as if to hold it in.
“Please.” He begged. “Please, form a life oath with me.”
“No.”
“It’s okay if you don’t love me. But if you can’t combine your magic, you’re going to die!”
“…” I shook my head, having a hard time speaking any more.
BAM!
“PLEASE!” He grabbed my face, his  tear-filled eyes the only thing I could see. “Don’t throw your life away! Even if you form the life oath, I’ll let you go with him! I won’t bind you to me, just don’t die!”
All nice sounding words. But he was wrong. A life oath would bind our souls together. For me to leave him would mean tearing his or my soul, like the priestess had suffered in the original story. There was no simple way to untangle a life oath.
But the harsh truth was I didn’t have enough magic to win.
“I could try.” Liam’s defeated tone made my stomach drop, even as I struggled to hold on to my ward. “If I fuel my magic with all of my life energy, I might have enough to win. “
“Don’t you dare!” I snapped, trying to focus through the pain. “I won’t lose you again!”
The look on Liam’s face as he died in my arms in the zombie world was imprinted on my brain, unable to be removed. I missed my chance in the last world. I can’t let him sacrifice himself for me again.
BAM!
“Belaire, please. It’s the only way to save us all.”
Is it?
I felt like everything had slowed to a standstill around me.
Is this the only way? A life bond with K’llean? Is this some sort of twisted destiny I can’t avoid?
Is this my fate?
___________________________
I walked down a path, silk cloth rustling as I moved. The garden around me was beautiful, teeming with life, the heavy scent of flowers hanging in the air.
“Mistress! Please slow down!”  A voice called behind me, but I didn’t turn back.
“I can’t! He’s waiting for me!” My voice was filled with anticipation, excitement.
With love.
“MISTRESS!”
A white blur rushed past me, landing with a crash at my feet. I paused, my feet slowing coming to a stop as I stared down with confusion and growing horror.
A dove?
It had dived into the ground in front of me, landing head first on the stone path. Its neck was bent at a severe angle, clearly broken, its form was still.
Why?
From the ruined mess of flesh that had been its head, blood pooled, far more than could ever be contained within the body of such a small creature. The red liquid condensed, forming letters at my feet.
YOU MUST ACCEPT YOUR FATE
“No.” I was whispering, my head pounding, my vision tunneling.
“MISTRESS!” I head one last scream behind me, before I felt my whole body descend into darkness.
___________________________
“No.” 
I spoke out loud, blinking back a memory that had overwhelmed my senses, coming and leaving without warning. “I won’t accept my fate.”
K’llean was crying now, trying to heal me even as I continued to sway on my feet. “Belaire… I know you love him, but magical attributes are an integral part of magic. It cannot be changed.”
Wait.
It can’t be changed?
Isn’t that what we said about the amount of magic? That we are born with a fixed final amount? But I proved that wrong. The priestess proved it wrong in the original story.
Magic can be changed.
It just comes at a price.
I looked up at the sky, laughing with relief.
“Liam.” I called out softly, immediately feeling his hand grasping mine.
“Yes?”
“If I told you there was a way to save everyone, AND stay by my side, but that it would cost you almost everything, would you do it?”
His hand tightened on my own, as he answered without hesitation. “Even if you want my life, its yours.”
BAM!
“I won’t take everything.” I turned around, pushing away K’llean’s hand that was applying healing magic and grabbed Liam’s face, bringing it close to my own. “But we’re not going to live long after this.”
“Belaire!” At K’llean’s shout I turned to look at him
“Get ready to protect the village, my magic won’t work well for wards in a few moments.”
“You…”
“I’m sorry, K’llean.” I smiled. “I’m not a heroine. I’m actually pretty selfish.”
Before he could answer I looked back at Liam and kissed him deeply.
The ward around us disappeared, but K’llean immediately replaced it, his face turning bright white at the strain. He was powerful, but nowhere near my level.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! YOUR STRUGGLES ARE MEANINGLESS!” Stella screamed as she attacked again. “I AM THE CHOSEN ONE!”
BAM!
We didn’t have much time.
I drew Liam’s magic towards me, our kiss dampening my gasp of pain as I felt it burning even as it just came near my soul. The light and dark attiributes were truly opposites, repelling each other even before they could touch.
But magic could be changed.
I drew from my life force, feeling it quickly drain from me.
Deep inside I felt a panic, an emotion not mine but from the priestess’ remnant.
I’m not sacrificing myself, Priestess. At least not my whole life.
Before I drew too much, I began pulling life energy from Liam as well. The power  within me was bursting at the seems, and I applied it to my magic without hesitation.
One of us had to change to combine. We both needed to be light or dark.
I started changing my magic to dark.
As I used the energy to change the magic within me, I felt the light that shined deep within my soul turn black. My hair which was always a golden blond, turned black at the roots, the color slowly taking over the long locks hanging down my back. It was painful, deeply painful. Not just losing my life force but the changing of something so integral to my existence was pure agony.
Which is why I changed my magic and not Liam’s
Besides, dark magic is a better fit for a villainess like me.
As my magic changed attributes, I quickly began forming a life oath with Liam, our thoughts integrating with each other, saying the words of the oath silently between us.
I trust you with my life, my heart, my magic.
I will walk hand and hand and face all danger with you.
I promise to stay by your side forever, until there is nothing left but dust.
As the last of our magic combined, I whispered out loud. “I love you.”
The life oath was complete.
___________________________
As the magic combined, just as they said, the amount was ten times or more my natural source. Reaching for the unfamiliar dark magic, I stepped outside the barrier, smiling at Stella.
“Hey, Chosen One.”
Her dark magic crumbled around her, being overwhelmed by a much stronger force.
“Turns out you aren’t so special after all.” As her magic was crushed, I lifted her up into the air, separating the amulet from her.
I can give you everything you wanted.
I heard the faintest of whispers from the artifact, before using my dark magic to crush it to pieces. After not being able to leave even the smallest scratch on it when I had tried to destroy it months ago with light magic, the dark magic easily consumed it, seemingly breaking it down from the inside.
“NOOOOOOOO!” I wasn’t sure if it was Stella or the amulet that screamed in pain and anger, but I didn’t care. I walked closer to the heroine, my magic holding her in place. Leaning forward, I whispered in her ear.
“You’re not the only world traveling girl around. And I’m a lot meaner.”
Before she could respond, I reared my arm back and punched her in the face. She fell to the ground unconscious.
I heard cheering behind me, but I ignored it as I placed my hand against her head, using my powers to burn up all traces of her magic. When it was done, I leaned back with a sigh. 
“You’re not going to kill her?”
“Too easy.” I grinned. “The thing she hated most was being unimportant. And now she’s completely powerless.” I stood up, cleaning my hands. “You can have her. Imprison her, cast her out in exile. I don’t care. Just don’t kill her.”
It wasn’t that I was against killing. I had already done plenty of that. But I wasn’t sure what would happen to a story world whose heroine was killed early, even a broken one like her.
Turning around, I stumbled a bit, the loss of life energy and the depletion of my magic making me feel drained. An equally tired but happy looking Liam placed his arm around my waist, supporting me.
“Thanks.” I smiled at him, feeling the comfortable bond of his soul against mine.
Liam placed his forehead against mine. “Anytime.”
“… I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
I sighed. “I had to use up the majority of our life force. We’ll only be able to live another five or ten years.” Compared to the centuries that the life expectancy of elves normally ran, it was a blink of an eye, but Liam just shrugged, unconcerned.
“Better five years as your husband than hundreds without you.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re ridiculous.”
“Noted.”
“…” An awkward silence fell as we reached K’llean, who was staring at me with a lost expression.
Finally I smiled sadly at him. “Sorry, K’llean, I won’t be able to be the priestess anymore.”
K’llean stared at my newly darkened hair, nodding slowly.
“Liam and I will get married, and then I think we’ll travel around…”
“WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” A loud shout interrupted  us, as the elder of the village came out of hiding, glaring at me. “I don’t know how you CORRUPTED your magic, but you will fix it immediately!”
I chuckled. “Sorry, can’t. Even if it wouldn’t literally kill me to change it again, I’m already bonded to Liam here.”
“YOU BLASPHEME YOUR HOLY ROLE!”
“You’re welcome, by the way, for saving the village… and the world.” I shrugged. “But I’m not your priestess anymore, and I don’t feel like sticking around and waiting for you to figure out how to use my newly upgraded magic for your own benefit.”
“You can’t leave! You made oaths to stay and lead us!”
K’llean laughed, but it was a deeply sad sound. “She can leave anytime she wants. Her oath was to stay, lead, guide and protect us for as long as the light magic shines within her.” He smiled at the elder, gesturing at my changed appearance. “As you can well see… it no longer shines. So she’s free.”
“YOU…”
“Just shut up.” Sighing with frustration, K’llean applied magic over the elder’s mouth, as I had done multiple times in the past. I nodded with approval, giving him an awkward smile
“Thanks…”
“Don’t thank me.” He interrupted, no longer meeting my gaze. “You would rather risk everything, giving up the majority of your life span, than choose me.”
“…” I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. He was speaking the truth.
His eyes finally met mine, but the pain in them was hard to watch. “It’s better if you both leave sooner than later. The village won’t forgive what you’ve done.”
“… Will you?”
“Forgive you?” He gave a helpless smile, looking up at the sky. “I honestly don’t know.”
“Then I’ll say goodbye, K’llean. I’m glad you were my friend.”
I took Liam’s hand and we walked towards Prince Henry, but behind us I heard a soft whisper.
“Live well, my friends.”
I felt a deep sense of relief and gratefulness. The last of the Priestess’ remaining emotions. I had saved her people, and found my own happiness. I smiled, feeling the last remnant of her faded away.
“Rest in peace, Priestess.”
In front of me formed bright blue words.
100% complete.
**** You have finished the mission! ****
Stay in this world?
YES/NO
I smiled, and for the first time in response to this question, said “Yes.”
Granted.
You will be transported to the next world at the end of your character’s natural life.
I was almost knocked over as Liam knocked into me, grabbing and holding me tightly to his chest, his face desperate.
“What’s wrong?”
He looked confused. “I don’t know. I just felt for a moment that you might leave me, and I was terrified to let you go.”
I grinned, kissing him. “Don’t worry. I’m here to stay.”
___________________________
We lived for eight years together as husband and wife.
Although the life oath was more intimate than any title, Liam insisted that we hold a ceremony in the capital of the human territory. Prince Henry helped him plan it out, and since I was the technical savior of the world, it turned into a rather large party.
Looking at the lavish decorations, the happy faces and magical lights floating in the air like balloons, I felt something within me relax.
I wish the Blood Wolves could have seen this party. Although they would have complained about the lack of explosive balloons and weapons.
The fairies had shown up, dancing in the air and drinking too much wine. Violet became a purple blur as she whizzed over our heads, shouting “Congratulations!”
K’llean was invited, but he never came.
___________________________
After the wedding, Liam and I traveled the world. Exploring dungeons, riding desert creatures, diving into the deepest of the dwarves mines, we tried it all, hand in hand.
One night, as we slept under the stars, a thought occurred to me, and I asked him.
“What do you think you would have done if we never met?”
Liam frowned, holding me tightly against his chest. “We did meet though. We’re married. No take backs!”
“No, I just mean, hypothetically, if you and I never met, what do you think you would have done?” I leaned into his embrace, patting his head comfortingly. It wasn’t as soft as his fur in his wolf form, but I did still like touching his hair.
“It… wouldn’t have ended well.” Liam sighed. “I was already on the brink of completely losing myself. I spent more time as beast than elf. If I hadn’t met you… I think I would have left to get stronger, and eventually come back to destroy them… maybe destroy everything.”
“So if you had run into the woods and say, found the amulet…”
“I would have immediately taken the power it offered.” Liam nuzzled my shoulder. “I’m not a good person, Belaire. Do you regret it?”
Did I marry the original Dark Lord?
I shrugged. “I’m not a good person either, so I think we’re even.”
___________________________
After six years, we ran into Stella again. It was on the streets of an outer human town. We had come back from a monster slaying quest, and had just turned in our spoils for a good profit. As I skipped next to him, happily counting our coins and discussing the lavish meal we would buy with it, I heard an angry shout.
“YOU SHOULD ALL FEAR ME!”
Liam eyes met my own.
“Is that…?” I hesitantly asked.
We both looked over. A disheveled young woman with wide eyes rushed towards a random pedestrian.
“I AM THE CHOSEN ONE! THE SAVIOR OF THE WORLD!” She shook her head, confused. “No…. wait… I’m the DARK LORD! I will destroy you all!”
I stared at her, feeling conflicted.
What are the odds that we’d run into her?I shook my head. Nevermind, she’s the heroine, she runs into everyone.
I hadn’t liked her, in either the original story or this lifetime. But there was no escaping that I had changed her life.
Stella sat down, glaring at the ground. “If it weren’t for that stupid elf priestess, I would be living wonderfully. They’d be pampering me, protecting me... IT’S ALL HER FAULT! I’m going to kill her! Tear her to pieces!”
Well… not gonna lie… that makes me feel a bit better.
Liam was uncomfortably silent for a few moments. “Do you want me to kill her?”
I kissed his cheek, pulling him away. “Thanks for the thought, but she’s not a threat anymore.”
We left her behind, and never saw her again.
___________________________
Years passed, we lived each day side-by-side, happy to be in each other’s company. But all things come to an end, and as we came close to the eight year mark after the defeat of the Dark Lord, I could feel the life energy within me running out.
“Liam.” I held his hand. “I want to go back to the forest.”
He stared at me quietly for a few moments, and then smiled. “Of course.”
When we entered the village, I noticed a few differences. The area was bustling, filled with activity. There were more people from other races, traces of multiple types of magic being used. I walked further in, hand in hand with Liam, staring around in excitement.
“Belaire?” A familiar voice called out, and we both turned to see K’llean standing off to the side, watching us with a complicated expression. Despite the passage of time, he hadn’t aged much, other than a gentle maturity in his eyes.
“K’llean.” I smiled tiredly at him. “We’re home.”
He brought us to a large home in the center or town, one that hadn’t existed when we left eight years ago.
“Is this yours?”
K’llean smiled. “Yeah, it’s mine.”
“How’d you get such nice place?”
“Well…”  Before he could answer fully, the door slammed open and a young warrior elf barged in.
“Elder, that brat the advance class is causing trouble again, can you come yell at him? You’re the only one he’s scared of.” He then noticed Liam’s and my presence. “Oh, sorry, didn’t know you had guests… dark magic elves?”
K’llean rubbed his forehead. “T’nial…”
“Do you know Belaire and Liam?” The young elf was too excited to notice K’llean’s warning tone. “They had dark magic too! They saved the world, you know, and they’re from our village!”
“T’NIAL!”
“What? Come on Teach, you act like you don’t talk about them all the time.”
Liam and I grinned. Seeing our expressions, K’llean frowned walking to the door.
“Out. Now.”
“But…”
“Or do you want to take over training the youngest class?”
“I’m heading out now!” With a cheerful wave, T’nial ran out, leaving a slightly awkward silence behind.
“Elder?”
“You talk about us?”
Liam and I asked different questions at the same time.
He sighed in response. “Yes I am the new village elder since the last one died three years ago. No I don’t talk about you all the time.”
We sat down, and K’llean made us some tea. As he poured, he asked quietly. “So what brings you two back? I thought you weren’t planning to come back.”
I leaned back in my chair, smiling at Liam. “We came back to die.”
CRASH!
K’llean’s hands faltered as I spoke, dropping the cup onto the floor, which shattered into multiple pieces. He blinked, staring down at the mess in confusion, and then looked up at me again.
“What did you say?”
“Our life energy is running out.”
“… “ He grabbed another cup, starting to pour tea again. “How long?
“A week, at most.”
He sat down hard, putting his head in his hands. “You really know how to break news, huh?”
“What do you mean? I’m super sensitive!”
Liam started to chuckle, a sound that he quickly disguised as coughs.  I glared at him, causing both K’llean and Liam both lose it and laugh loudly.
After things had calmed down, K’llean sighed. “You two haven’t changed.” Pausing he added. “No… you’re happier than you ever were here.”
“You’ve done well too.” I grinned. “The village is so exciting now.”
“Just a few small changes.” He shrugged. “If we stay mired in our past, we’ll never move forward.”
“…K’llean?”
“Yes?”
“Can we stay here until the end?”
“…” There was a long, tense silence before he finally grinned. “Until the very end.”
There were tears in his eyes, but we  all ignored them.
___________________________
A week passed quickly. I spent time walking the forest with Liam and K’llean, visiting our old training spots, seeing all the new changes with a smile. We argued constantly over trivial memories, none of us mentioned the fights that had truly torn us apart.
My energy ran out first, which didn’t surprise me as I had originally taken more from myself than from Liam. As I rested in bed, feeling the remainder of my life fade. K’llean sat down to say his goodbyes.
He reached out and held my hand. “I‘ll always love you, you know.”
I smiled at him. “I know. I love you too.”
“… just not in the way I wanted.”
“No. But you’re family, whether you want it or not.”
He laughed, gripping my hand as if he was afraid to lose it. “No, I want it.”  Taking a deep breath, he added. “I’m sorry, that I tried to force you two apart.”
“It’s okay, fortunately you’re terrible at being the villain.”
“Fortunately.”
“…”
“… Did I ever have a chance?”
I sighed quietly. “No. It was always him.”
“Well… at least you’re honest.”  He leaned forward and kissed my forehead, his eyes closed to hide his tears. “I’ll go get your husband before he thinks you’re running off with me.”
“K’llean.”
He paused, looking back at me. In his eyes I still saw the shadow of the arrogant boy declaring that he was the strongest elf and would protect everyone. “Yes, Belaire?”
“Live well. Be happy, please.”
“Hmm…” He leaned his head against the doorframe, forcing a smile. “I was fortunate enough in this lifetime to love you. How can I not live well?”
He left, and Liam came by. Skipping the chair by the bed entirely, He laid down next to me, gathering me in his arms.
“Liam, sorry, I have to go first.”
“… You should be sorry. Next time don’t divide things so unevenly.”
We hugged silently for a few minutes, before I finally spoke up, my voice soft.
“I’m scared.”
“Don’t be, I’m here.”
“What if I can’t find you in the next world?”
He paused at that. “Even if you don’t, I’ll find you.”
“But you never remember me.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll love you each time we meet.”
I leaned close, kissing his cheek. “Good. Next time, you chase me, courting you is exhausting.”
“I’ll listen, wife.” Liam smiled. “I’ll definitely chase you next time.”
“Don’t forget your promise.” I tucked my head against his chest. “See you in the next world.”
He hugged me tightly. “See you soon.”
I closed my eyes, and in the darkness, bright blue words formed.
CHARACTER LIFE AT END.
TRANSPORTING TO NEXT WORLD…
I felt the brief nothingness between worlds, and almost instantly arrived in the next one. Surprised, I realized I was still lying down, but the soft bed beneath me had been replaced by a hard flat surface.
I opened my eyes, but saw nothing but darkness. Trying to sit up, I immediately hit my head on something hard.
“OUCH!” the sound as I yelled with pain was muffled. Concerned, I reached around, realizing the confined space I was in, Just big enough to hold my body laying flat. As I felt the velvet inner lining around me, I came to a grim realization:
I was in a coffin.
“SON OF A…”
___________________________
K’llean sat up as he saw Liam enter the room, dried tears on his face.
“Is she…”
Liam nodded. “She’s gone.”
He let out a breath he felt he’d been holding all day.
She was gone.
Ignoring the stabbing pain in his chest, he looked up at the dark haired elf. “How much longer until you…?”
Liam shrugged nonchalantly, sitting lazily down on the chair in front of him. “I’ll go in a little bit. No use staying here without her. But you looked like you wanted to talk first.”
K’llean’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you so different?” The change after Belaire had passed was striking. He looked the same, his form unchanged, but his eyes…
They were suddenly filled with a sense of deep wisdom, of strong power…
Of horrifying sadness.
Liam smiled. “I only get to remember things at the very end. Kind of a middle finger to me from the universe as I realize just how futile our goal is.” He shook his head. “But you don’t need to know all that. Why don’t you ask the questions you really want to know the answer to?”
“…”
“Come on, don’t be shy, I’m in a bad mood right now, so I’m much more likely to tell you the unpleasant truth than a sweet lie.”
“…Why did she never even consider me?” K’llean threw up his hands. “We met when we were kids, for crying out loud! I know I was little annoying…”
“Very annoying.”
“I know I was very annoying, but I matured, grew strong. I always stayed by her side, supported her, helped her… but she never even thought about loving me the way she did you.” He leaned back with a groan. “I just don’t know why.”
“Well, leaving out the complex discussion of my amnesiac wife being the woman you fell in love with, and how you’re lucky you struck out… the easy explanation is that you already had your chance, and you blew it.”
“I what?”
Liam looked up in the sky, seemingly silently conversing with something. “You owe me.” He muttered out loud, before opening his clenched hand to reveal a small red object. ”Ooh, a red pill, very sci-fi.”  He tossed it to K’llean, who caught it, looking at it uncertainly.
“What is….”
“Swallow it.”  Liam spread out his hands. “It will give you memories that you never should have had. Of this world as it was before my wife fixed it for you.”
Feeling a deep sense of dread, K’llean lifted the pill to his mouth and swallowed it. Immediately it felt that his head was splitting open and he fell to the ground, gagging.
“Oh you can’t throw it up. Knowledge, once you gain it, is yours forever.”  He grinned. “Serves you right.”
K’llean blinked rapidly, trying to make sense of the completely different lifetime of memories that he had acquired. “I… married her?”
“Well, not really her. You did grow up with the Priestess. You married her. You betrayed her, and watched her die to save you and your lover.” Liam’s gaze was cold. “Now do you understand? You never had a chance because you already wasted it.”
“No… this isn’t right. Belaire… she never would have taken things so calmly… I could never turn my back on her.”
“On Belaire… no. On the priestess… definitely. You see, in the original, you grew up thinking you were the greatest. And the priestess always just agreed. You were an entitled, selfish brat who had everything, including affection, handed to you, and you thought it was what you were owed.”
“What I was owed…” K’llean winced. “It makes me sound like Stella.”
“Exactly, which is honestly why it’s surprising you hit it off with her so well. I assume it was some main character magic forcing the issue, at least partly.” He leaned forward. “At the end of the day, I don’t think you really loved the Priestess. I think you were fond of her. You saw her as a friend, as a companion. But, she was never as important to you as your happiness.”
“I…”
“My wife on the other hand… She ran circles around you!” He laughed. “No matter how hard you tried, you could never be stronger than her. She worked harder, cared more, and did it all without ever looking your way. You learned from her how to care for others, how to put everyone else before yourself. But you never lost that desire… the desire for family, for that perfect happiness that you sensed was within reach but could never touch.”
Liam stood up. “You went a bit crazy back then… but all protagonists do when the world that used to revolve around them suddenly grows bigger. It seems that you’ve become a good person despite it all, and I applaud you for it.” He started walking back to the room where Belaire had rested.
“Where are you going?”
“To follow my wife. She’s gone to the next world without me, and I can’t let her down.”
K’llean stood up. “What if… what if I followed her… tried to win her over this time?”
“You could.” Liam laughed. “But you wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“It costs too much.”  
“I’m willing to pay any price!”
Liam shook his head. “You know, you’re better than that other asshole that half-heartedly follows her now.  I actually thought you might be him for a quick minute… but you’re too messy in front of her. That guy always has to be the perfect hero, because he thinks that’s what she wants. He refused to sacrifice anything really, so he can’t follow her carefully, he just depends on that damned protagonist luck of his.”
“What are you…?”
“You’d probably be willing to give up your life, your future, even your memories… But what about the village?”
“…”
“What about those kids out there that you’re teaching magic to? What if the cost was all of them as well?”
“…” K’llean hung his head, surprised when Liam patted him on the shoulder.
“It’s okay. That’s why you’re a hero.” His body started being covered in a black fog. “And why I’m a villain.”
Now in wolf form, the familiar dark blue eyes seemed to be laughing as he disappeared into the room next door.
Stunned, K’llean followed after him, only to see the two lying side by side, no longer breathing.
“You both keep calling yourself villains.” He muttered to himself. “Why can’t I believe it?”
___________________________
Seven hundred years later…
K’llean found the old cave, the one where Liam, Belaire and him used to practice in. His bones creaked as he laid down, looking at the familiar patterns on the stone ceiling.
“I lived a long life, Belaire. I was happy enough I think. Are you proud?”
There was no answer.
He laughed softly, tears forming in his eyes. “I miss you, you know. Even after all these years.”
He rested in silence, counting his breaths, only to be shocked by the formation of bright blue words in front of him. He reached out to touch them, but his hand passed right through them.
“Magic?” He whispered, staring at the words.
Do you plan to reject your fate and follow?
“Follow?” His breath caught. “You mean see Belaire again?”
Yes.
Part of him wanted to shout “yes.” But he remembered that conversation with Liam all those years ago.
“What would it cost?” he asked instead
Paragraph after paragraph filled out in front of him, which he read with increasing horror.
“Liam, you bastard.” He finally whispered. “No wonder you call yourself a villain.”
He sighed, leaning back and covering his eyes with a hand.
Do you plan to reject your fate and follow?
K’llean laughed bitterly to himself. “No.”
You were right, Liam. I wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice that much.
The words disappeared, never to be seen again.
As his breathing slowed, K’llean hummed a old childhood song to himself, dreaming of a day in the forest, when a young elf girl with bright green eyes saved his life with a confident smile.
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feingeister · 4 years
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Hmm..I kinda wanna know what you would like from S5 if it happens? In terms of who the main should be, what kind of storylines you would like to see from all the characters, what should improve etc.
when it happens, anon. we’re full-on delusional on this blog. 
ok let’s start with general stuff:
-       i want them to take their time. in season 4, things tended to feel a little rushed and while scheduling conflicts are fine and just happen sometimes, they had several scenes where so many characters were missing without an explanation at all.
-       i can forgive a lot of tiny mistakes, like david’s scarf changing positions or a haircut change but i really don’t want to see another mess like the season 4 finale. it looked like they had about 500 abdi’s on set fhkjfhfk i think with more time and care stuff like that wouldn’t happen, so I’m more than happy to wait for a season 5
-       listening to feedback is one of druck’s greatest strengths and im very glad that they take our suggestions into account, but when they have sooo many people telling them how to do things, it’s probably really easy to lose their own vision and i don’t want that to happen
 okay now the main of season 5…. it has to be sam. i always believed that we knew so little about sam, because we would dive into her story in her season and FINALLY get to know about all her motivations and fears. solve the mystery and all that. all of her sideplots always gave me a “SOMETHING is going on, but we don’t know what” vibe. now…i can see how that might’ve been a little too much good faith, but it still means that her season has a lot of potential. a problem that sam has is definitely that (as a cris character) she doesn’t take things seriously, she’s maybe a bit too easy-going and amicable and ends up avoiding conflicts because it’s too much drama for her.
i’m kind of tired of love stories being the main plot of the season, but i still wouldn’t mind something like cris’ season in skam es lol, especially because druck hasn’t used the mental health plotline yet. it would just be a bit difficult to not make it too similar to either cris’ or matteos season. i’m sorry i just haven’t let go of my “sam is a lesbian” headcanon ok.
i could also go for a platonic storyline where sam needs to stick up for a friend and in turn learns to stand up for herself as well (and no… i don’t mean a gal pal version of og s3, don’t even try it @druck).
and just to address the elephant in the room: i don’t particularly want a kiki season, because we already know so much about her and she has done a lot of growing in the past seasons. while it would be cool to see it from her perspective, sam is just my number one priority.
and the even bigger elephant in the room: david. i don’t want season five to be his because right now he’s happy and i want him to be happy for longer and really settle into his life with matteo and the combined squads. i do however, want season 6 for him (or any season… pls).
this is maybe an unpopular opinion, but i don’t want to see a drama-free season where david just happily goes about his life. i mean, i’d watch it and enjoy it but at the end of the day, i think it would be a bit of a disservice to his character to have every season-main change and grow through hardships and to leave him with a mostly uninteresting (to people who aren’t hopelessly obsessed with him like me and everyone else on here), unchallenging storyline. which is also why i want to wait for his season, because if he’s gonna go through some shit i want him to be happy first. i also think it makes sense, because i’m pretty sure david is someone who lets problems sort of… pile on until they’re almost too much to deal with. we already know he’s an escape artist when it comes to his problems (both literally and figuratively) and on top of that i believe he’s someone who likes to bury himself in his work (he’s competitive, ambitious and he studied for his goddamn math exam and passed it even though he was waiting for his soulmate to show some sort of reaction to his coming out… hello? who does that. i can’t even study under the best of conditions.).
i know we’ve been through the whole ‘running away as a coping mechanism’ thing and maybe some people would get bored with that but... well this is my ask and this is what i want to see lmao. in my eyes, david is stable and healthy enough not to literally make a run for it when things get bad, but i really want to get into the nitty gritty of it all, yknow. see how that sort of coping mechanism works in a less dramatic way in day to day life, because i don’t think he’s completely gotten rid of it. ignoring calls and text, excessive workouts, overworking in general, problems growing and growing until they knock at your door to take you out, those are all things that the skam format is made for. you don’t see them happening to people when you’re not in their head and if you are it’s all the more intense. so that’s what i think davids ~thing~ would be but he also needs an actual plot.
the absence of any kind of information about davids parents to me seems so obvious that i feel like it has to be purposeful. much like with sam, i think there is a deliberate gap of knowledge, because there is something significant to be found there. this is maybe also controversial, but i wouldn’t mind another story that revolves around queer-centric issues. 
what i’m kind of envisioning is david exploring his relationship with his family. i have some thoughts on this but in general i think it would be interesting to explore what it’s like to have two families, your legal family and your found family, especially if you have both of them in your life. i’ve seen a lot of (not enough) stories about finding people who give you what your family refused to give you and i’ve seen a lot of stories about making peace with your family even if they wronged you and i would kind of like to see both? i think it’s a reality for many, many people that they have a family in their life that they love and keep around, but they also have to live with the fact that their trust as been irrevocably broken. to parallel that with a happy found family that gives you all the support and love you need is certainly a thing i would like to see.
anyway, those are all super rough ideas that have been floating around in my head and there are a hundred more ways the next seasons could go and i can’t wait for them either way.
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croinagreine · 4 years
Note
Betrayed
Meme: Send a word and I will write a drabble or headcanon based on it Status: Open
The silence of the back garden is…haunting, despite the illogical sound of the gavel forever echoing in her ears, over and over and over again. A bottle of Tullamore Dew–his fa..well one of his favorites she reminds herself–set on the patio table before her. A cigarette burning in the tray near by, as fingers worry at a single paper between her fingers. 
It seems so surreal. The color of the liquor against the growing evening. The smell of the smoke on the near non existent breeze. It’s like if she closed her eyes, it would be so easy to pretend everything that’s happened as just a bad dream. Convince herself it was only to open her eyes again and have it all shattered in a single glance at the chair beside her. Cold and vacant. 
A sharp sniffle. Fingers trembling against the thin parchment. And its all sudden yet some how fluid movement. The way she lifts the glass and knocks back its contents. Refills it before tapping the ash loose of the smoldering smoke and taking a drag. One that burns and shreds down her throat but to her credit she does not choke. And maybe for an instant as she holds the toxins in her lungs she maybe understands why he was so keen to them. But its only a moment and the smoke is released hurriedly. The cigarette replaced as glassed green returns to its unfocused staring into the depths of glass of liquor.
Half full now, half empty. And she marvels at the old adage about what a pessimist sees verses what a optimist does. 
A pessimist would focus hard on the things that have been taken. Focus on the things robbed her. Like her husband. Her ability to trust everything he says. Her friends that…can’t be what they once were anymore. Her life as a home maker going up in flames the moment the conviction came tumbling out of the unfortunate jurors mouth. Her children that will very possibly never see their father again. Not until their old enough to make their own choices anyhow.
But an optimist? Would see what she still has. Her children. A loyal friend that will not leave her to drown on her own. The possibility for growth though maybe not in the way she’d thought she would in her future. Lessons learned that could not truly be learned any other way. A wake up call that the real world really was out to get you, as Lugh had tried to teach the boys time and time and time again. And—
Saints help her how fucking heavy that makes the ring around her finger. How angry and hurt and stupid it makes her feel.  Because she had  been that. Just so stupid. That her fairy tale as perfect as it had seemed wasn’t that at all. And she’d known it. Known it in the way a wife knows but chooses not to acknowledge it. Known it in the way everything was never to be worried about. That he would address. He would take care of it. He…he…he…he. And how fucking idiotically she had let him. Chosen to ignore the looks the other wives would give her. Chosen to be blind to what everyone else wasn’t. Because her so long as her children were well taken care of…spoiled in responsible ways—she could overlook.
Still did overlook, because even now sitting where she is. Angry at the lies and the half truths…she still loves him. Would still do it all over again–though perhaps call him to account sooner. Perhaps help him cover and fix whatever it was that got him condemned. Perhaps stop him from making the mistake entirely.  And what does that make her? No better than him. She knows that. But even for all the dark…the bad things he’d done–he’d treated her…their children like priceless things. And there had to be some sort of redemption in that. Some seed of good. Because she refuses to see him painted the monster the tabloids made him out to be. NO matter how many witnesses were or were not put on the stand. Or how many have come forward later because there’s no longer anyone to fear. 
A glass shatters against the table in the wake of her picking it up and driving it down into the iron grating. Small water falls of whiskey dripping down to the painstakingly laid brick. Green shifting to take in the damage. The stinging hurt of red spilling out around bits of glass sunk beneath the surface of her skin. 
It always comes back to blood. A hundred years ago, a thousand, now. It’s a game that has been played since the dawn of man she thinks. The fight to come out on top. To be the one with the most power. To have and not just to survive. To make a name for one’s self that will be remembered. And that is why it always came to ruin. Why every story eventually met some sorrowful end. Because men no matter how pure of heart–can become such easy victims to their own hubris. 
A lesson she takes to heart. A lesson she will use in the coming times ahead. Why? Because her confidence was betrayed by the love of her life. Her friendship, betrayed by someone she believed she could trust. Both of them were going to learn a new sort of lesson, respectively.  Lugh for his lies of omission and Riley for doing so through his teeth. But how different the outcomes would be. How different the proofs.
A shift of soles against brick. Her name spoken ever so tentatively framed in concern. And she’s standing up before she really understands she’s done so. Turned about as the small pool of blood in her palm spills over the side of her hand. Fire lit green rising to meet the only face she knows she can trust with any amount of surety. Because while he might not have told her the truth…the man understood loyalty. And she knows without a doubt to have his now that Lugh is gone.
     “Help me pack. We’re leaving.”
         Mrs Sw…Cai…wha? Jaisus woman, wha’ did ye d–
     “Now, Michealine. Oi’ll not say it twoi’ce.”
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chirpingtiger · 6 years
Text
Tony stans hate Wanda so much because she's living proof that Tony's sordid past didn't all just “magically get better” when he decided to stop selling weapons to everyone but the American government.
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Tony stans as a whole seem desperate to villainize Wanda at every given opportunity - to make her bad or evil or unforgivable in some way.
For the longest time I thought it was just an attempt to make their fav look better, but after seeing them all forgive or even praise Pietro, who had the exact same motives and nothing if not more extreme methods than Wanda, now I'm starting to wonder...
Why is it that one twin is forgiven, while the other is condemned?
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Now a lot of people immediately jumped on the reason being sexism because Wanda is a girl and the Tony fan crowd aren’t really known for being kind to anything that might interrupt one of their crack ships, but based on the immense hate for Steve, Clint, Sam, and Scott that they all seem to perpetuate as well, I don't think this is the case.
Instead, I think that it likely boils down to the fact that Wanda is still alive, while Pietro is not.
Because while Wanda is still alive, the stans have to see a victim of Stark's careless weapons manufacturing days that is not a closed case or a done deal or a nameless extra that they can forget about a scene later.
For once, they have to face the fact that Tony’s mistakes have very long-reaching consequences.
Yes, Tony blew up the Ten Rings, but what about all the people whose lives they destroyed with his weapons before he did?
Who cares, because that never comes up. It gets swept under the rug.
Likewise, how many people were killed as collateral in Iron Man 2 and 3? How many grieving families were left a member short?
Who cares, because we never see them again. Tony sweeps in, "saves the day," and never once looks back.That’s what the PR team gets paid to do.
How many people did Tony injure or kill in Johannesburg when he decided to fight Hulk in a crowded city and punch him through buildings instead of luring him off into the forest or calling in the iron legion as backup?
Doesn’t matter, we don’t ever have to look at his involvement in that again.
How many innocent lives were destroyed when Tony decided to lie to Thor and use a highly dangerous and malicious infinity stone to bring his world-peace-keeping program to life outside of SHIELD/HYDRA’s project insight, and it subsequently went rogue and tried to destroy the planet?
Doesn’t matter, because nobody cares about any of them but Charlie Spence, the American Boy who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and whose death can be blamed on the team as a whole if he twists the words just right.
Nobody even mentions Wanda’s twin brother who died at Ultron’s hand. He’s just completely out of the picture here.
All of Tony’s victims up until this point have been completely and utterly ignored.
Except for Wanda.
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The sad part is, she’s not really even doing anything malicious.
She’s just hanging out with the others at the compound and doing her best to help and protect innocent people. The same thing they’re always going on about when it comes to Tony: “Oh, he’s just trying his best you can’t blame him if he’s not perfect.”
But the problem isn’t what Wanda is doing. The problem is that Wanda is walking evidence that people were hurt because of Tony’s actions, and that people continue to suffer long after he threw out his apology letter to the press.
Wanda was orphaned at a very young age. Suffered immense trauma. Was left homeless to grow up cold and hungry on the street. Her country, her home, was destroyed, and her last living family member was slaughtered.
All of these things due either directly or indirectly to Tony Stark.
Wanda has had every single aspect of her life destroyed by Tony’s carelessness and bad decisions.
She never brings this up - in fact, she doesn’t even seem to have a grudge against Tony over it - but her moving on from her anger doesn’t matter to the fans, because she is and will continue to be a walking example of just what Tony is responsible for doing.
And just like Tony himself, his fans will do anything to make that walking sign of his accountability go away.
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This is why, despite everything Wanda does in the narrative to redeem herself, she will never be good enough for them.
They are all quick to point out the “ridiculousness” of Wanda blaming Tony for her parents death based on his name being printed on the weapon, but they never bring up the fact that she was ten years old at the time, or went through the type of extreme trauma that would easily override logical thinking, even in the longer term, or that Tony’s weapons were STILL being actively used on Sokovia, and that was the reason that the twins (as well as dozens of other Sokovians) signed up with Dr. Strucker.
They leave out all of the details that might possibly explain her continued grudge against Tony in AoU, as well as the fact that her brother was the one who talked her into volunteering and simply wanted to kill Tony straight off the bat. They instead and instead try to perpetuate the lie that she’s being illogical and stupid for blaming Tony for anything that happened instead of magically knowing that someone else was pulling the strings or had bought the weapons illegally.
They take what is very clearly a terrorist attack and make Wanda the bad guy - acting like not a single life would have been lost in Lagos if Wanda had just been in jail like she belonged, and erasing Rumlowe from the picture entirely in order to do so. They forgive a known Nazi and mass murderer of all involvement, just so they can make Wanda look more at fault for not being able to save all of his victims.
They blame Wanda for Steve going outside the law and becoming a fugitive, despite the fact that Steve originally broke the Accords to stop an extrajudicial kill order on Bucky, or the fact that it was Tony locking Wanda up for Ross to come pick up/imprison that eventually forced Steve’s hand to more drastic measures.
They make Wanda responsible for Rhody’s injury, even though Rhody gave the command to fire, and Vision took the shot despite all of them flying within friendly fire distance of his target.
They blame Wanda for Thanos succeeding, despite the fact that he only succeeded because Tony refused to warn Steve and the others of the danger like Bruce begged him to (leading to Vision’s grievous injuries) and that he delivered the time stone right to Thanos, meaning that nothing anyone else did to stop Thanos would have done anything more than delay his progress by a few minutes.
They are desperate to find fault in everything she does or is involved in.
This is why the stans want her jailed. This is why they want her killed. This is why they call her evil, and a bitch, and a Nazi. This is why they make up off-the-wall posts about whitewashing someone of north European descent despite that area being mostly pale-skinned, and pretend that the actress is some horrible person in real life. This is why they write dozens of posts and hundreds of fanfics condemning Wanda and showing her as the evil hiding in the Avengers’ midst.
This is why they are so desperate to blame Tony’s mistakes on her.
They want this character gone by any means possible so they can go right back to pretending that their fav has done no wrong, and that a simple comment about “maybe I shouldn’t let terrorists sell my weapons anymore” is enough to fix all of the innocent deaths and destruction that he’s gleefully made his billions on.
Wanda was not the only one hurt by Tony’s actions, but she’s the one they have to look at and remember that he wasn’t always good, and that he has still yet to make up for most of what he’s done.
Don’t let them turn her into just another Tony sub plot.
#protect Wanda from the stans
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whitehotharlots · 5 years
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M.I.A., Fariha Róisín, and the rhetorical triumph of passive listening
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I’ve been thinking about the rise and fall of M.I.A., the might-aughts musical sensation who was briefly the most celebrated alternative pop artist in the world. 2004’s Piracy Funds Terrorism and 05’s Arular generated some of the most positive press I’d ever seen from outlets like Pitchfork (which, back then, still kinda counted as an alternative to dominant culture). 2007’s crossover hit Kala was one of the most genuinely dangerous and experimental records ever to enter the mainstream of American culture. Then... she just kinda went away. 
M.I.A.’s politics were miles beyond the limp, bland positivity of the era’s liberalism. She was literally militant, lending her support for the Tamil Tigers. A lyric on her song “Sunshowers,” (“Like the PLO I don’t surrender”), was considered dangerous enough that it got her banned from entering the US for several months.  This was not the fuzzy, feelgood liberalism of Obama, nor even the “fierceness” of someone like Beyonce, whose material accomplishments are considered a substitute for actual politics. This was a literal refugee woman telling the world that, actually, things really fucking suck, and if you want them to get better you you’re going to have to fight.
Of course, this engendered pushback--first and foremost from the “liberals” at Pitchfork. M.I.A. complained, rightfully, that music reviewers tended to give far too much credit to the male collaborators of female musicians. No one would attribute the genius of Purple Rain to Wendy and Lisa, so why did all of her reviewers spend so much time talking about Diplo? Pitchfork responded by viciously smearing her next album and accusing her of uneven and naive politics. Other outlets followed suit, and by the turn of the decade she had fallen out of mainstream favor.
And so you’d think, with recent developments, that the liberal-leaning press would have switched positions in regard to M.I.A., maybe even apologize for the horrible treatment she received. After all, the meat of her criticism is now practically unquestionable. And so I was confused by this article from affidavit.art, which is a rather woke-leaning website. The piece’s author, Fariha Róisín, purports to demonstrate herself taking a nuanced and forgiving tack toward M.I.A., but in doing so she reinforces some of the most reactionary and regressive impulses of our current social justice paradigm. In reading through it, seeing how deftly it continues to smear M.I.A. for the crime of being a genuinely dissident artist, we can get a good bead on the self-destructive tendencies of wokeism.
Róisín’s article is a personal reflection upon her relationship with M.I.A. as an artist, starting with her infatuation with the M.I.A’s early work, and moving into political disappointment that culminated in her asking hostile questions to the artist at a MoMa panel. She frames things by explaining
I hadn’t listened to Maya’s [M.I.A.’s] work in a couple of years, after she somewhat embarrassingly responded off the cuff to a question about Black Lives Matter: “Is Beyoncé or Kendrick Lamar going to say Muslim Lives Matter? Or Syrian Lives Matter? Or this kid in Pakistan matters?”
MIA’s comment, I would argue, is tone-deaf. Within the context that Róisín presents it, it certainly comes across as insensitive. The US criminal justice system is a world-historic atrocity that has ruined countless lives. It should be discussed in stark terms, and it’s fine to criticize someone who appears to not regard it with the severity it deserves.
But let’s look at MIA’s full quote, as it appeared in The Daily Standard:
“It’s interesting that in America the problem you’re allowed to talk about is Black Lives Matter. It’s not a new thing to me — it’s what Lauryn Hill was saying in the 1990s, or Public Enemy in the 1980s. Is Beyoncé or Kendrick Lamar going to say Muslim Lives Matter? Or Syrian Lives Matter? Or this kid in Pakistan matters? That’s a more interesting question. And you cannot ask it on a song that’s on Apple, you cannot ask it on an American TV programme, you cannot create that tag on Twitter, Michelle Obama is not going to hump you back”
Knowing anything about MIA’s personal history makes it clear that she did not intend to diminish the horrors of American judicial violence. When one reads the full quote (oh, the horror of having to parse an entire paragraph!), it’s clear she’s stressing a bigger picture here, criticizing the fact that the vast majority of US liberals still refuse to criticize US militarism, even as they’ve become near-pathological in defining themselves as social justice crusaders. She is, in short, criticizing the ineffective and narrow politics of people like Róisín.
I cannot speak for Kendrick and Beyonce in specific, but I have known dozens of putatively woke people--people who consume all the right cultural artifacts, who would never speak over a black person in a workplace meeting, who have been very vocal critics of police violence for upwards of 4 whole years--who still proudly celebrate the armed forces.
Through direct military action, support for brutal dictatorships, and otherwise meddling in the affairs of other countries in pursuit of our own financial interests, the American Military Industrial Complex has been the single biggest purveyor of human suffering worldwide for the past 70-odd years. They have killed literally tens of millions of people, ruined the lives of a few hundred million more, and immiserated billions. US foreign policy spends trillions of dollars killing brown people and enriching a handful of elites. And, to most American wokeists, that constitutes at best a complicated situation worthy of consideration and debate--unlike, say, someone who supports the wrong movie to win best picture, or who doesn’t celebrate Cardi B--these people deserve uniform and unambiguous condemnation. This perplexing mindset is what M.I.A/ was criticizing.
Of course, those who operate within this mindset are going to reject this criticism. They will refuse to just listen to those who question their approach to social justice. They will speciously declare such criticism as evidence of the evil nature of the person who uttered it, demand the “cancellation” of said person, and use all criticisms of their condemnation as proof of their own righteousness--if what they were saying wasn’t good and true, then why did so many bad and wrong people disagree with it?
Unless, that is, they take so-called “nuanced” route outlined by Róisín. In the face of overwhelming evidence of the vicious self-certainty of her peers, Róisín  attempts to deflect such criticism by introducing a new plane of equivocation. MIA isn’t evil, she says. The artist is just deeply ignorant, a defect born of her inability to listen in the correct manner:
Cancelling people is exhilarating, especially when it’s done by marginalized folks, those who so often experience the world through white supremacy—sometimes as a soft and subtle barrage, other times through vicious and terrifying means. The ability to dictate someone’s fate, when you’ve long been in the shadows, is a kind of victory. Like saying “Fuck You” from underneath the very heavy sole of a very old shoe. But while outrage culture has its merits, nuance has evaporated. So often it involves reducing someone to their mistakes, their greatest hits collection of fuck-ups.
This does not mean that we should simply forgive an untoward statement. It certainly does not mean we should try to understand where that statement came from. Nor does it even mean we should read a statement within the context of the full paragraph in which it appeared. Oh no. It means, instead, we should ascribe that statement to ignorance:
What I believe Maya is trying to say is that American issues have become global. What she lacks the language to say is: how do we also care about the many millions of people around the world who are dying, right now? Why does American news, American trauma, American death, always take center-stage?
It’s pretty fucking insulting to insist that M.I.A. “lacks language.” But Róisín makes the exact same assertion again, a few paragraphs later.  She ends the lead-in to her description of the moment in which she calls out M.I.A. (which is interminably long and ponderous) with the following, deeply chilling quote: “You can understand Maya’s perspective without agreeing with her, but I had another question. How do you hold someone you love accountable?” Indeed. Even if you try in earnest to understand someone’s perspective, that does not absolve you of your duty to punish them for their word-crimes.
During the talk, M.I.A, rightfully, defended herself against accusations of racism. We can all agree that’s a mistake. In reality, it’s a mistake because wokeists considering defending oneself to constitute proof of guilt. In “nuanced” woke framing, it’s a mistake because it reveals a refusal to just listen:
Her incomprehension that people could be upset by her remarks reflected her naivety about how the internet kills its darlings. Two weeks prior to our meeting, Stephon Clark was murdered, shot twenty times in the back by two police officers. To this she responded: “Yeah, well no-one remembers the kid in Syria who is being shot right now either. Or the kid that’s dying in Somalia.” It made me wonder if she was unwell, not on a Kanye level, but just enough to lack the mechanisms it takes to understand perspective.
[ … ]
Laconic and aloof, I remind Maya on stage that anti-blackness is not an American issue, it’s universal. Perhaps it’s ego, or shameful anger, but I know she cares. Before she begins to speak I realize that you have to build empathy when someone fails you. That they’re not yours to own. You have to try your best to talk to them, and that it’s never helpful to reduce them to a punchline. I believe in Maya’s possibility to grow. I believe in the possibility of change. Maybe that’s my own naivety, but it’s also my political stance. It’s not about compromising ideology, or even making space for the existence of those ideas. It’s about creating dialogue. She begins to speak, and I listen. Holding space for her when I can without biting my tongue. But, mainly, asserting myself as hard as I can, with as much compassion as the situation deserves. We are sisters in this fight, and we’re butting heads—but both critique and accountability are important. So I remind her with a glance, with an interjection, that I’m here to talk, too.
Ascribing an ideological disagreement to one side’s refusal to listen to the other side is perhaps the laziest form of argument. It is, after all, the preferred tactic of Jordan Peterson’s idiot fans. The assumption is that one side is manifestly correct, and so the only way someone could disagree with them is they didn’t bother to listen to what that side had to say. Even if they claim to have listened, they must have listened incorrectly. Otherwise, they would certainly agree with what the other person was saying.
Róisín takes this process well beyond the Peterson fans’ simple wailing of “you need to watch more of his videos!”  She instead crafts an ethos of false humility out of a long and detailed description of attempting to not dismiss MIA’s viewpoint even as she does exactly that, of announcing how little pleasure she’s taking in describing the manifest evil of the horrible, ignorant pop star.  
This displays the bizarre definition of “listening” as the act of simply remaining silent while another person speaks. You’ll notice that Róisín doesn’t bother to cite anything M.I.A. said--it’s unlikely she retained anything, other than perhaps appropriate pull-quote that would, outside of context, allow her to present the artist as an ignorant racist. Listening remains, by definition, a unidirectional affair. But turning it into a completely passive act turns it into a powerful rhetorical tool. Listeners need not attempt to understand speakers (that might actually go against the spirit of proper Listening). It’s still okay to demonize someone for something they never actually said. The power of passive listening is that it allows us to feign humility and claim its mantle of righteousness, to disguise dismissal as empathy.
Those who have actually studied race theory might notice a pretty incredible contradiction in Róisín’s penultimate paragraph. Her belief that anti-blackness is a universal constant is perhaps ascendent now, at least within middlebrow woke media. But this is by no means an accepted understanding within actual scholarship: Adolph Reed, Barbara and Karen Fields, Asad Haider, Walter Benn-Michaels, Stephen Steinberg, and Kenneth Warren would all strongly disagree with such an assertion.
Broadly, these scholars (and dozens of others, all erased by Róisín) argue that such a conception of anti-blackness is actually incredibly regressive, as it is based on an understanding of race that cannot be combatted through personal or political action. If Róisín had bothered to actually listen--in the sense where she not only received but actively engaged with what other people were saying--she might not have made such a comment. But that’s not what she does. That’s not what is safe. That’s not what is possible. What is safe, and possible, and popular is exactly what Róisín does in this article: she presents an incredibly imperious argument in the guise of pathological humility; her perspective becomes validated precisely because of its dismissiveness. Nevermind its self-contradictions. Nevermind its profound inefficacy. She’s right, her critics are wrong, and that is all that anyone is allowed to say.
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twitchesandstitches · 5 years
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COMMANDER YATRUIGA -SHOGGOTH MONSTER GIRL WANNABE GENERAL
Basic Concept: World conquering shoggoth monster girl down on her luck and Doing Her Best to be a villain but just terrible at it.
Appearance: Imagine a very wide and strongfat humanoid woman, at least from the waist up. Get that broad image in mind, and add a few additional features: a variable number of arms (at least two, often six or more) that usually comprise tentacles, with optional crab claws or grabby bits. From the waist down, things get more interesting, dividing into a large cluster of enormous muscular tentacles crowned by a massive butt, each tentacle as thick around as her entire body and longer than she is tall. This is the default shape of Yatruiga, the shoggoth girl.
Normal shoggoth girls generally have amorphous flesh, but she takes it to an extreme, apparently made of jelly or a thicc ooze, so fluid that she oscillates and is subject to goo physics; it has some of a latex-ish look, colored a pale cream with veins of blue. This is mirrored in her plump face, and her eyes, which are usually the same blue, as are her very big lips. She doesn’t have hair, but she does have two thick bundles of tentacles that look like hair.
Technically she has at least three eyes at any given time, but she mainly has a large central eye, ringed by two smaller ones that sort of look like eyebrows, and the impression is of a cyclops. She often grows a set of short and spiky gills, but her face is otherwise featureless.
As a shoggoth girl, she can assume whatever body configuration she wants, but rarely deviates from this form; she usually increases her number of arms for an advantage, or make hands if she needs fingers. She can alter her body shape, like becoming incredibly muscular for a powerful attack, or immensely round to absorb an attack. She often adopts crustacean traits into herself, growing heavy exoskeleton, pincy claws, or shaping her tentacles into crab legs. She sometimes does this just for a bit of rigidity and to hold her body together, too. This form is astonishingly flexible, and more than a little stretchy. You don’t impact her or cut her, you just sink in.
She’s not precisely fat but she looks like it, and is very solid too, tending towards a very large gut and imposingly big breasts larger than her upper torso, and even wider lower hips. Her tentacles - and matching mega-scale butt - are incredibly large and somewhat longer than normal for her people, but her liquid form body is highly unusual. This is very hard to maintain and she is smug about her skill in maintaining her body like that permanently, and other shoggirls think this means that she is mentally fluid and capricious.
Her exact size varies, and she is not exclusive to any particular AU. In ones where human-scale is the normal, she’s about twice human size, 11 feet or so. In ones where giants are more common, she’s about seventy feet at minimum, though she can get bigger.
Backstory: Yatruiga’s people, the immortal and incredibly ancient people generally called shoggoth girls, have long cultivated a reputation as being elegant and cultured beings of great refinement, on the rare occasions they feel up to venturing out of their enclaves or form beneath the waves to bother with the rest of the multiverse. It is rare indeed for a shoggoth girl to deliberately seek out company outside of the great shoals of their hidden homeworlds and the private universes folded away from the rest of the planes. But it is even rarer for one to seek conquest and martial glory.
Yatruiga is such a shoggoth girl, hailing from a world that had contact with the shorter lived species prior to the multiversal cataclysm. That is to say, they opened their minds to mortals while remaining obscured to them, examining their cultures and media and written accounts, filing it away for study and reflection. Yatruiga examined these with great fascination, growing to admire the idea of change measured in mere decades, rather than the millenia her passive kind were suited to. She longed for the notion of suddenness, of quickness.
And in the wake of the cataclysm, in the rise of warlords and demagogue, she perceived the value in warfare. Not as a resolution, but as a means to an end. Finding more relevance in mortal customs than the slow pace of the shoggoth, she found that she wanted glory.
Since the cataclysm’s end, she has been patiently learning the skills of conquest, leaving her isolated worlds behind and shunning contact with her people, bearing their advanced technology (now overwhelmingly dangerous in contrast to the ruins elsewhere) and potent psionic abilities and magical theory, and has set forth to gather minions, forge mighty weapons, and conquer as much of the multiverse as she can hold.
In her heart, she dreams that all the multiverse will know her name.
Personality: She presents the image of being bombastic and a hammy, dramatic figure, prone to grand gestures and who wants only the most impressive of things to her name, making every single action or even her form a performative gesture. She speaks louder than most people yell, she gesticulates almost continually, and she takes advantage of her shapeshifting so that she is in an almost constant state of flux; the effect is, by shoggoth standards, of outrageous pomposity, and it is very deliberate.
And it is just that: a persona. She has studied many famous warlords, generals and battle-hardened champions across history and has tried to emulate all their various personalities into a single mask to put on, believing that this is the appropriate way for her to act with her ambitions of warrior accomplishment.
When she isn’t acting like that, though, she’s very low key and even surly, filtered through the mannerisms of a typical valley girl personality. Reluctant to speak more than she has to, she comes off as very terse. She might have a lot to say, but she will only speak in brief, clipped words, saying what she must and trickling it out in a laconic tone littered with easy-going terms.
Ultimately she is acting out a role, without really getting fully into it and still trying to figure it out; she worries that she has the tone down, but hasn’t understood the essence of it yet. This sense of ‘not quite doing it right’ pervades her entire outlook, making her nervous around mortals, and she is not used to that feeling, so it makes her angry and irritable.
However this is hard for mortals to take note of; as a species, shoggoth handle everything in extremely long-term progression, so while by her own standards she is shockingly impulsive and even disturbingly mercurial in how quickly her mind shifts, Yatruiga’s melancholy phases seem more to mortals that her bombastic personality regularly becomes grim and dour as the seasons turn, and remains like that for some time. To her, she slides smoothly into her role, but to mortals she comes off as gradually progressing from one extreme to the other.
She’s not an easy person to like. Whether she is grumpy or dramatic, she has trouble relating to mortals as people rather than brief things, finding them not so much interesting as their ideas, perhaps viewing them as mere hosts for fascinating notions; thus she often treats them as tools for her use, and annoying flies overtaken with their own importance otherwise. She’s not cruel, but her callousness and disinterest in caring about people in general makes her come off that way. She doesn’t enjoy suffering, she just doesn’t care about it much; she might try to swallow someone whole and simply not consider digestion as an unpleasant doom.
She’s also ludicrously overconfident, and simply will not learn from her mistakes, and her military career is full of constant defeats, setbacks and losses from her absolute refusal to accept bad odds. As she can regenerate from almost any wound, she tends to forget that her weapons and armies are not so strong as she is, and heedlessly charges into battle without much regard for tactics or common sense.
Many of her armies have been wiped out by her own overconfidence, or else aged past the point of service simply because she forgot that mortals don’t treat a few hundred years as a brief rest time. That said, she is a genuinely dangerous warrior and very hard to even slow down, but her armies regularly desert her. She’s made up for this by making herself into a broodmother and breeding a massive army of barely intelligent monsters little brighter than zombies, but she craves genuine loyalty, and doesn’t understand why no one really respects her that much.
As a broodmother, she almost constantly pregnant, periodically giving birth to thousands of bestial soldiers for her armies that grow to full size in a matter of weeks, and she has little attachment to them, viewing them not as children but in the same way as she regards individual tentacles. While she can reproduce parthenogenetically, she prefers to harvest genetic material from suitors (be they biological compatible for babymaking or not), and it doesn’t help that she gets crushes on those she has rivalries with. Her shapeshifting powers let her mate with any living being, and she’s become somewhat addicted to this in recent ages.
She does have some slight yandere tendencies; if she gets dedicated enough to a specific rival, she can grow more obsessed with them and single-minded about constantly breeding with them and milking them for every last drop of extra soldiers from them… and eventually become fanatical about consuming them and beating them once and for all. As a result, her getting attached can be a very bad idea, at least in a romantic context.
Species: Shoggoth Girl, a species of amorphous primordial masses of shapeshifting flesh, capable of assuming whatever form they please. She’s very atypical for her people in living ‘in the moment’ and leaving the homeworlds, and even more unusual for her love of violence and martial concerns.
Fandom: Mostly an original creation, though her people are cute monster girls versions of the shoggoth from the Lovecraft Mythos (with a touch of space elf and precursor archetypes), and draw upon the aboleths from Dungeons And Dragons.
Abilities: She is extremely skilled in most in-universe modern forms of warfare, having been doing it for an extremely long time. Practice alone has taught her much, and she is extremely good at fighting in a wide variety of ways, from firearms to melee weapons, and has come to specialize in shapeshifting in combat to maximize them, such as slithering out of holds or making many limbs to attack directly.
Her liquidform body offers her many advantages; among other things, she is incredibly hard to hurt directly, since most attacks will just sink into her body; exceptional magic or specialized weapons are required to actually pierce her body or leave more than temporary holes, though heat does it consistently and she is incredibly vulnerable to biological weaponry. She is extremely flexible, even by shoggirl standards; she can force her way down someone’s throat, bend herself any which way, stretch her body like living gum, and force her way through any gap, given enough time.
By altering the chemicals that make up her body, she can become specularily acidic, dissolving most materials she’s in contact with; by forcing someone into her body (by swallowing them whole, forcing them into her or flowing around them) she can digest them and absorb their biomass directly, and do this to most substances too. She can even apply this to attacks, by making a blow with a limb briefly made of super acidic flesh, though this is draining to do repeatedly.
Her favorite ability is to shapeshift. AS a shoggirl, her amorphous body can assume any transformation she can imagine (though she can’t change her apparent nature, such as take on human appearance), diverting biomass to grow more limbs, reshape any part of her body or make them as big or restructure them, or even grow larger or smaller. She is incredibly creative with this power, manifesting extra limbs just to do a quadruple sword swing, produce a dozen hands on arm just to slap someone repeatedly, swell a tentacle into a barrier in front of her, or produce extra organs to survive different environments like gills.
She seems to favor altering her stomach in odd ways, such as splitting it apart into a belly to swallow enemies whole and then launch them like ammunition, make it a living shield, or store excess biomass in there so it swells to immobilizing proportions. If she is incubating young, she doesn’t grow particularly larger, through her transparent body might make them visible, which can be very disturbing; she can make herself more opaque, if asked.
Her body is also immortal, after a fashion. She does not age, and will regenerate almost any non-magical wound, and even those will heal with time and biomass, and since it is hard to harm her in the first place, she comes across as very tough. Even the complete digestion of her body is only a hindrance; if a single part of her remains, it will regrow into her again, still stubbornly refusing to admit defeat.
Another aspect of her fluid body is that she can gestate young in localized mini-wombs pretty much wherever she wants, though she usually keeps them in her belly to make herself look even bigger and cooler. She can do this parthenogenetically, making strange crab-monster minions that resemble her, but she has grown fond of harvesting genetic material from others through sexual means, or digesting them if she feels like it, adding those genetics to her creations and making stronger armies.
These powers do have a big drawback; her fluidity is the biggest one. She is very vulnerable to being, say, slurped up like any other liquid. Stick a straw in her and suck hard, and she will be drawn into it helplessly despite weighing several dozen tons. She has been defeated many ways in this fashion, and has never learned from it. Her great resilience gives her a false sense of invulnerability, and she heedlessly rushes into situations even when its a blatantly terrible idea.
Her broodmother mass breeding has the big drawback of requiring food for those thousands of offspring; she must constantly devour enormous quantities of food, almost every single hour, in addition to the massive amounts of food she needs to maintain her biomass. As a result she usually must hold off on replenishing her armies, at least until she has enough resources to do so. In theory, if she actually did conquer enough territory, she might end up eating every last drop of organic material or depopulating entire planets - namely, the populations she just conquered - solely to maintain her status quo, and she might not even realize this until after the fact.
She is also apparently incredibly delicious as a minor side effect of her basic chemical makeup, and considers this just another point in her favor. Making her enemies eager to swallow her up hasn’t yet occurred to her to be a bad idea.
Height: Highly variable. She can be as big or small as she wants, but she needs actual biomass to fill out to that point; she’s rather vain and refuses to be too skinny, or at least not look properly bulky. She likes to be on the bigger side on things, to the point that it is ridiculously impractical, such as growing to full size on her flagship and immediately breaking it into pieces.
Relationships: She doesn’t have any canon relationships as such; her tendency to destroy her own armies through mismanagement, obliviousness to their mortality, accidentally engulfing and then digesting them, or simply losing their loyalty through more mundane events, has left her with an inability to hold onto minions for very long. Stil, she always gets more, even if its not clear how she does it.
The minions she mass produces are more loyal, and really have no choice. They were born to obey her and know nothing but following her orders. They’re just not very good at it and unimaginative. She tends to order them to their doom, and she’s not very strategically minded either.
She’s not unfriendly though, or totally unapproachable; come to her pretending to be a servant or at least willing to play a submissive role and she will gladly take you on and she can have a aristocratic sense of duty to her subordinates, if she remembers that they have their own goals. One-on-one, she has the potential to be a good friend, if only she can be bothered to remember things, and learn some humility.
Those who have bested and digested her in the past, she tends to see as rivals and constantly seek them out, always striving to beat them. This even applies if thy died a long time ago, and she pursues their descendants, sometimes under the impression that they are that ancestor.
Pred Level: She thinks she is an alpha predator that flawlessly devours all in her path as surely as she wins campaigns, and she really does try to do this; she does digest whatever she possibly can, rather like an acidic slime monster, just to maintain her biomass levels and be healthy. However in practice she’s not very good at it, most of her attempted prey fighting free of her or actually washing out of her when she forgets to solidify herself. At best, she’s a low-tier with very high potential.
However, her sexual appetite can very easily translate into genuine hunger if she gets attached and her rivalry hits a high pitch, her yandere potential going into overdrive. While she hasn’t had much opportunity to do this yet, it might happen.
Prey Level: Extremely high, though she won’t admit it. She’s constantly getting drunk by enemies, indifferent monsters, ship machines she got stuck in, her own soldiers sleepwalking, kisses that get too intense… it just goes on. Due to the messy nature of her body, at least one droplet of her always falls free and she regrows from it, dazed and unsure of what just happened. Despite her sheer size, it is strangely small for even extremely small beings to swallow her. Even if she’s a 100 ft tall giantess, a regular human girl can swallow her in one drink, and her body material is easily digested.
MILF levels: As she is right now, N/A. Callous, oblivious to anyone’s interests except her own, she’s barely a team player, let alone a matriarch. While she is a powerful mass-producer of young, she doesn’t view them as children but extensions of herself, and she might not even be wrong there, and it's unclear if she even can produce intelligent young, at least without mods. She does have the right look, though, and it's unclear what the MILF fleet’s patented mega-fertility and empathy enhancers might do to her.
Overall Themes: Generally a light-hearted antagonist that just won’t go away, and a recurring threat that isn’t that dangerous despite being quite powerful. Mainly themed around being vore prey, but as a component to adventure and battles rather than a focus detail. She’s also a giantess and at least a huge BBW, with extra tentacles and plush-ness. Her habit of constantly seeking out ‘genetic material’ from interesting suitors makes for some potential sexual vibes. Plus, she’s a cute monster gal!
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gurubuckaroo · 6 years
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A Tumblr looks at 50
Tomorrow, the 21st of February, I turn 50 years old.
#what are you going on this hell site #delete your account #go pay taxes or something #hes literally twice the ops age
Go ahead, get it out of your system. Those are all things I’ve had replies to me tagged with. A lot of people think a lot of things about people my age being on Tumblr, and they’re not shy about saying it. If there’s one -ism I’ve learned that’s perfectly acceptable to most Tumblr users, it’s ageism. That doesn’t bother me. The last time I got anonymous hate, I donated to the ACLU on their behalf.
There are a lot of things being old (ugh) means. There are a lot of things it doesn’t mean. I don’t deserve your respect because of my age. It doesn’t make me better, or wiser, or smarter or more educated. It doesn’t make me more interesting.
The only thing I’ve got on you is that I’ve had a lot more time to make mistakes than you have. And boy have I taken advantage of those opportunities.
They say people can’t learn from the mistakes of others - they have to make their own, and only then do they learn the lesson. Well, that may be. Maybe it’s true for my generation but not yours. Maybe if I can prevent just one person from making some of the mistakes I’ve made in my life, this will be worth it.
Stop hating yourself. There are plenty of people out there willing to do it for you. Don’t be like them.
Stop berating your talent. You think your art is bad. Your music is bad. Your cosplay is bad. You know what? Everyone who has ever expressed a talent feels the same way about theirs. If there’s one constant about artists, it’s that they always feel like their own stuff is trash. Stop being your worst critic. Again, plenty of other people out there willing to do that job. You don’t want to be like them, so don’t agree with them.
Drink. Do drugs. Or not. But always in moderation. Moderation in all things - including moderation. Be moderate in your moderation. Although stay away from crack, cocaine, heroin, and anything prescribed - unless it’s your prescription (more on that later). I’ve seen those first three kill far too many friends. Worse, some of those killed are still walking around, pretending to be alive.
If you’re going to do LSD or other hallucinogens, do it with someone you trust who’s done it before. Bad trips happen - but almost always because of something you or your tripmates bring in with them. An experienced tripguide can walk you back out of a bad trip. Never do it alone. It’s almost impossible to have a bad experience on shrooms, but they might give you stomach cramps - if so, make tea out of them instead of eating them.
Take your Brain Pills. If you’ve been prescribed antidepressants or some other psychoactive meds, take them. My first psychologist appointment was when I was 5. I’ve literally fought clinical depression my entire life, to the extent that I was hospitalized for 45 days just before my 18th birthday. It’s not something to be ashamed about any more than having Diabetes or Sickle Cell or Grave’s Disease or Autism. Depression, Schizophrenia, Bipolar, these are all brain diseases, not failings, and taking medication for them is how you treat them. If you’re terrible about remembering whether or not you’ve taken your meds, they sell pill bottles now with caps that show how long it’s been since you opened it last. They’re great for my chronic pain meds. If you can’t afford them, you’ve got a Tumblr - make a draft post and update it every time you take a pill.
Don’t over-rely on safe spaces and trigger warnings. I can hear you now - “Oh here he comes, about to call us all snowflakes or something.” On the contrary. Safe spaces are wonderful. My wife is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and teenage sexual assault. I worked for most of our (so far) 27 year marriage helping her to heal, only to see so much work thrown out because of a well-placed trigger from someone who proudly considers herself a SJW and doesn’t care who she offends.
The mental immune system we build up in our psyche is every bit as important as the biological immune system we build up in our bodies. Excessive trigger warnings are no less damaging than refusing vaccination, and can in some cases be triggering themselves. In both cases, the individual will be perfectly fine living in a sealed bubble, but will be completely unable to survive in the world at large. Like biological defenses, the young brain is the best at developing coping mechanisms. As individuals age, those systems become more difficult, and more traumatic, to develop. I’m not suggesting that there should be no trigger warnings or safe spaces. I am suggesting that, like in all things, moderation is the best course.
Fact-check. Snopes is your friend. Google Reverse Image Search is your friend. You may really want to believe that new rumor from a .info site. It takes 20 seconds to check before you powerslam “reblog.” It could save your reputation. It could save someone else’s. (Oh, and any website ending in .info is trash. That domain costs the least to register, so it’s essentially disposable). And for god’s sake, don’t believe everything Anonymous says. Bryan P. Willman, a part-time police dispatcher, had his life ruined because Anonymous claimed he was the shooter who killed Mike Brown, and half of Tumblr and Facebook reblogged the accusation without pause.
Be yourself. Shakespeare said it - “This above all else: to thine own self be true.” Of course, knowing him, it was probably an elaborate dick joke that I still don’t get. But it’s still true. Capital-T True. Possibly the biggest Truth I’ve ever learned.
See, we all like to have friends. And we start off thinking that the best way to have friends is to be what our friends what us to be. Doesn’t help that we probably don’t really know what our friends want us to be, but that’s beyond the point. The problem starts when we end up feeling like we’re being drawn and quartered - because we are trying to be all things to all people. God help young people today who have potentially hundreds of friends through Tumblr or such - they’re trying to be perfect in the eyes of too many observers. Throw social forces into this, and we start to try to be perfect to entire movements. It cannot be done.
There’s another perfect truth we have to realize. It’s simple and absolute: People are jerks. Not all the time, and not to everyone! But we are. And here’s why: We’re all individuals. At some time, we’re going to rub someone the wrong way. And if we’re trying to be exactly what everyone else wants us to be, we’ll end up being jerks to everyone. If we’re true to ourselves, we’ll only be jerks to those who just naturally deserve it. Because we aren’t trying to be perfect for the wrong people.
Be yourself. First and foremost. Be the best yourself you can be, but be it because you are it, not because someone else wants you to be it. Let’s face it, other people quite probably don’t have your best interests at heart. If being yourself means that you don’t fit well with a few people, that’s OK - because it means you will fit better with some others.
When you first met the people you call friends, you probably acted like yourself. Because you didn’t know what they wanted yet. Imagine how much more they’ll like you when you go back to being that person they first met, rather than being a mirror.
Regrets are OK. Self-recrimination is not. There are so many decisions I’ve made in my past that I regret. One decision I made I will never be content with, even though I know (then and now) it was the correct action. My regret from that is purely for my own lost chance. Every once in a while I look back through hindsight and say “well maybe it would have been OK to make the other choice”, but I know I’m lying to myself. I just end up wallowing in self-pity over having lost the experience. Don’t be like me. I’m still trying to learn this one. It’s possible I never will.
You will hurt people. Don’t be afraid to apologize.  Some of my actions ended up hurting people - some accidentally, some deliberately, some through sheer childishness. I’ve managed to apologize to most of the people I’ve hurt. A few have left this world before I got the chance, or the courage, to face my own failings. And in almost every case, it was my own failing that hurt them. Growth comes when we recognize our own failings, and learn to overcome them. And if we’re going to grow, we’ll need a good ecosystem - and that means friends, who may be hurting because of what we did.
Life is too short to spend with toxic people. There can be a case made that you become an “adult” when you no longer need to tolerate toxic people. This is especially the case regarding parents. I first cut my father out of my life (to my mother’s delight) when I was 11 and refused to come visit him over the holidays. Later we attempted a reconciliation - that experiment lasted 3 terrible years. Since then, I’ve exchanged maybe an hour’s worth of words with him, over three in-person visits and a few phone calls. I doubt I’ll attend his funeral, should he ever get his shit together enough to die.
Unfortunately, there will always be times when you have to tolerate toxicity. Usually at the workplace. The really nasty stuff can often be abated (but not always cured) with a trip to Human Resources - but not always. At least, not yet. Things in the workplace are better now than they’ve ever been, regarding this at least. One can only hope the trend continues.
Life is an experience. Don’t be afraid of it. Imagine yourself on a roller coaster. You’re locked into the car, and slowly it starts climbing the first hill - clack clack clack - and the ground is falling away, and ahead you see the turn. Excitement builds. You crest the hill - and pull quietly into the station. Oh boy, can’t wait to try that again, right? Life exists in the dips, the valleys, the turns and rolls.
Every day you keep pushing through, every day that you groan and pull yourself out of bed anyway, every day you curse while tying your shoes, pulls you kicking and screaming through life. I’m not going to promise you it’ll put you one day closer to your dream job, or one day closer to happiness, or contentment, or whatever. Life isn’t about reaching a goal. It’s an experience. And every day you keep moving, you get to keep having that experience - the highs and the lows. And the highs make the lows so very much worth it.
If you’re still hung up on my age, and think someone my age doesn’t belong on Tumblr, tell me - at what age are you going to give up your fandoms and delete your account?
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itsagoodluckkiss · 6 years
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Bridge Back To Your Heart
Okay, so this is my post for Jake’s Appreciation Week, Day Seven: Fanart/Fanfic and I hope you will all enjoy it. I’m gonna tag the week’s hosts, @jakeymckenzie and @jakemcspooky, thank you for an awesome week.
Words: 4,792
Warnings: Mentions of sadness, depression, PTSD, death. Sex is implied but not mentioned anywhere.
Pairing: Jake x MC
Author’s Note: (This idea came to me before the final two chapters of ES Book 2 so sorry if it is a bit all over the place. Also I’m sorry for any grammar mistakes, English is not my first language.) This is based on a song called ‘’Bridge Back To Your Heart’’ by The Beach. This is an AU where you manage to save your friends and the world so you can return to a normal, mortal life. Jake had to kill Mike because he was too far gone. Ludgren and the Arachnids survive and return so Jake is still a fugitive. Rourke is dead. Aleister is forgiven by the group and takes control of his father’s company. Jake chose to leave MC because he was afraid of her getting hurt because of him. But after a year the group found evidence of his innocence and MC goes to Costa Rica to tell him.
It had been a year since they escaped La Huerta and returned home. The group still hanged out, going to Michelle’s favorite brunch spot every Friday, supporting Sean and Craig in their games, chilling and cooking at Raj’s place. Most of them had almost returned to their normal lives. But she hadn’t. It wasn’t only the PTSD from the island or the nightmares that still haunted her. It was his absence.
He decided to cut ties with her. When they got on the plane, she thought he was going to be there, beside her. Instead, he let her go without a word. When realization hit her, they were already a hundred feet off the ground. It had been a year since he left her and still she found herself all torn up on the inside because of him. She refused to speak about him, or join the group chats the others made with him from time to time, she wouldn’t even say his name.
It was a typical Friday and the eleven of them were heading to their now usual booth in the bistro. They usually happily chatted together while drinking their mimosas and waiting for their food to come. But that day was different. There wasn’t much talking, an awkward silence filling the air, glances of nervousness between one another and glances of anxiousness toward her. She started to get sick of it.
‘’Okay guys, what is it, why are you like that today?’’
‘’MC… we gotta talk for something… but we don’t know if you’ll be okay with it.’’ , Diego said, a worried expression on his face.
She looked carefully all her friends who tried to somehow avoid her gaze. She knew they wanted to talk about him.
‘’It is about… Jake. Isn’t it?’’
His name sounded weird coming from her lips. She hadn’t said it in so long. It was weird for the group too. Most of the times they avoided mentioning him when she was around. Diego cleared his voice and continued.
‘’Yes, yes it is. Look, MC… you know we still talk with him sometimes.’’
‘’Yes, I know. I don’t mind.’’
‘’That’s not the point… we don’t just talk with him… we’re trying to bring him home.’’
She was taken aback by his reply. Why didn’t she knew that? Why did they keep it a secret from her? Yes, Jake hurt her but she still cared about him, she still loved him and wanted him to be happy. Did they actually think she wouldn’t be happy about that? Did Jake knew? Did he knew and still didn’t try to contact her?
‘’He doesn’t know that, if that’s what you’re thinking.’’, Diego said to her, knowing she would think that.
‘’We didn’t know if we could actually find anything. It took us a lot of time. But we did. Aleister and I managed to find some top secret documents of the military. And they make good evidence.’’, Grace spoke in a soft voice, pulling out two folders from her bag.
‘’Also, I hacked the Arachnids and some military systems. Took me some months but I did it. I have every conversation the bastard made. Some payments. Accounts. Everything.’’ , Zahra said with a cocky smile, ‘’The bastard is going down finally.’’
‘’We will actually visit him in Costa Rica in a few days, as a surprise. He might appreciate it, we going there to tell him the news in person.’’ , Quinn interfered, with a nervous smile on her face
‘’Okay, okay guys, wait a sec… why do I learn about this now? What did you thought? That I would be pissed that you are trying to help him? And you’re all going to Costa Rica and you just announce it now?’’
‘’We didn’t want to get your hopes up. Neither your hopes, nor his. But now, with the proof we have and the support we can give, it is actually possible.’’ Aleister fixed his gaze on her.
‘’We also didn’t know how you would take it. You are feeling blue all these months and we were worried it would just make you feel worse.’’, Michelle answered her, a worried look on her face.
They were right. She would always get upset even in the slightest mention of him. How could they have told her about this before they were sure? She took a long breath and calmed down, trying to get her head around the idea of him being back to the States. She was happy for him. She really was. But it still hurt her. She didn’t want to speak about it more.
‘’Okay guys. I’m happy for that. I’m happy you have made progress. Is that all?’’, she said, trying to sound somewhat indifferent, even if she was dying to learn more about everything.
‘’Nope. We’re not done. Look MC, we all know you still care about him, okay? Don’t hide it from us. He does the same thing all the time but you two can’t even convince yourselves you don’t love each other anymore. He isn’t looking good either, he always sounds apathetic and he’s gloomy all the time. So do yourselves a favor and go find him earlier than us. Go and make things clear with him. It will be good for both of you.’’, Diego answered her, sounding a little exasperated.
She looked into Diego’s eyes, stunned. She knew he was right. She had to stop running away from this, from him.
‘’Okay… okay I will go.’’
The plane finally landed. The flight seemed to last forever. It was afternoon, the sun almost setting. She was growing impatient. The only thing she wanted at this point was to find him. Diego had said Jake wasn’t exactly in high spirits all this time as well. She wondered how he was. If he was healthy enough. She was worried about him. That was the reason she agreed to come earlier. She wanted to check out if her pilot was okay. She didn’t know what she would say to him when she saw him again. Would she scream at him for letting her go like that? Would she be able to resist kissing him right away? How would he react? Would he want to see her? He was the one who pushed her away after all.
She started wandering the streets of Costa Rica, her traveling bag in hand. She didn’t need a lot of things anyway, she wasn’t going to stay long. Jake had told her once when they were in La Huerta where his house was, next to that one beach, a small bungalow. She asked a bit here and there as well and managed to arrive at the beach he had told her about. She saw the small house and froze for a second. Was she ready for this? So many what ifs went through her mind as she slowly walked toward, her feet burying in the soft sand. Her stomach was tied in a knot, her hands were sweating. She was going to see him after a whole year. A whole year of not even saying his name, let alone see his face. She actually missed him even if she never told that to anyone, she was too stubborn to admit to anyone else she still cared for him. Her breath caught in her throat as she knocked on the door and heard a sharp “Coming”.
Ever since returning to Costa Rica, he just gave up. It was all too much. He had to kill Mike on that damned island. He had to kill his best friend because of what he had become. And so, when their adventure ended with his old commander still alive and going, he had to leave her. He was afraid to be with her. She would always be in danger next to him. She would never accept it of course. So he had to push her away. He preferred to be in pain than see her getting hurt. But his thoughts were killing him, his sadness was slowly taking him over. He didn’t want to do things anymore, even getting out of bed was hard. He actually spent most of his days in bed. Even drinking wasn’t making him feel better. He still talked with the group from time to time but it had been a year since he had heard her voice. He learned about her through Diego but it wasn’t enough. He knew she didn’t want to speak with him, he knew he had hurt her.
If there was one thing he never expected to see that day, it was her. He heard a knock on the door and thought it would be someone randomly asking for directions. It happened quite commonly there. He got out of the couch he was lying all day and walked to the door. He didn’t expect to open and see her, his princess, standing on his porch. He looked straight into her eyes, shocked. Words didn’t seem to fall from his mouth. What could he actually say to her after what he did? After letting her believe he would go back with her and fight and then leaving her alone without a word, breaking her heart? He thought she would hate him, would never want to see him again, and he wanted that because he wanted her to have a better life. Yet there she was, standing in front of him, beautiful as always. Her hair were longer now, falling around her back, her eyes as magnetizing as ever.
His light brown hair was still a bit higher from his shoulders but he was fresh shaved. He looked like he had lost some weight and most of his tan. More faired skin than she was used to. There were dark circles under his eyes. He looked like he didn’t get out of his house a lot, he looked unhealthy and she held back a sob. He looked depressed. It was killing her to see him like this. His blue orbs moved from confusion to relief to fear when their gaze met. She missed his beautiful stupid face even if he hurt her in ways she couldn’t imagine before him. The silence between them started to get awkward and she decided to break it. She managed a few words out.
‘’Hello Jake… how are you?’’
‘’MC… what… what are you doing here?’’
‘’Wow Top Gun, forgot your manners?’’
She slightly chuckled. Seeing her smile made him relax just a bit.
‘’I’m sorry, I… Come in.’’
She walked into his house. Much to her surprise, it was tidy. But of course it would be. Carryover from the Navy. She looked at the sea, out of the big glass window from his living room. She understood why he had chose to stay beside the beach.
‘’You have a nice view here. It seems calming’’
Jake rubbed the back of his neck as he was trying to think what to say to her. It was so hard for him not to just hug her and kiss her but he knew he had lost that right some time ago.
‘’Thanks, uh… come, sit.’’
He didn’t wait for her as he sat on the couch and he rubbed his face with one hand. She took the place beside him and he looked at her.
‘’How… how are you, MC?’’
‘’I’m okay Jake… I… can’t say the same for you though, you… you look a little off…’’
‘’I look like shit, don’t I?’’, he chuckled, a hint of a smile on his face as he took her in. She was a sight for sore eyes.
She looked at him, being at a loss of words. Seeing the man she loved being like a shadow of himself caused her even more pain.
‘’Jake, why do you look like this? Do… do you even eat?!’’
He wanted to be distant, she shouldn’t see he still cared. He looked at the other side of the room. He had chosen to push her away and he had to keep it up for as long as he could. His voice came out cold, devoid of emotion.
‘’I don’t think you’re here to discuss my eating habits, princess. So why are you here?’’
“I’m here for you, Jake.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to talk to you.”
“Okay princess, you want to talk, let’s talk. Tell me why you’re here for me after everything that happened? Why do you still want to talk to me? You don’t even know if I want to talk to you.”
She felt her frustration toward him grow. How could he just speak to her so coldly? Why did he have to act so much, putting walls between them? He couldn’t hide from her, he knew that, but kept trying it anyway and she was tired of it.
“Are you seriously gonna do this, Jake? Even now?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, you do. Stop acting.”
He looked at her with an angry expression in his face.
“Stop acting?! Yeah, tell me about it, really! You coming here and pretend to suddenly care really does the job for it.”
She started to disagree with Diego. Her coming here may have been a bad idea. She had started to lose her temper and he made it too hard for her to keep calm.
“Pretend to suddenly care?! I am here because I still fucking care about you even after all this time we do not talk, even after you decided to ruin everything for us and run away not only from me but from yourself, so stop this bullshit act and let me talk because you’re not fooling anyone!”
He stared blankly at her. Of course she wanted to talk to him. She had the right to confront him for leaving her in a sudden, she had the right to scream at him for never loving her and he would take any accuse she would shoot at him even if it wasn’t true because she had the right to do it.
“I would have never believed you’d just get up and leave me like that! You had agreed to come back with all of us, with me, and fight for your innocence! You left me believe and then you left me alone! You didn’t even call! And I couldn’t bring myself to contact you! If you believe there would be a better future for me without you, I am sorry you think so lowly of yourself because I don’t! I still think about you, I still care and I know you care too! But you still owe me a reason, don’t you think?!”
Angry tears run down her face as she let out the bitterness that consumed her all this time. Seeing Jake in his current situation made it really hard for her to let out all that anger but she couldn’t help it. He was on the verge of tears as well. He knew she was right but he couldn’t find the right words to explain.
“There is no reason MC… I’m a coward, I can’t fight anyone anymore. He’s still alive and going. He has already won. There was no hope for me. For us There still isn’t. Putting you and the others in danger because of me again was not an option.”
“For what it matters, there is hope for you.”  
She opened her bag and slammed the papers on the coffee table. He looked at them confused. He slowly picked them up as if he was afraid they were going to bite him and started reading a bit. He turned his gaze to her as the shock of realization hit him.
“You think we forgot about you all this time? Aleister and Grace hasn’t stopped looking for proof since Aleister took charge of Rourke International. Zahra has been trying to hack military systems for months to find evidence. All the guys are rooting for you, waiting to have you back, love and care about you! They will actually come here in a couple of days, I just came here earlier because I needed to talk and make some things clear with you. Now there’s only one thing; are you willing to fight this now with us by your side?”
He buried his face in his hands to keep himself from crying. How could he be so stupid? How could he ever think these guys would leave him alone in a fight or that they wouldn’t be much of a help anyway? He knew these kids. He should have realized after all the things they had survived together that they would all stick with each other. He let out a long exhale and looked out the window. Night had fallen, the moon shining in the sky. She noticed too. For him, everything was too overwhelming that moment and she thought she had to give him some space. She stood up.
“I should go, I… I think you have to think about a lot of-”
“Stay.”
She stared at him in confusion. He looked back at her, his blue eyes gazing into her own.
“It is late. It is dangerous to walk out there now, you… you don’t have to leave. You can sleep in my bed, I’m sleeping in the couch the past few weeks anyway.”
She was surprised by her own answer.
“Okay… I will.”
They didn’t talk much after that. He asked her a couple of times if she was hungry or if she needed anything but she declined. She was confused, he tried so hard to push her away, yet he told her to spend the night. She changed into something comfortable and lied on his bed. She lied there with her eyes closed, trying to process what had happened. Even if he didn’t sleep in the bed, his smell still lingered. Oh, how much she missed that smell.
He lied in a hammock in his porch, staring at the starry night, the waves hitting the seashore, tears falling down his face. She just suddenly came into his life again, even if he did everything to push her away, even if he tried not to be a part of her own. How much of an asshole could he actually be to underestimate her feelings for him? His feelings for her? And now there was actually a chance for him. To be a free man. To be part of his loved ones’ lives. To see his family again. All of these because of the gang of little rascals. Because of her. He went inside glanced at his bedroom to see if she was asleep. She seemed so. He took his guitar from the living room, went outside and sat on the sand. He hadn’t touched his guitar in months. It reminded him how much she loved it when he sang to her. A song came to his mind and he started playing.
//People like you make people like me so fucking nervous,
But I’m calm on the surface.
What’s wrong with the world and how’d we get so cold,
Oh we don’t deserve this, we need something to worship.//
He remembered all the times they had spent on the island. All the flirting, the teasing, her tousled from the wind hair and her big smile when they went rock climbing, how she held onto him for dear life when they first kissed underwater and thought they were gonna die, her beautiful face when he first made love to her. The laughing, the jokes, the bonding with everyone else in their group.
//If our time came back around tell me, would you hear me out?
If we knew what we know now?
Like the waves roll with the moon, did we rise and fall too soon?
It’s been so long I can’t remember.
If I could walk between the stars or be given one more chance,
I know which I’d surrender just to build a bridge back to your heart.//
He knew he had no right to ask for her forgiveness. He certainly didn’t deserve her unconditional love. She was too kind, too perfect for him, still he managed to fuck up, to damage something so pure, to mess with her feelings. Even if she would ever forgive him, he would never forgive himself for giving up on her.
//Oh, drifted apart, how did we get so far?
Forgot where we came from.
You know I never meant to let you down.
Sometimes, these moments, they come and they go, the only thing that you can do
Is hope that they come back around//
She was thinking about all the time she was away from him. How much she missed him. How much she longed for his eyes, his touch, his smile. Lying there, in his bed, she felt a kind of comfort she missed all this time. His smile seemed to have been wiped off of his face. He suffered all this time as well and she knew it. She wished he was lying there beside her, wished she could kiss him so hard that all of his broken pieces would come back together. While thinking all of these, she heard guitar playing from the beach. She knew it was him. She got out of bed and went outside.
//If our time came back around I would never let you down.
‘Til my lungs can scream it out.
Like the waves roll with the moon, did we rise and fall too soon?
It’s been so long I can’t remember.
If I could walk between the stars or be given one more chance,
I know which I’d surrender just to build a bridge back to your heart.//
She listened to him from the moment he started playing. He was sitting in the sand, eyes closed, with a pained expression on his face as he poured his heart out to the song. The moonlight fell onto him, making him even more beautiful, if that was even possible. She quietly sobbed while hearing him sing, understanding his pain and wanting to hold onto him and never let him go again. She missed his voice.
//Don’t fade on me.
I’m holding on to these memories.
Wait for me
As I lay my heart out across the sea.//
He knew she was there, listening to him sing for her. Maybe that was what he wanted. He was never good with words, could never bring his mind to say the right thing. But in that moment, that song and her presence made him feel hope. Hope that he could fix it. Fix everything.
//Like the waves roll with the moon, did we rise and fall too soon?
It’s been so long I can’t remember.
If I could walk between the stars or be given one more chance,
I know which I’d surrender just to build a bridge back to your heart.
People like you make people like me so fucking nervous.
But I’m calm on the surface.//
She walked shakily, with tears in her eyes, to his direction as he finished the song and laid his guitar on the sand. She kneeled behind him and slowly wrapped her arms around him, pressing a soft kiss on the side of his neck, making him shiver slightly. He missed that feeling for so long. Tears run down his face and fell on the sand.
“I’m sorry… I’m sorry I left you alone… I’m so sorry…”
He turned to her and wrapped his arms around her. She sat on his lap, hugging him tightly. They just sobbed in each others’ company for a while, taking out all their sadness caused by the time they were apart. He wiped away some tears off her cheeks.
“I love you so much, MC. I’m sorry, I’m sorry I pushed you away and left you alone. I’m sorry you had to go through all of this. I never meant to cause you trouble, I only ever wanted the best for you but ended up destroying what we had. The thoughts of all the awful things I’ve done are killing me. The past year was a living hell for me as well. There wasn’t a single day I wouldn’t think of you or of what I did, what I had to do.”
She knew he was reffering to Mike. She knew Jake carried so much guilt and sorrow inside him. He cupped her face with both his hands, gazing into her watery eyes, their noses almost touching, a vulnerable expression on his face.
“I know you carry a heavy burden but I’m here for you and I want to help you with it. I love you so much Jake. More than you think I do. Life without you is a miserable life.”
She closed the gap between them, bringing their lips together for the first time in so long, tears still running down their faces. The kiss was soft and tender, their lips moving in perfect tandem. Her lips were velvety against his own. She parted them slightly, allowing his tongue to slip inside her mouth. She could feel the soft tickle of his breath beneath her nose, her fingers entwined with his sandy hair as they breathed each other in.
After a long moment, they broke the kiss and stared at each other in the moonlight.
“I missed you Princess.”
“I missed you too Top Gun.”
She laid her head on his shoulder and looked at the stars she had wished so many times to bring him back to her. She forgave him the moment she saw him again. She knew how much he still loved her. How hurt he was. How much he loathed himself. Loving someone who hates himself is a special kind of violence but she would make it better for him. She had to.
After a while in each others arms, she started shivering slightly because of the cold breeze.
“Should we go inside princess?”, he whispered into her ear, then kissed the spot behind it.
They went inside. Neither of them slept much that night.
Bonus: A thin beam of sunlight fell on her face from the half-closed window as she was slowly waking up. Her back touched his naked chest, his arms around her waist, holding her close to him. She felt small kisses on the side of her neck and couldn’t help but smile to herself. She turned around, with her eyes still closed, and wrapped her arms around his chest, placing a kiss on the crook of his neck.
“Good morning to you too, Jake”
He chuckled slightly, taking in her sleepy figure and then speaking in a quiet, husky voice.
“You’re up early, why?”
“Could ask you the same thing.”
“I… I just couldn’t sleep more and…”
He blushed a little and she looked at him with a playful smile on her face.
“How long have you been staring at me?”
“I don’t know.”
She giggled and kissed him softly.
“It has been a long time since I woke up this happy… Or actually got a peaceful sleep… so thank you for coming here even if I don’t deserve it.”
“I should have come here sooner. I should have tried to reach you, I knew-” “Hey, none of that now, you’re not to blame, I’m just… grateful and happy that you’re here. ”
He smiled warmly at her. He already felt better than yesterday, better than he had been the last year. They lied on the bed for a while, cuddling, nuzzling, kissing. Then a dark thought crossed his mind.
“Do you think I can actually pull this through? Win? And then… I have to tell people what I’ve done… I don’t know if I can make it. I’m afraid MC.” , he said, holding back a sob.
“Jake… do you remember what I had told you in our tend, the night before we would break into the MASADA?”
“There is nothing in this world or the next we can’t face together.”
“And I meant it. I’m here for you Jake and you will pull this throught, we will. You know I love you right?”
“ I do. I love you too.”
“Then everything will turn out okay. You will come back home with us.”
“You’re right, you’re always right.”, he nodded and smiled, “By the way, when will our friends come here?”
“Tomorrow.”
“So what do you want to do today? We could go out, I can show you around if you-”
“We have time for those.”
She climbed on top of him, straddling him, and leaned down, close to his face.
“Can I just stay inside with you all day?”
She placed a sensuous kiss on his lips, then started kissing his neck softly.
“I can’t say no to that princess, can I?”
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Repeal the ACA?
This is in response to a FB post that someone commented a story about a Trump supporter who is now worried she will lose the ACA. The man commented that her story was BS and that hospitals HAVE to take care of everyone-”if they don’t kill you with malpractice”- that you can pay $10/month or file bankruptcy to pay for health care but that Obamacare is broken and imploding on itself with companies pulling out and premiums going sky high until it is basically catastrophic health care.  This is my response.
I speak as a nurse practitioner AND a patient with a complex genetic disorder AND as the mom of 2 kids with the same disorder that has presented in different ways so I've seen A LOT of doctors in a wide variety of specialities as well as worked in clinics and hospitals. I am personally and professionally offended by your statement that they are trying to kill you with malpractice. There are hundreds of thousands of doctors and nurses giving everything they have to keep people alive every single second in America. Hospitals don't try to kill you-Americans are doing a great job of that all by themselves- eating processed foods which are basically almost impossible to avoid in this country in 2017, not exercising adequately, not sleeping, texting while driving, stress and mental illness going untreated and our lack of community, compassion and humanity is eating away at our health. But let's say you only eat things you grow and you butcher and you are zen. Your body IS STILL going to start declining at about age 40. Yes, there are a lot of problems with our medical care system and a lot of idiots practicing medicine but MOST want to do well. The human body is very complicated and patients don't exactly do what they are told to do. Also think about it- if nurses and nurses are 99% accurate which is way above the average performance rate of most workers, that means they will make 1000's of mistakes a year and some of them will be deadly.
Now on the ACA argument: 1. Yes, hospitals are required by law to see EVERYONE for EMERGENCIES but only for emergencies. They don't have to see you for chronic psoriasis or a long term cough and they have no ability to care for you after the initial stabilization. There is no mandate to admit you for anything once you are stabile. SO while they must stabilize your diabetes if they are able to stabilize you in the ER, they can discharge you home and they have no mandate to help you with follow up. This is a huge hole in the often-repeated theory that "hospitals must care for everyone". 
2. In a lot of areas patients can't be seen by doctors if they don't have insurance. In other words, they won't even make an appointment for you if you are uninsured. There is no bill to pay off over time because you can't be seen. I had a patient with a grapefruit-sized tumor in her uterus. I saw her at the health department but nobody would see her for imagine to diagnose it further. NOBODY-because she was uninsured...except the ER -which is where I told her to go, but I doubt she went because how would she pay for treatment? The tumor was growing quickly so it wasn't going to turn out to be "nothing". 
3. Hospitals won't let you pay $10/week. They want a much higher percentage of the bill WITH a down payment and they want to negotiate the bill right NOW and you only get a small grace period before they are sending you to collections. 
4. The #1 cause of bankruptcy in America is medical expenses and THAT isn't a statistic to brag about. It is abhorrent that people can't access basic health care and that you think bankruptcy is a viable option to pay for health care. That it is more viable than fixing the problems with the ACA. America is the only developed country without guaranteed health care for ALL. 
5. In 2016 7 out of 10 returning Marketplace customers could get a plan for less than $75/month and 8 out of 10 for less than $100/month. In 2017 even with rate increases THOSE STATISTICS STILL STAND!!!!! 
6. The livable wage issue and part time vs. full time work issue is another topic but suffice to say that as long as corporations are controlling the GOP you will not see a living wage for workers outside corporate America. CEOs only care about their shareholders and the next corporate earnings call. That is about as far thinking as they get these days. 
7. 30M Americans have health care coverage because of the ACA. To take that away form them with nothing equal to replace it is inhumane and NOT how we do things in America. The fact is we could pay for single payer healthcare if we don't build a pointless was and cut taxes on the wealthy again. 
8. The ACA IS NOT Perfect. There is no doubt that a group of people in the middle class have extremely high premiums and that has to be fixed. But keep in mind that issues wouldn't be a there if the GOP hadn't kept the mandate out of the law. A lot of the problems that the GOP sees with the ACA are problems they brought to the table. They have had 7 + years to come up with a plan and they can't. 
9. One thing that has them really pissed off is that when ACA was first implemented they did a great job of getting RushRadio and FoxTV to sing a song and dance that the ACA was horrible before Americans had a chance to use the program.For a few years it worked. Obamacare had a bad reputation but over time, as people finally got the health care they long needed, the perception changed. People realizes that health care is a wonderful thing to have and not the evil, sinister thing the GOP sold them in 2009 and 2010. It was mind-blowing to me to watch Americas argue that health care coverage for all was a horrible thing and something they didn't want. Thankfully it was all GOP Propaganda marketing and when American's got health care coverage, that view changed dramatically. The GOP wasn't watching. Nope, they were still over in their corner-using their cadillac plans to care for themselves and their family- thinking Americans still hated Obamacare and a repeal was a slam dunk. I think Trump had it on his Day 1 agenda or close. Unfortunately for them the push back at the grassroots level has been spectacular. My Deep-As-They-Come Republican Representative has changed his song for a HARD REPEAL to Repeal with Replacement. If this corporate-owned politician who has voted 27 times to repeal the ACA can change his tune, they all can. Our new goal is to get him to FIX not REPEAL. 
10. One thing that has been expensive for insurance companies has been the fact that many people who signed up for ACA have long-standing, untreated health problems which means a lot of catching up with therapies, doctors, medications, etc. It takes a lot of resources to get them back to health and that is costing the insurance companies a lot of money. Another problem is the insurance companies didn't use a model that allowed them to be profitable under these conditions. Medicaid and Medicare have long been examples of efficient and cost effective health coverage and a few insurance companies are doing well under the ACA, but those who failed did so at their own fault by not following the lead of Medicaid and Medicare. Seven years into the program, some are figuring out how to make a profit in this environment. 
Why would it make sense to throw out ACA and start over? This reminds me of the old saying "don't throw the baby with the bathwater". We need to fix the problems not start over or as Ryan and the GOP want, give Americans Health Savings Accounts which is so stupid I can't even comment on that here. Why would anyone expect legislation this large, one that profoundly changes the way our society functions would be perfect in its first form? Why would anyone expect that health care coverage on this magnitude wouldn't need twerking and even major fixes during its initial years? As for companies leaving the exchange- Aetna left the program simply as punishment when the Obama administration refused to approve their merger with Cigna. That was all politics. Some companies are trying to put pressure on the system to allow them to sell across state lines because that allows them to go to states with fewer regulations so they can offer less coverage -another example of a company relocating simply to improve their bottom line and not that of their customers. 
There are many stories of people who wouldn't have any coverage if not for ACA .Clearly you fall into the group that is paying ever increasing premiums and deductibles and it essentially becomes catastrophic coverage. That needs to be corrected. But 30M people rely on the ACA and there are millions of stories of lives being saved because of that coverage. 
Let's talk about how hospitals feel. Hospitals can't go back to the old system where 30M people didnt have coverage and therefore the hospital is left with 30M unpaid bills. Imagine how you would keep your business open if people who owed you thousands of dollars were paying $10 a month. It isn't a sustainable business model, even for public and university hospitals. They rely on Medicaid and Medicare to help pay for services and they do not want to see ACA repelled. Frankly, neither do the insurance agencies because to repeal without a viable robust replacement is going to create a chaos that they don't want to see either.
It only makes sense to go to single-payer healthcare. We are the only developed country who doesn’t take care of its citizens in this way. Medicare and Medicaid have proven very efficient methods of health care giving us a model to build upon. Health care has become yet another system that is easily accessed by the upper middle class and up and something the lower middle class and those in poverty struggle to get. Even children are often left out as Dentists rarely take Medicaid. I have cared for many kids who come in for their yearly physicals with holes cavities in their teeth so big I can see them from across the room and I cannot imagine how painful that was before the cavity ate the root away. Children...suffering because American’s can’t agree on Single-Payer Healthcare. We need to step up.  
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inyri · 7 years
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Equivalent Exchange (an SWTOR story)- Chapter Fourteen: Past Perfect
Equivalent Exchange by inyri
Fandom: Star Wars: The Old Republic Characters: Female Imperial Agent (Cipher Nine)/Theron Shan Rating: E Summary: If one wishes to gain something, one must offer something of equal value. In spycraft, it’s easy. Applying it to a relationship is another matter entirely. F!Agent/Theron Shan. (Spoilers for Shadow of Revan and Knights of the Fallen Empire.)
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Chapter Fourteen: Past Perfect
“I’m not sure I understand.” She glances down at Lana, at her anxious face and the tension lines at the corners of her eyes. “Not that kind of… you did want to, correct? Finding a new fleet captain will be tedious, but if I need to go kill Koth for you-”
“What? Stars, no, that wasn’t what I meant at all.” Though she hasn’t even moved Lana’s hand reaches up, wraps around her wrist as if holding her in place. “No killing. Not Koth, at least.”
“Spoilsport. But then I suppose I still don’t quite follow.”
With a sigh, she lets go, opening her eyes again. “If I knew how to explain, Nine, it wouldn’t have been such a problem. I knew he trusted me after that, and I think that was what I’d been missing. I missed-” she gestures helplessly, her expression softening- “I missed something like this, I suppose. I wanted a friend, not a bed partner.”
(She smiles at that. They are friends, when it comes down to it, not something she ever thought she’d say about a Sith Lord who used to be her boss, the outsider who was handed the gutted corpse of Imperial Intelligence and told to resurrect it as a puppet of the Council. She was used to treating Sith in the same way one would treat a serpent- kept safely at arm’s length, a knife behind your back to take the head off quickly when, inevitably, the fangs came out.
Lana, to put it mildly, had been a surprise.)
“Did you tell him that?”  
“Yes and no.” She sits up, reaching for one of the biscuits still sitting on the forgotten tray. “The next morning I told him it wasn’t going to happen again. He asked if he’d done something wrong, which was ridiculous- it was perfectly nice, honestly, but-”
Nine stops short, her own hand halfway to the plate- they may as well both eat; she’s still starving- and winces. “You didn’t actually use the word ‘nice,’ I hope.”
Shrugging, Lana mumbles around a mouthful of crumbs. “I might have. What’s wrong with nice?”
She oughtn’t laugh- it isn’t funny, except she can picture the face Koth must have made- so she shoves half a sandwich into her mouth and turns away, nominally chewing but mostly composing herself. After a moment, her expression settled back into neutrality, she rotates back to face her. “Let’s put it this way. Imagine you’ve given me a gift, then asked me if I liked it. If I told you I thought it was nice…”
“I’d think you hated it, but you were being polite to spare my- oh.” Lana pales. “Oh, hell.”
“Myself, I used to default to ‘lovely.’ I generally save ‘nice’ for when I still have to be diplomatic but the sex was egregiously bad.”
“I should have said something else.” She flops backward, settling back onto the pillow, covering her eyes with her hands. “I should have said anything else. But it was- I don’t know. It wasn’t him. I-”
In that moment, she thinks she finally understands.
She leans over, smooths a stray piece of hair down over Lana’s forehead. “That just isn’t your kind of lonely at all, is it?”
“No. Not really.” Lana rubs at the bridge of her nose, lets her hands fall to her chest with fingers interlaced. “On Korriban it was an advantage, if anything. I saw too many other acolytes die at lovers’ hands to have any interest in romance, and frankly I preferred the library.”
“I can imagine. I had a few bad breakups in my own school days, and unlike you we weren’t being actively encouraged to kill each other.”
Lana laughs, a little, at that. “Yes, well, there was that. But then, even later-” she shrugs again. “I’m really quite fond of Koth, despite his obstinacy, and in the moment I thought perhaps… but nothing. Always nothing. And I couldn’t make him understand. He still thought it was him.”
If there’s a right way to respond to that she’s not sure what it is. I’m sorry seems wrong, somehow, placating the wrong part of the problem assuming it was ever really a problem at all, which isn’t for her to say. Instead, she lets the quiet settle around them, the only noises their breath and the occasional shout from the corridor beyond her closed door.
“You weren’t even in the records,” Lana says after a few minutes of silence. “It didn’t even matter, in the end, everything we’d done on Arron Prime. You weren’t in prison. We still had no idea where you were, whether you were alive or dead, and Koth started second-guessing the whole thing once he’d realized you were the woman who’d allegedly killed the Immortal Emperor.”
“I wish I had. Shot him clean through the heart, not that he has one-”
(Now, now, he says inside her head, and her temples throb with pressure like a tightening vise, that’s a terrible thing to say.)
She hisses- ah, that hurts; Lana tenses and sits up again, one hand on her shoulder. “Was that him? I could feel it, I think.”
“Yes.” She thinks of walls, solid walls made of stone and steel and wound around with thorns as long as her hand, until she feels his presence retreat from her conscious mind. “He tends to like to interject his opinion when he’s the topic of conversation.”
“Senya, Sana-Rae and I are still looking at possible solutions. There was a Dark Council member who might have been of help- Darth Nox was her name, and by all accounts she was a master at spirit binding, but the war took her. I haven’t heard from her in years.” A pause, then, a finger brushing above her upper lip. “Your nose is bleeding.”
“That’s the usual outcome. Beats a lightsaber through the gut, I suppose.” She vaults over the back of the couch, crossing  the room to the ‘fresher and grabbing a clean cloth off the towel bar, presses it to her nose and pinches, hard, across the bridge. “It’ll stop in a minute or two.”
Lana rises, too, reaching out. “Here. May I?“
“Thought you weren’t a healer.” She leans in anyway, toward her outstretched hands, and a faint warmth blossoms across her face as Lana concentrates.
“I’m diversifying. Someone’s got to keep the rest of you alive,” she says, “and the techniques are fascinating, actually. The different applications of energy-”  
Her eyes glaze over about ten seconds in; Lana could go on for ages about the Force, and it probably is really interesting stuff except that she doesn’t understand a single word of it, like listening to Watcher Two discuss algorithms or Doctor Lokin break down chemical formulae. She can feel the flow of blood slowing, though, so she’ll take the lecture.
“-but the Zakuulan philosophy suggests that- I’m talking too much and you’re going cross-eyed. Sorry.” She pulls her hands away. “That ought to do it.”
“Thank you.” Wadding up the cloth after wiping away a few stray drops of blood, she throws it back through the open door to the refresher. “It’s a shame Koth didn’t see this. It might finally convince him that the Emperor isn’t what he believes.”
“I doubt very much that it would be enough.”
Something in Lana’s voice makes her turn around; when she does, Lana’s still standing on the far side of the couch, her hands clenched tight.
“We fought constantly in the weeks after Arron Prime- about you, about Arcann, about what our next steps should be, about everything except what we were actually fighting about. Vitiate, especially. Always Vitiate, Valkorion, however you want to call him. Even when we thought he was gone for good, damn him, he still ruined everything.”
She comes back around beside her, rummages under the little table for the bottle she’s pretty sure ended up there last night (she knows they didn’t finish the whole thing, she and Theron, before their attention turned elsewhere) until her fingers close around its neck.
“That was my second mistake. I thought if I showed him,” Lana looks at her, grabs the bottle from her hand, pulls the cork and takes a long sip before she can reach for a glass- she never does that, not ever- “if I showed Koth the terrible things Vitiate had done, I could make him see.”
“Lana.” She knows in her gut what the answer’s going to be. Of all the terrible things the Emperor did there is one that they cannot forget, one place where they stood and watched a world die, but she needs to hear her say it. “Lana, what did you do?”
It’s almost a laugh, but for the way it pitches upward at the end. “I took him to Ziost.”
“And-”
“Have you been back to the surface? Since it happened?”
“Yes. Once. Never again.”
Lana takes another long sip from the bottle, then hands it back to her. “You know, then, what it’s like.”
“Yes.” She needs a drink, too, to wash out the memory. Thankfully, it’s only half-gone. “Koth didn’t take it well, I assume.”
“He refused to speak to me for three days. We were halfway back to Asylum before he’d even look at me. As I said, I’m not sure he’s quite forgiven me even now, and on some level… you’ve hear him. He still doesn’t quite believe it was real.”
“But he stayed. Koth’s deserted once already-” Lana raises a hand to object that that, but she waves her down- “not that it wasn’t warranted, but the point stands. If he hadn’t believed in what you were doing, Emperor or no, he’d be gone by now.”
“I suppose, but-”
Her holotransmitter, set up on the table in the far corner, starts to ring, and she turns to check the display; she hasn’t got any meetings tonight, as far as she can remember, but in their ever-growing Alliance there are always a hundred fires to put out and some burn hot, even in the middle of the night.
Incoming call: Theron Shan.
Lana peeks over her shoulder at the call display. “I’ve taken enough of your time, Commander. I’ll just-”
“Oh, sit down, would you? Unless it’s an emergency he can wait- transmitter, answer call- and if you call me Commander again I will give you the longest title that I can think of and insist that every single person on this base use it in its entirety every time they so much as mention your name.”
The holo flickers to life. Theron’s sitting in what looks to be the pilot’s chair of his shuttle, feet propped up on the instrument panel and arms folded across his chest, and to judge by the wrinkles across his forehead he’s desperately trying not to laugh. “Hey, you. And Lana, I’m guessing. No one else hates titles that much.”
“Hello, Theron.” Sinking back into the corner of the couch, surrounded by a pile of pillows, Lana waves backward over her shoulder at the transmitter camera.
He quirks an eyebrow; she passes the bottle into her left hand, raising her right index finger to her lips, and he nods, spelling out a question. Koth?
She inclines her head to the right- later. “Hey, yourself. Is something the matter, or did you just miss me?”
“Mostly the latter.” He grins. “And much as I like Tee-Seven, I can only listen to binary for so long. Nothing wrong, just a few contact updates a little too sensitive to write down. But those can wait if I’m interrupting.”
“I’ve got the hour set aside as designated ‘drink and discuss the many ways in which men are inferior’ time, sorry. No boys allowed.”
At that, Lana reaches across to steal the bottle back.
“Really, though,” she says, “are you on your way to bed? I can ring back later, or in the morning-”
“Oh, I’ll be awake.” Theron stretches, arms over his head, as the astromech wheels by in the background with a cheerful chirrup of greeting. “I never sleep well shipboard. If I’m not paying attention just keep calling until I pick up.”
Should’ve taken me with you, she signs where Lana can’t see. Your fault for traveling alone.  
He smirks.
“I will. Talk to you soon, then.” Careful, neutral words, for others’ ears. Always careful.
“Yup.” The channel clicks off.
Lana chuckles. “I really should learn smugglers’ cant. I always feel as though you’re talking about me.”
“We weren’t.” It’s mostly not a lie, and she won’t tell Theron everything in any case- some things aren’t meant to be shared. “Just teasing him a bit, is all.”
“It’s funny, really. The first time you two met, on Manaan, I was sure you loathed each other.”
“Oh, we did.” She sits back down beside her, laughing. “We actually talked about that once. I believe the consensus was that he thought I was entirely amoral and completely incapable of being serious and I thought he was a humorless prude. Cute, but humorless: standard SIS field operative. They’re fun to play with, until one gets bored.”
With a toss of her head, Lana runs her fingers through her hair, working out the last few plaits. “It did rather remind me of a cat toying with a mouse. What happened in between, though? By Yavin he hated me for what happened on Rishi, but as you’ll recall-” her cheeks flush, ever so slightly- “I know more than I care to of what happened between the two of you. You can’t expect me to believe all of that was play.”
“Serves you right for reading my mind. But no, it wasn’t- only at first, and even then not all of it.” She grins at the memory. “Honestly? I flirted with Theron because I thought it’d piss you off.”
***
15 ATC. Manaan.
This was a stupid idea, she thinks to herself. This was a really stupid idea.  
When Lana called her the last time, she should have said no. This isn’t Intelligence, not anymore, where she had to jump every time some self-important Sith Lord snapped her fingers, but she hates being made a fool of and she has to admit it’s looking more and more like Darok and Arkous played them all like a Void-damned orchestra. She still can’t figure out why, either. She’s got no idea what their end game is and it’s driving her crazy.
So when Lana called, she answered, following her all the way to Manaan. Apparently they’ve got an ally now; she won’t tell her who it is, which is both annoying and worrisome. With no name she couldn’t pull a dossier before arriving. It could be anyone. It could be a Jedi.
It had better not be a Jedi.
Not that it matters now. She let Jakarro kill the scientist- all the files they need will be on the lab terminal anyway, and hopefully it’ll keep the Wookiee from ripping her arms off before they can make it back to the surface- but that kept them occupied just long enough to let her quarry escape. As she watches, their submersible pulls away from the docking tube, taking off toward the surface and-
“Um, boss?” Kaliyo points toward the door they came through, now sealed shut behind them, as a half-dozen explosions rock the station and freezing water pours in through a crack in one of the viewports. “I can’t swim. Thought now might be a good time to mention that.”
Shit.
There must be escape pods, but she doesn’t have a map of the facility either. “Lana?” She opens the channel as they run toward the far passage. “I need an exit, and you need to pull as much intel off the network here as fast as you can. They bugged out and blew the seals.”
“I’m sending a shuttle down your way.” A voice in her ear, definitely not Lana. Definitely male, Coruscanti accent. Not Imperial. “Keep heading down that hallway toward the cargo bay. It’s about ten minutes out, but you should have time.”
“This is a private channel,” she says, ducking back around a corner as two of Gorima’s engineered soldiers launch a volley of rifle fire in her direction. “If you’re there with Lana, put her on. Otherwise, get the fuck off my line.”
“She’s here. But she’s meditating, trying to track Darok and Arkous. I’m working on that data-” the accent’s not entirely Coruscanti, now that she’s heard a little more; there’s a softness to the consonants, less emphasis on the hard k. Whoever he is, she’d guess he was raised elsewhere- “but I’ll try to talk you through at the same time.“
The water here’s already up to her ankles, freezing cold even through boots and thick socks, and as they run she catches a whiff of wet fur as Jakarro charges past her into the next room. “You must be the mysterious ally, then. Do you have a name, mysterious ally?”  
“We’ll do names topside. Too many potential ears.”
“We do know how to secure a channel, you know.”
He snorts. “Maybe, maybe not. Once you cross this room there’s one more hallway before the cargo bay. I’ll- um. Hang on. There’s something-” the channel cuts out for a second.
Kaliyo looks at her. “That doesn’t sound good.”
She hands her an extra stim, an extra kolto syringe, and her last two grenades. “Let the Wookiee take point. If it gets that bad, run for the docking tube.”
Before Kaliyo answers, Mysterious Ally’s in her ear again. “Gorima had a pet project- a cyborg prototype. Shielded. It’s loose in the cargo bay.”
“Can we bypass? Dock the shuttle somewhere else.”
“There isn’t anywhere else.”
She sighs, ducking as a dead Selkath goes flying overhead. “I’m not equipped for cyborgs. I was expecting a Sith and a meat shield.”
“Oh, come on,” he says, “Lana said you were tough.”
(now that is disappointing, hunter says.
she’s curled up on the floor of the nar shaddaa safehouse, hunter called her back after hoth- she thought it was just to get her away from temple, to threaten her again, but that wasn’t it. she doesn’t know what was in the syringe; it could have been glitterstim or etching acid and she would have had to stick it in her arm anyway when hunter told her to. her nerve endings burn and it hurts it hurts it hurts and-
one finger up the back of her neck. it feels like her skin’s splitting. i thought you were tough.)
“You-” the doors to Cargo slide open and it’s standing in the center of the room, easily ten feet tall and studded with metal where it isn’t armored which is almost everywhere; that is the biggest Selkath she’s ever seen- “have no fucking idea.”
Five minutes until compression failure. The synthesized voice rings through the overhead speakers. Five minutes until compression failure. Please proceed to the nearest escape pod for immediate evacuation.
She kills the creature in three.
The decontamination jets helped, to be fair, but dead’s dead and dead and on fire’s better. She lets Kaliyo patch up Jakarro as she activates the console beside the docking chamber. “Alright, Mysterious. Where’s my shuttle?”
“Docking now. Hold on.”
The projector activates, and- oh. He’s cute.
“Well. Hello, ‘pub.” Not a Jedi, but there’s no mistaking it, looking at him- dark hair and eyes, tanned skin above a leather jacket that definitely isn’t standard-issue and cranial implants that definitely are - SIS. She’d bet good credits he’s SIS. She licks her lips. “Now I see why Lana’s been keeping you all to herself.”
He rolls his eyes. “Yeah. I’m with the Republic. I’m also saving you. Is that going to be a problem?”
“Oh, no. I can play nice.”
“Good. Door should be opening-” as he says it, the seals hiss and the panels slide open, revealing a little shuttle beyond- “now.”
“Looks cozy.” She signals, waving her team onward. “And here I was just thinking it’s been a while since I’ve gotten to ride anything Republic-issue.”
Oh, he’s a blusher. This is going to be delightful. “Oh, for-”
She hangs up on him. Time to go.
(Was that really what you said? Lana buries her head in her hands, her shoulders shaking with laughter. He did look flustered when I came out of meditation.
She tries, unsuccessfully, to look innocent.)
By the time they get back to the meeting room she’s gotten the water out of her boots and most of the blood off her face, and rearranged her hair to cover the scorched bits.
“Everyone, this is Jakarro, our new friend and import/export specialist, and his colleague C2-D4, formerly of Onderon. Jakarro, Cee-Two, this is Lana Beniko-” Lana, polite, nods her head- “and Mysterious Ally who won’t tell me his name except in person.”
He’s got his nose buried in a datapad, but at least he looks up when she speaks. “Theron Shan, Republic SIS. Hi.”
She knew it . “Hello, Theron Shan. Lana, have you introduced me?”
“I thought I’d let you do the honors.”  
“I see.” She turns toward him with a mocking little bow as he looks her up and down, tracks his eyes as they flick toward her weapons, her armor, lingering on her face. “Cipher Nine, formerly of Imperial Intelligence. I do hope my reputation precedes me.”
To his credit, he only goes a little pale. Good. “I hear Imperial Intelligence isn’t much to speak of these days.”
“We got tired of winning all the time, so we figured we’d let you see what it feels like for once.” She shrugs, her smile wide. “It was getting boring, really.”
“And we will all,” Lana sighs irritably, “be working together for the near future, so if you would please keep the sniping to a minimum-”
“Oh, you’re no fun.” She winks at him. “We’re only playing, aren’t we, Theron?”
He looks back down at his datapad as Lana, eyes narrowed, mouths a single word in her direction- Behave.
(I seem to recall hearing that a lot, that year, she says.
Well, you did deserve it. She curls into the cushions as Lana ruffles her hair. I suppose I did.)
***
Up next- Legacies, in which Rakata Prime is a learning experience, going to ground is less fun than it used to be, and Nine gets a taste of her own medicine as our flashback continues.
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Why I don’t like Cancel culture, Part 1. (Specifically pertaining to Adolescents)
TW: There is a very brief mention of suicide in this post. 
About a year and a half ago, I took a psychology course on adolescence (teenagers). Something my professor (a doctor of psychology) told the class at the time has really stuck with me. 
He said that teenagers aren’t reckless; they haven’t lived. The world is fresh and new to them, so it’s not that they don’t consider the consequences of their actions, it’s that they considered them, and they found the consequences to be unlikely due to their personal experiences. 
Let me explain: My professor told us a story. I believe these were friends of his, and not a personal story, but I’m not certain. The story is about a teenage boy who won’t racing with his friends on the freeway, going max speed in the car. The boy was caught by the police, pulled over, and taken into the station. When the father of the boy got a phone call, he was furious. He came down to the station, and when he later talked to his son, his son said “Dad, I know what you’re thinking.” 
The father responded “what am I thinking?” likely expecting an excuse to come from his son’s lips. 
“You’re going to say I wasn’t thinking. That I was being stupid and I didn’t consider the consequences; but I did. I thought about what I was doing. No one was on the freeway but us. It was a clear road. I knew it was dangerous, but the risk was low. I thought about it beforehand. We weren’t in danger.” 
The father stopped, and thought about it. He DID think his son had been reckless, and that he hadn’t considered the risks of his actions; he could’ve died. But the words of his son made him think; this man was also a doctor of psychology. And he realized, his son wasn’t lying. He probably had considered the risks. But it wasn’t recklessness that had driven him to do something so dangerous. It was a lack of life experience, and knowledge. His son BELIEVED he was being careful. He believed that the risk was low. 
And because of his limited life experience, he didn’t think anything bad would happen to him. 
This is one of the reasons why I get mad about cancel culture, specifically surrounding teens. I see it all of the time on tiktok, adults giving teenagers shit, or teens saying or doing stupid shit and the comments attacking them for it, telling them they should have known better. 
Should they? The unfortunate truth is most of us learn that the stove is hot by getting burnt. And we try to mitigate that, lower the risks, protect the children of our world where we can, but we can’t stop all of it. Experiencing the world, and getting hurt by it, is part of how we learn. No one can know for certain the consequences of their actions until they’ve actually happened. And sure, adults have learned. We can guess the consequences, even pretty accurately sometimes. But kids, even teens, haven’t fully gained that ability yet. They haven’t lived enough to do so. 
Give the kids on the internet a break. They’re kids. They have little lived experience. They haven’t touched as many stoves, been as burned or faced as many consequences of their actions as the adults have. They’re still learning what’s okay and what’s not okay and how to think for themselves and appropriately mitigate risk. 
There’s this tiktoker I follow named Brooklynne. She’s got millions of followers. Her videos are all very light hearted, makeup and dances and POV’s. She got great body positivity messages that she shares, and she’s always smiling and positive. A few months ago, she said something really shitty. She got into an over text argument with some people who were saying some really awful, offensive things. And she said something along the lines of telling those people to off themselves. 
And that’s not okay. It’s not. It would never be okay. But she’s sixteen. Her emotions got the better of her, and it’s easy when you’re that young and in that emotional state, to say something that you know would hurt someone without actually expecting the damage to happen. You say it, but you don’t think someone would actually do it; why would they? You’ve never seen it happen, so obviously it’s separated from you. It’s something far off from your lived experience and obviously something you say couldn’t have that much power, right? 
Wrong, but it’s hard to know that, especially for a teenage girl. 
Brooklynne took accountability. She apologized, many many times. She owned up to her mistakes and tried to do better. 
And what else is she supposed to do? Grovel on her knees? Beg a bunch of internet strangers for forgiveness the rest of her life for saying one stupid harmful thing? She can’t take back what she said, but she can’t stop living either. She has to move on, learn from the mistake, and try to do better. 
And people for the longest time refused to give her any slack. She got hundreds, maybe even thousands, of hate comments a day. They wouldn’t let up. It didn’t matter that she apologized and took accountability. It didn’t matter that she was sixteen and stupid and didn’t think what she said would actually matter. 
Give teenagers a break. They’re entire adolescence is put on blast on the internet, and they don’t get the ability to make mistakes, grow, and learn from them without being vilified by social media warriors. 
I’m not sure a single person in the world didn’t say something stupid and harmful when they were a teenager. Give her and other teenagers the room to be teenagers. Hold them accountable, teach them, explain to them why what they did was harmful, but don’t bully them or try to destroy them. 
Give people the room to grow, especially kids. They deserve it as much as we did. 
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smartphone-science · 5 years
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Malicious Takeovers Happen – and It Could Happen to You Too
So I want to use this post to get straight to the point. Recently I lost all admin rights on my own Facebook page, Cat. I was the creator of the page and only person with admin rights to the page. Over the last few years I have used the page to share my love of cats and certain aspects of my life with a steadily growing base of followers. To some people it is probably “just a Facebook page” – and that is a fair assessment, but without going on about it in detail I will say that it means quite a lot to me. Losing the page even for a short amount of time freaked me the heck out, and rather than pretend it didn’t happen because it was a bit embarrassing – I want to talk about how it happened so it doesn’t happen to anyone else.
If you are owner/admin of a Facebook page with a relatively large audience or high amount of cyber traffic – then you are a vulnerable target in the eyes of people with malicious intent. You may think that you are far too clever or internet savvy to fall for an online scam. I know I certainly thought I was. And that was the first of several mistakes I made on the way to losing admin rights on my own page.
Mistake Number 1: “I know that online scams exist, but I’m not actually silly enough to fall for one.”
I guess at the end of the day I’m quite quick to self-blame but I actually do see this as probably one of the most important factors. I’m not completely naive to the world of internet scammers, in fact, I ignore hundreds of fake requests to my page inbox on a regular basis. I don’t forward chain emails. I see friends fall for a scam and I think, “that wouldn’t happen to me.” The entire time I was being led on, I did have a bit of a bad feeling and on reflection can look at what happened and think “wow I was foolish,” but at the time my feelings of doubt were dampened significantly by thoughts of “surely this isn’t a scam because it’s different. SURELY I would know if it was a scam.”
Mistake Number 2: A scam by any other name is still a scam.
Scammers pretty much rely on changing their tactics to adapt to changes in the information people have about them that exposes their schemes. Most of us have stopped thinking we will win an iPhone for sharing that giveaway post, and so the people wanting to rip us off have to change their game in order to keep up with the people cottoning on to their plans. It’s easier to get caught by a scam that is set up differently than all the others you’ve seen and it was one of the first things that led to me dropping my guard. In these screenshots I’ve given an example to the type of message the page has sent to it on a regular basis that I usually just ignore.
Most of the time, when I look at the inbox at a later date the profile is no longer available and the messages removed as they have been identified as spam or abuse. I’m very accustomed to getting them and very accustomed to ignoring them.
So what happened? How and why did I drop my guard?
I’ve thought quite a lot about this as it was ultimately my own fault that the page was stolen and frankly I felt pretty bad during the whole ordeal. There were a couple of factors that aren’t really within my control that contributed and they are interrelated. I am struggling with an ongoing mental health battle due to a seemingly malevolent trifecta of PTSD, depression and anxiety. This has led to having a financial struggle as this mental state has meant I’ve been unable to continue my medical school education at the present time and have not been able to work. Feeling like a financial burden on my family and wanting to provide some economic relief was a driving factor in the entire debacle. However, what I  thought would happen and what actually happened were two drastically different things.
What I thought would happen: I would be providing links to relevant products for the people who like and follow the page – cat T-shirts and fun products for cats and their humans – while generating some income so I don’t feel terrible about staying home and making cat memes.
What actually happened: I woke up one morning to find I had no control over my page and another person had been added who was posting irrelevant spammy content every few hours. People in the comments section were saying I had sold the page and basically I went into a complete state of panic. I felt stupid, angry, and absolutely devastated that my cat page had been stolen after all. Ultimately I got it back – but this is overwhelmingly not the case for all such takeovers and so I want to write about what happened in case anyone else finds themselves in  a similar position.
The details: 
I receive a message to the Cat page from a person claiming to work for an advertising company. I see the message and initially get annoyed as I assume it is yet another scammer so I grouchily message them back to tell them I’m not interested in doing any business with them unless they will email me with the details. Not too sure why I set this strange invisible condition of a person’s legitimacy but for some reason I felt like those who were dodgy would refuse to email me.
“Velma” sends an email to me with her terms of business.
3. I agreed to proceed and “Velma” begins the next step in her process of fooling me into losing administrative rights on my own page. First she sent this email, carefully worded in a way that leads me to believe the process is to PROTECT my security.
4. “Velma” sends the invitation from Business Manager; the email comes from Facebook because the scammers are using an official Facebook tool to carry out their plot.
        5. At this point I have reached a state in which I am simultaneously suspicious that something is up, while also thinking that no harm can be done if I proceed with the invitation. After some excruciating internal debate I decide to accept the invitation. “Velma” directs me through with the following screens to add my page to the advertising account. Note that at this point I was actually kind of worried but “Velma” convinced me that it was ME sending the invitation and only me who could give anyone admin rights.
6. I sent “Velma” a message with the screenshot of the page ownership request, because to me it seemed like accepting the request would be handing over the page to her business. She convinced me that was not the case (spoiler, she lied, it was the case).
7. Up until this point, “Velma” had been kind of pushy with her messages. Once the page transfer was done, she became strangely quiet. I became very concerned that I was making a big mistake and messaged her asking why she was no longer responding.
8. After a day or two of politely waiting for “Velma” to continue the process of sponsored advertising, I became too anxious to continue and sent her a message saying I was going to contact Facebook and ask them to reverse the process because it didn’t seem like I had done the right thing by handing over ownership of the page. “Velma” insisted that she would contact Facebook herself to sort out the issues. I went to sleep. I did not screenshot the last messages, which is a same because the next morning I woke to find I had lost control of the Cat page completely. I could no longer access the messages, post as the page, remove posts by the page, or anything else other than viewing the insights, because my page role had been downgraded to “analyst” instead of admin. There were three strange, click bait, spammy videos that had nothing to do with cats posted on the page. Fans were irate and each of the posts had comments about how the page had been sold or hacked.
It felt like a bad dream but it slowly sunk in that I had in fact been duped. For an hour or two I freaked out and tried finding SOME WAY, ANY WAY, of contacting Facebook to tell them what had happened. Friends commented on how similar things had happened to them or someone they knew and the success rate of page return was quite low, involving a lot of effort. Ultimately I became extremely worried that I had permanently lost the page due to my own foolishness and finding a way of getting it reinstated seemed virtually impossible.
I found a way of submitting a report through bug feedback and wrote the details in the form, hoping for the best. Hundreds of people supported me by commenting on Cat and reporting the page for intellectual property threat. Many people encouraged me to set up a new page and start again – but to me it seemed pretty half hearted since the other page was already so large. I set a new page up anyway but felt completely devastated by the loss of Cat and furious with both myself AND the hijackers for the whole situation. However, I DID ultimately get the page returned to me – and it was much quicker and easier than I thought it would be.
Getting it Back:
During the whole ordeal I tried many different ways of getting to speak with someone at Facebook, well aware that this is pretty much impossible most of the time. A friend of mine who lost a Facebook page in the same kind of way told me about his method to get his page back and it sounded pretty arduous to be honest, involving providing identification etc. However, he also gave me this link which is a simple form that you submit when you have lost access to a page which is yours because an admin was hacked: https://m.facebook.com/help/contact/1280439701975125
Several hours after I used the above report to let Facebook know I had lost access to the page, I received a notification from Facebook with a message to say that my page admin rights had been restored.
So there you have it. Yes, I am embarrassed that I fell for this scam. Part of me did not want to tell other people how silly I can be, but I think it is important for other people to see how it can happen to just about anyone. If you are one of the people who supported me during this time, thank you! I wanted to give up several times but the large movement of people behind me really helped. And of course I found it pretty amusing to read all the messages demanding that the page be returned to its rightful owner –  don’t screw with cat people…we are a different type of human, that’s for sure. I guess it’s safe to say I probably will have a much higher degree of caution going forward.
Until next time,  Love from, 
Cat’s Human
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  via Science Blogs
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topicprinter · 7 years
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Hi, my name’s Arman.In 2014, I dropped out of university to start a startup with a high school friend (go figure). In the following two years I had my first taste of the startup world, taught hundreds of people in the UK how to code, made some money, and eventually lost it all in the end along with my (then) best friend, Bob*.Two years later, I summed up the courage to present at FuckUp Nights in Chiang Mai, an event where people publicly share their biggest failures.I wanted my presentation to focus on my FuckUps, not Bob’s. But this article is about Bob and why if you see a “Bob type,” you should avoid going into business with him/her at all costs.After the FuckUp Nights presentation, I decided it was time to move on, I was relieved to have finally publicly shared my story and I went back to focussing on my ongoing ventures.Until recently.A few days ago, I received an unexpected email from someone who had started working with Bob. Let’s call this person, Sally*Sally wrote to me explaining that she was about to enter into a big work commitment with Bob but had her concerns. After Bob failed to provide any professional references, she decided to do her own research into his past business ventures and came across my FuckUp nights presentation.Watching the video, Sally drew parallels between both of our experiences working with Bob and decided to reach out to me and ask if I could share more details about the situation.Thanks to her consent, I’m able to share her story and parts of her emails here but have kept her identity anonymous.[see screenshot email on Medium here]When I read her email, I was surprised to say the least. Quickly, suspicion took over me. I thought it was a hoax. Maybe it was Bob just trying to mess with me. Or maybe he had put someone else up to it. Eventually, I replied:[see screenshot email on Medium here]At the time of replying, I still wasn’t sure wether Sally was real or not, but I felt it was worth replying something — especially if it could prevent someone else from losing time and money to the hands of Bob.In the days that followed, Sally and I exchanged over 20 emails, detailing more about both of our experiences with Bob. She was also able to get in contact with several other business partners of Bob, some that I had known, others that I didn’t but all of them with the same story — cheated out of their time and money.By now it was clear to Sally to cut her loses and discontinue working with Bob. Luckily, she didn’t lose too much to him, but others, myself included, have lost a lot more.These events are what sparked me to write this article on Bob and all the Bob’s around the world.This is for the first time entrepreneurs, the inexperienced investors and the unknowing interns who may cross paths with a Bob in their life. I can’t stop the Bob types around the world from harming the people they do, but I can make people more aware of their traits.*11 signs that you’re dealing with a Bob TypeMissed/delayed deadlines: Missing deadlines happen, but if the person you’re working with refuses to provide updates and constantly delivers work late or not at all, you may have a Bob on your hands.Constant excuses: Building from point one, every missed deadline comes with an excuse, eventually they grow more obscure over time.Sell big dreams: Bob’s use promises and dreams as a way to lure people in. They target your aspirations — like to own your own business, do something creative, be location independent, etc, and then offer you all of it and more. As the saying goes, if it’s too good to be true, it probably isAvoiding questions/details: Bob’s never give it to you straight. There’s always a twist or a turn, a detail missing, a question you’ve asked is flipped and returned back to you. At the end of the discussion, you’ve probably forgotten your question all together.Lack of trust with you and other employees: This could be withholding information, not promoting employees, no transparency with finances, retaining access to company accounts, etc. Everything to retain majority power in the company.Focuses more time on their image than their work: Bobs rely on their reputation to spread and prefer to spend time networking rather than working. They feel that actual leg work is below them and they choose to outsource this part of the equation. Instead, you can find them busy maintaining their jet-set entrepreneur lifestyle over social media.Overly impressive LinkedIn, Website: Bob’s tend to label themselves as “serial entrepreneurs” or “CEOs.” They may have a website or LinkedIn that compares to the likes of a young Elon Musk. If you do your research into their past ventures you’ll probably find they’re not what they seem.Putting down others around you: Bob’s will often pick apart the careers and life choices of the people around you, this serves to feed their own ego and discredit those with opposing views.Leaving little to no trace of conversations: Bob’s are aware that everything they write online leaves a digital footprint which could then hold them accountable in the future. Watch for people who tend to avoid writing on email or in permanent form — instead opting for calls, in person meetings or apps like Telegram.Taking spontaneous trips around the world without notice: Okay, this is probably unique to my Bob.Surround themselves with vulnerable/less experienced people: I’d like to bring special attention to point 11. This is something that I was oblivious to until recently through the exchanges I had with Sally.Bob’s tend to approach people who are unhappy with what they’re doing. These people might be tired of their studies/work/life, looking for a change of pace, a fresh start, in need of work experience or sometimes, just a roof over their head.Bob’s will then be so kind as to bestow incredible opportunities on those less fortunate, leaving them eternally indebted to his/her generosity. Debt, that they can use as leverage in the future.Beware: Bobs are toxic, manipulative and controlling. But they’re also intelligent, charming and appear trustworthy.This is what makes Bob’s all the more dangerous, they’re not what you’d expect. They’re masterful crafters, intelligent individuals and expert charmers — they are con artists.7 tips to avoid getting harmed by BobDon’t be naive, act fast. If by now you’ve got the feeling that you might be working with a Bob type, you probably are. Act now before it spreads.Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself. If you have concerns, confront Bob, ask the tough questions and demand answers.Sign on the dotted line. No matter who it is you think you’re working with, get the paper work and legislatives done first. It might seem boring, but if that person turns out to be a Bob, it will save you a headache (and a fortune) later.Avoid falling into Bobs debt. Bob might offer you something like an initial salary, a laptop, a flight ticket, a bed, or something similar. The price? Your loyalty, and your life. At all costs, do not accept.Ask for references from people they’ve worked with. Start by asking for introductions from people they’ve worked with in the past. If they come back empty handed, take the initiative to find and reach out for yourself.Don’t believe everything they say or show. We’re all guilty of highlighting only our best features and that’s more the reason to take everything Bob says with a grain of salt. If you have your doubts about something, do your own independent research.Don’t work with Bob. The best way to avoid getting affected by Bob, is to avoid the Bob type. Deciding on the person you work with is a huge decision, don’t mess it up. Before committing to work with them, fully understand who you’re working with,Some Bob’s may be assholes, others, may just be unaware they’re assholes. I don’t know whether my Bob was ill-intentioned in his actions or not. In fact, I still don’t believe he fully understands the consequences his actions have had on me and the others he’s worked with.It took me too long to write and publish this article on Bob and the Bob types. I finally got around to it because I believe too many people have been hurt and cheated in the path of them and if we don’t call them out, more people will continue to be hurt.I hope Bob reads this. Actually, I’m certain Bob is reading this right now. If there’s anything I could say to you, Bob, it’s: Stop being an asshole. Go and right the wrongs you’ve done. Pay back the people you owe. Stop taking other peoples money. Learn from your mistakes.*The characters in this article are true and represented to the best of my knowledge. Only their names have been changed to protect their identity.p.s. I sincerely apologize to anyone out there who’s actually named Bob and is genuinely a great person. The name Bob stuck and I had to roll with it.Originally posted on Medium here
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