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titengdakila · 2 years

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I have a confession to make.

It was March 14, 2020 when President Rodrigo Duterte announced a metrowide lockdown in Metro Manila. I was busy playing on-line games on my computer. When I heard my Mom shouting calling my name. "Enoch!!! come here quickly we need to go to the grocery store to buy canned goods and other things." she told me while panicking. "What's going on? Why are you panicking?" I asked her.

"President Duterte announced a metrowide lockdown and we need to buy our provisions." she answered. So I grabbed the key of my older brother's motorcycle and took our eco bags. "Don't use the motorcycle son you don't have a license yet." My Mom said. "Don't worry Mom SaveMore (grocery store) is just a few blocks away from here. And there are no traffic enforcers near our area." I told her, But she insisted that we take the tricycle because she is going to buy a lot of things.

"How about we call Kuya (How filipino calls their older brother) and ask him to pick us up?" I suggested. "Go ahead call him! I also need him back here at home the soonest possible time." My Mother added. So I did, and my brother told me that he is also about to go back home since their agency asked them to leave early because of the lockdown announcement." So he did picked us up after an hour of waiting.

The grocery store is full of people from our area and I even saw my schoolmates buying groceries with their parents. Everybody was wearing facemask. My Brother is 5 years older than me. I have a twin sister but she died during our birth. I look up to him like he is my father. Unfortunately my Dad is the promiscuous type and he abandoned us when my mom found out what he's been doing to me and my brother. My mom is a government employee in LTO (Land Transportation Office) while my brother works for an advertising agency as research specialist.

My mom is diabetic and she's struggling with her health. Good thing that Kuya Theo is helping her with the finances. Kuya Theo is a handsome, tall Chinese looking guy. Our Dad is a half breed of both Filipino and Chinese descent. Both of us have chinese eyes. My mom keeps on joking about his sexuality. She always asked him (jokingly) to finally get a girlfriend so that she could have grandchildren. My kuya would always get annoyed every time my mother says that.

Kuya Theo is the type of guy who would rather spend his time focusing at work than having a time for his love life. I would always catch him masturbating at night watching gay porn videos from Twitter and Reddit. He wouldn't even bother to stop me from looking because we've seen each other naked since we were young. Masturbation is just a normal thing for us since we are both male, and we share the same room. He loves sleeping naked because of the humid temperature here in the Philippines.

He is the type of person who I could say is very practical. He wouldn't turn on the AC because he doesn't wanna pay for a higher electricity bill. He would always join me whenever I take a bath to save water consumption. My brother is my idol. He is smart, responsible and a very caring person. I asked him once if he's already dating and he just laughed at it. I wanted him to be happy because he's been busy working to help us with our finances.

During the lockdown we were not allowed to get out of the house and we've spent so much time talking about our lives. My mom would always tell us about her stories growing up in Pampanga. She started planting vegetables in the backyard and bought live chickens on line. She told us that just in case the lockdown gets longer we have chickens for survival.

Our Barangay (a small territorial and administrative district forming the most local level of government.) can only provide one quarantine pass (ID) per family. My mom was the only one who is allowed to go out to buy groceries for us. I felt really upset that we could not help her carry the heavy eco bags because of the restrictions. Unfortunately because of this my acquired COVID19.

When she began to show symptoms of COVID19 my brother and were both so afraid that we might have it too. So we called the hospital and asked them to have us checked. Men wearing protective clothes (PPE) arrived and have us checked. Both me and my brother tested negative while Mon turned out to have acquired COVID19. She was taken from us and was quarantined at the hospital.

She only stayed there for a week and we were told of the unfortunate passing of my mom. We were so devastated and I don't even know what to feel at that time. I furious, getting emotional and pretty much confused of what is going on. My brother processed all the documents on his own so that he could get the ashes of my mom who at that time was cremated.

I was so afraid for him. I don't want him to acquire the virus too. He he finally got the urn I asked him to have us checked again. Thankfully we were both tested negative. On the night that my mom's urn arrived we were too emotional and mentally drained out. "Kuya I don't what to do if I will lose you too?" I told him. "Don't worry Bunso (filipino word for youngest sibling) I will never ever leave you." he answered back.

I somehow felt relieved after hearing those words so I hugged him tight and kissed his cheek. Days turned into months and we are slowly losing money. President Duterte on the other hand announced a Luzon wide lockdown. "Looks like we are going to stay here confined for a long time, and we need money to survive." My brother told me. He almost used up all his savings and the money that mom left for us needs to be processed first before the insurance allows us to withdraw it.

I kept on telling my brother that he better stay at home and just wait for the lockdown to end before he could process the claim. Good thing that he listens because I was really crying and begging for him not to go out. He asked his agency for assistance but they said it would take weeks to process the monetary assistance. My brother is getting frustrated so he tried applying for an online job. Unfortunately he was having a hard time getting a job online.

I don't know what to do to help him with the problem so I just helped him with all the chores. "Kuya... why don't we contact Dad and ask for help?" I suggested. I don't know but he suddenly looked furious after hearing my suggestion. "I WILL NEVER ASK THAT BASTARD FOR HELP!!!" he shouted. I was stricken when I saw his reaction. I can't help but to cry. "I was just trying to help." I told him.

He turned his back on me and did not say a single word. I could see how frustrated my brother is and I can't help but to cry. I went to my mother's room and banged the door and I wept there all alone. Around 1am (Manila time) I heard him knocking on the door. "Enoch! open the door please." he asked. So I stood up and open the door for him. He asked me to stay in our room and jokingly said that my mom's ghost would show up if I stay there alone.

He got me a ham sandwich and warm milk while he made coffee for himself. "Enoch, I am really upset about what you suggested earlier. You know what Dad did to us and how he abandoned our family right?" He said. I just nodded. I remember my kuya would always protect me by telling my Dad to do whatever he wants with him so that he could avoid him from touching me.

I witnessed how Dad touched him and did whatever things he wanted to do with kuya. It happened so many times that it became a normal activity every night. One time my brother was admitted to the hospital for having a Dengue and my mom have to stay with him in the hospital. That night my Dad took advantage of me. I don't know but I find it weird that I was not surprised or even reluctant. Because somehow I felt like I saved my brother that time and that I'm okay with it. I even told myself that I'd do it for him even after he recovers so that I could at least avoid Dad from touching him. I want to protect him too.

Although I am willing at that time to do it with Dad I still felt nervous somehow since that is the first time he touched me. When he first touched my dick I was not getting a hard on maybe because I'm too nervous at that time. But when he started licking and sucking my dick I felt this weird sensation. It felt so warm and tickling that I began to harden up, closed my eyes and moan a bit. When he heard me do that and saw my reaction he got excited and started to get rough.

I was so confused but at the same time I am enjoying the sensation I'm getting that I even grabbed his hair and started pulling it. My hips began to moved slowly and I felt like I wanted my dick deep inside his mouth. I began to pound his mouth and started to move roughly too. "This is not bad at all" I told myself while my eyes are closed. It really feels good that I forgot who's doing that to me. That was the first time I reached orgasm and my cum squirted in abundance inside his mouth.

He looked me in the eyes after I cummed and he gulped it all. Then I felt guilty after that. He told me not to say anything about what we did even to my mom and my brother. He gave me 100 pesos after that. After my brother recovered and went back home he asked me if my Dad tried touching me? I told him nothing happened but he seems skeptical. After a few days passed dad started touching me again and when my brother saw him he tried to seduce him and get his attention, But dad really wants to do it with me but my brother insisted.

I went near them and tried to get my dad's attention so that I could save my brother and at the same time have that irresistible sensation again, But my brother pushed me and whispered furiously that I should go back to my bed. If look could kill I would have died when he stared at me. I went back to bed I kept on looking at what they are doing... I don't know but I started rubbing my disk on my pillow and my brother saw me doing that while I'm staring at them. He looks angry but I don't care. I kept on rubbing my dick until I cummed.

In the morning my brother and I argued secretly and he kept on telling me that what I did was wrong. "I don't understand you!!! I did it because I don't want him to touch you!" I told him. He seems aghast and slapped me after hearing my words. One late afternoon my dad approached me again and started touching me. My brother was not around at that time. I don't know but I felt excited. He started touching me my dick and fiddling it.

I just can't resist the sensation that I began to pull his hair again. I pounded his mouth roughly and enjoying the sensation I am getting. I even started moaning and it really felt so fucking good. I was about to cum when suddenly the door banged and it opened. My brother was looking furious wearing his school uniform. I was surprised I didn't expect him to be back so soon because he told me last night that he'd be late for home since he needs to attend a school activity.

He shouted so loud and called my mom who is with him when they arrived. My mom went in our room and saw what my Dad was doing. She started beating him with a soft whisk broom, While my brother is beating me with his shoes. That memory stayed with me until now and I still feel guilty about it. Sometimes I blame myself for ruining our family but my brother keeps on reminding me that it was not fault.

It was mid September when President Rodrigo Duterte announced a nationwide lockdown. My brother seems really frustrated after hearing the news. The money he received from his agency is no longer enough to feed us. He called our aunties in the state and asked for help. That night my brother was so preoccupied on how he could find ways to earn money. He stayed awake till 12am. It was raining and it's getting cold. My brother slept naked so I stood up to cover him with the blanket.

The lights are off but the light from the electric post outside illuminates inside the room. I noticed that my brother is having an erection. He was deeply sleeping but his cock is so hard. I've seen him naked so many times but something felt different this time that I started approaching his bed and getting near his cook to have a good look. "How did it became this big?" I asked myself. I am used to seeing it when it's not hard so I was really curious how did it grew so thick and long.

#gay story #gaylife #gayboy #gay #kuya #confession

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translations-by-aiimee · 3 years

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Dig a Grave to Dig Out a Ghost - Chapter 18

Original Title: 挖坟挖出鬼

Genres: Drama, Horror, Mystery, Supernatural, Yaoi

This translation is based on multiple MTLs and my own limited knowledge of Chinese characters. If I have made any egregious mistakes, please let me know.

Chapter Index

Chapter 18 - Memories

Lin Yan was afraid that the professor was going to run away. When the event was over, he didn't even take the time to change his clothes. He called over to little Daoist priest to tell him he could leave first, then rushed to the backstage lounge. The crowd trying to leave completely blocked the exit. Lin Yan wasn't able to get out for a while. Behind him was a swarm of school reporters, sweating profusely as they followed.

"Excuse me! Coming through!" He wasn't sure whose foot he stepped on in his rush, but the girl in front of him turned around and gave him a sharp look.

"Lin Yan!" a clear voice rang out. Lin Yan looked up and saw Weiwei standing at the door with a red staff badge hanging around her neck.

Lin Yan didn't care anymore about feeling embarrassed while he hurried through the crowd without any organized manner. He shouted at Weiwei: "Can you do me a favour? This is urgent!"

"It's my birthday next week, come over for dinner!" Weiwei shouted on her tiptoes.

"Okay, whatever, help stop the crowd behind me!"

Lin Yan ran as fast as he could straight down the corridor, stumbling from time to time over the hem of his clothes. When he burst into the backstage VIP room completely dishevelled, he realized that he had been worried for nothing. The professor hadn't planned on sneaking away at all. He was seated on the sofa and had waited for him, sipping his tea.

"You came? Sit down."

Lin Yan clutched his chest and nodded, breathing too heavily to speak.

The lounge was decorated in a very stylish way, with arc-shaped floor-to-ceiling French windows, beige wallpaper, and light brown soft leather sofas that looked like they were worth a lot of money. The school had always been willing to spend money on entertaining guests. The professor poured a glass of water for Lin Yan and pointed to the single-seater sofa opposite of him.

"You're Lin Yan, who came to us for an internship before, right? You performed well today. You've got guts and have a good mind." The professor pondered for a moment: "I thought you'd come find me sooner or later. I didn't expect that you would get back here so soon. "

"Do you know me?" A series of questions popped up in his mind. Lin Yan suppressed the urge to outright address his issue. He apologized for the outburst just then, and then said seriously: "I did here for that internship. This is very important to me, please tell me everything you know."

The professor nodded slightly: "I can probably guess what happened. So, I'll speak slowly. Listen carefully. If there's any useful information, I'll tell you." He sighed and looked out the window. He spoke softly: "The fact that you are still standing here in good shape is already much better than the person who came before you."

Lin Yan looked back at Xiao Yu, who was holding his hand tightly, standing ignorantly.

The floor-to-ceiling windows were facing the path outside the auditorium. The students must use this path to get to the dormitories. In the night, boys and girls walked down it together in large groups. I don’t know who yelled: "The river flows eastward, the stars in the sky look to the Big Dipper!*" The professor smiled, turned his face to Lin Yan, and recalled: "I was about the same age as you when I first entered the tomb. It was a good time to be young."

*(Song lyrics from "Hao Han Ge" by Liu Huan)

"Young people don't know what's important. . ."

The professor spoke very coherently, as if he had been wanted to say all this for many years. Lin Yan even felt that he was using this as an opportunity to reminisce about his nostalgic youth. But when the professor painted the scene back to Lin Yan, it sent a chill down Lin Yan's spine.

Twenty-five years ago, a group of coal miners in Jinxiang County accidentally collapsed a mineshaft while they were hacking away. They removed some jade plates and funerary wooden figurines from inside the hole, which turned out to be the entrance tunnel of an underground tomb. Once the county head official learned about this tomb, he blocked off the mausoleum and reported the news to the central government. At that time, China was still a novice in both archaeological technology and cultural relic preservation, and it was still difficult to excavate many imperial tombs. Therefore, this cultural Ming Dynasty tomb was handed over to the university, and a team of several master's students hired some local volunteers and rushed to Jinxiang.

This group of people included the professor and Lin Yan’s current supervisor. When preparing the materials for the tomb, the professor and Lin Yan both found some strange information. He strangely discovered that whether it were the county chronicles, the local chronicles, or genealogical records, there was no record of the tomb's owner. One of the workers on the team claimed to be a master of fengshui. After seeing the mausoleum, he said that it would be impossible to excavate. The earth's meridians formed a breeding ground for negative energy. The evil spirits attracted to the space were too dense to bury people. The owner of the tomb wouldn't be able to find peace after death. Not to mention the misfortune it would bring future generations. However, most of the students were young and energetic. They were eager to try after seeing the exquisitely carved jade artifacts. Without much consideration, they went directly to the tomb with tools and equipment.

"Strange events started after that." The professor adjusted his glasses and grimaced: "We should have listened to the warnings, but we didn't believe in evil at the time."

First, the four chickens brought to ward off evil spirits died overnight. When the underground tomb gate was opened, the scaffold collapsed, and an 18-year-old fell and broke his right hand. Everyone thought it was an accident, but from the time they entered the tomb, all those involved in the excavation had nightmares whenever they closed their eyes. Every night they dreamed that they were dying to the point that no one dared try to sleep anymore. Fatigue and constant fear made everyone’s fighting spirit die off after only a week.

"What happened after that?" Lin Yan looked back at Xiao Yu in surprise. He thought he had been tormented thoroughly by him, but he hadn't even seen half of this ghost's ferociousness yet.

"After entering the main chamber, we found many valuable cultural relics beside the coffin, but they were poorly preserved. We could only brush off the embroideries. Watching the treasures that we brought out so easily blacken and carbonize the moment the sunlight hit them was the fatal blow to our spirits. I cried miserably, but everyone was equally depressed and even fearful. No one had the energy to comfort me."

The professor's hand shifted on the windowpane, leaving behind a damp handprint. "There seemed to be some kind of energy in that tomb that could make people fall into despair. We worked hard and sang to make ourselves feel more brave, but it was still useless. A rural volunteer girl went crazy on the ninth morning and smashed her husband's head in with a machete while everyone could only stand in shock."

"Blood sprayed all over the bricks on the top of the tomb, and it was dripping everywhere. The woman put her husband's head in front of the blank memorial plaque, kowtowed three times, and sat on the ground convulsing, laughing eerily, while laughing and shouting a name." The professor looked at Lin Yan and asked, "Do you know what name it was?"

Lin Yan took a dazed step back. He wanted to break away from the hand holding his, but Xiao Yu held it tighter, not giving him a chance to escape.

"It was Xiao Yu. Who exactly is Xiao Yu? I searched through both the official and unofficial records, but I couldn't find any record that mentioned this name." The professor's expression became painful: "We gave the woman a consolation fee to settle the matter. After she took the money, she laughed for a while before she raised her machete and slashed it down across her neck. The blood was sprayed onto the memorial plaque. When she fell, only a thin piece of skin kept her head attached to her body. At that time, people didn't know much about archaeology. At first glance, some of the students were okay, but the hired volunteers were all scared away, saying that we dug up the grave of the dead, and this was retribution for it."

"The last person who left was the fengshui guy. He told me that the tomb had no fengshui. The owner of the tomb had died violently. Nothing could approach the tomb through the evil energy breeding ground. This resentment built up over a long time. The woman's body had been filled with too much Yin energy and she was the first to fall prey to the ghost."

"The man left. The students didn't want to go, but they were still having nightmares every time they. They tried to stick it out for a week before packing their bags and returning to school. No one else died. The first time the lead took over, he wouldn't even touch the coffin. It was a disappointment for everyone."

Lin Yan imagined the beheading. His face grew pale, and his stomach felt sick.

"Are you alright? You don't look well." The professor seemed to catch on to the younger's expression, and pointed to Lin Yan's cup: "Drink some water. Take a break then you can listen some more."

Lin Yan shook his head and asked, "Was it really like the fengshui master said?"

The professor hesitated for a while, and his fingers scribbled across a section of thin vapor he exhaled onto the glass. Two words appeared on the glass: "Xiao Yu." As if he didn't want to see it, the professor wiped it away and shook his head: "I have seen a lot of weird things throughout my career. The demon and ghost theory is not unfounded, but I think that the tomb might be some kind of spiritual formation. In ancient times, emperors and generals did everything they could to prevent their bodies from being destroyed. Many strange arts and techniques also emerged. It is possible that the woman was already delirious and so was the first to lose her mind in the consuming and the gloomy atmosphere in the tomb."

Lin Yan imagined the shadowy chamber with two headless bodies lying on the ground. He could barely squeeze out a wry smile: "What does this whole thing have to do with me?"

"I'm getting to that part." The professor sadly lowered his head: "Young people have never been willing to admit defeat. Since then, I've been very interested in the history of the Ming Dynasty Chenghua period. At first, I wanted to find out the identity of the tomb owner but I really fell in love with the history, and, 20 years later, I became an expert in the field. But long-term research in any field will encounter roadblocks. I was troubled by problem for nearly two months, and finally decided to go to the Ming Tomb again."

Lin Yan asked puzzledly: "Are you not afraid something will happen again?"

The professor shrugged: "No way, the large amount of untouched cultural relics inside was too tempting. The team left before anyone had even touched the coffin the last time I was there. I've never gotten over it."

"Be considerate of the obsessions of an old man who has been involved in academia for most of his life." The professor said: "When the newspaper published the news about the excavation of the Ming Tomb again, a message came from my secretary saying that someone was willing to help me. He understood fengshui. If something went wrong, I could turn to him."

"I'm not the same young man who spent a whole year studying about the tomb. I ran all over the country all day and night. I was too busy to take care of it, so I asked the secretary to keep in touch with him."

"Later on, something did happened. It was exactly the same as before. After entering the tomb door, everyone was inexplicably depressed and paranoid, and soon began to have nightmares. I was so afraid that the tragedy would happen again, so I had to ask the person who knew fengshui for help. He told me that I need to find a person who shares the same horoscope as the evil creature in order to make it stop. Then he gave me a birth date and said that he could find someone with the same birth date horoscope."

Lin Yan had already guessed the answer. He pointed at himself and hesitated to confirm: "Me?"

The professor nodded: "That birth year made me think of a student. I asked your supervisor. He said that he had a friend’s son who was looking for an internship, and his own student, Lin Yan. It was just an extreme coincident that your birthday fell onto the right date."

"You know what happened after that." The professor looked at the path outside the window. The students were almost all gone now. The moonlight didn't reach the path, instead only reflecting the black shadows of the trees that were swaying back and forth in the night breeze. "If you want to ask me who the owner of the tomb is, I can only tell you that I don't know. It's shameful; after more than 20 years, I have revisited this topic year after year, but I still haven't made any progress."

"If you have anything else to ask, please go ahead. As soon as you say the name 'Xiao Yu', I knew it was you. You've got a lot of guts to throw my things like that." The professor laughed, "I was just like that when I was young. I had trouble with authority back then. It took a lot to keep up with me."

Lin Yan hurriedly lowered his head and apologized. He kept thinking that it was this File Folder dragged him into this mess, but it didn't seem like he did it intentionally. . . How much did he know about what happened after? Thinking of this, Lin Yan raised his head and asked, "Don't you want to hear how I know Xiao Yu's name?"

The professor waved his hand and relaxed his expression: "People my age don't want to listen to these ghost and monster stories. It's bad luck. I know you're fine when I see you standing here. I didn't discuss it with you. I blame myself for not discussing this with you sooner. I'll try my best to explain anything you need, but the rest. . ." The professor said, spreading his hands, expressing that there was nothing he could do.

During their talk, the professor's personal secretary came in and urged him to leave, saying that the car was ready and the school officials were all waiting downstairs. The professor nodded to the secretary, turned around and asked Lin Yan, "Is there anything else you want to know?"

Lin Yan felt stuck. The most renowned Ming historians in China had no answers. Did he really have no choice but to wait out the three months, waiting for this ghost to remember his life experience and tell him his wish. But what he couldn't remember? Would Lin Yan be forced to accompany him for eternity as a ghost?

As he pondered, a thought popped up, like a small copper hammer hitting the glass with a crisp sound. Lin Yan stopped the professor who was packing up and asked: "You. . . you mentioned that the fengshui guy had mentioned a horoscope date. I happened to be looking for an internship at that time, so it all worked out, right?" Lin Yan's voice was trembling with excitement: "This is too much of a coincidence. It's almost like he was waiting for me. . . Where is he now? How did he know something would happen in the Ming Tomb?"

The professor suddenly stopped, frowning and thought it over: "You're right to be suspicious. At that time, I was busy planning the excavation and didn't care much about it. . ." The secretary who was waiting at the door shouted: " Xiao Liu, do you remember that fortune teller? Give me his contact information."

The young girl flipped through the folder in her arms, and replied: "That person never contacted me directly. He had been passing messages through a young guy who was new to the team. I'll look into it for you. I'll get back to you about in in the next few days."

The professor's face sank, and just like Lin Yan, he had no answer. He whispered to him: "It'll should be easy to track him down." He patted Lin Yan on the shoulder: "I'll help you out with this, don't worry. "He took out a pen and left Lin Yan's his phone number, and the corner of his mouth ticked up: "I still owe you your prize. I'll give it to you the next time we meet."

When he left, the crowd was gone. The corridor was empty. The old custodian didn’t even turn on the ceiling light to save electricity. Only the wall lamp glowed a dull yellow. Lin Yan’s face drained of all colour. He suddenly felt like he was in a horror movie. He was the lead actor stumbling along the wall in a terrifying corridor.

The professor's story made him feel incredibly afraid. Behind him was a ghost, a murderer who put people to death in a cruel and bloody way. He didn't even dare to look behind him. He was afraid that when he turned around, a ghost covered in bloodstains would be there, grinning sinisterly at him through a veil of long hair, saying: It's your turn.

Lin Yan's breathing became heavier and heavier. When he couldn't resist the urge to run away, he was suddenly pushed harshly against the wall. His body was wrenched around. Lin Yan raised his head and squeezed his eyes shut.

#dig a grave to dig out a ghost #dig a grave to dig out a ghost translation #chinese bl #chinese novel #english translation #danmei #danmei novel #yaoi #yaoi novel

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purplesurveys · 3 years

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1277

Who are you most nervous about introducing potential significant others to? Ooooh moving forward, probably Angela hahahaha I have no idea how I’d break it to her if ever I do start seeing somebody again. She’s well aware of all the shit that I let slide so she might get intense with the scrutineering.

What is the most exciting thing about your life right now? Just the fact that I feel on top of the world these days. My days of being depressed and picking at my insecurities seem to be far behind me and the change has looked to be apparent coming from friends who’ve told me I seem happier, louder these days.

What was the most important non-academic thing you learned in high school? To not be scared to fight harder for the things you believe in or what make up your identity, coming from having to hide a same-sex relationship during that period. That feeling of being constricted and having to hide to stay on some conservative seniors’ good graces really pissed me off so high school was really crucial in letting me discover just how much I’d be willing to fight and test the waters to be able to live as me.

Have you ever had a job that deeply affected your personal life? How so and do you still work there? Hmm no, not really. If anything my job is one of the things that helped make me a lot livelier and happier.

Do you have a “one who got away”? It felt that way at the start when my view was still skewed, but it didn’t take long until I realized she was not a loss at all.

If you were in a superhero movie, would you be the hero or the villain? Hero.

If you found a mouse in your house, would you be frightened? Mice or rats are the literal worst fucking thing I could see in my house. I definitely see myself making a big deal out of it lmao, especially rats.

Have you ever tried to perform magic tricks? Nobody ever taught me, so no.

Can you do more with a yo-yo than just "go up and down"? Nah, which kinda makes me feel ashamed because considering it was a Filipino who invented the modern yo-yo, I feel like it should be my responsibility to know a few tricks LOL.

What is one form of technology that you wouldn't be able to live without? Instant messenger.

Did you get an allowance, growing up? Why or why not? Starting high school. Before that I was living in our family’s duplex, so my grandma could make packed meals for all of us – not to mention the fact that my parents were also still on their way to establishing themselves at their respective workplaces so we weren’t all that well-off yet.

When we moved into our own place, we started with my mom making our meals but eventually it just proved to be time-consuming and a lot of work considering she also had a job to go to. With that and the fact that both my parents at that point already got a couple of promotions, we switched to allowance.

Would you rather go to a water park or an amusement park? Why? Amusement parks though I would only probably head to the safer rides and food stalls with all the deep-fried offerings haha. I cannot handle more intense rides. On the other hand, water parks have always sounded nasty to me.

What is one instrument you wouldn't mind learning how to play? Piano.

What's the longest amount of time you've had to wait in line for something? The stupid LTO, because you can never count on government agencies to be efficient. Technically my whole time in there took a couple of stages, but all in all I spent eight hours there.

What is something that you would like to learn more about? Korean. I just graduated from my Basic Korean 1 class but I already have plans to enroll in the following course, since I seemed to do well and I want to keep the momentum going.

What is something that one of your family member collects? Mom has a large collection of chef-themed figurines and other sorts of trinkets like a chef timer, shot glasses, etc - but mostly the figurines - that she has displayed in a glass case. I should keep that in mind for when I start Christmas shopping, actually...she hasn’t updated that collection in a long time. Thanks for the idea!

Have you ever moved to a new school before? If so, how did it feel? No, not in the middle of the same period since I went to the same school from kinder to high school for 14 years. I only “moved” when I started college. Like I’ve said in previous surveys, it felt freeing to finally not under be the hands of an environment ran by...well, Catholics. It was a culture shock to see rallies everywhere, to find out I could wear short shorts or even go to school naked if I wanted to, and to see boys in my class (I went to an all-girls), but it was all the good kind of shock.

Have you ever legitimately forgotten to do homework? Always, because I never wrote them down.

Do you enjoy autumn leaves or spring flowers more? Why? I experience neither season.

Depending on where you live, why might a day of school get canceled? Typhoon.

If you could meet any fictional character from a book, who would it be? Melanie Hamilton from Gone with the World.

What are some common places that people tour when they come to your city? I rarely see foreigners here since my area isn’t particularly known for tourism; most go to the island provinces like Cebu, Aklan, Palawan, etc. If I had to recommend spots here, I’d tell them to go for Pinto and maybe the rooftop bars that offer a view of Manila’s skyline.

What's one food that you did not enjoy as a child, but do as an adult? Chicken curry, which I used to dread.

Would you rather have a mermaid tail, a fairy's wings or a unicorn's horn? I guess the wings just because I feel like it’s the only practical one.

What is an animal that you'd like to have as a pet but it's not allowed? I don’t think that way about animals I can’t keep as pets anyway.

What are some things that you do to make the world a better place? I always clean up at restaurants (my mom doesn’t understand why I do it because “the servers are here for a reason, Robyn”) but I always see the relief on their faces when they see I’ve stacked up the plates and cups so I don’t see a reason to stop doing it. I keep the door open for people who happen to enter/exit a building the same time as me, share dog adoption posts, don’t make a fuss about or towards a shop staff who messes up...things like that. I hope it’s able to help, even if just in a small way.

Has the last person you had sex with ever had sex with someone besides you? I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised if she has already.

What’s your favorite store at your mall? We have several malls within the vicinity but I like frequenting NCAT.

Have you ever done a workout DVD? No but my mom is fond of those.

Who usually takes out the trash in your family? Either of my parents.

What song are you currently obsessed with? My Universe is soooooo good. It’s Coldplay’s classic sound but they somehow managed to perfectly blend in BTS’ style as well, so I love how it turned out.

When you go fishing, do you make someone else get the fish off the hook? I've never gone fishing.

Do you take any prescription meds? Nope.

What happens if you don’t take them? Who was the last person you dreamt about? My dad.

Do you prefer your tea sweetened or unsweetened? Sweetened, though I don’t usually actively look for iced tea. I’d have it if it was served, but I don’t typically order it for myself.

How often do you honk your horn? As long as I am annoyed, which gives my mom a mini heart attack every time because she insists I just let people have their way to avoid getting into fights. Sometimes when she’s driving and someone’s being stupid on the road I lurch forward to do the honking for her and it pisses her off soooooooooo much but it also gets the job done so *shrug*

Do you have any children? If so, names and ages? I don’t.

Have your parents ever witnessed you doing something inappropriate? What? TMI but I almost got caught doing the m-word once but my reflexes were at lightning speed that day so when my door opened I was able to fix myself up and appear as though nothing was happening lol. My mom also saw a hickey on me once but I was able to veer the conversation away when she started inquiring.

Did you get babysat a lot as a kid? No, I did the babysitting.

If you were the principal of a school, what would you do differently? Actually deal with teachers who mistreat or make issues towards their students. I had several teachers I know didn’t like me but I could never do anything about it because there was no way in hell the school was going to take my side.

Are you doing anything fun tomorrow? Continued from yesterday. If I took this question yesterday to refer to today I would’ve answered yes because we actually have a really fun PR stunt scheduled for execution today, wherein we get to sponsor someone’s whole wedding from food to flowers to the host and fillm crew :D :D But tomorrow is just Monday so the real answer to this is no.

What is something you'd like to receive as a housewarming gift? I dunno the usual housewarming gifts, but I would appreciate anything practical, or anything that you’ll need at the least expected times, like batteries or even like Sticky Tack.

How old were you when you first experienced the effects of puberty? Oooh I was an early bird – I was 9 when I could first tell my first period was on its way; it came a month after I turned 10.

What is your least favorite holiday, and why? I don’t dislike any holiday because they all mean a day off work lol.

What were some outdoor games you played as a child? We usually played piko (hopscotch), our local version of freeze tag that we dubbed “Ice ice water” for whatever reason, and a garter game that we call 10-20. Dodgeball was a favorite during recess and lunch, too.

Did you accompany your parents on "Take Your Child to Work" Day? That’s not observed here, but my mom did use to take me and my siblings to her first workplace. Are cemeteries peaceful to you, or do they freak you out? They’re actually more interesting to me than anything else. I like learning about the different lives of many different people, even if I only technically know them by their birthday and date of death. Sometimes the inscriptions would be more detailed and tell more about their life, sometimes I’d come across babies who only lived a few days...and it’s just interesting to have those glimpses into life.

Which ancient civilization would you be interested in learning more about? Filipino, because Western colonization destroyed proof of most of it.

Do you have better long-term memory or short-term memory? Long.

What was the last situation that made you cry? Describe. I cried this morning. Nothing bad or heavy, I just found myself thinking again about my mental state last year.

Which forest animal would you be most afraid to encounter? Anything that wouldn’t hesitate to tear my limbs apart.

Do you believe in anything supernatural? (ie: spirits, etc) No.

Has anyone close to you ever gone to war? No. The closest link I have to the military, other than my dead great-grandfather, is Angela’s uncle who’s like a general or like a colonel or something, idk titles.

Have you ever experienced altitude sickness? Yeah, occasionally. Pressure in the ear is a bigger nuisance to me, though.

Is there anything, any event, you wish you could remember more clearly? The last time I saw my grandfather. My only clear memory of him that day was stepping out of the house to leave (my mom and I were visiting) and him sending me off with the message to always be kind and good. If I had known I would never see him again, I never would’ve left.

Have you ever rubbed anyone’s feet? Hmm no, not that I can recall.

If you had to get advice from someone of the opposite sex, who would you go to? I’d go to Hans for certain advice, but not for every single situation. He’s the only person that comes to mind.

What was the last new food/drink that you tried? So last Wednesday I finally got to try this Instagram-based doughnut shop that I’ve been eyeing since August and it turned out to be even MUCH BETTER THAN EXPECTEDDDDDD. Like yeah their photos were always mouthwatering but I didn’t expect it to taste as good as it looks, since most pretty food I’ve encountered usually end up just tasting meh. Anywho, I got two orders of their sampler box and they served me their specialty bacon doughnut, signature brown butter, and a bunch of their chocolate and peanut butter variants and I loved every single fucking thing.

Have you had a good day today or was yesterday better? Oh it’s hard to tell, it’s only 9:05 AM. Both days might be uneventful, though.

Have you ever played Sudoku? I don’t actually get how to play it hahaha. I feel like I’m too stupid for sudoku.

Do you ever take surveys for money? I tried it last year when applying for jobs was still a bitch for me, but the thing is most of those surveys look for employed participants so there was rarely ever a survey that fit me anyway.

Do you like Barbie or Bratz better? Bratz.

Do you prefer purple or green grapes? I don’t like grapes.

Who was the last person that made you laugh? Idk, probs one of the boys since I was watching videos of them earlier today.

Where does your best friend live? A nearby city.

Who did you last confide in? Angela.

Does your car have an alarm? Sure.

Where was your mom born? Somewhere in Metro Manila.

What can always make you feel better no matter what? My dogs.

What is something you’ll never eat again? Why? I don’t think there is anything. I feel like I’m always bound to retry things and that I would be open to doing so, even fruits. One thing I’m firm about never drinking again, though, is coconut water. Get that SHIT away from me.

What is currently happening that is scaring you? I’m not feeling scared these days.

Have you ever found a stranger’s note somewhere? If so, what did it say? Probably. But nothing sticks out.

#survey #surveys

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ckret2 · 4 years

Text

Gigan Invades Earth

I got a request on ko-fi for “something Gigan-Ghidorah,” and I don’t have any freestanding Gigan/Ghidorah fic plans right now, all my current plans are from farther forward in the chronology of the fics I’m currently writing.

So I was like, okay, I’ll just write a few scenes from, uh... like, sixteen fics ahead of where I am right now.

So here’s a few scenes from way ahead of where we currently are! I haven’t edited it because this fic ain’t done and ain’t gonna be for a long time, but enjoy the preview.

###

First contact was made on a Monday at exactly ten in the morning, local Central Zone time—as convenient a time as any for first contact to happen: late enough in the morning that just about everyone was up and about but early enough to ensure the arrival would dominate all but the early morning news broadcasts; and at the start of the work week so that all of the white-collar governmental sorts who were going to have to deal with this were rested from the weekend.

He'd planned it that way.

One moment, the sky above Constitution Plaza in Mexico City was clear; the next moment, a smooth object hurdled down from the sky so fast that passersby didn't even have time to send out panicked messages about their impending doom before it stopped, hovering, seeming to glower down on the National Palace. A thunderclap followed in the wake of its sudden stop, traveling out as a deep rumble across the city.

It sat there, a dark grey and black mass of machinery thrumming in the air, for exactly five minutes: long enough to attract the attention of damn near half the continent but not long enough for the panicking politicians inside the National Palace to start rallying the troops. Then a deep, slightly synthesized-sounding voice boomed out of the ship. It was clearly audible for blocks around in every direction:

"Buenos días. Vengo en son de paz. Llévame hasta tu líder."

Good morning. I come in peace. Take me to your leader.

Astute observers noted two things about the new arrival:

It had a sense of humor.

And it had done its research.

###

"On behalf of Monarch," Serizawa said, his Spanish stilted and slow over the video call, "I am honored that you have invited us to witness this historic occasion. But I don't understand what place Monarch has in a moment of... of interstellar diplomacy."

The video conference was cut into four windows: Serizawa Ishiro, who'd pulled on a button-up shirt for the call but who beneath the frame of the camera was sitting up in bed, still on bed rest from his near-death experience during the Titans' mass awakening; Xochitl Flores Rosales, scientist at Outpost 56-B monitoring Rodan and Ghidorah, and Monarch's official liaison to the Mexican government; a representative of the Mexican government, a stern-looking middle-aged woman with deep frown lines creasing her brown face, someone whom Monarch had never worked with before but who had been available to get on the line with them; and a live feed of the interview being conducted between the flustered Mexican president and the alien.

The alien took up most of Constitution Plaza; even sitting, it towered over the four-story National Palace, and every other nearby building. Footage taken of it standing when it had descended from its ship put it at fully a third taller than Godzilla. It was recognizably bipedal, seemed vaguely avian or reptilian, and called to mind comparisons to penguins, turtles, chicken, and lizards. Fully half of its body was covered in metallic-looking prosthetics or armor—unless that was how its body naturally looked? It was far too soon to know. They didn't even know what planet it came from.

"Unless you called us because of the size of our visitor?" Serizawa ventured. In the fourth screen, muted, cameras set atop the National Palace craned back to look at the alien's head. Its face was shaded beneath the spacecraft the loomed over several city blocks; only the glow of the red goggles-like visor that seemed to serve as its eyes helped illuminate its face. "Despite its scale, I don't think it's wise to count it as a titan."

"But it's already counted itself as a titan," the government representative said.

While Serizawa raised his eyebrows in surprise, Xochitl hurried to pull up a video clip—she'd been in the call longer than Serizawa and had watched more of the interview. "Here," she said. "One of the first questions he answered."

The president's voice was tinny and small as he asked through speakers, "What is your name?"

"Nothing you can pronounce," the alien said, then launched into what was clearly a prepared comment: "But the largest citizens of your planet—you call them 'titan' because they're titanic? I have the most in common with them, and since I'm gigantic—call me Gigan." His metal beak seemed to curve into a smirk.

Serizawa watched silently, hand over his mouth in concentration. Somewhat abashed, he said, "Gigan speaks better Spanish than me."

Xochitl laughed weakly. The government rep barely managed to crack a smile.

"And called the titans citizens of our planet," Serizawa went on. "Not animals, or residents—citizens. As fluent as Gigan is, I doubt it's a mistranslation."

"Maybe it misunderstands their status on Earth," the government rep said.

Serizawa said, "Or maybe Gigan is trying to tell us that we misunderstand their status."

The clip continued as Gigan answered another question: "I don't have a gender. I don't reproduce like species on your planet do. But most of you humans respect men more, don't you? So you can refer to me with male grammar."

Serizawa nodded slowly. "Yes, I think he understands how things work on Earth just fine."

Xochitl laughed harder.

"So that's why we thought Monarch should be involved," the government rep said.

"I understand now. We'll offer whatever assistance we can." Serizawa nodded at the clip. "Should we return to the live interview?"

"In a moment," the government rep said. "To get a full understanding of the situation, you should know why Gigan says he's come to Earth."

Serizawa nodded and focused on the clip again.

The president was asking, "Why have you come to Earth? Diplomacy? To trade resources?"

Gigan said, "I want to purchase some real estate."

###

He was in the market for a few acres near the gulf coast of Mexico—"just enough space for me to put my ship down and stretch my legs," he said.

He didn't represent any worlds or governments. He wasn't setting up an embassy. To his knowledge, no one else would be following after him. It was just him, a lone traveler in a lonely part of the galaxy. Most of the major population centers, he said, were way to heck and gone on the other side of the galaxy—and then he moved the conversation onward without elaborating on these alien civilizations.

He wanted to get his land the legal way—the human way. With currency. He reassured them that he understood currency, money, markets, capitalism, yes, all that—they all existed other places, with minor variations. He dealt in money most of the time. He had a job. He said he was an interstellar freelance mediator. When two parties had a conflict, one hired him to resolve the dispute.

He didn't intend to sell the fabulous secrets to interstellar space travel. He had a ballpark idea of how much that info was worth to humans, and he didn't need near that much to buy a few acres. He offered raw materials: enormous hunks of raw iron and gold. He'd harvested a few asteroids on the way into Earth. Effortless for him, impossible for humans.

Yes, he could accept money from the deal. He had a bank account. Or PayPal or Venmo, if they preferred. He also had accounts on YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and Weibo. When he gave his usernames, the accounts were immediately flooded with thousands of new followers. He mostly lurked, retweeted titan pictures from Monarch, trolled flat earthers by informing them he was an alien currently orbiting Earth, and three weeks ago got in a heated debate on a M*A*S*H subreddit. He started responding to messages from new followers while still speaking with the Mexican president with no outward change in his demeanor or visible Internet connection.

By early afternoon, they had agreed—in concept—to Gigan's proposed sale of metals and purchase of land; in three days they would meet again to give Gigan a list of potential properties for him to choose from.

"And on behalf of the people of Mexico and the entire human race," said the president, reading off a statement that a speechwriter had prepared for him two hours earlier, "I would like to thank you for this peaceful and mutually fruitful first contact—"

"'First contact'?" Gigan cut in.

The president stammered to a stop. After a moment, he said, "Yes, that's... that's our phrase for our first meeting with intelligent alien life."

"I know what it means," Gigan said. "But I'm not your first contact. Some of my friends are already here."

Flabbergasted, the president asked, "Are—are they? Where?"

"I'm sure you've already heard of them," Gigan said. "We're former coworkers. What is it you've been calling them—Ghidrah, Gidora?"

as he asked the question.

And suddenly the entire meeting looked different.

There was something sadistically delighted in Gigan's glowing visor as he basked in the humans' stunned silence. "Speaking of, I meant to visit them before I headed back to orbit," he said. "Do you know if they're at home?"

###

It had been eons since Gigan had last seen the triple threat.

Eons since he'd grabbed himself a space ship and taken off across the galaxy to attempt to track them down.

Eons spent combing back and forth over the same five hundred cubic light-years where their trail went cold, trying to figure out where they'd vanished to—if they'd left that patch of space, or if they were still drifting through space in the heart of an unfallen meteor, or if they had died on some lonely planet...

Until now. Until he'd found traces of their signature in this little solar system. Until he'd found the one populated planet, jacked into the primitive locals' communication system, and found it riddled with pictures and recordings of the trio.

It had been so long since Gigan had seen them, the material of the only physical photo he had of them had long since corroded and crumbled. He'd digitized, reprinted, redigitized, and re-reprinted the image dozens of times, maybe hundreds. He was afraid his own electronic memories of them might have also decayed over time, byte-sized glitches switching 1s for 0s and 0s for 1s until the memories distorted, the images changed, and he forgot what they looked like.

But when he saw them through the humans' news feeds, they looked exactly how he remembered. Even compressed through humans' primitive sound recording processes, they sounded the same.

It had been eons—and now he'd be face to face with them in just a few minutes. He'd left his ship in orbit and was flying down to the island they'd been hanging out on under his own power.

And now he couldn't put off asking himself the question he'd been trying to avoid for millennia:

What if they didn't want to see him?

They were the ones who'd run off, after all—and he'd never found out why. Maybe they hated the sight of him. Maybe they would to try to kill him. Maybe by now they'd completely forgotten about him.

He could see a glint of gold on the island below. Sparks sizzled through his system.

No time left for doubt. He waited until he was low enough to be within hearing range, and bellowed at top volume, "Hey! You worthless, spineless, heartless featherweight! What's the big idea, bailing on me like that?!"

They started, shifting from reclining on top of their folded-up wings to crouched anxiously, long necks whipping around to search for the unexpected noise. It was Lefty who looked up first and spotted Gigan; and faster than Gigan could react, they were launching straight up to meet him in midair.

He'd definitely forgotten how fast they could take off. "Whoa, wait—"

they crashed into him, getting him in the gut with a double head butt; and then tried to grapple him with their claws while he was stunned. He barely managed to weave out of their way.

"You damn loser!" One jaw snapped at him, and another demanded, "Did you come all this way to ride on our coattails some more?!" Lightning crackled over their wings with every flap, the sky quickly clouding over.

"You wish! How's business been without me to handle finances for you, huh?"

They butted a forehead violently against his, static crackling back and forth over their skin. The rattling of their tails was nearly lost in a crackle of thunder.

They were happy to see him.

#godzilla #fanfic #my writing #(not stuffing this in all the usual tags since I haven't finished this yet)#(but if I don't stick this in ONE tag I'm not gonna find this later)#(if you try to read this and you don't know what's going on... it's because there's like 75 fics of context you haven't read)#(including 15 I haven't written yet)

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tinytourist · 3 years

Text

Look At All Those Chickens (And Sheep)

On Monday morning we drove to the Waitangi Treaty Grounds to learn more about New Zealand’s history and the relationship between the aboriginal Māori and the European settlers. The story here is similar to most places where Europeans settled; however, it’s different in the way that Kiwis make a real effort to recognize Māori culture, language, and traditions.

We learned that the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840 to institute British governance in NZ and establish peace and order. The document was intentionally mistranslated so that while the Māori believed they were just giving the British the right to govern them, the English version said that they were giving up their sovereignty. This treaty has been highly debated since its signing. The story that struck me the most was about Lord Bledisloe, a former governor general of NZ. In 1932, he purchased over 1,000 acres of land surrounding the treaty grounds and gave all of it back to the people, even though it’s prime real estate with a scenic view of the Bay of Islands. We need more government officials like him ASAP.

After finishing walking the grounds, we grabbed lunch to-go at a local fish and chips joint before heading to Waitangi Falls. There was a picnic bench in the parking lot for the waterfall so we decided to eat there. Wrong choice. We were immediately swarmed by chickens. They kept flying up on the table staring at us as we kept shooing them away. This resulted in us scarfing down our food before walking over to the falls where we were able to sit peacefully on top of the waterfall and meditate to the sound of the rushing water.

Once we felt relaxed, we drove a few hours to Ahipara where we checked into our YHA hostel. The hostel was composed of a collection of little cabins surrounded by beautiful flowers and foliage. We were only a few minutes walk to 90 Mile Beach, so we went for a little stroll before dinner. The tide was low and the water was surprisingly warm. We were even lucky enough to find a few abalone (pāua) shells sticking out of the sand on our way off of the beach.

Back at the hostel, we cooked up a big meal of pesto pasta with veggies and ate our dinner outside with a glass of wine. There was a TV with movies in the common area so Mary and I relaxed after dinner with a viewing of “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”.

The next day we made the hour and 45 minute trip up to Cape Reinga which is the northwestern most tip of the North Island. Our intent was to stop along the way at whatever attractions we noticed. That didn’t work out so well as there’s pretty much nothing to see between Ahipara and Cape Reinga. When we arrived, we walked down to the lighthouse, reading signs about the cape the whole way down. We learned that the cape is a sacred place for the Māori people as it is thought to be the point in which spirits jump off and begin their journey into the afterlife. From the cape, we were also able to see where the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific Ocean. The clash of the different bodies of water is evident from the constant white water and waves forming where they connect.

We ate our lunches at a local camping spot just a 15 minute drive from the cape and then headed back to Ahipara. On the way back we did make one stop for Real Fruit Ice Cream, which we were forced to eat in the car due to rain. Once we were back, we went for a swim at 90 Mile Beach and meditated in the sand.

The next day, we packed up our things and took one last stroll along 90 Mile Beach before making our way to the Waipoua Forest. Along the route, we passed by a cute town called Hokianga. Since we weren’t on any tight timeframe, we stopped to explore. I grabbed a coffee and we meditated on a dock where we saw the occasional fish leaping out of the water. We also stopped in an interesting art gallery where we both bought some artwork and connected with the American store owner. About 5 minutes down the road we ended up getting on a car ferry where we ate our lunches with the windows cracked. Soon enough, we made it to the forest which is filled with kauri trees. We were able to do two walks to see the largest and second largest of these great trees.

After enjoying the nature, we headed to our next Airbnb which was on a farm in Mamaranui. Upon arrival we were greeted by one of our hosts, Dennis, with a beer in hand. Mary and I relaxed until the other host, Julie, arrived to give us a farm tour. She showed us her two adorable babydoll lambs, collection of sheep, goats, and pigs, and let us participate in feeding them dinner. Next, she made us a tasty dinner of homemade pizza and garlic bread, topped off with complementary wine, which we enjoyed on the deck while watching the sunset over the farm.

The next morning, we got to bottle-feed the lambs and have some good chats with Julie and Den. I could not have imagined a better place to end our trip. The next thing we knew, we were back in Auckland for Christmas Eve. Alecia hosted a party at our place and we had a bunch of our expat friends over to celebrate since they were unable to be with their own families. We threw some food on the grill and enjoyed a lively white elephant gift exchange. Alecia even got ornaments for everyone and let us take turns decorating the tree. It was a lovely way to celebrate the holiday.

#new zealand #ahipara #cape reinga #hokianga #waipoua forest

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yasbxxgie · 4 years

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South Holland syrup maker poised to pick up market share from Aunt Jemima

Michele Hoskins felt a seismic shift for her company on a Tuesday morning in mid-June when Quaker Oats announced it was retiring the Aunt Jemima brand due to concerns about racial stereotypes.

“My life changed,” Hoskins said. “Our company changed. It brought awareness to us.”

Her South Holland-based company, Michele Foods, has been selling syrup and other products since 1984. Still, she has a tiny fraction of a market dominated by Aunt Jemima.

Hoskins saw her company’s profile suddenly elevated.

“The next day my tech guy called and said, ‘Your website has crashed,’” Hoskins said.

People were discovering her company on social media. After 35 years of hard work, she was an overnight sensation.

The Aunt Jemima brand dates back to 1889, according to Quaker Oats.

“I never in my wildest dreams thought that anything would happen that would make her do anything that would affect my company,” Hoskins said.

After building her business for 35 years, the south suburban entrepreneur is poised to expand her company’s operations.

“I should be in every major retail chain in the country. I should be able to supply customers who want my product,” she said.

Hoskins expects other competitors also will try to seize the chance to increase their share of the syrup market.

“I’m not going to take Aunt Jemima’s place. No one ever can, because she’s a different brand from a different era,” she said. “But if you’re looking for a minority company that sells in that category, I’m that. I think we should have the same opportunity as everyone else because we persevered.”

Hoskins said she launched her company in 1984 while she was going through a divorce and moving back into her parents’ home with her three young girls.

“I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” she said.

She decided to make syrup based on a secret recipe developed by her great-great-great-grandmother, America Washington.

“She was a slave who worked as a cook on a plantation,” Hoskins said. “The family she worked for did not like molasses. So she came up with this concoction of honey, churned butter and cream. It was delicious.”

Hoskins had her idea, but no clue how to start a business.

“I didn’t know anything about the food industry or product development,” she said.

She cooked up a batch on the stove and took it to local restaurants, whose owners told Hoskins the syrup separated and had to be reheated.

“I think at that point most people would have gotten discouraged,” Hoskins said.

She applied lessons she learned from teaching world religions at a private school.

“You can do anything if you put your mind to it,” she said. “I still believe that.”

Hoskins found someone to make her syrup so she could focus on marketing and distribution.

“I had a company at 35th and Kedzie that made the product for me and they would deliver it in 55-gallon drums in the alley,” she said.

She and her daughters would fill bottles and place handmade labels on them in her parents’ basement.

“I would take it around to neighborhood stores,�� Hoskins said.

Even though independent South Side retailers agreed to stock her product, no customers initially bought it.

“It wasn’t moving,” she said. “I would go in myself and buy it to create this illusion of movement.”

To expand her reach, she visited the corporate offices of Jewel Foods in Melrose Park. She asked to talk with a buyer.

“They had never seen anybody walk in like that,” she said. “I was the first minority supplier for Jewel stores.”

She expanded her line to three syrup flavors: butter pecan, maple crème and honey crème. She worked to get her products placed in Kroger, Publix, Safeway and other grocery stores across the country. Companies were eager to do business with her, she said.

“I realized who I am made a difference, because diversity was hot,” she said.

By 1990, after she had been featured on local TV news, she was contacted by Walmart, which was looking to increase its diversity, she said. Then she was contacted by Harpo Studios.

“Oprah was looking for women who had made their first million (dollars),” Hoskins said.

She appeared three different times on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” she said. The first appearance led to her getting called back for a second.

[Most read] Column: If Stephen Hawking is right about Earth’s end, keep an eye on the deer »

“(Oprah) asked me something and I said you create your own destiny,” Hoskins said. “That’s profound, right?”

Her business continued to grow. She supplied syrup to Denny’s restaurants, then Popeyes chicken. While networking at a conference, she received another call from Harper Studios. They had learned a viewer in Texas had planned to take her own life but was stopped by something she heard on the television.

“She heard, ‘create your own destiny,’ and stopped,” Hoskins said. The woman started her own business and wanted to thank the woman who inspired her. The two appeared together.

“That was a tearful show,” Hoskins said.

She was featured in newspapers and business magazines and developed a reputation as a savvy entrepreneur. During an interview in her South Holland office, she pointed out a magazine cover about her doing business with General Foods.

“I called up the head of General Foods and said I had done research on Bisquick,” she said. “Seventy percent of people who buy Bisquick use it to make pancakes, and you only have 2% market share in the African American community. “I didn’t have a pancake and General Foods didn’t have a syrup. I said, ‘I can get you some share in the African American community by my face.‘”

They partnered and offered a coupon where shoppers received discounts when they bought Bisquick and a Michele’s Foods syrup together, she said.

She reached out to Kellogg’s. The maker of Eggo frozen waffles and other breakfast products had no syrup brand of its own.

“They wanted a share because Aunt Jemima had 77% of the syrup market,” she said. “I helped them develop Eggo syrup. I did that because when they did that, it brought light to the syrup category.”

Aunt Jemima’s market dominance left little room for competition.

“The syrup category is a very unsaturated market,” she said. “There are certain products in retail where you don’t add to them, there’s no room for them, there’s no market share. It’s just a closed category.”

Aunt Jemima continues to dominate market share, with Mrs. Butterworth’s, Log Cabin and Hungry Jack distant competitors, according to 2019 market data published by Statista. Aunt Jemima sells about $500 million worth of syrup annually, Hoskins said.

“Aunt Jemima owned that category by her image and by the perception that she was African American,” Hoskins said. “A lot of us grew up on that not understanding anything about advertising.”

Brands like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben perpetuated stereotypes about Blacks, she said.

“People would walk past me to get to her,” Hoskins said. “For years I didn’t have my face on there.”

Hoskins said she introduced an illustrated image of herself to her syrup bottles about 18 months ago. She had resisted for more than 30 years because of something a grocery store buyer said to her when she was starting her business 35 years ago.

“I went out to one of these suburbs and told the manager that was my product,” she said. “He called (the regional grocery chain) and said, ‘I don’t want Black products out here. I don’t want anything that’s going to draw the African American community into my store.’”

Hoskins said she expanded her reach by masking her identity.

“I became a general-market product,” she said. “My product was sold in Colorado and Utah. No one knew this was an African American product.”

Hoskins has shared her expertise about business with others. She has mentored 225 people over the past 20 years, she said.

“Some of them have great products,” she said. “One girl was on ‘Shark Tank.’ I have a guy in Virginia that’s doing about $20 million (of business) a year with the government.”

At this stage in her life, Hoskins could look back on an award-winning, successful career, but she is not one to rest on laurels.

“We still did not have the consumer awareness that we wanted,” she said. “Right now we’re in about 6,000 stores.”

Michele Foods remains relatively small, with just four employees and modest annual sales, Hoskins said. Her product is made by a subcontractor near Cincinnati, she said. Profits and sales have never been her primary motivation, she said.

“I’m in it to create a legacy,” Hoskins said. “I feel that at some point we as a people have to understand how to build, create and pass on wealth.”

Most minority-owned companies sell out or fade away, she said. Hoskins wants to eventually pass her company along to her daughter Keisha, who runs social media and other projects for the business.

“If my great-great-great-grandmother could pass down this recipe, I surely could pass it along to her,” Hoskins said. “That becomes our legacy. It’s my legacy in a bottle. Whatever wealth is built into that, we break that curse.”

+Black Enterprise [h/t]

#michele hoskins #michele foods #quaker oats #general foods #aunt jemima #syrup #black owned businesses #black business women #black businesses #chicago #chicago tribune #america washington #food

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acoolchristianchick · 4 years

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Chick Fila - This is what happens when you BOW DOWN to the world.

(CNN)What do bigots become when they bite their tongues?

Richard Morgan -

It's a trick question: bigotry is not just a matter of word or deed, but also of heart and mind. You can still be a bigot even though you have a black friend -- or even though you are black yourself. You can be a gay bigot, a fat bigot, a bigot with abs, a bigot with breasts, a young one, an old one or an immigrant bigot.Bigotry habla español and every other language. Whoever you are, bigotry is within your grasp. That's the liability of being human. And, in this age when corporations are people, too, the way to know for sure that you are a bigot is to look in the mirror and ask yourself if

Chick-fil-A

is staring back at you.

After drawing backlash in previous years for funding homophobic charities and nonprofit organizations, including the

Fellowship of Christian Athletes

and The Salvation Army, the chicken sandwich spot

announced on Monday that, as part of "a more focused giving approach to provide additional clarity and impact," it will focus on homelessness, hunger and education. That is not the change of heart it seems.This would perhaps be more convincing if Dan Cathy, Chick-fil-A's CEO, acknowledged as wrong, and directly apologized for the comments that he made in 2012 about the company's belief and support of the "the biblical definition of the family unit." Instead, the company released a statement saying that "The Chick-fil-A culture and service tradition in our restaurants is to treat every person with honor, dignity and respect -- regardless of their belief, race, creed, sexual orientation or gender...Going forward, our intent is to leave the policy debate over same-sex marriage to the government and political arena."Fun fact: there is no "policy debate" about gay marriage. There is settled law. Gay marriage has been enshrined as justice by the Supreme Court since 2015. It's hypocrisy to claim a commitment to "respect" and describe same-sex marriage, affirmed as legal in the Obergefell decision, as a "policy debate" in the same breath. With its new announcement, Chick-fil-A did the corporate charity equivalent of apologizing without ever saying sorry. It is sobriety disguised as therapy or healing. It is silence hoping to pass as reverence. It is tolerance doing its best impression of fellowship.

Chick-fil-A will no longer donate to anti-LGBTQ organizations

It didn't mention any shift in its views on homosexuality, despite Covenant House International, the homeless charity that Chick-fil-A is associated with, having formed a partnership in 2014 with Cyndi Lauper's True Colors Fund, which fights queer homelessness.Such unspokenness is the same faux diplomacy that allows comedian Kevin Hart to say "

So what?

" -- the queer version of "I don't see color" -- when rapper Lil Nas X told him he was gay during a September episode of HBO's "The Shop: Uninterrupted." Although Hart goes on to say that it's important to understand and acknowledge people's differences, he never says, for example, "I would love my son

if he were gay

." (Hart famously stepped down from hosting the 2019 Oscars after a backlash over homophobic jokes he'd made in the past, for which he -- eventually -- apologized.) This unspokenness is the kind of thing that lets Michael Bloomberg think he can control his own forgiveness with a

simple "I was wrong" apology

for years of defending and promoting racist policing without acknowledging that such an apology means so many fines, arrests, and convictions were also wrong. An apology centered on the apologizer is vain catharsis, not enlightened or humbled redemption.Fitting for a two-faced corporation, Chick-fil-A is biting two tongues at once: the one that refuses to acknowledge the right of anyone to love whomever they please, and the one that proudly mingles what the company

calls in its 2020 Chick-fil-A Foundation priorities

"staying true to its mission of nourishing the potential in every child" with a cowardice about the holiness of those of God's children who are also gay children.

Why the Popeyes chicken sandwich tastes like 2020

However self-purported Christians act interpersonally, and however corporations act financially, every formally stated effort of selflessness, kindness, patience, gentleness, self-control --

all fruits of the Holy Spirit

-- are rendered rancid and hollow when personal tenderness is superseded by structural toxicity.On Monday, Chick-fil-A said that the reason for this change was that its previous charitable commitments -- which the company neglected to note were rooted in homophobia -- wrapped up in 2018. The new announcement was for 2020's commitments. But what about them? What about 2019? Where does Chick-fil-A stand on LGBTQ rights?Maybe Chick-fil-A was so serious with its soul-searching that it took 11 impassioned months to do this better thing. Or maybe it had something to do with a Chick-fil-A in Reading, England -- Britain's first location! -- which opened on October 10 and

closed eight days later

, unable to fulfill even its six-month pilot amid local scrutiny and protest for its bigotry. God only knows."Watch your words and hold your tongue," warns the Old Testament's

Book of Proverbs

. "You'll save yourself a lot of grief."But Chick-fil-A has always been far more about the New Testament. In that tome -- in the

Gospel of John

-- Jesus is tested by being presented a woman accused of adultery and asked if she should be stoned in accordance with ancient biblical law. This is where Jesus said his famous line that only those without sin should cast stones.

But before that, instead of confronting the woman or her vigilantes, instead of being direct or candidly compassionate, Jesus turned away and drew in the sand. What he drew is lost to time, but the action had the effect of distracting the mob.Get our free weekly newsletter

Join us on Twitter and Facebook

Such a lesson has not been lost on Chick-fil-A: distractions work. Can they get an amen?

(MY COMMENT ON THIS. This is the reason why Christians SHOULD stay Grounded on the word. This company BOWED down to the pressure and what happened? This article shows that the company is now looking like a hypocrite. What is the message to the world? That they are BIGOTS. To me they did more harm than good. The people that they are catering too don’t believe them and the people that liked their company because of their values are now seeing that they are hypocrites and WEAK.

The love of MONEY.. The LGBTQ community still doesn’t like them because they don’t believe them and making this gesture to them means nothing.So yes, the company looks as if they did something wrong, are bigots and trying to make amends for it. It is amazing how 8-10% of the population has so much power to make 90% of the population fall to their knees. smh)..

#LGBTQ #Chickfila #Hyprocrites #Whataretheydoing?#Jesus #Christianposts #christianwarriors

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braincoins · 5 years

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“Of course you brought Chinese,” Matt chuckled as he held the door open.

“Someone has to look after you two,” Shiro told him as he walked in.

“We eat! Hell, Katie still lives at home most of the time; she gets Mom’s home cooking.”

“DO NOT CALL ME KATIE, MATTHEW!”

Shiro laughed at that. “Hi, Pidge!” he called. And before he knew it, she was wrapped around him, hugging him hello.

“Thank you for bringing us food! My brother has been starving me!” she wailed.

“We had pizza last night!” Matt cried out in self-defense. “And cereal this morning, and we walked over to Gino’s for lunch...”

“Starving,” Pidge maintained. Shiro let her grab the bag of Chinese food and make off with it.

“She’s a growing girl,” he reminded Matt. “So, I know we should probably eat first, but...”

“Impatient?” Matt chortled to himself. “Don’t worry about it; you don’t have to be polite with us. Come on in.”

Matt’s living room had the standard equipment: sofa, TV, game consoles, stereo. But it also had two desks pushed together, with back-to-back multi-monitor computer setups. One of the desks also had a laptop on it, which seemed unnecessary to Shiro, but he wasn’t going to press Matt on his methods.

The Holts were two of the best white hat hackers he’d ever known (not that he’d known many), and that they were fun and friendly was a bonus.

“Haven’t seen you on much lately,” Matt said.

“Been busy,” he replied.

“Busier than usual. Can I convince you to show up tonight? We could really use you.”

“Sorry, can’t.”

“Damn. Well, I’ll tell the guys I tried.”

“Say hi for me and give them my apologies, will you?” He pulled a chair up to Matt’s station.

“Sure.” Matt sat down as Pidge handed him the carton of General Tso’s. “Thanks, sis.”

“So, I’ve been working on the Galra stuff and Matt was looking up those people in the photos you sent last night,” she said.

“Yeah, let’s start with my end,” he said. “Entrepreneurs, businesspeople, CEOs. Some old money in there. But no one that’s involved in anything shady, unless you count Maria Villanova’s kickbacks to the hospital to promote their prosthetic. And that’s a pretty new thing, done specifically to counter Galra’s new up-and-coming prosthetic lines.”

“Yeah, I... may have heard about those.” Shiro pulled his sleeve up to show them.

“Oh wow, is that a GalraTech model?” Pidge asked. When he nodded, her eyes lit up. “Take it off, I want to see how it...”

“I can’t,” he told her, pulling his sleeve back down. “It doesn’t detach.”

“Weird,” Matt said. “How does it feel?”

“Weird,” Shiro confirmed. “But... good. Much better than the one I got from the hospital.”

“Huh. So maybe those kickbacks are pretty necessary,” he replied.

“My turn! I have all the cool stuff,” Pidge declared. She was only 15 but she’d already graduated high school. She was technically enrolled in online classes at State, but she’d been taking online courses from colleges all over the country for the last year or so. She split her time between her parents’ home and her brother’s apartment, supposedly so that she could have easier access to the downtown campus when she needed it. In reality, the only reason she wasn’t living with Matt full time was that he had a romantic life he wanted to indulge every now and then.

Thinking about that just made Shiro realize how long it had been. Adam had broken up with him... a year ago? Year and a half? Had it really been that long since he’d been held, been kissed, been loved? And it made him ache all over again at the feeling of Allura’s betrayal that really wasn’t a betrayal because they weren’t anything but co-workers and crime-fighting partners, but dammit, it had hurt like a betrayal. The main reason I never asked you out was because you were my boss, but you go out with your boss like it’s not a big deal? And that that boss was LOTOR of all people, and...

He shoved all that aside. “What’ve you got for me, Pidge?”

She grinned her crooked grin - a Holt trademark - at him. “Galra got all big and important because of some new energy source they claim to have.”

That got his attention. “Just as clean as solar but 10x as powerful?”

She nodded. “The very same. They’ve been peddling it to every manufacturer in every industry, doling out sample machines that just seem to run smoothly and cleanly forever. And ever since the, uh... accident,” her eyes jumped to his arm briefly, “they’ve even been talking with the DoD.”

“Department of Defense?”

She nodded. “Not just as an energy source for weapons systems but as a potential weapon itself.”

His stomach churned. “You’re telling me that this energy source - quintessence, I believe Dr. King called it - vaporized Zarkon’s wife and his response is to whip around and try to sell it off to the Pentagon?”

“Oh, it’s weirder than that,” Matt put in. “There hasn’t been a published obituary for Dr. King. Granted there’s no body to bury, but there hasn’t been a wake, a memorial, nothing.”

“He doesn’t even care that she’s dead?”

“Or he doesn’t think she is,” Pidge put in. “He hasn’t spoken much since the accident, but when he does, he refers to his wife in the present tense.”

Shiro shook his head. “She’s gone. She’s gone, gone like my arm is gone. There’s no way... She was standing right by the machine when it blew.”

“Pidge, tell him the good part,” Matt put in before popping some chicken into his mouth.

“A few months before the accident, Galra was doing some construction. They wanted a lab on the city outskirts, for testing slightly more dangerous stuff, I’d bet. I found some chatter - just rumor, mind you - that they found something when they were digging up the land they’d bought for the facility.”

“Like what?” Shiro asked her.

“Well, this is just my theory, but... you know the word ‘quintessential,’ right?”

He nodded. “Yes, I know a lot of big words,” he teased.

Her mouth twisted at him. “For millennia, philosophers and scientists believed that the world we inhabit was entirely made up of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Aristotle added a fifth element, the aether: the material that fills the rest of space, mostly invisibly but sometimes taking the form of stars and planets. Many writers described aether as a kind of invisible light or fire - you know, like an energy source? In the Middle Ages, it was referred to as the quinta essentia - the fifth element. Quinta essentia came to stand for anything so perfect that it seemed to surpass the limitations of Earth.

“So, what if - now just hear me out - this thing they found wasn’t terrestrial in origin?”

“Pidge,” he groaned.

“What if they found a piece of alien technology and...”

“Pidge, will you stop with your alien conspiracy theories?”

“It’s not a conspiracy theory! Not this time, anyway. It makes perfect sense! Tech from a super-advanced alien civilization that Dr. King was able to reverse-engineer and...”

“Look, Pidge, I’m sure there are aliens out there, but there’s nothing saying they’ve been coming to Earth. We’re such a tiny planet in an otherwise unremarkable part of a huge galaxy...”

“I’m not even talking about that!” she insisted. “It could be debris or something! I’m not saying aliens landed on Earth - at least, not this time I’m not - just that something extraterrestrial was dug up and that’s why Galra’s tech division suddenly has unlimited clean power out of nowhere!”

Shiro looked to Matt for help.

He just shrugged. “Dr. King was a genius; it’s not outside the realm of possibility that she created it herself. But then again, all geniuses have stood on the shoulders of those who came before them. It’s also worth considering that she found something to use as the basis for her further discoveries.”

“You’re a good brother,” he told Matt, because what else could he say in response to that dissembling bit of nonsense? He was clearly just trying to back his sister up on her crazy theories.

“I’m not crazy,” Pidge told him as if she’d heard his thoughts. “If they’d found something normal, we would have heard about it. But it took me a lot of digging to find out about this. They kept it hush-hush.”

Shiro held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, I’m willing to concede they found something that they wanted to keep secret. And that it’s possible that they used it as the basis for what became their ‘quintessence’ they’re peddling. But do you really think it’s... I dunno, alien star energy or something?”

She made a thoughtful noise. “I don’t know. I mean, the ancient philosophers also believed in alchemy and astrology and nonsense like that. But I think it’s something... fundamental. Something truly quintessential.”

“Yeah,” Matt put in, “scientists don’t always come up with the best names for things. Like ‘Jupiter’s Red Spot’ - how boring and on the nose can you get?”

“They also come up with names like ‘deoxyribonucleic acid,’” Shiro replied.

“Okay, point. But my point is that maybe she called it quintessence not because it’s some long-lost, non-Bruce Willis-related ‘fifth element’ but because she viewed it as something quintessential to the universe.” He shrugged.

“Whatever it is, that quintessence is powerful enough to be getting them a lot of industry and government attention,” Pidge concluded. “But the weird part is...”

“...why aren’t they announcing it?” Shiro finished for her. “Well, to be fair, they tried, and looked what happened.” He held out his right arm as proof.

“Yeah, but that was a local demonstration for local reporters. They’ve been really cagey with this stuff.”

“Hmm, good point.” He smiled. “Thanks. As usual, you two do amazing work.”

“Naturally,” Pidge said.

“We’ll email it all to you,” Matt said. “As soon as we get our fee?”

“Of course. I’m covering it this time; new owner’s locked down the discretionary funds.” Just as I knew he would.

“Oh yeah - the son of Galra’s CEO?” Pidge asked. “That’s gotta be fun.”

He wasn’t surprised she’d found that out. “Yeah, it’s fantastic. Fortunately he doesn’t know what I’m working on.”

“Yeah, he’d shut that down quick, fast, and in a hurry,” Matt agreed. “Good luck.”

“Thanks, I’ll need it.” He stood. “Enjoy the Chinese. I’ll send the money over when I get home.” He headed for the door.

“If your plans for tonight fall through, log on!” Matt called after him.

“Will do, but don’t expect me!” I’m going to have to talk to Starlight about this. Assuming she shows up tonight. His heartache could wait. Galra - and its CEO - were definitely up to something, and he intended to find out what. His mind raced on the information he’d just received, distracting him from that lingering off-putting thrum from his right arm.

{Previously in The Adventures of Starlight & Paladin…}

#Starlight/Paladin #Shallura #Socks writes Voltron fanfic #superhero AU #and thank you Merriam-Webster #LOOK EVERYONE - PLOT!

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concordiairvine · 5 years

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Enactus Philippines Trip: Day 5

By: Ashley

Hello from Cebu! Today was such an amazing day as we all took turns teaching a class on fix and variable costs. The day started with Celine going to Bohol to see the children whom she had spent last summer with and we will spend the day with soon. Followed by breakfast and then a trip to the class.

Today we had fewer students than yesterday. We got there and realized that we needed coffee. All we ever want is coffee; here they do not live off of coffee like in we do. To RJ, our constant need for coffee was entertaining and unreal to him. So since we had an hour to kill before Hope taught her lesson, we walked to a Bo’s Coffee shop which was only about 3 kilometers away from us (800 ft). We got to see a bit of the slums in the city and also how the government in the Philippines promotes their election. The election hubbub was unlike anything we have ever experienced or witnessed.

Hope began her lesson by introducing the concepts then we all worked with each student individually. We had a worksheet to help give a ballpark idea of how much the running costing would be. Our students were eager to get ahead and complete the entire worksheet all after Hope’s lesson of just listing out the items needed to run the business.

Then it was the Communications student turn to teach, a.k.a. Ashley, a.k.a. me. I do not know business but I took the manual, read it and then did the example on the board and learned that pots and pans are start-up cost and variable costs. Who knew? Not me until today. Hope and Hannah are good friends as they told me I did well when I had no idea what I was doing and had a panic attack with a smile while up there. After my lessons, it was time for lunch!

We figured while we are here in the Philippines we should try street food. We went to a canterina of one of the students who we had taught yesterday. I had the fried chicken and some fish soup. The chicken was better than any I have ever had in the US. Then the soup was equally as good, the mix of spice and flavor was perfect. Hannah had some beef stew and Professor Rogers had the chicken. We all enjoyed it.

A last our lunch break had to end, we went back and it was Hannah’s turn to teach. We helped our students to finally complete their worksheets then it was back to the hotel. I have a film camera as I enjoy printing black and white prints and I needed a new roll, so RJ had agreed to take me to the mall but he had to run home for a helmet. On his way to the hotel, a car door had hit him and he broke his left arm. Luckily he was ok and so is his motorcycle. (We ask that all of you keep him in your thoughts and prayers as his motorcycle is his main source of transportation and it is slightly hard to drive one with a cast on your arm.) Before we went into the van for our evening plans we prayed for him. Even though the medical cost is significantly lower here than in the US, the cost is still a burden.

Off to the top of the mountain, we went. The view was breathtaking! We all stood over and took it all in. Then we answered three questions “what was our favorite thing thus far?”,”what did we learn from this trip?” and “whose life do we think we touched or did someone touch ours?”. After we asked some locals to take a picture of us. We took one then had a deep conversation about how just a few weeks ago we didn’t think twice about the people here. Now we have friends in the Philippines and people we can relate to. It is such a blessing to have met these people and now call them friends.

Last was dinner. We went to a nice restaurant with a beautiful view. Hannah ordered fish and got a whole cooked fish, with the bones and all. Then we started talking about how we could give the business owners we had met business connections to be more successful. This conversation helped us to start thinking in a way that would help us and them. We realized the importance of business connections and we started putting the dots together for them. Today was a very important and eye-opening day. We are all so blessed by this trip and it’s not even halfway over.

*Please excuse any typos as we are writing while on the road.

#concordia university irvine #enactus #phillippines #students abroad #travel

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loudlytransparenttrash · 6 years

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One of my followers is a lefty, but unlike most left-wingers today, she's an actual liberal. Not the kind that hates conservatives because our ideology is different. But she seems to think that us right-wingers hate black people and the only difference is we're more honest about it than the left. I wanna give her a convincing argument against this notion but I'm not Ben Shapiro or the right-wing equivalent of Jordan Peterson, so what do I say to her, exactly?

Lol you don’t need to be either of them to know that’s simply not true. I think it’s senseless to suggest either side hates black people. I’d love to talk to your follower and find out what reasons she has to believe majority of the country hates blacks considering she believes both sides hates blacks just one is more honest about it than the other. I think she’s confusing the black civil rights leaders who would say the only difference between a liberal and conservative is liberals pose as black’s benefactor while conservatives are more honest about not being blacks’ benefactor. That’s very different to hating black people.

I don’t disagree with the sentiment either, as conservatives openly have no interest in being the benefactors for anyone. Conservatives don’t want us dependent on the government, they’re against creating a socialist welfare state and they’re against creating policies which enforce special treatment to entire groups. They believe in individualism, self-sufficiency and productivity. And this is why they’re considered racists today. They refuse to treat blacks differently and they don’t encourage blacks to be dependent on them, so that clearly must mean they hate black people.

Blacks had always overwhelmingly voted Republican as they once valued family, freedom, independence and personal responsibility. It also helped that Democrats were the party of slavery, KKK, Jim Crow, lynching, segregation and anti-civil rights. Only after the black vote started to count, Democrats rebranded themselves as the sympathizers, defenders and saviors of black Americans, telling blacks they will give them the free ride they are owed, they’ll give them reparations and entitlements and welfare in return for their vote. Unfortunately, they fell for it, and Democrat policies and Democrats elected in black-majority cities have turned out to be disastrous for blacks.

Racism and “the legacy of slavery” is the go-to explanation for the struggles faced by black Americans, and if only the government righted the historical wrongs of whites and promise to coddle blacks and provide for them, and if only we have Democrat/black leaders (despite having a black Democratic president and largely black administration for eight years), well only then can black people succeed. This is the winning formula for the Democrats hooking the black vote, but what would happen if blacks regained their conservative values and stopped asking what the government can do for them and instead go back to asking what they can do for themselves.

Before blacks latched onto welfare and reparation programs and believed success was owed rather than earned, black high schools were doing better than many other majority-white schools, blacks had higher rates of workers than whites, blacks had a lower rate of teenage unemployment, blacks were rising into professional and other high-level positions at greater rates, the large majority of black couples were married, most black babies were born to married parents, the number of teenage pregnancies had been decreasing, both poverty and dependency were declining and black income was rising at equal rates to white income. There was also far less black crime and less black homicide.

Fast forward to the implementation of Democratic welfare and “we owe you” programs and rewarding single mothers, black workers and black teenage employment decreased in half, less than half of black students graduated from high school in 2005, 75 percent of blacks aren’t married, almost every black baby is born to a single mom and raised by a single parent, teenage pregnancy has accelerated, blacks today commit the overwhelming largest rates of murder and violent crime, in many cities blacks constitute majority of shooters even when they’re a minority and black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males of the same age combined. But let me guess, racism is worse today than it was pre-1960? Or the legacy of slavery is more prevalent today than two generations ago?

You may not think black married families is important, but when you consider almost no black married family live in poverty while the large majority of unmarried, single black mother households do live in poverty, it’s probably something we should be treating more seriously. Imagine what could be possible if we took the values blacks once believed in such as marriage, education, nuclear family, high expectations, holding everyone to the same standards, being self-empowered, respect for law, and combined them with the ceaseless rights, opportunities and freedom we enjoy today. It’s never been done and it probably never be will for as long as conservative values are racist and our rights, opportunity and freedom only exist for white guys…

This is the problem with feeding blacks the idea their lives are hopeless, threatened and oppressed. It makes them feel powerless which is great for Democrats as they become black’s only hope to provide for them like wounded pets but it’s proven to be a massive setback for blacks because once you give up your self-determination and independence, productivity and progress can never exist. Black Americans continue to sit at the bottom and in many ways have fallen backwards more today than 50-100 years ago. No group has ever successfully improved their circumstances by clinging to a counterproductive culture that is supposedly “authentic” in the name of group pride or identity. The only way up is to work for it, the excuses and blame have to stop. We have to reach out, forgive and move on. Walking on eggshells out of fear or guilt or throwing money at the problem solves nothing.

Apart from the myths about oppression and victimization which push more blacks into welfare, crime, broken homes, poverty, drugs and self-destruction, I despise the well-intentioned, sympathetic liberal view on black people. Have you seen the video where young liberals all agree blacks shouldn’t have to hold an ID to vote because most blacks are either too broke or don’t know how to use the internet to find their local DMV? Or that it’s not black people’s fault for being unhealthy because all they can afford is fried chicken or they don’t know how to find healthier places to shop… I sure as hell believe this liberal shit is more offensive than expecting blacks to be held to the same standards, rules and accountability as everyone else.

It’s also why they vote for affirmative action and racial quotas, rather than wanting blacks to be better educated or be employed based on skill and merit, they rather just lower the bar altogether and admit based on skin color where they will ultimately fail and drop out or come out of college less educated than before holding an expensive degree in Fuck Trump studies. Just look at the black student who was accepted into a top university just for writing lines of ‘black lives matter.’ Professors are told to not correct the spelling of black students as their broken english is their “own language” and now they want to do away with tests altogether as the results discriminate against blacks.

We can add the bigotry of low expectations to the list of Democrats screwing over black Americans. Ask your follower if she can come up with a list of examples of Republicans or conservatives “hating blacks” that can out-do the left. She might want to leave out the inevitable incarceration rates though as they perfectly match the black homicide and violent crime rates, plus older blacks support the no-sense approach as they’re just as fed up with young blacks terrorizing their neighborhoods and shooting each other daily. She might also want to read up on Black Lives Matter, their violence, agenda and the facts surrounding their founding martyrs before claiming the right unfairly criticizes the movement. And she sure as heck can’t point to pro-lifers as the majority of aborted babies are black, probably not something racists would protest.

None of this not to say the right doesn’t have its racists or major faults, but if they’re as so honestly and openly racist as your follower believes, surely she could prove it? Thanks :) xx

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havekiddoswilltravel · 5 years

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Cuba Travel Tips

Havana, Cuba trip report and pro tips for a safe, personalized family travel adventure to Cuba.

Tips for family travel to Cuba - A guide to exploring Cuba with kids, friends, family or multigenerational groups.

Did you know that you can in fact still travel to Cuba independently?

Updated: July 2019 with new Cuban travel rules.

We cruised prior to the US restrictions. You can however, still enjoy these Cuban tours by traveling by air to Cuba. Keep reading for more details.

Our family of six enjoyed a 5 night Key West and Cuba overnight cruise aboard Royal Caribbean’s Majesty of the Seas in December 2018 prior to the cruise ship restrictions. We traveled with four kids ages 13, 10, 7 and 5 and thus felt that a cruise was a comfortable way for us to explore Havana. We’re hooked and already planning a return land trip in order to enjoy more of the island. The Cuban people were gracious, funny and talented. Our guide Dayami is fluent in both English and Spanish and a breath of information about the history, culture, art, music, architecture and food of the island.

2018 Cuban travel update: The U.S. announced new travel rules for Cuba. Americans can no longer travel to the island under the People to People category as an individual and you're unable to patronized any military - owned business.

Legal travel to Cuba is still possible under the Support For The Cuban People category and my recommended tours can assist you in planning a safe, educational and cost effective trip to the island.

Have Kiddos Will Travel Cuba Tours offer: A one of a kind safe, private tour option for those wanting to visit Cuba and experience it like a local.

What we did in Havana:

Dayami picked us up at 9:00 am at the Saint Francis of Assisi Square

(the plaza right across from the cruise ship terminal in Old Havana).

We started with a guided walking tour in Old Havana (about 2 hours) which included:

- All four main squares

- Some of Hemingway’s favorite places in the city

- Handcrafted perfume shop - the perfume is inexpensive and comes in beautiful hand made pottery.

- Free entrance museums - our kids loved these museums. We had to drag our 10 year old son out of the art museum.

- Cigar/coffee/rum shopping - Dayami was an angel and sat with our kids at a nearby table while my husband and I enjoyed this amazing tasting. I can’t recommend it enough. There was a live band playing during our tasting. In fact, music and dancing was everywhere in Havana. Buy Cuban coffee (I regret not buying more as gifts). Dayami is incredibly knowledgeable about Cuban rum and cigars. We bought two boxes (4 bottles total) of Havana Club 3 year white and 7 year dark rum for approximately 20 CUC. We also brought back 25 (fiftieth anniversary) Cuban Cohiba cigars. We bought handmade individual cigar boxes for the ones that we gave as gifts.

We did a coffee-rum-cigar tasting/sampling. This service (about 1 hour) is provided by a Habanos sommelier Cuban cigar expert). I highly recommend this tour option. We learned so much and it added to our overall experience in Havana.

After the walking tour, Dayami had a air conditioned car with ready to drive us to the main places of interest in the city. I loved that she was flexible and worked with our children. We took extra breaks for water, snacks and to use clean bathrooms. She knew all of the best places to use the facilities and though I was prepared with my own toilet paper, we ended up never needing it.

Our family’s personalized itinerary:

- Ride along the Malecon (sea wall drive)

- Colon Cemetery (World Heritage Site)

- Callejón de Hamel (rumba performances/Afro-Cuban religion/art scene)

- Central Park

- Capitol building

- National Hotel

- San Jose Handicraft market

- Fusterlandia community/art project

- Revolution Square

- Rainforest of Havana (National Park)

- Bay fortresses and the Christ of Havana (viewpoint)

Dayami made a reservation for us a privately owned restaurant and we enjoyed it. We were lol a bit when we arrived because we literally walked behind a normal looking home in Havana and entered a massive outdoor restaurant which was packed with people and even had a live band. Our total lunch cost was 74 CUC which included drinks, 3 orders of chicken and all you can eat white rice and beans.

The whole tour was from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, take into consideration that lunch may took over an 1 hour.

What to buy in Cuba:

- While cigars and rum are the main things that people buy when in Cuba, we also bought an amazing art piece (beware that customs will attempt to charge you art fee if you travel back with it in an art tube), engraved leather baseballs, Cuban key chains that I then turned into Cuban Christmas ornaments and a small piece of wood art. We ran out of time to stop by Clandestina, but they do have an online shop that you will not want to miss.

Pro - tips: - Everyone (including children) will need a passport book (not a passport card) that is valid for at least 6 months after your trip. Two pages are required for entry - exit stamps.

- Each traveler will need a Cuban Visa if you're a US citizen (please research Visa laws for other countries) which cost $75.00 per person. Take your time completing this simple form, as mistakes are not accepted and you will have to buy another one.

- U.S. credit and debit cards generally do not work in Cuba. Bring cash to cover your stay. The Cuban government requires that travelers declare cash amounts over 5,000 USD. Travelers should note that the Government of Cuba charges a 10 percent fee for all U.S. dollar cash conversions; this does not apply to electronic transactions or cash conversions in other currencies. - US dollar and credit cards are not accepted in Cuba. Do your research regarding how much money you will need and plan accordingly. I recommend changing money into Cuban Convertible Pesos (CUC) before meeting your guide (for lunch, souvenirs, rum, the sampling, etc.). It is recommended that you change US currency to Euros prior to your trip (AAA will do this without an additional conversion fee for members) and then change euros to CUCs upon arrival. At the time of our visit The official exchange rate (at the time of our trip in 2018) is 0.87 for every 1 USD (due to the 13 percent US dollar fee). The exchange rate for the euro at the time our trip was 1.15.

- The export of Cuban convertible pesos (CUC) is strictly prohibited, regardless of the amount. When departing Cuba, U.S. travelers are advised to exchange Cuban convertible pesos (CUC) back to US Dollars well before reaching airport security checkpoints to avoid potential confiscation of the CUC. For other currencies, travelers may export up to the equivalent of 5,000 USD. Anyone wishing to export more than this amount must demonstrate evidence that the currency was acquired legitimately from a Cuban bank. - Dayami was very helpful in regards to helping us figure out how much cash we would need for all of our tours, meals, and shopping.

Getting there:

- You can fly to Havana depending on your group size and family needs. We’ve had family members fly and we did an overnight Havana cruise with Royal Caribbean as we were traveling with small children and wanted access to the comforts of the cruise line. Cruising if no longer an option as of June 2019.

Where to stay:

- If you’re flying, I highly recommend Casa Habana for a one of a kind, local Cuban experience.

What to pack:

- Bring sunblock, hats, and sun glasses. I packed a back pack with safe drinking water, snacks and treats for our kids.- Wear comfortable walking shoes. Havana streets are beautiful, but the cobblestone is hard on your feet.

What NOT to do:

- Leave your jewelry and fancy items at home.

- Don't take pictures of Cuban police or military.

- Keep your strong tourist opinions about Fidel, the Castro family, the Revolution or communism to yourself. Avoid discussing politics (history discussions are okay) and you're good.

- There are two currencies in Cuba. The first is the Cuban Convertible Peso CUC (which tourists use) and is worth 26 Cuban Pesos CUP. Count your change and keep your street smarts about you.

- Don't expect to have access to the many comforts of home. There is almost no access to many of the consumer goods that are common for us in the United States. So, make sure to bring that which you can't live without. If you wan't toothpaste, a toothbrush, toilet paper, hand disinfectant, mints or snacks, make sure to bring them with you.

- Print out all of your relevant travel documents prior to your trip. I know, we’re digital people but access to technology in Cuba is pretty much nada. If you think you’ll need it, print it at home.

- We’re big foodies and thus find it crucial to discuss Cuban food in Havana versus Cuban food in the United States and other parts of the world. Due to trade restrictions and general lack of access to ingredients that we take for granted, (our guide Dayami did a great job explaining the Cuban rations to our kids) we found the food to be good enough, but not something to write home about. The saving grace was that our kids love white rice and beans and literally were “starving” from all of the walking. They ate their food and loved it, with no complaints. Pro tip: if you’re traveling to Cuba, pack some salt and hot sauce. You’ll thank me.

- Book your Cuba tours before you travel. The internet is hard to come by in Cuba and thus, don’t expect to be able to research or use the internet to communicate with tour guides while on the island. We arrived via a cruise ship, and I had all of my confirmation information from Dayami printed and I had confirmed pick up times and location with her while we were in Key West and still had internet service.

By booking a trusted private tour, you will save hundreds of US dollars on your excursion time while on the island. Our tours are priced per car, not per person for a group of four and can be coordinated to accommodate larger family - group sizes.

- Lastly, let’s talk about safety. We’re a family of avid travelers. Our kids have had passports since they were newborns and we travel extensively throughout the United States and abroad. This cruise to Cuba was our third cruise in 2018 alone and all six of us are Diamond Crown and Anchor with Royal Caribbean International. Even with all of the stamps in our passports, I was perplexed by how safe we felt in Havana. Despite what our history classes and news tell us about communism and Cuba, we felt safer in Cuba than any other place that we’ve traveled to. Use common sense and respect the local culture and you’ll have a blast.

Havana, Cuba - YouTube

https://havekiddoswilltravel.net/cuba-tours

Check out the link above for a full list of tour options and contact Dayami Interian [email protected] to discuss further planning. Your won’t be disappointed!

About Ruth: I’m a wife and mami of 4 active and globe-trotting kiddos. I’ve always loved a good adventure and truly believe that it’s possible to travel with kids. Join me, as I share our adventures and inspire you to get out of the house with your kiddos. Whether you’re planning a family vacation, a road trip or a trip of a lifetime to an exotic destination, I’ll share insights, trip reports and information that will inspire you. Check back often to stay up to date on things to do with kids at your next travel destination.

family travel - adventure - explore - Travel with Kids

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hashtagsmitty · 5 years

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Smitty's Thailand Adventure - Day 1

I'm inspired right now by Uncle Gilly's travel blogs. And since I'm in my hotel room at 11pm Thai time and nowhere near sleep despite being up for some ungodly number of hours, here we go!

Heading into this trip I was super anxious. I haven't gone overseas for 7 years, and I've never travelled alone before. It's not so bad since I'm hanging out with Josh the whole time, but it's still a bit weird. Plus, I don't speak a word of Thai. I'm sure that will be fine, but it's a bit iffy going in.

April and her mum drove me to the airport. We left early to make sure we'd get past any traffic. Plus, last time April and I went anywhere I fucked up the timing and we missed our flight. I guess that was on her mind? Long story short we were at the airport 3 hours early.

I got through security and check in fine. My passport photo is from when I was 21, with a baby face and bad hair. Some beefy security dude pulled me aside to scan my passport manually when the facial recognition shit didn't work. Slight monkas.

I got through fine, bought some Thai Baht and got jibbed on the exchange rate, and then went to the gate. I bought earbuds because I don't own any. It occurred to me later that I'd ordered the entertainment package on the plane which comes with them. It turned out being a good thing, because 3 hours is a long time to listen to airport sounds.

I walked around the terminal to get my bearings, then went to a café thing. It wasn't a real café, but it was close enough to make me comfortable. I got a steak, then sat down and started reading. I'm reading "Growth Mindset", a text about how the way you think about success and achievement is the biggest predictor for future successes and how you deal with failure. It's really interesting, lots of real-world examples, and I'm hyped to try to teach it to my new students.

The steak arrived. I asked for a steak knife and the poor waiter gave me the most embarrassed look. He went to check, then came back and said he wasn't allowed to hand out steak knives in the airport.

Thinking back, of course he wouldn't be, but in the moment it was a weird thing. I guess it felt too much like a real café?

2 hours left. I sat at the gate and read. I had pre-downloaded a whole bunch of Podcasts and music, too, so I was listening to music while I read and swapping to podcasts when I was bored. I kept checking the time because 2 hours is a goddamn long time to wait.

Eventually though the time ticked over and the JetStar dudes were calling for business class people. Before I could react, a whole bunch of vultures had lined up. Seriously like 100 people. I joined the line. They started calling for rows 44 to 57. I checked my ticket - row 57. I walked forward hesitantly, to see if I was allowed to cut the line and board. I pussied out and realized that I'd lost my place in line. I did a slow walk of shame to the back of the line. Then the Jetstar dude started walking down the line and calling for those rows. I cut the line and got on the plane. The dude checking tickets looked dead inside.

My seat was in the middle of the last row on the plane. Two old white dudes sat either side of me. Nobody spoke, as is appropriate. The dude to my right was a bit grumpy, and took up our entire overhead bin. I sat down after putting my bag away and started my music back up. While we were waiting for takeoff, I remembered my trip to Italy from when I was 16. I wasn't sitting next to anyone I knew for both of the 26 hour flights, but the in-flight entertainment had Pokemon Pinball, and I played the shit out of it. It sorta became a tradition when I fly, and I redownloaded the rom right before the plane took off.

It was good that I did, because the in-flight entertainment was garbage. I played chess, and the piece of shit computer played the same opening against me twice. The only difference between medium and hard was that it took 2 minutes to decide each move on hard. I played two games then quit.

The flight was boring. At the end, the pilot had to do some stupid holding pattern because the flight was early:

The green circle bit was repeated 5 times. It added like an hour to the flight. It sucked being so close and having to wait so long. Speaking of waiting so long, being at the very end of the plane meant waiting 10 minutes to get off, and then waiting longer while people only grabbed their bags once they were supposed to move. Monsters.

Disembarked, went through immigration with no problems. The dude who waved me through was being so slow with his line. I held my passport open to the photo page when I gave it to him and he closed it when he took it. Awkward.

Customs didn't exist. Just walked straight out.

I met up with Josh. He was on the opposite side of the airport to where I came out. There were stacks of dodgy WiFi networks to sort through to find the one non-dodgy one. I felt like having to fight through 12 phishing networks before I left the airport was a bit much.

Josh and I got Korean chicken at the airport. It was okay, I'm not big on chicken with sauces. Or sauces in general. Or most foods in general. But, I felt like I should just dive in and broaden my comfort zone a bit. It was pretty good chicken. I'm sure it would be better at a non-airport franchise.

We caught a taxi to my hotel. Josh is staying in an AirBNB somewhere else. On the way Josh talked a bit to the taxi driver. She didn't speak any English and he barely speaks Thai, but she got us to our destination fine. It really drove (dwoop) home how foreign this place is, and how screwed I'd be if not for Josh living here. The taxi driver was not great. She was driving in two lanes for most of the trip, and I don't think I heard her indicate. The traffic lights have a dank coloured countdown for how long until the lights change. We need that in Melbourne.

We got dropped off at a skytrain station. It was attached to a huge shopping center like Melbourne Central. It was pretty sweet - I'd like to check it out when I'm less fried.

The streets looked pretty low-tier, but Josh said that it was average for Thailand, and that the closer you are to main roads or train lines, the nicer it is.

I needed toothpaste, and Josh insisted I get a local SIM card, so we went into 7-11. Josh explained that they're actually really cheap and good quality here. While we were sorting out the SIM card, the clerk needed to see my passport and take a photo for me to be able to buy it. It was weird, but everyone acted like it was normal, so whatever. The same thing happened at the hotel. Josh said they send the info to the government, but didn't say why. The clerk called me handsome in Thai as we were leaving. We got some weird salt toothpaste that Josh swore by. He said the first time was meh but the second time is amazing.

I was warned that there would be "massage parlors" on the street my hotel is on. Josh said the girls out the front would go out of their way to make me uncomfortable, and double so if we ignored them. We just stayed in the other side of the road instead.

The hotel is okay. Bed isn't great, but there's air con and a hair dryer. And a bidet, which I'm excited to try.

It feels lonely up here on my own. Like I said, I haven't travelled solo before, so it's a new experience. Bros will get a video tour of the room when I'm awake - it's 4am AUS time and I'm so fried. Gotta avoid that jet lag though, so normal sleep times.

I tried the salt toothpaste. It was okay.

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rhetoricandlogic · 6 years

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Foxfire, Foxfire By Yoon Ha Lee

Issue #194 - Science-Fantasy Month 3

, March 3, 2016

AUDIO PODCAST

EBOOK

(Finalist, WSFA Small Press Award, 2017)

If I’d listened to the tiger-sage’s warning all those years ago, I wouldn’t be trapped in the city of Samdae during the evacuation. Old buildings and new had suffered during the artillery battle, and I could hear the occasional wailing of sirens. Even at this hour, families led hunched grandmothers and grandfathers away from their old homes, or searched abandoned homes in the hopes of finding small treasures: salt, rags, dried peppers. As I picked my way through the streets tonight, I saw the flower-shaped roof tiles for which Samdae was known, broken and scattered beneath my feet. Faraway, blued by distance, lights guttered from those skyscrapers still standing, dating to the peninsula’s push to modernization. It had not done anything to prevent the civil war.

I had weighed the merits of tonight’s hunt. Better to return to fox-form, surely, and slip back to the countryside; abandon the purpose that had brought me to Samdae all those years ago. But I only needed one more kill to become fully human. And I didn’t want to off some struggling shopkeeper or midwife. For one thing, I had no grudge against them. For another, I had no need of their particular skills.

No; I wandered the Lantern District in search of a soldier. Soldiers were easy enough to find, but I wanted a nice strapping specimen. At the moment I was posing as a prostitute, the only part of this whole affair my mother would have approved of. Certain human professions were better-suited to foxes than others, she had liked to say. My mother had always been an old-fashioned fox.

“Baekdo,” she had said when I was young, “why can’t you be satisfied with chickens and mice? You think you’ll be able to stop with sweet bean cakes, but the next thing you know, it will be shrimp crackers and chocolate-dipped biscuits, and after that you’ll take off your beautiful fur to walk around in things with buttons and pockets and rubber soles. And then one of the humans will fall in love with you and discover your secret, and you’ll end up like your Great-Aunt Seonghwa, as a bunch of oracle bones in some shaman’s purse.”

Foxes are just as bad at listening to their mothers as humans are. My mother had died before the war broke out. I had brought her no funeral-offerings. My relatives would have been shocked by that idea, and my mother, a traditionalist, would have wanted to be left to the carrion-eaters.

I had loved the Lantern District for a long time. I had taken my first kill there, a lucky one really. I’d crept into a courtesan’s apartment, half-drunk on the smells of quince tea and lilac perfume. At the time I had no way of telling a beautiful human from an ugly one—I later learned that she had been a celebrated beauty—but her layered red and orange silks had reminded me of autumn in the forest.

Tonight I wore that courtesan’s visage. Samdae’s remaining soldiers grew bolder and bolder with the breakdown in local government, so only those very desperate or stubborn continued to ply their trade. I wasn’t worried on my own behalf, of course. After ninety-nine kills, I knew how to take care of myself.

There. I spotted a promising prospect lingering at the corner, chatting up a cigarette-seller. He was tall, not too old, with a good physique. He was in uniform, with the red armband that indicated that he supported the revolutionaries. Small surprise; everyone who remained in Samdae made a show of supporting the revolutionaries. Many of the loyalists had fled overseas, hoping to raise support from the foreign powers. I wished them luck. The loyalists were themselves divided between those who supported the queen’s old line and those who wished to install a parliament in place of the Abalone Throne. Fascinating, but not my concern tonight.

I was sauntering toward the delicious-looking soldier when I heard the cataphract’s footsteps. A Jangmi 2-7, judging from the characteristic whine of the servos. Even if I hadn’t heard it coming—and who couldn’t?—the stirring of the small gods of earth and stone would have alerted me to its approach. They muttered distractingly. My ears would have flattened against my skull if they could have.

Superstitious people called the cataphracts ogres, because of their enormous bipedal frames. Some patriots disliked them because they had to be imported from overseas. Our nation didn’t have the ability to manufacture them, a secret that the foreigners guarded jealously.

This one was crashing through the street. People fled. No one wanted to be around if a firefight broke out, especially with the armaments a typical cataphract was equipped with. It was five times taller than a human, with a stride that would have cratered the street with every step, all that mass crashing down onto surprisingly little feet if not for the bargains the manufacturers had made with the small gods of earth and stone.

What was a lone cataphract doing in this part of the city? A scout? A deserter? But what deserter in their right mind would bring something as easy to track as a cataphract with them?

Not my business. Alas, my delicious-looking soldier had vanished along with everyone else. And my bones were starting to hurt in the particular way that indicated that I had sustained human-shape too long.

On the other hand, while the cataphract’s great strides made it faster than I was in this shape, distances had a way of accommodating themselves to a fox’s desires. A dangerous idea took shape in my head. Why settle for a common soldier when I could have a cataphract pilot, one of the elites?

I ducked around a corner into the mouth of an alley, then kicked off my slippers, the only part of my dress that weren’t spun from fox-magic. (Magical garments never lasted beyond a seduction. My mother had remarked that this was the fate of all human clothes anyway.) I loved those slippers, which I had purloined from a rich merchant’s daughter, and it pained me to leave them behind. But I could get another pair of slippers later.

Anyone watching the transformation would only have seen a blaze of coalescing red, like fire and frost swirled together, before my bones resettled into their native shape. Their ache eased. The night-smells of the city sharpened: alcohol, smoke, piss, the occasional odd whiff of stew. I turned around nine times—nine is a number sacred to foxes—and ran through the city’s mazed streets.

The Lantern District receded behind me. I emerged amid rubble and the stink of explosive residue. The riots earlier in the year had not treated the Butterfly District kindly. The wealthier families had lived here. Looters had made short work of their possessions. I had taken advantage of the chaos as well, squirreling away everything from medicines to salt in small caches; after all, once I became human, I would need provisions for the journey to one of the safer cities to the south.

It didn’t take long to locate the cataphract. Its pilot had parked it next to a statue, hunched down as if that would make it less conspicuous. Up close, I now saw why the pilot had fled—whatever it was they were fleeing. Despite the cataphract’s menacing form, its left arm dangled oddly. It looked like someone had shot up the autocannon, and the cataphract’s armor was decorated by blast marks. While I was no expert, I was amazed the thing still functioned.

The statue, one of the few treasures of the district to escape damage, depicted a courtesan who had killed an invading general a few centuries ago by clasping her arms around him and jumping off a cliff with him. My mother had remarked that if the courtesan had had proper teeth, she could have torn out the general’s throat and lived for her trouble. Fox patriotism was not much impressed by martyrs. I liked the story, though.

I crouched in the shadows, sniffing the air. The metal reek of the cataphract overpowered everything. The small gods of earth and stone shifted and rumbled. Still, I detected blood, and sweat, as well as the particular unappetizing smell of what the humans called Brick Rations, because they were about as digestible. Human blood, human sweat, human food.

A smarter fox would have left the situation alone. While dodging the cataphract would be easy, cataphract pilots carried sidearms. For all I knew, this one would welcome fox soup as an alternative to Brick Rations.

While cataphract-piloting didn’t strike me as a particularly useful skill, the pilots were all trained in the more ordinary arts of soldiering. Good enough for me.

I drew in my breath and took on human-shape. The small gods hissed their laughter. This time, when the pain receded, I was wrapped in a dress of green silk and a lavender sash embroidered with peonies. My hair was piled atop my head and held in place by heavy hairpins. The whole getup would have looked fashionable four generations ago, which I knew not because I had been alive then (although foxes could be long-lived when they chose) but because I used to amuse myself looking through Great-Aunt Seonghwa’s collection of books on the history of fashion.

I’d hoped for something more practical, but my control of the magic had slipped. I would have to make the best of it. A pity the magic had not provided me with shoes, even ugly ones. I thought of the slippers I had discarded, and I sighed.

Carefully, I stepped through the street, pulse beating more rapidly as I contemplated my prey. A pebble dug into my foot, but I paid it no heed. I had endured worse, and my blood was up.

Even in human-shape, I had an excellent sense of smell. I had no difficulty tracking the pilot. Only one; I wondered what had happened to her copilot. The pilot lay on her side in the lee of a chunk of rubble, apparently asleep. The remains of a Brick Ration’s wrapper had been tossed to the side. She had downed all of it, which impressed me. But then, I’d heard that piloting was hungry work.

I crouched and contemplated the pilot, taut with anticipation. At this distance, she reeked worse than her machine. She had taken off her helmet, which she hugged to her chest. Her black hair, cropped close, was mussed and stringy, and the bones of her face stood out too prominently beneath the sweat-streaked, dirty skin.

She’d also taken off her suit, for which I didn’t blame her. Cataphracts built up heat—the gods of fire, being fickle, did an indifferent job of masking their infrared signatures—and the suits were designed to cool the pilot, not to act as armor or protect them against the chilly autumn winds. She’d wrapped a thermal blanket around herself. I eyed it critically: effective, but ugly.

No matter what shape I took, I had a weapon; there is no such thing as an unarmed fox. I wondered what the magic had provided me with today. I could feel the weight of a knife hanging from my inner sash, and I reached in to draw it out. The elaborate gilt handle and the tassel hanging from the pommel pleased me, although what really mattered was the blade.

I leaned down to slit the pilot’s throat—except her eyes opened and she rolled, casting the helmet aside. I scrambled backwards, but her reflexes were faster, a novelty. She grabbed my wrist, knocking the knife out of my hand with a clatter, and forced me down.

“Well-dressed for a looter,” the pilot said into my ear. “But then, I suppose that goes with the territory.”

I had no interest in being lectured before my inevitable addition to a makeshift stewpot. I released human-shape in a flutter of evanescent silks, hoping to wriggle out of her grip.

No such luck. Almost as if she’d anticipated the change, she closed her hands around my neck. I snapped and clawed, to no effect. I had to get free before she choked the life out of me.

“Gumiho,” the pilot breathed. Nine-tailed fox. “I thought all your kind were gone.”

My attempt at a growl came out as a sad wheeze.

“Sorry, fox,” the pilot said, not sounding sorry in the least.

I scrabbled wildly at the air, only half paying attention to her words.

“But I bet you can speak,” she went on as I choked out a whine. “Which means you’re just as likely to snitch to my pursuers as something fully human.”

She was saying something more about her pursuers, still in that cheerful conversational voice, when I finally passed out.

I woke trussed up as neatly as a rabbit for the pot. The air was full of the strange curdled-sweet smell of coolant, the metal reek of cataphract, the pilot’s particular stink. My throat hurt and my legs ached, but at least I wasn’t dead.

I opened my eyes and looked around at the inside of the cockpit. The blinking lights and hectic status graphs meant nothing to me. I wished I’d eaten an engineer along the way, even though the control systems were undoubtedly different for different cataphract models. I’d been tied to the copilot’s seat. Cataphracts could be piloted solo if necessary, but I still wondered if the copilot had died in battle, or deserted, or something else entirely.

The cockpit was uncomfortably warm. I worked my jaw but couldn’t get a good purchase on the bindings. Worse, I’d lost the knife. If I couldn’t use my teeth to get out of this fix—

“Awake?” the pilot said. “Sorry about that, but I’ve heard stories of your kind.”

Great, I had to get a victim who had paid attention to grandmothers’-tales of fox spirits. Except now, I supposed, I was the victim. I stared into the pilot’s dark eyes.

“Don’t give me that,” the pilot said. “I know you understand me, and I know you can speak.”

Not with my muzzle tied shut, I can’t, I thought.

As if she’d heard me, she leaned over and sawed through the bonds on my muzzle with a combat knife. I snapped at the knife, which was stupid of me. It sliced my gums. The familiar tang of blood filled my mouth.

“You may as well call me Jong,” the pilot said. “It’s not my real name, but my mother used to call me that, after the child and the bell in the old story. What shall I call you?”

I had no idea what story she was talking about. However, given the number of folktales living in small crannies of the peninsula, this wasn’t surprising. “I’m a fox,” I said. “Do you need a name for me beyond that?” It wasn’t as though we planned on becoming friends.

Jong strapped herself in properly. “Well, you should be grateful you’re tied in good and tight,” she said as she manipulated the controls: here a lever, there a button, provoking balletic changes in the lights. “The straps weren’t designed with a fox in mind. I’d hate for you to get splattered all over the cockpit when we make a run for it.”

“So kind of you,” I said dryly. Sorry, I thought to my mother’s ghost. I should have listened to you all those years ago. Still, Jong hadn’t eaten me yet, so there was hope.

“Oh, kindness has nothing to do with it.” The cataphract straightened with a hiss of servos. “I can’t talk to the gods of mountain and forest, but I bet you can. It’s in all the stories. And the mountains are where I have to go if I’m going to escape.”

Silly me. I would have assumed that a cataphract pilot would be some technocrat who’d disdain the old folktales. I had to go after one who knew enough of the lore to be dangerous. “Something could be arranged, yes,” I said. Even as a kit my mother had warned me against trusting too much in gods of any kind, but Jong didn’t need to know that.

“We’ll work it out as we go,” she said distantly. She wasn’t looking at me anymore.

I considered worrying at the bonds with my teeth, even though the synthetic fibers would taste foul, but just then the cataphract shuddered awake and took a step. I choked back a yip. Jong’s eyes had an eerie golden sheen that lit up their normal brown; side-effect of the neural interface, I’d heard, but I’d never seen the effect up close before. If I disrupted the connection now, who knew what would happen? I wasn’t so desperate that I wanted the cataphract to crash into uselessness, leaving me tied up inside it while unknown hostiles hunted us. Inwardly, I cursed Jong for getting me involved; cursed myself for getting too ambitious. But recriminations wouldn’t help now.

For the first hour, I stayed silent, observing Jong in the hopes of learning the secrets of the cataphract’s operation the old-fashioned way. Unfortunately, the closest thing to a cataphract pilot I’d ever eaten had been a radio operator. Not good enough. No wonder Great-Aunt Seonghwa had emphasized the value of a proper education, even if I had dismissed her words at the time. (One of her first victims had been a university student, albeit one studying classical literature rather than engineering. Back then, you could get a comfortable government post by reciting maxims from The Twenty-Three Principles of Virtuous Administration and tossing off the occasional moon-poem.) The ability to instantly absorb someone’s skills by ingesting their liver had made me lazy.

“Why are they after you?” I asked, on the grounds that the more information I could extract from Jong, the better. “And who are they, anyway?”

She adjusted a dial; one of the monitors showed a mass of shapes like tangled thread. “Why are they after anyone?”

Not stupid enough to tell a stranger, then. I couldn’t fault her. “How do I know you won’t use me, then shoot me?”

“You don’t. But I’ll let you go after I get away.”

Unsatisfying, as responses went. “Assuming you get away.”

“I have to.” For the first time, Jong’s cheerfulness faltered.

“Maybe we can bargain,” I said.

Jong didn’t respond for a while, but we’d entered a defile and she was presumably caught up making sure we didn’t tumble over some ledge and into the stony depths. I had difficulty interpreting what I saw. For one thing, I wasn’t used to a vantage point this high up. For another, I couldn’t navigate by scent from within the cockpit, although I was already starting to become inured to the mixed smells of grubby human and metal.

“What bargain can you offer?” Jong said when she’d parked us in a cranny just deep enough in the defile that the cataphract wouldn’t be obvious except from straight above.

I wondered if we had aerial pursuit to worry about as well. Surely I’d hear any helicopters, now that the cataphract had powered down? I knew better than to rely on the small gods of wind and storm for warning; they were almost as fickle as fire.

Jong’s breathing became unsteady as she squinted at a scatterfall of glowing dots. She swore under her breath in one of the country dialects that I could understand only with difficulty. “We’ll have to hope that they’re spreading themselves too thin to figure out which way we’ve gone,” she said in a low voice, as though people could hear her from inside the cockpit. “We’ll continue once I’m sure I can move without lighting up their scanners.”

Carefully, I said, “What if I swear on the spirits of my ancestors to lead you where you need to go, with the aid of the small gods to mask your infrared signature?” This was a guess on my part, but she didn’t correct me, so I assumed it was close enough. “Will you unbind me, at least?”

“I didn’t think foxes worshiped ancestors,” Jong said, eyeing me skeptically. She fished a Brick Ration out of a compartment and unwrapped it with quick, efficient motions.

My mouth watered despite the awful smell. I hadn’t eaten in a while. “Foxes are foxes, not gods,” I said. “What good is worship to a fox? But I remember how my mother cared for me, and my other relatives. Their memory means a lot to me.”

Jong was already shaking her head. A crumb of the Brick Ration fell onto her knee. She picked it up, regarded it contemplatively, then popped it into her mouth.

A ration only questionably formulated to sustain humans probably wouldn’t do me much good in fox-form, but it was difficult not to resent my captor for not sharing, irrational as the sentiment was.

“I need a real guarantee that you’ll be helpful, not a fox-guarantee,” Jong said.

“That’s difficult, considering that I’m a fox.”

“I don’t think so.” Jong smiled, teeth gleaming oddly in the cockpit’s deadened lights. Her face resembled a war-mask from the old days of the Abalone Throne. “Swear on the blood of the tiger-sages.”

My heart stuttered within me. “There are no tiger-sages left,” I said. It might even have been true.

Jong’s smile widened. “I’ll take that chance.”

When I was a young fox, almost adult, and therefore old enough to get into the bad kind of trouble, my mother took me to visit a tiger-sage.

Until then, I had thought all the tiger-sages had left the peninsula. Sometimes the humans had hunted them, and more rarely they sought the tigers’ advice, although a tiger’s advice always has a bite in it. I’d once heard of hunters bringing down an older tiger in a nearby village, and I’d asked my mother if that had been a sage. She had only snorted and said that a real sage wouldn’t go down so easily.

Tiger-sages could die. That much I knew. But their deaths had nothing to do with shotguns or nets or poisoned ox carcasses. A tiger-sage had to be slain with a sword set with mirror-jewels or arrows fletched with feathers stolen from nesting firebirds. A tiger-sage had to be sung to death in a game of riddles during typhoon season, or tricked into sleep after a long game of baduk—the famously subtle strategy game played upon a board of nineteen-by-nineteen intersecting lines, with black stones and white. A tiger-sage had to consent to perish.

We traveled for days, because even a fox’s ability to slice through distance dwindled before a tiger-sage’s defenses. My mother was nervous than I’d ever seen her. I, too stupid to know better, was excited by the excursion.

At last we approached the tiger-sage’s cave, high upon a mountain, where the trees grew sideways and small bright flowers flourished in the thin soil. Everything smelled hard and sharp, as though we lingered dangerously close to the boundary between always and never. The cave had once served as a shrine for some human sage. A gilded statue dominated the mouth of the cave, lovingly polished. It depicted a woman sitting cross-legged, one palm held out and cupping a massive pearl, the other resting on her knee. The skull of some massive tusked beast rested next to the statue. The yellowing bone had been scored by claw-marks.

The tiger-sage emerged from the cave slowly, sinuously, like smoke from a hidden fire. Her fur was chilly white except for the night-black stripes. She was supposed to be the last of the tiger-sages. One by one they had departed for other lands, or so the fox-stories went. Whether this one remained out of stubbornness, or amusement at human antics, or sheer apathy, my mother hadn’t been able to say. It didn’t matter. It was not for a fox to understand the motivations of a sage.

“Foxes,” the tiger rumbled, her amber eyes regarding us with disinterest. “It is too bad you are no good for oracle bones. Fox bones always lie. The least you could have done was bring some incense. I ran out of the good stuff two months ago.”

My mother’s ears twitched, but she said only, “Venerable sage, I am here to beg your counsel on my son’s behalf.”

I crouched and tried to look appropriately humble, having never heard my mother speak like this before.

The tiger yawned hugely. “You’ve been spending too much time with humans if you’re trying to fit all those flowery words in your mouth. Just say it straight out.”

Normally my mother would have said something deprecating—I’d grown up listening to her arguing with Great-Aunt Seonghwa about the benefits of human culture—but she had other things on her mind. That, or the tiger’s impressive display of sharp teeth reminded her that to a tiger, everything is prey. “My son hungers after human-shape,” my mother said. “I have tried to persuade him otherwise, but a mother’s words only go so far. Perhaps you would be willing to give him some guidance?”

The tiger caught my eye and smiled tiger-fashion. I had a moment to wonder how many bites it would take for me to end up in her belly. She reared up, or perhaps it was that she straightened. For several stinging moments, I could not focus my vision on her, as though her entire outline was evanescing.

Then a woman stood where the tiger had been, or something like a woman, except for the amber eyes and the sharp-toothed smile. Her hair was black frosted with white and silver. Robes of silk flowed from her shoulders, layered in mountain colors: dawn-pink and ice-white and pale-gray with a sash of deepest green. At the time I did not yet understand beauty. Years later, remembering, I would realize that she had mimicked the form of the last legitimate queen. (Tigers have never been known for modesty.)

“How much do you know of the traditional bargain, little fox?” the tiger-woman asked. Her voice was very little changed.

I did not like being called little, but I had enough sense not to pick a fight with a tiger over one petty adjective. Especially since the tiger was, in any shape, larger than I was. “I have to kill one hundred humans to become human,” I said. “I understand the risk.”

The tiger-woman made an impatient noise. “I should have known better than to expect enlightenment from a fox.”

My mother held her peace.

“People say I am the last of the tiger-sages,” the tiger-woman said. “Do you know why?”

“I had thought you were all gone,” I said, since I saw no reason not to be honest. “Areyou the last one?”

The tiger-woman laughed. “Almost the last one, perhaps.” The silk robes blurred, and then she coiled before us in her native shape again. “I killed more than a hundred humans, in my time. Never do anything by halves, if you’re going to do it. But human-shape bored me after a while, and I yearned for my old clothing of stripes and teeth and claws.”

“So?” I said, whiskers twitching.

“So I killed and ate a hundred tiger-sages from my own lineage, to become a tiger again.”

My mother was tense, silent. My eyes had gone wide.

The tiger looked at me intently. “If the kit is serious about this—and I can smell it on him, that taint is unmistakable—I have some words for him.”

I stared at the tiger, transfixed. It could have pounced on me in that moment and I wouldn’t have moved. My mother made a low half-growl in the back of her throat.

“Becoming human has nothing to do with flat faces and weak noses and walking on two legs,” the tiger said. “That’s what your people always get wrong. It’s the hunger for gossip and bedroom entanglements and un-fox-ish loyalties; it’s about having a human heart. I, of course, don’t care one whit about such matters, so I will never be trapped in human-shape. But for reasons I have never fathomed, foxes always lose themselves in their new faces.”

“We appreciate the advice,” my mother said, tail thumping against the ground. “I will steal you some incense.” I could tell she was desperate to leave.

The tiger waved a paw, not entirely benevolently. “Don’t trouble yourself on my account, little vixen. And tell your aunt I warned her, assuming you get the chance.”

Two weeks after that visit, I heard of Great-Aunt Seonghwa’s unfortunate demise. It was not enough to deter me from the path I had chosen.

“Come on, fox,” Jong said. “If your offer is sincere, you have nothing to fear from a mythical tiger.”

I refrained from snapping that ‘mythical’ tigers were the most frightening of all. Ordinary tigers were bad enough. Now that I was old enough to appreciate how dangerous tiger-sages were, I preferred not to bring myself to one’s attention. But remaining tied up like this wasn’t appealing, either. And who knew how much time I had to extract myself from this situation?

“I swear on the blood of the tiger-sages,” I said, “that I will keep my bargain with you. No fox tricks.” I could almost hear the tiger-sage’s cynical laughter in my head, but I hoped it was my imagination.

Jong didn’t waste time making additional threats. She unbuckled herself and leaned over me to undo my bonds. I admired her deft hands. Those could have been mine, I thought hungrily; but I had promised. While a fox’s word might not be worth much, I had no desire to become the prey of an offended tiger. Tiger-sages took oaths quite seriously when they cared to.

My limbs ached, and it still hurt when I swallowed or talked. Small pains, however, and the pleasure of being able to move again made up for them. “Thank you,” I said.

“I advise being human if you can manage it,” Jong said. I choked back a snort. “The seat will be more comfortable for you.”

I couldn’t argue the point. Despite the pain, I was able to focus enough to summon the change-magic. Magic had its own sense of humor, as always. Instead of outdated court dress, it presented me in street-sweeper’s clothes, right down to the hat. As if a hat did anything but make me look ridiculous, especially inside a cataphract.

To her credit, Jong didn’t burst out laughing. I might have tried for her throat if she had, short-tempered as I was. “We need to”—yawn—”keep moving. But the pursuers are too close. Convince the small gods to conceal us from their scan, and we’ll keep going until we find shelter enough to rest for real.”

Jong’s faith in my ability to convince the small gods to do me favors was very touching. I had promised, however, which meant I had to do my best. “You’re in luck,” I said; if she heard the irony in my voice, she didn’t react to it. “The small gods are hungry tonight.”

Feeding gods was tricky business. I had learned most of what I knew from Great-Aunt Seonghwa. My mother had disdained such magic herself, saying that she would trust her own fine coat for camouflage instead of relying on gods, to say nothing of all the mundane stratagems she had learned from her own mother. For my part, I was not too proud to do what I had to in order to survive.

The large gods of the Celestial Order, who guided the procession of stars, responded to human blandishments: incense (I often wondered if the tiger I had met lit incense to the golden statue, or if it was for her own pleasure), or offerings of roast duck and tangerines, or bolts of silk embroidered with gold thread. The most powerful of the large gods demanded rituals and chants. Having never been bold enough to eat a shaman or magician, I didn’t know how that worked. (I remained mindful of Great-Aunt Seonghwa’s fate.) Fortunately, the small gods did not require such sophistication.

“Can you spare any part of this machine?” I asked Jong.

Her mouth compressed. Still, she didn’t argue. She retrieved a screwdriver and undid one of the panels, joystick and all, although she pocketed the screws. “It’s not like the busted arm’s good for anything anymore,” she said. The exposed wires and pipes of coolant looked like exposed veins. She grimaced, then fiddled with the wires’ connectors until they had all been undone. “Will this do?”

I doubted the small gods knew more about cataphract engineering than I did. “Yes,” I said, with more confidence than I felt, and took the panel from her. I pressed my right hand against the underside of the panel, flinching in spite of myself from the metal’s unfriendly warmth.

This is my offering, I said in the language of forest and mountain, which even city foxes spoke; and my mother, as a very proper fox, had raised me in the forest. Earth and stone and—

Jong’s curse broke my concentration, although the singing tension in the air told me that the small gods already pressed close to us, reaching, reaching.

“What is it?” I said.

“We’ll have to fight,” Jong said. “Buckle in.”

I had to let go of the panel to do so. I had just figured out the straps—the cataphract’s were more complicated than the safety restraints found in automobiles—and the panel clanked onto the cockpit’s floor as the cataphract rumbled awake. The small gods skittered and howled, demanding their tribute. I was fox enough to hear them, even if Jong showed no sign of noticing anything.

The lights in the cockpit blazed up in a glory of colors. The glow sheened in Jong’s tousled hair and reflected in her eyes, etched deep shadows around her mouth. The servos whirred; I could have sworn the entire cataphract creaked and moaned as it woke.

I scooped up the panel. Its edges bit into my palms. “How many?” I asked, then wondered if I should be distracting Jong when we were entering combat.

“Five,” she said. “Whatever you’re doing, finish it fast.”

The machine lurched out of the crevice where we’d been hiding, then broke into its version of a run. My stomach dropped. Worse than the jolting gait was the fact that I kept bracing for the impact of those heavy metal feet against the earth. I kept expecting the cataphract to sink hip-deep. Even though the gods of earth and stone cushioned each stride, acting as shock-absorbers, the discrepancy between what I expected and what happened upset my sense of the world’s equilibrium.

The control systems made noises that had only shrillness to recommend them. I left their interpretation to Jong and returned my attention to the small gods. From the way the air in the cockpit eddied and swirled, I could tell they were growing impatient. Earth and stone were allied to metal, after all, and metal, especially when summoned on behalf of a weapon, had its volatile side.

The magic had provided me not with a knife this time but with a hat pin. I retrieved it and jabbed my palm with the pointy end. Blood welled up. I smeared it onto the cataphract’s joystick. Get us out of here, I said to the small gods. Not eloquent, but I didn’t have time to come up with anything better.

The world tilted askew, pale and dark and fractured. Jong might have said something. I couldn’t understand any of it. Then everything righted itself again.

More, the small gods said in voices like shuddering bone.

I whispered stories to them, still speaking in the language of forest and mountain, which had no words except the evocation of the smell of fallen pine needles on an autumn morning, or loam worked over by the worms, or rain filling paw prints left in the mud. I was still fox enough for this to suffice.

“What in the name of the blistering gods?” Jong demanded. Now even she could hear the clanging of distant bells. Music was one of the human innovations that the small gods had grown fond of.

“They’re building mazes,” I said. “They’ll mask our path. Go!“

Her eyes met mine for a moment, hot and incredulous. Then she nodded and jerked a lever forward, activating the walk cycle. The cataphract juddered. The targeting screen flashed red as it locked on an erratically moving figure: another cataphract. She pressed a trigger.

I hunched down in my seat at the racket the autocannon made as it fired four shots in rapid succession, like a damned smith’s hammer upon the world’s last anvil. The small gods rumbled their approval. I forced myself to watch the targeting screen. For a moment I thought Jong had missed. Then the figure toppled sideways.

“Legged them,” Jong said with vicious satisfaction. “Don’t care about honor or kill counts, it’s good enough to cripple them so we can keep running.”

We endured several hits ourselves. While the small gods could confuse the enemies’ sensors, the fact remained that the cataphract relied on its metal armor to protect its inner mechanisms. The impacts rattled me from teeth to marrow. I was impressed that we hadn’t gone tumbling down.

And when had I started thinking of us as “we,” anyway?

“We’re doomed,” I said involuntarily when something hit the cataphract’s upper left torso—by the I’d figured out the basics of a few of the status readouts—and the whole cockpit trembled.

Jong’s grin flickered sideways at me. “Don’t be a pessimist, fox,” she said, breathless. “You ever hear of damage distribution?”

“Damage what?”

“I’ll explain it to you if we—” A shrill beep captured her attention. “Whoops, better deal with this first.”

“How many are left?”

“Three.”

There had been five to begin with. I hadn’t even noticed the second one going down.

“If only I weren’t out of coolant, I’d—” Jong muttered some other incomprehensible thing after that.

In the helter-skelter swirl of blinking lights and god-whispers, Jong herself was transfigured. Not beautiful in the way of a court blossom but in the way of a gun: honed toward a single purpose. I knew then that I was doomed in another manner entirely. No romance between a fox and a human ever ended well. What could I do, after all? Persuade her to abandon her cataphract and run away with me into the forest, where I would feed her rabbits and squirrels? No; I would help her escape, then go my separate way.

Every time an alert sounded, every time a vibration thundered through the cataphract’s frame, I shivered. My tongue was bitten almost to bleeding. I could not remember the last time I had been this frightened.

You were right, Mother, I wanted to say. Better a small life in the woods, diminished though they were from the days before the great cities with their ugly high-rises, than the gnawing hunger that had driven me toward the humans and their beautiful clothes, their delicious shrimp crackers, their games of dice and yut and baduk. For the first time I understood that, as tempting as these things were, they came with a price: I could not obtain them without also entangling myself with human hearts, human quarrels, human loyalties.

A flicker at the edge of one of the screens caught my eye. “Behind us, to the right!” I said.

Jong made a complicated hooking motion with the joystick and the cataphract bent low. My vision swam. “Thank you,” she said.

“Tell me you have some plan beyond ‘keep running until everyone runs out of fuel,'” I said.

She chuckled. “You don’t know thing one about how a cataphract works, do you? Nuclear core. Fuel isn’t the issue.”

I ignored that. Nuclear physics was not typically a fox specialty, although my mother had allowed that astrology was all right. “Why do they want you so badly?”

I had not expected Jong to answer me. But she said, “There’s no more point keeping it a secret. I deserted.”

“Why?” A boom just ahead of us made me clutch the armrests as we tilted dangerously.

“I had a falling out with my commander,” Jong said. Her voice was so tranquil that we might have been sitting side by side on a porch, sipping rice wine. Her hands moved; moved again. A roaring of fire, far off. “Just two left. In any case, my commander liked power. Our squad was sworn to protect the interim government, not—not to play games with the nation’s politics.” She drew a deep breath. “I don’t suppose any of this makes sense to you.”

“Why are you telling me now?” I said.

“Because you might die here with me, and it’s not as if you can give away our location any more. They know who I am. It only seems fair.”

Typically human reasoning, but I appreciated the sentiment. “What good does deserting do you?” I supposed she might know state secrets, at that. But who was she deserting to?

“I just need to get to—” She shook her head. “If I can get to refuge, especially with this machine more or less intact, I have information the loyalists can make use of.” She was scrutinizing the infrared scan as she spoke.

“The Abalone Throne means that much to you?”

Another alert went off. Jong shut it down. “I’m going to bust a limb at this rate,” she said. “The Throne? No. It’s outlived its usefulness.”

“You’re a parliamentarian, then.”

“Yes.”

This matter of monarchies and parliaments and factions was properly none of my business. All I had to do was keep my end of the bargain, and I could leave behind this vexing, heartbreaking woman and her passion for something as abstract as government.

Jong was about to add something to that when it happened. Afterwards I was only able to piece together fragments that didn’t fit together, like shards of a mirror dropped into a lake. A concussive blast. Being flung backwards, then sideways. A sudden, sharp pain in my side. (I’d broken a couple ribs, in spite of the restraints. But without them, the injuries would have been worse.) Jong’s sharp cry, truncated. The stink of panic.

The cataphract had stopped moving. The small gods roared. I moved my head; pain stabbed all the way through the back of my skull. “Jong?” I croaked.

Jong was breathing shallowly. Blood poured thickly from the cut on her face. I saw what had happened: the panel had flown out of my hands and struck her edge-on. The small gods had taken their payment, all right; mine hadn’t been enough. If only I had foreseen this—

“Fox,” Jong said in a weak voice.

Lights blinked on-off, on-off, in a crazed quilt. The cockpit looked like someone had upended a bucket full of unlucky constellations into it. “Jong,” I said. “Jong, are you all right?”

“My mission,” she said. Her eyes were too wide, shocky, the red-and-amber of the status lights pooling in the enormous pupils. I could smell the death on her, hear the frantic pounding of her heart as her body destroyed itself. Internal bleeding, and a lot of it. “Fox, you have to finish my mission. Unless you’re also a physician?”

“Shh,” I said. “Shh.” I had avoided eating people in the medical professions not out of a sense of ethics but because, in the older days, physicians tended to have a solid grounding in the kinds of magics that threatened shape-changing foxes.

“I got one of them,” she said. Her voice sounded more and more thready. “That leaves one, and of course they’ll have called for reinforcements. If they have anyone else to spare. You have to—”

I could have howled my frustration. “I’ll carry you.”

Under other circumstances, that grimace would have been a laugh. “I’m dying, fox, do you think I can’t tell?”

“I don’t know the things you know,” I said desperately. “Even if this metal monstrosity of yours can still run, I can’t pilot it for you.” It was getting hard to breathe; a foul, stinging vapor was leaking into the cockpit. I hoped it wasn’t toxic.

“Then there’s no hope,” she whispered.

“Wait,” I said, remembering; hating myself. “There’s a way.”

The sudden flare of hope in Jong’s eyes cut me.

“I can eat you,” I said. “I can take the things you know with me, and seek your friends. But it might be better simply to die.”

“Do it,” she said. “And hurry. I assume it doesn’t do you any good to eat a corpse, or your kind would have a reputation as grave-thieves.”

I didn’t squander time on apologies. I had already unbuckled the harness, despite the pain of the broken ribs. I flowed back into fox-shape, and I tore out her throat so she wouldn’t suffer as I devoured her liver.

The smoke in the cockpit thickened, thinned. When it was gone, a pale tiger watched me from the rear of the cockpit. It seemed impossible that she could fit; but the shadows stretched out into an infinite vast space to accommodate her, and she did. I recognized her. In a hundred stolen lifetimes I would never fail to recognize her.

Shivering, human, mouth full of blood-tang, I looked down. The magic had given me one last gift: I wore a cataphract pilot’s suit in fox colors, russet and black. Then I met the tiger’s gaze.

I had broken the oath I had sworn upon the tiger-sage’s blood. Of course she came to hunt me.

“I had to do it,” I said, and stumbled to my feet, prepared to fight. I did not expect to last long against a tiger-sage, but for Jong’s sake I had to try.

“There’s no ‘have to’ about anything,” the tiger said lazily. “Every death is a choice, little not-a-fox. At any step you could have turned aside. Now—” She fell silent.

I snatched up Jong’s knife. Now that I no longer had sharp teeth and claws, it would have to do.

“Don’t bother with that,” the tiger said. She had all her teeth, and wasn’t shy about displaying them in a ferocious grin. “No curse I could pronounce on you is more fitting than the one you have chosen for yourself.”

“It’s not a curse,” I said quietly.

“I’ll come back in nine years’ time,” the tiger said, “and we can discuss it then. Good luck with your one-person revolution.”

“I needn’t fight it alone,” I said. “This is your home, too.”

The tiger seemed to consider it. “Not a bad thought,” she said, “but maps and boundaries and nationalism are for humans, not for tigers.”

“If you change your mind,” I said, “I’m sure you can find me, in nine years’ time or otherwise.”

“Indeed,” the tiger said. “Farewell, little not-a-fox.”

“Thank you,” I said, but she was gone already.

I secured Jong’s ruined body in the copilot’s seat I had vacated, so it wouldn’t flop about during maneuvers, and strapped myself in. The cataphract was damaged, but not so badly damaged that I still couldn’t make a run for it. It was time to finish Jong’s mission.

#Yoon Ha Lee #Foxfire Foxfire #short story #actually long story

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restorerjourney · 3 years

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First week in Mazatlán

Buenos Dias! Jesús te ama!

The first week had a lot of ups and downs, but we are so thankful that God has been with us every step of the way.

Before departure: It’s been a whirlwind cleaning up, running errands, and saying our goodbyes here. It started off pretty bad as our red-eye flight to Phoenix, Arizona was the worst flight ever. We had to endure 5 hours of freezing cold with no blankets so a lot of us couldn’t fall asleep. Then what was supposed to be an hour layover ended up being a 5 hour layover. Finally we arrived to Mazatlan and we were warmly greeted with a big hug of heat and humidity. For those not familiar with YWAM, they are bases that created all over the world. Each base is different depending on what kind of building God provided. The one in Kona, Hawaii looks like a college campus since we were given acres of land, in Mazatlán, it was a hotel! So we get amazing ocean views and have access to see the skyline at night! Now it is not a 5 star hotel and it is pretty rundown, but I could feel the love poured out to this building to make it a home to any missionary who visits here. An A/C room is like heaven on earth here and although we have one in our own room, we are only able to use it from 9pm-9am, so we would have to find a public room at the base to have a/c. Another adjustments are the stairs since our base is a hotel and the elevator is small. The food here thankfully is so much better than what it was in Kona. Our dining schedule was another huge hurdle we had to adjust. Meal times were at 7am, 1pm, and 6pm. If you don’t make it on time within 30 minutes, all the food would be gone. Another hurdle was rooming situation. All 9 girls had to be in one room with one toilet and 2 showers. There have been many funky smells which are intensified with the humidity and hair balls in our room but we organized a cleaning system so we could keep our sanity. Lastly the water issue. Thankfully we have filtered water provided at the base but when we brush our teeth, we are not recommended to use the sink water. Also if we go out to eat there is a chance we could get diarrhea and many of us have already. So to sum it all, our team felt overall this week being a time of sanctification and discipline as we adjusted here.

Our schedule is super packed so our week has felt so full, but I am so thankful that our leaders prioritized carving out time for us to have alone time with the Lord and debriefing with our team. Before coming here, God really spoke to all of us the importance of unity and the debriefing session really allowed us to not only share but communicate our struggles and interceded for each other.

We had two days to do orientation and get acclimated to our living situation. Wednesday we did our first ministry which was bible distribution. We all carried 5-7 bibles in our backpacks, rode the back of a pickup truck, and walked in the heat to do house visit and distribute bibles. We split into small groups and I was with Sunny, Martin ( our spanish translator), and Grace. We were lost at first but then we found a house with a man staring at us. We gave him a bible and his mother came out with a wrapped wrist. She was 82-years-old who suffered from a multiple chronic fractured wrist, swelling in her legs and feet, and cataract in her right eye. She couldn’t afford medical care so we offered to pray for her. I’m not going to lie, it was not easy to pray for her cataract to be healed as an optometrist. It’s like asking God to reverse an 82-year-old from wrinkles and gray hair but I felt God impress my heart if I was going to dwell in my unbelief or obey. As I prayed for her, I felt the Lord leading me to share how God saw her as his darling little daughter. After prayer she teared up and shared with us how touched she was by our prayers. We asked if she knew Jesus and she said she did. We hugged and said our goodbyes. We then visited another house where we found a woman named Maria as well who was isolating herself since she had COVID. We prayed for her and Grace prayed for her since she had compassion for her situation since she herself had COVID last year. We gave her a bible and encouraged her. It’s always fun when we come home after dinner to hear everyone’s experience as we debrief together.

Thursday’s highlight was when we got to choose which ministry we wanted to be involved in that YWAM Mazatlan was already partnered within their community. There was soccer ministry, hospital ministry, bible distribution, Stone Island ministry, skateboard/surf ministry, children’s ministry,and government ministry. Children’s ministry, hospital ministry, and government ministry were canceled because there were COVID outbreaks so I ended up choosing soccer ministry. What happened to work out was that soccer ministry was actually a type of children’s ministry. We were able to play scrimmage with the local children which was great because there is no language barrier. After the local pastor shared a quick bible story and then we gave ice cream to the children. It was so fun to see the children laugh and have a great time.

Friday’s highlight was when we went to visit Stone Island’s ministry. Stone Island is not an actual island but a peninsula but looks similar to an island. There the population is majority indigenous mexicans and you have to take a 10 minute ferry from Mazatlan. There the people are living in huts with not much to live on but are one of the friendliest and humble people that I’ve met. We split into small groups and I went with Grace, KC, Bethel ( our translator), and YK. We listened to the voice of God and asked Him which way to go. It was crazy how looking at hindsight, the Lord really directed our steps to go to the specific people He has called us to meet. When we approached the hut and made eye contact with them, YK got excited because they had a lot of parrots and she had 2 parrots back at home but one died recently. She asked if she could see them and they immediately invited us. As we sat the grandfather recognized KC who played with the children yesterday so without him we wouldn’t have made a quick connection with the family there. They offered to give us food and we ate chicken and coke with them. One of the ladies there shared about her eyelid condition which she had suffered for over 10 years. She had a congenital tear duct issue and has received multiple surgeries here in Mexico but they just made the condition worse. What was heartbreaking was when she showed us scars on her leg, neck, and forehead where they took pieces of her skin tissue to use for her tear duct surgery but ended up lying to her and selling her skin grafts. We prayed healing for her and after we prayed YK started to tear up and share what God has revealed to her..about how Jesus loved her so much and his heart grieved her situation and that He was with her. She teared up and was so touched. Her father also teared up and they asked how long we would be here and invited us to their home for dinner next time. They were so generous, pure, kind, humble, and beautiful that I felt so privileged to get to meet.

Saturday was our day of rest and it was just so nice to be able to do laundry since it gets so humid here and we can’t rewear some of our clothes. At night we went to the street market and ate mexican corn. While we were there a few children approached us and were so excited to talk to us because we were korean. They were huge fans of a korean band called BTS. They were so excited one girl started to cry and they all wanted to hug and take photos of us. We asked if they knew Jesus and we prayed for them.

Sunday we went to a local church in Stone Island and two of our members shared their testimony. I’m not gonna lie, it was so difficult staying awake during service because it was so humid and hot that day. This past week's outreach experience really has opened my eyes to see how weak I was and depending on my condition and external circumstances...it really affected me and my ability to love others. It was convicting to see how my love was conditional and a humble experience.

Prayer request:

1.Unity: We are already experiencing spiritual attacks from the enemy towards some of our members but praise God that we experienced breakthrough every single time we bring to light our issues during debrief. Please pray that we would continue to remember to love our team members as ourselves and to fight for our unity.

2. Divine appointments and salvation for the people in Mazatlan: We do believe there are many people ready to receive Jesus. Please pray that we would have a greater fear of the Lord more than man.

3. Health: Please pray for protection from COVID, stomach/digestive issues, back, shoulder, neck, and skin issues that we have been facing.That these ailments would not hinder us doing kingdom work her.

4. To focus our eyes on Jesus and have him involved in all that we do.

Praise Reports:

-We are seeing God’s promises already fulfilled in us! We are experiencing unity like never before. We have experienced supernatural healing and it’s amazing to see our team members be transformed by the love of Christ. Jesus is so so good!

Gracias!

Alicia

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