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allwithagrainofsalt · 4 months

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So I'm watching Princess Weekes' video about confederate vampires (watch it fr) and I wanna expand upon smth they mention about the explicitly White American Confederate storytelling in,

Drumroll please...

Firefly.

Now first: I LOVE Firefly. It's an incredible show and in fact I think it's a beautiful and inspirational piece of political art in many ways, and I'm gonna talk about that part a little bit at the end. But mainly, why did I hear the comparison and immediately start to have 50 puzzle pieces click? Well. This essay got long, and to be honest idk how much I might be repeating others cuz PW mentioned it due to others talking about it too, but I just kinda took a journey of my own off-the-dome observations based on things I've already read about/know. I hope it's an interesting journey for you too.

TW below the Readmore: discussion of colonial / military violence; discussion of Sexual Assault

We are looking at a world of cowboys in the stars, in which there was a recent Civil War. In fact, we're set in a "real life future," where the majority remaining galactic race stems from the great American Empire. We do get influences of Chinese culture with language and clothing, but remember that Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s - which themselves romanticized the values of independent, libertarian southerners (who massacred Indians and no-good loiterers - we'll talk about that later) - heavily utilized "Oriental" aesthetics and caricatures while dehumanizing the Asian people they were ostensibly in relationship with. After all, Asian Americans were a growing population in the landscape of the Western frontier, often working alongside your storybook railroad workers, gold seekers and, even further east than Pacific coastal industries, working & living alongside cowboys. However, the language of Western-genre films (because of the way it mirrors the language of Confederates) does not respect Asian culture as it is, but rather as a collection of "wisdoms" and aesthetics to pick apart and use the "good parts" of - for use by white people in their white expansion. This idea fits a bit uncomfortably well with Firefly's multiple white characters who are "orientalized" by the camera. Kaylee, Inara, and the Tam siblings fulfill various stereotypes and tropes of Chinese- and other Asian-American diaspora people groups. The show, in this way, offers the "diverse" presence of a Chinese influence... using actors of Italian, Irish, German, and possibly Latine background to fill the roles. This makes the Firefly universe look less of a pacifist future between Western and Asian cultures, and more like a colonized universe where the (white) Western colonialists maintain some practices of those forward-thinking Asians who came before them.

But! You may say! Firefly isn't quite so white as that. What about the POC in the show!? Beyond its treatment of the de/re-Orientalization of a decidedly American/Western future, what about Firefly's real interracial representation, like Zoe Washburne and Shepherd Book? I would argue the inclusion of these unapologetic and kind black activist ideas is part of what begins to bring this show towards something more agreeable, but I also think they are at risk of becoming a bit of an obfuscation of a deeper anti-black racist remnant that remains entrenched in the show's Confederate story influences...

We need to talk about Reavers.

Joss Whedon admitted that Reavers were influenced by the role Native Americans played in traditional Westerns. "Every story needs a monster," he said in an interview. "In the stories of the old west it was the Apaches." It's pretty clear how the Reavers, who rape, murder, skin and cannibalize those of the "civilized world" are constructed from the specific racism against Black and Indigenous groups in America. Depictions of cannibals and savages in media have always been constructed to dehumanize those on the outskirts - whether it's the Apache threat Whedon mentions from the Wild West, or indigenous tribes of Africa or South America in any media, or the "terrifying" blackfaced "black" characters in Birth of a Nation, the horror trope of "uncivilized bands of roving lunatics who self-mutilate and can't communicate with their words" is pretty inseparable from its own racist origins. For centuries Europeans have been making "demons" out of pagans and indigenous people for their battle tactics or necropolitics, while simultaneously working hard to entrench our own atrocities in "necessities of the time." For one example, think of the fear associated with "headhunter" displays versus the still-controversial but more civilized-presenting "harsh peacekeeping" of public hangings. What is the difference between these practices besides a different eagernesses to contextualize the practice? I don't argue in favor of punitive violence for cultural purposes here, but it's important not to lose the contextualization of these tropes' origins in the social messaging of popular media. And in fact, the Reavers show an interesting way that the criminalization of Black and Indigenous Americans ties closely to the way we talk about the incarcerated and the mentally ill. I'm frankly not much more satisfied by the Reavers being an embodiment of "space madness" than I would be if they were straight up just Native Americans, or runaways from enslavement. American culture is great at coming up with "madnesses" which are really just the pushback to dehumanizing and unjust regimes. I'm not saying that the logic of the show would allow Reavers to receive constructive community-based mental health support involving free medicine and good therapy. But in a show that claims to be in favor of the marginalized and their voice for power, it's weird that this doesn't come up, right? Do the monsters in our media need to be irredeemable to work as narrative tropes? I would argue, once again, the inclusion of this Western and frankly genocidal trope (and if you think the Reavers are NOT a genocidal story trope, let me know what paths the narrative offers as a solution besides killing them immediately and indiscriminately when given the chance.) works to build a world-feel that's less "for the people" and more "for the justified, downtrodden warriors who know right from wrong," which is a very confederate line of thought.

Although Firefly highlights some literal black voices in their main cast, the plotline of the show is much the same as a confederate apologist story. Some people are more worthy of life than others in this tale - others who are too animistic and uncivilized; or who are simply left behind by the inevitable march of the white, righteous underdog ideologies. And these bold, brave rebels from the Civil War which recently happened are still around, just waiting to reassert their power and their independent desires from the empire. The Confederacy of the US was a white, ethno-nationalist and fascist state, admittedly so by their own politicians. It provided ideological groundwork for Nazi Germany and preceded much of the pseudoscience of phrenology. The Confederate position was based on white supremacy nearly entirely, and argued for the most racist version of a "globalist" idea possible. As evidence, here's some of the Cornerstone Address presented by Alexander Stephens, the "vice president" of the Confederacy: "Many governments have been founded upon the principle of subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature's laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system." But confederate stories and ideas have maintained a long-standing and unyielding influence, as after they lost the Civil War, the ideology of the Confederacy underwent a serious PR rebranding. Rather than "anti-American" racists, they became the noble fighters of a lost cause. They became the "defenders of heritage," and they became the mythologized ancestor of any white people who wanted to claim them. The Civil War "rebels" were painted as noble Southern men and women who, in a political landscape of the South becoming red states and the bible belt, were mythologized as Southern Belles and nobly humble plantation owners who loved Good Black people... just not the "mentally ill" ones who did things like run away or fight bondage.

(By the way, Alexander Stephens had some things to say about mental illness too (same link again)- I'm tying this back to my point about "mentally ill Reavers" being less of a far-cry than you might think from Confederate thinking: "Our new government [the Confederacy] is founded upon [this] idea; its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. ... Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. ... Those at the North, who still cling to these errors [of racial equality], with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate [call them] fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the antislavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. ... [I] told [a gentleman from one of the northern states in the House of Representatives] that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal." It's worth wondering what makes us, as viewers, accept that Reavers are inherently incurable of the mental illness which makes them monsters. Of course this trope could be used in a critical way - but we can see the real-language example here which should make us question what kind of reading to take from media which only addresses the single solution of wiping a True Evil demographic from existence.)

So I hope you see the influences now, how Firefly follows Confederate and White Supremacist storylines. It's of course worth talking about though, the ways it can be read as a radical story as well. The cast includes an empowered revolutionary black woman, a black spiritual elder who advocates for pacifism in resistence, a sex worker who consistently values and stands up for herself and her line of work explicitly, a working woman who struggles with misogyny, and a rich man disgracing himself from society to save his mentally ill younger sister who was facing violent abuse at the hands of the state. These are people who orient themselves for one reason or another in at least some form of opposition to the oppressive and violent power of the government, which once again, is an analogous state to the United States. Of course, the difficulty of the anti-governmental Confederate narrative is that anti-governmental sentiment can have incredibly valid origins. If you are facing discrimination you should indeed oppose the oppressive force that monitors and abuses all its citizens in one way or another. But for God's sake, that opposition should come from a perspective of eliminating discrimination for all. Not a perspective like Jayne Cobb's - the explicitly violent and self-serving voice which, through the show and movie, metaphorically pulls our disaffected protagonist, Malcolm Reynolds, toward the direction of his more cynical, militaristic and even fascist internalized values. Firefly wants to simultaneously make a diverse revolutionary text, but also misses the opportunities it presents itself to say something more meaningful through its own medium. We could've addressed the harm of Jayne's willingness to grant "humanity" ONLY to the people he deems as something like family - or who he feels have properly convinced him that they're worth saving. He is the perfect embodiment of the right-wing, misogynist, white-supremacist ideology at the center of Confederate thinking. He's a Nazi who has been pulled into collaborating with real marginalized people through his relationship with Mal. And there's some level of that which could be an interesting story about deradicalization. In fact in some ways I believe the show could be open to some kind of that interpretation, given the almost-betrayal that Jayne goes back against due to his dedication to Mal. But unfortunatly I'd also say that in the execution of the show I got a different perception, which is back to the whole Confederate thesis...

Instead of a fascist who we could watch be deradicalized by his fellow crew, Jayne ends up doing marginal good only ever out of respect for Mal. I would argue in this way, their relationship mirrors the romanticized mythology of the Civil War being a "war between brothers" due to split households in border states. This narrative clearly holds more respect for the Confederacy than continuing to rightfully call the ideology the abhorrent thing that it is, and it is clear that the same ideology rears its head deep into our legal systems through the treatment of oppressed groups to this day. In ways, the influence of pro-Confederate radicals AFTER the war worked to legitimize bigotry of all kinds in a truly unprecedented way in America. If we have to respect the opinions of the Confederates because they were our "brothers" and not our ideological enemies, then who will we feel more and more comfortable throwing by the wayside - them or the people we work together to shamefully dehumanize? Through this contextual lens, with a vision of Mal as a "decent cowboy" compared to Jayne's more blatantly intolerant cowboy persona, it seems glaring that Jayne's bigoted views are just more intense outward versions of similar prejudices to those Mal feels, but by comparing the two characters to one another Mal would of course begin to look more forgivable despite his relative centrism and lack of care for the marginalized beyond his immediate group. Neither Mal nor anyone, for the narrative's sake, ever really, constructively pulls Jayne aside to actually lay down meaningful expectations of respect. And our rebel storylines of outgroup justice in the future should not accept this lack of accountability! By doing so, we leave no room for the revolutionary need for the Paradox of Tolerance...

The one thing we must not tolerate is intolerance.

Oh and P.S., one last thing: Upon an internet search about the paradox of tolerance I learned that Bill Maher has a famous quote about it, and idk the specifics but seeing that dang centrist asshole liberal made me want to clarify that the argument itself could tie very well into stuff like Islamophobic talking points, since the US defends a lot of its military landgrabs as "defending liberal ideals" due to conflating all Muslims with extremist groups. So I just felt the need to add that being "intolerant of intolerance" is NOT equivalent to dehumanizing groups based on stereotypes of them being "more prone to violence" or other dogwhistles like that. I would imagine that comes through, but it's also just worth making explicit. Even me, in this essay, seeing a character who falls into many of the plot points of a Confederate heroism storyline and is a white man - I'm not intolerant OF those things. In the episodes where Mal successfully subverts those ideologies he's mirroring on screen, by interacting with the world differently because he has learned to humanize an increasingly large group of people, I cheer for him! However, I remain intolerant of the intolerance Mal continues to show by virtue of his failure to hold others and himself accountable to the paradox of tolerance, and lets abuse goes unchecked for longer than he, as a man with power and a growing communal mindset, COULD put to rest.

#media analysis #firefly #white supremacy #orientalism #historical #history lesson #critical theory #philosophy #revolutionary #racism #leftism

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paellegere · 3 months

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final thoughts: sophie's world

so i ended up staying up late last night and powering through the last few chapters. i wanted this shit done!! getting a new gig slowed me down and it was beginning to frustrate me, so i guess i just expended all of that energy in one go. i think that's the fasted i've read something in ages honestly lmao

anyway i quite liked the book. the ending was more or less satisfying to me, though i was expecting that with how much emphasis was placed on that "magic" mirror, they would actually do something with it. if you mention the gun it has to go off and whatnot. all that talk about the mirror being some kind of "portal" and how the mirror functioned as a symbol connecting sophie and hilde and then in the end they didn't even truly connect with each other through it. idk why the author went with the boat instead honestly. it wasn't bad, but it just made me shrug unimpressed-like.

i found the prose too juvenile for my taste, but while it was pretty distracting in the beginning, i did get used to it quickly and it didn't pose much of a problem. the translation, though, was incredibly awkward. it felt like a random mish-mash of of dozens of english dialects: the general spelling conventions were american, but there were so many instances of words and phrases being dialectically non-american or straight-up stilted and non-english (i.e. there are set phrases and translations we use for certain things, and the translator inexplicably used something else instead). it was only after i discovered the translator, too, is norwegian that i realized what was going on. it does seem like yet another case of "you probably should only translate into your native language(s)" that seems to prove the rule more than being an exception. i was very unimpressed with the tl, and when i noted errors (small, like grammar or punctuation, or large, like claiming the surrealists did "automatic writing" instead of the aforementioned romantics) i found myself doubting the translator over the author. i'd like to get my hands on the original norwegian to check myself tbh.

i did think the book did a good job of presenting its information. it's both informative and engaging, and because the novel is aimed at kids, it makes the dense subject a lot more digestible. which was great for me, since philosophy texts tend to make my brain melt out my ears—i'm glad it wasn't fucking heidegger all over again, jesus christ.

but again i'm still bothered by the fact that it claims to be a history of philosophy, but it only actually covers european philosophy, and staggeringly so. maybe it's a marketing error, but that does rub me the wrong way. i was looking forward to getting more broad insight to far-eastern philosophies or even buddhism or schools of thought in the islamic world and so on. outside of asian religions, i don't actually know where to start research on this, and i certainly don't have the foundation in philosophy required to easily connect and weave all of the philosophies together the way this book did, so i was pretty disappointed when it finally sank in that this novel would only cover europe's philosophical background.

i think some of the eras were glossed over way too quickly though. i already mentioned my disappointment in the enlightenment, but the modern era was really lacking too. i'm pretty sure nietzsche deserved more than one sentence dedicated to his ideas considering his impact. if sigmund freud and charles darwin can have whole chapters dedicated to their decidedly not philosophical practices of psychology and biology i really think nietzsche can get more than "he said god is dead" and then moving on. obviously i get why setting the context for the shifting european order is important; darwin and freud needed to be explained. but why dedicated a whole chapter to each of them and then leave out very important actual philosophers like nietzsche or camus or voltaire or montesqieu (and et cetera et cetera). it feels poorly planned in the second half of the book and it was pretty frustrating.

but the way each philosopher (that gaarder did give time to) was presented in an engaging and digestible way. i like that there were seemingly certain criteria that had to be covered with each one; the notes i've been taking are in the form of a chart with headings for those criteria. it brought up elements of each person's philosophy that i never would have thought to look into on my own (namely, personal views on god (or "god") and the soul).

and the way the book presented these philosophies as a never-ending back and forth between history, a game of tug of war, a series of theses and antitheses and syntheses and so on, was really clever. it's the exact kind of understanding and context i try to create for myself when i study history; the cyclical nature of humanity is important to understand imo. it helps you find patterns in our current world and it presents options and solutions tried by our predecessors, and it gives a warning about what happens when the pendulum inevitably swings back in the other direction. this book gave a great purview of these patterns and i really appreciate what it set out to do—in the end the individual philosophers weren't as important as the changing social, economic, and cultural climates through the ages. and in that regard i think gaarder did a pretty good job of accomplishing what he set out to do.

i do feel like it gave me a solid foundation for understanding the development of european philosophy from the last 3000 years, so despite my criticisms i'm really happy i read it. it satisfied almost everything i was looking to gain from it, and that's pretty awesome! i don't think it was amazing or perfect, far from it, but for what it offered it did do a pretty good job. i feel more confident that i can go and read the works mentioned in the book and understand the philosophical and historical context in which they were written—and i feel more confident that i can go and research underrepresented philosophers like nietzsche or voltaire and be able to follow along with their projects without struggling too much.

so with that said, i'm finally going to reread candide. i remember liking it when i read it in high school, and watching a lecture series on unbelief made me remember (or realize?) that the book is a scathing critique on the church, so i'd like to revisit that as my current, enemy-of-the-church self and see for myself. honestly after reading sophie's world, what i really want to do is pick up another nonfiction book, but while i'm reading east of eden simultaneously i think i should stick to lighter reads, lest i fall to the same mistake i made trying to read carry the wind (which i've shelved for the time being, because it's too dense and textbook-like to serve as a refreshing alternative to steinbeck; i'll try to pick it back up maybe once i've finished eoe). so i'm excited to get through candide! it's a short read, so i don't think it'll pose too many problems for me (or if it does, the problems will be short).

#liveblogging: sophie's world #thank god i'm finally done. i'll finish writing out all my notes for the book this weekend bc i'm still busy with this job until friday #.txt

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theonethatslowlyfade · 1 year

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ENG America can be fire and it can be iron. It can be oily and slimy like a fish or silent and enveloping like a snake. She can be as tall as the first skyscrapers of those years, she can be boundless like the great prairies his mother had told him about. For Bly, America was a dream and a legend, a home and country without borders, but above all... above all terror. He found the gaze of the entire lodge upon him, but on the other hand he had initiated the speech. “Now that you have decided on this destination, since it is also where I come from, it seems right to me... to warn you about what concerns me. To avoid surprises." He swallowed silently. Feli, Hubert, Grayson, Raven, Franco and even Lagrange looked at him expectantly. He looked at them one by one raising an eyebrow, he couldn't understand how they could have the slightest interest in that story-nevertheless he went on talking, marveling at the ease with which the words came out of his mouth. “I was born in Mariposa County, my family lives in a mansion on top of a hill. When I was… very young, a group of dissidents attacked us, my sister and me.” he took a deep breath, wrinkling his nose. He was putting a wall between himself and the memories to avoid recalling them without control, a subtlety that a psychoanalyst like him was able to perform in order to "mentally" separate himself from the events. “They ravaged her, violated her, killed her in front of my eyes and cut off her head. We buried her like this, without the skull.” “The coldness with which he talks about it is disturbing ... ” Grayson looked at the other cronies with a decidedly tried look. "It's called dissociation," Felicita replied. “Something like that traumatizes you for life.” Still, they weren't talking to him. They were talking to each other, about him. Bly felt that if Monocle was still a split personality at this point, he would at least have masterminded a massacre of the poor fellows. Not him; he actually understood them: he couldn't understand how serious it was and why they continued to listen to him. Was it really that important, what he had to say? He just washed it off with water, he really didn't seem worthy of attention. Lagrange introduced herself into the conversation discreetly, glancing at him because he probably didn't look good. He was aware of it and at the same time he had no idea, he only felt the firmness and the gaze fixed on a vague point in the air. Okay, he wasn't well. He was on the long mellowed threshold of a tantrum, or worse he was about to send the group to hell with a blackout where he didn't know what he was going to do. “For the Doctor's culture, burying one's headless dead is an incredible affront.” “Yes, for Native Americans - my grandparents - the spirit of a body whose parts are separated, especially the skull, is forced to roam the earth restlessly without ever reaching the afterlife, the Great Prairies or what what's up. It becomes a ghost or worse." He suddenly felt incredibly light-headed, he didn't want to keep talking about it. He looked at Hubert, even looked at Felicita but he knew he couldn't get comfort if they didn't know him completely or almost. “Then I literally vaporized the perpetrators and their families in an explosion. That was how Tara found me and took me under the wing of the Caped Crusaders. After that I went to Sacramento, then to San Francisco, where she later replaced Yurei for me." "Actually, it was you who replaced him," Lagrange pointed out, making him feel like a sketch of a man fumbling on a smooth glass sprinkled with oil. He had a crush on Yurei, but it was no use—however he tried, the Japanese-raised American didn't seem to want to start a romantic relationship with him. Respecting his colleague's wishes, he still remained a good friend and colleague. “I don't know where my family is or what happened to them. I don't know what state my house is in, my sister's head is still missing and her killers... their blood is on my hands. Do you still want to come with me?” “Bly, you know we always stepped in if there was an issue that was affecting one of us. We went to Egypt and Cairo for Hubert and Felicita. If this thing concerns you personally, and you want us to intervene about it, we are the first to want to come.” “Actually…since we have to go through Salem…” “Do you want us to intervene?” Grayson repeated it to him forcefully and Bly was literally overwhelmed by tears. His eyes glazed over, aware that he would soon cry he narrowed his gaze to two slits to hold back what he could. It was nothing new that he felt small, stupid, a little likeable at times and that not everyone liked him. He was a Caped Crusader for that too, by the Gods! But in his feeling so irrelevant, he thought he could only offer help and never receive it, seeing his problems as little more than a nuisance to be given to more local, powerful, and definitely committed people like Grayson, Hubert, Feli, and even Franco. In front of them he had made a prolonged series of fools, mistakes to no end - he was ashamed of himself to be honest. Yet, they were all there. Even Lagrange. “Y-yes…” he said with little force, whispering a barely audible “Thank you.” "Well, it's decided: we're leaving for America!" For the first time he saw a softness in Grayson's eyes that he had never noticed before. On the verge of his own tears now, misguided as they were, he took his handkerchief from his vest pocket and turned away briefly, wiping the contours of his eyes and cheekbones. He prayed to any divine entity or unwilling to listen, the spirits and any saint because their safety was kept intact throughout the journey and beyond. What would have happened otherwise? Would he send the remains of a father to his unborn daughter, or lifeless favorites to his mentor? And Franco, perhaps sent back to the cage and left to be killed by the guards, by hunger and by beatings? No. he would never have accepted it. ITA Entry 5 L’america può essere fuoco e può essere ferro. Può essere oleosa e viscida come un pesce oppure silenziosa e avvolgente come un serpente. Può essere alta come i primi grattacieli di quegli anni, può essere sconfinata come nelle grandi praterie di cui gli aveva parlato la madre. Per Bly l’america era sogno e leggenda, casa e patria senza confini, ma sopratutto... sopratutto terrore. Si trovò lo sguardo dell’intera loggia addosso, ma d’altronde aveva iniziato lui il discorso. “Adesso che avete deciso questa meta, dato che è anche da dove provengo, mi sembra giusto... avvertirvi di quello che mi riguarda. Per non avere sorprese.” Deglutì silenziosamente. Feli, Hubert, Grayson, Raven, Franco e persino la Lagrange lo guardavano con aspettativa. Li squadrò uno ad uno alzando un sopracciglio, non riusciva a capire come potessero minimamente provare interesse per quella storia - ciò nonostante andò avanti a parlare, stupendosi della facilità con cui le parole gli uscivano di bocca. “Sono nato a Mariposa County, la mia famiglia vive in una villa sulla cima di una collina. Quand’ero... molto giovane, un gruppo di dissidenti ci ha attaccato, me e mia sorella.” prese un lungo respiro, storcendo il naso. Stava mettendo un muro tra sè ed i ricordi per evitare di rievocarli senza controllo, una sottigliezza che uno psicanalista come lui era in grado di eseguire per separarsi “mentalmente” dagli eventi. “L’hanno devastata, violata, uccisa davanti ai miei occhi e le hanno tagliato la testa. L’abbiamo seppellita così, senza cranio.” “E’ inquietante la freddezza con cui ne parla...” Grayson guardò gli altri compari con uno sguardo decisamente provato. “Si chiama dissociazione” gli rispose Felicita. “Una cosa del genere ti traumatizza a vita.” Eppure, non stavano parlando con lui. Stavano parlando tra loro, di lui. Bly sentì che se a questo punto Monocolo fosse stato ancora una personalità scissa, avrebbe come minimo architettato una strage sui poveri colleghi. Lui no; lui per la verità li comprendeva: non riusciva a capire quanto ci fosse di così grave e perchè continuassero a prestargli orecchio. Era davvero così importante, quel che aveva da dire? Bastava lavarlo via con l’acqua, non sembrava davvero degno di attenzione. La Lagrange si introdusse nel discorso con un fare discreto, lanciandogli un’occhiata perchè probabilmente non aveva una bella cera. Se ne rendeva conto ed al tempo stesso non ne aveva idea, sentiva solo la fermezza ed il proprio sguardo fisso in un vago punto dell’aria. Ok, non stava bene. Era sulla soglia da tempo ammorbidita di una crisi di nervi, o peggio stava per mandare il gruppo al diavolo con un black out in cui non sapeva cos’avrebbe potuto fare. “Per la cultura del Dottore, seppellire i propri morti senza testa è un incredibile affronto.” “Si, per i nativi d’america - i miei nonni - lo spirito di un corpo a cui vengono separati i pezzi, specialmente il cranio, è costretto a vagare senza pace sulla terra senza mai raggiungere l’aldilà, le Grandi Praterie o quello che c’è. Diventa un fantasma o peggio.” Si sentì improvvisamente la testa incredibilmente leggera, non voleva continuare a parlarne. Guardò Hubert, guardò perfino Felicita ma sapeva di non poter avere conforto, se non l’avessero conosciuto completamente o quasi. “Dopodichè ho letteralmente vaporizzato i colpevoli e le loro famiglie in un’esplosione. E’ stato così che Tara mi ha trovato e mi ha preso sotto l’ala dei Crociati Mascherati. Dopodichè sono andato a Sacramento, poi a San Francisco, dove in seguito mi ha sostituito Yurei.” “Veramente sei tu che l’hai sostituito” puntualizzò Lagrange, facendolo sentire un abbozzo di uomo che annaspava su un vetro liscio e cosparso d’olio. Aveva una cotta per Yurei, ma era inutile - per quanto provasse, l’americano cresciuto in Giappone non sembrava voler iniziare con lui una relazione sentimentale. Rispettando i desideri del collega, gli era rimasto comunque buon amico e collega. “Non so dov’è la mia famiglia, nè che fine ha fatto. Non so in che stato è ridotta la mia casa, la testa di mia sorella è ancora dispersa ed i suoi assassini... il loro sangue è sulle mie mani. Volete comunque venire con me?” “Bly, sai che siamo sempre intervenuti se c’era un problema che riguardava uno di noi. Siamo andati in Egitto e al Cairo per Hubert e Felicita. Se questa cosa ti riguarda personalmente, e vuoi che interveniamo a proposito, siamo i primi a voler venire.” “Veramente... dato che dobbiamo passare da Salem...” “Vuoi che interveniamo?” Grayson glielo ripetè con forza e Bly fu letteralmente travolto dalle lacrime. Gli si appannarono gli occhi, conscio che a breve si sarebbe messo a piangere ridusse il suo sguardo a due fessure per trattenere quello che poteva. Non era una novità che si sentisse piccolo, stupido, un po’ piacione alle volte e che non piacesse a tutti. Era un Crociato Mascherato anche per questo motivo, per gli Dei! Ma nel suo sentirsi così irrilevante, pensava di poter solamente offrire aiuto e mai riceverlo, considerando i propri problemi come poco più di un fastidio da dare a persone più altolocale, potenti e sicuramente impegnate come Grayson, Hubert, Feli e persino Franco. Davanti a loro aveva fatto una prolungata serie di figuracce, errori a non finire - si vergognava di sè stesso a dirla tutta. Eppure, erano tutti lì. Perfino Lagrange. “S-si...” disse con poca forza, sussurrando un appena percettibile “Grazie.” “Bene, è deciso: si parte per l’America!” Per la prima volta vide una dolcezza nello sguardo di Grayson che non aveva mai notato prima. Ormai sull’orlo delle proprie lacrime, così sbagliate com’erano, prese il fazzoletto dalla tasca del gilet e si voltò brevemente, asciugandosi il contorno degli occhi e gli zigomi. Pregò qualsiasi entità divina o non volesse mettersi in ascolto, gli spiriti e qualsiasi santo perchè la loro incolumità fosse conservata intatta per tutto il viaggio e anche oltre. Cosa sarebbe successo in caso contrario? Avrebbe spedito le spoglie di un padre dalla figlia non ancora nata, oppure dei prediletti senza vita dal mentore? E Franco, magari rimandato al gabbio e lasciato uccidere dalle guardie, dalla fame e dalle botte? No. Non l’avrebbe mai accettato.

#rippers #rippers resurrected #william bly #ttrpg #america

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architectnews · 2 years

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World of Volvo, Gothenburg

World of Volvo, Gothenburg Real Estate Development, Swedish Visitors Attraction, Scandinavian Modern Architecture, Images

World of Volvo Visitors Centre in Gothenburg

4 May 2022

Architecture: Henning Larsen Architects A/S

Location: Mölndalsån, Gothenburg, Sweden

Images: Kvant1

World of Volvo, Sweden

At World of Volvo, Native Swedish Landscapes, and the Right to Roam take Center Stage. With the timber structure already coming up, Henning Larsen is pleased to reveal the design for World of Volvo, a unique experience center and meeting place for the famed Swedish brands, Volvo Cars and Volvo Group in Gothenburg that puts its focus on Scandinavian landscape, environment, and traditions.

After winning the interview competition for World of Volvo in late 2018, Henning Larsen is proud to share the design for the 22,000 sqm experience center as site work begins in Gothenburg. World of Volvo will unite the brands of Volvo Group and Volvo Cars to share the history, tradition, and future of the famed Swedish brand in a single structure. It will be an embodiment of the Volvo brand values and aspirations.

“This project is incredibly special to us,” says Søren Øllgaard, Design Director at Henning Larsen. “With its deep connection to Scandinavia, from its landscapes to its architectural tradition, World of Volvo has given us to the opportunity to explore the profound relationship between architecture and the natural environment.”

“We commit to create a landmark, a new icon and destination in the city centre of Gothenburg. We also commit to gathering people in an inspiring meeting place reflecting Volvo’s human centric approach and perspectives. Our aim with World of Volvo is to deliver a premium experience in a place where we combine entertainment; exhibitions, talks, conferences, and music, as well as food, drinks and shopping says Magnus Wrahme CEO at World of Volvo.

Located in Gothenburg’s Event district (home to many of the city’s museums, parks, and entertainment venues), the project is expected to be completed in late 2023 and open to visitors in 2024.

Allemansrätten World of Volvo is designed around the Swedish concept of “Allemansrätten”, denoting the fundamental right that all citizens share to nature: the right to roam freely on any land (public or private), showing consideration for nature and for others. This tenet has become not just a right, but a central part of the Swedish ethos and one that lives in citizens, businesses, and organisations alike – Volvo included.

The circular form of World of Volvo, encompassing both care of nature and consideration for people, encourages visitors to make their own experience both inside and outside, regardless of whether they hold tickets to the exhibitions inside.

“Our goal was to give form to something very essential to the Swedish spirit. World of Volvo’s circular form, the timber materiality, its integration with the landscape, and, fundamentally, its openness – these things are all parts of a core collective identity,” says Martin Stenberg Ringnér, Associate Design Director, Sweden. World of Volvo’s timber construction is at once the most forward-facing and most traditional element of the project. While Sweden (like many Nordic countries) has a long tradition of timber construction, World of Volvo takes a decidedly modern approach. The beams and columns are built from glulam timber, a wood product that constitutes multiple layers of dimensional lumber bonded by a durable moisture-resistant structural adhesive. Computer-controlled fabrication allows the curved glulam pieces to be cut with a high degree of precision. Rigidity and continuity in the structure is guaranteed with metal connectors that can be hidden inside the wooden members. The floor slabs are made of locally sourced CLT, cross laminated timber.

“Architecture is currently in the midst of a timber renaissance, with new milestones in timber construction being reached at breakneck pace,” explains Filip Francati, Lead Design Architect at Henning Larsen. “But despite strides in structural development, aesthetic expression hasn’t kept pace. World of Volvo has been an exciting opportunity to push the boundaries and we hope that it can set a new standard for the many ways we can use timber in architecture.”

Embracing Swedish Nature The reference to nature in the arcing “branches” and roof “canopy” is by design, with the concept for the structure centered around the idea of The Mountain (the landscape and building’s base) and The Tree (the building itself.)

The large landscape that surrounds the building brings the nature of Sweden to the center of Gothenburg, covering the area in delicate flowers and native plants that bloom between, rocky outcroppings and meandering paths. And just like in the landscapes across the country, visitors are encouraged to inhabit the landscape however they like, keeping in mind the principle of allemansrätten: leave no trace.

“Our approach brings a native piece of Swedish nature to the middle of the city of Gothenburg,” says Sonja Stockmarr, Global Design Director for Landscape at Henning Larsen. “The landscape, from the Swedish quarries and the wooden structure, built with the pine trees, moss, and shrubs of the Swedish forest, make up the nature surrounding World of Volvo.” Growing out from the Mountain are three vast “Trees”, their trunks large enough to contain small exhibit spaces, vertical circulation, bran exhibition, and service functions. The open space between the trees is left largely empty, save for sculptural stairs (the fertile Swedish forest floor) that link the level and exhibit items that dot the floor. The interior space blends smoothly with the outdoors, a floor-to-ceiling glass façades creating a seamless transition into the sprawling nature beyond.

A New Icon for Gothenburg Located along Mölndalsån, the site for World of Volvo links to a promenade that traces the stream’s eastern bank up to Gothenburg’s city center. A number of green and functional cross-links of different types connect both sides of the river, allowing visitors to wind their way towards the site as they choose. While these links promote physical accessibility for walking and cycling, they also restore Mölndalsån’s ecological and visual connectivity.

On the other side of World of Volvo site passes the E6 highway, from which travellers will catch a high-speed glimpse of the project’s tilted roof and exhibitions inside. Whether passing from the east at 80km/h or from the west at 5km/hm the building doesn’t fully reveal all its spaces from within.

It is up to the visitors to make their way and determine their own experience. World of Volvo is expected to reach completion in late 2023, with doors opening to visitors in 2024. More information on the project is available on Henning Larsen’s website, and on https://ift.tt/mK5FvA9 worldofvolvo.com

World of Volvo in Gothenburg, Sweden – Building Information

Architecture: Henning Larsen Architects A/S – https://henninglarsen.com/en Project name: World of Volvo Client: World of Volvo Location: Gothenburg, Sweden Typology: Experience Center and meeting place Concept: 2018 Construction Start: 2022 Expected Completion: 2023 Inauguration: 2024 Size: 22,000 m2 / 237,000 ft2 Certifications: LEED Gold and WELL Gold Main contractor: BRA Bygg Architect: Henning Larsen Landscape: Henning Larsen Interior design: Nordström Kelly Arkitekter AB and Henning Larsen Wood Structure: Engineering and production by Wiehag GmbH Wood structure: interior claddings, and facade by Lindner Scandinavia AB Structural engineering: Optima Engineering AB and BRA Teknik Contractor Landscape: BRA Mark

About Henning Larsen Henning Larsen is one of Denmark’s leading architectural firms and has realized projects all over the world. Founded by architect Henning Larsen in 1959, the company is globally recognized for its aesthetic, sustainable and social architecture. Henning Larsen’s many iconic projects include everything from standalone buildings to landscapes to large urban development projects. These include Harpa Concert Hall & Conference Center (2011) in Reykjavik, Iceland, Moesgaard Museum (2013) in Aarhus, Denmark, and the development of Cockle Bay Park, a 73,000 m2 high-rise building in central Sydney, Australia.

Renders: Kvant1

World of Volvo, Gothenburg images / information received 040522

Location: Gothenburg, Sweden, north east Europe

Architecture in Sweden

Gothenburg Architecture News

Swedish Architecture Designs – chronological list

Gothenburg Architecture

Gothenburg Buildings

New Housing at Hills Golf & Sports Club, Sandsjöbacka in Mölndal, south of Gothenburg Design: apartment buildings designed by Unit Arkitektur photo © Krister Engstrom New Housing at Hills Golf & Sports Club

Gothenburg Cable Car Design: UNStudio image courtesy of architects Gothenburg Cable Car Design

Gothenburg Warehouse – Magasin 113 Design: MVRDV and BSK Arkitekter image : MVRDV Magasin 113, Gothenburg Warehouse Renovation

Centrala Lindholmen Architects: Henning Larsen image courtesy of architects Centrala Lindholmen in Gothenburg

Swedish Architects Studios

Swedish Architecture News

Swedish Architecture Walking Tours by e-architect – city walks in Stockholm

Comments / photos for the World of Volvo, Gothenburg design by Henning Larsen Architects A/S page welcome

The post World of Volvo, Gothenburg appeared first on e-architect.

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izzielizzie · 3 years

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Footnotes in the Story of Your Life

Nancy Drew never wanted to move from everything she knew in New York to an unwelcoming town in Maine, and she secretly refuses to enjoy her upcoming final year of high school, but that might not even happen when she and four Horseshoe Bay natives - Bess Marvin the socialite, Ace the stoic son of a single mother, George Fan the town foster child/screw up, and Ned Nickerson HBPD’s favorite ex-con - are accused of attempted murder. Nancy’s startled - when she said she wanted something interesting to happen she didn’t mean this - but soon she starts to notice that not everything is as it seems here (AU).

Title from “Tolerate It” by Taylor Swift

Nancy’s mother finds her sitting on her bed on the first day of summer with a framed photograph in her hands. Kate Drew softens at the sight of her daughter, her usually perfect posture long forgotten as she wilts into the bed.

“Nance,” she says quietly, and Nancy instantly looks up, her face crumpling. Kate crosses the bare room to sit next to her only daughter, wrapping a secure arm around her shoulder. “Moving must be hard, huh?” For the past month, the family of three had been packing up their New York home in River Heights, loading things into trucks as their friends came by with endless casseroles and ceramic dishes they didn’t know what to do with. Nancy, as social as her mother before her, had drawn into herself more and more as she made her goodbyes.

“Liven up Nance,” Carson, Kate’s husband and Nancy’s father had said not too long ago as they ate the tuna casserole Helen Coring - Nancy’s best friend - had brought earlier that day as they put the contents of Nancy’s room into a U Haul truck. “We’re moving to River Heights Drive. Not that much of a change, right?”

Nancy had spent the rest of the night glaring at her father, resenting his audacity, and Kate had taken over with the reassurances.

“Yeah. I just hate the idea that I’m missing senior year.”

“Well, you’re not missing it per say. You’re still going to school here.”

Nancy looks at the picture of her, Helen, and another friend named Burt at the junior prom, their arms around each other. Nancy sighs. She considers launching into a tirade about how New York and Maine are very different places and no she is missing school, the important parts at least, but she knows that this move is hard on her mother too, so she refrains. “I guess so,” she says, reluctantly putting the picture on the stand she had placed next to her bed.

Kate kisses the top of Nancy’s head. “Good. Now why don’t you explore and I’ll see what casserole I can heat up.”

“Ugh Mom,” Nancy says, already grinning as she pulls her blue raincoat from one of the boxes on the floor in front of her.

Nancy’s wanderings lead her to a small seafood restaurant with a great view of the Atlantic. Nancy’s not used to being this close to large bodies of water, and it’s making her a little nauseous. Her father, a native of Boston, assures her that she’ll get over the salt air smell, but Nancy’s not so sure.

She looks up at the claw shaped sign, creaking eerily on its pole. The Bayside Claw Nancy reads. What a fitting name. And a fitting sign. Nancy’s about to turn and keep walking, since she’s not a big seafood person, but she sees a handful of well dressed men enter the restaurant. Nancy’s spent enough time in New York City to know when a well dressed person is just fashion conscious, or when they’re rich and up to something. These men are definitely the latter. Nancy pauses for a few moments to make sure that the men have had the time to settle, since she locked eyes with a young man with sandy blond hair and the beginnings of a goatee, and she doesn’t want him to think she’s following him.

Nancy is an unnecessarily paranoid person.

She pushes through the doors of the restaurant and is nearly mowed over by a person the moment she steps into the dining area. “Whoah, I’m sorry,” she says, stepping back in time to see a woman with long black hair and an oversized cardigan stagger backwards, clearly discombobulated by well… everything.

“Ugh, Victoria,” A girl about Nancy’s age in a green uniform grumbles. She catches sight of Nancy. “Sorry about that ma’am,” the waitress says, reaching down to haul the woman (presumably Victoria) off the ground. The waitress pushes Victoria out of the door that’s still held open by Nancy. “Go be drunk somewhere else!” The waitress - whose name tag reads George - turns to Nancy. “Can I help you?”

Nancy freezes, not quite sure why to say she’s here now that she’s been spotted by this rather vocal waitress when she’s saved by another waitress, this time in yellow.

“George, Mr. Hudson wants us to give his wife food,” the waitress says in a posh British accent. She’s holding a wobbly plate of fish and salad in one hand.

George turns from Nancy to the new waitress, annoyance crossing her face. “Well what do you want me to do? Roll it onto a cart for her? Go bring it outside!”

“Mr. Hudson left his wife outside?” Nancy asks, without thinking.

“Yeah, that fellow over there,” the waitress in yellow points to the sandy haired man Nancy had tailed into here.

“And that fellow is both incredibly rich and able to give us a boost and my foster dad so maybe you should shut up and give Tiffany her food,” George snaps. Both Bess and Nancy flush.

“Sorry,” Bess mumbles, stepping away and around Nancy to slip through the front door. Nancy’s a little jostled when Bess passes her, and she spins a little, turning towards the kitchen. She catches sight of a young man in a colorful Hawaiian shirt ringing the bell to signify an order. They lock eyes - ice blue on sky - and Nancy feels a wave of déjà vu pass over her, but she shakes it off. She turns back to George, who’s still looking at her, waiting for Nancy to say something.

Finally, Nancy makes up her mind. If she’s going to be stuck in this tiny town she might as well do something to occupy her time. “Are you hiring?”

George looks her over. “Are you new here?”

Oh. So it’s that kind of tiny town. “Yes, my family just moved here.”

George nods. “Right. Well, we could always use a new waitress. We had one leave for college and Bess isn’t the brightest so…” George trails off, cocking her head. “Do you hear that?”

Both Nancy and George tilt their heads towards the front door of the restaurant, where they can hear muffled shouting. Both girls look at each other for a moment before Nancy spins and pushes the door open. George is hot on her heels, and after a few moments, a third pair of feet joins them. Nancy turns to see shaggy blond hair under a black cap and knows that it’s the boy from behind the counter.

Nancy stops suddenly when she sees Bess standing over a body, shock on her face. “Omph,” Nancy says as both George and the other guy come barreling into her. She stumbles, and George catches her around the waist. Nancy opens her mouth to ask the very obvious question hanging in the air-

“Bess? What happened?” a decidedly male voice asks, taking the words straight from Nancy’s mouth. She looks up to see a tall boy with cocoa skin exiting a blue truck parked a foot behind Bess, the body, and the sleek car looming over the person Nancy can only assume is Mrs. Hudson.

A strangled cry escapes George, and she rushes forward, dropping to her knees next to the woman. “Help her!” George says, looking up at the four of them as she lifts Mrs. Hudson’s head to rest on her knees. She cradles it in her hands like an injured bird.

“What happened?” the Hawaiian shirt boy repeats. Bess is sobbing now.

“I turned to go back to the restaurant and all of a sudden she cried out and fell! I don’t know!”

Nancy, still not quite sure what in the world is happening, crouches next to George and Mrs. Hudson. She lifts one of Mrs. Hudson’s hands, feeling her wrist for a pulse.

“She’s not dead,” she says as sirens come wailing towards them.

Fifteen minutes later, Nancy, Bess, George, and the two boys are sitting in the hospital waiting room with Mr. Hudson, George leaning against Mr. Hudson’s shoulder.

“The Hudsons have been her foster parents for the longest out of any of her homes,” Bess says, leaning over to whisper in Nancy’s ear. Nancy smiles at her. “I remember what it’s like being new. I only moved in with my aunt here in Horseshoe Bay last month. I used to live in London. I’m Bess by the way.”

“Nancy,” Nancy says.

“Welcome. Where did you live before?”

“New York.”

“City?”

“State.”

“Oh that’s nice. I love the city, did you go often?”

“Yeah, sometimes,” Nancy says as the waiting room doors swing open. She’s startled to see a man in a uniform striding towards their little group. He’s probably in his thirty or forties, and he’s got a no nonsense look on his face.

“Are you the people found at the scene of the crime?” he asks in lieu of greeting.

“Woah, woah, crime?” Mr. Hudson asks, standing up, startling George, who had been dozing on his shoulder.

The officer turns to Mr. Hudson solemnly, putting a hand on his shoulder. “There was poison found in your wife’s system, Mr. Hudson, which means that someone had attempted to kill her.”

Everyone turns to Bess, except Mr. Hudson and the officers.

Mr. Hudson stares at the officer for a moment before sinking into his seat, a look of genuine fear on his face. “Who would want to kill Tif?”

“Not me I swear!” Bess cries, latching on to Nancy’s arm. Nancy gently pries her fingers off her arm.

The officer shakes his head, ignoring the distraught waitress. “I’m not sure sir, but it’s our job to figure it out. Why is why I need to speak to these five.”

They all look at Mr. Hudson: Nancy, George, Bess, and the two boys whose names Nancy still doesn’t know. But Mr. Hudson’s face is ashen, like he’s going into shock. The officer motions at the young people. “Come along.”

The five of them look at each other uncertainly before standing and following the officer into the hall. Nancy catches sight of his badge: Chief E. O. McGinnis.

Now, Nancy, being the daughter of a lawyer, should know her rights, and the right to remain silent is the biggest one, especially since she’s a minor, but she’s too confused and terrified to think straight.

She’s being investigated for attempted murder. Attempted murder. God her mother’s going to kill her.

The unlikely five line up against the wall. Chief McGinnis paces in front of them. “Alright. I’m looking at an ex-con,” he pauses in front of the guy from the truck. “The town screw up,” (this time he’s in front of George). “A city girl,” he’s in front of Bess now, who looks rather guilty in Nancy’s opinion. He moves to the fancy shirt guy standing next to Nancy. “An HBPD legacy and Nancy Drew.”

Except, that’s not what he says.

He pauses in front of Nancy, and tilts his head at her. “Who are you again?”

Nancy stares at him as the weird feeling of déjà vu hits her again. No. That’s not right. He knows who she is.

But she doesn’t know who he is.

Nancy feels her hands start to shake. Everything here is wrong. She should be sitting at the police station. She should know what’s happening. But she doesn’t because she’s being accused of attempted murder.

But it shouldn’t be attempted. Nancy slides down the wall, her hands pulling at her skin where she can feel the ghost of a locket.

My mother’s gonna kill me she thinks. But no, her mom’s dead. And Ryan isn’t George’s foster dad. He’s her dad.

This isn’t right.

This isn’t ri-

“Okay just give her space.”

When Nancy comes to, she’s looking up into the face of the boy who had been working at the Bayside Claw. Nancy’s laying on the ground, her head against the cold tile. The boy gently slips an arm under her shoulders, helping her to sit up.

“Hey, are you okay?” he asks.

Nancy doesn’t know the answer to that. He can tell, so he tries a different question. “What’s your name?”

“Nancy Drew,” she croaks. He smiles.

“Hi Nancy Drew. My name is Ace Hardy.”

“Hi,” Nancy mumbles back.

“And that’s Nick,” Ace says, pointing to the boy from the truck who’s hovering on the outskirts of the circle of people around her. “I hear you’ve met the girls.”

Nancy nods and Ace gently slips his other arm under her knees, lifting her up in his arms like she weighs nothing. He walks her towards the waiting room, talking as he goes. “That, Nancy, was a panic attack. Have those often?”

Nancy leans her pounding head against his muscular shoulder. “No.”

“Well, first time for everything. Got anyone we can call?”

“My dad,” she mumbles. Ace nods to Bess, who rushes forward with her phone out. Nancy recites her father’s number, and Bess puts it to her ear.

“Hello? Hi, yes, this is Bess Marvin. I’m calling about your daughter. She’s in the hospital, she had a panic attack.” Bess is quiet for a moment. “Nancy Drew, yes.” After a moment, Bess rattles off directions and hangs up.

Ace puts Nancy down on a chair next to Mr. Hudson. Nancy looks at him sideways. She’s about to say something to him when suddenly - as if her brain has been reset or something - she forgets what she was going to say.

“Want some water Nancy?” Ace asks. Nancy smiles at the unfamiliar boy.

“Yes, please,” she says. He stands and heads to the water cooler, Bess taking his spot. “What did the officer mean by Ace is a legacy?”

“Oh, that,” Bess says sadly. “Ace’s father was a Captain on the police force. He was in a chase once when Ace was a child. His car got hit, and he didn’t make it.”

“That’s so sad,” Nancy says.

“I know,” Bess agrees. “His mother is all he has. She’s a librarian, but she doesn’t make a lot of money. They just get by with her salary and the pension from the state. That’s why Ace turned down MIT. To work at The Claw.”

“That must be so hard,” Nancy says. She can’t imagine giving up her dream of going to Columbia.

“It is,” Bess agrees as the doors to the waiting room are pushed open. Nancy sees her father and mother being trailed by an annoyed McGinnis.

“You can’t just take a suspect home! She has to be fingerprinted! She has to give her statement!”

Carson turns on McGinnis. “Excuse me, but my daughter is a minor and she’s had a panic attack.”

“We’re taking her,” Kate adds. She spots Nancy and rushes to her, crouching to put her hands on either side of her daughter’s face. “Nancy, baby, are you okay?”

“Yeah, just tired.”

“Okay, we’re taking you home, don’t worry, Mom’s here.”

It’s a simple statement, and normally Nancy would complain that it makes her sound like a child, but it relaxes her nonetheless. She slumps into her mom, letting the exhaustion and confusion sink over her.

Kate runs her fingers through her red hair as Carson argues with McGinnis, who finally relents.

“Fine, fine, you all can go if Drew is going. But I expect you back at the station at eight am sharp.”

Nancy is pulled to her feet by her mother, and before she moves, she puts a hand on Mr. Hudson’s shoulder. “Your wife will get better sir,” she says. Mr. Hudson puts his hand over hers.

“Thanks.”

Nancy waves goodbye to everyone else before following her parents. As she falls asleep in the back seat of her dad’s car, all she can think is that something about this entire night is off.

#cw nancy drew fanfiction #nancy drew #ace #bess marvin #george fan #nick nickerson #au #queued

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canmom · 3 years

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Animation Night 43 - Early Dreamworks (aka Jaaaaaames Baaaaxter!)

Hello friends. It is once again a week where I have struggled to do the kind of extensive prep for Animation Night that I used to; nevertheless, I hope I have something interesting to show you...

Tonight it’s the point in the three-week cycle where the Anti-Weaboo Pact mandates I must show some animation that was not made in Japan. So, pulling from my collection of Animation Night concepts, let’s scoop up one we mooted back on Hanukkah animation night: that brief window where Dreamworks was a group of ex-Disney animators competing with the Mouse at its own traditional-animation game, under the slightly dubious oversight of good old Jeffrey Katzenburg (and his pals, Steven Spielberg and music producer David Geffen, who together form the initialism Dreamworks SKG).

Despite being entirely the product of the most cynical showbiz capitalism, Dreamworks set out to a surprisingly impressive start - at least on the traditional animation side, let’s not talk about Antz.

We’ve already seen their incredible opening act, The Prince of Egypt (1998). Since then I’ve learned a little of how many key scenes in that movie, the ones that make you just sigh and say “how can anyone animate that good”, were the work of - guess who - James Baxter. The horse guy. Some of his old pencil tests are available on his youtube channel; here for example is a rough pass on Moses returning from having seen God, a scene that was entirely silent in the movie to lean on the strength of Baxter’s character acting:

youtube

The success of Prince suggests something of the space these guys were inclined to work in; Dreamworks followed this up with another traditionally animated movie in a historical setting centring on the totally not gay relationship between two young well-muscled guys, The Road to El Dorado. However, the film suffered a great deal of rewrites; Katzenberg decided midway through production that the film should change from something serious to an adventure-comedy and it sounds decidedly troubled.

El Dorado one takes after a certain tradition of animated films that deal with the genocidal colonisation of the ‘Americas’ one way or another, such as Disney’s Pocahontas or the French-Japanese series Mysterious Cities of Gold, by setting up a European protagonist who takes on something of a saviour role for a typically fictional nation. In the case of El Dorado, a pair of young rogues from Spain are accidentally loaded onto the ship of infamous conquistador Hernán Cortés as he launches one of his expeditions to subjugate the various nations and cultures of mesoamerica (a process that was by no means a straightforward victory of superior technology, but that would be far too long a tangent).

So in this case the film constructs a fictional nation (taking after the Spanish legend of a rich king/city/empire known as El Dorado) and indulges in the tired trope of Europeans being mistaken for gods by the native people. While it does depict, for example, the Mesoamerican ball game, it sounds like this film frankly indulges in a lot of extremely tired shit, and is firmly rooted in coloniser perspectives even as it sets up its protagonists against Cortés. Which is quite a shame, because the clips I’ve seen look quite charming; in any case, the critics were not impressed and the film was mostly forgotten.

This blow was not decisive for the traditional-animation side of Dreamworks, though their CG department was starting to take off with juggernaut franchises like Shrek. Their next traditionally animated film is, of all things, a horse-movie fable also dealing with the genocidal expansion of America, titled Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

Now, let’s talk about horses. (Destroying any chance I have to escape the horse jokes.) Horses are among the most notoriously difficult animals to draw, let alone animate: their limbs seem disproportionate, their movements involve the whole body in complex ways. I have seen many animated films in historical settings whose horses are boxy, move stiffly, or don’t quite seem to have the weight and physicality of the real animal, even if the rest of the film is really good. (Sword of the Stranger, for example, fell down in its horse scenes.)

So who do you call when you want to make an entire movie dependent on the ability to create horses who are as expressive and emotional as any human character? Well, James Baxter obviously. If you’ve ever wondered why Baxter was invited to animate himself as a horse on his episode of Adventure Time, it’s because he spent years teaching himself every nuance of horse movement until he could animate horses better than anyone in history, for this movie.

Like honestly, look at this. Unreasonable.

The skill that most makes me jealous of Baxter is his unbelievable intuition of moving characters in 3D space with consistent shapes and volumes. Of course, working on this movie, he had some CG assistance (unlike The Lion King, where he broke down a circle into perspective segments), but I know from experience that going from a rough CG perspective aid to a fully expressive drawing is an enormous challenge for much shorter cuts.

(‘course, it wasn’t just Baxter; popping onto sakugabooru I find a list of animators including james baxter, william salazar, bruce ferriz, cinzia angelini, jakob jensen, joe achorn and scott wright all contributing to making the horses move good.)

OK, enough salivating over animation; what’s this movie actually about? Well, it’s horse movie tropes: you have the horse that can’t be tamed, representing the wilderness which is being destroyed by the advance of American armies. Spirit, a wild stallion doing his herd-ly duties, is captured by the US army during their westward expansion, but when he proves untamable, faces death; he is freed from captivity by a Lakota man named Little Creek. The two of course face distrust but well, it’s a horse movie, you can probably guess where this is going. (Incredible animation in service of a fairly rote plot does seem to be the fatal flaw of a lot of these Dreamworks movies).

A year later - meaning its animation was concurrent with Spirit, and Baxter was not involved, so this isn’t really a Baxter night - Dreamworks sent out a pirate movie! (It seems something of a shame not to exhibit this alongside Disney’s take on the concept of Treasure Planet, but that will have to wait for another day...) In it, the legendary sailor Sinbad - here interpreted as a pirate with the gay rivalry that Dreamworks loves to put in their movies, though tbf I’m going off the first five minutes which is all I’ve seen - gets sent on a mystical quest by the goddess Eris (hey @grubhonker they put you in a movie!).

Technically, this movie stands as the last time Dreamworks set about mixing 2D and 3D animation, which means, sadly, that we have a lot of really quite incredible 2D animation and some rather dated CGI. My attention was caught by a clip of the opening fight (in this 45 minute youtube video essay, I may have had a problem), a complex multi-layered sequence involving many long shots of pirates fighting each other in a chaotic melee, but still choreographed clearly enough to show their individual personalities.

youtube

From this scene, things get increasingly supernatural as ‘giant woman’ Eris swoops in to assign Sinbad his mission. I don’t necessarily have space here to go into the depths of the Sinbad legend (originally Sinbad the Sailor was a character in later versions of the 1001 Arabian Nights, who turned into a popular film character seeing a number of interpretations

It’s definitely at the silly end of swashes being buckled, but it offers a tantalising glimpse at what could have been if American traditional animation had been allowed to shed some of its Disney child-appeal trappings and try at some of the same territory as anime.

But, of course, instead both Dreamworks and Disney pulled the plug on traditional animation after a series of poor showings (blaming the public being no longer interested in 2D animation, and not a series of bad writing and direction decisions)... and we’re well into the CG/toonboom/flash-puppet animation only era now in America. Luckily the same is not true in Japan, France, or indeed now China.

So tonight I’m going to show you two movies from this era of Dreamworks (Spirit and Sinbad), and also the James Baxter episode of Adventure Time, because it will be cute to watch after Sinbad. We’ll be starting almost as soon as I post this; hope you can join me to indulge in some horses and swashbuckling and appreciate some flawed but, hopefully nevertheless quite fun sakuga juice...

Animation Night 43 will be starting pretty much right now at twitch.tv/canmom, see ya in there!

#animation night #here's to getting back on track with this next week

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stringergames · 3 years

Text

Downtime Roleplay 4 - Checking Out

Post Session 5 - Misty Eyed

Ireena and Magpie spend some one on one time in the Kolyana Library, as the rest of the party continue to exasperate Ismark downstairs.

Words spoken in Elvish are denoted in italics. Spoiler warning: contains spoilers for episode 5 of Edge of Night

Content warning: grief, implied dead parents, alcohol consumption

"So, Mr Magpie, do you like poetry?" Ireena smiles at him as they climb the stairs.

"I do, it can be very beautiful. I prefer such things set to music, but that's a personal taste."

Magpie casts a slightly wary eye over the opulent staircase, taking in the disrepair and lack of upkeep. He takes another sip of wine and makes no comment.

"I enjoy the simplicity of poetry, so much can be said with so few words." Ireena is caught up in her own enthusiasm and does not notice Magpie's appraisal of the house. "Novels are good for escaping entirely to another realm, and you already know of my enjoyment of learning through books." This is said in Elvish, with a smile, before switching back to Common. "But poetry will remain my favourite, I think. If only for its love of pain that cannot be spoken in other ways."

Ireena opens a door on the landing that leads to a damp room piled with books, in the centre of which is a chair. The dust marks on the floor indicate that a desk once also stood there, but judging by the fate of other furnishings in the house, this was probably pilfered to become barricade materials a while ago.

Magpie replies in Elvish, quietly pleased to be able to use his native tongue. "Songs are my favourite, I believe. The dual storytelling between lyrics and tune is wonderfully versatile, but poetry definitely has a beauty of it's own, I can see why it calls to you so." He takes an almost hesitant step into the room, and checks back that she's joining him.

Ireena follows him into the study and responds in Elvish, clearly excited to be able to do so. "I wish I had a better understanding of music. It is a rare thing to hear music in Barovia that isn't a funeral march. Unless you encounter the Vistani whose performances are... livelier." Ireena smirks, and gestures to the room. "This is my library!"

Magpie quirks an amused grin at her Elvish, and takes a slow look around the room. "We heard Vistani musicians at the party. They played very well, Sierra was there among them actually. You'll have to see if she'll play the violin for you, it's truly beautiful."

"I would like that." Ireena pauses, wondering how far she can push her luck. "Maybe you would dance with me."

Magpie crouches in front of a bookshelf, scanning the titles distractedly, not so much as reaching a hand out to touch any of them. "I'm not sure you'd enjoy that, I was... never in a position to be taught any of the proper dances, and quite besides, I've been reliably told I have two left feet."

Ireena crouches next to him. "Then I shall simply have to teach you."

Her smile is soft and her tone no longer teasing. The tension in her shoulders is heavy, but not directed at this conversation or her present company. It is tension she's clearly been carrying for a long time.

"I like this one." She selects a book from the shelf. "It's long, but it tells the most wonderful story of a hero who journeys to find his way home after a long battle away from those he loves." She strokes the cover wistfully.

Magpie looks over at the book, admiring the cover.

"Sounds like a compelling tale." He casts his eyes to the floor briefly, and takes another drink of wine before focusing back up on Ireena and the book. "You have so many books, it must be lovely to be able to come here and escape with them."

"Father loved to read. And there weren't exactly many other ways for me to spread my wings beyond this village." She sighs darkly and gestures at the window. "Even before..."

Aware that her façade has slipped again, Ireena straightens her shoulders and attempts another smile.

"But yes, I am lucky. There are a few tomes in here that predate the beginning of the Von Zarovich reign in Barovia."

"Really? How old does that make them?" Magpie looks very interested at the promise of old books, a shadow that had fallen over his face lifting a little.

"Well over a century! Father rarely let anyone handle them, they're very delicate, but I always loved the way old books smell."

“Incredible. I shan’t ask to look at them, but what are they about? I often find some of the most fascinating stuff is in the oldest books.”

"There's a first edition of some very dramatic plays, and a couple of these epic poems too. If I'm being entirely honest, I am not completely sure I know what is in all of the oldest books Father had. But please, if you would like, feel free to select any volumes that take your fancy to take with you. It is wonderful to finally have a fellow bibliophile to share these with. My brother is not opposed to literature, but he's mostly been too busy with more important things to indulge me in expounding the joys of fiction."

Magpie looks gently surprised. "You'd let me bring some? Just like that?"

"I doubt Ismark will miss them, I will certainly be bringing some with me, and Father hardly has a use for them any more. Of course you may take some, as many as you would like." She laughs a little. "Or as many as you think you can carry, at any rate!"

Magpie laughs a little in return, a hesitant set to his face still. "It won't be many then. Most of us ended up here without a bag. You're sure I can borrow some?"

"Borrow, have, whatever you would like. And while we can't promise armour or weapons, I feel confident my brother can provide satchels or something to carry possessions in." Ireena puts a hand on his arm gently. "I mean it, really."

Magpie flinches at the touch, and pulls his arm away gently. "Satchels would be a great help, I don't think Fox's bag will survive anything else being put in it."

Ireena retracts her hand, but does not seem offended. "I did notice that sewing does not appear to be among Lord Ripley's particular skills."

Magpie laughs properly this time. “Apparently not, though I’m not sure I can say much after the gods awful job I did on those replacement gloves. It turns out not having something proper to cut the fabric with is a significant hindrance.”

"I hadn't liked to mention it, but they were somewhat unorthodox." Ireena giggles. "I wondered if it was some new trend from where you're from!"

“Decidedly not, just shoddy and hurried craftsmanship on my part.” He gives her a lopsided grin. “If you’re certain I can take a couple of books with me, do you have sections you’d rather I chose from? Or perhaps any recommendations?”

"You must feel free to choose whatever you'd like, although I suggest you take something less likely to fall apart when you touch it! But if you are open to suggestions, then I could show you some of my personal favourites?"

“I’d welcome that gladly, I find myself decidedly in a position of rather too much choice, and while I’d often like nothing more than to stay up all night browsing, I fear after the day we’ve had I need the rest.”

Ireena starts pulling books from shelves and various piles. They're all well-thumbed volumes, but don't seem in danger of falling apart completely. They span a wide range of genres: a poetry anthology by a Lord Byron, the classic epic poem she'd picked out earlier, a trilogy of long form fantasy, a collection of old Elvish plays, a couple of shorter looking novels (one historical fiction and one murder mystery), and a nonfiction biography of ancient rulers of Barovia. She sets them down in a pile in front of Magpie.

"This should narrow down the selection somewhat, I wasn't sure what you preferred, so I have chosen my favourites of many genres." She looks between Magpie and the pile a little nervously. "I hope there's something to your liking here?"

Magpie looks at the pile in astonishment, and brushes a gloved hand delicately across the covers.

"All of it, I'd wager; I'll struggle to pick those that I can carry from such a fascinating collection." He looks up and catches her eye. "Thank you. Truly."

Ireena shows him a flash of the smile she must've had before the recent events of her life, and it lights up her whole face for a moment.

"You are more than welcome, Magpie. I am aware that the journey ahead of us will be difficult, but I will not regret the opportunity to spend more time with you." She pauses and then adds almost as an afterthought, "With all of you. It will be nice to be able to say I have friends."

"It would be lovely indeed." Magpie looks back at the books, carefully thumbing through a couple of pages and starting to sort them into two neat piles. "After such a kind gesture, the least I could do is help you with your Elvish, if you still want to learn."

"Very much so, if it isn't too much trouble!" Ireena suddenly looks like she might cry and turns towards the door. "We should be getting back to the others, it is intolerably cruel of me to leave them solely in the company of my brother for too long." She turns back, and if her voice cracks, she doesn't acknowledge it. "Besides, as you said, you've all had a very long day. I imagine you will be wanting to rest soon."

Magpie blinks a couple of times at the abrupt change in mood, but makes no comment on it. He drains the last of his wine and sets the glass down, carefully picking up a stack of five books he'd set aside, the biography of rulers of Barovia, Elvish plays, and trilogy of fantasy, balancing them carefully in his arm before picking his glass back up.

"Are these alright? Is it too many?"

"No, no of course not! That's fine! Would you like some help carrying them?"

"That's very kind of you, but I have a good hold on them, and there's no risk of me spilling my wine." He gives her a cheeky grin. "Well, shall we go and save the others from the company of your brother then?"

Ireena smiles back, small and shaky, but perhaps more real than some of her smiles up to this point. "An excellent idea, Mr Magpie."

She leads the way back out of the study. She pauses on the landing and points at another door. "I believe that is to be your room for the night, if you'd prefer to drop the books off there, although I have no objections to you bringing them downstairs to share your finds with the others, if you wish."

"I –" Magpie looks torn, and a flicker of something passes over his face. "Perhaps, I'll drop most of them off. Bring just one down. To flick through."

"Great, I can wait here, or just meet you downstairs if you'd rather?"

"I'll be just a second." Magpie smiles at her briefly, and dips into the room to gently place the books down, keeping hold of the Elvish plays, and returning to her quickly.

"Shall we?" Ireena gestures at the staircase.

Magpie nods, and walks alongside her downwards, gently clutching the gifted book to his chest.

Written by Francesca Forrest & Nick Drew

Edited by Rowan E. Madden

Edge of Night is a dnd 5e actual play podcast, brought to you by Stringer Games. It is available on iTunes, Spotify & all good podcast providers.

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cozycryptidcorner · 4 years

Photo

“This takes place in the universe I’m working on! Some of my followers might recognize the characters, I’m drawn them plenty of times before. I’ve been wanting to actually write the relationship, but have been working on the plotline beyond what ya’ll see in order to do so. I hope you enjoy these two dumbasses as much as I enjoy writing about them!”

This can’t get any worse, AJ thinks, as it inevitably gets… well, worse. At least instead of freely orbiting through the vastness of space, she gets caught in a planet’s gravitational pull, but that opens a whole other can of worms that involves things like possibly burning up in the atmosphere. She doesn’t know if her spacesuit has any kind of heat guards or impact safety measures beyond the basics, but oh boy, she’s about to find out.

Being caught in a gravity well is sort of like how AJ imagines being caught in a whirlpool while completely paralyzed and numb all over. It’s an inevitable sort of horror, though she can’t actually feel friction of any kind, like someone on the outside might think she would be experiencing, her spacesuit at least makes sure of that. From her position, she can see the planet through her tinted visor, a soft, golden shade overtaking everything it possibly can.

There are two possible planets she could land, twins, locked in each other’s gravitational pulls, and she doesn’t know which one claimed her first. Her so-called team briefly stopped in the system, trying desperately to pull the energy of the sun to refuel the damaged warp engine and repair the external damage before the accident.. Her body flips over, tumbling, plunging, flipping head over heels, wholly unsure of the direction she is heading, much less the planet that has decidedly grasped onto her frame and pulls her ever closer. She has thrusters, but they won’t so much when barreling towards the ground at high speed; however, maybe she can angle herself so that she bounces right off the atmosphere bubble?

She has to think over this very quickly. Which sounds worse, floating in a vacuum and hope someone who aren’t the space pirates her crew was running from picks up on her suite’s emergency beacon, or pray her suite can take the impact of a crash and try to make contact with the natives? Tentatively, she tries working her thrusters and quickly realizes by the lack of movement that they must somehow be damaged. Awesome. Incredible. Her day is just getting better and better.

There’s a blinding flash, and she realizes that all other options are now unavailable, because she is now falling to the planet’s ground. She’s also on fire, that’s why it’s suddenly so bright. The light control on her helmet kicks in a moment too late, her eyes ache from being exposed that, but she can’t do anything about it. Her brain fizzles for a moment, and when she opens her eyes again, she realizes that she must have fainted for a few seconds. The systems operator is going insane, flashing messages running across the face shield, one of them politely suggesting that she call for assistance because it appears she’s moving faster than the recommended speed the suit can tolerate without disintegrating.

Helpful advice, but AJ knows that slowing down will probably aid in her survival, so she maneuvers her body around so that she’s parallel to the ground, spreading out her limbs to create surface drag. A warning pops up in front of her face, letting her know that the heat of reentry is melting the outer layer of her suite. She doesn’t even have any time to panic, though, because she’s trying to figure out if there are any sort of functions she can use as a makeshift parachute, something, anything to cause enough drag that will increase her chances of not pancaking into the ground.

It’s so very unbearably hot. AJ’s suit’s internal systems try to let her know, unhelpfully, that the air conditioning is not compensating enough for the external heat. AJ thinks she might start crying but tries her best to keep her shit together so she can focus. A part of her wishes that the impact could be instantaneous, but the ground doesn’t seem to be getting any closer. The descent controllers work, though, miraculously slowing her fall to the point where she is no longer on fire.

She hits her thrusters, hoping they might decide to work now, though nothing happens. Then, miracle of miracles, sees that the option for the descent controllers is still available. Nothing that will guarantee a soft landing, but it might be enough to keep her bones from shattering on the impact. She hits the release and two hexagonal shapes pop out on either side of her, the difference in speeds almost immediate. Her body wobbles uncomfortably, but nothing breaks off, thankfully

One problem is out of the way, but another one is fast approaching. She can’t really control her descent beyond angling her body slightly to fall a little more forward, so it’s not as though she can pick where she’s going to hit. There’s a loud snap as her body rams into a tree, and the damn thing cracks in half as though it were made from weak plastic. There’s a dull pain on her hip, AJ can feel the suit take critical damage, but she doesn’t fucking stop. It’s like she’s chained to a speeding train, her body skidding through the forest, the leaves and branches doing little to stop her, the protective layers of the suit beginning to crack and warp.

AJ can hear the pop of her chest piece as it fractures, and parts of her arm guards begin to rip off. Just as it looks like she’s finally stopping, she slides right off the edge of a cliff, which, incredible! Excellent addition to her day. Water leaks into the cracks of her armor, and her breathing apparatus beeps a warning that it can’t manage to sort oxygen from other harmful molecules anymore. A current sweeps her away, just as merciless as the gravity has, and AJ has to figure out how the fuck to get the helmet off so she has a better chance to breathe.

The weight of what is left of her armor drags her down, but she tries to focus on one dilemma at a time. The release buttons of her helmet are almost welded together, which only leads to further panic, thus speeding up her oxygen use. After a few, shaky moments of being tossed about in the water like a ragdoll, she finally managed to release the helmet, letting it get sucked away by the current. When she manages to find and break the surface, she barely has time to take in two, gulping breaths before her foot catches something, and she’s yanked back under.

She flails, terror building because AJ did not survive a freefall through a planet’s atmosphere just to fucking drown once she hit the ground. Again, she manages to surface, if only for the barest moment, and she quickly goes back down. She tastes blood in her mouth as her chin hits something solid. Then, by some other miracle, she’s again up, jerked roughly from the water, and she can finally breathe as something- or someone- drags her out of the river and onto the grassy banks.

At first, all she can do is sputter any water out of her lungs, too shaken from the river to do anything. A hand sets on her back, and she turns to look over her so-called ‘rescuer’ as a headache fully setting in once she manages to sit up on her own. Actually, everything hits AJ at once, a shudder of pain rippling through her body like a goddamn tsunami. With trembling fingers, she begins to peel away what is left of her armor, side eying the… the person with a curious glance.

He’s remarkably tall, she can tell that just from his kneeling position, his legs slim and long. His gaze holds hers, eyes wide, pupils small, as though he sees a ghost, which AJ supposes if fair. This is most likely his first time seeing someone from outside his world, his shock is understanding. AJ is, after all, completely desensitized to all things’ alien,’ she can’t imagine what he must be thinking.

“Thanks for getting me out of there,” AJ says, her voice raspy, and she can tell her face is swollen just from the areas of pain that come with speaking. After prying her gloves and finger guards off, she finds that most of her hands are covered in blisters, which explains why moving them hurt so much. When she wipes her nose with her wrist, it comes back tinged with red.

He answers, but when all she hears is a string of gibberish, AJ realizes that the universal translator must be fried. Her day just keeps getting better and better, because she needs to ask him to help pull the arm plating off next. Her fingers are dripping with pus and blood, some of her blisters popping from the effort, and with the way that the metal has melted and hardened weird on her arm, she’d be surprised if it’s only bruised.

“I need your help,” she says, slowly, in case the translator is just having some minor processing issues, “can you,” she gestures in his direction, “pull this,” she taps on the armor and mimics a good yank, “off for me?”

He seems to catch the gist, hesitantly reaching over, his long, slim fingers grasping the end of the metal awkwardly, as though he isn’t sure where to grip. As he pulls, there’s a sharp pain that runs up AJ’s arm, but she tries not to make anything more than a soft grunt as the plate pops off its attachment. Before she even has a chance to recover, he holds his hands out, taking the opposite piece in hand and doing the same thing. That one hurts a bit more, though, and AJ finds herself letting out a quiet whimper.

The alien quickly places a steady hand on her shoulder again, a comforting gesture that catches her off guard, and then he helps pull off all other parts of the suit until it’s just an exoskeleton. It’s a bit more complicated to get off than the external plating, since it involves a load of switches and locks, safeguarding her body against the vacuum of space. AJ’s fingers are stiff and aching, but she somehow manages to undo all the bells and whistles, and with her brand new friend’s help, she actually gets the damn thing off.

Her arms are covered in dark, swelling bruises. Patches of her skin are burned, much like her fingers, and she doesn’t want to know what her legs and feet look like quite yet. She can’t even wrap her arms around her chest to fight the oncoming chill since, beyond the obvious, her left arm spikes with pain every time she bent her elbow. Something in her stomach gurgles, she isn’t sure if it’s anxiety, hunger, or the fact she might have accidentally swallowed half of that river while she was fighting to breathe.

She starts crying. Not full-on sobs, but the tears are there, sliding down her already wet cheeks, mingling with the blood and snot that’s dripping out of her nose. The alien looks like he’s about to panic, and glances self-consciously over his shoulder, pointing to somewhere in the trees. He stands, and yes, AJ’s first observation about his height is correct. Good god, he has legs for days, the cool, blue of his skin remarkably reminiscent of a clear, sunny day back on Earth.

Oh, and he has horns. AJ doesn’t know how she missed that part, plucking the translator from the rest of the discarded suit and tucking it against the waistline of her leggings. He helps her up, slowly, carefully, clearly aware of how the more bloody and battered body parts are strictly off-limits. AJ doesn’t know how she could possibly walk, but she somehow does, another miracle to add on today’s list. Just because she can, though, doesn’t mean it’s not absolute agony,because there are a lot of things happening at once and none of them are good.

She’s suddenly overcome with pain, and she can’t do it. She can’t go any further. Her legs are quaking, her balance is warped, and just as she stumbles, the alien catches her. Carefully, conscious of her other injuries, he wraps her arm around his neck, placing his other hand on her wrist, effectively pulling a significant amount of weight off her feet. It’s torture, but she quietly tells herself that the pain will end just over the next landmark. They’ll get where the alien has them going soon, just beyond the trees. Beyond that big rock. Over the bridge.

And then there’s a house, small, rectangular, made from dark pink clay up ahead. AJ breathes out a gasping sigh of relief as the alien steers her there, letting her in through the awkwardly placed door, into the warm glow of weak, artificial light. Lightbulbs. Electricity. That’s a worthy observation because that pops the lid off dozens of possibilities that come with such a technological advancement, including things like functional, decent medicine that AJ is probably going to need in the near future.

There’s someone else in here, but AJ doesn’t try to be too worried. A woman, older than him, it looks like, judging by the slight creases in some areas of her face, and she’s looking at them like… well, like she’s seeing an alien for the first time. That’s also pretty fair. AJ tries to make herself seem like less of a threat, though she doesn’t really know… how to do that when she’s almost broken apart from the fall. Surely she possesses no sort of danger to these people?

They speak, and all she hears is garbled nonsense, though there is an undertone of familiar syllables that signals that her translator is trying to do its job. The female gestures over to a nearby table, and she is now ferried over to a kitchen area and seated on a comfortable wooden chair. The two proceed to converse, while AJ tries to use all her linguistics training to pull meaning from the gestures, tones, and facial expressions alone. After all, it is her goal to eventually be able to communicate with unknown species from the ground up, as is most linguistic anthropologists without technological aid. Might as well start now.

The older one sets a blanket around AJ’s shoulders, then goes about something around the kitchen area. Carefully, AJ undoes the straps of her giant work boots, wincing as her fingers bend around the straps. Her feet are horribly swollen, she can already tell without looking at them, and she’s almost afraid that she will have to cut the damn things off. Luckily, though, once everything’s loosened enough, her feet slide out with minimal effort. Like her hands, her toes and heels are burned, the red, raw flesh already peppered with popped blisters, she doesn’t think she’ll be able to walk for a good couple of days at least.

A bowl- no, cup, is set in front of her, the older one must have made her something to drink. Before AJ has a chance to pick up the ceramic mug, the female picks up her hands, looking over the wounds with a skilled glance, clucking her tongue sympathetically. After a moment of banging around in a drawing tucked to the side, she returns with long strips of cloth and a glass jar filled with some sort of paste. Carefully, the female patches AJ up, a sharp, biting sting overtaking her senses as that sticky stuff is unceremoniously smeared all over her hands and arms.

AJ dimly wonders if this is what a mummy partially feels like as her hands, fingers, and forearms are wrapped firmly in the bandages. Despite the burning pain from the salve, she feels… tired. Like she could just go to sleep at this very second. Slowly, she drinks the tea, though that doesn’t help the drowsiness, watching the two people go about their day like an extraterrestrial isn’t chilling in their kitchen area. Now, she can’t be sure unless she like… actually speaks to them, but the older one seems to have some sort of parental authority over the one who saved her from the water. Like a mother and son dynamic?

Her eyes drift closed, and AJ finds herself fighting them back open. Is she even safe to sleep? She doesn’t know, there hasn’t been any sort of weird vibes from the natives. Self-consciously, she takes another sip of tea, wincing as her hands move weirdly against their wounds.

The one who pulled her from the river disappears for a few minutes in the back of the house, then returns, wearing something entirely different from the simple tunic he sported earlier. The fashion is… Well, it’s something, that’s for sure. Lots of ornaments dangling from his ears, horns, and nose, dozens of piercings that she hadn’t noticed now plugged with gold-colored jewelry. There’s something more aggressively strange about his outfit, too, with a longer skirt and an open front, and he’s quick to avert his eyes when he catches her staring.

The female says something in passing, probably to her, but AJ doesn’t understand any of it. She finally takes the time to finally pick up her universal translator in an attempt to repair it. Not that she has any sort of confidence in her engineering abilities, though, because to put it nicely, she’s not really an electronics person.

When the masculine one actually leaves, though, ducking out from the door, AJ is overwhelmed with a sense of absolute panic, though she doesn’t really know why. She trips over herself, trying to stand, and she doesn’t know what she would do once she finds her footing, maybe follow him, but her feet just are not capable of walking anymore. He returns to her side as she crashes into the ground, hoisting her up by her waist, and she catches a whiff of his scent. Oh, it’s nice. AJ didn’t think that the indigenous people of technologically unadvanced planets use things like cologne. Still, he definitely smells different than when he first pulled her out of the river. He picks her up, arms hooking under her knees and around her waist, like a bride, and carries her through the hallway.

The bedroom he enters is cluttered, yet clean, a collection of things lining the walls and various shelves, clothing folded and carefully placed in little cubbies dug. AJ is then placed onto a bed, which is good, because she��s tired, but she’s also aware that the alien is just going to leave her, and a part of her is remarkably nervous over that. Even so, she buries her face in the blankets, struggling to find a comfortable sleeping position to accommodate all of her injuries, and she still manages to sleep, fully aching.

#alien/human #monster/human #exophilia #alien romance #monster lovers #alien lovers

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iandeleonwrites · 3 years

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Ian’s Case: A Personal Statement for Grad School Admission

Personal Statement, Ian Deleón

“He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was being thrown swiftly through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs were gently relaxed.”

It was more than a decade ago when I first read those words. Written by the American author Willa Cather, Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament has always felt to me like an intimate account of my own life penned by a woman one hundred years in the past.

That is a feeling which makes me proud; that my personal whims, fears, and desires, could find their echo long ago in a story about a young man and his pursuit of a meaningful life. Because of it, I felt a pleasing sense of historicity at a time when I was struggling so much with my own.

I grew up in Miami Beach. Literally not more than a block away from water for most of my life. My father had emigrated from Cuba with his family in 1980. My mother had come on a work visa from Brazil a few years later. They met on the beach, had an affair, and I came into the world in May of 1987.

My life was marked with in betweenness from the very beginning. My parents’ relationship did not last long, so I grew up traveling between houses. I had two families. I was American, but I was also Cuban and Brazilian. I even have a Brazilian passport. I spoke three languages fluently, but I couldn’t dance salsa or samba. I felt at home with the working class immigrants and people of color in my neighborhoods, but I often had to work hard to prove I wasn’t just some gringo with a knack for foreign tongues.

[A quick note on Paul’s Case––If it happens that the reader is not familiar with the short story, let me briefly summarize it here: A disenchanted youth in turn of the century Pittsburgh feels increasingly alienated from his schoolmates, his teachers and his family. His only comfort is his position as an usher at Carnegie Hall, where he loses himself in the glamour of the art life. Having no drive or desire to become an artist, however, the dandy Paul makes a spur of the moment criminal decision and elopes to New York City. There, he is able to live out his fantasies in a financial masquerade for about a week’s time, until the authorities back home finger him for monetary theft. Learning that his father is en route to the city to collect him, Paul travels to the countryside and flings himself in front of a speeding train, musing about the elegant brevity of winter flowers.]

When I first encountered Cather’s short story I was blown away by the parallels I saw between my own life and Paul’s. In 2005, fresh out of high school, I was living mostly with my father as my mother had relocated to faraway West Palm Beach. I was an usher at the local concert hall, a job I cherished enough to volunteer my time for free. I became entranced by the world of classical music, opera, theater, and spectacle––often showing up for work early and roaming the performance spaces, probing high and low like some kind of millenial phantom.

In school, however, I had no direction, no plan. I had good enough grades, but no real motivation, and worst of all, I thought, no discernible talent. I probably resented my father for not being cultured enough to teach me about music, theater, and the arts. No one in my family had ever even been to a museum, or sat before a chamber orchestra. And it didn’t seem to matter to them either, they could somehow live blissfully without it.

Well I couldn’t. I began to mimic the fervor with which Paul immersed himself in that world, while also exhibiting the same panic at the thought of not being able to sustain my treasured experiences without a marketable contribution to them. But here is where Paul and I take divergent paths.

I was attending the Miami Dade Honors College, breezing my way towards an associate’s degree. I took classes in Oceanography, Sociology, Creative Writing, Acting and African Drumming. I was experimenting and falling in love with everything.

But it was my Creative Writing professor, Michael Hettich, who really encouraged the development of my nascent writing talent. Up until that point my ideas only found their expression through class assignments, particularly book reports and essays on historical events. My sister had always felt I had a way with words, but I just attributed this to growing up in a multicultural environment amongst a diversity of native languages.

As a result of that encouragement I began to write poetry, little songs and treatments for film ideas based on the short stories we were talking about in class. Somehow, thanks to those lines of poetry and a few amateur photographic self portraits, I was admitted to the Massachusetts College of Art & Design for my BFA program.

There, I attended classes in Printmaking, Paper Making, Performance Art, Video Editing, and Glass Blowing. I was immersed in culture, attending lectures and workshops, adding new words to my vocabulary: “New Media” and “gestalt”. I saw my first snowfall. I had the dubious honor of appearing at once not Hispanic and yet different enough. I was overwhelmed. I felt increasingly disenchanted and out of place in New England, yet my work flourished and grew stronger.

It was during this time that I developed a passion for live performance and engagement with an audience. I also worked with multi-channel video and sculptural installations. Always, I commented on my family history, grappling with it, the emigrations and immigrations. I even returned to those early short stories from Miami Dade, one time doing an interpretive movement piece based on The Yellow Wallpaper. Most often I talked about my father. He was even in a few of my projects. He was a good sport, though we still had the occasional heated political disagreement. We never held any grudges, and made up again rather quickly. It would always be that way, intense periods of warming and cooling. A tropical temperament, I suppose.

I continued to take film-related classes in Boston, but my interests gradually became highly abstracted, subtle, and decidedly avant-garde. I had no desire to work in a coherently narrative medium. This would eventually change, but for now, I let my ambitions and aspirations take me where they would.

I returned home to Miami for a spell after graduation. I traveled the world for five months after that. I moved back to Boston for another couple of years, because it was comfortable I suppose, though I was fed up with the weather.

Finally, I wound up in NYC. Classic story: I followed a charming young woman, another performance artist as luck would have it, a writer too, and a bit of an outsider. We were quickly engaged and on the first anniversary of our meet cute we were married on a gorgeous piece of land in upstate new york, owned by an older performance-loving couple from the city. Piece of land doesn’t quite do it justice, we’re talking massive tracts, hidden acres of forest, sudden lakes, fertile fields, and precocious wildlife. As they say in the movies, it really is all about location, location, location.

Nearly all of our significant personal and professional achievements in the subsequent years have centered around this bucolic homestead. After meeting, courting, researching and eventually getting married there, we soon decided we would stage our most ambitious project to date in this magical space––we would shoot...a movie.

We hit upon the curious story of an eighteenth century woman in England called Mary Toft. Dear Mary became famous for a months-long ruse that involved her supposed birthing of rabbits, and sometimes cats. The small town hoax ballooned into a national controversy when it was eventually exposed by some of the king’s physicians. My wife and I were completely enthralled by this story and its contemporary implications. Was Mary wholly complicit in the mischievous acts, or was she herself a sort of duped victim...of systematic abuse at the hands of her family, her husband, her country?

We soon found a way to adapt and give this tale a modern twist that recast Mary as a woman of color alone in the woods navigating a host of creepy men, a miscarriage, and a supernatural rabbit.

Over the course of nine months, our idea gestated and began taking the form of a short film screenplay. This was something neither of us had done or been adequately trained to do before. But we knew we wanted it to be special, it was our passion project. We knew we didn’t want it to look amateurish––we were too old for that. So we took out a loan, hired an amazing camera crew, and in three consecutive days in the summer of 2017 we filmed our story, Velvet Cry. It was the most difficult thing either of us had undertaken...including planning our nuptial ceremony around our difficult families.

It was an incredible experience––intoxicating––also quite maddening and stressful. But it was all worth it. Because of our work schedules, it took us another year to finish post production on the film, but throughout that process, I knew I had found my calling. I would be a writer, and I would be a Director.

Perhaps I had been too afraid to dream the big dream before. Perhaps I had lacked the confidence, or simply, the life experience to tackle the complexity of human emotions, narratives, and interactions––but no longer. This is what I wanted to do and I had to find a way to get better at doing it.

In the intervening months, I have set myself on a course to develop my writing abilities as quickly as I could in anticipation of this application process. I know I have some latent talent, but it has been a long time since I’ve been in an academic setting, and in any case, I have never really attempted to craft drama on this scale before.

I’ve read many books, listened to countless interviews, attended online classes, and most importantly, written my heart out since relocating down the coast to the small college town of Gainesville in Central Florida with my wife in June of 2018. It was through a trip to her alma mater of Hollins University that we learned about the co-ed graduate program in screenwriting a few months ago. After all the debt I accrued in New England, I didn’t think I would ever go back to college, though I greatly enjoyed the experience. But what we learned about the program filled me with confidence and a desire to share in the wonderful legacy of this school that my wife is always gushing about.

Our Skype conversation with Tim Albaugh proved to be the deciding factor. I knew instantly that I wanted to be a part of anything that he was involved with, and I had the feeling that my ideas would truly be nurtured and harnessed into a craft––something tangible I could be proud of and use to propel my career.

I continue to mine my childhood and adolescence in Miami for critical stories and characters, situations that shed light on my own personal experience of life. I’ve found myself coming back to Paul’s Case. No longer caught up in the character’s stagnant, brooding longings for a grander life, I’m now able to revisit the story, appreciating the young man’s anxieties while evaluating how it all went so fatally wrong for Paul. There was no reason to despair, no cause for lost hope. I would take the necessary steps to become the artist I already know myself to be. The screenplay I am submitting as my writing sample is a new adaptation of this story, making Paul my own, and giving him a little bit of that South Florida flavor.

I will close by reiterating how I have visited Hollins, and heard many a positive review from the powerful women I know who have attended college there. As a graduate student, I know Hollins can help me to become a screenwriter, to become a filmmaker. This is the only graduate program to which I am applying––I have a very good feeling about all this.

I want to be a Hollins girl.

#college essay #paul's case #queer writing #hollins university

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satansamwriting · 5 years

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I Can't Stop Thinking About You

Hey! I’m back with more Trapped one-shot!

Will I ever get over Trapped I don’t think so, so enjoy my ones-shots because there’s more to come!!

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Drama : Trapped

Pairing : Shao Fei x Tang Yi

Words : 2285

Synopsis: Shao Fei becomes a hostage after being at the wrong place at the wrong time.Tang Yi is worried.

I just realized that Tang Yi isn’t much there in this one-shot I’m sorry. I’ll try to make a better one-shot next time!

Warnings : description of an epileptic seizure, bref mention of sex.

As always I’m sorry if there’s any mistakes English is not my native language

Hope you enjoy!

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Scraping noises could be heard in the apartment building as two men walked down the hallway. A man in his thirty marched, with an imposing posture, behind a smaller one. Silence welcomed them as they turned into a new hallway, barely lit. Hands rose up in the air, the smaller man walked calmly not minding the cold steel of the gun placed against his nape.Arrived at a door, most likely to be the older man apartment keys were thrown on the carpet floor for the smaller man to pick up. As the man knelt to take possession of the keys, the pressure of the muzzle on his nape increase, probably to remind him not to try something. Once the “click” sound of the door unlocking was heard, the man holding the gun pushed is victim inside and violently closed the door behind. Forced to sit on the rusty-looking couch, Meng Shao Fei started to wonder if what he did was really the best thing.

Meng Shao Fei, a senior police officer who works alongside his best friend Zhao Li An, was everything but stupid. He knew perfectly well what he was doing and not once was he intimidated by the gun pointed toward his head. Impulsive, sure, in most cases Shao Fei acted according to the situation. In this case, his priority was to save the hostages and thus he made a move without thinking. Stubborn, damn right he was. No matter what his captain told him not to do if he had his mind set on doing it he would do it. He’ll keep fighting for justice. Destructive, not that he actually realized he was destructive over his own body. With complete disregard for his own safety, Meng Shao Fei would frequently end up in a dangerous situation and ,most of the time, with injuries. His co-worker tried hard to make him more cautious, to no avail. His job was to catch criminals along with saving normal citizens, placing his safety at the bottom of his list of importance.

A thought crossed the senior policeman mind as the criminal, not noticing the lack of attention of his hostage, kept talking about his escape plan all the while pointing the gun in every direction. Shao Fei thought of Tang Yi, the gang leader he “ stalked” for four years and his current boyfriend. He sure the other male would reprimand him for doing this. He just hopes Tang Yi wouldn’t do something dangerous if he hears about him being a hostage.

How did he ended up like this, well it was kind of a funny story. Today was his only day off, so, with a sudden desire to buy something for his boyfriend, the senior policeman went shopping in the nearest mall. The saying “ You were at the wrong place at the wrong time” could be applied to him as he entered his third shop. A man in his thirty had entered the same shop at the same time. Everything turned bad as the man took his gun out and started yelling and threatening the cashier. Apparently, the woman was the man ex-girlfriend and he didn’t like the idea of her breaking up. Shao Fei had cursed under his breath when he remembered he didn’t have his gun, since it was a day off. The whole situation then turned to a criminal taking hostages and asking for money. The man probably notice how fast the police were on the site and thought of a way of escaping. In another circumstance, seeing the surprised looks on his co-workers face as they laid eyes on him, would have been funny.

For almost an hour, Shao fei along with twelve other people, waited in the shop with a deranged man walking around pointing his gun at whoever would dare to move. He wouldn’t have done anything if everyone in the shop was alright. However, as the minutes passed, a kid sitting next to, what Shao Fei assumed was her mother, started to breathe heavily. Soon enough, the mother gasped and watched as her daughter fell into the floor shaking violently. Shao Fei understood what was happening and moved before the man with the gun could approach the child. He stood in front of the man, the muzzle of the gun was resting on his forehead.

“ She’s having an epileptic seizure she needs medical attention.”

Shao Fei had told the man, his eyes staring at the other’s. He didn’t care about the gun, his preoccupation was on the kid having a seizure. Maybe it was the stress that caused the kid to have an epileptic seizure but one thing was for sure, she needed to go to the hospital. Sometimes, Shao Fei wished he had the innocence of Zhao Zi so he could convince the man to give himself to the police, but Shao Fei was Shao Fei. The man was getting angrier and the kid was still shaking on the ground, her mother making sure she was on the side with no object around. Shao Fei did something is boss really would have killed him for that.

“ Look, let them go, you can keep me as a hostage they’ll let you pass for sure. The little kid needs help if you don’t she might die.”

Movement could be seen outside the shop, from his peripheral vision Shao Fei saw his captain alongside Zhao Zi talking with other police officers, his captain looked angry. After more tries to convince the man from taking only him as a hostage, the man finally obliged. Both of them past by the police outside, his captain yelling at Shao Fei, which made the senior smile. He would be in trouble after this.

The man kept mumbling, pacing around his dusty and gross apartment. Blinking, Shao Fei observed the distracted man, his eyes landing on the keys resting on the small coffee table near the couch. He knew the other police officers would be there soon but he would give a shot at trying to escape. Testing the water, Shao Fei moved slowly on the couch, trying not to alert the distracted man. Sadly, luck wasn’t on his sides that day , once he moved the couch made a protesting noise and caught the man’s attention, who pointed the gun back to Shao Fei.

“Don’t fucking try to move or I’ll put a bullet in your precious skull!”

Yeah maybe it was a bad idea to do what he did. Not that he was afraid of getting a bullet, like he told his boyfriend, only a canon could kill him. What he was more afraid of was worrying Tang Yi. It’s been two hours since he was kidnapped, he was sure that by now the gang leader had heard of it and was trying to find him.Well, more like Jack had the job of finding him and Tang Yi would beat the man who dared touch him. He was wondering who would come here first, Tang Yi’s man or the police. A smile drew on his lips as he thought about his boyfriend being the first to arrive, he trusted his co-worker but sometimes they could be dumb so he bet on the gang leader. His smile was caught by the man and Shao Fei could feel the cold of the muzzle on his temple.

“What are you smiling at?”

Spat the man visibly pissed by the nonchalant attitude of Shao Fei. The lack of reaction toward the threatening gun made the man growled.

“Nothing really, just wondering what’s going to happen next.”

Shao Fei contemplated the front door, the man followed his gaze and growled even more. The senior cop felt the handle of the gun met his temple with force making him lay on the couch, his head in pain. Well, now the man was definitely dead, Sha Fei sighed as he knew he would have to confront Tang Yi and prevent him from killing the man.

“ Those stupid cops won’t find us that easily don’t get your hopes up. You’ll probably be fucking dead when they arrive!”

Shao Fei didn’t bother sitting back up, even if the couch was really disgusting, he was just waiting for a few minutes for the pain to subdue.

“Believe me, I’m more worried about what’s going to happen to you when he finds us.”

The man angrily grabbed his collar and violently forced Shao Fei to look at him. Their faces were almost touching and Meng Shao Fei could smell the horrible breath of the other and forced himself not to make a disgusted face.

“ Who the fuck are you talking about! No one will come to save you !”

It was at that moment a knock was heard on the door. Shao Fei smiled again, chuckling at little. The man didn’t like that and, once again, punched him violently with the gun. The man pushed Shao Fei on the floor, walked to the door with his gun raised up in the air.

“ I wouldn’t answer if I were you.”

Insisted Shao, but the man didn’t bother listening to him.

“Shut the fuck! If it’s the cop, i’ll just shoot them!”

Decidedly, the man was dumb, Shao watched as the man opened the door and wasn’t surprised by the wide smile that was on the other side.Waving, Jack tilted his head to be able to see Shao lying on the floor. The red head man didn’t even acknowledge the gun pointed to his head as his eyes met Shao’s.

“Hey!”

The man charged the gun, making Jack paid attention to him, still smiling like the Cheshire cat.

“Get the fuck away asshole!”

Before the man could shoot, Jack took out his knife and with an incredible speed and plunged it into the man's arm holding the gun. The man screamed and dropped the gun. Jack then pushed him inside and closed the door behind him. Shao Fei watched as Jack and the man fought each other; truly Jack was unsettling as he kept his big smile all the time. It wasn’t long before the man fell to the floor unconscious. His head was still hurting when Shao stood up, under the cheerful smile of the mercenary.

“The boss is looking for you.”

Teased Jack, kneeling in front of the unconscious man.

“Leave him here, the police will come to get him, I’ll send them the location.”

Jack shrugged, he opened the door for Shao Fei and the two of them walked away leaving a beat up unconscious man in his apartment. Sitting in Jack’s car, Shao fei was thinking about what he would say to Tang Yi, the gang leader would surely scold him.

“You didn’t have your phone on your other boss?”

Shao shook his head, his phone was dead so he didn’t bother bringing it with him. In his mind, he would have just been out for shopping, no need for the phone. Eyes on the road ahead, Jack gave his phone to Shao so he could call the police and tell them where the man was. After ending the call, Shao Fei was about to give the phone back to Jack when a LINE message popped up. The cop raised an eyebrow as he noticed the name of the person texting Jack.

“How did you get Zhao Zi’s LINE?”

Jack only answered by smiling even more, leaving a confused Shao Fei beside him. They arrived soon after at Tang Yi enormous house. Jack left him, his eyes glued on the phone as he walked away. Shao Fei would have to question Zhao Zi about that. Entering Tang Yi’s bedroom, the cop met his love, who was sitting on the edge of the bed his hand claps together. Once he heard the sound of the door opening, Tang Yi stood up and closed the gap between him and Shao Fei.The other man didn’t have time to say anytime as strong pairs of arms wrapped themselves around his waist. It was at that moment Shao Fei felt bad for worrying his boyfriend. Breaking the hug, the senior cop starred in the other’s eyes mouthing an “I’m alright” before connecting their lips into a passionate kiss.

Sitting on the bed, Shao Fei winced as Tang Yi’s gentle fingers brushed against the spot where he got hit by the handle of the gun. The gang leader brought his lips to the spot making Shao Fei smile at the loving gesture.

“I was worried about you.”

“I was thinking about you.”

Tang Yi placed his forehead against his boyfriend’s , his hands cupping Shao’s face.

“Hm?”

“When I was there, I kept thinking about you. I knew that no matter what I had to go back to you so I didn’t do anything rash I just waited.”

Well, not exactly, Shao Fei did try to escape by himself but his plan had failed miserably so he didn’t count it.

“What were you doing in the Shopping Mall?”

Shao Fei wasn’t even surprised that the other man knew where he had been. Looking down, the cop felt a little embarrassed about telling his boyfriend he went shopping to find him a gift.

“ I was looking for something to give you.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted! I wanted to give you something that you would love!”

Tang Yi forced Shao Fei to look up, their lips meeting again.

“ The only thing I love is sitting in front of me. I don’t need anything else”

This time, the kiss grew more and more passionate and soon clothes were thrown across the room. Hours later, the couple cuddled in the comfortable bed, their foreheads touching as they fell asleep.

The end

#history 3: trapped #bl drama #tang yi #shao fei x tang yi #tang yi x shao fei #zhao zi x jack #zhao zi #jack x zhao zi #Jack

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tulipscomeinallsortsofcolors · 5 years

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i'm trying to figure out how Linda deals with sportsball because she's so much faster than humans. maybe she knows to match them naturally, like how Logan developed along with Thomas naturally. maybe Logan specifically has that talk with her? but i'm imagining Linda as Dash from the Incredibles at the end with the track meet

oh wow i am about to WAY show off my total lack of jock tendencies but i think in soccer the defensive players don’t run back-and-forth quite as much?? if i am remembering high school gym more than five years ago correctly

so they probably put her there just to slightly reduce the chances the opposing team who is decidedly Not from Wickhills and Not In The Loop realize there is something distinctly supernatural about this kid

(and i’ve JUST realised the way i’ve got Wickhills set up culturally - very insular, actively hostile to outsiders, when they do let an outsider in that outsider proceeds to go native and become also hostile to outsiders including their own family, discouraging them to come visit or talk to them at all

they have strange tick/traditions when you see them outside of Wikchills - they all knock three times on a door before entering, they all have bizarre jewlery of iron and cryptic silver symbols and stones on loops

bells in the hems of the childrens clothes? wearing necklacess and crowns of flowers in broad ass daylight on other wise normal days

its a cult. I’ve made them look like a cult, near everybody in Southeast Ohio in the laoft verse is 100% convinced the whole town is a cult and i did this completely unintentionally and now i can’t stop laughing)

anyway back to Linda - She gets (a series of) talks from her various dads on the subject including Logan and Patton, and Virgil gives a sort of “humans are very breakable and a lot of them are not very smart so you have to play gently” which is not... ideal phrasing but communicates the concept fairly well.

Linda likes to win, and she likes to win even more the longer she plays because her teammates like to win

but when Roman informed her they were giving her a place to make friends, she took that to heart and thats what she personally thinks soccer is for - so she’s happy not to go full-superhuman on the unsuspecting opposing team most of the time

(this is immediately rescinded if the opposing team fouls one of her friend. there have been Incidents)

#love and other fairytales ask #trivia-goddess #ask

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write-it-motherfuckers · 5 years

Text

You hadn’t thought anything of it when you initially saw it. It wasn’t exactly uncommon to see large birds of prey around here, and you by no means claimed to have any advanced knowledge on what types there were. Just because you had never seen such a bird before, didn’t mean they weren’t normal. Besides, it wasn’t as if you had lived here long enough to really know the local native flora and fauna.

Still, you had a love for animals, and though you knew nothing of its breed, it wouldn’t stop you from trying to befriend the creature. Part of why you had jumped at the chance to move here, was because of the wildlife after all.

At first you had simply left out some of the nicer left overs and scraps that you knew would be safe for wild animals, not trying to impose your presence upon the bird, though you dearly wished to. It stayed that way for quite some time, and gradually, the bird, and a few others, came to accept the treats, letting you watch from within the comfort of your home.

Eventually, other types of wildlife started to occasionally show up in your yard, happy to accept anything you left out for them, or to simply enjoy the relative peace and safety your yard provided. It was at this point, that you started to notice how the other animals reacted to the strange bird.

It was almost as if they deferred to it, respected it. No matter what their species, they seemed to hold immense respect and a healthy dose of fear for the beautiful creature, as though recognising it as something much more powerful than they. It was strange, but you told yourself there could be perfectly reasonable reasons for such a thing, rather than the reasons your overactive imagination were trying to claim.

One morning, as you went out to sit on the balcony and relax for a while, you heard a great flapping of wings, before something landed on the banister beside you. Up this close, you could finally see just how massive the bird truly was, and how bizarre its radiant feathers were. The bird seemed content to simply watch you, and so you remained seated, only reluctantly moving when you saw other birds start to linger around, waiting to be fed.

From then on, a new routine began, and each morning, you would find the bird waiting for you. You began to talk to it fondly, chattering on about nothing and everything as it kept you company, and much to your delight, even allowed you to stroke its beautiful feathers from time to time. The bird started to linger longer and longer with you over time, eventually coming to spend almost its entire day with you, something that you greatly enjoyed.

Not everything was positive sadly, as someone in town had taken a little bit too much interest in you, seeing as you were someone new to the area. One evening, they had decided to invite themselves up to your house, despite the long drive, a fact that made you incredibly uneasy, to say the least.

You were trying to be polite as you firmly declined their requests to enter, but the look in their eyes was starting to make you nervous. Suddenly, they looked up, staring behind you with a startled expression.

Smooth strong hands firmly pressed over the top of yours, where you held the door, and the warmth from a taller body, appeared behind you. When they spoke, their voice was strong and smooth, a strange feeling of power, lacing it.

“They’re not interested, and you are not welcome. Leave.” They said firmly, something about them causing the other to turn pale.

You trembled slightly with nerves as the person from town obediently fled, though you were shocked that you didn’t feel more panicked over the presence of yet another stranger, one that had simply appeared, inside your home no less. Slowly they released you, and stepped back away from you, letting you spin around to anxiously take them in, now that the former threat was gone.

Whilst their form was decidedly human, it was very clear that they, were not. There was something otherworldly about the feral grace of their movements, and the strange sharpness of their gaze. Their hair and clothing however, were what surprisingly made everything click.

The beautiful silk of their garments was richly and intricately designed, baring a motif that was strikingly similar to that of your avian friend. Their hair, you noticed as you unthinkingly stepped closer, looked just as soft and silky as the birds feathers did, even carrying that strange but beautiful radiance to them, and no doubt was just as soft as you remembered the feathers being.

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cygnetofthesea · 5 years

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66 , westallen:)

I’ve been wanting to write this AU for two months now and I finally get to all the while fulfilling this prompt–shooting two feathers with one arrow (I just made that up because “killing two birds with one stone is so morbid”). Hope you guys enjoy this!

Staring At The Other’s Lips, Trying Not To Kiss Them, Before Giving In

Chemistry in Motion

If Dr. Barry Allen and Dr. Iris West were chemical elements like the ones they so dearly loved, together, they would be the compound that would cause explosions. The charged energy every time they were in a room together made their colleagues uncomfortable and often resulted in an awkward shuffle out of the lab.

Only Dr. Harrison Wells, their mentor, was brave enough to stay in the room as he barked at them to “quit the bickering and remind me why I brought you both onto the team.”

If anyone were to ask either Barry and Iris, neither would give in and admit the brilliance the other. Dr. Allen would gripe about how he couldn’t believe he was yanked from his hometown in Moscow just to be placed alongside a stubborn and infuriating scientist who did nothing but question him at every turn.

(Nevermind the fact that he’d also often mutter under his breath about the “beautiful and brilliant nuisance” in his native Russian tongue lest Dr. West overhear and call him out on it.)

Dr. West, on the other hand, would practically emit steam from her ears every time his name even came up.

“Don’t even mention the puppy-eyed ‘doctor’ who keeps putting in the wrong units of measurement into the acceleration mass spectrometer. You’re in America, use the correct units!”

(Nevermind the fact that she thinks it’s stupid they were the only ones that used a different form of measurement than the rest of the world…Or that she could barely look at Dr. Allen for too long because his stupid bespectacled green eyes made her soft like the way his hair flopped when he ran his hand through it in frustration.)

The tension between the two scientists reached a new height when Iris found that Barry had once again changed the settings on all their machinery. It was only after she punched into the numbers before she noticed the small units in the bottom corner of the screen.

She clenched her jaw and absolutely seethed. Whirling around, she charged at Barry as he sat hunched over a microscope.

“What is that matter with you?”

“Well, yesterday, it was my turtle being eaten by my cat. I had to scold her most severely,” he responded blithely in his heavy accent.

Iris reared back at that, baffled, but he continued on without looking up.

“After that, it was watching you nearly crack your neck while reaching for the graduated cylinder as I specifically said I would get it for you. Nearly gave me a heart attack,” he commented casually. “And well, at the moment, you’re shouting at me while I’m trying to concentrate on identifying the particles in this chemical that was shot at us by our enemies. What’s the matter with you?”

Iris spluttered, taking all that in, especially the bit where her well-being nearly gave him a heart attack, before remembering why she was irked.

“Well, today, and not to mention every other day, it’s you! You changed all the units of every single one of our equipment. Are you asking for a disaster on a nuclear level?”

He swiveled around in his chair and looked at her. “No. I am simply asking why I must compromise and yield to your every need. Try adapting to a different lifestyle.”

He swiveled back to his desk and scribbled in his book while muttering, “And perhaps try a different flavor of men.”

“What was that?” she demanded, cocking her head to the side.

“Oh nothing,” he said simply before she, again, heard him mutter something. “I suppose Dr. Thawne and his blondeness is quite nice too.”

“What? What the hell does Eddie have to do with anything? And quit being so damn passive-aggressive.”

He whirled around and looked her square in the eye. “Fine. Would you like assertiveness? How’s this for assertive? You are beyond infuriating,” he enunciated.

“Me? How am I infuriating? You’re the one who walked into this lab with a stick up your ass and your nose in the air since day one!”

He got up from his stool and advanced toward her. “That is not true. I was actually excited to work alongside you, the esteemed Dr. Iris West until I found out that you don’t exactly play well with others.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Ah, how do I say it? You’re not a team player. ‘It’s my way or the highway.’”

She scrunched up her nose. “I never said that!”

“Oh, you didn’t have to say the words explicitly. I got the picture.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Oh, is it?” he asked in mock surprise.

She looked up at him, at those annoyingly gorgeous eyes framed by those annoyingly thick and adorable lashed and let out a frustrated growl. A small voice in the back of her head whispered that perhaps there was a little truth to his words. Iris was, after all, alone her whole life. She never knew what it was like to be part of something other than herself.

“You! You are so full of yourself if you think you have me pegged, you arrogant…accented…ass!”

He let out a harsh breath through clenched teeth. “Chert by tebyapobral, tvoichertovskikrasivyyeglazaigubykrichalinamenya!”

“What did you say to me?” she belted, pointing a finger at him. “What kind of person argues in a different language? How am I supposed to present my counter-argument if I can’t understand a damn word you just said to me?”

“I said,” he replied, jabbing a finger at her and moving closer until they were just inches apart. “‘Goddamn you and your fucking beautiful eyes and lips screaming vitriol at me’!”

Iris let out a sharp breath as her chest heaved, her eyes wide. “W-what?” she uttered in a small voice, a decidedly stark contrast to the volume she previously took on.

“You’re a marvelous being but so goddamn stubborn it drives me absolutely mad,” he glared.

Iris couldn’t help but let her eyes flit to his lips where heavy puffs of air emitted. Heavy, hot air that she wanted to feel against her. Desperately.

She looked up at him only to see that his own eyes had traveled to her lips as well. Before either knew what was happening, they charged at each other, their lips finding one another like magnets.

And they absolutely melted and fused against one another. It was electric. For the first time since they met each other, they finally yielded to the other as their bodies gave and took.

She was pliant under his hands as he brought them firmly around her to lift her and settled on top of their lab table while her leg wound around his waist and kept him firmly against her. She let her heels drop with a clatter as she practically scaled his torso. He gave into her touch, groaning under the feel of her hands traveling under his lab coat and dress shirt to the expanse of his back while his hands dove into her hair and guided her lips in time with his.

He gasped against her skin. “Gods, I’ve dreamed of getting lost in you. Feeling your soft, shiny hair between my fingers,” he whispered into her mouth. “You really are incredible.”

His words jolted in her chest as her skin heated under his touch.

“I don’t mind it when you change the units,” she breathed as she kissed along his cheek to his ear.

“It makes me so hot when I see you working on those heavy machineries and when you balance equations in your head.”

She laughed breathlessly as his lips dragged across her throat, leaning her head back. “I’m sorry I wasn’t welcoming when you first arrived. I really do respect the work you do here.”

He licked her jaw and smiled against her cheek. “You were already forgiven. Besides, you’re making up for it plenty now. This is quite a welcome. Albeit late.”

They looked at each other softly for a long moment before leaning in again, unable to stay apart for long. As they explored one another, little did they know Dr. Wells was walking by.

He did a double-take when he saw what was happening through the lab window before he looked away and rolled his eyes.

“Fucking finally,” he grumbled as he walked away, leaving the love birds to their private moment.

#Westallen #cygnetofthesea writing #prompt request #WA AU #Westallen AU #thank you to the anon for the submission!#It was the perfect opportunity for me to finally write this little story that's been on my mind for two months now!

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mr-kamiyama · 4 years

Text

Quick thoughts about Digimon:

I tuned in one morning I wasn't working, which was rare at that job I was at at the time, caught 02 ep 10, and was hooked. I later realised the writer of all the Dark Ocean content was Konaka Chiaki, whose work I generally like, so no surprise there.

I gotta say, they probably should've just gone with 「相棒」 for partner. This word is usually a partner in context of a business partner or police partner--in fact, a show called just that has been running for the entire 21st century about detective partners (and it's a pretty good show. I've seen it be sympathetic to the plight of undocumented immigrants, for one)

Using "partner" the English loanword...well, the context I really hear it in is same-gender partner.

Now, mind you, I only figured things out as an adult, and native Japanese speakers here are and always have been treated pretty miserably. (Which is why "exotic Japanese garnish for my human default English" is very, very much rubbing your priveledge in our faces, incredibly offensive, but hey, y'all also repost Japanese fanworks without permission to the point many delete their accounts and give up because y'all are so married to the idea we're not people, which frankly, y'all's treatment of queer men in fandom is equally garbage)

But the reason that point is mentioned is that we're so sidelined, it's hard to even find and connect with each other (e.g. SF Japantown only has Japanese speaking clerks on one floor of Kinokuniya where the books in Japanese for us are kept. It's now "look Asian for the tourists") so a lot of us end up having trouble accessing random words in our own language because we're so used to either no one around us speaking it or bad consequences when we break our English with Japanese.

So, as I've never experienced queer life in Japan, and Japanese immigrants commonly end up yoyoing back to English, I'm not entirely sure "partner" the loanword is the only way to express same-gender partner as opposed to just the only one I've heard.

It does stand that it is *a* way. (Well, obviously, you could still use terms like "boyfriend" or "wife" but think the same as English speakers use it)

When watching 02, it's pretty easy to not go there because they're so young, and interact with the digimon during downtime like siblings, as the digimon are children as well (and you can't tell me that Wormmon isn't spot on for a younger brother in an abuse situation caring for an older brother)

Tailmon isa bit different, and obviously more mature, but ep 10 was the only Hikari-centric episode, and I never really had the desire to go back and watch Adventure. I don't feel like it had something for older viewers like I got out of 02-Frontier (Savers was intentionally about older viewers, and it was like a Doogie Howser/Men in Black/Digimon crossover, and I love it. And it had adults and even an elderly character with Digimon partners! Yay for useful adults!) so I admittedly can't decisively say about Tailmon.

But the rest do seem like siblings to their human children. And they're pointedly all children.

But just now, I was watching the new short, To Sora.

I have to say, as Piyomon has an adult voice, and Sora is an adult, my mind definitely went to "maybe the nomenclature could be better."

I do also have to say that I'm rather disappointed that they're ending this with "adults can't be Chosen anymore." At least there'll always be Savers, and maybe someday, I'll have enough of my massive dual-prong Digimon and Bleach project up that I can call it "extant" (I'm having a handful of the Bleach gang become Chosen as well as Osamu put into a gigai, and if you know Bleach, just imagine Coyote Starrk getting a new friend. Of course, he still has Lillynette and also adopts most of the Arrancar as his own children, but yes, Coyote gets a Digimon friend, too. And they're specifically trying calling adults because the kids keep getting too traumatised)

Ah, things run away from me.

But yes, especially with adult chosen and digimon, "partner" the loanword with no qualifier (i.e. "partner digimon") sounds like something else entirely to my queer mind www

And also "boo" for usefulness having an age limit. I wouldn't be saying this if this weren't specifically being aimed at fans who grew up with Adventure, and, while younger than me, are still well into adulthood. Cross Wars or the reboot have no reason to concern themselves with adult viewership, but Kizuna is being made for adults. So "end of childhood=end of your ability to be a hero" seems kinda... Even if they're just trying to end the original Adventure franchise, seems like a...they can do it better.

While no, Ken's and Daisuke's parents and Jun really *don't* deserve love, just... I dunno, there's just a deluge of teen heroes with powers and some immortal hero stories, but there's not a whole lot of the kind of adults you see in Savers. Yeah, they're side characters, but I'll take what I can get. Kizuna's approach is more common, which is a shame now that the average fan is roughly 29.

(Doesn't it also mess up the whole making the epilogue make any sense, what with everyone being with their digimon in that?)

(And for that matter, I would've loved 02 parents to have names, and maybe they could've gone into Miyako's more. She seems like she has a solid family. We see Ken explaining the digimon, and his parents exploited him until he had a breakdown. Heck, his dad continues to jump down his throat over things. Why couldn't Miyako's get some love? Why can't we see Miyako explaining digimon to her family and stay up all night with her older siblings hanging on her every word? Which considering how much real life kids get sorta discounted when two adults are talking (which I'll often just walk past and wave to the kid, so they know someone sees them) might have actually been an empowering fantasy for viewers. And a really great balance to Daisuke and Ken's home lives. (The kids with unpleasant families feel represented and empowered because they can still be heroes, but kids can also have the empowerment of watching Miyako's whole family, of which she is the baby, hanging on her words

(Also, why can't we see how someone from that family could enjoy the company of someone who slaps her kid brother around? And has some kind of stalker complex? Sure, it's stuff I can make answers for myself in my project, just like the initial reason to cross them was explaining the Dark Ocean, but I really would've loved something in canon about them)

Typically, adults in any kind of action hero story--let's look at Star Wars. The people who raised Luke are non-combatants. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda (an older Muppet, but older still stands) are just there as mentors, like Urahara in Bleach. It's really on Luke's shoulders. Han Solo is as old as a hero gets, and he's pretty young himself. (I've seen the original trilogy, and it was forever ago, so if Luke Skywalker is actually a teenager, forgive the error)

You don't see anyone between 20 year old hero and 60 year old mentor doing much of anything. Buddy cops are the only exception to this.

Shame that digimon is gonna follow that pattern instead of buck the trend, especially now that their fanbase is getting older. I dunno how much of a letdown the apparent Kizuna narrative is for a 29 year old as opposed to someone who wasn't even a kid when it was new, but I'm sure it's there. Even if I am decidedly older than that, I can't be the only one disappointed by it. If I thought I was, I wouldn't make this post.

And it kinda messes up using this to make the epilogue make any sense. When it was first revealed that Yamato suddenly became an astronaut, Gabumon was there with him on Mars. So on and so forth, and all humans had partners. Which naturally includes all the people over 23.

I guess we'll always have Satuma and Kudamon. (Miki and Megumi are nice too, and are also teetering on the edge of canon ship, which it's nice to see queer female fans get that, but they do seem like they're in their early to mid 20s, which arguably puts them at the end of typical "useful age range")

I'd love to already have an alternative up, but for now, I only have a few Bleach prequel one shots posted and over 800 pages of bullet point notes.

#digimon #digimon 02 #digimon kizuna #ageism in media #aging fanbase

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brooklynislandgirl · 4 years

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{I probably shouldn't and of course you may ignore the fuck out of me, but...BUT randomize me lady} Make Me Feel

Make Me Feel || Accepting

3. My muse is forcefully taken from yours{ @nolegacies for honourable mention}

Dreams in the Witch House

The cream for her coffee is curdled.Drops into the cup in sullen little plops that instinctively turn her stomach and she pours the whole thing into the sink. Rinses it out, trying not to cringe, and fixes a new cup.It’s fine. It’s Monday. She’s barely out of bed and the sun hasn’t broken through the cloud cover. She doesn’t know how Anakin can sit at the little kitchen table, wrapped up in his coat and scarves when there’s already a single bead of sweat racing down her spine and she was born on a tropical island.

“The Old Ways,” she yawns and takes a sip of her cup, “are dying, Anakin. An’ wheddah or no ya wan be…ya…ya conscripted into a war t’ save it. Ya choices, ones ya gonna have t’ make…dey gonna rest squarely in ya hands. No can tell ya f’ do, jus’ here as a…guide. A…mentor.”She glances down at the mangled one that sits cradled close to the warmth of his cup. There’s something nagging about the fact that he’s drinking chicory coffee. Something about it sparks a shiver up her spine and she can’t quite put a finger on it.

She doesn’t even remember buying any, but there it is, the smell distinct. Her gaze slides away from him for a moment, maybe two and surreptitiously glances around the kitchen. Nothing else seems odd, or out of place. The air is still, though there’s an underlying hum of electricity to it, the calm before the storm. She doesn’t like it, and starts to prowl behind him.

A knife, long and wicked and slightly curved in the blade, comes into her hand from parts unknown, there’s no way she should have been able to hide it in the next to nothing she’s wearing. Her other hand rests on the back of his neck, slides down to his shoulder because…that feels a little off too. He’s in no danger from her, something he needs to understand, and all of this…the conversation without preamble, the weapon in hand, it’s all part of the greater mystery and yet there’s an undefined urgency.

The explanation is not long in coming, happens before he even gets a chance to use that Southern Boy charm on her.The light in the kitchen dims. A shadow falls on both of them from behind. Almost in slow motion, she turns, still protectively hanging onto the young man at the table.“You.”The surprise in her voice holds an edge when the single-word hisses out. She gets no reply. An arm, nearly as thick as Anakin is wide, snakes around her throat. The dagger clatters to the ground as she’s yanked back from him, off her feet. Dragged up by several inches.By the time Anakin turns around, her feet dangle uselessly, her wide eyes show a remarkable spark of fear in their depths as her fingers glance off flesh, leaving bloody rents in the wake of her nails. Exposing a hint of metal and wiring that is impossible for a human being to possess, unlike his own haphazardly attended injury of pins and wire. Tattoos or something of the sort cover a lot of the skin she’s clawing at.The man holding her is incredibly tall, taller than Anakin by a bit, and nearly twice his breadth. Face like hewn granite, close-cropped blonde hair. Mirror-shade sunglasses cover his eyes but can’t hide the minute and occasional flash of red.She gets one breath.“RUN!”The sickening crunch that follows….was her neck.~*~

She knows the clothes are stiff and bother him. She can see out of the corner of her eyes that he’s picking at seams, fidgeting in them, avoiding eye-contact with most of the patrons here. He stands by her side, maybe a little behind, his damaged hand either in his pocket, or carefully concealed at the small of her back between the lace barrier her dress makes between her skin and his, and the chiffon scarf that glides down the back of the dress from her shoulders, a Vera Wang signature. She doesn’t want to be here any more than he does, but the future of her clinic rests not only on her financial contributions but also that of the elite Society of the city, and their generous natures. So she makes nice. Makes small talk. She introduces Anakin as a friend and every so often one can catch the pursed lips or raised eyebrows at just what they take that to mean. He’s clearly younger than she is, and as a single woman…

“Le’em talk stink. Mos’ of dem don’ wanna be wid deir wives or husband anyway, an’ I can tell ya dat dat blonde in da blue dress? No’ da real Missus Senator Chevalier.”She smiles at him brighter than the chandeliers, and occasionally presses a champagne cocktail into his empty hand. She much prefers sazeracs or straight up vodka and cranberry juice. The rented out riverboat is full of people, too close, too loud, too everything. They are pressed in on all sides, and after a while the thrill of gambling loses its appeal.

It’s his turn to throw, and she watches him look at the dice in his hand. There’s something decidedly un-Beth-like the way she blows over them for ‘luck’, and she looks up at him with a feline gaze.They never find out if Anakin wins or loses.

The doors of the salon break come splintering inward with a deafening roar, and five armoured paramilitaries carrying standard issue weapons step in.

Implanted HUDs in their eyes, inserted in the growth tank at the same time their entire circulatory system was replaced with advanced ‘wet’ nano-machinery glint in the confusion. Men in Black. Tactical clones. A man steps out in front of them, weapon raised, wearing an armoured vest over a black business suit. For a moment there’s shocked silence as the Union agents and certain patrons glare at each other. Everyone stops, slack-jawed and frozen, before the screaming starts.All hell breaks loose.Beth doesn’t explain to him when the fangs and claws come out. Or the shooting starts. Certain members of security ~she knows they’re leeches, but you sometimes make deals with the devils you know~ use illegal arms, and she drags Anakin down behind the craps table for cover. But the technocrats are faster by milliseconds and a round goes right through her shoulder.

“Fuck!” The first actual swear word he’s ever heard come out of her mouth.Primium flechettes miraculously miss panicking businessmen, government officials, trophy wives and husbands by millimetres even as they seek to use the crowd as cover. Others, like Beth, are not so lucky, being targeted by precisely engineered Technocratic hardware, and trigger-happy undead monsters. She lifts her hand up to her shoulder, bright red blood pouring out of the wound and ruining the delicate dress, and she smears her fingers with it, warm and coagulating. Her hand comes onto the wood of the table where she draws some kind of arcane sigil that seems to pry at the edges of his sanity, and mutters words in her native tongue.Soft features edged with excruciating pain turn to him as Beth grabs him by the shoulders. Shakes him not kindly, not gently. “WAKE UP!”

But it’s a little too late when she explodes in a mist of red, chunks of bone and brain tissue and other viscera showering his face.The man with the granite-jaw and close cropped hair smiles at him from across the room and chambers another round.

~*~

She’s barely out of bed and the sun hasn’t broken through the cloud cover. She doesn’t know how Anakin can sit at the little kitchen table, wrapped up in his coat and scarves when there’s already a single bead of sweat racing down her spine and she was born on a tropical island.

“Anakin? You…you okay? Look like some kine cat drag in an’ hork up all over da carpet. Mebbe sleep bad?”

Before he can quite answer her if he was inclined, there’s a tap at the kitchen door, a shadow falling on the small curtained window in it. Her brows knit leaving little worry lines in her forehead. Clearly she isn’t expecting company, or patients, today. Right now.Barefoot, she pads toward the door, and opens it.The man in the doorway easily clears over six and a half feet. Almost half that wide judging by the way the black suit crosses his shoulder. Mirrored sunglasses sit on the bridge of a straight nose surrounded by sharp cheeks and a jaw like stone and below close-cropped blonde hair. Piercing blue eyes look right Anakin for too long a moment before everything softens.She makes a sharp sound, the bastard child of a gasp and a shriek and she bodily rushes at him.No…No. No knives, no claws that she can’t possibly have. No bullet wounds. Her arms wrap around the man’s neck and his around her waist. Anakin is treated to a vision of her tiny body lifted almost a foot off the ground in all of this, the hem of her nightgown flirting with the backs of her thighs, and the hideous shark bite that she takes great pains to hide exposed to his view.

“You!”

The man finally says something, a painfully proper British accent on his lips.“Hey, Izzy. How’s my favourite sister?”

#Mahalo!Ani <33 #Like a Sad Hallucination|Anakin Skywalker #Like a Memory In Motion|Anakin and Beth #The Trunk You Kept Your Life In|Mage the Ascension #Honourable Mention|Billy Manderly #tw: hallucinations #tw: nightmares #tw: gun violence #tw: character death #tw: blood #mynameisanakin

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