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littlefreya · 3 years

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Stalker Walker - Part 5

Summary: A voyage to Paris in order to escape your mundane life leaves you with more than you bargained for.

[Previously on Stalker Walker]

Pairing: August Walker x Reader

Words: 1k

Warning: He’s cute and all but a stalker, mentions of sexual thoughts, mention of age gap.

A/N: No Beta!!! He is back, and on this episode of Stalker Walker™, our dear reader has finally met with August... now I wonder, what will happen next.

Title: Last night in Paris

It was as if the street fell utterly silent all of a sudden, save for the soft drumming of raindrops upon the thick fabric and your trembling breath no sound met your ears. The little shelter beneath his large umbrella felt like a secluded little realm and there you were, drowning on solid land, sunken into the abyss of the most stunning eyes you’ve ever seen.

Like the heart of a cold ocean kissed by the storm, passion and hunger swam within the tall man’s gaze, deeming him even more attractive.

Absentmindedly, you gaped, unable to determine if this was a movie, an extremely lucid dream or real life.

He was your stranger from earlier, the elegant, well-suited man who sat alone at the cafe’, how odd it was that by chance you’d meet again? Now further hulking, he stood so close that you could taste the same brew of Columbian coffee off his breath and the mist of his stark, musky cologne engulfed from each direction like some intoxicating enchantment.

It took a while before you could find words and the hint of a smile that began to spread on his surprisingly succulent lips didn’t help your lack of coherence.

“I’ve seen you,” you finally managed and immediately wanted to throw yourself into the canal.

Certainly, he would now think that you were some sort of a creepy stalker.

The stranger-now-turned saviour, tilted his head at you in a query while a small spark ignited his aquatic glance.

“At the Cafe’, earlier this morning…” you explained, trying to maintain a stable tone as your voice was about to give in to the same tremor in your knees.

The man observed your face silently, his tongue flicking over his bottom lip as he drank the sight of you in. He had to admit that you were far more fascinating in the flesh; your beauty a thing of ballads sung by knights and love poems, your scent - delicate and feral at the same time like a wild rose that grew timidly in a dark cave.

He couldn’t wait to pluck your soft petal and drink your sweet nectar.

“Shame,” he spoke, his baritone a smooth, low chant, “I would have offered you to join me for breakfast,” he paused and then clicked his tongue, his smile further widening, exposing two large dimples and two sharp fangs, “had you agreed to it, of course.”

In your cheeks, you felt the lick of flames. Eyes dropping to the damp cobblestone, you chuckled softly and then tucked an errant curl behind your ear. You’ve just met him 5 minutes ago and didn’t even know his name, but you were willing to leave with your bewhiskered stranger to wherever he fancied if only he’d suggest.

But this wasn’t you, you weren’t the coy, giggly girl falling for every tall handsome man with a void of a dark angel. You were the same independent woman who travelled on her own for the first time, visiting a completely new land. Yet his glare somehow held you captive in a chamber of glass which you couldn’t escape from, nor did you ever wanted.

Unable to find the correct answer to his theoretical question, you simply shrugged and crooked an eyebrow, trying to suggest you wouldn’t have minded having breakfast, lunch, dinner and then another breakfast in bed with him the morning after.

Moving his arm in the most elegant manner, he reached for your palm and took it in his grasp. The drum of your heart never beat louder as he leaned in to kiss the back of your hand, pressing his soft lips against your supple skin. The rough edges of his moustache scratched your hand and you had to swallow that giggle that threatened to escape your throat.

“August,” he introduced, remaining a tad bent and only keeping his glare fixed upon yours. Smitten by his direct charm and suave charisma, you wondered about his age. He couldn’t have been older than mid-30, much older than you, no doubt, yet his manners and gestures were that of a man who was slightly old fashioned, one that treats a woman like a lady.

You scratched the back of your head awkwardly which he took as a signal to let go of your hand and stretched back to his full height.

“August,” you repeated his name, enjoying the way it rolled on your tongue, “I am so lucky to have run into you, and have you save me from the rain. I brought an umbrella with me today but misplaced it somewhere...”

Possibly at the cafe, when you were too lost in your own gawking and fancies, though you’d be lying if you didn’t admit to yourself that you were thrilled to have lost your umbrella. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have the chance to run into August on a rainy autumn day. Perhaps it was your destiny that on the last night in Paris, you were to meet a man that made you want to do something completely outrageous.

It was time after all…

The anticipation grew in your eyes as you stood waiting, unaware of how your body swung from side to side. If only you knew what an open book you were to a man like him, there was no need to swipe your credit card and trace your information, he picked up every twitch and flutter of your lashes, noticing how you fell into your own musings, as you did when you were alone. He wanted to browse through your pages and read each passage and syllables of your naked body, as he will have you in your own hotel bed tonight.

Inhaling calmly, he reached for your hand again, and placed the hook of the umbrella in your grip, “you are welcome to have mine till the end of your trip, sweetheart. I’m not afraid of getting wet.”

At the arch of his brow and the drawl in his voice, you flushed, but then your heart sunk like a broken ship. The end of your trip was closer than he knew and home was nothing but a mundane little fortress of solitude, this was by far the most exciting thing that ever happened to you since forever and the fact that you’ve met him at the last night of the trip felt as if you’ve wandered from a pleasant little garden of roses into a bush full of thorns.

Giving him a disappointed glance, you pushed the umbrella back toward him, “there is no need, that’s gonna be tomorrow morning.”

August’s brow lifted with surprise and the same disappointing tainted his eyes that now looked as soft as the eyes of a puppy. “Pity,” he pouted but then offered you another one of his endearing smiles, “perhaps then, you can hold it for me till the end of the night.”

His hand pushed yours away gently, and he pulled back, stepping into the rain and letting the drizzle dampen his trench coat and slick hair.

“Have a drink with me tonight.” It didn’t sound like a question nor like a suggestion but more of a fact as he took another step away from you, his hair gradually becoming tussled by the soft wind and droplets of rain. “You are staying close to the cafe’ where we met, I presume.”

“Yes,” you retorted, squeezing your fingers around the rigid metal handle, “at the Pantheon.”

Tucking his hands down the pockets of his jacket, he continued to pace away, walking backwards as if he didn’t want to say goodbye.

“I’ll see you downstairs at 8, my little rose, don’t forget my umbrella, because then I’ll have to hunt you down” he announced with a playful smirk and then turned on his feet and walked away.

Watching him leave, you finally allowed your self to exhale loudly. A broad smile stretched your cheeks to the point of pain, and you couldn’t help but chuckle at the turn of events. Even if you were to never see him again after tonight, it would still be the sweetest memory, and maybe a part of you was somewhat afraid of the commitment that could follow anyway.

You began pacing away, staring into nothing with music playing in your mind when you suddenly found it odd that he never bothered asking for your name.

*Disclaimer: I don’t own August Walker or any of the Mission Impossible franchise characters*

*No permission is given for reposting my work, copying it, my ideas or parts of the source material and claiming it as your own*

#august walker #henry cavill #august walker x reader #august walker fanfiction #stalker walker #august walker x you

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meichenxi · 3 years

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For the ask game! 9, 12, and 22?

Yay more askies :D this is going to be likewise long!

9) What does a week in your language learning routine look like?

- I’m not particularly disciplined in the way that I study, though I do tend to study most days. I’m very good at making plans but less at following them consistently, so this is a more realistic depiction of what I do!

- Because I’m currently studying with HSK Online and they have two classes a week which cover about 3 chapters, I have a lot of vocabulary and grammar that I need to cover in the app before attending those classes, so most of my studies at the moment are focused on getting that done. So:

Vocabulary and grammar:

(I do this all most days, depending on what exactly I need to do for the next lesson, but I try to do Quizlet every day)

1) I go through the vocabulary and grammar lessons, and write down the vocab and any example sentences.

2) When I input this into Quizlet, I use Baidu Translate to look at example sentences to get a better feel for how the word is used. I also write a couple of sentences / say a couple of sentences with each word. Baidu Translate is a fantastic tool, much better for Chinese than Google Translate, and it has an example sentences section where you can get the pinyin if you hover over the characters.

3) After I feel I vaguely know the words for that day, I will go back and actively study them on Quizlet. For any words I forget I’ll write more sentences, or look at more examples. If there are any grammar points, I look them up on Chinese grammar wiki.

Input and reading

(I don’t do these at any specific time, but luckily I quite enjoy this section so am very happy to Consume Media)

1) Try to read something every day. It doesn’t matter exactly what this is - often it’s Bilibili comments! I also like to skim through my graded reader and try to practice scan-reading.

2) I do dedicated HSK-style reading practice a few times a week as well. Again, I use the HSK Online app for this. It’s terrifying but necessary. This one I do have to motivate myself to do.

3) I watch a lot of Chinese shows. Some with English subs, some with Chinese subs. My favourites include The Untamed (obviously), Nirvana in Fire (will always need the subs for this rip), Tian Guan Ci Fu (a donghua on Bilibili) and Street Dance of China. I probably watch a good 5-10 hours of TV a week.

4) I learn other things through Chinese. So I watch lectures or courses on Bilibili or do workout videos. I especially like watching videos teaching beginners Cantonese and Japanese, two languages I am interested in learning, as well as Literary Chinese.

5) I listen to podcasts in Chinese when I’m walking around. My favourites include 聊聊东西, 听故事学中文 and 面包吐司. They are all in Chinese, but all specifically designed for foreigners, though the first and last are not learning podcasts, just podcasts of fairly accessible content where people chat about things like smoking, health, dating and so on. The second one is a podcast where stories are read in Chinese, and then explained sentence-by-sentence in Chinese, so it’s more ‘learning’.

12 - What tips would you give to people that want to study the language/s you’re studying?

1) It’s an uphill slog, but you’re at the hardest place right now. So if you feel discouraged, if you feel overwhelmed, nobody else got it after one month either! It will take time, but is there anything worthwhile that doesn’t?

2) Invest in good pronunciation training right from the beginning. If you can’t take classes, watch videos (YoYo Chinese, Outlier Chinese, Mandarin Blueprint etc have good tone series). Practice tone pairs. Tone pairs are your saviours. Practice repeating what the speaker actually says, not what you think they say. Learn a little bit about phonetics.

3) Listen to Chinese right from the get go, as much as you can. Listening is many people’s weakest area, especially if they are learning it in a non-Chinese speaking environment. Play podcasts all the time. Differentiate between ‘learning’ podcasts (which will mostly be in English at the beginning), and podcasts that just train your ear to the sounds of Chinese. Have Chinese podcasts on all the time, regardless of whether you understand them or not.

4) Invest in a structured course. I don’t necessarily mean classes with a teacher, though if you can I would recommend italki (feel free to contact me to see which teachers I’d recommend). But consider something like Chinese Zero to Hero, where they have videos explaining HSK1 through to HSK6. It’s about 100 dollars, but even if you have to save up for a few months to get that, I’d recommend it. Why? Because Chinese is overwhelming and there’s so much to learn. Having someone to tell you what you need to learn next is an absolute god-send. Plus, they know more than you what beginners need to tackle. They also have beginner-appropriate audio, which is absolutely crucial to learning to speak. I really would recommend this course.

5) Learn properly about how characters work from the get go. Learn about phonetic and semantic components. Learn what types of characters there are, learn the most common components, and learn to hand-write them too.

6) Record yourself speaking as much as you can. Play it back. How does it sound? Record it again.

7) Practice reading from the moment you have around 150 characters. There are excellent physical graded readers as well as apps like The Chairman’s Bao and Du Chinese. THIS IS SO IMPORTANT, PLEASE DON’T LEAVE IT OUT. It takes time for you to get used to reading in a second language, especially one with unfamiliar characters.

8) Decide whether you’re going for traditional or simplified, and stick with it. Do not learn both unless you have a very good reason. If you think you might go to Hong Kong or Taiwan, have family there, want to read literary Chinese, or even understand ‘deeper’ how certain characters have developed, you can learn traditional, but if you’re less than 100% sure, go with simplified. It’s easier for beginners, and if you have a good level of simplified Chinese, traditional isn’t that hard to pick up later down the line - some common characters are completely different, but many are different in very predictable ways. If you are not absolutely sure you are going to need traditional, I’d recommend simplified.

9) Really, really consider your motivation. Why are you learning? Do you just think it would be cool? It is cool, but that’s not enough of a reason to embark on any language, much less one with extra difficulties like Chinese. In an ideal situation, you’d be intrinsically motivated all the time: but that’s not always going to happen. Do you have Chinese family you’d like to communicate with better? Do you want to travel to a Chinese speaking country? Do you want to read Chinese poetry? Do you just really love Xiao Zhan?? If you’re doing it ‘for your career’, please bear in mind that you won’t get any points for learning half a language. If you’re not willing to engage with the culture and the people, you’re just not going to be successful long term.

10) Find things you like watching / listening to / reading in Chinese as soon as you can. Bored? Unmotivated? Stick a favourite episode of your favourite drama on. It still technically counts as immersion, and when your language skills are better, you’ll be able to use that as your textbook!! Try and find something that will make you want to read or listen in Chinese, and then it won’t feel like a chore. It’ll also become a motivation, because inevitably the more you explore the Chinese language internet, the more you’ll find things you can’t interact with in translation and need your language skills for.

22 - How has learning about the culture of the country impacted your language learning?

Hmm, this is a really interesting question!! I'll have to answer in a few ways.

1) I'm interested in a lot of things about Chinese culture, which fuelled my interest for learning Chinese, and also let me learn in a more fun way. I’m a huge tea nerd, I enjoy listening to Chinese traditional music though I know very little about it, and I enjoy calligraphy. I think that some hanfu is just objectively the most gorgeous clothing on the planet and I enjoy Chinese water-and-mountain style landscape art. I also love the karst landscapes of some parts of southern China (OH MY GOD LIMESTONE MY FAVOURITE ROCK) and I’ve had a faded picture of Zhangjiajie on my wall since I was about nine. This is very different from my experience with German: I love the German language, and I have a lot of great friends from German-speaking countries, but I’m not intrinsically interested in the culture the same way I am Chinese-speaking countries. Because there’s so much I want to learn, it gives me a) huge motivation for continuing studying, b) makes it a more holistic, rounded experience, and c) provides me with wonderful study materials. At the intermediate level, I can avoid textbooks if I really want to and just learn about tea. Isn't that just the dream. Also, realistically, if I want to be able to read poetry in literary Chinese, my modern Chinese has to be a lot better. So I’m very motivated because of this.

2) My interest in martial arts! I originally started learning Chinese because I had gotten interested in Chinese culture via wuxia and martial arts. My dad is a huge martial arts nerd. By that I don’t mean someone who sits on his sofa all day with a nunchuck collection and Bruce Lee pictures, I mean he gets up at 6 every day and trains for about 2-3 hours. He can run a 5:30 minute mile aged 56. I have so much respect for this man, seriously. He used to practice karate, taekwondo and Muay Thai, but after he got sick he started with taiji. He’s practiced taiji and qigong now every day for about twenty years. So I was brought up on a diet of Hong Kong and mainland Chinese martial arts cinema - my dad would regularly show me clips of films because I couldn’t watch the whole ones until I was older, and get into trouble when my mum came back! We spent hours learning forms together and doing push-hands in the kitchen. Even now when we go home our form of affection is trying to kick each other without being kicked back lmao. I discovered the Jin Yong books in English about 15 and was just entranced by the names of the movements, by the action, the galloping across the plains, the sweeping scenery. I have inherited this interest, and am also a huge martial arts nerd and so a large motivation for me learning Chinese is that a) I love the genre of wuxia and want to know more about it, and b) I’d like to spend a few years training at an academy in Wudang and want to be able to understand as much as possible and for that, I obviously need the language to a high level!!! I started jiu jitsu when I was 8, started a southern style of Kung Fu when I was fifteen, studied for a few months in China in an academy, and it’s been my dream to go back since.

3) Different cultural attitudes, the outside park culture, and how people talk to each other. I’m from the UK, alright - we don’t do things in public and we certainly don’t approach strangers!! So when I was in China this was one of the weirdest things to get used to, next to just the sheer amount of people (I grew up in a village of 2000). But though it was tiring at times, I liked it so much. It was so refreshing to have people ask me questions because they were curious, and start talking to me. One of the reasons that I think my accidental immersion-only approach to learning Chinese the first time I was in China worked was because I just couldn’t stay away from the parks. People practicing taiji, playing badminton, chilling with kids, doing calisthenics: isn’t that just so so cool??? And naturally if I was in the parks, people would chat to me. This patience and friendliness (because my Chinese truly was awful) combined with many people’s lack of ability / confidence in English meant that I was able to improve in a way which would have been impossible in, say, Germany or Finland. Can you imagine?? Once an old guy came up to me, peered over my shoulder at my (English) book, then announced loudly, ‘I can’t read it.’ I was like - can you read English?? He shook his head, and then pointed to a small boy: ‘This is my grandson. He’s learning English.’ That kind of interaction repeated daily, as well as being in a second-tier city where I had to speak Chinese, did so much for my language skills. It also made me very motivated to improve. Also, training and exercise is just a great way to meet people: no matter your language skills, if you are dedicated people are going to respect that, and if you’re both there every day, you’re going to get chatting eventually.

Phew, that got long again (what a surprise). But thank you very much for your questions!! :D

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pyrrhiccomedy · 4 years

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DM Talk: Pacing

So I made a comment recently about putting Big Decision moments for the party at the end of your sessions. There are three major advantages to this: the players get to end the session on a high note, making a climactic choice that could change the course of the entire story; it keeps anticipation high for the next session, because the players are in a cliffhanger while they wait to find out how the world will respond to their decision; and, critically, you as the DM don’t need to plan the in-depth outcomes for every choice they could possibly make. You just set up the choice, they make it, and then you get all week to plan just for the choice they actually made.

A lot of people replied that while they planned for their players to hit the Big Decision at the end of the session, their players ended up taking an unexpected shortcut, and getting to that moment hours ahead of time. So I want to talk a little bit about pacing your sessions.

But first I want to talk about Chris Harrison, the host of The Bachelor.

I watched an interview with Harrison recently, in which he talked about his career. The interviewer asked him what his biggest challenge is, as the guy who hosts all the high-drama reality show love-stuff. Is it the hungry, horny, drunk twenty-somethings having meltdowns in front of him?

No, no, he said. That was fine. It was pacing interviews with so many people who aren’t professional entertainers.

Professional entertainers, he said, are, for the most part, very easy to interview. They, like you, know that there are key subjects they need to cover for the interview to be a success. They, like you, want the interview to end on a high note: a big reveal, a funny story, something to make it memorable. And they, like you, want to finish on time: so they’ll keep a clock running in their heads, and leave enough time at the end for their big story, or they’ll whip out an anecdote if they realize you’re ahead of your mark.

Contestants on The Bachelor (et all) are not professional entertainers. They’re just people, who often act like they and the interviewer are here to have an organic conversation. They ramble. They jump ahead. They get off-topic. They want to talk about the most exciting thing they have to say FIRST, because they’re excited about it. They have no idea how much time you have left. They’re just excited to be on camera.

Spare a moment for poor Chris Harrison, who has exactly 43 minutes, with 4 commercial breaks that need to happen at specific intervals during what feel like natural lulls in the conversation, and 76 talking points to hit for every finale episode of the Bachelor, packed in a room with these absolute goobers he somehow has to herd across the finish line. No one really notices - he said - how hard it is to get a bunch of normal people to have a conversation that sticks to an agenda, hits the relevant beats, ends on a high note, and finishes exactly on time. Because it’s his job to make sure you don’t notice. But it’s the hardest thing he has to do.

Huh, I thought. This sounds a lot like being a DM.

There are a lot of things that go into DMing well. Creativity! Flexibility! Storytelling! Improvisation! Planning and project management! Creating props, finding a soundtrack, running a zillion NPCs, voice acting, giving the impression of cool omniscience while you secretly are frantically trying to remember something you told them 4 sessions ago! And all of that stuff gets talked about a lot. I don’t think I’ve seen much discussion around the importance of getting your players to just fucking hit their marks at the right time during a given evening.

Here are some tips.

1. Watch the clock. I mark the time at least every 15-20 minutes, and do a mental inventory of how much content we still need to cover before I can bring the session to a satisfactory end.

2. Incorporate elasticity into your scenes. That means build them out with organic ways they could be made longer OR shorter, depending on how you’re tracking. Combat scenes can be made longer by (for example) introducing reinforcements, or shorter by having the enemies retreat. Dinner party espionage scenes can be stretched out by having NPCs strike up conversations with the players (or by just letting the players ramble, if they’ve really gotten going), and can be cut short with the ring of the dinner bell, or the sudden arrival of the guest of honor.

3. Build in interrupts, and use them. Jesus, my players can talk. It’s great! But guys. I’ve got ground to cover. Pretty much any situation they walk into, I have a way of kicking them out of it. The library is closing, you have to leave. Dryagin has another appointment, you have to leave. Can I have an Alertness check? Oh no, someone is following you, time to leave! Your phone rings, ring ring, it’s the plot! It says it’s 10:30 PM and your DM needs to get you through 3 more scenes before the end of the session.

4. Build in stalling techniques sideplots, and use those too. Every session, I have a long list of stuff that could happen this session, or it could happen next session, or the session after that. These all come as little calls-to-action for the players; and while they don’t necessarily need to respond to them immediately, they usually do, because players are like magpies and if you wave something shiny in front of them they’ll usually drop whatever they’re doing to follow it. I usually plan on hitting 2-3 of these in an evening, but that number can be increased, or these scenes can be cut out entirely, depending on how we’re doing for time.

5. Really develop your NPCs as interesting people. The easiest way to kill time during a session is to get a conversation going, and your NPCs are your toolkit for starting conversations. Give them strong points of view, big motivations, and engaging personalities. Your players will go to them for a plot thing, and then happily just talk. If you need to wrap things up, your NPC can easily have something else they need to do; but if you’re trying to kill some time, it’s great to have the option of just letting your players hang out with Feoda for 20 minutes.

6. Remind your players to talk to each other. You can be really transparent about this. “How did X make Misha feel? ...Is that something he’d want to discuss with anybody?” is usually all it takes. A lot of times, players don’t want to have those conversations because they’re afraid of holding things up. When you, the DM, tell them that it’s a good moment to have a heart to heart, that tells them that they’re not going to inconvenience you by engaging in some character development.

7. If you’re short on time this session, tell your players up front. Sometimes you don’t have time for the players to engage in a lot of conversation. Instead of rushing them through a scene that might be important to them, just say to your players as you sit down, “Hey guys, we have a lot of material I want to get through tonight, so critical conversations only. There will be time to discuss things in-depth next session.” One of your players raises their hand. “Um,” they say. “Can I talk to so-and-so?” “What about,” you reply. They smile hopefully. “I wanted to ask them on a date.” “I love that,” you tell them. “Next session would be better. Your character is going to have a lot going on this session, and I want to make sure you and so-and-so have all the time you need for that conversation.” “Oh,” they say. “Okay.”

8. If all else fails, have someone try to kill them. If they really, really want to get to something that you’re not ready for them to get to, just have some goons open fire on them in the street. You’ll have all week to figure out why, and it will never occur to your players that that wasn’t planned.

Good luck.

#dice matters

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let-me-write-shit · 4 years

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Somebody To You: 8

Friendly reminder to please Like and/or Reblog. It helps more than you think! :)

New chapter every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday!

WARNING: Mention of situational depression

Word Count: 2,866

A/N: Ok. Here’s the thing. This chapter was MEANT to be about something else....but I got a TAD BIT carried away and...well, here we are. So the super fluffy stuff will be in Friday’s chapter...but this chapter is still really cute :) Hope you like!

Click Here For Previous Chapter & Other Completed Stories

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CHAPTER EIGHT

The thing about Zoey’s situational depression is that it tended to put her into such a deep sleep that oftentimes caused her to oversleep. Usually, when waking up from one of these episodes she became slightly disoriented, which was the case the following morning when she felt herself being shaken awake, and the sharp whispers of her name being repeated made her cognizant of the fact that someone was desperately trying to get her attention. She shot straight up, clutching her sheets over her bare chest to see Nancy, kneeling beside her on the bed and pressing her phone to her chest.

“Wh-What’s wrong?” Zoey stammered, trying to take in her atmosphere.

The early morning sun had just risen, shining softly across the city below. Brett was still fast asleep in the bed beside her, snoring loudly. Loose strands of hair were stuck chaotically on her forehead and cheeks and drool had formed at the corner of her mouth that she quickly wiped away. Nancy looked like she had only recently been woken up, but she paid no mind to Zoey being half-naked, or the fact that there was also a half-naked man in the bed beside her.

“Harry’s on facetime,” Nancy pointed to the phone she held to her chest, “he says he needs to talk to you and it’s really important.”

The expression teetered on the side of concern and Zoey nodded, looking around frantically for something to cover herself while still trying to process what was going on. She could hear the sounds of Harry rustling and breathe through the speaker on Nancy’s phone and increasingly began to worry, wondering what was so important that he needed to Facetime her so early and it couldn’t wait.

“Ok, give me two seconds to put on a shirt and I’ll facetime him from my phone,” Zoey whispered.

Harry must have heard and his muffled voice sounded from Nancy’s phone, “Okay, hurry!” before the ping of the facetime call ended.

Nancy pulled her phone away from her chest to see that Harry was no longer on the screen and looked up at Zoey, whispering a quick apology for waking her up so suddenly, before standing up and quietly leaving the room.

Zoey slipped out from under the bed covers, instantly cold from the air conditioner, sending shivers down her back and across her stomach. She grabbed her robe that she had draped on the back of her vanity chair, pulling it over her and tying it tightly to her waist before grabbing her phone, seeing several missed facetimes, texts, and calls from Harry. She pressed the ‘return missed facetime’ button, plopping onto her chair. Her reflection popped onto her screen and her eyes widened at just how crazy she looked, wiping the strands of hair away from her face and trying to smooth out the bedhead on the top of her head.

Her phone panged as Harry quickly answered her call, smiling widely, twitching when he noticed how dazed she looked, “Did I wake you?” he asked.

Zoey shot him a bemused look, whispering back, trying not to wake Brett, “It’s 7:30 in the morning! I’ve only been asleep for four hours.”

Harry winced, “Sorry! But guess where I am.”

Zoey’s eyebrows furrowed, confused by the exchange so far. He hadn’t seemed in trouble at all. He was so desperate for her to call that he had Nancy come and wake her up, yet the conversation so far was nonchalant.

“What is going on?” she hushed again, “I thought you were hurt or something. You made it seem like it was super important.”

“Why are you whispering?” he asked, just as Brett stirred in the bed behind her. Zoey flinched, looking behind her and pausing, avoiding any sudden movement so as not to wake him up even more, which caused Harry to call out, “What are you doing?”

Wordlessly, she stood and tiptoed over to her closet door, flicking the light on and softly closing the door behind her. Her bedroom might have been small, but at least she had a semi-decent walk-in-closet. With a grunt, she sat cross-legged in the back corner, leaning up against a row of dresses that hung down to the ground, and tightening her robe that had loosened from bending down.

“Are you in your closet?” Harry chuckled.

“Yes,” Zoey confessed, rubbing her eyebrow.

She watched as Harry’s laugh slowly turned into realization and he asked, “Oh, shit. Is Brett there?”

She felt her cheeks begin to flush and again said, “Yes.” It was Harry’s turn to be embarrassed, mouth forming an ‘o’ and looking just beyond the phone. She shook it off and remembered his question, “Didn’t you say you were in Philly today?”

Harry’s eyes glinted in excitement, “Yeah! I got up early so I decided to do a bit of sightseeing. Guess where I am.”

“The museum?” she yawned, shrugging.

He turned the camera screen around to show a familiar tree-lined street with a few cars parked along the side of the road, slowly panning to a yellow cape cod house with a small front porch, and a dark wooden door. An assortment of bushes and flower blossoms lined the front and surrounded a lantern post on the right side of the walkway, while a weeping cherry blossom tree sat on the left.

Zoey gasped, sitting upright, “Is that my house?”

Harry spun the camera back around to face him, smiling, “I also saw your school you mentioned. It’s so big!”

“How the hell did you remember my address? What the hell?”

He laughed, “Think anyone’s home?”

“My sister’s car was in the driveway, so probably.”

“Should I go knock on the door and say hi?”

Zoey laughed at the thought of her sister seeing Harry Styles on her front step, “You might give her a heart attack. She’s so shy.”

“Does she even know we’re friends.”

“I mentioned it in passing, but I don’t think she really believed me.”

Harry took his keys out of the ignition and pushed open his door, stepping out. She clasped her hands over her mouth, anxiety coursing through her body as his camera was panned down towards his feet, watching him casually saunter up her parent’s walkway, something she never thought she’d see. He flipped his phone around so that Zoey could somewhat see what he was doing, though at a very unflattering angle that, if she tried, she could probably see up his nose.

Harry knocked on the door lightly, his heart beating a little faster than normal. Honestly, he was nervous. It was understandable. He was by himself, knocking on a stranger’s door, about to meet the little sister of a friend he just made. A minute had passed and no one had come to the door yet. He held the phone up to his face to see Zoey, her puffy eyes were starting to settle as she had become more awake.

“No one’s answering,” he told her.

She smiled, “Want me to text her?”

Just as he was going to respond, he heard the click of the door being unlocked and he dropped his phone to his side as a freckle-faced girl with long, dark brown hair framing her face answered. Her hazel-green eyes were wide in shock. If he looked hard enough, he could see Zoey in her. The bright, round eyes, the arch of their eyebrows, plump lips, but the bottom lip slightly larger than the top, even their nose was the same, small at the bridge and slightly turned up at the end.

“Hello,” Harry smiled, kindly, trying not to laugh at her expression.

“H-Hello?” She stuttered, flickering between him and scanning the area to see if anyone else was with him.

“My name’s Harry. You’re Katie, right?”

“Yeah? How do you-why are you here?” she shook her head, confused.

“Well, I was in the neighborhood and I thought I’d stop by. I actually have a friend that wants to say hi.”

He held his phone up for Katie who’s mouth dropped when she saw her sister and the two girls let out a small screech.

“Zoey, what the hell?” she exclaimed, sounding exactly like her sister did earlier.

“This was all his idea, I had no clue he was planning on going there,” Zoey immediately defended herself.

“What the heck is happening right now?” Katie clasped her hands on her cheeks and Harry couldn’t help but laugh as she reminded him so much of Zoey right now. “Do you want to come in?” she offered, widening the door.

“Yeah, that’d be lovely, thank you,” Harry grinned.

He followed her inside and waited by the landing as she closed the door. He noticed the hallway lined with pictures of the two girls growing up and his lip twitched upwards, his heart softening as he recognized his new friend from the childlike eyes in the frames. For some reason he could never quite picture Zoey as a little kid, running around and playing in sandboxes, but here was the proof right in front of him.

Katie led Harry towards their living room where the television was on and The Office was running, a half-eaten bowl of cereal was sitting on the coffee table, and a laptop was opened, but the screen was black, probably having gone to sleep mode. The two took a seat on the couch and Harry held his phone up so they could continue talking to Zoey.

“I don’t even know what to say right now,” Katie blushed, grinning, “How do two even know each other.”

“Through her roommates,” Harry informed her.

“I tried getting rid of him, but he just won’t leave me alone,” Zoey joked.

“I’m like an annoying fly. You can’t get rid of me,” Harry smirked, making the girls laugh.

“You haven’t been responding to my texts!” Katie uttered towards her sister.

Zoey frowned, “I know, I’m sorry.”

Harry turned to Katie, smiling, “It’s okay, she’s been ignoring me, too.”

The three of them continued talking and Harry had Katie tell him embarrassing stories of the two of them growing up. She was nice and could see why Zoey found it difficult to be away from her sister. Seeing them interact was special. He knew just how important family was to her because he felt the same. Their bond reminded him of his own bond with his older sister. They could pick on each other, then praise each other in the same sentence.

“So, Katie, do you have any plans tonight?” Harry asked.

“I have work in an hour, but I get off at 6. Why?”

“Well, Zoey told me that you were a fan. So, I have two spare tickets to my show tonight for you and a friend, if you’d like.”

“Are you serious?” Katie squealed, clasping her hands over her mouth.

Zoey awed, “That’s so nice!”

“Thank you,” Katie grinned.

There was an indistinct knocking through the phone and both Katie and Harry watched to see Zoey’s attention shoot up and look past the screen. A deep, Australian voice laughed, “What are you doing in here.”

Zoey sheepishly smiled, pulling her phone down so that just her chin and neck were visible and she hushed, “Sorry, just on the phone with my sister. I’ll be right there.”

He knew it shouldn’t have bothered him, but why couldn’t she also say that she was on the phone with him, too? Her whole situation with Brett didn’t sit well with him. It wasn’t because he didn’t like Brett, because he was a nice person and he didn’t have anything against him. It’s just that Zoey was always so defensive when Brett was brought up into conversation. If you like him, that’s fine. But you don’t have to hide it, especially from your friend. And if you didn’t like him, why keep sleeping with him? It just made no sense to Harry. But he wasn’t going to tell her that. She could do what she wanted. And he had no room to talk. After all, he still had to figure out what he wanted to do about Rory.

Things hadn’t improved with Aurora since their last serious conversation. They still texted semi-frequently and would occasionally flirt, but there was definitely a lack of interest on her side. She did warn him of this, though. How she wanted to give him the distance to figure out what he wanted. And he was trying, honestly, but he just had so much on his plate that the stress of figuring out what he wanted the future of his relationship with Rory to look like was the last thing he wanted to do at the moment. Still, he worried that he would take too long to decide and ruin his chances altogether.

Not wanting Zoey to feel uncomfortable, Harry said, “Well, listen, Katie and I are going to talk about the plan for tonight and I’ll call you later. You better answer.”

“No promises,” Zoey grinned, waving them goodbye and hanging up.

Harry slipped his phone into his back pocket and turned to look at Katie, who had a clear expression of confusion and concern on her face. Her gaze was towards the floor for a few seconds, and when she looked up, Harry could almost hear the words that came out of her mouth before she spoke.

“Who was that?”

“Zoey didn’t tell you about Brett?” He asked. When Katie shook her head no, Harry bit his bottom lip in thought. Obviously she didn’t tell her about Brett for a reason, and he didn’t want to be the one to say anything in case there was a reason for hiding it. So very carefully he said, “He’s just a coworker. He hangs out with Zoey and her roommates a lot.” Katie nodded, looking down again. He couldn’t tell if she believed him or not, so he changed the subject, “So, she’s been avoiding you, too, huh?”

Katie looked up, almost frowning, and nodded, “Yeah, but I get it. She’s been having a hard time lately.”

Harry nodded, “Yeah, she told me about Jess. I figured she’s just missing her or something.”

“Well, yeah. But it’s Jess’s birthday on Tuesday. It’ll have been a year since she’s died.”

Harry’s eyes widened and his mouth fell, “That’s on Tuesday?” Katie nodded her head and he sighed, “I know that Jess died in June, but I didn’t know the date. That makes so much sense. Usually, she tells me everything but now she’s barely answering my texts. I feel bad that I didn’t realize.”

Katie blew a puff of air before cracking a smile, “Sorry, this is just so weird. You’re in my house and talking about how you and my sister tell each other everything? I feel like I’m hallucinating.”

The two of them talked for another hour or so, mostly casual chats and polite conversation starters, him asking her what she does for work and what her hobbies were before Harry had to leave. He was sure to give Katie his number so that she could let him know when she got to the venue and planned to see her and her friend when he got off stage, he wanted to make sure he took care of Zoey’s little sister, or else he was sure that Zoey would beat him to a pulp.

The drive back to his hotel was mostly silent. He was so deep in his thoughts that he forgot to turn the stereo on. Why hadn’t Zoey just said something to him? She knows he would have been there for her. He felt stupid for not seeing it sooner. He should have. She wasn’t just avoiding him. Both Rory and Nancy have reached out to him about how distant she’s been with them, too. He figured it had something to do with Jess, but obviously he couldn’t tell them that. They still didn’t know about Jess. Still, they asked him if he knew what was bothering her or if he’d reached out to her. He should have been more assertive about it. Right? Or did she want space?

His hands began to clam up, gripping the steering wheel tighter. He didn’t know what to do. The feeling of helplessness was infuriating. Zoey’s always been very forthcoming about her emotions, but this was such a fragile topic. He remembered being in this situation and having the need to be around people, but not wanting to talk. Maybe that’s why Brett was there.

He thought harder. It was three days until Tuesday. And to make matters worse, he knew that she didn’t work on Tuesdays. A whole day of nothing to distract her. A whole day of nothing but being trapped in her own mind. Unless she had someone to talk to. He was off from Tuesday to Thursday. He definitely couldn’t fly there, he’s flown out way too much already and his management and tour team was pissed enough as it was. Plus, he was meant to go to the studio on those days to start writing for his new album. But he could call. Or facetime. Or ...something?

KEEP READING

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singularityhacker · 3 years

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7 Power Laws of the Technological Singularity

When people talk about the technological singularity they usually do so exclusively in the context of Moore’s Law. But there are several Moore’s Law-like laws at work in the world and each of them is equally baffling. I’m referring to this list of trends as “power laws” because of the nature of their incredible rate of growth and because they independently work as pistons driving the engine of the singularity. A few things to note about these power laws. Firstly they are just observations. There are no, known, deeper physical principles in the universe that would lead us to believe that they must hold true. Secondly, we’ve observed these trends long enough to warren their recognition as power laws and there is no evidence or signs of their stagnating. We’ll start with the most famous and well-known power law and work our way through the others.

1. Moore’s Law

Moore’s Law states that transistors on a chip double about every two years and that the cost of that doubling halves. This is a double-edged sword. It means that the next model computer will be way faster than the previous but it also means that the value of your existing computer is dropping rapidly. The end of Moore’s Law has been proclaimed for a long time but there seems to be no end to its progression.

As we reach the physical limits of transistor sizes, entirely new hardware architectures are developed that sustain the progression. Things like 3D chips, specialized chips, and non-silicon based chips like photonics, spintronics, and neuromorphic chips are being developed and will ensure that this law continues.

“Regular boosts to computing performance that used to come from Moore’s Law will continue, and will instead stem from changes to how chips are designed.” — Mike Muller, CTO at ARM

What this does not mean is that a user’s experience of computer speed will increase. We tend to be more sloppy with application development when it’s cheap to make up for it with hardware horsepower. There is a standing joke that the same amount of computing resources that were used to send astronauts to the moon in the ’60s is now accidentally used by a sluggish browser tab.

2. Kryder’s Law

The second law driving our propulsion into the technological singularity is Kryder’s Law. It states, loosely, that digital storage doubles every year. It specifically has to do with magnetic storage but the principle is applicable to all digital storage as you will see. While you may not see this law exactly played out in the price of external drives in your local Best Buy, you can see it if you consider the price of cloud storage services.

Let’s look at the current top cloud storage providers. Apple offers two terabytes of cloud storage for about $10 a month. Google offers the same space for the same price as well as 10 terabytes for about $100 a month. After that, users can get 20 terabytes for $200 a month, 30 terabytes for $300 a month, and so on. Dropbox offers yet a similar package but with extras like full-text search for $20 a month. Lastly and most competitive is Amazon offering an incredible $0.004 per gigabyte per month through its Glacier storage service. When you take these cloud providers into account and consider that they will only grow via economies of scale, you see that Kryder’s law is in full effect.

Note that this also doesn’t even take into consideration innovations like Filecoin that actually distribute Kryder’s Law by allowing anyone with storage capacity to rent that space out. You could look at it like Uber or Airbnb for digital storage. This highlights the idea that this digital power law, like the others, should not be strictly tied to a hardware implementation. Similar to how Moore’s Law continues but not strictly through cramming more transistors on a chip but through new engineering architectures. The same principle applies.

3. Nielsen’s Law

Thirdly, we have Nielsen’s Law. If the previous laws could be summarized as computation and storage, this one is summarized as throughput. It states that bandwidth grows by 50% a year. More precisely, it states that the bandwidth of high-end users grows by 50% a year. That’s just 10% less annual growth than Moore’s Law.

In practice, we don’t see this linear growth and there are three reasons for it. One, Telecom companies are conservative. It cost billions of dollars to update their sprawling hardware. Two. The immediate impact of the end-user is not a guaranteed faster experience if they do upgrade their infrastructure. You can have the fastest hardware in the world on your street but that doesn’t automatically make the rest of the countries hardware faster. That slow loading web page may only be imperceptible faster after your area’s hardware is upgraded. Lastly, as new people get online, it’s more likely they are using older slower devices so the average expected speed is kept pressed down by these newcomers.

Since 1G was introduced in the 1980s, new wireless technology has been released every ten years. The advent of 1G introduced mobile telephony. Than 2G in the ’90s brought about global roaming and SMS. The 200’s saw 3G and smartphones with data. 2010 introduced 4G and mobile broadband. The year 2020 will be the year of 5G and the realization of the fully ubiquitous cloud. To put this in perspective, let’s say you wanted to download the newest episode of your favorite television show. At 800MB it would have taken 8 hours hrs to download in 1998, 5 hrs in 2001, 45 minutes in 2009, and 1 second with the new wireless protocol.

The impact and roll out of 5G will be enormous. With current networks, it takes about 100 milliseconds for information to travel across a network. With 5G, that latency will be reduced to 1 millisecond. We are talking about downloading full-length 5k movies in less than a second, surgeons controlling surgical robots in real-time from across the country, smart cities, and smart car-to-car communications.

4. Koomey’s Law

Koomey’s law has to do with the efficient use of energy and states that the number of computations per joule of energy dissipated has been doubling approximately every 1.57 years. This trend has been stable since the 1950s and has been faster than Moore’s law. Jonathan Koomey reframed the trend as follows: “at a fixed computing load, the amount of battery you need will fall by a factor of two every year and a half”. You can see the effect of this law in today’s newest generation CPU’s (Apple’s M1 chip) that are pumping out incredible amounts of processing power at significantly reduced levels of energy consumption.

5. Metcalfe’s Law

This power law with its closely associated cousin, the network effect, asserts that the value of a network is proportional to how many users are a part of it and that the addition of a new member adds value to all the existing members. A good example of this power law at work are social media sites like Facebook and YouTube. These sites had no revenue model in the beginning and were very expensive to run but grew to have so many users that the value grew directly from the value of the size of the network itself. Not too many years ago, software products had to packaged on physical media and shipped through the mail to users. Now, the same products can be built and deployed to one of any number of app stores and have a global audience with little to no overhead.

6. Hendy’s Law

Next, consider Hendy’s Law. Hendy’s Law states that the number of pixels per dollar in a digital camera doubles every two years. We can generalize this trend to encompass the idea that our ability to capture images and video of the world is exponentially improving year over year. This improvement opens the door to such high-fidelity VR and lifelogging that our human senses begin to find synthetic media and real-life indistinguishable. This already exists in the form of gigapixel photography where images are used instead of real specimens in biological study where we can’t tell the difference even under a microscope. Imagine being able to photograph a group of people and then zoom in so close later that you can identify properties of their cellular biology.

7. Bell’s Law

Last on our list is Bell’s Law. It says a new class of smaller, cheaper computers comes along about every decade. With each new class, the volume shrinks by two orders of magnitude, and the number of systems per person increases. The law has held from 1960s’ mainframes through the ‘80s’ personal computers, the ‘90s’ notebooks, and the new millennium’s smart phones. This is likely manifesting in the realm of wearable right now with the wild success of smart watched and wireless intelligent earbuds.

To wrap this up and summarize, while there may be temporary or geographically isolated stalls in the progression of these laws, they are still holding steady. You might compare them to walking up a set of stairs. At various points in your travel up the stairs, you rise up very high and then drop low. You do not move at a constant linearly increasing height. You go up and down but the trend is a clear move upwards. Through that up and down, you are converging on a net increase. The same is true of these digital laws. The overarching result is that software is eating the world and eating itself, recursively accelerating the process even further. One doesn’t need to theorize about potential advances in machine intelligence to see that we are accelerating into an unimaginable future. A clear technological singularity.

If none of the above convinces I will leave you with this chart illustrating the grown of the global economy. Assuming the continuation of these power laws, where are we 50–100 years from now?

#technological singularity #technology

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thewayiremember · 4 years

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youtube

EPISODE 3

July 7, 09:50 AM

All packed up. I checked twice if I hadn’t forgotten anything but I'm sure by the time I get home I’ll notice that I hadn’t, of course, packed everything. Happens every time. I just hope it’s something I won’t miss. To not my surprise at all, my blood test results are fine, so my mom can pick me up a bit earlier than we planned. Luckily for her, because that way she won’t be late for work.

As much as I’m eager to leave this place and hopefully not be back any time soon, I have to admit I’ll be very curious about Nathaniel’s recovery. I hope he wakes up soon and goes to Australia just like he wanted. We were friends while one of us was unconscious, would we still be friends if we got to know each other? Would Bobbie and Nicole like him?

I already have two friends and I think that’s plenty. Sometimes, when the three of us are not together and I discuss something with one of them, I need to have the same kind of conversation with the other one the next day. It’s a waste of time. But who am I trying to fool? Friendship is not really what I have in mind, is it?

And yet I felt like leaving him something as a gift would be a nice gesture. I thought for a while what it could be, but since I didn’t have that many things to give away in the first place, I grabbed my notebook and a pencil and put it on his bedside table. I asked my mom to buy it for me when I decided to start writing this journal, but I quickly figured that a laptop and a phone are a lot more convenient. I left him a note saying it’s a gift for keeping me company and that dr. Gramm says that visualizing your thoughts helps with the way your brain works. I didn’t write down my name. Take care, buddy.

11:15 AM

“There’s leftover spaghetti in the fridge if you’re hungry,” said my mom, before she left for work. I microwaved it immediately after she closed the door. It’s good. Hospital food wasn’t that bad, but I missed something with fat.

I’m very proud of myself that before I wound up in hospital I had this unexpected urge to clean up this room. I can’t imagine coming back now to its usual form, which is just like everybody else’s room, but upside down. It’s a little dusty, but hey, dust never bothered me anyway. I also already wasted water on taking a bath, making sure I’m a big part of climate change. And people say I’m irresponsible. I’m responsible for global warming! Checkmate.

Okay, I need a plan. Bobbie and Nicole are coming in less than an hour and I still haven’t told them about anything and I don’t know how to do that without making a big deal out of it. My face looks roughed up but I swear it’s not as bad as it seems. On a logical level, of course, I know it’s a big deal for them. They’re my friends, obviously, they care. And yet every time they do care and they do worry it makes me furious. And one thing I know is that I can’t control my emotions and I tend to be very hard to stand in those moments.

Bobbie and I have known each other since 1st grade and he is my best friend. He’s the most beautiful and kind-hearted soul on this planet. How on earth does he put up with me? I have no idea. I don’t think he has one corrupted molecule in his body, which I’m pretty impressed by after all that time he spends with me. He’s very understanding and I know I don’t have to worry about him pressuring me into something I don’t want to do. Like remembering, for example.

Nicole, on the other hand, I can already hear saying “If you don’t find out what happened, I will.”. I have to ask her if she realizes how dramatic she really is sometimes. But it is my body and my memory, Nicole. You don’t have to always be adventurous Mrs. Smith who must solve the case shooting the UMP-45 all the time. She hasn’t said it yet and I’m already mad.

THE PLAN:

Open the door like nothing’s happened. Like my face isn’t purple at all. “Hi, guys! Long time no see! What have you been up to? I need to know everything! *then I point at my face and say* What, this? That’s nothing, not even worried about it. The doctors said “Ian, you have nothing to be stressed out about, you are perfectly fine. And you tell your friends when you’re finally reunited that everything’s good, thus they shall not worry. And doctors know better so you can’t argue.”

Stop turning everything into not-funny jokes, sit down with them, and acknowledge the fact that they simply want to know what happened. You’re adults, you can handle talking about emotions, without being emotional.

Now go find some snacks before your guests arrive, like a good host you are.

1:10 PM

This journal is slowly becoming like some influencers’ Twitter account, where they can’t go on with their lives without updating what’s going on every 5 minutes. Well, this is the closest I will ever get to feeling like a celebrity, so let me shine.

Dear Diary, I just wanted to update you, that nothing went according to my very simple plan. I know! How could anybody mess it up? Well, I’ll tell you all about it when I’m done hiding in the bathroom and contain my very human emotions. Talk to You later! Oh, and I promise I will never call you a Diary again.

8:30 PM

They already knew what happened because they came to visit earlier that day. Apparently, they wanted to surprise me in the morning but of course, I wasn’t home and my mom was the one who opened the door. She had no way of knowing I hadn't told them, but she had the opportunity to confess to me. In the car for example. I’m not upset with her, but I am upset with myself for acting like a child and not just telling them. Like every normal person would do. The goal was to not make a big deal out of it, and I made it the complete opposite.

“You say it’s nothing serious, yet you lost a part of your memory. Sounds like a pretty serious injury to me,” said Nicole, and I could tell she was being suspicious of my truthfulness. And she was correct since I’m still not sure I want them to know about the part when I travel in time. Again, I want to be a dentist, not an actor. I’m not that good at lying.

“Look, Nicole, please don’t try and make me all freak out. Can we just talk about your trip? How was camping?” I tried to change the subject.

“But don’t you want to know who did this to you?” she wouldn’t give up.

“No, to be honest, I don’t. I’m glad I don’t remember. Do you know why? Cowardice. I’m scared, Nicole. I’m not you, I don’t usually face fear, you know that. It’s easier to move on that way, I can’t cope with nightmares that I’m pretty sure would occur the second I remember.”

And that’s true, I am a coward. And although I know that everybody deals with their problems they’re own way and not everybody has to be brave or be the hero in the story and that there’s nothing shameful about it, sometimes I do wish I were a little more like Nick. She gets things done. She doesn’t run. I mean, she does, she gets her scholarship from running, but she doesn’t run away from her problems. She solves them. Just like that.

I’m spending the night at Bobbie’s. Like most of the summer nights, probably. And if I’m not at Bobbie’s, Bobby’s at mine. Some things never change. It’s not as easy for Nicole, because she doesn’t live just across the street as we do from each other, so she went home. I’m finishing the last French toast we made earlier as I’m waiting for Bobbie to get out of the shower, so I could go. What’s taking him so long?

11:50 PM

I woke up looking at Bobbie’s concerned face. He came back to the room and found me already asleep, but it was still early for him so he just lied down and started reading. He noticed I was acting weird but didn’t interfere at first. Not until I woke up screaming.

“Are you ok? Who’s Nora?” he asked.

“I… don’t know,” I lied to my friend yet again.

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thuskindlyshescatters · 4 years

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Team RWBY and the Very Long Day

Or maybe... not as long as you’d expect?

When the team reaches Atlas Academy and are brought on a tour, they’re dead tired. Now, as someone who’s gone on a number of college tours myself, I totally can relate. And plus, the team has had a really long day -- Volume 6 Chapter 10 through Volume 7 Chapter 2 have all been the same day.

However, it feels a lot longer for us than it should, since we saw it over a nine-month period, and they only experienced it in a day. But how long was that day specifically?

There’s a couple factors we need to consider: time zones, hour of sunset, flight hours, and actual in-show events. By evaluating this, we will determine: How long of a day were the past 6 chapters of RWBY? Is their exhaustion justified by canon events?

Spoilers, math, and lots of pointless reading below.

I) Time Zone

According to this map (the fifth image) from the second “World of Remnant” short, we get a pretty good approximation of the location of Atlas. Argus is on the U-shaped peninsula a third of the way from Mistral to Atlas. Ideally, time zones would work in 24 hour-wide increments, so assuming there is NOT a huge Pacific-like ocean around Remnant’s back half, there is approximately a two-hour time difference between Argus and Atlas. This means the sun sets on Argus earlier than Atlas -- however, Atlas is further North, so sunset may be earlier for them relative to someone at a lower latitude in their timezone. Additionally, it also means the team may experience around two hours of jet lag upon arrival.

II) Sunset

When the gang arrives in Atlas, it is night time. In Volume 6 Chapter 7, they arrive at Argus in mid-afternoon. Because the next episode’s scenes with Cordovin at the base and Maria in the garden do not have the same warm lighting, we can infer that those took place the next day, sometime during the middle of the day. They receive news that Oscar is missing and begin their search -- however, unless they were searching for him like in Volume 1 Chapter 16 (if you recall, that was 12 hours), it’s likely they were out of the house for no more than 4 hours. From the end of Volume 6 Chapter 8 to the end of Volume 6 Chapter 9 might have been from, call it, 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM -- meaning sunset was sometime within those hours. It is wintertime in the Northern hemisphere of Remnant (quick summary, it’s been about a year since the end of Volume 3 Chapter 12), so assuming they don’t have daylight savings time, this is a pretty reasonable estimate for when the sun would set in a city whose latitude is comparable to that of Paris. If we take a quick look back at Atlas, it is MUCH farther North than Argus, and is pretty much in the Arctic. If we compare map distances, Atlas might as well be in Iceland, as Paris and Reykjavik are 1,396 air miles away from each other. In December in Iceland, the sun sets at around 3:00 to 4:00 PM. Therefore, it is perfectly reasonable that people would still be up and about when it appears to be night time in Atlas.

III) Flight Hours

What this means is that the team, in order to leave Argus during daytime (earlier than 5:30 PM) and to arrive in Atlas during nighttime (later than 4:00 PM) when there is a two-hour time difference between them, it works out to assume that the minimum time a flight on an Atlesian dropship would take from Argus to Atlas would be 4 hours. Even more generous would be to allow them 5 hours, considering the pace of the vehicle.

IV) Events

I’d like to start with the evidence we see in Atlas and work backwards to make a fair assumption about when they arrive in Atlas. The amount of people on the streets and the fact that Dr. Polendina’s pharmacy is open makes me want to believe it’s before 6:00 PM. The Faunus miners we see on the passing vehicle makes me wonder if this is accurate, however, because I would assume the miners would work more unreasonable hours than that. I will chalk this up to be a case of world details being more important to show punctually than consistently. Anyways, if we say it’s 5:30 PM in Atlas when they arrive, then it’s likely 3:30 PM in Argus when they depart (accounting for a 4 hour flight and 2 hour time zone difference.)

Now, for the real numbers:

Ruby’s role in the heist takes place more or less in real time, while Blake and Yang’s excursion with Adam is punctuated by breaks of which we cannot know the duration. Therefore, knowing that Blake and Yang rejoin the group in Volume 6 Chapter 13, I will only recount the “cliff-side” events, as it were, to calculate the duration of the heist itself.

Volume 6 Chapter 10

We have no idea when the heist begins. Cordovin, being a military officer, would probably want Weiss to arrive at a sharp hour, so let’s call that hour “X:00″ o’clock. Based off of our previous calculations, the end of the heist must occur at around 3:30, so depending on their length, this hour could be 3:00 PM. (Spoiler: it totally will be.)

The episode begins on the Rooster Teeth website at 2:08 minutes, and from there it pretty much goes in real time until 4:50, which is the moment when Weiss loses scroll signal with Ruby. Ruby loses signal with Weiss at 6:02, so we can deduce that those next 1:12 minutes of Ruby’s timeline are occurring simultaneously with what we see of Weiss. From the beginning of the heist to when Ruby loses signal is 2:42 minutes in real time (how efficient of Weiss!). From 6:02 to 11:02 is the next realtime sequence, at which point we cut to Blake and Adam, but again, we’ll be ignoring them for now. Now, the heist has been in progress for 7:42 minutes; it is X:07.

Volume 6 Chapter 11

The episode officially begins at 2:08 again. The first scene of them talking lasts until 4:01, when it cuts away from them planning to attack. Let’s be generous and give them 30 unspoken seconds where some offscreen planning occurs, making that first sequence about 2:37 minutes. Then, the sequence continues from 4:01 to 9:44 (no, I’m not counting slow motion because that’s dumb). Then, we cut away again. This episode’s total real-time stacks up to 8:20 minutes. Therefore, the heist has now been occurring for 16:02 minutes, so it’s about X:16 o’clock.

Volume 6 Chapter 12

This episode actually starts at 1:57 -- wow, wild. It runs continuously to 7:25 (no, cutting back and forth between dialogue doesn’t fucking count), making this section 5:28 minutes. We cut away to Bees, but we return to Cordovin at 11:42, pretty much exactly where it left off, and that carries on to the end of the episode at 12:54. The total of the episode comes out to be 6:40 minutes, since the Bees got a lot of murder screentime. We are also now 22:42 minutes into the heist, and it is X:22 o’clock.

Volume 6 Chapter 13

Cinder and Neo take up the first few minutes of screentime, so the episode starts for our main heroes at 3:33. It kind of carries over from the previous episode, but there’s enough fighters in the air that I’ll give them 90 seconds of cushion time to compensate for realism. I will also add 30 seconds between when Weiss says they destroyed the mech to when they’re all in the airship taking flight at 4:21. Since they like skipping time so much for dramatic effect, I’ll add ANOTHER 30 seconds between when Ruby realizes she has to face it alone and they hatch their second plan at 8:39. I’m going to stop the clock at 9:55 because Ruby yells for Jinn and stops time in-universe until her Silver Eyes moment at 11:16, which, while awesome, is the first event that occurs once time speeds back up to normal. So that whole first section, including padding, was 8:52 minutes. Then, from Silver Eyes to the end of this time section when they time skip to their arrival at 13:14 is 1:58. Finally, the episode cuts to credits at 16:51, the last line being “welcome home,” making the total for the episode 14:27.

I’d like to note that the episode was 10:50 minutes before they timeskipped to their arrival, so it was 33:32 minutes into the heist and X:33 when they left for Atlas. We said earlier it would be best if they left at around 3:30 PM, and what do you know: the number works out! We can therefore pretty confidently say the heist began at 3:00 PM, which will be important later.

Volume 7 Chapter 1

That’s right folks, we’re not done! Now in Atlas, it is 5:33 PM, just like we predicted it would be. The line “welcome home” is said at 0:38, where I’ll be starting the clock for this episode, but I’ll add the 3:37 of dialogue that occurred the previous episode. They cut away to some pretty Atlas shots while they descend into the city, so I’ll provide 60 seconds of offscreen time. From there, we stay in real time until they put the ship down, which I’ll again provide another 60 seconds for. After their encounter with the MAGA (Make Atlas Great Again, obvs) hecklers, let’s say they walk for another 60 seconds before reaching Piedro’s pharmacy. Continuing to the end of the episode, it’s pretty continuous, except for the extra 90 seconds I’ll provide for them being loaded into the airship. The realtime total for this episode is 18:24 minutes, so it’s been 4 hours and 51:56 minutes since they began the heist, and it’s now 5:51 PM in Atlas.

Volume 7 Chapter 2

The episode starts at 1:46. Let’s be generous and say they’ve been in the air for 2 minutes so far. The episode plays out pretty much in real time until 15:18 where we enter Penny’s montage, so I’ll add about 3 more minutes of travel time to and from Ironwood’s office within Atlas Academy and account the Ironqrow moment for the time it took offscreen for the rest of the group to start Penny’s tour. Then, because I’ve been on many a college tour myself, I expect they’ll be walking for about 10 minutes before they start to feel like they need to collapse. So, in total, this episode takes 29:02 minutes of real time, bringing the amount of time since the start of the heist to 5 hours and 20:58 minutes, making it now approximately 6:21 PM.

In that time, various members of the team have singlehandedly overwhelmed two Argus soldiers, taken control of an airship, fought brutally with their archnemesis, battled a giant mech, flown into the barrel of a cannon, murdered a man, entered a maelstrom of Grimm, obliterated a behemoth of a Final Boss, taken a 4 hour flight, fought an onslaught of new Grimm, reunited with former besties, sisters, and colleagues alike, been arrested, and worst of all gone on a college campus tour.

V) Conclusions

I don’t think the team is suffering from that much jetlag, but I’d definitely be exhausted with that much happening even if it was only 8:21 PM in “my time.” (International travel takes a lot out of you, man.) Additionally, they probably got up earlier in the day (maybe around 9:00 AM, Argus time, if it was a lazy morning), so at this point, they’ve been awake for 11 hours, assuming no one took a nap on the airship.

However, I was surprised to find that even though all 6 of these episodes happened in one day, the actual heist part took only 33 minutes, and their first day in Atlas was about 47 minutes, maybe actually longer. That means that a LOT of the bullshit I listed above was packed into 33 minutes, and the remaining time stretched out over a leisurely hour or so. This post also was made on 11/09, so it might even happen that the next episode CONTINUES this exhausting day, in which case, expect an update.

TLDR: In conclusion, the team deserves to be tired AF because of all the crazy stuff that’s happened to them today. However, they were not awake for an exceptionally long time, nor did the events in Argus actually take up much of their day, much to my surprise.

What was the point of this again?

#rwby #rwby7 #rwby spoilers #this was fun :D #why did I do it tho :DDDD #I could have been posting about something people actually cared about :DDDDDDD #8DDDDDDDDD

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lunawings · 5 years

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King of Prism Rose Party 2019 Orchestra Concert (10/13/2019)

So as usual I like to talk about the entire experience of the event to keep a record/help guide people who want to do stuff like this in the future, so if you only want to read about the parts of the show with the voice actors please skip to the end.

This was intended to be a 2-day event with a concert by the stage actors on the 12th and an orchestra concert on the 13th, but typhoon Hagibis cancelled the live show for the 12th (although it was streamed online) and delayed the 13th.

I woke up on the morning of the 13th waaaay too early, partially from excitement and partially from adrenaline from the typhoon probably....

Also it was a beautiful frikkin day. I don’t know the science of it, but the day after any typhoon is always sunny and just gorgeous.

If it weren’t for the elderly folk cleaning up the stray leaves and branches from the street you’d have never known what happened the previous night.

The original plan for the merch was that they would let us line up by 7, hand out tickets by 8, and start selling by 10 so I was planning to get there by at least 6 am originally. But, after the typhoon they announced merch sales would be from 12. Still, I ended up getting there at 8 since it was just so nice outside, I felt like I could use a walk, and because there was no other info I couldn’t help worrying about how things would really go down. The trains weren’t running that morning (or at least JR wasn’t) because they had to ensure the safety of the tracks or whatnot, so the only other people around were also fans that had decided to stay close to the venue. We loitered around awkwardly, every so often asking the staff what was going on only to be told that sales would start from 12 and still no other info.

But it was dangerous to stray too far away because we all knew there would be that “OK go” moment where we could all get in line, and where you decided to randomly loiter around would determine your position in line. That “OK go” moment finally came at around 11:15, and I ended up in the middle of an incredibly short line of only about 40 people or so. Is this really all there is? We wondered until about 11:30 when the line suddenly quadrupled and we realized ah, I guess the first train got in ahah.

Waiting in the line was really funny because this event took place during the Rugby World Cup, so there were a lot of bewildered middle-aged white people in rugby shirts just walking by and getting caught up in clouds of King of Prism fangirls. They would always stop and look at us like ?? then casually try and keep walking but then stop again for longer and look at us like what. Haha. Baby boomers were peeking in the windows to see what the heck all these Japanese girls (and one white girl) were lining up for and walking away more confused.

We thought they would just open sales at 12 like they said and go in order, but actually they handed out tickets anyway so the people who came by train had no disadvantage. (Still, even though it was random I got number 42 which was incredible.) The tickets ended up being kind of a joke though! Usually they call in large groups and you check online to see when your number would be coming up. But instead the guy was like.

“Okay, ready? Number 1... 2.... 3...!” Hahaha like WHAT! There was an awkward moment where someone had to admit to being number 1 in front of everyone or we couldn’t go in. (People looking around like OK WHAT BITCH PULLED NUMBER 1...) So I got into merch in roughly the amount of time it takes to slowly count to 42. They had so many registers and so much merch (and less people than usual) so everyone got in and out in like 30 minutes and bought everything they wanted. Incredible.

I think the only thing that sold out early-ish was the Torachi and Dorachi plushies and they weren’t even event exclusive.

When the doors opened for the event, people who had the “special” two-day tickets were given the special bonuses that came with them for both days of the event.

I put “special” in quotations because literally everyone there seemed to have the two-day tickets because there were zero people in the other line ahah. But I also guess maybe people with the two-day tickets were more likely to come on Friday like I did and avoided trouble with the trains? I dunno. Anyway.

The bonus for the orchestra concert was a coaster and some rose tea. The bonus for the stage show was a file with some cards in side (I guess they are supposed to be Edel Rose IDs?) one which reveals the stage actors when you turn it a certain way.

Holding the bonus in my hands which I would have received at the live stage show was the moment it finally hit me what could have been if only the show hadn’t been cancelled... ahhh..... hdldksjf.................

So, the concert.

It started up with just the orchestra, playing the background music from the movies/anime. Something I never really thought about before was about how the music from the first two movies is kind of non-specific. Like, although I definitely recognized all of it, I had trouble remembering exactly which scene(s) it was from. Meanwhile, although I am less familiar with the background music from SSS since the CD only just came out, there are a lot of songs which are specifically associated with certain characters and certain scenes. Like the music which plays during Leo’s flashback to his childhood, or the music that plays when Minato talks to his parents and decides to go back to Tokyo.

I used to go to orchestra/wind ensemble concerts all the time as a music student, but somewhere along the way I stopped. (WHY DID I STOP) Still, I haven’t been to many professional orchestra concerts, so I’m not used to things sounding so.... how should I say.... perfect ahah. There were a few times I had to stop and remind myself that this was actually live and not a recording.

There were a few times when I didn’t feel that need though. Like during the performance of the music which plays during the Schwarz Rose bath scene in SSS episode 1. That violin.... oh..... my...... lord...........................

As a flutist I have always been eternally confused at how string instruments work. Well I mean, I have held a guitar in my hands and been taught how to make chords so like I know... but still I just don’t know how it is possible to do... THAT......

The Schwarz Rose music in general really shook me. I noticed for the first time how few instruments they use compared with the background music for Edel Rose, and yet that makes the mood so much heavier. In addition to the Schwarz Rose stuff, the music they played which really gave me that full body chills experience included the piece from the scene where Hiro becomes Prism King, and all the Rinne/Shine stuff... that was..... oh wow...... I actually gave myself goosebumps again thinking about it.......... (I can kinda understand why they didn’t do a live viewing for this. It probably wouldn’t have been the same.)

So we were allowed to cheer it, but quietly with only one light in each hand. As you can imagine, the atmosphere was quite different with this being an orchestra concert and all. I tried to change colors as little as possible since the clicking just seemed SO LOUD. So I was just gonna keep red the whole time, but then I remembered the DVD so I tried to match everyone to make it look pretty for that.

But I realized after they will probably show the evening performance on the DVD anyhow because the theater was probably fuller then. Since the trains were down for most of the morning, there were a good amount of empty seats. It was about 85% full when it was supposed to be sold out originally. (But they did offer refunds for people who couldn’t make it.)

So about the voice actors.

Junta Terashima (Shin), Shouta Aoi (Louis), Tasuku Hatanaka (Taiga), Taku Yashiro (Kakeru), Masashi Igarashi (Minato), and Takuma Nagatsuka (Leo) were scheduled to attend. Originally it was just gonna be Shouta and Junta and the others were kinda tacked on later, so they had less to do (they only got to sing once) but of course it was wonderful to have them.

They first came out on stage while the orchestra was playing but of course we couldn’t cheer or react to them because the orchestra was playing so it was this like silent screaming until we could finally cheer for them hahah.

They were all wearing suits themed to their character colors except for Shouta Aoi who was wearing this elaborate suit/wedding dress combo with a huge train that kept getting stepped on and caught onto things several times during the show hahah ha....

(+one more special guest I’ll talk about later)

When they introduced themselves and we got to Masashi Igarashi, he made such a huge, overblown reaction to the crowd and was like FINALLY! I CAN HEAR YOU!

(This is because he’s the only one of the voice actors to be in the stage show cast as well, so yesterday he’d performed to an empty concert hall.)

I laughed..... but then felt this intense pang of inconsolable sadness. I hoped the stage actors were all backstage and would come out at the end just as a surprise so we could cheer for them. I WANTED TO CHEER FOR THEM THEY DESERVED IT SO MUCH. WHY.

But they never did.....

Huaaahhh........................

Well.

When it was Taku Yashiro’s turn he called out “WANBANKOOOO” to both the girls and guys like Kakeru would do. When it was time for the guys to repeat it I was surprised the response was a lot heartier than I was expecting! Despite being about zero men in the merch line, there were more than I realized at the show. How nice! It always makes me really happy when they call out to girls at Love Live events, so I was really happy for them.

In the middle they all did a talk session where they played and discussed scenes from the SSS anime where the music was significant.

And it was weird because.... while they were playing the scenes we all automatically cheered them like we would do in the theater. Except several of the voice actors were RIGHT THERE watching us react to their work. Come to think of it, it may have been a little strange for them to see us cheering for their work as if they weren’t there. It was almost like all walked in on each other naked for a second. I have been trying to think of the best way to describe it and that was all I could come up with ahaha....

When they showed Brilliant Oath I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to sing or not? I think they really wanted us to sing but people were afraid to. So I was mouthing the words really exaggeratedly and probably looked like such a weirdo haha.... I’m not going to jump to the conclusion that Junta Terashima was actually looking at me during this part, but I was singing to him and he was kinda looking over in my direction ///// The scene ended right before “Chikai no ring....” so there was this little “Chi--” from the audience when we didn’t know the scene was going to end and they all laughed at that.

While the orchestra was tuning up they joked about tuning up their characters. Takuma Nagatsuka was like “Saionji Leo Leo Leo”. Junta Terashima bragged about not having to tune, but they were all like nah you should really tune your Shin so he made a bunch of Shin yells in various pitches ahaha.

In the second half of the performance just Junta Terashima and Shouta Aoi came out and performed their songs. Shouta was up first, so when Junta left the stage he wished him luck as Shin.

Shouta got all flustered about it, and turned to the audience like “I wasn’t ready for that.”

AhhHHhwwrrgh I really want to see that again. But like I said I’m afraid the DVD will be ust the evening performance. (This and many interviews have shown he’s in love with Shin the character and it’s adorable.)

It was right at this moment, when Shouta Aoi was on the stage by himself, that it suddenly hit me all at once that this was my first time seeing him live. (Since he wasn’t at MRS and I wasn’t able to make the lottery for the 2018 Rose Party or the first SSS theater greeting. Since I have seen the other boys multiple times, and I have seen him at live viewings, I guess somehow it kind of slipped my mind.)

When he announced the first song (”Moonshine”) there was like, an audible gasp from the audience. Like actual SHOCK at the idea that he was ACTUALLY going to sing for us... (at an event where we already knew he was going to sing for us).... THE VERY IDEA.....

And when he announced his second song, I know Shangri La, same thing.

It’s so hard to describe what it’s like to be in his presence. He’s just so different from the other boys. It’s a whole other level. He’s just... I can’t.... I can’t even believe he exists. I felt this same sense of awe even at the live viewing for the 2018 Rose Party but now he was actually HERE only 24 rows away from me!? It did not seem like this could be possible. How could this be allowed. All I could think about the entire time he was singing was just: Angels are real and one of them is named Shouta Aoi.

And what’s even more amazing is he doesn’t even seem to fully realize??? Like how all these girls are just so in complete awe and entranced by him??? He has no ego at all!?! When he finished his songs he was just like “Ohhh I was so nervous!” after singing with a flawless voice from heaven. NNghghghg.

So after that, Junta Terashima came out to do Platonic Sword. As you may have noticed in the photo above, there was a special guest: Mitsuki Saiga (Shine)

She was supposed to be a surprise, but I knew since I saw her name in the pamphlet. (And I’m glad I did, because it gave me a couple hours to emotionally prepare.) So I was just waiting. Then suddenly the light came on and there she was.

So this was basically the first time I (or anyone?) got to hear Shine sing solo. I know Shine sings on the soundtrack version of Platonic Sword, but he sings together with Shin so it’s hard to separate his voice. Shine has.... a beautiful, deep voice. I’d.... I’d like to hear more of him. (But now I hear a bit of Hibiki from PriPara in it, which is another complex I have ahah.)

Seeing Platonic Sword Live was something I really needed. I’d been both dreading and looking forward to for a long time. That song/scene has always terrified me. But am I afraid of these two people?

Of course not.

The dissonance created by seeing Shin(e) on the screen with Junta voicing it below was incredible. As I hoped it would, it made me feel ready to deal with something I have been avoiding dealing with for a while: And that is that even though Shine made him do it, Platonic Sword is still a part of Shin and I need to accept that. After the concert I went back and listened to the full version from the soundtrack for the very first time. It still creeped me out but, I’m getting there...

So, I have seen Mitsuki Saiga before, at the Pretty Live, but it was a lot different seeing her so much closer vs. in the giant Makuhari Messe. Also she definitely seemed a bit more comfortable wearing a blazer instead of Hibiki cosplay ahah.

Her speaking voice is so naturally deep. Like, noticeably deeper than Junta Terashima and Shouta Aoi. When she left the stage after the three had a talk session, Junta and Shouta agreed on how much cooler she is than them hahahah.....

But the best part was how she said that when she voiced Shine, apparently no one told her what kind of a character he was because he was still secret or whatever. They were like “Just do it” and she was like “.....what!?” Then later when people told her how much Shine scared them she was like “Really!?” HAHAHAH.

Before this session ended they did a Shin/Louis duet of Silent Promise. So for people saying the photos looked like a wedding.... basically it was.

After all that they made the big announcement of the King of Prism era Prism Show Best 10. Masashi Igarashi made an increasingly frantic bid for us to vote for Minato which really hit me and made me actually give him my vote when I got home. If you bought the soundtrack CD and got the serial code I’d encourage you to also PLEASE PLEASE vote for Minato as well. He really needs a break.

Also Taku Yashiro did promise natural gas if you vote for Kakeru, so there is that too. But.

At the end of the concert when they were saying their goodbyes, I was holding up my big Shin fan and neso plush while Junta Terashima was talking. I don’t think he saw me though, because I was kinda too far back to be noticed easily and he was concentrating on talking. I think Tasuku Hatanaka might have though, which would be really funny if true. Because he looked in my direction and kinda made a face like “heh”. It made me want to bring some Taiga stuff for next time. I re-remembered the best way to get their attention is when they are not talking, because they will be kinda aimlessly scanning the crowd and if you do something (tasteful) to attract their attention during that time (like holding something up) it might actually work.

The last thing they did was an orchestra backed version of Dramatic Love and it was..... the near definitive version, the most beautiful Dramatic Love I have ever heard and it changed the song for me forever........... I.... I feel bad because it wasn’t all of them but. BUT! They gave Yukinojo’s lines to Louis and it just... it just sounded so good. Since Yukinojo usually sings before or after Shin (since SePTENTRION sings in order a lot since they are like that) I kinda want to hear Yukinojo replaced by Louis in more SePTENTRION songs. I mean I like Yukinojo’s voice fine but... BUT!!! For Yu’s lines they split them among the other characters. There was one point where Takuma Nagatsuka had to sing two lines in a row and he seemed to maybe have a little trouble stringing them together because he wasn’t used to it. (Like *finishes phrase* *split second of oh crap I have to sing again* *next phrase* eheh I love him.)

Music Ready Sparking was great and the next concert is going to be great too. But there was something really special about this one to me. I think I probably enjoyed the orchestra-only parts a bit more than your average attendee because of my music background, but that combined the smaller venue really made it magical. I really, really hope they do more of these.

#king of prism #kinpri #rose party #rose party 2019 #prism orchestra #junta terashima #shouta aoi

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thewritewolf · 5 years

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Marinette March Day 1 - Kindness

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Well, I’m a bit late, but still doing better than I usually do with these things! For today’s prompt, I’ve decided to showcase just how helpful Marinette tends to be - even at the cost of her own plans. Since this one shot is around 2.5k words, I’ve put most of it under a read more.

@marinettemarch

Enjoy!

Read on Ao3

Marinette’s phone alarm went off, officially starting her day with Adrien. Well, at least the morning she would be spending with Adrien. A couple hours, probably. She paused with a frown while brushing her hair in front of her mirror. Come to think of it, she didn’t really know how these photoshoots tended to go. From what she could tell from her well-researched Adrien schedule they could last anywhere from half an hour to half the day. Either way, she intended to make the most of this invitation.

An invitation which she had gotten by having her room, plastered with his gorgeous face, broadcasted on television. And yet still his first concern was for her safety and wellbeing. She sighed dreamily - such a gentleman. If today went well, then marriage and three kids and a hamster wouldn’t be such a distant dream for much longer!

Needless to say, she had taken every precaution against being late. The alarm that had woken her up was the first of five - at least her own excitement had helped her sleep lightly. Everything she might need was packed and ready to go, which included a sketchbook just in case he really believed that she was interested in his pictures for the fashion. She patted herself down to make sure she had everything - purse, sketchbook, backpack, drawing utensils, phone, cookies, and the most important thing of all…

“Tikki! Ready to go?”

“Whenever you are, Marinette.” The red kwami flew into place in her purse and Marinette made her way out the backdoor of the bakery. As early as it was, there wasn’t nearly as many people on the streets as there usually was, but that was sure to change soon. Clouds broke up the summer sunlight into mottled patches of bright and dark. “Where is the photoshoot, again?”

Marinette made sure to glance around before talking into her purse. There had been enough instances of people looking at her like crazy. “Not too far, but not that close either. Thanks to the clouds, they’ll be doing an indoor photoshoot, but the place they chose is just barely in walking distance.”

“That great! What about- wait. Is that Nino?”

Sure enough, Nino was standing in front of a flower shop looking about as out of place as he could be. He was biting at his nails at he looked around in uncertainty at the wide array of blossoms and bouquets. The poor boy was overwhelmed, occasionally reaching for a few flowers only to pull back at the last minute. Someone needed to help him. Tikki held her phone up. There was still plenty of time to meet up with Adrien - she had left early after all.

“Hey, Nino!” She tapped him on his shoulder, suppressing a giggle by biting down on her lips as he jolted at her sudden appearance. “You seem lost. Anything I can do to help?”

“Oh! Hey, dude. I’m just, uh,” He rubbed the back of his neck and his cheeks darkened. He glanced around before pulling Marinette into a huddle and whispering, “Listen, I was gonna surprise Alya with some flowers, right? Sounded cool and romantic and stuff, right? But who knew there were this many different types! I have no idea which ones she’d want!” He looked at her with pleading eyes. “You gotta help me, dude.”

She blinked, trying to make sense of the rapid fire information he just unleashed on her. Slowly, a grin dawned on her face. “Aw! That’s so cute! Of course I’ll help. C’mon.” She walked among the flowers slowly, searching very carefully while Nino stayed close behind and wringed his hands nervously. She helped his nervous tick by passing the flowers she found to him. “This one is her favorite, so we’ll have the most of them. Here are some that represent love and joy. And here are some to help balance out the colors and make it smell all the sweeter.”

His eyes lit up as he looked at the finished bouquet in his hand, around a dozen in all. “I can’t thank you enough, dude! You are a total life saver!” She followed him to the cashier. “Is there anything I can do to help you out?”

“Take a photo of Alya’s face when you give it to her, it’d be nice to see how much she appreciated it. Other than that, don’t worry about it, I was glad to help.”

After a brief hug, they parted ways and Marinette was back on track. She’d lost about fifteen minutes, but it was well worth the cost - Alya was going to love it. As she continued walking through Paris, doubt began nagging at the back of her mind. If she stayed on her planned route, she’d only get there just barely on time. Taking the shortcut through the park would save her a few minutes and she’d much rather be early and get that much more time with Adrien. With that precious extra moments, she was sure they would hit it off and then he’d propose and they’d live happily ever after and-

She was stirred from her pleasant daydream by someone crying. The tall trees and hedges did even better work than the clouds in blotting out the sunlight, creating an empty and shadowed section of the park that she had thought was free of people. For a brief moment, she considered turning away. Maybe it had just been the wind, or maybe she had misheard. But then the crying returned, stronger than before and there could be no doubt in her mind. With only a slight pang of regret, she looked for the tearful stranger.

Nestled away on a bench within the hedges, she found a familiar bob of red hair and Marinette once again hesitated. Sabrina may not have been as bad as Chloe, but there were plenty of times where she had caused someone else to run off in tears. This could have been justice, in a sense. Even so, Marinette couldn’t bring herself to leave, instead sitting next to the other girl.

Her head jerked toward Marinette, but the wild hope in her eyes vanished once she saw that it was her. “Oh… hey, Marinette.”

“Something wrong?” It wasn’t hard to tell what had happened - it was a common enough occurence for Sabrina and Chloe to fight, and it wasn’t like Sabrina was close with anyone else. Maybe because of her friendship with Chloe. Still, it wasn’t nice to presume without asking.

She wiped away her tears and tried to stifle her sniffles. “Nothing out of the ordinary.” She flashed a watery smile that went away quickly.

The silence stretched out. What could she say to help her? Past attempts to get her to not put up with Chloe anymore had ended in failure and trying now wouldn’t help much anyway. Which really just left her one choice…

“Did you see the latest episode of Fill My Shoes?”

...Distraction.

Sabrina latched onto the topic and they spent a good long while talking - drifting from the reality show with Jagged Stone to fashion to games, all the while dancing around the topic of why Sabrina had been hiding by herself in a shadowy patch of park. After half an hour, they got up to leave. The redheaded girl gave her a hug and a whispered thanks before quickly parting ways with Marinette.

She stood still and waved as Sabrina left, only hurriedly digging around for her phone after she had left her field of view. Now she was late - very definitely late. Her shoulders slumped in defeat.

“Don’t give up just yet, Marinette!” Tikki chirped from her purse. “Maybe they started late, or maybe it’s a long photoshoot! There is still hope!”

Smiling down at her kwami, she nodded. “You’re right. Even if it is a shorter photoshoot, there should still be an hour left, right? Plenty of time to get Adrien to fall for me!”

“That’s the spirit. Now let’s go.”

With a bit of forced cheerfulness in her step, she resumed her journey to her dream day with Adrien. Yes, this wasn’t ideal, but she could still make it and have at least a nice time with him. Hopefully. Besides, the first half hour was all prep work probably. Did she really want to watch them apply make-up to Adrien? Yes. Yes she did. Well, he wouldn't be able to chat with her while they did so, thus it probably wasn’t a big loss. Everything was fine!

Until she heard the commotion and wailing come from inside the church she was passing by. She crouched into a combat stance, completely prepared for the panicked screams to start up, but it seemed that Hawkmoth had better things to do today. The door to the church was open and Marinette was curious, so she stepped inside.

It was pandemonium. Great care and been taken with elegant decorations. The church was practically packed with men in suits and women in dresses, all murmuring worriedly among each other. Every now and again another round of sobs could be heard coming from the back. Right at the entrance stood an older man in a suit, glancing nervously towards a backdoor.

Marinette tugged at his suit sleeve. “Excuse me, sir? Is something wrong?”

“My daughter’s wedding gown got torn when someone stepped on the bridal train and ripped the hem. They are trying to figure something out, but the store we got it from is closed and it would be expensive to get another tailor in without the warranty paying for it.”

“Well… I do design work in my spare time. Maybe I could try to fix it?” The man looked down at her dubiously. It sparked a competitive fire in her and she puffed out her chest pridefully. “I won a design contest by Gabriel Agreste, the fashion moghul.”

He seemed to weigh the options before shrugging. “Well, it’s worth a shot. Come with me.” They navigated the field of haggard loiters, the fraying best men, and the panicked bridesmaids. The door swung open and Marinette’s eyes widened. The dress was beautiful, to be sure, but what the man had described as a tear was even worse than he let on.

The harried bride turned at the sound of the opened door and Marinette saw the familiar flash of dashed hope when she saw it was just her and the older man that had entered. “Any luck, dad?”

“No word from the store, but!” He added quickly as he put a hand on Marinette’s shoulder. “This young lady thinks she might be able to help.”

She sighed and shook her head. “If you’d brought in a high schooler an hour ago, I would’ve declined. But now I’m desperate.” She walked over to Marinette. “What’s your name, sweetie?”

“Uh… Marinette. Marinette Dupain-Cheng”

“And do you think you can do it?”

Squaring her jaws, she reached into her purse and retrieved her pocket sewing kit. This was a challenge, just like any other. “I know I can, miss…?”

“Emilie.”

“Sit tight then, Miss Emilie and I’ll get this fixed in no time at all.” At least, so she hoped. Fixing it wouldn’t be the problem so much as how long it would take it pull it off. On the bright side, she had lots of practice with working under pressure.

In truth, Marinette didn’t know how long it had taken her to pull it off. After she had taken the silky material in her hands, the outside world faded away and it was just her and the task in front of her. That was the part she had always enjoyed about creating - everything becomes much simpler when the world shrinks down to pouring herself into her work. Emilie seemed curious at first of her industriousness and impressed when it actually looked like she would be able to pull it off. Once she had reached the final stretch, Emilie gave her a round of excited applause, all stress melted away.

“And to finish off, I’ll close this last little seem with some baby blue thread.” Marinette smiled up at her. “Something blue, right?”

Emilie hugged her as close as the dress would allow, and kissed her cheeks. “It looks fresh from the tailor! I can’t thank you enough, Marinette. Is there anything I can do to help you?”

“No, no I just need to get going. I’m running behind for a date.”

“Oh? I’m so sorry for holding you up! My father can drop you off, it’ll be a little while before we can get started again anyway.” She held up a hand to cut off Marinette’s protest. “Please, it is the least we can do, my little hero.”

Marinette, growing slightly desperate, accepted and found herself in front of the building where the photo shoot would be taking place. And she was only… two hours late, she realized with a wince. She didn’t even have the opportunity to build up any hope before it was broken, since she saw camera equipment being moved out from the space and into waiting vans. She shambled into the building, completely drained and slightly depressed. Maybe she could still at least see Adrien. Then she could pretend like this had all been worth it, pretend that she hadn’t shot herself in the foot with this. Or maybe she should just slink out the way she came and pretend she had been sick today. At least then she’d have a believable excuse.

“Marinette!” At the sound of her name, she turned around, only realizing mid-turn that it was Adrien’s voice. He was frowning, worried. “Hey, I was wondering where you were. I saw Nino’s post about you, so I was sure you were going to be here on time.”

“Post…?” She pulled out her phone, and noticed the notifications - she’d been tagged by Nino. It was a candid photo of Alya smiling, eyes misty as she held a familiar bouquet in her hands. Marinette found herself smiling as well. Nino had remembered to take the picture for her. “Y-yeah, I got side tracked…”

“So I heard from Chloe. Apparently she and Sabrina had a fight, but Sabrina came back and they talked it out. You came up at some point in the walls of text she sent, so I guess that was what held you up?”

“Well, uh, sort of. See there was this wedding-”

A car horn blared from outside and they both looked back to see Adrien’s bodyguard standing outside his car, staring at the both of them. Adrien glanced back at her, then at the car before saying, “Could you stick around for just a minute?”

“S-sure…” He walked away and Marinette collapsed onto a chair in the lobby. She’d only managed to get a couple minutes with him, and she’d basically implied she’d had more important things to do than hang out with him. There was no doubt in her mind that he wouldn’t be inviting her to any more photoshoots and she couldn’t blame him.

Her bitter reflections were cut off when she saw Adrien’s car drive away, and she felt the tears coming on. Before she could really work herself up into a good cry, Adrien appeared, smiling.

“Hey! I just convinced the Gorilla to give us a couple hours to ourselves. Do you want to hang out? After the day you’ve had, I’m sure you could use something to eat. You can tell me all about it over lunch.”

Feeling like her soul had left her body, Marinette could only nod as Adrien took her by the arm and started walking her to their lunch date.

#Miraculous Ladybug #Marinette Dupain-Cheng #Adrien Agreste #Adrienette #MarinetteMarch #Nino Lahiffe #djwifi #Tikki #my writing

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jarmes · 5 years

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The Man In The Attic

From the attic of a suburban family’s home, a mysterious stranger fixes their problems...

The walls in this house are thin. I hear every footstep, every word, every rage-filled fight with crystal clarity. At 6:00, I hear Keith’s alarm go off. Five minutes later I hear him stumble out of bed and into the shower. At 6:30, I hear the sound of Karen knocking on Kim’s door and the sound of Kim chucking a pillow at her. At 6:45, I hear the front door opening as Keith leaves for work. At 7:15, I hear Karen wake Kevin up. Five minutes later I hear the sound of a sizzling griddle as she makes breakfast for her children. At 7:45 I hear Kim leave the house, dragging her younger brother with her. Five minutes later, I hear Karen pouring herself a cup of coffee. At 8:05 Karen finally leaves. Five minutes later, I descend from the attic.

I open the refrigerator door and pull out a Tupperware container full of pasta, leftovers from the previous night. I only take a few bites, small enough that no one will notice that I’ve touched anything. Karen has left half a pot of coffee sitting on the counter; I finish it off. As I sip my lukewarm coffee, I make my way to the living room and turn on the TV.

The morning news is playing some sensationalist story about a string of recent break-ins. I roll my eyes and flip through the channels, looking for something interesting to watch. After finding nothing but reruns and game shows, I open up the DVR recordings.

I pop on a new episode of a sitcom I like, one about a happy family that Keith recorded the previous night. While I watch it I check the recording schedule, making sure that my shows are set to tape. I notice that the Karen forgot to tape this afternoon’s episode of one of her soap operas.

I imagine the fight that’ll break out when Karen comes home and realizes that her stories weren’t taped. Presumably, she’ll accuse Keith of deleting them for the sole purpose of angering her and refuse to acknowledge the possibility that she made a mistake. Keith will bring up the fact that he’s had a hard day at work, which will only make Karen angrier. Kevin will try to drown out the fight by watching TV and Kim will storm out of the house.

I set the soap opera to record and pat myself on the back for a job well done. I can’t imagine how these people got by before I started living here. I’m the glue that holds this family together. My job is thankless, primarily because the Brattons don’t know I exist.

I’ve been living in the Bratton family’s attic for nine months now. Hiding in the attic of a suburban middle-class family was never the plan. My stepfather kicked me out and I didn’t have anywhere to stay, so I started squatting in an unsold house on their street. After three days of squatting, a new family moved in without any warning.

I probably should have run away. But, I knew finding a new squatting location would be a hassle, so I just started hiding in the attic. When the Brattons are all gone, I sneak down to grab food from their fridge. When they come back, I return to my hiding place. It was hard, at first, avoiding detection. I almost got caught a dozen times. But, before long, I managed to learn the family’s schedules. Nowadays the odds of me getting caught are minuscule.

My hearing has gotten pretty good over the past few months, so I was able to hear the unmistakable sound of a door opening at 8:30. This surprises me, because I know for a fact that no one should be home until 3:45. As soon as the door opens I dash to the pantry; it would take to long to return to the attic.

I hear the sound of footsteps. Judging by their sound, they belong to Kim. I realize that she must be skipping school. I hear, through the thin door of the pantry, Kim walk to the living room. Sneaking past her to return to the attic is risky. If she doesn’t move until her family comes home, I’ll definitely get caught. I reach into my pocket and grab my cell phone. I text Karen, informing her of her daughter’s truancy. I smile when the Read tag appears beneath my message. I wait for Karen to come storming home.

I’ve learned a lot about the Brattons since I started living with them. Karen and Keith were high school sweethearts, him the local high school’s star quarterback and her the head of the cheer squad. I honestly think that the two of them would have gone their separate ways if it wasn’t for an unplanned pregnancy. Nine months and one shotgun wedding later, Keith and Karen came home with a baby girl named Kim.

If Karen’s weekly phone calls to her sister are to be believed, Kim used to be a sweet kid. But, with high school came new problems. One day Kim came home with black hair, piercings, and a new foul attitude. Keith and Karen came to the conclusion that they were the only parents in the history of mankind to have a rebellious teenager and responded by doubling down on punishments in an attempt to “fix” their daughter, something that has only made her rebel more.

Karen rips open the front door and marches into the living. “What’s up, mom?” Kim says.

“Why aren’t you at school?” Karen asks.

“Didn’t feel like going,” Kim replies.

Karen sighs. “Kim, you need to go to school,” she says. “Otherwise, you won’t be able-”

“I won’t be able to get into college and then I won’t be able to get a good job and I’ll have to marry a loser,” Kim interjects. “I’ve heard the speech before, mom.”

“Then why do you keep doing things like this?”

“Chill.”

“I had to leave my nursing class to come and get you, you know.”

“That was a dumb decision.”

I hear the sound of a struggle, presumably created by Karen grabbing Kim by the ear and dragging her to the front door. “How’d you even find out I skipped school?” Kim asks.

“You principal texted me,” Karen replies.

I chuckle from the darkened pantry. I inputted my number into Karen’s phone number under the principal’s name two months prior, knowing that a situation like this might occur. After making sure that Karen and Kim are gone, I return to the living room to watch TV.

At 3:00, I grab some snacks from the cupboard and return to the attack. At 3:45, right on schedule, I hear Karen’s car pull into the driveway.

I hear Kevin dash for his bedroom as soon as Karen opens the front door. “No video games until you’re done with your homework!” Karen shouts.

A few minutes later I hear the sound of Kevin turning on a game console. I don’t know if Karen doesn’t know or is just too busy to care. If I were to guess, I would say that she’s working on her classwork. Fortunately, I don’t have to guess.

I grab a small tablet sitting atop a pile of boxes and turn it on. Camera feeds showing various rooms spread throughout the house appear on the screen. The feed from the kitchen shows Karen surrounded by a pile of books, jotting down notes in a notebook. The feed from Kevin’s room shows him sitting on a beanbag chair, blasting heads off an army of zombies. There isn’t a feed from the attic; if there were, it would show me lazily lying on the old couch I claimed as my bed.

The security system was already installed when the Brattons moved in. The realtor neglected to tell them about the countless cameras spread throughout the house, designed to help stop an intruder. Ironically, nothing has contributed to my continued residence in this house more.

When I’m up in my attic, I do a variety of things to keep myself busy. I read, I browse the internet, I play games on my phone. But, the main thing I do is observe the Brattons over the cameras. At first, I did this so I could learn their schedules and figure out how to stay hidden. Over time, I started watching them for my own enjoyment. The Brattons are better than any soap opera. Their fights, their wants, their struggles, all of these things feature an authenticity television could never reproduce.

I don’t pay for the food, shelter, and entertainment I take from these people, but I do make up for the things I take. I provide this family with something that money could never buy: stability. When I first met the Bratton’s, Keith and Karen’s marriage was hanging on by a thread. I knew that, if the two of them were to split up, they might leave this house and sell it to more observant residents. So I took it upon myself to keep the two of them together.

The main thing I do is clean up the minor creators of stress spread around the house. I make sure Keith’s work clothes are clean, I take out the trash when it gets too full, I make sure the toilet seat is down, I write things on the grocery list when we run out, that kind of thing.

I never do too much, because that would reveal my existence. Just enough to make sure Keith and Karen are happy. Occasionally, I do something big, like sending Karen flowers using Keith’s credit card or hiding tickets to a concert in the family’s mailbox. I honestly think that, if it wasn’t for me, Keith and Karen would have broken up months ago.

At 5:30, Karen moves her moves her books from the table to the living room. She isn’t done studying, but needs to start in on dinner if she’s going to have it done by the time Keith arrives at home. She pulls up a recipe on her phone and beings cooking fish.

I don’t think Karen ever wanted to be a housewife. She mentioned once, while talking to her sister on the phone, that she wanted to be a doctor when she was a kid. She’s never mentioned what changed, but I’m guessing that she put those dreams on hold when Kim came along.

She’s started taking nursing classes recently, a decision that has led to no shortage of stress in the Bratton family. No one has been impacted by this stress more than Karen herself, who has struggled to balance her studies and her family.

At 6:30, Keith comes home from work. He trudges through the front door and collapses onto the sofa. “How was your day?” Karen asks, seemingly oblivious.

“Tiring,” Keith replies.

Keith spends eleven hours each day in a cubicle. Since Karen started going back to school, things have been lean around the Bratton household. Keith volunteered to pick up extra responsibilities at work to help pad his salary, something he has regretted more and more with each passing moment.

Judging by the framed newspaper articles that hang in his study, Keith was a damn good football player in his youth, one good enough to get quite a few scholarships. He never accepted them, though. I’m not sure why.

“Keith, we need to talk about our daughter,” Karen says.

“What did she do this time?” Keith asks, eyes closed.

“She skipped school!”

“And?”

Karen scowls at Keith. “I can’t believe that you aren’t taking this seriously,” she says.

“Karen, she’s sixteen,” Keith says, rubbing his temples. “She’s going to make mistakes.”

“Skipping school is more than a mistake, Keith.”

“Fine, I’ll go talk to her,” Keith says while getting off the sofa.

“She isn’t here right now,” Karen says, “I drug her back to school but she hasn’t come back yet.”

Keith sighs. “Did you try calling her phone?” he asks.

“No Keith, I didn’t try calling my missing daughter,” Karen snaps. “Of course I tried calling her. She didn’t pick up.”

“Maybe that means she needs space.”

“She could be at the bottom of a ditch for all we know!”

Karen is proven wrong ten seconds later, when Kim walks through the front door. “Where on earth have you been for the past three hours?” Karen asks.

“Out,” Kim replies.

Keith chuckles and Karen shoots him an angry look. “I was hanging out with friends, I didn’t think it was a big deal,” Kim says.

“I was worried,” Karen says. “Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

“It died,” Kim says.

“Bullshit,” Karen says.

“Easy,” Keith says as he pushes Karen and Kim apart. “Let’s all calm down.”

“I am perfectly calm, Keith,” Karen says. “I am just sick and tired of the fact that my daughter doesn’t respect me.”

“Okay,” Kim says while rolling her eyes.

Around this time, Kevin wanders downstairs, drawn by the fighting. He notices something that the others haven’t. “Mom?” he says.

“What is it, honey?” Karen asks, temporarily shifting her attention away from Kim.

“I smell smoke,” Kevin says.

Karen curses before running into the kitchen, ripping open the oven, and grabbing a glass pan containing charred fish with her bare hands. She screams and Keith runs over to her. “Are you okay?” he asks.

“I feel fucking phenomenal, Keith,” Karen says.

“Do you want to go to the hospital?”

“No,” Karen says, as blunt as a boulder.

She reaches into a drawer, grabs a pair of oven mitts, and picks the pan full of burnt fish off the floor. “I have had a long day and would like nothing more than to have a nice meal with my family,” she says.

The Brattons eat the burnt fish in silence. Up in the attic, I munch on a bag of chips, enthralled by the tension so thick you could cut it with a knife. Kevin doesn’t touch his food. “What’s wrong, honey?” Karen asks.

“I don’t like fish,” he replies.

“It’s what we’re having for dinner tonight,” Karen says.

“It’s burnt,” Kim says.

“Maybe it would be better if I was able to focus on making dinner instead of worrying about you,” Karen snaps.

The doorbell rings and Keith answers it. A pimply pizza delivery boy stands on the front porch, holding a large stack of pies. “Pizza delivery for Keith Bratton,” he says.

“We didn’t order any pizza,” Karen says as she walks over to the door.

“Is this 432 East Meadow Street?” the pizza boy asks.

“Yes,” Keith replies. “And I’m Keith Bratton.”

“I have a delivery for you,” the pizza boy says.

“We didn’t order any pizza,” Karen says as she slams the door in the pizza boy’s face.

To be fair, Karen is right that she didn’t order any pizza. I did, hoping to stop the eventual fight over dinner by replacing the burnt fish with fresh pizza. “What did you do that for?” Keith asks.

“We didn’t order pizza,” Karen replies.

“I know, but we could have just paid for the pizza and ate it for dinner.”

“I worked really hard on dinner and we are going to eat it as a family.”

Karen walks back to her chair. “So, how was school? she asks.”

“Good,” Kevin replies.

“Did anything interesting happen?”

“My teacher talked to me about football tryouts.”

“Football tryouts?” Keith asks, suddenly interested.

“The answer is no,” Karen says.

“Now, let’s not be rash,” Keith interjects.

“I said no,” Karen says. “Football is dangerous and I don’t want my son getting involved.”

“Karen, it’s just flag football,” Keith says. “He’ll be fine.”

“I said no, Keith,” Karen says. “That’s final.”

Kevin gets out of his chair and storms off to his room. “Nice going mom, you made another child hate you,” Kim says before following her brother.

Kevin is the youngest of the Brattons, born a measly seven years prior. As much as I hate to say it, I think Keith and Karen decided to have him to rekindle their long dead marriage. This plan failed as a second child only added to their stresses.

I think Kevin would have it a lot worse if I wasn’t around to keep his parents happy. I’ve seen children who grow up in broken homes and the problems they face. I’ve been keeping Keith and Karen together for Kevin’s sake as much as my own.

After dinner, Keith brings his laptop to the table and starts typing away. Karen scrubs away at the pan, rubbing off the charred fish and dumping it into the sink. “How was dinner?” she asks.

“It was fine,” Keith says.

It’s a lie, of course, and a poor one at that. Karen can easily see through her husband’s deception, but chooses to play along. “Just fine?” she asks.

Keith sighs. “Can we do this some other time?” he says. “I’m drowning in work right now.”

“You hated it, didn’t you?”

“I said it was fine, dammit. Why does it always have to be mind games with you?”

Karen leaves the pan to soak and begins cleaning one of the plates. “I’m just trying to make conversations, she says. “How was work?”

“Busy,” Keith says while typing on his computer.

“You know, I’d appreciate it if you put the laptop away while we’re talking.”

“Well, dear, I’d appreciate it if you acknowledged that my job pays for the roof over your head.”

“Here we go again,” Karen says, bitterness flowing through her words.

“What?”

“You act like you’re the only one who works hard in this family!” Karen shouts.

The plate slips from her fingers and falls to the ground, shattering. She reaches down to pick it up and slices open her finger. “Are you okay?” Keith asks.

“I’m fine,” Karen says as blood drips from her hand.

On my screen, I notice that Kevin is watching his parents from the living room. I sigh. No child should have to see their parents fight like this. Using a remote I stole from the living room I turn on the living room TV. Kevin stops watching his parents fight and starts watching my favorite sitcom, the one about a happy family.

#writing #short story #fiction

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mrs-mitch-rapp93 · 6 years

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Blood Moon Rising (Part 5)

Author: @mrs-mitch-rapp93 Words: 3,423 Warnings: Fluff, cussing, underage drinking, and violence. Characters: Steph, Stiles, Scott, Castiel, Lydia and Malia.

Summary: Steph and Stiles head to Lydia’s party, where an unlikely guest interrupts their time alone together in Lydia’s room.

Authors Note: I want to thank my friend Ehron for helping me with this chapter (He’s going to be my editor throughout this series). Hope you all enjoy, it’s just the beginning of a crazy adventure for Steph and Stiles.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8** , Part 9 , Part 10 , Part 11 , Part 12 , Part 13

It was 6 o-clock on a Saturday night; I begged Dean and Sam if I could go to the movies with Lydia and Malia. I, of course, was really going to Lydia’s party. But they both said “no” because of the curfew; they had to run to the Sheriff’s station and the library to figure out what was causing so much chaos in Beacon Hills. Dean decided I couldn’t be trusted alone, so they called Castiel to watch me, which I thought was childish.

Lydia’s party started at 9:00 and‑ I texted Stiles earlier and told him what the situation was. He said he would be at the house by 8:30,‑Before I could leave, I had to distract Castiel somehow. I walked into the living room to see him just staring out the window, I grabbed the remote that was on the couch and flipped to the local news to see if they found anything new about the case‑ there was nothing, so I changed the channel and came across a marathon of Friends playing on TBS,

“Cas, would you like to watch Friends with me?” I said, Castiel turned his head and walked over to the couch and sat down.

“What is Friends?” he asked, I could tell he was intrigued,

“It was a show on during the 90s about a group of friends in their 20s living in New York,” I said.

“Interesting,” Castiel said. We watched about two and half episodes. I looked at my phone the time read “7:45.”

“So, why are Rachel and Phoebe screaming at Monica and Chandler from across the street? Are they not allowed to be together?” Castiel asked with a confused look on his face.

“They are with Ross who is Monica’s brother looking at the apartment from across the street and he doesn’t know that they are together,” I answered as sweet as I could. I love Cas, but he is basically a giant, warrior baby in a trench coat.

“Oh… Does he not want them to be together?” Castiel asked.

“Chandler is Ross’s best friend and he just couldn’t see them together because Monica is his little sister,” I said, looking over at Castiel.

“Is that the same way Dean feels about you being with that Stiles boy?” Castiel asked, turning his attention to me.

“I don’t know, Cas, Dean is just being a pain in the ass,‑I’m going to go upstairs and take a shower,” I said. I got up and patted Cas on the shoulder, then I headed upstairs.

I took a quick shower and when I exited, I wrapped my body in a towel and used a hand towel to dry out my hair. Once I was finished drying it, I hung the towel up letting my hair fall loose‑blonde curls laying down my back. For makeup, I did a smoky-eye and put on some light, pink lipstick. I decided to wear a white and black striped tank top with a flowy black skirt and a light blue, jean jacket. Then, I topped off the outfit by placing on my white with black stripes Adidas. As I tied my shoelaces, I heard a light tapping sound on my window. I opened my curtains and saw Stiles. I opened my window as quietly as possible; Stiles slid through the window and shut it behind him. I smiled at him and he turned around and stared at me.

“What, do I have something in my teeth?” I said as I went back to the bathroom to check.

“No, Steph. I’m just struck at how gorgeous you look,” Stiles said as he leaned against the door frame, he stood back up walking over behind me and wrapping his arms around me. He rested his head on my shoulders. We both looked at each other in the mirror for a few minutes.

“Damn, we would make a good-looking couple,” Stiles said as he kissed me on the cheek.

“We do, don’t we,” I said. I turned around to face him. Tugging at his red hoodie, I saw that he was wearing a gray t-shirt underneath. I noticed that he was wearing the same jeans and Vans from yesterday.

We stared into each others’ eyes and paused for a few, lingering moments. Then, I kissed him — hard, almost pushing him backwards. A knock at the door broke our kiss.

“Steph, are you done with your shower? You’re missing Ross and Rachel fighting about something called, ‘we we’re on a break,’ Castiel said from the other side of the door.

“Who is that?” Stiles mouthed.

“His name’s Castiel. He’s a family friend, I’ll tell you more on the way to Lyd’s,” I whispered back. I went to the door and cracked it open.

“Hey, Cas, I decided I was going to play round with my hair and makeup, Are you enjoying Friends?” I asked, only showing my face through the crack of the door.

“I am, but you’re missing everything that is going on with Ross and Rachel. And I thought I heard someone talking,” Castiel said. He crooked his head to try to get a better look into my room.

“Oh, that was just my laptop — I started watching a movie.” Suddenly, out of the blue, I hear Stiles trying his worst impression of Yoda from Star Wars coming from my bathroom.

“See, I’m just playing around with my makeup and watching Star Wars,” I said giving him my prettiest smile.

“Ok, I’m going to see what happens with the, ‘we were on a break’ with Ross and Rachel.” Castiel said. I shut the door and leaned back on it. Stiles came out of the bathroom.

“Thank you so much for the terrible Yoda impression…” I said with a laugh.

“Finally, someone who likes Star Wars around here. And any way to help my favorite girl to sneak out of the house,” Stiles said with a Yoda accent. I giggled and grabbed my purse that was hanging from my closet door handle. I pulled my Beretta 92FS from my dresser and put it in my bag.

“What’s with the gun?” Stiles asked as he walked up behind me.

“For starters, there’s a curfew starting at 9:00, and you never know what to expect in the supernatural world,” I said while zipping my purse up.

We snuck out my window. It was located at the back of the house, so I knew we’d probably have to jump a fence or two. We left my room and I closed the window as quietly as I could. We crossed through one of the neighbor’s back yard, which connected to the next street over where Stiles’ Jeep was located.

On the way to Lydia’s, I explained to Stiles that Castiel was an angel who saved Dean from Hell, and Purgatory. Stiles didn’t believe that Dean died and went to hell and that Castiel was basically Dean’s guardian angel who saved him. I sighed and knew that it’d probably take him awhile to come around to believe it.

We continued our way to the party listening to the radio; the station ended the song it was playing and started playing “First Date,” by Blink 182. “In the car, I just can’t wait, to pick you up on our very first date, is it cool if I hold your hand,” the radio played. I started to heavily focus on the lyrics. I couldn’t help but wonder if Stiles and I were more than friends or just two people who make out every once in awhile. Stiles chuckled to himself breaking my train of thought.

“What’s so funny?” I asked while putting my hand on his thigh.

“This song; it’s kind of ironic, isn’t it?” he said while taking his eyes off the road to look at me.

“What makes you say that?”

He paused for a second, looking back at the road. I could tell he was thinking deeply before answering me.

“The first time we hung out, I wanted to take you out to a nice restaurant, not to some party.” He took his right hand off the steering wheel and took ahold of my hand, kissing it.

We arrived at Lydia’s house and cars lined up and down the driveway. We got out of Stiles’ Jeep and started walking up the driveway. As we walked, we started growing closer to each other — close enough that our hands tapped one another. I swore, a bolt of lightning went from my hand to my heart. We entered the house; music was blaring and there were a tone of teenagers dancing in the living room and others were playing beer pong in the study. We saw Lydia talking to a few of the lacrosse players; she noticed us and excused herself to welcome us.

“Stephanie, you look stunning, I love the outfit,” Lydia said giving me a hug.

“Thank you, Lydia,” I said with a smile.

“So, the beer and snacks are in the kitchen, there’s a pool in the back yard if you two would like to go swimming, and just have fun, you two.” Lydia swung around and returned to the lacrosse players.

“Do you want a drink, Steph?” Stiles asked while trying to yell over the music that got louder.

“Yes, that sounds good,” I yelled back at him. He headed to the kitchen.

I looked around to see Malia and Scott talking in the corner. I waived at them and they gestured me to come over.

“Hey, Steph. You look really nice,” Scott said with a cute smile.

“Thanks! Lydia said that, too,” I said.

“Yes. Lydia says a lot of things,” Malia said.

“Um… yeah.”

“So, did your brothers figure out anything else about what happened last night?” Scott asked as he took a sip of his beer.

“They are actually down at the Sheriff’s station talking to Sheriff Stilinski, but they aren’t sure what it is; they just told me the girl who was attacked is named Audrey Teller and she said it was a teenager with black eyes and claws. She also said that he was fast as a cheetah,” I answered him.

Stiles returned with our drinks. He handed it to me and then gently placed his right hand on my upper back. He stroked between my shoulder blades with his thumb.

“I’m puzzled on what’s the cause of these killing; it doesn’t sound like anything we’ve come up against before,” Scott said, looking at Stiles and Malia.

“By the way, Scott told Lydia and I about you guys being hunters,” Malia said while taking a bite out of a potato chip.

“Yep. Also, I guess I never told you my real last name,” I said, Stiles looked down at me with a strange look on his face.

“What do you mean, ‘real last name’?” Stiles said narrowing his eyes at me.

“When we arrived in Beacon Hills, Dean gave us an undercover name, which was Rapp. My real name is Stephanie Winchester,” I said while taking a sip of my stale beer.

“That makes you sound even sexier, so where did Dean get the name ‘Rapp’?” Stiles asked while still massaging my back with his thumb. I laughed and looked up at him.

“He heard about some new movie coming out and the main character’s last name is ‘Rapp,’” I answered.

“So, I guess you two are an item, now?” Lydia asked as she came to join our conversation.

“Well, I’m not so sure if—” Stiles and I began until the group of teenagers, who were playing beer pong, shouted loudly. Someone won and someone lost, which resulted in them drinking, cheering, and laughing.

The shouting disrupted my train of thought for a moment.

“So, what are we going to do about these deaths?” Scott asked.

The conversation was directed back to the problem at hand — who is the enemy, or who are the enemies? We all continued talking; Stiles and Scott were talking about lacrosse and if someone on their team could be responsible. Lydia went back and started talking to some boy. Malia and I were talking about her and Scott’s relationship. I was listening to Malia when I felt someone bump into me knocking the beer out of my hand and landing on the carpet.

“Excuse you,” I said harshly to whomever bumped into me. I turned to see a tall, shaggy blond boy looking at me, embarrassed.

“Sorry,” the blond boy said rather quickly and took off.

“Steph, what happened?” Stiles asked noticing that my beer was on the ground.

“I just got bumped into, that’s all,” I said as I picked up the empty solo cup.

Stiles and I decided to go up to Lydia’s room to get away for a bit, Stiles sat on Lydia’s bed watching me look around Lydia’s room; I noticed she had a few pictures of her and the rest of the pack — one of the pictures was of her and a gorgeous dark-haired girl that I didn’t recognize.

“Who’s this?” I asked Stiles, I turned to look at him.

“That was Allison Argent. She was Scott’s girlfriend; her family were also hunters,” Stiles said.

“Really, and what do you mean, ‘were’?” I asked as I sat down next to Stiles. Stiles was hesitant for a moment.

“Her father left last year after Allison died.”

“I’m sorry to hear that do you mind me asking what happened.” Stiles looked down at his shoes and took a deep breath.

“Last year, I was possessed by a Nogitsune. I ended up killing her.”

His voice cracked a little and he kept looking down at his shoes. I was speechless. I couldn’t imagine Stiles possessed — being controlled by some unthinkable force. I just couldn’t see Stiles, this goofy, clumsily boy, possessed by a demon.

“Stiles, that doesn’t make me think of you any differently; I’m so sorry that you had to go through that,” I said. I pulled my legs up on the bed and wrapped my arms around him.

“Can I tell you something?” I pulled away from him, now; he looked at me nervously.

“My mother didn’t die from a robber, she was…” I took in a deep breath.

“She was killed by a demon named Azazel. He also killed Dean and Sam’s mother, Mary, and even John. I guess he was our family curse.” I looked at Stiles. He had a sympathetic look on his face and hugged me even tighter.

“Steph, you should have just told me the truth,” Stiles said, as he let go of me, keeping his hands on my shoulders.

“I wanted to, but I didn’t know if you would have believed me — I was afraid that you were going to think I was crazy.” Looking into his hazel eyes, I suddenly knew that wasn’t true.

“Steph, if you told me the truth, I would never have thought that you were crazy and I would have believed you. I mean, come on, my best friend is a werewolf; nothing fazes me.” He put his hand on my cheek and a soothing sensation swept over me.

He leaned in and gently kissed me on my cheek; he pulled away smiling at me and got up from the bed walking over to a little speaker that was sitting on the dresser. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and plugged it in. He scrolled through his phone, choosing an old, familiar, slow song “I Knew I Loved You,” by Savage Garden.

“Maybe it’s intuition, but some things you just don’t question. Like in your eyes, I see my future in an instant and there it goes. I think I’ve found my best friend.

“Would you like to dance?” Stiles asked; he walked over to me and extended his hands out, giving me a smile. I looked up at this beautiful boy standing in front of me. I extended my hands out to him, smiled, and stood up.

Stiles put both his hands on the small of my back. I put my arms on his shoulders and clasped my hands around his neck. I looked up at him and he looked down at me, I inched a little closer to him; we both swayed back and forth enjoying the song.

I know that it might sound more than a little crazy, but I believe I loved you before I met you. I think I dreamed you into my life.

I leaned in and rested my head on his chest, and we continued swaying to the music.

I knew I loved you before I met you. I have been waiting all my life.

I looked up at him; he lifted his hands from my back and placed them on my face. He tilted his head leaning in and kissing me on the lips. We stopped in place and the song stopped playing. It was quiet — the only noise we could hear was from the party going on downstairs, but we continued kissing. Stiles started to guide me to the bed. I felt the edge of the bed hit the back of my leg forcing me to sit on the bed. Leaning back, Stiles got on top of me — his mouth moved from my lips to my neck. I moaned as he worked his way down. He continued until we heard a woman scream.

“Who was that?” I asked while trying to catch my breath. Stiles lifted his head.

“That wasn’t any normal scream — it’s Lydia!” Stiles said as he took in a deep breath. He had a worried look on his face.

Stiles got off of me; I sat up and straightened my skirt that had been hiked up. I followed Stiles to the door and grabbed my gun from my purse. We ran down the stairs to see teenagers scattering everywhere. In the living room, there was Scott and Malia showing their wolf forms. Lydia was raising her hands and a deafening screech exited her mouth again; they were fighting a blond-haired boy. On a second glance, I recognized him as the same blond-haired boy who knocked my beer out of my hand.

“Hey, asshat,” I yelled. I turned the safety off my gun and aimed it at the blond-haired boy shooting him in the left arm. Scott, Malia, Lydia, and Stiles all froze when the gun went off; the boy screamed a blood curdling scream and when he turned around, his eyes were as black as tar. He had fangs, pointed ears, and claws. Since his attention was on me, Malia was able to surprise him and attacked the boy while his back was turned. She clawed at him slicing through his shirt causing him to scream. He ignored her for the most part. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Stiles grab a vase and approach the boy. He swung the vase shattering it across his head; the boy stopped for a second, but brushed off the attack ignoring Stiles. The boy was right in front of me — it happened in a blink-of-an-eye; I punched him in the face and he stumbled backwards holding his nose and doubled over. As he bent over holding his nose, a silver necklace around his neck swung through the torn gap in his shirt. The amulet was a crescent moon with three half stars. His attention wasn’t towards them anymore — it was on me… he started walking towards me.

“You bitch,” the boy yelled.

“There’s more where that came from,” I taunted. I brought my left arm up and was about to punch him again, but he grabbed my wrist twisting it backwards. I winced in pain.

“Your brothers are going to pay for what they did,” the boy said in a raspy voice.

“How do you know my—” I started saying until he swung me by my wrist throwing me across the room. I landed on the dining room table and rolled off and hitting my head. I sat up slowly seeing Scott, Malia, and Lydia trying to fight the boy, but he somehow threw them out of his way and jumped through the wall-length windows. My head started pounding and my vision started to get blurry. I put my hand to my head and felt warm liquid seep through my fingers. I brought my hand down and saw two right hands covered in blood.

“Shit. Steph, Steph!” Stiles said. I looked at him seeing two Stiles, then everything went black.

@were-cheetah-stiles @lovefilledtragedy @little-miss-stan @give-me-some-fin-noggin-duuude @caitsymichelle13 @itsamberh @redstringlovers

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catholicismabusedestiny · 3 years

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What Happened...

12.01.1999

Up until the age of 10 or 11, after the last child was born (and about the same time where my father came to deeply resent my “responsibility for the kids” – which was beat into me for as far back as I can remember); however, once it threatened his role or, more precisely once I started to get a voice, my father did a 180 degree turn and anything I did around the house or with the kids was not likely to get me in trouble.

I’ve spent a life-time being disappointed about various issues pertaining to my family; however, none has been as painful as the adult relationships (or lack thereof) I have with my siblings; therefore, this has been one of the top three topics discussed over 26 years of therapy and I think it’s finally coming into focus thanks to my Minister, Therapist and two close friends.

To begin with, my father’s verbal and emotional abuse is not disputed; it’s to what extent and how it was carried out which appears to be the issue people differ on. As stated, those first 10, 11 years were the hardest of their marriage and on one another; they were untrained, ill-prepared and almost desperate at times and it was something open discussed about by relative and friends – particularly after one of many crisis’s (i.e. 6 births, the house fire, Dad’s accident, the accident the day Patty was born etc.,). Dad would refer to that time as his “Irish luck” but, suffice it to say, those first 12 years were the most difficult for them.

During these difficult times – before my Dad had to be cognizant of who was around and where he was before going off on me – Dad did a lot of yelling and even more criticizing. It was during these years when he developed and began trying out his many phrases he had for me. His unrelenting criticism and disappointment of me was not new and was widely known within the family and beyond. Therefore, in getting back to whether he loved me unconditionally during that time I’d have to say “No, he didn’t show me unconditional love during my early childhood”.

As a result, to those that were horrified by what I said earlier, the only thing I can say is that “you don’t know what you’re talking about!” Moreover, his total lack of respect for me was not only felt but was picked up by all of my siblings; they all knew from the time they could walk and talk that Dad disliked Mike, makes fun of Mike and disrespects Mike; therefore, they, in turn, also disrespected me and it’s only grown worse and has even been passed down to the next generation who will not return a message from me. They were unconscious taught to believe the things Dad said of me; then, by my mid-20’s while in therapy, I confronted my parents on the abuse and came out of the closet.

From the time I engaged in those activities, the abuse factor transferred from Dad to Mom who disapproved of everything I did or said. Although, it was the confronting them on the abuse that she got stuck on; she knew that I knew (or remembered) those early years when all of the physical and verbal abuse was followed by screams from me wanting my Mother. While she still blamed me for what went on, she knew that if I repeated this info to others outside the family that it would negatively reflect on her and that’s not something she could tolerate.

In fact, I think it’s that very point as to why she wanted me to visit more often, as well as all the pressure she put on me to move back to Chicago. More to the point, however, she constantly criticized me (jobs, where I lived, what I did etc.,) and never-ever wanted to hear anything I had to say (I was not to speak with I visited UNLESS it was about kids or marriage). She so resented me that anything she said about me was done with heavy doses of disapproval, accusations I was lying, and a consistent tone that I was not accepted, respected or approved.

With me being gone for all of those decades, there was never anyone to comment on her accusations or to stick up for me; thus, everything was said and taken as gospel. Ironic too that the entire reason why I stayed away (as well as all of those times when I was actually in Chicago but didn’t go home because my Mother refused to allow me to bring anyone with me when I’d visit; and, when I did visit, there were strict instructions about what I could and couldn’t say.

Yet, each Sunday night, after I listened to 20 minutes about babies and weddings, she’d give me shit for not visiting more often AGAIN! Finally, I obviously had to be more direct with her so I said “Mom, you wonder why I don’t visit more often or why I won’t move back and, the truth of the matter is it’s you Mom… you refuse to allow me to bring my bf with me and then you get mad if/when anyone asks me a direct question about my volunteer work, the AID’s epidemic, gay rights etc., etc., So, if my significant other is banned/not welcomed and I’m prevented from talking about my passions and all of the good things I’m doing for the cause of AID’s than why would I even want to attend?”

It’s as though my Mother wants me to be present but she doesn’t want me; she wants me at 19 or 20 – before I came out. “I cannot flip-on or flip-off my life just because you don’t like it…” Moreover, because of this dichotomy between who I am and what my Mother wants me to be, I return home from these visits and fall into a deep depression knowing that I’m not accepted (or respected) for who I am. My friends are well acquainted with the depths of those depression episodes after I visit Chicago and, thus, will give me a few days to myself when I return but, after that, they go all out to force me out of that state of funk.

It wasn’t all that long ago when someone referred to the unconditional love one receives from their father and I stated that I was “unsure” about that; you’d thought I said “Kill All The Babies!” Immediately, my sister and her husband became extremely upset with me and, as such, I became quite irritated with them.

I’m unsure what “con” was played on them while I was gone for 30 years but, one thing is certain:

Ø None of them were around for the first 7 – 8 years of my life; therefore, they have absolutely no idea what took place. Accordingly, I deeply resent anyone telling me what I relive in my bed on a daily basis is not true.

Ø Yes, I did carry around a lot of guilt for decades that Dad’s temper, behavior and his anger ridden tirades were - in some way - my fault (as both of my parents attempted to allege which, in and of itself, every therapist states is abuse). Furthermore, over the years, Therapists have continually stated that I was not responsible for Dad’s behavior or conduct in any way, shape of form.

§ All of this changed permanently, however, on January 12, 2012 when Uncle Chuck asked me “How was your childhood?” That pandora’s box opened up a whole host of bad things that my father had done to me before I was 18 months old.

§ It was further shaped by the very odd or weird things some of Mom and Dad’s life-long friends and extended family members said to me as I became the point person for the dissemination of information re: My Parents Health.

· As they became more comfortable with me – especially since most of them hadn’t spoken to me in decades; and, overtime, I heard things such as: “it’s so good you’re here for your parents now given some of the things that happened in the past...” OR “your Dad was so hard on you growing up; I’m so glad to see that you’re doing well and that you and your father have resolved things…” OR “Mike, I’m proud of you, you’ve been able to put the past behind you and are now working to help your parents… given some of the things that occurred, that’s quite impressive…”

· What I came to realize (or actually remember), any neighbors we had on either Quincy or Thurlow would have (and did) hear, listen and witness things that they’ve not forgotten. I knew that in the summer, with the windows open, that neighbors 10’ away would have heard the loud arguments and much more since my blue bedroom (where most of the physical and verbal abuse took place) was < 10’ from our neighbor to the North on Quincy. On Thurlow, when I was older and learned to always sit near an entrance, I would run outside every time Dad would blow up so his verbal abuse from across the street was legendary. Each time he’d throw me out, disown me and tell the world that I was not his son and that I was just a huge embarrassment that he was ashamed of, was all done outside where everyone around heard and listened. Moreover, Dad’s favorite put-downs and “phrases” such as “you’re worthless and will never amount to anything” were (at least during those first 10 – 12 years when we were on Quincy) said to me at any time and anywhere; it didn’t matter is cousins or Aunt and Uncles were around; although, after about 12 years (or about the time we moved to Thurlow), Mom had been influential in getting Dad to stop saying certain things about the kids outside of our immediate family, thus, he was coached on how bad his behavior reflected upon him and he became more cognizant of who was present when he’d go off.

Ø Therefore, between my bad dreams, my memories, those repressed memories retrieved via hypnosis, countless therapist opinions, my Minister (actually two of those), dozens of self-help books and self-actualization seminars/workshops/courses on being your best and being yourself and more than 3,000 diary entries, I believe I know who I am and I remain very disappointed that my siblings cannot see how their everyday actions of excluding me, not showing me respect and accusing me of lying are all actions intended to provide cover for Mom and Dad’s conduct and behavior.

§ What they don’t see is that I don’t blame out parents; however, they’d have to go through my writings to understand why I believe that’s true and that my actual intent for talking about any of these things is not only to seek truth and knowledge but to break down barriers, demonstrate how much of what went on was handed down from the previous generation and that the ONLY thing I want to ensure is that the dysfunctional, negative, critical and homophobic attitudes DO NOT get handed down to my nieces and nephews. Mom would ask “why do you bring that up?” “Mom, I bring it up because no one has brought it up previously, thus, it becomes engrained and passed down to the next generation. I DO NOT WANT ANY NIECE OR NEPHEW TO GO THROUGH EVEN SOME OF WHAT I DID; I WANT THEM TO FEEL BUILT-UP, NOT TORN DOWN!!

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lovingtrance · 3 years

Text

I got dumped

On December 21st my partner of 5 years, who I lived with for 2 and a half, told me he’s no longer attracted to me and only views me as a best friend. He said there’s more in store for him than “just a safe relationship.”

While we were together I was keeping a running list of all the reasons I loved him. But for my own well-being I’ve decided to start keeping a running list of annoying and toxic things about him. I’m posting it here for your viewing pleasures:

1. I had to constantly remind a grown man he had to brush his teeth. Often times having to convince him to not skip it bc he would sometimes go days without brushing. And this was NOT due to depression. Truly. It was just laziness and a lack of urgency to practice basic hygiene.

2. He would pick his nose and wipe it on just about anything. Furniture, his clothes, his side of the bed, my side of the bed, his car seat no matter whose car, etc.

3. He’d constantly ask “are you gay” as if it was a joke.

4. In general he reveled in pushing my buttons and saying things that I found boarderline offensive.

5. Near the end especially, but in general it was like pulling teeth to get him to spend time with me doing something he didn’t have a personal investment in. If it wasn’t an activity he enjoyed he didn’t want to do it with me.

6. When I would try to spend time with him 9/10 he’d say “I’d rather play call of duty.” His call of duty playing was a daily occueance. On weeknights it was from the time he got home from work until bed. He’d stop just to spend about 30 minutes with me for the dinner I made. This was EVERY NIGHT. And on weekends it would be about 3/4 of the weekend every time.

7. A few days before NYE of 2019 (to celebrate the start of 2020) he went out with a few of his friends to drink. Apparently someone said they didn’t like my plan for NYE and another person agreed. He took offense to that and came home drunk and angry. He ranted about how much he hates them, hates our home town, and how mad he was. I tried to calm him down and he got mad I wasn’t on his side and threw a chair across the room while yelling so loud it woke his parents and sister. He then went to his bedroom and I tried to calm him and he got mad I was “taking their side” and tried to physically kick me off the bed. As if he was a toddler.

8. When I said “no you will not treat me that way. I’m not your punching bag” and called a friend to pick me up he tried every manipulation tactic in the book. First he called to apologize. Then when that didn’t work he tried to plead and promised he didn’t mean it and he wasn’t trying to hurt me. Then he turned and said it was typical that I left bc everyone leaves him and I don’t care. I’ve never cared. After that tactic didn’t work he said he was going to kill himself. All while his sister was texting me saying he was just eating chicken strips on the couch watching TV.

9. The next day he gave me the silent treatment and treated me like I was the one who hurt him and I was the problem. He was trying to give me the cold shoulder so I’d break down, beg for his forgiveness, and beg him to open up and forgive me and talk to me. This was a typical thing for him in the past. If I ever told him he hurt me or tried to put up a boundary for my own mental and physical well being he’d flip it and put up a wall so I’d have to beg him to open up and I’d end up being the one apologizing.

10. He cheated on me in 2016 with women he’d meet up with from Craigslist for casual hook ups. He then insisted we were never exclusive even though we absolutely were and had already said I love you to each other.

11. On my 22nd birthday we went out to bars together. He had a list of bars he wanted to stop at. We’re from MO and were in San Francisco. The 3rd or 4th bar had a bouncer who saw his MO ID and insisted it was fake. I was using my passport since my ID expired on my birthday. When I told the bouncer I’m also from MO and the ID is legit they gave it back but turned us away. That made him mad so we went home and then he got upset I didn’t want sex. I sort of agreed anyway but then withdrew consent. He got SO mad about that. He started screaming and shouting about how I was jerking him around and he was upset and confused. He threw his fan at the wall and broke a hole in the wall. He started pacing around the room and then I called a friend and said I was leaving for my safety. That made him even more upset and he started pacing around the hallway of his apartment building while NAKED. I convinced him to cover up but the manic episode continued and he paced in the street as well. The cops were called by a neighbor. I was mortified. But we stayed together bc I couldn’t find my ID to be able to leave that night. Then we slept it off in separate buildings and came back together the next day to talk it out. We both apologized and stayed together.

12. About a year before that he got upset I couldn’t have Skype sex with him every night even though I was a full time student working a full time job. He frame it as though he was willing to make compromises for me but I refused to do the same for him. Even though I’d already forgiven him for the Craigslist cheating caused by his “sex addiction”

13. He said he was breaking up with me bc he wanted more “intimacy” and knew that he was meant to have a relationship that had more spark basically. He made it seem like yet again I was the problem for not having enough sex with him. Despite the fact I tried to initiate sex with him many times over the last few months and we would reject me almost every time. Often times saying he would rather play call of duty.

14. When we first moved in together I did some laundry. A few days later he realized a few random things were missing. A pair of underwear or two, a shirt. He accused me of losing them by forgetting them in the apartment laundry room. I swore I didn’t but he didn’t believe me and yelled at me. I told him they’re just clothes and I’ll replace them and he still yelled. I suggested maybe he forgot them back at his parents’ house but he swore he didn’t. A few days later a package arrived from his parents containing all the “lost” clothes. I did not receive an apology until I requested one.

15. We were long distance for the first few years of our relationship. I would go to visit him every spring break and fall break (my school had fall break). Once when I went to visit we went over to his frat house for a party for st. Patrick’s day. I was having a good time getting two know two foreign students (one girl and one guy). When we walked back to his place we were sitting outside the building while he smoked a cigarette and he got mad at me and asked me why I acted the way I did at the party. I was confused bc I didn’t think I was acting differently than usual. He said by making friends with those people I was basically being obnoxious and annoying- like I was trying too hard. It broke my heart. It was like he expected me to just be a wall flower or hang on his hip the whole night. It was so unfair bc obviously I didn’t know anyone there it’s not my school. So did he just expect me not to have a good time?

16. The one other time he had me go to a party at the house I went to the bathroom on my own. I remembered where it was and told him “I’m going to the bathroom” and got up from my seat. When I came back he was being weird to me and basically implied he thought I walked away to go cheat on him?... even though I was gone less than 5 minutes and I knew no one there!

17. Once in late 2017 early 2018 one of my close friends came over to hang out and drink wine in my living room. She mentioned she’d done this app called Cake where you live stream whatever and people pay you. We decided to just sit around in our underwear and drink wine to make her some extra money. I told him about it and he freaked out. He contacted her on FB and went off on her telling her she disrespected our relationship and manipulated me. He told me I was drunk and let my friend manipulate me. I told him that’s not true at all and everything I did I did bc I wanted to and was comfortable doing so. I never crossed a line. I never even interacted with a person. We just set up a camera and barely acknowledged the comments. He was acting like I was his child or property and I didn’t have agency of my own. He also told me I cheated and I needed to admit I cheated so we could move on. As if it’s not my body and my choice who I allow to see me wearing the equivalent of a bikini. And he definitely had no right to contact my friend and scold her and shame her. He acted like I was his to control and I was a toy my friend took and misused without his permission. It was disgusting and so painful to deal with. I felt awful about myself for days.

18. He was and is such a hypocrite. He even admitted to me before the Cake incident that he once did cam stuff but quit bc he was bothered by how many men tuned in and barely any women. He was also hypocritical about spending money. He would criticize me for spending $50 on new clothes at target or wanting to spend $30 every few weeks to splurge on eating out. But then he’d spend $100s-$1000s of dollars at a time on his hobbies like gaming, bowling, his guitar, etc.

19. In April of 2020 I told him I wanted us to be more romantic. I wanted us both to be better about making an effort to show each other we had a romantic attraction to one another. He told me “you expect too much. You ask for too much.” This is the same man who 8 months later told me he was leaving me bc there was no more “spark.” I EXPLICITLY asked him to work with me to keep the spark going and he said “you ask for too much.”

20. Also in April of 2020 he got upset the recycling bin was starting to smell. Over time some of the containers had leaked the small bit of contents they had left and created a film on the bottom of the bin. He blamed me because he “always rinses containers before recycling them.” I tried to explain “yeah but that’s just because you leave them sitting on the counter to be rinsed and then never rinse them. I too am bad about not rinsing, so I just put your pile and my stuff straight in the bin.” I explained that technically yes, I recycle more items, but only because he leaves me to do it. He told me I HAD to clean the bin. I said “I’m not your servant. I’m not at your beck and call and I don’t HAVE to do anything.” That made him angry so he said “maybe I should just pour milk all over your clothes then?” Shocked I of course asked “why would you do that?” I also wondered “what clothes? The clothes I have on the drying rack next to the kitchen? Or the clothes in the closet? The ones I’m wearing?” He said “you pour milk in the recycling bin. It’s the same thing.” Like truly- what a manipulative, illogical ASSHOLE.

21. When breaking up with me he told me “I’m sure you’ve noticed I haven’t wanted to have sex with you the past few months.” I said “yes I thought it was stress from work.” Then he said “no I’m just no longer physically attracted to you.” I asked what we could do. Should we spice things up? Should we go to a sex therapist? He said there was no point. But fear not reader- it’s not that he’s gay (yes he felt the need to clarify that) it’s just that he’s not attracted me specifically. He said honestly he just wasn’t happy because there was no spark. And there was this (apparently) indescribable element that had never really had been in all 6 years. There had always been something missing that he had in other relationships. I said THERE WAS ONLY ONE OTHER RELATIONSHIP WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! He had one other serious girlfriend before me and they were together between the ages of 15-18. Yes he’d had other flings and sexual partners obviously, but nothing that even came close to the level of commitment or sheer length of relationship we had. But sure- go ahead and compare what we have to a high school relationship and a handful of college hookups.

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