#then did some cramming for term papers

[nymfaes]

sabine: dragon deez nuts????

#ts4 #the sims 4 #nym:g #a1 #g:archer #ts4 gameplay #ts4 legacy #ts4 legacy gameplay #i think shes having hella fun on campus #pranked a couple toilets #then did some cramming for term papers #if u cant tell im just making up moodlets as i go along hahaha

[fakegingerrights]

A Little Support

[Wrecker x Medic!reader, warnings for mentions of medical issues, other than that just fluff! Oh, established situationship, kinda, nothing too lovey dovey. I write with a female reader in mind but try and keep it gender neutral so tell me if I mess up.]

“Hunterrrrr.” You smiled slightly as you hear Wrecker’s groan from the hall. Hunter had called earlier, said he wanted you to look Wrecker over. The bad batch had no real medic, so finding proper care was hard.

“C’mon big guy, they’re your favorite.” You snorted quietly at Hunter’s coaxing tone. “You were so sore after this last mission you could hardly lift your arms. They’re just gonna check and make sure you haven’t pulled anything.”

Wrecker huffed, and rolled your eyes. Pressing a button on the desk you opened the door to your small private workspace. Wrecker jumped a little at the suddenness, but Hunter just rolled his eyes.

“You boys gonna sit out there arguing all day or come in.” You sass, standing up and walking over to the exam table crammed into a corner, unrolling a fresh layer of tissue paper on top. Hunter patted Wrecker’s shoulder.

“Go on, Wrecker. I’ve got some paperwork to finish.” He started to walk away, leaving a slightly bewildered Wrecker.

“You’re not staying?” He called at Hunter’s back. You chuckled, fussing with a drawer full of instruments.

“Oh come on, Wreck, I don’t bite.” You smiled innocently at him.

“No… you stab though.” He mumbled, walking over to the exam table and flopping down with a grunt, wincing a little and not even trying to hide it. “Tech’s gotten enough sedatives to know that.”

“No needles today, promise.” You march up to him and fold your arms. “Stiffness in your shoulders, huh?”

Wrecker nods. “Just a little bit though. It’s been worse. Long necks always brushed it off so I do too for th’ most part.” You frown a little. Kaminoans brushing something off? Especially a long term injury?

“Armor off, top half only.” You think, trying to remember if you knew where they were coming back from. “Blacks too, if you’re comfortable.”

Your frown deepened as he rolled down the top half of his blacks. Bruises and scrapes were dusted across his back, stretching all the way down to the bottom of his ribcage. His armor had taken the most of it, but it looked like he had been thrown pretty hard against something.

“Maker, Wreck! What happened? Did you have Tech look you over?” You asked, instantly grabbing a tube of bacta gel from the cabinet behind him.

“Wall was in my way. Tech said it wasn’t bad, just a deep… fancy word for bruising that starts with C.”

“Contusion?” You supply, pulling latex gloves on before you began applying the bacta to the worst of the bruising.

“That’s the word.”

You kicked the bottom drawer out off the table, the drawer being sealed off to make a step so you could reach his shoulders. “How long have you had soreness like this? Your shoulders are really inflamed.”

“Uh, always?” He sounded confused. “Tech said it was probably ‘cause of my size.”

You nodded, not that he could see it. “Does wearing your armor help?”

“Kinda, with m’back.” He rolled his shoulders as you finished, and a small part of you took a moment to appreciate the slow ripple of muscle. Wrecker’s good eye lit up as he noticed you staring and he winked with his bad one. You just rolled your eyes fondly.

“I’m gonna try some stuff, wear it for tonight and tomorrow, ok? I’m gonna see if I can wrap your shoulders and back, since I doubt we carry a brace in your size.” You grabbed a roll of kinesiology tape from yet another drawer, a couple different kinds after a moment of considering. “Got all different colors and everything.”

“What’s it gonna do?” He looked at the different rolls.

“It’s… hmm. You know the hydraulics under the ramp of your ship?” You ask. He nods.

“Yeah, Tech’s had me lift the ramp when he fixes ‘em.”

“Ok. Think of those hydraulics as your muscles, and the ramp hinge as the joint. Without the hydraulics working, the ramp breaks, right?” Wrecker takes a moment to think about this for nodding.

“Yeah. This last mission it broke while Cross was usin’ it as a ledge to line a shot up off of and it almost dumped him into a canyon!” Wrecker laughed. You chuckled as well, while also making a mental note to drag Crosshair in by the backplate if need be.

Wrecker seemed pleased at getting to laugh nonetheless. You tapped the rolls of tape. “Right, like the ramp then. These help your muscles along a bit, so there isn’t as much strain on the hinges, your joints. It also is good for taking the strain off in general.”

Wrecker nods, following along. “They go on my skin? And stay there?”

“A couple days if you can keep yourself from tearing them off.” You supplied. “Ok, scoot. I gotta sit behind you to do this. Wrecker slid to the edge of the table and you climbed up behind him, grunting as you kicked off the ground to hoist yourself up. The bench height table for Wrecker came almost up to your ribs.

He held still as you took the backing off a piece of tape and pressed it to his shoulder, stretching it as you pressed it down until it was fully on before rubbing it to seal it in place. Wrecker’s skin practically radiated heat as you worked, forcing you to push away the urge to just press yourself against him and doze. It had been a long day.

Wrecker was quiet as you worked, a tension you hadn’t noticed seeping out of him as he slowly relaxed into your touch as you worked your way down his back with the kinesiology tape. You added a second layer on his lower back to help the strain on the muscles there before going back up to his neck one last time to double check everything, smoothing a hand down the patchwork of brightly colored tape.

“Ok, how does that feel?” You asked, sitting back a bit. You couldn’t see his face but Wrecker seemed to pout a bit at the loss of contact. He stood up and stretched, several joints cracking as he rolled his shoulders.

“Kinda weird.” He grunts. You snort.

“Yeah, it will. That’s just temporary until we can get you proper braces.” You smile softly and pass him the top of his blacks. He pulls it on, giving you one last chance to discretely admire the amount of work the kaminoans put into him even if they are heartless sleemos who screwed up a perfectly good man in their desperation for a perfect specimen.

Wrecker pulled his head out through the top and you looked away, flushing slightly and clearing your throat. “Is that everything, trooper? Not gonna pull a Crosshair and try and hide injuries from me?” You tease as he tucks his stack of armor plates under his arm.

“Hah, we might have to drag you back to the barracks t’ look at him.” He shot right back.

“I can make a house call later.” You begin collecting your mess of flimsi and datachips from your desk. You were surprised when scarred hands helped you with the mess, pushing the pile into a neat stack and dropping them on the desk to even it out before handing it to you. It was hard to tell on his dark skin, but his ears were looking a little red.

“And if I want you down there in case I mess the tape up?” He asks, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand.

“Wrecker, are you trying to take me home for the night.” You lean forward on your desk, watching as his eyes go wide and his entire face goes red as he tries to explain himself. “Relax, I knew what you meant.”

You knock your hip against his as you pass, taking the flimsi stack. You bounce right off, but Wrecker still seems a little stunned.

“I’m gonna change and grab dinner for us, ok? After all, Crosshair probably needs to be checked after he nearly fell down a cliff.” You were playing coy and you knew it, but Wrecker still lit up like a kid remembering their birthday was tomorrow. You watched in amusement as he fistpumped the air in celebration before realizing you were watching him.

“Oh. Uh, I’ll see you soon?”

“Sure, Wreck. See you soon.”

#wrecker x reader #tbb wrecker #tbb wrecker x reader #the bad batch #clone wars #tbb x reader #wrecker x you #GingerWrites

[lcatala]

A Review Of Nimona

Despite some reservations, I really liked Nimona.

I open with the conclusion because this review starts off quite pessimistic and is rather long, so that way those of you who won't make it to the end will not leave with the false impression that I didn't like Nimona; I really much did.

I have a complicated relationship with 3D animation.

Well no, actually, it's a pretty simple relationship: I hate almost all of it.

It's not that there's any reason why 3D animation cannot be good in the abstract. I'm not a medium snob; you can tell good stories in live action, in 2D animation, in 3D animation, in stop-motion, with hand puppets, with shadow puppets, with paper cutouts ; in theory, it absolutely doesn't matter.

Except, in practice, most 3D animated films range from mediocre and forgetable to actively repulsive.

Visually, they almost all look the same, to the point that it's really hard to distinguish studio styles at all (without looking it up, between Coco and Encanto, which is Pixar and which is Disney?) Storywise, it's all very pain-by-numbers, hero's-journey crap with little deviation. But what gets those from merely nondescript to actively annoying is the tone. So so many of these movies revolve around "hype" and "cool" teenagers who constantly strike poses, raise their eyebrows, and talk in one-liners. Everything is manic and noisy, there's not a single moment to breathe, because if nothing stimulating happens on screen for more than three seconds, surely the audience will stop watching, so there's always someone gesticulating, dancing, singing, making faces, or all four at once. And everything has to be crammed with pop culture references and topical allusions so that the audience can relate.

Don't get me wrong, it's good to have media you can relate to, media that speak of modern problems and adress a modern audience in its own terms. But there has to be less insultingly condescending ways of doing it than shouting "HELLO FELLOW KIDS" over and over for 90 minutes.

Let's be clear: this isn't happening because the people involved are not competent or because the budgets are too tight. Very talented people work hard (routinely to the point of exploitation in fact) on these movies, and they actually get quite strong budgets reflecting the benefits they're expected to make.

And that's the actual problem: there's too much financial stake in 3D animated films, too many producers and shareholders breathing down the neck of everyone else, too many committees trying to craft the perfect crowd-pleaser, too many rewrites and re-rewrites, too much fear of failling to capture the children-and-teenager audience and losing hundreds of millions. So everything must be made to appeal to the widest, shallowest base as possible, and every second of screentime must be an attention-grabber that leaves absolutely no chance of anyone getting bored.

Mirroring this, there's no reason for 2D animated and stop-motion movies to be inherently better than 3D ones. They are so in practice because big studios see them as uncool and no longer profitable, which means that the only people who still make these kinds of movies have to actually deeply care about them and go in with the full awareness that their next project might well be a commercial flop that will set them back for a decade on the project after that or might even end their career.

So when it was announced that Nimona, a webcomic I had really liked for its quirky, original, both humorous and dark tone, was going to be adapted by Blue Sky Studios, who had afflicted the world with not one, not two, not three, but five Ice Age movies, well, I was not happy at all, because that seemed like worst possible match. It was hard to imagine them doing anything other than remove anything remotely interesting about the story and turn it into a generic seizure-inducing mess with poop jokes because that's all that they do with their movies.

I feel bad about it retrospectively, but my first instinct when I heard that the movie was cancelled was to rejoice that we had been spared from what would certainly have been a complete disaster and a terrible insult to the original comic. And the revival of the project, while it was always a positive for the actual people involved, left me largely indifferent.

Who would I have had instead to adapt this into a movie? Why, Cartoon Saloon of course! A fantasy story about a free-spirited, hyper-active, shapeshifting red-headed girl and the friendship she seeks with another outcast character, leading to a fight against the instutions of law and order that turn out to be corrupt and evil? Why, they would have loved making that movie.

Except they did make that movie. What I'm describing is not just the premise of Nimona; it's also that of Wolfwalkers, the absolutely amazing 2D animated film that Cartoon Saloon released in 2020, as the third part of their "Irish Folklore Trilogy" (following The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea).

Ok fine then, if Wolfwalkers already exists, it would be redundant for Cartoon Saloon to make it again, so I guess Nimona can be in its own thing; if it doesn't work out, I'll just rewatch Wolfwalkers.

Then I saw that ND Stevenson, the author of the original comic, was actually really enthusiastic about the project — which in itself isn't a definite proof, many times has a creator be enthusiastic about an upcoming adaptation of their work only to get burned when the actual thing came out, but at least it was a positive sign. Maybe I was going to give this movie a chance.

Then the movie came out, and I saw a lot of positive reviews from people who I trusted not to be easily swayed by any old crappy animated film just because it had some queer representation. Ok, ok, fine, y'all win, I'll watch it.

So I watched it and… I actually had quite a really good time.

I liked that there actually was a conscious stylistic choice in the animation, this sort of 3D-2D hybrid technique, like very-advanced-cel-shading seems like it's a lot more flexible when it comes to actually give an animated movie a distinct, signature style — and it blends in a lot better than pure 3D, as seen on how Ghibli has used those techniques for complex individual shots since Princess Mononoke in 1997 — a movie mostly made in 2D traditional animation, but that has a number of digitally made shots seamlessly incorporated using those 3D-painted-over-to-look-like-2D techniques. By the way if you like Princess Mononoke, you should also watch Wolfwalkers, it has a number of similar vibes!

I liked the humor! For the most part, it worked, and some jokes were actually pretty clever in their absurdity, like having Nimona pull out a polaroid picture she's somehow taken a few minutes ago just for the sake of a visual gag, even tho we've already established that this is a futuristic fantasy setting (which is also a thing I like, the worldbuilding was pretty cool) where everyone has smart phones (but it also works as a subtle early hint that Nimona is much, much older than she seems).

I liked that queer representation was front but not center: several main characters are openly, explicitely queer, but this isn't a plot point, this isn't something that they have to defend or call attention to. It's just a normal character trait, and the problems, drama and obstacles these characters face do not stem from them being queer.

I liked the story, the themes it went for and how it executed them, twisting traditional feudal fantasy and hero's-journey tropes but without being heavy handed and obnoxious about it, showing that you can play with a genre and pick apart its problematic implications without being a scatological edgelord about it (yes I loathe the Shrek franchise, why do you ask?)

It still has some of the things that make me strongly dislike modern 3D movies, but it's contained. It's here and there, but not to the point of ruining the story. Yes Nimona is an out-of-control nuclear-powered goblin, but the movie actually goes into why she is like that, and suddenly it's a lot more interesting to have a character be manic and constantly at 11 because she has a lot of pent up anger and insecurities about being alone than just because that's a quirky character trait to throw in randomly; and the movie does manage to have a few quiet and reflexive moments, and those matter a lot in the story.

I am of two minds about its qualities as an adaptation. On the one hand, even if this is a very different story from the original, the themes are there, the spirit of the original story is there; different media have different strength and what would work in comic format wouldn't necessarily work in an animated movie. Having the movie tells its own story makes it less redundant compared to the comic, more complimentary — you can know the one by heart and still get surprised and awed by discovery when you get to the other. And updating the material can be good; people always complain about Disney's track record of sanitizing fairy tales, but I can assure you that you don't want to see a faithful adaptation of Sleeping Beauty on screen. In general, an adaptation making significant changes to the story isn't a deal breaker for me, some of my favorite movies massively depart from their source material, usually for the better.

On the other hand, it seems to be almost a constant with animated adaptations that the source story is going to get discarded. It gives the feeling once again that the people involved in making these adaptations do not take the medium seriously and cannot imagine that these stories could stand on their own without needing heavy rewriting, that they can't see them as deserving a faithful adaptation. I understand why a lot of these changes happened for Nimona, but I still regret some of the stuff from the comic. Like yeah, it's very clever that in this version, Nimona has essentially no origin story and actively refuses to talk about how she came to be, but then we miss out on this absolute wham moment from the comic, Ballister telling her "Nimona, you forgot your own backstory!"

So in the end, I have to take the movie for what it is, rather than look too closely as what it is an adaptation of. Those are two different takes and stories on the same characters and themes, both with their strong points, and I think I can live with that.

So in the end, I had a pretty good time. It had some small issues, it's probably not the best version possible of that story, but it's still far, far better than anything I was expecting. I you loved it, I do still recommend checking out Wolfwalkers as soon as possible if you haven't already, you might well love that one too.

#nimona #nimona 2023 #nimona movie #nd stevenson #movie review #old person yells at cloud vibes #a nimona review but actually it's propaganda for wolfwalkers #no but I actually liked it I swear #wolfwalkers #3d animation #2d animation #rant

[raccoon-eyed-rebel]

Part 2 - Play it by ear

Masterlist

Series Masterlist

Part 1 -- Part 3

Pairing: CollegeAU!Sherlock Holmes x OFC (Elena) 

Summary: Sherlock helps his friend study for an exam, and she teaches him some new things in return... 

Warnings: Rated M for making out, second base stuff, boobs. This is mostly fluff, marked awk for awkward and slight emotional crisis (it’s Sherlock. Every emotion is a crisis...). Mention of deadlines and assignments - for those of us who are in uni or relive the anxiety every damn day of their lives.

Word count: 6.1k

A/N: The writing here is like superduper different from the last chapter, but enjoy virgin!Sherlock, he’s bby. Also; I just realized that the timeline of this fic is a bit of a tripping hazard...

I promised I tried to proof and edit this. Typos may be registered with the Office for Typo Registration, open every February 29th from 10.00h - 10.01h.

Anywhoozles; not really a lot of smut under the cut today. 

It was a little past three when the professor finally dismissed his students. Sighs of relief sounded throughout the lecture hall. Laptops were slammed shut and crammed into bags, books and papers were gathered in sloppy piles and hurriedly carried out: practically everyone was looking to get out of the room as soon as possible. Only two people behaved as if they hadn’t just been assigned a huge paper with an impossible deadline. For one of them, this behavior could be explained by the fact that he was the professor, and therefore indeed did not have to write said paper, the other was simply deeply opposed to hastiness. It was not for nothing that diligent and thorough were among the first words that came to many a mind when asked to describe Sherlock Holmes. Other descriptors included unsociable and strange. Lastly, and heard perhaps less often than one might expect, there were the terms young and genius. After all, Sherlock had a keen mind, which had allowed him to reach his third year of law school when he was yet to turn nineteen. 

Unhurriedly, the young man began his commute home. Immersed in thought, he didn’t notice the small redheaded woman that appeared next to him. Only when he had finished outlining the freshly assigned paper in his mind did he become truly aware of his surroundings. 

“Elena,” he spoke, the baritone of his voice dark and warm - cozy, almost. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “For how long did you allow me to ignore you this time?” His chuckle was as comforting as his voice. 

“I didn’t want to disturb your thoughts,” Elena replied. She had before. It had vexed him at the time, as the pair had barely known one another. Now, however, they had gotten better acquainted - much better, one might say - and he found that she was one of very few people whom he allowed to disrupt his thinking. 

“And your saying so,” he mused, “shows precisely why I would allow you to.”

“I’ll be sure to remember.” Elena fidgeted with an unraveling seam on her bag. “Sherlock, you took Criminal Law two years ago, right?” There was only one possible answer: he was in his third year, therefore he must have taken and passed that particular first year course - it was mandatory. 

“Naturally,” he said, hesitantly. His head turned toward his companion, one eyebrow raised in confusion at the strange inquiry. Elena wasn’t usually one to ask rhetorical questions - it was something he quite liked about her. 

“Would you help me prepare for my midterm? I’m struggling with the material a bit, and I missed some things when I was sick last week.” She averted her eyes when she asked him, the deliberation of her actions completely lost on Sherlock, who felt something that resembled anxiety at the gesture - though for the love of God he could not figure out why. He had come to terms with the fact that she was one of the few people he could not read very well - as if his sharp instincts and attention to detail left him the second she stepped into the room. Though he did always notice when her hair fell differently, when she wore a different perfume, or when her makeup had left tiny colored specs on her cheeks. Of course, that was something Sherlock considered without value when he could hardly keep track of what she was saying. He simply thought his talents to be of no use in her presence. 

“I’d be more than happy to,” he said. His face held a familiar smile that was wider than was normal for him, but - as was so often the case with this particular smile - he couldn’t help himself. “I’m free this weekend?”

“Right now?” She smiled shyly. Sherlock replied with just a nod before suggesting they might use his room to study. 

“I have some notes that may be helpful,” he quickly added, as he suddenly became afraid that his offer had come across as untoward. It was as if he had forgotten that for the past six weeks, they had spent every Saturday in that room, rehearsing their pieces for orchestra. Nothing had ever been strange about that. Not to him, at least, and his mother had raised neither a savage nor a fool; surely he would remember it if he had been improper. He remembered that first encounter vividly, often replaying the memory in his head.

“You are quite good,” he had said to the new addition to the orchestra. She had been sat next to him, in the usual place for the second violinist. 

“Thank you,” she had replied, blood creeping up her neck, finding its way to her cheeks. She had heard about him. Sherlock Holmes, the famous - though among his peers all but notorious - first violinist of the university orchestra. In stories of him, which rather often were filled with complaints that he received special treatment, he was often portrayed as a pompous arse. She could see now, that these tales were nothing but the product of jealousy. He truly was remarkable. “You are very good.” 

“Thank you, that’s awfully kind of you,” Sherlock had said, and for the first time he had felt this peculiar smile, that was so much wider than he was used to, creeping onto his face. “Sherlock,” he had introduced himself. He had never entertained the thought that it may not have been necessary, that she had already known who he was. 

“Elena,” she had replied. 

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Elena,” he had said. And before he had good and well thought it through, he had added: “Perhaps we might rehearse together sometime? If you’re free, of course.” He had been unable to determine the source of the incredible anxiety had felt in the limbo between his asking and her answering - or that of the intense relief when she not only accepted his proposal, but did so rather enthusiastically. 

Her laugh tore him away from his memory of the experience. 

“Sounds fantastic,” she said, the smile on her face widening as she looked into his eyes. As he looked back into hers, he noticed the intensity of their color - green - and the little gold specs in them - but he missed the slightly provocative twinkle they held. His eyes wandered over her face, slowly, carefully, as if he thought he would otherwise disturb it. He noticed the thick, long lashes that framed her eyes. The freckles on her nose and cheeks, where - as always - her make-up had left tiny brown and golden specs. Sherlock’s heart was beating so hard that, despite being well aware that it was impossible, he feared it would break through his ribs and escape from his chest. Still, his eyes remained locked onto her face, wandering further down to her lovely smile. He noticed her teeth were a bit crooked, which he found strangely endearing. Her full lips looked soft and dewy - undoubtedly the work of that cherry-scented chapstick she was always applying. Its scent paired nicely with the sweetness of the perfume she wore almost every day. Today, Sherlock noted, was no exception; he inhaled the delicate aroma with every breath. His thoughts ran away with his sanity, his gaze clung to her alluring mouth, even as she moved it to speak and he only vaguely registered her voice. The movement of her lips, the fragrance that surrounded her, and his erratically beating heart gave way to new sensations. Blood humming in his ears. A lump in his throat that refused to be swallowed away, no matter his efforts. The familiar rush of blood… down, and the subsequent tightening of his trousers.

 “Sherlock?” Her hand waved through his field of vision, breaking his trance-like state. “Let’s go?” Her eyes were mischievous, something Sherlock would have picked up on immediately, had it not been for his current affliction. In fact, the young man was not even aware of this condition. He had questioned his health and his mental faculties, surely, but was yet to arrive at the appropriate conclusion. Elena, however, recognized the symptoms of his ailment immediately. He was two years ahead of her in university, sure, but she was two years his senior and more than a bit wiser than him when it came to the less intellectual and more instinctive truths of the human condition.  

“I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head as if that would rid it of those thoughts. It did not; if anything, it made him look ridiculous. He extended a hand. “Allow me.” 

Only in the first few weeks after making his acquaintance had Elena attempted to decline his offer, but resisting the charm of this man was something she had ultimately found exhausting and unpleasant. Now, she would normally opt for a coy smile and a thank you, but she was feeling playful today. “Always such a gentleman.” She practically purred the words as she handed him her bag, making sure to touch his hand in the process. She relished his reaction; the twitch of his hand as her skin came into contact with his, the sharp breath that escaped from between his slightly parted lips, the soft blush that slowly crept from beneath his collar, his averted gaze. She felt a little bad for toying with this sweet guy’s emotions, but since she shared his feelings, she saw no real harm in having a little fun. 

The pair made their way to the house on Crescent Street that Sherlock shared with seven other students. Elena had only ever met two of them; August Walker - because he had been leaving the house one Saturday morning just as she arrived at the front door - and Walter Marshall - because he took the Criminal Law course with her and he had recognized her when she’d been trying to find some space for her jacket on the coat rack in the hallway. The fact that Sherlock kept to himself - and kept her to himself - didn’t upset her. In fact, she rather liked it: There was very little pressure to socialize, which she found rather relaxing. 

“Ladies first,” were the familiar words with which Sherlock ushered her through the door, accompanied - as always - with a simple gesture. They climbed the stairs to his room in silence. For the first time, Sherlock dreaded the moment they would soon spend behind his bedroom door, in the cramped space that led to the attic stairs. The room itself was spacious, but that tiny hallway - calling it that was a stretch, even - barely held two people, and it was impossible not to touch each other. Elena, however, looked forward to that precise moment: It would be a good opportunity for some close physical contact. Once they arrived at the second floor of the house, Sherlock muttered something about the bathroom. 

“I’ll be right up,” he spoke. You’ve been up for a while, Elena thought to herself, but she bit her tongue and swallowed the words, offering up a sweet smile instead.

 “What is the matter with you, Sherlock?” He chastised himself while looking at himself in the mirror as he leaned over the sink. His knuckles were pale from the iron grip of his hands on the white porcelain. “Pull yourself together.” Stop thinking about her, he thought to himself, which - naturally - had an effect contrary to his desires. It finally dawned on him, as he felt himself harden at the thought of her beautiful lips, that perhaps the explanation for his reaction wasn’t rational at all - which explained perfectly why he didn’t care for it. Real panic set in when he considered the possibility that these were feelings she did not reciprocate, and he found, much to his dismay, only one short-term solution to this problem: to ignore it completely. An entirely unsatisfactory remedy, and likely ultimately unsuccessful at that. 

“Yes! You’re absolutely correct!” He exclaimed proudly as she answered one of his more difficult questions with a very thorough rebuttal. Criminal law had been a fantastic distraction from the earlier troubles, and it had kept the two of them occupied for a few hours. 

“Thank goodness, I don’t think I can take much more of this today!” Elena sank back into her chair and let her knees fall to the side slightly. “It’s only eight, after all.” 

Sherlock buried his face in his hands. He often lost track of time, and he was usually careful not to drag others along with him. “I’m sorry,” he chuckled softly. Somewhere in his mind, he knew that this time, he had done it on purpose, for fear of her wanting to leave. Her hand reached for his thigh, and his muscles twitched at the touch. 

“I can go get us some Chinese food, as a thank you?” Sherlock gratefully accepted her offer.

Shortly after Elena had left, Sherlock walked downstairs, and stood hesitantly in front of the door at the far end of the hall. He couldn't bring himself to knock, but could neither persuade his legs to walk away. After a minute or so, the person on the other side of the door yelled: "It's open, come in." Sherlock often forgot how good Geralt's hearing was. He entered the room, hesitation in his steps, his stance, his expression, and closed the door behind him. Geralt was laying on his bed, reading what looked like a book on Celtic mythology, not bothering to put it down just yet. 

"Sherlock," he said, a simple acknowledgement of his presence, no question or judgment behind the remark. It was something that Sherlock admired about him, though it could be quite annoying at times - when one was in search of questions or judgments, for example. Tonight, he was in luck, because as much as Geralt aimed to steer clear of other people's business, he did consider Sherlock a good friend, and he could tell something was the matter. 

He snapped the book shut and sat up. "Trouble?" Lengthy conversation would just make the both of them uncomfortable, that much was clear. 

"Girl," Sherlock sighed as he leaned his back against the door. 

"Even worse," Geralt laughed. "The violinist?" Sherlock couldn't answer, so he opted for a sigh, hoping it sounded enough like a confirmation. "Her name seems to have slipped my mind, I'm sorry," Geralt chuckled.

"Elena." Sherlock spoke so softly it was barely even a breath. He figured it would suffice for Geralt's impeccable hearing - and he was correct. 

"Right," he chuckled, "and you have finally come to the conclusion that you’re attracted to her?" Another affirmative sigh escaped Sherlock's lips. 

"Thank heavens," Geralt said bluntly, "your denial was becoming quite annoying." Sherlock opened his mouth to speak but Geralt raised his hand, beckoning him to be quiet. "Do I need to remind you that not much will happen when you're in your housemate's room making idle conversation, instead of in your room? With her." 

"Firstly, Geralt," Sherlock snarled. He knew Geralt had said it with no intention of mocking him, but it aggravated him nonetheless. "She's not currently upstairs. And secondly," a sigh broke up his rambling, and Sherlock found himself unable to regain his stern tone. "Geralt, I… I can't do this. I cannot make sense of these feelings. I can't stand being… consumed by them." And unlike any of the others in the house, save perhaps Walker - but anyone who had ever had the pleasure of dealing with August understood immediately why one would opt out of having this particular conversation with him, Geralt understood the sentiment perfectly. 

“For those of us who actually seem to enjoy being in control of our mental faculties, it can feel like surrender,” he said matter-of-factly. 

“It feels like the beginning of a steady descent into madness,” Sherlock confessed. The remark made Geralt laugh. This, too, he understood, though he had learned by now that it wasn’t true. “Why is that funny?”

“It isn’t, I’m sorry,” Geralt shook his head, still laughing. “Look, I can tell you… If you really like her, it won’t go away by doing nothing. That’s your descent into madness, right there.” Sherlock groaned and vowed that this was the last time he’d ever looked up from a book for long enough to ever see another woman. “You can’t fight biology, my friend.” At least that made some sense to Sherlock - in fact, it made him consider that what he was feeling could be completely rational, after all. The science behind it was solid enough. 

“And Charles doesn’t spend most of his nights in company because it’s a terrible way to pass the time.” Geralt grinned. Now it was Sherlock’s time to laugh.  

Geralt’s head turned suddenly. “That’s her,” he said as he got up from the bed and walked over to where Sherlock was standing. In passing, he grabbed something off the nightstand. His efforts to keep himself far from these situations couldn’t change who Geralt was at heart: a reluctant father-figure to his friends - especially the younger ones. “Can’t believe I’m doing this. Here.” Sherlock didn’t have to look in order to know what he’d just been handed. “Fucking hell, they’re condoms, not scorpions. Just...” 

“Thanks,” Sherlock muttered, more than a little embarrassed that Geralt had just assumed he would be this unprepared for a situation such as this one. Nevermind that his presupposition was correct; it was mortifying nonetheless. He was grateful, though, that his friend was looking out for him.

“Take them.” Geralt ran a hand through his hair. “Oh, and talk to her.” 

Sherlock knew better than to overstay his welcome and opened the door, just as Mike came up the stairs, closely followed by Elena. He waved at Sherlock and Geralt. “Hi, guys!” 

Geralt raised an eyebrow at him. “Don’t you have company?” 

“Yeah, speaking of,” Mike turned to Sherlock. “Could you keep it down tomorrow morning?”     

“Of course,” Sherlock said. He received the request quite often - sometimes incited by guests, but equally as often caused by the prospect of copious amounts of alcohol. And if it was Charles who was asking, it was almost certainly both. 

“Thanks!” Mike beamed. “G‘night, guys! Nice to meet you, Elena!” And with that he adjourned to his room. 

“He seems…” Elena got no chance to finish her statement on her first impression of Mikey. 

“Annoying?” Geralt snickered, a crooked grin on his face, while shaking his head in disbelief.

“Spirited?” Sherlock offered, as he launched an elbow into Geralt’s ribs with more force than anyone would reasonably suspect from a bookish, violin-playing law student. 

“I was going to say ‘nice’,” Elena mumbled, slightly taken aback by the banter. 

“Oh, Mikey’s great,” Sherlock confirmed with a smile. “This is Geralt, by the way.” 

She looked at the white-haired figure in the doorway, as he extended a hand towards her. “Elena,” she said as she shook Geralt’s hand. Her thoughts were scrambled for a moment when she met his gaze. His eyes were a striking amber color - beautiful but peculiar, in a way she couldn’t quite articulate.

“Pleased to finally meet you,” Geralt said, “Sherlock talks about you quite a lot.” Before Sherlock could even scowl at him, he stepped back into his room and shut the door. 

“So, you talk about me a lot, huh?” Elena chuckled when they finally made it back to the attic. Sherlock chuckled nervously as he sat down on the leather couch and set the food on the small table in front of it. No matter how many times Elena saw this room, that couch still looked too big for it. On her first visit, she had wondered how it had ended up here in the first place, as it was obviously much too big for the stairwell. Sherlock’s answer had surprised her, as she’d been absolutely positive she never asked the question out loud - it had been moved in through the window by his predecessor, and no one would dream of ever moving it out again. If the stories of Geralt and Walker were to be believed - and they generally were - people had nearly died in the process. Despite being too big for the room, the couch only fit two people - a feature Elena made sure to exploit by joining Sherlock on it. 

“Well?” She asked him, flashing a suggestive smile. 

The world seemed to spin faster and grind to a halt at the same time, the room became both hot and cold, and Sherlock’s heart started yet another attempt at escaping his ribcage. Good grief, why did she have to be so close to him? Everything he had felt before, when they had been studying at his desk, returned to him; this time without the distraction of criminal law - it was just them now.

“I… ehm…” Sherlock stammered, unable to answer her question. Thoughts whirled through his head in an unfamiliar fashion: rapidly and erratically, and free of logic or order. Of course he talked about her often. He spent more time with her than with practically anyone else. His housemates had been teasing him relentlessly for weeks, saying he fancied her. And now he was beginning to think they were right, as he could barely keep his eyes off her when she was with him. And she continuously made her way back into his thoughts, sometimes even distracting him while he read, and Lord knows he was never distracted while reading. Now, here he was, deafened by the sound of his heart pounding in his chest, and bouncing his leg restlessly, unable to will himself to stop - figuring he should probably stop chastising Mikey for doing that all the time - and it was all because of her. Because she made him so incredibly nervous. Because maybe he had fallen for her. In other words: Geralt may have been an absolute knob for saying that to her, but he wasn’t wrong.

“Sherlock…” she giggled. When his eyes met hers, a wave of panic washed over him. Elena was looking up at him in a way that could not possibly mean anything other than that he had just said every last one of those things out loud. To her. He raised a hand, intent on using it to cover his mouth, but she grasped it and pulled it back down gently, while her other hand reached for his face. She traced his cheekbone with her thumb, her fingers resting lightly on his jaw, and he leaned into her touch. Elena softly caressed the side of his face before bringing her fingers to the nape of his neck, and attempting to pull him closer. Sherlock resisted her pursuit, clenching his jaw as his nerves took over his mind from his desires. He looked away for a moment, only to return his eyes to Elena’s and smile apologetically. 

“Don’t tell me you’ve never kissed anyone, Sherlock!” Elena blurted out. She always knew that he was inexperienced, but such complete innocence was unexpected, bordering on unbelievable. Surely she couldn’t be the only one who was as charmed by him as she was? 

“Not telling you won’t change the fact that I have, indeed, never kissed anyone,” he muttered under his breath. Her apparent incredulity did not help his nerves, and he was surprised to hear himself speak at all. Elena’s hands set his skin ablaze with a vast desire until every fiber of his being begged for it. It took everything he had to control himself, to prevent himself from doing something so legendarily foolish that his friends wouldn’t let him hear the end of it for years to come. 

“Well, do you want to?” Elena asked, a playful tone to her sweet voice, mischief in her eyes. Sherlock swallowed hard, but found himself ultimately unable to make the lump in his throat disappear. Thus, he just nodded, and let himself be pulled closer to her. 

She placed her forehead against his. For a moment, they just sat there: eyes closed, heads resting against each other. The sweet fragrance of Elena’s perfume, the sound of her breathing, and the feeling of her skin against his, engulfed Sherlock’s senses, filling him with eager anticipation. A soft sound, a combination between an exasperated sigh and a lustful moan, arose from between his slightly parted lips. He shivered and drew in a sharp breath as Elena’s soft fingers drew a line along his jaw. She rested them underneath his chin, her thumb tracing the dimple in it, and tilted his head. Then, Sherlock felt Elena’s soft lips brush against his so incredibly lightly that it took a moment before he realized he wasn’t imagining it. The last shard of self-restraint he had been clinging to so desperately shattered at the contact, and at long last Sherlock allowed himself to be enveloped by affection and desire. He reached out the hand she wasn’t holding and placed it against her cheek, holding her head in place as he leaned forward and pressed his lips against hers more firmly. She responded eagerly, though her answer was not as feverish as his request. With wicked determination, she paced the kiss; slowing down right when his mouth so hungrily sought more, and picking up speed each time he finally accepted a gentler rhythm. Without mercy and almost devilish was her approach, and by God did it have the desired effect. The hand on her cheek found its way into her hair, the other crept up to her waist, where his fingers dug into her with surprising force. He let out a moan; dark, frenzied and filled with pure, unadulterated passion. What had caused her to fall for him, had been his calm and collected nature. Not once since meeting him had she dared to dream of ever seeing him like this: consumed by carnal greed, frantically gripping at her in search of release. Moans occasionally made way to almost pitiful whimpers - questions, or rather, pleas; to indulge him, come closer, give him more, something, anything. Oh, how powerful she felt to have a man like Sherlock pour into her arms like this, to see him reduced to a mere shadow of himself in her delicate hands. Elena chuckled at the thought, causing him to withdraw from their embrace. Concern emerged from deep in his eyes, steadily catching up to and overtaking the yearning in them. Sherlock struggled to catch his breath, still firmly in the grasp of the ache that pulsed like fire through his veins. It was heightened further by the sight of the lips he now no longer needed to assume soft. He knew them to be, yet he longed for proof as much as - if not more than - before. Alas, her laughter had roused his insecurities, and they were picking at his brain like starved crows at a morsel of bread. He wondered what could have inspired it, what he had done wrong. Had she just been leading him on, and was she now relishing the sight of what she had reduced him to, only to break him completely, later? 

Then, amidst his contemplations, he heard her voice once again, only this time it was no laughter that escaped from her pillowy lips. Caught in between ragged breaths, wrapped up in a moan, more intoxicating and provocative than he had ever dreamt possible, was his name. The sound of it so utterly rife with pleasure that it awakened once more the wanton desires within him, their scalding flames more excruciating than before, and even harder to quench. Her eyes, positively drunk with lust, together with that very moan revealed to Sherlock that she currently found herself in a predicament remarkably similar to his - only this time it was Elena who succumbed to the unrelenting pressures of her yearning. She moved towards him with resolve, pushing him into the couch by his shoulders, as she swung one of her legs over his. Sherlock was startled by her sudden advance, but did not protest. Elena sat down on his lap, one knee on either side of his hips, arms around his neck, hands running erratic patterns through his dark curls, down his neck and over his shoulders. Sherlock was surprisingly muscular, she discovered, which would have been in no way helpful to any attempt she might have undertaken to compose herself. Luckily, she had no intentions of embarking on such endeavors. Instead, she chose to give Sherlock as much of herself as he would take, and longed more than anything to receive what he was willing to relinquish to her, in return. As her fingers trailed along his neck and shoulders, she mapped the spots that caused the muscles in his thighs to twitch beneath her. His eyes fell shut at her touch, and his hands rested comfortably next to him, on her thighs. Soft groans emerged from his chest as her fingers explored his body, seeking out the sites that stirred his arousal. His hands brushed along her thighs, up towards her hips, where they caressed her sides as they traveled further to her waist. One hand rested on her back, while the other made its way to the nape of her neck. He pulled her towards himself, his touch tender yet demanding. Elena saw no reason to resist, and happily fell into his chest. Her lips found his again, her hands continued their expedition. Sherlock found himself overwhelmed by the many sensations he experienced, until Elena’s tongue trailed his lower lip and the feeling forced itself to the front of his mind. Hesitantly, he granted her access, allowing her tongue to slip into his mouth. It felt strange, but not unpleasant, he concluded as he imitated her movements. When Elena sucked gently on his bottom lip and softly sunk her teeth into it, he let out a loud moan. She tilted her head, still holding his lip between her teeth, softly tugging on it as he gasped quietly at the unexpected stimulation. 

To his displeasure, the pressure disappeared from his lip, as Elena broke the kiss and pulled back. For a moment, it saddened Sherlock that her face was moving away from his, but when her head dipped and her lips brushed the stubble just below his jaw, his chagrin gave way to yet another surge of exhilaration. She meticulously sought out all the sensitive spots in his neck, causing him to squirm beneath her touch. Slowly, he became aware of the nimble fingers that pulled at the hem of his sweater.

“Take it off,” she sighed, her mouth barely leaving his neck. His hands took over for hers and he hastily complied with her request. Before the jumper was even off, Elena’s hands were already working to loosen his tie - and making remarkably quick work of removing and discarding the garment, too. The buttons of his shirt were next, and they, too, succumbed under the touch of those slender fingers, one by one. He had admired those fingers so often, as they moved through the most difficult passages of a piece with confidence and ease, but not once had he dared to dream that someday - this day - he would experience them from this perspective. Elena played him like she did the violin; with great enthusiasm and determination - though perhaps with even greater skill. Sherlock pushed against her shoulder to steer her away from his neck. Then, after cupping her face in his hand and guiding it back to his, he kissed her passionately while his hands traveled to her waist, where they gently slipped underneath her jumper. Her hands undid the last button of his shirt and it fell open, exposing his chest, which Elena took as an invitation to rake her fingers across his skin. The feeling of his remarkably solid chest and the coarse hair on it heightened her desires; it caused the ache between her legs to grow and her to lean into him even further, to press her lips to his more urgently, and to kiss him more frantically than she had ever kissed any man - or anyone, for that matter. Sherlock answered, spurred on by a surge of longing brought on by the clash between his skin and her hands, by slipping his hands under her blouse, exploring the naked skin of her back and sides. Elena did not hesitate; she pulled away from him to reach for the hem of her jumper. Her eyes never left his as she pulled it over her head. As soon as she let go of the fabric, her fingers returned to her blouse. Only the minimal required amount of buttons were undone before this garment followed the same trajectory as the one before.

“Wow.” Whether he spoke the word or simply mouthed it, neither of them knew or cared.

Sherlock’s hands fell still around her waist, his eyes widened. The sight of her was almost too much; her long, auburn hair framed her face in the most enticing way, her mischievous smile and the longing in her eyes drained him of coherent thought with every passing second, and when his gaze dropped to her now exposed torso, he was positively done for. His eyes seemed glued to her chest; it heaved as she tried to catch her breath, and the motion hypnotized him. The soft curves of her breasts were so tempting that his hands all but itched to reach out and touch them. He could swear his fingers moved of their own accord, palms creeping up ever so slowly, along her sides, until his thumbs lightly brushed the underside of her bust. Elena used every bit of strength she had to stay where she was. The look in Sherlock’s eyes had her beside herself with lust, but she reveled in his attention and admiration, and she wanted to prolong it for as long as she could possibly manage. Every minute movement of his hands fueled the fire that consumed her from the inside. The thin fabric of her bra was not enough to conceal the hardening peaks of her nipples - a fact that Sherlock seemed to pick up on as well, as his hands traveled up her sides further. She whimpered as he used his thumbs to lightly brush the buds through the thin material. Suddenly, he gripped the nape of her neck and pulled her in for a kiss. It was frenzied, messy, and quick, as he immediately moved away from her lips and kissed a path along her jaw to her ear. Where this courage to push aside his nerves and continue his quest had come from, he did not know, but he decided that the opportunity should not be allowed to go to waste. His lips worked their way down her neck: kissing, gently sucking and biting the sensitive skin, teasing it with his tongue. Her moans filled the air, her fingernails dug into his shoulder, and she could no longer stop her hips from grinding into him. In that moment, Elena wanted only one thing; to get even closer to him, feel more of his skin against hers, to truly melt into him and chase that sweet release. Feral groans heralded similar desires on his part. Their frequency increased as his mouth inched closer to her collarbone with every touch of his lips, every nip of his teeth, every gentle flick of his tongue against her skin. Encouraged by the desperate pressure she used in an attempt to hurry him along, and the fingers that tugged at his hair as a different means to the same end, he continued. One of Sherlock’s hands tenderly cupped her breast, squeezing lightly - at first. His movements became more erratic as she whined and moaned louder and louder with every touch. His other hand copied the actions on the other side. The way she was writhing in his lap, rubbing herself against the bulge in his trousers with every move - it was maddening beyond belief. Sherlock rested his head on Elena’s breastbone, wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close, and took a deep breath in hopes it would save him from losing his mind completely. Both of her hands cupped the sides of his face and tilted his head so as to allow herself to look into his eyes. He smiled up at her, eyes filled with love, or lust, or perhaps both. When he spoke, it was so calmly, with such softness and affection in his warm, dark voice that the sound pierced straight into her soul. 

“You are so beautiful.”

-> Part 3

#Henry Cavill #henry cavill fanfiction #henry cavill characters #henry cavill sherlock holmes #sherlock holmes #HC sherlock #sherlock x ofc #sherlock holmes x ofc #geralt of rivia #geralt #virgin!sherlock #first kiss #much anxiety many wow #179 crescent street #179CS #179CS2

[carnal-lnstinct]

HII if you’re still open for requests i just finished this semester’s finals can i get some fluffy praise and worship from Raditz for this tired af college student 😹 sfw or nsfw up to you 👌🏾

RADITZ X READER

☆☆ Content: ( au, fluff, praise, size difference, pining ) ☆☆ Warning: ( M / 18+. MINORS DNI. explicit language )

☆☆ A/N: sfw is for yellowbellies! (joke) put that old man in a sex-tuation

You flopped yourself into the mass of black spiky hair and lightly bounced off the solid muscles hidden beneath. The most relieved you have felt all week. Having found your way to him from your work desk, it was all you could muster from the long week of finals. Hitting “submit” on your final term paper, you finally allowed all of the stress and exertion of the last few days take you and sought out solace from your lover. You let out a weary sigh into his back and feel the tug on his mane as he tried to look over his shoulder at you.

You hear him snort, a quiet laugh at the way you sank against his back. An agreement that you’ve had enough of those tests. Raditz could do nothing but observe you throughout the week coming and going to your classes, then disappearing into your little home office to study and sigh and tap away at your “tiny console” until your eyes were heavy and dry.

“All done now?” He speaks up, tilting his head further in an attempt to look at you. His tail makes itself known when it brushes against you. "Did you pass?"

You squish your cheek into his upper back and pout. "I don't care." Wearily left your lips as you sigh again. You were just happy to be done with it for now. Raditz’s brow arches at your response and gives a thoughtful hum in acknowledgement. His right hand comes over his left shoulder for you.

"Come here." He encourages. Insisted, really. You take it and he guides you around him. Releasing your hand he uses the same arm to swiftly scoop you up against his side and carry you off to the nearby couch where he left the tv running. You find yourself in his lap as he sits, your back now up against his protruding chest and his tail resting across your thighs. "You know you did."

"I don't yet." You answered in a mutter. The whole thing was just an expectation you didn’t want on your overstimulated nerves right now. With a moment to catch your breath, it was better not to think about it. But the saiyan wouldn’t let up from the topic just yet.

"After all of that, you assume otherwise?"

"...No, but-"

"-Then you passed. There's no reason to doubt now." A crooked, yet playful grin rises in his features and a large hand pets the top of your head, affectionately rocking it from side to side until you shake him off.

"You're just saying that." You rolled your eyes, giving his hand a swat so you could lie back against his chest. Undeterred, Raditz then cups your chin, your cheeks squished between his rough thumb and fingers giving your head a light tilt toward him.

"Tch, Because you're acting like you're afraid to admit it." He insisted with a more profound smirk, a sense of pride in his eyes looking down at you that now overshadowed his prior teasing. "The worst thing you could do was not do it at all, you need to remember that. Now you can take pride in knowing you bested it!" Raditz boasted on your behalf, giving your efforts the praise it deserved in the end. Even he knew a sharp wit was worthy of some acclaim. All the limits you pushed yourself to with the knowledge you’ve gained to finally triumph your “exam labors” as he referred to it had to have some ego under your exhaustion. And he would happily remind you.  "Now be a good girl. Worry about the little things later."

 Looking up at him, you can see his thick brows lift over his eyes as his expression lightens up watching you soak in his words. He loosened his grip on your chin and stroked it with his knuckle instead.

 To be where you are now at the end of the semester, everything else did feel like a blur of deadlines and cramming black and white words from a screen. The load was lifted off of your mind with only your final grade to review when it came in. Then all is said and done until next semester rolls around. Raditz stood by celebrating this as opposed to seeing it as just another boulder up the hill as you had internalized in these last few weeks.

 He may not fully grasp the full expectations of the human educational process, but he’s been helpful to you. Even when he’s simply looming by you waiting for your attention, whether impatiently pining for the chance to fuck you silly or trying to distract you. He knows your schedule and tried to keep you on it each day as you forced yourself to study to the last minute. He flies faster than any vehicle you own and got you to every campus class when you overslept, and rushed you back home hoping you’d spare the extra time you had with him.

 You thoughtfully lower your eyes with a soft bite on your lip. Then, you let a deep breath drain the remnants of your stress away, leaving a soft smile in your lips. "Thanks, babe." You finally answer him, placing your smaller hand over his with a charmed twinkle in your eyes.

He’s been waiting to see that smile. His other arm pulls you further into lap as you settle back against his chest and he lets you have that moment of peace you sought as his thumb idly stroked your jaw. Literally, counting down the minutes until his hand slips around your jaw again, this affection but firm grip forcing you to tilt your head back as he leans over you.

“Now that you’re finished, you owe me for blowing me off all week.” He spoke in a rigid, low tone, indicating his frustration of not having you when he wanted. A blend of his neglected desires and his annoyance over it made his voice low, darkening his natural rasp. “You're all mine again…”

The rough sound in his voice made it clear you were in trouble, but it never failed to excite you either and helped you find your second wind for the evening. Evident in the flutter of your heart in your chest when his other arm left your waist and forced down your bottoms to completely expose you.

“Why do you insist on testing my patience knowing what I’ll do.” He seemed to scold you, the best way he could express himself over things he genuinely cared for. You’ve been able to see through his harshness and knew it wasn’t really about just having sex with you, but it was the only way he wanted to show his feelings right now. You both deserve it, really. The way he cradled your head in place gave you a view of him shaking your panties free of your lower dressing and clutching them possessively in his fist. You watched as his eyes darkened in his intrigue at the delicate fabric and brought it up to his face, first burying his nose in it to take in the scent he’s been starved of. Then his tongue dragged against the fabric where it consumed his senses the most, the tip of his tail starting to thump against your bare thigh. His actions reminded you of an animal, nothing he does really surprises you anymore. Moreover, it captivated your attention to see the raw side of an alien man discover his fascinations.

That’s when his other hand left your face and stretched out the collar of your top as he seized one of your breasts with an equally possessive squeeze. The hitch in your breath was enough to take his attention away from the panties and let it fall from his hands. Raditz wets the tip of his fingers on his tongue. Even with his impromptu lube, the roughness of his fingers isn’t lost on you when he starts to stroke them across your clit, his tail now wrapped around one of your thighs to help with holding your legs apart. The way you arched into his touch made him chuckle to himself, toying with your nipples one at a time and soaking your bloom to slick his own fingers until he could easily bury two of them inside.

The stretch stole your breath, making you grip on his wrist as if to hold onto the last of your composure in the intensity of the warmth his touch gave you. Naturally, your legs opened further to embrace the pleasure until he sought to feel you completely fall apart under the thrust of his fingers, his tail, then, was the only thing holding your legs from clenching around his hand.

He didn’t spend too much longer simply playing with you, removing his slick fingers to replace it with his thick cock. He’s been aching to feel you around it, loving the way you fit him. Almost like a glove had he not have to be mindful of how fragile humans were compared to a saiyan’s endurance. Oh, but those instances that you do and your eyes roll into the back of your head would send him into a frenzy fit for an Oozaru. The worship he carried for you being so ripe with lust and able to take all of his cock. He needed this to be one of those exceptions, so he continued to feed you inches of girth while he tended to your sensitive clit to help you along the way.

#♚ ;; [ requests ] #raditz x reader #raditz imagine #dbz fics #dbz imagine #nsft #lemon #My writing

[frostandflamesfanfic]

Make It Back for Christmas (Steve Harrington x Reader)

Make It Back for Christmas (Rated T)

Pairing: Steve Harrington x Reader (gender neutral)

Word Count: 1.9k+

Warnings: Mild brief language, holiday fluff, pining Steve and Reader

Summary: It's the last week of the semester and you're dying to head back home to Hawkins for the holiday festivities. Not only that, but you haven't heard from your boyfriend in a week and you're already going through withdrawals. Will you be able to make it back in time for Christmas?

God, you hated finals week. 

This wasn’t like anything you experienced in your high school years. Or was it? Thanks to the last semester of all-nighters and unbelievable amounts of cram studying, the last four years all blended together. 

Three exams. You had three exams this week. Plus a term paper, a research project… one of your professors thought it would be fun to have an exam and a nine-page paper due the same week. Was it nine pages single-spaced or double? Hell if you knew. Your brain had already begun to hurt just thinking about everything you did to army-crawl your way through to break. Even though most of the hard work was done, you weren’t out of the clear yet— you still had a five hour drive home on Saturday and you hadn't packed yet. 

You just had to select a college five hours away. You hated being away from your home of small town Hawkins, Indiana. You missed your family, your friends. Some nights there was nothing you wanted more than to spend a few hours at the local arcade or the neighboring video store. 

The only thing that made everything seem a bit more bearable was your boyfriend. Usually, Steve would be the first one you would call and talk to after your latest exam or assignment, but you haven’t been able to reach him in days. The two of you had gotten together the summer before you left for college. It was a sweet summer romance story. You had known each other for years, practically growing up together. It was the typical cliche: two friends who had been skirting around their feelings throughout high school, mainly due to one garnering a reputation. 

Although, when you were with Steve, that’s all he was: Steve. Not overly cocky King Steve, not party keg master Steve; he was Steve Harrington, your best friend since preschool who always stole your peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because you hated them. The same Steve who would sit with you for hours in the backyard watching the clouds or the stars, listening to you talk about your superficial problems like they were an international threat of war. The Steve who was so terrified going out on his first date with Samantha Hollis in the sixth grade, he spent most of the morning excessively brushing his hair and gargling mouthwash in your bathroom while talking about his big first kiss plan — a conversation that later had your stomach turning and your dinner in the upstairs toilet. You hadn’t realized it at first, but you had fallen head over heels for your best friend. 

When you finally recognized and came to terms with your feelings for Steve in junior year, it had been too late. He had already started his “perfect” relationship with his dream girl: Nancy Wheeler. You had no malice toward the girl. In fact, you were both good friends. It was just hard to maintain that friendship when all the conversations ever gravitated toward was, well, your shared connection. 

“Steve and I were going to see that movie!”

“Oh, you’ll never believe what Steve said the other night.”

“Oh my god, isn’t he so clumsy? It’s adorable.”

Forced smiles and friendly nods became second nature for you. All you wanted was for Steve to be happy. If he was happy with Nancy, then you were happy for him. You had to admit they made an attractive couple. She was helping him in ways you never could, helping him succeed instead of just encouraging him to try and make a change. They were an unstoppable team. Steve didn’t need you anymore and you had to come to terms with it. You slowly began to distance yourself, just so you could sort through your feelings and not be awkward around them. It made things easier at first. 

Then Nancy broke his heart at Tina’s halloween bash. Suddenly you found yourself thrust back and immersed into Steve’s life once more. Only this time, you leaned into his touches a little more than usual. You two sat a bit too close at movie night. You split too many meals at the local diner. It was only when Dustin Henderson made a passing comment about how the two of you acted like an old married couple did you snap back to reality and attempt to distance yourself from Steve again. He didn’t need to lose the love of his life and another friend at the same time because you couldn’t keep your feelings in check. So you resorted to only hang around him with the kids when he needed to play carpool, taking them to the arcade, or the farmer’s market, or even the grocery store to pick up 

This only seemed to confuse your best friend. “Why aren’t you spending time with me?” he asked you when you brought El and Max to the mall over the summer. 

“What are you talking about?” you tried to appear nonchalant, like you weren’t doing this on purpose even if it killed you. Unfortunately, your poker face needed some much needed work. 

“No, no,” the look he gave you that day would haunt you forever. Steve looked like you had just kicked his puppy right in front of him. “Don’t bullshit me. You’ve been avoiding me all summer since we graduated. The only time I ever see you is with the kids and even then you spend more time with Dustin than me!”

It was true. After Dustin had oh-so-kindly exposed your emotions, you had somehow convinced the child to be your partner in distracting you from Steve. Well, it was less of a convincing and more of a “if you breathe a word of this to anyone, I’ll lovingly end you” type of agreement. He stuck to you like Velcro when the three of you went out, making sure there were very few interactions that could lead into moments of longing. 

“It’s nothing, Steve,” you had tried explaining with no success. “Dustin just really wants my attention is all, I guess.” 

A frown on his face, Steve turned away mumbling something under his breath. You weren’t quite sure at the time, but it did sound oddly similar to, “he’s not the only one.”

It wasn’t until you found yourselves trapped in a Russian underground that you had to face more than one fear. Trapped in your own room, the soldiers tried to get you to admit how you found their base. They had even stabbed you with some type of drug, which you would only later discover its use. You couldn’t tell how long it was before you were released with the help of your best friend. Steve had looked so worse for wear, but even in the chaos, he was only concerned about your safety and well-being. 

“Are you okay?!” his slurred speech inquired as he ran hands up and down your arms before cradling your face. 

You weren’t sure if it was the stress or the inclusion of a truth serum in your system, but you did the only thing you could think of to answer his incessant questions: you leaned forward and kissed him. 

And he kissed you back. 

From that moment on, everything was different. You had gone from being best friends, to two people who went out to dinner, to being in an honest to goodness relationship. Just over a year later, you’re sat in your dorm room with a receiver broadcasting a busy signal in your ear. 

This was the sixth time this week Steve hadn’t answered the phone. He hadn’t called for his daily good morning or good nights. He didn’t call to check in on you during what he knew was going to be a stressful week. Concerned about his safety, you reached out to Dustin several times, who assured you that Steve was fine. He was just busy with all of the families renting out movies for the holidays. You knew you weren’t entitled to his time, but all the same…it had been a long week and all you wanted was to hear your boyfriend’s voice. 

Allowing a sigh to escape your lips, you dialed Steve’s number again, this time with the intent to leave a message. When the recording of his mother’s bored yet powerful voice played, you bit your lip to refrain from showing too much emotion over the phone. “Hey Steve,” you started. “It’s uh, it’s me calling…again. I just wanted to let you know that I, uh, that I miss you. Miss hearing your voice, seeing you. And I hope that you’re doing okay. Just a few more days until I can start my drive home and see you!” 

You let out a sad chuckle as there was a knock on your bedroom door. Your roommate, Allie, probably wanted to use the phone since you’d been hogging it for a few hours. “Oh, I gotta go. Call me back soon, okay? Love you.” As you hung up the phone, you moved to open the door. “Sorry, Allie. Just wanted to make sure-“

“Make sure I was doing okay?” A familiar voice cut you off and your breath caught in your throat.  You couldn’t believe it. Standing in front of you with rosy frost bitten cheeks, tired eyes, and the brightest smile you’ve ever seen was Steve. “I’d say I’m doing much better now that I’ve seen you, sweetheart.”

Without much thought, you ran into his arms and kissed him. And kissed him. And kissed him one more time, just for good measure. It was messy, all smiles and awkward breathing, but it was perfect. “What-“ you stuttered in surprise once you caught your breath. “What are you doing here? Why haven't you called?!”

Steve grinned sheepishly, head bent down to stare right in your gaze. A few strands of his perfectly unruly dark hair fell directly in his line of sight and you automatically moved your hand to brush it away. “I knew if I picked up the phone it would be really hard for me to keep my mouth shut. Did you really think I’d let my baby drive home alone for Christmas?” he said with mock disdain. “I don’t think that would make me a very good boyfriend, do you?”

“I have a car.”

“Yeah,” your boyfriend nodded in agreement, “but why waste gas if you’re not going to use it in Hawkins.” 

You frowned. What was he talking about? 

“Baby, you’re with the Harrington car service,” Steve’s smooth voice rolled over you like honey. “It’s door-to-door service, even during your trip.”

“….so you’re kidnapping me and not letting me drive my own car.” 

Steve gave a small huff, shoulders slouched. “Gee, when you put it like that…you really sucked the romance out of it, babe. You know I did just drive five hours-“

You silenced him with a gentle kiss to the lips. While not as rough or as passionate as the first reunion, it was just as loving. Your fingers curled around the soft fabric of his white Henley top and pulled him closer. He stumbled a bit from the action, but soon rested his hands on either of your hips, a low hum vibrating his throat. 

“I love you,” you whispered. 

The smile on Steve’s face stretched out to be a mile wide. “I love you, too, baby,” he replied, pressing a quick kiss to your temple. “Now come on. Let’s get you all packed up.”

You laughed at his dramatic hand gestures before he crossed his way into your room. “Your chariot awaits, my dear,” he mused, turning his head to glance back at you over his shoulder. “It’s time to get you back home for Christmas.”

====================

Author's Note: So this is happening. Is everyone excited?! To say I've been looking forward to this event for the last month plus now. I just want to give a small shout-out and thank you to two very amazing people, @bakerstreethound (for encouraging me to keep writing) and @upsidedownwithsteve (for inspiring me to try my hand at this -- so sorry for the tag!).

Writing this and some of the other fics for this event have me convinced Steve would be the perfect boyfriend around the holidays, even if he may be a bit of Scrooge sometimes. The number of times I've smiled writing these pieces...I've lost count. But stay tuned because we have a lot more headed your way (including some dad!Steve...)!

If you liked this post and want to see more like it on my blog, please make sure to leave a comment and reblog it! While likes are appreciated, it's these two things that really help spread the word about my writing and motivate me to keep making new content! Until next time, my little sparks! <3

#steve harrington fanfic #stranger things #steve harrington #steve x reader #steve stranger things #steve harrington imagine #steve harrington drabble #steve harrington x reader #stranger things x reader #stranger things imagine #joe keery #joe keery imagines #frostandflamesfanfic #twelve days of stevemas #ficmas22

[gokartkid]

inception au chalex that will NOT BE A FIC. until i finish everything else <3

Some people think that being in dreamshare is glamorous, and full of action, like you’re some sort of a James Bond. 

Right now, with a piece of toast crammed inside his mouth and a bit of toothpaste dripped onto his skinny blue tie, Alex would like to give a big middle finger to those people. 

His phone starts ringing furiously in his back pocket and he swears, wipes his greasy, buttery hands on the tea-towel on the counter. He chews and swallows too quickly, can feel the toast travelling in big chunks down his oesophagus.

“Hullo, Albon speaking.”

“Alexander, that is seriously such a creepy way to answer your phone mate,” Charles says on the other end. 

“Sorry, just trying to maintain some professionalism here,” Alex rolls his eyes. He pats at the white stain of toothpaste, then does his tie up quickly. Simple, not any kind of fancy Windsor knot. He wasn’t that kind of prep school boy.

“Do you have everything ready with the files?” 

“Mm hm,” Alex shoves his phone between his cheek and shoulder, as he rifles around the loose papers on his desk. He prefers to be digital, everything stored on his laptop, but Charles is a pieces-of-paper-pinned-to-a-board type. It’s like he can’t think properly on a google doc, has to be able to highlight and draw arrows and circles and whatnot. Alex thinks it’s the best indicator of his personality you could get.

“And-“ Charles sounds excited, “-I have finally gotten in contact with George.”

Alex pauses, in his frantic search. He hadn’t really expected Charles to be able to get him, to be honest. Of course, that was one of the reasons that Charles was up there in terms of point men. He was frightfully good at pulling stuff and people together, even if he seemed a bit in his own head at times. Nobody could avoid him for long before he was borderline banging down your door, cherubic smile on his face. 

He replies after a delay, too long to be strictly polite.

“Ah. Okay, so what did he say?”

“He said he is in, and asked if we were still working together.”

Alex’s mouth twists.

“And-?” 

Alex’s phone bursts into static as Charles laughs. He really has to get a better microphone; Alex knows for a fact that he’s talking into his airpods that he dropped into the river the last time they went out drinking together. They miraculously came back to life after soaking overnight in a bag of rice, but they had never been the same. 

“I said of course we are.”

Another pause. Alex sighs.

“And what did he say to that.”

Sometimes, getting a story out of Charles is like pulling teeth. 

“Well he just made a noise like-“ he sighs, staticy “-and then said oh yes of course he will fly over, and where are we, and can I send the contract.”

Alex frowns. 

“That is okay?”

Charles can also be, alarmingly perceptive.

“Yeah. Yeah of course, alright, look, I’ll get to you in a second.”

“No problem, I know how you are in the morning.”

Alex splutters.

“Just do not forget the compounds, I don’t want to have to talk to Max about getting more of his formula, and Daniel is on holiday.” 

Alex hangs up on him. Charles is probably cackling on the other end. He had been about to forget them, but he wouldn’t tell him that. Five bottles with sticky styrofoam glued to them protectively, held suspended in case. Clear liquid, just a bit thicker than water, swirled around in brown glass. 

He pulls up to the office that they’ve rented out with his suitcase, laptop bag slung over one shoulder and two coffee’s in his hands. He blends right in with the other suited, corporate drones walking to their jobs, nothing about him suggesting why it is he’s elevator-ing up to an abandoned and empty 4th floor, sandwiched between a law firm and a co-op workspace. 

Alex had dropped out of architecture halfway through his degree, but had done well enough for his professor to earmark him for the dreamshare project. That is, he’d done well, got the dreamshare project, then promptly flung himself out of university in order to make more money than he ever, ever could designing buildings and infrastructure. 

Charles had been a part of that initial uni group too. Alex remembers walking in and seeing him, knuckles pressed into his face and half sliding down his chair, looking like he hated being there. He’d had deep bags under his eyes, and his hair stuck out from underneath a bandana wrapped around his forehead. 

He was easily one of the most attractive people Alex had ever seen. Alex had promptly wrote him off as an option entirely. People that looked like that, usually weren’t interested in advances from people like Alex.

George had been there too, in that little group that met late at night and laid down on the floor, all hooked up to a bulky machine. They weren’t architecture majors, all cobbled together from different degrees. 

Alex is pretty sure they’re the only three that actually broke through from that little group. The rest of them were somehow satisfied with the few hits of Somnacin, of only dipping into that endless, beautiful world of dreams the once. 

Charles is already under when he makes his way up, face still and peaceful, arm hanging down with the IV in. The machine is beeping steadily beside him. 8 minutes left, counting down on the screen. Decent time, enough for Alex to shuck off his jacket and push the sleeve of his shirt up; too starchy, he had to get it dry-cleaned after he spilled a bit of Chinese on it the other night. Sweet and sour pork. 

It’s a facsimile of Alex’s plans that he drops into, buildings that stretch up and then become hard to look at, half made, your brain struggling to fill them in. That’s the problem when Charles hosts dreams. They blur at the edges obviously, and there’s too much free space where a clients mind can take over, construct a whole world without you having control. 

When they need to use him for a layer, usually they make him do just a room, or the interior of a hotel that they never have to leave. 

“Ah,” Charles turns and smiles at him. “finally. I think I am finishing up in here soon, no? Just wanted to get an idea of how everything was going.” 

Alex nods, and spreads his arms. “Well. What do you reckon?” 

Charles crosses his arms and looks around.

“Obviously, it is not done yet, and I am not so good at filling in, but it definitely looks like the pictures. And there-“ he points to a bridge, further in the distance, “-that is where we would do it? The kick?”

Alex nods. Dropping a car off the side of a bridge isn’t so original, but it’s the easiest way to coordinate a simultaneous kick, since they’re going 2 levels deep. An intricate dreamscape, their most complicated so far between the ones they’ve put together as a team. Alex had done 3 layers once before, with others. It hadn’t worked out well. 

He rubs at his coin in his pocket, smooth and well worn. If he flips it, it’ll be heads, a shiny golden queen staring impassively back at him. 

They do a walk through discussing the little things; where the maze of roads needs to fit, the route the car will need to take, weaving through the city. Music starts playing faintly and muffled, the last ten seconds of a dream that stretch endlessly. 

Alex frowns, and then opens his mouth to say, incredulously, “is that Camilla Cabe-“

He blinks awake. Señorita is blasting out of the speakers and Charles is red-faced. 

“I didn’t expect you to be here! I wake up easier to this kind of,” he gestures, “anyway. Hello.”

Alex blinks, and then bursts into pealing laughter. 

#anyway alex is like exes with george in this and spends half the time pining for charles #and lewis and seb r here also very like. the seniors of dreamshare. im imagining its becoming slooowly more known #and they were pioneers #alex albon #my fic #charles leclerc #chalex #inception au #charles/alex #f1 #formula 1 rpf

[renizera]

How to make a strong academic comeback

My academic year started in February, and now it's August, which means I slacked off for nearly 6 months. I couldn't cope up with the academic pressure. Spent some months trying out new things ,hanging out with friends, trying to understand the new concepts and terms of the brand new fatass books. When the first exam knocked at the door, I couldn't help but cry looking at the 100 pages long syllabus just for one subject. With all the 13 subjects and huge syllabus, I did not know how to study all these just for 10 marks. It was like trying to swim in an ocean just after learning swimming . It was the same scenario for most of my friends. Just to fuel up my anxiety, my nerdy friends would say they haven't studied anything yet. I, of course, knew what "anything" actually meant. However, I crammed for exams and forgot most of them eventually, and of course, my score wasn't up to the mark . But I wasn't that serious because it was the same for all of us .It did bother me though,  i just didn't  let it affect it much until it hit me that my board exam is just 11 months away and ive hardly started anything . I am lagging behind in so many subjects. So it came to me that I SERIOUSLY NEED TO MAKE A COME BACK . And I did made a successful comeback and I am sure you will do too. So, HERE'S MY GUIDE TO MAKE A SASSY COMEBACK. I swear it truly works if you  struggle to be consistent like me.

1. CLEAN UP YOUR DESK RIGHT NOW   Put on some music on and just clean the desk, please. I know it might sound either ridiculous or classic to some of you. But believe me, it's the game changer. Why, you ask? Because, • It will be the source of motivation to study • You will be aware of your study materials • You will find out so many things that you thought were lost for months (I found 2 pens that i lost a year ago) • You will have a clear idea about the study materials you  need. • You might find your inspiration to study harder (like I found my old to-do list diary, and it reminded me how I nailed my national exam). It might boast up your confidence level. • Find out unused pages that you can easily reuse. • Let your mind wander, and it will relieve stress. • Finally, you will have a clean and arranged desk and a motivated clear mind.

Next, 2. Take a paper and a pen  Write down all the pending works . I know it's hard. Take time if you need it, sometimes, we don't acknowledge what we are lagging behind, so use the motivation and get going. I urge you to do this on the same day. If you did these 2 things you can either call it a day or you can

3. Put a timer of 5 mins and start studying 1 topic leave it after 5 mins . In this way, this unfinished task won't leave your mind, and you will feel intrigued to finish it. (source: yt :in59seconds )

4. Wake up 15 mins earlier next day and move your body You will feel a lot better I swear. Try to stretch everyday after waking up for 7 days . These 4 minimal task is easy to follow. I dare you to stop reading from here and get your asses up to get some work done. I wish you luck on your sassy comeback. You got this.

I will be back with more tips and tricks like this. So stay tuned and comment down if these tips helped you and update me with your sassy comeback. Love you.

#education #college life #school #studyblr #study motivation #study blog #studygram #sassy #motivating quotes #cool #lesson plan #notes #study desk #movies #pride month #moodboard #catfinder #lfc #girlboss fr #future #self love #love #planning #calendar #instagram #productivityboost #comeback:fight

[ahleezeruinavt]

My Super Shitty Fast Food Experience (and just stuff I’ve noticed because of it)

If there’s one thing I’ve always despised after working my first job, it’s how fast food places (never worked retail so I can really only talk about fast food), don’t want you to be seen doing things that people just… do.

At my first job we weren’t allowed to do or be seen doing a lot of things (mainly when the GM was working). It was one of those drive thru only places, so nobody ever really saw the inside, but we did have windows to see stuff outside.

One of the big rules was that you couldn’t take you break or be seen relaxing in front of any of the windows. Not even taking a sip of your drink. Now remember how I said it was one of those Drive Thru only restaurants? Yeah. We didn’t have anywhere to really sit or “take a break” at, and since most of us were teenagers who’s parents dropped us off or biked, we couldn’t just go eat in our car. Additionally, that “no being seen relaxing / not working” rule applied to our breaks, so we couldn’t even go sit at the outside benches to eat. There was a very small side table which was normally crammed with drinks where you could eat, but there was still no place to actually sit and eat. There were no chairs or stools in that entire building, not even when we had a pregnant lady working. And if you were injured or felt dizzy, you had to sit *on the floor*. Which mind you, wasn’t very clean.

Next was the fact that we weren’t allowed to have any tattoos, unless they were super super small, like the size of your fingernail (though this rule seemed to be just specific to my location). There was a girl who ended up quitting simply because of the fact that she wanted a small cross tattoo on the inside of her forearm and the GM flat out told her that if she was going to do that, she would be fired.

But wait! There’s more! I didn’t mention this at the start but I started working around the time when COVID was “dying down” (I use that term loosely, but it was when a majority of people started unmasking in my state). I had asked the manager what the protocol was for being alerted about being exposed to COVID on your shift. He simply said there wasn’t one. You’d figure out if you caught it yourself. And, if you caught COVID you were still responsible for finding people to cover your shifts. Failure to do so could result in you being fired. So the first thing I had to do when I had gotten COVID was, instead of resting, sit at my phone for a good hour or so to text all my available coworkers about covering my shifts because I had COVID. There was even one time when I was just sick (not with COVID, just had some food poisoning and a fever), that I was forced to come in because I couldn’t find coverage. I was forced to work for about 3 hours while vomiting almost every 15 minutes. They had me taking orders right next to where food was. I expressed a discomfort about that, especially since I had already practically begged them to let me go home. Mind you, this wasn’t the first time this happened. One of my coworkers projectile vomited when coming out with food, and they just put the food in a new bag (the food itself was untouched but still kinda gross), and told her to go get cleaned up and continue serving food.

Workers comp was REPEATEDLY ignored and not filed unless you were one of the managers. I had developed pretty bad tendonitis and actually fractured one of my wrists (scooping ice as funny as it is), and I hadn’t really noticed anything was wrong until a day or two later. I got yelled at for not filing the same day and then the paper never got put in. The GM had also forced a girl, who thought her finger was broken, to finish up the last few hours of her shift serving food. As a side note, I tried staying on top of the GM and he kept waving his hand and telling me he’ll get it done.

Same GM also stole money from me which ended up taking basically all my tips and when I had said I think he forgot to adjust my total at the end of the day, he asked me if I was accusing him of something. I am GREAT with keeping track of money. There was no way I was specifically missing $74 (and some change) when that was the specific amount he took from me for a cash in cash out (a cash in cash out is- and this is how it was explained to me so sorry if I’m wrong- when they need to pay something for the store so they typically take money from the carhops and then take it off of our total we owe back to the store at the end of the night). So I was down $74 in TIPS because of this guy and he had the audacity to ask me if I was accusing him of stealing money from me. Which, to be fair, I kinda was, but that was because he basically had. So yeah, if you were, for some reason, short on cash at the end of the end of the day you had to pay it out of your tips (I think what we used was you had to have something like 10 five’s and 15 one’s or something like that, and then another thing for your changer).

Then there was politics in the workplace. And I don’t mean LGBTQ+ people working there, or non-white people working there. I mean the GM constantly tried to talk to people about his thoughts on gun laws and abortion and, not surprisingly, equal opportunity employment. I want you to picture this. Super skinny white guy with a small mustache, who’s kinda tall and openly talks about how he has been working at this company for 30 something years and is super proud of it while having the BIGGEST stick up his ass with “the customer is always right” attitude. Yeah. That was my GM. A coworker of mine wore a hat with a rainbow pin on it. Not even a flag iirc, just a rainbow, and she got told that “we don’t represent that here”. This was an employee who was very open about being queer and this manager harped on her for wearing a rainbow pin on her hat. The very same guy who made multiple of us uncomfortable because he discussed things like gun laws at work, and went into gruesome detail about how women get assaulted so they should like guns more. Also told two black coworkers that they looked similar despite being two entirely different builds and not even having any features in common except skin color. He really sucked at hiding his biases.

Then, when I finally quit I didn’t give notice. I was sick and tired of my requests to be off work to not be respected, the DISGUSTING working conditions, how stuff wasn’t cleaned properly, and how I’m pretty sure they were breaking some sort of health laws. I got a call from the manager and he said that he’ll say I left on good terms in case I ever wanted to come back. I hung up. I didn’t care. It wasn’t a shock that almost NOBODY who I worked with back then even works there now. Almost the entire staff changed after about 6-7 months. They’re still trying to advertise getting people’s teenagers to work there on almost every stall and the place is pretty much dead now.

Almost no one goes there and the reviews suck because people get food poisoning, not cold ice cream, or even are flat out ignored when they say they’re allergic to something. So yeah. I’m glad I quit because I would not want to be there anymore. But there are a few key things I noticed from this.

These places don’t want their workers to seem like actual human beings. You have to keep a smile on 24/7 and be nice even if the customer is being rude to you. You aren’t allowed to express who you are for the fact that a customer might find a rainbow pin offensive. People aren’t even allowed to see us off the clock in our uniforms waiting for our parents to pick us up. And the BIGGEST thing I learned is these places absolutely take advantages of teenagers who are just trying to earn some money. And they don’t listen to requests until a parent gets involved. They don’t even care if their workers are sick, just so long at the company is still making money.

You couldn’t even request certain days off unless your parents confirmed you couldn’t come in that day. Not to mention PTO was supposed to be a thing and… it wasn’t. Never got paid it. Never got that workers comp. All I have to say is fuck how “beginner jobs” (fast food and retail more specifically) treat their workers and how they allow their workers to be treated.

#I literally hated working there #Ranting just because #feel free to leave your’re own stories #i hate people #man im glad i could leave that place #fast food work sucks #ex fast food worker #literally got food poisoning every time I ate there #got covid from eating there once too

[madd-information]

hey is there any documents that has like a list of terms to do with maladpative daydreaming as a whole? like maybe even the history of it? i swear there was one at one point but idk if i am misremembering it

Perhaps you mean the "what do long" or the "glossary" from the Discord? Neither have a dedicated portion to history though. You may be thinking of separate posts and remembering them as one, I've answered some asks with a bit of MD history before. Here's a video with a brief history of the discovery of MD, mostly focusing on Jayne Rachael, if that helps?

Text for those who can't listen:

Gather round darlings it's story time. Today we're going to run through a brief history of where this idea of Maladaptive Daydreaming kind of started and took off from. If you've done some preliminary research into Maladaptive Daydreaming you probably think this story starts in 2002 with Eli Somer, but it doesn't. Our story begins way back in the 1970s with Little. Baby. Jayne. I can see some of you know where this is going but there's a few of you out there thinking "Jayne who? Never heard of her." You have, we'll get to that…

Little Jayne was a lovely child who lived in a lovely house with her lovely parents, a doctor and a therapist. who supported her and loved her unconditionally and gave her all the space she needed to dream. And dream she did! For hours. Pacing around her front yard shaking a little string dreaming that she was the seventh Brady child. And little Jayne started to notice that she wasn't like her friends. She started to think she was weird so she talks to her parents they think "all right let's go see somebody." So she sees a therapist who says "you're very imaginative a little girl, carry on," and another therapist and another and another, nobody really gives her the time of day.

They've never heard of such a thing, it's not strange for children to live in their imagination and Jayne was intelligent and happy, what could be the problem? She knows somethings up, something differents, but really has nothing to show for it so she just goes on with her life she ends up in college. A really good college, and she does well, but it's always a very exhausting balance. She's cramming for tests the night before, she's sitting with her friends thinking only of when she can get home to daydream. She's wondering if she'll ever live a normal life. What's a relationship going to look like when she needs every spare second that she can get to dedicate to her inner world rather than to a partner? And she's bouncing from doctor to doctor and therapist to therapist trying to figure out what's going on and nobody has anything for her.

So now it's 2006 and Jayne has graduated from Harvard Law School she's working with vulnerable populations literally lifting people up out of human trafficking and she still has no answers. But she hits google one more time and finally she finds it! On the forum "India Parenting" someone posted an article detailing their child showing all the same symptoms that Jayne had as a child and the comments to that were all people like her, like us, weighing in with their experiences.

Now she's on to something she does a deep dive and finds that little paper from 2002 written by some dude in Israel but it's really the only academic piece out there. But Jayne is a very hard-working and privileged young woman, and she has friends! Who know what they're doing. She has the resources at her disposal to really get to the bottom of this, and she does. She gets her psychiatrist to do a case study on her.

A couple years before this she had found a psychiatrist who found a family history of OCD, and even though she didn't really have OCD they tried out some medication for that and it helped her. So her psychiatrist agrees and in 2008 the first case study of Maladaptive Daydreaming is published. So when you're in the community and you see somebody asking "are there any medications that help with this?" There will be a reply that says something like "fluvoxamine has been shown to help Maladaptive Daydreamers," or "some research showed SSRIs have been helpful." They're talking about Jayne. That comes from this case study.

With that in hand she hooks up with another researcher, Cynthia Schupak, and they hit the internet recruiting people to take part in the first study of Maladaptive Daydreaming. Eli Somer was, you know, breakthrough for us, but it was qualitative. It didn't have the hard numbers or the big sample, it was just sort of a little theory he had at the time. Speaking of Eli; meanwhile, in Israel, nothing's really happening. He published his paper, it didn't get much attention. From time to time he gets a few emails from somebody who has come across it and he doesn't really have much else to point them to but he's a nice guy, he does his best.

After that study is published, though, Eli and Jayne start to collaborate and that trickle of emails turns into a deluge. Awareness has suddenly exploded, we are all over the internet, this was the birth of our communities. Where Reddit and Facebook and where Wildminds really took off.

In 2016 they co-author a paper together, along with Joplin and Lherfeld, called "Evidence for an Under-Researched Mental Health Disorder." During this time they also developed the first measures for Maladaptive Daydreaming, and she was put as a co-author on the "Development of the Maladaptive Daydreaming Scale" paper. She also wrote that article in The Atlantic, "When Daydreaming Replaces Real Life," which is single-handedly responsible for letting thousands of Maladaptive Daydreamers out there know what the condition is called and that there are others like them out there. For a lot of people this is what they found first, you might even be one of those people.

What's she up to now? She's still helping out the the vulnerable, she's a lawyer that deals with that human trafficking. She went back to school to get a degree in psychology so that she could better look into these things. She started a website, called "Undiagnosed," where she is trying to give people who have difficult-to-diagnose disorders the the tools to to advocate for themselves (I'll put a link to that down below, yes Maladaptive Daydreaming is on there). And although she hasn't really had her fingers in any of the the big scientific studies of late she's still active an active part of pushing awareness and research forward.

Eli Somer is really a juggernaut in our community; he's done so much research, he has helped so many people, he deserves every bit of respect and praise that he gets, in my opinion. But people forget about Jayne. Without her initiative right now that paper from 2002 would just be some little theory some guy in Israel had 20 years ago that nobody ever really paid attention to. So that's a brief history of where we kind of came from as a group. Jayne, the unacknowledged catalyst.

You can check out her site if it sounds interesting. A few months ago she did an AMA on reddit, you can read through that, read her experience. I'll also put a link down there of an interview she did where you can hear her talk about her experiences herself. And that's pretty much it for this video. Can't remember the last time I did one where my cat didn't interrupt, so that's cool, bye.

#maladaptivedaydreaming #actuallymadd

[amor-immortalem]

A fic where Solomon is dissepointed on his daughters magical potions test results. So the wizard teaches her a few months.

It’s finally done! Sorry about the wait, friends... my life absolutely sucks, right now. Plus, this kinda turned into a lot more than what I meant it too...

Word count: 3.9k

Zulima knew she should have studied more for her magical potions final. She thought she’d had it down pat. She’d put in the long hours, staying up well past what she would consider an appropriate hour into the night cramming for this final with the notebook her father had jotted the formula for these potions down in when he’d first created them figuring she’d have a nice leg up on her classmates.

So why is there a big fat ‘F’ labeled on both the paper version and rubric for the practical portion of her final? And why was there a little note from the professor asking to see her after class? There had to be some kind of mistake. After all, Zulima, King Solomon the Wise’s daughter, doesn’t make mistakes when it comes to magical potions. This has to be someone else’s results.

As class comes to an end, the silver-haired half-demon rises from her seat. Her classmates are leaving to celebrate the last day of the term with lunch- classes were only in session for half a day today.

“Um… Professor… I think you handed me the wrong test results.” She lays the papers on the desk in front of the demon.

“No, I didn’t.” The professor peers down his nose at the papers, “Do you know why you failed, Miss Morningstar?” He looks back up at Zulima who shakes her head. “Every single one of these formulas is wrong. For two of them, you actually jumbled two different sets of ingredient lists together- had those been in the practical portion of my exam, you’d have blown this room sky high. You do this every test. I’ve been lenient with you so far only due to the fact that whatever potion you do end up making has the same intended effect as what I originally asked for but I can’t let it slide on a final.”

“Sir, please this can’t be my test. My father created most of these potions here and I studied his notes to where I could recite them in my sleep. There’s no way I could fail.”

“Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the formulas have been tweaked and changed over the years? If you’ve been only studying your father’s notes and not the notes I provided you, well you’re an intelligent individual- you can see how you would fail.”

“B-but-”

“No. No buts.” The Professor holds his hand up. “And none of your crocodile tears either. My grades are already finalized and submitted to the headmaster. Nothing can change them. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my way. I need a drink after your cousin nearly incited a brawl in my advanced applied potions class this morning.”

The professor escorts Zulima out before grabbing his briefcase and raincoat, locking the classroom door, and making a beeline for the exit.

・・・〆・・・

“What do you mean you failed?” Aurelius asks as he, Zulima, and Azalea all sit down to lunch at Hell’s Kitchen. “Even I passed and my ingredients weren’t even labeled for the first half of my practical exam…”

“My formulas on the written test were all wrong…” Zulima whines as she lays her head on the table, “What’s my dad gonna think? Especially if he finds out that I had been using the original formulas from when he first created them?”

“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” Azalea suggests as she flips through her menu, “if it makes ya feel better, I flunked my potions final too…”

“I heard you got a B- because you almost started a fight.” Aurelius sighs, “That’s not the same as getting an F, Sis.”

“Shut up, I’m tryin’ ta make ‘er feel better. And to me, getting anything less than an A is the same thing…”

“As much as I appreciate the thought, Azalea, that doesn’t make me feel any better.” The silver-haired half-demon rests her cheek against her hand. “I’m going to get laughed at…”

“For what?” Max asks as she joins the table, a little out of breath. “Sorry I’m late- the P.E. Teacher made us run laps for our final today and then he yelled at me for being so out of shape as if that might make me run faster or something.”

“Zulima bombed her potions final,” the twins say in unison.

“Oh… I mean I flunked too. It’s not that big of a deal. There’s always next term, right?” The human offers.

“Yeah, I guess.” Zulima turns her champagne-colored eyes up at Max as the human takes a seat. “So where did you go wrong?”

“I caused a small explosion…”

・・・〆・・・

After lunch, the teenagers all split ways with the twins heading off to do their own thing while Zulima and Max headed off for some shopping for Max’s upcoming trip to the human world. They were partway through picking out some outfits to try on when Zulima’s phone beeped with a text from Asmo.

“Come home as soon as you can! Your father and I would like to talk with you?” She read the text aloud, “Oh no…”

“Oh no, what?” The human looks over her shoulder at the text. “I’m sure it’s not that bad.”

“Not that bad?!” The half-demon squeaks, “My father came back early from the human world! How is that not bad, Max?!”

“Maybe Mr. Solomon just missed the Devildom and he doesn’t know about your bombed final yet… c’mon Zul, he doesn’t seem like the type of person who screams and yells over one bad test. I think you’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, but there’s something else…” Zulima chews her lip nervously, “I kind of took all of his notes that he took on each potion he created without permission… as a way to get a leg up on my classmates after I managed to get a look at the exam questions. I also may be in possession of some of his spell books that he definitely doesn’t want me to have at my current skill level…”

“There it is…” the blue-eyed human sighs, “I’d say you dug yourself into a hole with that one.”

“See! I’m in so much trouble…”

“But staying out too long after you’ve already been asked to come home is only going to get you in even more trouble. Didn’t you learn anything from that time Aurelius stayed out to avoid getting in trouble with your Aunt and Uncle? It’s best that you just bite the bullet so to speak… if it makes you feel better, I’ll go with you to your dads’ house.”

The girls start placing the outfits back on the shelves and racks before they eventually make their way back to Zulima’s childhood home.

・・・〆・・・

“Well, what can I say, Solomon? She’s her parent’s daughter.” Asmo is unconcerned with the tall stack of spell books sitting on the kitchen counter. “If I would have had such easy access to your potion formulas, I would have done the same thing.”

“The point is that she shouldn’t be going into my home office where I keep all of my magical items and supplies. I have things in there that, if not handled correctly, could seriously harm Zulima or at the very least maim her.” The sorcerer sighs as he pinches the bridge of his nose. “What’s more, she cheated on a final so now every single test from the term is being reviewed for evidence of cheating as well. She could very well have to repeat the class.”

“While I agree with you about the snooping around in your magic stuff, I still don’t see the problem with the cheating.” The demon shrugs nonchalantly, “But if you’re that pressed about it, then we can just ground her and take away her phone and computer until the start of the new term.”

As the sorcerer goes to respond the front door opens up. Zulima and Max have made it home.

“My baby’s home!” Asmo exclaims as they wrap the silver-haired girl up in their arms, “How was your last day of school? And yours too, Max?”

“It was okay…” both girls say before Zulima is returning the hug. “So… what did you and Dad want to talk to me about?”

“I think you already know…” Solomon says as he leans against the kitchen’s doorframe, waving both a copy of her failed final and one of the six spell books he’d confiscated from the teen’s room when he had taken her laundry up earlier. “If you’re going to steal from me, at least don’t leave them where they can be easily seen.”

“You’re not mad at me are you?”

“Oh honey no,” the Avatar of Lust starts, “we’re not mad at you… it's more like…”

“I’m more disappointed in you than I am angry.” The sorcerer frowns. “Rumor has it you even knew what was on the test beforehand and you still couldn’t pass… Not what I’d expect from one of my children. If it had been seductive speechcraft or history or law or anything else, I might be just a tad less disappointed but potions?”

“I’m sorry,” the half-demon bows abruptly, “I thought maybe if I gave the original formulas for every one of the potions you created, the professor would be impressed and give me extra credit.”

“It doesn’t change the fact that you attempted to cheat.” Asmo says, “but I can’t blame you, I’d have done the same thing without remorse.”

“So… does that mean I’m not in trouble?”

“Oh no, dear,” the silver-haired human chuckled slightly, “Your phone and computer will be confiscated until the end of the school break. And to add on to that, you’ll be spending the break with me and Max up in the mortal realm- we’ll work on your knowledge of potions while you’re up there to prevent something like this,” he motions to the test papers in his hand, “from happening again.”

“The human world?!” Zulima’s eyes lit up. “It's been ages since I’ve gone. Did the human governments ever get that whole ‘cult’ thing ironed out?”

“It's not going to be a vacation, Dear.” Asmo had to be the one to burst her bubble. “And I don't think 5 years quite qualifies as ages...” there’s a slight chuckle in the demon’s voice.

“No, they haven't but those organizations haven't been exactly going after the witches and sorcerers that live there anymore either...” Solomon hums, “so I’d say it's about as good a time as any to start allowing you all back up there... You’ll be supervised by me on any outings you might have so you’ll be safe either way.” There’s a sort of half-shrug the sorcerer does that’s none too reassuring.

“Well, I’ll get packing then,” is all Zulima says in return before she’s looping her arm with Max’s and dragging the human off to her bedroom.

・・・〆・・・

“Hold on, I think I need a moment...” The teen clutches at the side of the dining room table. “The room feels like it's spinning...”

Max, Solomon, and Zulima had been in the human world for all of maybe five minutes, having just come through the portal, before the future Avatar of Lust decided to put on the dramatics. Her father can only roll his eyes at her display.

“You’ll be fine, Zulima.” The sorcerer reassures her, “Just take a seat and it’ll wear off in no time. You're just not used to portal travel.”

The teen is skeptical at best but takes a seat at the dining room table like she was instructed to. When she sees Max is not affected in the same way she is, maybe her father’s words start to hold a little more truth to them. After a few minutes, the silver-haired half-demon lets out a quiet sigh as the dizziness starts to disappear.

Feeling much better, Zulima stands and shoulders her bag as her father moves a curtain to the side and peeks out the window. It was the dead of night, indicated by the dark blackish-blue, starry sky.

“So, when do we get started?” Max flicks on the kitchen light as she places her bag of the countertop.

“We’ll start tomorrow afternoon...” Solomon closes the curtains, “I still have to secure the house- make sure there are no surprise guests hiding around. You can never be too safe considering all the recent issues that have come up within the past fifteen years...”

Both girls nod as Solomon walks off, leaving the pair to their own devices.

・・・〆・・・

Once the house had been secured and protective sigils placed down on the exterior doors and windows, everyone had gone off to bed. Okay, maybe not everyone, as Solomon was the only one still awake at this ungodly hour. He busied himself with devising various potions for the girls to work with. It was clear from the recent school term that they both still struggled with formulas. As he looks out the window, Solomon thinks about whether it would be better to start with memorization of formulas or to start from a more practical experience and work backwards from there.

Wanting to keep the house on its foundation, the sorcerer decides maybe it’s best that he go back to basics with them. Start with the formulas and once they both can flawlessly recite the formula to him only then can they move on to mixing the ingredients together.

・・・〆・・・

By the time, he decides on a list of potions, the sun is nearly risen.

“This is fine... now to check on my ration of supplies.” He makes his way down to the cellar where he keeps a nice little stash of preserved Devildom flora. “Looks like I’ll need to get my hands on some more Wolfsbane, Hellfire Newt Extract, Bloodmoon Drop pollen... I’m out of a whole lot more than I thought I was...”

A crash from the ground level draws Solomon’s attention. As he makes his way out of the cellar the smell of something burning makes him move just a little bit quicker.

“You have to be more careful, Zulima.” He hears Max scolding the half-demon. “You dropped hot sauce all over the stove and counter.”

“Sorry... It slipped...” Zulima grumbles as she cleans up the messy counter and the cabinet doors where the sauce had dripped down. “It’s not like I meant to drop it, you know.”

“It slipped because you were doing stupid tricks with the bottle. This isn’t home where glass bottles are super durable to accommodate for demon strength... Glass is more fragile here.”

Nothing more is between the teenagers and Solomon slinks back down into the cellar to finish his inventory. If he had to go shopping anyway might as well stock up.

・・・〆・・・

After breakfast is finished being cooked, Solomon reemerges from the cellar with his list of ingredients.

“Morning, sir,” the black-haired human says, “We thought you were still sleeping so Zulima just went to wake you up.”

“Good morning,” He smiles back politely, “I didn’t sleep actually. I was inventorying my potion ingredients- we have quite a few supplies to get from the magical district, so we’ll leave as soon as breakfast is over. If I may ask, what did you two make that required hot sauce to be used?”

“Just a spicey omelet- it was my Abuela’s recipe,” Max shrugs. “We made you a plate as well.” She pulls the dish out of the oven where it had been keeping warm and put it on the table as Zulima joined them.

“Oh, there you are...” There’s surprise in her champagne-colored eyes, “Where were you? I’ve been looking all over for you.”

“I was in the cellar. I had to take stock of all my ingredients to see which ones I needed to go shopping for this morning. You two go get dressed and I’ll take care of the dishes once I finish eating.”

The girls both nod as they head off for the bedrooms they’d taken up for the trip.

After an uneventful morning of shopping for supplies, the three of them finally make it back to the house. As the sorcerer sets the ingredients down on the table, he snaps his fingers and two note books appear along with a pencil for both of them so they can take notes.

“Get ready, you two. We’ll be starting from basics, and we’ll work our way up from there.”

・・・〆・・・

After three weeks of drilling the most basic formulas into both his apprentice’s and his daughter’s heads, they still weren’t getting any closer to being able to recite the formulas from memory. They only had a week left until the start of the new school term and this whole trip was starting to feel like a waste. Perhaps there was something wrong with the way he was teaching the formulas? None of his other apprentices had ever had this level of difficulty with his method of teaching even the simplest potions.

As the trio breaks for the night, Solomon returns to his room. What was he missing? Maybe it wouldn’t help to consult the one former apprentice he was still on relatively good terms with. Pulling his D.D.D. off its charger, the silver-haired immortal dials up his human friend. It should still be early enough back in the Devildom that he wouldn’t be disturbing her. The line rings once, twice, thrice and Solomon is about to hang up when Arella answers.

“Hey, what’s up?” her voice is quiet- she must’ve just put her youngest down for bed, Solomon figures.

“I had a question for you... bad time?” He asks.

“Not really.” She chirps back and the sorcerer can hear the soft sound of a closing door and the chirping of crickets, “Just put Mahlon down for the night and you know he’s such a light sleeper unlike the rest of my children. Anyway, what’s your question?”

“Do you have any alternative methods of teaching potions? Both Max and Zulima did so horribly on their final for last term that I brought them both up to the human realm to work on that with them but even after going back to basics and starting with just simple formulas with them, they’re still just not getting it. I remember Aurelius had trouble with potions for quite some time up until just recently and I wanted to pick your brain about what you did to help him.”

“Honestly, I don’t have an answer for you.” She shrugs, “The only reason Aurelius had the amount of trouble he did with potions in previous terms was due to his achromatopsia. His professors wanted him to be able to mix together a potion using ingredients based solely on their color. After Mammon and I found out about that we pushed for the accommodation to be made that all of his ingredients be clearly labeled during in class experiments and practical exams. After that, his grades have been fine.”

“So that’s what it was...” Solomon makes a humming noise, “Thanks, then. That’s all I needed. I’ll let you get on with your night. Good night, Arella.”

“Night, Solomon.”

The pair hangs up and it just leaves the immortal back at the drawing board.

“Maybe if I turned it into a game- I know after a while lectures can get boring... Max already has concentration issues as it is. Zulima also doesn’t tend to do well if she sits for long periods of time without having a chance to participate in practical exercises...”

The sorcerer thinks long and hard about what he can do to help the teens.

・・・〆・・・

“We have to get this right,” Zulima groans as she runs a hand through her silver hair, “Dad’s starting to get frustrated with the lack of progress and frankly so am I...”

“We have all night- this trip only lasts until Friday and it’s already Monday... We have to make tonight count. I feel like a lost cause- I should be able to memorize these stupid ingredients lists... Now, how much Gold Hellfire Newt Syrup do you add to a genuine love potion?”

“Trick question!” The half-demon replies, “You don’t add any at all to a genuine love potion. Adding Gold Hellfire Newt Syrup turns the whole potion into a powerful aphrodisiac. You should instead use 1/8th of an ounce of your targets tears and 1/4th of an ounce of your own to bind the connection.”

“That’s right. Now what about a truth potion?”

The future Avatar of Lust thinks for a moment. Was it dragon’s claw? No that didn’t sound right… what about wolfsbane? No that’s not it either. With a shrug of her shoulders, Zulima sighs.

“I don’t know… I’m tired…”

“Me too,” Max comments, putting away her notebook. “Let’s just sleep on it, yeah?”

“Yeah…”

And with that the girls are curling up into their respective beds for the night.

・・・〆・・・

Day by day, they inch closer and closer to the end of their break in the human world. Things were starting to look up in Solomon’s opinion. While they weren’t perfect 100 percents, the pop quiz he’d given the girls were at least better than their scores from the final. And just in the nick of time too it seems.

“So…” Zulima’s the first to speak up as Solomon’s pondering over the quizzes in front of him. “How’d we do?”

“You passed… not with a perfect 100 like I was hoping for but a 70 will do for now. We’ll continue working on potions over the coming months together but at least now I feel confident that you two won’t make complete fools out of yourselves in class.”

The girls have a small celebratory moment before Solomon clears his throat.

“I wouldn’t celebrate just yet. I know the two of you can produce better results, it just so happens that we’re out of time up here. Next week, after you both settle in from the back to school festivities, I’ll test you again and I expect better results.” He watches as the pair of teens nod. “That being said, this is the last day of our trip. We should do something fun to celebrate all the hard work you two have been doing.”

“Let’s go out into town!” Zulima’s the first to speak up. “I want to see what normal human cities are like.”

“We could go see a movie or something?” Max offers, “I think you’ll be disappointed if you just want to go into a human city and treat it like a zoo… I mean human cities aren’t all that different from the Devildom’s capital city.”

“It’s gotta be just a little different though, right? Like, I want to see the adaptations normal humans have for things we would use magic for instead.”

Both Max and Solomon share the same skeptical look but don’t say anything to discourage the teenager.

“Any more objections?” She waits for a moment, a big smile breaking out on her face when both her father and his apprentice shake their heads. “Alright, let’s gooooo!”

With a fist in the air, Zulima takes off with Max following behind her and Solomon can only let outa small chuckle as he shakes his head at his daughter’s enthusiasm.

・・・〆・・・

End

#obey me kids #obey me next gen #obey me #obey me shall we date #obey me swd #obey me! shall we date? #obey me solomon #om! solomon #obey me asmodeus #om! asmodeus #obey me asmo #om! asmo #obey me next gen oc #zulima #azalea #aurelius #max

[floral-frenziez]

Geology Field Course Update #4 (?): I love biotite

Today’s adventures are finally concluded and boy oh boy was it a lot today. We were supposed to have four stops today but only went to three because the professors we are with talk A LOT. 

First stop was at Antietam Reservoir (first two photos). From the research I did in the morning about all our stops I was least excited for this stop, but turned out to be my favorite. To get there I finally got to experience the typical roadside geology outcrop on a very busy road where the speed limit is like 55 MPH! How exciting that was. But this area was filled with Gneiss and Granite (which is great because biotite is my favorite mineral and I got to see tons of it today. I have some pictures but forgot to include them). First things I noticed were tons of drill holes everywhere for blasting (for the road likely) and lots of vegetation growing out of the rocks (the second photo has a really cool tree protruding out almost looking like it is floating). These rocks are from a part of the Proterozoic time period. These rocks were pretty steeply dipping (cannot say confidently which direction because I am 110% sure I did my measurements incorrectly. I failed to use my noggin in terms of this today for some reason). Water was gently coming out of some of these rocks in the fault lines as well. These rocks were apart of the Grenville orogeny event in PA! 

Second stop was at Pagoda in Reading PA (third and fourth photos). This area was heavily covered in quartzite but farther down the area there was sandstone and shale. The sandstone had many different grain sizes and was super interesting to look at it even though there wasn’t much to be found. I found a rock of shale (maybe...) with a small banding of sandstone as well which was pretty neat. The rocks were more steeply dipping in an opposite direction than the first stop we took. These rocks are younger than that found in stop 1. 

Third stop was at Stonecliffe Park PA (last two photos). This location was the least interesting for me out of all of them today. It was just limestone and dolostone (my friend found some chert as well). These were very similar dipping like the first stop we took. Because of this and the ages of these formations as well as their geographic placement it could suggest a smaller scale syncline is present. So many lichens and mosses at this location though. These rocks are even younger than those found in stop 2. This area is apart of the Allentown formation which we also visited yesterday (but I don’t think I mentioned) at the mining area. 

Overall, we noticed a pattern between the three locations and narrowed these formations down to showing a nonconformity as well as a disconformity. I didn’t mention the ages of them all exactly because again, I am not confident with the answer (I have the answer on a sheet of paper I am too lazy to locate and I cannot spell for the life of me). 

Afterwards we had some time to relax and eat dinner but after dinner we looked at each others field notebooks and gave some much needed feedback and criticism to one another. 

Today was super exciting, and there is a lot more tomorrow! We are going to try to cram a lot of things in tomorrow so hopefully we can end up doing it all. 

#introduction to geology #geology #geography #biology #history #field camp #field notes

[roleplayolyhedrons]

Simulating the World (Pt. 1)

I might as well confess from the beginning that I did not grow up playing tabletop (pen and paper) role-playing games. I was a war gamer from an early age. I played behind grand armies, rolling dice to decide the fate of entrenched enemies, and even my soldiers, for that matter. I came to role-playing games at a critical juncture in my own life—a time when I was bored with war games and needed some form of mental stimulation that went beyond what television and video games could offer me at the time. Role-playing games, to me, signify a significant step in a process of self-exploration through games and gaming—a sort of natural progression from one gaming genre, such as war games, to the next, role-playing games.

Mage Knight

I roll the dice—they’re high numbers—what exactly, I can’t recall after nearly fifteen years. Probably a six and a five on the six-sided dice. All kill shot, I remember. I also remember the ugly orange carpet of the room and the dozen or so people crammed into the tiny spare room in my junior high school. My opponent’s face, a fuzzy, easily forgotten face, scowls at the loss of her Mage Knight miniature, her prized soldier on the battlefield. She removed the plastic warrior from the table, which is decorated with sand table terrain—i.e., stone masonry structures, such as fortified walls, square towers,m and sagging buildings with thatched rooves all of which are fashioned from painted soda box cardboard. I’m winning at a game that is, at its heart, very much like chess, although it’s different. In other words, it’s hard to say it tastes like chicken, when, in fact, it isn’t chicken, doesn’t even come close, in many respects. The endgame is the same as chess: Kill off your opponent’s pieces until s/he capitulates. It’s a game my pubescent self prefers over chess because of the options available to one playing the game. No more strict movements on an undecorated board. The pawns of war move in ways that chess pieces only dream of, duking it out over neatly modeled sand table terrain. Dice rolls act as the great equalizer, as much as a good strategy. (And good strategy doesn’t hurt either.) Chess, after playing Mage Knight, feels anachronistic and tastes bland.

There’s a catch to playing Mage Knight: I have to keep it secret because it is one of those things forbidden in my household. It’s far too similar to a game called Dungeons & Dragons in my father’s eyes. When he finds out that I want to play this game with my friends, and on a Sunday of all days, he flips out. My old man decides the best punishment is to force me to read aloud Bible passages. He thinks, hopes, that this activity will purge, scrub away with an intellectual version of a wire brush, any interests I have in such games. My father hands me an old Bible and says, “Here, read this. Make sure I can hear you reading this from in the living room.” I ask him why. He says, “Because I told you to. Now read!” My father truly believes the rumors and theories surrounding the connections between devil worship and suicide among those who play games like Dungeons & Dragons. This is strange to me. My father doesn’t treat my younger brother in the same way. He can play with his friends on a Sunday, and so can my sister. Instead of playing with my friends, instead of playing a harmless game of Mage Knight, I read from Judges, and the fantastical stories from this part of the Bible only serve to kindle my interest in playing out such stories in game form. I can almost imagine reenacting the battles with my miniatures, bought with earned and stolen quarters, all in the name of G-d.

War Games

Military modeling and simulation is the technical term for what hobbyists call war gaming. M&S, as it is more commonly known, has been around for millennia. Human beings, from ancient Egyptian pharaohs to Mesopotamian kings to Prussian military officers have all tried to simulate combat without the risk associated with actual warfare. The answer to this dilemma of simulating a part of the real world was not what we would call LARP-ing—live-action role-playing—, complete with mock swords and shields and cheesy acting to boot. Instead, ancient and modern civilizations alike developed board games using intricate and not-so-intricate playing pieces, along with wooden, clay, or stone boards. What started as a training tool for the ruling and military elite soon became a pastime of those who had little interest or knowledge in the affairs of war and peace.

War games are a permanent staple of modern-day gaming hobbies. Popular war games fill the shelves of big box stores and hobby and specialist shops alike. Entire conventions are dedicated to the wargaming hobby in the civilian world. Names like Avalon Hill, Games Workshop, and Fantasy Flight Games (FFG), conjure up images of miniature warriors duking out over sand table real estate. Players rely on dice and pre-established statistics to determine the odds of combat and movement on the board. In some cases, war games are quite elaborate, with miniatures, realistic, war-torn landscapes, and complex formulas as part of the overall gaming experience. However, other war games are quite simple, with said games being fashioned from inexpensive cardboard cardstock or plastic tokens. Nevertheless, whether it is elaborate war games or cheap cardboard ones, many civilians know war gaming simply as a hobby they love and spend countless hours on. Few know about the origins of war gaming, the grandfather of role-playing games, especially when it comes to its political and military origins.

War games have been around for as long as human beings have fought wars against one another. Such games offer players a chance to experience combat against an opponent without the risks associated with real war. War games, like chess and Go, have become permanent fixtures of the civilian world, as ultimate games of strategy, patience, and mental endurance. Entire libraries have been written on games like chess. However, the war game as we know it is a relatively modern invention. The wargaming hobby is in debt to the likes of Prussian military strategists, who first developed and used the game Kriegsspiel (i.e., literally “war game”) to train military officers in strategy and tactics. This pedagogical method is pregnant with possibilities and problems. Officers, and even the political elite, are better able to get a grasp of combat, which is fraught with unknowns, unknowns that must be anticipated by the commander in question. These same games, however, can create a sort of myopia within those who play them, allowing the officers in question to believe they are best prepared for the situation at hand, when, in fact, they haven’t.

Jackson Kicked My Ass

I’m at my friend’s, Jackson’s, house, an old riverfront Victorian. Jackson is this tall, lanky character, with combed hair, a goofy smile, and the mouth of a sailor on shore leave. We’ve brought together a collection of Warhammer 40K miniatures my grandmother, on my father’s side, bought for me, along with some old hardbound books, clean coffee mugs, and a handful of six-sided dice. The books and cups serve as ad hoc terrain, the best we can come up with, considering the circumstances. Cups serve as towering mountains, and the books are grand mesas, tableland on some alien desert world. The books and cups are organized in such a way that the middle of the table is the narrowest point, with the top and bottom ends widening out enough to allow for our troops to be placed in their start positions. I play a small squad of Space Marines. Jackson plays a squad of Tyranids, an alien insectoid-like race. We’re using our own rules this time because I’ve forgotten the rulebook at home, which is hidden from my father’s prying eyes. I position my Space Marines in a firing line, just before the narrowest point on the table, getting ready for Jackson’s insectoid swarm. Once it’s his turn, he unleashes his horde, charging toward my Space Marines. Both sides are equally matched, considering. It’s my turn again. I roll to fire on the Tyranids, killing three off the bat. Jackson curses under his breath. It’s his turn again. His alien horde attacks my Space Marine line, full force. He rolls and kills two of my Space Marines. It’s my turn again. I find that my Space Marines are in an optimal position. Jackson’s troops are being bottle-necked by the terrain and my soldiers are ready to take them on. I decide to roll an attack against Jackson’s troops. I roll low, really low. So low, it is laughable now that I think about it, some fifteen years later. Jackson laughs. It’s one of those laughs that sounds like monkeys fighting one another over forage. He knows his troops are safe, for now. It’s his turn. He rolls for attack, and he manages to kill four of my courageous Space Marines. I wince as this takes place. Jackson feels victory coming.

“You ready to surrender, bitch?”

“Fuck you, man,” I retort.

“You kno’ I’m gonna fuckin’ win,  bro. Just admit it.”

“Fuck off, Jackson.”

It’s my turn. I roll. Again, the numbers aren’t in my favor. I don’t manage to kill or wound any of Jackson’s horde, which appears to be more ferocious than it did a few minutes ago.

I move my Space Marines back some, giving myself breathing room. Jackson moves closer. I roll for an attack, and I only manage to kill one of his hordes. I feel the sweat dripping off my brow, my hands are shaky, and my heart rate is through the roof. I can’t let this cocky fucker win, I think to myself. Jackson moves in for the kill. He manages to finish off the remainder of my Space Marine squad. In my mind, I can hear the shrill screams of grown men being torn apart by an alien horde. They cry out for their God-like emperor to save them, but their cries fall on deaf ears.

Jackson’s smiling at the end, all of his front teeth, pearly whites even in the dim light, are showing. He reaches over to shake my hand. I take it.

“No hard feelin’s, bro?”

“Sure, no hard feelings.”

“Another round, dude?” Jackson asks.

I nod, and we begin setting up our soldiers on opposite ends of the table for another battle.

#ttrpgs #wargames #simulation #series

[vici-2023]

Week 4

Last week, we successfully conducted an interview to our client which is the School Registrar from Lugait College. Our group gathered information altogether to see if the questions asked are what’s needed for our Chapter 1. Last Tuesday was the due date for our Chapter 1 but before we submitted our work, we went to the library first to see what’s really the inside of Chapter 1, although, Sir Gulfan already provided some description and information but we still want to make sure if what we did was actually correct. In short, we need some basis.

What's inside of our Chapter 1 is the starting point where we give a big picture of our proposed project. We talk about what the project is all about, what problems it aims to solve, what goals it has, and why it's important. After submitting, we know that some revisions will follow. But the good thing here is that, revisions are made for us to face less rejections in the future, especially in our Capstone defense.

So far, the questions asked are what we needed to put in our Chapter 1. As a group, we collaborated the gathered information because we want to make sure that the information stated in Chapter 1 is written truthfully without adding or missing anything. The next thing we will be doing is to start gathering questions for the next interview (if necessary), because we think that there are still questions that needs an answer, we just couldn’t figure it out just yet.

In making Chapter 1, we have to be consistent and mindful of the words or terms to use and at the same time avoid flowering words as much as possible. Our adviser advised us to just be direct on how we give information, so that, the readers, will find the paper easy to understand. Also, the reason why we went to the library because we are not sure with our Narrative Listing. What we did was look for basis so that we can finalize our paper once done.

To sum it all up, this week has been pretty chill for the group because we manage to conduct an interview way early compared to others. We really made sure to finish tasks as early as possible to avoid cramming. Cramming, for us, is not good. We have to pour our hearts out in this project because we want to make sure that we really know what’s inside of our paper. In this way, we'll be knowledgeable of our own project and will help us on what to do next.

#ISY108-Week-4

[blarrghe]

Sixty-five. 

Taren stared at the stapled stack of paper in his hand, flipping through quickly and barely scanning the black pen of difficult to read notes lining its margins, the encircling red around his references. He flipped back to the title page, to the number in the top corner, a loose circle around a two digit number to sum up ten pages of late nights and tired hours hunched over library tables. To sum up the semester. Sixty-five. 

He wanted to crumple up all ten pages into a tight little ball, throw them on the muddy spring ground, and stomp on them. 

He took several deep breaths, shoved the paper deep into his bag, sat down on a bench, and called Dorian. 

Two weeks of finals, and then he’d only have calling Dorian . 

He tapped his foot while the phone rang. 

“Afternoon, amatus,” Dorian said when he answered, smooth and low. 

“Hey,” he replied, his own voice compressed by tension. 

“Everything alright?” Dorian's tone shifted slightly, still smooth, but with curiosity just bordering on concern.  

“Yeah. Fine,” Taren sighed. 

“I thought you had class.” 

“Just got out. Got a final paper back.” 

“Oh?” 

Suddenly, calling and complaining to Dorian seemed like the worst choice he could have made. His foot tapped restlessly against the soft ground of the grassy quad. “Not good,” he said, barely getting it out, grimacing. 

“Ah. How bad?” 

Sixty-fucking-five. Taren grimaced some more, and muttered it. 

“That’s a pass,” Dorian noted. 

“Barely.” 

“What percent of your grade is it?” 

“Thirty-five.” He groaned. “I can’t fucking — I can’t fucking fail at this.” 

Dorian made a thoughtful sound. “What was your standing before?” 

“I don’t know.” 

“What did you get on the midterm?” 

“Seventy-four.” He hated this course. He’d studied and slaved and crammed for that midterm. The assignment before it had only won him a seventy. Nothing he did seemed to land higher than that, no matter how many times he read over his rubrics and checked his formatting, something was always wrong. Arbitrarily, seemingly, with his citations or his phrasing or his conclusions or his too-anecdotal personal experience. With his grammar in formal Common, with his lack of proper Ferelden Circle terms in class discussions, with his understanding of vague impossible to parse multiple-choice questions. With the professor, he’d thought, more than once. 

“Hm,” said Dorian, “any other papers?” 

“Seventy on the first one,” Taren continued listing grades and sighing, “other than that there’s just participation.” 

“And you participate?” 

“Yeah but—” 

“You’d only need ten percent to pass,” Dorian mused, “you’ll do fine. Seventy, seventy… three, if you really aced the discussion component.” 

He hadn't. He was sure that he hadn't. Taren furrowed his brows and decided against asking how Dorian had calculated that so quickly. 

“That’s a C, amatus. You’re not failing.” 

“I don’t get that bursary next year with a fucking C.” 

“Taren, you know if you need help —” 

“— I don’t.” And that wasn’t what this was about. Without the bursary, he could still pay the fees. Or he would be able to, after the summer. It wasn’t about affording it, it was about keeping it. It was about… it was about — “I feel like a - like everything I say in that class and everything I try to - to — like it's pointless." Pointless for him to be there, in the class, on the very campus. Pointless to waste his energy struggling to achieve something purely for his own pride, and not even managing it. "I just can’t fail at this.” 

“You’re not failing,” Dorian said again, calmly. 

“Fuck. I feel like throwing a tantrum. I feel like a — like a dumb fucking kid, or something.” 

Dorian chuckled. “That happens.” 

Taren groaned again.

“Think of it this way, it’s done now. You don’t have that professor again next year, do you?” 

“Don’t think so.” 

“Good! And if you really like, I’ll get him fired.” 

“Ha ha.” 

“It happens, amatus.” 

“To you?” 

“Maker,” Dorian laughed again, “you know, when I was younger I once brought home an eighty-two and was grounded for a month. Nothing but being locked up in my room and studying until the next ninety-plus.” 

“Right,” Taren sighed. 

“So when I only managed an eighty on a problem set in first year, you can imagine —”

“ Only an eighty?” Taren muttered. “You’re not helping.” 

“I did it to myself,” Dorian continued, ignoring his bitter snark, “locked myself away to study, no parties, no friends, spent the rest of the semester miserably making grades. So, you know what you should do?” 

“Lock myself in my room and study harder?” 

“No. You should call Sera.” 

“What?” 

“Call Sera. Go over to her place, let her tell you all about how school is for nerds and your grades don’t matter. She'll make fun of that crotchety old professor and the course and the degree and you'll listen .” 

“And if she convinces me to drop out?” 

He laughed again. “She won’t.” 

Taren groaned.

"Come over later, I can give you study tips… or just help you feel better," Dorian let his voice drop to a suggestive pitch, somehow still sounding like he was smirking. 

"Yeah, ok, maybe." Taren was still only grumpily muttering through his words. 

"Take tonight off. Trust me." 

He did. After hanging up his call with Dorian, Taren slung his bag back up over his shoulder and made his way off campus. He stomped on over to Royal Station, blending in with the student crowd, and took a train towards Sera's. 

#Posted without comment #I am in grad school #Actually one comment: I have a had an 8+ page paper due every other week this month and that is why there is no update #Got a big final paper due this Sunday also #Pls wish me better than a 65 🙃 #And enjoy this old chapter snippet it's all I got time for #A Complicated Match

[notopedia1]

Tips and strategies: How To Study For An Exam

Everyone has a different approach to studying. Some people find that if they study for an exam just the night before, it works well for them. They can recall what they learned because it's fresh in their mind. Others find that if they space out review over multiple days or weeks leading up to an exam, then it's easier to remember everything when it comes time for test day.

Make a study guide.

It should include everything you think you need to know about the exam, even if it doesn't seem important or relevant at first. For example, if there are going to be multiple choice questions on the test and one of them asks what two states border each other, but only one state is named in the question (for example: "Name two states that border Texas"), then write down both states next to each other on your study guide--even though only one will be correct when you take an actual multiple choice question from this type of test!

Use your guide as often as possible during your studying process so that all information stays fresh in your mind when it comes time for exams!

Take notes.

Take notes in class, not while watching a video. If you write down what the professor says, you are more likely to remember it. If you take notes on something that is not in the book, you will have to look it up later and this can be a waste of time because sometimes there is no way for students to find these materials online or elsewhere easily (for example: if they're from an old textbook).

Don't copy other people's work! This makes things difficult because then everyone will have similar answers on their test instead of varying ones that show how much they actually know about the subject matter being tested on--and this could hurt your grade if too many people did this same thing without knowing why they were doing so (which would be because someone else told them).

Study from your notes on a regular basis.

Study from your notes on a regular basis.

Review in short bursts, rather than one long session.

Review when you are most likely to remember the information, such as when you take notes or immediately after writing them down (when they are fresh in your mind).

Review more than once--even if it's just a quick glance over the material before going to bed at night!

Work with friends.

Working with friends is a great way to motivate yourself. You can help each other out and share notes, but if one person isn't sure about something, they can ask their friend for clarification.

Don't cram!

The most effective way to study is by reviewing in small chunks over a few days or weeks. This helps you retain information and makes the information easier to recall when it's time for the test.

Cramming is not recommended because it only allows you to learn how much information fits into your short-term memory, which can be forgotten after a few hours or days (depending on how much sleep you get).

Instead of cramming all night before an exam, plan several short review sessions spaced out over a few days leading up until your test date!

Notopedia provides mock test online. Notopedia aims to become the No.1 destination for all the tests you need for your exam preparation. Our user-friendly interface allows you to revise, self-test and improve your score just before the real test.

Notopedia is an online learning platform that helps the students in solving any kind of problem in a very short period of time. It provides guidance to students by providing mock tests, practice papers and results.

#study videos #state board #study notes #mock exercises #exam material