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#they're paid audios

honeyhotteoks · 4 months

Text

lessons in intimacy (k.ys)

summary: you didn't mean to actually meet the man who's audio porn was single handedly getting you off every night, but you do.

note: this has been a looooong time coming and is dedicated to one of my best friends, grace. 💗 i hope everyone enjoys this chaotic smut fest.... also i've recently discovered that porn is actually illegal to produce or consume in korea? so suspend your disbelief for this fic lol

warnings: camboy!yeosang/barista!yeosang x fem!reader, it's a smut-a-thon barely a plot in sight featuring - nsfw/audio porn, guided masturbation, female masturbation, male masturbation, lots and lots of orgasms, use of dildo, nipple play, one night stand dynamics except they kind of fall for each other, big and i mean big dick yeosang, oral sex (f receiving), gratuitous squirting, fingering, thigh riding/grinding, protected and unprotected sex (do not do this they're being hella dumb), rough sex, maaaaaajor praise play he says good girl more times than i can count, so much use of 'baby', plus pretty girl/babygirl, absolute pleasure soft dom yeosang of our dreams, reader literally passes out from coming you're welcome

pairings: yeosang x reader

genre: smut and more smut, where's the plot???

word count: 14.5K

additional note: yeosang owns a cafe in this fic called ongozisin, it's a real cafe in seoul and you can check out their ig here! the vibes are truly so yeosang i can't even articulate it, so i just wanted to share this for the extra visual!

Paid porn for women has tiers. You stumble headfirst into this realization with your fingers stuffed inside yourself and your body slick with sweat, and there’s nothing that takes you right out of your frantic self care session than a request for your credit card number and a terms of service page.

Your chest is heaving, legs shaking, and you feel your orgasm slip right through your fingers as you skim over his Fansly page. You should have just skipped to another one of his free audios on Pornhub like you always do, but this week was long and stressful and slightly emotionally fraught, and there’s only so many times you can ignore his husky little ad at the end of the audio file inviting you to check out the full, uncut content.

“Jesus,” You breathe, pushing yourself up in the bed and letting your phone drop to the side as you recover your breath.

Are you really going to do this? Are you really going to pay for porn? The internet is full of it, spilling over from every angle with any little thing you can imagine. There’s a reason Rule 34 exists, people are horny and people love attention, so if you can fathom it there’s free porn of it.

And yet, nothing ever, ever gets you there like he does, and you’ve never even seen his face.

You glance down at your phone again and you see his familiar header image, a deeply contrasted black and white header of tangled white sheets, and his username striking across the corner in neon green. fromryu. This is what drew you in initially, the simplicity of it all. You were sick of skimming through all of the men making porn for women with names like ‘TheMasterDominant’, ‘Your_Daddy’, or ‘forherpleasureee’ and then just listening to them groan in your ear and call you a slut for fifteen minutes. That might work for some, but it definitely doesn’t work for you.

Ryu was different, is different. His audios are a mix of scenario based role-plays and straight forward guided masturbation for women, and you’re pretty sure he comes right along with you when you listen, but it’s just not the same.

You’ve fucked yourself to every single one of his free audios. Some of them more than once, some of them several times, if you’re being honest. You’ve always ignored his ads, because he gives so much content away for free you can’t imagine what would be behind a paywall that would get you off harder, until today.

Your brain just couldn’t get there. You’ve heard him chuckle that chuckle before, say that line before, coax you into orgasm with those exact words before, and you need more.

Your credit card is firmly in your hand before you can give it another thought, and with a fluttering stomach you tuck yourself into a robe and back into bed to pick a tier. With a long sip of a fresh glass of wine you lean back in your pillows and read through his welcome page.

His tiers make you smirk, he’s funny.

Third base, full uncut audios and one special audio per month just for subscribers – $4.99/month

Just the tip, uncut audios, one special audio per month, and access to a private discord server where subscribers can make audio request submissions – $9.99/month

Every inch (and more), uncut audios, exclusive audios, access to discord, exclusive video content, and access to a private Snapchat - $24.99/month

In for a penny, in for a pound, you guess.

You click on ‘Every inch (and more)’ and plug in your card numbers before you have a second to rethink your decision. You really hope you don’t get hit with a fraud alert that you have to explain to some poor customer service representative.

The wheel spins, the charge goes through, and suddenly you’re in. Your mouth has never been so dry.

There’s dozens of videos, dozens. For every audio you’ve listened to on Pornhub, there’s a video that goes with it, and for every free piece of content there’s two times as much paid video content. $24.99 was nothing compared to how many hours of content you’re suddenly sifting through.

There’s a common thread across every video though, you can already tell from the thumbnails, Ryu still never shows his face. Almost every thumbnail is the same, a white wall and a charcoal gray couch, and a man wearing oversized black sweatpants and a tight black athletic shirt.

His knees are parted, legs spread open and casual, and his hands rest clasped between them. You swallow thickly at the sight of his arms. He’s built. His hands are so good looking you think idly that he should just be modeling watches or something, it’s ridiculous how nice they are. His skin is tanned, veins snaking up his forearms, and silver rings across several of his long, thick fingers. Can the sight of a man’s hands make you come? Your aching clit throbs.

You skim through the video titles and tags to try and select one and your stomach twists. His videos are even more varied than the free content he posts and organized so well you think you might be in love with him already.

There’s a folder for role play videos, and you skim through that quickly just to see. Neighbor overhears you moaning and comes to check on you, best friend takes your virginity, boss and secretary working late, brother’s best friend slips into your room at a sleepover, step-daddy teaches his babygirl a lesson.

Your cheeks flush hot pink and you settle further into your sheets, backing out of this folder and navigating to your tried and true favorite.

Guided masturbation and encouragement.

There are even more videos in this folder and you skim through any of those ones that say ‘exclusive’ in the title to avoid ones you’ve already heard parts of. The hashtags alone leave you breathless and you have no idea what to choose, every video cleanly tagged with what you’ll need to be able to keep up with his instructions. Hands only, rabbit vibe, hitachi wand, bullet vibe, dildo, butt plug, nipple clamps, lubricant, massage oil, blindfold, wrist restraints, ankle restraints, the list goes on and on.

You select one at almost random with the tags ‘hands and fingers’, ‘dildo’, and ‘optional squirting’.

The screen starts black, and for a second you’re pretty sure something’s wrong, but then you hear him.

“Hi everyone,” Your muscles melt, and you push your noise canceling earbuds deeper into your ears, “I have something a little special today,”

You’ve never heard him talk so casually, almost like a vlogger or something. His voice hasn’t yet shifted into that deep teasing tone that kicks off every free video, and you’re already sold on every dollar you’ve spent when he starts to just chat.

“I got a request from a special subscriber in my discord,” He says, “someone who’s become a friend and who confided in me that she’s never been able to make herself squirt,”

Your breath comes a little more quickly.

“It’s not easy to do, I know,” He says, tenderly, the screen still black, “and I want you all to know that if you’re still struggling after this audio, that’s okay. It takes time, and your body is not a sex toy. There’s not a perfect combination that works for every person with a vagina,”

Your brow quirks at the inclusivity of his language choice and you smile a little, easing yourself down in the bed to keep listening to him.

“But I’m going to do my best to help you,” He continues, “so while I get set up over here, I need you to get your own space ready. Get up out of bed or off the couch, but keep me with you, okay, baby?”

You’re shaking and he hasn’t even said anything sexy yet. You don’t always listen perfectly to instructions, sometimes you skip ahead a bit and get to the good stuff just to get yourself off, but this time it’s different. You tuck your phone in your robe pocket and stand.

“For this session,” You can almost see the smile in his voice and you try to imagine him, “you’ll need a couple of good towels laid out across your space. You’ll need to drink a big glass of water before we get started, and then I want you to find your best dildo, the one that really makes you come hard. The one that fills you up just right, that hits that tender little place you wish I was touching with my fingers,”

He’s going to make you come so hard you see Jesus, you can tell already.

“We need everything to be perfect,” He says, “and for you to be comfortable. Tonight is not the night to test out that new toy, okay? Tonight is for you and me, so go and get your supplies, and I’ll tell you all about my day. I’ll be your favorite little sexy podcast.”

As he starts warmly talking to his audience about his long lazy morning off work, you nearly crumble. You’re really not supposed to be getting a crush on this guy, but here you fucking are. He’s sweet, casual and laughs a little while he talks, and while you gather up the towels and the water and the frankly oversized dildo, you’re smiling.

You hear him sit down and sigh and then his voice shifts, just a little, “Alright, baby, are you ready?”

You sink back back down to sit on your own bed and you wait.

“Just a reminder,” He says, “I will be using female descriptors throughout this video. If you’re uncomfortable with me calling you ‘girl’, like babygirl or good girl, or referring to you as a woman in any way, I am posting the similar content with male descriptors. If you’d prefer to hear baby boy or good boy, check the links below this video, okay?”

You smile again.

“Alright,” He hums, “now, where were we?”

The camera clicks on and you feel the little gasp leave you. You almost forgot.

He leans back on the couch and keeps talking, “That’s right, the lesson. Get settled over the towels, and if you’re wearing anything, it’s time to take it off for me.”

You lay back over the towels and let your robe part open.

“That’s so good,” He croons softly, “god, you’re so pretty, baby,”

Your chest thumps hard.

“Let’s start slow, okay?” His hands smooth over his thighs, “the key here is teasing, and I know how much you like it when I tease you.”

Your hand rests on your own thigh, your other propping up the phone as you watch with rapt attention.

“Touch your pretty thighs for me,” His voice is rich and thick in your ears, “that’s a good girl, there we go, nice and soft. Is your pussy wet? Did I do that to you again, pretty girl?”

You’re barely breathing, eyes fixated on the screen as he strokes his own thigh through his sweatpants, slow and steady.

“Are you aching?” He asks and you can’t help but nod, feeling like suddenly he can see you through the screen.

“Touch just a little,” He murmurs, “but don’t jump ahead. Keep your fingers off your clit, we’re not there yet, sweetheart.”

A little tight sound slips out of you as you follow his instructions.

“Is your sweet slit wet?” He hums, and his hand slides up his thigh and rests over his stomach, “Are you throbbing?”

Fuck.

“Someday, baby,” He sighs and you watch him shift on the couch cushions, “I’ll taste you,”

“Fuck,” You whisper.

“But for now,” He’s smiling, you know it, “you just need to listen to me and do everything I tell you,”

You’re nodding again.

“I promise,” He says, “I’ll take such good care of you baby, if you listen, I promise to make you come.”

Your stomach clenches, core fluttering, and you drift your fingertips up and down your slit, following the way his middle finger is slowly sliding back and forth on his abs.

“Are you listening?” His voice goes husky and your head drops back into the pillows. Next time you’ll need a better way to watch him and listen and touch yourself, but you’re so incredibly desperate at this moment that it really doesn’t matter, you’ll make due.

“You are, aren’t you?” He murmurs, “Good girl,”

Your legs spread a little wider.

He leans forward, you hear the rustling of the fabric and you snap your eyes back to the video to see him leaning forward, hands clasped together loosely, and you’re pretty sure you can see the outline of a bulge in his sweatpants.

“Does it hurt?” He croons, teasing.

You love him like this.

“Take your hand away from your pussy,” He says, just a little more commanding, “right now, baby,”

You pull it back reluctantly.

“Close your eyes for a minute,” He murmurs, “spread your legs for me,”

You comply immediately.

“Tease your nipples,” He sounds a little breathier now and you fight the urge to watch the video, “do whatever feels good, touch your tits exactly the way you like it,”

You roll your nipples, tugging them softly and kneading your breasts with both hands now that you’re not propping up the phone.

“Imagine me with you,” He says, “feel my fingers sliding up your calves, my lips on your inner thigh, you can feel my breath against your sweet cunt, I know you can,”

You’re about to come untouched, that’s the thought that rocks through your mind when your hips jerk on their own, his deep voice nestled right in your ear.

“Look at you,” He muses, “squirming around, so fucking desperate for something inside you,”

Your breath catches.

“You’re so needy,” He continues, “are you making noise for me? Little pants, little moans? Are you trying to be quiet?” He clicks his tongue against his teeth, a soft scold, “Not with me, baby,”

A moan bubbles up out of you.

“Hands off.”

Your eyes open immediately, and you don’t pull your hands away just yet, but you’re frozen still. You’re breathing hard, blush climbing up your chest, and your hips jerk slightly. If he doesn’t let you touch yourself soon, you’re going to lose your mind.

“Good girl,” He says after a moment, “very good,”

You drop your hands, scrambling for the phone so you can see what he’s going to do next.

“Now watch me,” He instructs, holding his palm up to the camera, “take two fingers,” he separates his fingers, keeping his middle and index fingers tucked together, “and when they’re inside curl them just like this.” He crooks his fingers in a come-hither motion, “Just like this,”

You slide your hand down your front, slipping your fingers through your soaked folds, but his voice makes you pause.

“Go slow,” He instructs, “push them in nice and slow for me,”

You follow his instructions.

“There you go,” He sighs softly, “now curl your fingers,”

You watch as he does it in the video and you follow instructions dutifully, your fingers brushing over your spongy g-spot.

“Feel that?” He leans back, and the tent in his sweatpants makes you pant, “That perfect little spot that makes you whine so good for me?”

You nod again, biting down on your lip, desperate to move but waiting.

“When I say,” He slips his fingertips into his sweatpants, teasing you, “fuck your perfect pussy with those fingers,”

Sweat drips down your chest.

His hand disappears into his sweats and he groans, “Now,”

You don’t have to be told twice.

“Harder,” He says, throaty and low, “I know you can,”

A tight sound slips out of you as you work yourself, but you nearly fall apart when you watch him push down the top of his sweats. His cock is huge, there’s no other way to say it. Thick and perfect, aching pink at the head and when he wraps his hand around himself you feel the tense knot of your orgasm rushing back.

“Oh, f-fuck,” You scramble in the sheets, pulsing your fingers in and out just like he told you to.

“Look at you,” He says again, “fucking yourself for me. I bet you’re imagining my fingers, aren’t you? Just like I’m imagining your dripping pussy,”

Pleasure rocks in your gut.

“Use your other hand,” He instructs, “rub that clit for me,”

You drop the phone like it’s hot, and you have to crane your neck to see the video, but it doesn’t matter. He’s given you the perfect permission to do exactly what you need and you have to take it.

“Does that feel good, baby? Yeah? Do you feel like you need to come for me?” His voice gets closer to the microphone and you’re rapidly approaching the edge, “You’re so close, fuck, listen to you,”

“God, oh god,” Your legs are trembling.

“Do you see how hard you make me?” His fist jerks over his cock faster and your mind is unraveling, none of his other audios feel like this, “Do you know how much I want to see you come?”

Pressure drops in your belly.

“Fuck,” He pants, “you’re almost there, I know you want to come for me, but not until I say,”

It’s happening whether he wants it to or not, whether you want it or not, and your fingers bear down harder on your clit, your eyes locking closed, head falling back.

“Hands off,” He’s not teasing anymore, he’s telling, “right now, babygirl, hands off.”

You pull your hands away and it’s possible that nothing has ever felt as bad as this one stolen orgasm. Your hands are shaking, body flushed and slick with sweat, and if any of your neighbors are up they are probably getting an earful.

You lock eyes with the video again and his hands rest on his knees, cock standing tall and at attention, edging with you.

“Get that dildo nice and wet,” He says, and you search your sheets for the silicone cock, “in your mouth pretty girl, imagine that’s my cock between your lips,”

He strokes his hand slowly down his length, smearing a bead of precum down to the base of his shaft as you dip the cock between your lips and take it as far in your mouth as you can.

“It’s time to come,” He soothes, like he knows you’re a whining, quivering mess, “I know you need it,”

The dildo pops free from your mouth and you watch as he lifts the hem of his shirt to expose the smooth plane of his abs, “Fuck yourself with me, sweetheart,”

Pleasure pops through you as you press the toy to your hot channel.

“Nice and fast,” He pleads, thrusting into his fist, “don’t stop this time, not until you come,”

The bubble inside you expands again, pressure everywhere.

“Just trust me,” He whispers in your ear, “don’t stop. I’ve got you, I’m right here, you let go baby. Don’t fight it,”

Your back arches up off the bedding, the muscles in your arm aching as you thrust the toy in and out of yourself, pressing it up again and again into your g-spot.

“Come, baby,” He sounds like he’s begging, and your free hand flies down to grip the sheets, “let go, you come, that’s it, there you go,”

You turn your head, catching sight of him again and the way he works himself over.

“There we go,” He groans sharply, his own release spurting up ropes of cum onto his exposed chest, “can you feel me inside you? Come with me, that’s a good girl, good fucking girl,”

He sounds dizzy, panting himself, you’ve never heard him quite like this and one final thrust sends you spilling over the edge. Your vision whites, body locking up in ecstatic pleasure, and you clap a hand over your lips to stifle the moan that rips out of you.

It takes a minute to come back from that. Your ears ringing, and the dildo slips out of you with a final pulse from your shattering orgasm. He’s talking, you register it, but his voice sounds far away and you realize that you’ve lost your earbuds. You scramble to get them back in, pulling the video up to your eyes.

“-And that’s okay,” He’s saying, his cock tucked away and his shirt back down, “you can try again another time if you didn’t quite get there,”

For a second you’re confused, it was the hardest orgasm of your life, but then you remember this was intended to be a guided masturbation to squirt and you blush, alone in your apartment, at the fact that you didn’t quite get there and he’s talking to you.

“It’s all about the build up,” He explains, “but I’m sure with a little practice we can get you there.”

You’ve never really cared about squirting until now, but he makes it sound like a perfect date and something tells you that you’ll be back here again night after night if he’ll have you.

“Anyway,” He sighs and you hope he’s smiling above the camera, “thank you for spending a little bit of your day with me, I hope I made you feel as good as you made me feel,”

You blush again.

“I’ll see you soon,” He assures, gentle like a lover would, “sleep well, jagiya,”

The video cuts and you blink hard, you’re still smiling.

You are so, so fucked.

After that, Ryu becomes a problem. You wish it was just the videos and the dirty talk and the good orgasms, but it’s more than that. You just like to hear him talk now, the little bits at the beginning about his day are starting to get into your head. And then there’s the Snapchat.

You kind of expected the private Snap to be sexy photos and videos of him in the almost pitch dark huskily saying good morning, but it isn’t. You still have never seen his face, but his videos are casual, friendly, too real for a man you spend every night fantasizing about. He chats about things he’s doing or books he’s reading while he’s cooking, filming just shoulders down so you can watch the muscles in his arms while he chops vegetables. You fall in love with the sound of his voice when he’s just talking, his stretched out s-sounds that only really peek through outside of his constructed scenes. You find yourself missing him a little on days he doesn’t post.

You’ve gotten used to waking up with him, falling asleep with him, checking in on him during the day. His message announcements in Snapchat don’t feel like they’re for everyone, they feel like they’re for you. You know that’s not true of course, you know you’re paying a hefty monthly bill just to feel like this, but you don’t care. It’s been a while, and you’d be lying if you said you didn’t just need some company.

It’s a Thursday when everything goes to shit.

You wake up far too late, forgetting to set the alarm on your phone after falling asleep directly after yet another Ryu narrated orgasm, and everything has been off kilter since. You’re scrambling to get to work on time and every little thing is going wrong. Your coffee machine isn’t turning on, the sweater you want to wear is still in the wash, and your umbrella will not open despite the rain that’s ruining what would have been a good hair day.

When you decide to stop into the coffee shop across from your office it’s not even a want, it's a need. You’re already thirty minutes late, why not make it forty-five?

You’ve never come here, not once. You’re used to going to the shop around the block from your apartment, and this place is new. Ongozisin is the kind of place you’d normally take your time in. The space is clearly industrial, concrete walls and flooring made to look unfinished. The aesthetic is still warm though, with natural dark wood furniture and bamboo accents, Joseon era paintings and a juniper bonsai along the back wall.

To the left side of the cafe stands a bay of tall windows and the very modern, very clean point of sale. The line isn’t too long, but you can see that the pace of this place is slower by design, so maybe you’ll just round up and call it an hour late. A door opens to your left and you watch as one of the baristas steps out from a kitchen holding two black plates of colorful, carefully constructed pastries.

The line moves ahead of you, and the person behind you softly clears their throat to jog your attention.

You step closer, only one person ahead of you now.

When you hear his voice you nearly reach for your phone.

“That’s perfect,” It’s Ryu, clear as day. His voice is distinct and deep and here.

Your eyes snap up to the barista behind the counter, your body frozen stock still as you take him in, mind spinning.

“Do you want any cream?” He says to the woman ordering.

Blush lights up your cheeks and all you can think about is the video you watched the night before and his voice in your ear - Do you want my cum inside you, pretty baby?

You should leave. There’s a reason this man is anonymous on the internet, never showing an inch of his face, and Ryu isn’t even his name, it's just what you call him. He never calls himself anything in the videos, never reveals what part of Korea he lives in, never talks about his job. He doesn’t want to be found.

You’re about to turn, run, scramble away, but his voice comes again and this time you realize he’s talking to you. The man, Ryu, smiles, “Good morning, can I get you something?”

You’re frozen.

“Miss?” A little crease between his brows.

“Sorry,” You jump forwards, ignoring the annoyed huff behind you and shaking off as much of this panic as you can, “I don’t know where my head is this morning,”

“That’s alright,” He says warmly, “that’s what I’m here for,”

You can’t say anything, your mind blanks.

His eyes flick over you and then he nods, “You know, coffee? To wake you up?”

“Right!” You nod, “Sorry, yes, an americano please,”

“Iced or hot?” He asks.

Are you feeling hot, babygirl? Do you need to take something off for me?

“Hot,” You say it on a reflex but then you remember yourself, “no sorry, iced, iced please,”

“Okay, sure,” He smiles, “iced,”

You make it through payment without too much more embarrassment, apologizing again, and then you step to the side. Another barista appears, slotting into Ryu’s place so he can turn his attention to the drinks he needs to make and you take the moment to get composed.

He’s handsome, that’s a given. You expected that, but still he looks even better than your imagination conjured up, more real. He looks exactly right for this cafe too, his black hair long enough to brush the base of his neck with half gathered into a ponytail, pieces loose to frame his angular face. He’s dressed smartly too, black oversized trousers and a fitted black t-shirt, slim black boots, and an open jacket in a dramatic modern-hanbok style. You realize you’re staring the minute his eyes hold on yours and they crinkle up as he smiles. He has a birthmark, a smooth light pink flush across his eye and your heart thumps in your chest.

“Long night?” He asks you, passing off a coffee in a mug to the woman who had been ahead of you in line.

He just puts you at ease and you nod, “Something like that,”

“Ah,” He knocks out the round cake of used espresso from the portafilter as he talks, “and you look like you got caught in the rain, don’t you have an umbrella?”

“Broken,” You grimace, “it’s been one of those mornings,”

“Mm,” He nods, focusing on queueing up espresso for your americano, but while the shots pull he turns back to you, “I don’t think I’ve seen you here before?”

You shake your head, “No, first time,”

“Do you like it?” He gestures around with a nod of his head.

“Very much,” You smile, “it’s a great space,”

He smiles again, looking proud, “I’m glad you like it,” he says, “we haven’t been open very long, but so far people have seemed to enjoy it,”

“Oh,” You watch him pour your espresso over ice, “is the cafe yours?”

He nods, “Mine and my friend’s,”

You wish you weren’t late, you wish you were able to stay just a little longer.

“Well,” You tell him honestly, “it’s beautiful here, I’ll have to come in more often, I only work across the street.”

“Ah,” He nods, “I thought you looked familiar,”

Blush creeps up your neck.

“Did you need cream?” He asks and you hope he doesn’t notice the way your pulse quickens at his words, but he nods towards your coffee and you shake your head.

“Thank you,” You take the cup off the bar and step back, “I appreciate it.”

“I hope that helps,” He says, and then he glances behind you at the large round window, “actually, I’m sorry, can you wait one moment?”

“Sure,” You watch him duck out from behind the bar, making a quick beeline for the swinging door that leads back into the kitchen. You have no idea what he could want, there’s no way you’d be recognized by him except as a stranger on the street, and your stomach knots up.

It takes him a moment, but he darts back out, a long black umbrella in his hand, “Take this,”

“I can’t do that,” You wave a hand, “I’m only across the street, but that’s really kind of you,”

“If you’re only across the street then I know where to go to get it back,” He shakes his head, “just take it, it’s raining like crazy out there,”

He presses the handle of the umbrella into your free hand, and your breath catches in your throat, his skin brushing against yours. Your eyes flick over his rings, just the same as always. A signet with a deep black stone, a hammered silver band, a clearly vintage one on his index finger that looks like an old Catholic saint token, the finer details rubbed away with age.

“What time do you close?” You ask, accepting the umbrella.

“Seven,”

“I’ll bring it back after work then,” You tell him, “is that alright?”

He nods, “But if it’s still raining, just keep it. Bring it by tomorrow,”

“Tomorrow,” You nod.

“Mhm,” He nods, something warm in his expression, “this will have to be your new usual spot,”

Is he flirting? You’re wholly and entirely unprepared to deal with that considering the way you moaned his name last night. Something clicks in your brain at that thought though and you nod, “Maybe it will. I’m y/n, by the way,”

“Yeosang,” He smiles, “it’s very nice to meet you.”

Yeosang.

“You too,” You dip your head, “and thank you again for this,”

“Of course,” He says, “I hope this turns your morning around a little,”

You open your mouth to say something, but there’s a voice from the cafe bar that slices cleanly between your conversation, “Yeosang-ah!”

Yeosang glances back and then he sighs, just a little, “I have to go,” he tells you, “but I’ll see you again,”

“See you again,”

He’s back behind the bar before you can blink, focusing on each customer’s order. The man who called his name is grinning, and you wonder idly if he’s the friend who owns the cafe with Yeosang or just a part-timer.

With your stomach fluttering, you push out into the rain to get to work, Yeosang’s name on a loop in your brain for the rest of the day. When you get home, his umbrella resting by the door, you delete his Snapchat from your contacts and unsubscribe from his Fansly account.

Ongozisin becomes a daily ritual.

The money you used to spend on his Fansly now goes straight into the cafe, first thing in the morning before work and a last lingering stop in the evening before you go home.

On busy days you barely get to see him and sometimes you’re left just chatting with Wooyoung, his best friend and business partner. You like him too, you like the atmosphere and their kind warmth, but if you’re being honest you find yourself living for slow days. The days where you’ve timed it just right to have a little talk before the rush of the day or the closing tasks of the evening.

Little by little, Ryu fades from your mind, and the man in front of you is just Yeosang. The guy who runs your favorite coffee shop, the guy who dresses almost otherworldly, who smiles wide but only when you say something truly funny, who sometimes gets lost in his own head while he’s making cappuccinos.

He’s lovely.

Sometimes you think he might be flirting, a little more suavely and charismatic than his business partner who asked if you had a crush on him since you were coming into the cafe so much. Sometimes Yeosang adds a little extra treat to your plate of food or he adds pretty latte art to your cup if you’re staying in the cafe. That might be nothing, but it certainly might be something.

It isn’t until another day of rain, harsh pelting rain, that Yeosang appears at your table.

“We close soon,” He says, and when he sees the brief flash of concern that you’ve overstayed your welcome on your face he shakes his head, “sorry, I meant to ask, how are you getting home tonight?”

“The train,” You glance outside.

His nose crinkles, “You don’t have an umbrella today either,”

“True,” You look down at your belongings, “I didn’t check the weather,”

“If you wait a bit for us to lock up,” He says, “I’d be happy to walk you to the station,”

“Oh,”

“Or if you’re not busy,” He clears his throat softly, “I could walk you to this little restaurant around the corner?”

Flirting, then.

You smile and nod, trying to keep your eagerness tamped down to a normal amount, “Are you asking me out, Yeosang?”

He grins, “I’ve been trying to,”

Your stomach flips pleasantly, “I’ll wait, dinner sounds nice,”

His shoulders sag, a little relief in his expression and he clears away your empty cup as he says, “I’ll be quick,”

You catch Wooyoung slapping his friend's shoulder as he disappears into the back room, and before you know it you’re blushing and sitting across from this man at the restaurant down the block.

Dinner is so smooth it feels surreal. It turns out you both like the same music, and several books too, and you’ve never been on a date with a man who asked you so many questions about yourself and didn’t just talk your ear off. Dinner stretches long too, and you’re strangely grateful it’s a Friday when you finally do check the time. He has to work on Saturday at the cafe, but not until a little later in the morning, and so neither one of you really wants to call it quits.

The after dinner walk turns meandering, and then his hand is brushing against yours, knuckles to knuckles.

You don’t think of him as Ryu until his fingers brush down your back, lips close to your ear when he finally asks you. The way he does makes your body melt - I hope I’m not ruining things by asking, but would you like to come home with me tonight?

You agree before your mind catches up to itself, but every step of the walk to his apartment has your heart picking up speed. You had forgotten on the date how you met him, really met him, and your gut churns.

Do you tell him? Do you lie?

Everytime he grins at you, touches you, tucks his long hair behind his ear and nods, you can’t imagine a one night stand. You could maybe swallow the truth if that’s all this was to you, but it’s not, and so you can’t.

On his block you feel the internal countdown ticking.

“You can change your mind, you know,” He offers, noticing how you’ve gone quiet, and it pulls you straight out of your thoughts.

“Oh,” Your head snaps up, “I’m sorry, I don’t want to change my mind at all, I just got a little lost in thought.”

He nods, this time finding your hand and giving you a squeeze, his steps slowing as you approach his building, “Can I ask what about?”

You nod, returning the soft pulse of his hand in yours before separating your skin from his. His eyes flick down to your hands, and then back up to your eyes.

“I have a bit of a confession,” You swallow hard, “something I think I should tell you before we go upstairs,”

“Okay,” He leans against the stone wall behind him, “is everything alright?”

“I hope so,” You nod, “I just feel like there’s something I should say now, and if it makes you uncomfortable at all, just be honest. I’ll go home, no hard feelings,”

“y/n,” His brows draw together in confusion, “what’s going on?”

You take a deep breath, taking a step back to get a little breathing room, “I recognized you when I came into the cafe that first day,”

“Recognized me?”

“Yeah,” You clear your throat, your chest feeling tight, “for the past few months I’ve been… a subscriber,”

“A subscriber,” He repeats, and for a brief flickering second you wonder to yourself if this man just looks and sounds and feels exactly like Ryu but isn’t, but then his face blanches, “oh,”

“I’m not anymore,” You shake your head, “and clearly you like your privacy, so I didn’t know how to just come out and say it, but if you’re actually interested in me and not just being flirty at the cafe then I just can’t lie to you… I don’t want to start something with a lie,”

He’s quiet, and then his eyes flick down.

It was so, so nice while it lasted.

“I should have told you sooner,” Your stomach flips and you take another step back, “and I completely understand that you’re upset, I’ll just, I won’t say anything to anyone and it was lovely getting to know you, and I’m sorry, I’ll go,”

His head snaps up, “Go? y/n, stop, slow down,”

His hands smooth down your forearms as he jumps forwards, pulling you gently back towards him. Your heart is beating so loud you can practically hear it, “I’m sorry,”

“I’m not upset,” He assures, “can we go inside to talk? I don’t want to do this in the street,”

You nod, letting him lead you through the garden gate and up towards the house, but his words pulse on a loop in your mind. You hope he’s good at letting you down easy because this hurts. You should have known it that first day at the cafe, you should have stayed away and not played with fire.

His house is small, but very nice and despite being sparsely decorated, you like it. You feel trapped in the entryway so unsure of what to do in this space, especially when you recognize the corner of his gray couch.

“Can I get you a drink or something?” He interrupts your thoughts, “I have wine, probably some soju, and a bottle of truly undrinkable Japanese whisky,”

“Undrinkable?” You blink.

“I think it’s supposed to be very good if you like whisky,” He explains, “it was a gift,”

“Ah,” You couldn’t feel more awkward if you tried, “wine, I guess?”

“Okay,” He smiles, a close lipped polite smile that doesn’t quite touch his eyes, “well, make yourself comfortable, I’ll get us a drink and then we can talk,”

“Sure,” You’re still frozen as he walks away down the hall to what you presume is the kitchen. It takes a minute to unstick yourself, but you make your way to the couch and wait.

He returns with two glasses of red wine and then he sits in the chair opposite you, not on the stretch of couch next to you.

“Sorry,” You take the wine, stomach flip flopping, “I know this isn’t how you thought the night would go,”

“Mm,” He nods, taking a sip of his drink.

“I don’t know what to say,” You tell him honestly.

He nods, looking anywhere but at you until he finally meets your eyes again, “You’re not a subscriber anymore?”

“No,” You tell him firmly.

“Why?” He asks, and the question hangs between you.

“When I recognized you at the cafe and you were being so nice to me,” You explain, “it occurred to me that something might happen between us, as friends or otherwise, and it just felt wrong to know you as Yeosang and then… engage with your content that is clearly anonymous and meant to be private. I didn’t want to do that without you knowing,”

He nods, setting his glass on the nearby coffee table, “I see,”

“You are keeping it private, right? I feel like you’re careful to not overshare,”

“Yes,” He nods, “no one knows.”

“Then I really am sorry,” You set your own glass aside and lean forwards, “I’m sure you didn’t want to bring your real life as Yeosang and your online life as Ryu together, I just recognized your voice immediately that day in the cafe,”

“As Ryu?” He glances back up at you.

“That’s what I…” You try to parse through it so it doesn’t sound like a parasocial affair, “fromryu, you know? That’s just what I filled in for your name, I guess,”

“Ryusang,” He nods, “it’s the Hanja spelling of Yeosang,”

“Oh,” You soften.

“Why didn’t you mention you knew me before?” He asks, but despite his words nothing in his demeanor is upset, just curious.

You take another large, steadying gulp of wine and nod, “I didn’t really think the cafe was an appropriate place to tell you that I’ve gotten off to your voice before,”

He laughs sharply and looks down, “Okay, that’s fair,”

“Right,” You murmur.

“y/n,” He sounds hesitant and you look back up to him, “can I ask you something?”

“Anything,”

“Did you come out with me tonight because you wanted to go out on a date with the guy from the cafe, or because you wanted to have sex with Ryu?” The question is direct and cutting.

“With you,” You answer quickly, and now you know exactly why he’s putting this distance between you, “you, Yeosang.”

He’s quiet, turning your words over, you can practically see him thinking.

“Yeo,” You murmur, fighting the urge to reach out to him, “if all I wanted was that, I wouldn’t have told you. But I really like you, Yeosang, and I’d like to see more of you and see where this could go, but I completely understand if me knowing this part of you is too much. If you don’t want to go any further with me romantically or as a friend, this can just be a nice date we both had,”

He nods and then says, “I have one more question,”

You wait, your stomach in knots.

“Do you have a problem with what I do?” He asks.

“I mean,” You shake your head, “I was a subscriber, so no,”

“I don’t mean like that,” He clarifies his words, “I mean in terms of a romantic relationship. I like my work, both the cafe and the content, and if we start seeing each other I’m not going to suddenly stop making porn just like I wouldn’t close the cafe.”

“I’m not asking you to,” You shift over on the couch and reach towards him, resting a hand on his forearm.

“I’ve dated a few women,” He explains, slipping his hand into yours and twining your fingers together, “this was not something any of them were comfortable with,”

“Oh,” You nod, but he continues.

“A couple of them thought it might be fun,” He adds, “but when things got more serious they expected me to stop for them,”

“I’m sorry,” You tell him quietly, “I don’t expect anything like that,”

“You don’t now,” He points out, “and neither did they in the beginning.”

You can see the way this has fucked with his head a little, the way he keeps his shoulders stiff and turned away from you as he explains, and you suppose you might react the same way if you were in his shoes.

You chew the inside of your lip as you think about how best to say this to him, but finally you manage it, “Yeosang,” you get his attention, “what you do for work doesn’t change what we do on a date or in bed,”

He turns his head a little, the only indication you have that he’s really listening.

“I have no expectation that you’re some… sex god,” You smile a little, “though my guess is that you’re pretty good at dirty talk,”

A small smile appears on his lips.

“If I didn’t like what you do for work I’d go find another guy,” You continue, “and I’m sorry if the other women you dated weren’t comfortable with it, but I’m not so shy about it. I like what you do, and you’ve helped me plenty, and there’s nothing more flattering than knowing you liked me enough to even bring me upstairs,”

“Don’t sell yourself short there,” He looks up, shaking his head, “when you said yes to dinner I thought I’d be lucky if I got to so much as touch you,”

Your heart quickens in your chest, “You, what?”

He turns his body towards you properly now, “y/n,” he says, “I like you, I’ve liked you since you walked into the cafe soaking wet and exhausted, I’ve been trying to figure out how to ask you out for weeks.”

“I think I’m dreaming,” You breathe, and he grins at your words. You clap a hand over your lips and groan, “Sorry, I didn't mean to say that outloud,”

“It’s honest,” He says, “I like that about you,”

“Well,” Your hands naturally separate as you lean back onto the couch, “then believe me when I tell you that I am fine with your work. All aspects of your work,”

His eyes flick over you, gauging how honest you’re being now, “All aspects?”

You nod again.

“y/n,” His voice softens, “what tier subscriber were you?”

It clicks in your brain that you haven’t really told him everything, all the things you know about him and his work. Little audio videos here and there might be forgivable to some women, but more might be too much.

“The highest,” You tell him, “when I say everything I mean it, the videos, the Snapchat, all of it.”

He seems to relax at that, “And if this does go somewhere,” he gestures between you both, “if we keep seeing each other. If it becomes more than a few dates,”

You nod.

“You’re alright knowing that even if we were dating and going to bed together every night, I spend my free time making people come on the internet for money,” He says it so plainly that you have to blink at him.

You turn his words over and then sigh, “There’s one thing,”

He leans back in his chair, putting a little more distance between you both, obviously braced for your words.

“I just have a question,” You ease him, “just something I should know, I think.”

He nods once, his shoulders tense again.

“Do you ever talk one on one with people?” You feel your cheeks heat, “I know you do, you have the discord, but I mean do you ever do what you do alone with someone?”

He softens, “No, no I don’t,”

“Okay,” You nod, the tense knot in your stomach relaxing, “okay, then,”

“Would that be a boundary for you?” He asks.

“I think so,” You tell him, “it’s different when you’re making a video to upload for anyone and talking to someone, at least to me,”

He nods, and then he moves, shifting from his position on the chair to your side on the couch. The nerves that were knotted deeply inside you start to unfurl, his proximity feeling like a peace offering, like an acceptance of your words.

“Subscribers aren’t lovers,” He says finally, “and some people blur that line with their content, but I don’t.”

“Then, Yeosang,” You take the opportunity to slide yourself sideways a little closer to him, “I am fine with all aspects of your work, more than fine.”

“Will you tell me if that ever changes?” He asks.

“Yes,” You make him this promise, “I like you too, all I want is to be honest with you,”

He nods, his fingers flexing on his thigh as he thinks. Finally, he swallows tightly, his skin flushing a little now that you’re almost pressed together on the couch, and he asks what he’s wanted to ask all night, “y/n,” he turns towards you, “can I kiss you?”

He’s stunning this close, enough to render you speechless, breathless. You manage a single word, “Please,”

He’s on you in a flash, and Yeosang’s lips are warm, soft and plush and as he presses into you and winds his arms around you. Your body relaxes into his instantly, the feeling of his warmth, the scent of him, rich coffee grounds and sugar infused into his skin from his work at the cafe.

His tongue probes your mouth, his breath hot as he sighs. Your body feels alight, hot and feverish and desperate from just a single kiss. You need him inside you yesterday.

When he breaks the kiss, you realize you’re half straddling him. Somewhere in the heat of the moment and the muddled fog you hitched a leg over his and his hands dragged you up against him so you’re chest to chest. When your mouths break apart, you’re still merely inches from each other and panting the same little breath of air.

“y/n,” His hands explore you slowly, moving over your skin like he’s trying to learn you, “normally I would try to keep the kink to a future date, but since you already know all of my deepest, darkest fantasies, maybe we can skip ahead?”

“Yes,” You laugh softly, “definitely,”

“But I am realizing something,” His hands find the curve of your ass, “I’m at a disadvantage here, you’ve seen my videos, but I don’t know anything about what you like.”

“You,” The word bubbles up and you flush red again.

“My voice, I’m sure you like that,” He drops it a little to emphasize the husky bedroom quality of it with a teasing smile on his face, “but what videos do you like? What were your favorites?”

He’s about to ruin you, there’s absolutely no question. Even if he was all talk you’re sure to be coming just from his words alone, but his hands, the way he touches you, there’s no doubt he has the skills to back up everything he’s ever said in the videos too.

“Now I’m a little embarrassed,” You admit, “an hour ago we were on a first date,”

“An hour ago I didn’t know the woman across the table had fucked herself to the thought of me,” He counters softly, “and we can slow down if you want but judging from the wet patch on my thigh I think you want to keep going,”

You jerk your hips immediately, angling to pull them away so you can stop embarrassing yourself all over this man after a single kiss, but his hands lock down hard over your ass and he holds your body firmly against him.

“No, no,” He adjusts his leg so that his thigh is pressed even more firmly against your cunt, “don’t be embarrassed with me,”

“Right,” You blush darker.

“I’ll tell you what I want,” He offers, “would that help?”

You nod quickly.

One of his hands shifts to lovingly stroke up and down your back as he speaks, “I want you to enjoy this more than anything. There is nothing that gets me off harder than making a partner absolutely fall apart for me, and knowing I did that for them, and I think you already know that from my content. That’s real, that’s me.”

You shiver a little and he leans up to kiss you, softer this time.

“I’d like this to be good for you,” He continues, “and honestly I already want to see you again, but in case it’s only one night for you I think we should make it count.”

The night went from nothing to everything so fast your head is spinning but you nod, surging up to kiss him with your hands pressed against his chest for balance. Your core drags along his hard thigh with your momentum forwards and you gasp a little into the kiss, your hips bucking softly on their own at the sudden pleasurable sensation. You feel something stiff and warm pressing into your belly and you feel a rush of sensation between your thighs.

“So,” He kisses you again, leaning away so he can talk to you, “tell me what videos you liked,”

“The um,” You clear your throat softly, “the guided ones,”

He smiles, “Those are your favorites?”

You nod.

“And the roleplay?” He asks.

“Good,” You nod, “everything you do is really good,”

“But the guided ones get you off, hmm?” He squeezes your hips.

You nod again, “You’re very good at what you do,”

“Guided,” He says, almost to himself, before he drags your hips up and back along his thigh, “so you like when I talk you through it?”

You rock your hips on your own this time, picking up on his cues that he wants you to grind on him, “Mm-hmm,”

“Tell me more about what you like,” He keeps one hand planted firmly on your backside, but the other starts to wonder, fingers teasing the skin of your collarbones before he cups your breast through your sweater.

“Y-you’re so comforting,” You manage as you slowly rut your body against his, “even when you’re edging me and telling me what to do, you’re just, I don’t know,”

“Is that right?” He teases softly, his fingers toying with the top button of your closed cardigan.

“Mm,” You sigh, pleasure truly starting to build inside you as you rock your clit lazily against him, “and you understand it takes time for women,”

The button opens.

“You take your time with the build up,” You sigh, finding a better position for your hands against his firm chest while you continue to rock, “and when you talk about what you wish you could do to me if you were there,”

Two more buttons part open and he hums softly, appreciatively, “You like knowing what I want?”

You nod, watching as he makes short work of your other buttons.

“Maybe I should just show you,” He slides the cardigan off your shoulders until it pools around your waist, caught on your elbows, “wouldn’t that be better than just listening?”

“Y-yes,” You sigh, your hips slowing so you can let him take the lead.

He shakes his head, pressing his hand against your ass again to keep you moving, “That’s it,”

You moan softly, fingers gripping his shirt, “Yeosang,”

He chuckles at your needy whine and brushes his fingers between your breasts, stroking up your chest, down and over the wire of your bra, and lower still over the soft flesh of your belly.

“There you go,” He smiles, “I know that feels good,”

You nod, “So good,”

“Jagiya,” His hands slide your bra straps down, letting the soft material of the mesh cups fall and reveal your breasts to his hungry eyes, “look how pretty you are for me,”

You’re close.

“Don’t stop,” He murmurs, shifting under you so that he can sit up further and press his lips to your chest, “I need you to come,”

“Yeo,” You whine, your hips sinking into a quick rolling rhythm that feels so right.

“I need to take my time with you,” He confesses, lips traveling from the center of your chest across the swell of your breasts, “but I don’t think I can,”

“I-I don’t want you to,” You moan, wrapping an arm around his shoulders to stay steady, “please,”

“I want to,” He groans, “but, fuck, y/n,”

“Yeo,” You shudder, pleasure snapping up and down your spine, “it’s not one night, it could have never been one night for me,”

He exhales a heavy breath against your skin, hands tightening pleasantly on your rutting hips.

You’re startlingly close to tipping over the edge, the bubble growing closer and closer to bursting, and you squeeze your eyes shut tightly to focus on the sensation of him, “I-I need,”

He grips you harder, “Tell me, baby,”

“I, I,” You stammer, body stumbling towards coming.

“Come on,” He says lowly, “tell me what you need, baby, I’m right here,”

A tight sound bubbles out of your mouth and you figure it out in a second, your hand winding into the back of his hair to direct his head, pushing his mouth until you feel his lips ghost over your pebbled nipple.

“Oh,” He groans, his tongue catching your nipple firmly and sending a shock down your back, “there we go, I’ve got you,”

His tongue flicks over your nipple again, closing his lips over the hardened bud to suck sharply in exactly the way you need to take you right over the edge.

“I’m,” You grip him harder, losing yourself entirely now as you grind against him for your release, “I’m so close,”

“Come,” He pants, latching back onto your breast to keep lavishing the same attention, his arms banding tightly around you to hold your shuddering body close.

Your finger tightens in his hair, he begs you once more to come, and your orgasm knocks into you sideways. You moan sharply, jerking against him as you fall apart, and you feel him start to move.

He presses fast kisses across your chest, his voice soothing, “Oh, there we go,” he sighs as he feels you trembling, “fuck, what a good girl showing me exactly what she needs,”

His words draw a groan from your lips, your head buzzing at his praise.

“Perfect,” He sighs against your chest, “you have the prettiest tits I’ve ever seen,”

You shiver, “Yeah?”

“Mhm,” His fingers trace a circle around your nipple, and something in the way he’s touching you and the sound of his voice tells you everything. He’s about to tease you, edge you, make you come, and god willing he was about to fuck you. Yeosang flicks his thumb over your nipple and smiles, “Baby, I’m going to turn you over, if you want to slow down or stop at anytime you just tell me,”

“I think I’ll be,” You start to say, and then he maneuvers you quickly in his strong arms, gathering you close so he can turn you over on the couch, leaving you lying flat on your back against the cushions. You squeak and the way he pushes your legs together, quickly undoing the buttons on your trousers and pulling down the zip, and he glances up at the sound to check your eyes but finds nothing but your lazy post-orgasm smile.

As he kneels and strips your trousers off he groans, “God,”

“W-what’s wrong?” You blink, finding his eyes.

“Absolutely nothing,” He smooths his hands up and down your bare legs, “except I’m finding it very difficult not being inside you yet,”

“So come inside me,” You smile.

The corner of his mouth turns up at your words, “Already, baby? It’s only the first date,”

You process your words and roll your eyes, “You know what I meant,”

“I do,” He smiles wider now, “but you need to come again before I fuck you,”

“Not that I’m complaining about you touching me,” You gasp sharply as he hooks his thumbs under the sides of your thong and yanks it away, “but I’ve been daydreaming about your cock for months, so,”

He laughs sharply, tugging his own shirt up and off over his head as he does, “I’m flattered,”

“Shut up,” You press your thighs together and let your head flop back onto the cushions.

“Darling,” Yeosang says, kissing each of your thighs before he starts to slowly open your legs again, “how long has it been since you’ve been with someone?”

“Honestly?” You grimace, “A while,”

“And how long since you’ve had anything bigger than your fingers inside you?” He asks it so plainly, so calmly, while he widens your legs and starts to tip you open, another kiss to your inner thigh.

You shiver in his hands, “N-not that long,”

“Hmm,” He sounds pleased at that, “do you like using toys when you fuck yourself to my voice?”

“Fuck,” You gasp as his finger traces the softest line up and down your slit.

“Is that a yes?” He blows a cool stream of air across your throbbing clit and you jerk in his hands.

“Yes,” You answer quickly.

“What I wouldn’t give to watch that,” He says, kissing your inner thigh again before he continues, “but still, I’m probably bigger than your dildo, be patient with me,”

“Oh, fuck,” You melt as he presses one finger inside your slick channel.

“Relax,” He soothes you, “just let go for me,”

You don’t know how your life is this strange, how you went from listening to this man through your headphones while you touched yourself under the covers alone at home to his fingers sinking inside you. You’ll probably wake up from this dream with sticky thighs. There’s no way this is real.

Those are the thoughts that dizzy you until he pushes two fingers flush into your heat and you moan sharply, your hand gripping down on one of the couch throw pillows. He feels pretty real.

He groans, gently pumping his middle and ring finger just to get you used to the sensation, “Feel good?”

“So good,” You sigh.

“How badly do you need to come, darling?” He asks, continuing the slow and steady thrust of his fingers.

“So badly,” Your voice is whiny, needy, entirely informed by the feverish heat spreading through you.

“Pretty girl,” He hums, “with an even prettier pussy,”

“Oh, god,” You grip the pillows harder, and he’s barely doing anything to you but your legs are already starting to tremble.

“Mmm,” His fingers begin to pulse more firmly and you feel his fingers curl, finding the spongy crook of your g-spot with practiced ease, “and you need my cock inside, don’t you?”

“Ah, yes! Yes,” Pleasure blooms through your body.

“Soon,” He promises.

You moan again as he repositions, continuing the steady drumbeat of his fingers inside you as he reaches around with his opposite hand to separate your lower lips, the pad of his middle finger now alternating between maddening flicks and taps to your clit.

“Ah! Yeo,” Your hips rock, “just like that,”

“Good girl,” He murmurs, “telling me what you like,”

A tight sensation fills your lower belly, a blossoming heat that spreads from your core up through your body in warm waves, “F-faster,”

“Mm,” His thrusting picks up speed instantly, the angle slightly adjusting as he does, “that’s it,”

The angle chance has his curled fingers pumping against your g-spot hard and suddenly the sensation drops low, almost painfully tight and sharp like you’re on the precipice of something.

It occurs to you all at once what he’s trying to do, the way he’s trying to make your body sing, and despite the rolling waves of pleasure and how close you are to your second release, you don’t necessarily want the first time you squirt to be on Yeosang’s floor.

“B-baby,” You whine, the pet name slipping off your tongue, “I’m gonna, I think, oh fuck,”

“Fuck yes,” His fingers flatten down over your clit and he rubs fast, slickly rolling over your firm bud, “let go,”

“I can’t,” You shake your head, sweat breaking out across your brow, “I’ve n-never, oh, fuck, Yeosang!”

“Come,” He commands softly, “that’s it, you come, right here, baby,”

He’s not stopping, and with the way he’s working you there’s no way you could even if you tried. In a snap your body releases hard, a sensation like nothing you’ve ever felt pulsing through your slick cunt and your legs jerk, hips snapping up as clear fluid pulses out of you. The sound that leaves your lips is wanton, broken and needy, and your ears are very clearly ringing.

“Oh, fuck,” Yeosang hums, almost to himself, rubbing fast across your soaked slit to help coax every bit of slick from your center, “oh, baby, look at you,”

Your legs try to snap shut at the suddenly sharp overstimulation, but all he does is take that as his cue to stop directly stimulating you and instead drop the warm flat of his tongue over every inch of your glistening pussy. You gasp sharply at the feeling, rolling your head forwards so that you can look down between your legs, and you moan softly at the sight.

He’s buried between your thighs, lazily licking stripes up your inner thighs and over your cunt, but slowly enough that his aim isn’t to draw you into another orgasm, he just wants to taste you. To feel you on his tongue and ease you through your little aftershocks.

“God,” You breathe after a moment, “oh, my god,”

He chuckles, kissing the top of your mound, “Was that your first time?”

You nod, still trying to catch your breath.

He groans a little, palming his hard cock through his trousers to readjust, “That’s an ego boost, I’m not going to lie,”

You manage a laugh despite your dizzy, orgasm fogged brain, “Yeah?”

“Mhm,” He strokes your thigh, “if you’re not careful I might get addicted to the way you taste when you come,”

A shudder runs through you, “You can’t just say things like that,”

“It’s not a lie,” He says, “I’d spend a whole night between these thighs if you’ll let me,”

“Mm,” You sigh, reaching down for him and brushing your fingers through his long, dark hair.

“Now?” He cocks his head slightly to the side, “If you want my mouth, you just have to ask,”

You shake your head, slowly starting to push yourself into a sitting position and slide your hips away from him, “Not tonight,”

“What more can I give you tonight?” He murmurs, running his hands up and down your bare thighs, “Anything you want,”

You cup his face, drawing him close to lock your lips on his, wrapping your arms around his shoulders and nuzzling into his nose, “Take me to bed, please, Yeosang,”

“Let’s go,” He agrees, extricating himself from your arms so he can stand and offer you a hand up.

You take it, but as you do you realize the wet puddle on the floor in front of the couch and you blush dark red, covering your mouth with your hand, “I’m so sorry,”

“For what?” He blinks at you, and then follows your nervous eyes.

“I didn’t realize,” You start to say but he interrupts you with a hard kiss.

“Relax,” He says, “if we’re lucky you’ll make a mess of my room too,”

“I don’t know how I did it,”

He laughs again, “I do,” he smiles, “now come on, I need to see you in my bed before I combust,”

He tugs your hand, leading you down the hall until you’re in a large master bedroom. Your eyes flick over the details - industrial, warm wood, dark green sheets, soft ambient lighting. You’re about to comment on it, but he flips you back around to face him and captures your mouth in another hungry kiss.

“God,” He backs you up to the edge of the bed, dropping you down and falling over you, “tell me I can have you,”

“You have me,” You pant against his mouth, all thoughts of his lovely interior decor gone in an instant when you feel the hard shaft of his cock nestled between your thighs.

“I swear next time we’ll go slow,” He grinds his hips down, rolling his length up and down your slit, only the thin fabric of his trousers separating you.

“Please,” You buck against him, “I need you right now,”

“Fuck,” His hands are hot, searching, “is that right, darling?”

“Inside me,” Your hands scramble to find his waistband, “please,”

He nods, lips still pressed against yours, and then he leans back just enough to undo his trousers and start to push down his pants and boxer briefs.

Your mouth runs dry immediately. He wasn’t wrong about his size. You have fairly large dildos at home, thick and long and perfect for reaching all the spots you need it to, but Yeosang was bigger, thicker and longer than anything you’ve ever had inside you.

“Condom?” He manages as he shucks off his pants.

You blink, tearing your eyes away from his perfect, aching cock and nod, “We probably should?”

“Right,” He doesn’t push you to make a different choice, he simply searches his nightstand for a moment and produces a foil packet.

He strokes his cock twice while he tears the packet open with his teeth, before watching you beneath him as he rolls the condom smoothly down his length, adjusting it so that it fits perfectly.

You’re trembling with anticipation, you can feel it and so can he.

“y/n,” He murmurs, leaning over you and pressing a hand beneath your back to finally unclip your bra, “I want you to do something for me,”

You nod, sliding the cardigan and bra off your body and pushing them over the edge of the bed.

He grabs a firm looking pillow and folds it in half, “Lift your hips for me,”

You lift up and he slides the pillow right under your backside to leave you propped up and open for him.

“If it doesn’t feel good,” He murmurs as he maneuvers you into the position he wants, “or if I’m hurting you at all, just tell me,”

You nod.

“And I want you to tell me when you’re about to come,” He instructs, “I need to know,”

You nod again, your stomach flipping with desire.

He licks his lips, folding your legs open a little wider and slotting himself over you. He settles with one hand on your raised hip, the other braced on the bed by your head, his knees on the edge of the mattress between your splayed thighs.

His cock finally, finally, nudges at your entrance and you grip down on the sheets below you.

“Mm,” He groans, sinking just an inch or two into your tight heat, “you’re even tighter than I thought,”

He pushes in a little more and you moan at the stretch, “Oh, god,”

“Do I feel that good, babygirl?” He teases, pushing in a little more.

“So good,” You lift your head to watch the way his thick length splits you open.

“I am bigger than your toys, aren’t I?” He rolls his hips this time, rocking himself deeper with every little thrust.

“Y-yes,” You nod, your head dropping back to the mattress.

“Can you take me, baby?” He murmurs low.

“Fuck yes,” Your hips buck up again on their own as he opens you up, nearly fully sheathed inside you.

“Just a little more,” He says, his hand tightening on your hip, “there we go, fuck, that’s it, you’re taking me so beautifully, baby,”

Tears rush to your eyes, not from any kind of discomfort, but just from the overwhelming sensation of him. You’ve never been so full, never been so deliciously stretched and had these parts of you touched, and it rushes a blush to your chest and emotion through your veins.

His fingers brush along your jaw, bringing your eyes to his, “Good tears, or should we stop?”

“If you stop I’ll actually cry,” You laugh, blinking away the hazy sheen in your eyes, “you feel so fucking good,”

“Oh,” He sighs, thrusting gently in and out of you, “what a good, good girl, you are,”

“Jesus,” You shiver beneath him.

“Yeah?” He starts to move now, just a bit more, rocking his cock at a steady pace in and out of your wet core, “You like when I tell you how good you are for me?”

“Yes,” You moan, a shock of hot pleasure spiking up from your core, “please,”

“Such a good girl letting me fuck her perfect pussy on the first date,” His voice has dropped low again, husky and direct, and you babble out a sound of pleasure as he talks, “so warm and wet,”

“Fuck, fuck,” Your eyes roll.

He collapses over you a little more, his desperate lips searching for yours and the angle deepens, pushing his cock deeper and deeper inside you with every downward thrust of his hips.

You grip his shoulders, nails digging into his warm skin, “Baby,” you pant, “your cock, oh god,”

He hums against your cheek, head falling slack as his lips find your throat, sucking your pulse points and no doubt searing his mark into your tender skin. He pumps his hips harder and you moan under him, cursing again and scrambling to hold him closer.

“Such a dirty mouth,” He nips at your neck, “are you always like this, or is my cock that special?”

All you can manage is a taught moan in response, his cockhead now continuously connecting with your sweet spot over and over and rendering you unable to string a coherent thought together.

He groans at the way your cunt flutters and spasms and he kisses you hard, fingers tangling in your hair, “One of these days I’ll feel you for real,” he pants, “nothing between my cock and your sweet cunt,”

Your back arches, your mind spinning at the thought, “Yeo,” you moan.

“Fuck,” He chokes, “the way you’re squeezing me,”

You make a tight sound, something between a pleasured whine and a sob, and his hips stutter and stop, pressing his cock in as deep as possible as he grips down on whatever parts of you he can, breathing hot and heavy against your skin.

You can’t really move well in this position, but your hips rock in tiny back and forth motions to try and keep the sensation rolling through you. He’s panting into your shoulder, clearly trying to keep himself from coming too soon, and your mind commits to an idea before you have a second to double check yourself.

“Yeo,” You tap his arm, “baby I need to move,”

He pushes off you, his cock sliding out of your soaked core and you leg your legs straighten out, “What’s wrong,”

The words are barely off his tongue before you’re sitting up, grabbing his hand and drawing him back to the bed, pushing him onto his back with a guiding hand to his shoulder. He lets you lead, watching you as you put him where you want him this time, and he smiles, eyes flicking over you appreciatively.

“I need you,” Is all the explanation you can give, and maybe with a stranger this is foolish, borderline stupid, but you know him. He’s not a stranger really, not to you.

With a feverish pulse of need inside you, you shift to straddle his hips, and with quick, sure hands you roll the condom up from the base of his cock and toss it to the side.

“y/n,” He manages, but you’re lifting yourself over him now and his hands fly up to brace your waist, “are you sure?”

“So sure,” You connect his cockhead with your slick hole and drop your hips down fast, taking the whole hard length of him inside you in one smooth motion.

It’s his turn to moan, his head dropping back at the sensation of your wet walls and he grips at you, his hips stuttering beneath you.

“God,” He bucks up into you, “you’re perfect,”

“So are you,” You rock against him, finding the perfect place for your hands on his chest, “you’re so deep,”

He moans again, and when you start to bounce up and down he curses tightly.

“J-just don’t come inside me,” You keep bouncing, a steady fluid motion in your hips that you can tell is driving him crazy, but you have to keep your head at least a little.

“F-fuck,” He groans, his jaw tightening as his eyes flick down to the place your bodies are joined together, “you’re making that kind of difficult,”

“I just wanted to feel you,” Your shaking arms buckle a little and you find yourself flush against his chest while you work his cock.

“Me too,” His hands find your ass again and he starts to direct the pace, “God, I could fuck you forever,”

A moan drops from your mouth, your hands tightening on his chest.

“Don’t stop,” He urges you, and you realize your hips slowed at his words, “you feel so good riding me like that,”

Your thighs are burning already, but you hardly care, every fast shift up and down leaves you closer and closer, “Love you cock,”

“Mm, yeah? Say that again,”

“I,” You curse as a spike of pleasure rolls through you, “fuck, I love your cock,”

“Good girl,” He grips you tight, his hips jutting up to meet you now.

Your pace falters slightly, “Please, please,”

“I’ve got you,” He adjusts just enough to hold you steady as he fucks up into your tight heat, “I’ve got you,”

You moan, dropping your head into his chest and shuddering against him, “Baby, oh fuck,”

“A-are you close, jagi?” He pants, fingers digging into your hips so hard you know you’ll have bruises.

“Don’t stop,” You beg, “please, god, don’t stop,”

He groans, keeping the pace of his thrusts and using his hands on your ass to maneuver you to meet his hips.

“Shit,” You shudder in his arms, your orgasm fast approaching, “I’m coming,”

“Come here,” He shifts you fast, rolling you up and off him and manhandling you up to your feet.

You make a surprised noise at the lack of him inside you when you were getting so close, but you don’t have to worry for very long. Before you can open your mouth he has you standing, facing away from him, and bent over ninety degrees to brace your hands on the bed.

He thrusts back inside you sharply, slamming his hips into yours and leaving you moaning and curling in on yourself, your legs starting to tremble.

“Come on my cock, pretty girl,” He palms your ass before planting his hands on your hips and using the leverage to pull you back into each of his thrusts, “you’re so close,”

Your eyes slam shut, fisting the sheets as you hang on, every sharp push of his cock driving deeper and deeper. You’re going to have bruises, you’re going to be sore, but none of it matters when he’s making you feel this good.

You sob out a moan, collapsing forward into the bedding but he holds you up, “I can’t,”

“Yes, you can,” He pants, his sweat slick skin connecting again and again with yours.

“Fuck,” You groan, “I’m almost, I’m so,”

“Touch your yourself,” He directs, interrupting your pleasured ramblings, “rub your clit for me, baby,”

You slide a hand between your legs, locating your slick bud with ease and rolling your fingers over it quickly.

“Fuck, there you are,” He groans, “that’s right, baby, come on my cock,”

The same new sensation drops in your gut, your legs start to shake and you’re fairly sure that without his sure hands you’d be crumbling.

“That’s it,” He coaxes you up, never once slowing the sharp snaps of his hips, “there you go, that’s my good girl,”

Something unravels in your gut and you come with a shout, folding in on yourself as your legs quake and your mind whites out. Yeosang wraps his arms around you, curling over your back to keep you steady, and his cock slips free so he can stimulate you through your orgasm with his fingers, more liquid pulsing out of you as he fucks you over the edge.

You’re a quivering mess, and he lets you drop into the sheets, pushing you onto your back so he can stand over you, one hand fisting his slick cock.

“I’m coming,” He groans, “w-where?”

Your hands cup your breasts automatically, and you arch up to offer yourself to him, “On me, baby, come all over me,”

Yeosang groans sharply, his hips thrusting into his tight grip as ropes of silvery white cum paint your skin, covering your belly and breasts and dripping down your chest. He’s panting, his skin flushed pink and sweat covering every inch of his toned chest.

It takes you both a moment to recover, both trembling in the same position as you try to regain your breath, but after a few moments he smiles a hazy, satisfied smile and finds your eyes, “You’re so beautiful,”

Suddenly you feel a bit shy, even despite everything you’ve just done together.

“So beautiful,” He sighs again, pushing his hair back out of his face, and then he drops to his knees.

He hushes your soft protests and this time he tastes you slowly, but with intention. After such rough, intense sex, he follows it with the softest, slowest orgasm you’ve ever had. With slow sucks and gentle licks he brings you through a languid rolling wave that softens your limbs and leaves you sleepy and pliant in the sheets.

You drift, falling into sleep too easily for a first date in a sort of stranger’s apartment.

You wake a little later to a warm sensation on your skin, and you blink your eyes open to see Yeosang sitting next you, freshly showered and wearing black sweatpants and a familiar blank tank top. He draws the wet washcloth over your skin and then stops and smiles when he sees your eyes open.

“Hey,” He murmurs.

“Hi,” You reply softly, “I didn’t mean to fall asleep,”

He shakes his head, “Don’t be sorry,”

“I think you scrambled my brain a little,” You laugh, covering your face with your hands.

“Hopefully in a good way,” He nudges you.

“Beyond good,” You look up at him, “are you kidding?”

He smiles a little wider, “Good,” he says, “I drew you a bath,”

“Oh,” Your eyebrows raise.

“I thought you might be sore,” He explains, “I know I was a little rough, I hope you’re not feeling it too much,”

You shake your head, “Just a little, but in a good way,”

He nods, “Does the bath sound nice, or would you prefer a shower?”

“Bath is perfect,” You can see that he’s suddenly a little nervous, back to the same man from your date, no trace of Ryu’s husky tones.

“Here,” He offers you his hands to help you up, and guides you towards the connected bathroom suite. It’s large, crisp and clean, and in the corner stands a large spa-like tub filled high with warm water.

“Thank you,” You murmur as he helps you slip into the cocoon of water, the subtle scent of lavender wafting up from the steam.

“Mhm,” He nods, pulling a bamboo stool from the side of the sink and setting it down so he can sit at the edge of the tub and be at eye level with you.

“This is nice,” You murmur, still finding yourself a little shy in the post-orgasm clarity of it all.

He’s quiet for a moment, his fingertips dragging over the surface of the water and then he bites his lip.

Your stomach sinks for a moment, nerves coming back tenfold at the idea that maybe he’d prefer you to go after this, maybe this is all you’d ever have. Maybe he reconsidered what you know about his online persona and maybe he wasn’t willing to take the leap.

“y/n,” He sighs, “this might be forward,”

You look up from the rippling water.

“But what do you think about staying the night? We could order some dessert, maybe keep getting to know each other a little?” He asks.

You can’t fight the smile that blooms over your face, “I thought you might have changed your mind,”

“No,” He reaches into the water to find your hand, twining your fingers together, “not at all.”

“Yeah?” You squeeze his hand.

“I’d be crazy to let this be a one-time thing,” He lifts your hand from the bath and presses a kiss to the back, “I hope you feel the same.”

“I really do,” You twist to the side, leaning over to find his mouth and lock your lips together.

Yeosang cups your cheek, deepening the kiss tenderly, his tongue sweeping against yours, “What are you doing tomorrow night, then?”

“Tomorrow?” You lean back a little.

“Let me take you out again,” He kisses you again, softly this time, “I’m probably supposed to wait a few days, Wooyoung would tell me I seem too eager, but,”

“Who cares about that?” You grin, leaning out of the bath far enough to wrap your arms around his neck and kiss him, “It’s a date,”

“And Sunday?” His hands slide down your back.

You nuzzle his nose with yours, “I have a date,”

“Oh,” He says, deflating instantly.

“You might know him,” You tease, “he owns this lovely little cafe,”

He laughs, his forehead leaning on yours, “You’re mean,”

“You like me,” You peck his lips.

“I do,” He nods, “I really, really do,”

#honeyhotteoks updates #honeyhotteoks fics #yeosang x reader #kang yeosang #yeosang #ateez #yeosang ff #yeosang fic #yeosang smut

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becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys · 4 months

Note

With Duolingo getting enshittified, do you know any similar alternatives for learning Welsh? I started last year but stopped after moving here because house move, spoons, etc. and all the news about it is really putting me off restarting on duo.

If vocab is what you want, there's an app called Influent that has a Welsh option. It's paid - I think it costs a fiver? So not much. But it's great for vocab, and gamified, so that's fun.

Actual courses:

learnwelsh.cymru is the official Welsh Government supported website to hook you up with any course. At any level, too, from absolute entry level beginner to "Used to speak it but haven't in a while so need to polish up". You can find in person courses, online courses, long ones, short ones, free ones, paid ones, ones designed for employment (including specific fields), Saturday workshops, residentials, digital resources... There's tonnes. Absolutely tonnes. And, if you want one of the paid new beginner ones, they're currently discounted to half price until the end of January with the code CYMRU24. Obviously, free ones are shorter and much more basic than paid, but they do exist.

Your local Menter Iaith will very likely have some options; go along and ask (you can do that in English, they'll be fine with it).

SaySomethingInWelsh is always always the best. It uses a completely different language learning method and it churns out fluent speakers like you wouldn't believe. This is because their course focuses on verbal and oral language acquisition skills rather than the written word. Now, they used to achieve this, in the online courses, by means of audio recordings, but they have finally built their own AI NO DON'T SWITCH OFF COME BACK they built it themselves. It hasn't replaced anyone, and won't. It just makes the audio recordings into something more interactive and therefore more effective. And currently if you sign up to it, you get it for a tenner a month (this will sometime soon be rising to £30 a month, but if you sign up while it's still a tenner they'll never put you up to the £30).

Or, they do an in-person intensive course, which is 100% effective and incredible but costs £2000 a day. Like, it will make you fluent in weeks, but that's way too steep for the likes of us peasants.

And, I expect others will probably add in the notes any others I've missed. So keep an eye there. Good luck!

#asks #wales!#closed for cleaning on mondays #linguistics

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leonardcohenofficial · 8 months

Text

vinyl + turntable basic info / general tips

while i am by no means a real audiophile or vinyl expert here are some tips that have worked for me over my almost two decades of collecting!

turntables + speakers

do not buy suitcase players. i cannot overstate this enough. do not buy suitcase players. the all-in-one players are generally cheaper, but there isn't enough support from the platter because they are smaller than 12 inch LPs. this can lead to shitty sound quality, the needle can fall out of the groove, and you can actually break your records. save up and pay a little more and get a proper turntable

there is a lot of debate about belt vs. direct drive turntables (belt drive turntables use a belt to spin the turntable while direct drive turntables have the motor directly under the platter) and which is better. very generally speaking if you want better sound quality, belt drive is the way to go; if you want a player that's a little easier to use that's also a little more durable, direct drive is a better option (most DJ turntables are also direct drive, as a side note)

i currently have three turntables and they are all audio-technica, which is a well respected brand (especially for beginners)—i have an AT-LP60X ($149) which is a belt driven player, as well as two AT-LP120XUSB ($349 each) which i use for practicing DJing/selecting. i also have a stanton M.203 mixer (insane to me that it's listed for $350 on amazon, i paid eighty bucks for mine on ebay), audio-technica ATH-M20x headphones (they were a gift but are listed for $49 on amazon) and a set of edifier R1280DB bluetooth speakers ($149). the speakers are hooked up directly into my mixer, but because both the speakers and the AT-LP60X are bluetooth, i can also play records on that turntable too

change your needle! general rule of thumb is to replace your needle every thousand hours of listening; for the average person if you change it once a year you should be good, i'm on the cautious side and change them every six months

i really like my setup; it's on the cheaper side when it comes to "grownup" gear but true audiophiles would probably scoff at my basics. regardless of what you end up getting, a decent turntable that doesn't have the speakers built in that fits within your budget and a good set of speaker or headphones is all you need

buying records

any time that you can, i recommend buying vinyl directly from the artist! whether it's through bandcamp their website or at a show i think it's better to buy direct when you can (and often times it's cheaper than buying through a third party)

when you can, buy local. not only is it good to support independently owned shops, developing a relationship with local music people is great and if they're good they'll start to know you/your tastes. it also allows you to get good at crate digging, because you never know what you're going to find in a dollar section

utilize listening stations if the store has them! people can be pretty fast and loose with grading used records, so it's better to listen to it and see if the audio quality corresponds with the price (i don't always buy mint/nearly mint records and can tolerate a fair amount of noise but not if i'm being ripped off lmfao)

look things up on discogs to see if you're getting ripped off. not only is discogs great for keeping track of your collection (also you can friend me here!), the online marketplace is great for checking average sale prices for a given release. also handy for seeing how rare a release is!

buying records on discogs can be a crapshoot, ebay even more so. read seller's reviews; if there's feedback that they generally grade conservatively, that's a good thing

i have such a large collection that maintaining a record of what i have is really necessary; discogs is really fantastic for this. you can even scan barcodes on specific releases to find them through the discogs app! it's super handy for me as sometimes i forget that i have certain albums already and end up buying multiple copies and having to get rid of them (i need to get better at cataloguing immediately after i get new stuff, i currently have about forty five records i still need to add lmfao)

storing + maintaining records

keep your records clean! get a good cleaning kit and have microfiber cloths on hand to keep your vinyl as dust free as possible. also use those storage sleeves, it makes a different in keeping your records cleaner longer

a general rule of vinyl storage that i learned from the owner of the shop that i've been going to since i was nine years old is to store them in less than 70 degrees F environments with less than 70% humidity (funnily enough this is apparently the same rule for cigars)

i recommend those ikea square storage bookcases, as they're generally study, aren't too expensive, are pretty easy to put together, and hold a lot of records (do not store your records in milk crates long term)

actually listen to your records! there are very few releases i keep sealed for the sake of keeping them in mint condition. vinyl can be a very expensive habit (800+ records later i am living proof lol) but it's no fun to keep them sitting around. have fun collecting and play your music!

#vinyl #music #records #sorry this took a minute ben lmfao #also folks are welcome to share / please feel free to friend me on discogs!

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kcamberart · 8 months

Text

Development going forward

So in case anyone hasn't heard, Unity announced this morning that they're going to be making some pretty major (baffling) changes to their licensing plans and monetization. TLDR regarding the pertinent info (from what I understand. The company hasn't made another statement at the time of writing, and the FAQ is very vague):

They've removed the cheapest paid subscription tier (Unity Plus) completely, and are altering Unity Personal (the free one) so that the editor needs an internet connection in order to function. If you're offline for 3 days, it kicks you out until you reconnect to the internet again for the software to phone home. This is apparently not an issue if you subscribe to Unity Pro, the $2,000/yr plan.

If you publish a game made using the Unity engine, once it passes a certain threshold of installations and revenue, Unity will charge you a fee for every subsequent installation of your game on a per-month basis (and it's not per-purchase, it's per-installation. So (allegedly) if someone on Steam buys, installs, uninstalls and then reinstalls your game, or if they need to update the game, that's considered multiple different instances of installation and Unity will (allegedly) charge the developer as such). This will go into effect in January of 2024, but will seemingly retroactively apply to all games published before then as well.

If I've misunderstood any of this, please feel free to correct me.

I would not be surprised if they heavily walk back some of this (i.e., "the last time we announced something bad everyone got mad about it, so this time we'll announce something unbelievable and then say that we changed our minds so people will be more willing to accept the slightly less bad thing we wanted to do in the first place"), but it's setting a very bad precedent for using Unity for any future projects.

I'm currently weighing my options on whether to finish Vollema in Unity and then migrate to a new engine for future projects (Godot gets better every day, from what I've heard), or to just take what I've made so far and start over using different software. Honestly, it's early enough in development that the vast majority of what I have finished and ready to implement is visual assets, dialogue, narrative stuff and audio, so I'm leaning heavily towards testing the waters with a different engine. I likely also will not be able to work on or release any smaller games in the coming months for the time being (RIP 2023 Halloween Game, I'll make it up to you) while I make some decisions. Regardless, I'll keep you all in the loop.

TLDR: I'm likely going to be changing game engines, which will definitely set Vollema's development time back a bit (along with my other projects), but development in general will continue regardless.

Hopefully I'll have more positive news to share with you soon! I'm gonna miss my add-ons, though. Oh man, am I gonna miss my add-ons.

#not art #vollema #gamedev #i'll have to update my software recommendations list to remove Unity regardless because I'm not about to pretend this is a good thing lmao #long post

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faeiri-tft · 7 months

Note

PLEASE do the toontown online rant i want it so badly

this post kinda got away from me, and by "got away from me" i mean this 3000 word toontown rant is Part One. there will be a Part Two to this later in which i actually talk about the fanservers i wanted to talk about. anyway let's go

toontown online (tto) was a children's mostly-turn-based subscription MMO released in 2003. after a few years of obviously being on life support, disney gave a one-month notice that tto (and several other games) would be closing on september 19th, 2013. on the same day the game closed, the fan-run server toontown rewritten (ttr) was announced (with multiple other fanservers/fangames/reimaginings being established since), and is a few months away from outliving the original game

see, one thing about tto that allowed fanservers to crop up so quickly and easily was that it had, um, interesting choices. very interesting choices. like, "kids could use a code injector to turn their backyards into giant mashed-together nightmarescapes"-level choices

youtube

(loose video description: a rabbit toon running around a chaotic mismash of rooms, obstacles, and npcs that Should Not Be There. audio caption: Evanescence's "Bring Me To Life".)

but ok let's talk about the actual game first.

toontown online (tto)

the game starts with you creating your player character - you can pick from eventually-9 species, a couple body types, and 2 dozen preset colors. the gender code is a spaghetti nightmare but you won't learn this until the fanservers come about so don't worry about it. you're then taken to the Toontorial, which explains maybe 20% of the game's mechanics before setting you loose into the main game

the toontorial also gives you the basic "plot", such as it is: Toontown is suddenly* under attack by a bunch of boring businessrobots called the Cogs. their goal is to turn toontown into a dreary gray featureless corporate hell; their business activities are so boring that they're physically painful to be around. luckily, they can't take a joke, so the toons have figured out how to defeat them: by playing pranks on them until they laugh so hard they Explode

*originally, the game installer had a little animation giving a backstory for the Cogs' creation. this was never referenced in game, removed pretty quickly, and i think even the devs kinda forgot it existed

that's...pretty much the whole story! in that context, your toon progresses through all of toontown, helping some mostly-pretty-interchangeable shopkeepers, reclaiming buildings from the cogs, eating ice cream, etc. occasionally, the cogs would Come Up With New Tricks (read: major content update) and the toons would Find A Way To Fight Back (read: same major content update). that was the closest thing to Plot, unless you count "the devs scheduled a bunch of invasions of high-tier cogs right before the game's closure". but...i doubt most the kids really expected a Plot. mickey mouse was there

the gameplay:

the Free Account

there were two...pretty different approaches to playing toontown online. when the game launched, there was a 3-day free trial to the entire game, after which you got kicked entirely until you subscribed. at some point, this was changed so that the first area, Toontown Central (TTC), was Always Free - you could do all of that area's quests/"taskline" and limited activities, indefinitely, and in theory this would make you beg your parents for the rest of the game

i have no idea if this actually got more subscriptions or not. from what i can tell it just spawned more warrior cats

(source)

there were. a Lot of warrior cats. there were some other social activities, too, such as Fashion Shows (with your limited range of clothes) and Begging Subscribed Players To Summon Cog Buildings To TTC and Getting Chat Banned. ...however, as one of the subscription kids i didn't really interact with this side of the game, so i'm not the best person to talk about it

2. the Paid Account

mmm look at those crisp clear graphics. hell yes

a subscription account gave you access to this whole map, along with all these areas' tasklines. to progress through the game, you must complete a variety of "ToonTasks" for the Toon Resistance (it's called that. their catchphrase is "Toons of the World, Unite!". you were giving disney money for this). these reward you by increasing your max health (your "Laff Points"), slowly unlocking more combat options, and sending you to different, higher-difficulty areas of toontown

some of these tasks were...longer than others. generally, though, they all boiled down to: "just go fight some cogs"

combat:

(source)

toontown battles are turn-based: the players use their attacks ("gags") first, and then any surviving cogs attack you with, usually, office equipment and puns thereof (unless the cog is e.g. a Loan Shark, in which case they can just fucking bite you). if you defeat a cog, it explodes; if the cog defeats you, you "go sad" and are sent back to the safety of the playground, lose your gag inventory, and can't leave until you heal.

early on, most your battles are 1v1, but later on almost everything is a multiplayer 4-ish-v-4.

an...interesting feature here in the game's early days was that you could only Type Your Own Words to someone who shared their "friend code" with you IRL. otherwise, you had to use this thing:

(source)

you had a set list of phrases you could string together, which generally covered most the things you wanted to say. but it could get frustrating when you wanted to have a real conversation with your toontown friends! so...as the source above mentions, people obviously found ways around the system. turns out that if you let players move objects around their houses, they will use that to Draw Letters and pass their friend code along regardless

eventually - before the warrior cats, of course - disney presumably realized this system was pretty goofy (🥁) , so the game got a real chat, albeit one that functioned on a very strict whitelist. my favorite is that it didn't let you type numbers, however you could just say won too tree for hive etc. like. disney i really don't know what to tell you. anyway

(isn't he charming)

cogs come in levels 1-12, with levels displayed above their heads, and as you'd expect their damage output and HP increase with their level. however, the game doesn't...actually show you cog HP? instead they have a little colored light on their chest that fades from green to red until they explode. you see numbers on all the damage you do, and you see your own HP/laff, but never the cogs'. also lategame cogs are Too Tall For You To See Their Level once they line up for battle (which isn't actually that bad but it's funny). there's a formula for HP per level, but it's never mentioned in-game. i guess someone can teach it to you but then you have to watch them type "a level tin cog has won tree too health" and is that really worth it

(as you can tell i just…don't get this. "my kid is practicing arithmetic with toontown!" - marketing angle expressly denied by god. the stealth edutainment was right there)

anyway! in theory, you have seven base combat options ("gag tracks"), which combine in a variety of ways:

toon-up, which restores your teammates' health;

trap, which does guaranteed high damage but only if someone uses lure;

lure, which stuns the cogs for a few turns and is the only way to make trap work

sound, which does low damage to every cog;

throw, which does medium-high-ish damage to one cog; multiple throws combined give percentage combo damage, and hitting a lured cog will also add percentage "knockback damage";

squirt, which is exactly like throw but less damage;

and drop, which does high damage but cannot hit lured cogs, and has low accuracy unless you hit the cog with something else first

each gag track has 6 levels, which you unlock by using that gag track a bunch. you can't carry as many of the high levels with you - i mean, putting one piano in your backpack makes perfect sense, but two is just silly, right

a few years into the game's lifespan, level 7s were added - these were huge AOE that you could regain with every 500 track EXP. there was also something called "organic gags" to promote the please-log-in-every-day gardening system

every player starts with throw and squirt, and throughout the game you slowly unlock four more gag tracks. your choices are permanent: once you have your six tracks, you're locked out of the seventh forever.

in theory, all of this opens up a huge variety of combat options!

in practice, the battle strategy looks something like this:

use sound

as mentioned, almost all of lategame will be 4v4 battles, which means sound will almost always outdamage everything on earth. you don't even need four foghorns (the highest normal sound gag) to break 200 AOE damage, and the highest health a cog EVER has is 200*. and two of the boss battles can reward you with gag restocks and heals that you can use mid-battle with no consequences (other than having to grind for those rewards a bunch). and failing THAT, you can just...ration your foghorns and take 2 turns to clear a set of cogs, interspersed with healing.

(*okay there was something called "v2.0 cogs" but they were...strange, and we just used sound anyway)

sure, once level 7s were added you could use those occasionally. and you could fall back on lure+throw if you didn't want to use your sound restocks. but even then, for most of tto's existence there was something called the "knockback bug" which. well. just look at it

(link for transcript. it's tvtropes sorry)

if you are a target-audience eight-year-old this translates to "lure + throw will only do enough damage if the cogs Feel like it." like it's really just insult to injury at this point. this was the result of One misplaced variable and was not fixed until the game closed

in the tto era, if you didn't have sound, you were kinda doomed to be kicked out of every fight forever

(bonus fun fact: there were Four entire battle themes and they were 40-second midi loops. let me out)

the bosses:

each of the four cog departments has a Boss Cog. to face off against them, you have to assemble a cog disguise and collect enough merits/stock options/whatever to be allowed into the boss's office.

(pictured: your convincing disguise)

when you enter, your disguise pops off due to Reasons, and you have to fight through...a bunch of waves of normal cogs. it's basically a really long normal battle. once the minions are dealt with, you have to, inexplicably, do a live-action battle against the boss themself:

youtube

(loose video description: four toons defeating the CFO by using magnet cranes to hit him in the face with safes for 32 seconds.)

the live-action rounds aren't supposed to go this quickly, but it's still...kinda strange? certain reoccurring game areas require Parkour, but there are no battles like this outside of the Four bosses. the CFO's room is the only place you see these cranes and they have A Lot Going On. the other 3 bosses have their own unique weird mechanics. before the first boss was added we neither had nor needed the ability to Jump. it's just weird

once you've defeated the boss, you're given a reward of varying usefulness (the best/most unbalanced reward type is Unites, which are a free heal or gag restock you can do inside or outside of battle. essentially lategame toons can simply choose not to die. riv2u etc.)

and, um. then you get some more merits/stock options/whatever and do it again. and again. and again. and again. and agai

the grind:

so the thing is that tto was a subscription mmo. every addition to the game had to be measured, above all, in terms of "how can we best get kids to beg their parents to give us money." this especially shows in the suit grind:

(source/source)

you have to defeat each boss 78 times in order to get all their laff points - and as you proceed, you have to defeat an increasing amount of cogs to even be allowed into the boss (although once you max you get in for free).

by far the easiest way is to run through the designated HQ facilities - basically, cog fights interspersed with some platforming or minigames. you only collect your merits/whatever at the Very End of the facility. the only way to increase what a facility gives you is if your last battle ends during an "invasion" - a timed period where One Specific Cog replaces all street cogs, usually summoned with boss rewards.

the sellbot HQ grind isn't so bad. bossbot HQ - the endest-game HQ - frequently requires you to do an hour-long facility and on six separate occasions you have to do seven of them. if the invasion ends before your final battle, you have to sit around until someone summons another. if you lose your internet connection because it's 2008, or if your parents make you come to dinner, or if hacking or the game's general bugginess cause a server reset because you're probably in the busiest district for the invasion bonus, you have spent that Entire Hour On Nothing. the CEO (bossbot cog boss) probably also takes an hour because you and your fellow players are 10

this shit, combined with laff points locked behind gardening (time-gated), racing and golfing (multiplayer minigames with absurd requirements), and fishing (RNG-based with some fish being absurdly rare. i watched my mom fish for one every day for a month), meant that maxing a toon took Years, if you managed it ever.

it wasn't, um. it wasn't good

ok so what else is wrong with this game:

i had "aged out of the game" (lol) by the early '10s, so i'm not the best person to do a writeup of the hacking/scripting situation of those days. that said, what i'm going to do is give you a few examples, and i want you to just...look at them

(source)

(source). early '10s youtube was funny i'm trying to decide if i miss it

(source). fun thing to note here is that other players had collision, so a swarm of t-posing toons could just barricade the gag shop if they wanted to

youtube

(video description: toon who has Replaced His Head Model With An Anime Logo throwing thousands of jellybeans at everyone) (cw mild flashing just in case? and also the feather headband accessory)

i should note that the Bring Me To Life vid i started with was client-side, meaning only the player could see their technicolor hellscape. this guy's face was server-side. i do Not Think you should be able to do that

youtube

(video description: a player demonstrating use of a bot to get into the nutty river district, followed by other players using it to go to different game areas)

the above video was posted on august 17th, 2013. if you don't want to watch an Unregistered Hypercam 3 recording at about 5 frames per second, what's going on here is:

the player goes to a specific location and says a specific speedchat phrase.

a bot toon teleports to their location and provides some prompts on how to use it

the player tells the bot, via speedchat, to teleport to the (currently closed from the outside) busiest district so the player can follow

these "taxi toons" were server-sided, persisted across server resets, were made by a future fanserver dev, had younger kids referring to them as a "glitch" as if this were something that could Accidentally Happen, and stayed functional until the game closed

like...a lot of the "hacking" was just baby's first script download. this one - afaict also created by the laughing man head guy - is like...the fact that after years of no substantial game updates, someone effectively programmed their own "QOL feature" (note: not actually good for the poor mid-00s server being turned into a clown car) into a silly disney MMO and it just fucking sat there for a year is just. it's just.

i don't know what this is. this is not Playing The Game Toontown Online. this is nothing. this is everything. there are comments from 2013 on some of these videos saying stuff like "hackers killed toontown", but your game cannot have this happen if it is not already dying

and, like...it was. i'm not sure how many moderators there were by this point, but at the very end of tto, the number of active devs was One. the original devteam recently brought this up at the 20th anniversary celebration: devs just...slowly started getting pulled from the game, one at a time. there were a few updates after bossbot HQ - Field Offices, which i've basically never heard anything good about in their tto form ever; the Silly Meter, a yearly event...thing whose main function was to add unskippable dancing-inanimate-object cutscenes to your street battles; Parties, which...yknow parties were okay actually. i accept parties. but they weren't exactly a Major Game Update like the ones that had come before. in 2011 we gained the ability to Wear Hats. in 2012 the test server got some actual QOL updates that never made it to the main game; the final test server update was some maintenance in february, and then nothing for 18 months. disney was not providing enough resources to address the scripting because disney was not providing enough resources to address toontown. imagine being the last dev standing on an MMO that was older than some of its players, was losing its business model to mobile gaming, and spent most of its life falling apart at the seams. just imagine it, for a second

it couldn't have kept going, not like this.

on august 20, 2013, the closing announcement came: we had a month left of toontown online. the test server shut immediately; subscription refunds went out, and the game became actually F2P for the month; the part of the announcement that went like "we're shifting our focus to other games!" made a bunch of twelve-year-olds hate club penguin as if club penguin wouldn't also close in a few years; all the holiday events went off at once; and...

there wasn't a "thanks for playing!" popup. everyone online just got kicked, all at once. it was finally over

hey wait.

#toontown #toontown online #tto #tft talks #tft stuff #<- this goes in that tag i think #this was like. enrichment. thank you

243 notes · View notes

froggibus · 1 year

Note

omg what abt valorant sova/chamber watching their s/o get killed by their mirror counterparts 🤭🤭

The Wrong Reflection - ft Cypher, Chamber, Sova & Phoenix

Includes: Cypher, Chamber, Sova and Phoenix

Genre: angst, hurt/comfort

Summary: you encounter your boyfriend's mirror counterpart and realize all too late what's about to happen, and all he can do is watch

CW: violence, major character death, stabbing, shooting, degrading?, lots of angst, major injuries, near death experience, resurrection, hurt/comfort, some fluff at the end?, fainting

so this isn't *quite* what you asked for but i really loved this idea and wanted to make it a little less angsty so here we are lol...also this is my first time writing about Sova, Chamber & Phoenix so if they're a little OOC or there's timeline issues thats why

————

Cypher:

Though everyone at Valorant had been warned about the evil doppelgangers that seemed to look and sound exactly like your closest comrades, hearing about it just wasn’t the same as seeing it. No matter how many times the other agents testified to you that it was the truth and swore up and down that there were “two Phoenix’s”, you just couldn’t wrap your head around it.

Until now, of course. Sent on a mission with Cypher and Jett, separated when a grenade went off and forced to hide in an alleyway until the smoke cleared, you didn’t think the day could get much worse. Then you saw your boyfriend’s hat through the smoke and went to pursue him, only for him to spin around and shove a dagger just below your ribs.

You flinch and lurch forward, just barely able to catch yourself before going toppling over. He yanks the dagger from your side, and just as you’re about to ask ‘why’, blood bubbles over your lips. You blink a few times, head spinning from both the pain and blood loss.

Why would he…

And then you remember. You remember the warnings from Brimstone and the stories from Phoenix. This wasn’t your boyfriend at all. This must have been the mirror counterpart they told you about.

Worst yet, your real boyfriend was nowhere to be found and you’re losing blood fast. It’ll be a miracle if you can even crawl, let alone fight.

Somehow, you manage to get to your knees and pull out the small pistol you had tucked into your waistband. You brandish the weapon threateningly, swinging it around in a warning. The doppelganger doesn’t seem to care, though.

You squeeze the trigger.

Cypher is frantic. He’s tearing through the streets, desperately searching for you. He didn’t want to be separated, but there was no other choice. The camera he had placed where you had first been was shrouded in smoke, smoke that was clearing way too slowly for his taste.

How long has it been since your comms went dead? Five minutes? Ten? He shakes his head. He can’t worry about that now. You have to be okay. You can’t die on him now.

He checks his camera one more time, leaning his back on a brick wall in a futile attempt to catch his breath. When the familiar screen loads, he’s relieved to see the smoke finally cleared enough to grant him sights on the streets below.

The relief lasts only a second.

You’re on your knees, blood pooling down your side and forming a dark puddle on the scorched pavement. And standing in front of you is him. His heart sinks. He doesn’t need audio to know what must have happened. You must have mistaken the counterpart for him, and paid the cost.

Not you, he thinks. Anyone but you. Before he knows it, he’s tearing away from the wall, sprinting as fast as his legs can carry him back to where you were. He’s only seconds away, but he doesn’t even know if he’ll make it in time. He turns the corner just in time to hear the gunshot.

He flinches, heels skidding to a halt. You collapse to the ground face first in a pool of your own blood. His doppelganger is nowhere to be seen. His heart is racing so fast it's painful. Everything seems surreal. This can’t be happening, not to him, not again.

His only solace is the slight twitch of your body, a miniscule sign of life.

He rushes forwards, dropping onto the pavement and sliding to you. He ignores the burning in his knees, the strain on his lungs. All he cares about is your collapsed form on the ground.

He flips you over, examining every inch of your body. He squints. There’s no bullet wounds, no signs of being shot. There’s only a gash just below your ribs, and that's clearly the source of the blood.

But hadn’t he heard a gunshot?

He looks at the small pistol laying on the ground next to you, the barrel still warm. There’s a bullet hole in the wall in front of you, and he almost sobs in relief. You didn’t get shot. You shot back.

He squeezes your body to his, so happy he almost forgets you’re bleeding out. It’s only when he feels your warm blood staining his clothes and hands that he remembers.

“I’ve got you, little one,” he murmurs, scooping you up into his arms. “I promise.”

You’re not going to die on him today, he thinks. You’re coming back to him, no matter what.

—

You wake up in your own bed. It takes you a while to realize where you are, your eyes barely able to focus and your head pounding. You inch your way towards sitting up, your side burning the whole time.

What happened? You blink, trying to force yourself into remembering. You had been on a mission, right? With Amir.

Oh, you realize, memories coming back. He was there, but so was his mirror counterpart. And he had stabbed you. That’s why your side hurts.

Still, it doesn’t explain how you got back, or how you’re even alive.

The door bursts open, and Cypher is standing there panting. “Y-you’re awake!”

You’re beyond asking how he knows, assuming he put a camera in your room the minute you got back. You just nod, taking in his disheveled state.

“I was so worried,” he closes the door softly, coming down to sit in front of you. “You were…you almost—” he sighs “—are you sore? Can I hold you?”

“Yeah,” you say, your voice so hoarse you barely recognize it.

He wastes no time in wrapping his arms around you and nuzzling his head into your shoulder. “Don’t ever leave me again,” he mumbles into your neck, hot breath fanning over your shoulder, “please. I can’t lose you.”

Chamber:

Chamber had never once been worried about his counterpart. After all, they shared a common goal, and he assumed his counterpart had the same soft spot for you that he did.

He assumed wrong.

It was a month ago when you went on a mission together. A month since you followed the wrong Vincent, and a month since he almost killed you. Had your real boyfriend not been there, you would be toast by now.

That incident was almost enough to make him reconsider his partnership with his mirror self. Almost. Still, he swore if he ended up in that situation again, he would protect you. That wannabe wouldn’t lay his damn hands on you again.

Now, stepping off the jet with him, you’re not worried. You know better now, and you and Chamber had also come up with a codeword only he would know to distinguish the two.

“Just stay by my side, okay?” He cautions, overprotective as always, “if we stick together, he won’t get the chance.”

You nod, letting him lead you across the abandoned pier. You duck behind storage boxes and abandoned machinery, Vincent trying to find the place where they’re going to plant the bomb.

There’s a slight clicking behind you, ever so slight, like the scraping of footsteps on gravel. You turn your head for a second, see nothing, and turn back to see your boyfriend staring at you.

“What is it?” You ask, “did you find it?”

He shakes his head, “we already passed it. We have to go back a ways.” You nod in agreement, letting him lead the way. He leads you back the way you came, around a corner and to a deserted place in the docks. The surface is incredibly damp and uneven. You can’t see how they could ever plant a bomb here.

“Are you sure? It looks—”

You’re cut off by him pulling out his pistol and shooting you through the shoulder. The force of the shot is enough to knock you onto your ass, the pressure from the bullet making you scream in pain.

No, you think. This can’t be. You took your eyes off of him for one second, not even. How had he replaced your Chamber? How did your Chamber not notice you missing or—had he done something to him? “How?” You wheeze, applying pressure to your shoulder.

A smirk finds its way to his face.

—

Chamber expects you to be behind him when he runs from the storage box you’re currently behind to another. He’s so sure you’re going to follow him that he doesn’t even turn around. He’s so focused on finding where they’re going to plant that he doesn’t even realize your body heat isn’t behind him.

To him, nothing seems wrong until he hears the sound of a gun go off. Not just any gun, his pistol. He whips around, expecting you to be there. His heart drops when you’re not.

How had he tricked you? Did you run off? He shakes his head. You weren’t stupid, he was just too smart for his own good. But if he’s hurt you or worse, Chamber can only imagine the ways he’ll torture his mirror self.

He sprints back to where you were before, desperately looking for any evidence of you or where you could have gone. He tries to think like himself, tries to think of what he would do if he was trying to lure you to an early grave.

But he can’t. He would never hurt you, he would never think to even try. Time is running out, he knows it. If you’re not already dead, you will be in seconds. He slams his fist against the steel of the crate, the pounding echoing throughout the pier.

He freezes. An echo. That’s right, for the sound to carry where he was, it had to have echoed off the boxes. So, he just has to follow them and find you, right?

He takes off quick as lightning, climbing the crate and leaping across the tops for a better vantage point. Come on, y/n, he sighs. You can’t die on him like this. You can’t die because of him.

He’s done a lot of bad things in his life, but he can’t possibly see what he’s done to deserve this. He can’t possibly see what higher power is cruel enough to take you from him.

He’s going fast, faster than he’s gone in his entire life. All he needs is to reach you, to save you, to do his job as your damn boyfriend and protect you.

He hears a whimper and skids to a halt. There, just below him. You’re laying on the ground, blood pooling around your head. His other self is crouched above you laughing, dragging his pistol across your body.

He’s taunting you, he realizes.

That’s fine. If he wants to play, Chamber will play. His mirror self doesn’t see him coming, doesn’t see his sniper rifle being pulled out. Chamber takes a deep breath, steadying the scope like he’s done a million other times in his life.

Just as he takes the shot, so does his doppelganger. The bullet rips through your chest, your body seizing once before going limp. The other bullet tears through the skull of his doppelganger and sends him toppling to the ground.

Chamber hops down, rushing to your side. The blood is pouring out now, and though he’s seen countless people die, it's different when it's the love of his life. Your face and hair are coated in your blood. He hates the way it gets on his hands and covers his sleeves when he tries to apply pressure to the wound.

Your heart is beating, just barely. His mirror self must have missed but…he shakes the thought away. He needs to focus on you now. You can’t die on him, not now. Still, his own hopes don’t change the way your heart rate is slowing down more and more by the second.

He’s out of time.

—

You wake up in a flash of blue light. You have to blink a few times to focus, but the energy coursing through your veins is so intense it's like your senses have been dialed up to 11. Sage is standing in front of you, looking at you in concern. Her eyes are slightly puffy.

Next to her, his head hanging low, is Chamber. Your eyes shoot wide as you remember what happened, and start to register what's going on. He had killed you. Well, not him, but his other self. You died and—and Sage resurrected you.

The energy starts to leave and your strength wanes. You pitch forwards, expecting to hit the floor, but Chamber catches you before that can happen. He’s holding you gently but securely, strong arms unrelenting.

“Mon chérie,” he sighs into your hair. “I can’t bear to part with you again.”

Sova:

It’s white as far as you can see across the horizon, snow blotting out everything in your path. You’re already nervous—this is a big mission, after all—but the snow just makes you feel even more uneasy.

Your boyfriend grabs your shoulder reassuringly. “We get in, we get out.”

You nod at him but your nerves are still on fire. Brim got wind of someone planning on bombing a safe house, and sent you and Sova to go investigate.

It made sense why your boyfriend would be sent—he practically breathed cold air—but you? You despised the cold. Yet, they were unrelenting in their decision and no matter how many times your boyfriend assured you that you would be fine, you weren’t convinced.

“Cover your footsteps,” you remind him. “They’re easier to track in the snow.”

He sighs, “angel, there’s nothing out there to hurt you. I’ll protect you.”

It warms your chest slightly to hear him say those words. Only for a second, though, until you make a wrong step into a snowbank and you’re sent tumbling away from him.

You roll to your feet, covered in snow and glaring. You look up to where you were, but your boyfriend is nowhere in sight.

“Sova?” You call.

No answer.

You turn around. Could he have gone a different way? Or did you fall so far that he’s out of sight?

“Sasha!”

You hear a noise behind you and whip around, drawing your weapon. There’s nothing there. “Sasha, please! I—“

“I’m here.”

You turn around, coming face to face with him. He has his head tilted at you curiously, using one hand to push your weapon down.

You frown. Something seems off. How did he get down here so fast? And if he was here, why wasn’t he answering your calls?

“Why didn’t you answer me? I was calling you.”

“Sorry,” he shrugs. “I came as fast as I could.”

“Right…let’s get back up, okay, we need to monitor the situation.”

You start hiking through the knee-deep snow, trying to get back to where you were. You pause about halfway up, though, when you realize you don’t hear footsteps behind you.

You turn around, about to ask why he isn’t coming up with you. You face him, and just as you do, you hear another voice behind you, Sova’s voice, yell: “y/n look out!”

It’s too late, though.

The Sova you’re facing let’s an arrow fly loose and you have no time to dodge. It embeds itself into your chest with a seeing pain, and you fall backwards into the snow. Despite the cold, your whole body feels like it’s on fire now.

Your breaths are shallow and ragged, your chest barely rising and falling with each one.

Sova stares horrified, looking between you and his doppelgänger.

As soon as he saw you fall through the snowbank, he was coming up with a plan to come and save you. To get a better look at his surroundings, he uses his Recon bolt.

That’s when he sees two figures at the bottom of the snowbank. His blood runs cold (or colder than usual), and he’s sprinting towards you. Just when he can see the top of your head, you turn around.

He gets closer and that’s when he sees someone that looks exactly like him. He tries to warn you, yelling your name, but all he succeeds in doing is distracting you.

That’s when the other Sova lets an arrow fly at you. You have no time to move before it’s planting itself in your chest.

Sova nocks an arrow and lets it fly, but all it does is wound his other self. The other Sova gives a half-hearted salute, and runs away.

Sova runs to your body, the snow beneath you stained red. He checks your pulse, but there’s nothing there. He’s frantic, desperately pressing his head to your chest to hear your heart beating.

Maybe it’s the cold.

Hoping is all he can do. Hoping against all odds that the cold has slowed your pulse down enough to save your life, that that’s the reason you’re not breathing.

He breaks the arrow, hands shaking when he realizes it’s one of his. He tosses the arrowhead to one side and the shaft to another, before lifting you as gently as he can.

—

You come to in an infirmary bed. Starch white sheets pulled up over your chest. Your eyes adjust to the light and you see that you’re in the Valorant infirmary.

You try to sit up but your chest burns and you’re left laying down in the bed. You turn your head to the side, just to see Sova laying there.

His hair dangles in his face, tickling his nose. You smile softly and push it out of the way. He’s frowning in his sleep and dark circles sit under his eyes.

You wonder how long it’s been since he slept. It was only in his nature to blame himself for something like this. You could only hope it wouldn’t change anything between the two of you.

You stroke his head gently, flinching when a hand grabs yours. Sova is half awake now, looking at you through tired eyes. His hand is in yours, thumb rubbing circles over the back of your hand.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” you say softly.

“No, no. I’m just—I’m glad you’re alright.”

“How long has it been?” You ask.

He grabs your other hand in his, his need for contact practically insatiable. “A few days,” he admits. “I was worried you would never wake up…”

“Hey, I’m here,” you give a weak smile, “and I’m alright. But you, you look like hell.”

You slide over in bed as much as you can and pat the spot next to you. “Come rest with me.”

He reluctantly climbs in bed next to you, wrapping his arms around you carefully. He nuzzled his head into your shoulder and kisses it softly.

The two of you stay like that until he falls asleep.

Phoenix:

Phoenix was the first to see his doppelgänger—and he would not shut up about it. Night in and night out, he would talk non stop about it.

“He’s just as cool and as sexy as me—it’s like me, but evil!”

And you would roll your eyes at your boyfriend. “Sure he is, Jamie.”

You never pictured you would come face to face with him, so you never cared too much about your boyfriend’s words.

Now, on a mission chasing your boyfriend's doppelgänger, you wish you had paid more attention. He really was identical to your Phoenix, and it only made it harder on you.

You’re pushing yourself hard, harder than ever before, trying your best to catch him. He was faster than you and stronger, and way more agile. It made you wonder just how much he had been holding back on you in training.

Your Phoenix is nowhere to be seen, too. You split up at the start of the mission and now he wasn’t answering his radio and you had no possible clue where he had gone.

The Phoenix ahead of you disappears into a building, and despite your unease, you duck through the doorway and follow him. You follow him up the stairs and into a tiny, half-finished room.

He smirks at you, eyes flickering with flames. “Wow, you really are almost as pretty as my y/n.”

“It sucks you’re not nearly as hot as my Phoenix.”

He rolls his eyes at that. You wonder what he’s doing, why he hasn’t attacked yet. Is he waiting for something? You can’t tell.

You had no time to react when he raises his hands and the whole room erupts into flames. They’re scorching and they take the wood easily. The mirror Phoenix only gives you a half-hearted salute before leaving you to burn.

You rip off your shirt, using it to cover your face from the smoke. You can’t possibly escape—the windows are barred and the door is blocked by the flames. You’re going to burn to death, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

—

Phoenix only realizes something is wrong when he sees a building up in flames. His comms broke as soon as he left and he had been searching for you ever since.

When he sees the building, he just knows what must be going on. It only takes a matter of seconds to get inside the building and tear his way up the stairs to where the flames are beginning to spread.

He sees you, limp in the corner with a shirt pressed over your face. He runs through the flames, the heat barely tickling his skin, and scoops you up into his arms. You’re alive—barely—but he knows running through the flames with you in his arms might do more damage than good.

He can’t lose you, and staying here he’ll lose you for sure. He has to take the risk, but for the first time in his life, he hesitates. He would rather burn here with you than lose you.

You start to come to while Phoenix carries you, coughing up blood and wheezing more than breathing. He rubs your back and tries to reassure you that everything will be okay, but he doesn’t know what he’s going to do.

You’re awake, and that’s a good sign, but you need more medical attention than he can possibly give you in the field. He already called HQ but he has no idea when they’ll be here.

He settles down on the ground near where the jet will pick you guys up, holding you firmly on his lap. He kisses your forehead, rubs your back and tries to keep you as calm as possible.

You slump into him, arms lazily wrapped around his shoulders. His touch is reassuring but your skin still feels like it��s on fire and your lungs still ache from the smoke.

You silently hope you make it through this because you know if you don’t, it’ll tear him apart.

#valorant x you #valorant fic #valorant x reader #valorant #cypher x you #cypher x reader #cypher valorant #chamber valorant #chamber x You #chamber x reader #valorant sova #sova x reader #sova x You #phoenix Valorant #phoenix x you #phoenix x reader #valorant hcs

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annabelle--cane · 1 month

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a final vague before I banish the rest of my thoughts to the drafts for public release day. I barely paid attention to most violence or body horror warnings on archives, I barely pay attention to those warnings on most horror podcasts, they don't really get to me, especially if they're just described as opposed to enacted on-audio. I Am Now Paying Attention To Those Warnings On Protocol.

#the word 'flowering' is used in a particular way. iykyk.#tmagp vague #marina marvels at life

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chaifootsteps · 5 months

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I was just watching the press preview for Hazbin that was live-streamed and a few things stuck out to me that I think point towards the 'Press' that's there have actually been paid off.

They're focusing on Brandon. He's not an A-List celebrity, he's a Youtuber, not even Matt Patt got that sort of attention when he was in the FNAF movie

Press for magazine shoots don't really publish profanity, rude gestures or things that can be seen as 'not family friendly' into magazines or online articles...All the things Brandon was doing would not make it past the cutting room floor. (Middle Finger, the poses, etc)

The live-stream had 500 people max in it at any one time...That is ridiculously low views for a premier, especially considering how many followers spindlehorse have.

Only one side of the backdrop from the left-hand side was being shown, with not a lot of people there, the audio only sounded like there were maybe 10 - 15 people there since premiers are notoriously loud and have press shouting for attention...

Speaking of shouting for attention

Press don't instruct stars how to pose. They call out their name to grab their attention, sure, but press don't instruct the stars how to pose. You can hear in the video a few photographers direct Brandon to do certain poses. Watch any movie or tv premier and you'll notice that.

I am friends with a professional photographer that said "Something seems very off with the press there, press don't guide or interfere with the subject, they're acting more like they've been commissioned to be there'

Thanks for the sleuthing, Anon. This is fascinating and I'm not saying it definitely means anything, but it's incredibly suspicious.

#Anonymous #hazbin screening #viv stuff #hazbin hotel critical #actual blog post

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 months

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The long sleep of capitalism’s watchdogs

There are only five more days left in my Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

One of the weirdest aspect of end-stage capitalism is the collapse of auditing, the lynchpin of investing. Auditors – independent professionals who sign off on a company's finances – are the only way that investors can be sure they're not handing their money over to failing businesses run by crooks.

It's just not feasible for investors to talk to supply-chain partners and retailers and verify that a company's orders and costs are real. Investors can't walk into a company's bank and demand to see their account histories. Auditors – who are paid by companies, but work for themselves – are how investors avoid shoveling money into Ponzi-pits.

Attentive readers will have noticed that there is an intrinsic tension in an arrangement where someone is paid by a company to certify its honesty. The company gets to decide who its auditors are, and those auditors are dependent on the company for future business. To manage this conflict of interest, auditors swear fealty to a professional code of ethics, and are themselves overseen by professional boards with the power to issue fines and ban cheaters.

Enter monopolization. Over the past 40 years, the US government conducted a failed experiment in allowing companies to form monopolies on the theory that these would be "efficient." From Boeing to Facebook, Cigna to InBev, Warner to Microsoft, it has been a catastrophe. The American corporate landscape is dominated by vast, crumbling, ghastly companies whose bad products and worse corporate conduct are locked in a race to see who can attain the most depraved enshittification quickest.

The accounting profession is no exception. A decades-long incestuous orgy of mergers and acquisitions yielded up an accounting sector dominated by just four firms: EY, KPMG, PWC and Deloitte (the last holdout from the alphabetsoupification of corporate identity). Virtually every major company relies on one of these companies for auditing, but that's only a small part of corporate America's relationship with these tottering behemoths. The real action comes from "consulting."

Each of the Big Four accounting firms is also a corporate consultancy. Some of those consulting services are the normal work of corporate consultants – cookie cutter advice to fire workers and reduce product quality, as well as supplying dangerously defecting enterprise software. But you can get that from the overpaid enablers at McKinsey or BCG. The advantage of contracting with a Big Four accounting firm for consulting is that they can help you commit finance fraud.

Remember: if you're an executive greenlighting fraud, you mostly just want to be sure it's not discovered until after you've pocketed your bonus and moved on. After all, the pro-monopoly experiment was also an experiment in tolerating corporate crime. Executives who cheat their investors, workers and suppliers typically generate fines for their companies, while escaping any personal liability.

By buying your cheating advice from the same company that is paid to certify that you're not cheating, you greatly improve your chances of avoiding detection until you've blown town.

Which brings me to the idea of the "bezzle." This is John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the weeks, months, or years that elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery." This is the period in which both the criminal and the victim feel like they're better off. The crook has the victim's money, and the victim doesn't know it. The Bezzle is that interval when you're still assuming that FTX isn't lying to you about the crazy returns they're generating for your crypto. It's the period between you getting the shrinkwrapped box with a 90% discounted PS5 in it from a guy in an alley, and getting home and discovering that it's full of bricks and styrofoam.

Big Accounting is a factory for producing bezzles at scale. The game is rigged, and they are the riggers. When banks fail and need a public bailout, chances are those banks were recently certified as healthy by one of the Big Four, whose audited bank financials failed 800 re-audits between 2009-17:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/28/cyberwar-tactics/#aligned-incentives

The Big Four dispute this, of course. They claim to be models of probity, adhering to the strictest possible ethical standards. This would be a lot easier to believe if KPMG hadn't been caught bribing its regulators to help its staff cheat on ethics exams:

https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-professional/article/sec-probe-finds-kpmg-auditors-cheating-on-training-exams-061819

Likewise, it would be easier to believe if their consulting arms didn't keep getting caught advising their clients on how to cheat their auditing arms:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/09/dingo-babysitter/#maybe-the-dingos-ate-your-nan

Big Accounting is a very weird phenomenon, even by the standards of End-Stage Capitalism. It's an organized system of millionaire-on-billionaire violence, a rare instance of the very richest people getting scammed the hardest:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/04/aaronsw/#crooked-ref

The collapse of accounting is such an ominous and fractally weird phenomenon, it inspired me to write a series of hard-boiled forensic accountancy novels about a two-fisted auditor named Martin Hench, starting with last year's Red Team Blues (out in paperback next week!):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865854/redteamblues

The sequel to Red Team Blues is called (what else?) The Bezzle, and part of its ice-cold revenge plot involves a disillusioned EY auditor who can't bear to be part of the scam any longer:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-bezzle-a-martin-hench-audiobook-amazon-wont-sell

The Hench stories span a 40-year period, and are a chronicle of decades of corporate decay. Accountancy is the perfect lens for understanding our modern fraud economy. After all, it was crooked accountants who gave us the S&L crisis:

https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10130&context=etd

Crooked auditors were at the center of the Great Financial Crisis, too:

https://francinemckenna.com/2009/12/07/they-werent-there-auditors-and-the-financial-crisis/

And of course, crooked auditors were behind the Enron fraud, a rare instance in which a fraud triggered a serious attempt to prevent future crimes, including the destruction of accounting giant Arthur Andersen. After Enron, Congress passed Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), which created a new oversight board called the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB).

The PCAOB is a watchdog for watchdogs, charged with auditing the auditors and punishing the incompetent and corrupt among them. Writing for The American Prospect and the Revolving Door Project, Timi Iwayemi describes the long-running failure of the PCAOB to do its job:

https://prospect.org/power/2024-01-26-corporate-self-oversight/

For example: from 2003-2019, the PCAOB undertook only 18 enforcement cases – even though the PCAOB also detected more than 800 "seriously defective audits" by the Big Four. And those 18 cases were purely ornamental: the PCAOB issued a mere $6.5m in fines for all 18, even though they could have fined the accounting companies $1.6 billion:

https://www.pogo.org/investigations/how-an-agency-youve-never-heard-of-is-leaving-the-economy-at-risk

Few people are better on this subject than the investigative journalist Francine McKenna, who has just co-authored a major paper on the PCAOB:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4227295

The paper uses a new data set – documents disclosed in a 2019 criminal trial – to identify the structural forces that cause the PCAOB to be such a weak watchdog whose employees didn't merely fail to do their jobs, but actually criminally abetted the misdeeds of the companies they were supposed to be keeping honest.

They put the blame – indirectly – on the SEC. The PCAOB has three missions: protecting investors, keeping markets running smoothly, and ensuring that businesses can raise capital. These missions come into conflict. For example, declaring one of the Big Four auditors ineligible would throw markets into chaos, removing a quarter of the auditing capacity that all public firms rely on. The Big Four are the auditors for 99.7% of the S&P 500, and certify the books for the majority of all listed companies:

https://blog.auditanalytics.com/audit-fee-trends-of-sp-500/

For the first two decades of the PCAOB's existence, the SEC insisted that conflicts be resolved in ways that let the auditing firms commit fraud, because the alternative would be bad for the market.

So: rather than cultivating an adversarial relationship to the Big Four, the PCAOB effectively merged with them. Two of its board seats are reserved for accountants, and those two seats have been occupied by Big Four veterans almost without exception:

https://www.pogo.org/investigations/captured-financial-regulator-at-risk

It was no better on the SEC side. The Office of the Chief Accountant is the SEC's overseer for the PCAOB, and it, too, has operated with a revolving door between the Big Four and their watchdog (indeed, the Chief Accountant is the watchdog for the watchdog for the watchdogs!). Meanwhile, staffers from the Office of the Chief Accountant routinely rotated out of government service and into the Big Four.

This corrupt arrangement reached a crescendo in 2019, with the appointment of William Duhnke – formerly of Senator Richard Shelby's [R-AL] staff – took over as Chief Accountant. Under Duhnke's leadership, the already-toothless watchdog was first neutered, then euthanized. Duhnke fired all four heads of the PCAOB's main division and then left their seats vacant for 18 months. He slashed the agency's budget, "weakened inspection requirements and auditor independence policies, and disregarded obligations to hold Board meetings and publicize its agenda."

All that ended in 2021, when SEC chair Gary Gensler fired Duhnke and replaced him with Erica Williams, at the insistence of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Within a year, Williams had issued 42 enforcement actions, the largest number since 2017, levying over $11m in sanctions:

https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2023/01/pcaob-sets-aggressive-agenda-for-2023-what-to-expect-as-agency-enforcement-expands

She was just getting warmed up: last year, PCAOB collected $20m in fines, with five cases seeing fines in excess of $2m each, a record:

https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2024/01/pcaobs-enforcement-and-standard-setting-rev-up-what-to-expect-in-2024

Williams isn't shy about condemning the Big Four, publicly sounding the alarm that 40% of the 2022 audits the PCAOB reviewed were deficient, up from 34% in 2021 and 29% in 2020:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-audit-the-auditors-and-we-found-trouble-accountability-capital-markets-c5587f05

Under Williams, the PCAOB has enacted new, muscular rules on lead auditors' duties, and they're now consulting on a rule that will make audit inspections much faster, shortening the documentation period from 45 days to 14:

https://tax.thomsonreuters.com/news/pcaob-rulemaking-could-lead-to-more-timely-issuance-of-audit-inspection-reports/

Williams is no fire-breathing leftist. She's an alum of the SEC and a BigLaw firm, creating modest, obvious technical improvements to a key system that capitalism requires for its orderly functioning. Moreover, she is competent, able to craft regulations that are effective and enforceable. This has been a motif within the Biden administration:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

But though these improvements are decidedly moderate, they are grounded in a truly radical break from business-as-usual in the age of monopoly auditors. It's a transition from self-regulation to regulation. As @40_Years on Twitter so aptly put it: "Self regulation is to regulation as self-importance is to importance":

https://twitter.com/40_Years/status/1750025605465178260

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28 - THIS SUNDAY!) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/26/noclar-war/#millionaire-on-billionaire-violence

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

Image: Sam Valadi (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/132084522@N05/17086570218/

Disco Dan (modified)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/danhogbenspics/8318883471/

CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

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snaccpopstudios · 11 months

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Games Report 06/20/23

Hello everyone! Before we get into the meat of this week's dev report, today's guest artwork of Shaun Durand-Coffer and Moon Pie is by Coda Blue, a black games developer we commissioned to commemorate Juneteenth 2023!

We're also breaking a bit of convention today: it’s Sauce here to do some talking about a frequent (and valid) concern/question we get from fans.

Why so many projects at one time?

There are a lot of reasons that go into it and it’s kind of difficult to break down casually. But I’ll do my best to use the analogy of a relay race with batons!

Each project (Sunny Day Jack, The Groom of Gallagher Mansion, AphroDesia, and DacahaBo) largely has its own team, meaning that Writer A is assigned to Project A while Writer B is assigned to Project B and so forth. In a single Project, when the Writer is done with the script, they pass the baton to the Artist (usually me, in this case) to draw additional art like CGs to accentuate key scenes, while an Editor works to tighten up the sentence structure and spot missing plot points (a Musician may be working at this time as well). After editing is complete and art is at least underway, Programmers and Voice Actors can begin on their tasks. As we near completion, Programmers, Audio Engineers, and Beta Testers make sure the package is nice and tidy for everyone to enjoy.

At least, that's how it goes in an ideal situation.

When you’re working on a production, a large amount of variables (defined as an "element, feature, or factor that is liable to vary or change") are in play. Some of those variables might look like:

When does this team member get off from college, their day job, or other life commitment?

When they're done with those, how much personal time do they need in order to take care of themselves, or even recuperate?

What happens if the person actively working on something has a chronic illness flare-up, gets sick, or has something else preventing them from doing their assignment?

What happens if this person isn't openly communicating about delays in delivering work?

What happens if we can't contact someone because they're not responding to our inquiries?

What if we need to remove someone from the team, or someone we were counting on leaves voluntarily?

What happens if work that was "completed" and already paid for needs to be scrapped entirely and redone from the ground up?

Does someone else from Project C need to fill in and work on Project A to help them catch up?

Does someone assigned to one role in a Project need to take on multiple roles to help the entire team catch up?

Even from this short list of potential hurdles we might face during production, it seems like an easy solution would be to eliminate someone's time spent on outside life commitments! Except, it's not: even BáiYù can't quit his day job because in America, traditional employment often offers healthcare as part of their employee benefits and SnaccPop Studios is nowhere close to being able to provide a full living wage for everyone working with us. Maybe one day! But we’re not quite there.

So as you can imagine, sometimes there will be periods of time when an entire group of people aren't working because they don't have the baton quite yet since the person holding the baton is being held up by life. And this isn't their fault by any means, but a lack of communication about that makes it harder for us to estimate when any single relay race will be complete.

So how do you keep a Patreon filled with content?

We are very fortunate and grateful to receive a lot of Patreon support, especially after our SDJ Kickstarter! But getting all those funds is a huge responsibility. You should attempt to keep it stocked. And that’s what we attempt to do.

SP is made up of different teams suited to each individual property. Different programmers, different writers, etc. Each team is tasked with getting a set amount of work done, and between all the variables listed above sometimes we have really good months and sometimes we have pretty dry ones. Keeping all these teams moving together helps us to put out content while say, a writer is out with COVID and SDJ needs to pause for a week. TGoGM had a technical error that saw the game needing to be rebuilt in a new engine. And at the moment, AD is currently sans an audio drama writer.

These are frustrating problems and we're working on fixing what's in our direct control. But we understand that we also have to USE the money we receive visibly or else people ask us where the money is even paying for. And while we make an effort to put away savings responsibly, we can’t just accept large amounts of money without providing a product, or portions of one, in return.

The "Boring Bits"

There’s also in productions portions I like to call “Boring Bits”. These are moments where everything being done is just exceptionally boring to show off. Either it’s programming and bug fixing, or it’s deep lore writing and scripting we can’t show due to spoilers, or something else like that.

At those times all we CAN say is we’ve been fixing bugs or writing. BáiYù and some of the other team members could give an explanation of what's going on during those times but most of us can agree that it's not as enjoyable as something like a new pin-up or an audio drama.

Sometimes to say more would be a spoiler, or we can’t say anything else. Sometimes, it's all a waiting game.

At the beginning, waiting was the hardest part. It could take anywhere from two weeks to months to get back recordings or audio or art. And we have to respect why these things happen. When it’s an instance of slow delivery, we can ask for more clear deadlines or pay a rush fee, but other than that it’s just a long wait.

So, while we waited, we tried to find other means of providing entertainment.

Productions featuring groups of people all over the world, with very different lives, is extremely difficult. But sometimes people who provide quality work require that bit of patience.

So where is everything in the relay race?

At the moment, the status of our projects is as such:

Sunny Day Jack

SDJ is still being mapped out due to the inclusion of Nick as a love interest, as his character becoming more permanent changes several things in the narrative with the other love interests. To help speed things along, we've asked Gil Finnegan (he/him) from the DachaBo team to work with Biscuwuit to split the character route workloads.

It’s a large game, and their work includes labeling every individual scene as well as planning all the programmable variables. We can’t share ANYTHING more than what we have already shared on Kickstarter and Patreon. No new art assets are prepared because they’ve either been made (BGs, GUI) or we don’t how many sprites we need for the full roster until the plot is reworked completely. We can’t give script pages because of spoiler reasons.

We anticipate that a more robust report cycle will begin appearing once we get to scripting, but as a VN writing is a heavy and very important portion of the game that requires this narrative planning, sensitivity editing, and retcon checking. We will likely be in the writing portion a lot of 2023, which was expected since the game is intended to release in 2024.

Sleepy Time Jack

STJ is our additional companion app that’s seeing its final updates with the Patreon Exclusive “Jacktor” portion currently in progress. Due to some less-than-ideal cloud storage issues, we had to remake certain assets from scratch. Additionally, Steam is currently giving BáiYù the runaround and making it difficult for him to get the page up publicly, but we think we've figured out why they're complaining about the logo (they seem to be afraid of the "Digital Talking Body Pillow" subtitle not being part of the app's name in the system).

The Groom of Gallagher Mansion

TGoGM is expected to be finished soon, with free NSFW content planned for the future, but not until we’ve given it some time to sit. BáiYù has had to not only perform his usual Producer duties across all of SP, but also take on Writer and Programmer duties in this project to keep it moving due to life circumstances surrounding team members.

DachaBo

DachaBo Classic is being maintained canonically and updated by a largely separate team, but mostly only as a cosmetic and stability update. DachaBo: Barks & Mews proper remains in pre-production (Planning lore, connecting dots, and conceptualizing) until TGoGM sees its first release in English.

AphroDesia

AD is currently planning its audio reboot. But as a lore-heavy series, it’s being taken under consideration very carefully. Audio drama writers are key, and our current writer is prioritizing living expense-crucial work.

The "Re-Pilot" has a full outline written that is about seven pages long, with a script to follow after. Priority will re-shift back to this project once TGoGM and STJ are out the door, with a slowly metered development since it is an audio drama/planned comic. This production is more about assigning duties and waiting than any other task.

What about other projects?

Anything else besides these projects and the Bachelor of the Month series (currently on hiatus) is not an official SP project, and funds do not directly contribute to those projects, as they’re considered personal items by individual members.

As has been mentioned before, I (Sauce) also make personal works. And that’s part of why I’m the one handling this.

Many people still consider me a part of SP from a heading POV. But part of why I stepped down as "Boss" was because at the moment I’m juggling a college education, full or part-time employment, and healing from years of untreated mental health. It was no longer feasible for me to manage all of these things.

BáiYù instead is compensated to handle the business aspects, and is more capable to do so at this time. I help with Patreon art, tier rewards, and additional creative work while he's been the one writing the majority of the updates and dev reports. I also work on SDJ sprite art, and additional art assets (Steam page, GUI, graphics, etc.) but with my free time I have begun to prioritize taking moments to relax with some non-game art.

I have noticed people saying my work outside is SP work, or attributing it as such. I attempted to even use a separate alias to separate the two, but I guess my style is recognizable to a degree and tried to make the best of it by declaring otherwise myself.

Anything not SDJ, STJ, TGoGM, DB, AD, or BotM is not property of SnaccPop Studios. I've invited some of the individual team members to talk about the projects they do in their free time or as parts of other game studios as SP has a wonderful platform thanks to all of you, but always be sure to look for the official SP branding or else risk accidentally affiliating unrelated work with us.

That is such the case for me, and it could very well be that way for anyone else.

In conclusion...

At the end of the day, SnaccPop does its best to balance a busy, worthwhile Patreon and quality projects done by persons whose individual circumstances are acknowledged and respected. And we understand that a lot of things at once can look flighty and unfocused.

We really hope this breakdown helps, and we apologize for any issues that not having one up prior may have caused!

Making art is messy. Confining creative and quality visions to jobs and roles can be at the best of times spontaneous. But we’re happy to be able to employ or use our funding to pay and contribute to the lives of many different types of creatives in many different lifestyles.

Again, here's how our projects are looking:

SDJ is on track to arrive in 2024.

STJ and TGoGM are in their final stretches with more content to come after.

DB Classic is being stablized before wide release while DB: Barks & Mews is in pre-production

AD is in pre-production, but the personal circumstances of a key writer are making it a bit difficult!

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#the groom of gallagher mansion #visual novel #somethings wrong with sunny day jack #sunny day jack #minors dni #sdj #dachabo #indie games #game development #snaccpop #snaccpop studios #aphrodesia

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about-faces · 22 days

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I'm still loving Gotham Nocturne and I wish it was getting the love/respect/attention is deserves. I've spoken several people who haven't been reading the current Detective Comics run because they're Batmanned Out (good lord, do I get it) and they see it as just another attempt at some kind of "ultimate Batman story with Batman fighting the ultimate evil," which I strongly disagree with.

THAT SAID... as time has gone on, and the story seems to be reaching its finale, there are a few things that stand out of me as problems with this epic storyline.

1.) It's one of the most egregious examples of "writing for the trade paperback." This simply isn't a story that's meant to be read month-to-month. It's too slow, with too little "happening," at least on the superficial level. Paradoxically, it's NOT a story that should be binged! The best comparison that comes to mind is Better Call Saul, since that's the only other example of serialized media that's meticulously slow-paced yet INCREDIBLY RICH for those willing to engage with it on its level rather than expecting it to be Breaking Bad (or in Nocturne's case, a typical Batman story.) Ram V is capable of writing super-engaging monthly issues, as the fantastic Rare Flavours proves, but that brings us to...

2.) The story is sprawling. Maybe even TOO sprawling. When it comes to people who are sick of Batman, I try to sell them on the fact that this story is about GOTHAM AS A WHOLE, right down to the villains who call it home, and how everyone there is as intrinsically a part of Gotham as Batman is. But ensemble stories like that are tricky, and it makes the focus feel all over the place at times, with alternately too much and too little attention being paid to the main players, Batman included. It's a balance that was handled beautifully with Batman: The Audio Adventures, but it seems a bit more awkward here. Again, it's hard to pull off!

Like, we have characters pop up and then vanishing without explanation. We got Azrael back in the AzBats armor for the first time in decades, like, holy shit! That should be a HUGE development! And then, poof, he vanished! There's simply no time to explore Jean-Paul's character because there's so many other things the narrative needs to explore.

This feels like it would have really benefited from a companion series, something to focus on the characters the way the backup stories have done, but just more so. I think about how Peter Tomasi would write companion books to the main big storylines written by Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, and Scott Snyder, and how he'd focus on character, which always enriched the greater "big important storyline." Which, in turn, also brings me to...

3.) The backup stories have really lost a lot of their punch since they stopped being written by Si Spurrier and were taken over by Dan Watters. Watters is incredibly capable, make no mistake, and his Cheshire/Lian Harper story is one of my favorite parts of this entire saga. But by and large, his tales focus more on the spooky and weird sides of what's happening with Nocturne, whereas Spurrier's stories were more focused on characters navigating the weirdness of the events. As a result, Spurrier gave us what I consider to be some of the very best stories about Jim Gordon, Harvey Dent, and Victor Fries ever written. I really miss those, and how they enriched Ram V's (possibly overly-ambitious) narrative.

Ultimately, Gotham Nocturne feels like the Batman equivalent to an arthouse film, which means it's going to be appreciated by a handful of nerds while leaving most other fans cold, and I can't really blame them. If anything makes me sad about all this, it's how all this incredible character work with Bruce, Harvey, Victor, Talia, and others is going to be ignored. Hell, it already is, given the complete lack of acknowledgement we've seen in other Bat-books for what's going on in Nocturne.

At this point, I just hope it sticks the landing in the finale, because I want to be able to have a complete, satisfying epic to recommend to people who want something a bit richer than the typical "guy in Bat costume punches clown" stories we usually get.

#gotham nocturne #detective comics #batman #dc comics #ram v

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oneshlut · 6 months

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Hello!!!! Love your writing!!!! May i request a platonic Sun and Moon (or eclipse its up to you!) With a favorite child reader? I just think that would be adorable!!!

P.s. i LOVE your writing!!!! And your headcanons!!! Dont overwork yourself!!!! Keep being cool/pos!!!!!!!!

A/N: UGHHH you guys are SO SWEET!!! pls stop im gonna IMPLODE /j tyty for all the kind words, also i really needed some1 to tell me not to overwork myself lmaoao, ive been getting so many requests lately.. promise i'll get to all of y'all! OHOH AND I LOVE WRITING FOR THESE THREE! and child readers for them, especially!

(since im feeling extra silly i'll give you a fanfic recommendation: New Consciousness! i think it can be found on tumblr too.. its a yandere sun/moon fic&child reader, one of my favs and greatest inspo!)

Your Best Friend (Sun/Moon/Eclipse & Child!Reader) [Headcanons]

Rules For Requesting

Characters I Will Write For

Masterlist

Summary: General meeting, friendship, and attachment headcanons for The Daycare Attendant with a child reader.

Extra Info: Sun and Moon share bodies, just like in the game. If I mention them talking to each other, they're talking with their shared consciousness.

Sun:

Sun can usually tell when someone new joins the daycare. If he doesn't hear the obvious audio clue of the ballpit, he'll have a sensor that will go off so that he's notified. Every time Sun gets a notification, you can almost see his built-in smile grow wider. A new friend!

As a child new to the Pizzaplex, entering the daycare for the first time was terrifying. I don't think the current horrible reputation on the Fazbear company helped one bit. The animatronics were definitely scary, you didn't need to know that there was a chance you could go missing because of them.

But the daycare had attendants, so that calmed your nerves. Slightly. Until you realized, they too were animatronics. The statue in the entrance of the daycare was massive compared to you. You suddenly wished that you hadn't accepted that birthday invitation.

Sun immediately goes in to meet you! He's practically radiating happiness onto you, skipping to where you were. He's definitely very intense when first meeting you, waving to you like a maniac. You eventually find yourself getting used to his upbeat energy, agreeing to do most activities with him that he brings up. This includes making macaroni art, crudely put-together paper pals, and a few drawings that he's sure to hang up in his room afterwards.

The security officers seem to catch on over the next few weeks how Sun has grown attached to one child. It pretty much went against his code, as he was supposed to be keeping a watchful eye over all the kids, not just one. But the officers at Freddy's get paid minimum wage, so they don't really care about the two of you unless they've got a lawsuit on their hands.

If you were ever feeling down, he'd immediately try to cheer you up. He will spend the entire day with you if he needs to! He may be intense, clingy, and won't let you out of his sight for a mere 2 seconds, but he's got good intentions. Sun hates seing children sad, and the one thing he knew how to do best was cheer them up. Whether this be silly faces, drawings, or hide n' seek, he always had something new to distract you from the little raincloud utop your head. However, Sun knows he can be a bit chaotic at times. If you want him to, he'll give you space. Sometimes, kids just need calm, and that was definitely not his strong suit.

Sun tries not to have "favorite" children, but he couldn't deny he was growing a bit attached. You were enjoying his company anyway, so why should he have to stop? You seemed much less nervous around him aswell, so as far as he knew, he was doing the right thing. A new term had suddenly seemed to form in his memory bank: "best friend".

Moon:

Now, Moon definitely caught you off guard. You had grown so used to Sun's warm, exatatic nature, that when the atmosphere to the daycare had a sudden chill, yet calming feel to it, you immediately thought something was wrong.

Given this, you met Moon when, apparently, Sun was going under.. technical support of some kind. You didn't know the full extent to the details, but what you did know was that Sun was gone, and in replacement, Moon took over both the day and night shifts. You watched as the kids in the daycare scrambled around, some trying to hide, and some just trying to get all their energy out before Moon came out for the night shift. You had intended to just stay away from him in a random corner, since most kids seemed afraid of him, but with the "night" shift coming up, you really had no way to avoid him.

Moon wasn't in the mood for hide n' seek. Not like Sun usually was. He recognized that he had a job to do, so if anything, he'd get it done. He did enjoy working for kids--it was in his code, after all--but this didn't distract him from his work. As most children were, you were scared of him at first. Moon normally just forced the kid to go to bed, either with a Moondrop candy, or tame threats like time-out. But you seemed.. different. He didn't want to be seen as mean, not to you. Instead, he tried to gain your trust by telling you that he was friends with Sun, assuming you were more favorable towards Sun.. again, as most kids were. Surprisingly, he was right to assume.

You, on the other hand, were thrown completely off guard. For the most part, you had thought Moon was this mean, strict, and harsh version of Sun--as you've heard from other children. But instead, you found him to be much more calming, if anything. Maybe the kids just hated having to tone down their energy, that when someone forced them to, they grew naturally afraid of them. That was your reasoning, anyway.

Unlike Sun, Moon is more of a "denier" than anything. He had things to do, and didn't need things getting in the way. But you were different. You weren't a distraction--no, far from it. He wouldn't admit it, but as Sun did, he grew attached. Out of all the kids he's taken care of during his career, you were definitely the calmest. Your presence is.. nice.

If you're going to anyone for comfort, it's Moon. This is if Sun didn't manage to cheer you up previously. Moon's version of comfort was more of quiet, small ambiance, plushies, blankets, and pillows. Sometimes storytimes! That's one method the two had in common. So if you ever have trouble sleeping when nap time comes around, Moon may or may not give you special treatment to ensure you sleep soundly. This means absolutely everything I just listed above for comfort.

He soon discovered what it was like to spend the whole day with you. He'd now ask Sun every now and then if he could take over the day shift for him. At first Sun denied, that would mean less time with you! But, if he made it equal..

Sun made a somewhat "deal" with Moon, where they would now just take days instead of shifts. This.. didn't look good to the staff, though. Instead of making them go back to their shifts, though, they would make sure they both got what they wanted. And in the staff's eyes, what the shared animatronic wanted was to each have both shifts. Not too far off.

Eclipse:

A day passed one day, where neither Sun or Moon was watching over the daycare. In replacement were just the.. extremely creepy staff bots. You began to grow worried--if he'd ever come back again. Luckily, you only had to wait a day.

The day he came back, the animatronic was.. new. Different. You tried to listen in on the clumps of children's conversations--listening until the words blended together to form the name "Eclipse". The name definitely made sense for their character.

To say you were ecstatic would be an understatement. You were practically as happy as Sun was when he first met you! Eclipse was everything you could ever want--it was both of your best friends put into one personality, one animatronic. But if anyone was more excited than you, it would be Eclipse himself. One thing that was different now was his ability to tone his excitement and clinginess down. With the two brought together, their personality fell on a balance.

Meeting you was much less of a shock for him as it was for you. You liked the new look, though. As soon as Eclipse caught your eye, he immediately skipped over to squeeze you in a tight hug. Don't worry, he tried not to squeeze too hard. Even if you were confused at first, you warmed up to him quickly. You noted his voice as he spoke to you for the first time. Not too frantic like Sun's, yet not too quiet like Moon's. Something about it was.. comforting. Which leads me to my next topic.

Eclipse is the best source of comfort you can get. He can most likely tell if you're having a bad day. If you ever feel overwhelmed/overstimulated at the daycare, he'll take you to his room for the first time. If he's being honest, he's never really shown anyone his room before--until now, that is. You immediately fell in love with the room! You would ask to go there more often, and on some days, stay in there the entire day. Eclipse didn't mind, though! Anything to cheer you up, after all.

Eventually, your birthday will come around, in which Eclipse goes all out. He didn't truly expect you to visit the daycare on your birthday--he had figured you'd like to see the Glamrocks instead, but no! Eclipse was honestly so honored that you'd want to spend your birthday with him of all animatronics. With this in mind, he tries to make today the best day of your life! The best day for you in the daycare, at that. He won't go too overboard, but he will spend all his time having fun with you. Eclipse would schedule activities to do, such as macaroni pictures, creating puppets to be used in future puppet shows, and if he's feeling nice enough, he'll sneak in some FizzyFaz into the daycare. When the day starts to near an end, he'll take you backstage to his room, where he has fully decorated the small spot with birthday balloons, banners, strings, and small gifts scattered across the floor. In the center was a.. poorly made cake. Eclipse was only an animatronic after all, his coding didn't have any baking intelligence in his mainframe. It was the thought that counted.

Going home afterwards was definitely a challenge, though. You were practically dragged away from the daycare, and Eclipse had never felt more flattered. On your drive back, you had discovered that you had a new best friend. Animatronic or not.

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metacrisisdoctor · 1 year

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i truly keep getting the most horrendous takes suggested to me in my for you page this week.

seeing a post about how rose is bad working class representation because she ended up with a rich father is absolutely ridiculous to me.

firstly, by journey's end rose is 24. she is an adult. the idea that she just sits down and takes pete's money is ridiculous to me. not even because that would be inherently wrong, but because this is not who rose tyler is. she is not automatically "mega rich," especially considering she was not even planning for on returning to pete's world until tentoo offered to spend their lives together. if anything i imagine she kept a rather safe emotional distance from pete those years because it would have been so painful to leave her family behind.

if you understand anything about rose tyler you should know that would probably not accept his money, and you should know that she would want him to redistribute his wealth to people in need. rose always, always asks people if they are being treated and/or paid fairly. this is a constant part of her character. her being on the so called "other side" in pete's world gives her access to make changes in an unjust system, to make things better for everyone because that is what she and the doctor would do.

they all work. for fucks sake, in the tentoo big finish audios jackie is a dinner lady at unit. she speaks at length about how hard it was to raise rose on the estate, how she and rose were (and continue to be) looked down on because they're "chavs." the importance of pete has absolutely nothing to do with money, jokes jackie made aside. it's about the emotional aspect, it's about second chances, it's about how different things can be (for better or worse) when you have different chances presented to you.

all of this is made more frustrating when people pull rose's importance down to raise another's. was rose perfect representation? no. was the representation she gave working class people important, especially in 2005? absolutely. writing a character off entirely because they weren't as good representation to live up to your standards of what "real" people go through unfair and narrowminded at best.

and honestly the idea that rose ended up happy and secure and loved is wrong reeks of misogyny and jealousy. the fact that rose has not been on doctor who in fifteen years and people still feel the need to drag her through the mud after all this time is appalling but it also proves how important she is to the show's legacy.

you're thinking about her. she hasn't been on screen in fifteen years and you're foaming at the mouth about her. wow.

#rose tyler #doctor who #dw #pete tyler #jackie tyler #rambles

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