#(also dont trust Clemence....)

[justanotherrandomperson]

Just started 1899 last night and the ship is called KERBEROS??? AS IN THE COMPUTER AUTHENTICATION PROTOCOL (THAT VERIFIES IDENTITIES)??? WHILE EVERYONE ON THE SHIP IS LYING ABOUT WHO THEY ARE????

[carnelianns]

Hey~ I was wondering if you can make an ikerev hc bout a fem mc who loves to do parkour (and she's good at it)? (If you dont want to do for all the suitors then I hope you can do jonah, edgar, and kyle) thanks in advance ☆ btw, I love your writings, and I hope you stay safe !

Jonah Clemence

Jonah is unaware of what exactly parkour is, and he, unfortunately, had to find out the hard way.

Said hard way was when he found you on top of the Red Army Quarters in the middle of the night, scaling the tall building in a way that only makes him pause for a good few seconds, jaw dropped and eyes widened to the size of saucers, before proceeding to scream his lungs out.

“Get down right now, you foolish girl!” He yells, bright eyes following your form. You can only laugh as you make a slightly wide jump, only doing wonders to his already wildly beating heart.

When you finally do get down with a breathless smile on your face, Jonah is less than amused. He’s dragging you all the way back inside, uttering long strings of flowery expletives just for you. How sweet.

“You absolute fool. Ridiculous troll. Intolerable woman. You — troublesome chimpanzee!”

“I haven’t heard that one before. Getting creative, Jonah?” You tease, only causing the ever-worried Queen to hiss at you. “Though I do wonder when you’re gonna stop swearing at me.”

You’re suddenly pulled into his room and pushed into the bed, your eyes widening when Jonah decides to get on top of the soft mattress and… pull you into his arms, back flat against his chest in an attempt to hide his flushing cheeks.

“... What are you doing?”

“I’m keeping your reckless self safe,” he scoffs, as if it were completely obvious. “There’s nowhere safer than in my arms, after all.”

After he finds out, Jonah is still awfully skeptical of your parkour habits, though he trusts in you to take care of yourself whilst doing so. 

More often than not, however, he’s sporting a slight pout whenever you announce you’re going out for a run, though the Queen of Hearts is only helpless against you.

Edgar Bright

Edgar has his fair share of dangerous hobbies and hidden secrets, so when he does find out you do parkour and what it is exactly, he’s giving you his usual smile that doesn’t give much away.

Inside, however, he’s extremely curious and, dare he admit it, slightly worried.

Said worries are immediately washed away when he sees you in action, jumping almost effortlessly from building to building and swinging dangerously off of a few ledges. He’s awed at your talent.

Edgar would be the most accepting of your habit, quickly warming up to it, and sometimes even asking you to teach him some tricks in case he needs to use it for his, ah, missions.

“So lets say you’re on the top of a building, and the nearest building is around 9 floors down, and you’re unable to leave because you’re being chased, and you’re also unable to fight them because your hands are too slippery due to the bl—”

“Haha.. What an awfully specific scenario you have there,” you laugh nervously, staring at the man who only meets your worried gaze with his angelic smile.

He’s actually serious and would appreciate your suggestions, so Q&As with Edgar usually end up with a tutorial lesson as well. Unsurprisingly, the Ace is quite good at parkour.

If you end up teaching him for long enough, you’ll be running around town and scaling buildings with the Jack of Hearts in no time — his breathless smile when you two land a jump is worth the trouble.

Kyle Ash

If you think about it — which you have — then telling the Cradle’s most famed doctor, and resident worrywart for anyone but himself, about your love for the sport that causes you a good share of breaks and bruises isn’t exactly a good idea.

Which is why you didn’t tell him, or anyone, for that matter; the Red Army is filled with many worried souls, despite their admittedly cold facades.

All secrets, however, are revealed in the end. Yours just so happened to come out after a particularly bad fall, only leading you to the one and only infirmary.

“So you’re telling me… you like jumping and rolling around — usually high places — without equipment… for fun?” Kyle asks, not bothering to hide the dissatisfaction in his tone as he wraps up your foot.

You wince, more at the scowl of his face than the slight pressure of the gauze. Rubbing your head sheepishly, you try smiling up at him to lighten his mood, “Yeah — ow! What was that or?!”

Rubbing the sore spot on your forehead that came from Kyle’s finger flick, your face scrunches up, staring at the frowning doctor.

“That was for having a life-endangering hobby,” he scoffs, though he can’t help how his fingers push your own away, rubbing gently at the spot on your forehead. “But I guess I can’t do anything if you really love it…”

He’s awfully understanding of your love for the sport, so much so to the point wherein you almost feel bad. 

If his schedule allows it, he’d accompany you whenever you wish to parkour, just to make sure you don’t hurt yourself, and just to be there in case you do.

[blackdogblues]

#i think the biggest thing youd have to get over though  #is how caesar handles this  #and then how lesser and higher ranking legionaries handle it  #cause Caesar would have to justify why she gets to be high ranking or get certain privileges over some of his men  #and as a right hand why all of his men objectively wouldnt ever rank higher than their lady legate  #which could potentially cause its own issues of unrest among the ranks down the line  #esp if caesar is pushing the sexism thing  #graham would then be alienated from a large portion of people shes suppose to see as fellow soldiers and understand that even those  #shes trying to fit in with will never full accept her  #and that she is legitimately one slip up away from falling into the lion pin  #shed potentially be held to several higher standards just for being a woman  #and her brutality would be seen as the bare minimum of requirement for her position to some others  #that and i think a big contrast for graham as a woman  #is she wouldnt have pride as a character flaw and maybe a lot more trust issues?  #since being aware of herself as a woman in her rank and knowing it causes unrest  #and that she cant mess up  #i forgot exactly what i wanted to touch on with this  #but it was feeling less assurance in her position  #and more paranoid about mistakes  #so the motivation at the dam may have been due to a completely different driver than what a male graham would have felt  #and esp the burninating  #she may view that as different than a male graham  #hell her entire relationship with caesar may feel less brotherly and more performative  #i dont see a lady graham feeling comfortable in her rank and always being on a high alert edge  #cause shes up so high  #and shes very aware of what rock bottom would hold for her if she messes up

SEE YOU GET WHAT I’M TRYING TO GET AT. This is SUCH A good addition--and it also gives a good reason as to why Caesar was so ready and willing to set his most prized, ruthless, and capable tactician/soldier on fire and kick her down a cliff instead of offering some kind of clemency, because god damn it you woman you failed me and now you have to die. Obviously he didn’t spare male Joshua from the punishment just because he was a man, but I feel like Joshua being a woman could add some impact or some further degradation to the whole thing that might not have been there with Joshua being a man--because in Caesar’s eyes she wouldn’t just be failing, she would be failing because she is a woman, and Caesar couldn’t have that and he couldn’t have his soldiers causing even more unrest because he not only allowed a woman into his top ranks, but because he spared her a punishment the rest of them would have to face if they were in her position.

@socksual-innuendos​

[viralhottopics]

Gift of freedom: how Obama’s clemency drive tackled aftermath of ‘war on drugs’

Ramona Brant is one of 1,324 people serving long terms for relatively minor drug crimes to be freed by the president but his successor is unlikely to follow suit

Last April, two months after Ramona Brant walked free from prison having served 21 years of a life sentence for a first-time non-violent drug offense, she found herself outside the Busboys and Poets restaurant in Washington as a convoy of limousines drew up. A tall black man got out of the central vehicle and greeted her with the immortal words: Hey Ramona, come on, Im taking you to lunch.

I was no good, I couldnt think, Brant recalls. This is the person who used his executive power to say Enough is enough, you can go home now. Then he invites me to lunch. I couldnt believe this.

By the end of lunch, Brant had composed herself sufficiently to make Obama a heartfelt promise. She told him that she would not allow his name to be tainted by anything she did that would send her back to prison.

I will honor you with my freedom, she said. And that is what I have done.

Brant is one of 1,324 women and men who will honor Obama with their freedom long after he vacates the White House in less than three weeks time. Most of them, like her, were serving long prison sentences 395 of them for life for relatively minor drug crimes imposed during the so-called war on drugs.

Brants case was particularly brutal. She had no history of drug dealing when in 1994 she was arrested and charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine valued by the prosecution at $37m. I have never sold drugs at all in my life. Never once.

Yet through association with her violent and abusive boyfriend, who forced her to accompany him when he went on interstate drug runs by beating her and threatening to kill members of her family, she was accused of personally trafficking large amounts of crack cocaine and powder cocaine quantities she says were entirely fictitious.

Those amounts never existed, there was nothing there. They were based on what my co-defendants traded among themselves, and all of that was lumped together and I was held responsible for it.

Even the trial judge as he sentenced her to remain behind bars for the rest of her natural life complained that putting her away forever made no sense. But his hands were tied the sentence was mandatory.

Her former boyfriend remains in prison on a life sentence.

Obama cited Brants case in the long article he wrote last week for the Harvard Law Review looking back on his impact on criminal justice reform. Ramonas case is in many ways emblematic of the problems with overly harsh mandatory sentences in the federal system, he said.

Brant says that she kept her spirits up over 21 long years in the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, by placing her trust in God. Her prayers were answered last December when she received a letter from Obama saying that he believed in her and was giving her a second chance by commuting her sentence.

To see the letter, and his signature! I just sat there reading it over and over, it was surreal.

Barack Obama escorts Ramon Brant to the Busboys and Poets restaurant in Washington DC on 30 March 2016. Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

Multiply that overwhelming joy by 1,324 and you start to get a sense of the human scale of Obamas clemency project. In any future assessment of his legacy, his flinging open of the prison gates to so many victims of the drug war is certain to loom large.

What hes done has been unprecedented, said Kara Gotsch of the Sentencing Project. These people were the victims of policies that trapped them in the criminal justice system for low-level drug offenses these werent the drug kingpins.

One of the strengths of Obamas clemency drive is its power to act as a model for individual states that are responsible for the incarceration of the overwhelming majority of prisoners in America. While there are about 190,000 people held in the federal penal system almost half of them for drug offenses there are close to 2 million under state lock and key.

President Obama has tried to set an example on the national stage, and that is critically important in shifting the needle on what is fair and proportionate. The whole country is looking at this, Gotsch said.

Obamas embrace of commutations comes at the end of a singularly frustrating period for criminal justice reform. A year ago there were high hopes that a bipartisan coalition of forces, from the rightwing Koch brothers to the ACLU, would effect legislative change that would bring freedom to thousands of largely black Americans caught up in the harsh mandatory sentencing of the drug war.

When those hopes were dashed on the rock of Republican intransigence in the House of Representatives, Obama turned to his presidential power to grant clemency without the need for congressional approval. It would be comparatively slight compared with the initial ambition to overhaul the entire justice system, but it would be something.

This is his last shout to try and bring relief to as many people as possible, Gotsch said.

It has certainly come late in the day for the Obama presidency. Until he announced the clemency project in 2014, Obama displayed scant interest in this area indeed during the whole of his first term he granted pardons or commutations to only 23 people.

As recently as last March criminal justice experts were lamenting in the Washington Post that his record on pardons where individuals have their legal liabilities erased as opposed to commutations where their convictions still stand was so poor that Obama could go down as one of the most merciless presidents in history. It was only in 2016 that his drive for clemency really picked up speed, with 1,171 of the 1,324 lucky recipients gaining their freedom in the course of last year alone.

Obamas sudden burst of activity rocketed him from being a no-show on the clemency league table to being a titan among postwar presidents. Many of the reports on his late conversion to commuting and pardoning prisoners have noted that he has wielded his clemency power more times than the previous 11 presidents combined.

That characterization is misleading. Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St Thomas who set up the first clemency legal clinic in the country, points out that Obama holds such a distinction only if you discount the clemency record of Gerald Ford.

In 1974, the Republican president granted clemency to 14,000 draft dodgers and deserters of the Vietnam war. That was a brave move, Osler contends, given that at the time draft dodgers were as popular as crack dealers are today.

Ford achieved his massive clemency rate by setting up a lean bipartisan operation that could push petitions through with minimum bureaucracy. By contrast, Osler criticizes the Obama clemency project for operating a system of review that is so cumbersome it has gummed up the process.

The professor lists seven consecutive hurdles, spanning four federal buildings, that any prisoner must negotiate to have her or his petition granted: The petition goes from a staff person at the pardon attorneys office to the pardon attorney, then it goes to a staff person at the deputy attorney generals office to the deputy attorney general, then to the staff at the White House counsels office then to the White House counsel, and finally to the president. And people are surprised that the results are so uneven.

As a lawyer who has represented more than 60 petitioners, Osler is keenly aware of the impact of Obamas efforts. For the 1,324 beneficiaries, he said, this was an incredible act of grace. The restoration to society matters, not just to them but to their families and communities.

But he is also keenly aware that the vast majority of more than 30,000 prisoners who have petitioned the president have been denied clemency or are still waiting for an answer. The problem is, I feel like the person after the shipwreck in the lifeboat seeing all the other people in the water.

Ramona Brant knows that feeling all too intimately. Many of her fellow prisoners she calls them her sisters are still incarcerated. There are still too many of my sisters left behind, she says.

Hopes for those people are fading with every day. President-elect Donald Trumps choice for US attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has been scathing of Obamas clemency project, denouncing it as an abuse of executive power. The chances of the Trump administration continuing to push for release of low-level drug offenders is slim to none.

Ramona Brant with her two sons, now grown up. Photograph: Brant family

As a way of doing her bit to keep the flame alive, Brant has spent much of the past year since she was released last February traveling the country speaking about the dual scourges of domestic violence and mass incarceration. She uses the power of her personal story to try to influence change.

I didnt just study criminal justice, I lived it. This has been my life and that of so many other women. The system is structured to incarcerate people, black women like me.

Brant, who was a mother of two young sons by her co-defendant and former boyfriend when she was arrested, thinks back on all the precious moments she missed over 21 years in a cell. I missed an opportunity to be a mother to my own children, to watch the first tooth come out, to take them to the first day of school; I wasnt by my fathers side when he died, or there when my mom was put to rest; I missed my first two grandchildren being born. No matter how many pictures you have on your wall they cannot replace the images in your mind, and I have no images.

She was there four months ago, however, at the birth of her third grandchild. She has begun to fill up the void.

She thanks Obama for that. He has given me an amazing gift, and I wish there was a way to express my gratitude. He knows he gave me a second chance, but I dont think he knows the depth of what it really means to be free.

Read more: http://bit.ly/2ijuyim

from Gift of freedom: how Obama’s clemency drive tackled aftermath of ‘war on drugs’