#But i usually put two characters per page to use up the full paper

[deltaswapjevil]

Batman Reboot Au: Joker

Going through Batman and his rouges and redesigning them

Here's Harley Quinn and the Joker

[sasha-uria]

Hey there! this is an project me and @misturearaposa (Mix) been working on and now is done ✨

Mix is the master mind behind this cozy and peculiar tale and i did the illustration of our main character.

Hope you enjoy 💖

Marsella’s office was a mess, as usual. Students’ essays and documents covered just about every surface of furniture. There was a wooden desk in front of the only window, illuminated half by the moonlight, half by an oil lamp that sat on top of it. One of the documents on top of this desk was an envelope with some writing in a dark green ink on it. It read “To the current Master at Ecological and Zoological Studies Regarding the Arcanum; Marsella Kampersois.” It clearly had been opened and most of the pages it previously contained were already being read by the professor. She brushed aside how tired she felt and tied her strawberry blonde hair behind her head so it would stop obscuring her reading. Marsella put the first page, which she had just finished glancing through, on the desk in front of her and continued on.

“Our guides are Onlen and Briannee, a local couple who live in a village just outside the Asheyran woods. Brianne is one of yours: Amantenese born and raised, but she moved here after her parents died and, eventually married Onlen. So I’m not that interested in her.”

A warm smile pushed through the exhaustion in Marsella’s face as she read that line. It was clear that her friend was still as blunt and socially “unique” as they were when she first met them.

“Mister Onlen himself, on the other hand, is fascinating! We always hear stories about how mysterious the Folkbound are but let me tell you Marsella: the stories do not do them justice! On our way to their village, we passed through a few Niamenese settlements, but none of them had Folkbound in them. So up until we met Onlen, the team and I had only seen the average person going about their day, not different in the slightest from you and me. I am sure you are curious, so I’ll just get it out of the way first: Yes, he does have them!”

Sketched just below this paragraph was what seemed to be a pair of human ears with pointy ends which slowly curled into something that resembled a short flower’s stalk.

“His canine teeth are also remarkably long and sharp, and his hair has a faint, but pleasant smell that I can’t quite describe. Brianne tells me he never takes baths, only cleans himself in the rain or under a nearby waterfall. He knows an awful lot about medicinal herbs and just plants’ properties in general. His behavior is certainly ‘normal’ most of the time, but sometimes he acts like a completely different person, with periodic mood changes to boot. Nothing too extreme, though.”

Marsella grasped the paper a bit more firmly and her eyes suddenly seemed completely devoid of the sleepiness they were presenting up until then. She saw briefly what the next paragraph started to describe and soon sat a bit more upright on her chair, excitement and curiosity taking over.

“As for his partner: we didn’t see it for more than two full days at first. He assured us it was around, but we never even got a hint of its presence. It wouldn’t be until we were finally preparing for our first deep foray into the woods that it showed itself. And what a sight it was! She was no more than 12 centimeters tall; her skin was a deep foliage green with some protuberances that resembled little thorns all over the legs, arms and back. She did not have wings per say, but instead a pair of cloak-like extensions from the back of her shoulders that resembled long and red silky petals. It was like looking at a walking rose. Her head, at least from the back and sides, also reminded me of a rose bud. I was never able to see her face, however, as she wore a tiny mask made of tree bark which was devoid of any distinct features or adornments. The first time we saw her was when the team was packing our provisions and Onlen came from the edge of the woods to check on us. She was sitting on his left shoulder, legs dangling in a cute, childish manner as he walked towards us. We were stunned, but Onlen never made any introductions or try to explain anything. He acted as if we had been seeing her the whole time. In fact, it was as if he thought we knew her our whole lives. As we made our way into the woods, he finally told us her name: Flian. Nothing more than that, however. None of us asked anything either. Mostly because it felt intrusive, but also because as much as no one on the team had personally seen one before, it isn’t like commons pixies are completely new and unknown in our field. As the time passed and we headed deeper into the woods, she would switch from riding on his shoulder to floating up from tree to rock and tree again, accompanying our pace from above. It’s quite a sight to behold. She really didn’t fly around exactly, it looked more like her little “petal cloak” was carried by a gentle breeze, allowing her to glide and float around. She also never made any sound. I don’t mean just vocalizations. Her movements, her breathing, nothing seemed to make any noise, even a small one.”

Marsella put the finished page on top of the desk and scribbled some notes on a journal that laid right beside the two pages she had finished. Before she could continue reading, however, she noticed that on a corner of the note she had just finished was a sketch of the pixie. She assumed she couldn’t see it before because it was being covered by her thumb and fingers as she held the paper. She took a good look at it and then continued on.

“Something that I noticed after a few hours is how, no matter what she was doing – whether it was floating around, walking on top of tree branches or splashing around in little puddles (still not making any sound while doing it.) She would ALWAYS land right back on Onlen’s shoulder whenever he and Brianne got closer, started whispering to each other, holding hands and so on. She’d always stay on the side of his body opposite to Brianne, though, and start grooming his hair, tapping his cheek and at one point I even saw her tickle his right ear after Brianne, to his left, almost tripped and supported herself on her husband. It didn’t seem to bother Onlen, however, as his reactions ranged from ignoring it to simply looking at her and making weird faces that I couldn’t interpret. At most he once turned to face the pixie and motioned a fake bite towards her, which made her jump off him for a second before landing right back again.”

Putting the papers aside for a moment, Marsella felt her exhaustion creeping in again. She pulled a bottle from one of the corners of the deks towards her and uncorked it. She looked around, searching for a cup amidst the mess of her office, and decided she could not be bothered to get up from her chair for a more thorough search. Bottoms up and she felt a warmth spread from her stomach to her chest and limbs, put the bottle on the desk again and though of sealing it with the cork again, before deciding to leave it open. She picked the papers again and continued to read.

“During our first night, our couple of guides told us a little bit about their lives, how they met, fell in love and all of that sappy stuff. I’ll spare you of that torture, something I wish someone could have done for me. Onlen did, however, sprinkle some interesting information here and there. His bonding with Flian happened when he was fourteen. A little late for the average Folkbound, as you know. Apparently he was a bit of a recluse as a kid and because of that it took him a little longer than most to actually find a Fae partner who’d actually bond with him. He said a year before he met Flian, he almost got bound to a lovely little toadstooler who used to cross his path now and again. But he tells me it bonded with a younger girl who lived close to him one day because she apparently gave it treats and sang to it. When he was telling this story - with a tinge of melancholic nostalgia in his face - I noticed Flian starting to look a bit agitated, fidgeting around on his shoulder. Brianne seemed to notice it too and her reaction fascinated me. She quickly flicked her husband’s forehead and made him change the subject or rather move on with his story. Her tone was playful, but I could see a hint of worry or apprehension in her face. Onlen told us that, eventually, he met a common pixie drowning in a pond and after rescuing her, she would visit him everyday until eventually, they were bound. The details aren’t uninteresting, but it was the known stuff for common pixies. They exchanged vows, she told him her name and she pricked his thumb on one of her thorns and it was done.”

Marsella made some more notes on her journal before taking another gulp from the bottle and continuing to read.

“The following morning we left the forest and the team made a quick trip to the nearest village to buy a few things. Briannee went with them and I stayed behind with Onlen. He did not speak for the whole day. In fact, I barely saw him save a couple of times. First when I was cooking a bit of soup a little after noon and he came out from his house, looked at me and my cooking pot as if he could not even begin to understand what I was doing, before going back inside. The second time was right before Briannee and my team were coming back. It was starting to get dark and I had barely noticed them coming into view on the road when I noticed Onlen sitting cross-legged on top of a boulder close to the entrance to the woods. Flian was in front of him, doing something. It was a bit far and the light was getting dim, so I couldn’t ascertain it, but it LOOKED like she was dancing. I had slept a bit after eating so I did not see when he left his house, no idea how long he was sitting there for. I got up from my napping spot and went to ask him what he was doing, but I was met with silence from him and a furious gaze from Flian. She still had her mask on, obviously, but I could tell because she stopped dancing abruptly and turned towards me with a fierce and almost violent movement. I felt as if I could see a pair of cold eyes staring at me even through the tiny bark mask. I subconsciously turned around and left, but as I walked away, I stole a quick glance back at them and noticed how Onlen had his eyes closed and a stiffness in his posture. After I made my way towards Briannee and the rest of my team, she must have noticed some confusion or curiosity betrayed on my face, because she immediately looked in the direction Onlen was and then back at me again. She started to explain it and as soon as I realized what she was telling me, I immediately grabbed her arm and dragged her as I ran back to the boulder again.”

Realization also dawned on Marsella as she read that last sentence and she quickly pulled her journal closer, preparing herself to make more notes as she read on, excitement inundating her mind.

“It was a scouting charm, apparently. I could not believe it. Sure, I had expected to see a genuine Folkbound spell at some point during the expedition, but to finally see it after studying and reading so much bout it, I could barely contain my excitement. Briannee explained that he was probably preparing it to scout the woods in search of a better path, since the previous day we didn’t see any signs or tracks. She also told us how it worked, or at least she tried her best to pass on what he had told her: As we know, common pixies can connect their senses remotely to many different species of flora in a certain radius. What we don’t usually hear about is how they can supposedly share this connection with their bond partners. This is what was happening, apparently. At that moment, Onlen’s mind - or more accurately, his senses - were jumping from flower to flower forest inwards, searching for a better direction for us to travel in the next day. When my team finally caught up to us, they also observed Onlen with me, making their annotations quietly after Briannee reprimanded us for the distraction when we were talking amongst ourselves and sharing insights. She went inside and we only followed after we finally felt like we had enough of observing that man sitting motionless on a rock and his little Fae companion dancing.”

“The following night we stopped and made camp after a whole day of walking through the woods. Onlen had been quiet, even more so than usual. We had, in fact, made our way towards a completely different direction from the previous day as he assured us that Flian helped him see that this trail would be more successful in finding what we were after. Speaking of Flian, she had a very different demeanor this time around. Instead of playing and floating around like the previous day, she had been tucked away inside Onlen’s clothes for almost the whole day. With all that in mind, when we finally had our little camp set up come night, I asked Onlen if there was anything we should worry about. He asked all of us in the research team how much we knew about the Fae. Honestly, I had expected this talk to have come much sooner, seeing how hard we had to search in order to find a Folkbound who would agree in guiding us for this expedition. Even when we found Onlen, a little over two months ago, we had to go through a lot to convince him. I told him we were no experts in Fae, specifically, but also assured him we were pretty competent researchers. After a few minutes of discussion, he still seemed apprehensive, but decided to give us a more in-depth lesson. Onlen explained how the Fae are usually regarded as two different categories or tribes. There are the ones with whom the Folkbound usually bond with, the ones they call The Seelie. On the other hand, there are those with whom no Niamenese should ever partner with. The Unseelie.”

For a second, Marsella fought back an urge to roll her eyes. Her friend knew she was aware of these classifications, so if the next paragraph was going to be a lengthy explanation about the grouping of “good” and “evil” Fae folk, she would have to remind herself to smack her good colleague the next time they saw each other. However, as her eyes glanced at the first few words of the next sentence, her frustration was quickly replaced with curiosity and she prepared herself to make more notes in her journal.

“Apparently the fools who published the studies on these classifications either did not pay a lot of attention or they simply were not smart enough to understand. As Onlen explained it, the Seelie and Unseelie tribes - or courts, as the Niamenese usually refer to them - do not, in the slightest, depict the moral standings of their members. It is not as simple as ‘good faeries’ vs ‘evil faeries.’ According to him, a faerie of the Seelie court can very well be evil and cruel, SPECIALLY when partnered with a morally contentious human, as they are as much susceptible to their partner’s influence as their partner is to theirs. What sets an Unseelie faerie apart from a Seelie one, then, is the kind of bond they form with their partner. You see, Marsella, as we learned very recently, a faerie can bond itself to any species of living creature, it doesn’t need to be a human. In fact, it is more common for other animals and even plants to be bonded to Fae folk than for humans. However, no matter what kind of creature is bound to them, there is ALWAYS a component of trust and consent or respect and care, in the case of plant life. A Seelie faerie will never forcefully bond with an unwilling creature or do so with ill intent. That’s where Unseelie Fae come in. As Onlen put it, the Unseelie will almost always bond with an unwilling partner, be it to exploit them, consume them, corrupt them, you name it. They disregard a rule or instinct that all faeries should acknowledge and respect. He explained to us that there ARE some faeries who don’t force themselves upon their partners and, when bound, don’t exactly act to harm them, but are still considered part of the Unseelie court because of another crucial taboo that they violate: The ‘rule of attachment’ or ‘rule of the veil’, as Onlen described it.”

Marsella placed the finished page on the desk and quickly began reading the next. She no longer felt like she needed another drink to stay awake. Her attention to the letter was unwavering now.

“When you, as a Niamenese, willingly make a pact with one of these types of Fae, you are immediately ostracized. Depending on the specific species, you may be exiled, imprisoned for life, or even hunted down and executed. No other Folkbound will ever accept you as one of their own. And this ‘rule of attachment’ or ‘rule of the veil’ is the reason. He explained that in a ‘normal’ bond, whenever one of the partners dies, the other has to accept, mourn and never bond itself to another. That usually addresses the faeries, since they live much longer than their human or animal partners. But if in any circumstance, a Folkbound were to lose their faerie partner, they have to adhere to this as well. What the Unseelie Fae usually do, however, is disregard this rule. It varies from species to species and how powerful they each are, but it can range from a Fae keeping the corpse of their partner as a cadaver host from keeping them alive in wrong and wicked ways, with some of the most powerful ones even bringing them back to life entirely. Some of them may not have the power for any of that, but they still violate the taboo by bonding with new partners after their previous one died. It started to occur to me, as I’m sure it is occurring to you now, where the problem in this expedition lied, in the eyes of the Niamenese.”

As her friend correctly deduced, the realization indeed hit Marsella and she let herself melt onto her chair. She felt the shock of new information reshaping her views and shedding new light on their whole topic of research: This wasn’t just foolish and dangerous in the eyes of their local guides. It was a matter of searching for a creature who defiled their beliefs and way of life. She straightened herself and pushed through her conflicted thoughts before continuing to read.

“As we talked more through the night, Onlen finally addressed the reason why he agreed to guide us in looking for our research subject. He wasn’t doing it to educate other people about their culture and the ways of the Fae. He said Flian was actually the one who told him he should accept it just for the small chance that ‘the outlanders might help find a way to understand and correct that dark and sad side of her people.’ As he told us that, I noticed how Flian was standing on the ground between him and I, the light from the campfire illuminating her in a way from an angle that made me unable to see the front of her head. I must admit that hearing that this tiny, almost otherworldly creature was the one who pleaded with Onlen and reached out for us was a bit unnerving to me. And judging from the fact that the whole team had difficulty sleeping that night, I’d say it was unnerving to them too.”

Below this paragraph, Marsella saw a drawing of the pixie as her friend had described above: A sketch of the faerie’s head looking up directly at them but with the whole “face” - or bark mask, in this case - shadowed by a source of light behind her. She felt a sudden chill permeate her and quickly moved on.

“The next morning was uneventful, the whole team clearly was still a little shaken up by Onlen’s words from the previous night. We kept walking in the direction he had scouted with his Folkbound charm two nights earlier. Briannee made us a quick lunch at noon - or what we supposed was noon, it was very hard to tell so deep into those woods - and we kept going without stopping for as long as we had light. As the day went on and the little glimpses of sky we could through the canopy would get rarer, we started noticing a cold mist settling all around us. Or to be honest, we noticed it after we were completely surrounded by it. It wasn’t thick enough to completely obscure our visions and it mostly stayed low, at most reaching 10 to 15 centimeters high. But it certainly felt like a sea of cold smoke extending to every direction. Everywhere we looked, there were two certainties: giant, old and shriveled trees and thick and white mist on the ground stretching for as long as our eyes could see. We kept marching on for another hour or so and by the end of that time, only torches and lamps lit our way. At one point, one of the team members stepped on something and as he reached down to see what it was, we were all a little unsettled. A human skull, looking like it had belonged to a young child, was resting on his open palm. Onlen shouted something in Niamenese and quickly ran from his side to stand closer to us in the research team. We felt a tension in the air, but I believe it only really dawned on us that something was amiss when we saw Flian float out from her little refuge in Onlen’s clothes and start moving erratically through the air around him. She would float in one direction, point at something that we couldn’t see, float in another direction and point that way. When I asked Briannee what was wrong, she only said that ‘we had found them’.”

Marsella’s eyes opened wide as she put the finished page down and immediately saw what started the next one. Before the first paragraph in this new page, a new sketch greeted her. A human skeleton partially covered by moss and dead leaves, stared her down through the page. On its head - skull - a long and dark crimson cap hung to the side. Covering the left eye socket. From the skeleton’s torso, a squiggly arrow sketched pointed to the writing “host?”, while from the skull, another arrow jotted out with the tip pointing to the word “subject?”.

“From the ground, previously concealed by the thick mist, three fully grown human skeletons rose. We had indeed found them. After months of research, travel and local convincing, we had finally stumbled upon our subjects. I was so excited that I momentarily ignored the danger of the situation, even as I heard my team screaming in surprise. Briannee yelled for me to stop and only then did I realize I was walking towards the creatures. Onlen was a few meters in front of us, between the subjects and I. I saw him run towards them with Flian floating away in the same direction, but as one of the skeletons made an erratic swipe of its arms to presumably try and grab him, Onlen stepped aside and ran past it. He kept running away from our group and all three of them turned around and started chasing him and his faerie companion. Their movements, for the brief moment I was able to see before they were all gone in the darkness of the forest, was unnerving. It felt wrong, as if all the bones were being dragged around by some invisible puppeteer. We all stood there with bated breath as Briannee told us to watch our surroundings and make sure no other skeleton arose around us. My heart was racing and my thoughts were running wild as I took out my sketchbook and subconsciously started drawing right there on the spot, standing up and having only the faint light of my lamp to help me see the result. Before I even finished, we heard Onlen returning from the shadows and Briannee ran to check on him. That took me out of my trance and I immediately asked him where the subjects were. He said he got rid of them and before I could even protest it, he tossed something my way. Only after I caught it, despite my surprise, did I notice it was a burlap sac with its ‘mouth’ tied in a knot. After feeling it around a bit, I noticed a faint movement coming from within. Onlen told me my ‘target’ was inside and that I was not allowed to open it until after I left Niamenese lands. I thought of protesting that, as well, my curiosity clouding my judgment, but one look at his face, illuminated in a somber way by the faint lamp lights, made me reconsider it. After carefully analyzing his expression I also noticed Flian standing completely straight on top of his right shoulder. Her petal cloak was wrapped around her, covering her arms and most of her torso, instead of hanging behind her like usual, it gave her a resolute and unpleasant atmosphere.”

Marsella once again felt a sudden chill and fought the urge to check if her window was open. It wasn’t, it never was and she knew it. She put down the newly finished page on the desk and went back to reading.

“The whole way back to the entrance of the woods was filled with a strange tension. No, it would be more accurate to say there were three tensions in the air, competing to see which one would make the group crack first. One was the tension that team and I constantly felt since Onlen handed me that sac. The pressure we fought hard to keep in check, the NEED to open it and immediately start our long awaited research. To think our object of study was there in our possession, but we were not allowed to study it was almost killing all of us. The second tension was the total silence tha Onlen immersed himself in since he told me not to open the sac. His steps, his breathing, his occasional whispers to his wife. None seemed to make a sound, but at the same time, it was a silence that felt heavy in our eardrums. It was almost as if he exuded an aura of stillness around him that pushed outward from him and collided with us in its way. Flian, of course, also seemed closed and distant. Even from Onlen himself. Despite riding on his shoulder the entire way back, she did not play around with her Folkbound at any time. Briannee did all of the talking with us during the trip back out of the forest, but even she sounded quiet and drained. Then, there was the third tension… This one, I suspect, was only felt by me. It was a strange mix of almost palpable feelings coming from within the sac. I could feel the subject’s fear, curiosity, and loneliness. At one point, I could swear I heard something like a faint voice coming from it and I had to fight really hard to keep myself from opening the burlap sac. When we finally exited the woods and arrived at their home, two full days after our encounter in the mist, Briannee quickly helped us pack while Onlen disappeared in the direction of a little stream which ran down from the nearby waterfall where he usually bathes, as his wife told us days earlier. She made it clear that he would not be coming back to see us off and that she would, in fact, like us to depart as soon as possible so that she could go and join him. I should also point out that as we exited the forest, I noticed that Flian was no longer riding on Onlen’s shoulder. No one in my team seemed to notice when she left or where she went, so we just left it at that. Despite our exhaustion, we respected Briannee’s wishes and departed as soon as our travel preparations were finished. We traveled for almost four more days before finally officially being out of Niamenese lands and one full morning on top of that to reach the first Amantenese settlement. By this point, the team and I had already grown used to the urge of opening the sac, so we refrained from doing so immediately upon arriving in Amanten. We decided we were all too tired and we’d wait until after we rested at an inn before digging into our research.

That night, however, I felt that third tension from the track back from the woods pulsing in my ears again. As I lied in the bed of my room in the roadside inn we came across, I looked at the sac resting on top of the little bedside desk. I got up, opened it and let its contents slide onto said desk. An adult human skull covered in dirt and riddled with little cracks in the bone stared at me, devoid of any life. On its side, spread onto the desk like a soft fabric, the long and crimsong little hood or cap that adorned it before. As I started to reach for it, I saw movement. Subtle, slow, weak. What I thought to be a dark red fabric revealed itself to be a sort of amorphous, living substance and from the borders of what would be the opening of the cap, parts of the ‘cap’ started to stretch out towards the skull like little tentacles. It latched itself to the bone and moved until it was ‘upward’ and close to my face. Suddenly, a pair of black beads showed themselves. Little dark eyes looking at me with intense curiosity and longing. There it was, finally! The creature I had waited so long to meet. Seeing it up close and harkening back to Onlen’s explanation of the Unseelie Fae, I immediately understood its common name. This was never a deceased human who came back to hunt the living in violent revenge.

No… this was a fragile, desperate creature who clung to its deceased host/bound partner even after their demise. Manipulating its animated corpse and feeding on its clotting blood as it deteriorated and nothing but bones remained. Bones and a little, bloody Red Cap.”

Marsella put the last page down on the desk and noticed she had been staring at her journal for quite some time, pen in hand, but nothing came to mind. She opened one of the desk’s drawers and pulled a sheet of paper more proper for a letter and started to write a reply. In her excitement, she failed to notice she did not read the final sentence in her colleague’s message.

“It was speaking to me, Marsella. It was scared and starving and I felt for it. I hope you understand.

Your friend and colleague, W. Asarui.”

[deardragonbook]

What’s in my writing journal?

So, I felt like I needed to do a post but did not feel like thinking too much. So I’m going to do a quick walk-though of the paper journal I’m using for my current WIP. 

My current WIP is a standalone Young Adult Fantasy that popped into my head one night, I thought, “I’ll add it to the list and probably never come back”... it had other plans and now I’m kind of in love again. 

So, I thought I’d start a little journal to help me let out some of that love and creativity without it evading my other WIP’s space too much. 

FIRST PAGE: The working title, obviously and an otherwise blank page. There’s a reason for this and it’s not the typical skip the first page many artists face. It’s where I throw random post-its with ground-breaking ideas. “So and so is totally the bad guy’s daughter in disguise” “they’re adopted!” “insert emotional scene here” and so on so on. 

It’s a blank canvas, just like my new book. 

SECOND PAGE: The list page. Right now it’s a list of character names and location names. Because if I can’t remember my own name there’s no way I’m remembering all of theirs. 

THIRD PAGE: The badly drawn map with literally only four towns on it. The four relevant towns. I’ve done a post on maps, I believe in the act of adding as it happens, blank canvas. So many blank canvas’ (glances guiltily towards the literal pile of canvas’ I purchased but never felt secure enough in my abilities to use)... moving on. 

FOURTH AND FIFTH PAGE: A quick explanation of the two important kingdoms with bullet points relative to the narrative and some adorable watercolours titles. 

UP UNTIL PAGE THIRTEEN: Character sheets. One page per each important character. I have their full name, some bullet points and a watercolour first sketch I plan to compare to a later designs when I actually get a feel for each character. 

PAGE FOURTEEN AND FIFTEEN: “Things I google while writing (minus grammar or synonyms).” Because I find this absolutely hilarious to look back on later. Like seriously, it won’t make your writing any better but as a writer tip, do this. You’ll thank me in a year’s time when you’ve forgotten the silly stuff that goes into a book. 

LAST PAGE FOR NOW: A quick scene written in pen in an old notebooks ripped out and glued in, inspired by a random writing prompt on TikTok because writing short stories or AUs can be really good for learning more about your characters. 

So that’s my current writing journal. Does it make my writing better? Honestly, not much. Most of my important bits and bobs I keep digital because I can lose my own hand if I really put my mind to it. But the creativity is fun. Writing a book is more about the journey than the outcome so why not make that journey as fun as possible? 

My writing journal is about combining my passion for writing with my others passions such as scrap-booking and watercolour. It’s about stepping away from the screen for a second because although I love the digital era and all it’s done for me, sometimes my eyes just need a break. 

So this is me telling you to start a writing journal not for others, not even for your writing, just for you. 

I hope you’re having lots of fun writing whatever your current project is! 

As usual,  check out my book, stories I’ve written plus other social medias: here.

What have you done that involved your writing without being your writing exactly? Any other fun ideas to make writing a part of your other hobbies? 

[itslunarwritesstuff]

A Special Place

Character: Shawn Hunter ( Boy Meets World)

Word count: 1,606

Summary: Sitting in Shawn’s lap is one of your favorite things. At a party, while you study, legs wrapped around his waist your head resting in the crook of his neck while he writes something in that little notebook of his. And while you’re curious as to what it is inside, you know that it is his own personal property and if he wanted you to know its hidden treasures then he would tell and show you on his own accord. 

A/N: The long awaited imagine is now out. I know this one is a lot shorter than my other ones but there will be more out soon just you wait. 

___________________________________________________________

10:32 pm Jenny pass’s house, Truth or Dare

Grabbing a drink from across the room you turn back and make eye contact with your boyfriend who currently resides on the couch. Both of you smile to let the other know that you acknowledge each other, lifting up your can of soda you gesture as if saying “You want one” he shakes his head. Running a hand through his brown hair and shaking it a little, ‘His Signature move’ you thought to yourself.

Looking back up at you he beckons you over with the pull of his hand, you oblige and weave through the standing bodies that crowd the living room. 

When you get to where Shawn and a few others are circled around the couch chatting Shawn asks “We are about to start a game of truth or dare, are you in?”

“When am I not in” You laugh out a reply. 

Still standing there in front of him you look to see there is not enough space between Shawn and Cory on the couch but honestly, you don’t mind one bit. Setting your drink down on a coaster that’s on the coffee table you then make yourself comfortable in your favorite spot; Shawn’s lap.

The only looks of surprise were from envious onlooking girls who could only dream to be in your position. The others barely bat an eye this was a common thing you did, having no shame in the fact that you enjoyed being sat and snuggled into your boyfriend. 

But Shawns face had the same giddy expression as every other time you have done this, his smile so big that his teeth couldn’t help but be the center of attention and his dimples were on full display. 

Wasting absolutely no time he wrapped his arms around your waist under your arms forcing you to lean back into his chest, his nose scraping the tops of your shoulder just sniffing the remnants of your perfume you put on hours before.

9:24 pm Shawn’s apartment, Studying 

Tomorrow Shawn and you had a midterm in Feeny’s class and somehow you had coerced him to study. You had made some practice questions for the two of you but when you got halfway done you felt the deep need to be closer to Shawn but also knew you had to finish your work.

So what ended up happening is you rested your notebook and paper on the back of the couch while you sat in Shawn’s lap legs wrapped around his waist and chins resting on the others’ shoulder as they did their respective school work. After finishing the sheet you let your body go limp on Shawn’s frame arms strewn over his neck and shoulders and head dangling there as well, your body finally relaxing for the first time that day. 

Shawn’s signature scent of warm vanilla and wood shavings lulled you to sleep as he continued to work. 

He didn’t even realize you were asleep until he was on the second to last question and he felt the vibration of a soft snore through his neck. Hurriedly he finished the remaining questions and figured you guys could pick up and put away the school work in the morning. 

Placing his a hand under your leg that was wrapped around him and another hand on the small of your back he gently lifted you up from the couch, making sure not to wake you as he brought you to his bedroom to sleep for the night. 

As he carefully carried you up the few small steps he caught Eric coming out of his room and whispered a soft “Shh” before he could say a word. 

Eric understood so he whispered, “Everything okay”? 

“Yeah, she just fell asleep. Could you call Y/N’s Mom and tell her that she fell asleep while studying and I thought it wasn’t the best idea for her to drive tired that she is just going to spend the night here, also that I will see her tomorrow when I drop Y/N off after school”.

“ ‘Course man,” Eric said with complete certainty understanding that it was important that your mom knew you were safe but not being able to make it home.

Shawn nodded his head in thanks and continued to walk you into his room, mentally thanking himself for two reasons. One was that he left his bedroom door open so at least he didn’t have to struggle with that and two being that he cleaned his room for once and he had nothing to be embarrassed about.

Caressing the back of your neck in his hand he very gently laid you down on the bed pull the covers out from under your body and then over you. He was grateful you had changed into a pair of his sweatpants when you got there earlier in the day, so at least you wouldn’t have had to sleep in jeans and be uncomfortable.

Brushing some loose hair out of your face he slid into the other side of the bed, lifting his chin up to leave a sweet kiss on your forehead. In your sleep you made a soft squeak and moved closer until you found Shawn’s body and snuggled up to him an unconscious smile on your sleeping face. 

It was moments like these that Shawn really realized that you were his greatest gift of all. A lot of things may not have panned out for him but you have always been this ever-shining light that he feels so lucky to have and to hold as well as love. And he reminds himself at that moment as he has your sleeping figure embraced in his arms to never take any part of loving you for granted.

12:15 pm Shawn’s Apartment (Again), Lazy Day

It was the end of the week and both you and Shawn were absolutely knackered; Midterms went off without a hitch and the entire group passed which meant that the upcoming break was going to be nothing but relaxation. 

As per usual you were sat in Shawn’s lap, reading a book with your back resting against the arm of the couch. And him using your lap as a table while he wrote in that little notebook of his; you wonder a lot about what he is writing about but you never let your curiosity get the best of you. 

Whatever lies between the pages of that journal is obviously very important to him, and until he decides to share and show you that it is none of your business. 

Shawn absent-mindedly rubs your legs with his free hand, you peer at him over the top of your book. A grin tugging its way onto your lips. 

You couldn’t ever get enough of this boy who is growing into such a great man, he treats you as if you deserve a throne and tiara just for waking up in the morning. Loving him was such a gift and you waste no time or effort, showing and telling him that every day.  

You must have zoned out for a moment because your book was now in your lap and Shawn’s eyes were locked on your features his face twisted with a bit of worry and confusion. 

“Babe is everything alright,” he asked ever so softly then his hand came up and cupped your cheek. 

You nodded in response then gave him an audible answer, “Yeah, yeah was just thinking”.

A hand rested on your face his thumb rubbed the skin in an up and down motion, that if you were standing you were fairly certain your knees would have given out from underneath you from the flurry of emotions that evoked you. 

A smirk made itself apparent on his sweet face and when his eyebrows lifted up he said in a bit of a cocky attitude as if to suggest something. 

“Yeah about what,” he said, his eyes danced from your eyes then down to your lips and back up again. 

Gosh did this boy know how to press your buttons, but in the very best way. 

Your hand reached out to his arm that hung there next to your head and you answered truthfully. 

“About how much I love you” this definitely caught him off guard, you could tell by the way his mouth hung open and how his eyes glassed over in ecstasy. 

Letting your hand travel up to his chin, you refocused his gaze back to your eyes instead of the space that was currently between the two of you. 

He gulped but not out of fear but out of overwhelming emotion. 

Not letting himself even finish his own breath he leaned over, slicing through the previously said space; and he kissed you with absolutely no caution. 

His hands pulled you the rest of the way onto his lap and then grabbed your face yet again to make sure he had you, just as much as you had him. 

You let yourself kiss him back, a giggle being suppressed in your throat from the joy and surprise you felt. Letting your hands take control of the situation you delve into his pretty brown locks in the hopes of grasping onto anything that will stabilize you in this moment. 

Running out of breath the two of you separated to get some air but that was before Shawn said “I love you too” that knocked the wind out of you yet again. 

Excited, you fiercely wrap your arms around his neck and tug him down to lay down with you. 

Both of you giggling over the playful manner that suddenly hit you.

Taglist (dm me to be tagged in future imagines): @in-constant-fear

[neo-princess]

Hi, bby! I thought it'd be fun if you did nct as high school students! Would you be interested in doing it?

Oooou this would be so fun! Thank you for the request!

⇢ TAEIL༊*·˚

Taeil would be pretty nerdy I think. He’d stick to himself and hang around one or two people. I think he’d be very smart, and a bit clumsy. He’d get good grades, and be involved in smart kid clubs.

⇢ JOHNNY༊*·˚

Johnny would be the skater. Probably the senior that eveyone thinks is cool. He’d be friends with the entire school. Never a teachers pet, but always the teacher favorite. Buys people snacks and stuff, just to flex the money he has tbh.

⇢ TAEYONG༊*·˚

Taeyong would be popular, but only cause girls really thought he was hot. But he’d be super smart, he’d tutor after school if anyone wanted help. And he’d always help with homework or something. Would take the girl that people bully to the prom, just to see her happy.

⇢ YUTA༊*·˚

Definitely skips school all the time. He might be here for some periods, might just walk out of class. He never does his homework...of course. Cheats a lot, detention king. Laughs at everything. But, he would be the schools star soccer player.

⇢ KUN༊*·˚

Definitely a teachers pet. Always doing his work, gets A+ all the time. That one who freaks out just cause they got a B. Tells people to be quiet, or stop talking. Never breaks a rule, gives me hall monitor vibes. Class president?

⇢ DOYOUNG༊*·˚

Always raised his hand, always knows the right answer. Does the most for class projects, and always wants to do all the work though he’ll complain about it later. Always wants to pass out the papers, and always asks about his grades.

⇢ TEN༊*·˚

Has all the hunnies. Girls literally do anything for him. Lines of people asking to go to prom with him. Flirts with the teachers to attempt to get better grades on tests.

⇢ JAEHYUN༊*·˚

Pretty much everyone’s crush, apparently everyone is his girlfriend. Locker full of Valentine’s Day cards. He doesn’t prompose to them, girls prompose to him. Doesn’t hang around too many people. Basket ball player! Pretty much the whole school are his cheerleaders.

⇢ WINWIN༊*·˚

Always wearing his headphones, never listening to anyone. Sleeps in class all of the time. Never talks to anyone. He really is just there to be honest. Doesn’t know how to react when someone has a crush on him. Doesn’t like female attention, it bothers him.

⇢ JUNGWOO༊*·˚

A class clown. Always making people laugh, gets sent to the office a few times. Never gets in trouble though, cause who could punish that cutie. Never eats the school lunch, he eats his own. Very extra with presentations.

⇢ LUCAS༊*·˚

Another heart throb. Goofy jock, basketball I assume. Or football. Never studies for the tests, or forgets there was even a test in the first place. Always the loudest person in the class room. Eveyone wants him on their team for games where height is an advantage.

⇢ MARK༊*·˚

He never knows what’s going on, he really just doesn’t want to be there. Always talks about how bad the school lunch is, yet he always eats it up. Gets hit with the dodge ball first everytime. Definitely awkward around his crush. Teachers love him, he’s kind of a model student. Perfect attendance.

⇢ XIAOJUN ༊*·˚

Always arguing about his grades with the teachers. Late to school 70% of the time. Disinterested. Always passes some how, when he barely does his homework. Goes to prom alone, or doesn’t go at all. Over it.

⇢ HENDERY༊*·˚

Always on his phone, he never puts it away. How many detentions will the man get until he-. The type to write “Ben Dover” on his test. Always getting sent out into the hall. Never wants to participate in gym, he’d rather walk. Takes the bathroom pass and is really just roaming the halls.

⇢ RENJUN༊*·˚

Applying to so many collages. Never smiled in picture day photos. Has a hustle of giving people answers to homework for $25 per page. Usually super quiet and does his work. Valedictorian.

⇢ JENO༊*·˚

Does sports all school year. Pretty good at his school work. At least a straight B student. Always the teacher’s favorite. That one who always gets good phone calls home. Volunteers a lot to help out around the school.

⇢ HAECHAN༊*·˚

Annoying as hell. Paper airplanes and spit balls. Detention prince. Everyone in the office knows him by name. Moans and makes fart noises in class. Never does his homework, very loud.

⇢ JAEMIN༊*·˚

Flirts with everyone in the school. Pretends that he doesn’t know what he’s doing to have someone help him get the answers. Skips class a lot. Always saying how he wants to go home. Never returns library books on time.

⇢ YANGYANG༊*·˚

Also very annoying. Never stops talking, and talks about. Laughs at everything. Does his homies it’s being collected. Signs his own detention letters. Goes around collecting chocolate milks at lunch. Always wants to be a captain during gym. Purposely loud to bother people.

⇢ SUNGCHAN༊*·˚

Child he really is just sitting here. People don’t even remember he goes to the school. He gives me main character vibes. Just that one tall guy, who’s just tall. Probably a band kid.

⇢ SHOTARO༊*·˚

Everyone loves him. Pretty much the school sweetheart. He’s very polite and always raises his hand. The one that brings the teachers Christmas presents. Actually uses study hall to study.

⇢ CHENLE༊*·˚

Never listening, headphones in all the time. You never see this man do homework, yet somehow he always passes. You can hear his laugh from a mile away. Running in the halls. Tries to stay in the locker rooms, so he dies have to do gym.

⇢ JISUNG༊*·˚

Teacher always has to ask him to speak up when reading. Always forgetting something in his locker. Only likes the strawberry milk at lunch. Has his mom pack his lunch. Never raises his hand, but he always knows the answer.

[lindstromm]

Simplified Bookbinding:  Font and Text Ornaments

In the first post in this series, How to Make a Cheap First Book, I set out the four steps of bookbinding:

1. Format the text and print it. (This post is all about this step.)

2. Create the text block.

3. Create the case.

4. Attach the case to the text block.

In this post, I’ll give some pointers to get your story from a word processor, or an AO3 story, to a printed page. There are two main formatting sections: (1) the intro pages like the title page and the “about this book” page:

And (2) the text of the book, which may include specialized chapter title font and text separators:

Formatting tips and pics under the cut.

I use Microsoft Word for formatting and printing. I know one method and I stick to that, and I use basically the same formatting process on every story. I get overwhelmed if I have to do something specialized every time or have too many choices. So look at this tutorial as your starter pack, and once you get comfortable, branch out and get as fancy and specialized as you want.

In the Simplified Bookbinding method, we print on A5 pages, which makes the pagination a whole lot easier than printing signature booklets. I have two separate files per book - the intro pages are one file; the text is a second file. This way I don’t have to figure out how to suppress page numbers on part of a file. The intro pages file does not have page numbers; the text file has page numbers.

Page Setup in Word

1. Open a new document.

2. Click “Layout” then “Size.” You need to tell Word that you’re printing on A5 size paper. If the dropdown menu doesn’t include A5, then click on “More Paper Sizes” at the bottom of the menu and fill in the A5 size manually. It’s 5.83 wide by 8.27 high:

Click ‘OK’ and let’s get started putting text on the page.

The Intro Pages

Go pull a professionally published book off your shelf and look at the title page. You’re going to format your title page basically the same way. It’s going to have the title, the author and maybe a text ornament. Center it on the page.

I googled the name of the fandom to get a text block that says “The Old Guard.” A recognizable symbol for that movie is the main character’s labrys, so I googled “labrys line drawing” and snipped it. I titled my story “The Next Job” because I lack the fanfiction ability to select beautiful lines of poetry for story titles. Not as lovely, I’ll grant you, but it fits better on the spine of a book. Anyway, play around with your formatting until you like how it looks. Print a test page.

This is a good time to find out how to print on A5 paper. My printer has a paper size option in the menu, in which I could select “A5″ and then just push the paper holder in the tray for the smaller paper. If you don’t have a printer or can’t connect it, then . . . um, problem. Some bookbinders send print jobs to Staples or other office supply shops. You would have to ask them about printing on custom sized paper and see what they charge. (If you’re going to have it printed at a shop, don’t use easily identifiable text ornaments unless you want to explain to the print shop employee why you aren’t violating copyright laws.)

Depending on your fandom, you may be able to find a fun text ornament that identifies your fandom, like the Avenger’s symbol, a Star Trek symbol, Star Wars, whatever fandom you’re in, I’m sure there’s a graphic you can use. Things like these:

Now we’re going to format the “about this book” page. Look at a professionally published book. This is where you have the copyright information and publisher information. I put in basic information in a list format. In most of my books, I put in a word count and which font I used, just so I can keep track of about how many pages a word count will be. You can put in different info.

On a third page, you can format the author summary and any author notes you want to include. I keep author notes that talk about what the story means to the author. I don’t keep author notes that are basically apologies for not updating often enough. That’s entirely up to you.

So those are your intro pages. It’s 2-4 sheets of paper. I always set 4 blank pages in front of the title page. You’ll notice that professionally published books have a few blank pages before the title page as well. I also put 4 blank pages at the end of the book.

Story Text Pages

Now we’re going to format the actual story. There is a page limit to how much you can bind into one book when using this Simplified Method. You’re limited by the size of the binder clips used in perfect binding. Yep, true, binder clips are your limiting factor. The most I can usually get into big binder clips is about 225 sheets of paper. It varies depending on your paper weight. Take out about 12 sheets for intro and end pages, and that leaves me about 210 printed pages, which double-sided is 420 pages of text. The max word count I’ve bound in one book is 140,000 words. You can bind lengthy works but you will have to play around with margins and font size to keep the number of pages to something that fits into the binder clips.

1. Open a new Word document.

2. Set the paper size to A5 the same way you did for the intro pages document.

3. I always set all four margins to 0.7 just to get more words on a page. I wouldn’t go much smaller than that. You can keep your margins at 1 inch if you want, and I would recommend it if you’re printing less than 50,000 words.

4. Insert page numbers.

5. Go to the story on AO3. Make sure you’re in the “Entire Work” view because it’s a pain to cut and paste chapter by chapter. Press Ctrl-A to “Select All.”

6. Navigate back to your document. Press Ctrl-V to paste the entire mess into your document.

7. Save the file. Save often. You don’t want to lose your formatting.

8. Delete all the stuff that isn’t story text. The “Select All” will have picked up all the buttons and the kudos list and comment box and everything. Just delete it all until you only have text left. The text will have spacing between paragraphs, no indents, chapter headings in the middle of pages, and so forth.

9. When you’ve got nothing but text, press Ctrl-A again to select all the text and we’re going to do some basic formatting. With all the text selected, make these changes:

     a. Change the font to Gentium Book Basic 12 pt. (There are hundreds of fonts to choose from. I stick to Gentium Book Basic 12 pt or Book Antiqua 12 pt for the text of the story.)

     b. Get into the paragraph format menu. Change the spacing Before and After to 0, and add a first line indent of 0.3. On an A5 page, the standard indent of 0.5 is too deep.

Click out and your page count should change drastically to something pretty close to what your finished page count will be.

10. Now we’re going to format the chapter headings. If you’re in a highly merchandised fandom, you’ll be able to find custom fonts that you can use for chapter headings. Some are free to download. I’ve got the font for Frozen and another one for Star Trek.

Fun, right? If you don’t have a fandom-specific font, I recommend using Narkisim or Baskerville Old Face for chapter heading text. Both are included with Word.

     a. If you have more than a couple chapters, it’s easier to set a Heading to auto-format your chapter titles than it is to select text, change font, and center for every single chapter. To do that, format Chapter One the way you want it. Select font, font size, center it on the page (you’ll have to turn off that 0.3 first line indent for just the chapter heading text). While you have your chapter heading text formatted and selected, go to the Home menu and right-click on Heading 2, then select the top option: “Update Heading 2 to Match Selection”. I couldn’t get a snip with the right-click, but this is what you want to right-click on:

Then for your next paragraph, just select the text of chapter number and title, click Heading 2, and it automatically applies all the formatting for you. Yay!

     b. With the copy and paste we did to get the text from AO3 into Word, the chapters may start in the middle of a page. Make sure you press Ctrl-Enter at the end of a chapter to start the next chapter on a new page.

     c. If you want to insert a text ornament at each chapter heading, that can be fun. If that’s too much right now, don’t worry about. I didn’t start using text ornaments until I had done about 15 books. You’ll have to work to get the text ornament the right size and positioned under the chapter heading text.

Are you done with chapter headings? Moving on!

11. Scene breaks. You know those places inside a chapter where there’s a scene break? Go look at a professionally published book. Many will just have a double space between paragraphs to mark a scene break. That’s probably the easiest way to mark a scene break. Go right ahead and do it that way.

12. Text separators at scene breaks. If you want, you can put in a text ornament to mark a scene break. There are full line text ornaments, or tiny text ornaments:

I found all my text separators by googling ‘images text ornaments’ or ‘text dividers’ and then snipping from the screen. Here are a few I haven’t used yet, which aren’t quite as blurry as everything I take a photo of (sucky camera phone):

To get a text ornament on the page of a Word doc, you go to “Insert” and click on “Pictures” and then select your image file. Then you have to resize it and position it, plus curse because it knocked all your text out of alignment, wonder what the purpose of image anchors are, drag, accidentally drop it in the middle of the paragraph, discover that Word has green guidelines that appear at random. I tell you what, text ornaments are a real treat. I just like them, okay? I like the way they look, I mean, they are annoying to work with. I did discover that once I have it resized, I copy that image, and then paste it into the next scene break rather than inserting the image from file again. That way I know all the text ornaments are the same size.

All done? Got it all formatted? Looks so great, doesn’t it?

Take a deep breath. Take a few days off. The hardest part is yet to come.

Printing

You’ll have to figure out how to print double-sided on A5 paper. I have very little advice here. It’s going to be you figuring out how to get your printer to cooperate. I’ve discovered that auto-double sided printing does not work on A5 paper. The print rollers just aren’t designed for little pieces of paper. My inkjet printer would auto-double-side on A5 paper, but it would offset the text on the front and back by a centimeter. My laser printer won’t auto-double-side at all on A5 paper. I manually double-side the pages. I can do it in batches of 20 pages at a time, so it’s not so bad.

If you are manually double-siding, make sure you know how to orient the pages when you stick them back in the printer. Instead of practicing on your actual book, just print pages that are blank other than the page number. Print pages 1-10 double-sided and see if you have to rotate the pages 180 degrees, or flip them over before putting them back in the paper tray.

Printing is a pain in the butt. Especially if you run out of toner partway through, or your printer starts printing a black line down the middle of every page. WHY??? It just does. It takes me about an hour to print about 80,000 words. I hope you will someday be more efficient than I am, but that’s how long it takes me.

Phew. Okay. Formatting and printing are done. Yay!! I’m very proud of you. That’s a huge job.

[rigelmejo]

Comprehension Levels

I did the actual words-known/words-on-page to find out my comprehension % of chinese (so characters known/characters on page to make things simple to count). i wanted to see how close I am to reading at that 98% sweet spot they tell people to read. so here’s my comprehension % of some novels of mine, as of 7/20/21:

撒野: 98.9% comprehension (I should just extensively read it, I could speed read the page I glanced at and guess the unknown words once I saw them)

SVSSS: 97.9% (pretty much at a comfortable reading level, the unknown hanzi were mostly parts of multi-character description words I could roughly guess the meaning of, but I was marking every unknown character)

小王子: 96.8% (again, this is as of today, I flipped to a random page so I wouldn’t have myself remembering the plot to affect how much I ‘knew’)

DMBJ 1: 96%

Peach Blossom Debt: 96% if I count name characters as unknown, 97% comprehension if I ignore character names. (I imagine part of the difficulty is my lack of xianxia reading vocab, so if I intensively read a few beginning chapters I could probably fix that).

Guardian: 95.7% understood (I picked the last page of the first print volume, as I figured if I picked the first chapter which I’ve studied and reread my comprehension level would be higher than if it was a part of the novel I haven’t read)

Update: the current fanfic I am reading 夜半衣寒，I tested my comprehension of the new chapter 16 I started. Out of 705 characters, I didn’t know 9, 695/705=0.987 so I have 98.7% comprehension! This is interesting to me, because I would guess (since I didn’t actually measure at the time), that I did not have above 98% comprehension when I started reading it (of course I’ve read like 34k+ characters of it now so I’d hope I’m more familiar with its vocab now). So this is just info for me, that if something starts out as ‘hard’ as this fic to start, if I intensively read for a while (and I’d guess probably the first few chapters since that’s where author’s own specific language is the most new and their setup/genre words hopefully get introduced), I might be able to learn enough words to put it into a more comfortable regular comprehension level for myself. I do think, at least now that I’m into the flow of this story, I’m reading it a bit faster (still on the slower end since I look up every unknown or ‘fuzzy’ word to double check the pronunciation). To be fair to me? These chapters are 20 pleco pages, which used to take me 1-1.5 hours ToT. Now they take 30-40 minutes, since I slow down to look up things and listen to certain sections, but considering they’d take 15-20 minutes to follow along to someone narrating out loud, I’m getting closer to a normal reading speed. If I sped read/extensively read these chapters instead of intensively looking things up, I may well be at 20-30 minutes a chapter. 

Last night I read 4496 characters, chapter 1 of 福尔摩斯  血字的研究. I used the click-dictionary for new words, and there was definitely a lot of new vocab (though mostly places and names confused me). All of the experiment related new vocab it was nice to see though and learn, since I like reading mysteries I’m sure those words will come up again in other stuff I read. 

Some things I find interesting about this information: I read 小王子 extensively months ago so presumably when I comprehended a bit less than the current amount (since I learned a lot of new words from context or from glancing at the english translation for some words). So whatever my personal ‘minimum’ level of comprehension I can personally tolerate when reading extensively is, it’s below 96% comprehension. 

Listening Reading Method and other activities I’ve been doing has helped my comprehension a LOT. I did NOT expect the comprehensions of all these to be as close to 98% as they are. Particularly Guardian, being at 95% - that isn’t very far from the comfortable reading material level of ‘98%’ I’m aiming for. I’m not sure how fast I can boost up my comprehension just a BIT more, but wow is it close to the goal...

On a related note, that explains why Guardian and Silent Reading have felt relatively easier for me to ‘extensively read’ when I feel like it lately. While I still have some difficulty, since I have familiarity with the general story (Guardian) or have read the english translation (Silent Reading), the new words are not super hard to guess and therefore following the main idea is not an issue. Guardian is above the 95% comprehension level for me now, and its likely I extensively read a novel I had NO prior knowledge about -  小王子 - also at 95% comprehension or less.

I looked up the comprehension level I had because I just read this article about how to pick reading material when learning a new language, and it made me curious how far Below that 98% comprehension level I usually try to read.

For comparisons, I’m curious how my personal comprehension compares to the general-vocab-difficulty tool and results I got from that (which can be viewed in this post more in depth). 

This was the novel’s ranking, from easiest to harder, based on that tool (lower number = more difficult):

小王子 2.004

DMBJ 1 1.992

撒野 1.98

SVSSS 1.9

Guardian 1.9

Peach Blossom Debt  1.858

I am guessing the difference in order of difficulty compared to my personal comprehension levels, might have to do with the materials I learn from? Or may have to do with the fact the tool sorts by full words, not characters, so 2-4 character words/phrases that are unknown would only count as one unit. Whereas when I calculated my comprehension I counted by character (since I was physically counting on paper it was easier to just go by character when counting unknown versus amount-of-content on the page). Also, the tool took a bigger sample of 2,000 words for each novel, whereas I used 300-500 characters per page samples.

It’s also possible, because of the small amount of characters in my comprehension % samples - Guardian overall may have more unknown words and put it lower than 95% overall, and stuff like DMBJ may well have a lot more words I know and potentially be more comprehensible than 96% overall. 

For the most part I had 4-15 unknown characters per page. Which could realistically affect my reading more or less depending on what role they served in the sentence. Characters in descriptions I can figure out the rough meaning of easier when reading because they’re often part of 2-4 character words and phrases where I know the rest of the characters, or they’re an emotion/mood description another word I know on the page will also re-state, but unknown characters for critical verbs or nouns affect story comprehension a lot more. Xiao wang zi is a good example of my overall actual reading level, since some unknown hanzi were in descriptions and I could ‘guess’ well enough to follow just ine, but some of the unknown hanzi on the page were verbs and nouns which makes those sections harder to comprehend. 

Some promising notes from articles!

From FluentU: https://www.fluentu.com/blog/reading-in-a-second-language/

So I am at the spot for most novels I want to read right now 95%+, where if I read with a dictionary it probably feels okay and I will learn a lot, but it will feel challenging at times.

And for a few (at least SaYe) I can really just extensive read the way its supposed to feel. 

Reading Rockets: https://www.readingrockets.org/article/fluency-introduction

This article puts 95% as the minimum comprehension level for a person to read to improve reading fluency.

This https://readingmatrix.com/articles/september_2011/prichard_matsumoto.pdf

is an interesting paper, and puts 95% as the minimum for comprehension to read unassisted, but also mentions it could be a spectrum rather than all-or-nothing. Readers who use strategies to comprehend more can improve their comprehension a bit, and readers who have background knowledge on the subject can improve their ability to comprehend the reading material a bit. 

This part was also fascinating: “ Hu and Nation (2000) sought to examine the lexical threshold more deeply. They tested the comprehension of a narrative text by 66 advanced learners, adapting the text to include frequent words estimated to be known by all the subjects. They replaced uncommon words with nonsense words in order to set coverage levels to 80%, 90%, 95%, and 100%. Comprehension of the various versions of the passages was measured by a multiple-choice comprehension test and a recall measure. Subjects at the 95% level had a mean score of 10.2 points out of 14 on the multiple-choice text, while the readers with 90% coverage averaged only slightly lower at 9.5 points. There were a wide range of scores at these two coverage levels with 7 of 16 subjects at the 90% level getting a higher score than the mean score of the 95% coverage group. The results were similar on the recall measure. Overall, while there was a clear and strong correlation between coverage and comprehension, the existence of the 95% lexical threshold was not supported by Hu and Nation. They estimate that if there was a comprehension threshold at all, it may have been between 80 and 90% since all the readers with 80% coverage had difficulty comprehending the text. Hu and Nation state that learners at the 90% were able to reach comprehension through reading skills and background knowledge. They also hypothesize that 98% may be the coverage required at which most learners can comprehend the text adequately. The mark they set to determine this was about 85% comprehension, which was much higher than that used by Laufer (1989, 1992). “

“ Lower threshold: A percentage at which comprehension becomes possible; a percentage at which few learners below have any significant comprehension of the text (referred to by Hu & Nation, 2000, as potentially being between 80 and 90%). 211 

Significant increase threshold: A coverage point above which learners’ mean comprehension increases significantly (95%, based on Laufer, 1989). 

Adequate comprehension threshold: A percentage at which most learners achieve “adequate comprehension” (suggested as 95% in Laufer, based on 55% comprehension; hypothesized as 98% coverage in Hu & Nation based on 85% comprehension). 

Upper threshold: A point above which an increase in coverage does not lead to improved comprehension (Laufer, 1992). If it exists, it is likely 98-99%.

That study may explain why some people with lower vocab knowledge ‘feel’ more ok with reading at lower comprehensions (that’d be me lol ToT). When I was learning french, I started reading extensively at a somewhat low vocab level, and in english I knew in elementary school I’d pick up novels for adults and read some sometimes, and by end of elementary I had a college reading level, so mm.

[jobrown14]

One Piece; Is it really all that?

TL;DR - It is, but does that mean you should read it?

I spent the majority of the month of December getting caught up in the grand tale of One Piece so that I could enjoy it by the time it hit it’s 1,000th chapter. While I did end up being a little late, getting fully caught up two or three days after the 1,000th chapter was released, I feel that I was able to say I really did accomplish this. 

One Piece is a grand tale, an exciting tale. It is also an excruciatingly long tale. There are 1001 chapters in One Piece currently and each chapter contains around 16-19 pages per. Shonen Jump series all start with a chapter that’s roughly 50 pages, followed by one that’s 25, which if we go by an average of 18 pages per chapter, we would end up with 18,057 total pages! There are currently 97 volumes out in the original Japanese, and 95 in English.

So where does that leave us? It’s a dauntingly massive series to try to get into! But would I say it was worth reading the whole thing?

Yes, I would. It was a fantastic read. And I’m not just telling myself that due to the sunken cost fallacy. (more on that here) 

One Piece is truly a grand journey, one that I can barely describe in a single blog post. It’s got action. It’s got comedy. It’s got drama. It’s got exceptional main and side characters. It’s got an incredibly charming yet intricately thought out world that’s full of fantastic creatures, locales, and peoples. Following Monkey D. Luffy and his pirate crew is enthralling. He is a charming lead, and his crew is equally charming as well. Each member they pick up along the way gets their own time to shine, so you truly feel like you’re getting to see what they can do. The whole series just oozes charm.

And yet, it’s difficult to say that everyone should drop what they’re doing and read this. It’s fantastic, sure, and I personally really enjoyed it, but will everyone enjoy it the same? Of course not.

There are some slow parts that I didn’t like quite as much as the rest of the story, one of which caused me to drop the series for several months earlier in the year, only to pick it back up late November - early December. And while many other Shonen manga are easy to read, One Piece is surprisingly wordy. I like to consider myself a fast reader and yet some of these chapters took me quite a bit longer to read than I’d expect a chapter of a Shonen manga to take. Most Shonen chapters tend to take me less than five minutes, with One Piece chapters seeming to take between six and eight minutes per chapter on occasion. This isn’t a negative, per se, but it did make it feel like certain parts of the story I was less enthralled with lasted forever.

But therein lies the biggest problem with recommending the series to people: it’s length. It’s a 1001 chapter long story with many story arcs which don’t all hit the same notes. Most of the arcs in One Piece are fantastic, but several are less so, and one or two are just not good. While the overarching tale is a great one, the minute to minute action sometimes leaves you uninterested.

But there’s more to One Piece than just the story. As manga is a visual medium there’s also the art to contend with, and it’s fantastic. Across the entire time I was reading I may have gotten tired of the story at points, but I never got tired of the art. Eiichiro Oda’s creative character designs melded with his gorgeous backdrops and smooth action sequences made the fights seem to float off the paper. It’s so easy to visualize the sword strokes Zoro is taking, or the punches that Luffy makes. The art is just fantastic, all the way through.

But “should I read it?” you may ask. And while I can gush about the characters and art and the story and the locales way more than I even scratched the surface with here, I can’t answer that question for you. It’s a long series. While dedicated, hardcore, long time fans of the series may always tell you that it’s the best thing ever and you have to read it, I’m saying that it’s a tough call to make. It’s incredibly long, parts of it were slightly hard to follow, some parts got boring. On the other hand, some arcs were some of the best I’ve ever read in manga. The Summit War saga and the Wano Kuni saga were so great that for each of them I ended up spending the whole day reading, totaling around 100 chapters a day for both of those arcs. And while, really, most stuff once they get into the Grand Line is wonderful, it’s still 100 chapters to get there. That’s the entire length of a smaller manga! You could read all of a newer Shonen Jump manga like Chainsawman (97 chapters) or get most of the way through Jujutsu Kaisen (135 chapters) in 100 chapters. 

So should you read One Piece? The better question to ask is “Do I want to read one manga that’s 10 manga long?” 

Because that’s the main thing, you could read 10 or more other manga in the time it takes you to read One Piece. Or you could read other long-form shonen manga like My Hero Academia (297 chapters) and Black Clover (278 chapters). Both of them are still less than the total number of chapters it takes to get to the time skip in One Piece (597 chapters). This isn’t to discourage, though it may feel like it, but it is a big time commitment. And while, if you’re fast, dedicated, and have 2 weeks to kill, you can grab a Shonen Jump subscription through VIZ and hit their 100 chapter limit 10 days in a row and get caught up in 10 days, it took me the better part of a month to get caught up, and I finally did on January 5th, two days after chapter 1000 came out.

But I suppose the real best question is just “Do you want to?” because if you’ve spent this whole time reading this to help you decide, I think you’re interested enough to give it a go. I don’t usually like recommending series where you have to put in a major time commitment before you’re sure if you like it, but One Piece really is that special. It’s a gem. And while there were parts I didn’t like and other parts I wasn’t incredibly keen on, some parts have become my favorite parts in all of manga, and it is a truly special thing to experience.

[ask-de-writer]

MET BY MOONLIGHT : (Part 2 of 3) : Flocking Bay

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MET BY MOONLIGHT

by

De Writer (Glen Ten-Eyck)

5740 words

© 2020 by Glen Ten-Eyck

written 2003 by Glen Ten-Eyck

All rights reserved.

Reproduction in any form, physical, electronic or digital is prohibited without the express written consent of the author or proper copyright holder.

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Copyright fair use rules for Tumblr users

Users of Tumblr.com are specifically granted the following rights. They may reblog the story. They may use the characters or original characters in my settings for fan fiction, fan art works, cosplay, or fan musical compositions. I will allow those who do commission art works to charge for their images.

All sorts of Fan Activity, fiction, art, cosplay, music or anything else is ACTIVELY encouraged!

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I was liking Laelia more and more. We ordered lunch and it was so good that we wolfed it down. We relaxed over coffee and watched the harbor. I could see Allison’s little sailboat skimming out past the breakwater. Laelia appeared to be thinking something over. I let her have time.

Abruptly Laelia said, “Just how interested are you in the local history?”

“I find it to be fascinating,” I said. Then with a grin added, “Almost as fascinating as my present company.”

“Flatterer. Why don’t you come to my house and have a look at my collection?” she asked. Then with an impudent smile said, “No etchings — — — Just woodcuts.”

“That sounds irresistible,” I said, reaching impulsively across the table and taking her hand. We left the Stone Oven and strolled up the street, away from the harbor.

Laelia’s house was on a side street a few blocks from my clinic. Changer’s Ct. I commented on the name and Laelia responded by telling me that money changers used to have shops along the court. Most of the lots along the street were overgrown with brush and trees. Obviously, few had ever lived here. It took a very long time for brush and trees to reach the size of the ones that I saw.

Laelia’s house was another surprise. At first glance, it seemed to be a thoroughly modern cottage set among large trees. Then I noticed traces of the original drive. There was a maple growing in it that was easily five feet through the bole. What at first I took to be siding proved to be hand-cut, adze squared timbers on closer examination. The proportions of the house betrayed great age. The more I looked, the older I realized it was.

The door was made of oak and beautifully carved. It was topped by the Darkmoon crest and filled with scenes from the history of Flocking Bay. I noticed that there were none depicting the Marquost massacre.

The inside of the house showed none of the betraying signs of its age. All was neat. The walls were finished in modern style and the lights and computer in the corner were up to date. The kitchen where she went to fix a pot of tea was as tidy and modern as the rest.

In the living room was a locked, glass front bookcase of antique design, if not a genuine antique. The dairies and other books of her history collection were housed in it.

Laelia emerged from the kitchen with the teapot and cups. She laid out the service, solid silver, not plated, or I was completely off base. I had seen a set like it once before. In a museum. Hallmarked Paul Revere.

She poured the tea and unlocked the bookcase. I carefully took down the first of the Darkmoon dairies and looked at it. It had been rebound several times and was in excellent condition, given the age of its pages. I took down several other volumes at random to assess their condition.

It was a pleasant surprise. Diaries of that era are usually delicate and crumbling. The Darkmoon Diaries were in excellent condition. Even the Hilstrom Diaries were in good shape. I recognized that the early Hilstrom Diaries had many palimpsest pages. In the 1600’s paper and parchment were dear.

For the first time, I learned the full name of that first ancient enemy. He was Eben (short for Ebenezer) Gaston Hilstrom. I did not find the personality revealed in the pages to be a likeable one. In spite of that, he was an acute observer and had much to tell, including the names, not only of his descendants but those of the other ‘founders’ of Flocking Bay. The massacre was described in great and self-righteous detail. Interestingly enough, the matchlock musket that Eben used to slay the Shaman would never fire again, no matter what was done towards repairing it. It was retired to Eben’s mantelpiece with a small plaque.

They had named the town for the many bird rookeries in its sheltered waters and woods.

The first of the Darkmoons had come a year later, from Civilized Europe, though she spoke English only haltingly. She had been a stowaway, fleeing from a forced marriage in Poland. Two ‘honest sailors’ vouched for her and Eben bought her indenture from them to reimburse the ship for her passage. He was pleasantly surprised at the low price that he paid. At the normal and customary rates, she would be a free person in only five years. Eben altered the price on the document of sale and had her services for seven.

Sipping Laelia’s excellent English tea, I turned to the Darkmoon Dairies. She was busy with official business, working away at her computer in the corner of the room. A few people came and went on routine business needing a Justice of the Peace. A few traffic and parking citations, an application for a marriage license, nothing extraordinary at all. After the marriage license applicant had gone, Laelia got down a large ledger type book and copied particulars from the application into it. She shut the book with a snap and a satisfied smile.

I looked up from my reading. The Darkmoon Dairies were fascinating in themselves but there was something that I couldn’t quite put a finger on. It wasn’t their age. I was certain of that. I determined to get copies of both sets of books, if Laelia would allow it.

“Laelia,” I asked hesitantly, “would it be alright with you if I brought over my digital camera and an ultraviolet light?”

She looked up from her work with a secretive smile and asked, “Why the U.V. light?”

I carefully held one of the first volumes of the Darkmoon Dairies open and pointed to a page. “This is a palimpsest. The older writing was erased, probably with a sponge of vinegar, and new writing done over it at right angles. A U.V. light picture of the page with the proper digital enhancement will reveal the original writing as well as that of your ancestress’.”

Her eyebrows raised up and her pupils widened in interest. She nodded. “I had experts look at them years ago. They thought that these weren’t recoverable. If you think that they are and it is as nondestructive as that, go ahead. I will need accurate copies of anything you get, both the palimpsests and the main books. I need good readable copies to give to Mrs. Alderman at the library anyway.” She grinned lupinely and added, “You cannot believe the determination of that woman where a historical document is concerned.”

“Then I will make three copies,” I replied. “One for you, one for the library and one for myself.”

“Yourself? You will have it in your computer and on disk won’t you?”

“I like the feel of paper in my hands when I’m studying. I’m old fashioned that way.”

She had crossed the room in uncanny silence and I nearly jumped when she laid a hand on mine. “I would very much like to recover those palimpsests but there is a problem. I don’t want all of them to be known. Can I sort which ones are to be available?”

What could I say? It was the only thing possible, so I said, “Certainly. I will have to have copies in my computer and storage devices but I won’t release anything without your consent.”

I hadn’t even realized that she was tense until she relaxed. “Thank you, Dr. Fredricks. I don’t know for sure what is there but I do know, from family tradition, that some of the parchment in the first volumes of both the Hilstrom and Darkmoon Dairies was made from skins salvaged from the Marquost village.”

Hiding my excitement, I said, “I have it on good authority that though the Marquost did not write, per-se, they did have a system of pictographs. Some claim to be able to interpret the few pictograms that survive.” I should know. As the last Shaman, I was one! And I had lied about the writing. The Marquost had been genuinely literate.

Laelia said with some authority, “With my family history, I am most curious about any such things. I made tracings of the ones on the Blackwall before you built your clinic around it. Does your system work on stone as well as paper?”

I grinned back at her. “The photographic system was originated for recovering lost stone pictograms. I made some pictures before I built the clinic around the Blackwall. Do you want to see them?” I was already sure of the answer and was pulling a wallet of photos out of my inside coat pocket.

Laelia looked carefully at my enhanced photos, brows knitted in concentration. Almost absently she opened the bookcase and pulled a slim binder out of a hidden drawer. She laid it open and took my photos in hand. After many minutes she laid aside my photos and looked at her drawings with new eyes. She picked up a pencil and began to sketch rapidly, muttering, “Of course, now it makes sense.” Her pencil down, she looked at me and nodded. “Yes, definitely do your magic on the books. Who knows what will be revealed?”

I agreed at once, before she could change her mind. Over the next several weeks Allison became sure that there was something going on between Laelia and myself because I was spending so much time over at the little house on Changer’s Ct. The job of photographing three hundred years of written history was huge. Also, the dairies were fascinating in themselves.

Among the hardships that the people of Flocking Bay endured were many minor animal attacks. Dog bites, the occasional bear mauling, being raked by an eagle for getting too close to a nest were just a few. Occasionally there was a fatal attack but those seemed rare. There appeared to be little discernible pattern to the attacks.

On the other side, Flocking Bay was not your typical small town that would die out. The small fishing fleet always managed to find the best and highest priced catches. Gardens and surrounding farms bloomed. Stores found active trade. No matter the vicissitudes of the world outside, depressions, wars, epidemics or whatever, Flocking Bay continued to prosper quietly.

Few ever wanted to leave and most of those came back.

Through all of this vast span of time the Darkmoons had stayed and observed. Oddly, there was no mention of marriages or husbands. All of the Darkmoon children were female and carried the family name. In so small a town, it was peculiar that nobody seemed to notice. It was simply accepted that the Darkmoons would cling to their ‘foreign’ ways. They stayed to themselves, out of the way, nearly out of town, on the virtually deserted Changer’s Ct. For almost all of that time, the one thing that they did do was handle the duties of the Justice of the Peace. Animal Control had been added to that office in the 1950’s.

The Darkmoons were always ready with assistance for those in the town who needed help. It might be a loan or perhaps just a suggestion for a way to make money. The Darkmoons showed little or no need for money themselves. They always appeared to have whatever they needed for the people that came to them. Perhaps they were independently wealthy. Nobody knew — or cared.

The Hilstrom Dairies ended in 1867. The Darkmoon Dairies came right up to the present. Laelia was still writing in the most recent volume.

The photography had been, if a long project, at least a simple one. Now the real work began. Allison now thought that Laelia and I had broken up. I spent all of my time at the computer, enhancing the palimpsests first.

Some were of no interest, just old notes or handbills of one sort or another. Others were very different. There was the original Darkmoon indenture contract, now recovered. The forgery to gain an extra two years of service showed too. More important to me were the ones on homemade parchment.

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[eggos-world]

Complainers (A MHA fanfic)

Midorya x Fem! Reader

(A/N : So this is my first fanfic EVER and I've really been into MHA for a while now and I LOVED reading all the fanfics, and I saw this particular ask to a blog if the reader had a writing quirk and how would Midorya and two other characters would react (I am so sorry I forgot the blog who wrote that) but I wanted to put my spin on it and make the reader be into slam poetry and let their tongue be their weapon. This particular poem is by Rudy Fransisco!! Not my original poem!! Hope y'all enjoy!)

When you write, it's like the whole world around you finally goes silent. You live out the daydreams in your own head feeling the words on the page a safe space. This was your quirk. Even if it didn't seem as great to be in combat fighting villains, at least it's something to fight your inner demons. That to you was enough.

Midorya was well use to the song and dance of getting you to snap out of your world when the bell rings, apologizing in advance. In truth he hates breaking your concentration, he knows full well that he hates the feeling being separated from writing his notes. But he knew you would sit there for hours on end just writing in your book, even if you finish it all in one go you wouldn't notice that you were writing on the desk. (And yes he had to get you out of there and insisted to clean it up for you). Even after all of this he still admired your quirk no less.

The bell had rung for lunch and everyone stood up and packed their books away and walked out one by one. You feel a tap on your shoulder not a minute later, and a familiar soft spoken voice breaks you from your concentration. " Hey, Y/N, I-Its time for lunch" He says with a smile and you close your book and packed it into your bag, walking with him side by side to the lunchroom.

"So what was today's story in your book?" He asked with a smile looking to you.

"Not a story today, I've been into poetry for a while. So I figured I might try something different. " You say smiling back.

"Woah, I didn't know you were into poetry. That seems really cool! What was it about? "

You were always so surprised that he was interested in your work. Since it was such a personal thing to you and you haven't really shown off your work due to self consciousness, he was always very supportive even from the beginning. Later on you realized that he also loved writing. That was one of the many things that formed a great friendship between you both, besides from your love of heroes and nerding out with each other of course!. You both carried out your conversation while getting your lunches. Sitting down on the table along with everyone else smiling and joking you all causally eat your meals. You pull out your notebook, sliding it over to Midorya to take a look after you promised him too. He smiles and opens to the bookmarked paged, but a soon as he does a hand flashes and snatches the book out of his hands.

"Please tell me you don't think your sorry excuse of a quirk would get you into the top ten!" Bakugou loudly exclaiming with a smug look.

Well shit.

While he was chuckling you were about to stand and get it back, but Midorya beat you to it trying to pry it off of his hands, but Bakugou only lifts it up higher. "What's your deal nerd? Trying to stick up for your little girlfriend?" He says chuckling louder.

"S-she's not my girlfriend kachan! Give back her book! It's not yours!" Midorya says with a blush forming on his face. But Bakugou shoves him away and faces you.

"What makes you think that writing fairytale lands and princesses would make you pro hero? That's not going to save you from the real world. What's going to happen if a villain comes in and starts destroying everything around you? You're gonna write him a love story with a happily ever after!? Give me a break! " He says with a laugh.

"Kachan! You need to stop this" Midorya says stepping back up to him. "Not everyone's quirk is perfect!"

"Heh! If you really think she could handle the world on her own-" He says before holding out the book "Let's give her a chance to prove me wrong! "

And just like that, your notebook, your work your safe haven was blown up to flames. Bits of burnt paper flown into the air, your book quickly into ashes. You didn't notice midorya quickly moving to get his water and put the fire out, your eyes was fixated on Bakugou. A smirk had formed on his face that made your heart sink into your stomach. A lump forming within your chest as you fought the urge to cry. He moved his arms and raised his eyebrows, waiting for you to make the next move. But you felt a hand around your arm.

"Y/N, you don't need this now. Let's just go-"

"No... " You say stepping up to Bakugou. Taking one last look at your destroyed book you turn your head back to him. "It's a shame, because the poem I was just writing... Was about you. " You say with a sad smile and a nod. He blinks back in surprise, his smirk growing larger than before. "That's not a good thing.. " You later say. Even though it was still in the works, even if you didnt get to finish it you felt your tongue burn. An unfamiliar sensation forming in your mouth. Usually you would feel it within your hand as you write, a soft glow transferring onto the words you'd write on the page. But now that feeling had made it's way from your throat and to your mouth.

And it's telling you to speak the fuck up.

You took a breath, looked him deep in the eye and let your mouth took the wheel.

"The following are true stories.

May 26th 2003 Aron Ralston was hiking, a boulder fell on his right hand. He waited four days, then amputated his arm with a pocket knife.

On New Year’s Eve, a woman was bungee jumping in Zimbabwe. The cord broke, she then fell into a river and had to swim back to land in crocodile infested waters with a broken collarbone.

Claire Champlin was smashed in the face by a five pound watermelon being propelled by a slingshot.

Matthew Brobst was hit by a javelin.

David Striegl was punched in the mouth. By a kangaroo.

The most amazing part about these stories is when asked about the experience they all smiled, shrugged, and said “I guess things could have been worse.”

So go ahead.

Tell me that you’re having a bad day.

Tell me about the traffic. Tell me about your boss. Tell me about the job you’ve been trying to quit for the past four years. Tell me the morning is just a town house burning to the ground and the snooze button is a fire extinguisher. Tell me the alarm clock stole the keys to your smile, drove it into 7:00 AM, and the crash totaled your happiness.

Tell me! Tell me!

Tell me, how blessed are we to have tragedies so small it can fit on the tips of our tongues?

You see, when Evan lost his legs he was speechless. When my cousin was assaulted, she didn’t speak for forty eight hours. When my uncle was murdered, we had to send out a search party to find my father’s voice.

Most people have no idea that tragedy and silence have the exact same address!

When your day is a museum of disappointments hanging from events that were outside of your control, when you find yourself flailing in an ocean of “Why is this happening to me?”, when it feels like your guardian angel put in his two week notice two months ago and just decided not to tell you, when it feels like God is just a babysitter that’s always on the phone, when you get punched in the esophagus by a fistful of life, remember that every year two million people die of dehydration so it doesn’t matter if the glass is half full or half empty, there’s water in the cup.

Drink it, and stop FUCKING complaining.

Muscle is created by repeatedly lifting things that have been designed to weigh us down. So when your shoulders feel heavy, stand up straight and lift your chin – call it exercise. When the world crumbles around you, you have to look at the wreckage and then build a new one out of the pieces that are still here.

Remember, you are still here.

The human heart beats approximately four thousand times per hour.

Each pulse, each throb, each palpitation is a trophy engraved with the words “You are still alive”...

You are still alive...

Act like it."

When you felt the sensation cool from your lips and the tip of your tongue, Bakugou's eyes were wide. His smirk had fallen. Silence filled around you, even from Midorya. Everyone has seen and heard the whole thing. Just as you were about to walk back to your table to grab your things and leave, you hear a slow clap. Then another. Then another. You turn your head to see everyone clapping and cheering. You smile a little. Bakugou steps back and walks off with a smack of his teeth.

"Tch, whatever weirdo.. " He mumbles under his breath.

You walked over to Midorya smiling and he quickly gives you a hug. "That was amazing! The way you kept firing words at kachan was incredible! I never seen him so speechless like that! " He pulls away with a smile and a blush.

"Oh hehe! It was nothing really" You say forming a blush yourself, looking away shyly.

"I'm really sorry about your notebook though. I could buy you another one and bring it to you tomorrow! "

"Oh no it's okay! I have extras at my house-"

"Nope! It's my treat." He smiles and the bell rings again, making everyone pack up and ready for the next class. Midorya grabs his bag and hands you yours. Making your way back into the building he stops you for a second. "Hey, speaking of treat, d-do you think we could both head out f-for some ice cream after school? " He says with a heavier blush and fiddles with his tie. He always did looked cute when he blushed. You smile and giggle a bit.

"I would love to.. "

(Woah hey! First fanfic done! Hope you all enjoyed that!! 🤣💕)

[evolving-kalopsia]

Chapter one rough

“Medic 17, you’ve code 3 traffic at 2765 N Locus Ave. 37 year-old male complaining of chest pain and anxiety. No further info.”

Drew looks across the cab of the ambulance at his partner and flashes him a grin. “That’s dinner, Junk.”

“Fucking Albert!” Junk yells, putting the rig in drive as Drew hits the lights and sirens. “He’s not due to call for at least two days. Maybe he’s actually dying, for once. Don’t you still owe dinner from Margaret’s last call?”

“Nope. I got Thai for that one.” Drew says proudly.

“Fuck. Yeah.” Junk responds, slamming the shifter into drive.

The ambulance heads out of the parking lot and Junk hits the lights and sirens. Rush hour just ended, traffic is still a bit heavy. The ambulance weaves it’s way slowly through drivers that seem to have never seen an ambulance in their rear-view mirror before.

“Fucking Albert.” Junk repeats, gesturing at the Toyota in front of them. “And this fucking guy! Don’t stop, shit-head! Move the fuck over!”

The car in front slams on it’s brakes, pulling one of the three textbook panicked driver moves: brake slam, pulling to the left or staying the course, crawling at a slow crawl.

“Asian and female.” Drew says, upping the bet, “and I get dessert, too”

“Just because your Asian female can’t drive doesn’t mean they’re all like that.” Junk says as the car finally figures out that the screaming sirens behind it aren’t going around and pulls off to the right, halfway through the crowded intersection of stopped vehicles.

As the rig kicks forward again, they both look out the passenger window, “what the fuck” expressions already loaded on their faces.

The driver waves apologetically, mouthing sorry over and over as they pass.

The ambulance screams ahead, clear roads for a few more blocks. Ten per over the limit is what they’re allowed per company policy. Apparently Junk missed that page in the handbook.

“Well that was a surprise.” Drew says, looking in the side view mirror.

“Cute little white girls ain’t exempt from bad driving” Junk admonishes.

“Very cute.” Drew corrects him.

Junk looked sideways at Drew. “That’s creepy, old man.”

“It’s only creepy if I say it first.” Drew says, putting on his best creep smile.

Junk gives him a disgusted look and says “No, it’s creepy when you have that look on your face when you say it.” 

Drew feigns irritation, “It’s not a look, ok? It’s just my face, I can’t help the way I was born.”

“Exactly. Which is why everything you say is creepy.” Junk turns right onto Farley Ave.  Quicker than he should, jerking the wheel back to the left to avoid a dog in the street.

Drew barely glances up from his electronic chart, already halfway finished with it. He and Junk have been partners for seven years, Drew knows that Junk is all-pro behind the wheel. Seven years of fun and blood and guts, life and death. Buffoonery and bullshit. Seven years of betting meals at the beginning of the week, based on which frequent-flyer is going to call first.  

“Turn the fucking wheel, geezer!” Junk yells at the Buick ahead, the driver stopping halfway into the right lane.

“Shouldn’t assume they’re old. That’s profiling.” Drew says, chuckling.

“S’ a fucking Buick, man. Ain’t nobody under the age of sixty-five driving no Buick.” Junk says, waving out the window at nobody.

“Profiling.” Drew repeats

“Man, I am really not in the mood to smell Albert’s house today. Not at all.” Junk moans, thinking about what lies ahead;

Morbidly obese, 47 year-old diabetic, asthmatic, congestive heart failure, kidney failure, non-bathing rage-inducing EMS system-abusing Albert fucking Piffle.

As they pull up to Albert’s neighborhood, Junk kills the lights and sirens. The less people in this neighborhood that know an ambulance is sitting unguarded in the street, the better.

“Tonight’s the night. I can feel it” Junk says, pulling up in front of Albert’s trash-strewn lawn. “He ‘gon ride the lightning, we’re working him.”

“You keep saying it, and he keeps living. You’re jinxing us one way or another.” Drew grabs the computer off the dash as he gets out of the rig.

“Lock it, I’m not in the mood to go pawn-hopping on my day off.” Junk pushes his door lock down with his finger, the automatic locks long past working in this death-defying death trap of an ambulance.

They pull the gurney out, loaded with equipment they know they won’t need; Drug box, cardiac monitor, airway bag chock full of things they might use if this were a legitimate call. But it’s just Albert. He probably dropped his can of Spaghetti-O’s under the couch again. Or the TV remote is missing, stuck in a roll of back fat from the last time he managed to get moved from the couch and back under his own power. Or Albert’s just feeling extra bored and lonely. They bring the equipment even though they know they’ll be walking out of Albert’s shithole house, reeking of sweat and cat piss so bad they’ll change uniforms in the street before getting back in the rig.

They bring all that heavy, cumbersome equipment in because it’s got less chance of being ripped off in the house than out in the rig.

And the day they don’t lug all that shit in is the day they find Albert face-down in his own puke. Not so dead they can call it a night right there. They’ll find him just dead enough that they’ll have to actually work him. Roll his 400 lb carcass over and start compressions, cut his filthy clothes off and get him hooked up to the cardiac monitor, try to get at least one I.V. started, as well as call for assistance from another crew or two, just to get his ass on to the gurney in the event they actually get his ruined heart to start pumping blood again.

Junk leading the gurney, he doesn’t ring the bell or knock, doesn’t yell “EMS” into the house like he normally would. This is Albert. Junk just walks in, dragging the gurney with him as Drew pushes it from the rear, the wheels rolling across the stained carpet, a shade of some unnamable color distantly related to brown.

“Al!” Drew yells through his paper mask, donned by both of them automatically before reaching the porch. Not out of fear of catching anything, but from a lack of desire to smell the inside of Albert’s house. The masks barely do anything at all. Just enough to keep them from retching.

“Al!” He repeats, catching Junk’s quick glance back at him. It’s not like Albert to not answer.

Avoiding the piles of boxes and junk, they round the corner to the living room where they always find him; on the filthy couch surrounded by empty soda cans and chip bags and crusty food plates. Laptop opened on the snack tray, usually some Sci-Fi on the one large flat-screen tv, xbox or playstation on the other.  He’d always yell “Here guys!” when they’d call for him and it would make them grin, ever since Junk compared him to Sloth from the Goonies.

Junk stops as the room enters his field of view and looks back at Drew with an unamused smirk. Albert is on the couch, Xbox controller in his hands and a brand-new set of expensive-looking headphones over his ears.

Drew stares at him for a moment, a similar smirk on his face.

“Albert!” he yells. It gets Al’s attention and he jumps, risks a glance away from the screen and then he’s back in sniper mode.

“Hey guys.” Albert mutters, focusing on the screen.

Drew walks over as Junk heads back outside, pushing the gurney and cursing the whole way. He pulls the headphones off Albert’s head and sighs loudly.

“What’s the deal, Al?” Drew asks, looming over Albert.

“I kept reading online about how much better it is if you have headphones, you know? Like to hear guys’ footsteps and stuff when they sneak up? So I ordered these, they’re really good, Drew!” Albert says, grinning like a great big man-child with too few teeth and too many comorbidities.

“No, Al,” Drew exhales “why did you call for us? Dispatch said chest pain. I don’t give two shits about your headphones or electronic addiction.”

“Oh yeah sorry. Fucker! Fucking campers.” Albert yells, distracted by Call of Duty again as his character on screen dies.

Drew steps between Al and the T.V. and for a second Al looks like he’s going to object, but Drew’s eyebrow raise squashes his momentary outrage.

“I’m sorry, Drew. I had some chest pain, but I think it was just some anxiety. The internet was out for like an hour and I was starting to lose it a little. I forgot to call back. I’m good now, though.” Albert says, simultaneously giving an apologetic look and trying to see around Drew, who shifts his weight and keeps his vision blocked.

“One of these days, I’m going to come in here and take all your controllers and leave. I’ll show you some anxiety.” Drew says, making hard eye contact for a moment.

Albert’s eyes go a little wide, unsure how serious the threat is. He fidgets and reaches down next to the couch, grabbing a fresh battery off the charger and starts changing batteries on his controller.

Seriously? That’s not even funny, man. I said sorry.” Albert apologizes almost sincerely, putting his controller down on the arm of the filthy couch.

The voice in Drew’s head is telling him to let it alone, to just get on with his shift. But he can’t. No matter how burnt out he is, he has to try every time. Even just a little “Samantha still your case worker?” he asks, knowing full well that she is.

Albert’s eyes light up at the mention of the pretty girl that comes to his house once every other month to dot the I’s and cross the T’s on his paperwork so his handout money keeps coming in.

“Oh yeah, Sam was here last week. She looked hot.” Albert grins like a lovesick child.

“Sure. Right now,” Drew says “her Grandmother is dying on the kitchen floor, just three blocks away. I could be over there helping, but I’m here babysitting you. Maybe I’ll get out of here and catch that call. Have enough time to save her. Or maybe next time you see Sam, she’s a little less bubbly because she’s mourning the death of her beloved Grammy because it took the next available crew twenty minutes to get to her.”

“Her Grandmother’s dying? Right now?” Albert asks, almost panicked.

“Jesus!” Drew yells. He grabs the controller out of Albert’s hands and gets down low, points at his face.

“Stop abusing the fucking system, Albert. I’m not coming next time, I mean it.” Drew exclaims, holding eye contact before turning away and heading towards the door.

“Come on, man! Give me back that controller! Please? I won’t call again!” Albert pleads.

“If I don’t see you for a month, I’ll bring it back.” Drew yells as the door slams behind him.

“Oh C’mon!” Albert yells to the empty house.

He sits for a moment, wondering if Drew was serious about Sam’s Grandmother. He reaches down next to the couch and grabs another controller, mumbling “Whatever, sucker. You’ll be back.”

Junk’s already changed into a fresh uniform and packed the gear back up, taking a drag off his vape and says “Did you kill him? Please tell me you killed him.”

“My name’s not diabetes.” Drew mutters, still irritated  as he kicks off his boots and drops trou on the sidewalk, then pulls off his shirt and grabs his backpack from one of the outside compartments, pulls out clean clothes.

Junk takes another pull and offers it to Drew. “Want some? Helps get the smell out of your nose.”

“No” Drew refuses “ But you do look damn sexy sucking that robot dick. I see a future for you in robo-porn. You could be a pioneer.”

“You’re about to become famous, yourself.” Junk replies, motioning up the street. A group of young clowns two doors down have their phones out and are snapping pics of Drew in his skivvies.

Drew looks back at them and waves. “I’d better not see those on Ebay!” he yells, pulling his pants on.

A combination of laughs and catcalls come back, as well as “Chicken legs.”

Drew mocks surprise, turns to Junk. “Do I have chicken legs?”

Junk blows raspberry-scented vapor at him and laughs. “Yep. Chicken from neck to nuts, too. Speaking of, it’s taco time.”

Junk gets in the rig and starts it up, starts to pull away as Drew jogs to catch up and hop in before he gets left in this shitty neighborhood.

[spoookymuulders]

Firebolt

Read here on ao3 word count: 1931

JJ looks around for a moment, like she’s trying to find an actual healing potion to give to Hotch. She settles for taking a single cheeto out of the bag in front of her and holding it out to him with a grin. Hotch takes the offered cheeto slowly as JJ wiggles in her seat and rolls a d10.

 “That’s a three, plus.. Um.” Hotch squints at the piece of paper on the table in front of him.

    “Plus two.” Garcia says gently, leaning over and pointing to the correct stat.

    “Plus two. So five.”

    Reid remains quiet for a moment before clasping his hands behind his tri-fold and giving Hotch a smile.

    “It’s just a door.” He says pleasantly. Hotch squints at him from across the table disbelievingly.

    They’re gathered around the table in Rossi’s dining room, their dinner long since finished. They’re two - (in some cases four) glasses of wine in, and because it’s Reid’s birthday, Garcia had convinced everyone weeks ago to let him DM a game of dungeons and dragons for the team.

    Also because it’s Reid’s birthday, the smell of still-baking birthday cake had hit him as soon as he and Garcia opened the door and he had known immediately that this wasn’t just another family dinner like Garcia had said. Rossi had made them all old-fashioned spaghetti and meatballs with his mother’s recipe, as per the birthday boy’s request, and Reid was pretty sure his ears were a brighter shade of red than the homemade marinara when they brought the cake out, all singing at the top of their lungs.

    Garcia had also spent all week helping everyone make characters for tonight. In all honesty, part of her (quite a large part, really) is hoping that they all fall in love with the game and it becomes a regular thing. Something fun and silly to do to wind down after a case, because God knows they need it.

    Prentiss had been the easiest for character creation. Garcia had handed her a character sheet and Prentiss had filled it out suspiciously quickly, shoving it back at the blonde with dwarf scrawled in the race and ranger in the class. She won’t tell Garcia how exactly she filled it out so fast or so well, but Garcia gets the feeling that somewhere in Prentiss’ apartment is a hidden jar full of dice. She’s wrong. There’s two.

    JJ had been fairly easy as well. Garcia had sat down with her over coffee one afternoon, a players handbook laid out in front of them, and JJ, not knowing anything about the game, had quickly chosen to be a goblin and a rogue. Despite Garcia trying to persuade her differently, JJ had remained committed to her goblin, and Garcia had been quite proud when JJ had rolled well for her stats.

    Morgan was a little more difficult - Garcia found herself explaining each of the races and classes to him multiple times until he finally settled on being a half-elf paladin. His reasoning being paladin just sounds cool and you’re already an elf so I can’t be that.

    She had helped Hotch create his character over lunch one afternoon, the two of them holed up in his office. He’d looked through everything with a serious, practical eye, eventually deciding he’d be a dragonborn fighter. When Garcia had commended him on his choice of race, he’d shrugged and told her the claws looked like they’d come in handy. But Garcia’s seen the photo of Hotch and Jack where Jack is clutching a thirty-year-old stuffed dragon like his life depends on it, and she knows that it used to be Hotch’s.

    Rossi, in his own words, didn’t really understand or care, but if it was for the kid, sure why not. The five each glasses of wine he and Garcia had had while creating his character had resulted in a most-of-the-time drunk human wizard, and Garcia found that oddly appropriate, because that was basically Rossi anyways, wasn’t it?     Garcia herself had made her character before helping anyone else, her excuse being that it would be easiest to show everyone her character sheet when she was helping them create theirs. Really, though, she just wanted to be a bard before anyone else could claim the role.

    “I.. Open the door.” Hotch says slowly.

    “No, let someone else investigate the door first! Someone with a better investigation stat!” Prentiss cries from her seat beside Reid. “Hotch, you’re gonna get yourself squished by a wall or something.”

    “I open the door!” Morgan jumps in, grinning broadly. Reid raises an eyebrow and Hotch waves a relenting hand.

    “Let Morgan open the door, then.” He says, still squinting at Reid as he sits back in his chair. Reid flips through his book for a moment, then looks up at Morgan as Prentiss flops her hands and sits back in her chair with a huff.

    “Alright. Morgan, make a dexterity saving throw.” He says. “Hotch, you make one, too, since you were right there.” Hotch sputters a little, but doesn’t argue. He and Morgan shake the dice that were given to them at the start of the night, both leaning forward as the two d20s clatter against the table.

    “Sixteen!” Morgan crows, patting the table. “Oh - plus one, seventeen!”

    “Twelve.” Hotch grumbles. Reid grins at the two of them.

    “Morgan, as you open the door, a bevy of arrows comes flying towards you from each side of the wall. You manage to drop to the ground just as you hear the click of the tiny doors in the wall opening. Hotch, you do the same but you’re not quite quick enough.” Reid says, rolling a die of his own behind his screen. “What’s your AC?”

    “My what?” Hotch asks, frowning at his paper.

    “Your armor class.” Prentiss says. Garcia points at it on his page and Hotch nods.

    “Sixteen.” He says proudly. Reid hums.

    “Okay.” He rolls another die and scrunches his nose. “Take five piercing damage.” Hotch grimaces and scribbles a number on his paper, frowning.

    “What’re you at?” Morgan asks, leaning over. He whistles low, then laughs quietly. “Five, not great.

    “Ooh! I have a healing potion!” JJ says eagerly, piping up for the first time in five minutes. She grins broadly at Hotch from her seat between Rossi and Morgan. “Spence, can I give him one of my healing potions?”

    “Sure.” Reid says, nodding. JJ looks around for a moment, like she’s trying to find an actual healing potion to give to Hotch. She settles for taking a single cheeto out of the bag in front of her and holding it out to him with a grin. Hotch takes the offered cheeto slowly as JJ wiggles in her seat and rolls a d10.

    “He gets ten points back!” She says brightly. Hotch smiles gratefully and tacks a one in front of the five on his paper.

    “Okay, what’re you guys doing next?” Reid says, leaning forward on his elbows.

    “Going through the door?” Morgan says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. He loudly decides that he’ll go first when Reid asks. They settle on a marching order and Reid rests his chin on his fist, peering around the table at his friends as they chatter, smiling just a little.

    “What are our rations?” Hotch asks suddenly, tipping his head at his page. Reid hums, shrugging.

    “Usually things like bread, jerky, some cheese and grapes or other fruit. Some races get wine in theirs.” He tells Hotch.

    “Mine are cheetos.” JJ says happily, popping two into her mouth.

    “Honey, cheetos don’t exist in Faerun.” Garcia says gently. JJ huffs at her.

    “Fantasy cheetos!” She says indignantly, sticking her tongue out and tossing a cheeto at Garcia. Garcia catches it and munches on it. “I made them myself.”

    “How did you make them?” Reid asks, raising a brow. JJ shrugs.

    “I… Stole some of Rossi’s fancy cheese. And I baked it.” She says, grinning.

    “You stole my cheese?!” Rossi yelps, smacking the table lightly. “I cast firebolt on JJ.” JJ gapes at him, then pouts.

    “I’ll share my cheetos.” She says, using her best puppy-dog eyes.

    “This is a personal injustice and I’ll never forgive you.” Rossi declares, huffing loudly. JJ pouts more and he squints at her, leaning forward in his chair. Prentiss hides her snickering behind her wine, blinking innocently at Rossi when he turns his burning gaze on her.

    “Okay.” Reid says, waving a hand. Everyone looks at him and falls quiet at the suddenly serious look in his eyes. “You all file through the door and down a tiny hallway that opens into a big dining hall. There are two tables running most of the length of the room, piled high with forgotten food and dishes, as well as half-drunk goblets of spoiled wine. At the end of the room is a raised dais with a table and seven chairs at it. In each of the three chairs on the left and right are skeletons, and in the large chair in the center is a wight.”

    “A what?” Rossi asks, frowning.

    “A wight.” Reid repeats. “As you enter the room, it looks up from its spot at the table and smiles, then shoves the chair from the table and stands. I’d like everyone to roll for initiative.”     “Which one is that?” Hotch whispers to Garcia, leaning over to her. She puts the d20 in his hand and he thanks her, rolling it. They go around the table, telling Reid their numbers, and launch into their first real fight of the game. It goes surprisingly well, despite the one time Reid asks Hotch to roll a death saving throw and he squints at the doctor across the table. “If you kill my guy, you’re fired.” He says, his tone teasing. Reid just grins at him.

Hotch manages to roll a fourteen and gains back most of his hit points, much to his delight. He’s also the one to deliver the final blow to the wight. When Reid asks how he wants to kill the monster, he hums.

    “I wanna.. Chop its head off with my sword.” He says decisively. Reid nods and scribbles something in his notebook.

    “Okay. Hotch, you see this wight about to smash a chair over JJ’s head, and you run up behind it, swinging your longsword.” He says. “Its head drops to the floor and rolls away, and you take the chair from its hands as its body falls.” Reid grins around the table. “You guys just killed your first monster, congrats!”

    “I wanna kick the head!” JJ says suddenly. Reid laughs and nods. JJ beams at him and says, “I stand up and hug Hotch and then go kick the head as hard as I can.”

    “The head goes flying across the room and lands right in the middle of a silver platter.” Reid says, grinning when JJ laughs loudly.

    They play for a couple more hours, laughing and talking and drinking as they do. When they all part ways for the evening, Reid is smiling broader than any of them have seen him smile in months, and it warms all of their hearts. He accepts hugs from everyone and thanks Morgan for helping him load his gifts into the back of his car, then hugs his friend tightly.     “That was actually pretty fun.” Morgan says, patting Reid on the shoulder as they step apart. Reid grins and nods.

    “I’ve been telling you for years that D&D is fun!” He says, leaning against the car. He watches as Prentiss leads a giggling JJ out of the house and towards her car, holding the keys out of the blonde’s reach.

    “Maybe we’ll play again sometime.” Morgan says, squeezing Reid’s shoulder. He hugs the younger man again and heads for his own car, opening the passenger door for Garcia.

    They play a week later on the jet.

[aeori-o]

So long 2019!

I usually try and get these up December 31st not January 1st but, really, it’s 24 hours apart, does it really matter?

End of a year! And end of a decade!

I usually go over my yearly reading first. I wanted to get the “bad” out of the way first this time. This year I continued to stagnate creatively. I haven’t drawn anything since Qelvi back in January of 2018. I have written but mostly in role-plays with Vin and the other stuff I haven’t tracked very well. I don’t know how to track it in a way that’s clear and also easy to remember.

In the past my goals going into the new year have always been along the line of “do a little of  [thing] every day” and that is super not working for me. So this year I’m going to try and change it up. For writing all I want to do is a five minute, free-flow, unplanned just-put-pen-to-paper-and-write based off a prompt. That should be do-able as there’s no pressure of it having to be connected to a larger work. There’s no planning and thus no pressure except to take five minutes and do it. I think in the past I’ve tried to do that in addition to x amount of words or pages per day. I’m just gonna scale it back and see if I can get myself to do the bare minimum consistently and see where that goes.

As for drawing. Ideally I’d like to do a little bit every day so I can actually get better at it, but as that’s been my goal for the last several years and I have not done it even a little bit these past two years I’m going to change my goals for drawing up, as well. Instead of trying to do anything consistently I’m just going to make it my goal to do one drawing a month. That’s it. I don’t need to show it to anyone, or post it, or whatever. Just one drawing I can consider “complete” every month. Complete doesn’t need to be polished I just don’t want to do nothing again and this seems do-able. We’ll see how it turns out at the end of the year.

Reading! My goal was to read 100 books this year and then I got sucked into playing Fortnite halfway through the year and basically read nothing in May. I read as much as I did last year, so I’m not torn up about the amount I read, but just once I do want to read 100 books in a year. (Not counting graphic novels, because I read through them too quickly and it doesn’t feel the same as reading a novel). So next year will be attempt number 2 at reading 100 in a year because I don’t think I should give up after not meeting it once. Life happens, sometimes we play more video games than we should, I still read 78-book-books and 63 graphic novels. For a total of 141 books. Which is pretty good, I can’t be upset at that number.

Part of my goal for 100 books this year, too, will be to slim down my at-home to-be-read pile, which is currently taking up seven shelves and must be stopped. I say this but I already have five more books on hold at the library. Whoops.

Here’s everything I read this year that I inputted into goodreads:

My one hour a day reading calendar (this year I started trying to add dots for every book completed on the day of completion, but I think I missed days, gonna do that some more this year, too, I like it):

And my goodreads badge:

2019 was a pretty wild year, there were some unexpected and costly hiccups. One of my cats went missing for a week; the other got struvite crystals and his bladder nearly exploded; My ancient AV receiver kicked it and on top of those things being expensive there was a whole thing where the new one seemed to be messing up my TV, it was a time; I got rear-ended on the freeway which thankfully didn’t wind up costing me anything except for a lot of stress, some minor pain, and over two weeks without a vehicle. None of these turned out to be that bad, in the end, and thankfully spread out enough that I didn’t just expire from stress.

There was a lot of good this year, too. I got to bring my partner skiing for the first time ever, and for my first time in a very long time (I don’t know when the last time I went skiing was, back when I was in highschool maybe?). I expanded my plushie collection by A Lot this year. I have cute eevee plushes, and some really soft pillow plushes now, and beeb got me a little corsola who I would Die for.

I’ve been more involved with pokemon go. I technically found the group I play with at the end of 2018 (right at the end, it was in December during the community weekend and someone from the group saw me doing circles hitting the same pokestops over and over and was like “hey… wanna join our group?”), but 2019 was the first full year with them. It’s been really nice to reliably be able to get stronger/rarer pokemon and just have a general sense of community. It’s neat because it’s not like I’m close friends with any of these people, but they’re all good people and I like seeing them. I know virtually nothing about any of them, but still, it’s nice.

I also got super into stickers this year (I blame you, beeb) and since my laptop only has so much room I’ve taken to adding stickers to my car. I don’t want to go overboard but I love all the ones I’ve added so far and now that my bumper looks better than new I think my car looks pretty slick.

I started keeping a video-game journal at the beginning of this year, which has been really satisfying and I’m going to keep doing it. I always struggle to remember how much time I sink into games and what happens in this games. Being able to flip through and see all of what I played, when I played it, and what was going on is interesting.

Also got a new phone this year. I didn’t get the latest and greatest but usually when I’ve needed a new phone due to a previous one being busted I have found myself inheriting whatever phone someone else doesn’t want (for the most part). This is the first phone I’ve gone out of my way to get because mine was just not performing well and I have no regrets.

I have a huge issue with upgrading to a new device when my old ones are perfectly serviceable. For instance: the computer I am writing this on is twelve years old. It’s slow but it works for what I need. This computer isn’t even from the past decade, which is pretty wild to me. In thinking about the past decade this computer has been through it all with me.

I guess I’m moving onto the decade now. I was just thinking that this computer still has msn/wlm on it. There’s a dedicated button on my keyboard for it. I hit it and I can see the last icon I ever used on there (I used to change icons constantly, which is a thing I do not do anywhere anymore), as well as the theme I had in place. Absolutely wild. In the last decade(ish) we all abandoned msn/wlm, got skype, abandoned skype when it became a bloated, ad-filled disaster, and got onto telegram, discord, and the dms of various social media websites. (Which I suck at using as if I’m a person three times my age.) In 2010 we were on the iPhone 4 and basically every android sucked, now we’re on the iPhone 11 and androids are a viable option for a phone. Console generations are slower and mess with my perception of time. In the last decade we’ve only gone up one console generation which feels weirdly slow but then when I contemplate any company releasing a new console I inevitably feel it hasn’t been nearly long enough.

On a more personal note, I definitely cannot remember even most of the things that have happened in the last decade. I know I’ve read about five hundred books (closer to six hundred including graphic novels) because I’ve been tracking that since 2011. I’ve been tracking what I read for about a decade.

Left is books by year, middle is graphic novels by year, and right is the total of both.

I became decent at excel in the past few years. I went from not understanding this program at all to trying to find excuses to use it. I used to track all my reading in a notepad document, it looked like this:

As you can see: I only switched over in 2017. And it used to be a total pain because I would have to count all of the dates by hand. Hope I didn’t miscount. Then I’d be looking at my goodreads count and trying to figure out if that made sense against my personal count because I also didn’t count graphic novels as book-books back then and would sometimes mark them on goodreads. So I’d have to figure out how many I had inputted to goodreads to then make sure the two counts reconciled. It was a total nightmare. Now the computer counts for me.

And the reason I even became interested in excel is because of DnD which I have also gotten into in the last decade. It’s one of those things I had always been interested in but had no way to play or had false starts. A group came together a few years ago and we did some of the most fun, fulfilling, and emotional group-role-playing I have ever experienced. Our group has kind of disbanded now, and I’m trying to work on a campaign myself, but our first campaign is definitely one of the things I really cherish from the past few years. It’s definitely a highlight of the decade.

Speaking of meaningful role-plays. I got with my partner in the last decade, too. I’d feel weird getting all gushy about them here, but we’ve been doing written role-plays since before we figured out that we were a thing. They’re a constant source of inspiration to me and the things we create together are some of my favourite things in the world. At times there have been lulls between the things we make that really grab both of us, but this past year we started an AU of some of our characters and I think it’s safe to say we’re both in love with our little creation. Roach Squad is definitely the highlight of 2019 and I suspect it will continue to be the highlight of 2020. I don’t think we’ll be as aggressively into them by the time 2030 rolls around, but our original boys have persisted for the better part of the last decade (the Boys have been a thing since 2013 and we are still enjoying them, so I don’t doubt Roach Squad will persist, as well, but I imagine the next decade will give us a third group that we’re consumed with).

I’ve lost some friends in the past decade, and made some new, but find I don’t have the time to stay caught up with as many people as I used to. That used to be a thing I was good at. Toward the beginning of this decade, I’d regularly keep-up with at least a dozen people (by which I mean: talking to them daily). Now that number is at… maybe three or four people who I interact with daily (not counting group chats of which there is one). But if you’re reading this and we haven’t spoken in a while (“a while” could be years, honestly) and nothing really happened we just sort of stopped talking or hanging out: I still care about you. I hope your 2019 was more good than bad and that you have nice things to look back on in the last decade. Also hit me up, if you want to.

Overall I think the last decade has been pretty good. I’m thankful for all the good times with friends I’ve been able to have, all the sushi eaten and talks on long car rides. I’m thankful for the help I’ve gotten with housing and car situations that would have been outrageously stressful if I’d been dealing with them on my own. I’m thankful for all the creative people I’ve been able to meet and interact with, all the character ideas and moments we’ve shared through written role-plays, tabletop role-plays, and art.

 I hope the next decade can be as socially and creatively fulfilling as the last!

And at the end here, because I never do this and then I always look back and go “what even were my goals” I’m going to make a handy list of goals-discussed:

Draw one thing a month

Write for five minutes every day from an unplanned prompt

Read 100 books and continue with my one hour a day reading

Get my DnD campaign off the ground and keep it going (I don’t think I explicitly mentioned this above, but it’s a goal this year)

[kdtheghostwriter]

SNK #111 Recap

Guys. I feel truly blessed to have found a mangaka that seemingly operates in a near-constant state of existential angst just like me.

The fridge horror of this series has always intrigued me greatly, tied directly to the overt body horror that comes along with humans turning into giant monsters and regenerating from the most grotesque injuries. The real horror of "titanization" of course is the loss of autonomy. Ymir wandered the Island of Paradis for six decades - describing it as a nightmare without end. We’ve only seen one method of reversing this curse, so it’s safe to view titan transformation as death until shown otherwise. And now, we have a man of royal descent who is able to activate this ‘death’ inhabiting an island full of people susceptible to the transformation.

Welp. There’s that Circle of Hell. Descend just one level further and we see Paradis’ military pointing fingers per usual. “Just a bunch of jackasses standing in a circle.” Which is how we got here in the first place, isn’t it? Commander Hange points that out as the Military Police bring in the Survey Corps for questioning, as does Pixis when he makes his entrance.

Eren and his pals have officially been branded the “Jaegerists” and Pixis continues his streak as the smartest bloke in the room by announcing his intent to surrender to the Restorationists. He isn’t giving them anything obviously; it’s simple math.

We are days, if not hours, away in storyline from Marley and her allies raining down a fiery vengeance on The Usurper and his Island of Devils. They have exactly one chance (an outside chance, mind you) of surviving this offensive and that chance will be shot if any more officials are killed which the Jaeger Faction has made very clear they are willing to do. Pixis also correctly pointed out that Zackley only came to power by way of a coup. He himself being overthrown isn’t exactly surprising.

Now, Dot Pixis is Commander-in-Chief of the military government and his first order of business is finding all the available pieces on the board: checking on the Queen, getting in touch with Levi, negotiating with Eren with regards to his brother’s location. This is all very sound logic and the correct course of action even as we gain knowledge Pixis doesn’t have regarding the tainted wine: Zeke’s new bargaining chip. For someone on his last legs, nobody knows how to not die like he does.

We skip away from political machinations, smack dab into a thick helping of interpersonal drama. Cheery, I know! And can I say quickly, as choppy as his pacing is and continues to be, Isayama’s paneling and the framing of his establishing shots is positively cinematic. My guess is he spent some time with a camera before picking up the pen and paper. It shows.

In what can only be described as A Series of Poorly Timed Events we see Gabi and Falco arrive with Sasha’s family to receive Nicolo’s special meal. The occasion is a tribute to Sasha, who died on the mission to retrieve Eren from Marley. By total coincidence, Hange and Squad Levi appear at the restaurant to question Nicolo about his friends in the Volunteers. Before they can, he ducks away and is approached by the two runaway prisoners.

Falco puts two-and-two together quickly about Nicolo’s relation to the others but is unable to stop Gabi from proudly announcing her role in the death of Sasha Braus. Being from Marley like she is, Gabi expects Nicolo to respond positively. Congratulate her, even.

He...does not.

Isayama is pretty good with melodrama. You need to be at least competent when you’re writing a serialized story that updates this regularly. The best and worst part of this is the characters he writes and how they pop off the page. They are super dynamic, sometimes to the point of unbelievability, and rarely dull.

Nicolo assaults the two ten-year-olds, turning them over and encouraging Mr. Braus to take revenge on the person that took his daughter’s life. He refuses: citing Sasha’s childhood as a hunter and adulthood as a soldier. Taking part in such a dangerous and deadly operation, there was always a chance she might not return. The world is a scary, confusing place. An adult’s main job is making sure the younger folks benefit from their experience and find the easy path through. The ‘I Suffered So They Should Too’ gimmick? That ain’t it, Chief.

This all leads to the most important point: Gabi. Is. A. Child.

She’s got blood on her hands, no doubt. You know who else does? Sasha. And Eren. And Armin. Even Mikasa, who intervened before Kaya could use the discarded knife to strike down Gabi in a fit of grief and rage. Mikasa is so very tired. Who would know better than she the feeling of having your family violently ripped away? She’s suffered through it numerous times. As tired as she is of losing her loved ones, she’s even more tired of seeing other people broken by the brutal circumstances they’ve been born into.

Every SC member present saw Gabi and said, ”Ah! Look! The one who killed our comrade!” Mikasa saw Gabi (whom she knew killed her friend) and said, “Ah. Look. This child is hurt.” You see, because Gabi is a child, friends. A child who has been systematically brainwashed and abused not only by her government but also by her family. And keep in mind, Sasha and Mikasa were roommates for an extended period. If anyone should be triggered by Gabi’s presence, it should be her. But she wasn’t. Why?

I won’t take this moment to say ‘I said so’ because the story still needs to play itself out. But damn it all if Mikasa isn’t clinging with everything she has to even the barest scrap of humanity.

Momtaku brought up an excellent point in regards to the characters and how they react to trauma. Isayama tends to have them go to one extreme or another. On the one hand, given recent events in America, this isn’t exactly far-fetched but for a piece of narrative fiction it can be extremely jarring.

I still like the scene of Kaya lunging for Gabi, not because of who the players were. I enjoyed seeing Gabi get a moment of true realization of the pain her people have been living in. The pain she’d caused.

The moment in every person’s life when they realize there is no protagonist. There’s just a great many people doing a lot of suffering. And there isn’t much to be done about it.

Stray Thoughts

- Still no Tiny Queen, although she’s mentioned. What are the odds of them finding her at the residence they left her? Slim, I’d say.

- Eren has truly replaced Bert as the monolith of the series. He never gets a panel and is only mentioned by name once, but his shadow looms unmistakably across this entire chapter.

- Nicolo saved Jean from drinking the tainted wine by lobbing a slur at him. Easily the most tsundere thing I’ve seen in the past month. And I saw Venom!

- Speaking of: most of the military’s top brass partook of that wine. (Nicolo how you doin? I said so etc) Once he can confirm this knowledge, I predict Zeke’s negotiations will turn into demands very quickly.

- No offense intended to my friends who partake in adult beverages, I do not. And even though such a scenario is actually impossible, boy do I feel better knowing that for me it’s even more impossible. But if you happen to find yourself in SNK world and are given the choice...

[friendlyneighborhoodborg]

Marc Appreciation Week 2019| Day 2: Hero/Villain| ”Coping Mechanism”

Okay, so I know the prompt is basically supposed to mean “this character but with a miraculous.”  The backslash (/) in the prompt is meant to be taken as “or.”

But...

That’s one ambiguous backslash.

Let me know what I’m doing right/wrong.  Disclaimers were in the Day 1 submission.

~1700 words, for those who care.

Chapters:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

           Monday was a lot smoother than Sunday.  On Monday, Marc had stuff to do, including, but not limited to, school, meetings, and feeling depressed.

           Few strangers would be surprised to hear that he was depressed today.  After all, it had been two days since his little episode, and akuma victims generally had some sort of depressed attitude for a few days after.  Anyone who knew him would be even less surprised; Marc was anything but the ray of sunshine some of his schoolmates were.

           Getting akumatized was exactly the trauma he didn’t need.

           It was a little bit of the dissociation he had heard other people feel.  Having no memories of the event, watching the news and seeing himself as that stranger was jarring for a multitude of reasons.  He saw him as someone with his thoughts and personality, basically everything that made him himself, only twisted into someone with a killing rage and the means to destroy.  There was a lot of himself in Reverser, and that’s one of the things he tried to ignore from his viewing experience.

           The other thing he ignored was how familiar that experience was, seeing someone with his face and emotions do things only a complete stranger would.  He did often feel like he was projecting himself to the people around him,  with an overwhelming need to stifle his passions to stay normal.  He only felt allowed to act like himself when he was alone with his journal.  Being someone else wasn’t too far off from his normal, everyday life, which is why Reverser’s power-set in particular kinda sucked.

           Then the last thing he tried to brush off was the increasing number of stares he got from people who had never been corrupted. He just hated people looking at him in general.  Including himself, sometimes, and the extra attention was not welcome at all.

           But he was begrudgingly used to getting judged. Judging himself had even become a habit. Every morning, he’d look at himself in the mirror.  He’d feel some sort of emotion, something he hadn’t quite found the right words for yet. It would fall somewhere between “Ugh, not him again” and “Well, it could be worse.”  He had found that hiding his face was a good way of combating the more extreme end of the scale of loathing, so he had starting wearing makeup.  And he’d do his own face in the mirror until he felt more like “Well, it could be worse.”

           Point is, he didn’t like people noticing him, but he could usually brush it off.

           He didn’t usually take this approach to his writing.  He generally thought the writing was pretty good, especially if no one but him was going to see it.  No matter what, he rarely ever wrote down his own thoughts, or if he did, they were unintended, or buried and disguised as something else.

           His thoughts wandered to the journal in his backpack. The tale of a forbidden love between a hero and a former villain, the kind of workplace romance that scores a high budget and has audiences flocking to the cinema.  A de-evilization gone wonderfully wrong, making the butterfly’s effects on its victim permanent, a blossoming emotions between him the heroine who saved him.

           Starring the dubious alter-ego of one Nathaniel Kurtzberg, and written as the heroine from a first-person perspective.

           God, he wondered what Freud would say if he was living today.

           Thankfully, only one student seemed to have cottoned on that his artistic admiration went a little deeper than conventional, but even then he wasn’t sure if Marinette actually knew the full-blown extent of his crush.

           ‘Nope,’ he reminded himself.  ‘Not thinking about that today.  He’s your project partner, and that’s it, and he very obviously has a thing for strong, female superheroes.’

           ‘Well, that’s why you wrote from Ladybug’s POV, isn’t it?’ he argued.  ‘Why don’t you admit what the problem is?’

           ‘That’s not the problem.’  He straightened his back.  ‘I know that’s not what the problem is.  And I don’t have time for this right now.’

           Today, despite his constant state of internal darkness, he was early to school.  And so was a certain redhead artist whose attention he duly attempted to avoid.

           Poorly.

           As per his double-standards.

           Marc shrank as Nathan’s eyes met his and he was waved over against his will.

           He didn’t appreciate being called out like this, especially not in public. But since it was him... he inched up to him.

           “Morning,” Nath said, smiling.

           ‘Gosh dangit.’

           Nevertheless, Marc was determined to keep a level head. It may have been true at one point that the wordsmith had maybe possibly harbored some potentially… problematic emotions for this boy, it was abundantly clear nothing good would come of them.  It was a morose conclusion, as it usually was, but one that had to be reached for both of their goods.  So, he was determined to end his crush on this artist by any means necessary.

           Even if his eyes were clear blue gemstones, teeming with some unseen energy that made him want to keep looking—

           ‘No!’ he chastised.  ‘Bad Marc!’

           “You okay?” Nathaniel asked, and Marc realize he hadn’t answered him.

           “Yeah,” he admitted.  “I’m not a morning person,” Marc admitted.  Internally, he mused, ‘Or an evening person.  Or an afternoon person.  Really, I’m barely a person.’

           Unable to see into Marc’s soul, Nathaniel continued.  “Well, I hope it gets better.”

           ‘It rarely does.’  “You seem to be in a good mood, at least.”

           “Yeah.”  He scratched his head absently.  “Probably not what you expected, huh?  How am I supposed to be emo when I like sunshine?”

           “You seem to be managing yourself just fine.”

           “Thanks, I guess.”  He shrugged off his bag.  “So, we didn’t really do any work yesterday.  Got any ideas for a story?”

           “Oh.”  Marc relaxed, knowing this must be all Nathan wanted from him.  “I hadn’t really given it much thought.  Probably the usual heroes’ dynamic at play.  Ladybug, Chat Noir, and Mighty-Illustrator.”

           Nath looked confused for a second.  “But what about…”

           “What?”

           “Well,” he opened his satchel and pulled out his sketchbook, then he started flipping through it.  “Look, see here.”  He pointed at one page in particular.

           He saw what Nathaniel had drawn.

           He was suddenly aware of everyone looking at him.

           When he came to his senses, he found he was hiding in a bathroom stall.  Someone was banging on the stall door, trying to get his attention.

           “Marc!”  Nathan’s voice carried a deep concern.  “I’m sorry, I should have—I mean, of course, I’m an idiot!  I just…” He groaned loudly at himself, and his voice softened.  “I’m sorry. I should have realized, it’s too new for you.  It only happened a couple days ago…… Look, you can feel free to hate me, I didn’t think about what you’d…”  He just trailed off and left them both in silence.

           Marc heard him start to leave.

           “How do you do it?” he asked, suddenly.

           “Wh-what?”

           “You turned your akuma into the hero?  Why did you do that?” he demanded.  “How could you do that?”

           Nathaniel didn’t answer verbally.  Of course he didn’t, why would he?  He didn’t like expressing himself verbally.

           There was a rustling of papers and something was slid under the door.

           Marc picked it up.  “Are you crazy?  You put your sketchbook on the bathroom floor?”

           “Just look, Marc.”

           He did.  “This is… Mighty-Illustrator and Marinette.”

            There was a pause, and then, “That’s Super-Nathan.”

           “Huh?”

           Nathaniel explained.  “Super-Nathan.  I told you, I’m not good with words or names. He was… well, it was me as a superhero. That’s how he was created, and that’s what I drew him to be.  I wanted to be strong and empowered and witty and do all the things superheroes get to do. I don’t know if you noticed this about me, but I don’t… I’m not strong and I’m not witty.”

           “You’re pretty witty.  I mean, you made this.”  He realized something was off with the picture, however.  “Um, I thought he was supposed to like Ladybug, though.”

           “That was only after I was akumatized.”

           “Oh… Wait, so then… oh.”

           “Yep.  Super-Nathan came first.  Then Hawk Moth turned Super-Nathan into a villain.  Super-Nathan became Evillustrator.  Then I turned him back into Mighty-Illustrator.”  He took a deep breath, and continued forward, his words blazing with a strength Marc hadn’t heard him use before.  “Super-Nathan is mine.  Not his.  I figured this is the one way I can get back at him.  Taking him back, using him to fight Hawk Moth.  Fictionally, anyway.”

           Marc was somewhat grateful for the door in between them.  Nathaniel couldn’t see his completely floored reaction.

           Marc looked down at the sketchbook in his hands. He flipped to the most recently-used page, careful not to look at any of the others.

           The face of evil stared back up at him, striking a heroic pose.

           “We don’t have to use him,” assured the cartoonist. “If you don’t want to.”

           Marc stared back down at himself.  He was only startled out of it when Nathaniel’s steps started walking away.

           “No,” Marc said, stopping him.  “We can use Reverser.”  He hesitated.  “Only… can we change his name?  Like you did?”

           “Well,” his collaborator mused.  “You’re the writer.  And it is you, after all.  You think of something.”

           Making sure his face was back to its normal pale, Marc opened the door.  And there was Nathaniel.  Marc passed him back his sketchbook.  It was taken with gratitude.  “We don’t have to work today if you’re not up to it still.”

           Marc considered this before slowly nodding.

           “Okay.”  He turned to leave.  “Whenever you’re ready, then, you’ve got my number.”  He stopped at the door, still with his back turned.  “Hey, Marc?”

           A noise of acknowledgement was made.

           “I don’t usually do art for anyone but myself. But…” he searched for his words, which seemed to have left him.   “It-it’s nice to work with someone.”  He turned back and regarded Marc, smiling.  “Especially you.”  Then, looking unsure of himself, he awkwardly made his exit.

           Marc was now all by himself in the washroom, and he was suddenly very aware of the heat in his cheeks.

           He sighed.  Not out of any particular emotion, except maybe frustration.

          ‘Gosh dangit.’

I’m taking the mostly positive comments as a sign that I’m on the right track, so I’m just gonna keep going with this.  If the other chapters aren’t as good... well, there’s worse things than this on this site.  And I only finished this today, barely on the deadline, so I’ll try not to stress much over it.

[ladywinchester1967]

Hot For Teacher: Part 3

Pairing: Professor Dean Winchester x Kelly Frazier

Characters: Dean Winchester, Kelly Fraizer, Kevin Tran, Grandmom (Kelly’s grandmother) and John Winchester.

Warnings: Age gap (Kelly is 26, Dean is 35), Jealous!Dean, John Winchester being a douche, language, angst, arguing, SMUT (I need Jesus after all this smut), Daddy/ Baby Girl Kink, praise!kink, oral (female receiving), fingering, unprotected sex (use protection folks), spanking, feels/ fluff. 

A/N: Here we are, part 3!! I know I’m posting this kind of out of the blue; but I wanted to give you guys a little something while I’m working on other projects for ya’ll. This part is a LONG one, so grab a snack and your favorite beverage! Per usual, unbeta’d, all mistakes belong to me, but the pictures do not. I found them on Pinterest and tumblr.

Seeing this for the first time? Think you missed something?

Catch up!!

Part 1

Part 2

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

I knocked on the solid oak door with a brass number 2145 shining back at me as I adjusted my sweater. The door swung open and my grandmother beamed back at me.

“Oh hello darling!” She greeted me with a hug.

“Hi GrandMom,” I said and hugged her back “been a good week?”

“Oh honey, you know it’s same old, same old around here.” She said.

Only a head taller than I was, my grandmother was dressed in a sky blue outfit with her pearls and a seasonal brooch on the collar of her shirt. Today it was one of my favorites; three flowers with various shades of pink and purple on them and matching jewels encrusting the flowers. GrandMom grabbed her purse and keys from just inside the door and asked

“Ready?”

“As always.” I said and smiled at her as she locked up.

My Grandmother and I had always been close; after my parents died when I was little, she and my grandfather took me and my brothers in and raised us. When my grandfather, who I called GrandDad, passed away, my brothers had long since moved out; two of them were married, so it was just GrandMom and I. After I started college, she moved into an apartment that was within an assisted living facility. GrandMom was still independent beyond belief, but if her mental or physical condition ever deteriorated, she would be able to move into a different area of the facility.

Each Sunday we had our routine. I’d take her to church, we’d get some brunch and the I’d take her to run errands if she needed to. If she didn’t have any errands to run, we would watch her soap operas, work on puzzles together or socialize with the friends she had made since living in the home.

The facility provided a shuttle bus to church for those who wanted to go off site to a church near by. GrandMom was one of those and insisted on going to HER church.

“I know everyone there,” she had told me “I like the priests, the bishops and the people there.”

I wasn’t a religious person myself, but this was my time to spend with her and if going to a certain church made her happy, I was all about it.

When we arrived at church, I stood up first and offered GrandMom my arm.

“Kelly, you seem different.” GrandMom said as she used my arm to steady herself.

“I do?” I asked as I she stood. GrandMom’s blue eyes scrutinized me only in a way a grandmother could and it not feel like I was being scolded.

“Happier it seems.” She said as she shifted her purse to her other arm and looped her free arm through mine. “You didn’t meet a boy did you?”

I laughed as we walked toward the steps off the shuttle. I went ahead of her and held my hand out for her, which she took.

“I wouldn’t say he’s a boy,” I told GrandMom as we walked toward the church doors “he’s a man.”

GrandMom looked intrigued; I didn’t have a lot of boyfriends when I was a teenager so she knew this was a big deal.

“What’s his name?” She asked me as we climbed the stairs.

“Dean,” I told her, just me saying his name made me blush “his name is Dean.”

“Is he a nice man?” She asked and I nodded as we reached the doors.

“Yes ma’am,” I answered “very nice.”

After church, GrandMom and I took the shuttle back to the facility and made our way to the supper hall for brunch. This weekend’s buffet included French toast which I stuffed into my face in a very unladylike manner.

“This Dean,” GrandMom said and I sighed

“GrandMom!” I exclaimed as I sipped on my orange juice.

“Don’t speak with your mouth full Kelly.” GrandMom chastised me.

I swallowed before answering

“GrandMom, it’s so new that I don’t know where it’s going or what we even are.” I informed her.

GrandMom raised an eyebrow at me

“I was going to ask what he looked like, but feel free to presume.” She said and I laughed.

I described Dean, feeling a blush rise on my cheeks and GrandMom smiled knowingly.

“Ooohhhhh, he sounds like a handsome one,” she said “do you have any pictures?”

I nodded; I pulled up my Instagram, found Dean’s profile and scrolled until I found a picture I liked. He was sitting in his car looking off into the sunset. I showed it to her and said

“He only grows a beard in the summer, but that’s him.” I flicked to the next picture and in it, he was smiling at the camera, wearing a hat and holding up a pint of beer.

“He IS handsome,” GrandMom said and I smiled “how old is he?”

I put my phone away and said

“I’m not sure, if I had to guess I’d say early thirties.”

We continued the rest of our brunch, catching up and her grilling me about school.

The next day, I walked into Dean’s class and took my usual spot near the middle of the room. He hadn’t come in yet so I made myself comfortable in my seat as other students started to filter in. At precisely ten; Dean walked in, wearing a light blue shirt, dark grey pants, brown dress shoes and a cobalt blue tie. I bit my lip; the colors brought out the blonde in his hair and the green in his eyes.

“Morning people,” he greeted us as he set his things down “open your books to page two twenty nine, section three A and we’ll get started.”

During the lecture that day, I realized I had bitten off more than I could chew. On the one hand, Dean’s class was difficult and on the other, all I could think about was jumping his bones in front of twenty other people. I struggled to keep up and by the end of class, I realized I’d missed over a quarter of the notes I needed.

“Fuck.” I swore under my breath and looked around. One of the other students I’d frequently partnered with caught my eye as Dean dismissed us. “Kevin!” I yelled.

Both Kevin Tran and Dean looked up as Kevin caught my gaze. He smiled and made his way over to me.

“Hey, how’s it going?” Kevin asked

“Good,” I said “I missed a bunch of notes today, would you mind emailing yours to me?”

“Not at all,” he said “I’ll get it to you now. How was your weekend?”

Kevin and I caught up for a few minutes as he emailed his notes to me. I could feel Dean staring at me, but I pushed that thought to the back of my head.

“Done and done,” Kevin said “you wanna grab coffee later?”

“Let me see what the rest of my afternoon is like,” I told him “I’ll text you. Thanks Kevin, you saved my life. Again.”

He laughed

“Any time.” He said and we hugged.

Kevin left class just as the rest of the students did, leaving me and Dean alone. Neither of us said anything as I packed up my stuff and slung my book bag over my shoulder. I walked up to his desk, he didn’t look pleased.

“Did you want me to finish grading those papers today?” I asked hesitantly.

He nodded

“Yeah, you’re almost finished right?” He asked

“Yes,” I said “just a few more in that second stack. How does now work?”

He nodded again.

“I have a free period,” he said as he picked up his things “plus I have some stuff to get organized.”

“Okay; cool.” I said

We walked to his office together and once the door was closed, I felt him behind me, his large frame towering over mine.

“You and Kevin?” He asked, snapping his hips into my butt, his hands over mine.

“It’s nothing,” I insisted as his teeth scraped over the cartilage on my ear, a chill running down my spine “he was just giving me his notes.”

“Were you distracted during the lesson today?” He asked, his hands squeezing mine.

“Yes.” I said desperately

“Yes what?” He asked

I panted before answering him, his growing erection pressing into my ass. I tilted my head back and said

“Yes Daddy.”

I felt his lips curl into a smile.

“Gotta admit,” he said as he bit down on my ear, making me whine “I didn’t like seeing some boy having his hands all over my baby girl.”

“Only so I can pass your class.” I told him as he flattened me against the door.

“You speak when spoken to young lady.” He said fiercely. He spun me around, pinning my wrists by my head, one of his legs between mine. His green eyes bored into mine, had I not known him better, I would’ve been intimidated under a gaze like that. “I didn’t like that,” He said “at all.”

“I’m sorry,” I said with a pout “I wasn’t trying to make you mad. I just want to pass. I want to please you.”

The corners of his mouth twitched upward.

“Is that right?” He asked

I nodded

“My Daddy likes it when I do well in his class,” I said as I leaned forward and kissed his neck “it makes him happy.”

“Yes,” He said in a strangled voice as I innocently planted kisses on his neck “Yes it does.”

“I like making my Daddy happy.” I breathed as I left kitten licks over the areas I had kissed.

He let out a growl and I knew I had him in the palm of my hand.

“You want to make Daddy happy?” He asked. I pulled back and nodded eagerly, we kissed with burning passion. He pulled back, cupped my face in one of his hands, his thumb running over my bottom lip. “Tell me who you come for.” He said

“You,” I answered “and me.”

He grinned and kissed me again

“You naughty, naughty girl.” He said punctuating each word with a kiss. When it ended, he looked at me “What am I gonna do with you?”

He tugged me into his arms and walked me back to the chair at his desk. He sat down and pulled me into his lap as the phone on his desk went off.

“Be good while I answer this.” He told me, booping me on the nose as he picked up the phone. “This is Dean.” He said into the handset as I nuzzled into his shoulder, his fingers running up and down my arm. I could hear a deep, male voice on the other end but couldn’t make out exactly what was being said. I felt him tense up under me as he listened. “No,” Dean said firmly and looked down at me, giving me a fond smile “I’m in the middle of something.” The voice on the other end sounded meaner some how. “I said no.” Dean snapped and hung up.

“You okay?” I asked and he nodded, giving me a fake smile.

“I’m fine,” he said and gathered me up into his arms “I just want my baby girl close.”

“I’m about as close as I can get.” I joked, my arms were wrapped around his neck and and legs were across the arm of his chair. He smirked and kissed me deeply, his fingers digging into my skin. His tongue traced over my mouth and I opened up, letting him in. His strong muscle worked over mine, I could feel my mind fogging up from lack of oxygen. When we separated, a knock came at his office door.

“Office hours are over!” Dean shouted

“Dean Winchester!” I heard a male voice thunder, it sounded similar to the one on the phone.

“Shit,” Dean said “get up.” I got up and he walked over to the door, throwing it open. “What?!” He asked with a ferocity that I’d never heard out of him before.

“So NOW you can talk to me?” The male voice roared back.

“I told you I was busy.” Dean said through his teeth.

The door swung open further and I saw a man a little taller than Dean standing there. He had salt and pepper hair and the same build as Dean. With broad shoulders and narrow hips, the only difference between them was their eye and hair color. Where Dean’s eyes were a striking green, this man had intense hazel eyes. I shrunk under the man’s gaze, my eyes down cast.

“I can see that.” The man said.

Something in the back of my head tickled with familiarity when I saw the man, but I couldn’t place him.

“Kelly,” Dean said calmly and I looked up at him “we’ll talk later okay?”

I nodded and grabbed my bags

“Excuse me.” I said

“Wait,” the man said and then looked at Dean, who looked uneasy as the man’s eyes flicked from me to Dean and back again. Dean nodded and the man pushed past Dean. Now fully in my line of sight, I realized where I knew him from. There was a picture of this man, Dean and another guy on Dean’s bookshelf.

“You’re not going to introduce me to your friend?” The man asked, looking me up and down like he wanted to devour me.

“Kelly,” Dean said, looking annoyed “this is John, my Dad. Dad, this is Kelly, one of my undergraduate students.”

John licked his lips, oddly enough, he reminded me of Dean when he did this.

“Always did like them on the young side, right son?” He asked “How many girls have I caught you in here with?”

Dean looked furious as my heart hammered in my ears, I felt like I was going to puke.

“That’s okay sweetheart,” John said “so my son likes to sleep around? Big whoop. What do you say Dean, when you’re done with this one, give me her number?”

Now it was my turn to be furious. Finding my voice, I squared my shoulders, planted my feet and stared John directly in the eye.

“I’m NOT your sweetheart.” I snapped at him.

Both he and Dean looked taken aback.

“I’m sorry,” John said and stepped closer to me “What did you just say?”

“I didn’t stutter.” I said firmly as I shoved past both of them without looking back.

I stormed out of the building; hot, fat tears rolled down my face as I walked home and I shoved my sunglasses on my face to hide my eyes. When I arrived home, I let the tears flow, I threw my bags on the floor as my phone chimed in my bag. I ignored it as I crumbled to the floor, sobbing into my own arms. I’d never felt so cheap and disgusting in all my life. Is that all he saw me as? Just an easy hole to get off into? And like an idiot, I had fallen for it. He’d played me like a fiddle and I’d let him. The worst part was that I was starting to feel something for him, something deeper than I’d ever felt. I laid down and curled up into a ball as I continued to sob.

After a while, I peeled myself off the floor, feeling my crusted up mascara all over my cheeks. I went to the bathroom and saw I was right; I had black lines cutting through my foundation and powder.

“To hell with it.” I decided and washed off my makeup. When my face was clean, I changed into my pajamas and ambled to the kitchen. I opened a bottle of wine, pouring it into a glass and began to drink.

“To hell with that too.” I said and chugged the rest of the glass before setting it aside and drinking straight from the bottle. I could hear my phone buzzing and chiming every few seconds and I ran over to my bag. I fished my phone out and realized it was Dean blowing up my phone. I shut it off; I was too angry to deal with him, plus I knew he had class coming up so I’d have a while before I had to or could talk to him. I took another long pull from the bottle of wine and laid on the couch flipping through the channels on TV. I turned it to HGTV and zoned out while one episode of House Hunters rolled into another.

After a few minutes a loud knock came at my front door. I groaned and made my way to the door, opening it. Standing there was a frightened looking Dean.

“There you are!” He shouted and threw his arms around me, backing me into my apartment. I shoved him away, slammed the door and asked

“Don’t you have class?!”

“I canceled it, I’ve been calling you!” He yelled. In that second, he reminded me of my Dad and my brothers, who yelled at me when they were worried about me. I pushed that thought aside, my anger returning to the surface.

“What the HELL was that about with your Dad?!”

“Look, I know you’re upset-“ he started and I laughed humorlessly

“UPSET?!” I shouted at him “Upset doesn’t even fucking begin to cover it Dean!” He stood there quietly as I ranted on “Is that all I am?” I asked “just someone for you to like young? Someone for you to stick your cock in and get off into whenever you want?!

“No!” He shouted back “You stop right there!”

“Oh, THAT’S where it stops?!” I yelled “What were you gonna do? Pass me off to your Dad when you got bored? Well guess what? That’s not how this shit works. That’s not how I work! I’m not some whore you can pass around-“

He interrupted me by scooping me up and pushing me against the wall, his bulky arms and legs twisting with mine. I fought him hard trying to wriggle away from him.

“Would you fucking LISTEN to me?!” He shouted.

“Let go!” I shouted as I twisted in his limbs “You fucking let go of me right now!”

“Not until you listen to me.” He insisted. Any words I had coming up ceased in my throat, I could feel his green eyes practically drilling into me. “I’m not going to pass you around,” he said, I could feel an angry fire burning from deep inside him came out through his voice “I’m too selfish to share first of all.” He squeezed my wrists “second, my Dad isn’t any concern of yours. You made it clear he wasn’t going to talk to you like that.”

I squirmed, trying to get away from him. I didn’t want to look at him, I didn’t want to see the look on his face, nor did I want to hear what he had to say. “Thirdly,” He said, pressing his body into mine, his hand letting go of my wrist to push my face up to meet his eyes. I kept my eyes adverted, my mouth set in a defiant line. “Kelly.” He said, but I refused to acknowledge him “Kelly, look at me.” His voice was steady now, but I didn’t want to give in. Every cell in my body screamed at me to tell him to fuck off. To slap him, to do SOMETHING other than be pinned under him, completely at his mercy.

But my heart, my heart made my eyes meet his.

The expression on his face nearly brought me to my knees. It was a mix of hope and heartbreak all at the same time; in front of me was a severely hurt man that wanted, no NEEDED, me to listen to him.

I held his gaze steadily and he went on.

“You’re not some hole for me to get off into,” he said softly “you’re more than just sex to me.”

“What am I then?” I asked

He sighed, his fingers stroking my cheek.

“I don’t know,” he said “for the first time, I’m going into something without a plan. I do know that I like you, I want to be around you as much as possible and I can only hope you feel even a quarter of what I feel.”

I breathed, my heart pounding at a painful rate. I delayed answering him, rather, I let my hand slide up the back of his hand, his arm and then his shoulder. When I reached his face, he leaned into my touch, silently begging me for more. I let my fingers trace over the planes of his face; his cheek bones, the bridge of his nose and jaw line.

“Kelly,” he breathed “please say something.”

I couldn’t, I was at a loss for words. I pulled my wrist free of his grasp and let my  other hand wander around his waist. I stood on the balls of my feet and pressed light kisses into his neck. His breath hitched in his throat as I kept this up, kissing his throat and chin before reaching his mouth. When our lips met, it was like a rolling flame hit both of us. Our arms automatically locked around one another and our tongues fought for dominance.

Dean pulled me away from the wall and backed me up into my bedroom. I tugged off his tie and threw it aside, practically ripping open his shirt. He shed both layers quickly as I yanked my T-shirt off and pitched it aside, my arms automatically surrounding him. He backed me up into the bed and I sat down as we both took off our pants and shirts. Dean flattened me against the mattress and I kissed him feverishly. I wondered if this was how an addict felt before they got their next hit. He slipped my panties down and off. Without much fanfare, he slid out of his underwear and hauled me up into his lap. While I couldn’t tell him exactly what I felt, I could show him. That was a language I knew we both spoke. He, however, had other plans. He laid me down against the pillows. His mouth and hands seemed to cover every inch of me all at once; he sucked my left nipple into his mouth as I ran my fingers through his hair and moaned. He repeated this motion on my right nipple, his tongue flicking over it and making it perk up as his fingers grasped my hips. He kissed me hot and heavy, then he plowed straight into me, making both of us cry out.

“I want you,” he moaned, his hand sliding from my hip to my clit and began to rub it in slow, languid circles as I sighed loudly “I want you all for myself.”

“Oh fuck!” I cried out, my nails sinking into the back of his neck and the small of his back at the same time.

“Say it, please.” He begged, his eyes nearly piercing through me.

“I’m-FUCK! Oh my god!” I cried out, it felt like he was fucking the sense out of me “I’m yours, fuck! I’m all yours!”

He kissed me hard again as he rubbed my clit in faster, shorter circles while he continued to pound into me.

“Dean, god, DEAN!” I cried out.

I hooked my leg around his waist and flipped him on to his back, pinning his arms above his head as I moved on top of him. He looked shocked, but said nothing when he saw the expression on my face. I was still fucking angry at him and had to show him I wasn’t messing around. “If you ever, EVER make me feel like a cheap whore again,” I yelled at him “you’re gonna walk out that door and never come back. Do you understand me?!”

He nodded furiously

“Yes!” He yelled “yes!”

“Yes what?!” I asked fiercely, slamming my hips into him.

“Yes ma’am!” He yelled back.

I released him and he popped up, his lips smashing into mine as we moved together, grunting, groaning, biting and clawing each other’s skin like wild animals in heat. It felt like every muscle in my body was burning, but I didn’t care, nothing mattered in that moment besides him.

“Oh fuck,” he cried out, gripping me tightly as his movements became erratic, his hand slipped between our bodies and he rubbed my clit harshly. “fuck, KELLY!” He yelled

I screamed his name as he came deep inside me, my nails scratching down his back, leaving angry, red welts behind as I came hard. I shook, the orgasm rocking me to my core. I slumped my head on to his shoulder, both of us breathing hard. He pulled out of me and we both laid on our backs, looking in silence at the ceiling for a long time.

Eventually, we curled under the sheet together, still not talking. I laid on my back while he laid on his side, his fingertips running over my belly. I closed my eyes and I felt him kiss my temple.

“So beautiful,” he murmured in my ear “such a beautiful girl.”

I smiled without opening my eyes.

“Dean?” I asked quietly

“Hmmm?” He asked, kissing my temple again.

“How many girls ARE you fucking?” I asked

“Just one, you.” He said and I felt him place a finger on my jaw. I opened my eyes as he used his finger to turn my head to his. “It isn’t exactly a secret, I’ve had my share of girls.”

“You get around? Shocker.” I said in a sarcastic tone and he smirked.

“I like what I like,” he said “and getting laid is one of those things. But I’m no predator. What has happened between me and another party has always been consensual. I’ve never pressured a student to do something she didn’t want to and vice versa.” I listened and he went on “If I’m in a relationship, I don’t screw around. If I’m one thing, I’m a man of my word; loyal to a fault as my brother would say.”

I smiled and spoke

“Then why would your Dad say stuff like that?” I asked

“Part of me thinks that he thinks he’s being funny and the other part thinks he genuinely wants to fuck you.” Dean said with an eye roll “my Dad and I don’t have the best relationship because of how he treated my Mom.”

“And how was that?” I asked

“He messed around on her, a lot, and it hurt her. One of the many reasons I DON’T mess around.” He said “Ever since my parents got divorced, my Dad’s been in and out of my life. Now that I’m stable on my own, he keeps trying to reach out and have something to do with me but I’ve made it clear I don’t want anything to do with him.”

“Why does he want something to do with you so badly?” I asked

Dean sighed

“Because he’s getting remarried and he wants me and my brother there.” He said “The woman he’s marrying is also the woman he knocked up while he was still married to my Mom.”

My eyes went wide

“So, you have a half sibling?” I asked and he nodded

“Yep, a brother named Adam.” He said “He did everything with Adam; took him to baseball games on his birthday, went to school programs, attended graduations, he’s even in Adam’s prom pictures.”

“And he didn’t do that with you and your brother?” I asked and Dean shook his head, no.

“Not at all.” He said “Also one of the many reasons I’m angry with him.”

I nodded and said

“That shouldn’t be a problem now, he’s not getting anywhere near me.”

“Nope,” Dean said “I think you made that clear. Gotta say, I’m not sure if I was shocked or turned on when I saw you stand up to him.”

“It’s not the first time a guy thinks he can call me pet names and I’ll drop my pants for him, won’t be the last. I have four older brothers remember?” I asked

“I’m surprised guys were allowed anywhere near you honestly.” He said and I laughed.

“My brothers had friends,” I said “they didn’t pay much attention to me until after puberty, in which case, all four of the boys made it clear that their friends weren’t supposed to touch me. That didn’t stop some of them though.”

Dean looked surprised

“Did they live to tell that tale?” He asked and I laughed.

“I learned to hold my own,” I said “they taught me to defend myself and to let me handle my own problems. However, if them getting the shit kicked out of them by a tiny girl didn’t make the message clear, they’d step in. I think one guy still has trouble holding his bladder when he laughs.”

This made him crack up as he gathered me into his arms, kissing my forehead.

“Remind me not to get on your bad side.” He said

“Noted.” I told him and looked up at him. When our eyes met, we kissed.

The heat started to rebuild between us as he tenderly stroked my hair and back. I moaned against his mouth, throwing my leg across his hips.

“Can’t be sated can you?” He teased.

“When my smoking hot Daddy is laying butt naked in my bed? No, I can’t.” I said and he laughed.

“It doesn’t help when my sexy girl is pressing her hot little body all over me.” He said with a grin.

“I’ll try to be uglier.” I told him as my tongue gently grazed his lips.

“You can’t,” he told me “you’re too beautiful inside and out.”

I grinned as his mouth parted, allowing my tongue inside. He tasted faintly of mint and coffee, I noted as our tongues twisted together. He hummed in appreciation, the vibration from his chest registering to mine, which only made me want him more. When my tongue returned to my mouth, I pulled back a little and let my fingers wander through his hair. Even though it was mussed from our earlier romp, it felt soft and thick in my hands. I gently gripped the longer locks on the top of his head and kissed him again, his hands sliding down my back and to my rear end. He gripped two handfuls of my ass as we kissed and gave it a firm smack, making me yelp in surprise.

“Oh, my baby likes to be spanked doesn’t she?” He asked, his eyebrows shooting up.

“What makes you say that?” I asked, even though I knew full well I did.

“You’re practically gushing on my thigh baby girl.” He pointed out and gave me another firm slap on the ass and I whined, tugging on his hair and feeling him harden against my leg.

“GOD!” I cried out

“Answer me,” he said “does my baby girl like to be spanked?”

“Yes Daddy!” I exclaimed as I twisted against him.

“You want me to spank you sweetheart?” He growled in my ear.

“Oh god, yes. Please spank me.” I begged him

“You’ll have to ask nicer than that.” He said

I bit my lip and then asked

“Daddy, will you please spank me?” in the most innocent tone I could manage. “I’ve been a very bad little girl.”

His mouth twitched up at the corner and he said

“Let me sit up.”

I crawled off of him as he did this and grabbed my wrist. He hauled me over his lap

“Say “red” if it hurts too much baby.” he told me

“Yes sir.” I answered

“Good,” He said “three spankings okay?”

“Yes Daddy.” I said, trying not to squirm in anticipation, I could feel my nipples hardening just from his words.

“Count for me baby.” He said

“I will.” I told him, his erection poking me in the stomach. Without warning or preamble, he laid one firm smack on my ass and I cried out.

“AH! ONE!”

He kneaded my flesh in his hand before delivering another blow, the sound of his firm hand cracking over my butt sounded through the room.

“FUCK! TWO!” I cried, the delicious, painful sensation rocking my body.

“Such language.” He said “one more, you okay baby?”

“Yes Daddy!” I answered

He delivered the final slap and I cried out a strained

“THREE! Oh god, three!”

“Oh baby girl,” he growled as I sat up “you take your spankings so well.”

“Thank-thank you Daddy.” I said breathlessly, I could feel my core dripping.

He could tell I was wrecked and he gave me a devilish grin.

“You want Daddy to take care of you baby?” He asked

“Please?” I begged him “Please take care of me?”

“You took your spankings so well, you get to choose.” He told me as he sat up on his knees “What would you like baby?”

“Can you-?” I could barely concentrated, my nerves were buzzing so hard

“Words baby,” he said and tilted my chin up so that I was looking at him “tell me.”

“Will you go down on me?” I asked, even though it sounded more like I was begging him “and fuck me?”

He grinned, his thumb stroking over my chin.

“I can’t deny my baby when she took her spankings like a good girl.” He told me as we kissed, his warm lips over mine.

“You’re such a good girl for me you know that?” He said quietly as he tenderly touched my face.

“I try.” I told him, leaning into his touch.

“Since you’re so good for me, I want you to just relax and let Daddy take care of you.”

I nodded as he planted a gentle kiss on me as I nodded. He gave me a half grin and kissed me again, his tongue tracing over my lips. I opened my mouth and let him in and he seemed to lap over every inch of my mouth. He pulled back as I scraped my nails down his arms. He moaned as he kissed down my jaw and up to my ear. He took my earlobe in his teeth and bit down just hard enough to make me gasp and my back arch.

“Mh, I love those pretty sounds you make,” he murmured as he gently licked where he just bitten me “just for me.”

I nodded and he kissed down my body; licking, biting and sucking on my skin. He seemed to know which places to do each thing that made me cry out and my toes curl. He made his way to the apex of my thighs, hooking his arms under my thighs. He kissed my inner thighs and then started to suck. I propped up on my elbows, looked down and was mesmerized by what I saw. He sucked hard on my skin, his fingers digging into my thigh. I gasped and he looked up at me, a smirk forming on his lips.

“Something just for me.” He said

I bit my lip

“Do one for me too.” I told him

He pulled away, that devilish grin I’d come to love playing on his lips.

“I give my baby what she wants.” He said and went to my other thigh, sucking an identical mark in the same place. “One for you, and one for me.” He said

“Perfect.” I told him and laid back.

He spread my legs open and said

“I think you liked that more than I anticipated, you’re soaking wet baby.”

“You have that effect on me.” I told him as he licked a thick stripe up my slit making me cry out and grip the sheets.

“Do I?” He asked

“Yes.” I whined as he sucked my clit into his mouth. I arched my back, the sensation rolling over me like a wave. He licked through my folds, swirling and rolling his tongue into me as I cried out. I gripped his hair, the luscious locks tangling in my fingers.

“Deeeeeeeeeeannnnnn,” I moaned “oh my god, that feels so good!”

His fingers slid around and into me easily as I moaned louder. He lapped his tongue over my clit and his fingers scissored into me. I lost control, thrusting my hips into his mouth and fingers.

“Mhhhh, baby,” he said “be still for me.”

“Yes sir.” I said and laid back. I let him ravage me, he devoured me like a starving man, eating me out as if his life depended on it. I screamed like a woman possessed, my head rolling from side to side.

“That’s it,” he moaned “that’s it baby girl, come for me.”

With one crook of his fingers and I was done for. I came undone with a scream of his name, feeling a cold chill run up my spine. I collapsed on the bed, my legs fell open and my hand let go of his hair. I breathed hard as his adorable face came into my view, he was licking his shining lips as a stupid grin formed on my mouth.

“Feel good baby?” He asked me and then we kissed. I could taste myself in his mouth, which was strangely erotic.

“Yeah,” I breathed “better than good.”

“You sure you want me to fuck you?” He asked “I’m not opposed to it, but I want to make sure you’re okay.”

“You don’t have to fuck me,” I told him and kissed him “make love to me, like you did earlier.” My hands roamed up his back, his strong muscles dancing under my touch.

He grinned and we kissed again

“That I can do,” He said and easily slid inside me, making me cry out “your wish is my command baby.” He started to move and I threw my head back as I moved with him. His name fell from my lips like a prayer as he kissed me over and over again, his hips bucking up into mine. He sucked my lower lip into his mouth and bit down on it as I cried out for him.

“Dean, I’m gonna-GOD!” I yelled

“Let go baby,” he told me, gripping my hips hard “I’m right there, god you’re fucking tight for me!”

I cried out against his mouth as he fucked me through my orgasm, reaching his own as he sucked a dark mark on to my chest.

I didn’t remember falling asleep, but when I opened my eyes, I could smell food. I groaned and felt around for Dean, realizing his side of the bed was cold. I located my clothes and pulled them on, then walked out into my living room to find a sweet sight.

Dean has set up dinner at my kitchen table and was currently rummaging around in my kitchen for god only knew what.

I smiled and watched him as he moved; without a belt around his dress pants, they hung a little lower on his hips, his undershirt wasn’t tucked in and he was wearing his socks, his hair stuck up in all kinds of funny directions as he looked through my cabinets.

“Can I help you find something?” I asked and he turned, wearing a grin on his face.

“Hey sleepyhead.” He greeted me and turned to face me. I walked over to him and wrapped my arms around his waist as he kissed my forehead. “I was just about to come get you.” He said “where are your plates?”

“Dishwasher,” I told him “you don’t have to get fancy on me, we can eat off the take out plates.”

“I was trying to be sweet,” he said, giving me a playful pout “I wanted to surprise you.”

“Oh, I’m surprised.” I told him and gave him a kiss.

“In that case, we can dig in.” He said and we sat down to eat.

We ate in silence for a while, I glanced from my food up to him, toying with the fried rice on my plate at one point.

“What’re you thinking?” He asked

I sighed

“A lot of things.” I told him honestly

“I can tell,” he said “you’re doing that thing where you bite your lip when you’re concentrating really hard.”

I smiled

“You notice shit like that?” I asked, amused and he nodded.

“You pick at your fingers or your lip when you’re nervous,” he said “or you play with your hair and laugh.”

“What else?” I asked, intrigued

He thought for a second, a sweet, crooked smile forming on his face.

“When you’re really interested in something, your whole face lights up,” he said “first time I saw that face, I was hooked.”

“THAT’S what hooked you? Me geeking out?” I asked “You might want to get your eyes checked.”

He shook his head

“Not because of the context where you made the face,” he said “the way your eyes were sparkling and shining and that adorable smile that crosses your face. I knew I wanted to see that face more.”

I grinned as I looked down and pushed my food around my plate.

“Dean?” I asked

“Yes?” He answered

I looked up and he was holding a steady gaze at me.

“Would you want to,” I started “be my boyfriend? I know it’s kind of sudden, but I really like you and you’re the only one I want to be with.”

He gave me a half grin

“You’re a girl that knows what she wants huh?” He asked and I nodded.

“Yep.” I said

He sighed and asked

“Are you sure? Not any guys your own age you’d rather have?”

I shook my head

“I’ve done my fair share of dating,” I told him “nothing I’ve experienced comes close to what I feel when I’m with you, and that’s something I want to explore.”

He smiled and reached across the table, his hand covering mine.

“I’d like that. Very much.” He said

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

What did you guys think?! These two are driving me crazy because they’re SO CUTE!!! As always, kind feedback is welcome; feel free to like, share and drop a comment and if you want, Hulk smash that follow button to see more content from me. My boxes are always open; so if you have a suggestion, a request or would like to join The Squad or be tagged in this series, let me know!! See you guys for the next one!

The Squad:

@waywardbaby @waywardnerd67 @familybusinesswritingbro @ain-t-bovvered @mrswhozeewhatsis @girlborninstorms @dacleverfox@emoryhemsworth @bobasheebaby @salvachester@myinconnelly1 @mogaruke @imma-winchester-addict@theworldiscolorful @dean-winchesters-bacon @animerose96@l8nit-l0vr @drakelover78 @curly-haired-disaster

Hot For Teacher:

@wayward-gypsy