#Hunting Camera Reviews

[fremocpepoi]

Flex-M

The Flex-M is the biggest bang for your buck package when it comes to cell cameras. Based off of the original Flex design, it is affordable at the same price point as the Link-Micro series. Most of my micros that are starting to age have been slowly but surely swapped out for the Flex-M and have been providing much better photo quality, as well as some video, from those areas of our farm. While…

[ceilidho]

prompt: it's been a month since you managed to run away from them. your luck had to run out eventually. tags: noncon, darkfic, ghoap x reader, previous kidnapping implied, stalking and hunting down reader. i am begging you to read the tags before reading this, thanks. 4.4k

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You pay for the motel room in cash. Always cash. Never a paper trail if you can help it. Nothing that could ever tip anyone off if you didn’t want them to be tipped off.

You haven’t been on the run for long. Maybe a month, tops—but after the first week, the days and nights have begun to blend together like watercolours. You don’t do much during the day apart from sit in your room and wait for the night to come. Sometimes you venture out if you’re low on food or if the itch under your skin grows severe enough that you know you need to buy a fresh set of clothes and dump the ones you came into town with. 

Freshly dyed and cut hair. Jackets two sizes too big to make you seem larger than you are from the back. You’ll never be able to change the face god gave you, but you make an effort to obscure it when you can—surgical masks on public transit, heavy sunglasses even indoors, a deep mauve lipstick (purchased, again, in cash at the local pharmacy) to make you seem, from a distance, like someone else. Anyone else.

Sometimes remembering that it’s been a whole month since you escaped, since you got out, leaves you winded. You have to hold onto the wall in your pay-by-the-night, ratty, hole-in-the-wall motel room to keep from toppling over. A month without spotting one of them in pursuit of you feels next to impossible. Almost impossible. You still don’t let yourself think that you’ve fully given them the slip, that you’ve gotten the better of them. There is no getting the better of them. There is no outmanoeuvring the two men that—you’ve learned through painful trial and error—do not let up when there is still the trace of a scent.

And everything leaves a scent. Even you.

You sleep in the bathtub instead of the bed for fear of bedlice; these days, your neck has an ever-present kink that needs to be worked out. It’s bound to get worse though. It’s not like you can stop in this town now and call it home, not when you can feel them hot on your heels. 

You change in gas station bathrooms when you run. You’re learning a kind of awareness of cameras and eyes that you never would’ve developed before. You do not smile at cashiers. Your face becomes blank, unrecognisable. The goal is always that you fade into obscurity the second you step out of the shop, so that no one could ever identify you to the two terrifying men haunting your shadow. Even if they wanted to. 

Paranoid isn’t the half of it. When you hear a car pull up outside your motel room door, your body drops a whole degree and sweats like a night terror has found you in the waking world. You only relax when you hear a door four rooms down slam shut. Then you shake so hard that you swear you can hear your bones rattle.

This isn’t a life. It’s life like the promise of a tomorrow is the only thing getting you through today. 

You get on buses with no idea where you’ll be getting off. Pattern disrupter. In the months that you lived with them, you learned something. If your movements are scattered, they become unpredictable—harder to track down. You force them to stay behind while you skitter off, forcing them to review video footage, question people, even sift through garbage and recycling bins for any sign that you’d been there. 

It doesn’t make you any less nervous. You know they’re like hunting dogs. You’d love to believe that you’ve tried their patience enough for them to abandon the chase, but thinking like that gets you caught. Complacency will get you caught faster than anything.

The money folded and sealed in an envelope in your bag is dwindling though. Even for as frugal as you’ve been, food costs money—clothes cost money. Boxes of hair dye and bus tickets cost money. And you can’t stay anywhere long enough to hold down a job to recuperate what you’ve lost.

It feels hopeless. You trudge back to your motel room after grabbing a bite to eat at the pub down the road and feel like maybe this is purgatory. Maybe you died a long time ago, long before you got away from them, and this long path you’ve been burning across the country is just the long descent into the underworld. You let out a sigh, squeezing your eyes shut for a second by the door before unlocking it to go inside for the night.

You trip over something. It catches you so off guard that you almost break your nose on the carpeted floor, arms almost not swinging out in time to catch you. 

“Whoops. Sorry, kitty—took a lil’ tumble there, huh?” a familiar burr says from somewhere behind you by the door. “Gotta watch where you step.” He chuckles a bit under his breath, pulling back the leg he’d stuck out to trip you. 

Your body goes ice cold on the floor. The door clicks shut behind you; the deadbolt sliding into place is deafening in the silence. The thick knot in your belly expands until you think you might throw up. The only nonsensical thing you can think is that you hope the motel manager won’t be upset that you’ve ruined the carpet. 

You hear the muffled sound of knees hitting the floor and then a hand tangles in your hair, wrenching your head back. “Oh Jesus, look at the state of her, Lt.”

“Looks like she’s seen a ghost.”

The second voice is rough, like logs rolling over water, clattering into each other. It comes from the other end of the room, way into the darkness. They didn’t bother to turn the lights on, perhaps in an effort to make sure your guard was down. Fear grips the inside of your chest. Behind you, Johnny holds your head up high enough that you’re forced to stare at the patch of darkness from which Ghost materialises when he flicks on the bedside lamp. 

On the surface, he sounds almost amused, but as long as it’s been, you’re still attuned to the undercurrent of anger in his voice. His patience has been tried over weeks of chasing after you. He almost looks like he’s put on mass since you last saw him over a month ago, but that could just be the perspective of looking up at him from the floor. His face is still covered in the same half skull mask as always, exposing the shaved blond hair on his head. His eyes are narrowed though, terrifyingly mad.

“Poor baby,” Johnny murmurs, nuzzling into the back of your head. He props himself over you, not leaning his whole weight down onto your prone body, but trying to get as close as possible to you while still forcing you to stare up at Ghost. “Did we give ye a wee fright? Is that why ye ran off? I missed ye so, so bad, baby.”

“She ran off because she’s been spoiled,” Ghost snaps. He sits on the edge of the bed and it creaks under his weight when he shifts a little closer to the edge, leaning closer to where you’re lying on the floor. 

“I ken, I ken, Lt,” Johnny sighs, plastering sloppy, wet kisses into the side of your neck, fitting his mouth briefly into the crook of it, into the meat of your shoulder. “Cannae help myself, she’s just so—ah, kitty, am really sorry but you’ve really pissed Simon off.”

“No—no, please—” you gasp, breath splintered into short hitches. “H-how’d you—how’d you e-even find—”

Johnny shakes you by the hair, a bit rougher than usual. Anger finally leaking out like a drip from a loose spigot. You yip at the pain. “Of course we were gonna find you—Lt, ye hearing this? She thought she could outsmart us.”

“Pet’s don’t know any better,” Ghost says dismissively. It makes you feel queasy to hear him say that like you’re not even in the room. “Needs a lesson in not making us run halfway across the country after her. Get her on the bed, pup.”

“No, no, get OFF—” you try to yell, then gag when Johnny shoves two fingers into your mouth, pushing them almost to the back of your throat. 

When the urge to choke abates, you close your teeth over his fingers, flirting with the idea of just biting all the way down and taking them off. Only the fact that you’ve never done something like that before keeps you from instinctually biting through. Johnny laughs breathlessly when he feels your teeth flirt over his fingers though.

“Bite down,” Johnny dares you, voice quivering with smugness and rage. “Bite down ‘n see what happens to ye. Have nae gotten my cock wet in a fuckin’ month because you’ve been gone and Simon—”

“Quit talking to the pet like she understands,” Ghost snaps, finally standing up, towering over the two of you. You can’t help staring at his mud covered boots still rooted in front of your face. “On the bed. Now.”

You howl when Johnny takes his fingers out of your mouth and wrenches you to your feet, struggling when he coos and frogmarches you to the bed. No matter how hard you struggle though, you can’t break the way he has your arms twisted behind your back. It’s a short walk too, only a few steps, and then Johnny shoves you roughly onto the bed, clambering over you again. His hand forces your face into the mattress, not paying any mind to the way you grunt because your nose bends uncomfortably against it. 

“Always fuckin’ whining,” Johnny growls into your ear, fully pissed off now. His anger is electric, rippling down the length of you. “On and on and on—’n I’ve been so fuckin’ good to ye. Have nae even been a little mean. Being a fuckin’ brat to me and leavin’ me and makin’ us hunt ye down like dogs.” 

You can hear that he’s working himself up to a fever pitch, growing angrier and angrier. It terrifies you to think that you’re trapped under him, nowhere to go. Somehow, it’s a mercy when the bed dips again under Ghost’s weight and he pulls Johnny back by the shoulder, giving his cheek a little tap when Johnny growls and tries to bend back down. 

“You have all the time in the world with her, pup,” Ghost says, giving Johnny a rougher shove. “Get undressed. Can’t fuck her in your civvies.” 

“Yeah…yeah, yer right,” Johnny mumbles to himself, getting off you. 

Your head automatically twists over your shoulder, eyes following him. It’s easy to see in the spare seconds you get before you try to make a break for it again that he looks haggard, beard grown out a bit more than usual. Ghost usually makes him keep it short and tight, but apparently weeks on the road have tempered that military expectation a bit. 

His eyes are wild, electric blue, hardly blinking for how hard he stares at you. You tell yourself that you haven’t, on some small level, missed his pretty face. His arms bulge around the tight shirt that he easily strips off, pulling it off one handed from the back of his neck.

You hear him kick off his boots somewhere in the distance, but when you try to scramble off the bed, Ghost tips you over onto your bed and presses you down with a firm hand on your shoulder. He’s a bit less dressed now—hoodie pulled off and boots and jeans piled on the floor somewhere. Mask off. Familiar scars cut across his face—old burn marks and white spidery lines of fresh skin. Rougher than Johnny, not a pretty man; maybe without the layers of scarring he’d be a proper masculine kind of handsome, but with them, he only seems dangerous. Someone to avoid. 

He doesn’t say anything when he stares down at you. He says enough like that. He looks over his shoulder, away from you. “Johnny?”

“Lt?” Johnny’s at attention now, stripped naked and eager. When you glance down, his cock is already flushed and hard, excitement making him almost vibrate.

“Help me get her naked and then you’ll get her mouth, alright?”

You’re already struggling before the words come out of his mouth, frantically trying to push Ghost off you and opening your mouth to scream—the piercing shrill of it bleats out of you for half a second—before a big hand wraps around your neck and Ghost turns back to you. It shuts you up in a heartbeat. Not once in the months you were with them has Ghost looked half as terrifying; you’ve had a belt taken to your ass until the blood pooling under the skin almost burned, you’ve been manhandled and roughly positioned and been bent into shapes that your body could only just accommodate, but you’ve never, until now, actually worried for your safety somehow. 

“You scream—” he starts, moving his hand up just a little to grab you by the jaw and twist your head to make you stare at the bedside table, where a glock lays flat under the glow of the lamp, “—and I shoot anyone that comes through that fuckin’ door. We clear?”

You nod once. Sweat pouring out of every other gland, but the saliva running dry in your mouth. You lick your lips and swallow, hummingbird heart going wild in your chest. 

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Johnny mumbles, coming up behind Ghost to wrap his arms around him as best he can, planting a row of kisses into his shaved head. “Missed it so bad, I need ta—need ta—”

“Her clothes, Johnny. Take ‘em off.”

You only put up a little fight when Ghost works on unzipping and pulling down your jeans. It feels hopeless to try. Johnny almost tears your shirt in two to get it off, only being a bit gentler when you yelp. He can’t help groping at your chest when the shirt is pulled off you and tossed somewhere else in the room, big hands fitting over your breasts and plucking your nipples, twisting them like you’re just a toy for Johnny to play with. He slithers down onto his belly for a second to pop a nipple into his mouth, switching between kissing and sucking at the beaded nub like he can’t tell what he missed more.

Your panties get ripped clean in two. The sob comes out of your chest unbidden, tears finally spilling out. Ghost’s patience seems finally at its end. His eyes are black even in the light, all pupil. Your legs try to close instinctively, but he slots himself between them so you can only clamp your legs around his waist, stuck staring at the way his hand reaches for his boxers only long enough to pull the elastic under his balls. His cock is so heavy with blood that it droops, the tip dewy. 

Your nipples gleam with spit when Johnny finally takes his mouth off them, sitting back on his haunches and spreading his legs. It’s all happening so fast—there isn’t a right place to look. Either the monstrous cock between your legs that already has you feeling twangs of phantom pain knowing that Ghost isn’t going to even bother stretching you on his fingers before fucking you, or the pretty cock that Johnny is already rubbing against your lips, painting with his precome. You flinch when you feel Ghost spit on your sex; he doesn’t try to rub it in.

“Simon” he pants, fingers tangling in your hair again to keep your head still when you try to turn away. “Simon, please, can I—I need ta come so bad. Please, please.”

You almost say something and then Ghost pushes his cock in to the hilt in one brutal plunge. Your mouth opens on a ragged gasp and Johnny keens, fingers clenching so hard in your hair that he almost tears it out by the roots. The tip of his cock stays flush against your lips, even split open on your gasp.

“Please, sir, please,” he begs, tears pooling in the corners of his eyes. Aching and desperate. Holding himself back only because he needs permission to put his cock anywhere in you, just like he did all those weeks ago back in their house out in the countryside. The one you thought you thought you’d escaped. 

Ghost chuckles, groaning at the feel of your tight cunt squeezing his cock. “Go ahead, boy. Give your cock a squeeze.”

That’s all it takes. Johnny pushes past your lips roughly, no finesse or gentleness at all. Maybe the capacity for it is gone after going without you for so long. You choke when the head of his cock hits the back of your throat, tears making your vision blur. Johnny preens and gushes over you, unable to stop babbling about how hot and tight your throat is, how much he missed it. 

“Oh shit, sir, she’s—” Johnny gasps, sinking into your mouth again and again, sweaty hand still clutching your hair. “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.”

You feel close to the point of breaking, tight after a month on the lam, too tight for someone Ghost’s size to shove their cock into you without prep. You tell yourself that at least he bothered to spit on you, but lube would help a lot more. Too bad for you. His hands fit over your waist and hold tight, making sure you know that there’s nowhere for you to go. The first few thrusts are rough but slow enough to keep you from tearing—a small mercy, but probably not for your sake.

“I get—I get her pussy after, right, sir?” Johnny asks desperately.

“Dunno, Johnny,” Ghost muses, licking his lip. His thrusts get more brutish, faster; your teeth would be clacking together if Johnny’s cock wasn’t stuck halfway down your throat. “Gonna be a bit sloppy. Might not be tight enough for you after this.”

“S’okay, sir,” he whines, glancing back down at you. Fingers petting your cheek and tracing over your throat, trying to feel himself from the outside. “Jus’ need…oh fuck, please, it’s so good—oh Christ, missed it. I’ll take anythin’, sir, please.”

“Christ, alright, puppy. You can have a turn after. Been a good boy, huh?” 

You can only stare when Ghost lifts a hand from your waist to reel Johnny in by his mohawk, tugging him in for a wet kiss, still thrusting into your pussy all the while. Just a toy between them for their cocks while Ghost licks into Johnny’s mouth and mutters sweet nothings to him. Johnny moans into the kiss, sucking Ghost’s tongue when it’s offered to him and looking dazed, come-drunk. All fucked out and flushed, hips unconsciously pumping forward, just absently rutting. 

“Got our girl back, right?” Ghost murmurs, letting go of Johnny’s hair to smooth down his head and neck, making him preen. “Such a smart puppy.”

“Yeah, I’m good, sir.” He sounds out of his mind, slurring his words. Praise gets him like nothing else; it’s not easily given by Ghost, not handed out for nothing. “Did good…’m a good boy…”

The corners of your lips feel like they might crack. It’s hard to be careful with your teeth when you’re so overwhelmed, but luckily Johnny doesn’t mind it a bit rough. He hiccups when your teeth scrape over his cock a bit. He lips at Ghost’s mouth, dragging his tongue over the scar that bisects the corner of Ghost’s lips. When Ghost finally pulls away from Johnny’s mouth, a thin string of saliva pulls and then bends with the distance, finally snapping off and leaking onto your chest. 

Your flinch and squeak draws Ghost’s attention back down to you. 

You try to think of yourself looking down on the three of you instead of in it, but it’s hard. For as much as it seems like you’re just a toy between them, Ghost makes an effort to get you off, slipping a hand down to jiggle his thumb over your clit, rubbing it just the way you like. It’s sick how well he knows your body by now, how it takes almost nothing to push you to the edge of coming, core tight with the heat of it. 

“Gonna come?” Ghost taunts, scooping a hand under your ass to tilt your hips up, hitting a spot inside you that has you seeing stars, cunt flexing over his cock. You garble around Johnny’s cock as if to say something, but all it does is make Johnny groan and slump over you, holding himself upright with a hand on the mattress. His abs flex every time he fucks into your mouth. “Pussy this close to coming—you must’ve starved it. Good thing you didn’t let someone fuck you while we were looking. Woulda torn them apart.”

You can see the real threat in his eyes at that. There’s no way you would’ve, but the real danger of it crackles in the room. You feel like you’ll slip and touch the third rail if you so much as twitch under his glare. His jealousy at the thought makes him look like an angry god, chest heaving with every breath as he fucks you. 

“My baby wouldnae—” Johnny gasps, sinking his cock all the way into your throat and groaning at the squeeze, “—no, Si, she’s—ah, fuck me, ‘m gonna—fuck, fuck—Si, she wouldnae do that to us. No fuckin’ way.”

“She’d have a lot of making up to do then, huh?”

“She’s a good girl, sir, ‘promise. Oh, jus’ look at her,” Johnny gushes, sweat dripping down onto your face from how he’s curled over you. “So, so pretty. Maybe I dinnae take her…take her on enough walks.”

“Yeah…” You feel your skin crawl when Ghost stares down at you, not convinced. “Of course, pup.”

You know there’s no way he believes that. When they drag you home, you don’t think you’ll see the sunlight for weeks, never mind have Johnny take you on ‘walks’. Ghost’s smothering presence will take on a whole new meaning; he’ll snuff out the sun before he lets you walk in it alone ever again. 

Someone in the room adjacent to yours slams their fist into the wall a couple of times, jolting you out of your thoughts. The headboard must really be knocking against the wall. Ghost and Johnny ignore it though, Johnny so close to coming that he can hardly even form a sentence, solely focused on spearing between your lips. You can feel Ghost reaching his end too, fucking you with a single-minded intensity. Breath snorting out of his nose like a bull. The hair on his chest is matted with sweat, curls whorling around his nipples. 

You almost choke when Johnny comes down your throat without warning, hilting his cock until his balls brush your chin and his hand in your hair tightens painfully. He groans, drawn out and long, pained. It splashes against the back of your throat, almost familiar. You’ve done this before. You can do this without falling down a cliff and never climbing back up. 

He pulls his cock out before he’s finished, striping your face with come, twitching when he has to hold his cock from how sensitive it is. You instinctively close your eyes, grateful when you feel his come tag your eyelid. 

You hope it’s almost over, but Ghost hasn’t come yet and you know it’s going to get worse before it gets better. When Johnny pulls away to collapse onto his back on the bed, trying to catch his breath and dragging his hand over his stomach, Ghost hunches over you. He drags his tongue over your cheek, wet and nasty, and your brain almost switches off when you realise that he’s licking Johnny’s come off your cheek. 

“There we go,” he snarls, feeling you flex around him, the little tell-tale spasm of your approaching orgasm. “Atta girl—gonna come on my cock? A little wet sorry for running away?”

You try to say something, but your throat is raw, voice too hoarse for words. Even your lips feel puffy, swollen. Talking hurts. It doesn’t matter though, Ghost doesn’t wait for your response. He pumps into you like a machine, pulling his cock all the way out before pushing back in again. Your stomach cramps with the worry that he might miss and try pushing into the other hole.

You wish there was a way around it, but you can’t avoid it slamming into you, a white hot wave cresting over you. You come so hard it hurts, milking Ghost’s cock and pushing him over the edge too; he pants harsh, animalistic sounds into your throat, cutting himself off by sinking his teeth into the meat of your shoulder instead, making you howl. There’s no condom to keep his come from pumping into you; just a big, heavy man smelling of gunpowder and salt hovering over you, elbow propped on the mattress beside your head and making you go a bit crazy at the scent of him everywhere around you. 

He peels himself off of you after what feels like an hour, soft cock pulling out of you and making you clench down on nothing. You didn’t remember how much being empty can hurt. You try to roll away from him and onto your side, maybe squeeze yourself into a fetal position, but Ghost collapses down beside you and plants a hand on the centre of your chest, holding you in place. Never any respite. 

You croak a tired little, “Ow.” All it does is make Ghost snort softly.

Your body feels like one livid bruise in the aftermath, limbs loose at your sides. You couldn’t move even if you tried, even if you thought you could make a break for it. It would hardly be worth it. You let your eyes slide shut when Ghost runs a hand up and down your chest, a little comforting gesture. 

“Simon,” Johnny whines from beside you. Your brows scrunch, annoyed at his voice breaking the silence. “Please.”

You hear Ghost sigh. “Now?”

“Cannae wait—please.”

You wait to hear Johnny and Ghost get up. Maybe there’s something they have to do—maybe they drove to the motel and there’s still something in the car. 

A hand grabs you by the hip.

“Turn over, pet,” Ghost instructs, flipping you onto your stomach without waiting for you to acquiesce. “Promised Johnny a turn with your pussy before we leave.”

Your eyes go wide.

[ckret2]

Chapter 74 of that fic about human Bill but he's not in this chapter so forget about him: Ford and Dipper go cryptid hunting!

This is pretty much a standalone chapter so if somehow you stumbled on this without seeing the rest of the fic, u can just, read it by itself as a standalone Dipper and Ford adventure. It's funny. Promise.

####

The camera turned on to reveal Dipper, illuminated sunset orange and cast in heavy shadows, holding the camera out at arm's length. "Welcome back to Dipper's Guide to the Unexplained, anomaly #175: the Fremont Nightwigglers!" He held up a paper title card in his free hand. "I'm Dipper Pines, and today I'm honored to introduce our special guest star—" he turned the camera around to focus on Ford from behind, "—the one and only Dr. Stanford Pines, PhD times twelve—"

Ford laughed self-consciously. "Dipper, nobody's going to recognize my name outside of a few highly specialized academic fields—"

"—the scientist who developed the Theory of Weirdness—"

"That paper isn't even ready for peer review yet, and I can't take all the credit—"

"—and the coolest dimension-hopping monster-fighting mystery-investigating great uncle in the world!"

Ford paused thoughtfully. "Okay, I'll take that one."

"Tonight, we're on the trail of the Fremont Nightwigglers." The recording cut to CCTV footage from a much higher-budget cryptid-hunting show (which Dipper had recorded by aiming the camera at the TV). The footage showed two marshmallow-like creatures that seemed to consist solely of heads, long legs, and feet—smooth, ghostly white, and featureless except for black eyes. They wore denim jeans that covered their bodies from ankles to waists, and their legs seemed to bend jointlessly, like an octopus's arms or an elephant's trunk. "These weird armless creatures have been seen up and down the west coast states, leaving behind a wave of jeans thefts at clothing stores; but by the time local law enforcement has ruled out any human suspects, the true culprits are always long gone."

The recording cut back to Dipper, who'd taken the lead so he could turn around the camera and aim it at both himself and Ford. "Based on investigative research done by Dr. Pines in the 80s, we believe the Nightwigglers have a migratory route several years long that passes through California, Oregon, Washington, and Canada. More research is needed to find out if they travel as far as Alaska or Mexico. Locals believe each Nightwiggler creates an individual burrow around a communal gathering spot to hide in during the day, and at night they assemble in the communal spot to travel or forage in nearby towns."

Ford threw in, "Based on what the townspeople told me about their habits, they've been in Gravity Falls much longer than usual. It typically takes them a week or two to pass through the area, but this year there have been sightings for more than a month. Perhaps we'll find out why."

"And thanks to a hot tip from an in-the-know local"—the recording cut to a few seconds of footage of Wendy proving she could do a handstand on the split-rail fence around the Mystery Shack—"we know which assembly spot they're currently camping around! Tonight, we're trying to get the first deliberate footage of a Nightwiggler..." Dipper lowered the camera and turned toward Ford, "Hey, what'll we call a group of them? A flock? Herd? Meeting? If we're the first investigators to officially document the species, we get to come up with the name , right?"

Ford considered the question. "What about a wobble of Nightwigglers? Since their legs are so... wobbly."

"Sure, that works."

"Is this really your 175th episode?" Ford asked. "I've missed quite a few."

"Ye—well..." Dipper lowered the camera. It recorded his shoes as he walked. "So far I've got a list of 175 anomalies I want to do an episode on, but I've only recorded and posted thirty-something. I think you've seen them all except the two I've done this summer." He sighed. "I'm... kinda disappointed by it, honestly."

"Why? You should be proud of your work so far! You're the only person in the world who's caught footage of the Hide Behind."

"By accident."

"Because you learned how to identify its call, chased it through half the forest, and were prepared with the right equipment to record it. That wasn't luck, Dipper—that was your hard work."

"I guess," Dipper said grudgingly. "I just... wanted to have a lot more produced by now."

"Wh—You started these last June? That's about one every two weeks. That's a very impressive output."

"I made most of them last summer, I hardly did any over the last school year or this summer."

"You've been focusing on your studies, that's good."

"Yeah, but what about this summer? All I've done so far is borrow some of Robbie's music video footage to make an episode about zombies and record some footage I haven't edited yet about Pacifica's alpaca thief. I didn't even get any footage of the haunted doll crane game before it disappeared. Most of the time I've been just... hiding in Soos's room playing Bloodcraft: Overdeath"—(under his breath Ford muttered "Blood-craft over death?")—"or hanging out with Wendy and her friends, or helping Soos with the Mystery Shack, or just trying to avoid..." He trailed off, suddenly conscious of the camera still aimed at the ground. It had started recording footprints drying in the mud after the recent rain: soft indents like the pads of paws, but with no distinct toes, about the size and length of human feet. Dipper lifted the camera to better record the trail they were walking down.

"Well... there's nothing wrong with taking a break during the summer," Ford said. "Especially considering that your last summer was... quite a bit more exciting than most kids'—"

"That's just it!" Dipper said. "Last summer I did so much! I investigated your disappearance, I filled half of your third journal, I helped stop the apocalypse, I wrote a book with Mabel about solving mysteries and doing fun stuff, I recorded like twenty Guides to the Unknown... Compared to that, this summer I feel like I'm—falling behind."

"Falling behind what?"

"I don't know. But—I just—I... feel like..." He trailed off with a frustrated sigh. "I don't know."

Ford offered, "Maybe, like you're not living up to your own potential?"

"Yes! That's it," Dipper said. "I'm not trying to grow up too fast, I'm just worried I'll grow up before I've done all the stuff I'm supposed to do now. Like I'm already running out of time."

"Hmm..." Ford let out a long, thoughtful sigh. "Dipper, I'm probably the wrong person to be giving this advice, considering that I'm not exactly... the paragon of moderation when it comes to pursuing professional ambitions. But—remember that you're only thirteen. Right now, you don't need to be worried about graduating valedictorian and starting up an anomaly-hunting show and doing groundbreaking research into previously-unknown strange and wondrous creatures," Ford said. "You just need to focus on graduating valedictorian first. That's all I did with my high school years, and after that I still managed to rack up multiple PhDs before age 30. You've got plenty of time!" He said this with the confidence of a man who didn't realize having his life derailed by a manipulative alien villain was the only reason he didn't burn out hard by 1984. "Outside of that, just... worry about being a kid."

"Yeah. I guess you're right. Thanks, Grunkle Ford," Dipper said. "I keep worrying, though. I keep thinking, what if I'm wasting all my time on stuff that... just... doesn't matter? What if nothing I'm doing is actually important?"

Ford was silent a moment. "That's... a very existential question for your age. How long have you been worrying—"

Dipper hissed, "Grunkle Ford!" He jerked his camera up. "Is that fire?!" There was a faint orange glow in the distance between the trees.

"I think it is!"

Dipper whispered, "That's where I found the Nightwigglers' abanadoned campsite last time!"

"Did you see any signs that they knew how to start fires? Remains of a campfire?"

"I didn't notice anything."

"It could be a Scampfire..."

As quietly as they could, Dipper and Ford edged through the trees, Dipper all the while pointing the camera toward the light, until they found a narrow gap between two trees from which they could peer into the clearing.

There were three or four dozen Nightwigglers milling about in little clusters. Several had lit torches—sturdy sticks with the ends wrapped in fabric—which they carried by sticking the ends of the torches into their jeans' pockets.

"Dipper, look at the tops of their torches," Ford hissed. "Is that shredded denim?"

The camera zoomed in on the nearest torchbearing Nightwiggler. "I think so."

"We already knew they wore clothing—but they can make tools, too? How advanced are they..."

Ford trailed off as the clustered Nightwigglers separated, spreading out evenly into several rings. As the camera recorded, they began emitting a synchronized muffled humming; and then they began dancing, kicking their legs and turning in circles together. "Whoa," Dipper whispered. "Is this some kind of ritual?"

"What's its purpose?" Ford whispered back. "Recreation? Religion? Some sort of cultural event—?"

"Hold on. I think I recognize the song."

Ford and Dipper fell silent, watching in silence as the dance repeated a couple of times.

The Nightwigglers were doing the Hokey Pokey.

"Fascinating." The camera lurched sideways, and then turned toward Ford. Ford had stolen Dipper's journal from out of his vest pocket and was hastily taking notes on a blank page. "I had no idea Nightwiggler culture was so influenced by human culture. An hour ago, we didn't even know Nightwigglers have a culture. When could they have observed and learned the Hokey Pokey? It's not exactly a nighttime dance—do they spy on humans during the day?"

Dipper said, "What if we learned the dance from Nightwigglers?"

Ford stopped writing, looked up, and stared at Dipper, mind blown.

Dipper jerked the camera back toward the Nightwigglers as they filed out of the clearing. "Hey! Where are they going now?"

Dipper and Ford waited until the last Nightwiggler had left; and then they quietly followed.

####

After several minutes of silence except for the sound of footsteps, Ford said, "Are we headed toward Mabel's Fault?"

Dipper groaned. "I got enough of this place last week."

"Agreed." 

"Hey, you know Bill said we should rename it 'Bill's Fault'?"

Ford huffed. "Did he really? I don't believe it."

"Yeah. He tried to play it off like, 'oOOoh, I just want creEDit—'"

"That sounds like him—"

They came to a stop as the camera spied the Nightwigglers standing in the clearing around the fault, then they quickly moved off the path into the brush and crept closer. "What are they doing?" Dipper asked as they inched up to the tree line.

"I don't know—they're packed too tightly together for me to see."

"I've got an idea. Hold this." The camera bounced as Dipper passed it to Ford, who watched as Dipper climbed up one of the pine trees around the clearing. 

"Careful! There aren't a lot of low branches that can hold your weight."

"It's okay, Wendy showed me how to do this." Dipper held out his hand for the camera.

Ford passed it up to him. "What do you see?"

The camera foused on Mabel's Fault. "The Nightwigglers closest to the fault are taking off their jeans, ripping them into two separate legs, and... tossing them in the fault? Have you ever heard of this?"

"Never."

"Like a dozen have done it so far."

"Perhaps that's why they have to steal so many pairs of pants? But why..."

Dipper gasped. Tiny Nightwigglers had begun squirming out of the fault, each wearing a single denim pant leg, crawling around like inchworms with half the pant leg trailing behind them. The bigger Nightwigglers picked up the little ones with their feet and swaddled them in the excess fabric. "They're—I think they're baby Nightwigglers! Coming out of the fault!"

"Amazing! Is this how they reproduce?" Ford asked. "Is that why they travel the west coast—are they following the San Andreas Fault and the volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest?"

"Maybe that's why they've been in town so long," Dipper said. "Mabel's Fault wasn't here the last time they passed through."

"We'll have to find out what other towns they stay in the longest. How far is Fremont from the fault line—?"

"Hey," Dipper said, "A bunch more Nightwigglers took their jeans off. They're tying them in a circle." One of the torchbearer Nightwigglers knelt down and bowed forward, setting the jeans ring on fire; and it was tossed into the fault. The Nightwigglers that weren't carrying infants formed a circle and began Hokey Pokeying toward the fault.

"That definitely looks like a ritual," Ford said, "but why? To celebrate the births...?"

The ground rumbled. Dipper gasped and slipped several feet down the tree before he caught himself. When he refocused the camera, Mabel's Fault was several feet wider, and a fiery glow was rising up from within.

An enormous Nightwiggler, fifteen feet tall, climbed out of the fault. It wore a crown of flaming denim and tattered pants formed by stitching together many pairs of decades-old jeans. The Nightwigglers bowed down.

"Good lord," Ford breathed. "What is that? Did they summon it, or—or was it always down there?"

The giant Nightwiggler watched regally as its subjects danced around it. As they spun around and completed another repetition of the Hokey Pokey—that's what it's all a-BOUT—the giant punctuated the end of the dance with a ground-shaking stomp.

Dipper lost his grip on the tree. He and the camera crashed to the ground with a yelp. 

"Dipper! Are you alright?!"

"Ow... fine, probably just bruised."

The camera caught Ford kneeling to help Dipper sit up, and then Dipper grabbed the camera again as he stood. He pointed it back at the clearing.

Every single Nightwiggler, babies and giant included, was staring at them with wide black eyes.

Ford said, "Uh oh."

The giant let out a bellow like a muffled hunting horn.

The Nightwigglers charged.

Dipper and Ford ran away through the brush, screaming.

####

Dipper pointed the camera at his face. His hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat and his cheeks and arms were covered in small branch scrapes. "Still works," he reported to Ford.

"Great," Ford said. "That thing's hardy."

The camera jerked as Dipper tried to set it on a tree stump.

"Well, we got away with our lives," he said. "But... not without some losses."

He got the camera settled and backed up. He was wearing his vest zipped up around his hips like a skirt. Ford's trench coat was conspicuously buttoned up, and his legs were bare between his coat and boots. They both looked sheepish.

Ford said, "We've acquired some invaluable anthropological data, though."

"I'm calling this investigation a triumph," Dipper said.

Ford offered a hand. "High six!"

In the background, a skinny-legged Nightwiggler wearing Dipper's shorts darted through the trees.

####

(It's about time Dipper get a little personal attention. Hope you enjoyed and I look forward to hearing y'all's thoughts!)

[guywrestlingaddiction]

That Wrestling Moment: Hunted - Mark Hunter v Brooklyn Bodywrecker / Clint Morgan (bgeast.com) - Part 1

Some wrestlers come and go in a flash.  Now, while the guy only appeared twice, I have deep, vivid memories of Mark Hunter matches.  Perhaps it was that tall, lean frame I was into at the time, maybe it was because the man was destroyed by two of the best heels out there; whatever it was - let's review them together and see why nothing golden can ever last.�� 

Mark Hunter v Brooklyn Bodywrecker / Clint Morgan (bgeast.com)

SPOILER ALERT: I highly recommend viewing this match in its entirety before reading this post.

The Backstory

We open on Mark, stretching that taught body and showing off that handsome face of his.  The man is beautiful and as one of the early Bgeast matches I managed to view, this bout brings back memories just watching it now.  

Within in seconds, I think we can all guess where this match is headed.  Gorgeous Mark is not your typical wrestler build and going up against the meanest Bgeast wrestler out there, you don't have to be psychic to know what happens next.  

BBW with his trademark break the 4th wall and speak to the camera.

Mark might tower over his opponent in height but the man isn't in the same league as BBW.

The Action

Following a very brief assault by Mark, it's 100% BBW in control of this match.  Almost immediately our heel unleashes a devastating beatdown on the ring post leaving our sexy, strapping Mark completely at his mercy.  

That long lean body looks incredibly vulnerable on the ring post.  

Mark is left exposed and completely at the mercy of BBW

From here on out things only get worse for Mark.  The man suffers exquisitely, and all those moans and cries are like catnip for our heel.  Each whimper, every scream, only seems to energize BBW.  

BBW straddling Mark and having some fun. 

Mark: *Muffle* No, no...

Our First Moment 

You have to hand it to BBW.  If you think smothering your opponent with your speedo was the worst things could get, then think again because the heel manages to one-up even himself. 

That sinister grin, the agony from our jobber.  This is why BBW is king! 

Mark barely gets to catch is breath before ... 

BBW comes back to further humiliate an already trashed Mark

Was this ever a "hunt"?  Well I'd say no, at least not a sportsmanlike hunt.  No, Mark Hunter never stood a chance against an apex predator like like BBW.  The man was broken down physically, emotionally, and humiliated like a gay wrestling toy built for BBW's amusement.

Ladies and gentlemen, it all leads up to this moment.  Our heel can no longer control himself and he begins to take what he wants. 

BBW getting his jobber ready for his own enjoyment.  This is BBW's moment.

Handcuffed in the corner, BBW thinks he can play with Mark as he sees fit. 

BBW gets so distracted with Mark that he misses Clint entering the ring.  Big mistake by our heel, letting his lust take over and letting his guard down.

In the end, BBW was so hungry for Mark that he let Clint get the better of him.  It's heel on heel, with mean BBW looking vulnerable for once in his life.  

Is this the end, was Mark just heel bait for hungry BBW? Stay tuned for part 2 with Mark Hunter and Clint Morgan.

[maidenborn]

Detective Love-struck! the hunt begins

part two of Detective Love-struck! , Shoto x reader, in which Deku and Reader brainstorm ways to uncover the secret lover who gifted reader a love letter! fem reader, I apologise for any errors in advance,

cw: mentions of bruises on Shoto's arm, child Shoto being afraid of Endeavour, implied bullying.

Word count: 1,613

The walk back to the 1-A dormitory was riddled with half-baked plans and endless cries of paranoia, no matter how hard Izuku had tried to rationalise it, your mind kept drifting back to the last line of the confession letter you received. The last thing you had expected on a random Wednesday, was a love note, there were no upcoming holidays, like valentines day or anything. The forest training camp funded by your school, Yuuei, had just ended a couple weeks prior, love was hardly in the air. Rather, the overall vibe of your fellow students had only just started to revert back to normal.

It was only the first semester of the hero course, and you'd only just started learning more about your classmates. The possibility that one of them could be the culprit seemed absolutely insane to you, you barely knew them, they barley knew you. Its not like you liked any of them anyways.. not in that way.

You were pulled out of your thoughts by Izuku hatching yet another scheme,"what if we can gain access to the security cameras in the hallway! That way we can actually see who put the letter in your locker!" His hair bounced along with his words, he talked so fast sometimes it took you a few a few moments to process it all.

You're you were reminded of your younger self persistently trying to convince your hometown police station to let you in on their investigations. Prancing around with Todoroki, hand in hand, play pretending you were legendary investigators tracking down a high profile criminal. Claiming you didn't need the help of the actual investigators, you and him were waayyy better off without them. As humiliating as the memories were, you couldn't help but feel a sharp twang in your heart at the sudden recollection. Echos of the reminder rung warm within you, you smiled softly at the thought.

Snapping back to reality you replied to the boy, "As helpful as that would be, I doubt that we'd actually be allowed to review security footage. The time that would save though.." You actually considered it for a moment,"Im sure we can figure it out on our own though!" You raised a fist with ambition, as Izuku's eyes lit up with excitement.

"y-yeah okay!" The boy stuttered at your sudden enthusiasm, what was up with you all of a sudden?

By the end on your first week at your new school, you and Shoto were already attached at the hip. He had this inexplicable gravity towards you. You were quiet, but friendly, not snarky or cruel like the other kids that approached him. You never made uncomfortable comments like, "Why is your hair like that?" or "What's that weird mark on your face?" You never poked him or pulled at him, and you'd let him hold on to your bag as you'd both wander around too. Sho liked to wander with you, it would get too crowed sometimes and you'd always drag him away, nicely of course.

You liked how he listened, no matter how long you'd talk. At first you thought he was zoning out or ignoring you, but then you would aways notice a soft smile creeping up on his face whenever you'd get to an exciting part in whatever story you were telling. He didn't shy away from your excitement when describing your favourite sweet or tv show, he was drawn to it. Like a warm flame, one that he wanted to nurture, although young Shoto wasn't sure how. He figured staying close by you would be enough for now.

You were inseparable in no time. Completely enchanted, the boy would get worried that one day you'd change your mind, that you'd find him weird, or get angry at him for not being able to come to school some days. Or for being upset, and not being able to tell you why. You'd notice the bruising on his arms, he'd worry that you'd be sacred of them, but you'd just smile at him with that smile of yours and drag him off to show him a cool rock you found.

Shoto would start to greet you with slight enthusiasm, better then nothing, whenever you would meet his eye before you'd go into school. He craved you the same way he'd crave a cold bowl of soba, although you made him feel a lot warmer on the inside, you made his heart beat faster then anything, and when you'd smile at him he felt like he was falling in place. It panicked him at first, he confused the feeling with the way he felt whenever his father would come home. Then he realised he wasn't scared when he was with you, like when he was with his mama, he was happy with you. He wanted the both of you to stay with him forever.

You and Deku had made plans to brainstorm a solution to crack down on the 'crook' , but that was for tomorrow, right now you were sat on your bed in your dorm room, fiddling with the cloth of your pyjama leg. Cheek resting on your knee with a befuddled look on your face, the days events fading through your mind, going over each every word of the letter. You had it open on your bed in front of you, the once pristine edges now crumpled and folded from your aggression earlier. You scanned over the words once more, 'I'll set your heart alight'..

With petrol orrr...? No. stop being stupid, you thought, obviously the person responsible isn't an arsonist out to get you. You hadn't done anything wrong! Besides who would put a threat in a love letter. It's obviously an attempt at courting you. Perhaps they have a quirk related to fire! You sat up, back straight. Groaned loudly, why hadn't you thought of that before, you guess you're just on edge sinc-

knock knock

Jumping in your skin, your heart racing, you scramble to reach the door, you unlatch the lock fumbling with the door handle, hands still shakey. You sigh a breath of relief, realising it's just Shoto at the door. Shoulders relaxing, you invite him in,"Hey Sho," you chuckle, "you startled me for a second."

"I apologise Yn," You notice the boy clenching and unclenching his fists, eyes still calm. On you, as always. You learnt over the years to look for other signs of body language, other than his eyes, such at fiddling hands tense jaw, clenched fists. Although you seem to be the only one who ever notices the behaviour. Was he nervous? "Are you busy at all?"

Your lip twitches at the sudden question, your heart jumps a little, calm down you weirdo, "No, not at all, come in!" You beam up at him, you wonder how you don't have smile lines around your mouth yet, considering all of the cheesing you do at him.

Stepping to the side, you lean against the door, letting him walk in past you. "What's up" His hair is slightly damp, he looks like he's just showered and smells warm and like mint.

"I.." He pauses for a short moment. Blinks, thinking, "I was thinking about what Midoriya said earlier." Cool toned eyes immediately latch onto yours.

"Oh yeah?" You ask strolling over you your bed, you sit down, back and head now against the wall , you pat the space next to you, inviting him over.

He nods,"Yes. Midoriya mentioned you received a letter?" He asked, tone slightly questioning, mostly monotone. The boy didn't seem at all phased by the situation. You study his face, no disruptions in his features, no strain or tenseness. Body completely relaxed.

"Yeah, it's right here. Pretty strange huh. Who the hell prints a letter out without writing their name or something. Ive got no idea who it could be from." You hand it to him, gesturing to the writing on the paper. "It's just a regular love letter, 's got a confession and everything, nothing out of the ordinary." You state as if you get love letters on the regular. You've never received one before but you guess that that's what they usually say. "No hints as to who they could be."

Shoto nods again at this. You turn your head to face him, his eyes lurking over the text meticulously. Damn he's more into this than I am. He hands the letter back to you once he's done. "It seems as though you have a secret admirer." He turns his head, faces inches apart.

"Yeaahhhh", You lean back slowly trying not to bring any attention to your movements. "What do I do? Should I even try to track 'em down?" Turning your head away from his, feeling much less flustered staring at the ceiling instead. "Would it be even worth it? The type of person willing to send me on some wild goose chase, I mean, who would do that. Am I overthinking??" Haphazardly swishing your head back around to look at him. You're greeted by the sight of Shoto staring right back at you, having not moved an inch.

"No. Perhaps this person will make another move."

"You mean like, send another letter."

"It is possible, Yn." He replies, face serious as ever.

"So you're saying I am overthinking this." You huff, acting fake annoyed at him. He responds by pinching your cheek in-between his thumb and index softy, a slight smile on his face, a rare glint in his eyes.

"Don't twist my words Yn."

You chuckle slyly, pretend glaring at him,"Im not! You're supposed to make me feel better! Instead you're just enabling me."

"Right."

everrrrr so slightly shorter than yesterday's part but here we go! Im aiming to make the next part longer, but we shall seeee

hope you guys enjoy ! ˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚ Let me know how you liked this one, and feel free to ask me anythinggg ˚ʚ♡ɞ˚

part 3

[cyber-streak-2]

Drift: What are you watching?

Rodimus: Oh, nothing. Whirl stole someone's mustache and Mags stormed off to hunt him while I review the camera footage.

Drift: Let me guess, it's Minimus' mustache?

Rodimus: No comment.

.

[anonymous-existences]

Chapter 8 : Arkham Creeping with Dan pt.2

[ꀸꍏꈤ꓄ꍟ-ꉓꍟꈤ꓄ꋪꀤꉓ ꉓꃅꍏꉣ꓄ꍟꋪ]

[ꜱᴇᴘᴛᴇᴍʙᴇʀ 29, 12:00 ᴀᴍ, ᴀʀᴋʜᴀᴍ ᴀꜱʏʟᴜᴍ]

Dante lit a cigarette as he slowly heard the hoovesteps of Fright Knight's Mare. "My liege, you have called." Fright Knight hopped off his Mare and Kneeled Behind Dante who was looking over Arkham Asylum from afar.

"Yes yes.... I have indeed. We have been given permission to take a new victim.. isn't that fun frighty?" Dante chuckled as he breathes out a puff of smoke from his cigarette. Fright Knight perked up, seemingly from slight excitement at a new victim from the 'mortal plane'. Dante laughed "Excited you are and so am I. He dare hurt our little Ghost Prince, and thus he must pay the price of Torture and The Endless Torture Of The Nightmare Realms." He turns around to glance at Fright Knight, Fright kept his head down but even the Mare is Excited and hyped up by this.

"We can't take any more, any less. Just one. Soul by the name of Jonathan Crane. Let's Depart." Dante floated and went invisible as he closes in on Arkham Asylum.

"May we have fun Tonight." Dante laughed silently his hair transforming back to it's original Flamey White Form, his eyes crimson red with Green Rimmings and Pupils white and slit like that of a cat.

"The Nightmare Realms Await your Damnation." Fright Knight said as he hops back on his Mare and became Invisible as he followed his Master.

[ꜱᴇᴘᴛᴇᴍʙᴇʀ 30, 9:00 ᴀᴍ, ᴡᴀʏɴᴇ ᴍᴀɴᴏʀ, ʙᴀᴛᴄᴀᴠᴇ]

┈◈◉◈┈┉[𝙳𝚒𝚌𝚔 𝙶𝚛𝚊𝚢𝚜𝚘𝚗 & 𝚃𝚒𝚖 𝙳𝚛𝚊𝚔𝚎 𝙿𝙾𝚅]┉┈◈◉◈┈

"This is... So gruesome- his head is completely crushed but not by something, and it can't be possibly someone unless-" Tim Sputters out in a fast Speaking pace but Dick Interrupts. "Calm Down Baby Bird, Slow Down your talking, let's look at the cameras again okay? Breathe." Dick demonstrates breathing slowly in and out and Tim replicates that slowly calming himself down.

"Okay..." They review the camera clips of Scarecrow's Cell, they couldn't see much as the clip was obviously corrupted with... Green and Red Glitches. They can hear some voices.

["ｍ𝔂 𝕃Ɨ𝑒𝕘𝑒 𝓱𝐚丂 𝓭𝑒ĆƗ𝓭𝑒𝓭 𝐓𝓱𝐚𝐓 𝔂Øย 𝔀Ɨᒪᒪ ๒𝑒 卩ย𝐍Ɨ丂𝓱𝑒𝓭 ย卩Ø𝐍 м𝔂 ĆØмм𝐚𝐍𝓭, ⓕØя 𝓱ยя𝐓Ɨ𝐍𝕘 Øยя 卩яƗ𝐍Ć𝑒 𝔂Øย 丂𝓱𝐚ᒪᒪ 卩𝐚𝔂 𝐓𝓱𝑒 卩яƗĆ𝑒 𝔀Ɨ𝐓𝓱 𝔂Øยя 𝑒𝐓𝑒я𝐍𝐚ᒪ 𝓭𝐚м𝐍𝐚𝐓ƗØ𝐍 Ɨ𝐍 𝐓𝓱𝑒 ƤƗ𝐓丂 Øⓕ 𝐓𝓱𝑒 ⓝƗ𝕘𝓱𝐓м𝐚я𝑒 ⓡ𝑒𝐚ᒪм."] The voice said, it was all static and clicks and hisses, Tim could barely translate it. Trying to find and piece the sounds together but he fails miserably instead.

"It hurts in the ears.... Something is clearly not right and I don't like it. The other population in Arkham are also Terrified, especially the ones near Scarecrow's Cell." Tim flips through the Files, "They Described seeing a man with a Flame like White Hair Walking down the halls past their cell towards Scarecrow's, and a ... Horse?? A Black horse with wings, fangs and Red Glowing Eyes that's being ridden by a Black Armored Knight that also had Red Eyes. One of them claimed to having nightmares about that said Entity upon making eye contact." Tim states seeing the sketches the 'people' near Scarecrow's Cell have made.

One of them sketched out a terrifying picture of said horse and it's rider. It's like something out of a horror movie. "... So... A flame like white hair man and a knight with a terrifying Horse, okay- wow- that's a lot of information that I will never honestly understand. The thing now is ... Did they, were they the one who crushed Scarecrow's skull into bits and pieces? Maybe I should call Raven after all—" Dick said nervously, and oddly terrified of the drawings, it's as if they're staring right at their souls, sentient and about to go hunting.

Nightwing/Dick adjusts his Suit's Neck trying to shake off the feeling of this chilling fear. Tim folds the papers and puts them in the files back again, also getting cold and chilled. "Maybe it IS supernatural? A demon? Maybe. Maybe a demon but there has to be a motive somewhere, there's Always a motive, did Scarecrow make a deal with a demon? Possible , or maybe this demon had a grudge but why a grudge? What's the cause??" Tim scratches his head trying to review every single footage given to him but he freezes.

"Oh fuck." Tim backtracks and plays the video footage on rewind and pauses at the right time. "A CLEAR FRAME! FUCK YEAH!" Tim yelled out loudly feeling victorious.

"Language Young Master Tim." Alfred corrects him as he places the cup of coffee by his desk, "Ah sorry Alfred and thank you for the coffee.... Just got caught up in this Case." Tim says as he sat back down.

"It's quite alright Young Master Tim, but Remember, indoor voice." Alfred smiles gently and Tim just nods, Alfred Walked off leaving Dick and Tim by themselves again.

Tim analyzes the blurry but not too glitched photo and trying to make out a picture and a clear frame of the suspect's face. The Man was looking at the camera with an obvious grin, his face was more glitchier than the others around but it was obvious his eyes were glowing and a piercing red with Green Rimmings. His Hair was indeed flame-like.

"Maybe, just maybe this person or demon or SOMETHING is in our system." Tim was frantic and desperate now trying to find this... Terrifying thing.

One File Came Up in the Bat-Computer.

"Dante.. Jamie Masters...?" Tim questioned himself. Because this was the Bartender of his Local Coffee Shop, and The Bartender who he got along with because of His Baby Brother.

Wait.

Didn't his Baby Brother Get Caught In the Fear Toxin Attack...? Was that.... The motive?

┉┈◈◉◈┈┉─┉┈◈◉◈┈┉─┉┈◈◉◈┈┉

Dante plopped into bed as he finished washing the blood off his body, He was pleased with himself and what he has done, his core purred in happiness for it has been so long since he's done something like this, not after his redemption for Danny.

╔⏤⏤╝𝐁𝐚𝐝𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐃𝐞𝐧(𝐅𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐭𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐩𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐀𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐝)╚⏤⏤╗

𝐏𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐨𝐡 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐚𝐧 𝐄𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐤

....𝐈𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐞.𝐩𝐧𝐠

𝐏𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐨𝐡 : 𝐈 𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐁𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐯𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐝𝐢𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬.

𝐠𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐄𝐜𝐨𝐓𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭 : 𝐘𝐄𝐀𝐀𝐀𝐀𝐀𝐀𝐇!!!! 𝐈𝐓'𝐒 𝐀𝐋𝐋 𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐑 𝐓𝐖𝐈𝐓𝐓𝐄𝐑

𝐃𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐧 𝐁𝐚𝐝𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐞 : 𝐃𝐚𝐝𝐝𝐲 𝐬𝐚𝐰, 𝐡𝐞'𝐬 𝐥𝐚𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐥𝐨𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 :3

....𝐈𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐞.𝐩𝐧𝐠

𝐃𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐧 𝐁𝐚𝐝𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐞 : 𝐇𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐡𝐞𝐡𝐞

𝐖𝐞𝐬𝐖𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐧 : 𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓. 𝐇𝐔𝐇?? 𝐖𝐀𝐈𝐓- 𝐈 𝐉𝐔𝐒𝐓 𝐁𝐀𝐂𝐊𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐄𝐃 𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐘𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆?? 𝐌𝐔𝐑𝐃𝐄𝐑??

𝐆𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐄𝐜𝐨𝐓𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭 : 𝐃𝐄𝐒𝐄𝐑𝐕𝐄𝐃!

𝐏𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐨𝐡 : 𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐑𝐢𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐮𝐥𝐨𝐮𝐬

𝐓𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫/𝐡𝐭𝐭𝐩𝐬//:𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐤/𝐒𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐫𝐨𝐰-𝐌𝐮𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝-𝐢𝐧-𝐡𝐢𝐬-𝐂𝐞𝐥𝐥...

𝐖𝐞𝐬𝐖𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐧 : 𝐌𝐎𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑 𝐈𝐍 𝐂𝐇𝐑𝐈𝐒𝐓 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐀𝐌𝐈𝐓𝐘'𝐒 𝐏𝐇𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐎𝐌- 𝐖𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐅𝐔-

𝐏𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐨𝐡𝐍𝐞𝐫𝐝 : 𝐈 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭, 𝐮𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐲 𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐮𝐥𝐨𝐮𝐬, 𝐢𝐭'𝐬 𝐯𝐢𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲.

𝐖𝐀𝐈𝐓 𝐖𝐇𝐎 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐍𝐆𝐄𝐃 𝐌𝐘 𝐍𝐀𝐌𝐄!!

𝐆𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐄𝐜𝐨𝐓𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭 : 𝐂𝐨𝐩𝐞.

𝐏𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐨𝐡𝐍𝐞𝐫𝐝 : 𝐒𝐀𝐌!! 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐍𝐆𝐄 𝐈𝐓 𝐁𝐀𝐂𝐊!!

𝐆𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐄𝐜𝐨𝐓𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭 : 𝐍𝐮𝐡-𝐮𝐡

𝐏𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐨𝐡𝐍𝐞𝐫𝐝:𝐅𝐔𝐂𝐊 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐌𝐄𝐀𝐍 𝐍𝐔𝐇-𝐔𝐇???!?!?

Dante laughed as he read the messages very amused by their reactions, although it's concerning that kids like them find this normal but then again they've been through worse and Trauma so it's reasonable for now—

..╔⏤⏤⏤╝𝐅𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐭𝐋𝐨𝐨𝐩𝐬╚⏤⏤⏤╗

𝐅𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐭𝐋𝐨𝐨𝐩𝐬: 𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐉𝐨𝐛.

Dante stared at the Message pleased with himself. Not knowing he's about to get into a lot of shit because of one single frame that recognizes him.

Oh well, he'll get away with it... Maybe.

GHRAAAAH anyways

:33, that's the end for Dan Mission XD now it's gonna be Dan getting JL and JLD's attention because of a single frame, RIP.

Translation for the Glitched Text :

["𝐌𝐲 𝐋𝐢𝐞𝐠𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐛𝐞 𝐩𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐝 𝐮𝐩𝐨𝐧 𝐦𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐝, 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐡𝐮𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐚𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐄𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐝𝐚𝐦𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐦."]

Enjoy as always. <33.

[universitypenguin]

Chapter 28

Summary: Princess confronts Court about his investigation and is shocked by what he's uncovered. After their trap fails, she takes the hunt for evidence into her own hands and comes face-to-face with the stalker.

Word Count: 8,029

Warnings: Includes scenes with gun violence, hostage situations, and car accidents. Discussion of stalking behaviors, general violence, computer hacking, and spy/intelligence agencies. Minor foul language. Only appropriate for 18+ readers. No minors.

Author's Note: Thank you all for you patient with me these past few months. Your encouragement made a huge difference and really motivated me to get it done.

Masterlist

Court stationed himself behind the desk in Lloyd’s office and used the laptop to pull up livestream footage from the cameras in the patent department. He leaned back, looking relaxed, other than his eyes. That cool blue gaze locked on the screen, gleaming with an intensity usually seen in carnivorous birds before they descended upon unsuspecting prey. 

Nausea curled unpleasantly in your stomach, a sign that the rush of adrenaline that had propelled you through the evening had run out. You folded yourself into the chair across from Court, rubbing your temples to ease the dull throb of a headache. The overly bright fluorescent lights stabbed at your retinas. Though you were completely stationary, your head was spinning, as if you were on a high-speed carousel. Your thoughts whirled in a chaotic vortex that intensified the dizziness. Everything in your mind was colliding, tipping you off balance.

Yet despite the over stimulation, you were bubbling with excitement, because for the first time in months, you could see the fragments of the puzzle that had upended your life. Some of the edge pieces had been sorted out tonight. You’d been able to assemble the corners and from there, a complex mural of overlapping details took shape. For instance, your breakup with Aiden. He’d used his promotion as a pretext for the split, and in July, you’d had no reason to doubt him. After all, he’d been out that night celebrating with his friends at Song-Li’s restaurant. 

In hindsight, it was appalling that you’d missed such a glaring inconsistency, one that had been right in front of you.

Song-Li’s was outside of Aiden’s usual orbit–so far out of it that you wondered how he’d known the place existed. You knew you hadn’t mentioned it to him and the business didn’t have much of an online presence. They catered primarily to the office dwellers native to the neighborhood and charged exorbitant delivery fees to anyone who lived outside of a two-mile radius. If you knew anything about Aiden, it was that he was a netizen to the core, with annoyingly high standards for bars and restaurants. He wouldn’t step foot in a venue that had less than fifty reviews, and Song-Li’s only had nine last time you’d checked. 

It made no sense for him to pick an unfamiliar place for such an important event, especially one with all his friends in attendance. Yet you’d seen the crowded table and watched the gifts exchange hands with your own eyes. That meant the party Friday evening hadn’t been his first visit to Song-Li’s, and that demonstrated a much deeper familiarity with the neighborhood around your office than Aiden should have had.

Like a record scratch, your mind froze, the engine of your train of thought stalling mid-cognition as something else that should’ve been obvious to you long before now unveiled itself. In retrospect, it was as blatant as a neon sign in a dark alley: Aiden hadn’t seen the dismissal coming. He’d told all his friends about the promotion, thrown himself a party, and ended things with you. Those weren’t the actions of someone who anticipated an abrupt change in their fates. He’d been blindsided. 

Another event that made no sense was Aiden’s confrontation with Lloyd. You’d assumed it stemmed from jealousy, but reflecting on it now you realized that most of Aiden’s effort had been directed towards peacocking in front of Lloyd. He’d barely even interacted with you. The aim seemed to be the preservation of his ego, driven by the need to look tough in front of his friends. Between breaking up with you in a text message and his priorities at the restaurant, it was evident that Aiden had no lingering romantic interest in you. 

The deduction was sound, except for one tiny wrinkle: Aiden had shown up at your apartment a few hours later and made a scene so loud it had woken your neighbors. His behavior wasn’t logical. Neither were his later efforts to break into your apartment. That first attempt had been inelegant, but the second was meticulously plotted. The math didn’t add up, but reviewing the equation seemed to shade in the contours of the missing variable: Aiden’s motivation. Between the confrontation with Lloyd and Aiden’s appearance at your place, something had made him do a complete one-eighty, from callous to desperate.

While much of the puzzle remained incomplete, enough had come together that it revealed the blank space. That space had taken on a distinct shape, and the dimensions of it seemed to outline Court Gentry perfectly.

There was no doubt Court knew more about your ex-boyfriend than he was letting on. He’d claimed the spy had recruited Aiden to crack the patent department’s upgraded cybersecurity, which rang true, especially since you’d already confirmed it through Landon’s source at the FBI — he’d been terminated for “suspicion of espionage.” An allegation like that from a major IT industry conglomerate wasn’t common. No competent HR department would’ve signed off on such an action without hard evidence to back their claim.

Given that Aiden had been expecting a promotion instead of a termination, you figured the company hadn’t obtained the evidence on their own. If that was the case, the only plausible explanation for his abrupt dismissal was that an outside source had provided them with proof. Everything seemed to loop back to a single point of origin with Court Gentry at the center. He had to be the company’s source.

From that revelation, it wasn’t much of a leap to conclude that he’d been investigating the spy for a lot longer than he’d let on. You tried to recall if you’d bumped into him at the casino bar or if it had been the other way around. The exact order of events escaped you, but the timing of Court’s appearance in Singapore was damning by itself—he’d shown up just days after Aiden had been fired. Lloyd had once told you there was no such thing as a coincidence with spies, and that seemed especially true in this instance.

You wondered how long it had taken Court to gather enough proof for Aiden’s company to take one look at it and dismiss him immediately. Weeks? Months? He’d produced the evidence at the end of July, and it was now the middle of September. The timeframe begged the question of how much more he’d gathered since then. Perhaps the origin of the entire investigation had been Aiden. It tracked, because accounting for their personal history, who else would’ve drawn Court’s suspicions other than Lloyd?

The thought of Court already knowing the spy was your stalker made your stomach clench. If he had investigated you, he would have been aware of the stalking. If he’d been on Lloyd’s trail in Singapore, surely he would have dug into Lloyd’s close associates, too. That he’d read you in on the details of the investigation tonight hinted that he’d already vetted you. The odds of him knowing the stalker’s identity and holding it back lit a smoldering fury in the pit of your stomach. 

“You deliberately gave me a false impression of how long you’ve been investigating the spy, didn’t you?”

Court looked up from the laptop. “Excuse me?”

“You knew the spy was my stalker. How long have you known?”

He arched an eyebrow. A too-innocent expression lit his face.

“Don’t try me,” you warned.

To your surprise, he dropped the ruse. “I’ve suspected for a while, but only found proof a few days ago.”

“You were investigating Lloyd in Singapore, weren’t you?”

Court tilted his head. “Did you just put that together?”

You ignored the sarcastic tone. “By extension, you must’ve been investigating me, too. That you’d tell me so much about the spy’s activities proves it.”

“The spy made a transmission while you were abroad, which cleared Lloyd and you, but I kept digging through Lloyd’s contacts, searching for a connection. Eventually, I found one.”

“So you know who the spy is?”

“I said I found a connection to the spy, not that I’d found him,” Court said.

“Aiden was the connection.”

“Clever. Give the girl a gold star.” 

He was trying to throw you off topic by starting a fight. You recognized the maneuver almost immediately–it was exactly how Lloyd tried to dodge questions when you first worked together. 

“You got Aiden fired almost instantly, which means you gave his company irrefutable proof he’d coordinated with the spy. What was it?” 

“He made an extra copy of the decrypted program and left it… lying around, so to speak. I turned it over to the company’s security officer.”

“Lying around? Where?”

Court’s lips twitched. “Right under your nose.”

You stared at him for a moment. “He hid it in my apartment, didn’t he?”

“It was in your kitchen pantry, buried in a bag of rice.”

“Son of a bitch!”

“I also had proof of the payments he accepted from a bank in Hong Kong. It was more than enough to get him fired, especially after his company proved that his fingerprint unlocked the phone I retrieved from your rice.”

“If you had that kind of evidence, why didn’t you just report it to the police?” 

“Because Aiden was just a symptom of a much bigger problem–a problem I didn’t have proof existed at that point.” 

“Weren’t you worried that reporting Aiden would tip off the spy?”

“I was counting on it. Sacrificing the spy’s pawn was a shot across the bow, and it worked.” 

“What else did you do?” 

"I kept Aiden under surveillance, hoping he’d lead me to the spy, but the only place he kept returning to was your apartment. Eventually, I realized he was after something there.”

“The phone hidden in my pantry, which I assume you’d already broken in and stolen.”

Court smirked. “Better me than Aiden, right? The phone proved Aiden’s involvement, but it didn’t reveal the spy’s identity. At least, not until I saw the pictures in Detective Diskant’s file.”

“You had the entire file? Including the photos? How?!”

“I blackmailed a dirty cop.”

“Which is how you knew the spy’s IP address matched the one the stalker tried to hack my computer from.”

“No. That only came to light yesterday. What caught my interest was a picture the stalker sent while you were in Qatar.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t read those messages.”

“Good choice. They were creepy,” Court said. “It was the one he took at your apartment building on July 18th.”

“What about it?”

“The metadata proves when and where it was taken.”

“… and?”

“Aiden’s messages with the spy revealed that he’d threatened the spy, saying he had an insurance policy hidden somewhere safe. If the spy tipped off his company, Aiden would use it. The spy waited a few days to respond and then texted Aiden an image of your apartment building.”

“Walk me through that slower, I’m not getting it,” you said.

“The spy was at your apartment building on Tuesday, July 18th. The metadata proves the exact date, time, and location of the photo. He waited until Friday night to send it. When I saw the same picture in Diskant’s file that I’d seen on Aiden’s phone—”

“You cloned Aiden’s phone?!”

Court shot you a sardonic look.

“Right. Never mind, of course you did. Continue.”

“I knew exactly where the spy was on that day and time. The security footage from your apartment didn’t show much, but after you were almost run down a few weeks later, I had a second chance to figure out what kind of car the suspect was driving.”

“The police tried that,” you said.

“I have a lot more time on my hands than a metro police detective and considerably fewer restrictions — both moral and legal. With a lot of legwork, I narrowed it down to a specific make and model.”

“Why would the spy take so long to send the picture to Aiden? And even longer to send it to me? By my count, he waited—”

“Three days before sending it to Aiden and ten days before sending it to you. With Aiden he timed it to coincide with his party, presumably for dramatic effect. With you, your lack of reaction annoyed him and he needed to up the ante.”

“Why did a picture of my apartment freak Aiden out? I don’t get it.” 

“Think. What was at your apartment building that would’ve drawn the spy’s interest?”

“The phone. Damn it! What did Aiden do, tell him where it was?!”

“No. But he said he’d hidden it somewhere safe, which ruled out his home or work. Your place was relatively secure yet also accessible to Aiden, so it came under suspicion quickly.”

You were struggling to follow. “Aiden kept proof of his own wrongdoing… as an insurance policy?”

“Yeah, not sure what he was thinking there. It only seemed to irritate the spy.”

“I don’t imagine it took him long to figure out where it was,” you said.

“Nope.”

“That’s what triggered the stalking, isn’t it? He came after me because of Aiden.”

“At first,” Court said. “But based on the escalation in August…”

“Right. Yeah. I know, I just…”

“Get over the denial, Princess. If anything’s clear from the police reports, it’s that this guy is insane, but he’s also patient and calculating.”

“He even set up a red herring for me to chase.”

Court nodded. “He knew about the breakup and the attempt to break into your apartment; he took advantage of Aiden’s erratic behavior to drive your suspicions in that direction.”

“What else did you uncover?”

“Diskant’s file gave me a lot more angles to work from. There are several events involving the stalker that tell me where he was and when.”

“You even got his height and build.”

“The security footage from Lloyd’s backyard was very helpful. It eliminated most my suspects,” Court said.

“Who do you think the spy is?”

“Someone who’s been hiding their talent with computers.”

“Talent? He had to get Aiden to crack the security for him.” 

“He was good enough to beat the first version in May and bypass the safeguards intended to stop the transmission of classified files. He was good enough to hack your work computer, at least for a few minutes, and he knew who to reach out to when he couldn’t get through the upgraded encryption.”

“So he’s good, but not excellent.”

“Pretty much,” Court said.

“I know you have a theory.”

“Are you sure you want to hear it?”

“I’ve been chasing answers for months. Just tell me.”

“Clayton Bishop.”

Your breath caught in your throat. The name reverberated through your mind. 

“Bishop?”  

“I’ve been analyzing his movements and the timing of certain events aligns suspiciously with activities undertaken by the spy and the stalker.” 

“But Bishop...” You couldn’t form a coherent sentence. “He wouldn’t do something like this. He's nothing like… He’s not my stalker!” 

“All the evidence points to him.” 

“There has to be another explanation.” 

“Everything keeps coming back to him.”

You fell back in the chair, stunned. Your thoughts raced as you tried to reconcile the idea of Bishop and the sadistic stalker as the same entity.

“It can’t be him.”

“Why not?” 

“He isn’t a computer expert!”

“You’re right, but he’s good with them. He learned how to code in high school and took computer science classes in college.”

“In coding languages that no longer exist, I’m sure. And computer science classes in, what, 1972? Come on, Court. Bishop isn’t my stalker.”

“I investigated everyone in the company between five-foot-seven and five-foot-nine who had the correct build, particularly those with technical backgrounds. Guess whose cell phone data puts him in your neighborhood on July 18th? Who missed a meeting on August 16th, when you were almost strangled? Think about it. He knew you were staying at Lloyd’s place and exactly when he was supposed to get home. He even recommended you go to Detective Diskant.” 

“Bishop doesn’t drive at night. He couldn’t have tried to run me down in the parking lot.”

“He claims not to drive at night, but didn’t we just walk by him in the lobby on his way out? It’s night time, isn’t it?” 

You sucked in a breath between your teeth. 

Court continued. “Accounting for locations, availability, knowing the spy’s approximate height and weight, it’s a process of elimination.”

“But Bishop is the one who bought the firm’s cybersecurity programs.” 

“That’s not a point in his favor,” he said dryly.

You considered that and stiffened. “Oh… shit.”

“You know I’m right.”

“I don’t know if you’re right, but I know Bishop has access to any computer with high-level security from the desktop in his office.”

“What?” Court asked.

“Remember how we assumed the spy would have to use the computer in the patent department?”

“Yeah.”

“Bishop wouldn’t need to be in the patent department at all.”

“Doesn’t that defeat the entire purpose of cybersecurity programs?” 

“Look, all I know is that I’ve seen him use it before. A few months ago, when Westin wouldn’t put in my hours, Bishop remoted into his computer and accessed my timecard. I forget the explanation, but the gist is that he can get into any computer, as long as they have certain types of security programs. It’s like a master key to the firm’s network. The trap we set is useless.”

Court’s jaw flexed as he returned his attention to the laptop in front of him. He punched keys and typed in commands. You circled the desk to look over his shoulder and saw the security camera footage from the hallway.

“You had access to this all along? Why didn’t you—?”

“The spy’s been scrubbing the footage,” Court said, cutting you off as he flipped between windows. He stopped on a live shot of the parking garage. “Look. Recognize anyone?”

“There’s no one in the frame.”

“Any of the cars?”

You leaned closer. There was a black car parked near the far exit.

“That’s Bishop’s car,” you said.

“That’s what I thought.”

Court expanded the window to fill the screen with the image of Bishop’s Lincoln sedan. It sat idling with its headlights on. Then the driver’s side door swung open and the familiar figure stepped out. He walked toward the sky bridge that connected the parking garage to the third floor of the law firm. 

Your heart sank. Bishop had only been pretending to leave. “Damn it. What do we do?” 

“Stay here. I’ll go have a chat with our friend.”

- - - 

It wasn’t without protest, but after he threatened to tie you to the chair, you stayed behind while Court went to confront Bishop.

You called Lloyd again, a knee-jerk reaction, like a child seeking their favorite blanket during a thunderstorm. The call went straight to voicemail. You groaned and buried your nose in the collar of Lloyd’s quarter-zip, inhaling the faint traces of his cologne. The scent calmed the roaring panic in your head and helped you organize your thoughts. 

You dialed Zach’s number, to the same result, and then tried Detective Roth. It rang and rang, eventually going to voicemail. Really? Even Roth was out of touch? He was in the middle of a search operation–his phone, at least, should be on. 

The laptop on Lloyd’s desk showed the live video feed from the patent department. You moved it to split screen and looked up the number for the Harmony Police Department. A desk sergeant picked up, and you requested to be transferred to Detective Roth.

“I’m sorry, he’s not in right now. Can I take a message, or would you like to be transferred to his office voicemail?” 

“No, thanks. I’ll just try him again later.”

You hung up and tilted your head back and stared at the ceiling. What now?

There was another option, one closer than any of the others you’d considered thus far. An armed guard was right downstairs, and the other was circulating around the building. Just a quick walk down to the lobby would greatly improve your circumstances. The idea drew you out of your seat and saw you halfway to the door before reality hit. Bishop had hired those guards. He was the founding partner in the law firm. Even if you could convince them there was a spy in the building, it was unlikely that they’d be willing to turn on their boss. 

You slumped onto the sofa. No Lloyd, no Zach, even Detective Roth wasn’t answering your calls, and the guards weren’t likely to be a help. If there was evidence you would’ve called Detective Diskant. The thought of him sparked another unpleasant realization that made your skin crawl. Bishop had pushed you to report the stalking. He’d even given you Diskant’s contact information. As a former prosecutor and someone politically well connected in the D.C. area, there were a dozen strings he could’ve pulled to have your complaint buried without your knowledge. 

On the laptop, the video feed from the patent department was stubbornly blank. Two more minutes until midnight, and the trap was still empty.

Evidence. You needed evidence. There was nothing to tie Bishop to the stalking or the spying. Weighing the odds, you decided it would be more prudent to try and prove the spying allegations since treason carried a longer prison sentence than stalking. Also, the spying had been going on longer than the stalking, so it was more likely he’d left behind evidence of those activities. This short period, while Bishop was distracted, might be the only chance to gather that proof. Bishop was a brilliant lawyer, and unless the case against him was airtight, he’d evade the allegations like an eel slipping through a net. 

What would Lloyd do if he were here? 

The question brought to mind images of Lloyd with his hands around Bishop’s throat. That wasn’t exactly something you were comfortable attempting on your own. Despite his advanced age he’d probably do more harm to you than you would to him. You amended the question: What would Lloyd tell you to do if he was here? The memory of being tailed in Singapore came back, along with Lloyd’s advice: call Jake.  

This time the phone was answered almost immediately. 

“Hey, Princess, change your mind about that ride home?” Jake asked in lieu of greeting. 

“Sort of. Don’t freak out, but I have something to tell you.” 

“Uh, sure…”

“Bishop is my stalker. He’s also been stealing government secrets from the patent department and selling them to the Chinese.” 

“What?!” 

“There’s no solid evidence to prove either claim, but there has to be something. Also, I need the combination to Lloyd’s safe.” 

“Princess, where are you?” 

“In Lloyd’s office.” 

Jake launched a volley of questions. You answered them, explaining how Court had shown up, the spying allegations, and the discovery of the IP address. As you talked, you crossed to the wall and swung open the painting to reveal the wall-safe hidden behind it. 

“And you went with him? With Court Gentry? Just like that? What were you thinking?!”

“We can get into it later. Right now, I need the passcode to the safe. I think Lloyd said it was his favorite Super Bowls by year.” 

“Stay where you are and don’t touch anything. Landon and I are on our way.” 

“How far out are you?” 

“About forty minutes,” Jake said. 

“This can’t wait. I don’t know what Court’s doing or how much evidence he has, but we wouldn’t be here if he had enough. I need the laptop you gave Lloyd, the one with all the hacking programs. You can walk me through the rest.” 

There was a murmur from the background, presumably Landon. You only caught a few clipped words of Jake’s response before he returned to the phone. 

“The code is 917889.” 

The door popped open and there, sitting on top of the pile of cash, was the laptop. You powered it up and sighed in relief when you saw it was fully charged.

“Alright. I have the laptop. We need to get something that’ll give a prosecutor reason to press charges against Bishop. I think I can get to the server room. Court said the spy’s been scrubbing the surveillance footage, but maybe there’s a backup copy? Access logs, record of key card entries… there must be something he didn’t think of.” 

Jake sighed. “Fine. Go into the safe again and grab an encrypted USB stick.”

“Got it. Why do I need this?” you asked.

“For backup. You always backup evidence, Princess. You’re going to need to get down to the second floor’s server room. Landon wants to talk to you, let me put you on speaker.”

“Princess, under the organizer tray in Lloyd’s top desk drawer there’s a ring of keys. You’ll need them to get into the server room.”

“Okay, I have them.”

“Also, there’s a square key. It’s to the skywalk between our building and the employee garage. Stop on the third floor and lock it.” 

“Why?”

“If Bishop makes a break for it, it’ll slow him down. Jake is on his tablet, hacking the security cameras as we speak. He’ll be watching your back every step of the way,” Landon said.

You tucked the keys into your pocket and secured the laptop under your arm. 

“Alright. I’m going downstairs now,” you said, slipping in one earbud and switching the call to Bluetooth.

You moved cautiously, every little noise amplified in the stillness. Jake and Landon's voices murmured in your ear as they talked quietly between themselves. Hypervigilant, you navigated the stairwell, stopping on the third floor to lock the bridge to the garage. It felt hot on the second floor, despite the thermometer in the hallway reading 71 degrees.

“I’m at the server room.”

Jake guided you to the correct key on Lloyd’s ring for the deadbolt and gave you the door code. Inside, the server room was cool and dimly lit, with a pale blue strip of LED lights along the perimeter of the ceiling providing just enough visibility. You found the computer tower in the cabinet under the desk and disconnected its HDMI and USB cables, and plugged them to the laptop, which automatically brought up a new window.

“Okay, I connected the laptop to the computer station in the server room. What now?”

“Hold on. I’m piggybacking onto your connection for a second. Let me…”

Jake trailed off, but you saw evidence of his presence on the laptop screen. Windows opened and closed, then a terminal popped up, and lines of code began appearing at a rate faster than any normal human could type.

“There. I took care of the firewalls. You shouldn’t have a problem now.”

“Wait. If you can piggyback off the laptop, why can’t you do this part, too?”

“Princess, looking through these files requires a much larger screen than I have on my tablet, and an actual keyboard. Not to mention that the tower is connected to a dozen different servers. It’s like a maze to navigate and the interface isn’t user-friendly. I can’t even get it to display on my tablet.” 

Landon’s voice came over the line. “Jake, get a bead on where Bishop is.”

“I already did. He went into his office a few minutes ago and Court Gentry followed just after. Princess, I’m going to need you to get into the keycard logs. It’ll tell us who opened what doors and when.”

You followed Jake’s instructions to access the keycard database. 

“Start with the patent department last week at 11:49 P.M.—that’s just before the stalker tried to hack your work laptop.” 

“I’ve got a list of dates and times. The keycards are listed under employee numbers, though.” 

“Give me the numbers, I can look them up.”

“There’s two that look suspicious. One is from a guard and the other is registered to number #000.”

“Wait. What? It’s a guest user?”

“I don’t know, but their employee number is just three zeros,” you said. 

“That’s a guest pass user. Scroll over to the far right column and check their permissions.”

“It’s blank.”

“It can’t be blank,” Jake said. 

“This one is.” 

“How far back do the logs go?”

“Only a couple weeks. Let me check where Bishop’s keycard has been used… Huh. He’s been here late at night a lot lately. Like, around midnight. That’s unusual.” 

The silence on the other end of the line was palpable. 

“We're only a mile away,” Landon said. 

That would’ve made you feel better, but even at this time of night, traffic would be congested the closer they got to the city center. Soon they’d be slowed to a crawl. You turned back to the computer. 

“I cross-checked Bishop’s key card with the patent department door. For the past few weeks he’s gone in and out almost every morning at around 7:40 AM.” 

“How long are the visits?” Jake asked.

“A little over twenty minutes each. What about the surveillance footage? Court said the spy’s been scrubbing it, but there must be a backup.”

Jake directed you on how to get into the video storage server. After the connection finally loaded, you scrolled through the frames, tapping your nails on the counter as you examined the images. 

There was footage showing Bishop coming and going from the patent department, his office, and through the lobby. None of it looked suspicious. Finally, you found the video of the patent department last week during the hacker’s attempt. 

“The video’s just a black screen.” 

Jake groaned. “Damn it. He’s literally been scrubbing the footage, hasn’t he? I know that program. It sends a damaged file to the backup server which interprets it as blank.” 

“What else? We track computer logins, right?” 

“That’s on a different server.”

Getting into the computer records server was another ordeal, which resulted in you getting kicked out of the system twice when it suddenly recognized you as an intruder. Jake had to remote in again and take down another firewall. Finally, you opened the database screen.

“Start by looking at Bishop’s logins, then check for the ghost guest card,” Jake instructed. 

You searched the database and waited as the results filtered, dumping out into a clunky excel spreadsheet. “Yikes, this is a lot. It goes back almost to January. Everything is listed as his own computer, though.”

“Find out who was using the patent department’s computer during the attempted hack.” 

The computer produced the results of your inquiry at a sluggish, belligerent pace.

“Okay. The ghost guest pass is on this list. It’s the only one with blank permissions, so I can easily identify it. Also, there’s this random account that’s been accessing the computer remotely. It shows up several times a day.” 

After a brief analysis, he clucked his tongue. “Ah, I know that account. It’s just the IT department’s keystroke logger.” 

“Excuse me? Keystroke logger? I did not consent to a keystroke logger on my computer.”

“You only have to consent if it's monitoring you. This doesn’t save any official data–it identifies users by their typing patterns. The program’s being trained right now. They’re planning to introduce it in next year’s security update.” 

“Doesn’t everyone type the same?”

“Actually, typing is surprisingly unique. It’s almost like handwriting. People press keys differently, move from one key to the next with certain patterns, and use different rhythms. They’re subtle differences but taken together it’s enough for keystroke dynamic programs to create unique profiles for each user.” 

“Mmmhh. Delightful,” you muttered. 

“Give me a second, I don’t have access to that database, but…” 

“–but you can fix that,” you said, finishing Jake’s sentence. 

“I just did and guess what? We’re in luck. The keystroke logger went into beta-testing on the first of August.” 

“Which helps us… how?”

“We need to identify the owner of the ghost guest pass and the keystroke logger can do just that. Download the login spreadsheet and save it. Then I want you to run a search for any other activity under that pass.” 

“I have to access a different part of the server to do that, don’t I?”

“Sorry, Princess. You’re going to get back into the keycard access logs.”

“Great.” 

You wove your way back through the maze to find the correct server and followed Jake’s directions. The search of the keycard logs only brought up one result. 

“There was one instance when the guest pass was used. It unlocked the elevators last week, on the night of the hacking attempt.”

“Pull up the surveillance footage, if there is any. You need to–”

“I’ve got it. There’s a video file.” 

You fast-forwarded through the file to the timestamp where the keycard logger recorded its use. A figure entered the car, but he kept his head down and stood close to the cameras. All that was visible in the frame was some gray hair.

“Jake, I’ve got something. Whoever used that pass knew where the camera was. They’re standing too close for it to capture their face, but the top of his head is visible. I can see silver hair, and that’s it.”

“I’m seeing it too,” Jake confirmed. “Is that the right color? I thought Bishop’s hair was more white than silver.”

“You’re right. The hair on camera is dark gray and wavy. Bishop’s is silver and fine.”

“Is there any footage of him getting off the elevator?” Jake asked.

“Kind of. It's grainy, and I can’t make out much more than a shadow.”

“Send it over. I have a program that might clear it up.” 

“Done,” you said, tapping a key.

After a few minutes, Jake spoke again. “Got it. You’re right. The person using the elevator wasn’t Bishop. The restored footage isn’t great, but even with the artifacts, you can tell the figure it captured is about fifty pounds lighter than Bishop.”

You let your head fall back, inhaling through your nose. Relief surged along with frustration. You were glad Bishop wasn’t your stalker, but the setback was still disappointing.

“Are you still there Princess?” 

“Yeah.” 

“I got into the keystroke logger database, but I need you to do something for me.” 

“Okay.”

Under Jake’s direction, you navigated to a file storage area. “Uh… what am I even looking at?”

“Screen recordings.” 

“Of what?”

“Guest pass users. There’s a counter security measure where anyone using a guest pass on a workstation outside of regular hours is subject to random screen recordings.”

“Wouldn’t Bishop know that?” you asked. 

“Yes. That’s why I doubted he was the stalker after you found the guest pass. Search for any screen recordings created on Thursday of last week, originating from the patent department computer. Check around the time your computer was hacked. If there’s a recording, we’ve got the spy’s identity for sure.” 

You scanned through the records. “I have several files from 11 P.M. and 1 A.M., but there’s nothing that shows what computer they’re from.” 

“Download all of them to the laptop and copy the file to the USB,” Jake said. 

“Alright.”

“Now I want you to check something on the VPN server. Look up Bishop’s logins the night of your hit and run. August 13th, I think.” 

With a sigh, you went through the tedious process of changing servers again. It was a lot more fun to watch Jake hack than doing it yourself. 

“There’s a couple logins in the afternoon,” you said. “What am I looking for?”

“How long was the last login that day?”

“Four hours.” 

“What device was it from?” 

“His home computer. When I click into the file, it shows me his location. He was miles away when that car tried to hit me.” 

“It doesn’t prove that he was actually there, but it's something.” 

Landon’s voice came over the line. “Princess, check if there are emails mentioning cybersecurity updates during June or July.”

“Right. That’s a good idea. The update forced the spy to seek Aiden’s help. Princess–” 

“What do you mean ‘good idea’?” you interrupted.

“Cybersecurity updates usually only happen in the first quarter. However, someone threw a roadblock in front of the spy by installing those programs. I want to know who it was.”

“You think someone knew there was a spy,” Jake said.

“Yeah, I do,” Landon replied.

Jake walked you through how to query the emails and scan their content with a series of SQL commands. You then let the computer scan through the labyrinth of messages for mentions of security upgrades in June and July.

A few minutes later you announced the results. “Bishop made the request. He emailed the head of the IT department on July 2nd asking for a meeting. Their later emails discuss when to implement the upgrade. Also, security didn’t get upgraded everywhere–it was only in the patent department.”

“That might explain why his keycard was used at their door so much over the last month,” Landon said. 

“And it clears him of being our spy. If he was spying, he wouldn’t make it harder on himself to transmit.” 

“I have a two-minute screen recording from the guest user,” Jake announced. “Guess what? Bishop’s keystroke logger signature doesn’t match the spy’s. Gentry was wrong–Bishop’s definitely not the stalker, or the spy.” 

You sat back, the weight of the revelation sinking in. Like Aiden, Bishop had been another red herring. 

 “So who is it?” you asked Jake.

“I don’t know, but there’s plenty of evidence. We’ll figure everything out soon. Jake and I are only five minutes away. Go to Lloyd’s office and lock the door. We’ll be there before you know it.” 

- - - 

The call with Jake and Landon broke up as they went through the 3rd Street Tunnel. You shoved the earbud into your pocket with the USB drive and ascended the stairs to the fourth floor. Your heart pounded in a mix of excitement and dread. The laptop was hard to grip with your sweaty palms, so you hugged it to your chest. Reaching Lloyd’s office felt like stepping onto dry land after a month at sea. You pushed open the door, surprised to find the lights had been turned off, leaving the desk lamp as the room’s sole source of illumination. You paused, letting your eyes adjust, when a movement in the shadows caught your attention.

A figure stepped out from behind the desk. As soon as the light hit his face, you recognized the intruder.

Westin Tafferty. The man who’d spent the last six months making your life miserable, micromanaging and nagging you at every turn.

“Westin,” you whispered.

An icy smile spread over his face. “Hello, Princess.”

“What are you doing here?”

“What do you think?” Westin asked, stepping closer.

He’d always been a thorn in your side, but you’d never imagined he could be behind the stalking, the espionage.

“It was you all along.”

Westin laughed, but there was no warmth in it. “Very good, Princess. Such a clever girl.”

You needed to buy time. Landon and Jake were on their way. You had to keep him talking.

“You coward. You spend months harassing me from behind a screen and then hide in the dark? You’re pathetic.”

He smiled, a glint of malice in his eyes. “Such harsh words. You don’t understand anything.”

“Then explain it.”

Something dangerous flashed in his eyes, but his expression cleared just as quickly. A placid smile settled over his face like a mask.

“I’d rather not,” Westin said.

“You’re afraid of confrontation, aren’t you? If you expressed yourself, everyone would see all that bottled-up rage. So you used me as an emotional punching bag.”

Westin’s smile faded into a cold stare. “You’ve become a problem for me, Princess. And problems need to be dealt with.”

You gripped the laptop tighter, suddenly remembering how it had felt to have his hands around your neck a month ago. He wanted to kill you. Where were the guys? Shouldn’t they be here by now? It felt like an eternity had passed. You scrambled to think of a diversion but blurted out the truth instead.

“Jake and Landon are on their way. They’ll be here any minute. You won’t get away with this.”

“Then I guess I don’t have much time,” Westin said.

He reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun, pointing it at you. With the gun he gestured toward the door. “Drop the laptop on the sofa. You’re coming with me.”

With the weapon trained on you, there was no other choice but to comply. You set the laptop down and stepped back. Westin kept his eyes on you as he moved to the sofa and snatched it. Your heart sank at the prospect of what was about to become of the device, but you still had the USB hidden in your pocket. Jake and Landon would be here soon. You just had to stay alive until they got here.

Carrying the laptop under his arm, Westin led you out of the office and down the hall to the elevator. On the ride down, your mind raced with potential escape plans, but the cold metal of the gun pressed against your back kept you in check.

The elevator descended to the third floor, opening in front of the exit to the skywalk to the employee parking garage. You tugged on the door. It didn’t budge. Westin cursed and dug in his pocket for keys.

As he fumbled with the lock, you saw your chance. Right outside the door, in the breezeway there was a trash can with an ashtray fixed atop the lid. While Westin’s attention was on the lock, you slipped the USB drive between your first and middle fingers. The lock clicked open and when Westin turned to you, expectantly you didn’t move. He seized your elbow and yanked you forward. Your stumble wasn’t entirely pretend as the momentum propelled you through the doorway. You grabbed the trash can lid for balance, shoving your fingers into the tray of cigarette butts and burying the USB drive under the ashes. Westin grabbed your arm and shoved the gun in your ribs. His grip tightened like a vise and he held you against his side for the rest of the walk to the parking garage.

In the garage, he led you to his car, a sleek Lincoln sedan. “Get in. You’re driving.”

You slid behind the wheel, hands trembling as you fastened your seat belt. Keeping the gun trained on you, Westin climbed into the passenger seat.

“Where are we going?” you asked.

“Just drive. I’ll tell you where to go.”

You navigated out of the parking garage, the weight of the situation setting in. From the corner of your eye, you glanced at Westin.

“Why me, Westin?” 

He laughed, a bitter sound. “You were just an annoyance at first. But then I realized you were close to Lloyd; that made you the perfect target.”

“Lloyd? What does Lloyd have to do with this?”

“I’m not actually a paralegal. My entire resume is a government sanctioned lie. It was part of the separation package when the National Security Agency kicked me to the curb.”

“You worked with Lloyd.”

“He made my life hell for five years, then didn’t even remember me. That kind of disrespect demands a response.”

“So harassing me is your twisted idea of revenge?” you asked, incredulous.

“No. Killing you will be my revenge. Making you miserable was just the build up. I had a front-row seat to watch as Lloyd got more and more wound up, chasing shadows, never really getting anywhere. He doesn’t give a damn about anything or anyone other than you — you’re his Achilles heel. And of course, I’ve enjoyed this little game immensely.” 

The car made the last turn down the ramp. In the dash, the clock read 1:00 A.M. Jake and Landon must be close 

“You won’t get away with this.”

Westin snorted. “We’ll see about that.” 

Letting him take you out of the building hadn’t been smart, but if you went with him to a secondary location, you were as good as dead. 

“Turn right,” Westin said. 

You hit the blinker and turned onto the street. At the intersection the light was red. You rolled to a stop. It was the same light you’d been stuck at with Court a couple hours ago, though on the opposite side. The flood lights in the median where the underground work was being done were off now. You stared at the empty work site, surrounded by concrete K-rails that barricaded the construction workers from passing vehicles.  

Going through the light would be another step down a slippery slope. If you drove through it, how much further would you keep going? Out of the neighborhood? Past the city limits? Each meter he took you further away from the firm lowered your chances of survival.

Your fingers squeezed the steering wheel as you debated tossing open the door and booking it. You’d have to undo your seatbelt first. That would give Westin reaction time. He could easily shoot you in a nonlethal spot and force you to keep driving. It would never work; running was out of the question. 

“Why is this damn light so slow,” Westin complained.

His comment drew your eyes back to the stoplight, then down, to the construction site in the median. Your heart thudded. Suddenly it raced in triple time. Nervous saliva flooded your mouth. Oh, this was a bad idea, even worse than trying to run. 

It was a game of chance, like rock, paper, scissors. At the moment there was no other option. You had to risk it.

Rock, paper, scissors… 

Rock.

The light turned green. You hit the gas pedal, shoving it to the floor and turning the wheel to the right–straight toward the K-rails in the median. 

The car slammed into the concrete pony walls and the steering wheel lurched as Westin tried to grab it. 

Your head snapped back. After a dazed moment you registered that the airbag had gone off. Your ears were ringing. You didn’t know why your ears were ringing. Were airbags loud? 

You felt something wet on the side of your face and hoped you hadn’t hit a fire hydrant. When you touched the wetness, your fingers came away bloody. That was surprising, because your head didn’t hurt. As soon as the thought crossed your mind your head began to hurt. It stung and sizzled with discomfort. You winced, then suddenly remembered Westin. You whirled to face him but the movement made your neck seize. Pain whipped down your spine, triggering a spasm that rippled through your whole body. 

Maybe wrecking head-on into a K-rail hadn’t been the best idea. 

You took a deep breath and turned slower to avoid another spasm. Westin was slumped in the passenger seat, his head resting on the dashboard. He wasn’t moving. You yanked the door handle. It was stuck. You pulled harder, shoving against the door with your thigh, then slamming your body into it. The movement hurt, but adrenaline covered the pain well enough that you kept fighting with the twisted frame until it groaned, metal grinding against metal as it finally yielded. You swung your legs out, exhilarated by the success–only for the seat belt to clamp down, jerking you back into the car. 

Damn it. You fumbled for the release. 

Westin groaned. You groped for the button, trying to trace the belt back to the clasp, but it was buried between the console and the seat. With blood in your eyes and the darkness of the construction site, you couldn’t see anything.

From the corner of your eye, you glimpsed movement and jerked back. Without your body blocking them, the street lamps illuminated the seat, revealing Westin clearly. He was still slumped over, but he’d shifted to face you, positioning himself with his back against the passenger door. 

Blood streamed from a large gash on his forehead. In his hands was the gun. There was a flash of light from the muzzle. It was the last thing you saw. 

After that, everything was dark.

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Next - XXIX

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Masterlist

[fremocpepoi]

Flex-Plus

I have always loved Spypoint cameras and their products. When I heard about the Flex-Plus I knew I had to get one, because some of the areas I have on my property make it difficult for me to go and constantly change out batteries as they are deep in the woods. It would be a great idea to have a solar panel hooked up to a camera, but again, because the camera is deep in the woods and doesn’t get…

[jbaileyfansite]

Interview with Elle Italia (2024)

Viscount Anthony Bridgerton is currently busy. To play the hearthrob with Glinda and Elphaba in the kingdom of Oz, waiting to go hunting for dinosaurs on a remote island with Scarlett Johansson. Jonathan Bailey has made it. During the pandemic, he feared that his career was over. He had filmed the first season of that bizarre, sexy period drama by Shonda Rhimes and, locked in the house, he was asking himself about the possible outcomes. We know how it went, a firework of colored sugared almonds. Everyone went crazy about everyone, including "Jonny".

Now, the consecration, with a role he dreamed of, the vain Prince Fiyero in the film adaptation of the legendary musical Wicked. The first part will be released on November 21, the second in 2025. With him, Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo and Michelle Yeoh. When he is late for our interview, he gets into the car, turns on the speaker on his phone and apologizes.

Don't worry about it. In Italy we have dinner late.

Oh, the italian dinners! You are living in my favorite place in the world, you know? I'm just back from Salento, near Lecce, and I had my fair share of amazing night dinners, but still my delay is unaccetable, i'm sorry. Too much passion in talking about the movie, and I was long...

Film are a great escape mechanisms. Why we need Wicked right now?

When I watched it for the first time, I got emotional. I think it brings joy, the joy of escaping, and underneath, it is full of strong and deep meanings for our world. It's a movie deeply political that speaks about identity, diversity, understanding the differences and celebrate them, finding each other, be together. It speaks of friendship, commitment and new awareness. Of evolution and growing up. All important things.

Are you a fan of the musical?

Yeah, I've seen it four times in London and I've always been obsessed by the Broadway's recording. We are all fans of the musical in the cast, everyone see themselves in it for different reasons. Fiyero has an incredible story and an interesting transformation, there are elements in him that I understand. The trick was to be able to capture the essence of someone who is considered a playful frivolous person, vane and superficial and make it work behind a camera. I think this could be applied even for my fellow companions. Cynthia's perfomance is able to portray a truth and an emotion, both vibrant of urgency. The first time I've spoken with the director, Jon M. Chu, I was so excited: he showed to me every frame of the initial sequence with such an enthusiasm, a year before beginning filming it. And the movie is exactly how he pictured it in his head, he made his vision true. He immediately conquered me and I have been on board ever since.

After Bridgeron, even here 'you are the most eligible bachelor in town'. It's an habit.

It's an absolute privilege.

Talking about the scene in the library in the movie, in a review, a journalist praised "the costumist for the line of the pants (very tight) and the director for the framing."

(He laughs) Amazing! You see? The immense joy of doing this job is that you are going to play characters so different from you, like an eligible bachelor.

Wicked invites us to fight for who we are. Does this reminds you of something?

When I was a teenager, I was similar to him, very undisciplined, but in a funny way; I could very well beginning to dance in a library. It was then that I began to sing and dance, so this is basically coming full circle for me. I was very confused about roles at that age, and attracted by strange and intriguing people. I would have definitely befriended Elphaba.

You are very reserved but you talked about homophobia in Hollywood in the past, of when they suggested to hide your own sexuality to be able to get roles. Did things change?

I have never used the word 'homophobia' linked to Hollywood but, yes, things are definitely changing. I have a career I would have never imagined to have before, and it was amazing to be able to do a series like 'Fellow Travelers', to talk about certain aspects of my life and I'm so proud of that project. I think the entire world is evolving and it's better for everyone.

You have started working at 7, you have done Dickens and Shakespeare on theatre, you have worked with Oliver Parker e Shekhar Kapur. Then Shonda arrived and...boom!

I'm feeling very lucky that this happened to me. After every type of experiences through the years, to try to do the right thing, and make a lot of mistakes, years without a job, Bridgerton came and it opened to me many doors. It came out during the pandemic so there were so many variables but the magical moments just fell into the right place. I'm happy and grateful.

Are you still able to take the metro?

I would never give up on that. I'm determined to continue to live a normal life. Something has changed, of course, but in a positive way. It can be a little scary at the beginning, but thankfully I have amazing friends and family, and I've been lucky with my castmates, both over at Wicked and Jurassic World, I have met special people, very generous and sensible who helped me to understand how to adapt to the changes...

Jurassic World. Don't tell me it's another dream that came true...

I'm going to tell you that Jurassic Park is one of my favorite movies ever. I still remember when I first went to the cinema to see it. When I came out I was shaken in a way I couldn't comprehend, so imagine the joy in being in it now. Also there is Spielberg as a producer, Gareth Edwards as a director - and I have been a fan of all his movies - I've worked with Mahershala Ali and Scarlett Johansson, another dream coming true. It doesn't start where the last one has ended, it is called Rebirth, and it truly is and there will be many surprises.

Let's get back to Wicked, witches and wizards: what's the magic in your life right now?

Nature. I've realized through the years that nature is able to give me balance, calm and solidity. In the movie, all the scenes with Elphaba and the talking animals moved me, so yeah, nature and the sea...I'm living outside London now, a dream to live a quiet life in the green.

You have often worked in costumes. The more uncomfortable to wear?

When I was little, at my first play, they dressed me up as a water drop. I was six, I was full of blue shimmery fabric that hanged down on my arms and pinched me.

How do you release the tension after a day at work?

I go for a walk, take a bath and listen to a podcast. And listen to music. Today I listened to Bee Gees, and lately I'm listening a lot of Ludovico Einaudi. A great mix of different genres.

Is there a movie that helped you to feel less lonely?

There is a silent short movie, based on a book, The snowman, by Raymond Briggs and talks about a snowman who comes to life and becomes friend with the kid who created him. Together they fly North and meet Santa Claus. It's very poetic and sad because at the end of the story the snowman melts, but it moved me and I could feel the love watching it.

A person who had an impact in your life?

A professor, Dr Brunton. He had a gentle manner about him and encouraged me, it was stimulating. He asked me to read Shakespeare in class with him, and I could feel that he understood me better than anyone else. Even in elementary school, to be fair, there was a teacher who had an important influence on me, Mr Peters. He encouraged all of us to sing, he had been the first one to make me believe I had something special in me.

In the next season of Bridgerton you will become a father. How do you feel about it?

It's an incredible sensation, I feel that son as my own (laughs)... I'm happy that Anthony has found happiness now. New challenges awaits him as a father and I'm sure he will talk to his son about his own father, whom he has lost too soon. That will be a good territory to explore.

Do you remember the precise instant you decided to become an actor?

I have started by chance, I was living in a little town in the countryside and taken dancing lessons in the town hall. That's where they discovered me. At the beginning it was mostly a game, then I've played prince Arthur in King John of the Royal Shakespeare Company and from there I've begun to understand this was what I wanted to do for a living. I realized for the first time on stage the power of playing Shakespeare. I remember thinking: if only I could this for a living I would be the happiest man on earth. That boy couldn't have predicted in a million years what would have happened next, though.

The work helped you to grow?

Yes, because it forces you to bring out what you have inside, even now that I'm an adult it's a continue discovery. It definitely helped me in the process of growing up.

Someone in Wicked says: "As soon as you figure out how to harness your emotions, only the sky is your limit." Have you learned, then?

I have always expressed my emotions with my body language. What I feel and think has always been clear on the outside, but emotions need to intrigue you, you have to understand them and learn to accept them. A certain transparecy is important in relationships. I think I have learned to communicate my emotions better through my work and the experience of others. Yes, I definitely think that without acting I would be a lost man.

Source

[poisonheadcrabsalesman]

roland and linda in cahoots on something

Thank you. Athos and Linda got along, I think Roland and Linda would get along like a housefire no one suspected.

-

"Roland."

"Something I can help you with, Spartan?"

Linda 058, the quietest member of Blue Team, is asking for his attention.

"How much nuance do you allow when it comes to personnel in potentially off-limit areas?" She asks while staring straight ahead, not bothering to look at the ceiling or a camera. Her voice is low and even.

He can't get a read on her in comparing her tone and body language to his wealth of readings from his crew. IIs were sarcastic, but also had a habit of malicious compliance and going right up to the point of rule breaking before stopping. It gave his captain and the admirals headaches but fascinated Roland all the more. Despite being a Ship AI and not having the experience of partnering with a Spartan, he found a kind of kinship in their creative problem-solving. What files were available to him painted a relatable picture. Linda had worked with an AI, receiving a glowing review, but Roland could read between the lines. Nuance, huh?

They were so interesting. Roland found himself struggling to balance his desire to see where this led and his ingrained purpose of maintaining order and function on the Infinity.

"That's an interesting question." He can't help the chuckle that follows. "Potentially, if someone was where they shouldn't be and I caught them, they'd get a warning to leave before I contact whoever's necessary to remove them."

"So you have to catch them."

Oh, this is fun.

"I see everything on this ship, Spartan. You may have the clearance, but I can't let you climb around the engine room."

A muscle twitches on her face. Roland counts that as a victory.

IIs were so much fun. 15 minutes after he's thrown down the gauntlet, Linda 058 disappears into a blind spot in a major hub of hallways. Roland notes it down for security and then leaves several threads around to ping when she reappears.

She does not reappear. He gets no ping. AI can't sweat, but the invigorating exercise of hunting for her sours when it's 4 hours later and the Captain is frowning at him.

"Roland, where's Linda?" Captain Lasky asks in front of three quarters of Blue Team.

"I may have chosen my words poorly." Roland says, his avatar slouching in defeat.

"Sir, she doesn't have her armor, so we can assume she's inside the ship." Kelly supplies.

Captain Lasky pales as he considers the thought. Roland hadn't considered that. "She would do that?" Lasky's voice is stricken. Roland feels a bit guilty as he watches his captain's blood pressure spike.

Fred is the only one who grimaces as they all nod once.

"You might have to admit defeat before she reappears." The Master Chief says to Roland. "Linda's competitive."

"What?" Roland gapes in shock. He doesn't want to give up so easily, surely there are ways to track the NI or IFF tag even if she's not in armor.

He stops himself from answering when his captain looks dolefully at him.

"Do I make a shipwide announcement and hope she hears it?"

He does.

180 painful seconds tick by and Linda 058 materializes out of a different blind spot halfway across the ship. Her ready gear has dust on the knees and elbows. The vents then? She walks into the meeting more relaxed than Roland's seen her.

Linda nods to the captain and Roland as she takes her place beside her team.

"Do I want to know where you've been, Spartan?" The captain sighs. His face and his biosigns are pointing towards no.

"Finding gaps in security, sir." Linda replies.

"Great." Lasky looks like he does not think it's great. Roland is just glad it's over. "You can help Roland with that when we don't have scheduled meetings."

Or not.

[fiorella-a]

A secret to be kept

Streamer! Aged up! Future! Kenma x Reader

Concept:

-While playing a horror game full of jumpscares, he blurted out something– and that something was supposed to be a surprise for you.

Info:

-Gn! Reader

-Fluff

-Some cussing here and there

•Kodzuken is online

•Kodzuken's stream will start in 1 minute!

•Kodzuken is now live, click to join!

"Hello Everyone. Good evening, afternoon or morning to each of you here. Today we are playing a game called?"

"The hunt!" You say excitedly, "Me and Kenma are in a call because I'm currently visiting a friend."

Kenma smiles at the camera while nodding at your words.

Chat:

:LMAO THOUGHT U KICKED THEM OUT 😭😠

:Heard that's a scary game

:Start! Start! Start! ✊✊✊

Kenma pauses while reading the chat, "alright Calm down and let's play the game, Y/n do you wanna read the game's information?"

"This game is in beta and is currently being observed for issues or bugs, please leave your reviews on what should be changed or whatnot.

Warning: this game will contain jumpscares out of nowhere. For those with weak hearts, please exit the game immediately.

You and your friends (recommended to play in multiplayer) decided to go camping out in Icho Woods, that's famous for it's haunted stories. Finding out there is no such thing as Icho Woods, you are now stuck in the middle of nowhere and desperately surviving. But hey! At least the haunted stories are true, though.

The game is fictional, anything that references in real life is pure coincedence."

After reading, you breathe in and out, "that was breathtaking. Now let's go on, shall we?"

Kenma nods his head before replying to you, "let's go."

Chat

:GOODLUCK YA'LL

:Hi! One of the developers here, hope you enjoy it :)

:NO WAY

:GET THE SCREENSHOTS YA'LL

:Blessing to be in this stream fr 😩

:(2)

"Okayyy we spawned in" you say in a surprised tone

"One of the creators of the game is here. I recommend adding a short cutscene of how we got here." Kenma looks at the camera and smiles politely.

Chat:

:The smile‼️‼️

:We're working on it! We're also planning on adding more lives for the players.

:AYO THE DEVELOPERS ARE SO NICE

A crawl was heard along with the sound of cracking bones. "What the hell was that? If i could be an emoji, it'd be the crying one" You say as you laugh nervously

Kenma chuckles at you, "No need to be af– THE FUCK?" Kenma swears as he gets killed.

Chat:

:We're working on that bug! If you stay at the spawn too long it'll kill you, promise we're working on it.

:Developers sweating nervously 💀

:LMAO STOP IT 😭

"Okay, I got killed too, yay!" You say still clearly nervous.

"Alright, follow me, love. I see a shed over there" Kenma says as he goes in first before your character follows along.

"We won't get killed here, right?" Kenma says jokingly

Chat:

:Nope! ☺️

:IMAGINE IF THE ROOF BREAKS AND THEY DIE

Kenma smiles at the chats.

"There's a battery here, i think it's for a light? A car? I'm not sure." You say to Kenma and at the chat.

"Oh, is that all?" "Yeah" "Alright, let's go out."

As Kenma opens the door at the shed, the monster was lurking around and spotted them. Giving them a thrill-chase. The monster climbs onto a tree before finally ending them.

"FUCK WILL YOU MARRY ME"

"HUH?!"

Chat:

:AYO KENMA?

:As developers, we didn't expect to help in a marriage.

:BRO IS DOWN BAD

:📷📸

Kenma coughs as he realizes what he said "Let's exit the game."

"Sure, sure." You agreed and followed along with him.

Once you both left the game, Kenma spoke again "Once you get home from your trip, we can talk about what I said" He says as he turns off his camera at the stream.

"Alrighty, Love."

"I'll end the stream now, don't worry, we'll leave in a review afterwards. Goodbye, chat"

"Babye, everyone!" You say with excitement.

Chat:

:*Gets onto knees* will u marry me bb? LMAO

:STOP MAKING FUN OF HIM, HE'S CLEARLY FLUSTERED YA'LL

:Bye for the two of you <33

:Looking forward to the reviews! Thank you and enjoy your happy life ❤️

:BYE BYE KENMA & BYEBYE Y/N!

•Stream ended 13 seconds ago

•Kenma is offline

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #35 – To Say Nothing Of The Dog by Connie Willis

This was my second shot on reading something of Willis’, and I found it far more enjoyable than the first. Which is something of a feat, honestly – it’s a rare book that you can more-or-less accurately describe s a ‘cozy romcom’ that doesn’t make me recoil. But it was charming! And dated, but mostly only charmingly as well.

The story is the second in a series, which no one ever told me when recommending it because it does not matter in the slightest (at least, I had no issues at all following along with the story) – though it does mean that it hits the ground running and requires you to pick up quite a bit from context for the first while. It follows Ned Henry, a historian at the University of Oxford in the mid-21st century – a field that has been changed dramatically by the invention of time travel. For example, it’s suddenly in desperate need of particle-accelerator money, which is why and the entire rest of the department have been conscripted by an incredibly generous donor to help her reconstruct Coventry Cathedral exactly as it was before being destroyed in the Blitz. Exactly. ‘God is in the details’, and Henry has spent subjective weeks running himself ragged attending wartime rummage sales and sifting through bombed out ruins to try and verify the fate of a glorified flower pot mainly notable for being overdone and ugly even by Victorian standards.

After going through so many rapid-fire temporal shifts that the jump sickness leaves him waxing rhapsodic about the highway and falling in love with every woman he sees, he’s sent to Victorian Oxford to lay low and recuperate, and deliver a vitally important package to a contact already in situ. Unfourtunately that jump sickness means that he’s pretty unclear on the particular what and who. Really it’s remarkable that things don’t spin even more wildly out of control than they do (and there’s a period where he might have accidentally made the nazis win WW2).

So yeah, not what you’d call a serious novel. Most of the plot is sneaking around trying to make sure various members of the Victorian gentry fall in love in the right pattern to make sure someone’s grandson can fly in the RAF down the line and someone else elopes off to America on schedule (with drastically limited details and new information from back home changing things ever so often). Also sneaking a pampered rare-fish-hunting pet cat and slothful bulldog around before they arouse the wrath of their hosts. The apocalyptic threat that’s theoretically hanging over everyone never really feels real, and it’s all just pleasently absurd and enjoyable to read.

The comedy reminds me of early Prachett, in a way? Which like, a light comedy from the ‘90s in large part poking fun at English academia, of course there are similarities, but still. Not that that’s n insult. There’s plenty of absurd situations caused by miscommunication or desperately trying to work around absurd social conventions or personal foibles. Almost the entire Victorian cast (and a decent number of the present-day characters as well) are objectively ridiculous people, and the book has a lot of fun making do the literary equivalent of chewing scenery for the camera.

I call this a romcom, but I’m not ever sure that fits, honestly. It is a comedy with romance, between the two lead characters, whose dynamic with each other is the main throughline of the book. But it’s never really a source of drama? Or a motor of the plot. They are coworkers who end up working in close confines and get alone fine, who both awkwardly admit they find each other very attractive and start flirting and at the end they kiss and adopt a cat together. Least miscommunication- or conflict-ridden central romance in fiction you’ve ever seen. I don’t know enough about the genre constraints to determine whether it counts or not.

Part of the appeal of this was honestly the odd ways it came across as a bit dated? Not at all in a bad way but just, like – the fixation on the Blitz as the sine qua non of English history feels very 20th century? The references to the Charge of the Light Brigade and Schrodinger’s Box and Three Men in a Boat, combined with the felt obligation to step back from the narrative and explain what they were in case the reader wasn’t aware – just the idea that someone reading a time travel story won’t already be familiar with the concept of temporal paradoxes, really. It all added up to a reading experience that felt a bit off-kilter in a pleasing way.

This is obviously a story very fascinated by Victoriana – both the time period and the popular memory. Its perspective on the period is – I guess ‘affectionate contempt’ might be the best way to put it? It clearly doesn’t think much of the Oxfordshire gentry, the women shallow as a puddle and obsessed with marriage gossip and spiritualism, the men with their heads stuffed with some academic fixation and utterly divorced from all practical affairs, both obsessed with petty one-up-man-ship of their peers and casually abusive and callous towards the servants who run and organize their lives for them. But it all feels rather good-natured; not a trace of righteous fury or real class hatred is on display, the fact of the empire and the source of their fortunes is I think not even mentioned. One more way it feels a bit dated, I suppose, or maybe just a way my usual reading’s much more explicitly political about these things.

I’m also not sure if this is a matter of tastes or popular memory changing or just my impression of what the received common wisdom is being parochial or inaccurate, but – given the association of ‘Victorian’ with imperial grandeur, aesthetic superiority, eye-wateringly expensive historical real estate, etc, it is quite funny how the book takes for granted that to be ‘victorian’ means to be horrifically gaudy and over-designed, devoid of elegance or restraint, and to have probably ruined some real medieval beauty in its creation.

Anyway yes, you absolutely could dig into this book and write some meaty essays out of it, but I simply was not reading it closely enough to do so. It’s probably overlong and definitely meandering and unhurried, but I did find it a really enjoyable read.

[cutekittenlady]

Trains, Planes, and Autobots

Summary Fic Part 7

[Previous] [Next]

Everyone is gathered outside the Maltos residence just as the sun is starting to go down.

Bumblebee complains about the late start, but Alex calms him as he loads the last of the groups equipment into Bee's trunk. He points out that while while Cybertronias may not need to sleep in the same way humans do, Breakdown will inevitably have to stop to re-energize and hunt for Energon eventually.

Thrash points out that on the other hand Alex has to eat and sleep and so they'll be stopping just as much.

However Hashtag cuts in on both of them and tells them that Breakdown won't have the benefit of Hashtags wi-fi abilities. Telling the group that she already knows which highway exit Breakdown, Swindle, and Hardtop have taken due to "Cons not believing in red lights". (Red light cameras took pictures of them). She directs Bee and the others what direction to start in, but warns she'll only be able to track them via that method.

Schloder gives Alex an energon reader and recommends he try and use it to track the three.

Thrash questions how hard its actually going to be to track down a racecar, an armored buggy, and a jeep all driving together.

Dot says it may be harder than he thinks and takes the opportunity to remind Thrash to use the holographic tech he'd been given.

Thrash goes into his alt mode and tries the projection out; producing the illusion of his motorcycle having a human rider. Nightshade acknowledges that it may be difficult for them to remain out of sight, but Optimus tells them to just fly high enough to be out of sight during the day. Their owl like alt modes ability to fly silently and even see at night will be vital in helping Bumblebee stay on top of things as they try and track Breakdown.

Nightshade promises to do their best.

With that the group says their goodbyes, and Bumblebee, Alex, Thrash, and Nightshade all hit the road.

Ratchet quietly asks Optimus if he thinks the Terrans can handle the recon mission to which Optimus proudly tells him that they've handled big things already and have come out on top. Besides the remaining autobots on Earth remain scattered across the globe and mobilizing them together would take time they dont have. He also reveals that he had included the Terrans on their channels. So if the group ends up in trouble they know they can contact them for aid.

Ratchet isn't entirely convinced but opts to accept Optimus' judgement.

Dorothy directs everyone back into the dugout for one final review of things before they (she and the kids) turn in to rest for the night before beginning fresh in the morning.

In the dugout, Schloder stands in front of a white board with various pictures placed on it with magnets. Some of them clearly hand drawn.

He marches back and forth in front of the board with Dottie standing to one side and says that they must review the "subjects of interest thus far."

He starts with Subject #1; Breakdown. A decepticon scout. Known to be one of the components of the combiner Menasor, being the combiners right leg. After the war he became a fugitive along with the rest of Decepticons and, evidently, took to participating in races all over the globe under false identities. Most recently he has accessed the database they brought back from the old GHOST headquarters for "unknown purposes". Was previously thought to suffer from a "paranoid disposition" but seems to have dropped it in recent years.

Twitch irritably says they already know about Breakdown.

Schloder just says they have to start somewhere. And besides it'd be good to keep him in mind as any information they get about him could help with the rest. Adding that Breakdown, as far as he knows, had an affinity for taking on race cars as alt modes.

Megatron elaborates that Breakdown, at one time, was able to produce a vibration that shut down non-sentient machines. Which is where he earned his name. However, he lost the ability after suffering grievous bodily harm during the war.

He pauses and tells them that in spite of his association with the stunticons he tended to be fairly reliable and competent, and Megatron had trusted him with vital positions more than once.

Optimus points out that they're not talking about Breakdowns qualifications at the moment which Megatron just frowns at.

Schloder moves on to Subject #2; Dragstrip. A yellow bot known to take on a dragster, rather than a regular car, as her alt mode. She is dangerously competitive and will do anything, absolutely anything, to squeeze out whatever she perceives as a victory for herself. Her constant attempts to slip into races and cause mayhem resulted in routine energon checks being enforced in drag races all over America. She makes up Menasors right arm.

Megatron dourly says Dragstrip once tried to challenge the Seekers to a race and tried to tear off one of NovaStorms wings to make it "fair".

Subject #3; Dead End. Yet another vehicular bot. He formed Menasors left arm. Is thought to largely be the Stunticons strategic center.

Megatron says he always had trouble finding bots willing to go on patrol with Dead End. His dour nihilism tended to get on the other decepticons nerves. It got so bad that only the other stunticons were willing to go on missions with him.

Noting Dead Ends red alt mode, Optimus asks Jawbreaker if Dead End is the bot he saw Breakdown looking up. It's possibly he may have simply looked up Dead End twice.

Jawbreaker looks at Dead Ends picture and says that hes not. It was someone else.

Subject #4; Wildrider. DO NOT APPROACH ALONE. He is dangerous and known to deliberately cause destruction wherever he goes. Some of the biggest road accidents recorded in the past forty years had Wildrider identified as the central cause. He was Menasors left leg.

Megatron admits he doesnt have much to add. Mostly they just pointed Wildrider in whatever direction the enemy was and hoped for the best.

Subject $5; MotorMaster. The leader of the stunticons. He makes up the central component of Menasor. Was known to use his alt mode, a large truck, to barrel through obstacles to make a path for the other stunticons to move in. Notably he had a tendency to gun for Optimus.

Optimus quietly mutters that he still doesnt understand what MotorMasters problem with him was.

Megatron says that he thinks it was a "truck thing" and asks Optimus not to take it too personally. Though he grows serious when he admits that MotorMasters bullheaded violence caused Megatron to be forced to put him in stasis before he left the decepticons.

Twitch asks why he had to do that.

Megatron explained that when Motormaster learned the Stunticons were being disbanded he became so violent that Megatron had to subdue him. He very nearly killed their CMO in the rampage.

He still has no idea if MotorMaster is still in stasis or not. He hadn't seen him on the battlefield after he'd defected leading him to assume Shockwave and the others had left him there.

Schloder clears his throat and admits he actually kinda sorta might have some news about that?

With everyone looking at him Schloder admits that after Mandroids defeat he found some, ah, abandoned messages from another GHOST facility elsewhere in the country. They had, evidently, found Motormasters stasis pod and had awakened him. They'd managed to keep him imprisoned, but a month or two before the mandroid incident he'd someone managed to escape.

Dorothy quickly asks where all the others are.

Schloder tells her that Wildrider and Dragstrip had been imprisoned too. Keyword had.

"You're telling me that right now there's a group of Decepticon road hogs driving around free who can come together to turn into a giant lunatic?!" Dorothy asks.

Schloder stops. Thinks. And confirms that, yes, that is the case.

Ratchet says that this is dire. If Breakdown was working at Motormasters direction, he may have just gotten a lead on the locations of all the other stunticons. If the group comes back together, Menasor will likely make a return.

Jawbreaker nervously says that that cant be all bad, right? After all the autobots presumably defeated him during the war, right? right?!

Optimus confirms that the autbots did indeed have their own combiner teams that helped to combat forces like Menasor.

Jawbreaker sighs in relief.

BUT, optimus finishes, not only are some of the autobots in question scattered across the globe, but many of the team members were left behind on cybertron when the space bridge was destroyed.

Essentially, if their theory about the stunticons coming back together to form Menasor is correct, there is no one readily available to beat him.

Twitch asks if Menasor is as terrible as all that, but is met with silence. She says that if thats the case then they HAVE to stop it.

Dorothy calms Twitch telling her they don't know for certain that thats what Breakdowns aim was.

Shloder adds that regardless, he'll try to scramble what few former GHOST personnel remain to try and dig through information to try and get the last known locations of all the stunticons, or at bare minimum, a hint as to where they each might be located.

Besides that they still have to discuss where Subject #6; "The red guy" fits into all this. As the last search Breakdown did, and the only one he attempted to do in secret, "the red guy" might just be key to figuring out what they're planning. They don't know what connection "the red guy" might have to Breakdown, what alt mode they might have, or even whether they're an autobot or decepticon. However they lucked out as Jawbreaker got a look at the file and can, therefore, potentially identify the person he saw.

Hashtag hypes Jawbreaker up and talks about how they'll have to organize a lineup of "perps" for him to identify. Jawbreaker is not enthusiastic only managing a small "yay".

Optimus says this might be a much more dire situation than they thought. He asks Schloder to provide information on the stunticons last known locations so that he, Megatron, Dorothy, and Twitch can find them and find out what they know and neutralize them if they have to. Meanwhile Ratchet will remain behind to help hashtag, Mo, and Robbie help Jawbreaker try and identify which bot Breakdown looked up using the collected database they got from the GHOST base.

He also asks that Agent Schloder to stay on hand to help with identification.

With that they've done all they can and have to will wait until dawn to get started.

Out on the road, Bumblebees group travels mostly in silence. The silence is broken by Alex who asks if anyone would be interested in listening to his travel playlist.

[sinfullyrosey]

*slams hands on table in a dramatic fashion*

Tired am I of the fics featuring Reader (and or one of the other characters) being uncomfortable and disgusted by Rook’s creepy quirks, yet still being paired up with him!

Instead, I bring forth to you the concept that Rook’s partner is unbothered by his actions, not because they condone or support his stalker-ish tendencies and constant destroying of other’s boundaries!

But simply because they’re into that shit.

Voyeurism. Photography. Predator/Prey. Hunting/Chasing. Obsessive Devotion/Praise.

All of those are legit kinks some have, and out of everyone in TWST, Rook would benefit the most by finding someone who appreciates and loves those forms of affections. While yes, his actions are not appropriate towards those who clearly want him to back off and feel uneasy towards him. In fact it’s kind of illegal.

But towards a partner with these kinds of kinks?

Rook must be the jackpot they’ve been looking for!

Like, imagine his partner being into photography: While in public, they take regular pictures of whatever, whether it be nature, models, animals, food, etc. But in the privacy of their own bedroom? Suddenly, the photos become much more vulgar, risque and focuses more on intimate moments shared between the two.

I especially like the angle of his partner specifically photographing themselves as their own model, whether in a pinup sort of way or through an artistic lens that utilizes nudity and symbolic narratives. Maybe they do submit these photos to art museums or maybe it’s just something they enjoy doing in the privacy of their home and they just keep the pictures to review after each session.

Or, more salaciously, they only do photography in the bedroom because they enjoy capturing those shared moments with him so that they can easily look back on them and relive the moment again, even if he’s not around.

As for the voyeurism angle, maybe his partner likes it when Rook takes pictures of them or watches them from the shadows because it gives them a special kind of thrill. Maybe they like the attention and knowledge that Rook looks at them as a piece of art to be gazed at and appreciated. While others may find his eccentric and obsessive nature towards beauty to be annoying or too much as it were, they don’t.

In fact, they may even agree with him whole heartily and thrive off of his over-the-top appraisal towards them to be one of the sexiest aspects about him!

This can further go hand-in-hand with an artistic photographer, because maybe they understand Rook’s viewpoint better than anyone else, because they’re the exact same way. And this translates into their photography as they try to set up good lighting and camera angles during their sessions to better capture these images to visualize their personal views.

Not to mention I think Rook would also appreciate finding someone who is similar to him in this regard and is openly receptive to his advances. It’s clear he enjoys the chase (he is a hunter after all), so finding a partner who’s open to participating in predator/prey or hunter/hunted type roleplays is probably a dream come true for him.

Maybe early on in the relationship or heck, even before that, when he’s still courting them, they would “play hard to get.” They were coy with him, keeping him on his toes and keeping him guessing as to whether or not they were just as interested in him as he was with him. One minute they were accepting of his invitation for a nice walk around Pomefiore, only to turn around and reject the bouquet he was attempting to gift them and refusing to even look his way.

Only for him to catch the glint in their eye and the subtle quirk of a smirk on their lips.

This got way longer then I intended and I kind of got off topic, but like these are just my thoughts. I’ve always loved analyzing characters and trying to pinpoint the type of partner would work best for them. And Rook is one of those special cases where fandom writes him off as a creep which isn’t wrong tbf and only seems to be interested in writing him as an unhealthy partner when like, the opposite is so much more interesting. Rook just needs to find someone who’s into the sort of stuff he does and would view it as a fitting love language.

[mariacallous]

I wonder if we will come to look back on that supposed great virtue of our age – controlling the narrative – and see it for the cornered form of submission it so often is? I felt nothing but immense pity for the cancer-stricken Princess of Wales before the release of her intimate family video yesterday, and the sheer weirdness of the resulting enterprise has only magnified the pathos of her situation. Watching the three-minute film, shot by some ad man, I wondered who could possibly feel it was anything but sad that a recovering post-chemo mother should feel that this is her best option for keeping “well-wishers” at bay a little longer.

A lot of people could, it seems from the feverish coverage since it dropped – meaning that convention demands I couch the notion that the existence of the video is in any way weird as “my unpopular opinion”. In which case, allow me to chuck in another unpopular opinion: this sort of thing appeals precisely to the grownups who when Diana died demanded that the then Queen leave off comforting her grieving 12- and 15-year-old grandsons in Scotland to come back to London – in effect to look after them instead. The selfishness and self-importance of a certain stripe of loyal subject is at best demandingly prurient and at worst grotesque. We hear a lot about the male gaze. The royalist’s gaze could do with more unpicking.

Hilary Mantel understood this voraciousness where royalty was concerned – recognised it even in herself. Royal Bodies, her epic 2013 essay for the London Review of Books, began with a passage on Kate – itself disingenuously and enthusiastically misconstrued by the tabloids. Later on in the piece, the Wolf Hall author described coming up close to the late Queen at a palace reception. Mantel confessed: “I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones.”

And so to Kate’s video, shot by a man who has also shot campaigns for Uber Eats, and who made Tesco’s Food Love Stories commercials. Something else is being served up here, which for some reason he has decided to make look like a Center Parcs ad. Despite artfully included clips of Prince George asking of a camera “Is this filming?”, the video was not captured by a GoPro on a picnic rug, but by a crew and a significant post-production operation, who made studied use of filters and slow motion, switching from sweeping shots to grainy scenes designed to ape cine film. Unlike the private home movies in the opening titles of Succession, the footage shows a happy family – but for my money, the sense of menace is still there. But whereas the Roys are menaced from within, the menace to the Waleses comes from the outside – and it is the endless and thankless task of appeasing it that dictates that this video must exist at all.

Various media have added to the threats that always beset the throne, and, with its scenes of picnics and secluded country days, this video explicitly echoes Queen Elizabeth II’s famous decision to allow the cameras into her private family life in 1969 for the famous/infamous Royal Family documentary. That was an attempt by the crown and its courtiers to meet the medium of television on its own terms. Decades later, opinion is still divided as to whether it was a PR masterstroke or the moment the rot set in. “It was difficult,” concluded the historian Ben Pimlott in his biography of the late Queen, “once the genie of this kind of publicity had been let out of the bottle, to put it back in again.”

Fifty-five years on, the Princess of Wales’s video feels like an attempt to meet social media on its own terms. Social media is, of course, the arena in which hunting Kate became a jolly global blood sport earlier this year, when – despite having been explicitly told that she would not appear in public before Easter owing to significant illness – the #BeKind brigade grew bored within weeks and whipped up a vicious feeding frenzy of conspiracy theories as to her absence and the reasons for it. Despite condemning the ghouls of social media, sections of the traditional media merely put quote marks round their vileness, running coded versions of precisely the same hounding. Kate tried silencing it with a Mother’s Day photo; minor editing glitches immediately became a “scandal”, for which she absurdly felt obliged to formally apologise. Next, multiple royal experts and headline writers explained that the true problem was that the palace had “lost control of the narrative”. Eventually, a video in which a poised yet fragile Kate revealed her cancer diagnosis was judged the only way to regain it.

Inevitably, meanwhile, the same critics who detest Harry and Meghan’s barefoot California content decline to look at the style of the Waleses’ video and consider that the Meghanisation of the royal family continues apace. Things that are bad when the Beckhams do them are axiomatically good when royals do them, selling the crown being an activity from which the news media arguably profit most of all. This accounts for much of their magnanimity towards Kate’s latest video.

But service is not the same as people feeling forced to serve themselves up. It was often said, back in the mid-90s, that Diana learned to control the narrative. Did she really, though? As David Beckham stagily remarked in infinitely lighter circumstances in a recent candid film of his own: “Be honest.”