#I’ve got like 20 people here listening to me ramble about things. odd

[thymeisasocialconstruct]

Uhm. Hi I want to thank everyone here. You guys are cool

[potassium-pilot]

Prompt 20: Petrichor

I’m in over my head, he thought, I know nothing of the Convocation other than what I learned in school; my creations seem so minimal compared to the Emet-Selch; they’re all taller than I am- I know height has nothing to do with it, but it’s still intimidating. Am I truly worthy of the seat of Elidibus? Am I really the Emissary?

“Do you smell that, young Elidibus?”

He turned his head behind him and noticed a woman. One of the members of the Convocation he met, but which one?

“Y-you’re…the Azem, is that correct?”

“I am, just like you are the brand new Elidibus. Now, do you smell that?”

Elidibus stared down at his lunch that he chose to eat outside on the steps at the back of the Bureau. “Oh…if the scent of my lunch offends, I apologize…”

“Your lunch neither offends my senses, nor is it what I’m referring to, Elidibus. We’ve had a dry period for some time, have we not?”

The weather was far from his mind, but he answered, “Yes, I…think so. Why?” Azem sat down next to the young one and replied with yet another question, “Have you ever noticed that scent that comes before rain after it hasn’t rained for so long?”

Why is she asking me this, he thought. Is this a test? “Uh…no, not really.”

“Hm. You should, young one. One of the gods put in quite a bit of work into making the rain as pleasant as possible. It adds a spice to life to notice the small things.”

He gathered a strange first impression of the Azem, but decided to take a whiff of the air, try to gather what she means. To his surprise, there was indeed a difference. “It’s…sort of earthy…”

“You’re right. It’s a pleasant smell to me, although some have their preferences.”

Elidibus took a moment and asked, “Is this some advice for how to deal with the Convocation?” Azem chuckled with her mouth closed, then responded, “No, friend, I’m just making conversation. You seemed so nervous in there.” Never had he felt more grateful for his red mask as he blushed at the thought that someone would notice such a thing. “The first day is odd, isn’t it?” she asked him.

“I don’t know about odd…but I must admit, I feel a bit…” he didn’t want to finish, but the phrase he was avoiding was ‘out of place”.

“Wanna know a secret about the Emet-Selch?”

That piqued his curiosity. “Uh…will that be all right?”

“Sure, so long as you keep it between the three of us.” Elidibus nodded at the agreement. He watched a wry smile form on the Convocation member’s face. “He’s a sucker for strawberry candy, and he bugs me to bring some home every time I leave Amaurot on my missions.”

His eyes widened at the thought. “Really?” She nodded. “He’ll deny it, but he’s obsessed with it.” Elidibus made a thoughtful hum. “Now what do you like?”

“Me?” he pointed to himself.

“Is there someone else here?”

“N-no…I…” he felt confused as to why she would care, making him hesitate. “I…I like that one concept, that card game…”

“Ah, you’re a gambling man. I see… you and I will need to play one night. I’ll show you some of the cheap tactics I picked up on my travels. You can help me clean out my friend, Hythlodaeus.”

The young man smiled. “What of you, Azem?” She smiled back. “I love to dance. When the Emet-Selch, Hythlodaeus and I go to the park, Hythlodaeus always takes me to see the musicians nearby, and I drag him into dancing when the Emet-Selch inevitably runs to avoid it. There’s another secret for you to keep.” Elidibus chuckled slightly.

“Ah, finally, a laugh.”

“S-sorry…”

“Nothing to be sorry for; I just like knowing that you’re capable of letting loose for a bit.”

He nodded. There was a moment of silence before he asked her, “Azem, is there anything I should know about the Convocation?”

“That we’re all flying by the seat of our pants.”

He stammered at that remark. “I-I beg your pardon?”

“My young friend, confidence is key to being a member of the Convocation. Quite frankly, there’s something new everyday, and it’s impossible to create a real standard for how we handle things. We have our protocol, but as much as they complain about me skirting it, they have also conveniently avoided protocol themselves.”

“But-but we’re supposed to lead our people, keep our society thriving…”

“If that’s how you keep looking at it, you’ll be that nervous every single day for the rest of your tenure.”

He blinked.

“Yes, we’re leaders, and we do, in fact, lead, but there’s no trick to being a Convocation member. There is simply being one. Bring ideas to the floor, engage in debate, do your reports and other paperwork, and go home. You’ll feel much more fulfilled at the end of the day if you remove the unnecessary pressure.”

He contemplated her words.

“The next time we go to the floor, I have an idea about revamping the concept submission process, make it more streamlined for easier processing. Could I…ask for your support, Azem?”

She pretended to ponder, then told him, “Tell you what; I’ll support it…if you can beat me at a game of cards.”

“What?!” he exclaimed in disbelief.

“Those are my terms. Do you accept them?”

“Is that…that can’t be protocol!”

“It’s not, but I should tell you how the Lahabrea got me to support his idea to reconstruct the Akadaemia Anyder.”

BOOM

The thunderclap roared over the Bureau of the Architect, and the rain slowly followed suit.

“Seems like a good time to play in my office, don’t you think?”

He still felt befuddled by the idea that any one of the Convocation of Fourteen should be anything close to him. That they were anything like him felt foreign. They’re leaders of Amaurot, creation masters; how could they be as clueless as the Azem claims them to be?

“Or would you prefer to sit alone in the rain? Because I will be returning inside to listen and watch it from the comfort of my dry and warm office with my meal. I would be pleased for the company, but I will leave that decision to you, young Elidibus.”

She stood up and as she said she would, she turned around and walked inside the Bureau. Elidibus sat there for a moment, realizing just how little he liked to get wet, but still wasn’t sure what to think. Finally, he rose from the stairs himself, and opened the door to return inside himself.

He walked down the halls to locate her office, passing each door, trying to see if there were any that he could peek through, but many were closed. Lahabrea…Igeyorhm…Nabriales…Emet-Selch… and last, but not least, Azem, the only open door. Before young Elidibus could enter, he heard a voice behind him.

“Ah, good afternoon, Elidibus. Were you hoping to speak with me?”

Emet-Selch approached him from behind. Elidibus turned to meet his gaze, despite being hidden behind a white mask, and answered, “Oh, no sir. I was hoping to speak with Azem. She invited me to lunch in her office.”

“Did she now?” he asked with a hint of curiosity in his voice. He took his shoulder and told him, “Come.” The two entered her office together, the Emet-Selch clearing his throat to get her attention. It worked, but she didn’t pry her gaze from the window.

“Hades, use your words”, she teased.

“Helios, are you corrupting this young man?”

That got her attention enough to turn around. Indeed, the young Elidibus stood at his side, a shoulder in the Emet-Selch’s right hand. “He informed me you asked him to lunch with you in here.”

“Oh, Hades, there’s nothing to corrupt. He’s quite stalwart for someone so young.”

“What has she told you, young man?” Before he could answer, she piped in with a teasing, “Nothing of import. Certainly not about how you beg me for strawberry candy when I leave the city.” Hades gasped and stumbled his words, “I-you-guh-I most certainly do not!”

“Uh-huh” she taunted, “Nor how you try to bring home near every stray cat you meet.”

“I would never bring such a pest into our home!”

“Right, now what will you tell Locus when we get home? She’ll be just the saddest cat we’ve ever had.”

He growled, shot his gaze to Elidibus and told him, “Everything she tells you is an absolute lie.”

“Only when it’s convenient for me to be telling the truth will he say I’m telling it, or so I’ve noticed.”

“Helios, you’re impossible!”

“I love you too. Now you better not have eaten lunch without me. I’ll excuse dear Elidibus here, but you?”

“I would never. Come, Elidibus, take a seat.” The young man nodded and took one of two seats in front of Azem’s desk.

“Um, Azem, when did you want to play that card game?” Elidibus asked meekly.

“Ah!” She pulled out a deck of cards and answered, “I’d like to finish my meal, then we can get started.”

“You’re not teaching him that ridiculous card game.”

Helios shook her head at her beloved, “I don’t have to. Why, he told me himself he loves card games.”

“Do you?” Emet-Selch asked the new member incredulously. “Uh, yes, sir, I do.” Realizing how this could be taken, he blurted out, “I-I don’t usually play it when I’m working, but-but I was asked to play with her for a work reason.”

“Oh dear…” Emet-Selch rubbed his temples and asked, “I think I know what she’s doing. All right, young one, what did you want to bring to the floor?”

Something within him sparked. That such a powerful creator could possibly listen to someone like him made him feel so honored. “Well, sir, if I may, there’s been many complaints about the process for submitting a concept, and I had an idea for how to streamline it, make it easier for employees to process submissions, and if you’ll hear me out, I think we can make it work”, Elidibus rambled excitedly.

“Hm”, Emet-Selch thoughtfully hummed, “You are correct that many do have trouble with their concepts being input. Long wait lines, a filing system that needs updating…not a bad idea.” He turned his head towards Azem and asked, “But why are you making him play cards for this?”

“I need to see him play now that he’s told me he likes this game. Besides, he may have your support, but I still have my terms.”

“Such are the dealings of our Azem; you truly wish her to be your role model, young man?”

“Role model? I’m simply his coworker.”

“Well, I’m glad you would deny the mantle. It might be better for someone who actually performs his duties to teach him the ropes.”

“Ha! I do my job well, thank you. It’s just not pencil-pushing.”

Emet-Selch shook his head. “Whatever will we do with you?”

“The better one is ‘what will you do without me?’”

“Work, probably.”

She scoffed at him, and told Elidibus, “I’m ready for that game now.”

“Deal me in as well.”

“My stars, Hades- you would play cards at work?”

“We’re not exactly working now, are we?”

A smile formed on her lips as she shuffled the deck. “Not quite. Don’t worry about him, Elidibus, it’s just me you’ll need to beat, not that it’s hard to beat our Emet-Selch at cards.”

“Hmph, slander, my love.”

The three played a good round. Azem gave him a run for his money, but he ultimately succeeded in the end, and received her full support for his proposal. Not that it mattered; she would have supported him anyways, but she enjoyed seeing the young man go from the nervous wreck he started his day as to a more relaxed version of himself, one that realized he was among peers, and not masters.

“There, he won. Are you happy, Helios?” Hades asked annoyedly.

“Quite. Thank you for a good game, my young friend” Azem complimented.

“Now come, Elidibus; it’ll be better for us to discuss this without her influence.” Hades stood up and walked out of her office to go next door. Elidibus stood up, ready to follow him as he requested, but then stopped. Without turning around, he asked her, “Would it be all right if I came back to eat with you tomorrow?”

She grinned. “My friend, anytime I’m in Amaurot, you’re more than welcome here. I’d rather you here than outside in the rain.”

He smiled and said, “Thank you.” Elidibus walked out of her office and moved himself from her office to the Emet-Selch’s.

The day went by without much clamor, then Elidibus gathered his things and left the office for the day. As he walked outside, the humidity left from the rain slicked his skin. It felt sticky, not his favorite sensation. Then he remembered the conversation from his lunch with Azem.

He took a deep breath, and embraced the earthy scent that blessed the city of Amaurot.

[vitalityofficial]

Vitality LORE ACT 1 - The Girl: Prologue

VITALITY LORE // A1 - The Girl

Summary: We are introduced to a young girl whose life is about to change forever. After suffering a devastating loss, a mysterious man will eventually come into her life and begin his dark path of vengeance. The girl is only the beginning.

Warnings: Death, Cursing, Mentions of Blood, Bullying, Depression, PTSD, Anxiety

Wordcount: 1,778

School had been out for an hour now and all her friends had gone home. Why hadn't her parents come yet? They never took this long! And why haven't they called? She took her phone out, dialing her father's number and it rang and rang before going to voicemail.

"Dad! I'm still waiting. Are you okay? I'll wait for fifteen more minutes and if you aren't here, I'll walk home! I'll take the special kimchi route, okay? I love you!"

The 'special kimchi route' is a series of alleyways littered with various family-owned shops - one of those shops owned by an older woman who had the best kimchi dishes around and one her family ate at often.

The girl frowns after the fifteen minutes are up and finally hops off the swing, grabbing her book bag and sighing. "Traffic must be bad today," she reasoned, leaving the gated school property and making the long trek home. She still found it odd that neither had contacted her, but her mother's cellphone was being repaired and her father was old and sometimes didn't pick up service well. They lived far up in the hills - the rather "poor" part of Seoul, tucked far away with the main city in the distance - and any nearby payphones were broken and left to rot.

As she walks and walks, she can't help but to hum a happy tune, feeling perky despite everything. Her birthday was in 5 days and her parents had promised to take her to Busan for a whole week! Her best friend had moved there last year and the two didn't get to keep in contact so it was the perfect way to celebrate a special day.

"You! Child!" A gruff voice spoke from a darkened corner and she yelps when a frail hand grabs her arm, spinning her around. "Grandma! You scared me!" She laughs, hugging the older unrelated woman. She was a well-known resident to all in the small neighborhood and the girl's family was very familiar with her.

“It’s so awful, child! Truly terrible!” The elderly woman murmurs, her eyes wide and pupils as big as saucers. The girl frowns and a look of concern comes over her face - word around was that Grandma was not well and often spouted eccentric things but the other residents often did their best to take care of her as there were no known relatives around. “Are you okay, Grandma? Shall I help you home? It’s getting chilly out.” The girl softly grabs her hand, guiding her in the direction of the woman's house.

“I am so sorry, my sweet girl. You are to endure so much pain and it is not fair for you were destined for so much good.” The old lady rambles as they walk but the girl brushes it off, use to it. When they reach the final hill - which happens to split off into a fork - the girls home on the right and a cliff just across the weather-beaten road and the woman’s on the left - they are overwhelmed by the flashing lights of multiple police cars and an ambulance.

“What’s going on?” The girl panics as she takes everything in, immediately dropping the old lady’s hand as she rushes towards the commotion. She had never seen so many people gathered around this area and to her horror - right in front of her house!

"Was there an accident? What happened?" She pleads with an officer, who immediately stops her from crossing the tape barrier. "It's not safe, young lady. Please stay back!" The female cop grasps the girls shoulders, pushing her back. It wasn't soon enough though as the girl peaks around her, seeing a trail of blood that went over the cliff edge - something truly abnormal and mortifying.

“That’s my home! Where's are my Mother and Father?” She was panicking now - something clearly wasn’t right. Her parents were never late picking her up from school or activities and to come home to this...mess...The girl knew now that something terrible had happened and there was no hiding it from her. “Mama? Papa?” She screams desperately, tears instantly flooding down her cheeks.

The officer gave her a solemn look before turning to her superior, the two whispering among themselves for a couple of minutes. When they returned, the woman put a reassuring hand on her shoulder and guided her away from the commotion, sitting on a bench with her - a bench the girl often sat on with her Father when they ate breakfast and waited for the school van to pick her up each morning.

The officer didn’t waste much time breaking the news. “My dear, I am afraid your Mom and Dad had an accident and are no longer with us in this world.” Though her voice was gentle, it was clear that breaking such awful news to a child wasn’t something she did often, or even wanted to do.

The girl sputtered, unable to form any words. She looked around for the Grandmother but the woman was nowhere in sight now. “Mama...Papa?” She cries out weakly - the thought of never seeing them or speaking to them ever again filling her with an overwhelming sense of despair, leaving her gasping for air.

Everything went black then.

7 Years Later - (2016)

“Yah! Chaewon! Are you even listening? Hey! Watch out!” A firm hand grabs the girl's arm and yanks her backward just as a delivery scooter races past, beeping madly. “Are you spacing out again? What is with you?” Areum looked at her friend worriedly, the rapper of the triangle kimbap she was holding in her opposite hand crinkling loudly.

“Huh? What did I miss?” Chaewon snaps out of her funk, a tentative smile on her face. Areum groans in response, rolling her eyes as she takes a bite of her snack. “I said,” she begins with her mouth full of food, “I was thinking of asking Kangdae out. Isn’t he handsome, yeah? He’s not like the other boys in our class.”

“He’s a bit dumb, isn’t he?” Chaewon mutters. Sure, he was cute and had muscles but he wasn’t exactly known to be bright and was at the bottom of their class in terms of grades unlike Areum, who was in the top five.

Areum groans and smacks her friend on the arm. “Don’t be so rude, Unnie! He’s not stupid, okay? He just doesn’t really like studying but he’s a good person! He wants to get into music and he’s really good at it too! You should listen to one of his tracks he’s produced!” She goes to pull out her phone, biting her lip as she scrolls through some files.

“Maybe another time, yeah?” Chaewon waves dismissively at the cellular device her friend holds out to her. “I have to get home.”

“Let me walk you!” Areum offers, linking her arm through Chaewons. She was understandably concerned about her friend - who had been experiencing sporadic blackouts for a couple months now - and wanted to make sure she got home safely. “I mean, you did just nearly get shit on by a scooter while having one of your...moments.”

Chaewon shook her head, “No! I’m fine! Plus you know how my parents are.” Areum pouts, grumbling. “They have to be the lamest parents on earth if they won’t let their daughter bring a friend home. We’ve been besties since forever and I’ve never even met them! Ugh...”

"Yeah. They’re...strict and really embarrassing, to be honest. You’re not missing out on much.” Chaewon huffs, checking her phone for the time. “I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?” She forces a smile at her friend, pulling her school blazer around her tighter as suddenly a chilly breeze whipped through the air. The two said their goodbyes and went their separate ways.

As Chaewon walked, she couldn’t help but feel guilty for being so distant lately. Areum had been a true friend to her ever since her move to Gwangmyeong. She was the first student to welcome her. The first to defend her against the snotty students who picked on Chaewon for being sullen, quiet and “weird”. Prior to the...incident, she had no real issues with bullies and was rather well-liked by her peers.  She had since become the opposite version of former herself - the girl her parents adored was gone and she had no proper concept on how to defend herself or react to the other student's harsh words and actions.

So why was she so rude at times? Why did she lie to someone she considered her best friend? Chaewon had come to the conclusion that it was a defense mechanism of sorts. The only way she could deal with everything was by lying about her life outside of school. It made it easier to pretend - the façade she had created was an escape, albeit still very bleak, much like the truth.

The sounds of the city center grew more distant as she reached the iron gates of her “home”. Her slender hand gripped the cool iron and pushed it open slowly, the squealing of the metal sending a shiver down her spine. Laughter could be heard flittering from the playground behind the old stone building that housed 13 other kids just like her:

Orphans.

The Seojun house for orphans wasn’t too terrible - the food was edible on most days and the rats and roaches were few and far between as of late. The couple who ran it weren’t the kindest and had clearly become burnt out after running the institution for the past 20 years. If they hadn’t been getting a good sum of government money to run it, they most definitely would have abandoned the ominous place long ago. What made the place tolerable were some of the staff, like Mr. Kim.

“Welcome home, Miss Lee!” Mr. Kim - the designated maintenance and security man --  greets Chaewon with a cheery smile as she approached the front door. He even stops raking to open it for her, bowing and motioning with a hand for her to enter as if she were royalty.

“Ah! yes! Home sweet home! Thank you, Mr. Lee.” She manages to muster a smile, bowing as she walks through the familiar doors and sighing loudly. Her smile falters as she is out of the caretakers sight and the familiar sense of dread slowly overcomes her once again.

[fumbling-fanfics]

IT Support – Juice Ortiz x Reader...

@adela-topaz-caelon​ So I’ve kind of changed your request, as I couldn’t figure out how to slot the reader into the Ireland trip without making the story super long, and we all know I ramble loads, so I scrapped what I wrote for your idea (so so so sorry) and went with this which I was able to make a bit shorter.

Pairings: Juice Ortiz x POC/WOC Reader

Warnings: drug use (smoking weed mention), mention of death of parents/family, really sad reader but Juice being cute and sweet.

Reader is WOC/POC, like with all my stories. ***************************************************************************************************

When you opened the door the look on your face made Opie forget what he had actually come around for and go into full protective older brother mode. Jax, standing slightly behind him, also became angry – automatically thinking your distressed state had something to do with that punk ass that had been sniffing around you lately. Jax immediately thought over how he would teach the creep a lesson, better yet, he’d ask Happy.

“What’s wrong?” Opie asked stepping through the front door. Through red eyes and tears you turned walking into your living room to point at your laptop.

“I somehow deleted the photos of mom and dad. Fucking Apple!!!! They said they can’t help, that they’re gone. The photos are gone Op” Another wave of hysteria, panic and dread washed over you and you collapsed into to sofa crying hard into the sleeve of the hoodie you were wearing. Opie picked up the laptop and both him and Jax looked at the device puzzled. They both knew nothing about phones let alone computers so they couldn’t even pretend to try. They were also cautious of the fact that they could make things worse.

Jax nodded and disappeared further into your house, while Opie sat down next to you. You collapsed onto his lap, and all he could do was rub your back.

Jax appeared 20 minutes later with two duffle bags on his shoulder. “Maybe Juice can help?” he shrugged, still seeing you tearful and stressed. Jax had never gotten used to seeing you cry. Opie was slightly more used to it, as you spent the time after your parents death with him and his family, quickly becoming his little sister. But it still didn’t make it easier.

“Get your shit kid, let’s see Juice” you sat up and nodded, unable to speak, throat almost closed from crying.

Opie put his spare helmet on you and you rode on the back if his bike to Teller-Marrow, while Jax had the duffle bags on his bike.

You buried your face into the back if Opie’s kutte and cried more, your tears soaking in the the dirty reaper patch on the back. Your mind raced over the loss of the photos. You had no backups of the photos, not even the originals. While you had other pictures, pictures of your second family, Opie’s family, those would not replace the ones that were lost. Again. You never let Juice live down the day when he has suggested you digitalize old photos. It was as if he knew what would happen to the original 2 months after you finished.

Digitalizing old photos is how you and Juice got closer while he was prospecting for the Sons. He’d be told to help you move place, a demand of Opie and Jax as they couldn’t help you, and while unpacking you got talking to him and showing his old photos. Juice then showed you the new software he knew of that scanned up old photos. A function of it even colorized black and white photos – practically turning them into a whole new photo.

The following weeks after moving in Juice continued to came over to your new place to do odd jobs, paint and help scan in photos. He laughed with till you both had tears in your eyes and couldn’t look at each other. He also comforted you when you cried at old or incomplete memories. He wasn’t that surprised when you kissed him one evening, over beer and pizza. He put it down to you guys being high, but blushed when you told him it wasn’t the weed.

You felt silly that in your hysteria you had forgotten that Juice was probably one of the few people who could help you, more than the laptop manufacturer. But you were so used to hiding the relationship you had with Juice he didn’t spring to mind, especially in the presence of Opie and Jax.

“Go wait inside, I’ll get Juice” Opie unclipped the helmet leaving you to wait inside the clubhouse.

“Yo Juice!” Opie shouted. Juice slide out from under a car with a concerned look on his face. “I need your help” Opie started. Juice tried not to show his concern when Opie mentioned your name.

Juice found you sat at one of the table and chairs in the clubhouse, your head in your hands, laptop open next to you. Juice cleaned his hands on a rag and sat down next to you. You were still crying, your head throbbing with a headache but you didn’t care.

“What happened?” Juice asked softly. With words and sentences punctuated by hiccups and tears you explained to Juice what had happened as you saved a folder of work for your Master’s course, he listened and nodded, patiently taking in everything you said. He disappeared for a moment, to wash his hands and come back with an arm full of other equipment and his own laptop.

“Can you help?” Opie had come inside to get the downlow, hands on his hips looking down as your puffy teary face, while Juice fired up his own laptop and other equipment.  

“I think I can. I mean I’m sure I can. It’s just that it might fuck up your laptop” Chucky appeared momentarily, placing a glass of coke on the table for you and giving you a reassuring smile. You smiled back at him.

“I’ll just buy her a new one” Opie stated. Juice looked at you.

“I don’t care about the other shit on here. It’s just school rubbish” Juice nodded.

“I’ll back it up anyway, but I’ll get the picture back” Opie nodded and walked out of the clubhouse.

“You okay?” Juice asked, rubbing your back. You nodded, pressing your palms into your eyes, not wanting to cry anymore.

“So I’ve back up your laptop, but we now just have to let the software run to recover the lost stuff, so feel free to go home or whatever” You shook your head. “I wanna wait, go back to work. I’m sorry I interrupted” you watched the software progress bar jump slowly, and only by 0.5%.

“I guess Chucky can keep you company” Chucky nodded from over at the bar as he dried glasses. As Juice started to get up you stopped him.

“Thanks Juan” You wrapped your arms around his neck and pulled him in to a long hug. “Seriously, thank you”

***

At lunch Juice ran out to a shop along the street Teller-Marrow was on. He picked up a sandwich for him and one for you. When he came back you were asleep, slumped onto the table top, arms folded under your head and hood pulled up, next to the laptops set up.

“Hey” He gently woke you up. Your eyes were puffy and bloodshot.

When Juice picked up the laptop’s you panicked slightly. “It’s fine, just follow me”

Juice made his way back to his dorm room in the clubhouse.

“If I leave these here” He placed both laptops on top of the dresser, and plugged them into the mains. “Then, you can eat his, and then sleep” He handed you one of the sandwiches wrapped in paper. You shook your head.

“I know you’re hungry, at least eat half”

“I have a headache” You winced. “Do you have vallium or something?”

After giving you some painkillers, Juice forced you to eat. It was clearly needed as you finished the while thing. Juice set a can of coke on the bedside table.

“You need anything else? I have to go back out”

“Do you have another hoodie, this one’s wet” Juice lightly laughed and pulled out one of his Sons hoodies. Juice watched you take off your wet hoodie, not at all surprised to see that you weren’t even dressed properly, only a bra on under the hoodie. You slipped off your sneakers and socks, you gave Juice another hug and then climbed into his bed.

Apart from getting rid of your headache, the painkillers had also knocked you out. You were unaware that the software had restored the deleted pictures, as well as some other deleted items.

When you woke up, the laptops were gone, so you put on your socks and shoes and wondered out into the clubhouse to see if you could find juice.

Your laptop as sitting neatly next to your backpack, but with no one around. You climbed up onto one of the empty bar stools to check out your laptop.

Juice had just finished saying by to a customer, only to be met with you throwing yourself at him. Your arms wrapped around his neck as his arms wrapped around your body. “If I owe you my life will that be enough” You voice was muffled but Juice could hear and laughed.

“Don’t worry about it” He shrugged. Ever the humble person.

“What do you mean” You slightly released Juice to look at him. “Actually, just shut up and hug me please” Juice laughed and hugged you back, not caring that you were both standing in the middle of the Teller-Marrow lot and hugging for everyone to see.

Opie looked at Jax. Jax looked at Opie. Both had  “I mean, she could do worse. It could be Tig” Jax laughed. Opie punched Jax and then started over to you and Juice. He wasn’t mad, just felt a bit left out. “Op, you guys gave Juice such a hard time while being a prospect, how could I have told you” Opie laughed, scratching his neck. “True”

*****************************************************************************************************

[callmemythicalminx]

The Last Of Us 2: We Need To Talk About It

*Spoilers ~ ye have been warned!

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I’ve held this off for as long as I could, but I’ve given up resisting- we need to talk about The Last of Us 2. It’s an incredible masterpiece, there’s no doubt about it. The graphics are beautiful and incredibly realistic, and the gameplay has made bounding leaps in progress since the first game, offering a more exciting and intense experience for the player. The actors have of course done incredible jobs and the sound design is amazing. Altogether, a pretty amazing game… Except for one thing- the story.

The first game was widely loved for many reasons, but most prominently, and I’m sure many will agree with me on this, the story and the characters are what made it stand out and still hold up to this day. Joel and Ellie are amazing characters, incredibly complicated and realistic. The former was a man we as players grew to love, after seeing the horrible pain he had to go through and the hardships he faced. We saw him do unspeakable things, hurting and killing many, all in the name of survival. But still, we cared for him, because we saw him grow to love too, risking all to keep his new daughter safe. Ellie was a young kid, forced to grow up too soon in a world that didn’t really care about her. Faced with the fact that she was the possible saviour of humanity, she had the weight of a brighter future on her shoulders. In each other, these two characters found someone to care about again. Joel saw the daughter he lost and couldn’t protect. Ellie saw a father who wouldn’t leave and would help keep her safe.

After seeing the bittersweet ending of the first game, we waited for 7 long years to see Ellie and Joel return to our screens once more. Trailers promised new adventures with the pair, as well as the much-anticipated impact of Joel’s actions after taking Ellie from the Fireflies and stopping the creation of a possible cure. Even when leaks about the story were released, the majority of fans held strong to the belief that Naughty Dog would lead us well and would give us a great sequel to finish off an incredible generation of progress, leading us into a new age of video game storytelling.

Oh, how wrong we were…

Make no mistake here- I know Joel isn’t a hero. What he did at the end of the first game was incredibly selfish. I’ve always seen him as an anti-hero because of his sometimes cruel and violent actions and that can’t be forgotten. Undeniably though, he is still such a beloved character, who we can’t help but connect too because he’s human and vastly complicated. He was also living in a world where people are doing much worse things to survive. Darker, more evil actions that weren’t close to anything Joel ever did. Can he really be blamed for some of his actions, when seeing what other surivors had done? When I first played The Last of Us, I couldn’t help but sympathise with him, especially as I saw him slowly become more caring again after meeting Ellie. He’s incredibly interesting too in terms of characterisation because he’s neither good nor evil- he’s just human, trying to survive in a nightmare world.

Obviously, playing as Joel made a world of difference as to how we perceived him and whether or not he was a hero or villain. If we’d been playing as a completely different character, perhaps a Firefly, we would have most definitely seen him in a different light. This is where Abby comes in. I’ll give Naughty Dog credit here, it is a really interesting concept to introduce a playable character who’s seen the other side of our famous duo’s actions. It’s a great way to make us think even more about the consequences and the effect we have on our environment. As the daughter of the lead surgeon meant to operate on Ellie, Abby has seen the negative effects of Joel’s actions first hand.  This opens up a widely explorable concept for the player to experience, offering a new complicated character who has seen her own pain and hardships just like Joel and Ellie did. She’s sure to be liked… Right?

Unfortunately, no.  

In the span of two weeks, Abby has become one of the most hated gaming characters of all time. The reason why- bad storytelling.

I understand what the game was trying to do, I really do. I see what the story was trying to tell and portray, but the writing and pacing ruined this before the game had barely even started. I know I can speak for most when I say that I was expecting Joel to die, either it be naturally or inflicted by someone (or something) else. Naughty Dog know how to tug players’ heartstrings, as we saw at the start of the first game when Sarah was killed. It was bound to happen, though I didn’t really want it to. Joel deserves a worthy death, one befitting of his character which would complete his arc and bring a conclusion to his story. What we got instead was single-handedly one of the worst character deaths ever presented in a video game.

Joel dies at the hands of Abby, less than 2 hours into the game after we’ve seen him for only 10 minutes or so. He and his brother Tommy willingly walk into a very suspicious situation, in the most stupidly uncharacteristic way, revealing their names and where they’re from. They say this to a group of 10-20 strangers, in a building where they can easily be ambushed and restrained. Abby is at the helm of this group, driven to Jackson for one thing- the need to avenge her father who Joel killed. After hearing who they are, the group is obviously more alert and ready to strike. Joel then says, and I quote ‘Y’all act like you’ve heard of us or something’… Bear in mind here, that our Joel from the first game knew he was a wanted man and that he couldn’t trust anyone. Hell, he didn’t even trust Ellie for a good while before he started to care for her. But here he willingly gives his name and acts shocked when it’s recognised? This is not the Joel we know, who’s incredibly smart and can see a trap a mile off.

In one of the most sickening occurrences I’ve ever seen in a video game, Abby then shoots Joel in the knee with a goddamn shotgun. Tommy, of course, jumps into action to help his brother but is quickly restrained and knocked out. While listening to Joel’s horrific groans of pain as he lays wounded on the floor, Abby then has the audacity to ask him to ‘Guess’ who she is? Other than the fact that this is incredibly cringy, there’s no way in hell Joel would have the faintest clue who she is. He doesn’t run a family check on everyone he kills, does he? She could be the daughter of a random soldier he killed or some other nobody.

Ever a badass till the end, still having no clue who she is, Joel tells Abby to get on with whatever she has planned. She gets someone to tourniquet his leg while she collects her weapon to end his life- a golf club of all things. After calling him a ‘stupid old man’, something that both upset and pissed me off too much, Abby then begins to start beating Joel to death. You play as Ellie now, as she tries to find him. She enters this group’s hideout to see her father hunched on the ground, curling in on himself, spasming because of numerous brutal hits he’s received to his head. His face is bloody and bruised, his eyes barely open as a pool of blood spreads around him. We feel the horrendous pain Ellie does as she’s quickly restrained and forced to watch Joel meet his death. She begs, rambling for him to get up and leave, but there’s nothing she can do.  Ellie’s horrified cries are ignored as she begs for mercy and with a sickening crunch, Joel receives one final brutal blow to the head.

And he’s gone. Like that.

If this was written true to the character we know and love, Joel would have never entered that building and given his name that easily. Neither would’ve Tommy. These are two seasoned veterans of a zombie outbreak, who have seen the horrid measures people will go to when provoked or desperate. Is the game really trying to tell me that they’d trust a bunch of suspicious-looking kids, walking willingly into a crowded area with no weapons, standing apart instead of together? Joel didn’t trust anyone in the first game, why would this change?

Regardless of the fact that he’s in Jackson now, which is ‘friendly to travellers’, and that he’s grown ‘softer’, he’s still not gonna be trustworthy of strangers. By and by, Joel is still a wanted man and he knows this, he took away the world’s chance at a cure for Pete’s sake. Secondly, this is plain and simple a terrible death for Joel. Not because of how he died (because this is a zombie apocalypse, after all, it’s going to be brutal even if it’s awful to see) but the fact that this happens the way it did and the placement of it. There’s no closure to his character arc or to the rift between himself and Ellie that’s, at this moment, unknown to the reader. He didn’t die saving Ellie, which as cliche as it sounds, would have juxtaposed beautifully with Sarah’s death at the start of the first game. Imagine how satisfying it would have been to see that Joel would be willing to die for Ellie after he’s been focused only on surviving and himself. Imagine if he’d died in Ellie’s arms just like Sarah did in his…

The timing is also really bad considering we’ve barely seen any of him in the two hours we’ve played. When we see Joel die, it doesn’t feel as impactful as it could’ve been. We haven’t seen any new or old encounters with him and Ellie, except for the small seconds at the start as he retells the end of the first game. We haven’t had a chance to fully reconnect with him. His odd actions further distance us away from him because he’s not acting like he usually would. Therefore we’re left with a horrifying death that feels hollow, strange and disconected.

Abby does not help make this scene any better, which is a shame, because I think if different choices were made to push this death further in the game, we could have had a chance to care for her or at the very least begin to like her. Instead, we have no clue as to who she is or what her motivations are before this. All we know is she’s looking for someone. To then see this new character kill someone so beloved, in the most brutal way… Players are gonna hate her immediately! I hated her immediately! And like I said, her dialogue in this scene is atrociously bad, especially when she insults Joel. That really felt like you were adding salt to the wound there Naughty Dog.  

Imagine if you will, what a better death or a change in chronological order of Joel’s death could have done to help the story. If we’d got to know Abby more, playing as her for longer than two hours, she might not have been as hated. The player could have begun to like her and sympathise with her, slowly realising who she is and at the same time, seeing the damage Joel has caused in his selfish decisions. She could have still killed Joel, but towards the end of the game, so that the player would have felt more conflicted about her doing it after seeing her past, seeing the pain that she went through. The game could have reminded us that Joel is still an anti-hero. Imagine that? If the game had made us admit to ourselves that, though it’s painful to watch, his death might have just needed to happen to make up for the loss of everyone he killed? It could still have fit the environment they’re in too, with a brutal and harsh death that could’ve come out of nowhere, but still felt justified in the story. Tess in the first game had a brilliant death, befitting of her badass character, yet still shocking and realistic to the world she lived in. Instead of becoming a zombie, she instead let herself be shot after bravely standing outnumbered against the enemy while Joel and Ellie escaped. It was a great death and Joel had every right to one of his own. 

Maybe he didn’t even need to die for his actions at all though? Let’s not forget that he’s not the only one who has done bad and unspeakable things in this broken world the characters live in. He’s not irredemable, he’s a complicated human being who has had to adapt to the world around him. Think about some of the groups we came across in the first game- is Joel really worse than them? Yes, he took away the world’s chance at a new begining, but did it even deserve to start again after seeing how horrid people had become? Imagine if your loved one was sacrificing themself for a world that didn’t deserve it? Imagine if the cure might not even work or be possible to create, would you really just let them die? Joel’s only human, he acted with his heart instead of his mind. I have no doubt that Abby would probably do the same, or Ellie, or any other character who had those same choices ahead of them. Joel’s actions were selfish, yes, but he shouldn’t have to die for it. I wouldn’t want to lose someone I cared deeply about, just for a possible cure that would save an unworthy world.This is why we aren’t finding fault with the fact that Joel died, it’s HOW and WHY it happened that’s got us so pissed off.

What makes his death and the story even worse is the ending of the game. All the pain and trauma Ellie goes through killing all of Abby’s friends to find her becomes worthless. Why- she lets her go free. After fighting her twice and losing her fingers during one of those fights, Ellie suddenly has an epiphany and realises that revenge isn’t the answer. She lets Abby go. Once again, I understand what Naughty Dog were trying to do here and once again it could have worked.

‘Revenge is bad’. It’s been in many games and this message has worked beautifully in most too, like in Red Dead Redemption 2 for example. It worked beautifully in the game because it’s something that Arthur makes reference to a lot, reiterating the fact that ‘revenge is a fool’s game’. We see that pan out when John gets revenge at the end of the game and pays the price for it. The reason it fails in The Last of Us 2 is that this message comes from nowhere. Ellie has killed hundreds of people leading up to her final fight with Abby and she’s lost even more in the process too, including friends, her family and now her ability to play the guitar which was the final big thing linking her back to Joel. She’s brutally murdered many, torturing others so badly that she turned into a shell of herself afterwards. She suffers from PTSD because of Abby’s actions, seeing the death of Joel repeatedly, leaving her physically and emotionally weak. It doesn’t make any sense that after all this traumatising violence and pain, she suddenly gives up on the notion of revenge when she’s just about to kill the murderer of her father. The most disappointing thing is this message could have still worked if done correctly. If she could have realised revenge is pointless sooner, this wouldn’t feel as out of place as it does. Why does this one person, the murderer out of all people, change Ellie’s mind, after killing so many? Sure, you could say she has a family now and she was reminded of them, but then why would they have such an impact at the point of Abby’s near death, when Dina begging Ellie to stay didn’t work in the first place? It’s. Bad. Writing.

Abby and Ellie have both hurt each other equally, killing family, close friends and their fathers. Instead of killing each other, the story could have led them to realise together that Ellie is still the key to saving humanity, and with Abby’s link to the fireflies, they could somehow still create a cure.

Imagine. That. How fulfilling that would have been? Instead of the horrid, pointless ending we got instead.

Joel’s death could have brought the two together, connecting the Fireflies once again with the cure to right the wrongs he did. He could have realised that Abby was looking for him and willingly sacrifice himself to make up for what he did, completing his arc like I mentioned while also dying a fitting, badass death. He could have left a note for Ellie to read, explaining his actions, to say sorry and to show that he knows this is the only way to fix what he did. At the end of the game, Ellie could have looked out on a recovering world, singing her own rendition of Joel’s song, this time full of new beginnings in the face of great sacrifice.

That’s how you finish a story and a character’s arc. I’m no world-class writer, but I could imagine many different ways this same story and message could have panned out but with better writing, pacing and time, telling a tale of angst and sadness, while opening up a new chapter of hope and healing. The real end of the game leaves you feeling hollow and depressed, unfulfilled in the journey you’ve just experienced. Games are at their basic principle means of enjoyment, we play them to escape our lives and to have fun. They can be dark, harrowing and painful but still an absolute pleasure to play. What doesn’t help in defence of the game’s story is that the game director Neil Druckman said himself ‘For us, with The Last of Us specifically (Uncharted is a little different in our creative approaches), we don’t use the word ‘fun’. That feels… wrong to hear. If video games are not enjoyable, then what is the point in playing them?

I think it really says something in particular when the most enjoyable part of the game is a flashback between Joel and Ellie where there’s no real action. It’s just them, exploring a museum for her birthday, talking and joking and it’s the best part of the game hands down. It doesn’t include any of the new brilliant gameplay and while stunning, doesn’t really have much visual impact either. What makes it so special is just seeing the characters we love interact and have fun like it’s a scene cut straight from the first game. After 7 years, us fans were yearning to see more of Joel and Ellie’s cute relationship, so to only have that and a few other small scenes is so… unsatisfying. If we had more of their adventures before Joel’s death, I know that many people would have been much more accepting of it. It would have definitely been more impactful, having given us the chance to reconnect with them both again. Going back to Ellie on her revenge path after that museum scene was so depressing. It’s such a shame that further interaction between them was just forgotten about and thrown aside. They were such a big factor in the first game’s success, so to see them barely together felt too strange. Though we play as Ellie for the most part, it began to feel less and less like Last of Us and more like some new zombie game. Playing as Abby so suddenly too and for so long just further implemented that weird feeling. It’s a real shame because I really can’t stand her at all now. But she could have been a great character if the story was much different.

I can’t help but feel that the story feels patronising and degrading to its audience in some ways. Some of the choices and plot lines feel very disrespectful to the characters and fans, simply because of what it expects of you after forcing you through unwanted pain and misery. Let’s not forget also that we were lied to in the trailers. Showing numerous clips of Joel as his oldest self to reel us in, then change them to be flashbacks? Flashbacks which happen to be the only good pieces of storytelling in the whole game. It’s just wrong. And quite frankly it’s disgusting. Video games are expensive nowadays. We already knew many fans were gonna buy it anyway because we’re loyal to what we love. But to intentionally make that push, using lies, to secure sales for an expensive game from a huge fan base… it’s disrespectful.

As a whole, I can see what Naughty Dog were trying to do. They were trying to create something different, do what they wanted instead of what the fans wanted. That’s not a bad thing at all, it’s ballsy and creative to do something like that with a well-loved franchise. Rockstar took that same leap when they created Red Dead Redemption 2, forcing you to play as Arthur instead of the beloved John. It worked for them because they wrote the story well enough so that you’d have time to explore this new character and grow to love him, especially when faced with his actions and his mortality. Arthur dies brutality but fans still love the game because it was a fitting and wonderful way to finish his character arc.

This idea fails with The Last of Us 2 because the player isn’t properly engaged with the story before shit hits the fan and their favourite character is dead. I have no doubt that if it was written differently, if we’d been able to see more of Joel before his death and had more than two hours played with Abby that this story could have actually worked. The message that ‘revenge is bad’ could have worked. Ellie and Abby both have the same arc, experiencing something traumatic, being consumed by revenge, then ultimately realising it’s worthless to kill. We could have followed the same arc with a much better version of the story we actually got.

Instead, it feels like the game is intentionally pissing us off, continuously ruining that idea, first by making us watch as Joel is brutally and stupidly killed so soon, then secondly, by then forcing us to play and connect with Abby for 50% of the game when that seed of hate for her has already been planted. This is another one of the moments in the game where I feel like we’re being patronised. Is it really fair to paint us in such a bad light for not wanting to play and grow to like Abby, when we saw her as a stranger brutally kill our favourite character? Is it really that bad for us to hate her after she has caused so much pain when we’ve only known her for two hours? It’s such a shame because she could have actually become a new well-loved character.

I’d just like to say that while I think the story is bad, no one who was involved in the making of this game should be attacked for it. Video games, especially in this age, are such hard things to make because so much goes into them and I don’t want to discredit anyone’s work. Regardless of my or anyone else’s opinions on the game or its story, the team at Naughty Dog have still poured hours of time and effort into making it. They shouldn’t be receiving attacks or hate, we can still discuss the game and our opinions while being respectful. The actors shouldn’t be receiving hate either, they acted brilliantly with what they were given. Ashley Johnson and Laura Bailey especially should be credited for their work. And Troy Baker, though he was only in it for a short while, deserves an award just for that final ending scene between Ellie and Joel- it made me cry buckets. He made this character come alive beautifully and he deserves all the praise for it. And so do the rest of the cast, who did exceptionally good jobs.

In my eyes (though it sounds bad) The Last of Us 2 doesn’t exist as a game. In my own perfect world, it’s actually just badly written fanfiction posted to Tumblr or Wattpad. As goes in my made up ending, Joel and Ellie move to Jackson and restart their lives after the end of the first game. Eventually, he tells her about what happened and there’s a rift between them for some time, which is, of course, to be expected- it was a momentously selfish thing for him to do. Over time though, Ellie learns to forgive him and the rest is history. Because there’s no real canon ending, anything can happen. So… Did they eventually create a cure? Who knows. Did they stay in Jackson, happily living out their lives? Maybe. Did Joel die a badass and sacrificial death protecting Ellie? Possibly. Or did Joel die eventually in old age, surrounded by his family, holding his daughter’s hand as he passed away?

I hope so…

He may have been a complicated anti-hero. He may have even been a villain. Regardless, he still deserved a respectful death and in my perfect makebelieve ending…

He got it.

🌟🌟/5

Photo Credit ~ some from @ inora_miller on Instagram

[queernarchy]

Statement of Elizabeth Williams, regarding a box of tapes found in the basement of her student house. Statement given October 18th, 2018, 105 Hill Top Road, Oxford.

[INT. OXFORD, 105 HILLTOP RD, UPSTAIRS BEDROOM]

[TAPE CLICKS ON]

[SOUNDS OF BETH STUTTERING, APPARENTLY SEARCHING FOR SOMETHING TO SAY]

[A SHAKY INHALE]

BETH

Right. Um. I, uh. Right.

[PAUSE]

BETH

To be perfectly honest, I’m not really sure what I’m doing. I- I found this. It’s the only one I’ve found in the box that’s blank. You know, I’ve never actually seen a tape recorder, like in real life? It’s quite - Well, I’m not even sure I know how to use it. Except … I do. Because I turned it on. I hit the button and now I’m talking to it, like it’s a person. Like I’m crazy, which … I might be. God, I might be. 

[BREATH]

BETH

I probably am. In fact, I hope I am. I hope I was just dreaming it all up. Another sign of an overactive imagination. Spending too much time with those books and not in the real world, as mum would say.

[PAUSE]

Even if it was real, there is no reason for me to be talking to you - no, to this. [TO HERSELF] It’s a tape recorder, Beth, it’s not a person. [BACK TO NORMAL] But I am. It feels right to, to tell you. So I’m going to. I’m going to tell you what happened and then it’ll be over. And I can go back to my life. 

BETH (STATEMENT)

I’m not great at this. The talking, the explaining, the storytelling, it’s not really my thing, at least not anymore. 

When I was a kid it was easy, you know? I was always latching onto one thing or another, letting it consume my brain and then going on and on about it to whatever poor soul I could corner long enough into listening. My parents didn’t let me use a computer until I was well into my teens - something about them making nightmares worse? It was all bollocks, really, how would they know that if they never actually let me use one? But, anyways, before that I used to spend hours in the Wokingham library touring the sections. Once, when I was twelve, I read a book on oceanography: Vanished Ocean: How Tethys Reshaped the World, and spent a solid week scouring the corners of every bookshelf for anything I could find on ancient supercontinents or vanished fault lines before giving my report to the first unlucky and unsuspecting librarian who happened to be out in the open. [LAUGHS] Poor Mike.

I never cared what the genre was, nonfiction, mystery, fantasy, that was never important to me. I just loved the pursuit, and the compelling joy of walking through a new world. It was like a secret between me and the writer, something that we knew that nobody else did. 

I always dreamed of being a writer too one day, but like I said, the storytelling part never actually came natural to me, no matter how many books I consumed. I suppose it must have been that lack of skill that bugged the people around me to no end. My father spent most of his time at work and I didn’t really get along with my brother or sister, but let’s just say that my mum was never as ... enthusiastic about my new interests as I was. 

It wasn’t her fault, I was deeply, deeply irritating. But to my credit, the minute I realized that, well, that’s when I finally started to shut up. Thinking back, I think that’s where it started. I had always kind of been afraid of pretty much anything and everything. But when I got old enough, I started to routinely feel a gripping terror bubbling up through my stomach, my chest, shaking my limbs and rooting me to the spot whenever I spoke for more than a minute at a time. 

All this to say, a few years ago I graduated secondary school with absolutely no skill in writing, the one thing I actually enjoyed, and a lot of anxiety. It seems inevitable that I would end up studying library sciences, doesn’t it? It’s practically what I’ve always done anyways - sorting and researching. And a future as a librarian with a couple cats and a cozy cottage, surrounded by books, well … there are worse things. Much worse. 

I moved into student housing right before my first term started at Oriel. I call it student housing, but it’s not, not technically. The actual dorms were a bit out of my price range, so when I saw an ad looking for flatmates in Cowley, only a 20 minute bus ride from the college, it seemed meant to be. There were ten living here all together, to start. George moved into his boyfriend’s place last year, leaving nine of us. [DARKLY] Well, eight, now, I suppose.

It was a proper house, renovated a few years back, I think, but it was already thoroughly  trashed by the time I showed up. It was one of those places that, the minute you walked through the door, you could just feel the grime lurking between the worn couches and stained mattresses, that musty smell of overuse. I tried to ignore it, I did, but one Friday night a couple weeks after I’d settled in, I waited until everyone had gone and walked to the closest shop to buy a blacklight. It went about as well as you’d expect. I spent that entire weekend scrubbing this house from top to bottom. I even cleaned Sam’s room. It’s not like I’m a germaphobe or anything, I just like to know where things have been. And if they dirty again, well, at least I know it’s the slobbery of my friends rather than that of strangers. 

I didn’t touch the basement, though. None of us ever did. I’m not sure why, it was always just an unspoken agreement between us. I must have asked about it when I moved in. I must have. I mean, it would be one thing if it just never came up, if it was just an unfinished and unsafe part of the house we didn’t go down to and that was that. But, you know, thinking about it now, we didn’t even mention it, not once. It’s amazing, isn’t it, what you can ignore. Right up to the moment you’re devoured by it.

I don’t remember the exact moment things started to feel wrong. Can’t have been more than a couple weeks ago. It was subtle, at first. Doors swinging closed on their own, misplaced items, shadows that didn’t really ... fit. All things that could be chalked up to the mind playing tricks out of boredom, or fatigue - just a consequence of one too many sleepless nights. I didn’t really think about it too hard, even when Sam brought it up at breakfast, started insisting the place was haunted. That was easy to dismiss, she’s always going on about some supernatural this or that and I don’t believe in ghosts, but even that would have been easily digestible as an explanation. 

It was like that for a few days, and all the while, that feeling of wrongness lurked in the background, pulsing beneath us. I honestly don’t know if I would have even taken notice if Milton hadn’t started behaving the way he did. Milton is - was - every bit the hipster film student of your wildest imaginations. I swear, I saw him wear a beret once, completely unironically. We’d been friends, as I was one of the few people who would listen to him ramble on about whatever arthouse film had caught his attention that week. We got on fine, well, actually, for flatmates at least. That’s not to say that I always liked him - I’d acted in a few of his student films, just by convenience, and he wasn’t exactly the most easy to work with. Everything always had to be just the way he wanted it, down the most minute detail. I swear, if he could have tied strings around our limbs and puppeted us from afar, he would have. [PAUSE] Sorry, that’s … that’s poor taste. 

It had to do with the cassettes. You see, Milton had always insisted on using magnetic tape for his recordings, refusing to even entertain the idea of a digital camera. Something about being more authentic - I never understood it, but far be it from me to get in between a film major and their precious ‘analog charm.’ He loved those tapes, and we all got used to seeing dozens scattered throughout the house at any one time. Which is why it struck me as odd when last week, they vanished entirely. When I asked him about it, he just said that he'd been editing a new project that he needed them for. I wasn’t sure what kind of project would require that many cassettes all at once, but he certainly spent enough time working on it. He’d be locked away in his room for hours, sounds of whirring machinery coming from behind his door. When he did come out, he was exhausted, gaunt. I tried talking to him about it, you know, but he’d just ignore me.

It was strange behavior, sure, but not supernatural. Perhaps I would have chalked it up to stress, just a bad week, but that’s when the nightmares started. I had always had them, just a side effect of my anxiety, but they’d died down a couple years ago, after I moved to Oxford. One sleep after this started, though, I saw Milton. He was sat at a desk, a mess of cassettes unspooled into piles of thin black magnetic tape scattered across it. He was tangled in tape as well, almost every limb bound by it. He stared at the pile in front of him with dull eyes, completely still. 

I didn’t realize until the tape began to lift his arms that he wasn’t just tangled in it. The long, metallic strands were embedded directly into his skin. The strands controlling every movement, he grabbed a spool, and, very slowly, raised it to his mouth. His jaw unhinged, farther than anything natural, and he began to stuff the tape down his throat. Again, and again, and again, until the entire pile was gone. I had never felt relief the way I had when I finally woke from that dream. I didn’t know that was only the first time that I would have it.

I woke from one of these nightmares late one night, heart beating fast and body sticky with sweat. I climbed downstairs, trying to clear my head, and found Milton sitting in the living room, staring at our small television screen playing his movie. At least, that’s what I assumed it was. There was no coherence, no audio, just rapid, violent black and white images that flashed across the screen sporadically and bits of static that faded in and out at random. Occasionally, I’d see the corrupted and disjointed image of my own face cross the screen, along with the other actors. The pattern was hypnotic. Every few minutes, the images would perfectly align, shaping spindly, bony legs that almost seemed to reach beyond the glass face of the TV.

After a while, I finally managed to ask him if he was alright, if the cassette had become corrupted somehow, if there was any way to fix it. He had always been so fiercely protective of his tapes, and with the state it was in I expected him to be furious, or devastated, at least concerned. But when he turned, there was none of that written into his face. Just a calm, blank expression. He studied me carefully for a long moment, before finally speaking. ‘We should feed our guest. She’s so happy to have arrived, and she is very hungry.’ He smiled after he said that. When he did, I could have sworn I saw that thin black film tape weaved inside him - webbed in the back of his throat and threaded right through the fleshy center of his tongue. I went back up the stairs immediately and locked my door, sat in bed until the sun came up.

I managed to avoid him the days after that. I thought about telling the others, trying to explain it to them, but I knew it wouldn’t end well. They wouldn’t believe me, why would they? I wasn’t even sure that I believed me. I thought about moving out, of course I did, but I had nowhere to go. No money, no real friends outside of the ones I already lived with. And who knows if I was just overreacting, imagining it all. So I decided I’d just ignore him as much as I could until he went back to normal or I’d saved up enough money for a new place.

It didn’t last, though. It was three days ago that it happened. It was late, and I had carelessly lost time sitting in the kitchen, studying for my history exam. I was alone when he walked in. He didn’t say a word, just, met my eyes with that calm look, like an invitation. Then he turned, with a finality I had never seen before, opened the door to the basement, and vanished down the stairs. 

I shouldn’t have followed him. I could have just walked away, went upstairs and buried my head in my pillow. But I didn’t. I had to know. To see. 

So, I walked down those old stone steps, dodging cobwebs. I don’t remember if I closed the door behind me, or if it did that part on its own. The cellar was warm, far too warm for October. It was unfinished, and empty save for an old, lidded cardboard box that sat neatly in the center of the room. A long, jagged crack ran through the floor and up into the far wall, as though the foundation had been damaged in an earthquake or something. Milton stood facing away from me, towards the crack in the wall, whispering something I couldn’t quite make out. I called out to him, and he turned to face me, expression wild with … something. Excitement? Panic? He had started to say something before, all at once, dozens of shadowy, spindly tendrils, adorned with what looked like coarse hairs crept from the crack and began to wrap themselves around him.

I felt that familiar terror bubble up, running cold through my veins, stronger than I’d ever felt it before. I wanted to run or scream, but I couldn’t. He didn’t scream either, but I could see the fear growing in his eyes, silently pleading. He didn’t move, not even as the tendrils began to … unspool him. They reached into him, breaking into his body like plaster, and pulled. He was hoisted from the ground, his limbs yanked in different directions and elongated. They just dangled there, arms and legs and head only still attached by threads of dark, magnetic tape, like an old, torn doll hanging together by string. And then the tendrils began to move him. They took their time puppeting him, and at the end, they pulled up his head, forcing his gaze to meet mine. His cheeks were strung up into a grin, but I saw the tears that flowed freely down his contorted face. 

I don’t know how long I stood there, watching him stripped him apart, piece by piece, slowly and deliberately. I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. I felt hot tears roll down my cheeks, although I couldn’t tell if they’d come from the terror of it all or simply because I no longer possessed the ability to blink. I watched and watched. And when it was over, and he was gone, I waited. I waited for them to take me, a part of me just relieved that I didn’t have to watch anymore. I had already shut my eyes tightly before I understood that I could. I felt my hands twitch, regaining their will. When I finally opened my eyes again, I was alone, in that old, dank basement, with nothing but that long dark crack, and, in the center of the floor, the cobweb covered cardboard box, now open, and filled to the brim with tapes. 

I don’t remember the rest of the night with any real clarity. I know I stood there for a while. I know at some point I calmly bent down, picked up the box, and walked it upstairs. I spent most of the last two days just staring at it. I’ve missed all of my classes. Sam has come to see me a couple of times, to ask how I am. This morning she actually brought me a plate of spaghetti. Imagine that, spaghetti for breakfast. I do appreciate the thought, even if it makes no practical sense whatsoever. Must be an American thing. She did mention that a man stopped by yesterday. Short, greying hair, lots of weird scars, asking about ‘strange happenings’ in the house. Sam told him about her hauntings, and apparently he had been, less than impressed. He told her he was sorry, and that she should move out, and then left without another word. [LAUGH] Creep.

I finally got up the nerve to look into the box. It’s pretty much what it says on the tin: Tapes and stationary. And cobwebs. So many goddamn cobwebs. 

Nobody has said anything about Milton. I expect in the next few days someone will notice he’s gone. How do you explain something like that? I’ve been seeing it again, though. My nightmares … my nightmares have been getting worse. I keep ending up back there. I just watch, and watch, and watch, and I can’t turn away. 

BETH (POST STATEMENT)

Statement ends, I suppose.

[STATIC RISES]

[STUTTERS, CONFUSED]

…. Statement? I, I don’t, I didn’t -

[STATIC FALLS]

[A SHORT SIGH]

I don’t feel better. I really thought I would. I don’t know why. Why in the world did I think that telling my stupid story to this thing would make me feel better? 

The box is still sitting at the foot of my bed. I want to get rid of it, I do. So why don’t I just toss it? It would be so easy. Just … throw it out. But I can’t. 

[RIFLING THROUGH THE TAPES]

Oh, huh - 

[STATIC RISES]

This tape’s blank as well. I thought I’d sorted through them all, but I guess I missed one. Hm. 

[TOSSES THE TAPE ASIDE]

They’re quite interesting, you know. I haven’t played any of the tapes yet, but I glanced at a few of the written accounts. Some of them are so illegible I can’t even read them but others are. Compelling. They make me feel, right. Scared, but [SIGHS]. I don’t know how to explain it. 

I did some research on them, the ones I read anyways. I say research, I mean some quick Googling, a bit of asking around. They’re not real. The Magnus Institute, that’s the logo printed onto the stationary, isn’t a real place. And, as far as I can tell, these people … these people don’t exist. Anywhere. I mean, I found a few names that match but nobody who lines up to the descriptions and when I reach out to them they claim to know nothing about any of it. One of the people I called, Timothy Hodge, his name is, actually gave me the number of his psychiatrist. [LAUGH]

So maybe it’s fiction. A collection of short stories about fictional people and fictional suffering. Just a practical joke. Except, I know that it’s not. I can’t explain how, I just … Know. 

I should probably move out. Only an idiot would stay in this place, after something like that. When I leave this room, I’m going to have to walk by that basement door. Every single day.. I should leave. I want to leave. I will leave. Just, not yet. 

I need to understand, to unravel the mystery, and I’m getting the feeling that there is something in this box that’ll help me do just that. I’ll try to record whatever I find out. I do have another blank tape, after all. [HM] End recording. 

[TAPE CLICKS OFF]

[evalieena]

35 Questions for Fanfiction Writers

well since dearest @bachint​ asked, here goes nothing!

1. From one to five stars, how would you rate your writing? (No downplaying yourself!)

well if no downplaying’s allowed i guess i’d give it a 3/5? some mistakes since i’m not a native plus i”m still working on getting my english style better! i like what i come up with all the same, i’ve improved a lot these past two years, and my grammar isn’t that bad i guess?

2. Why do you write fanfiction?

to do what developers didn’t do in the first place to make good use of my imagination, to cope with the fact that some characters don’t exist and i will never follow another one of their adventures, to forget about a boring real life...

3. What do you think makes your writing stand out from other works?

my writing doesn’t stand out lmaooo but i guess i’m always trying to focus on the character’s psychology, struggles and all that, so if someone likes my work, it’s ‘original’ bc it’s usually quite different from the usual stories where there are a lot of dialogues and interactions.

4. Are there any writers that inspire you?

i’ve been inspired a lot by @welcometogressenheller​ (i wish i could do as well as she does.....), @aceklaviergavin​ (kudos to you even if you never see that post and you probably don’t know who i am), and some others whose name i forgot (sorry!)

5. What’s the fic you’re most proud of?

i didn’t write much but i guess that my latest fics are really nice (There’s No Light In You Anymore, and the whole Faith series on AO3). also my big project “Now That You’re Gone”, i’m glad i’ve been able to write that much for it and i intend on continuing as soon as i find the motivation!

6. What element of writing do you find comes easily?

pain, struggles and all that comes with it as long as it’s in the character’s mind, because beware here you step in a dark space

7. What element of writing do you struggle with most?

ordinary scenes of life? i always find my writing lacking as soon as i step out of my comfort zone, i’m all for rambling and never-ending pain

8. Which character(s) do you find easiest to write?

desmond/descole surely

9. Which character(s) do you find most difficult to write?

all the good guys (and dimitri allen because i’d love writing about him but i’m? just unable to?)

10. What’s your favorite genre to write for?

that may come as a surprise! angst!

11. Who or what do you find yourself writing about most?

a mix of question 8 and 10 and you’ve got your answer

12. Tell us about a WIP you’re excited about.

professor layton and the shattering secrets!!! i’m so happy of what this AU will look like when i’ll be done writing the following chapters, at first it probably looks annoying but heck i wanna promise anyone who’s reading it that the plot twists are gonna be worth it even though the overall background isn’t that original because i’ve mixed up different elements from other games (aaaand we’re back in our oh-so-amazing comfort zone that covers up a massive lack of imagination)

13. First fandom you ever wrote for?

ummm? the vampire diaries maybe? back when i was 10 or 11 lol

14. What’s your favorite fandom to write for?

hands up... pROFESsoR LayTON

15. What’s the weirdest fandom you’ve ever written for?

i didn’t write for many fandoms but back in my younger days i used to do self-insert fics with the vampire diaries cast and it was so odd and i wish i hadn’t just confessed that on my tumblr blog

16. Any guilty pleasure trope(s)?

nothing that comes to mind

17. A trope you’ll never, ever write for.

dunno either

18. Wildest fic you’ve ever written?

PL and the shattering secrets! huge canon divergence and one heck of an AU (also its original version is much worse, my mind was going crazy when i was 15)

19. Do you prefer canon-compliant, AUs, or something in-between?

i love reading AUs, writing some requires solid imagination which i have not, but honestly i don’t really mind

20. Gen fic or shippy stuff?

gen

21. Favorite pairing to write for? (platonic or romantic!)

desmond sycamore x his wife / randall ascot x hershel layton (be it romantic or platonic) / randall ascot x basically anyone from the MM i guess though i didn’t write anything about that yet (it’s about to change guys)

22. Do you listen to anything while you write?

yea i can’t write without listening to music - any playlist does the trick as long as i like what i’m listening to but usually i listen to sad soundtracks, or i’m inspired by some random lyrics

23. Do you prefer prompts and challenges, or completely independent ideas?

i’d go with challenges bc my horrible ass has very few ideas but i usually come up with independent ideas

24. One-shots or multi-chaptered works?

one shots!

25. Have you ever daydreamed about side adventures/spin-offs from your fic? Tell us about them!

i don’t remember ;_;

26. Is there anything you’ve wanted to write, but you’ve been too scared to try?

i’ve got one OS in mind with randall/layton but i don’t want to be the talk of the town because it’s probably going to be awful? also any other fic including the PL3 crew

27. What’s the nicest comment you’ve ever received?

@welcometogressenheller telling me she believed i was a native!!! i struggle so much trying to improve my writing style in english and i have a lot of insecurities so it was so heartwarming and incredible to read...

also basically any other comment where people tell me they like what i write. i love that writers feel the need to take some time reviewing my works bc i need constant validation

28. How well do you handle criticism when it comes to your writing?

well i’ve never really received ‘harsh’ criticism or anything, save for some very rare remarks on my grammar so i guess i don’t know? at first it’s always sad to see that what i’ve done isn’t perfect but i guess it’s impossible to be perfect so i’m really happy that people take some time to underline what looks wrong to them

29. Have you ever gone outside of your comfort zone for a fic? How did it turn out?

currently trying to with shattering secrets and it’s actually a great way to improve!

30. Tooth-rotting fluff or merciless angst?

MERCILESS ANGST

31. Do you have any OCs? Tell us about them!

i wish i could but it would perhaps be a huge spoiler so i don’t wanna say much about them...

i have 1) annabell sycamore, des’s wife, whose personality fits very much mine. she’s a playwright, spends lot of her time writing and acting in front of des AND WITH des. also she’s a very realistic person and some people usually tell her that she’s being too pessimistic 

2) aurelia from the shattering secrets and on her i really cannot say much... if anyone’s read this far it would be so nice if you could give SS a shot by the way!! 

32. Summarize a random fic of yours in 10 words or less.

desmond sometimes finds happiness but it’s always taken from him

(isn’t that a summary for everything i’ve ever written?)

33. Is there anything you wish your audience knew about your writing or writing process?

i don’t translate my works from my original language to english, i write straight in english. i spend a lot of time making sure i haven’t done any grammatical mistakes, checking the definition and the use of some words i’m not sure about, and sometimes it’s quite a pain and it can be also very discouraging bc i end up believing what i write comes from a random internet dictionary while deep down i know it’s not true but hey what can i say. huge insecurities laid bare here.

(if any reader of mine’s reading this, i apologize)

34. Copy and paste an excerpt you’re particularly fond of.

(beware: spoilers for the whole prequel trilogy!!!)

“Hershel Layton was puzzled. A funny emotion to feel for someone who loved puzzles that much, but nothing could ever describe better the way he’d felt for hours now, hours that seemed like ages.So much did happen in the span of a few hours.

First he’d learned his parents could be targeted by Targent, then Aurora had made it clear that she didn’t want to live anymore, all so she could protect them. Then Desmond—no, Descole—had taken the key from her hands, and revealed himself as the dangerous scientist Layton knew him to be.

Then they’d fought. Despair was filling the air, though Hershel didn’t understand what Descole meant when he cried that the Azran legacy was all he had to live for.

And as if there hadn’t been enough betrayals as it was, Emmy was soon to follow. Luke had been abducted. He’d had no other choice than siding with Descole to prevent Bronev from unleashing doom on Earth. Misery didn’t seem to end.

Just when he’d thought he’d finally be able to change things, Descole had been ready to sacrifice himself to save Luke. And then…

Then everything just collapsed.

He held his agonizing brother in his arms; the one who’d wanted so hard to take him down only a few hours back was now confessing, fearing death was on the way.“

[...]

from ‘Six Times Hershel Layton Remembered, Plus The One Time He Didn’t’

35. Ramble about any fic-related thing you want!

oops i haven’t got anything more to say but thank you for reading? perhaps?

[queerlilacroses]

Nothing to fear but fear itself (TW Blood, Murder, Biphobia)

Richie had always been afraid of werewolves,  ever since he was a little kid the thought of them sent shivers up his spine. He didn’t know if it was the sharp claws, the big teeth or the fact it could be anyone, watching waiting to turn him into his worst fear.                                                                                                                                                              It has also been theorised that werewolves are a metaphor for a specific sexuality, bisexuality, not many people believe that bisexuals exist, at least that’s what Richie hears when he attempts to come out.  

   “There’s no such thing dear, I mean you can be gay or straight I don’t mind I know you’ve always been an odd child but there’s no such thing as both”. He had lamented over that loss for a while, honestly he know lots of people wouldn’t understand but his own mother! That was his biggest disappointment.

So he ran out on her, hiding in the Clubhouse™ that his good friend Ben had built, waiting hours until his best friends Bill, and Bev came frantic down falling down the hole of the clubhouse, “why didn’t they use the stairs”, he wondered aloud forgetting that he had disappeared without letting anyone know and it had been all day since he had ran out on his mother.

“WHY DIDN’T I… I was looking for you you’ve been missing for 6 hours you dummy”

“I’ve been wounded Bev darling, I…wait SIX HOURS”

“Yea is s-something wrong”

Whilst his friends had accepted him all those years ago Richie was still paranoid about his bisexuality despite knowing he wasn’t gay or straight there was a nagging doubt in the back of his mind watching, waiting to creep up on hm like a horror movie jump scare that made him spill popcorn all over the floor like an idiot.

The problem with horror movies is they are real; Vampires, Zombies, Witches and of course Werewolves which are the worst of them all. The first time Richie had seen a werewolf had been in a stupid movie , a teen movie, “supposedly a romance” Bev had mentioned nonchalantly as they walked past it at the Aladdin and well it was, for the first 20 minutes or so then it turned out the lead had a secret…the movie plagued him for months after that day after day, night after night all he could see was the male lead chasing him waiting to turn him into a werewolf. He never knew what to do or where to go Richie was traumatized.

Eddie, had been a new confusing figure in his life, they had met at gig which Eddie had helped organized and hit it off but there was something about him Richie wasn’t so sure of. Was it the smell of wet dog despite Eddie claiming to be allergic? Was it the fact that he refused to wear the silver chain that Richie got him as a present? Was it his oddly hairy body? Or was it the fact that anytime  a full moon was around no matter what Eddie would make and excuse and disappear so nobody would see him for days. It confused and scared the hell outta him so he had to confront his ‘boyfriend’ he isn’t sure honestly they haven’t labelled what they are yet and Richie’s kinda nervous that’s because Eddie doesn’t wanna be with a bi man and whilst all these thoughts are in his head he’s overthinking again and he needs to talk to Eddie.

“Eds,”                                                                                              “Urgh what?”                                                                     “Are we like?”                                                                             “Like what Richie use your words”       “Are we boyfriends?”                                                           “no we’re Italian farmers who love growing tomatoes of course we’re boyfriends”                                                                                                               “Geez okay I’m just making sure”                                                                                                      

“Especially cause you’ve been acting so weird, I mean I hardly see you, anytime you stay it’s daytime and the two occasions that we’ve stayed together you’re like a magician here one minute and then disappeared the next like some cruel trick it’s not fair Ed’s, I wanted to move forward with this relationship but it’s so hard when I can’t, don’t, know? Do you understand what I mean?                                                                                                                                          

“Uh no? Why would that ever make sense babe” sighed Eddie although he understood Richie well and knew him inside and out he didn’t understand how his brain worked? His ADHD flickering from thing to thing topic to topic and although Eddie could sometimes be known to ramble he couldn’t keep up.

“Well I mean with you? Why are you avoiding me at night? What’s the big secret?” Richie teased.

“I’m a werewolf”

“WHAT”

“I’m one of those creatures you know the ones that come out on the full moon I turn into a wolf howl at the moon y’know all those stereotypes”

“WHY WOULD YOU TELL ME THAT! YOU KNOW ABOUT MY FEAR OF WEREWOLVES”

“I’M SORRY BUT YOU ASKED. THIS IS WHY I’VE BEEN AVOIDING YOU! I DIDN’T WANT YOU TO BE SCARED OF ME YOU ASSHOLE”

“I…what”

“Yea I remembered you saying that you were terrified of werewolves since you were 12 so I’ve been trying to avoid transforming and all the side effects around it whilst I’m around you so I guess that seems like I need to avoid you and I mean there’s the murder”

“MURDER”

“Well I mean it’s not exactly murder more people get in the way of me as a 7 foot tall wolf and unfortunately I think my instincts kick in? Although it could be deer,  but there’s been bodies found and I…”

“BODIES!!?! BODIES AS IN PLURAL !!?!”

“Richie can you stop yelling, it’s been a long night I’m tired and sore, honestly I just want to rest…”

“WAIT WHAT,  YOU WERE OUT LAST NIGHT? Like it was a full moon ? I’m sorry I have to go call Bev or something, I-I can’t.

“WHERE ARE YOU- it’s your never mind” Eddie sighed as his voiced tailed off his head in his hands. This hadn’t been the way he wanted Richie to find out, honestly they’ve only been together for a few weeks and as soon as they talked he found out about his fear of werewolves and was horrified, he knew it might potentially be a dealbreaker and although he didn’t want to lose Richie. He had known that at one point that he’d have to sit down and tell him the story of the doctor, decided that his mother, who was a maniac bringing him to the hospital every time he even touched the ground too hard convinced he’d broken or dislocated his ankle needed something to worry about properly and turned him into a werewolf whilst he was at one of his many stays when he was eleven. His mother had been far more protective when she had found out, it was as if she had been normal beforehand, complete and utter curfew (“back straight after school Eddie-bear don’t talk to anybody, you don’t want them to find out!”), bars on the windows and even restraints at night as she was too paranoid, which wasn’t fun, especially as every night he just kept breaking out of them which in turn scared his mother more and more.

Shakily Richie reached into his pocket for his phone that he’d grabbed in his     haste to leave the apartment building, as it rang the word murder went in his stomach over and over again. “Hello?” Oh good she answered he wouldn’t have known what to do with himself otherwise I mean…. “Helloooo??” Oh right yeah she’s still on this phone.

“I-I Eddie, and…”

“What’s wrong with Eddie, depth breaths calm down and try to try me what happened.

“He.. he.. he’s a monster, a werewolf a murderer I don’t know if I can do this” sobbing he knelt on the pavement holding the phone thinking about how he didn’t want to lose Eddie, the problem was that he loved the shorter man despite them only dating a couple of weeks and he knew about the dangers of dating a monster.

They had learned about it in school which only fuelled Richie’s fear further the teachers explaining about scientific experiments gone wrong and turning ordinary people into creatures that could climb into his slightly opened window in the dead of night and maim them or if they were dating whilst in transformations they would completely forget their partner, ending up harming them. Listening to this had made him scared to moved his bed and slept under his window to make sure nothing got in, freaking out anytime a bug crawled on him.

“A werewolf? Yea probably. A murderer? Probably not and an I mean a monster definitely not. Don’t you love him? Don’t you want the chance for him to prove you wrong, honestly you’ve been scared for far too long. All this time people have been putting ideas into your head about ‘this that and the next thing to do with monsters and no offence Richie but I’m sick of hearing about it, time to march back to your apartment and make your own decisions about Eddie.

“Yea, yea I guess you’re right, I should maybe go back? I.. okay Bev darling I’ll speak to you later”.

Sitting up he decided that it was time to get back, not realising it was getting darker and darker as a full moon approached.

Waiting for Richie made him terrified he was transforming in an hour and he had no idea what would happen. Would they break up?? If they did it would be so much worse, the adrenaline in this body taking over, making him more angry and upset and he knew his wolf side would harm anything that got in his way, which could include his caring but stupid and scared boyfriend. Hearing the door creak open his head perked up realising that Richie hadn’t let for that long and that probably meant bad news, knots grew in his stomach as he waited in anticipation for Richie to say something, anything whilst looking at the clock ticking on closer and closer to his time of transformation.

“I’m home babey! I wanna talk to you, my love” he said in a singsong voice. This wasn’t good, he honestly knew Richie’s speech patterns very well and he almost never called him babey unless there was a big problem or something was wrong.  

“Yea I’m in here what’s happening”

“I just wanted to say, I talked to Bev and she put things into perspective, I think I love you and I shouldn’t judge you based on what happened when you were younger and I should try to get over it, I wanna keep dating you so I think it’s a good idea to see you at least once.

“Wait wait you want to stay with me? HOLD UP YOU THINK YOU LOVE ME”

“Well yea, I guess? I know we’ve only been dating for a few weeks and technically I only found out a few days ago but I have really strong feelings for you and I think I love you”.

“ I … okay… really don’t know what to say I love yo…” but before Eddie could finish off his sentence something happened, it was supposed to be a strange scary thing but Richie didn’t feel scared all he felt was concerned H could see the pain manifesting on Eddie’s face as he twisted and turned and hair grew from his body turning him taller, more muscular and then into a wolf.

Werewolves, although potentially not less dangerous were smaller than the stories, and Eddie didn’t seem to want to attack him honestly? Richie was very confused and conflicted between everything he had ever heard and feared vs the man who was his boyfriend who had just turned into what looked like a slightly taller dog still vigilant just sitting there. Well until it started talking, but you never hear about things like that when people are attempting to scare you.

“Well aren’t you going to say something? You’ve been looking at me in a daze for the last five minutes like I get the idea of you being scared like yea but can you please snap out of your like -why are you- dude why are you laughing?” Forgetting he was a wolf he attempted to walk over to Richie and ended up falling over four paws”.

Doubled over in laughter Richie realising his boyfriend was an idiot as a wolf decided that there something they needed to talk about “Eddieeeeeee we need to talk soooo I also have a secret”.

“Okay, and it is?

“I’m boisexual, well actually I’m bisexual but we both know I couldn’t come out without a pun”

“And an awful one at that I mean, what does that even mean rich? But honestly I know you told me about the time you dated Bev before she started dating Ben so I just assumed, why is that like a problem?”

“Oh…I- forgot about I just -I assumed like most gay guys you wouldn’t be down to date a bisexual guy I mean most of my life I’ve been told I don’t exist and-“

“Wait who told you this, how many people told you this? You know they’re wrong right I mean you’re bisexual”,

“thanks I means it was mainly my mum and a couple of ex-boyfriends, some teachers and stuff you know”

“Do you want to get your own back?”.

Richie looked at the small wolf in surprise thinking about how he could play pranks and stuff or what they could do in order to get his own back but Eddie had something else in mind.

“Do you want to come with me to kill them”

 Maggie Tozier, was baking in the kitchen humming a light tune whilst taking a pie out of the oven, she hadn’t spoken to her son since he turned sixteen and came out as bisexual for the third time to her disbelief that it wasn’t a phase and after she decided not to accept him they both just stopped talking to each other and then a year later he up and left.

As Richie made his way to his childhood home with his boyfriend in tow he looked at his mom and realised there was no turning back, it was now or never, he could talk to his mom get clarification? If it all went wrong Eddie would be there to make sure he’s okay. Walking in announced he saw he face drop and her mouth open, unfortunately it didn’t seem to be in a nice way. “What are you doing here” her voice laced with disappointment at seeing her thirty-odd year old son standing in front her for the first time in years waiting for her approval or acceptance at last, but that would never come. “Do you still think you can live in cloud cuckoo land and date both boys and girls, I hate to tell you baby but people are going to take advantage of you, I don’t see a ring if you’d just stop all this nonsense I could-“

Before anyone knew what was happening Eddie had lunged at Maggie and grabbed at her arm to bite her, Richie frozen in shock and horror couldn’t do anything except gape at the site as he could see she was losing more and more blood out of her arm, thinking realising he didn’t have many options his adrenaline kicked in, he pondered back to all the times he’d been told he was invisible, bisexuality didn’t exist or he was a monster for trying to invade both communities and he snapped. Grabbing a butcher’s knife from the kitchen he could see his mother attempting to back away muffled screaming, and stabbed her stomach, hearing the organs squishing made his feel better so he did it again and again until he was cover in a pool of blood, surrounded by his mother whilst he was sobbing, Eddie in a corner waiting on him.

“I just murdered my mother”

“Well yea, I just thought you’d hurt her a little honestly but that was a full on murder, but I think she had it coming? Do you want to get cleaned up?”

“Mhmm, that’d be nice, but the problem is I liked it, I enjoyed stabbing her, is that weird?

“Weeelll that depends on who you ask, me, I’m fine with it I mean I enjoy maiming people as a wolf but to normal person I guess?? Hey do you wanna murder people when I’m in my wolf form”.

“You mean people who deserve it right? Not just random people on the street because I don’t know if I enjoy it that much”.

“Yep yea sure of course I won’t pressure you it’s only been your first murder  after all”.

That next night was the final full moon for the month and Richie was trying to think who he would want to murder next, one of his teachers who made him terrified of werewolves, one of the executives who said he’d never get a job in comedy (look at him now!) or one of his biphobic ex-boyfriends who made him feel so disgusting and pathetic that he decided not to date for six years and when he at last did date ‘forgot’ to disclose his sexuality every date he went on.

Tracing down his ex-boyfriend wasn’t as difficult as it seemed just follow the scent of disappointment and go to the nearest seedy gay bar. Julian, who was happily walking towards his car according to the police report, was ribbed in the heart with a duller kitchen knife as if to mimic a broken heart. One arm was ripped off and had teeth marks in it as if it was created by both man and dog.

Waking up next to Eddie, was one of the nice things about existing having had one of the weirdest dreams of his life, although as the blood dripped from the mattress that he couldn’t see he did know one thing though.

He wasn’t frightened of werewolves anymore.

[yououghtaknow]

18 and 20 for the meta asks? also I already commented on clip 3 but fr this clip was so good that was such a good execution of that scene and s5 has been so good and literally brightens my day thank u 💛 i hope you’re doing well

hi, thank you so much!!!!!!!! i hope you’re doing well too <3 <3

i am putting a read more because i am a rambley person, but underneath you will find talks of unused plot points, the parallels between the girl squad and the lad squad, and what taylor swift album(s) i believe each season has the vibe of.

tw for discussion of abuse, mental health problems, addiction and eating disorders

18. Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.

skam brighton has. so many aus. because it itself is an au of an original work. me and two of my great writing friends have written a great numbers of aus including but not limited to riordian-verse, glee, doctor who, rwrb, trc, a murder mystery au, and many aus based on comfort media of mine that i started on never finished (house of anubis, barbie movies, etc.). and many of them are unironically so good???? @fingersmithbysarahwaters and @nightwing642 are incredibly talented screenwriters. but also i did write a screenplay adaptations of the first two books in the raven cycle series and 2/3s of rwrb for no reason other than fun and autism.

as for skam brighton. oh boy. not many plot points have been changed, but some certain scenes/character moments were changed. for example, the scene in season 2 episode 8 where liz has a meltdown at the shopping centre and she has a heart to heart with mary was originally liz having a meltdown and running into al in the sensory room. but i wanted to hold back on revealing al as a main character until season 3. 

also in the og season 3, jake and al didn’t break up. as i was finishing the season, i was getting ideas for how i wanted the series to develop (james’s crush on al namely) so i thought it would be good for both of their developments for them not to end up together. also in season 3 i hadn’t planned for jake to move house originally, so there was a scene in the finale episode of the lad squad hanging out, but it got cut because it just didn’t make sense. 

in season 4, al and bree were a lot meaner to each other originally, because i love it when it gets busy at the brighton and the gay people get mean, but then i thought about it and decided it was out of character for both of them to be downright cruel. al and bree also had a scene in season 4 that was cut due to just not making sense. 

also, in season 5, the “inner white girl” scene originally wasn’t in the show at all, but one day i was listening to the song, and about a week before the episode came out, i wrote it. also, bree wasn’t written to be a she/they until literally the day of putting the clip out because i thought it would be cool. that’s it :)

also the way i write is that i write the full clip out in a google doc and then edit it in ao3 about an hour before i put it out, so a lot of changes happen there. just small things, like making dialogue flow better, changing certain songs because i just want to, and sometimes adding in new sequences that i just thought of.

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

oh!!!! there!!!!! is!!!!! 

personally, my favourite thing to write is little symbolic moments that make me happy because i play 4d chess in my head with myself every time i write.

before i go off, i must say, so many hints and clues have been dropped for season six so far. season six has been my favourite season to write and i’m already planning a spin-off project based on it to write, and it’s gonna be starting sooner than you think.

so a piece of writing i’ve been thinking about lately is the parallels between the girl squad and the lad squad. before i begin to go off, these are the characters i think parallel each other the most.

jake - sandy james - bree nick - rori theo - esther al - liz

jake and sandy is quite an obvious parallel to draw - both are football players, both begin the series closeted and having a close relationship with bryan - but their personalities are quite similar. both of them are closer with their mother than their father, both use their relationships as a method of protection, and both are afraid of of societal rejection at the beginning of the series. they also both discovered their sexualities and mental health issues over the course of their seasons, and both of their love interests are more outgoing theatre kids. jake and sandy’s relationship is also so interesting to me - because they start as very awkward friends, and jake tries to help sandy by making bryan break up with her, but outs her in the process, and sandy doesn’t want to forgive him. she takes her time and comes to terms with it on her own and decides to forgive him because sandy’s just a sweetheart - and this also parallels the way jake takes his time to forgive his mother. also, in their friend groups, they’re both the newcomer to them, and we get the introductions to the group dynamics in their seasons, and in the later seasons, they’re both a lot more relaxed as they’re in recovery <3

james and bree are also very similar characters. both have problems with substance abuse, both have promiscuous reputations, both have both mommy and daddy issues. they are both dean girls, to put it in spn terms. they’re both very funny, and use humour to cover up their struggles. both are dealing with a lot of mental illness and, throughout the series, it becomes more and more clear. they’re also both seen as “the hot ones” of their groups, with a lot of the characters canonically having small crushes on them (liz, rori and nick with james; rori, esther and annabell with bree). they’ve also both canonically hooked up with sophie. which i just think is fun. they also played mimi and roger together, which i think shows their parallels as addicts and people (with roger struggling with recovery and depression until the end, when he begins to get help, and mimi living the high life until it all crumbles down around her). they also share a want for independence and both are very sana-esque characters (james being middle eastern and religious, bree being the cool rebel girl in season 1).

nick and rori are both the “fun friend”. they’re both comedic relief in the early seasons, but we do get in depth with them as the show goes on. in grease, they play james and bree’s love interests (which is ironic, as rori and bree get together and nick is in love with james), and in rent, they play angel and maureen, the two main comedic relief characters. both of them struggle to connect their asian identity with their british identity, and both struggle with how the world perceives them (nick with their gender presentation and rori with her eating disorder). they both struggle with toxic masculinity and toxic femininity and use humour to cover up their struggles.

theo and esther are similar in the fact that they’re the squad members we know the least about. they’re both jewish, they’re both the mum friend of their respective groups, they’re both autistic and they’re both quite nerdy. they’re the most grounded member of their respective groups and tend to take charge and help make decisions. they’re also both quite sarcastic and very firm in their opinions. 

al and liz are parallels simply because they are both nooras and vildes. they’r eboth autistic, they’re both the odd one out in their friend groups - liz being a lot more serious than the girl squad, al being a lot more in his own little world than the lad squad. they’re both very blunt and straight forward and say whatever they’re thinking.

also just some of my favourite bits of foreshadowing: nick being bitchy to liz throughout season 2 because they’re in love with james….. al talking about his sister to jake in season 3 and whenever al talks to the girl squad, bree insults him or walks away…… in season 4 episode 1, audrey mentions bree’s cousin is pregnant and then when bree finds out the results of her pregnancy test, oh no by marina plays (i’m now becoming my own self fulfilling prophecy)....... nick and all of his gender stuff throughout the series……. just all of the character stuff with grease and rent….. also just bree and rori’s whole relationship arc because it has everything. queerbaiting. subverting expectations. musical homoeroticism. a little cheating for fun. and they were best friends. honestly bree and rori season 3 is very august by taylor swift…… you weren’t mine to lose…….. 

speaking of, no one asked by here’s each season of skambr and the taylor swift albums they’re most like.

season 1 - debut/fearless

bro sandy is just such a debut/fearless era person. she’s looking for her place in this world!!!!!! she has the teardrops on my guitar energy (quite literally sandy pre-canon voice i bet he’s beautiful that boy she talks about and he has everything that i have to live without about bryan and sophie)..... the fun giggly crush songs that are deeply homoerotic….. esther season 1 voice the entirety of you belong with me. like esther really made a deeper connection with sandy in one month that bryan did in years of knowing her. sandy also is the type of person to stan love story, she just thinks it’s such a fun song and she does yell the key change every time it comes on. 

season 2 - speak now/lover

elizabeth!!!!! liz is the type of person who only liked old taylor and then got internalised misogyny and then got over it and loves taylor again. the story of us is canonically a liz/rori song…. yes i am still a liz/rori subtext warrior….. liz is very never grow up and dear john is a very her and james song in the fact that they both relate to it……. when they bonded over their trauma “don’t you think i was too young”...... also lover is a liz season 2 album because it’s about liz learning that love is the most important thing in the world….. liz voice i want to be defined by the things that i love. also the archer is just a skam brighton song because it is an isaac song. also i’m just gonna say it. i like me! it’s a good song when brendon urie isn’t in it, you all are just afraid of having fun. also though liz in season 5 is very better than revenge because, while her season is about unlearning your internalised prejudices, i believe she deserves to be misogynistic for 3 minutes 37 seconds.

season 3 - red

now this is controversial. this season is about depression, grief and anger, and these feelings are red. literally jake voice so you were never a saint and i loved in shades of wrong we learn to live with the pain mosaic broken hearts….. like treacherous….. holy ground….. the whole country pop vibe….. the bitchy songs mocking people’s perceptions of the singer…..  22 is a lad squad song…. also jake voice i remember it all too well but it’s about his father’s abuse and his mother’s neglect…… like the whole season is just jake getting to the point where he is at “begin again”. also i feel like jake would like red because he spent a lot of time watching taylor swift music videos as a youth both because he liked the music and had crushes on the guys in them, and he feels red is the perfect middle between the country and the pop and the indie and he just really likes being sad.

season 4 - reputation

bree big reputation holland!!!!!!!!! she has it all - the romantic drama, the hatred of men, the fucking homoeroticism. bree stans the reputation tour and they have made the entire holland-fletcher family watch it on their netflix (al fucking loved it because he’s a canon swiftie, audrey had a fun time, patrick was a little confused, but has the spirit). listen bree “i did something bad”. bree “look what you made me do”. bree and rori “new year’s day”. bree voice i swear i don’t love the drama, it loves me!!!!!!!!! like the reason the season has a lot of reputation songs and ends with daylight from lover is a metaphor for bree leaving their reputation era…. also reputation has she/they vibes

season 5 - 1989

1989 my best friend 1989!!!!!!! i am coming out here as a 1989 (deluxe) stan. it’s just a serotonin album for me and it is just so nick. the mocking songs about their reputation…… the genuinely deeply depressing homoerotic songs that have fun upbeat music…… the cars….. also clean is just such a nick song. he is in recovery, he is just so personal to me. also nick voice one night he wakes strange look on his face pauses then says you’re my best friend and you knew what it was he is in love!!!!!!! nick canonically in love with all of their best friends braxton!!!!! also nick feels like a 1989 stan because they just have those fun energies. nick WILL scream the spoken part of shake it off at the top of his lungs. also new romantic is just a skamverse song in general. also just. out of the woods. no reason for me to say it other than it’s one of my favourite songs of all time.

season 6 - folklore/evermore

no evermore is not out yet. yes i am claiming it for season 6. see taylor has said that these albums are all about telling stories/fairy tales and that’s what season 6 is about. i cannot wait until next friday when the main and my plans for the hiatus are revealed…….. genuinely i do not know how anyone perceives skam brighton so i don’t know who people think the next main is, but…… i can only describe the state of me writing this season as the various ambiguous disorder gifs.

[damagexcontrol]

let's talk about how you never stop realizing things about yourself.

i turned 23 this month, september 5th.

for the past year, i thought i had finally figured my sexuality out. my identity along with it. pansexual, non-binary, typically just calling myself queer.

but i'm sitting in therapy, just rambling, occasionally being steered back on topic by my very patient therapist, when she asks me a question i wasn't quite prepared for.

"have you ever had a sex drive?"

what a question. i had to ask myself, have i ever had a sex drive?

no. i haven't. and that hit me in a weird way.

i never went thru the "coming of age" phase of realizing i was attracted to someone. i've always been able to recognize beauty and attractiveness, but while all my friends started calling people hot, i never quite ... got it.

back in high school, i considered the idea that i could be asexual. but, how could i genuinely say that if i'd never had any sort of sexual interaction? (i'm a pro at invalidating myself) then i hit my 20's and had my first consensual sexual interaction with someone: and it wasn't bad, it didn't make me feel gross or anything, and though i never sought it out i was more than happy to have sex with my partner when they wanted to. and since i wasn't sex repulsed, i thought "okay i can't be ace. i must be demisexual, then"

but my therapist, listening to me explain my odd take on sex and attraction, drops another bomb on me. "you don't have to be sex repulsed to be asexual, laine. it sounds to me like you never had a sex drive, that you're okay at times to please your partner, but you never seek it out. it's not something you actively want. and, it sounds like you've been trying to convince yourself you have a sex drive, to find some normalcy."

when i tell you i felt like a train just hit me ...

not in a bad way. it just ... the more we talked, the more we explored that idea, i started feeling the same sense of certainty i felt when i came out as pan. the same sense of euphoria i feel when people call me by my preferred name and use they/them pronouns.

i'm asexual.

that's not exactly something i thought i'd be realizing at 23, or even being presented with the idea sitting in therapy. but here we are. and honestly, it feels ... almost comforting. there's a sense of validation there, a sense of certainty i don't think i've ever felt when discussing sexuality as a whole.

i know i can fall in love with a person regardless of gender identity. so, i'm still essentially pan. but i'm also ace. a concept that isn't new to me obviously, but it's a new fact about me that i'm just now realizing and it feels ... good. it feels really good.

[mimiscappinisideblog]

Well this has been an EVENTFUL weekend...

Gonna ramble a “little” cuz is my blog and also cuz I may have ADHD who knows.

Last month I've been preparing stuff for an artist alley/artist convention/artist event I was invited to (they invited me a few month ago but I was out of the country and couldn't attend) BUT they invited me again for this last weekend!

Pressure and anxiety didn't wait to show up as always...

This last week I went to print my stuff (mostly stickers and a few prints) I went to a small store for that one that was like an hour away from my house instead of the 20 minute by foot one near my house because IT IS WAY CHEAPER!

I went to print my first batch of stuff monday and took three days to make more stickers designs. Then I went again friday morning cuz the event was from saturday to sunday. Also to note that around wendsday I was starting to feel a little odd but I shove it to the side thinking it was just the anxiety for my firstevent where people going to see me and buy my work so I didn't thought much about it, the same thing happened when I had to finish my tesis short last year.

Also to note that my mom was sick for about a week at the time. We have A LOT of dengue fever cases here because people is dirty and don't clean their houses to AVOID having mosquitoes. Here is something like: rain=dengue. Also one of my friends has it too.

So, friday was total chaos. I went to the printer in the morning, all the prints were okay and my visit was way faster then last time (I got fever the night before but went anyway). I got home eat lunch and went to the supermarket to buy some hair dye and stuf for my table (got a pair of macharons trays I used to display my stickers but I'm currently using to prop my laptop cuz I refuse to get off the bed)

When I got home from the supermarket my mom when out to get her pay check and do some grocery shopping. After she was gone I began to dye my hair, when I was in the middle of it my brother came from work and told me our grand aunt had passed away. I got sad and looked to my reflection and tought "great, now I'll have blue hair in the funeral" there was nothing I could to at that point so I kept painting the rest of my hair.

That night I asked my mom what'll I do with the event the next day, she said I should go because I already worked so much for it and as long as I go to see the family it'll be all okay (that surprised me).

I kept having fever friday night and still thought I was somatization for the big event.

And the first day came. I barely slept also fever it was still just anxiety. I went to my aunt's house, saw the family then my grandma told me to go to her house and make lunch. I ate very little now this was for anxiety... I think.

Put all the stuff I needed in my backpack, took a shower and got ready. Before going out I downed a ibuprofen ""just in case"". In the trip there I try to calm my nerves, tried and focused on stuff but mostly just listened to the Beetlejuice album.

The place was a little coffee shop and we were on the backyard... IT WAS SO HOT AND HUMID OH MY GOD. There were like just two standing fans for all of us which did close to nothing on lightened the heat.

Just the saturday I made enough to cover for the money I used for the prints. Sunday was a little more chilled out, not as many people as saturday but considering it kinda rained right before the event started makes sence. I made half of what I made saturday but it was solely winings!

I was destroyed when I got home that night. Slept till 10:40 today. At lunch I realized I had reddish spots on the my skin (now my whole body itches) which according to my mom they only appear when someone is in the last stages of dengue fever. So it turns out that all the fever and headaches I had weren't because of the event I was actually sick and didn't even realized! A lot of people die from this shit, I could've died but not to day satan!

I didn’t dye but I’m still sick and won’t be able to draw any time soon, sorry!

[quarantingz]

oop mind dump(!), half-baked thoughts (!), usual confusion(!), being busy(!), efficiency(!), procrastination(!) & none of the above(!)

enjoy :))

[written on] 7 april, tuesday

[intended to post on] 7 april, tuesday

[intended to post 2.0 on] 8 april, wednesday

[finally posted, after much procrastination and probably just laziness, on] 9 april, thursday

Hi there!

With a lack of a profound statement to start off this entry, I’ll just say this…my mind is as scattered and non-sensical as ever! What’s new?

Second coffee in, I’m thinking about, as the title suggests, a lot of things (with as much caffeinated enthusiasm as it suggests)! I definitely didn’t think I was going to be writing a post today because I thought yesterday’s entry [monday’s] was heavy enough that I could simmer and ponder over it for a while longer. But I guess, as things go, and because I naturally must write things down, I need to write everything that’s going on in my head right now - before I forget, but also so I can pRoCeSs it :)

I will definitely not get through everything I think I want to write about in this one post, and for the sake of keeping it short and still somewhat legible and engaging, I will try my best. Maybe I will do a part two (??). Hmmm maybe I won’t haha. We’ll see how this goes.

Here we go…enjoy…

So as I was swinging my arms and getting a good stretch of the legs on our family “night” walk yesterday, Tali asked me, “did you have a good day today?”. It was a simple question and one I always answer with a “yeah kinda, did a few things, wish I did more, but tomorrow will be better!”. I like looking on the bright side, but it really got me thinking about what it means to be busy and how society has placed a lot of emphasis on it currently.

I recently read an article on It’s Nice That called, “You are More than Your Output”, which was an interesting read on this idea of “busyness”, the pressures on what we do for a living, self-definition from this and our relationship with work. Oosh, it was confronting and I definitely needed to discuss this with someone further. So of course I decided to send it to Gwen, Cullz and Paulz (there’s something so comforting and encouraging to know that I have people in my life who creatively challenge and most importantly, understand my journey as a creative, post-graduation).

Twas good discussions and what they said was so so good (got my brain juices flowing for sure), but I want to briefly touch on this topic and my thoughts about this…I love being busy, in fact, as I’ve mentioned before, I thrive off being busy. As bizarre as it sounds, I’m almost like an adrenaline junkie who gets off of busy schedules and long lists of TO-DOs. I like to ambitiously jam-pack my day with the most things I can do and “tick off” in ONE day. Sounds overwhelming and you’re probably thinking I’ll burn out eventually and I won’t always like this once I have a full-time job. But for now, I like that feeling. It makes me be and feel productive. And although I regularly remind my friends to take a break and relax in order to rejuvenate, I can’t seem to take this advice myself. I constantly feel like I’ve drunk five cups of coffee within 20 minutes, so my heart usually feels like it’s going to beat its way out of my chest, and my mind is so full, it’s almost incomprehensible and confusing.

Anyway, back to productivity…this feeling is probably the reason why I struggle with self-love a lot - if I’m not achieving everything on my list, I’m not being productive enough, it is not a “good day” and I’m not…“succeeding” in life. Which again, is all about MINDSET, people!

Yes, everything does comes with balance, prioritising and re-evaluating what’s the most important things in life at any given time. Sorry, but I feel like this entry will just raise more questions and half-baked thoughts (ha, managed to tick that off the list!), than actually solving anything.

I guess what I want to touch on here, is not so much on the debate about whether you should be busy or not, it’s more about dismantling these personal-constructs that we have in our minds…

Ahhh, another topic to elaborate on (solely) for another time I guess (…??).

*** SIDE-NOTE (COZ WE LOVE A SIDE-NOTE) ***

Right now [tuesday, 2.40pm], my eldest sister sits on the La-Z-Boy, rocking back and forth trying to write a new idea for a new script. My dad too, sits facing the same way as her towards the ranch slider and garden, bowl of sweet mung bean soup in hand, relaxing in a foldable picnic chair for his “break”. I can’t help but smile at this scene and feel very happy and content in where I am right now. It also makes me chuckle at the contrast of their peaceful reflections with my scattered mind and furious typing. My frantic fingers almost echo in the quiet space that is my living room. I like this. I had only wanted to write one word down for this entry before I forgot it (then finish this piece tomorrow, when I felt like it), but here I am having written over one page long. I’m also not listening to music, which is rare for me as I like dwelling in the emotions and vibe of the music while I write - it helps me as you know by now. But in this moment, it’s just Tema, my dad, me, my typing and my silent scattered thoughts.

*** END OF SIDE-NOTE (ACTUALLY A SMALL APPRECIATIVE-NOTE) ***

Back to the point…the mere act of typing furiously on my keyboard (ooh links!) actually makes me feel busy and definitely makes me look busy. When someone says, “oh Alyssa, you’re always so busy” or “bro, when are YOU free?”, it kind of makes me feel good - that I’m somehow “succeeding” in life because I actually have things to do. But isn’t it all superficial and just an appearance? Because in my mind, I’m not achieving as much as I want to do within a day or week. Anyway, maybe that’s why a lot of people, even myself, give into this idea of busyness - because we’re fed this belief that to be “successful”, means that we not only occupy ourselves to the max, but we look the part too. That’s apparent in any bustling city, like Auckland, or London and Paris. People are constantly moving and doing things. These cities never sleep and apparently that idea means those cities and people are thriving and being “successful”.

I guess another aspect I want to discuss is the idea of efficiency. For some reason, that word is so mockable, but maybe that’s just because my boyfriend uses that word excessively and I like to laugh at him (because he’s silly, not because I’m a bully, woah, CHILL). So to be busy, and therefore “successful” is also associated with being efficient. Which also relates to B, who applies lip balm VERY STRANGELY, but efficiently…he applies it by swiping the stick across his top and bottom lip at the same time, followed by a giddy “EFFICIENCY G!” EVERY. TIME. This is quite like the idea of “killing two birds with one stone”. The idea of doing the most you can and preferably at the same time in order to optimise time. It also links with the saying, “time is of the essence”. Because we have such a limited time on Earth, people feel like they have to fill everyday and every waking hour doing something - or else we feel unproductive and ultimately a “failure”. I’m not saying everyone feels like this (I do), or that efficiency is stupid and entirely negative. I think it’s entirely individual and lies within our perceptions of the things we actually do and hope to do. Everything is relative (??).

Which brings me to the subject of procrastination. For example, in the span it has taken me to write this blog post, I’ve made myself a bowl of plain porridge for my late 2pm lunch (oop photo reference - twas really nice actually), a toastie with salami, sweet thai chilli sauce, harissa sauce and a lot of pepper (odd mix I know), which I had at 4pm, but now consider as my dinner coz now I’m stuffeddddd. I’ve also made hummus (which I think I want to write about next - there’s a metaphor in there that I want to exploit lol) for the fam, folded all of the whites and made the cinnamon apple filling for Tema and I’s mini pies. Talk about procrastination…see here, maybe this isn’t “procrastination”!

The issue lies in how we prioritise and give importance to certain things in our life. And in this case, I’m still being “busy”, but my perception of what I’ve done is that these are menial tasks - they are of lesser importance and priority compared to other things on my to-do list. Again, it is all relative. This comparison between certain things we do is what makes us fall into this trap of self-punishment and “failure” (again, maybe it’s just me). So when we do the thing that seems less important, we consequently feel unproductive . But I had been meaning to make hummus since last week, and I intended to eat lunch at 12.30pm, but got too busy looking through some design concepts for my friend, AND I was meant to fold the whites so my dad could have a clean set of singlets for this week. And lol, I wanted to make pie filling because we all craved something sweet (can’t we just do things just coz?). Looking over these, all of them are important! But why do we prioritise our jobs as so and essentially, degrade our life choices??!

Okay, I think I’m going to wrap this up because there’s no point to this entry anymore. But it was interesting to type out all these random thoughts and somehow try to weave them together. But as always, this is just a ramble. You're confused, I’m confused, we’re ALL confused.

(Or maybe I wanted to see whether you could keep up with my 100 mph train of thoughts hehe)

So to tie everything up in a big, definitely-not-an-indecisive-red-or-maybe-blue-nah-feelin-green-now-BOW…be busy, don’t be busy. Procrastinate, don’t procrastinate. BUT, be kinder to yourself. You don’t have to be busy nor productive - give yourself some slack, you’re doing the best you can! So practice SeLf-LoVe.

You owe yourself thatttt much :)

p.s. I think this post was more me procrastinating about writing and posting, because clearly, I took my time procrastinating and eventually posting three days later than when I first wrote this.

Anyway, have a great day y’all (productive or busy or none of the above)!

- a

[ckret2]

So a lot of care goes into your writing (I assume) and it seems like you do a lot of research. I was wondering how you conduct your research, what kind of sites you look for, how you narrow done what your looking for, etc, if you wouldn’t mind sharing?

It honestly depends on what I’m looking for! Like, I work better when I have specific examples, so I’m gonna ramble to you about one thing I looked up today:

When Ghidorah hooked up to a radio station, I wanted it to be an actual real world radio station so that I could listen to the station online and go “yeah, here are the songs they’re listening to.” Because that’s a lot better than me, whose sum total of Spanish knowledge comes from a couple years of very spotty Duolingo practice, trying to guess what kind of songs play on actual Mexican radio stations.

Based on prior research I already knew that the fictional Isla de Mara is basically straight out east from the Rio Grande, next to the state Tamaulipas, so I got on Google Maps, scrolled around to where the Grande dumps into the Gulf, and looked for the city nearest the coast that looked sizable enough to have a radio station (i.e., the one closest to the coast that has a big name). And that ended up being Matamoros:

Here’s a pro tip: if you’re trying to find info about something in a non-English-speaking country, you’re probably going to find a lot more reliable resources a lot more easily if you actually google for that info in the language that’s spoken in that country. If you don’t know the language, Google Translate it. When you find the page you want, Google Translate it back. Yes, you’re gonna lose some nuance and some of the translations will be wonky, but it’ll still probably give you better info than if you’re googling for English pages about something in, like, Indonesia or wherever.

(Can you tell Indonesia is also on the list of places I’ve been researching! Do y’all wanna read the best myth I’ve ever read in my life? It features a snake named Stupid Boy and a misunderstanding worthy of an Abbott & Costello skit. I love it and I’ve only read a Wikipedia summary of it. And a Google Translated version of the Indonesian Wikipedia version of the story, which is 20% wilder. This has absolutely nothing to do with what I was trying to research.)

So I plugged “radio station” into Google Translate, got the Spanish, googled “estaciones de radio matamoros tamaulipas,” and clicked on the very first result because it’s a streaming site, and look at the options. All the FM stations are out. All the AM stations that don’t have genres listed, I’m pushing to the bottom of the list because I don’t wanna listen to each individual one trying to find out if they actually play music or not. The station that gives its genre as “noticias” I ignore because I’m not here for news, I’m here for music. There are two stations that have “balada/grupera/mexicano/ranchera” listed for their genres, and these I do know are music genres due to Prior Research, because yes I had to do research to find that out because I don’t know crap about Mexican music genres but I’m sure gonna learn.

And also while I’m at it I look up “balada” and “grupera” on wikipedia because I don’t know what those genres are, and now I know that “balada” is just Latin ballad, and more significantly I know from one single line on Wikipedia that balada is partially distinguishable from the bolero genre it spawned from because ballads usually have more direct straightforward romantic lyrics whereas boleros are generally more subtle/metaphorical, which, okay! What am I going to do with this information? I don’t know! Possibly nothing! But because I read the Wikipedia page it’s now a fact that lives inside my head! Ballads are straightforward about the romance! That’s a distinguishing feature!

There’s pro tip #2 on research: when there’s a subject you need to know, seriously, just go to wikipedia and read up on it and start clicking on all the links on the page you’re on and absorb the knowledge. You might use none of it, or it might end up super important. The fic Mafic exists because when I was writing Gold Gilt on Molten Basalt Ghidorah licked Rodan and I needed to know what he’d taste like, so I looked up igneous rocks to find out what minerals are in them, and “feldspar” was on the list, so I said he tasted like feldspar, and then I kept reading the page and found out there was a difference between intrusive and extrusive igneous rock, with “extrusive” meaning the rock formed on the surface rather than inside/under the volcano, and it said “basalt” is common extrusive rock, and well okay then obviously any rock that makes up Rodan’s hide is going to be extrusive, and “basalt” is a word which I have heard before which means readers have probably heard it before, so bam now he’s made out of basalt. … And then doing more research on volcanoes in subsequent weeks I find out that basalt is a common extrusive igneous rock from volcanoes with mafic lava, which are typically short dome-shaped volcanoes that ooze rather than tall pointy volcanoes that go boom, but Rodan’s volcano is definitely tall and pointy and goes boom, and whoops I hecked up. And now because I looked up mafic and felsic volcanoes, I made up a whole-ass goddamn set of Rodan subspecies, and my worldbuilding is richer for it, even though mafic & felsic lava wasn’t relevant to the info I was looking for when I found it out. And these are things learned gradually, over several weeks of looking up one tiny volcano detail for Rodan at a time and then reading three more Wikipedia pages in the process. Do I understand 70% of what I read? I sure don’t, because I’m neither a chemist nor a geologist. Do I make use of the 30% I do understand? I sure do! And that makes it worth it.

So back to the radio.

So there are two radio stations on this site that play music, so I click on the first one. And what do you know, I get a radio stream and it’s playing music! That’s it research done I got what I’m looking for. I bookmark the station and listen to it from time to time to like, absorb the sound, so that I can describe it in fic when I need to. (Admittedly, when I finally did describe it in fic it was “confusing noise???” because I was writing from the perspective of a couple creatures that have never heard human music before—but as they adjust to the sound any descriptions of it will, like, reflect what it actually sounds like.)

So that was a week or two ago. Today, I’m trying to write a fic where actual humans are hearing that same radio station, which means they can probably like, actually understand what songs are playing. So I listen to the station and try to pick out lyrics to google so I can find out the titles of the songs. (I am told by Google Translate that the Spanish word for lyrics is “letra,” but I seem to get about the same results whether my search term is “lyrics” or “letra.”) But the thing is, I suck at picking out lyrics in English, which I actually speak, and duolingo does not prepare you for the challenge of picking out individual words from balada as they’re singing and you’re trying to parse two words inside your head when the next three words come and you forget the first two words and then you forget the whole phrase and fifteen seconds have gone by and the only word you picked out was “mañana” and that’s not enough lyrics to google. So I recorded 20-odd minutes of the station so that I could listen to the same lines over and over until I picked out a few words well enough to google. And I’ve now picked out… two lyrics that let me identify two songs! 

Pro tip #3: research is slow sometimes.

pro tip #4: if you’re trying to decipher spanish lyrics from a live radio station maybe like ask if any of your friends know more spanish than you and don’t have anything better to do with their evening than help you google lyrics.

So uh the tl;dr is research is a lot of Google and a lot of Wikipedia. If I was writing, like, an actual novel or something that I planned on publishing or putting before an audience bigger than… *checks notes on fics* a hundred people, then it would also be a lot of books and a lot of finding people from the actual cultures I’m trying to write about to ask them about whatever subject I’m writing about; but eventually you’ve gotta balance out the effort vs the rewards, and hauling ass to the library to spend five days doing research for a fic I’m gonna write in two hours and post the night I wrote it is a time sink that my ADHD and I lack the coordination and attention span to manage.

But hey here’s my last pro tip: assume you don’t know things, unless you know that you already know them. Like, if you’re going to drop a fish in a volcano, you probably assume that you know what that smoke is going to look like, because, generally, you know what smoke looks like, don’t you? But unless you’ve already seen a fish fall in a volcano, don’t assume that. Assume that you don’t know what the smoke of a lava-cooked fish looks like. Look it up. If you can’t find a result, look up a fish in a fire instead because that’s the next closest thing. Some smoke is whitish and some is black and if you want to describe that smoke you’ve gotta have seen it to know which it’s gonna be.

And here’s where “assume nothing” gets really important: if you’re gonna have a giant pteranodon make glass in his volcano, you’re probably going to assume that the volcano will be hot enough to actually melt the glass, because volcanoes are literally so hot they melt rocks. So it’s def hot enough for glass, right? Don’t assume that. Look it up. When you do you’ll find out that lava is actually approximately 500°C too cool to melt sand into glass. You’ll also find out that lava is too cool to melt the very rocks that go into lava, and you’ll spend four hours obsessively googling lava to find out how the hell magma is formed if it’s not actually hot enough to be liquid. (The answer: water mixed with the rocks lowers the melting point; and the drop in the extreme pressure when rocks move upward in the mantle also lowers the melting point; until the melting point is reduced to the actual temperature of the rock. I found this out while trying to write about a pteranodon making glass.)

And that’s it that’s how I do research. To answer your specific questions: I don’t concern myself with “what kind of sites” I look for because the sites that I’m gonna look at are the first results that pop up when I google a question, and if the first results don’t have the answer, then I click on the next results, and the next results, until I find the site that’s got it. I don’t “narrow down” what I’m looking for—if anything, what I do is the exact opposite of “narrowing down” what I’m looking for, I start with one question and then I broaden it to read about a half dozen tangentially-related concepts because that tangential info will probably be useful and I won’t know that until it’s in my brain percolating. If you want to know One Specific Fact and you look up that One Specific Fact and immediately leave, then you fail to learn the Fifteen Related Facts that are super important to the overall topic you’re writing about but that you never knew to ask about because you were only looking for that One Specific Fact.

Feel free to ask for clarification. I went stream-of-consciousness as hell on this ask.

[skepticalspooky]

hellbent

msr | fluff | college au | one-off/stand-alone

hello i’ve never written a fic before but i guess i have now! please feel free to give feedback. i aim to please (probably). also this is pretty short so i apologize for that.

A lettermen-clad frat boy thrust an unidentifiable drink at Scully as soon as her shoe hit the weird linoleum floor. Who picks linoleum for a walkway? The vibe of the house was anxious yet somehow sexual and the acoustics made by linoleum didn’t help. Maybe wanting to experience a college party was silly. It seemed atrocious so far, with the plethora of half naked 20-year-olds and the overbearing smell of vodka and perfume and weed. Scully felt like she was in another dimension where time moved one hundred times faster than normal. A guy that she vaguely recognized from some class came up to her and tried his hand at catcalling, though it didn’t carry the intended effect seeing as he was five inches away and had to face the consequences. His hand gripped her back in a way that could be passed off as “flirting” but was more likely his attempt at keeping balance. Of course, Scully had to decline his offer of “test riding his dick” by stepping on his foot. It was unfortunate for him that she was wearing wide heeled boots. He retaliated by calling her a bitch which, much to his chagrin, had no effect on the answer she already made clear. Tugging on her two-sizes-too-big jacket, Scully decided to make her way into the calmer yard. There, she was met with the odd couple making out and a few groups chatting about things that won’t matter in 10, maybe even 5, years. But who cares? Why not live in the moment? Thinking about the deeper meaning of every move and every word and every person gets tiring. A prime example of someone living in the moment was the kid who just received an unbranded cigarette from a random. Or was it a cigarette? Scully had all the time in the world to think about it because this kid was blissfully unaware of anything but his maybe-cigarette and the stars. She even clocked a few glances thrown his way, out of intrigue or lust, yet he sat unwavering, hellbent on outer space. A scary and often forgotten part of her wanted him to be hellbent on her. Not necessarily sexually, no, but in some way or ways, she wanted his attention because it seemed so sweet. An even scarier part of her knew he would be hellbent on her if he knew her. An instinct maybe, or perhaps just hope. At this point, she figured out that she had been staring for a bit too long. He was staring straight back, eyes smiling in unison with mouth. Could he read her mind? She desperately hoped that wasn’t so. Scully hung on to every moment as this mystery boy made room on his blanket and pat a seat beside him, holding relentless eye contact. She could practically see her eyes widening in excessive disbelief and her face reddening just enough to be noticeable. Nevertheless, her feet floated her to his stupid checkered lawn blanket and forced herself down. One would expect the first words spoken from this mysterious college kid to be somewhat thought-provoking or even brooding. They were not.

“Your coat. I like it.”

Her coat. He liked it. Her two-sizes-too-big brown bomber jacket. The one with all the patches. He liked it.

“Thanks. I like your...” she couldn’t search fast enough and too many off-putting things were coming to mind, “glasses.” She did. They were nice round glasses. He only needed them for reading really, but he seemed to like them too. Truth be told, they were both a bit flustered. It felt different for two complete strangers to share this common timidness upon meeting, yet it was there. Oh, was it there. Perhaps one of them was thinking too much about what the other looked like under their cool jacket and cursed themselves for thinking about that having just met them. Maybe the other wanted to run their fingers through the other’s hair just because it looked so soft and oh my God could not believe they were being so weird right now. But that’s merely one interpretation of events, of course.

“I’m Fox, but Mulder is preferred.” Fox Mulder? My Lord did this kid’s reputation precede him. This was Spooky, Spooky Mulder, the guy who believed in aliens and shit! Scully never had a face to put with the name. Her intrusive but welcomed thoughts said it was a good face.

“I’m Dana- uh, Scully.” She couldn��t tell if she was stumbling over words (her own name of all things) or if she was subconsciously following that last name pattern.

He simply repeated her. “Scully.” It sounded pretty good coming from him.

“Nice to meet you, F- um, Mulder.” Again with the word stumbling? Then again, she wasn’t used to people going by their last name. Then again, she was formulating excuses like clockwork with this guy. He laughed. He was clearly struggling a bit here too. If only she knew his excuses. He was just nervous about this other thing, he was just hot because of the weather. Maybe they could exchange excuses sometime.

A necessary subject change, if you wanted to say they had a subject to change at all, came on a shooting star. It was unusual to see a shooting star with all the artificial light surrounding the pair, but there was no denying its twinkling as it shot across the sky only to shrink and fade away. “Do you ever make wishes on those things?” He sounded a bit gruff. Scully was still red. He wasn’t helping.

“Not really. It’s more of a fun phenomenon to me. But it shows me that I’m on the right track by living in the moment, I guess.” Was she rambling? She had four-ish sips of beer, does that lead to Scully mini-tangents? It was all another excuse and she knew it.

“Hm. That’s a different way of looking at it.” He paused a moment with no sign of elaboration. “I make wishes sometimes.”

“What do you wish?”

He didn’t answer, he just smiled. She didn’t pry.

“But your thing with being on the right track. I think I’m gonna use that now. Like, um, would I have seen that if I was arguing or staying in or something?”

“Yeah, exactly. You probably wouldn’t have. But you made the choices that led you to see it instead.”

He nodded. “Plus, it might make girls think I’m deep.” Scully laughed, but he was right. It kinda worked and she hated it. “But it makes me think about other things that are out there, too.”

“Like... like, aliens?” She could see the Spooky in him now. He seemed so serious about this that she almost moved away a bit. She didn’t.

“I can sense the skepticism, Scully!”

“Mulder, if you think that’s skepticism, you should hear my thoughts on the WOW! signal.” They could both feel eyes on them at this point, but surprisingly Scully didn’t care. She couldn’t not look into his eyes when he started talking about aliens and bigger meanings of things and, at one low point, Bigfoot. Scully even dropped the excuses and quietness and replaced it with a newfound comfort. He gave her goosebumps when he spoke about crazy theories in a smooth tone and it made her laugh, really laugh, when he rolled her eyes as she disputed him. He certainly was hooked on her sarcasm and questioning looks. Her prodding was like the missing piece to his mixed-up Mulder puzzle. Sometimes, when he thought she couldn’t see him because she was laughing away from him, he looked at her like he was hellbent on her. She could see him.

When she was done laughing, she would push away a loose strand of her scarlet hair. Mulder noticed this happen every time for about nine muffled song changes, not that he was counting. This time, he took the liberty of tucking the strand away himself, lingering on her jawline only a few seconds too long. Scully couldn’t do anything but look down at her shoes. The sound of car doors slamming and crickets chirping and distant songs and loud laughing made for a nice distraction. But the alcohol proved to override this effect. Rosy-cheeked Scully wanted to speak her mind and she was only a bit buzzed.

“I can’t believe I’ve never seen you before.” Mulder looked away from her when she spoke.

“I tend to stay out of the, uh, spotlight,” he replied after a few pointless moments, annunciating the T’s in “spotlight.” Scully nodded understandingly, yet she yearned for him to be in the spotlight. She figured it would be a nice change of pace. She didn’t say that. No, she wasn’t that brave yet.

“Talking to you is easy.” Wonderful, changing the topic and beating around the bush. Hey, it made Mulder smile.

“I feel the same about you. It’s nice having someone who... pays attention? I don’t know if that makes sense. I just feel like you’re listening.”

“I’m listening.”

“Am I talking too much?”

“Did you forget the part of our conversation where I talked about my 8th grade Halloween dance for ten minutes?” Another Mulder smile, but this one came with a laugh. Now his hand was on her hand and he was sitting closer to her than she thought and was that her heart she heard beating? Or was it his? A common theme returning, intrusive thoughts got the best of Scully and all she could think about were his lips. Lucky for her, his mind was racing too. He wanted to be pressed against her; soft yet tense, breathing yet unmoving. She wanted to know how his hair felt between her fingers and she couldn’t explain why because she didn’t need to. That’s how it was and that’s how it will be. Their brains sparked at the same time as they turned to look at each other at the same moment. In a “fuck it, this needs to be true” moment, Mulder moved his hand to Scully’s shoulder as he leaned into the space between them. Scully met him in the middle, her lips carefully finding his before he could reach her. It was different than she expected in the best way possible. His lips were soft but his face was contrastingly rough, and as she let her hand wander to his hair she found that it was soft too. Pulling away but lingering close, the two weren’t quite sure what to say. They’d just met and now they were swapping spit in some stranger’s yard. Less romantic than expected, but perhaps the fact that it was so thrilling and a bit spontaneous made up for it. She thought a kiss would be the cure, but Scully’s heart didn’t stop racing and she was fine with that. Mulder looked at her for the longest time as she thought. Visually, he was unaffected. Deep down, he felt he could run a mile. She seemed pretty perfect to him before and this confirmed it. Not once had he felt so connected to someone before. Sure, she disagreed with him on almost everything, but she listened and truthfully had some great ideas of her own. He loved that she could take an urban legend and it explain it fluidly and scientifically as if she was writing a revolutionary report in her mind. Maybe it was the beer or the group of assholes smoking in front of them. No, that’s wrong. It couldn’t have been. God, was it time to talk now? He didn’t know what to say and she obviously didn’t either. He went with the first thing that came to mind.

“How come we’ve never met before?”

[rafaelafranzen]

In which I answer many questions about books

I came across this survey from @drawlight and I thought it’d be fun to fill! Fun fact: I’ve been an unabashed devotee of literature and stories all my life and am a stalwart champion of connecting people with stories – I’ve spent most of the last decade attending and volunteering at literature festivals and crossed fingers, am trying to get a job there. I don’t do the tagging thing, but if you’d like to fill this tag me back so I can discover your literary world!

I, like everyone else, am drowning in Good Omens right now, including the script book and original publication, so I’ll omit them from my responses for a bit of variety.

1. What book are you reading now?

Kraken – China Miéville. Yet another book about an impending apocalypse set in London, because I’m a sucker for undercurrents of fantasy in places I’ve walked in. This one’s a dark comedy about a squid-worshiping cult, where the initiating event for The End of the World is a forty-foot giant squid specimen being stolen from the Natural History Museum.

2. What are your favourite books?

I’m a bit of an odd duck in that my favourites change all the time at different points in my life. I hate to do the thing where you divide things up by genre because I think stories are valid in so many shapes and forms but it’s an easy shorthand – a few top favourites:

Literary Fiction: Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither – Sara Baume (a book about a misfit man who brings a misfit dog into his life. I’ll never get tired of recommending this. The poetic turn of prose in this book is astonishing, and I’m reminded of it every time I read something by Drawlight, actually).

SF/F: Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman (again pushes all my right buttons with undercurrents of another world in places I’ve been) and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu – the titular story in this anthology made me cry on the train, in public – you can find it in full here. It’s a quick and heartbreaking read about the tenuous relationship one so often has with their parents.

Short Story: The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble – Julian Gough (A economic satire and the first fiction piece ever published by the Financial Times, which was subsequently adapted to a Radio Play by the BBC which is also available in the link if you prefer listening. Will make you clutch your sides with laughter, teach you about securitizations, futures and hedge funds and global market forces without the need for you to get a degree in economics first, and ensure you never look at goats the same way again.)

3. How did you learn to read?

Other than the obvious – school, my mother used to take me to the library each weekend when I was a kid and let me borrow 4 books using my library card, and another 4 books with hers. I’d devour all 8 and rinse and repeat the next weekend.

4. What foreign languages do you read?

I studied Chinese as my second language for 12 years and subsequently lost pretty much all of it due to lack of usage after. I can still muddle my way through a menu but that’s about it.

5. What’s the funniest book you ever read?

The Teenage Textbook – Adrian Tan (I’m sure I’ve read plenty since that are better, but this is always the first one I think of. A bit of local nostalgia.)

6. What books have changed the way you look at the world or the way you live your life?

Without a doubt, This Is What Inequality Looks Like by Teo You Yenn. It is a non-fiction book told through the lens of people in poverty, and just as equally, from vantage point of the privileged, us folk who are more or less living in the median of society and the different frames of ‘common sense’ that need to be considered from these perspectives. It is a book about how acknowledging poverty and inequality leads to uncomfortable revelations about our society and ourselves. And it is about how once we see, we cannot, must not, unsee. It is a book that might sober you up for the rest of your life.

It was one of the books heavily drawn on to produce a play titled “Underclass” which I once described to a friend as “the wokest shit sandwich you’ll ever eat”, and I mean this in the best kind of way – it’s the most difficult pill I was ever made to swallow. It left me questioning every assumption I had about poverty, inequality and human dignity, left me squirming and uncomfortable in the way we gloss over the marginalized, and forced me to ask hard questions about the systems of society and who provides for those who fall through the cracks. I saw it a year ago and I still can’t stop thinking about it.  

7. What books have affirmed what you believe about life or the way you look at things?

Not entirely sure how to answer this one, I take away bits from every book and media property I encounter. I suppose if I would recommend anything, especially from the perspective of a writer, that rejection is par for the course so long as you keep forging on, and keep at it, then Stephen King’s On Writing. And on the love for the parts of your life that are odd, glorious and to be cherished, Sue Perkins Spectacles. Her letter to her dog Pickles in the book, available here, is one of the greatest confessions of adoration I’ve ever read, and will speak to every love you’ve held close in your life)

8. What are some of the scariest books you ever read?

To be frank I don’t read much horror, though I used to as a kid. I don’t have enough memory of any specifics to give titles.

9. About how many books do you think you have read in your life?

I’ve not the slightest idea. Probably hundreds.

10. About how many books do you own?

Currently, probably between 50-100, only limited by my bookshelf and now much it can hold. Most of my major book-purchases come around during the Singapore Writers Festival, so annually I drop between $100-200 on new books signed by authors I’ve met in person. Every 2-3 years I cycle out books from my bookshelf I no longer care to go back to and donate it to the book exchange shelf in my local library to make room for new titles.

12. How much would you say you’ve paid in library fines in your life?

Probably less than $5. I’m pretty neurotic about returning things on time.

11. How many books per month do you usually borrow from the library?

Probably less than one to be honest, but when the Writers Festival swings around, loads, to get an advance look at the authors that are coming I may enjoy the work of. Nowadays I usually buy my books.

13. Do you read in bed?

A resounding yes. It’s how I screwed up my eyesight as a kid!

14. Do you ever read while walking or driving?

Sometimes when walking but often I’m just scrolling reddit or catching up on current affairs and UK politics (I don’t live there but I can’t help following it). I don’t drive but I do read books when I commute on public transport.

15. OK, let’s get real. Where’s the strangest place you’ve ever read a book?

What, pray, be a strange place to read a book?

16. Do you listen to audiobooks?

Not particularly, as I find I can absorb information much faster reading words on a page. I also find it hard to multitask when something’s being read out because I want to pay attention to the story. I do, however, listen to radio plays adapted from books!

17. Has anyone ever read aloud to you or you to them?

Plenty, being on the receiving end of readings from many authors from attending the Writers Festival and events at independent bookstores. For me reading: loads of times workshopping my own work while I was pursuing my creative writing minor in university.

18. What was the most difficult book to read?

I attempted Lolita by Nabokov when I was about 14 or 15 and don’t think I got past the first 50 pages.

19. What books do you intend to read but keep putting off?

Craptons. Including the aforementioned Good Omens which I’ve owned for 7 years but never finished. Others that have been sitting on my shelf for the longest time now include The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and The Book of Dust by Phillip Pullman (Lyra, my chosen name that I now use professionally, came from the protagonist of Pullman’s His Dark Materials). As you can see my stable of books mainly tend towards SF/F.

20. Do you buy new or used books, paperbacks or hardcovers, leather or collector’s?

Absolutely! I buy mostly new – see Writers Festival book acquisitions from the earlier question. Mostly paperbacks but occasionally hardcovers if the price difference isn’t too dear. Secondhand bookstores are a dying trade here so I don’t get much opportunity to shop for used. I’m also constantly wary about how much room I have on my shelves and pick my purchases carefully. I usually don’t buy collectors editions because I don’t like having to be precious with my books -  they’re there to enjoy, to crack the spines in and get their corners banged up from being hastily stuffed into bags. With special editions I feel an odd obligation to keep them pristine.

21. How do you feel about writing in books?

Depends. If it’s a book I specifically want for reference, especially non-fiction I don’t mind marking them up. Otherwise I typically don’t.

22. Do you lend books?

I do! There have been books I’ve lent out for years and not sought back though. I do prefer to get them back eventually because books I do keep on my shelves usually hold the memory of the time I had with them, and are usually paperback editions whose covers I enjoyed and are no longer in print. It never feels quite the same to just get a new copy.

23. What were your favourite books as a child?

I read with such volume and variety when I was a child I actually hardly remember specific titles. I’m sure there was Dahl in there somewhere. An awful lot of Blyton and Nancy Drew/Famous Five which are now horrendously outdated but from which I still hold onto fond imagined memories of British summer days and mysterious nights, which are experiences I still sort of seek out when I go to the UK on rambles or hikes.

24. What children’s books do you enjoy as an adult or young adult?

If we’re talking specifically Children’s books and not YA, almost anything written by Kes Gray (Oi Frog!/The Trouble with Daisy series) and Julian Gough (Rabbit and Bear series, whose first book is a great introduction to the concept of gravity, hibernation, and the nutrition of rabbit poo). I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Terry Pratchett’s Discword series, which includes several YA titles but even the main books in the series are fantastic reading for kids I think.

25. Do you ever read the ending first?

Oh gosh, why would anyone do that to themselves?

26. grab the book nearest to you (I picked something non-GO related), go to page 29 and type line 17 (if there isnt a line 17 type line 3)

“You always tell me that when someone is special, then the system has to make an exception." Connect (Julian Gough) – a cheeky one-of a kind signed edition I got from Julian’s apartment in Berlin when I visited him a couple months ago, combining the UK book jacket with US deckled-edge hardback. He started out as a writer I admired, then a mentor, and is now a fond friend.

[mtvswatches]

Crazy Ex Girlfriend 4x08 I’m Not the Person I Used to Be

Stray thoughts

1) OMG I’m Other Rebecca!

2) This looks like a smut fanfic…

…except no one asked for it?

3) OMG!! What is it with Rebecca and shit?

REBECCA: Hey, I'm sorry I stunk up the toity yesterday.

JOSH: Oh, no problem. Made my eyes tear up, but, uh, I needed a good cry.

4) I fucking love when this show goes all meta!

5) And they did it again!!!

HEATHER: How long are you here for?

VALENCIA: For the rest of the series! …of holidays, I mean.

Is this going to be a thing in this episode? Because I love it!!

6) This scene was – in Heather’s words – THE BEST.

Okay, based on your face when you were looking at the guest list, my guesses are we're dealing with a frenemy, a nemesis or an ex. So it's an ex. Wait, no. But you dated Josh all through high school. So you cheated.  Oh, you really cared about this person. Oh, my God, you were in love. And nobody knows. Whoa. This is so juicy. Wait, wait, was it a girl? Oh, it was the first girl. Wait, is she here yet? Have you seen her? Oh, okay. So she's not here yet, but she's on the list. Okay, I am on it, I am gonna figure this all out.

I just love how well they know each other, and even though this is obviously exaggerated and played for laughs, it’s a quite accurate depiction of female friendship. When you really know your friends, it’s quite easy to read them and know what they’re thinking just by looking at their facial expressions.

7) So this is the episode, this is the episode where he gets back? Right? Btw, I nearly died when this happened…

REBECCA: Anyway, am I… I can't believe I'm saying this Am I meant to be with Nathaniel or Josh or both or neither?

VALENCIA: Neither.

HEATHER: Neither.

REBECCA: Right, of course. Because the idea of "meant to be" is a lie perpetuated by Western culture.

VALENCIA: No. You're meant to be with Greg.

HEATHER: Wait, you think that? I totally think that.

VALENCIA: Everyone thinks that.

Seriously, it made me feel so good inside and giddy to hear both of them validate how I FEEL. Yes, Rebecca is meant to be with Greg.

Now I’m getting nervous because I know he’ll show up soon. It is his high school reunion, after all. But “he” won’t be “he”anymore, and I’m not sure if the show will be able to pull off this switcharoo you know? Okay, I have to continue watching, don’t I?

8) I see what you’re doing, show…

REBECCA: Okay, look, the only way the only way… The only way Greg would ever be my "meant to be" is if we were in some sort of sci-fi weird parallel alternate universe where he was just a completely different person.

I swear to god, I just got chills when I heard his voice in the background. I’m not ready for this. I’ve been waiting two years for Greg to be back and yet this wasn’t what I was waiting for? What if I don’t like Greg anymore? I’m scared! Okay, I’m going to hit play again…

9) So here he is…

He does look Greg-ish, I must admit.

So, the idea is that this is how Greg has always looked to everyone but since Rebecca wasn’t mentally stable at the time they were together she saw him differently? Is that it? I mean, we always tend to see people differently after some time apart. And Rebecca has changed a lot since Greg last saw her, so that’s probably why she’s seeing him differently. Both of them have probably changed a lot.

10) OMG they did it again, the entire conversation!

GREG: No, I'm-I'm here on winter break. I'm actually back for the whole rest of the series��� of holidays. Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's and the finale…. Valentine's Day.

HECTOR: Valentine's Day. I guess that is the logical end of our series… of holidays.

11)

12) I love Heather so much…

13) Josh had a literally one good thing going on in his life right now – being prom king at his reunion – and it was all a lie!

14) Now, this was quite a revelation…

GREG: I got to confess, I've been back a few times.

REBECCA: You have?

GREG: Yeah, uh, I just thought it would be best if you and I didn't see each other.

REBECCA: So you were back in town and no one told me?

GREG: Well, I may have asked them not to. I did. Yeah, I did.

Question is… does he know about Rebecca and his dad? And everything that happened in the last two years?

15) The clean slate thing works considering he is literally a different person – at least physically, what he says sounds pretty Greg-ish to me – but it’s the easy way out for Rebecca… Sleeping with Greg’s dad is probably at the top of the worst things she’d done (and yes, I’m including pushing Trent off the balcony.)

16) OMG we’re getting a new Greg and Rebecca song, I can’t believe it.

Okay, show, I think you did it. You got Greg back and you didn’t piss me off in doing so. And of course the Greg and Rebecca song is amazing and it’s the first one this season that I actually love. I had to go back and watch it again.

I really didn’t believe they could pull this off, and I really don’t know how they did it, but it worked? Listening to these two sing to each other about their history together and seeing them reconnect… my heart was swelling with joy.

Also, I loved the fact that they made it clear Greg is still sober.

Is it weird that even though he’s clearly a different person, I do see Greg?

17) Man, I loved every Heather/Valencia scene in this episode! And damn, Valencia, that story is the thing great love stories are made of!

18) So… does Greg’s dad really have to talk to him about sleeping with Rebecca or was Greg trying to get Rebecca to fess up?

19) Yes, Rebecca, you make total sense…

I mean, he basically told her he didn’t feel for his ex-girlfriend the same way he’d felt for her, right? I wouldn’t want to fess up either...

20) WAIT, WHAT?!!!

HEATHER: What? It was Father Brah?

VALENCIA: Joseph. He never got the letter. My love letter was in his jacket in Hector's trunk for 12 years?!

OMFG this show just blew my mind!! He was going to marry Valencia and Josh, right? He was always giving Josh advice about his relationship with her? Is this why he decided to become a priest? WHAT IN THE HELL?!

21) I’m HEATHER, THIS IS HOW I FEEL WATCHING THIS EPISODE!!

22) A GEORGE SONG?!!! CAN THIS EPISODE GET ANY BETTER?!!!

Another catchy tune!! Love the Hollaback Girl homage! And I laughed so hard! “We learned to cry while you were popular!”

23) My shipping heart is killing me right now…

24) Oh, dang, indeed!

25) OH ME GERDS!!

Paula is going to freak out when she reads all those texts, isn’t she?

26) I SHIP THIS? A PRIEST AND A PARTY PLANNER?

What is this episode doing to me?

27) thIS FUCKING EPISODE, I SWEAR TO GOD!

Okay, it makes sense, Valencia is in a good relationship and she is very much in love with her girlfriend. And I’m sure Father Brah didn’t become a priest just because Valencia didn’t choose him. At least they got closure and knowing the truth about what happened definitely changes how they will look back on those memories.

28) OMG they were about to kiss and she told him!

I’m kind of sad she ruined the moment, but it had to be done. Good for you, Honest Rebecca, I’m proud!

29) Greg’s reaction was not what I had expected. He did freak out a little, but he was mostly surprised at how Rebecca came clean and owned up to probably the shittiest thing she could’ve done to him. He didn’t punch any walls (awwing at the reference!) And yes, Rebecca has changed, too. For the better. Old Rebecca? She would’ve lied and schemed and manipulated to prevent him from finding out until ultimately everything would’ve blown up in her face.

And I loved the fact that he’s the one to acknowledge they both have changed.

30) Paula’s ending scene!! I loved her reaction to all the texts from Rebecca as if she was seeing the situation unfold in front of her in real time. It was perfect!

31) This episode… is definitely my favorite episode this season! I just loved EVERYTHING about it? The Heather/Valencia/Father Brah B plot, Greg’s return, Hector’s obsession with the speech and the 2-hours lunch, Rebecca’s texts, the songs, the meta!

It was an amazing episode that reminded us why we love this show so much and why it is SO GOOD.

The writers knew the odds were against them in bringing back Greg with a different actor in the role, so they brought their A game and delivered a nearly perfect episode, one that I’m sure will be remembered as one of the best in the series.

And of course they had to amp up the meta jokes in this one - they were bringing back one of their main characters but played by a different actor, they had to make a meta-commentary about it. But I really enjoyed how organically they weaved the behind the scenes stuff into the storyline - they made the fact that they were recasting a character emotionally relevant for the characters.

I also love how all the storylines had a common thread and in a way reflected back to Rebecca’s storyline - Father Brah and Valencia missing their shot kind of echoes Greg and Rebecca’s story, although they might get a second chance now; Josh discovering this whole new side to the high school experience he’d never noticed before kind of mirrors Rebecca seeing Greg in a new light; Paula missing out on the events of the whole night and catching up in a few minutes probably mirrors Greg’s journey in this episode.

I was very hazy about the decision to cast a different actor to play Greg, but I also knew that if any show and any group of writers could pull it off, it was CEG. And God bless them, they did! I’m not saying I’m totally sold on New Greg yet, but I feel like I will. I feel like I will grow to love this Greg as well. And I think the fact that they were able to achieve that - the possibility of viewers falling in a love with a recast character - is a feat in itself.

This show is such a blessing, I swear! I can’t wait to rewatch this episode!

Sorry if I got a bit rambly and incoherent there, I just enjoyed this episode a lot!

32) Hope you enjoyed my recap, and, as usual, if you’ve got this far, thank you for reading! If you enjoy my recaps and my blog, please consider supporting it on ko-fi.Thanks!