#Mira Math Mirror

[bluepoodle7]

#ENS #Nexus #MyOC #MiraMathMirror #Illbleed #PoodleArtMyArt

This is ENS (Nexuz) This is his fake human form caused by him being trapped inside of a school where monster characters or non humans characters become low poly humans that can't move their face to convey emotion or move their mouths.

And humans become the monsters that attack you. The mysterious shrapastone might be the key to end this nightmare.

He was original going to be a ENA oc but I changed him to be original and be like a spiritual successor to Illbleed for like one level themed after a school that just appears out of nowhere.

Ens (The glitched word for ensure when my charger doesn't charge right on my laptop. What his name means in his cannon Educational Neurological Solutions.)

He has two forms a human form that is similar to the art style of the Illbleed characters and his fashion sense is from the early 2000s mostly 2001. Only have a blank expression on his face but moves his body to convey emotion and also his voice sound B movie like.

Has a secret mouth on his back that is hidden to keep the effect like Illbleed. His real form is more monster like and only appears when angry or when he's thinks he is alone with his thoughts but he tends to hide his real form from others.

He's a shapeshifting teacher that was trapped in a haunted school that he is locked inside by the shrapastone. The shrapastone turns non humans into humans similar to the Illbleed residents being low poly and unable to use powers and move their face to emote.

You also have to wear a similar orange, green, and purple school outfits. While humans become monsters. Also there is also an evil superintendent that keeps the story going and this also happens during prom in the gym which is where the boss is.

His uses his math mirror or Mira like a horror monitor/ copier. This can prevent traps and copy items. He has different colors of this item be he likes red. His real name is Nexuz.

Carla The Cautious Cab (Flying, Waterproof, Living Car) you see a purple and yellow cab stop sign with Cɔ it says Close Call like Narrow Escape in Illbleed.

You have to do a hitch hiker thumb motion to get her attention or find the item the handy phone that is shaped like a hand it calls her faster it similar to the speed ladder. She will run over the enemies that you left behind and you gain courage.

The courage is similar to adrenaline in Illbleed it gives you the energy to push through the stage and set everything right and retrieve the shrapastone. But you gain less courage if you use the cab too much so you can fight off the monsters.

The Mira image link.

Missouri State Bookstore - GEO-REFLECTOR MIRROR #IN9389

The songs that inspired him and I own none of these songs.

Illbleed fright/shock SFX - YouTube

Dross - Illbleed OST: Track 3 - YouTube

Fantastic Plastic Machine - You Must Learn All Night Long 【PV】 - YouTube

His ringtone reference.

【ファミコン風】 園内BGM ～ILLBLEED - YouTube

[charmcoindied]

Stares at you autism style. I love music!!!!!

Bury Me by Huxlxy Fairytale by Michael Richter I Give Up by The Royal Foundry Kicks by Barns Courtney KILLING TIME by Jordan Fiction King by Black Math Late by Matthew Crawford Nothing Personal by Des Rocs Talking to the Mirror by Woolf and the Wondershow The Bug Collector by Haley Heynderickx This Could Be It For Me by Hotel Mira Venom by Icon For Hire

Also erm. I have my sideblog @autismusic where I randomly post music suggestions.

lots of songs (NOT COMPLAINING!) so i am not going to do a song by song breakdown but i really liked killing time and the bug collector :>

[abluescarfonwaston]

Gregory Week - Pinup

Day 1 of Gregory Edgeworth week. 

He’s not so far out of college - and definitely not out of debt - enough to turn down what promises to be free money. He doesn’t know why the ladies in filing asked him to pose for the calendar but who is he to turn down a paycheck?

His mentor complains loudly and repeatedly about his hemorrhoids. The prosecution happily informs them of his gastrointestinal issues. The judge nods and offers an anecdote about diapers. 

... So maybe he has a reasonable understanding of why they asked him.

“Do you want the glasses on or off?”

These pants are a little too tight and he’s not sure why the shirt even has buttons if he’s not allowed to actually button it. The photographer frames him with his hands.

“With!” The costumer - or well she was the one who’d given him this to wear - insisted. 

“Without!” The woman who’d done his make up - and wasn’t that fun? Makeup! - demanded.

The photographer lowered his hands. “We shall do it both ways.”

Four costume changes later and a thought occurred to him as he smoothed down the skirt - Kilt Gregory! - no it was definitely a skirt. He wasn’t Scottish and neither was this outfit.

“When are the other folks coming in?” They stared at him blankly. “Wasn’t this a courthouse calendar?”

They stared at him. Oh dear. Had he misspoken again? People often said he was rude or scary...

“They’ll be by later.” Cosmo assured him, moving his leg into position.

“Well alright then...”

He sighed when they were finally done. That took far longer than he’d anticipated. He settled back into his suit and tie. Pulled on his trench coat. Stepped out to thank them for their time. (And clarify when he should expect the check) Tried one last time to adjust his hair. After all the musing and fussing it just... Wasn’t having a good day.

They didn’t respond to his inquiry. Stared at him with - well he wasn’t entirely sure. 

“One more!” Cosmo raised one finger desperately. Wanda downed an entire glass of water. It was hot under these lights. “Just one more set, Please Gregory! This will be my finest work ever!”

(Its just a calendar... No, I shouldn’t demean his work. Of course this is important to him.)

“... Do I need to change again?” He tried to fix his hair one more time. Without a mirror at least he couldn’t tell if he was making it worse or not.

Mira watched him. Went over to her costume trunk and rustled as Cosmo and Wanda set up a... desk? Just an office desk? Why that was much more in line with what he’d been expecting. They began debating poses and lighting and if he should unbutton his shirt- if so by how much.

(I rather like this tie, I hope I don’t have to take it off.)

“Bend down for me?” Mira asked. Hiding something behind her back. He did.

She placed on his head a black hat with a dark grey band around its rim.

“Perfect. Just perfect.”

He liked the man who stared back at him in the mirror.

“Mira... Would you mind terribly...” He held the hat to his chest. Worried the soft inner felt with his thumb. “If I kept the hat? Or-”

“I’d love it if you did Gregory. It’s yours.”

It really did feel like it.

He laid back on the couch. Hat over his eyes. Exhausted. 

“Do you know what that calendar cost me?” It was too bright. He didn’t dare move. “I had abs. I went to the gym every night. I ate well. Had a regular sleep schedule. I had suitors out the door!” Miles sputtered. He pulled the hat off and looked down at him. “I know you don’t believe me but that calendar made me popular Miles! Popular!”

“Mgmmhm.”

“I did the math once. I got less than minimum wage for that gig, you know that Miles? And it took me months to get them to pay it! They made bank on those calendars and I couldn’t even get them to cover parking for me.”

Miles ear pressed against his chest. Listening for that familiar rhythm.

“Which is all to say you should never agree to that kind of work without a contract up front. Learn from your Father’s mistakes Miles.”

“Noooghn.”

“Nooogh? No? No you’re gonna make the same mistakes as Daddy? You’re going to go a little crazy enjoying all the attention the picture of you in heels got and end up with a little bundle of joy? A little poop making machine?”

“Mmghn.”

He kissed the top of Miles little head. So small. How could anyone be so small?

“You’re very right. I wouldn’t trade you for anything. Maybe one day I’ll show you that calendar of back when your daddy was hot and watch you die of embarrassment. Wouldn’t that be nice? For what you did to my dating life.”

Miles cooed and drooled on his shirt.

“That calendar,” He told his most precious bundle of joy, “Was the best mistake I ever made.” His thumb ran up and down the tiny back. Too small. Too fragile. If he thought about it too long he couldn’t breath. How was he supposed to be a good father to someone? To someone so small? “And you. You were the best choice I ever made.”

“I love you, Miles. Father loves you.”

“And I always will.”

[sasstrash]

Hi guys so last night I started coming up with an idea for an ever after high au I had help so @virgil-is-a-cutie and @justafanwarrior here’s that deaf Raven au. It turned out to be a little longer then I thought it would be so I guess this could be considered a prequel. Sorta?

The Silent Queen

When Raven Queen was born nothing seemed out of the ordinary. However as time went on many things seemed to change. When John Good tried to wake his little daughter with a small coo, nothing happened. This was worrying at least for him. He screamed for Cook to come over and still Raven didn’t wake. As the two talked and panicked they almost didn’t notice when she finally woke up.

“Why didn’t she wake up from all the noise we made?” James asked trying to catch his breath. He didn’t want to lose her especially after how hard the labour was for Mira.

“I think we should call a doctor, they might be able to tell us what’s happening.” Cook said placing a hand on the Good Kings shoulder as he stood over Ravens cradle.

After a short period of waiting the doctor came and gave Raven a checkup. “Well she’s perfectly healthy.” He said looking up at the King and some of his staff. “However she is deaf, this isn’t a problem one of you just needs to learn sign language.” He finished, ignoring the small gasps in the crowd.

The castle staff soon began to learn sign language and everyone pitched in to help in their own ways. Teaching Raven at home for just about everything. Writing was taught first in addition to ‘speaking’ with all other subjects such as math, science, spells, cooking and others coming afterward. The young Queen was homeschooled for much of her life, and only had a few friends outside of the castle.

Theses friends were Cerise Hood and Ramona Badwolf. When Mira learned that her daughter was deaf she quickly told her best friends. Scarlet and Romulus of course made sure that their daughters learned how to communicate with Raven. Which Cerise seemed to enjoy doing, it meant she didn’t have to speak as much. When Maddie caught her shy friend going over the language she became curious and asked about it. Although Cerise was a tad bit mad at her wonderland friend she ended up spilling the secret. So Maddie began to learn sign herself.

Raven first met her soon to be best friend through a mirror “chat” with Cerise where all three talked about everything and soon Raven has a new friend under her belt.

However Raven wouldn’t be able to actually meet her friend in person until a few years later when she finally went to public school. The reason? It was the year of legacy day, where she would have to sign the book to become the next Evil Queen. She didn’t want to but she had no idea what would happen. As she walked into the castle grounds she was oblivious to how strange this year really would be.

That’s what I’ve got so far, more to come I promise.

[hopespeakkrp]

LOADING HOPE’S PEAK STUDENT FILE…

❝ I’m here to have a fun and serotonin  time, not a victory time. If I can’t have fun, then what’s the point of playing? Winning all the time gets so boring ❞  

MOON SUGIRIYASA

1998.05.18

University Grade 2

Mirae Huts #3

THE ULTIMATE MAGIC THE GATHERING PLAYER (MTG PLAYER) IS PREPARED TO DIE

Moon always plays a variety of decks in varying formats, draft not withstanding. She tries her best to diversify her playstyle but in the end she always sticks to tokens. She likes to be able to swarm the field and laugh at the sheer absuridity she can do with token decks no matter the color combination. The current decks she has are…a lot. The last time Moon checked, it was around 69 commander decks, 10 modern deck, 1 standard that she’ll take apart when certain sets rotate out, 2 vintage decks, and like 3 legacy decks.

You can imagine how much all of that costs in total.

Her primary decks, at least in commander, are Brudiclad and Trostani; two token decks that represent two sides of her, Trostani and Brudiclad.

Trostani focuses on token generation via enchantments and life gain. To Moon, Trostani is more…passive. She can lean back and watch as her Life Total skyrockets to the thousands; one time it went to the millions due to…multiple token doublers going off; it was a mathmatical nightmare. Honestly, she can just lay back, watch her tokens and life multiply, and then attack for game. She usually attacks when it’s least expected; Moon is sneaky like that. She gets a lot of glee from the sheer shock from how many tokens she has on the field. Plus, she runs green so she can ramp pretty quickly. When Moon plays Trostani, she’s more laid back and prone to not pay as much attention unless she is needed for something or if she needs to do some ungodly math. When she smiles, she’s happy that she’s able to have fun by winning with a lot of life points and watching other people beat each other while saving her for last. You can see her grin as everyone starts to pummel each other, never minding whatever bullshit Moon has up her sleeve. Trostani is like the sleepy and quiet deck that’s silent but deadly except you can see how many tokens she has and how much life she is at. When she beats you with this deck, it will be with a gentle smile.

Brudiclad (or as she nicknames them “Bootyclap”), on the other hand, is more aggressive. Rapid token growth and artifacts is her game here. Counter spells are more abundant here and Moon will be more aggressive playing with Brudiclad. A lot more aggressive; this deck enables her to take more risks with attacking while giving her counterspells as a safety net. Mana ramp is sort of a problem but when you have a lot of mana rocks and the ability to possibly go infinite with Deadeye Navigator and Peregrine Drake. When she plays this deck, she is a bit more…aggressive in her demanor; she tends to egg people on and is willing to cut deals with people in her pod thanks to a few cards like Curse of Opulence and Curse of Verbrose not to mention cards with ‘tempting offer’ in red and blue. Instead of being a sneaky little shit, she’s a loud piece of shit who’s willing to use Brudiclad’s token copying ability to suit her needs and with Helm of the Host with Mirror Gallery…have fun. She’s more flexiable in what creature she needs for that particular turn. Not to mention she can just gain extra battle phases and go all in. She once had 100+ Brudiclad triggers go off before she turned them into Eltali (and making them lose their legendary supertype thanks to Mirror Gallery) and just swung for game. At all 5 opponents. And making them mill god knows how many cards. When she grins, it’s a vicious kind of grin; 'I want to eat you whole while having artifacts on my side of the field’ is what she wants to do as she enters the battle phase and multiple Brudiclad triggers go off and then tunring into whatever token she needs. Sometimes it can be more Brudiclad tokens, other times it can be treasure tokens when she needs to ramp. When she has Etali on the field and decides 'I’m just going to swing this dinosaur at you all’ then you’re in trouble. Have fun trying to survive when Moon is gleefully planning how to make you lose via tokens.

Modern? We don’t touch modern–okay we’ll touch on Modern. She’s a Simic player (Green/Blue) and she plays the Uro deck which focuses on ramping a whole lot and combined with Omnath, Locus of Creation? You’re in for a very bad time. She loves and hates this deck primarily because it’s a very powerful deck but it’s also boring so whenever she doesn’t have to play modern, she avoids the format entirely. You can tell she’s bored by the way she puts her cards down: just puts her cards down quickly and with a lack of enthusiasm. She also plays a spell slinger deck she topped two Modern events that involved having Lutri as the companion and…a whole lot of sorcery/instant copying cards. She has a lot more fun playing this deck although she has to call a judge because of certain timing rules that, despite her title, can never get down. While she has knowledge of the game, she is only human and sometimes her memory is bad so she needs to be reminded. This applies to Arena whenever she is (forced) to play. When she plays her Lutri spell slinger deck, you can tell she’s trying to be careful; timing rules are weird in Magic and she hates to step on anyone’s toes. She hate’s being a rule breaker and she hates pissing off everyone because if you piss everyone off then they’ll be mad at you and tell you to d–She hates having to miss timing, so she always asks. Even in the finals, she has to ask for timing and sure it makes her look stupid but she would rather look stupid asking then look stupid doing it.

Standard? Oh god, never ask her about Standard; she’ll take what she can get or scrounge around the internet for inspiration then tweak it. IF she has to play Standard, then she will go for a burn deck or whatever is the Cool New Deck to play with. She barely participates in Standard unless events call for it. Her mood depends on what kind of deck she is (forced to) play but expect her to be somewhat grumpy. She will, from time to time, play meme decks and her mood will be up. She wins half the time with whatever meme and janky deck she decided to pick up; it’s fun. She’s also loud whenever she plays meme decks; you can hear her laugh from two tables away. People will say that, if you her hear laughing that loud, then she’s playing a meme deck though reports did say that this is rare nowadays.

We don’t talk about draft. We NEVER talk about draft because those things can go haywire and she fucking /hisses/ at those formats. You can tell if an event is a draft like format by the look on her face. She likes the random chances but that’s only for the decks she constructed. Drafting, on the other hand, is not it for her. If she can help it, she avoids it but nonetheless she /has/ to go. Reminds her of her parents dragging her to 'important Indonesian events’.

For Legacy, she tends to play more graveyard decks such as Hogaak dredge which focuses on summoning Hogaak and other graveyard shenanigans. One of her most expensive decks that she has and she did play this when she was invited to a team trio constructed format as Team “Moist Girthy Loins”* ’s Legacy player. They topped that event with her winning most of her matches against the other Legacy players. Outside of any team formats that require Legacy players, she plays around with a lot of artifacts and Brudiclad except this is the more expensive version of Brudiclad and it’s not restricted to the singleton format. She also has a meme deck which can only be described at 'otter meme and artifact go brrrrrr’. She’s mainly neutral when playing, almost like she is tired…but she still has fun, though she would like it if people were chill a bit whenever she plays Legacy.

*Do not ask about the name; she did NOT come up with that.

Vintage is just artifact go burrrrr with Tolarian Academy and–she just goes ham with artifacts in this deck. Lockdown/prison, tokens, the whole 9 yards. She also plays a meme deck that she would describe as 'Brudiclad and Trostani, but involve deal making in there too’. She will hold back for the sake of giving other people a chance but sometimes she forgets and goes all out. Good god. The format where she just chills and watch people have a grand old time while she sets up artifacts to fuck people up.

But what is she like outside of Magic? Well…

Wouldn’t you like to know, weather boy?

She’s so tired and she’s trying to live and be happy but everything always comes crashing down. She just wants to sleep forever. She’s trying she swears but there are days where it’s hard and there are days where she is reminded that no matter how much money she earned from the tournaments she will never make her parents happy. she will always be the family disappointment.

she wants everything to end. she wants the roller coaster of emotions to just. stop.

but no one will ever know that, now will they?

[corystssides]

Roommates, part 2

Words: 1120

Summary: Logan and Patton are gone for the weekend, and Roman doesn’t understand algebra. One-sided Prinxiety. Pining. This is part 2 of And They Were Roommates.

Warnings: Platonic sharing of a bed, major misinterpretation of an event, minor mentions of fighting, I think that’s it but lmk.

Tags: @yep-another-fander, @softlogic, @virgilsanders, @tssanderssidestrash, @diplomatic-arsonist, @saltequeen, @fallingineternity, @satisfied-sanders-sides, @vixenneko, @the-strange-universe-of-cake, @fangirlfiles1, @winds-and-stardust, @the-laarmy, @pfftwhatnoimhuman, @gaysaxaphone, @mira-jadeamethyst, @frustratedwaffle, @romananalogicality, @the-prince-and-the-emo, @pippa-frost 

Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

There was a knock on Virgil’s door. He opened it without even checking the peephole, which he regretted immediately. Right outside the door was Roman, wearing a dark blue v-neck sweater with the school logo on it and some atrocious paint-stained jeans that somehow still managed to look okay on him. His hair was carelessly mussed and he almost looked embarrassed to be there. Virgil immediately squashed all uncomfortable emotions. It was too early in the evening to be feeling feelings.

“Sup?” he asked neutrally, having no context as to why Roman was at his door on a late Saturday afternoon.

“Hey, is Logan here?” Roman asked.

Those feelings that Virgil wasn’t feeling suddenly felt like a huge weight in the pit of his stomach. “He went home for the weekend,” Virgil said. “Why?”

“Oh, I was gonna ask him if he’d help me with my math homework,” Roman said. Almost immediately, the weight was lifted. Virgil was going to get emotional whiplash from all these feelings that he definitely wasn’t having tonight.

“Math homework? Aren’t you a theatre major?”

“It’s for those general education requirement things that we have to take forty credits for,” Roman said.

“Oh,” Virgil said. “I think I tested out of some of those.”

“Heh, I wish I was smart like that,” Roman said, with a half-smile. “I’m taking the basic stats class. I was just hoping, y’know, since Logan’s already taking calc--wait, you tested out of those? Do you think you could help me?”

Virgil almost squirmed under the uncomfortably bright beam of hopefulness that Roman was beaming in his direction. “I could try?” he said. “I’m not sure I’ll be any help, but I can try.”

“Thank you, Virgil! You’re a lifesaver!”

“Yeah, yeah, lemme get my keys,” Virgil mumbled, going back into his room and grabbing his dorm keys. He took a surreptitious glance in the mirror to make sure he didn’t look too red, and then joined Roman in the dorm next door.

What followed were four of the most painful hours of Virgil’s life. Almost all of the problems that Roman needed help on were worded so poorly that Virgil wondered if the professor was intentionally trying to make their students fail. But this was college; professors didn’t do that in college, did they?

Once they’d finally determined what it was that the question was asking, Roman either understood how to do it immediately or couldn’t grasp the concept at all. In the case of the latter, it took several different bouts of explanation, examples, and sometimes fighting in order to get the concept to click in Roman’s head. Over the course of the four hours, Virgil went from still-nervous around Roman to completely comfortable and entirely exasperated.

It was eleven pm by the time they’d finally solved the last question. Roman cheered when it was finished. Virgil sighed in relief and dropped his head on the desk.

“That was really stressful,” Roman said, rubbing his face and yawning.

“Yeah,” Virgil said.

“You wanna watch a movie? Try and actually relax, since it’s the weekend?”

“What movie?” Virgil asked, slowly picking his head up.

“I was thinking something Disney, but we have the entire internet at our disposal if you’re not interested in that.”

“I love Disney,” Virgil said.

Roman gave him a tired, but genuine grin. “Lion King?”

“Sure,” Virgil said, with a half-smile of his own.

“I hope you don’t mind watching it on the laptop. We haven’t figured out how to hook up Patton’s TV yet.”

“No, that’s fine.”

“You wanna sit on the bed? It’s way more comfortable than these weird dorm chairs.”

“Uh, sure,” Virgil said, suddenly getting a flicker of nervousness. “I mean, if you don’t mind.”

“Nope. Just kick your shoes off first.”

Within minutes, Virgil was shoulder-to-shoulder with the guy he’d been crushing on since the first day. He was incredibly nervous, and yet, the closeness was surprisingly comfortable. It almost felt natural. He supposed that maybe all that neighborly bonding that Patton had been pushing them all into for the last several weeks had actually been somewhat effective.

Roman started the movie, and they both became quickly absorbed in it. He kept it at a fairly low volume; after all, it might be Saturday, but it was nearly midnight and they still had to observe quiet hours. He was delighted to find that Virgil was just as willing to sing the songs as he was. It was so rare to find a friend who liked Disney as intensely as he did.

As the movie went on, Virgil got quieter and quieter, moving from singing to humming, and then stopping completely. Roman honestly barely noticed, too absorbed in the movie, and was surprised to find that Virgil had fallen asleep against his shoulder once the movie had ended. Roman felt a little guilty; after all, not only had he worn out Virgil’s energy and patience with his math homework, but he’d asked him to stay up until the wee hours of the morning with him watching a movie. Not wanting to disturb him further, Roman gently moved Virgil so he was actually laying on the bed instead of sitting on it, then put the laptop on his desk and grabbed his phone to text Patton. Then, realizing that it was past one in the morning, he decided against that idea, and just lay down next to Virgil. Tomorrow he’d ask Patton if he would mind Roman using his bed if this situation were to arise again. Tonight, he didn’t want to risk Patton getting mad.

~

Patton came home bright and early Sunday morning, just before lunch. Knowing that Roman usually slept until one or two on the weekends, he slipped in silently, not wanting to wake the other. He made sure to shut the door without a click, and then turned towards the rest of the dorm.

And froze. There, on Roman’s bed, was a familiar black hoodie. And a familiar neighbor inside that black hoodie. And the arms of the black hoodie were curled around his roommate. The sight was so unexpected that Patton short-circuited for a moment. When did this happen? And how?

Then, recovering his senses, Patton grinned and quietly put his stuff down. Then, he quickly scribbled a note for Roman and put it on his desk. After that, he made his way back out of the dorm, headed for the food hall.

Hey Ro,

I don’t mind that you bring your boyfriend into the dorm, but I would appreciate if you could text me next time. I’d rather not walk in on an awkward situation.

PS. I want to hear all the details when I get back.

~

Next

[disownedbytiime]

There’s so many things about the chapter that I don’t think I remember them all, and these are all over the place, but anyway

– I loved fighting against Crewel, I guess at some point we’ll get the teachers too. Also I loved that finally we got an insight about the 4th year students.

– I loved the Jamil - Azul interaction tbh, I love how Azul is still interested in him.

– Speaking of Azul, doesn’t he give the impression that he’s still mad at Leona for what happened in chapter 3? He made two comments against him which I found hilarious.

– I love how Deuce worried about Epel of all people, it was cute and I think this will be important later.

– The reason behind Rook calling Ruggie “Monsieur Dandelion” was so funny but also cute ? Rook is such a good man.

- Rook giving everybody 100 points was amazing and hilarious at the same time. Especially since Vil was so critical of them. Which definitely show their differences, which are nice and understandable.

– I already said the singing was kinda cringy for me but tbh the best one was Ortho which shows Shouta Aoi is definitely the best. (Jamil and Epel were second imo)

– Rook and Vil’s relationship is super interesting! But it makes me worried about Rook betraying him at some point.

– Neige.... is interesting. Ngl I don’t like his looks, I’m not sure who he reminds me of but I don’t like him. He’s like too cute but not in a good way? Epel (and Lilia) are definitely better and cuter too. But ngl for some reason he doesn’t gives me good vibes lmao. Idk I do want to know more about him though. Also as soon as he appeared I think every Vil-Epel brothers theory vanished and turned into Vil-Neige. I’m not sure which I like more.

– I love how Ace and Deuce said that Vil reminded them of Riddle.

– Ace mentioned Jamil taught Floyd to dance (btw why wasn’t he in the competition?) which is shown in a personal story (Jamil’s PE I think?) so I guess personal stories are considered part of the story. Yet Ace doesn’t seem to know Epel even though his Ceremonial Clothes PS involves Epel a lot. This confuses me.

– Where is Jack? I’ll start shipping Epel and Deuce if he doesn’t appear soon

– I’m 100% with Rook and want to see Leona and Vil dance.

– Deuce’s math was funny seeing how fast Ace was. Grimm-Jamil too.

– Grimm is 70cm tall. 😭

– It was really clear that Vil is shown to be overblot since it happened so fast, but I wonder if that’s it? Like I said, it was too early so it makes me think there’ll be more to that. And Epel acts suspicious anyway so either he will do it too or he knows something else about Vil. I’m really interested in Vil-Epel relationship <3

– ‘Mira Mira’ being the equivalent to Siri and the magic mirror made me laugh tbh, it’s such a good concept.

– Just how long this chapter will be? 21 parts for the first part and we’ll have 4. Like 80? Chapter 4 has 41 I think? Maybe less than 80 but still I guess it’ll be a lot. (Or is there another reason why this is divided in 4?)

Anyway I’m excited.

[coleymari-blog]

Living Artwork

(Late) Submission for @nalu-week 2017 Tattoos; where one of our lovebirds shares a particular skill set with the other in a rather peculiar fashion.

The laser lights were strobing across the body-filled dancefloor. Electronic covers of popular songs were pumping through the booming speakers and into the humid, crowded club. Lucy, accompanied by her normal crew of girlfriends, strolled through with their painted eyes set on the velvet-roped VIP section. They were regulars in Mira’s boyfriend’s club, named ‘Fairy Tail’, so the bouncers were already expecting the sexed-up goddesses. Heads turned as the five of them took their seats on the plush couches, drink menus already in hand as they got comfortable.

“Laxus’s friends should be here any minute,” Mira cooed, tucking her legs beneath her as she smiled brightly, her silver hair taking on the multicolor spectrum of the light show around them. Juvia immediately looked uncomfortable with the fact that they were going to have to share their section with men they’d never met and fisted her dress as she fidgeted nervously. Cana, due to ‘pre-gaming’ back at Lucy’s, was already well on her way to inebriation. Levy ran her fingers through her wild blue hair, her facial expressions giving away her exasperation. Lucy was fine with sharing as long as the guys weren’t complete douchebags. Unfortunately for her, it didn’t seem likely once they arrived at the pedestal. The ropes parted again for the club’s owner and his friends, the five gentleman sitting down across from the group of women. Mira immediately broke down the invisible wall and relocated to her boyfriend’s lap. “Laxus, introduce the boys, huh?”  

The blond huffed at his girl’s request, acquiescing nonetheless. “Ladies, meet my investors,” he groaned. He pointed to each one as he went down the line. “This is Gray,” pointing to a raven-haired cutie with a smoldering glare. Juvia even squeaked when he spoke for himself. The next was Bacchus, someone Lucy recognized without fail. He ran the largest brewery in Magnolia and supplied 90% of the alcohol to Laxus’s establishment. The largest member of their motley crew was Gajeel, a local Rocker whose band played at the club a couple nights a week. Bringing up the rear was a guy simply introduced as Laxus’s cousin Natsu and Lucy could barely keep her eyes off him. He wore a black tank top and jeans but what caught her attention most was a perfectly depicted black and red dragon swirling down his right arm, wrapping around his chiseled muscles.

After a few rounds of drinks, everyone had split off into pairs except Lucy and Natsu, leaving the two alone back in VIP. The silence between them was astounding given the atmosphere but Natsu soon ended it by offering to buy her another drink. They went back and forth, buying each other drinks and swapping stories before the pinket grew bored and dragged his new ‘friend’ to the dancefloor. The song playing was slower than the previous selections, but the bass combined with booze led the two better than they could have done on their own.

Soon their hands were traveling over each other, gripping at whatever they could reach in order to pull the other in closer. The sound waves coursed through them, eliminating the need for speech. They danced together song after song, only resting when Lucy grew thirsty and Natsu refused to let her go on her own.

Settling back in the VIP area with their friends, they saw that they weren’t the only ones who had found company. Gray and Juvia were playing coy, but the attraction was obvious. Levy and Gajeel were cuddling on the couch engaged in an argument on whether audiobooks were better or ‘an embarrassment’. Bacchus and Cana? Yeah, they didn’t even last an hour before they took off for Cana’s place right down the street.

Lucy reached over to grab her drink and was shocked by the warm, rough sensation of Natsu’s fingers sliding over her now exposed skin. Judging by the area, she could only assume he was tracing the black outlined stars that littered her ribcage. A friend had started her design but never finished, leaving them nothing but black marks on her pale skin.

“I like your ink,” Natsu hummed, his fingers still tracing the familiar patterns. “If you ever want more, let me know. I wouldn’t even charge you shop minimum.”

That’s when the name hit her. Straightening up, Lucy locked eyes with him, chocolate brown staring into emerald orbs. “Wait… you’re not, Natsu Dragneel are you?” No way he was the most famous tattoo artist in town.

The handsome pinket grinned, his pointed canines drawing in her attention. “In the flesh,” he remarked teasingly, moving closer in order to lessen the gap between them. “What do you say, hm? Wanna wear my next project?”

A nod was all it took before Natsu grabbed her by the hand, dragging her away from the rest of their group. They wove their way through the crowd, making their way to the elevator to Laxus’s private office. “I was working on Laxus earlier,” he explained, his voice gruff. “So my kit is still there and the room is still set up perfectly.”

Lucy’s heart was racing. Not only was she getting a tattoo in a nightclub from a stranger, something that was definitely not her, but she was getting inked by the Natsu Dragneel. The dinging of the elevator bell brought her back to Earthland and she allowed him to drag her inside.

After a rather passionate make out session, the two arrived at the top floor and Natsu’s demeanor quickly changed. He instructed her to stand by a leather chair as he took his knife from the small of his back and cut a piece of plastic from a box. He draped it over the chair and politely asked her to sit down. Lucy watched as he grabbed a red leather case from the desk and set up all his tools on top of more plastic wrap. She wondered if he could hear her heart as it tried to escape her chest because he chuckled right as her pulse spiked.

“I promise I don’t do this all the time,” he remarked teasingly, seating himself atop a rolling stool and wheeling up to her side. He had everything situated perfectly and was ready to go before he gloved up, pulling on black latex-free gloves and snapping them playfully. Without breaking their staring match, he carded his fingers through her honey hair before kissing her softly. “What do you want?”

Go big or go home right?

“Surprise me,” Lucy replied, her voice more meek than usual. It was like she had fallen under some sort of spell, and the alcohol played no part. In fact, she felt completely sober except for the effect Natsu had on her. Could he be considered a drug himself?

Cracking his knuckles, Natsu kissed her again before asking her to pick her shirt up, brushing his fingers against her tattoo. “Mind if I add on?” he questioned, laying eyes on the entirety of her art. There were 12 stars in total seemingly floating atop her milky ribcage. Lucy agreed and the artist sensed the edge in her movements.

Putting down the gun, Natsu took his time and kissed every star, feeling the anxiety leave Lucy’s body with every caress of his lips. After his adoration, he put on some rock music in the background and set to work. After an hour or so of conversation, laughter, and Lucy’s various painful outbursts, the piece was finished and he immediately cleaned up his canvas and his tools. He gently wrapped her entire torso in plastic wrap before picking her up off the chair and bringing her to a nearby mirror on the back of Laxus’s door.

When Lucy stood on her own two feet and had positioned herself appropriately, she had to fight tears from streaking her cheeks. Where a few measly stars once stood, there was now an entire animated galaxy. Swirls of color combined to form the emptiness of space, but he incorporated the stars, making them stand out against the cartoon creations. It was more beautiful than anything she could have ever imagined on her own.

The only way Lucy could think of to properly thank him, was to throw herself onto him, latching her lips onto his. She kissed him with a fervor she hadn’t had before, which he attributed to the endorphin high. “T-thank you,” she breathed against his lips. “It’s gorgeous.”

Natsu smiled, dipping his head down to kiss her again. “Gorgeous ink for a gorgeous girl,” he quipped, causing the both of them to laugh. He brought his fist up and glanced at his watch, noting that it was pushing 2:00am.

“Want to catch breakfast?” he propositioned, Lucy immediately doing mental math.

“No one will be serving breakfast for hours…” she reminded, trying to catch whatever hints he was throwing.

Flicking her forehead softly, Natsu chuckled. “There’s a couple things we can do to kill time,” he offered with a salacious wink. “And I happen to know that the best breakfast in town is served in the diner below my apartment. Think you can make it a few more hours?”

Pulling herself away and pulling her shirt back down, Lucy nodded toward the elevator doors, her smile beaming. “I think you’ll find plenty of ways to keep me up.”

[gryneos]

Time to detail some of my beliefs, and why Otherkin fits into them neatly.

One thing that is common to Otherkin is the concept of reincarnation. What isn't common is the idea of non-linear time when it comes to "past" lives. When one reads some books on various aspects of New Age Spirituality, the idea of simultaneous time crops up. What also comes up in the idea that in the realm of Spirit, time does not exist.

Now, I will admit that my tiny human mind cannot truly grasp that concept. Even though I have had experiences that have given me a taste of the afterlife, I still don't have a good idea of what 'life' as a spirit is like when there is no linear time. I can only conceive time then as a spatial construct instead of the linear experience we only have here in physical reality. Existence as a spirit in the next life simply is, and has neither a beginning nor an end. There is no passage of time.

That can be difficult to imagine further when one ponders how it can be 'life' in that next existence if one does not experience a passage of time. The mind would stop as would all other energy according to our knowledge of science and math. To the atheist, this is a no-brainer. At the end of life, the mind does indeed simply stop. Comparing the mind to a computer is apt to the atheist definition of life. Once the computer is turned off, and all electricity halted (no internal motherboard batteries, either) then there is nothing left to keep the thoughts/programs running, and so it simply stops. Taking that into the concept of it continuing to work even without electricity and without linear time is rather mind-blowing, whether looking at it as an atheist or a believer.

Okay, I'll leave that concept where it is in case anyone wants to expand upon it. That's just part of my overall belief. The rest is that once in the 'afterlife' and accepting of a no-time reality, there then comes the part about all of our lives, past, present/concurrent, and future. Well, in a reality of no-time, none of those terms have any meaning. All lives exist at the same time. All moments occur simultaneously.

What makes the life we are experiencing now different is a matter of focus. Our spirit is focused on this life at this moment. It may very well move its focus to another life, as when in this life we explore 'past' or Other Lives (I capitalize those due to looking at them from a no-time perspective.) However, I do not limit my spirit to the idea that it can only focus on one life at a time. It's Spirit, so it's as limitless as everything else associated with Spirit (and I capitalize that word to denote all of the spiritual realm, reality, existence, god, goddess, and whatever else that is not physical reality as defined and known by modern science.)

Now then, I figure those who have read this far are balking at my ideas and are more than ready to label me "Tumblrkin" "kinny" et cetera. That's fine, but I need to at least point out that I have come to these conclusions after many decades of pondering it all. Yes, I said "decades" because I'm in my 50s and have been reading books of the New Age variety since the mid-1970s. Here is a list of what I have read that have molded my views to what they are now, and why I can easily fit my Otherkin beliefs into them:

Books on Astral Projection (also known as "Out of Body Experiences" as first defined by Robert Monroe): "The Projection of the Astral Body" by Sylvan Muldoon & Hereward Carrington (1929) "The Study and Practice of Astral Projection" by Dr. Robert Crookall (1960) "Journeys Out of Body" by Robert Monroe (1971) "Far Journeys" by Robert Monroe (1985) "Ultimate Journey" by Robert Monroe (1994) "Mind Trek" by Joseph McMoneagle (1993) "out of body experiences" by robert peterson (1997)

Other books on spirituality of note: "The Art of Dreaming" by Carlos Castaneda (1993)

Magazines on spiritual thought: (technically, just one because I found "Gnosis" to be the best of that time-period) Gnosis - Between 1985 and 1999, GNOSIS Magazine was the only widely available, serious journal devoted to Western esoteric and spiritual traditions. http://www.gnosismagazine.com/about_gnosis/about_gnosis.html

Further reading on spiritual thought can be done at both the Internet Archive as well as "The Internet Sacred-Texts Archive" http://www.sacred-texts.com

Recent (or relatively recent) books on other lives and the next life: "Past Lives, Present Miracles" by Denise Linn (1997) "The Convoluted Universe" by Delores Cannon (2001) "Mirrors of Time" Brian L. Weiss, M.D. (2002) "Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives" by Jim Tucker, M.D. (2013) "Beyond Past Lives: What Parallel Realities Can Teach Us About Relationships, Healing, and Transformation" by Mira Kelley (2014) "Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing" by Anita Moorjani (2012)

So, there you have it. Ideas and concepts that have long pre-dated not only the existence of Tumblr, but also the Internet as we know it.

This is also why I refuse to use the term "multiverse" because it doesn't really have anything to do with Spirit. It's a construct dependent upon scientific thought, mathematics, and hypothesizing.

Spirit, on the other hand, is inherently infinite, so anything at all is possible through it. All one needs is belief or faith (or both.) :-)

[bluepoodle7]

#Mira #MathMirror #SchoolSupplies #Illbleed

Thinking about the Mira or what I call a math mirror. I remember looking through this thing and see virtual boy red colors. If I made a Illbleed styled game this would be like the Horror Monitor.

Image is not mine but here is the link. https://mathodology.com/product/mira/

[mitochondr-moved]

tagged by @canidswain

nicknames: mira, mirawr, mirror

sign: pisces

height: ngl i don’t remember but i think i’m around 5’6 or 5’7

hogwarts house: hufflepuff

last thing i googled: sue perkins age (she’s 50 and i’m crying i thought she was like 35)

song stuck in head: it’s not a song but i have brian david gilbert saying ‘why do piranha plant have bone in it’ stuck in my head and i have done all day

following: 295

followers: 74

amount of sleep: on weekends it’s probably about 8-9 hours, on weekdays it’s probably about 5-7.

lucky number: 24

dream job: musician but like, that’s not happening so probably something with maths or medicine.

wearing: suede tshirt, black, yellow, white and red flannel and black jeans

fave song: seashore - regrettes

instruments: guitar + piano

random fact: when i was like 9 i was trying to show off to this girl i liked so i ate some really sour sweets or something and i had a cut in my mouth and her brothers girlfriend told me i could die from it infecting the cut

aesthetics: i really like grunge and punk shit

i’m tagging @lillloydbby @rernlikefern @ronance-dingus and literally any of my mutuals because i love y’all.

[pyxel-spree]

01 | centaurii ascendant

Duchess Seonid Min walked down to her private parlor. With a final twirl to display the fullness of the strapless gown, with its fluffy white tulle skirt, yellow satin overlay and white rose corsage, she grinned at the image in the mirror, clicking the heels of her white velvet boots together. She fiddled with her short shiny dark brown hair, admired the shimmering blue eyeliner that brought out her slender winged eyes and the pink in her creamy cheeks. She was no beauty-she was too overweight and too short (4"5 with heels) to look like those models on TV. But she wasn't going to dress like a nun just because she had a big butt and thick thighs, and she could still pretty up her round plain face a bit.

Satisfied that she looked perfect, she sauntered into the pale pink room with its gilded chairs, pausing only to adjust the vase of flowers on the table. For this was her room, and everything, from the matching, rose-printed dishes on the irewood table from the overstuffed, pink velvet wing chair in the corner, had to be just so.

On the opposite corner of the room, a large wallscreen with a holomap of the Rublex Galaxy resided. Seonid marched over to this sleek device, rather out of place in the frilly, old-fashioned room, and used her fingers to zoom in on a small solar system, which she scanned for minutes, her brow furrowed in concentration, until she reached the small silver dot labeled Oriolis. She tapped on it, and a list of figures and statistics appeared on the dark-blue background of the coat of arms of the galaxy.

"The two hundred fortieth meeting of the Rublex Royal Council will now commence," she announced to the crowded room, packed with men and women in expensive clothes, all sampling delicacies from silver platters and sniffing the floral arrangements. "First, I would like to welcome each and every one of you into my humble home. Please, make yourself comfortable. Secondly, we have three proposals we need to address-the Petrochemicals Guild has a suggestion on how to reduce emissions, the Screen Actors Association has been lobbying our local councils with some film-friendly bills, and the demands of the Granjan people and the ongoing discrimination they claim to be facing under our administration." As she spoke, the people in the room listened raptly, politely applauding when she was finished All of the people in the room were older than the Duchess; her round face and innocent brown eyes gave one the impression of a child, malleable and easily influenced. And yet it was clear who the leader in the room was.

Seonid Min had been born in the Earthen ghetto of North Side, a rough section of the Grand Centaurii City. Her parents were the children of Korean immigrants from Earth, and the tiny family apartment was barely big enough for the family's seven children. She was the middle child, the first girl, but expectations were hardly high. Her three older brothers and her father had all done jail time; the oldest, Kivran, had been sentenced to life for second-degree murder, and her father was always in and out of the house, dancing between prison and complete bankruptcy. But Seohyun Min hadn't lost all hope-she'd given her daughter another name-Gim Mirae, which meant "golden future" in Korean, and the names of two great Centauriian empresses (Seonid and Elysei, just to be on the safe side), so it seemed fair to say that Seonid was bound to be an extraordinary child.

Nevertheless, when Seohyun sent six-year-old Seonid to the same inner-city public school she had sent her two brothers, she was completely flabbergasted when the girl came back with a letter the first day claiming that that she has shown "exceptional promise" and would they not mind if they promoted Seonid to the sixth year, as she was not like to learn much in the first? Seohyun couldn't believe it. After all, both she and her husband had barely graduated from upper school. But she signed the form with a shaking hand, and subsequently, Seonid was on track to be very special indeed.

Suprisingly, Seonid didn't like school very much. Oh, she liked learning well enough, but school? Not at all. Pretty soon, she realized she was quite a bit smarter than many of her teachers, and often had to correct them, "to preserve the integrity of the lesson," as she put it. This habit caused two labels to be hung up on her, neither of which she liked very much-"genius girl" and "smarty pants." She didn't like "genius girl" because it implied that she had supernatural abilities, and she didn't like "smarty pants" because it prevented her from having friends. After coming in top in the nation-wide exam required to pass the sixth year, she then moved onto upper school. Upper school was different from lower school in several ways. For one, what year you were didn't matter. You just had to complete a certain number of courses and then you could graduate. Generally, it took students six years to finish upper school. Seonid finished all her required courses in two-and participated in every extracurricular activity her school offered, even sports, which she wasn't much good at.

Most geniuses, the ones you hear about a lot, are famous because of their contributions to math and science. Seonid was different. Her strengths were in language and public speaking. But she had no idea where to go with those skills. A helpful teacher had watched her at a debate team match, and had asked her afterwards, "I know you're finishing this year; what universities are you applying to?"

Seonid told him the names, all local schools, mediocre at best. He shook his head. "You're looking at the wrong places. You should be applying to the best, with skills like yours. Grand Centaurii University, perhaps?"

Grand Centaurii University?! Home of the best law program, the incredibly elite school only accepted-and oftentimes rejected-the very best. But Seonid had taken his advice, and before she knew it, she had applied applied, had been called in for an interview, had been called in for another interview (this one for a merit scholarship), and had finally been accepted.

University has passed by in a blissful blur, and she had come out top in her class again. Many of her peers wanted to go on for internships in prestigious law firms, but Seonid had a different goal. She wanted to help North Side, where she had been raised. And the way to do that? Get elected as Centauriian senator.

The empire divided its powers into Houses of nobility headed up by the emperor or empress, and the elected Centauriian Senate, which represented every single planetary system and galaxy within the empire. There was one representative for every planetary system (a planet and its moons). So politics within the established parties were cutthroat, nasty, and unwelcoming to outsiders. So Seonid and a few college friends founded their own party, put Seonid on the ballot, and waited.

What no one could have predicted was how popular Seonid would become. People, for some reason, really liked her. Probably it was because people liked her whole image-thirteen-year-old inner-city whiz kid Seo Min, her ability to sound smart without sounding pretentious, the way she could talk to all kinds of people, her persistence on issues she cared about but her willingness to compromise, her openness. Without really meaning to, she became a contender. And before long, she was planet rep and galaxy rep (the contest between the planet reps within the galaxy).

She would have been content to just stop there, but fate, as it would seem, intervened. Within a few weeks of her first term, Seonid received a letter that would change her life.

Apparently, the High King Selevar, head of House Onyx (the guardians of Centaurii and the leaders of the military) had caught sight of  Seonid's exceptional rise to power and declared her Raised to the Imperium, Duchess Seonid Min of the planet of Oriolis of the Yancyl system of the Adeline Quadrant of the Dencë sector, First Duchess (duchess of the capital planet!) of the Rublex Galaxy of the Grand Centaurii Empire, and eligible for all ranks and privileges of that title.

Which was really a nice way of saying that the High Lord Cielaré, the real power in House Onyx, demanded that she ascend to the Imperium. One did not refuse such an offer, even if one had never heard of the Rublex Galaxy before.

And so, at the tender age of fourteen, she was a planet leader. Royalty.

It was all a bit hard to believe.

She examined the members of her cabinet fondly. Tall, thin Piengo la Chanve, Minister of Affairs. City Magistrate Ala Stinworthy, pale and elegant. Duke Cierno of the nearby planet of Long Gap. Rather unattractive, middle-aged Duchess Cal, Duke Cierno's wife. Other assorted royals, some she liked, some she didn't. And presiding over them all, white-haired ancient old High Lord Dunavain, the leader of the galaxy. She couldn't imagine a better group of people to work with. Or a more unlikely.

Houses Onyx (military) Diamond (diplomacy) and Emerald (finance) together made up the "Big Three." These were the most influential houses, the ones every noble wanted to be a part of, the ones with the most money, influence, and power. But naturally, there was a world of difference within the Houses, made up of multiple families who may or may not agree ideologically. Such was the case with Onyx, where the High Lord Cielaré's ultra-conservative militarism had made him more than a few enemies. So the High Lord had come up with a solution. Anyone whom he deemed likely to make trouble, he banished to the Rublex or other outer galaxies, cutting them off from main channels of power. So the Rublex was, therefore, an enclave of thought quite different from that of mainstream Onyx.

Seonid didn't care. The people she had met here were fantastic leaders, all brave and talented and wise. The High Lord had no idea what he was missing not having these people on his side.

High Lord Dunavain, their leader, stood up feebly. He was getting up there in years, but his mind was still sharp. At his side, his son Milos, the heir to the Rublex, a dignified gentleman who sat with his wife, dutifully giving his father his glass of water. As the older Dunavain rose, he quaffed the drink, then gave Seonid a conspiratorial wink. "Thank you for those kind words of welcome, Duchess. Now, before we address those issues, I have some of my own-Oh! I almost forgot!" He turned to a portrait on the opposite wall and bowed very low. "Good evening, High Lord Ruble."

As one, the leaders of the Rublex rose, and saluted the picture, which depicted a handsome, strong-jawed man with coffee-colored skin and a fall of rich copper hair that fell in long curls to his waist. Despite that, and his flamboyant silken raiment, the angles of his jaw and cheekbones left no doubt as to his gender.

High Lord Rythicæn Ruble was something of a legend among the Centauriians. He had been one of the original founders of the Celestial Empire, as well as the counterpart to the High Lord Cielaré's ideology, the founder of House Diamond. Like the High Lord, he was brilliant, but he was a sworn pacifist, holding to the vows of his religion, the Church of the Seven Angels. Despite his political rivalry with Cielaré, the two remained good friends. That was, until a final argument (no one was certain what it was about) had so angered Ruble that he fled the empire, never to be seen again. The Rublex Galaxy was his legacy.

To salute the portrait, here, under the command of House Onyx, was unthinkable, semi-blasphemous, in fact. But it gave the men and women of the Rublex their own little form of defiance, a small rebellion, in a way. They may have been relegated to the ass-end of the empire, as Dunavain liked to say, but that still meant they could act with style.

The only person who wasn't standing (or smiling) was her bodyguard, Tessa. Just taller than Seonid, the small woman had her perpetual poker face on. As a direct employee of Cielaré, the guard took her responsibilities very seriously.

As Seonid sat down, a tray of food was passed to her. She stared at the "simple and elegant" Rublex dinner in front of her. After two months in the galaxy, she was sick of their food, its subtle nuances and slight shifts in flavor. Today, a light yellow cream and a Rublex roll with fruit, all arranged in the most artful manner. It churned her stomach to look at it.

"Rondeman," she whispered to the uniformed attendant, "tell the chef to fetch me a deep-fried eekak bucket." She longed for the bold flavors of her home planet, even if it did take a toll on her figure.

The attendant nodded, walked away to give her order. As he did so, Dunavain flagged him down. "Oh, Rondeman!"

"Yes, m'lord?"

"Fetch one for me too." Seonid blushed, but Dunavain grinned. "I haven't had eekak in years."

The assembled nobles chuckled, and would have laughed more had not a horrible creak sounded above them, with a nails-on-a chalkboard quality. Everyone stopped, nervous.

Then all the lights went out.

All was darkness.

••

Tessa lounged in her chair, watching with fond disinterest the proceedings of the day. She had never been one for politics, but it did amuse her to watch her small, confident duchess twist these seasoned dukes and governesses around her fingers.

If only they didn't have to salute the portrait. It looked for a second like Dunavain was going to forget, but then he quickly remembered, and everyone got up to salute the damn thing. It always seemed fairly stupid to Tessa, nothing but a petty little way for these third-rate politicians to feel like they had a say in anything. Did they not realize their guards and servants were Cielaré's direct employees?

Many of the guards seemed to be forgetting that. They were wearing Rublex clothes instead of Onyx black, and they laughed and joked as they saluted the portrait.

Well, she wasn't going to do it. Someone had to be professional.

She supposed this was just her punishment. Though why anyone had to be punished for saving their employer's (such a strange word, employer, so technical) life was beyond her.

When she thought about the series of events that had landed her here, it was more like a series of flashes. A fancy ballroom, with long white tables, the flash of crystal and the spray of red wine as the crack of a bullet cut through the soft waltz that was playing. Standing up, fiddling with the trigger of her own gun. Burning pain in her side. Red dots spreading into wet splotches on the man's white shirt.

The doctors said she was incredibly lucky that the bullet fired by the man, who was, rather predictably, an Arkillion nationalist, had lodged in flesh rather than a rib. Even if it had lodged in a rib, she doubted she would have cared much. The High Lord Cielaré was safe. That was all that mattered.

But there was a problem. News of the assault on the palace had spread far and wide. People wanted to know about the brave guard who'd saved the High Lord's life. There would be interviews and fluff pieces and worst of all, photographs. All their work could be undone. And so, for the fourth time, all the files on her were erased, then re-edited into a new alias and a new location. She would travel to the remote Rublex Galaxy to guard someone named Seonid Min, far away from prying eyes and anyone who might recognize her from the Earthen newsfeeds.

She didn't want to. She would feel safer near the High Lord, preferably in his Miramoor Galaxy or in the Imperial residence at Lyria. But it was a promotion, and she had been nearly located with less, so all in all, it was a necessary evil.

Given how out of the way the Rublex was, Tessa saw no need to disguise herself. Few people knew what she looked like, although it was true she did possess an otherworldly beauty. At four feet seven inches, she was tiny, with a pretty, heart-shaped face that made her age impossible to gauge. She had large, dark eyes and dusky red lips highlighted by the barest touch of makeup. Soft olive skin, lighter than her thick dark hair, rounded out her unusual appearance. One might mistake her for a doll, with her haunting eyes and the way she rarely changed her facial expressions. Yet her slender arms were corded with muscles, and the too-large black jacket she wore bulged with knives. But with a face like hers, she was rarely taken seriously.

She was expecting some spoiled little brat, but Seonid wasn't at all like that. No, this duchess seemed like she needed Tessa, in some bizarre way. Needed her experience from four years of watching House Onyx politics, needed a shoulder to cry tears of frustration, anger, and grief on, needed an older sister. And so Tessa unknowingly became all of those things, for a little Earthen duchess who was truly a force to be reckoned with.

Am I getting soft? It was a valid concern. She wasn't supposed to be attached to anything or anyone. After all, her contract was almost up. One more year and she'd be able to leave, go wherever she wanted with as much money as she could ever need. She sometimes wondered if that's why she'd been assigned to guard Seonid-so that she would never leave.

But no. They had a deal. Five years of service in exchange for protection. And the High Lord Cielaré was a lot of things, but never dishonest. At least, not dishonest to her. That was why he needed to stay alive.

Mind on the job. she reminded herself, beginning to stare down Duchess Cal's bodyguard, a pale, nervously freckled young man. Duchess Cal, she had liked. But Duke Cierno always seemed like a false friend of Seonid's. The duke, she suspected, was probably responsible for the mass pullout of troops two weeks ago, an idea that would leave Oriolis completely defenseless. And Duke Cierno had hired this guard, who was probably only loyal to his paycheck.

If you try anything...She was neither the strongest nor the best-trained guard on the Onyx force, but she knew how to break a man. The guard looked away, blushing at the strength of her gaze.

Tessa was about to shift her gaze to Cierno when the lights went out.

All was darkness.

••

All was darkness, but not all was quiet. Some of the richer nobles were tittering nervously. Seonid could not help but smile. These coddled royals had probably never been in a blackout before, but Seonid's years in North Side had resigned her to the experience of blackouts-the way everything stopped, the waiting for the crews to come turn everything back on. She had an idea why the power had gone out, though. The mansion had just installed a new power system that was not all the way stable. But to have it happen now, during a meeting, was just bad luck. Of all the times for an outage...

It would be a pain to fix, though, because the mansion was on an island overlooking the city. They'd have to get Grand Oriolis City power teams up there, which could take weeks.

"Look!" cried Count Behran of the Smelziorg sector. "The city's out! Everything's black!"

"What?" Seonid scrambled to the window, only to see that he spoke the truth. The evening lights of the city, which could usually be seen from the mansion, were black as pitch, as was the sky above. Even the water of the river was shimmering obsidian, rippling below them.

A collective groan from the room. Then, chatter broke out. "What are we going to do?" "They can't get power teams up here for weeks!" "The Miramoor Galaxy could!" "They're too far away." "It must be something really big." "To get the whole city out, no less!"

"Everyone, quiet!" commanded Seonid. "Let us go to the command room and see if it's just our area. There's no reason to panic." Her words, she hoped, concealed the anxiety she felt. She had never lived through a blackout this big before, even in North Side. An entire city out...that had never happened before.

As no one had a better idea (the wall displays were essential to continue the meeting), they all got up and followed Seonid down the ornately carved stairs, the flashlights on their cellphones bathing the floor in a blue glow.

The house was frightening at night, without a doubt. Without lights, especially. Now furniture that was innocent at day took on a sinister feel at night. In the dim glow, Seonid saw Tessa's hand, clutching at her gun. She suppressed a shudder, then remembered how paranoid her bodyguard often was. It was probably nothing. Wasn't it?

The command room in the basement was powered by a generator, so was still lit. It was sparsely furnished, with industrial-grade metal tables and plastic chairs. The real power in the command room came from the new computerized walls which lined the entire room. The room was created to serve in case of extreme disaster, invasion, or war, which was why it was always powered.

The duchess spoke, "Initiating status report."

The walls responded with a series of clicks and beeps, then a map of the whole galaxy appeared.

All dark.

"The whole galaxy..." whispered Cal, horrified.

"I suppose we can call the Miramoor," said Dunavain reluctantly. Everyone knew he and the High Lord Cielaré were hardly on the best of terms. But if the whole galaxy was out he would need to do something.

As if on cue, the Apex in his hand, along with the walls and the halogen lights on the ceiling, flickered, and then went out.

"That...that's not supposed to happen." stammered Seonid. "The generators..."

Suddenly a grinding overhead split the silence, as though from the world's largest electric saw. "A ship." Tessa told Seonid. "Perhaps the Miramoor got a power crew up here."

They heard a thud, a couple crashes, and the grinding noise ceased abrubtly. All was eerily silent.

Then someone kicked down the door to the mansion.

"Oh, God," Seonid breathed.  She heard similar exclamations from the assorted nobles below. Each intoned the name of their deity. Some of the really religious ones, like Governess Stinworthy, had set up a small pocket shrine and were actually praying. Though about what, Seonid didn't know.

Centaurii had never been invaded since Amadeus IV had conquered the universe in 1099. Never. But what was the kicking down of the imperial manor if not invasion? And how had the generators gone off?

Calm down. she told herself. There was no need to panic. Not yet. They didn't know who was above them. Beside her, Tessa tensed, listening to the heavy bootfalls of what seemed to be a small squad of...soldiers? They had the voices of soldiers, at least.

"Al-Almiarah, this place is huge!" one said in an unfamiliar accent.

"Centauriian dogs," his companion sneered. "They're all evil, all filthy-rich, bourgeoisie noks." He spat audibly.

"They could be anywhere, by al-Almiarah!" fumed the first again. "This place is huge."

"Will you shut up and look for them, then?" said a waspish female voice. "You're not going to find anything by admiring the furniture."

"Yes, Lady Castella." said the voice meekly.

"I found something!" called a voice triumphantly. "Some sort of secret room, it looks like!" There was a flurry of feet on the stairs. Seonid's heart pounded. He was standing just outside the command room!

"Yes." the acerbic voice of the woman came again. "They did say something about a hidden room." And then, after a pause, "Bring it down."

"Yes, milady!" the men called out enthusiastically. clattered over to the door, grunted, heaved, grunted, heaved, and grunted and heaved again. Boots pounded on the metal in a futile attempt to break it.

Inside, the Centauriians exchanged nervous looks. Their options were limited at this point. Bereft of their usual military escorts, who had pulled out only recently, they had only their personal guard to protect them, and who knew how many men waited on the other side of that door? Seonid looked to Dunavain. "What do we do?"

"Open it." Seeing their stunned faces, he smiled. "I've met this type before. In the Third Arkillion War. All bluff and not very many guns. They rely on a few fancy tricks to conceal their real flaws-like that business with the generators. A real threat wouldn't need to do that. They could just force their way in."

Seonid nodded. He has a point.

Duchess Cal didn't look convinced. "And if it gets hostile-"

"We've faced worse from the Onyx loyalists." said Milos Dunavain, which earned a laugh from them all. He turned to his guard. "Would you open the door?"

••

Tessa observed the strangers who streamed through the now-open door with some trepidation, eager to find out who they were. The majority were standardly trained fighting men, dressed in black bodysuits with new guns. But even from this distance, she could tell that the guns were shoddily constructed and the black suits were cheap. She suspected some sort of illegal private army. Boring.

There were two people in the room she was quite fascinated with, however. The first was, of course, the woman who called herself Castella. Castella was a standard humanoid, with dark blue skin that was obviously home-grafted (you could see traces of a lighter blue skin beneath.) and a shaved head. Yet she had golden flanged armor on that was clearly expensive, and carried two long crystal swords instead of a gun. Yet despite her outlandish outfit and appearance, there was a certain cadence to her accent that reminded Tessa of home. She seemed distinctly Earthen, which was puzzling. Now, where have I seen her before?

The other person was shrouded in a black robe covered in cabalistic symbols. He was also a standard humanoid, only his skin had been grafted on with bright green. Something in the shape of his jaw gave Tessa the distinct impression that this was a man who got his way, even though he appeared to be a mute or too important to talk.

What frustrated Tessa was that she couldn't analyze these people, couldn't classify them as threats because she knew next to nothing about them, couldn't classify them as non-threatening because of the way they had come in. She longed to grab Seonid and go, but even she couldn't fight her way through twenty soldiers at once, not to mention Castella and this man.

Seonid was not taking this well. "Who are you people?" she demanded rudely. Milos Dunavain put a steadying hand on her shoulder, but she threw it off angrily.

Castella ignored the question. "Are you the leader?"

"Who are you people?"

"Are you the leader?"

Tessa held her breath, wondering how the fiery little duchess would respond. In terms of seniority, she was not ranked highly, being only a duchess, but she was obviously the natural leader in all other respects.

Dunavain raised a hand. "I am the leader."

"Your name?"

"High Lord Helios Dunavain of the Rublex Galaxy." Dunavain responded, with a nonchalance of manner Tessa had never seen in him before. It's almost as if he's trying to provoke them. "Now, if you will. Our good First Duchess has raised an excellent question. Who are you and what are you doing in my galaxy?"

"That, I believe, I can explain." the robed man said suddenly. It was the first thing he had said all day. Tessa was stunned by the rich honeyed tones of his voice, strengthened with a fierce steel. Strange...

"Your Grace," he swept an elegant bow to Seonid, "and you lovely lords and ladies," here he made another bow, "it is truly a pity that you had to be involved in all of this...unpleasantness."

"Which is..?" Seonid's tone made it quite clear she wanted answers.

"My dear girl, this is a coup. A coup to restore the galaxy to the hands of its rightful owner, High Lord Regen." Seeing their stunned faces, he went on. "You see, a long time ago, there was a man named Regen, of noble birth, but the High Lord Cielaré saw an enemy in him. An enemy that needed to be snuffed out and destroyed. So he went to the King of House Onyx, who was-and still is-little more than a figurehead and used his influence to get Regen exiled on a wrongful charge. We are Regen's men. We returned today to take back the galaxy that would have been his-the Rublex Galaxy."

There was an unpleasant silence as he allowed this to sink in. Castella picked up. "Milord Regen wished to have all the nobles of the Rublex executed, but my good Lord Sever intervened on your behalf. He sees no reason to spill Centauriian blood. So, we will allow you to live, if you give up the galaxy to High Lord Regen, its rightful leader. We are sorry, my dear, that the High Lord mixed you up in all of this, took a barely trained girl and dressed her up in duchess's clothing. It is nothing short of despicable. "

"And to sweeten the pot for the loss of the galaxy, my good lords and ladies, a sum of two hundred thousand eekaks will be waiting for you on Centaurii when you arrive." Sever added. "Clever girl like you, you can put that to some use, and get a real job."

Two hundred thousand! Tessa's heart could have leaped from her chest. However, Seonid didn't look so pleased with the offer. She was trembling with rage, and her face had been growing steadily redder throughout Sever's speech.

"Don't patronize me." Seonid snarled. "I may be young, Lady Castella-" here she made a mocking suggestion of a bow, "but you will speak to me with the respect I deserve. And you!" she cried, turning on Sever. "You really must take me to be some kind of fool. You think I would sell my planet-my galaxy-for money? For a sum, I am sure, you have no intention of paying?" She was really getting into it now, like she did in her speeches. "I was chosen rightfully by my House and my Empress to lead this planet. It is I, not Regen, who is First Duchess of the Rublex Galaxy. I have far more claim than he ever will. Oriolis has become my home as well as my duchy, and to Oriolis I shall remain, to the death!" With that, she concluded proudly, daring anyone to contradict her. There were some shouts of defiance from the other lords, and Seonid smiled. "We of Centaurii are not so easily bought. Now run along, before we have to make you."

"You go too far!" Castella sprang forward with a cry, swinging her deadly crystalline blades with a skill that would have taken Seonid's head off, had not Tessa spotted this and jumped in front of Seonid, so that the tips of Castella's swords dug into her abdomen. As Tessa aimed her gun at Castella's aquiline neck, it was then that she remembered where she had seen Castella before.

"Careful," she said in a low voice. "Wouldn't want to hurt anyone with that."

A flicker of recognition glimmered in Castella's eyes, only to be replaced with cold concentration. "How's Lucas?"

"He's fine." Tessa replied smoothly, refusing to let Castella break her concentration.

"Castella, enough." Lord Sever's tone was carefully controlled, but domineering.

"But, milord, you must know who this woman is-"

"DO AS I SAY!" Sever's voice cracked like a whip. Castella suddenly froze, dropped her weapon, and slumped against the table, face-first, baring the back of her neck to Tessa for the first time. Embedded in the zaffre appendage's base was a small, silver square. Tessa immediately knew its function, and stared, horrified at Sever. His cold grimace chilled her in a way no one had done in years. Oh God...what did they do to you?

Castella finally managed to get to her feet, but her whole body was trembling, and her midnight-blue eyes were leaking tears. When Tessa attempted to make eye contact, Castella glared at her, as if it were her fault. My fault! Seonid was looking at Tessa and Castella curiously. Someone's been following this little chat.

Sever frowned. "Well, it seems you have left us with no choice, Duchess. If you will not relinquish control of Oriolis, we will have to take you to High Lord Regen." He appeared to sweep his eyes over the room, though it was impossible to tell through the hood. "All of you. You." He pointed at Tessa. "Put the gun down."

Wordlessly, she let it drop to the floor with a thud. The other guards followed suit. It felt like giving up, which Tessa hated. My life rests on the oratory skills of High Lord Dunavain, she reflected, seething. Cielaré would have never attempted to negotiate with these people. The Centauriians were white in the face by this point, but what could they do?

Sever turned, and Castella followed him out of the command room. The soldiers forced them to walk single file, pushing them in line with the butts of their guns. Every head was bowed, grim.

The Centauriians turned, walking up the stairs of the grand mansion, turning again and again, marching, marching, until they finally reached the grand door and the soldiers pushed them through, towards a sleek Miramoor-made shuttle parked on the island. The cries of the dark city could be heard across the water.

••

Sever and Castella were the first to enter the shuttle-Our shuttle! Seonid thought angrily-and then the contingent of soldiers pushed them in as well. The shuttle hadn't been made for quite so many people, but she was a Centauriian, a citizen of a land that thrived on overpopulation, and she'd been in bigger crowds in smaller places when she was a girl with her family of nine.

It took less than fifteen minutes to reach the Grand Old Clam. The Clam was a bulky, old fashioned war cruiser, not sleek like the new models they had in the Miramoor, its black hull and pointed rudders looked more suited to a tugboat than at home among the stars.

A hatch near the front opened, just big enough to fit the shuttle, and they flew in, landing with a thud. Seonid felt a sudden wave of claustrophobia, which was amplified when a soldier roughly tied a black strip of cloth around her eyes, blindfolding her. From the noises of indignation the Centauriian nobles were making, she guessed they were getting the same treatment.

They stumbled out of the shuttle like a troupe of fools. Seonid attempted to peer through her blindfold, making out two pinpricks of light through the sheer cloth. Hangar? Her musings were interrupted when she was shoved roughly from behind by the butt of one of those guns.

Everyone was forced into a kneeling position on the cold Astrotile floor, and with a single motion, the blindfolds were ripped off. Seonid stared into the face of the fattest man she'd ever seen in her life, wearing an antiquated set of golden armor too small for him-she could almost see the strain-with a straggly gold beard streaked with gray, beady black eyes, thick, full lips, and the most ridiculous-a golden helmet in the shape of a clam on his head. He sat upon a throne in the same design, with the words THE THRONE OF CLAMS on a piece of cheap printer paper taped to the base.

He opened his mouth, and she nearly fainted. His voice was high and squeaky, exactly like she thought a chipmunk would talk, if it could. "Welcome, goodpeople of the Rublex galaxy! I welcome you! Behold-" and here he threw out his arm in the general direction of the throne-"THE THRONE OF CLAMS! Tremble before its all-encompassing majesty. Tremble before me-once a lowly General Regen, now the mighty High Lord Regen!"

Seonid realized her mouth was open, and quickly closed it. It would not do for the Duchess of Oriolis to be gaping like a fool. "I know you are confused. Angry, perhaps, but wanting for answers. Well, fear not, my school of benevolent subject-fish. I shall explain everything. But-" he waggled his finger like a schoolmaster. "all in good time. I have summoned you hear for a great porpoise-a porpoise so great, you shall quake like a school of the Quaking Fish of the Reynor Sea-"

"Sir," Sever's voice took on a tired quality, as if he had been obliged to explain this point one too many times. "It's purpose, not porpoise-"

"Well, of course it's a porpoise! And a very good one it is, too!" screeched Regen, producing, rather triumphantly, from somewhere behind the throne, what appeared to be a live porpoise stuffed into a plastic garbage bag filled to the brim with orange juice. Some of the juice slopped onto the floor as he brandished his porpoise.

He's mad. Both Tessa and Seonid reached this conclusion rather quickly.

"His name is Reynor the Destroyer, after my father," explained the madman. "But we have many special names we call each other, such as Rabies and Insanity, Leprosy and Cholera, Fury and-"

The Centauriians made an effort to check their laughter.

Sever said, "Word has reached us, my lord-perhaps you could put away your porpoise-" And he whispered something in Regen's ear.

Regen chuckled. "Is that so? Good, good, good!"

"What?" demanded Seonid.

Castella curled her lip. "Children do not speak until spoken to, girl."

"I am no child!" Seonid exploded, meeting the haughty blue woman's stare head on.

Regen bounced like an excited baby. "Tell her, Sever."

Sever smiled unpleasantly. "It appears that your great empire is wiser than you, Duchess Seonid, or perhaps better at listening to reason. High Lord Dunavain, all the system and sector heads, indeed all the planetary systems, and the Empress herself have signed the galaxy over to us."

"I never signed any such thing!" Dunavain's voice quivered with outrage.

"Perhaps you are mistaken." Sever said smoothly, holding, just out of arms' reach, a paper with signatures on it. Seonid thought she could discern elements of relief in the false Lord's voice. He's worried about the wrath of the empire, and I don't blame him. Yet, he would be smugger if he believed the signatures were a forgery.

Dunavain stood, barely taller than Seonid. "I repeat, that is not my signature. I don't know how you got that, and I don't care to know. But know this, Regen-" he spat out the man's last name as if it were a curse-"I would not hand over my galaxy to the likes of you, not even if the Empress herself held the Twelve Destroyers of Ruble above this galaxy. Which I am certain, she has not."

"Excuse me," said Seonid. "Milord Sever, I have not signed my name to this document either. But according to Article Three, Sublevel Six of the most recent revision of the Cession Agreement, you require the signatures of all the senators and high arbiters also. Anything that could have gotten that many signatures is something that we would have heard about. Land is valuable here-we do not cede galaxies lightly."

Ha!

"Very true, Duchess Seonid." Sever said. "Have a look, if you will, everything is in order."

Seonid glared at him, certain he meant to pull some trick, but he met her gaze with a flat, expressionless stare. Tentatively, she moved toward him, and examined the document. Indeed it looked to be a real Cession Statement, but...

"Lord Sever," She put on her sweetest expression, intending to regain the control he had taken from her inside the house. "My signature is not among those assembled here. And, as the signature of every noble in the empire is required to give up land, it appears, that, for whatever reason, the Empress has declined to give you the Rublex Galaxy."

"Impossible!" Sever whirled to Regen, who had been playing idly with the clam designs on his throne, and said something in an undertone to the lunatic. Both began to re-read the list of names, frantically. Clearly, they could not find her name either, for they commenced doing it again. Castella was even dragged out from a panel behind the throne to read the list, but she too, couldn't find Seonid's signature.

Seonid thought she was going to explode from sheer laughter. This has got to be the most incompetent takeover in the history of the universe.

Finally, the frantic re-reading ceased, and Sever turned back to the Centauriians, who were now whispering and giggling like schoolgirls. His face appeared to have been carved from stone now. "Well, then, it appears we will have to remedy the Empress's incompetence. Duchess Seonid, sign the proclamation."

"No, I-" Seonid started to say, but she was interrupted by none other than the High Lord Dunavain, whose watery blue eyes sparkled with mirth. What little of his white hair remained bristled like a cat's, and his bushy white eyebrows writhed like sto-worms, carving lines on his tanned forehead.

"You, sir, are hilarious," he said, standing up. "I've seen a lot of things in my day, but none quite as ridiculous as this. Forgive me!" and he dissolved into giggles again, then appeared to get himself under control. "This coup, if you can call it that, was doomed from the start, what with such complete dunderheads spearheading the effort. You seem like you can't decide which story you want to spin for the masses-Unjustly Accused Noble Risks The Ire Of The Government To Reclaim Homeland, or The Government Is Letting Us Do This-See The Official Forms. Well, guess what, girls and boys! Show's over! No matter which way you spin it, your forger screwed up. You forgot the duchess-you think she's going to sign your 'completely legal' " (here he made air quotes with his fingers) "form? You, who can't even control your own pawns-" he pointed at Castella "without some sort of gadget on them-you're just going to convince her to sign it? So who's going to make her? Regen, the incompetent madman? So, no, she's not going to sign it, not on her life."

••

Another man appeared from behind the throne. He was as opposite to the the smirking, self-important Sever as one could be. He was tall and slender, and moved with a menacing, otherworldly grace. He had a shock of jet-black hair and dark brown eyes, and he wore a dark wool suit. His voice was pitched dangerously low, raspy where Sever's was smooth. "But her life doesn't have anything to do with it. It's yours she'll have to bargain for."

"Murakami." Sever's voice became cold, and tinged with something that sounded like fear. "We are handling this."

"Oh, I see that," Murakami's eyes swept the room disdainfully. "Allow me to assist you."

Tessa's heart had leaped into her throat, and she could feel it pounding away as if it was fighting to escape her body. No. It can't be. After all these years...Did you really think he was dead? the snide little voice in her head remarked. You've never been that lucky.

She forced herself to take a deep breath, to keep her eyes carefully dull as his own swept over her. I am nothing more than a bodyguard. She pulled her sleeves down until they covered almost her whole hand, pressing them to her side, carefully concealing her inner left wrist. To her relief, he did not appear to notice, but that did not stop the pounding of her heart, nor the unremitting desire to scrabble for a weapon, any weapon.

Regen's face, which had been growing progressively redder during Dunavain's speech, contorted, and his hideous slash of a mouth opened with a spray of saliva to scream out. "BRING OUT THE BONE-CRUSHER!"

"No, really!" Sever called, stating hopelessly at Murakami. "There's no need for this. Come on, milord. Surely you don't want to do this."

What the hell is a 'Bone-Crusher'? Tessa wondered. Her question was answered when three men in dark grey jumpsuits and round plastic helmets with dark faceplates appeared, rolling out what appeared to be a plank of wood attached to some crudely constructed wheels. Tight leather straps were attached to the sides of the device, fastened by constricting brass buckles, rusted with age.

Two men in the jumpsuits forced Dunavain to his knees again, then the third casually pulled on a pair of metal cuffs with embedded spikes, handed to him by Sever.

"NO! NO!" Seonid screeched. She broke away from the clutch of mercenaries that surrounded her, and jumped between the High Lord and his would-be tormentors. The cuffed man lowered his hands, unsure suddenly. "If you wish to get to the High Lord-"

Fast as lighting, Murakami moved, a shiny black staff with a intricately carved top in his hand. Wielding the staff with both hands, he swept Seonid off her feet, pushing her to the side. The cuffed man seized the opportunity to rain blows down upon Dunavain's head and neck. The spikes' cruel points opened up rents in Dunavain's black high-necked Rublex coat, tearing skin and fabric alike. Blood stained his white hair reddish-brown, ran down his unprotected skin from horrible scarlet scratches and holes. He groaned in pain. Regen laughed with glee as the Centauriians cried out in sympathy with their leader.

His bloody bruised body was forced onto the Bone-Crusher, and he was buckled and strapped in place, Slowly, they were forced to watch as the men in gray used the buckles to adjust the straps tighter and tighter, yanking on them to force a hoarse scream from his strangled throat, the leather strap digging further and further into his flesh.

Murakami smiled a tight little smirk, and Tessa shivered, feeling utterly powerless. And Regen, perched on his throne, laughed maniacally as the High Lord screamed, his agonized shrieks reverberating off the metal walls.

••

"Will you sign now, Duchess Seonid?" Murakami called above the screams (it appeared that his right arm and left leg had broken at the same time).

Seonid turned her gaze to Dunavain's broken form. Bloody spittle sprayed from his lips, but he still managed to rasp out, "Don't...sign...it...girl.." before breaking into incoherent screams again.

"Do you want to have his blood on your hands?" cried Sever.

Seonid tore herself away from Dunavain. Tears streaked her face, but her brown eyes smoldered with fury. "I will never sign your-" With a horrible crack, Dunavain's neck snapped, his lifeless head lolling to the side.

"MURDERER!" Ala Stineworthy shrieked. "MURDERER! We of the Rublex will never bow to the likes of you!" The cry was taken up by many in the crowd. In a detached way, Seonid noted that pale, coolly beautiful Governess Stineworthy was the last person she'd expected to have an outburst like that. Her own head was still reeling from the blood on the wooden slats of the Bone-Crusher and the gore smeared on the floor of the ship. It was one thing on Earth, but not here, in the Centauriian Empire.

"MURDERER!" Stineworthy's shrill cry was directed at Regen, who clapped like a child at the circus. "How lovely! Another volunteer." The men seized the Governess, shoving her toward the Bone-Crusher.

Stineworthy's usually calm, chilly voice was low and husky with urgency. "Don't sign it, Your Grace. Whatever you do, don't sign it." Yet when she faced the faceless men and the Bone-Crusher, no matter how hard the men beat her or how tight the straps constricted her, she did not make a sound, even until the end, where she, too, was hauled off the Bone-Crusher lifeless, her proud body broken, blood from her mouth dripping down her chin.

And still, Seonid refused to sign it.

••

Cierno went next, and Cal after. Tessa was amazed at the Centauriians' fortitude. One after one, these nobles, guards, and servants whom she had thought so soft and weak, stepped in front of Seonid and faced the Bone-Crusher stoically. Even when Regen devised new tortures, such as tying them to the Throne of Clams and cutting off one of their limbs at a time, they still defied him, each of them demanding with their dying breaths that Seonid not yield. Though Sever gnashed his teeth in frustration and asked how many deaths Seonid's willful behavior would cause, she refused to sign, though Tessa could tell it was an effort for her.

The last couple of deaths were particularly violent. Poor Piengo la Chanve was drowned in the bag of orange juice, and a young count who's name Tessa didn't know was literally burnt alive, soaked in boiling oil and lit afire. Why am I not stepping forward? I should...but I have to be here to guard Seonid, no matter what happens. But that's not all it is...

I'm afraid to die. I cannot embrace it as these people do.

She had always been afraid, she noted with some finality. She had always been frightened of death, of losing the only thing she had ever had to lose. And she had done anything, would still do anything, to stay alive. Even if that had been something that would haunt her afterwards.

Murakami wrinkled his nose in disgust at the oil on the floor, mixing with the orange juice to create a foul aroma, then composed his expression from one of condescending disdain to a perfect servant's-meek and always ready to please. "My lord Regen, it is clear that the foolish girl isn't quite getting the message. Perhaps some time in the cells will clear her head."

But I'm having the best fun I've had in years!" whined Regen. "Besides, there's one left-and she's pretty! I like you!" he said leering at Tessa. "She'll give good sport, I think."

Sever put on a placating tone, but his voice was shaking. The man had been pleading with Murakami up until the Bone-Crusher had been brought out. Tessa didn't blame him. Something like that-enough to break anyone's resolve. Anyhow, he's as guilty as they are. "That's why we should save her for later. More fun that way."

"Well, I suppose you're right." Regen sighed. "Guards, take them away to the cells!"

The men in grey melted away, dragging the Bone-Crusher with them. As Seonid and Tessa were led away, they looked back once, seeing their terrified expressions cast in the crimson relief that was all that remained of their fallen companions.

••

In her cell, Seonid screamed filthy words at the smooth white walls, willing one of them to morph and descend into Sever or Regen's face, or at least show some emotion. When none of this happened, she turned to screaming filthier words at the walls, then kicked them and beat upon them with her fists, even though all she got for her troubles was sore fingers and toes. After she tore all the skin off the knuckles of her right hand, the pain drove away the superficial façade of anger she had built up, and gave way to sorrow. She curled up on the all-white cot and dissolved into sobs.

It wasn't fair; it wasn't fair! Seonid had never seen murder up close, but that was then, and this was murder. This was the stuff of nightmares. People you knew, good, law-abiding people, weren't supposed to get murdered. But now they had and she had seen and she hadn't done anything, because what could she do? Something. I should have done something, and now it's too late.

Survivor's guilt. She'd heard the term thrown around a lot, in detective movies or Arquillion Massacre history shows. But hearing a word wasn't the same thing as feeling a word. Before, she'd laughed, thought, What do they have to feel guilty about? They've survived because they were clever enough to find a way to evade the injustice. But now she knew that they hadn't-couldn't have-done it alone. The reason that those people had survived was because they hadn't done anything to stop the injustice. I'm alive because good men and women put themselves between me and harm. I'm alive because other people would die rather than see me sell out the Rublex Galaxy.

She could have stopped it. She could have! She could have signed her name to Sever's stupid document, and no one would be any the worse off for it. She could have saved Dunavain and Piengo, and Ala...she could have saved all of them.

No one would be any the worse off for it.

Sitting up, she wiped the tears from her face with her blood-spattered skirt, chuckling at her stupidity. Everyone would have been the worse off for it. The citizens of her galaxy would never forgive her if she signed it over to a madman. She'd be vilified in every galaxy for a thousand light-years. "Duchess Seonid Min-The Traitor of Rublex." Not only that, she'd be shirking her duty. Tessa isn't the only one who guards people. As the Duchess of the galactic capital, I guard more people than she ever has. Because I'm the chief Duchess of my galaxy, I have one other, seldom-used title-The Guardian of the People. What kind of guardian yields to invaders?

No, I'm glad I did this, even though it seems more a loss than a victory. They died because they believed that I could fix this mess. Now it's my job to make sure Dunavain and Ala and all the rest didn't die in vain. I'm not just 'girl', I'm the Duchess Seonid Min, and I've got to make them remember that. Even if it's in their dying moments, I'll MAKE them remember it.

Seonid got off the cot, pulling on the white boots she'd kicked off during her fit of temper. Kneeling on the cold, white tile, she ran her hands over the walls, searching for a panel or something that opened to the outside. After all, there was always something like that in the movies. And there had to be in real life, too, because they had to feed the prisoners. Or not. She pushed that thought away. They would feed her. She was too valuable to waste.

She was scrabbling with her fingernails at a tile in the side, when the air vent in the ceiling clanged open, falling to the ground with a thump.

She tensed, ready for whatever would come out of the duct. But it was just Tessa, garbed in a baggy black shirt and standard-issue cargo pants that had been clearly made for someone a whole lot bigger than her. An impressive-looking military belt secured a small flashlight to her slim waist, and a pair of greasy flight goggles were jammed on her forehead. A long scrape marred her shapely jaw, but aside from that, she looked relatively all right.

Breathing heavily, she said, "Shall we?"

••

The guards hadn't seriously searched Tessa, and at any rate, they seemed a whole lot more interested in discussing various aspects of her body, trying to impress her with their clever lewdness. Needless to say, they had been quick work, and she'd left them tied up in a service chute. Then she'd found a small Splash8 computer on the third guard, plugged it into a port jack and seen a model of the layout of the ship.

Next, she'd gone to than equipment depot and grabbed some standard-issue clothes. Her relatively expensive shirt and pants would probably attract unwanted attention if she intended to sneak out, and Seonid's Rublex lace-embellished gown more so. She'd saved her shoes and jacket from the heap of things confiscated-shoes because she was rather attached to them, jacket because of the collection of knives and six boxes of matches inside.

As she moved from level to level, she'd opened as many of the fuel hatches as she could find, throwing matches inside, pleased when she'd heard the pop that signified the explosion of one of the cells, and the alarm that accompanied it. She'd acquired the goggles on the sixth level, snatching them out of the jacket of a maintenance worker. If she were stopped, she would, hopefully, look the part of a lowly engine repair woman.

She'd then located the air duct and crawled into it, sliding down the metallic tube until she reached Seonid's cell, marked in red on the schematic she'd seen on the computer.

Seonid was, however, being less than helpful. She was shaking, eyes wide, her hands fumbling as she took the clothes from Tessa. Exasperated, Tessa knelt to make eye contact with her. "Listen to me. Listen to me. We don't have a lot of time. I have the layout of this ship, and I know they have small-range shuttles in the hangar bay. We just need to get there."

"But if they catch us-" Seonid suddenly burst into tears. "Oh God, what if they decide to kill us like they killed Dunavain? Oh God, Dunavain had grandkids, did you know that? And now he's gone and so are their parents, you know? It's all my fault-"

"No. No, it's not. It's not your fault. It's the fault of those people up there. It's their fault and it's no one else's. But if you want to live, if you want to show them that you are more than just some powerless little girl, then you should do what I say."

Seonid nodded, nervously. "Can you help me with the back of my dress?"

Tessa attempted to untie the tightly lashed laces, failed, then ripped them off. The dress puddled around Seonid, who unlaced her underdress herself, pushing herself into her new pants and buttoning up the shirt. As soon as she was done, Tessa thrust her into the air duct, then climbed in herself. "Go," she hissed. And Seonid went.

It was dark and cramped in the silver tube, and a bit grimy too, but they ended up on the other side nice and easily. Well, as nice and easily as they could with a crystal sword pressed against both of their necks.

"Well, well, well. Look who we have here." Castella's slow, drawling voice was the most hateful sound in the world at that moment in time, thought Tessa. "Fun time's over, girls. Time to go back to your cells."

"No," said Seonid bravely. "No, we will not. You will get out of our way now."

"And why should I do that?"

"Because Tessa will kill you if I tell her to. Which I am thinking about doing right now. So unless you want your throat cut with your own sword, you will do as I say."

"Is that what you call her now? Tessa." She snickered. "Who would have thought the day would come when the Lady of Darkness would be saving people's lives? Although, to be honest, she isn't doing a very good-"

Tessa didn't wait for her to finish her condescending speech. She grabbed the crystal sword's blade with her hands, not caring about the streaming divots the sparkling weapon was rending in her exposed flesh. She yanked the sword, blade-first, out of Castella's hands, then flipped it around so that her bloodstained hands held the golden hilt. Castella smirked, and she pulled out an identical sword from behind her. As Tessa swung the sword at her head, she blocked it with uncommon ease.

It only took Tessa three cuts and a jab to learn she was hopelessly outmatched. Castella was undoubtedly the superior fencer-indeed, she had already cut Tessa's arm, a small, razor-thin slash on her upper arm, surprisingly deep. The crystal swords were wickedly sharp, and it was all she could do to parry the taller, stronger woman's lunges. I can't beat her with these, but maybe I can aim for another target...

Tessa changed tactics. Instead of swinging at her upper body and head, she fell to the floor, feigning injury. Seonid squealed. Castella was baring down on her, a triumphant smile touching her lips. Quick as a wink, Tessa slid across the sleek floor and stabbed the long glittering blade between the slits in the golden armor into Castella's calf.

Shock registered on Castella's face briefly, yet she compressed it behind a mask of bravado, falling into full-formed fencing. Tessa evaded these wild lunges, than leapt into the air, kicking the sword away, and pinned Castella to the wall by her periwinkle throat. Castella kicked and squirmed, but she held firm.

"Now," she said in a low voice. "What should we do with you?"

Castella spat at her, but her eyes were full of fear. Tessa reached into her jacket and pulled out a coiled length of barbed wire. "I always keep one of these with me. You never know...it just might come in handy. Wishing your neck was a little bigger?" She wrapped it around Castella's slim neck, and was pleased to see the Xia wince as the barbs dug into her flesh. She tied it to one of the utility pipes, suspending Castella by three feet. "You always were too fond of your neck, Miera."

The woman who called herself Castella choked, blood running down the splendid armor. Seonid was looking openly shocked, and Tessa suddenly felt a wave of self-loathing. In the end, this is all I'm good for. Displays of excessive cruelty. At least I left it tied where she can take it off...if she's clever enough.

"Let's go," she said, her voice deliberately hard. And Seonid followed, both of them making a pointed effort to not look back at the pole to which the woman was tied.

The rest of their flight was a blur to Seonid. Tessa had planned the escape well, apparently setting up small explosions throughout the ship. They ran at breakneck speed to the hangar bay, where Tessa commanded the steward to unlock one of the small shuttles. The man was so flustered with the alarms going off everywhere, he didn't even look at them twice.

The shuttle was small and compact. Seonid belted herself into a cramped seat, watching Tessa fiddle with the controls-a silver panel with an array of knobs that baffled her. Her ears began to pop as their altitude increased and they soared towards the hangar door.

The door had to open. It had to..

But she saw through the window the steward talking with some of those hired soldiers. He had not opened the door. Oh no...

And then the tiny shuttle shook with an ear-rattling screech of metal on metal. Again and again, Tessa rammed it into the door, punching a hole in the metal and making bright lights and loud beeps explode from the various panels and screens within the shuttle. The men were screaming into radios.

The shuttle burst through. The black expanse of space loomed before them, a prospect both frightening and exhilarating. Tessa slammed something, and the shuttle zoomed ahead, outstripping Regen's Clam. Lights began to flash, and an automated voice said something in a garbled tone. The ship began to spiral downward....downward...downward...

Her last thought was that Seonid didn't have a seatbelt on.

[foodselfiesandstuffblog]

The New Yorker: The Provocateur Behind Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Issa Rae

Melina Matsoukas, a director of music videos and television shows, had just returned home from a trip to Cuba when she got a call from Beyoncé, asking her to direct a video for a song called “Formation.” Matsoukas had directed nine of Beyoncé’s videos, and considered her “family.” But this assignment was unusually demanding. Beyoncé was working on “Lemonade,” a deeply personal “visual album” that touches on betrayals in black marriages—her parents’ and, reportedly, her own. “Formation” would be the first single, and an introduction to Beyoncé’s new aesthetic: both vulnerable and political. She wanted to release the song the day before she performed it at the Super Bowl, which meant that Matsoukas would have to submit a video within a few weeks. “It was the fastest delivery I had ever done in my life,” she told me.

When I visited her loft in Hollywood recently, Matsoukas opened her rose-gold laptop and pulled up the video. The brassy opening beats began as Beyoncé crouched on the roof of a police car, wearing a red-and-white blouse and a matching skirt: evocative of the rural South but made by Gucci. Matsoukas, who is tall and thin, with dark hair and high cheekbones, radiates a disconcerting hyperassurance. (She’s a Buddhist, with a fluctuating practice.) She is, as she says, “very loud and New York,” but her apartment projects an almost hermetic cool: Africanist art, a golden skull on a shelf, a tar-splashed vanity mirror.

After Matsoukas agreed to direct the video, Beyoncé invited her to her house in Los Angeles, and explained the concept behind “Lemonade.” “She wanted to show the historical impact of slavery on black love, and what it has done to the black family,” Matsoukas told me. “And black men and women—how we’re almost socialized not to be together.” This was a fraught subject for Beyoncé. She and her husband, the rapper Jay Z, are among the most famous couples in the world, and they had long been surrounded by rumors that he was unfaithful. Beyoncé considers herself a feminist, but for black women feminism can be a tenuous balancing act—advocating for women’s rights while supporting black men against racism. Black feminists have often been forced to pick between being politically black or politically female. “It’s an unfair struggle that only black women can understand and relate to,” Matsoukas said. With the “Lemonade” album, Beyoncé was publicly calling out the men in her life, an unexpected and, to her fans, thrilling decision.

The video for “Formation” would be an anthem of female and black empowerment, set in Louisiana, where Beyoncé’s maternal grandparents are from. “We spoke about the South, New Orleans, her mother’s history as well as her father’s,” Matsoukas recalled. The concept suited Matsoukas, who is known for videos that retain contemporary hip-hop’s commercial glamour but feature black women as the heroes. While the lyrics offered a certain amount of feminist swagger—Beyoncé promises that, if a lover pleases her, she “might take him on a flight on my chopper”—there wasn’t an obvious story line.

As Matsoukas develops an idea for a video, she spends hours browsing online and through art books and magazines, looking for images that resonate. “I treat each video like a thesis project,” she said. Stacks of old sources are piled behind her couch: books by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Noam Chomsky, and C. L. R. James; back issues of Wallpaper; math and science textbooks from college. For the “Formation” video, she found ideas in the work of Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Octavia Butler. She began to conceive scenes of black history, from slavery through Mardi Gras parades and the Rodney King protests. “I wanted to show—this is black people,” she said. “We triumph, we suffer, we’re drowning, we’re being beaten, we’re dancing, we’re eating, and we’re still here.” She wrote out a treatment and sent it to Beyoncé in the middle of the night. Within hours, the singer had written back to say that she loved it.

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Matsoukas, looking for a set that resembled a plantation house, rented a museum in Pasadena and decorated it to summon “Gone with the Wind” and “Twelve Years a Slave.” Then she had her art director “blackify” the house, hanging French Renaissance-style portraits of black subjects. Films about slavery “traditionally feature white people in these roles of power and position,” she said. “I wanted to turn those images on their head.” Matsoukas planned technical details to create a sense of verisimilitude, shooting some scenes with a Bolex camera—for a “grainy look,” like that of documentary footage—and others with a camcorder. She hired a camera operator named Arthur Jafa, who had been the cinematographer of “Daughters of the Dust,” an iconic 1991 film about Gullah women in South Carolina whose focus on black sisterhood echoes throughout the “Formation” video.

Matsoukas had two days to shoot Beyoncé, between her rehearsals for the Super Bowl. She devised a scene of Beyoncé performing on top of a squad car, as it slowly sank into the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina. “I wanted it to be a police car to show that they hadn’t really shown up for us,” she told me. “And that we were still here on top, and that she was one with the people who had suffered.” She shot the scene on a Los Angeles soundstage, with an artificial lake backed by a blue screen made to look like New Orleans. A crane on a barge suspended a camera overhead while a lift lowered the police car, and Beyoncé, into the water. Matsoukas operated another camera from a speedboat. “Everyone was scared, because the water was cold,” she said. “And Miss Tina”—Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles—“is calling me, like, ‘You’re going to give her pneumonia, and she has to perform at the Super Bowl.’ ” Beyoncé, who was wearing a wetsuit under her clothes, didn’t complain.

In the first edit, the video ended with an image of Beyoncé sinking into the water, but the singer wanted the final note to be more uplifting. A friend of Matsoukas’s had recently joked about the “black-girl air grab,” an incisive gesture made with your forearm upright as your fingers stretch toward the ceiling and then close in a fist. In extra footage, Matsoukas found a portrait of Beyoncé sitting in the plantation house in a white dress, half in shadow, air-grabbing as she faced the camera. “It just felt so perfect,” she said. She spliced it in after the drowning scene as an emphatic last gesture.

The response to the video was immediate and contentious. On Slate, a documentary filmmaker named Shantrelle Lewis accused Beyoncé of profiting from tragedy, writing, “Are we in need of mainstream blackness so badly that we’ll mistake its exploitation for validation?” Police unions throughout the country protested, saying that Beyoncé had an “anti-police message.” But the video was enormously popular among fans and critics, winning a Grand Prix Lion Award, at the Cannes Lions Awards; Video of the Year at the B.E.T. Awards and at the MTV Music Video Awards; and, earlier this month, a Grammy for Best Music Video. “I didn’t know the video was going to incite all those conversations,” Matsoukas said, closing her laptop. “But I was very pleased it did.”

In the “Formation” video, a black man wearing a yellow T-shirt and a black Stetson rides a horse through a deserted alley, edged with shrubs and red brick walls; his white Adidas sneakers are fitted with spurs. The scene was inspired by Matsoukas’s maternal grandfather, Carlos, an Afro-Cuban preacher and musician, known to friends as “the Cuban Nat King Cole,” who rode in rodeos in Harlem and the Bronx. “We’d see him on his white horse, and he was just this regal-looking black cowboy,” she recalled. Her maternal grandmother was a Cuban maid, who brought her six children from Havana to New York after the revolution. Matsoukas’s paternal grandparents were Greek and Polish Jews living on the Upper West Side. Her parents, David and Diana-Elena, met through one of Diana-Elena’s brothers, who had encountered David in a socialist student group.

Matsoukas was born in 1981 and grew up in Co-op City, a sprawling housing development in the Bronx. Her father worked as a carpenter, and her mother taught math in a local high school. When Matsoukas was eight, the family moved to Hackensack, New Jersey, but as a teen-ager she often returned to the city to go clubbing. “I was just trying to be grown,” she recalled. “Young girl trying to do too much.” She read Malcolm X and Assata Shakur, and listened to socially conscious hip-hop by Rakim and A Tribe Called Quest. “She’s always been an old soul, and she’s always been confident,” her mother told me. “I sometimes had to remind her, ‘Melina, I’m the mother here.’ ”

In high school, Matsoukas began taking photographs—including portraits of her friends, dressed in Afrocentric clothing—and she went on to study film at N.Y.U. and cinematography in the graduate program at the American Film Institute. She admired the directors Spike Lee and Mira Nair, and imagined making films that documented the lives of people “who look like me and think like me.” Her college thesis was a music video featuring a friend who was a singer, filmed on the subway and in an apartment building in the Bronx that her father owned.

Her first paid gig—two hundred and fifty dollars—was a video for a song called “Dem Girls,” by her cousin the rapper Red Handed, in Houston. “It was just in the hood, doing hood stuff,” she said, laughing. The result, which featured an assortment of preening video girls, was distinguished less by its imagery than by its precise focus and framing. Matsoukas shot in black and white, with split screens showing contrasting views of the same scene: gold-chained rappers playing dominoes set against children running through the grass.

After she finished graduate school, an agent named Inga Veronique got her a job directing a video for Ludacris and Pharrell. The song was a strip-club anthem called “Money Maker” (“Shake your money maker like somebody ’bout to pay ya”), but, Matsoukas said, “I wanted it to feel rich.” Borrowing from fashion photography, she posed models in front of bright-colored backdrops and lit them as if for a photo shoot; to accompany one chorus of the song, she created a montage of gleaming watches, sunglasses, and stacks of cash. Veronique said that the video was “fashion-y without beating you over the head with fashion.” The song went to the top of the hip-hop charts, and the video drew attention from the industry.

In 2006, on the night of the MTV Music Video Awards, Matsoukas met Jay Z and Beyoncé at a club in New York, and Jay Z hailed her as a rising star. Matsoukas shook Beyoncé’s hand and told her, “I’m coming for you.” Two months later, Camille Yorrick, a record executive who worked with Beyoncé, called to ask Matsoukas to direct four videos for a forthcoming album. “I had only done four videos in my whole life!” Matsoukas said. “I was really scared.” Still, her work appealed to artists’ managers. “The thing that stood out to me about her early videos was the way she made people look,” Yorrick said. “She just made them look really beautiful—people of color, white people, it didn’t even matter.”

As Matsoukas made videos for such singers as Whitney Houston and Jennifer Lopez, she often relied on highly stylized settings. Generic lyrics could yield generic imagery: she set Lady Gaga’s “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” in a moodily lit mansion filled with piles of money, and Robin Thicke’s “Sex Therapy” in a moodily lit mansion filled with acquiescent models. Her videos were often less concerned with narrative than with what the film theorist David Bordwell has called “world making.” Unlike other directors, she selects the wardrobe for a video, and creates mood boards of clothes and accessories for her performers. “Fashion is as much a character in her work as everyone else,” Yorrick said. She is also unusually capable of coaxing performances out of musicians. “She knows what she wants, and she knows how to command a set,” Yorrick went on. “She’s a negotiator—she negotiates her way to the best product.” Beyoncé said of Matsoukas in an e-mail, “She is a force, deliberate and methodical.”

When Snoop Dogg asked Matsoukas to make a video for a song called “Sensual Seduction,” in 2007, she took the job with trepidation. A few years earlier, Snoop had released a film, called “Doggystyle,” that blended hip-hop and pornography. “You walk into that kind of situation and you’re, like, ‘He’s a pimp—I don’t know how he’s going to react to a female director,’ ” Matsoukas said. She envisioned a video that was radically at odds with Snoop’s usual work: an early-eighties throwback, in which he would dress up in outrageous suits and wigs and perform with a keytar. She won him over, she said, with playful enabling: “In order to make artists feel comfortable in a space they’re not normally comfortable with, I go along for the ride.” By mid-shoot, she had Snoop shirtless and dancing. “I remember being, like, ‘Well, we want to attach this weave to your beard,’ and he was, like, ‘Sure, glue it on,’ ” she said.

In 2011, Rihanna asked Matsoukas to make a video for a song called “We Found Love.” By then, Matsoukas had grown tired of making videos that simply conjured a mood. “I had done a lot of performance-based stuff, and I just wanted to tell stories,” she said. She admired David Fincher’s work with Madonna, which felt like four-minute melodramas, and she was drawn to experiments like Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up,” a cinéma-vérité chronicle that follows a drunken, coked-up lowlife through a night out in London—fighting, vomiting, groping women—until, in the last scene, the lowlife is revealed to be a woman.

Matsoukas drew up a treatment for Rihanna, which evoked “Romeo and Juliet” and “Requiem for a Dream”: a depiction of a relationship charged with drug-fuelled passion and domestic violence. To play the male lead—“that man we all want but we know we shouldn’t fuck with,” Matsoukas said—she found an amateur boxer from London named Dudley O’Shaughnessy. On the set, a farm near Belfast, the chemistry between Rihanna and O’Shaughnessy arose out of improvisation. Before the first scene, Matsoukas recalled, Rihanna “was in her trailer getting ready, and he was on set waiting, and of course we were behind. So when she came out there was no time for formal introductions. It was, like, ‘O.K., take her hand and run, and get lost in it.’ And then I was, like, ‘And if you feel like it, maybe kiss her.’ And he did—they kissed on the first take.”

Two years before the shoot, Rihanna’s boyfriend, Chris Brown, had assaulted her in a car, and pictures of her bruised face had filled the tabloids. Rihanna’s fans saw an uncanny resemblance between Brown and O’Shaughnessy. Matsoukas denied that the resemblance was intentional, saying only that the video “was based on my terrible love life and obviously her terrible love life and every woman’s terrible love life.” Nevertheless, the violence of the onscreen relationship can feel unsettlingly reminiscent of Rihanna’s real-life assault. “She was open to taking it there,” Matsoukas said, “and with being honest and showing what life really is.”

On the set, as Matsoukas prepared to shoot an argument between Rihanna and O’Shaughnessy in a parked car, fans crowded around them. Matsoukas warded them off with a bullhorn, then slipped into the back seat to coach the performers as a cameraman shot from outside. In the scene, Rihanna and O’Shaughnessy can be seen screaming inaudibly at each other. “They were saying the most nonsensical things, like ‘Your pants are too tight!’ ” Matsoukas recalled. “But veins were popping out.” The owner of the farm eventually grew uncomfortable with the spectacle, and evicted the crew. “I wanted it to feel free, and like they were living life, and Rihanna took off her shirt,” Matsoukas said. “That was probably a bit too much for him.” But the video helped Rihanna establish a grittier image. And it earned Matsoukas a Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video, making her the first solo female director to receive the award.

Two decades ago, the music video looked like a dead art. MTV was steadily losing viewers, as young people turned to purchasing or pirating songs online. But the rise of video-streaming services, in the late aughts, again linked the success of pop songs to videos. In 2015, Americans streamed more than three hundred billion songs, most of which were videos—an increase of a hundred and two per cent from the previous year. Matsoukas now checks her work on a laptop with a compact twelve-inch screen. “I like to see a video through a computer or through a phone to make sure it looks good at its worst,” Matsoukas told me. “I hate when you perfect something for the ideal way of consuming things and then when you see it on YouTube it looks like crap.”

A pop star is the head of an enormous business that sells one product: herself. Matsoukas’s clients have to trust her to present them in a way that feels artistically gratifying and also inspires people to buy their music. Hype Williams, perhaps the most inventive video director of the nineties, once said, “At the end of the day, what we do is technically supposed to be a marketing tool as well as something creative.” Female artists, especially, are drawn to Matsoukas because she guides them in bolder directions, attracting new attention. “She has the ability to hit the nervous system,” Malik Sayeed, a cinematographer who worked on “Formation” and “Lemonade,” said.

In 2012, Natalie and Elliot Bergman, the siblings who make up the band Wild Belle, asked Matsoukas to direct a video for “Keep You,” a lovelorn song about a cheating partner. Matsoukas’s treatment portrayed a turbulent relationship between Natalie, who is twenty-eight and white, and a prepubescent Jamaican boy, who, between bouts of philandering, clutches a Teddy bear, sucks his thumb, and swaggers around in a Boy Scout uniform. “When we saw the treatment, we were a little bit taken aback,” Elliot told me. “But we also trusted Melina.” Elliot recalled being persuaded by Matsoukas’s intensity on set: “She’s in your face. She’s yelling at the top of her lungs, and she’s right in there with the kids dancing on the car, dancing harder than any of them.” By the second day of shooting, Matsoukas’s voice was almost gone.

“Keep You” is Wild Belle’s most-watched video on YouTube, but controversy doesn’t always benefit Matsoukas’s collaborators. “I like to create provocative imagery,” she told me. “Sometimes it works and sometimes it goes awry.” In 2012, she directed a video for No Doubt’s “Looking Hot,” a Wild West fantasy, in which the singer Gwen Stefani appears tied up and wearing a feathered headdress. As the video goes on, she dances around a fire, sends smoke signals, and writhes on a tepee floor with a wolf. The American Indian Studies Center, of U.C.L.A., responded with an open letter describing the video as “the height of cultural misappropriation,” suggesting that it recalled “nineteenth-century paintings advancing the ethos of manifest destiny.” A day after the video was released, No Doubt took it down.

Matsoukas’s videos have also drawn criticism for being derivative. In 2011, she directed Rihanna in a video for the song “S & M,” in which the singer danced in latex fetish wear, brandished a whip, and led a man around on a dog leash. The provocation worked: even as the video was banned in several countries, it received tens of millions of views on YouTube. But later that month the artist David LaChapelle sued Rihanna, claiming that imagery in the video had been plagiarized from his photographs. (Rihanna settled the suit.) During the production of “Formation,” Matsoukas intercut her own footage with shots of New Orleans from a documentary about bounce music called “That B.E.A.T.” The documentary footage had been licensed from the company that owned the rights, but the filmmakers were still startled to see their imagery subsumed in a different, and much higher-profile, production. Abteen Bagheri, the director, tweeted that the use of the footage was “not cool,” adding, with apparent resignation, “It’s the sad reality of the music business.” Matsoukas said that she was hurt by the criticism, but she also suggested that the pop-culture industry thrives on borrowing. “I’ve also seen stuff that I think looks similar to mine,” she said. “People are influenced by similar things. I try to stay away from close references.”

There are very few women of color working as directors in Hollywood, and Matsoukas has sometimes felt that she was not taken seriously. “People will challenge you and try not to listen,” she said. “The director of photography will try to get over you and say, ‘Oh, that’s not possible—we can’t light this way,’ and I know what the possibilities are.” If a camera operator won’t film a scene the way that Matsoukas wants it done, she will step in and shoot it herself. Paul Hunter, a veteran director who helped found Matsoukas’s production company, told me that he “loved her sense of style and cinematography and thought that she had a really special eye.” Without missing a beat, he added, “It doesn’t feel like a woman is directing it; it feels like it’s just a top professional.”

But, as a black woman in an industry dominated by white men, Matsoukas has an unusual affinity with her most frequent collaborators. Beyoncé wrote to me, “I feel safe working with her and expressing or revealing things about myself that I wouldn’t with any other director, because we have a genuine friendship and I trust her artistry.” Their first videos together were playful and unambitious: a teaser for the song “Kitty Kat,” in 2007, was a minute-long vignette of Beyoncé vamping in a leopard-print bodysuit. Over time, their work became moodier. In “Why Don’t You Love Me,” from 2010, Beyoncé drinks Martinis and screams lyrics into a Princess phone, her mascara running, like a deranged housewife from “Valley of the Dolls.”

Matsoukas set the video for the 2013 song “Pretty Hurts” at a fictional beauty pageant, focussing on the ways that beauty standards affect women. She gave Beyoncé bulimia, and shot a scene of her throwing up in a bathroom stall. (Though, even then, she didn’t fail to make her star look captivating.) “They’re cool girls who play together,” Dream Hampton, a filmmaker and music writer, told me of Matsoukas and Beyoncé. “Melina is very supported. Black filmmakers don’t generally get to play in film—it costs too much money. But Beyoncé is willing to invest.”

Matsoukas has also become close with Beyoncé’s family; she has directed videos for Solange, and in 2014 she spoke at her wedding. “One of the special things about our friendship is, nine times out of ten we are on the same wavelength,” Solange told me. “Her being a black woman being able to tell those stories in such a bold, unique way is really rare.” In “Losing You,” from 2012, Solange wanted to feature sapeurs, an informal society of Congolese men who compete to have the most ostentatiously stylish outfits. Matsoukas recalled that security concerns prevented them from shooting in Congo, so they moved the shoot to South Africa and invited some sapeurs. “We really had no money,” Solange said. “We didn’t have a real plan, because we didn’t have a full production team.” For a scene in which Matsoukas wanted magazine clippings on the walls of a night club, she and Solange worked with the crew to cut up magazines.

Last year, on Solange’s thirtieth birthday, Matsoukas posted a tribute to their friendship on Instagram. She recalled their first meeting, on a conference call, when “I thought you were high but later realized you were just a slow ass talker,” and a moment of bonding when they “ate mad sushi and became sisters.” In the post, Matsoukas described the “Losing You” video as “one of the best pieces of art that I’ve ever made.”

When Matsoukas started working on the “Formation” video, mainstream black artists were showing unaccustomed interest in issues like police brutality. “The people rose up, and the artists were so behind—the artists were still navel-gazing,” Hampton told me. “Because of the Black Lives Matter movement, artists are not relevant if they’re not talking about what’s happening in the streets.” One of the most arresting scenes in “Formation” depicts a black boy facing a line of white policemen, doing what Matsoukas calls a “peace dance.” The camera cuts to a wall emblazoned with graffiti, which reads “Stop Shooting Us.” “I wanted to talk about police brutality and talk about us dying and us being killed, but do it an artful way,” she said. The boy was supposed to dance shirtless, but he had arrived at the set in a black hoodie. Matsoukas told him to keep it on. When Beyoncé saw the footage, she questioned the change. “I was, like, ‘Please let me keep it,’ ” Matsoukas told me. Beyoncé acquiesced. The singer and her dancers then performed at the Super Bowl wearing black berets and militaristic leather that resembled Black Panther attire.

After the performance, Beyoncé told Elle that she was not anti-police. “I have so much admiration and respect for officers and the families of the officers who sacrifice themselves to keep us safe,” she said. “But let’s be clear: I am against police brutality and injustice.” The backlash was intense, with extensive Fox News coverage and police unions threatening not to provide off-duty security for Beyoncé’s “Formation” tour; in response, the Nation of Islam offered its own protection. Matsoukas worried about the heated reaction. “It’s kind of scary,” she said. But she doesn’t regret her choice of imagery. “When they said ‘Formation’ was anti-police, I was, like, ‘So what are you, pro-shooting us, then?’ ” she said.

Beyoncé funded the “Lemonade” film herself, allowing for a kind of artistic control that few black artists have experienced. Despite boycotts, the album sold more than two million copies. It was first released on the music platform Tidal, of which Beyoncé is co-owner, helping to attract more than a million new users in a week. The “Formation” tour promoted her other ventures: Before one performance, I watched two extended ads for her sportswear line play on the giant screens. Other black musicians Matsoukas has collaborated with—most notably, Rihanna—espouse the same message of economic self-determination. We have money now, their lyrics suggest, so we’re going to build a kind of power that has been denied us. “Malcolm X, during the Nation of Islam years, was absolutely a capitalist,” Hampton said. “Elijah Muhammad’s idea of self-determination and independence was very much linked to black capitalism.” With Matsoukas’s help, Beyoncé has made the idea of capitalist liberation an essential part of her presentation. The last lines of “Formation” encourage listeners to put business before feelings: “Always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper.”

Matsoukas is now working on her first television show, an HBO series called “Insecure,” which grew out of the comedy writer Issa Rae’s Web series “Awkward Black Girl.” The show is a sendup of Rae’s trials in work and romance, and a love letter to South Los Angeles, where she grew up. Most music-video directors hope to eventually move to film and television, which offer more prestige and creative scope. Few are successful. “The industry discounts music-video directors as being all style, and so it makes it hard for executives to see beyond that,” Paul Hunter, the veteran music-video director, said. Another director in the industry told me, “In videos, you can do quick cuts and pretty shots because it’s exciting just to look at Rihanna or Beyoncé’s face. When you don’t work with big celebrities, you can’t get away with that.”

Rae requested Matsoukas for the job, but told me that she and Matsoukas sometimes clashed on how to balance authenticity and glamour. “Her taste is more elevated than mine,” Rae said. “A lot of our biggest battles come from me wanting this to be grounded, and we end up meeting halfway. She comes from a more heightened world, and I’m self-proclaimed basic.” Matsoukas, who is an executive producer of the show, brought on Solange as the music consultant. Where the Web series was amateurishly filmed, with nondescript interiors and haphazard lighting, “Insecure” is artfully composed and glossy. The characters’ travails play out in a shabby-chic apartment, a glass-walled boardroom, or a South L.A. mansion—environments that suggest excellence rather than a struggle to get by. For a sequence in which Rae’s character pursues a love interest at a corny open-mike night, Matsoukas found a historic club with swirling tile mosaics on the walls, then painstakingly lit it to flatter the actors. “She’s a perfectionist,” Deniese Davis, a producer on the show, said of Matsoukas. “It obviously wears everyone out around her, but I think when you see the end result you always appreciate it.” “Insecure” received six N.A.A.C.P. Image Award nominations, including best directing in a comedy series. The show recently began preproduction for a second season.

One afternoon, Matsoukas and Davis took Matsoukas’s black Range Rover out to scout locations for B-roll. Davis drove while Matsoukas, wearing a rose-colored blazer over a lacy camisole, skinny Levis, and peach heels, shot video on her phone. As reggae played on the car stereo, we headed to Leimert, a mostly black neighborhood in southern L.A., with palm-tree-lined streets and tidy bungalows and ranch houses in pastel shades.

Rae had made a list of places that were significant to her when she was growing up. The first was the Vision Theatre, a vaudeville-era landmark facing Leimert Park that has been in the midst of stalled renovations for two decades. Matsoukas shot only the building’s green tower, avoiding its dilapidated façade and shuttered windows. “We’re trying to show Leimert and Inglewood in a nice way,” Matsoukas explained. “To show that it is a vibrant community that has a lot of culture. It’s where the black people are.”

The next site, in a nearby plaza, was a concrete fountain, with a flute in the center streaming water. “That fountain is not poppin’,” Matsoukas said. She studied the fountain warily. “Maybe a moving shot from the street or having someone pass through it,” she mused. “The trees kind of frame it nicely.” But there was a limit to what Matsoukas would work with. Rae had included on her list a doughnut shop that she had frequented as a kid. “I’m, like, ‘I’m not shooting the Krispy Kreme,’ ” Matsoukas said. “I don’t know how to make that look good.” ♦

The author of this article is Alexis Okeowo, she joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. She is working on a book about people standing up to extremism in Africa and is a fellow at the New America Foundation. This article was originally published on NewYorker.com