#No it's just the whole game again but with trivia pop-ups! I love that!!

[sysig]

Ellen McLain’s commentary from my trivia playthrough

[popculturebuffet]

Sam and Max Beyond Time and Space Retrospective: Ice Station Santa (Patreon Review for WeirdKev27)

Hello all you happy freelance police and welcome back! For those just tuning in for the better part of the year i've been taking a look at Sam and Max: Save the World courtsey of patron WeirdKev27, falling more in love with this franchise and these games each chapter. If you'd like to catch up, I've put links to each review into one masterpost

RIGHT HERE

So with season 2's production.. I don't have a lot. I tried but most articles I could find from the time are "Sam and Max Season 2 is happening and it's better than ever" and not much else.

It makes sense: Season 1 was Telltale Games big coming out party: while it wasn't the first game they made, that would be....

It was their big breakout success. So while season 1 was proving themselves by this point Telltale was a big name, Sam and Max were once again big names, and the episodic model had worked. So it's not a huge suprise that season 2's production was more: Let's do it all again but bigger and better!

So for season 2 the models are slightly more expressive, there's more mini games and the originals had widescreen support back when that was a feature. '

So what actually happens in this sequel? Well a lot so join me under the cut as our heroes take on a bloated hairy pagan god to save christmas, embark in a rigged trivia night, traumatize bosco for fun and profit, and run over some muppets. In other words it's another day at the office and i'm glad to be back.

We open season 2 with our heroes returning from a case, some time after season 1 which is said explictly to be last year, only to get a nasty suprise. A giant robot smashing up the place

It's not that souless abomination but the maimtron 5000. With our heroes assuming it's their goldfish plotting max's death, that old chestnut, we head outside for the first puzzle.. well okay we're SUPPOSED to head outside but I choose to instead dick around the office. The trophy closet continues to grow and i'm happy to see a jar of bliss join the stuff. It's not a big or flashy trophy granted, it's not a melted ted-e-bear heard or a whole human being. There's some nice new touches to the office too: the photos from hit the road and bad day on the moon are replaced with ones from season 1. IT's a nice little touch that helps vary up the office and allows it to feel refreshed while still recycling the set from last game.

The biggest and best addition though is some stuff swiped from Ted.E Bears charred ruins. I get the feeling they WANTED to include these last season but it simply wasn't fesable. At any rate you now have a mounted mafia anamatronic head over the desk and the wack a rat game is now free to play any time in your office. I did again, because I had fun and it's even more fun when you just touch the screen.

So we walk out onto main street.. and quickly get our first of many status quo shake ups for the season: Sybil's is thrown through the air and lands squarely between your business and boscos where the space for rent used to be. Or on top of it more likely. It's also teling just how used I got to Sam and Max's street that I know it like the back of my arm hair. Thankfully she's not inside but it was still unnerving to see such a key part of the first season tossed aside.

Thankfully the Maimtron himself... is pure comic gold. He's waxing lyrical incarnate, quoting countless pop songs. My faviorite bits from him are giving his number as "6875309" and "All the cops in the donut shops say way oh way oh". That one's more for Max's response "That's it no one quotes walk like an egyptian at me and lives!"

However bullets can't do anything against him. Thankfully he has a big wind up dealie on his back so you simply need to ask why do birds suddenly appear every time he is near. I mean the obvious answer as given by Lorne

Is just like me, they long to be, close to you, but since he's in metal box at the bottom of the sea since Max took office, it instead gives you an opening to turn the robot off. The sender turns out to be a hairy pagan god with powers untold. That right it's old saint nick and time for Christmas in late august.

One opening sequence later we're at the north pole and it's here we get some interesting structuring for this episode. For the first act of it you can't leave the north pole. Which was annoying at first as I wanted to see Season 2's settings and what's changed, but in hindsight works perfectly: it keeps you at the pole and thus keeps your options kept there. Likewise apart from a puzzle or two that requires you to go to the north pole, most of act 2 is on main street and the last one is a bit back and forth. It creates a nice gameplay loop without leaving you TOO overwhelmed.

But before we can get to the wonders of Santa's Workshop... we reunite with some old faces. Yes folks, the dreaded dark day of prophecy fortold in the scrolls has come. THE SODA POPPERS HAVE RETURNED

As you can imagine i'm not remotely happy their alive and survivied the great dakota wars with only a removal from office. Their mad about their christmas presents. Specs got.. something, Peepers got a night gown he just dosen' thave the hips for, and Whizzer got Tuberculosis. Same thing Sam got max. It's why they don't do secret santa any more. Those gags are funny, and at the very least Sam and Max are now as visably fed up with them as I am. They also aren't in this one too much and the developers make up for using them at all out of plot necsity by allowing you to throw snowballs full of bleach at them. Repeatedly.

It was one of the best days of my life. Also helping with the strain of these morons and specs returning is a little something from the past. See before I got into this chapter, Kev reminded me of what was INTENDED to be a running gag, but I simply never updated it. Persons of all ages I present the wall of misery

It was supposed to be a runnnig tally of characters I just.. flat out hated in fiction. Not just disliked, not just was mildly annoyed by in one version or another, the ones I CANNOT FUCKING STAND , the ones who truly bring out the rage in me. It ended up largely forgotten due to a combo of two things: my short term memory being shoddy.. and me simply not getting THAT angry that often when reviewing. I try to be fair to a work as much as possible, and prefer to focus on the positive. I"ll still be objective, i'll still come down on a works flaws, but at the end of the day the reason I got into this wasn't to let out my anger issues (which I do have and try hard to control), but to simply look at things I liked or things other people like as fair as possible. I WILL tear into something if it truly pisses me off, see my review of the boys comic, but I generally don't get my hackles up that high that often.

That being said.. as I looked at the wall I realized it had a place for that exact reason. If a character can not just annoy me (as a lot of this prototype do), but really make me hate them, really make it harder to watch an episode or read a scene if their around.. why SHOUDLN'T they get a badge of dishonor for it? Pissing me off is harder and harder these days, so why shouldn't someone get an award for it for somehow pulling that off? So I present to you

With thing one and thing two front and center. Thing three is absent because he's not a carnival of dicks crammed into one character model. If your curious whos who

First Row: Julie Powers (Scott Pilgrim (Comic)) Helen Lovejoy (The Simpsons) Billy Butcher (The Boys (Comic) ) Daisy Duck (Legend of the Three Cablleros Version, the rest are fine) Second Row: Mindy's Mom (Animaniacs Peepers (Guess) Whizzer (Oh come on) Roger Raincomprix (Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir) Yivo (Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs) As for what the Soda Poppers have to do puzzle wise...

Yup my anguish, my bringing back and old bit, my pelting them with bleach and possibly elf urine, it all amounted to... well okay you DO get to pelt them all with bleach and possibly blind them for life. I"ll give the developers that. This appearance gets a pass.

So we finally get inside the Workshop to find this is the night santa went crazy, as Santa is holding anyone trying to come into his office at gun point and has been having the elves making more militarilzed toys. And tourture me elmer. Naturally Max loves that last one. He even screams like a real person.

I will say Santa holding everyone at gun point.. is more than a bit unsettling and is very "product of it's time" given the.. well everything that's happened since this chapter happened. While mass shootings happened back then, they weren't nearly as common. and... I need a moment.

Okay back. I didn't even notice it while playing it oddly enough, probably down to it being a product of it's time and my brain treating it that way. Or the situation being silly enough that the horrible crushing reality simply didn't hit me and thus the chapter holds up okay.

It helps the workshop has a genuinely... creepy atmosphere> The music, a more offputting carol of the bells, the lighting it's all more ominous than previous settings. It contributes to the episodes depressing vibe as when we get to town in a bit it's also a bit off. Thankfully this is sam and max so while I was a tad unsettled.. it really didn' tstay that way for long as you can stick your guns to the north pole, talk with the elves on how things hav edeteroriated and how the elves sang a song when they left "It wasn't very happy" and make an elf cry to progress.

Elf Tears make trees grow

So we need to make one of the elves cry. And given this is sam and max it's naturally one of the most darkly hilarious things as the elf WANTS to cry.. but even threatning to rip out his eyes or kill his dog dose'nt work.. I mean the former at least makes sense. You know I forget sometimes how much horrible stuff these games make you do till I sit down and play this month's chapter.. or how much comedy gold you get out of the suffering.

Now we have a pail of elf tears.. .which I didn't even know you could pick up. I assumed growing the tree was what you did to progress. This one's on me for both not using the button to show you everything you can react to.. and on not turning the hint system up. See last game I honestly forgot half the time Max gave you hints, not helped by the fact a majority were just max being max instead of offering any advice. So for this game they instead worked out a better hint system. I mean you can still talk to max for giggles, but instead if you turn it on and the game thinks your stuck, he'll shout out what you specifically need to do. I needed to crank it up to get him to do it, and evne cranked up it's nicely just if you've been idle or wandering around long enough.

Thankfully once Kev told me I could us ether elf tears, I grabbed them and used them on a coinvent little tree outside. This gets us into Santa's Office, but dosen't really fix the problem right away as he still outguns us. And given this is sam and max we're talking about that says a LOT. Thankfully we get our lead in to act 2: an exorcism diagram. It's actually quite simple they simply need a magentic pole, which they have and the four horseman of the apocalypse action figures.

So collecting all 4 is our next goal and we're finally back home. And each area has one of the four horseman.

The first one I encountered, and ironically the last one I grabbed, was Boscos. And boy oh boy was I not prepared. So.. since the end of Save the World Bosco's somehow sunk further down the conspiracy whole. Besides dawning his most hideous disguise yet, himself, he's torn the store apart, taking all the fun and helpful condiments from season one and replacing them with a presumibly useful in the future set of photography equipment. The lights are dim, the security's somehow MORE draconian and bosco himself seems on a shorter fuse. That dosen't mean we can't light it as there's two really fun bits. The first is since bosco is hiding from a group called "T-H-E-M", who i'm not doubting exists since he was at least SOMEWHAT on the money about most of his paranoid delusions, any time someone says them he gives out a high pitched shriek. Props to Oogie Banks for making it so damn hilarious. You can just.. say it over and over ot hear it till Bosco eventually uses the security system on you. Btads is back baby!

You can also ask if he has any, which of course he dosen't this isn't a store.. but the payoff is what makes the joke:

As for bosco's horseman it's in his package

And that joke was ALMOST as subtle as the jokes the game makes. Bosco won't open it because he thinks it has a bomb inside but won't NOT open it because it might have his broom. So once again we have to ruin bosco's life. Id' feel worse but given he's taken trillions of dollars from us simply because he could, let's scar him for life again!

This requires the present machine. You can send random junk to people. We only need to send two gifts for plot progression: a ticking stopwatch to bosco for obvious reasons and a footbath to stinky's diner for reasons i'll get into in a moment.

The watch makes Bosco think the present is a bomb, and while he's disposing of it you can steal from him again. And if he has any problem with it.. them.

Onto our next one at Pimp Le Car, another very 2000's joke but one that holds up as it's just plain funny a custom car place would decide "you know what we need to not get sued by xibit? FRENCH!"

And running Pimp Le Car are The C.O.P.S.

The COPS are like the anti-soda poppers to me: their instantly likeable, made their chapter better by existing and every time they show up gets a smile out of me. And lucky for me Telltale clearly felt the same as their upgraded to Bosco's old role of shopkeep, via their custom car buisness. Their also as funny as ever.

Naturally their task is the best. To get their figure (a free hood ornament) you have to run over as many torture me elmers as possible while they spit out things likes "I have rights" and "I'm an american citzen"

That's 1/4 horseman, but before we go we can also get Stickers

For the desoto. Turns out you can get 5.. I only got one assuming it was a once a chapter thing. It's pretty neat.

Moving on, we have Stinky's Diner, our second new location and our replacement for Sybils. And I have to admit while I miss both Sybils and Bosco's as it was this shakeup was necessary: while the gameplay loop of visiting the duo worked for a game, changing up who does their roll was necessary. Telltales smartly kept both characters, they simply changed up their gimmicks: Sybil's focused on her relationship with Abe LIncoln and Bosco has gone deep down the paranoia rabbit hole.

Stinky's isn't ENTIRELY new, having shown up in Hit the Road as a quick gag and Season 1 as a background feature. Our heroes were mentioned being fond of it's salty order who hoped to cull the weak with his questionable food.

Sadly for our heroes and about a wash for the rest of civlization, Stinky is gone, apparently having passed between games with his daughter taking his place. The boys are suspcious. The fact Stinky is a habitual liar who has rigged her trivia contest so no matter what you answer you loose so she can feel superior doesn't help.

Winning at trivia is a lot of fun and a clever puzzle: the pattern is simple enough: Sybil and Abe are on a date and while their relationship is going fine, the date itself is not great as both want to murder Girl stinky but neither wants to ruin the date for the other, and my boy the Army Bug whose dealing with some ptsd and the recent loss of his father. Poor guy. I'm glad he's here but he needs some bug therapy. Maybe Buster Blaster can branch out

YOU ARE NOT YOUR FATHER

YOU ARE GREAT

YOU CAN DO THIS

GIVE ME 5.50

Since the bug and Sybil always give the same answer, a and d respectively, you simply need to tell abe whose desperate for advice to choose b or c, choose whiche ver one he didn't and you win. Stinky begrudginly gives you your prize.

As for the footbath I mentioned you mail that to Girl Stinky, and she's thankful enough to let you take her old sock.

Note this is just me personally. If your into that, good for you. It's just not for me.

Anyways the sock will be useful later, and the less I have to talk about someone else's dirty sock the better.

So that leaves us with our final horseman to grab, and that takes us back to the start.. the giant robut. Thankfully kev told me when I was stuck to go back there. So Jimmy Two-Teeth and co have turned the robot into a boxing league. Thankfully you can aquire a boxing doll from the north pole and engage in the rat equilvent of punch out.

The boxing mini game is painful. It's main problem is simple: it's a punch out homage.. that isn't designed to work like punch out. So if you say spent a LOT of time playing punchout in college and have all your reflexes for a game tied to this where you assume you can dodge either way when your instead supposed to go the same direction your opponents punching, your gonna have a bad time. Spoiler: I had a bad time. Not helping is the final fight with Jimmy gives him a super punch that can knock you out in one hit. Why they didn't tune this up for the console versions better is beyond me.. and probably time and space.

Our heroes win.. which leads to Jimmy Two Teeth, sad his wife left him, to perch on a ledge and prepare to commit suicide. Honestly i'm suprised this episode didn't have you kick a puppy or 12 at this point. We can't help him yet though, but we CAN help santa. Using a record from his office, we play the summoning chant the friendly demon song!

Jared Emerson-Johnson continues his hot streak from last season and shame on me for not looking up who was writing and singing these things. Admitely the puzzle itself is frustrating if you don't get it but the solution.. is neat. The beast possesing santa left a bunch of clues around the workshop.. and it turns out it's our old friend Shambling Corproate Presence! I'm so delighted they brought it back.. granted it's just a pink monster.. thing, but it's still neat they brought it back.

Turns out though while this does draw it out Santa actually left out the instructions as a way of fighting from the inside.. and our heroes didn't look on the back. The only way to restrain the thing is the ghosts of christmas past, present and future. And thus we've come to our final act. You have to get the help of the spirits of christmas past , present and future to help. And in a nice and, as you'd expect for this episode, fucked up twist, it's all undoing shit our heroes did. Well for the most part, one is saving them but two are christmases our heroes genuinely ruined.

So first is past, and this is where we help our old friend Jimmy Two Teeth. Kinda. We go back to season 1 and while Christmas Past dosen't care about them kidnapping Leonard for keepsies, they do care about Jimmy's son needing money for his toureets or jimmy's wife about ot leave him. The only way to fix this.. is to kindap jimmy's wife, bring her to him, and then take his boxing glove so his past self can get the tourettes surgery money, fixing the problems we caused in his life with more problems in his life.

Then we have christmas present. Earlier when we got the figure from Stinky, Max pressed it. And since that one was pestlience it summoned the bug's awful family. We throw a snowball at him, it triggers his psd, and this gets the others to leave thinking he's his own dad.

So it's on to our final one which thankfully isn't comitting any crimes. Horay! We simply have to save ourselves from hell in the future. We do so by firing up the sleigh, which has been sitting outside waiting for some coal. And we just so happen to have a terrible persons' sock. We use it to coal up, go rescue ourselves and max hits on his past self suprising no one.

So now we can release the spirits of christmas. They try appealing to the corprate presence's better nature.. and once they get that off their quota beat it. Unfortuantely it goes back into santa.

Fortunately this final boss fight.. is pretty neat. See earlier in the workshop there's a bunch of stuff to play with but none of it comes into play, a tad annoyingly at that.

And while I still contend it was a bit much.. I can't fault telltale for the payoff, as you use all the stuff in santa's workshop to knock him out. The package that brought shambling corprate presence here turned out to be for satan so we send it back.

The problem is who will save christmas? Turns out it's the soda poppers who like me Max wishes were deead but for once turn out useful. WEll okay peepers and specs are, Whizzer's only fucntion is "unrinate on stuff" but frankly it's a funny enough gag he can live till the end of the season. JUST TILL THE END OF THE SEASON. Speaking of great gags our heroes drop off. And why not.. it's only mid november.

Ice Station Santa is a mixed bag for me. There are a lot of great gags shoved in here as usual, the puzzles are mostly fun, and while the first act can be frustrating the atmosphere can't be beat. It's mostly great stuff. The more I wrote about it though the more it became clear that the tone.. is a bit of an issue. Some jokes like making the elf cry or the muppet slaughter are so dark they work, while other bits just .. don't quite land. There's enough of the old sam and max goofiness to make the chapter not get to ounsettling but there's a more mean spirited tone in this one i'm really hoping isn't a trend for this game. Sam and Max works better when it's more over the top insanity and our heroes being over the top callous instead of just depressing. Still i'ts a solid start to the season Next Month..ish: Sam and Max take a vacation! Naturally they have to save the day to actually enjoy it. Thanks for reading.

[newtlesbian]

Omg your old machinery collection + computer assembly sounds so cool please do not restrain yourself <3 id love to hear you talk more about it

oh kisses you kisses you kisses you. i love to collect old crap irl and to build things. maybe favorite thing about building computiez is i love wire management/organizing. so proud of making sure when you open it up its still as pretty as the front. ill pop that bad boy open and straighten your shit right out whenever people let me. gently gently brushing a girls hair for her oh so sweetly

and i collect anything tbh. any format of physical media is one i love like movies games music whatever i can get my hands on. bought records long before i had a record player. little machines are cute to me. ancient little relics from long ago i would unearth from thriftstores as a child. having to dig for it in piles. excavating. no money for new just things that were already way older than me when i got them used as a kid and now even more. but like i said theyre Cute theyre Sturdy theyre Dependable. and to character analysis mode myself its probably looking for stability and positive memory after losing most of my possessions or some gay shit. but the reality is i just like em :) the things i have currently all still work :) the section of a thrift store thats a wall of plastic baggies full of interesting remote varieties will never let me down

something fun is old games. not just cartridges or sweetest little console/old pc frisbee frisbeasts. the little machines are more fun to hear about. i have a good variety. for one i have such a deep fondness for old plug n play games and how the casings are so unique and goofy and colorful and chunky chunky. they have personality and good looks the whole package <3. something i rarely was gifted but adore. little animals on a leash to me with their wire <3 also non plug-in games. li still have a handheld lcd screen animal facts biology trivia game i loved that i cant seem to find online. so newtcoded of me. loved little educational machines and the purely games ones

and not just old ones ive got newer ones as long as theyre Some Interesting Cute Little Hardware. this posts going on wayyy too long but theres tons of throwback-style game stuff that i think is fun. like different flat darling little handheld animals to miniature version of arcade cabinets. i used to have a bunch of cheapo ancient fast food prizes people threw out. but, again, lost possessions. ill have to rebuild. but a neat newer one is a tetris game only sold in china mcdonalds thats in the shape of a Chicken Nugget. and Uh Yes the box looks like a food container. Yeah. cutest little beast i ever did saw. an angel sitting in the palm of my hands

[purebarnes]

‘infinity war cast play: family feud

ꜱᴜᴍᴍᴀʀʏ ➢ following along the family feud that the cast of the avengers played during infinity war

ᴡᴏʀᴅ ᴄᴏᴜɴᴛ ➢ 1.8k

ᴅɪꜱᴄʟᴀɪᴍᴇʀꜱ ➢ fluff, sweet/jealous seb, funny marvel moments in general

ᴀᴜᴛʜᴏʀ ꜱᴘᴇᴀᴋꜱ ➢ wanted to start this idea but never got to write it, hope it gets love since it was fun to write and i just enjoyed it in general

every time you and the cast would wrap up a movie was great because it meant you guys would have interviews and press tours to attend. for you, the games and trivia games were the ones you all really enjoyed because it just would be chaotic.

still it would a great time, you got along with everyone so no drama would surround you guys which was a good thing when you work with other actors. when you first started working with marvel, you hit it off with mackie at first, during captain america: the winter soldier.

your publicist makes sure you had time to move things around so that you could make it the live event with the rest of the cast.

you and sebastian were together but didn’t live with each other since you two were still waiting for the right time to move in together. anthony would tease you guys, saying you’re both married but not being committed. all jokes aside, you two did love each other but time would take it’s course and you would be happy soon enough.

when you arrived surrounding to the Los Angeles press junket, you met a few co-stars back stage. obviously you saw all the girls—with you adored. when you saw your boyfriend, you ran sneakily behind him before scaring him slightly. he jumped back from his seat where he was talking to anthony and letitia about something.

anthony looked up seeing your face, “you finally showed up. he was getting worried.” he chuckled before getting up to hug you while you hugged back letting go to see letitia and greet her as well. you turned to sebastian seeing that he was wearing something remotely similar to your outfit.

he wore a black and white stripped jacket which you wore one like that but it was a tad different with a matching skirt. he eyes you up and down seeing what you were wearing this time, letitia gawked at the couple matching even if it was accidentally. “you guys look so cute.” she squealed rapidly pointing at both of them as they both chuckled.

anthony hummed, “huh. what’s up with matchy matchy?” he questioned them as sebastian shrugged honestly not getting how they would of done that. the man obviously thought she looked gorgeous in that skirt and jacket so it didn’t bother him at all. “i think you look beautiful.” he admired you as you blushed and buried your head in his crock of his neck while thanking him.

anthony rolled his eyes until the russo brothers came telling everyone that it was time to start the family feud game and start the live broadcast. you walked towards everyone, where the russo brothers went to place you all in teams: blue vs purple.

anthony and joe did anything to keep mackie and seb from the opposite teams to not create that much chaos or to create it which didn’t matter. you went on the blue team with chris, scarlett, letitia, anthony and bautista. then the red team consisting with benedict, zoe, mark, chris hemsworth, pom and sebastian.

you greeted your team waiting for them to start as you made small talk with anthony and dave as you were in the middle of both of them. once the russo’s started—it was all chaotic from that point. “why don’t the blue team introduce themselves.” joe spoke looking at the blue team.

everyone from the team would get and when it got you mackie, he just was being a fool but so hilarious whenever he spoke. “i’m anthony mackie, i’m a libra.” bringing up his sign for anyone. “I’m y/n y/l/n.” you would smile when it would get to you.

the other team would do the same, then making the russo’s to explain how the game would work and all the rules. once you all got the hang of it, chris and zoe ended up being the first ones to make it and compete against each other. “which infinity war character would put on the best concert?”

zoe getting it first because pratt was slow, said his character which she got right being the first one on the answer board. benedict would repeat zoe’s answer not understanding the concept of family feud as the whole blue team would tease him on that. “good answer!” anthony laughed making you look up and chuckle as he defended himself.

“i’m english! whoa, stop.” joe explained it the english man and he looked relieved after he got the idea, getting the right answer again. when it got to sebastian he said dr. strange and got it correct then getting close to three strikes when it was at zoe.

the russo’s giving out clues and hints didn’t make the blue team wasn’t pleased because it was too easy for them. “what! you cheatin, you think steve harvey would give a hint?” chris would yell out to joe then you would agree with him. them all laughing at chris getting annoyed but not in a serious manner.

you would see that they would go and talk and you stopped them as they weren’t exactly playing the right way. “wait? you guys can’t confirm.” you spoke up pointing at zoe trying to talk to pom and the rest of her team. joe would confirm that, that would be true.

zoe trying to get another clue but the blue team interfering with her telling her no more clues. “okay, you know what. basta. i’m going to say rocket.” when her and benedict got them wrong it would be time for the blue team to steal.

chris would pull you guys together to confirm he answer but mackie kept repeating where their clue was—you would remind him that you thought that was the clue. “what? no, that’s their clue! who producing this?” you would look over to see them talking about who to pick. “well if it’s a guardian... then who did we already say? we said drax, already said star lord, we said rocket. so groot?” you implied.

letitia nodded when chris still wasn’t sure if that was the answer looking at the camera trying to get an answer from the fans. “feed me the answer. mackie says it groot but i don’t trust mackie—yes, you do!” mackie would say.

“i say trust him—thank you!” you would say making anthony hugging you when sebastian would glare at him making him laugh out loud looking back at him. letting go and telling joe that, they picked groot for the answer. “do they say groot for the win?” joe asked making the board ding causing the blue team to cheer for the win that they just got.

the next question being who would they take to prom... as letitia would take your answer, you’d have to figure on out when make chose his answer. “as much as i don’t like him. and his great hair.. uh bucky.” anthony paused. obviously getting the right answer and it being number one. anthony would look at sebastian but he would shake his head getting flustered.

it was your turn and you couldn’t say anything because you honestly had no idea, “alright y/n, you are up.” you hummed trying to see if you could think of someone on the spot. “look around.” they would try to help you to get a answer, anthony looking at you grinning.

“come on. imma look away cause you’re thinkin about me.” he would say looking the other way dramatically making you laugh then patting his shoulder clicking your tongue. “okay, i’m going to say uh... the falcon, sam wilson?” anthony grinning at you tilting his head while showing his bicep.

sebastians head rapidly going up when she chose anthony, “boo!” he booed putting a thumbs down and blowing raspberries at her direction. everyone laughing at his jealousy as you frowned feeling bad, “i’m sorry!” you quietly said as joe kept moving on. “alright facebook did you say sam wilson?” he asked the board and it dinged making anthony cheer at his name on the list.

almost finishing the questions, it was between mackie and hemsworth picking who would win in a staring contest. going around the purple team, they all started to get all the answer right and it went to seb. he looked around stoping at you and just staring, “i’m going with y/c/n.” you shook your head then waiting to see the answer. “did you say y/c/n, the sorceress?” he got that right making them all cheer.

they all go in a line getting all the answers right when seb was up again, “don’t screw it up bucky like you always do.” anthony yelled out making him stare up at him intensely, “what did you say to me—you heard what i said.” they kept going back and forth with each other.

you kept trying to contain yourself from laughing as they were so childish between themselves. “i’m gonna go with the falcon.” sebastian said staring at him continuously. when it came on the screen, you put your head down in disbelief.

the next round was you and sebastian and when you didn’t go up because you didn’t know it was your turn, joe told you to go up. you looked at him and walked to him. you put your hands in your pockets, seeing seb waiting for you. “oh oh. this is about to become intense, girlfriend vs boyfriend.” joe teased when you smiled and put you hand over seb’s.

you pulled away getting ready to answer your question and you probably knew it would work out because you hated being pressured. anthony russo looked at both of you and mentioned how you guys were matching, “you guys are matching, just noticed that—isn’t it cute!” letitia yelled but getting shushed by you.

“okay, which infinity war character takes the longest to get ready in the morning?” when he announced it you did your best to press the button by sebastian had quicker reflexes then you. you groaned watching him chuckle, “i swear my button is broken.” you complained but it was all jokes because you just lost.

“i think it works—mmh, no it’s broken. hurry say your answer.” you rolled your eyes wanting to hurry and leave, “downey. tony stark.” when the answer popped up you rolled your eyes, swatting your hand away. seb went over to hug you as you sighed but hugged him back anyway.

the ending was horrible because the opposite team won making you annoyed... you ended up having a good time with your friends. you walked passed all of them to use the bathroom and you went to open the door, you were tackled by some hands making you squeal.

you turned around to see sebastian and you sighed then when you composed yourself, you hit his shoulder. “don’t do that. i was about to hurt you.” he chuckled lowering his hands to your waist and pulling you close. “i missed you.” he mumbled kissing the side of your cheek. “we have to hurry for the press, then you can miss me even more.”

[queenmylovely]

Would you have any thots to share about....blowing ben perhaps? 👉👈maybe a first time blow job? 😘

well what do you know, I do! (smut, 2.8k words, 18+, gender neutral!reader)

���☆☆

You were not the first serious relationship for your first serious boyfriend, but you didn’t mind. You liked that he had ironed out a couple of the little things that there always were in new relationships (or so you assumed) before so that when they came up in yours at least one of you knew how to deal with them. It also meant that he had more experience with… certain things, whereas you were lacking. You definitely weren’t lacking in enthusiasm, though.

As soon as you felt comfortable with the idea, you put it to your boyfriend. The two of you were cuddling on the couch, just watching some game show you liked when you came to the decision that you were ready.

“Ben?” you asked to get his attention, turning to look at him fully, his arm around your shoulders falling to your waist with the movement.

“Yeah babe,” he replied, taking a second to look at you, making sure he had guessed the right answer first.

You grinned at him, excited to hear his answer to your question, “Can I give you my first blowjob?”

Ben’s eyes just about popped out of his head and he had to clear his throat just in order to speak, “Now?”

“Now, in an hour, whenever, just today,” you clarified, your nonchalant attitude doing nothing to make Ben feel like this was a normal conversation topic while watching contestants in a battle of wits over relatively useless trivia.

“Are you sure? Just ‘cause I went down on you the other day doesn’t mean you need to do it if you’re not ready,” Ben reminded, sweet as ever.

“Thanks for the reminder, Benny,” you rolled your eyes fondly because of course you knew that, but you appreciated his desire for your desire nonetheless. “And yes, I’m sure. I’ve been thinking about it for a minute and the way you thoroughly enjoyed giving me head gave me hope that I might feel the same way when I do it for you.”

With that, you slid a hand along Ben’s thigh and suddenly he looked very conflicted.

“Ummm…”

“Yeah? Do you not want to?” you asked, the beginnings of a frown on your face.

“No, I do! Just, can we wait until the show is done?” he asked sheepishly and you laughed.

“Yes of course, you gigantic dork. We can wait to see if you’re gonna win the whole thing,” you tell him, moving your hand back down his thigh and then patting his knee.

“Not for me, I’m rooting for uhhh Blair,” the pause was because he had to wait for any of the contestant’s names to pop up on screen.

“Uh-huh, I believe you,” you turned back to the screen. If you were going to be waiting the 15 minutes until the show was over, you might as well try to get more questions right than Ben.

___

17 minutes later and you and Ben had migrated to his bedroom because you had decided that you might as well be lying down so you could put your full focus on the task at hand.

“Alright, boyo, get naked!” you told him, pulling at the clothes he was wearing but not actually doing anything to take them off.

“You sure know how to turn a guy on,” Ben said as he took off his clothes on his own.

But you didn’t answer, too distracted by the sight of Ben’s chest and abs coming into view and, oh fuck, his thighs. You could count on both hands the number of times you had seen Ben naked and, so far, the effect it had on you had not diminished.

Barely pulling yourself together before you started drooling, you pushed your now butt-naked boyfriend onto the bed and he settled himself among the pillows. He wasn’t hard yet, but that wasn’t a problem. You climbed onto bed with him and straddled him, bringing your lips to his in a sweet, chaste kiss.

But the chasteness didn’t last long. You pulled out all of the stops when it came to your knowledge of kissing Ben (which was much further ahead than your knowledge of blowjobs). Ben liked it when you swept your tongue along the side of his and tickled the corners of his mouth. He also always moaned when you sucked on his lower lip then nipped it, so you did that now, pleased with yourself when you felt his muffled moan against your mouth.

You slowly started to feel him harden underneath you and shifted your hips until you were lined up with him. The heat from between your legs encouraged him along and you began to rock your hips back and forth gently.

Pleased with what you were able to get done with just kissing his lips and moving your hips, you pull back and start kissing your way across his jaw and then to his neck. You’re still not totally sure where his sweet spot is, but it takes you less and less time to find it every time you try, and nothing’s quite like the gasp you get from Ben when you do.

From his neck you move down to his chest, nipping the delicate skin over his collarbones and then licking it, trying to do that soothing thing that Ben does when he bites you but you’re not sure you’ve done it the same as he does. Oh well. Moving on, you got to his chest and instead of a nip, you pretty much fully bit into one of his pecs, unable to stop yourself when you saw the full, squishy muscle right there within reach. But Ben doesn’t seem to mind; on the contrary his hips move up into yours with the fleeting pain. You smile to yourself and add that to your ever-growing mental file folder of Ben's pleasure.

Now you’re bent low enough that you have to stop straddling him, kneeling between his legs for the moment as you lick and kiss his nipples, loving his surprised moan. Then as you crawl backwards, you press kisses to his stomach until his dick gets in the way and you take the chance you have to press a quick kiss to Ben’s head before resting on your elbows between his legs. It seems you had surprised him again, due to the wide eyed look on his face. You just giggled and traced a finger along his thigh.

Being this close to his dick, you could smell him, a faint musky scent that smelled like warm skin and something else. You licked your lips to see if you could taste him, but there hadn’t been enough contact. All of this reassured you a bit as you stared at his cock.

Then you quickly shifted your gaze to Ben and asked, “Should I start now?”

“If you want,” Ben’s voice was huskier than normal, something that made you smile a little, knowing you had caused it.

“But, like, is now a good time?” you asked self consciously, having left all of your previous experience behind at Ben’s collarbone.

“Yes, babe, now is a fantastic time,” Ben reassured, tucking a strand of hair behind your ear.

You nodded, psyching yourself up for a second. Then you remembered that Ben had kissed your thighs for a bit first, so you thought doing the same to him would be nice and a good build up for you to get ready.

So you pressed a kiss to his mid-thigh, looking up to see his reaction. He was looking at you with a funny little smile on his face.

“What?”

“No, nothing, I just thought you were going to start,” he said with a shrug.

“Shhh, I’m trying something,” you told him, pressing a similar kiss to the other thigh.

Next, you kissed a little higher on his leg, and it was an open-mouthed kiss, so you knew Ben could feel the wet warmth from your mouth on his skin. You kept moving your way up on either side, adding a swirl of your tongue or a scrape of your teeth here and there as you did. It only took a couple of minutes for you to reach the base of his cock, but by that time Ben was panting and his dick was throbbing literally in front of your eyes.

By now, you didn’t need psyching up and just kissed the base of his dick on either side. The natural continuance of your previous movements was to keep kissing up the length of his cock until you got to his head so that’s what you did, the light feeling of your lips on him making Ben’s breath turn shaky.

Finally, you got to his head and finally, you stuck out your tongue and licked it. He tasted like he smelled, which wasn’t bad, just different. So with that knowledge in hand, you brought your right hand to hold his cock in place so that you could do what you wanted at the top. You licked his head again, your tongue running along his slit. It honestly felt almost dry to you, so you gathered some spit in your mouth and then let it fall onto his cock. And even though it was a practical move, Ben moaned out loud at the sight.

You licked all around the edge of his head, trying to remember to give a little extra attention to the frenulum like you had read about in some online magazine. Ben seemed to like that by the way his hips twitched forwards and his breath caught. So you swirled your tongue on it again before moving on.

This time, you opened your mouth and placed his whole head in your mouth, closing your lips around him slowly as you got used to the sensation. It was definitely a little strange because you had never felt anything like it in your mouth. Again, not unpleasant, just weird. But a weird that you could see yourself quickly getting used to.

You moved your mouth further down on his cock and were able to take about half of his cock down. Ben hummed and you looked up, letting his dick fall out of your mouth.

Swallowing quickly, you asked, “Was that good, was it right?”

“Yeah, it felt nice,” Ben smiled. Then he thought for a second, “If you were already building up to it, totally ignore me, but remember you can also… suck.”

Your face dropped and your eyes widened, “Oh my gosh! I cannot believe I forgot about sucking your dick!!”

Ben was so obviously trying not to laugh that you started laughing too.

“Literally your dick was in my mouth, and that’s all! Just fucking sitting there!” a blush, mostly from embarrassment, but also partly from laughter, covered pretty much your entire face.

“Listen babe,” Ben said through giggles. “It’s not like it’s in the name. Plus I wasn’t lying when I said it felt nice. Just, you know, not quite enough to finish.”

The two of you laughed and joked for a few more minutes until the mood had settled. You’re about to get back to business when Ben insisted on a kiss first; you happily obliged.

Once you’re back between his legs, the whole thing seemed less daunting and you started redoing the kissing and licking of earlier since he had liked it. By the time you’re considering actually sucking his dick, the mood had changed enough so you’re not at risk for laughing.

You started by sucking on his head, which didn’t feel awkward in your mouth, and so encouraged, you sucked him a little deeper. His shaft was too long for you to fit the entire thing, but just under half seemed to work. This time you remembered on your own to start bobbing your head and Ben groaned at the feeling.

That worked well until you accidentally went too deep and gagged. Your first reaction was to pull him out of your mouth, a line of spit running from your lips to his cock. Ben immediately asked if you were alright and if you wanted to take a break and you did.

During this “break” you stayed between his legs and just used your hand to stimulate him instead of your mouth. You had given him a few handjobs as foreplay before so that was easy to fall back into. And once you felt ready to start again, it was nice to keep pumping him as you kissed his head. Slowly, you worked him into your mouth again, and this time you knew how deep you could go comfortably (at least enough to know where to slow down to prevent gagging).

It was actually a lot of fun. Doing things that made Ben moan once and then doing them over and over again until his hips twitched upwards. It was also kind of a funny experience, but instead of laughing, you would hum around his cock, which surprisingly Ben also liked.

The only issue was that your jaw was starting to get tired. Apparently, it was not used to this kind of movement. You tried to soldier through, but when it felt like you were getting a cramp (if that’s even possible in your jaw), you had to call the sucking part quits.

“Benny…”

“Yeah, babe?” Ben replied, eyes opening and his hands unclenching from the bedsheets.

“My jaw is sore,” you pouted.

“Oh no, babe. Is it okay? Is it bad? Why didn’t you stop when it started getting tired?” Ben’s questions are rapid fire but you can feel his care through all of them.

“I thought it would go away,” you admitted sheepishly.

Ben gave you a look, but just said, “Well, it was very good. And if you wanna keep practicing another day, that is more than fine by me. Plus the more you do, the more used to it your jaw muscles will get.”

As he spoke, Ben started sitting up like he was going to get up.

“What are you doing? I still want to get you off,” you told him with a tone of voice that told him to settle back down.

You grasped his cock again, stroking it up and down firmly, making sure to go over his head as well. When you wanted your hand to move more smoothly, you spat on his cock again and Ben cursed.

As soon as your jaw stopped feeling weird, you took just his head back in your mouth. Since it was less than before, it seemed okay, so you started sucking and swirling your tongue around him in time to your hand.

You could tell he was getting close by the way his moans had gotten higher, but now he seemed like he was at a plateau.

You pulled his head out of your mouth, “Ben are you close?”

His eyes moved from your hand to your face, “Um, mostly.”

You nodded, “Well, maybe you can show me what works better.”

Grabbing his hand with your free one, you situated yours and his together until he was covering your hand that was pumping his dick. Ben started slowly, unsure of your idea, but then the feeling of his large hand over your smaller one stroking his dick was incredibly hot and he started guiding you for real.

With some adjustment, you started sucking his head again. Between Ben’s encouraging words and instruction, and your hums in response to them, Ben was close minutes later and warned you.

You shook your head, quickly popping his cock out of your mouth, “I want to taste you.”

Just five more seconds set Ben off, his hips bucking into yours and his hands, his voice moaning your name loudly, and his cum spurting into your mouth.

It was more than you were expecting, and the taste was a weird mixture of things but not bad enough that you wouldn’t be okay with swallowing. Ben pumped your hand over his cock a couple more times and then let go, so you did the same and took his cock out of your mouth.

You smiled up at him, “I liked it!”

Ben smiled sleepily back, holding his hands out to you. Even though both of you had a hand covered in saliva, you happily let him pull you closer to him.

“Oh, you’ve got a bit of cum on your lower lip,” Ben mumbled and you started to reach up to wipe it off or push it into your mouth when he pulled you even closer. Ben kissed his cum off your lip and your eyes widened as a bolt of unexpected pleasure ran through you. But Ben didn’t give you time to think about that because he was deepening the kiss to show his thanks.

★★★

I'm gonna tag for length. permanent taglist: @riseetothesun@drowseoftaylor @caborhapch​  @queenlover05 @johndeaconshands @stardust-galaxies @zodiacaldust @buckyluvrs @im-an-adult-ish @sleep-i-ness​

[1ddotdhq]

Sat 30 Jan ‘21 

Welllllll I had a whole lead about Walls being built and coming down and then H had to go be gay on main and that just has to come first! It was discovered today that the scottysakamoto instagram account (Harry’s finsta which recently made headlines for being a dark larrie with his Papillion references) follows an account named @/best_of_grindr, which is exactly what is says on the tin lmao. This shouldn’t come as a real shock to anyone, but it is notable that he began to follow a grindr account from the instagram account that was meant to prove that he was ~totally straight~ and ~with his girlfriend~. Although, she did unfollow him, soooooo…..Anyways! He’s gay, Petra! 

And here’s the awesome Walls newsssss: LTHQ announced a listening party for the one year anniversary of Walls, but it’s unclear whether the King himself will be joining. I’m sure they’re gonna string that reveal out until the last possible moment. Louis himself has not said anything but maybe he’ll pop up tomorrow to celebrate with us, if only with a tweet! Niall is doing some taunting and teasing of his own on twitter, promising his fans that if they get him to the 40th artist worldwide on spotify he’ll do a dance half naked on tik tok (which half, fans wondered, and would it be any different than his instagram lives?). “NIALL DON’T UNDERESTIMATE US”, one fan assured him, and he replied with a cheeky “go on then”. Uhhh….time to trend #DONTstripthatdownNiall again! Niall also sat down with Sky Golf to talk more about his youth golf program, and I *am* honestly curious - as he talks about accessibility - about how he expects the demographic breakdown of this program to look like, and what it’ll end up being. Guess we’ll see eventually. 

Ziam were on and around instagram today, Zayn with a PHENOMENAL selfie in his Louis Blue hair and dark root showing off his “cheeky” NIL hoodie (ugh he’s so gorgeous) and then put out a pre recorded spon for the Harry Potter candy crush game that he’s been sponning for months now. JKR is a TERF, Z, sorry but even your lovely eyes won’t take that away! And Liam joined Andy Samuels (old hometown friend from before 1D!) for a Birthday Trivia Quiz, which has confused me to no end. Is this...a quiz where the trivia is about yourself?? Do you?? Make up really obscure questions about your life and hope your friends can guess? And IF SO: what knee do I have a long time scar on and how did I get it? The prize is a cupcake of your favorite flavor that you have to go buy yourself...I know, I’m AMAZING!

[everlarkficexchange]

Written by: @alliswell21

Title: One of Us

Prompt 145: She moves in with her aunt and uncle when her parents dies in a small town. After suffering through trama, Katniss slowly starts to get better with the help of her family (aunt, uncle, cousin) and the Mellark brothers. But when things starts happening to her and the people around her, it’s revealed that she and almost everyone in the towns are apart of the werewolf pack and that one of the Mellark brothers is her mate. #werewolves [submitted by @animekpopxx]

Rated: G for general audiences.

Tags: Canon Divergent!AU; Modern with a dash of Supernatural; Grief/Mourning; Feeding as a Language of Love.

Note: This is my final submission to this year's EFE challenge! Yay! I really am grateful to @xerxia31 and @javistg for their continued support of this fandom and for hosting once again this event. You are such amazing people, and I’m absolutely honored to be part of a community with people as amazing as you two are! Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for keeping EFE alive!

@animekpopxx, thank you too! You feed my muse! And you give me Werewolves!!!!

This story was a bit of rushed job, though, and there’s more of it, I mean... we haven’t seen them turn into wolves yet!!! 🤣 I just didn’t have time to edit the complete fic before the deadline, but if you’d like to read the finished product, keep an eye out for it on AO3. I’m fairly sure the rating will keep, but we will see.

 Kpkpkpk

There’s nothing but the sound of crickets and frogs filling the vast darkness of the night.

It’s another moonless night out here in Panem… or is I like to call it ‘the middle of nowhere’. It’s weird, how dark nights feel here, there’s barely a start peeking tonight, but in a strange way, I like it.

Sitting on my aunt and uncle’s porch to watch the infinite dark ahead while listening to the nocturnal critters it’s about my favorite thing to do… it’s what did used to do when we came here for long summer stays, anyway. He used to say he felt at peace and relaxed, connected with nature. Too bad it took him to be gone, for me to appreciate what he meant by that. So every night I come out here and sit in the steps hugging my knees, staring at nothing but the deep, black night surrounding the cabin, whisking my dad was sitting next to me.

Tonight is different than usual, though. It was raining until recently, and the smell of wet earth is so familiar my chest feels tight and my throat is knotted.

“Petrichor, Katniss,” I mumble the words noiselessly, “is the smell of rain, hun. It smells the same everywhere in the world.”

I lean my chin on my knees, wishing I could go back to feeling numb like when my parents just died. But thinking of the word petrichor, while smelling the thing, is bring forth a plethora feelings and memories I don’t know how to handle.

Dad used to love Scrabble, crossword puzzles and trivia challenges. He tried to get me interested in those games, teaching me words and their meanings, every time he had a chance.

I wish I had been more enthusiastic about learning the darned stuff; it would’ve meant an extra moment spent with Dad, and less regret to feel right now.

An involuntary whine leaves my chest. It hurts to think about it, and not for the first time, I dig my nails into my skin to keep myself rooted in place, and not tear running into the void.

I feel like I’m spiraling out of control, I fear this time something will break in my head and I’ll do something crazy, like scratch my skin away and run wild into the woods, like a beast… but the overwhelming thoughts gets halted when I hear soft noises from out in the distance.

It’s like the crunching of footsteps on the gravel at the mouth of my aunt and uncle’s property. It’s too dark and isolated here, deep into the country. I’ve seen big wildlife roaming around: deer, raccoons, coyotes and even a lynx. But the longer I hear the noises, the more certain I am I’m being stalked by something big and fast.

My heart beats erratically in my chest; every hair in my body stands on point, fear is clawing its way up my chest and into my throat, my eyes feel about to pop from my skull, and then I’m disentangling my knees from my arms, standing up as tall as I can— which isn’t saying much—and then I call into the night, “Who’s there?!”

I hear a faint disturbance of air, and then…

“Good evening, Katniss!”

Slowly, from the shadows, a blonde head pops, eerie for a second. Broad shoulders follow, and then a torso. Before the rest of his body comes visible into the light of the porch, two more blonde heads come into view, flank the first person on either side: Shoulders, torsos, Jean covered legs… The three Mellark brothers make their way leisurely towards me.

I nearly faint from relief after the rush of adrenaline pumping in my veins. Going through so many emotions: grief, sorrow, dread and relief, so fast in such a short amount of time has left me winded and unsteady.

I lose my balance, but one of the boys— Peeta, the youngest— breaks ranks, and rushes to hold me upright.

“Are you okay?” He asks softly, helping me sit back down on the porch steps. I lean my head against the main post.

“I’m okay. Just a little lightheaded,” I try not to glare. They gave me a fright, but I doubt they did it on purpose.

It’s something I’ve learn over the years. People in Panem are kind of quirky.

“Sorry we scared you,” Peeta offers, sheepishly. “We wanted to check up on you, and bring you something…” he looks up at his two older brothers and Rye — the middle one— steps forward, holding up a brown, paper bag, with little greasy spots on the sides.

I can guess what’s inside. They’ve been bringing me cheese buns almost daily, since Peeta found out they’re my favorites.

Rey hands the baggie to Peeta, and the latter offers it to me with a soft smile.

“Thanks,” I mumble, gratefully. I can smell the cheesy, yeasty treat through the bag; I can feel the warmth of the buns too! “While I love freshly baked cheese buns, you guys didn’t have to make this trek just to bring me a treat… on a dark, moonless night no less,” I fix them with a glare. “How did you even get here anyway? You couldn’t have walked and I never saw a car coming?”

My aunt and uncle’s cabin is at least 4 miles from town, and surrounded by woods; but then again, most houses in this weird little place are built in similar locations. It seems the townsfolk take their privacy extremely seriously.

“We rode our dirt bikes,” chimes Rye in, cheerily. “Not much light on those bulbs, though, but it’s okay. Our night vision is prime!” He gives me the A-Okay gesture.

“Rye,” the eldest, Bannock, warns lowly. Baring his teeth.

Rye shrugs and slips his hands on his Jean pockets.

I swear Rye hisses something like “it’s true” under his breath, but Peeta has been rubbing my back with the tip of his fingers all this time, and I’m getting drowsy, so I may have imagined the whole exchange.

“You should eat those while they’re still warm,” Peeta murmurs close by my shoulder.

I nod, and open the bag, releasing all the delicious smells of the buns, while Peeta massages my shoulders, encouragingly.

I must be really out if it tonight, because outside of my family, I’ve never been comfortable with people touching me… but, my family is all gone now, and I can’t go through the rest of my life without human touch, can I?

Grief stricken me out of nowhere, and barrels through me. I gasp at the acute pain in my soul at the loss of my parents. But in an instant, I’m enveloped in strong, thick arms, warm and steady. I’m sobbing into a hot, solid chest, covered in the softest cotton I’ve ever felt.

“Shush… I’ve got you, Katniss. I’m here for you,” Peeta whispers soothingly into the crown of my head.

He smells so good; like cinnamon and dill, from the bread he must’ve made this afternoon at his family’s bakery.

It takes a few minutes for me to get a hold of myself, and embarrassedly push out of his embrace, “I’m sorry,” I mumble, mortified.

Bannock presents me with a handkerchief, and I take it gratefully to wipe off my face and nose, before returning the soiled square of fabric to him.

I’m not sure why the Mellark brothers are being so nice to me. I’ve never been around them more than a handful of days over the past few years, when we came to see Dad’s remaining family outside mom and I, his half brother, his wife and their child.

I don’t know the Mellarks all that well, but in the handful of weeks since my parents’ funeral, the three brothers have been incredibly attentive and generous to me. Peeta more than the other two, but I don’t mind… I like him best anyway.

“It’s okay to cry and be devastated, Katniss.” Says Bannock, sagely. “You’re going through the worst time of your life, and we care for you… like family.”

“Oh,” I sit straighter, blowing my nose. I feel a little strange hearing him say that, “thank you? I appreciate your kindness,”

He nods, “Peeta’s right, though. You should eat the cheese buns before they go cold.”

“A full stomach always helps me feel better,” Rye adds, patting his belly, and smiling at me.

My stomach growls, as if to show agreement. I am hungry. I didn’t touch my supper earlier. I pick up the bakery gingerly, and pretty much shove my nose into it. The steam curls out of the baggie, filling my nostrils with the delicious smells. I pluck out a bun and practically inhale it in a second; quickly followed by another one. My third cheese bun, I decide to savor, slowly.

The Mellark siblings just hang around while I devour my treats.

The front door opens just as I’m wiping my hands on my leggings. My aunt’s head peeks out of the door.

“Oh, why hello everyone!” She greets, as bubbly as always. She’s wearing a dark purple wig, to match her dark purple outfit.

“Good evening, Effie,” says Peeta, standing from his squatting position next to me. “We brought Katniss a gift,” he points at the now empty bag in his hand.

“How sweet of you, Peeta!” my aunt gushes, “thank you for checking on our girl, and making sure she’s put something in her tummy before bedtime!”

I roll my eyes. Aunt Effie keeps treating me like a kid. I hate it. I’m 17 and mourning, not a freaking baby!

“It’s no problem at all, Effie! We were just on our way home anyway.”

“Well, it’s always nice having you boys over,” she offers, “but it’s getting late, and Primrose is already in bed, which is why I came out here to begin with, to let Katniss know that her sister was already asleep, so she’d know to tip toe back inside when she was ready to go to bed herself,” my aunt smiles.

I feel a slight pang of guilt; I’ve been wallowing in my own sadness this evening, and missed tucking my sister in to sleep. She’s the only person I’m sure I love, yet tonight I’ve let my own misery drown me.

“Don’t mind us, Effie,” Says Bannock, “We were about to leave…” he pauses and then calls a meaningful, “Peeta?”

“I’m going to wish Katniss a good night, and then we’ll go,” he says.

Not for the first time, I wonder if Peeta has a crush on me? I wouldn’t know he did, even if I wasn’t feeling so rotten inside. I’m not very good at flirting… but with Peeta it is different I think. He’s so nice to me, he’s taken up asking if I’ve eaten that day and if I haven’t, he feeds me something from his family’s bakery without charging me… it’s like he actually cares for me and my well-being, and his brothers care, because he does. It’s mesmerizing at times.

Peeta looks me in the eyes, “Are you ready to go inside?” He asks, offering his two open palms to me. He helps me up from the floor, and then smiles sweetly. He doesn’t let go of my hands while we stand facing each other.

Then something strange happens. Peeta doesn’t blink, as his clear-blue eyes bore into mine, and then his pupils blow out full, until only a ring of deep, glowing azure remains for his irises, “Sleep well, Katniss,” his voice sounds deeper and warmer than usual, “Rest and have a relaxing, dreamless night. Remember what I said: we are all here for you, to help through this hard time… alright?”

I feel groggy, “Yes, Peeta,” I mumble feeling my eyelids getting heavier.

“Oh dear, can you please instruct her to walk herself to bed? She might look lithe, but I promise, her little body is as heavy as any of us,”

Huh? What’s aunt Effie going on about? I don’t understand.

Peeta chuckles, squeezing my hands warmly in his, “You heard Effie… don’t fall asleep until you’ve gone into your bedroom and change into comfy pajamas.”

I nod, “Okay,”

“Good night, Katniss, I’ll be back tomorrow. Try to eat something on your own, I know you’re sad, but you need your strength for when the solstice comes.”

What a weird thing to say! Everything is strange here though… so I nod and march inside the house, mumbling my good nights to everyone and rubbing my very sleepy eyes. Once I’m in my sleep clothes, I lay in bed, and try to ignore the yearning of having Peeta rubbing my back like he was doing while I ate my cheese buns.

I sigh and go to sleep, a weird thought pops into my mind: “I’m so lucky to have such a sweet, caring mate. Peeta Mellark. Can’t wait to be bonded with him,”

[oh-boy-me]

Demon Outfits Discussed

The wait is over :) thank you for your patience and all the lovely comments on the casual discussion!!

I feel like it got longer this time, so I hope it’s all an enjoyable read!  Also, I apologize for the ugly pictures--it was the easiest and fastest way to both have all the design in one image and also prevent it from stretching so far.

Like last time, please don’t take this too seriously; we love these boys and Justin doesn’t know them but has no grudges against them.  We’re just harping on their fashion sense.  Absolutely no hate is intended towards the boys or the design team!

Participants in the discussion were

Jo ( @jodaneko ), our art major with storyboarding/character design experience, who finds they have more in common with Satan each passing day.

Justin ( @justinlester0629 ), our fashion expert, who dressed up and filled a wine glass with water for the occasion.

Noodle (Me), our untrained eye who owns the Barbie as the Island Princess video game on three different platforms.  It’s not even that good.

Featuring emergency guest star Megan ( @maggo77​ ), my sister who is physically near me as we look at the backs of their designs for the first time.

Edit: Distracted by the pretty jacket, we made a mistake when putting in Levi’s silhouette rating.  It’s the worst.  2/10, not 6.

Lucifer:

“Boy looks like he’s about to swing open the doors of an expensive mansion during a debutante party and give some SCATHING NEWS.” —Justin

“Short shoulder cape and a long split butt cape lol” —Jo

Jo has realized that based on both outfits, Lucifer doesn’t want people looking at his butt.  Possible reasons are: he doesn’t have one, or Diavolo someone was getting distracted.

His shoes match his outfit.  After last time that’s all I care about.

A triple popped color, and how many layers is the middle one?  Is that a book?  Dude has like 27 collars.

The forehead diamond is very important and it’s great that there are diamond buttons to match it.  But uh.  How about those red diamonds on his sleeves.  They.  They sure are there.  (I actually like the red accents and that they match his gloves; I just can’t take the diamonds seriously.)

  Lucifer 🤝 Some Horses Diamond on the Forehead

The peacock motif is HERE and we’re all living for it.  HOWEVER, the feathers on the cape and coattails should have matched, OR there should have been more lime green because there’s so little of that color.

The pants have a pleat in the front, which Justin says means he responsibly irons his clothes, and Jo says only heightens the fact that under the capes this is a marching uniform.

Can he fly?  Jo says these are baby wings that can’t support his weight, and his cape has a hole for the top pair but blocks the bottom pair?  Can’t believe Lucifer handicapped himself for the sake of fashion.

The red makes it regal and the wide flowy design makes it imposing.  Good job, Lucifer!  I might actually be intimidated if I saw you.

Definitely the classiest outfit.  You can tell they put care into it.

Mammon:

“BITCH MY BODY CANNOT TAKE THIS KIND OF SEXY, I THINK I AM OVERHEATING!  NO MORE FURTHER COMMENTS, YOUR HONOR.  HAUTE AND HOT.” —Justin

The whole thing does amazing with only three colors.  We’ve noticed the trend of black and white + one color, but I mean hey.  It’s working so far.

Damn those pants sit low.  No wonder literally all of you wear belts.

The leather jacket?  The studs and harness?  Bless.  Justin calls it “the perfect blend of stylish and ‘I’ll see you tonight *wink*’”.

Kind of don’t like how the belts connect to the pants, though.  It looks better in the back.

“He found a really cool jacket, but it didn’t pair with anything so he just didn’t wear anything.” —Jo

Honestly though?  We’ve all made fun of Mammon for having big hoe energy in his outfits, but like, he knew he had wings and planned his outfit to accommodate for that.  He’s the only one who didn’t cut holes in his outfit.  Maybe Mammon was the smallest hoe after all.

Also if there’s a motif it repeats elsewhere, like the studs and diamonds on his jacket and pants.  Did he and Lucifer have a “tastefully putting diamonds on my outfit” battle?  Because Mammon definitely won.

One of the charms broke off the belt loop and he never bothered to replace it, and honestly thank god there isn’t two of those anymore.

Torn between wishing the boots were tighter to match the rest of the outfit and saying “yoooo they’re open in the back!!!”

Ok so so far we’ve said generally only good things, but there is one major issue with the design: Its gravity.  Everything points down, his tattoos, the diamonds, even his wings.  The center of gravity in the image is his shoes.  Bitch loved his shoes so much he made his whole outfit point to them.

Either way this was universally considered the best and I mourn Justin who doesn’t know how far Mammon’s standards are gonna fall from here.

Leviathan:

Diagonal zipper

“Levi what the fuck.” —Megan

He looks like an e-boy.

Honestly it looks like he borrowed something from Justin’s wardrobe for Pride but he didn’t know how to put it on.

APPARENTLY the biggest hoe.  Abs that he shouldn’t have coming through a mesh t-shirt.  I thought Mammon’s pants were low, but Levi’s whole-ass ass is out.  Ok Levi, I see you.

The shirt pattern is good but he probably leaves it partially unzipped because it’d look really dumb fully closed.

Justin loves the funky pants pattern and Jo likes the pants but not with the outfit.  It’s because the devs were too coward to give him a thick tail base so his pants had to fill that role by sharing the pattern.

The shoes are good, and not just because they incited Justin’s deep-set hatred for Christian Louboutin and his uncomfortable red-bottom shoes.

Justin is offended that he’s hiding his suspenders; either show them completely or not at all, no in between.  Jo’s not fully convinced it isn’t just one suspender.  What are his suspenders doing?  What are they attached to?  Are they holding anything up?  Apparently not.

Jo pointed out that if you squint the belt on his waist looks like fangs and the orange dots on his sleeves looks like eyes so it’s like theres a snake head on his outfit.  Cute!

The gloves are throwing us off though.  Why is Levi of all other brothers need gloves?  I bet he has sweaty hands.

Ok really, does his sweater unzip all the way into two pieces?  Or does it hang by that tiny thread underneath the tail hole?  There’s even a button, just in case.

Can’t believe this antler-sporting, suspender-wasting nerd went diagonal zipper on us because we beat him at a trivia game.  Should have just zipped his hood.

Satan:

HONEY.

“I hate everything about this.” —Megan

First of all, he’s straight up wearing Lucifer’s casual shirt.  Does it only button down the back?  Can he take it off?

Then he spilled bleach on his pants.  Like I get what they were going for but with the white on black that is literally just bleach stains.

Incredibly differing opinions on the belt.  He got it in the cowboy department.  Justin adores it.  Jo despises it.

And are those… athletic slip ons?

And now the elephant in the room.  The ribcage made of ribbons.  The ribboncage.  The idea is great!  I love that they gave him a skeletal theme without throwing him into a Hot Topic.

But if you take the ribboncage and feather boa off he’s literally just wearing a dress shirt and some nice jeans.  And that’s the problem with Satan’s demon form.  Not that it looks goofy.  It’s that they took risks but then hid all the risks behind business casual.

Also Megan said that the back of the ribbons look like a rock climbing harness.  Someone (probably Justin) said the front reminds them of the underbelly of a green cockroach.  Ew.

The feather boa would look better if it was over something you wouldn’t literally wear at the office.  (And also didn’t look so much like worm on a string.)

“He is going to Dragcon 2020 and is definitely going to take a picture and ask to lip sync, but accidentally start beef with Acid Betty.” —Justin

On a good note, loving how the tail fades to highly radioactive green.  Feels dangerous.  Megan pointed out that it’s a pretty wimpy tail, though.  Jo enjoys the self-conscious posture it expresses.

That’s basically the only good thing we have to say, though.

I just????

Merry Christmas.

Asmodeus:

The kanji on the picture is just saying that the coattail is the same on both sides.

Ok now with that out of the way, HONEY.

I’m sure he says that to others but I hope he says it to himself too when he looks in the mirror.

Starting with the good.  The wings?  Adorable.  The heart-shaped hole to accommodate them?  Adorable.  One of the only good adjustments.

And I love that the tips of his horns look venomous, like a scorpion tail!

We love a good floral design and a good twin tailcoat.

But once again, the shirt just has too much going on.  The flowers.  The buttons.  The brick-pattern stitching.  The brooch.  The long collar.  The fact that if he closed the last button it’d end in a diamond covering his crotch.  Sometimes less is more, Asmo.

That scorpion brooch is the best thing to ever grace my computer screen and it shouldn’t have to share the spotlight with the rest of his shirt.  It should have wrapped around his arm and been paired with some more jewelry.  Then he could have ditched those giant cuffs.

The bleeding heart tattoos are a really good idea!  But they should have been angled better and not like someone else put them on at the roller rink.  And maybe they shouldn’t have been outlined in pink.  Those aren’t tattoos, those are gaping holes in his arm.  Is he ok.

I’ve been avoiding the pants, but.  The pants.

“Oh dear god. Oh no that’s… I thought you were a designer…” —Jo

One side is buckled the ENTIRE way down, and then the other side is COMPLETELY plain.  It’s too extreme on both ends.  It should have been only half a leg of buckles.  Not whatever this is.  I still don’t think he can bend that leg.

The shoes are ok but they COULD have been a stiletto so.

Jo is DONE with these demons’ inability to wear socks.

We expected better from you, Asmo.  I hope you have to fasten all those buckles every morning as retribution.

Beelzebub:

He said “how many belts can I wear on one outfit.”

Justin said it’s like Barry B. Benson and Post Malone had a beautiful baby boy, and Obey Me! is cancelled for creating a sequence of events that could lead to me hearing that with my own two ears.

The jacket?  Stunning.  “It’s steampunk mixed with Jack Sparrow, mixed with Billie Joe Armstrong,” says Justin.  It’s got puffy sleeves!  And there’s objectively too much going on with the jacket, but since it’s a leather jacket I can forgive it.  Justin and Jo can’t.

I’m not sure why they keep giving him weird jacket collars but I prefer belt number 9 to fur.

“Why is it bucked in the back?  Couldn’t it have just been a jacket?” —Megan

Good that the black tank isn’t only black, but he has so little color on his outfit that it would have been nice for it and the matching pattern on his boots to have been a color besides gray.

I don’t mind the belts down the leg because they’re not too in your face.  Jo wants the white belt to be thinner.  Justin wants him to just pick one and go with it.

Poor Beel, he can’t do his lil thigh pat pose without his right hand being assaulted by studs and that bear trap-shaped buckle.

Justin feels like the cowboy boots are too wide up top and it’s probably because they’re FAKE cowboy boots.  I don’t know why he didn’t just get cowboy boots instead of putting fake coverings over his dress shoes.

Can’t fault the twin belt, though.  And the wing hole isn’t terrible.

Idk I guess.  They knew what they wanted to do at least.  

That seems to be the pattern with Beel: they know what they want to do, but something weird happens in the middle of it.

Belphegor:

“I don’t know which Teletubby let their son go through the it’s just a phase mom phase, but they should be ashamed.” —Justin

A toddler who just learned how to cut holes in paper got a hold of his hoodie.

Is it a hoodie?  A jacket?  A poncho?  The cow print actually isn’t terrible.  At least it had the decency to be unique in its spotting.  And the actual presence of blue is very appreciated.

On the topic of colors, Jo is calling the devs out on their apparent fear of color.  “Put the pink elsewhere, cowards,” they say.

We actually don’t hate the horseshoe, and using it for the belt buckles is actually really clever.  Even if 75% of them are doing literally nothing.  Feel like he didn’t need that many.  Could do without the bottom one, maybe even bottom two.

There’s a teeeeny tiny cowbell on the back?  Megan apparently finds that VERY important.  Why do they go to such great lengths to remind us that Belphie’s a cow?  Beel doesn’t rub his hands together 24/7.  Mammon doesn’t even get bird wings.

Just like Satan spilled bleach, Belphie has tar pants.

It’s nice to see a change in pant style, but.  Am I biased because I hate harem pants?  Maybe.  Are these harem pants too short on him?  Yes.  Maybe they were supposed to be parachute capris?  But it just looks he outgrew them too fast and Lucifer won’t buy him new pants yet.  At least they look comfy.

If he puts his keys in those pockets will his pants fall down?  Probably.  That’s a problem considering his are the only pants that look like they could hold any keys.

The shoes are fine.  I can enjoy a high topped sneaker.  …Is that a security tag?  Did he steal his shoes.  Belphie stole his shoes.

On the tiny tail hole, I appreciate that Belphie went for modesty.  But I hope it’s impossible to wear these outfits outside of demon form because I don’t want him walking around with a tiny hole right above his ass.

Honestly he doesn’t even look like a demon?  He just looks like… a cow.

There’s one more aspect of their demon forms that I didn’t feel comfortable forcing into a smaller space than it deserved: Silhouettes.  Jo puts a lot of weight on silhouettes and their role in character design.  Is it dynamic?  Is it recognizable?  Jo ranked them as such:

1. Lucifer: 9/10.  Care and effort were put into this design and it shows. 2. Mammon: 7/10.  Points deducted for most of it being form fitting but otherwise still manages to get a passing grade. 3 (tied). Beelzebub: 5/10.  His wings have actual mass but his horns being mostly hidden by his head reduce his score. 3 (tied). Belphegor: 5/10.  Evens out since his clothes aren’t as form fitting as the others but they also kind of turn him into a blob. 5. Asmodeus: 4/10, and only because he’s got multiple wings and that his tailcoat breaks up the bottom half. 6. Satan: 3/10, for the fact HIS BOA carries most of the work in altering his silhouette. 7. Leviathan: 2/10.  The tail and horns prevent this from being a total flop.

Our (surprisingly unanimous!) ranking of their outfits (not counting Megan her opinions deviated) were:

Mammon

Lucifer

Leviathan

Belphegor

Beelzebub

Asmodeus

Satan

In conclusion, any M-rated fic that doesn’t have it take demon Satan 20 minutes to take off his shirt is too unrealistic.

[zaffrenotes]

[TRR x ES] Viewing Party

Book: The Royal Romance & Endless Summer Pairings: Liam x MC (Katrina Bailey), Drake x OC (Alyssa Devereaux), Jake x MC (Laurel) Rating/Warnings: G; mild innuendo Author’s Note: * All main characters belong to Pixelberry, I’m just borrowing them * Katrina Bailey & Laurel are the MCs I use when writing fanfic for TRR and ES, respectively; Alyssa Devereaux belongs to birthday girl @burnsoslow​ * This is my submission for @wackydrabbles​​ Prompt 80: Stop looking at me like that. * Author’s Note 2: * This is a birthday gift for my cheesy, potato loving homegirl Burnsie, who requested her very first Endless Summer/Jake fic, despite having never read any ES fic until now 🙈 for the sole reason being that she and Jake McKenzie are almost birthday twins, and my favorite pilot turns 30 this year. If you’re unfamiliar with canon ES trivia, Jake can hold his breath for 9 minutes, and Estela can hold her breath for an astonishing 14. This isn’t entirely what I had in mind when I set out to write an ES/Jake birthday fic, but I wasn’t about to miss your day because I’ve hit a whole ass writer’s wall, Burnsie! I hope you have an AMAZING day and I’m sending you so many hugs! You’re one of the sweetest ladies here, and I am so very thankful that I can call you a friend 🥰 also my real, real gift to you is coming at a later date, as I still have to work on it 😬 * and yes, that’s DDT in the moodboard - just for Burnsie, again - since I use Barnes as Drake’s FC in my TRR fics, lol * Word Count: 2000 on the dot!

It was nearly 10:00 PM on Friday evening, when Burns arranged things around the comfiest chair in her living room. The rest of her family already retired for the evening, after a small but wonderful birthday celebration in her honor at home. Within easy reach, she’d arranged drinks and snacks next to her laptop - a glass of water, a hot mug of tea, a slice of homemade birthday cake to take care of any sugar cravings, and a small platter of cheese and crackers for something more savory. She grinned softly at the newest addition to her mug collection, watching the steam rise from the contents within. 

The lavender mug arrived in the mail earlier that day from one of her friends, emblazoned with a quote from David Rose. Burns took a sip of the warm beverage before setting it down on the small side table and situated herself in the chair. She flipped open the laptop and pulled up a browser window, smiling at a gift from another friend - there was a sticker next to the trackpad with a drawing of a wedge of Swiss, quoting another memorable line from Schitt’s Creek, reminding her to “fold in the cheese.” Burns glanced to the time on the screen and logged in to her Netflix account, clicking until she arrived at the viewing party, and began typing to join the group chat. 

She was greeted with jubilant messages from Donna, Ella, Brandy, Anitah, and half a dozen other friends, wishing her a happy birthday before the show started. They’d formed an ever-growing viewing party for a new series titled Stranded in the Orchard, which was an odd amalgamation of Survivor and Gilligan’s Island. Taking a cue from reality tv competitions, there were hidden cameras all over the island to monitor everyone and reduce production crew intervention, and in a nod to Hunger Games, there was an omnipresent host that would drop messages to signal when challenges were about to take place. After four episodes, the ladies in the watching party started picking their favorites from the two teams. 

Team Ruby consisted of a group that appeared to have been shipwrecked onto the island. Leo was dubbed The Rogue; his brother Liam was The CEO; Katrina was The Attorney; Alyssa was The Teacher; Drake was The Cowboy; Olivia was The Weapons Expert; Bertrand was The Grump; Madeleine was The Whiner; Maxwell was Bertrand’s brother and The Jester; Hana was The Jill of All Trades. Bertrand and Madeleine had already been voted off when Ruby lost two events. 

Team Catalyst consisted of a group of mostly college students. Jake was The Pilot; Laurel was The Mystery Girl; Sean was The Coach; Michelle was The Doctor, even though she was only pre-med; Craig was The Muscle; Zahra was The Engineer; Aleister was The Slick One; Grace was The Brain; Diego was The Entertainer; Estela was The Huntress. Catalyst lost the last two events, which sent Aleister and Grace packing. 

Everyone settled in to watch the opening credits as they recapped last week’s episode, where Ruby won the immunity challenge and fishing gear by building a makeshift stretcher to rescue and carry Katrina from a jungle crash site to a first aid station on the beach; Catalyst voted Grace out. Burns popped a cheese cube into her mouth as she and her friends watched the two groups deal with day-to-day chores in their respective camps on Day 14 of the show. They chatted about the team members and how much Burns wanted to see Drake take off his shirt to go in the water, despite the knowledge that there were clips of him cuddling with Alyssa; Donna, Ella, and Anitah would keysmash in the group chat any time Liam appeared on the screen, even though he and Katrina were clearly sweet on each other, while Brandy and Alyssa Lauren would ask what was happening or who someone was from the Catalyst team.

—

“Pillows and blankets are nice, but what we could really use is food,” Maxwell said, drawing an octopus in the sand with a piece of driftwood. “I don’t know how much longer I can last on coconuts and rice.” 

“Liam and Drake took the raft out this morning to try fishing with the gear, maybe they’ll get lucky,” Katrina suggested, stirring the pot of rice in the fire. She set the lid on top and stood up from her kimchi squat position, dusting some errant sand off her leg. They both looked out towards the water, as dawn stretched out across the ocean, making out shadowy forms of their friends as they bobbed in the water, just before one of them went under the surface. Behind them, the rest of their friends began to stir awake from the scent of rice cooking. 

Back at the Catalyst camp, Jake sat by the campfire with Estela; they were working on making their own fishing gear from bamboo and camp supplies after losing the previous challenge. Jake fed a length of twine through a handmade fishing pole while Estela sharpened tips on one end of a pile of branches she’d gathered. “Whatcha whittlin’, Katniss?” 

Estela glanced at Jake sideways. “Stakes. Hand over some of that twine, I need it to bind these to make spears.” With a begrudging huff, Jake unfurled the twine and ran it against the edge of the makeshift bench he was sitting on to cut it, before tossing the rest at Estela. 

“How fast can you tie those off? We’re losin’ daylight for a morning catch, if you wanna ride on the raft with me.” 

“Five minutes,” she answered, already working nimbly around a branch to secure the whittled spikes. 

The screen cut back to Ruby’s camp, where Liam and Drake stepped ashore, smiles brighter than the sunrise as Drake held up a fish trap with small rays flapping against one another. 

—

“kjsdhfksjhfksjhfks,” Burns smashed into her keyboard. “Look at my man! With the sea bounty!” 

“mevmnbvmnxb,” Ella smashed back.

“How do you know Drake did all the work? Liam’s just as wet, hahaha,” Donna chortled in response.

—

After killing their catch as humanely as possible - with Alyssa turning her face to Drake’s chest to avoid witnessing it - Leo and Olivia gutted and cleaned the rays before setting them on top of their makeshift grill to cook. Liam and Drake regaled the group with their morning under the water, as they took turns fishing. 

While Team Ruby enjoyed some protein with their rice that morning, members of the Catalyst team glumly spooned rice into their mouths as they sat around the campfire while Jake and Estela dried off; their morning fishing trip had been unsuccessful. 

Later that day, both teams received messages from the host to gather for a reward challenge. Each team made their way to a small lagoon, where they saw a structure floating in the water. A booming voice overhead instructed them to swim out to the structure and await further instructions. Once everyone from both teams had done so, a blue holographic image of the host appeared in the center to explain the rules. “The challenge is simple,” she narrated. “We want to see who can hold their breath the longest. There’s a bar you can use to keep yourself from floating up if you need it. Last one standing earns the prize for the whole team — an overnight trip at the Celestial Hotel, where our rotating film crew goes to rest. You’ll be treated to clean sheets and towels, hot showers, along with a decadent dinner and breakfast menu the next morning, before having to return to your camp.” 

Everyone’s eyes lit up at the incentive of a night away from sleeping on the beach, away from mosquitos, rodents, and the threat of being waterlogged by passing storms. Stomachs gurgled at the thought of hot meals that didn’t consist of rice, and the possibility of cocktails or wine. “Oh, we got this,” Jake murmured quietly to Laurel. “Bet I can hold my breath longer’n any of those Ruby kids.” 

“Is that so?” Leo taunted, overhearing Jake’s comment.

“Just call me Poseidon,” Jake smirked. 

“We’ll see about that,” Leo replied. “You know most of us are from an island, right? We’re basically merpeople.” 

—

“Bets! Bets on who wins this!” Brandy typed into the chat window.

“Sticking with Drake,” Burns typed. “Maybe Hana. She could have another random talent up her sleeve.” 

“My money’s on Liam. Look how broad his chest is,” Anya replied. “He’s got to have massive lungs to match.”

“That makes no sense,” Ella typed, adding a laughing emoji. “But I’m Team Liam anyway.”

“Don’t hate me,” Donna began. “Something tells me Jake isn’t boasting right now.” 

From her screen at home, Alyssa Lauren used Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe to choose Zahra. The rest of the group picked their favorites as the castaways donned goggles and got into the water. 

—

“Ready? Set! Go!” 

Sixteen heads dipped under the water’s surface, with contestants pinching their noses and puffing out their cheeks as an underwater camera filmed them. A handful of them - Olivia, Alyssa, Maxwell, Diego, and Michelle - tapped out under a minute. As the sand settled, thirty seconds passed before Katrina, Laurel, Sean, and Drake headed to the surface. Just after the two minute mark, Hana, Craig, and Zahra gave up, leaving Jake, Liam, Estela, and Leo under the water. 

Jake looked positively peaceful, sandy brown hair swaying with ease in the water. Estela tapped her fingers lightly across the bamboo rod, counting each second as it passed. Liam glanced over to his brother, who’d begun to turn pink. Half a minute later, Leo popped up to the surface, muttering to himself out of frustration. 

Three minutes in, Liam surfaced, gasping for air, leaving Jake and Estela to battle it out between themselves. Even though the hologram host blasted a horn to signal the end of the challenge, neither Catalyst member surfaced. Liam ducked down to check on them, and Jake and Estela both signaled that they were fine. Everyone continued to wait as the pair spent minute after minute under the water.

—

“Seriously? They’re on the same team!” Anitah typed. “They won already!” 

“They’ve been underwater for a scary length of time,” Brandy added. “What are they, Navy SEALs or something?” 

“I think Jake mentioned he was actually in the Navy before,” Alyssa Lauren replied. 

—

A digital clock appeared in the corner of the screen as the two Catalyst members continued to hold their breath underwater. With each passing minute, members from both groups began to worry. After eight minutes passed, the host’s voice rang out, advising them to pull Jake and Estela up from the water to end the challenge. Laurel and Craig ducked down, eventually pulling their teammates up. “Congratulations to The Catalysts!” the host exclaimed. “A boat will be waiting at your camp to take you to the hotel.” 

Laurel swatted Jake’s arm as they made their way to the shore. “What’s wrong with you!? You were underwater for nearly ten minutes! Who does that!?” 

Jake looked over his shoulder to her with a grin, mischievous sparkle in his bright blue eyes. “Ten would be a new record, my best is nine.” He leaned down to whisper in her ear. “Imagine nine uninterrupted minutes of me holding my breath, Princess. My birthday is tomorrow, and I know exactly how I wanna celebrate,” he winked.  

Laurel’s cheeks flushed at the suggestion. “Stop looking at me like that, Top Gun.”

—

That evening at the hotel, after a sumptuous feast of lobster, crab, and an endless supply of beer and wine, the Catalyst members eventually went to bed. Much later into the night, Jake was seen sneaking into Laurel’s room. 

—

“I KNEW IT!” Burns typed. She laughed as her friends typed in responses full of lemon, fire, pepper, and eggplant emojis. She popped another cheese cube into her mouth and smiled, watching the rest of the episode play out.

[snarktheater]

Ready Player Two — Opening Cutscene & Chapter 0

Hello again.

It’s been a while. I haven’t been active on this blog since, fittingly enough, Ready Player One. I was going to do this sooner—even had an alarm set up and everything—but then, it turns out, I’m feeling so much negativity about the world in general that a book just pales in comparison.

Seriously, I had to scrap this post’s entire intro because it’s not even 2020 anymore as I write this. And you know, maybe that’s for the best. I’m not really in the mood for doom and gloom and bitching anymore. I uninstalled Twitter from my phone a while back, I’ve been doing good at my daily writing sprints, my biggest fanfic project concluded on a positive note from people I didn’t even realize had been following it for years.

So I don’t know what this is going to be like. My commentary, I mean; I’ve heard echoes of what the book is like, so I’m not expecting a surprise there.

The book opens right after the end of Ready Player One, in a “Cutscene” where Wade recounts to us what happened after he won Halliday’s contest. It also assumes you remember exactly who the main characters of the book are, which is a bold move for a sequel that came out almost a decade after the original.

Technically, I could just look up the details I’m fuzzy about. But also, I think it’s more authentic if I don’t. I trust my memory enough that if I’m wrong, it’ll be in subtle enough ways that it’ll almost be a private jokes between all of us. An “if you know, you know” sort of error system. And I don’t think there’s anything more true to the spirit of this book than that.

Shoto had flown back home to Japan to take over operations at GSS’s Hokkaido division.

So Wade starts his tenure with nepotism. Wasn’t Shoto really young? Why is he qualified to run anything?

Aech was enjoying an extended vacation in Senegal, a country she’d dreamed of visiting her whole life, because her ancestors had come from there.

You know what, I’m not touching “send the token black character back to Africa.” This isn’t my lane.

And Samantha had flown back to Vancouver to pack up her belongings and say goodbye to her grandmother, Evelyn.

Why is she saying goodbye? Why, she’s moving to Columbus to be with Wade, of course! It’s not like there was anything else in her life. Was there? And why isn’t she referred to as Art3mis? I’m pretty sure Wade found out all of their offline names in the last book, and the inconsistency mildly bothers me.

These three sentences are back to back, by the way. Someone—I forget who—once described Ready Player One as a book that’s fun to write a wiki about, because it’s got fun concepts to summarize about until you realize that all the emotional connective tissue you need to turn a list of things into a story is missing, and that’s roughly how this first page feels.

Hell, the first line of the book is Wade telling us he remained offline for nine whole days after winning the contest, but by the end of the second paragraph we’re already to him logging back into the OASIS to "distract himself from [his and Samantha’s] reunion.

I’ll give Ernest Cline one thing: it feels like he wrote this opening nine days after the first book and did about as much maturing as a teenage boy would do between the two books.

Way more time is spent describing Wade’s OASIS rig, or the in-game planet where the climax of the last book happened, than anything else in this introduction. He is immediately greeted by a crowd of adoring fans who have been waiting over a week for him to come back in the game, because they’re all grateful that our protagonist and his friends restored their avatars after they were annihilated by the Sixers.

You’d think the adoring fans would serve some kind of purpose, or that something would happen, but no. Wade immediately goes “ew, people” and teleports away, since he essentially has ultimate powers within the game. With a caveat: the powers are actually coming from the Robes of Anorak he’s wearing, and I’m mentioning that in the hopes that it will pay off sometime in the book’s future, assuming Cline at least learned to do that. But still, let’s not skip too fast the fact that we introduced that crowd of adoring fans for no other purpose than to tell us they’re out there, because it fits right in with the last book’s attempts at saying as little as humanly possible in as many words as possible.

Anyway, Wade went back into Anorak’s study, where he arbitrarily checks out the Easter Egg he got at the end of the last book, and finds an inscription on it. I was dreading another riddle, but no, it’s just straight-up instructions to a vault in the GSS archives, so Wade logs off and goes to check it out.

Of course Halliday had put [the archives] [on the 13th floor]. In one of his favorite TV shows, Max Headroom, Network 23’s hidden research-and-development lab was located on the thirteenth floor. And The Thirteenth Floor was also the title of an old sci-fi film about virtual reality, released in 1999, right on the heels of both The Matrix and eXistenZ.

I’m equally shocked that it took two whole pages (on my ereader) to get to the first slew of references, and that one of these references is from 1999. I didn’t know we were allowed to think of anything that isn’t the 80s. Speaking of which, I’ll spare you the whole paragraph, but the book does feel the need to explain why it’s vault 42.

Inside the vault, there’s another egg containing a super-fancy and advanced OASIS headset. The egg also has a video monitor that plays a video message from James Halliday shortly before his death.

But despite his condition, he hadn’t used his OASIS avatar to record this message like he had with Anorak’s Invitation. For some reason, he’d chosen to appear in the flesh this time, under the brutal, unforgiving light of reality.

That oh-so-important message? An infodump about the headset’s working. He called it an OASIS Neural Interface, ONI for short. It basically lets you experience the OASIS through all your senses with sensory input just like the real thing, you know, that thing Wade had to get a fancy suit and massive rig to do in the first book. And yes, Wade does spend a paragraph or two comparing it to other works of science fiction. Of course he does.

More importantly, it also records all the sensory input into a separate file, which can then be replayed over to re-experience said sensations, or live someone else’s experiences. Halliday tries to frame it as a tool to generate communication and empathy, seemingly all without acknowledging the potential creepiness of that. But hey. Who knows. Maybe that’s because this is the setup stage, and it’ll pay off eventually.

I also wondered about the name Halliday had chosen for his invention. I’d seen enough anime to know that oni was also a Japanese word for a giant horned demon from the pits of hell.

Add “reducing Japan to anime” to the list of things the book has failed to improve upon. By the way, the narration insisted on spelling out ONI letter by letter earlier, so it’s weird to make that link now. It’s also just kind of inelegant to just tell us “this is the symbolism behind the name”, but that’s just the sort of thing I’ve come to expect from this book.

Anyway, the reason Halliday kept this for his successor to find is he wants Wade to test out the technology and decide if humanity is ready for it. Why Halliday thinks the most glorified pop culture trivia / video game competition qualifies you for such a decision should be a problem, but sadly, a lot of billionaires have said and done a lot of dumb and eerily similar things in the past few years since I read Ready Player One, so actually, I can’t fault the book for that one. Tragically, our fates really are in the hands of people who should rightfully be cartoon villains.

To his credit, Wade does question Halliday’s motives in keeping this under wraps at all rather than releasing it himself. So hey, maybe it really is setting something up.

Wade goes back to his office with the ONI, and we’re treated with this lovely piece of narration:

I was grateful that Samantha wasn’t there. I didn’t want to give her the opportunity to talk me out of testing the ONI. Because I was worried she might try to, and if she did, she would’ve succeeded. (I’d recently discovered that when you’re madly in love with someone they can persuade you to do pretty much anything.)

There’s a lot to unpack about the implications this has for their relationship, but it’s way too early in the book for me to editorialize when one character hasn’t even been on the page yet. So I’ll just leave it here for the record. Hopefully you see the problem without me needing to point it out anyway. If not, feel free to hit my inbox.

So Wade, confident in the fact that Halliday would have warned him if there were any risks to using the ONI, decides to try it out. Even though he immediately follows up that statement with this:

According to the ONI documentation, forcibly removing the headset while it was in operation could severely damage the wearer’s brain and/or leave them in a permanent coma. So the titanium-reinforced safety bands made certain this couldn’t happen. I found this little detail comforting instead of unsettling. Riding in an automobile was risky, too, if you didn’t wear your seatbelt…

Wade. My dude. What the fuck is this simile. And why don’t you see that maybe a machine where you’re forcibly trapping yourself inside a virtual reality might be dangerous? Hell, when I said this was setting something up, I was expecting something vaguely interesting about the potential breach of privacy, or how you don’t need to literally walk in someone’s shoes to feel empathy for them, or anything substantial, but now I’m worried it’ll just end up as “man, sometimes science fiction machines will scramble your brain, isn’t that weird”?

Like, I don’t know, to me “it will put you in a coma” sounds like a good reason for Halliday not to release the ONI. Maybe we can still make it into a commentary on how corporations will sell stuff they know is directly harmful if it can make them a profit. Who knows.

The book waffles on about more risks, and the mechanics of how the ONI activates, and the warning disclaimer when it does turn on. Specifically, there’s a time limit of twelve consecutive hours, after which you’ll be automatically logged out, because yes, using the thing for too long can also cause brain damage.

Gregarious Simulation Systems will not be held responsible for any injuries caused by improper use of the OASIS Neural Interface.

See, now there’s the sort of thing that could be a source for commentary, but no, instead it’s thrown in there like it’s nothing and Wade glosses over the entire warning, and instead keep wondering why Halliday didn’t just release the ONI if even the safety disclaimers were in place.

By the way: this whole system has apparently gone through several independent human trials already, so I’m finding it hard to imagine that it’s actually a secret Halliday took to the grave as Wade says. Unless he also had everyone involved in those trials killed afterwards. Or maybe they all ended up with brain damage which rendered them incapable of talking about it.

And before you think I’m being unfair and maybe we’re supposed to understand that ourselves even if the protagonist doesn’t, I’ll remind you that the book didn’t trust its reader to know what the number 42 is a reference to, or what an oni is, even though I don’t think anyone in the target audience wouldn’t know about these two things.

There’s also the fact that, since this book came out, a video game did release with a scene intentionally designed to cause seizures, and it had countless fans flocking to defend it over that fact. So you’ll have to excuse me if I’m not assuming this book’s stance on whether your video game console causes brain damage and possibly coma is actually a bad thing, or just an acceptable risk.

Wade certainly seems to think so, since he agrees to the terms of service.

As the timestamp faded away, it was replaced by a short message, just three words long—the last thing I would see before I left the real world and entered the virtual one. But they weren’t the three words I was used to seeing. I—like every other ONI user to come—was greeted by a new message Halliday had created, to welcome those visitors who had adopted his new technology: READY PLAYER TWO

Well now that’s just silly.

And that’s our opening cutscene. And while this post is already long enough, I feel like I have to go on to chapter 0, because it feels like barely anything has happened so far. We didn’t even introduce any new character motivation or conflict, or a mystery to set the plot into motion, unless I’m supposed to think “why didn’t Halliday release this?” counts.

So Wade is back into the OASIS, and tells us about how much more real it all feels thanks to the ONI. I especially have to question how he can smell or taste anything—both of which he tells us he can. Like, who coded that? Did Halliday implement every single smell and taste himself, without anyone noticing? I hope you don’t need me to tell you that’s not typically how features are added to a large-scale video game.

If it feels like I’m nitpicking at the logic of the book, even though I always say I’m not very interested in that and would rather talk themes, it’s because I am, because there isn’t much else to discuss so far. Wade is happy about tasting virtual fruit. That’s the scene.

He tests out if he can feel pain, but no, the ONI reduces pain (a gunshot is translated as “a hard pinch”). On one hand, good, it would be a nightmare otherwise. On the other hand, I sort of hope there’s a setting for that in there, because otherwise, you just lost an entire clientele of kinksters.

This was it—the final, inevitable step in the evolution of videogames and virtual reality. The simulation had now become indistinguishable from real life.

Ah, now we have some juicy themes. Because if you think this is the inevitable final step in the evolution of video games, I invite you to look at literally any other art form, and what happened to them once hyperrealism became easy. Hint: they didn’t stop evolving, because it turns out realism isn’t the only goal one can achieve with art.

The realism discussion is not a new one in video games, mind you. In case you’re out of the loop: most of the big-budget blockbuster games (“AAA” as they’re known) are aiming for hyperrealism nowadays, and it results in development teams being forced to work in horrible conditions (known with the equally horrible euphemism of “crunch”). And, because it turns out that 1) humans working themselves to the bones isn’t healthy and 2) racing for realism with little to no vision besides it makes for poor creativity, a lot of these games come out as disappointments. Oh, there are hordes of Gamers™ who will defend them to the bitter end, but inevitably, in the months following release, the defense cools off while the criticism keeps on going, because the defense was a knee-jerk reaction born of a mix of people hyping themselves up for a game they hadn’t seen that much of yet, then attaching a part of their identity to liking that thing.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that this throwaway line feels like it comes from someone who is so out of touch as to accidentally support a world view that has in fact resulted in the biggest part of the industry stagnating artistically while growing more toxic for the people working in it. All the while, more and more independent games come out every year, proving that that realism is nowhere near the most important thing to making a game good, and that you can achieve much better results with a small team.

What I’m trying to say is: watch Jim Sterling’s channel, they’ve been bleeding out subscribers since they came out as nonbinary and make much better commentary on this topic than I could, and play Hades.

Back to the book, which sadly hasn’t become any more interesting since I decided to go on a tangent. Wade tests the ONI functions some more, all the while musing on how he knows Samantha would disapprove but that he doesn’t care, because what loving relationship doesn’t consist of that?

Among the functions, he tries the ONI files, the aforementioned recordings of someone else’s experiences. Specifically, a woman, which Wade tells us by telling us he suddenly has breasts, I suppose because Ernest Cline saw that subreddit about men writing women and went “I want a piece of that”. Oh, and also, those sample files were recorded from real people, in the real world. And yes, this goes exactly where you think it does.

SEX-M-F.oni, SEX-F-F.oni, and SEX-Nonbinary.oni

Look, I actually started writing a complaint about the boobs thing, and I deleted it, but now Cline is doing it on purpose. So, here goes: I saw a quote from this book on Twitter that looked like Cline attempting to make up for Wade’s casual transphobia in the first book. It wasn’t good, but it at least sounded like he was trying. So to immediately get this is…a lot? Let’s go for a lot.

I can almost excuse the use of “M” and “F”. You gotta name your files and you could excuse a non-exhaustive list. But…nonbinary? On one hand, I want to know what Cline means. On the other hand, I don’t think he can come up with an answer I’ll find satisfactory.

We are thankfully spared from finding out because Wade has just lost his virginity to Samantha a few days ago and he’s 1) not ready for this and 2) pretty sure this counts as cheating. You could make a case that this is more like porn, but I can see that this is more of a personal distinction anyway, and I can respect that one. Plus, you know. I don’t want to find out.

Wade logs off, and he can’t tell the difference between the OASIS with the ONI, and decides this will change the world. And then it’s back to the “how did he do it and keep it a secret”, even though Wade now finds out in the documentation that this had been in development for twenty-five years, basically since the OASIS launched. So it’s not really that it’s a secret, so much as there are a lot of people under very strict NDAs out there. Or, again, they’re all dead and/or otherwise incapacitated.

The ONI is the product of the Accessibility Research Lab, and Wade tells us about other stuff that the lab has produced using similar technology, mostly for medical purposes.

GSS patented each of the Accessibility Research Lab’s inventions, but Halliday never made any effort to profit from them. Instead, he set up a program to give these neuroprosthetic implants away, to any OASIS users who could benefit from them. GSS even subsidized the cost of their implant surgery.

Look, it’s nice that you want Halliday to be the good guy through and through, but it’s kind of hard to take any social commentary seriously when you think this is how a billionaire is made. Hell, even when he shut down the lab and fired its entire staff, he gave them a big enough severance package to set them for life. You know. Capitalism!

Hey, remember when Samantha said she was going to end world hunger if she won the contest, a thing billionaires right now could be doing, but aren’t, and she is now the co-owner of GSS? Yeah, I kind of hope the book remembers that too.

Speaking of the co-owners, the book just completely skips over the debate that our four main characters have over whether or not to release the ONI to the world. All we know is that they voted, and the vote goes in favor of releasing it. I mean, why have characters who could have opinions and feelings that could create a discussion? That might make us care about them! And who wants to care about characters in a story?

We put them on sale at the lowest possible price, to make sure as many people as possible could experience the OASIS Neural Interface for themselves.

What exactly is “the lowest possible price” here? Your company literally owns money. Like, OASIS money is real money. There is literally nothing stopping you from giving them away, especially because what you’re giving away is access to the platform you’re already running for a profit.

It’s almost like, even trying to make “good billionaires” out of its protagonists, the book can’t stop and actually make them significantly good.

Oh, I should mention. If you thought my Ready Player One review was angry at capitalism, wait until you see what the past couple years have done to me.

Anyway, once they his 7,777,777 simultaneous ONI users, a new riddle shows up on Halliday’s website. Because yep: our plot is apparently not about the implications of releasing the ONI, or any of the potential ideological discussions associated with that, it’s another riddle. Oh boy, do I wish I’d known that.

Seek the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul On the seven worlds where the Siren once played a role For each fragment my heir must pay a toll To once again make the Siren whole

I cannot wait to have the book give me just not enough information to solve the riddle until it’s solved by the book itself. That was so much fun the other…what was it, five times? Six times? Something like that. Wade already tells us the Siren might be Kira Morrow, because her alias was named after one of the sirens of Greek myth, so I can’t wait for that plot point to stick around. It was so fun to hear all about this man pining for another man’s wife the first time!

So this is the “Shard Riddle”. People are apparently convinced it was made by Wade and his crew as a publicity stunt, but of course, they know that that isn’t the case, and they also don’t know what that riddle is supposed to lead to. So, that’s great. We have a puzzle, and we also don’t know what the stakes are. All we know is that Wade wants to solve the puzzle essentially because it’s a challenge.

We skip over a year, and Wade tells us about how IOI collapses and gets absorbed by GSS because of the ONI’s launch. Remember IOI? They were the bad guys, so I guess we have to cheer?

GSS absorbed IOI and all of its assets, transforming us into an unstoppable megacorporation with a global monopoly on the world’s most popular entertainment, education, and communications platform.To celebrate, we released all of IOI’s indentured servants and forgave their outstanding debts.

On one hand: good for the slave. On the other hand: not gonna cheer for a monopoly, you guys.

Another year’s skip, and now 99% of the OASIS users are using the ONI, and yes, that includes trading their experiences with one another too. And I guess we’re still hand-waving any possible problems associated with that technology, because the technology is made so that all recordings must be shared and played through the OASIS.

This allowed us to weed out unsavory or illegal recordings before they could be shared with other users.

How? Do you know any of the problems associated with content moderations on the current platforms? I don’t know if I want to point to Youtube’s extremely faulty algorithm, Twitter’s complete apathy towards its Nazis, or Facebook doing moderation by making underpaid staff watch all potentially problematic content, which resulted in serious psychological damage to said staff.

You can’t just say that as if it solved everything. The chapter later says this is handled by an AI called “CenSoft”, and as an AI engineer myself, let me tell you: this is not going to work. Again: Youtube is the way it is for a reason.

It also let us maintain our monopoly on what was rapidly becoming the most popular form of entertainment in the history of the world.

And again, monopolies are totally a good thing as long as it’s in the right hands!

When I’m implying that the book does not care for any of these potential problems, I mean it. These enormous ethical issues are sidestepped in cold narratin, and we just keep going on introducing new slang that I hate, but have to quote so help you keep up.

“Sims” were recordings made inside the OASIS, and “Recs” were ONI recordings made in reality. Except that most kids no longer referred to it as “reality.” They called it “the Earl.” (A term derived from the initialism IRL.) And “Ito” was slang for “in the OASIS.” So Recs were recorded in the Earl, and Sims were created Ito.

There. You have been infodumped.

In the midst of all this (still extremely dry) exposition about how this changed media, we also get this tidbit:

You could take any drug, eat any kind of food, and have any kind of sex, without worrying about addiction, calories, or consequences.

Now, I was going to rant about this, but then, a page later, this happens and spares me the trouble:

I’d struggled with OASIS addiction before the ONI was released. Now logging on to the simulation was like mainlining some sort of chemically engineered superheroin.

So, you are aware that addiction isn’t just possible, but extremely facilitated by this. But sure, no worries! It’s perfectly safe! Because our protagonists are good.

Also, remember how the last book ended on a weak attempt at having a moral that maybe the real world is good, actually? Yeah, Wade tells us the ONI helps poor people live enjoyable lives in the OASIS. So. Fuck that message, I guess. It only applies if you’re the literal wealthiest man on Earth.

And me? All my dreams had come true. I’d gotten stupidly rich and absurdly famous. I’d fallen in love with my dream girl and she had fallen in love with me. Surely I was happy, right? Not so much, as this account will show.

Aside from the aforementioned returning OASIS affiction, there’s the Shard riddle that Wade is now obsessed with, to the point of offering a billion-dollar reward to anyone with information about the riddle’s answer.

I announced this reward with a stylized short film that I modeled after Anorak’s Invitation. I hoped it would seem like a lighthearted play on Halliday’s contest instead of a desperate cry for help. It seemed to work.

On one hand: good, Wade finally has a character flaw that the book actually acknowledges as a character flaw. I can work with that. On the other hand: this is all told to me in such a dispassionate that I am dreading how the book will handle this character flaw. Which is to say, I’m not expecting it to be very good.

(For a brief time, some of the younger, more idealistic shard hunters referred to themselves as “shunters” to differentiate themselves from their elder counterparts. But when everyone began to call them “sharters” instead, they changed their minds and started to call themselves gunters too. The moniker still fit. The Seven Shards were Easter eggs hidden by Halliday, and we were all hunting for them.)

Especially when this is something the narration feels is more important to tell me about.

Anyway, skip another year, and a gunter finally leads Wade to the First Shard. Solved that riddle, I guess. And wait, wasn’t part of why IOI was ~evil~ in the first book that they were paying people to find the Easter Egg for them? How is this any different, Wade?

And when I picked it up, I set in motion a series of events that would drastically alter the fate of the human race. As one of the only eyewitnesses to these historic events, I feel obligated to give my own written account of what occurred. So that future generations—if there are any—will have all the facts at their disposal when they decide how to judge my actions.

And that is the end of our chapter 0. And can I just say: what a mess already. I don’t think my snark can properly convey how utterly devoid of emotion this book’s writing is, and that alone is honestly more of a turn-off than anything else in the book so far. Even, knowing that I railed about it in the first book, I still feel newly unprepared for it. And it’s not like this double-prologue is making me hopeful that the book will show an ounce more critical thinking—or decent fucking humanity towards marginalized groups—as its predecessor.

So, that’s a lot to look forward to! For the sake of my sanity and schedule, don’t expect me to do such big posts every time. I’ll probably do one chapter a week from now on, if that. We’re in for a long ride, but I hope it’s worth it, at least.

[power-chords]

Some scattered Disco Elysium thoughts, behind a cut for spoilers:

Favorite characters as of my first playthrough: Lt. Kim Kitsuragi (I am a Virgo and obligated to ID with the Straight Man), Egg Head (and yet deep down, my soul is still screaming “Love is the relay out of death! WE DANCE!!!” over a 4/4 beat), Joyce Messier (I really did just go through my sun/moon/rising signs here), Cuno, Horrific Necktie, Iosef Drof

This game is like all right shit sucks and it ain’t getting better so you’ve got two options about it, Camus or Kierkegaard. And then it rewards you the most for flooring the gas in Kierkegaard’s direction. LOVE that. The Moralintern, according to Lt. Kim, “doesn’t demand faith, only accordance,” so Innocentic principles aren’t the game’s in-universe religious analogue — but an absurd, incomprehensible, inter-dimensional stick bug almost certainly is the closest thing Disco Elysium has to God. All hail the Insulindian Phasmid.

We are a “face” of islands surrounded by a vast white nothingness of radio static. We are the signal in the noise :’) (and according to the phasmid, we are also responsible for creating the noise!!!!)

I realize that I have subconsciously been playing/statting HDB as a reflection of my own personality. I am built like glass, doing TONS of drugs, and pursuing an art degree. My most developed skills are Conceptualization, Encyclopedia, Drama, Inland Empire, Perception, and Visual Calculus. I never shut up about dance music or rock ‘n’ roll. I built Martinaise’s best music venue in an old house of worship and became a communist who mostly sits around reading books and playing board games. I am about 80% normie but my outfits are weird and I am prone to random and impassioned outbursts (absurd trivia, apocalyptic despair, bad jokes, karaoke).

[Eric Andre.jpg] LET ME INVESTIGATE THE MYSTERY OF THE COCAINE SKULL. LET ME INVESTIGAAAAATE

Suzerainty the game is clearly Catan meets Civilization. Man I miss board game night at the RPGA.

I figured out very early on that this was a ruthless and yet indulgent meta-commentary on everything from cop fiction to tabletop gaming to dance music, and yet it still finds ways to sucker punch me. The Pigs... OUCH!!!!

I’ve gone on and on about the game’s superb writing already but the under-appreciated gems are the explanations for particular stat buffs/penalties associated with given Thoughts. E.G. my Actual Art Degree giving me +1 Morale and 10 XP for successful passive Conceptualization checks but -1 to all Hand/Eye Coordination rolls because my “hands shake from how shit it all is” lmao

CUNO DOESN’T FUCKING CARE

There’s an Oasis reference, multiple from the Manic Street Preachers and British Sea Power (the latter for obvious reasons), and now I kind of want to play the whole thing over again just to see how many nods to British pop music I can identify while actively keeping an eye out for it.

[chcnce]

guess the TWENTY FOUR YEAR OLD OCTOBER baby just arrived to dallyeog! it makes sense, because HWA YOHAN / CHANCE HWA  is just as CRISP as the month of OCTOBER. wait, why do they remind me of BANG CHAN? beyond that, they seemed RELIABLE AND PASSIONATE upon first glance. i heard someone say they’re sort of SELF-CONSCIOUS AND CAUTIOUS though. i hope they get acquainted here in COMPLEX # 4 / APARTMENT # 1 / FLOOR # 2 ; HE seem(s) to have a lot going on with HIS job as STREAMER.

hi! i’m lu and i’m really happy to present to you to my mess of a son. he’s certainly a hard pill to swallow but he’s not as bad once you get to interact with him. chance is his real english name, but also the persona he’s crafted to remain popular and relevant to the masses. he’s blunt and brutally honest, but mostly when he’s streaming. all in all: a whole ass mess, i insist.

without further ado, here are his basic stats, a trivia and wanted connections under the cut. however you can find his background and plots linked accordingly ( i’ll add other pages eventually ). i’m really fine with talking either here or discord, so whichever works fine for you, works fine for me too! i’ll be reaching to everyone go gives this a like soon enough <3

basic information

― full name: hwa yohan / chance hwa ― nicknames: yohwa ― age: twenty four ― date of birth: october 3rd, 1996 ― birthplace: cheonan, south korea. ― hometown: sydney, australia ― current location: seoul, south korea ― living arrangements: dallyeog / complex # 4 / apartment # 1 / floor # 2 ― ethnicity: korean ― nationality: dual, korean (natural born) and australian (naturalized) ― gender: cis male ― pronouns: he / him ― orientation: demiromantic, heterosexual. ― religion: atheist ― occupation: streamer ― language(s) spoken: korean (fluent), english (fluent) ― accent: heavy australian accent

physical appearance

― faceclaim: bang chan / christopher bang of stray kids. ― hair: naturally brown, though he often dyes to a variety of colors, mostly black and blue. right now, it’s a purple color that’s already fading. ― eye colour: coffee brown ― height: 171cm ― weight: 56kg ― tattoos: none at the moment. ― piercings: lobe and upper lobe on both ears. anti-tragus, orbital and rook on the left one. double helix on the right one. ― clothing style: regularly techwear when he goes out and athleisure at home.

personality

― label: the cynical ― positive traits: attentive, dependable, reliable, passionate, brave, energetic, honest, humorous, clever, versatile, truthful, affectionate, sociable ― negative traits: self-conscious, cautious, opinionated, arrogant, detached, critical, tactless, stubborn, loud, quick-tempered, harsh, unfiltered, cynical, restless, ambitious, ― hobbies: baking, collecting enamel pins and funkos, jigsaw puzzles, skateboarding, reading, listening to music, curating playlists when he has time, learning origami. ― habits: obsessively organising, borrowing books and rarely ever returning them (he forgets who they belong to ok), really bad road rage, awful at keeping track of time, people watching, always wears a black ring on his left index finger, always hugs something when sleeping, gets easily impressed by things, quotes movies and shows in regular conversations, knuckle cracking, snacking between meals, eye rolling without noticing, squinting when concentrated, crossing his arms over his chest, running hands through his hair, slouching, rolling his shoulders. ― zodiac sign: sun libra, moon gemini, ascendant libra. ― mbti: infp-t “the mediator” ― enneagram: 8w7 “the nonconformist”. ― temperament: melancholic ― hogwarts house: ravenclaw ― moral alignment: chaotic neutral ― primary vice: greed ― primary virtue: diligence ― element: air

trivia:

― he’s played all kind of games and his twitch channel was created 9 years ago (whew) and it currently has over 5 million subscribers. currently, he streams mostly genshin impact, valorant, league of legends, overwatch, spider-man: miles morales, cyberpunk 2077 and the witcher iii. every now and then he makes charity streams. he also makes special lives with other gamers and figures where they play games like among us, minecraft, fortnite (though he absolutely hates it), party animals, fall guys and other party games. ― despite the rumours around him and his parents, he’s never talked about them to the media. it’s not like chance hides the information, after all it’s online, but he swerves questions about them and pretty much decides to not say anything about them just to avoid controversy. his parents didn’t mind until last year the company they worked at offered him a sponsorship and yohan turned it down. it’s safe to say they were pretty hurt over this and they haven’t talked much recently. ― yohan is, in his words, the biggest fan of spiderman (not really) but he’s his favorite heroe of all times and he collects everything and anything that has him in it. his biggest collection is funko pops with over 30+ figurines. he collects funkos of various other interests of him as well as enamel pins. ― lowkey a weeb. he likes watching anime in his spare time and if he likes it too much, he’d buy the manga and read it as well. his latest obsessions are kimetsu no yaiba, boku no hero academia, haikyu and jujutsu kaisen. ― won’t ever admit this out loud, but almost every ghibli movie makes him cry his eyes out, even when he’s watched the same one over and over again. he prefers to watch these on his own. his favorite one is grave of the fireflies. ― it took him a while to get used to korean culture, a part of him is still trying to. luckily, his family would speak in korean in their household most of the time and this helped him not struggle as much when it came to the language. his streams are most of the time in english to cater to a bigger audience, but recently he’s got himself a small team of an editor and a translator that’s helped him add subtitles to the videos he uploads in youtube. ― his current setup is completely sponsored except for a few extra things he’s bought himself and he has minimal experience when it comes to builds, though he’s really interested in learning and has recently researched more about the whole topic, hoping to get his first custom build by the end of the year. ― has terrible road rage and this is the reason why he doesn’t own a car or a driving license, even being in the backseat makes him anxious and would much rather prefer to use the bus, a bike or his skateboard to commute between places. taxis and other rides are his last option, if he’s quite honest. ― as a neighbour, he’s polite and tries to be mindful just to avoid needless problems. the first thing he did was soundproof his office in order to not disrupt others, but sometimes this doesn’t work as well due to how loud he can be. chance will try to greet every neighbour he encounters either with a wave or a simple nod. ― loves dogs but doesn’t feel he’s responsible enough to take care of one yet, though he will certainly volunteer to pet-sit his friends’ dogs.

wanted connections:

― life in seoul: he’s been wanting to start a podcast that has nothing to do with his main channel, aka a podcast about the culture in seoul from different perspectives, he wants to know about other people’s experiences. can be people that have lived all their life here or foreigners that, like himself, are pretty much new or can’t get enough of the city. it’d be a pretty chill podcast and anyone can participate! ― people that know about him and lowkey follow his streams (or just play them in the background while doing other stuff) ― or people that know about him but dislike him because he’s said stuff before about other public figures you’re a fan of. or he just simply rubs you the wrong way. ― people who absolutely hates when he streams late at night and he’s full on screaming at the screen (he tried to soundproof his streaming room but someone he can be way too loud, sorry) ― he’s always up for a good collaboration regardless of the topic: food, art, random tags and challenges. even if it's not up to his alley, he's likely to always say yes just for the laughs. ― the group of friends yohan met in different ways. they're not all strictly gamers, streamers or anything of the sort, but whenever they get together to play some games, it's a total chaos. and he wouldn't change it at all. ― the one person that always gets his packages delivered by mistake to your place instead of his. or the other way around. ― more: friends, enemies, a penpal, a platonic soulmate, workout buddies, etc.

[ivory-sunflower]

Arty Art Things ✨

Hellooo!

I've decided to post some of the arty things I've done either recently or in the last few years, well the pieces I'm somewhat proud of at least. All my posts tend to be a lot more wordy than they need to be but hey it's what I do here!

Conchúr White

Anyone one who's been on this blog for a bit will have probably have seen me talk about this lovely Irish fella. The pencil drawing is actually a year old as of yesterday, I only know that because screenshots of me flipping out about Conchúr following me on twitter popped up in my memories yesterday. I think I'd sent it to him at about 3 in the morning (I was not in a good head space at that point in time), so probably not what he was expecting to see when he opened his phone in the morning aha

The biro version is much more recent: I got bored while sat at my desk and doing research about university courses, saw a biro, saw my old drawing of Conchúr, had an idea. I revisited my GCSE art techniques and here we are. Again, I put this up on Twitter and now (at the the time I'm writing this) when you google "Conchúr White" it's the third top image of him which is a bit mad really. I think I spent all of about 20 minutes on Conchúr but another 45 minutes on the words behind him. The words are the names of the songs on his EP 'Bikini Crops', he doesn't just really love the idea of Channing Tatum driving him around at night in a daisy print bikini... Well maybe he does but what he does in his spare time is none of my business...

TechDif

So I mentioned that the pencil drawing of Conchúr came from a rough patch in my mental health and this one is no different! In fact this one came from an even worse circumstance so we love to see it. I had a bad, bad time in July and this started as a way of distracting myself from what was going on in my head. Without it, I can't honestly say I'd still be here so even if the final product of this had been a terrible mess I would still love it for keeping me alive. However, it did not turn out to be a terrible mess!

Now that the origin of this is out the way, where do I start with TechDif? Unlike Conchúr, I haven't really talked about them on here (unless you count one brief post about Citation Needed) before so I guess I'll do it here. The Technical Difficulties are a wonderful group of 4 British fellas who have had their fair share of fun online and even before. They did a radio show at university together, which went on to become their Reverse Trivia Podcast, later moving on to a panel show called 'Citation Needed': and a game called 'Two of These People Are Lying'. All of which I would thoroughly reccomend, they're one of my go to things when I'm having a rough time. All 4 of them are excellent! Tom Scott (red top, blue jeans on the picture) has his own YouTube channel which does content aside from TechDif. If you're quite nerdy and like science, linguistics, computers, or any number of other things you may enjoy Tom's channel. He is probably best described as "The Moderator" of the group, much like a tired teacher he tries desperately to keep everyone on track with what they're meant to be doing, but usually it does not end well for him. Then we have Matt Gray (space top, holding an ice cream) who also has a channel away from TechDif stuff, he does techy electronic things and has a series called 'Will it Soft Serve?' where he puts all kinds of strange things through a soft serve machine. Matt brings a very specific energy to TechDif and I can't fully describe what that vibe is but I love it. Matt and Tom also share a YouTube channel where TOTPAL is posted and they had a series called 'The Park Bench'. Moving on to everybody's favourite Gary Brannan: Gary Brannan (SATIRE hoodie, glasses) and can I just say, what a fella he is! He's just excellent! He is the one that will argue and rip into Tom the most (not in a malicious way) and hilarity ensues. There are some episodes where he is absolutely on it, getting all the points and others where he very clearly has no idea and that's where some of his funniest quotes come from. Given how badly I was doing at the time I made this, his response to it on Twitter was so so lovely. I specifically remember one tweet where he said I'd made him happy and although it was probably a flippant comment, it just made feel alright for a bit. Yeah I might be feeling awful right now, but I've made someone else happy so that's a nice feeling. Then last but certainly not least, we have Chris Joel (buffalo check shirt, beard)! I would be lying if I said he isn’t my favourite... His sense of humor is the one I vibe with most, he can get rather dramatic in parts and can chat bollocks like a champion. He has absolutely no online presence away from TechDif and, like Rens from Temples, I fully believe he’s a cryptid and lives off in a tree somewhere. 

The picture took me about 4 days to complete, well 4 nights because I did most of it between the hours of 12 a.m. and 7a.m. - I remember watching the sun come through my window each morning. It’s made up of lots of little pieces, all cut out and stuck on; even the sky and hills are made of separate pieces of paper. Nothing was actually drawn on the piece of paper it’s all stuck on, it’s not how I usually do things but if I messed up one little but I could just redraw it rather than ruining the whole thing. The most tedious parts to make were Chris’ shirt because I had to draw each square individually and then join the as well, and cutting out the ban-hammer in the bottom right was surprisingly hard. Every single detail of the picture is a reference to the podcast/shows, I still have the plan sketch and reference list knocking about somewhere. I listened to a lot of true crime videos while making it to the point that certain parts remind me of different cases: the brandy now reminds me of Peter Tobin, and the big spiral thing reminds me of Tim McLean (very harrowing case) - sorry that fact is a bit morbid but interesting nonetheless. 

I did post this for a little bit back in July, but I received some rather awful messages so I took it down. Generally, Tom Scott/TechDif fans are lovely but there’s been a few that have taken a disliking to me for some reason so I’m hoping they don’t resurface again. I’m in a better head space now though, so even if they do I’m more equipped to deal with it this time.

Hozier

This was a quick sketch I did in April, I was getting bored with lockdown and decided to summon the bog man himself. There’s not really much more backstory than that, no poor mental health story, no fun twitter story - he’s just here. He’s vibing. I will say I’m particularly proud of his nose, I just think it’s one of the best noses I’ve ever drawn. His hand is okay, but I think that the hands on my Conchúr drawings are better. So there is the Hozi-Boi...

The Corpse Bry

I’ve talked about Bry on here before as well, I love him, he’s excellent, top lad. He is a living Tim Burton character, he’s 6′6, very skinny, and his legs are longer than my will to live. I was watching ‘The Corpse Bride’ a few weeks ago and suddenly had an idea and so ‘The Corpse Bry’ came to be. I gave him a little panda friend because the panda has always been his animal - he used to wear a panda beanie all the time and his album had a panda on the cover. Again, there’s not really a fun story behind this one, I guess it’s somewhat fun because it’s the first art I made after finishing my psychology exams in October so it was nice to actually have the time to draw.

James Bagshaw

Ginger talking about Temples for the third post in a row? it’s more likely than you think! I did this one last week, I’d had a bit of a wobbly day and had group therapy on Teams in the evening and I just couldn’t concentrate on what was going on and I ended up doodling Mr James E. Bagshaw, the glitter crying fraggle man himself. It’s a bare-bones drawing that I could definitely work into more but I’m happy with it as it is to be honest. I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit and add the individual bits of fringe to his jacket, just thinking about doing that makes me tired. Maybe I’ll get around to drawing the whole band at some point...

Alice in “Wonderland”

This one is from about 5(?) years ago, it’s not my typical style and was a “study” based on another artists work (basically i just had to copy this fellas work). I’ll be honest, this one has a sketchy backstory that I won’t go in to because it’s not exactly a nice one, and because of that I also won’t say who the artist is that it’s based on. Despite this, I’m still really proud of this one and I’m so sad that I never got this piece back after I got taken out the class. I’ve considered trying this style again, I’ve even joked about doing another Conchúr drawing in this style as a nod to my progression through GCSE art, eventually leading to Conchúr drawn in ink on music manuscript and stained with neon paint and dyes - it would be quite the project!

So this has been quite a lengthy post so apologies about that but life goes on. Similar to the vinyl post, I’ll probably add to this as and when I make more art. Even if no one is reading these posts, I’m enjoying making them so that’s the main thing. It’s just nice to document things and the feelings that go with them. 💕

~ Love Ginger xx 

29/11/2020

[mischief-and-tea-by-the-sea]

Holiday prompts: 8, 11, 20. FUCK MY SHIT UP

And white the fading forests grow

If anyone had told Kate Pryde years ago that she'd wind up spending a whole holiday season at a quaint little (little being relative) cabin in the New England wilderness instead of the Xavier School or any other large gathering of mutants, she'd have laughed them right out of her face.  If anyone had said she'd be spending that season with Emma and Christian Frost, Bobby Drake, and Loki, she'd have noped herself away and never speak to that person again.  

And yet...

"Kate, explain your lovely little candle tradition again, please?" Loki requested from where he fussed with the 12' Douglas Fir, trying to turn it to the perfect angle for decorating.  He glanced over his shoulder to see the look of surprise on the spritely brunette's face.  "Robert attempted to explain it, but he's so busy making eyes at Christian that I think he missed details."  

Bobby pouted from where he sat at the table with his boyfriend, Kate, and her girlfriend – okay, so they'd only been dating a couple of weeks, but Kate thought she was important enough to bring out to Loki's cabin in the middle of nowhere for the winter holidays – Danni. He reached out with the hand that Christian wasn't holding, and he gave the wooden dreidel a spin.  

"I didn't miss details, Loki.  I just...well, my parents weren't exactly orthodox.  Or even practicing.  Jewish stuff was on a need to be convenient basis with them.  Or when my grandmothers visited, so it wasn't as ingrained in me as it was Kate," Bobby defended himself.  He blushed a little when Christian lifted his hand and kissed it.

Loki walked over, rolling his shoulders until they popped.  His eyes fell on the dreidel as it spun and spun, finally slowing down to land on a character he didn't quite recognize.  Well, he could read it, but he didn't understand its meaning.  It wasn't as if he hadn't encountered many of Earth's cultures over the centuries he was alive and popping down here for visits, but he hadn't blanketed himself in most of them other than the more northern ones that based their religious practices off of what they'd learned about Asgard.  

"Alright, so what does that mean?" Loki asked, nodding toward the toppled dreidel.  "Robert spun it, so what does he...gain or...lose, I'm assuming is the object of the game?"

Kate just smirked a little even as Bobby's pout grew.

"It landed on Shin.  It means to 'put in'.  He has to put pieces of his gelt...his chocolate coin...into the middle. Which means that the three of us have a chance to win it."  

Loki reached out for the shiny gold 'coins' that were stacking up at the center of the table.  His hand hovered over them, however, and he looked from Kate to Bobby.

"May I?" he asked, hearing Frigga's voice in his head to not touch without consent.  When both Bobby and Kate nodded, he plucked one of the coins from the middle and studied it.  "And this is chocolate?  Inside this gold..."  

Emma walked closer and set her hand on Loki's lower back, stroking across his spine with her thumb.  

"It's not real gold, darling.  It's gold foil wrapped around chocolate," she told him with an indulgent smile.  

"Ohhh...that is a charming tradition," Loki remarked. "I do like chocolate, and dressing it up as a treasure when it is one makes it even more fun, doesn't it?" He set the coin back onto the table right where he found it then wrapped an arm around Emma's shoulders, snuggling her against his side.  "And this is a holiday like Yule...or Christmas?"

So they didn't just hover, Loki summoned one of the other chairs close, and he eased into it and tugged Emma into his lap. He didn't miss the looks of surprise that the two X-Men snuck to each other.  

"No, it's...well..."  Bobby looked to Kate for help.  "Sorry, Loki.  I'm just really bad with all the details.  I can make the latkes, I can light the candles, and I can play dreidel and apparently lose all my gelt, but it just wasn't the biggest of traditions in my house," he apologized and squeezed Christian's hand back.

"Sweetheart, I don't think you're offending our host by not being Mr. Trivia," the elder Frost sibling said sweetly and stood up to fill crystalline punch cups full of homemade egg nog for everyone.  

Emma made herself quite comfortable in Loki's lap. The only one missing from their little holiday away from everyone else had assured her that he was on his way, but for the moment, she was content with this motley family she'd somehow managed to accumulate.  Many times throughout her life, each family she'd claimed had built up into a monument she could trust enough to be vulnerable around only to crumble under the weight of betrayal and indifference.  Even now, she worried that letting these few, these happy few into her heart lest it shatter her heart like that diamond bullet.  

"Kate, you grew up in the faith with all the traditions and background," Emma replied in a tone more gentle than the sassy Queen was known for.  

Kate set the dreidel in motion before standing up to take two of the cups from Christian, one of which she offered to Danni before touching a kiss to the top of her girlfriend's blonde crown.  As she reclaimed her chair, the dreidel stopped again and fell over, making Bobby crow a little as it once more fell onto Shin.  She stuck out her tongue at him and tossed a chocolate coin into the middle of the table.

"Yes, I did.  I mean, my family wasn't Orthodox, but we kept the holidays and most Sabbaths...when Dad wasn't working late at the office.  I went to Hebrew school.  I think I learned even more from Erik," she explained and set her cup on the table out of the way.  

"Thank you, Christian," Loki stated as he took one of the cups from Emma's brother.  He took a sip and let the thick eggy liquid sit on his tongue for a moment before he swallowed, tasting the bourbon and nutmeg keenly.  "This is...very strange but delicious," he added. "If you'd rather not explain, I understand.  I'm just curious as your world has so many mystical options to choose from." Then those verdant eyes of his sparkled with the mischief he was known for.  As if tempting her, he added, "I'll show you mine, Kate, if you show me yours."  

"Hey now," Danni pretended to sound jealous and made a dramatic show of slinging her arm around Kate's shoulders. She kissed her cheek then plucked up the dreidel to take her turn.  While the wooden toy spun and spun, she gestured between Loki and Kate.  "By all means, babe, lay it all out on the table. If nothing else, I want to learn about all the shiny pagan holiday stuff from Asgard," the tattoo artist stated before turning her eyes to what her prize or predicament would be.  

Kate met Loki's and Emma's eyes and shrugged a shoulder.  

"Fair enough.  I'll tell you all about it, if nothing more than to impress my lady," she replied and gave her girlfriend a flirty smile.  

The dreidel stopped and fell over.  It landed on a boxy looking letter without a bottom.

"That looks very similar to Uruz," he stated. "The rune of strength," came the codicil.  

"It's hay," Kate said.  "It means that Danni gets to take half the pot.  That is what's at the center of the table.  Go for it, babe" she explained and encouraged her girlfriend.

While Danni collected her portion of the loot and Christian reached out to spin the dreidel, Kate started into the history of the Jewish rebellion against the Greek and Syrian oppressors, but she became more animated when she spoke about the rededication of the second temple in Jerusalem and how there was not enough olive oil to burn all seven candles of the Menorah, but they lit the first anyway.  It was a portion of the history that she and Erik Lensherr discussed most often, especially because she saw the hope out of oppression, and liked to think that she reminded him of that to soothe his cynical heart.  

"And when they thought they only had enough oil for one day, it burned for eight days," Kate finished.  

She took a drink of her egg nog and looked at the others.  The dreidel had been completely forgotten, even though Christian's spin had earned him the other half of the pot, while everyone listened to Kate the Storyteller. Blinking over their rapt attention, Kate cleared her throat.  

"So, now you know about Hanukkah, Loki," she mused, smirking at the way the King of Jotunheim huggled his arms around Emma and buried his face against her shoulder.  

Loki eased Emma from his lap and carefully set his cup onto the table where it wasn't in anyone's way.  He walked around until he stood between Kate and Danni, leaned down, and kissed Kate's cheek.  

"Thank you for explaining," he told her in the tenderest of voices.  

And for good measure, he touched his lips to Danni's cheek.  

"And welcome to this strange little family," Loki replied at her look of confusion before he made his way back to the tree to don its finishing touches.  

Bobby looked down at the center of the table and the dreidel and finally nudged Christian to point out that he'd won the rest of the loot, but without warning, his boyfriend tilted his head and delivered a sound kiss to his lips instead.  Something that Bobby wasn't going to turn down at all.  

"I'd say get a room, you two, but you'd just tell Danni and me to do the same," Kate teased as she looked at her meager winnings, knowing that her girlfriend would likely share a chocolate coin or two.

"Besides, you both have a room here, Katherine," Emma stated as she, too, stood up and finished her egg nog.  She took hers and Loki's cups to the kitchen to set in the sink then walked over to join one half of her significant others at the tree. She set her hands on his back; she'd already picked up on a little tension before she couched his strained shoulder blades.  

"What has you worried, darling?" she asked mind-to-mind so as not to concern the young ones.  

"Oh, you know.  Thinking that Anthony should've been here by now.  Pepper assured me that she wasn't keeping him any longer than necessary.  Otherwise, he would've driven her mad," Loki responded the same and tilted his head when Emma rested her chin on his shoulder. He touched his lips to hers then went back to adding shimmery crystalline ornaments to the branches of the tree.  

Kate and Bobby watched Emma with Loki.  Of course, Christian would recognize a more settled demeanor to his sister than years past, but it was truly the former two mutants who could see more of a difference because they'd lived through her pining over Scott.  While Danni and Christian headed into the kitchen to wash up and to check on the slow-roasting prime rib in the oven that they'd all been smelling since noon, Kate leaned closer to speak to Bobby where they wouldn't be heard.  

"Can you believe that our White Queen is so happy? With Loki?"  

"And Tony Stark," Bobby concluded. "It's weird, Kate, but...I don't know.  Seems right. More right than...all the rest." He shoved a piece of unwrapped gelt into his mouth then offered one of his few left to Kate.  

*

Another hour and a half later, they all stood outside the 'cabin', which was actually more elegant and upscale than the term 'cabin' would imply.  Snow dusted their boots, and they were all wrapped warmly in layers of shirts and coats, scarves wrapped around their necks, and beanies covering their heads and ears.  Kate held onto Danni's hands, and Christian was snuggled with his back to Bobby's chest.

Of course, the cold didn't bother Bobby at all; just as it didn't affect Loki now that he'd come to grudgingly accept the benefits of his Jotun biology underneath the Aesir glamor he continued to wear.  

"What are we looking at again, Loki?" Christian was the one to ask.  "I mean, the snow on the trees is beautiful.  The snow...as far as our eyes can see is lovely, but...we're just standing out here staring at...well, I'm not sure."  

Loki peeked over Emma's head at the others, making sure they all would have the best view of the horizon.  Then his longing gaze fell on the driveway again and the car that had yet to appear.  

"Soon, Christian, you'll see.  It is, after all, the Winter Solstice," Loki explained and nodded to where the sun was just beginning its descent toward the horizon, turning much of the scenery in the distance into silhouette.  "The longest night of the year.  I believe in your Iceland, the word for it is Vetrarsólstöður, which is very close to what it is on Asgard."  In fact, Loki repeated the word for Winter Solstice in the language he'd been raised with, and it sounded nearly identical to the Icelandic term.  "In our tradition, as in many of yours dating before the influence of Christianity, it is the death of the sun through the coldest months of the year," he added.

"I have several friends who are Asatruar...and plenty who are Wiccan of some variety, and that's pretty much how they celebrate it, too," Danni announced then kissed Kate's hands through her gloves.  

Just as the sun dipped down a little further, and Emma leaned closer into Loki's side to comfort his worries, a cherry red SUV of the newest models not even out on the market yet for public purchase, no less stylish than the Audi R8 Spyder of the same color, pulled up to the cabin and stopped just behind all the other cars.  The lights cut out, and the door opened and slammed closed before a figure dressed all in black and red ran over to the group gathered in the snow.  

"I didn't miss it, did I?  Bambi, tell me I didn't miss your thing," Tony asked and nearly pleaded, his voice catching in his throat as the thought of missing his S.O.'s holiday moment tore into him.  "Sorry I wasn't here soon.  I had to stop for the extra food and cake and..."  

"Anthony, shush," Emma scolded gentle and reached out a hand to the newcomer.  

Just as Loki did, and Tony rushed over, giving the others a polite but perfunctory greeted as he set his hands into his lovers' and happily let them fold him into them.  

"You didn't miss it, ástin mín," answered Loki in a hushed tone.  "It's just started."  

And together, the bundles of lovers watched as the humongous fire-orange sun lowered herself to the horizon and below until she was all gone, leaving in her wake a blanket of black sky and twinkling stars and the first quarter moon that smiled on all of them like the Cheshire Cat.

At that moment, while they all held still and silenced in the last moments of the sun and first moments of the longest night of the year, the trees around the cabin appeared to shake away their snow cloaks, and bright white-gold and green fairy lights sparkled into existence. Everyone's gasps of surprise made Loki smile, and the Trickster – this fallen prince of Asgard and forgotten prince of Jotunheim – felt a longing that he'd ached to be fulfilled at last find its way home.  

(Title taken from Loreena McKennitt's "Snow" on To Drive the Cold Winter Away (1987) and Songs for Winter Gardens (1995), and again on A Midwinter Night's Dream (2008).)

Holiday prompt list can be found here.

[emospritelet]

Heatstroke - chapter 11

In which Gold and Lacey’s loved ones try to reason with them

[AO3]

x

Gold watched as Lacey scuttled across the diner behind Miss Lucas, very pointedly not looking at him. Neal glanced at him, then turned, following his line of sight.

“Oh, hey,” he said. “It’s your neighbour. Least we know she has clothes, I guess.”

“That was her?” Emma craned her neck, staring as Lacey disappeared through the door. “Holy crap! Go, Pops!”

“I’m not going anywhere,” said Gold repressively. “And certainly not with Miss French.”

Emma shrugged, turning back and slipping out of her jacket.

“Just saying, she’s very pretty.”

“And as I’ve already mentioned,” said Gold patiently, “she detests me.”

“You don’t know that!” 

“She left the diner as soon as I came in,” he said. “That seems pretty clear-cut to me.”

“Poor thing’s probably just embarrassed,” said Neal.

“Yes, anyone prepared to get naked in someone else’s house is clearly a shrinking violet,” remarked Gold, in a very dry tone.

“She was prepared to get naked in front of you,” said Emma. “She wasn’t prepared for someone else being the audience. It would be like me thinking Neal was in the kitchen and doing my sexy dance, and it turns out to be you. Pretty sure I’d go to bed for a week.”

Gold closed his eyes.

“I - really didn’t need to hear about the sexy dance…”

“Embarrassing, right?” said Neal. “Imagine how she feels.”

“Well, maybe it’ll teach her not to flash people,” said Gold. “I have no sympathy. She was probably trying to embarrass me, anyway.”

“Fine,” sighed Emma. “I’m falling back on my ‘you’re both as bad at flirting as each other’ idea. Why don’t you just ask her out, save the poor girl any more humiliation.”

“Ask her out?” Gold stared at her incredulously. “She’s a bloody disaster! And I very much doubt I’m her type.”

“Why not?”

“Because…” He flapped a hand at the door that Lacey had just hurried through. “Look at her! And - and look at me!”

“You’re both short and stupid,” said Neal. “Match made in heaven.”

“I thought you two weren’t going to tease me about this,” snapped Gold, as Emma laughed.

“I see you’re not denying the fact that she’s hot,” she said. “How do you know what her type is, anyway?”

“I don’t,” he said shortly. “I just know it isn’t me.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“Can we just order dinner?” snapped Gold, snatching up the menu. “I have no desire to spend the evening in a futile discussion about Miss French, thank you.”

“Whatever you say,” said Emma, winking at him. “But you know what I’m like after a couple of drinks, so you’d better brace yourself for some questions later on.”

“What can I say?” Neal shrugged as Gold shot him an exasperated look. “I married an investigator. You’re screwed.”

x

Lacey slumped in a chair at The Rabbit Hole, shrugging out of her jacket and draping it over her bag beneath her feet. She watched Ruby weave her way back from the bar, a drink in each hand.

“Here you go.” Ruby put down the glasses, and took the seat across from her. “Let’s see if we can beat last night’s total. It’s not often I get Friday and Saturday off, so I plan on getting wasted.”

“My usual weekend,” remarked Lacey, and Ruby chuckled. 

“Granny’ll probably wake me up at six tomorrow morning on purpose,” she said. “Apparently the best hangover cure is deep cleaning the grills. According to her.”

Lacey shuddered, taking a drink.

“Think I’ll limit my morning activity to yoga and coffee drinking,” she said. “I have to recover by Monday, I have a breakfast interview with that West woman.”

“Zelena?” Ruby’s mouth twisted in amusement. “You’re interviewing her?”

“Sidney’s idea,” said Lacey. “Something about her charity dance thing. I’m hoping she doesn’t remember that I told her to go screw herself when she cut in line at the Dark Star.”

“Well, she certainly likes her fundraisers,” remarked Ruby. “Maybe focus on that.”

“What can you tell me about her?” asked Lacey, and Ruby shrugged.

“Not much. She moved up here from New York a few years ago. There was some sort of rumour going around that she was hiding from something, but I don’t know if there’s any truth in that. She’s kind of - intense. I get the feeling she doesn’t like the Mayor.”

“Why not?”

“No idea. Just caught her giving Regina the stink-eye a few times.”

“Okay.” Lacey hesitated, stirring her drink again. “Sidney said she flirts with Mr Gold.”

“Oh!” Ruby cackled, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “Boy, does she ever. It’s embarrassing! He used to come in the diner for coffee at seven-thirty each morning, and I’m almost positive the reason he’s moved to eight-thirty is because she kept fawning over him.”

“Ugh.” Lacey shuddered. “So I guess the feeling isn’t mutual.”

“No, but she’s not taking the hint,” said Ruby, still grinning.

Lacey took another drink, enjoying the smooth heat of rum on her tongue, and Ruby rolled her shoulders with a contented sigh, glancing towards the bar.

“Pretty quiet for a Saturday, huh?”

“You mean we managed to get a table?” Lacey looked around. “Guess it’s early. Hadn’t planned to leave Granny’s so quickly.”

“Yeah, what’s up with that?” Ruby stirred her drink with a straw. “I get you being embarrassed about the whole kitchen nakedness thing, but Neal isn’t a jerk. Or a creep. He wouldn’t have said anything to you.”

“It’s not him I’m worried about,” muttered Lacey, stabbing at the ice cubes in her drink.

“You’re still worried about Gold?” Ruby shook her head. “I told you, just act like nothing happened. He’ll be fine.”

“And if he isn’t?”

“Why do you even care?” asked Ruby. “You don’t strike me as the kind of person who gets hung up over stupid mistakes. If you were you wouldn’t come out drinking with me.”

“I don’t know!” said Lacey, feeling frustrated. “I’ve done stuff that’s way worse. I once streaked the length of the football field for a dare. In the middle of the last game of the season. The number of people that have seen me naked is actually pretty high.”

“Well, there you go.” Ruby gestured at her. “So why the hang-up over what Gold thinks?”

“I told you, I don’t know!”

Ruby sat back in her chair, brows lowering a little before shooting upwards as she leaned forwards, mouth open.

“Oh my God!” she whispered. “You like him!”

“What?” Lacey stared at her incredulously. “I do not!”

“Oh you so do!” Ruby’s expression was half delight, half disbelief. “This is amazing! You totally have the hots for Mr Gold!”

“Would you shut up?” Lacey snapped, glancing around anxiously to see if any of the Rabbit Hole regulars had overheard. “I don’t have the hots for the guy! I don’t know anything about him, except that he’s really comfortable with getting his cock out.”

“That’s not a bad thing…”

“Ruby!”

“Okay, fine!” Ruby rolled her eyes. “I won’t say anything else about it.”

“Good.”

“Guess you’re in denial. I can wait.”

“Ruby!”

“Okay, okay!”

Ruby picked up her glass, grinning at Lacey over the rim.

“Any bright ideas about that interview you want to do with him?”

“No,” said Lacey grumpily. “If you can think of any, now’s the time to tell me.”

“You could always do it over a nice romantic dinner…”

“Oh my God…”

Lacey slumped back in her chair as Ruby giggled, snatching up her drink and taking a gulp.

“Alright, I’ll stop teasing,” said Ruby, taking a sip of her own. “How about this? Send Darcy over with an invite. Since he’s so adept at breaking into Gold’s house.”

Lacey had to chuckle at that.

“Wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where he’s been eating,” she admitted. “If so, at least I know Gold likes cats.”

“And you’re interested in this little piece of trivia why, exactly?” enquired Ruby, raising a brow.

Lacey opened her mouth, then closed it again.

“I am not interested in him,” she said flatly. “And - and even if I was it wouldn’t matter.”

“Why not?”

“Because he hates me, that’s why.”

“You don’t know that!”

“I do!” she insisted. “He threw a bloody drink over me!”

“You threw one over him!”

“Yeah, but there were reasons!” said Lacey. “And - and besides, we have nothing in common!”

“You’re both blind idiots,” said Ruby bluntly. “Match made in heaven.”

Lacey sighed in exasperation, and drained her glass.

“Right, I’m getting another round,” she said. “The sooner we’re too drunk to even mention Gold’s name, the better.”

[waitineedaname]

frame the halves and call them a whole

also on ao3

--

“Alright, I’ve got a bad one.”

“Oh, lord.”

“Brace yourself.”

“I’m bracing!” Sasha made a show of gripping the short carpet on her living room floor and Tim grinned, leaning back against her coffee table.

“Would you rather… date a spider with the head of a human, or a human with the head of a spider?”

“Jesus. I see someone has been reading the discredited statements.”

“Guilty.” Tim shrugged cheekily. 

The two of them were sitting on the floor in Sasha’s flat, and she’d long since lost track of what time it was. Ever since they’d been moved to the Archives, they’d made an agreement to go out and do something together once a week. Sometimes that meant getting sloshed and losing at pub trivia, sometimes that meant dragging each other to whatever new film had made it to theaters that week, and sometimes that meant playing sleepover games in the middle of the night, as if they were twelve year olds and not thirty-somethings with 9-to-5’s. Neither of them had the energy to go out drinking and there wasn’t anything good in the theaters that week, so the third option had won out. They’d ended up on the floor when Sasha made an ill-advised comment about not being ticklish and Tim called her bluff. She’d dissolved into hysterical giggles and he’d said something about how being an oldest sibling meant having a sixth sense for someone’s ticklish spots, and then he’d gone very still and quiet. She’d taken his hand and squeezed and initiated the game of would-you-rather they found themselves in now.

“Okay. Let me think about this.” She drummed her fingers on her lips contemplatively. Tim smiled in that fond way he did when he didn’t want to outright laugh at her. “Are the human and spider bits proportional?”

“Ooh, very good question, Sash. Let’s say they’re the normal sizes for your average spiders and humans.”

“So my options are a human head scuttling around on spider legs or a human with an absolutely microscopic spider head?”

“Yep!” Tim said, popping the ‘p.’

“I’m going to go with option A. I mean, if it’s a human head, I could still hold a conversation with it, right? And I don’t think spiders would make good kissers.”

“I think some of our statement givers would disagree with that judgment.”

“Please don’t tell me we have a statement about a human body with a spider head. I don’t think I could take it.”

“Sure do! Statement number 9170108, or something like that. Some freaked out old coot convinced his neighbor’s head was fake and he was keeping a tiny little spider underneath the fake head.”

“Christ. I’m glad Jon didn’t ask me to look into that one. I might have quit on the spot.” Sasha laughed.

“Aw, and then leave me and Martin to deal with Jon? You know how he gets with the spider ones.” 

“Hm, fair. The Archives need someone sensible around.”

“Hey, you’re not the sole voice of reason down there!”

“You’re right. Martin can be fairly practical when he wants.” She failed to bite back her smirk when Tim clutched his chest, feigning pain.

“Oh, how you wound me, Ms. James! Here I was, thinking it was Tim and Sasha versus the world, but you’ve betrayed me for Martin!”

“Is that your proposal for a Scott Pilgrim reboot? Am I Ramona in this scenario?”

“No, we’re both Scott Pilgrim because combined, we can equal the pure sexual energy of one Michael Cera.”

“Eugh! Gross!” She retched and kicked at him, making him laugh. 

“I’m kidding!”

“You better be! Any and all horniness for Michael Cera is banned in this flat!”

“That’s fair.” He caught her foot and shoved it back at her. “Knives and Ramona were both way too good for him, anyway. They should’ve ended up together at the end.”

“That’s the first intelligent thing you’ve said all night.”

“You’re really not pulling any punches tonight, huh?”

“Nope. My turn. Would you rather...” She crossed her arms and stared him down long enough to make him squirm, “get stoned with Jon or Elias?”

Tim groaned so loud she worried her neighbors would complain. “No. Absolutely not. You cannot make me choose that.”

“Hey, you asked about spider people!”

“Yeah, and I’d argue that dealing with my bosses while stoned is worse than a human head skittering around on the walls!”

“Oh, come on. Jon isn’t that bad.”

“Sasha. You were friends with him in Research. I was friends with him in Research. Last time we got drinks, he talked about South American moths for forty minutes. I’m getting a headache just thinking about listening to him while he’s stoned.”

“Maybe it’ll calm him down.”

“Maybe.” Tim pouted, and Sasha did her best not to giggle. “Alright fine. I choose Jon, but only because I cannot imagine Elias getting within eyesight of anything as fun as weed without shriveling up and acting like an affronted Victorian gentleman.”

“Okay, first of all, the Victorians loved drugs, they were high on opiates all the time-"

"Like hell am I doing opiates with Elias."

"Second of all, I may have looked into what Elias was like before he got promoted…” She trailed off and bit back a laugh when Tim's jaw dropped.

“No.” 

“And he was a major stoner.”

“You can’t just say these things. I refuse to accept it.”

“I’m serious!”

“Are we talking about the same Elias? The Elias Bouchard that uses words like grandiloquent and apropos? The Elias Bouchard that gets pissy if you round up on your time card?”

“You know what’s even worse?”

“Please don’t make it worse.”

“I’ve seen him wear those socks with weed patterns on them.”

“I told you not to make it worse.” Tim wailed and covered his face. “I swear, if I saw that, I would gouge my eyes out without hesitation.” Sasha patted his leg sympathetically. 

“Well, good thing you chose Jon, then.”

“I guess so! Fuck’s sake.” He sighed and flopped over onto his side to lie on the floor. Sasha laughed at him goodnaturedly, and then joined him on the floor. She expected him to be thinking of his next would-you-rather prompt, but after a long minute of him silently running his fingers through the carpet, he surprised her by asking, “Do you ever miss Jon?”

“Sorry?” She said, confused. “We see him every day, Tim.”

“No, I…” He huffed, “You know what I mean. Do you miss the Jon we knew in Research?”

“Oh…” Sasha caught onto his drift and fell silent, unsure what to say. Tim was clearly brimming with emotions that he was struggling to get out, so she let him take a minute.

“Not saying he’s a completely different person now, but… I don’t know. We used to get drinks with him. He used to laugh at our jokes. He used to make jokes. Weird, dark jokes, but still jokes, you know? But these days, it’s all business, all the time. I don’t think I’ve seen him smile in months. All… All snappish comments and ‘research this, call this statement giver, stop goofing off during work hours.’ Never mind that just a year ago, he was the one using work hours to show us cat videos because he got distracted during his lunch break.” The side of Tim’s face was smushed into the floor and his one free eye was focused on the whorls he was creating with his fingers in the carpet. Up close as they were, Sasha could see the light scar on his chin that he’d once told her was the result of an ill-advised dare as a child, when his brother had challenged him to see if they could jump off the back deck of their house. She touched it, and he leaned into her hand, eyes distant and sad. “I just…” He spoke softly, “I miss my friend.”

“I miss him too.” Sasha said honestly, though she knew Tim was taking it harder than she was. “You know it’s not your fault, right?”

“I know that.” Tim said, and she believed him. “It’s this stupid job. The stupid Archives. I miss being in Research, where I could make fun of the weirdos in the Archives, but now we’re the weirdos in the Archives.”

“We work at an institute that studies the supernatural. I think we’re the weirdos no matter which department we’re in.” She said, aiming for some levity and feeling relieved when Tim let out a soft huff of laughter.

“Fair. Still. The vibes in there are…”

“Bad.” She finished for him.

“You can say that again.” He finally shifted to look at her again. “If you were the Head Archivist-”

“Tim-” She warned, not wanting to dig up an old sore point. 

“I’m serious. If you were the Archivist, do you think you’d act like this?”

“Would I push you away, you mean.” She said. He shrugged and nodded. “I don’t know. I really don’t, Tim. I’d like to say I wouldn’t, but who knows what kind of pressure it involves. I can be just as intense as Jon when I feel pressured.”

“Yeah, but you’d be way nicer than him.”

“You don’t know that.” Sasha said, firm but gentle. 

“...Guess I don’t.” Tim sighed and shut his eyes. She reached down and squeezed his hand. He squeezed back.

“Next time you’re missing Jon, call me instead, okay? Or Martin, he’d love that.” She ran her thumb over his and gave him a small smile. “You can always count on me.”

His gaze is impossibly soft as he looks up at her, and he seems to almost forget to respond at first. “Yeah.” He finally says. “I can always count on you, Sash.” A cheeky grin spread across his face, breaking the tender moment. “The Pilgrim to my Scott.”

She laughed and let go of his hand to push his shoulder into the leg of the coffee table playfully. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense!” He protested despite his own laughter. “Okay, maybe it doesn’t make sense, but it’s the thought that counts. I’m poetic.”

“No, you’re sleep-deprived.” She sat up enough to eye the microwave from her vantage point in the kitchen. “Oh lord, it’s 2am, no wonder. You always get sappy at 2am.”

“I do not!”

“You do. Big sap.” She patted his cheek playfully and stood. “Want me to get you some extra blankets for the couch?”

“That’d be great.” He hauled himself to his feet, groaning all the way. She snickered.

“You sound like an old man.”

“I’ll have you know, I’m young and spry.” He complained, stretching.

“Mhm.” She rolled her eyes and went to the closet.

“At the prime of my life.”

“And yet you make dad noises getting out of a chair.”

“Hey, lying on the floor isn’t good for your back! Aren’t you older than me anyway?”

“Maybe, but I’m not the one complaining about my back.” She cut off whatever complaint he had prepared by throwing a quilt at him. He caught it and stuck his tongue out at her. She returned the gesture and grabbed another blanket. “Are two blankets good?”

“That’s perfect.” He took the blanket gratefully and settled on the couch. “Should I make breakfast as thanks?”

“You don’t have to,” Sasha immediately said out of politeness, but then added, “But if you want to make pancakes…”

“Understood. I’ll see you bright and early with some pancakes, then.” Tim smiled up at her and made himself comfortable on the couch.

“See you in the morning, Tim.” She turned to walk to her room, but stopped at the doorway when Tim piped up again.

“Sasha?”

“Hm?” She looked back at him and saw his best flirty grin on his face. He winked and blew a kiss at her. More than used to his nonsense, she gasped and pretended to catch the invisible kiss, then promptly put her hand to mouth and pretended to eat the kiss. Tim clutched his heart and fell back onto the couch, trying to act like he wasn’t holding back laughter. “No, you’re so cruel!”

“Good night, Tim.” She said, closing the door behind herself before her poker face could break.

“Good night, Sasha.” She heard through the door, full of fondness and amusement in equal parts. 

Sasha rolled out of bed the next morning to find Tim making pancakes, as promised. They sat at her kitchen table and bickered playfully about movies; Tim listened patiently as she infodumped about the history of science fiction as a genre, and she let him rant for the fiftieth time about Indiana Jones. Tim insisted on washing the dishes like a gentleman, and Sasha insisted on squirting bubbles out of the dish detergent bottle at him. They didn’t speak a word about work or their conversation from the night before, but she hugged him very tightly before he left, as if conveying all the emotion she could through touch alone. From the way he squished his face into her shoulder, it seemed the message came across. 

“I’ll make sure to get you the spider guy’s number.” He said when they finally pulled apart, and she snorted.

“You’re insufferable, you know that?” She said, shoving him out the door.

“So I’ve heard.” He winked and walked backwards down the hall outside her flat. She sighed and waved, a smile on her face as she shut the door.

If he bugged her and Martin more than usual after talking to Jon the following week, she didn’t mention it.