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icycoldninja · 2 months ago

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Can u write the DMC boys in a scenario where they were turned into little kittens because a particularly smart devil managed to cast a magic spell on them to escape?

When they woke up, they’re very confused as to why their clothes are suddenly much bigger than they are and so do their weapons. Only when they look at their reflection in the nearby puddle do they realize they become a little kitten

Now they’re cursing in distress, which, sound more like distressed meows from a sulking kitty

And that caught the reader’s attention as she was searching up and down for them, not knowing what happened to her bf before she stumbled across a cute little cat near the pile of fallen rocks

Reader: What are you doing here little fella? Where’s your mom? Did you happen to come across my boyfriend? Can I bring you home with me?

The boys: ‘HONEY!! IT’S ME’ *distressed meowing being inserted*

Now the reader takes care of the little kitten she brought home, not knowing it’s her bf meanwhile she’s just praying for their well-being and hope that they get home soon (erm…about that) She usually plays with them, buys things for them for enrichment, etc and not only that, she usually rants to the little kitten that even though she do love the boys, she can’t help but feel that there’s a rift between their relationship because of how much time they spend with their job, which makes her feel neglected in a way but she can’t blame them. Meanwhile, the kitten, that happens to be her bf, is actually paying close attention to her words, their heart aches because they unknowingly neglect her by overworking themselves, which leads to little to no time for their relationship

After a few days, they return back to normal. Reader is glad they’re back home but is confused about what happened to her favorite little kitty. That’s when the boys explain that the kitten is them…which leads to a very awkward conversation afterwards, ranging from ‘Are you okay?’s; ‘What happened/?’ to the boys explaining that they heard her confession and both the reader and them promising to work out their relationship

P/S: No joke V looks like an Oriental Short hair cat like…no explanation needed

and Nero looks similar to an Ocicat

For Vergil and Dante. It’s rather complicated but they’re either Russian Blues or Turkish Angoras

Here’s a little illustration of cat V I made…I’m rather proud of it

yeap that's accurate. Cool drawing, btw.

Sparda boys + V x Reader kitten situation headcannons

¤ Dante ¤

-Somehow, a particularly powerful demon managed to cast a spell on Dante and turned him into a cat.

-Dante was super angry about this and started screeching at thin air, convinced he was speaking English words.

-While returning home from work, you came across this very kitten, sitting and meowing in distress. Naturally, you decided to help him.

-Dante was happy to be with you, but he couldn't understand why you didn't understand what he was saying. It took some time, but he eventually concluded that he must have been speaking cat.

-You cared for the cat-Dante for a little while, growing super attached to him in the process. Oh how you loved this fuzzy little ball of fun. You also vented to it, shamelessly dilvuging all your fears and issues with your relationship due to how much time Dante spent away from you. All this information went into the cat's wars, and registered in Dante's brain.

-When the spell eventually wore off, you were very sad, but hey, at least you had your boyfriend back!

-After asking about his strange absence, Dante was reluctant to admit that he was the cat you'd taken care of all along and that he remembers every moment; every word.

-He then apologized and promised to make more time for you, much to your delight. Thankfully, Dante is lighthearted and doesn't judge much or you'd be in for one hell of a lecture.

■ Vergil ■

-Vergil couldn't believe something like this had happened to him. How could he have been foolish enough to get turned into a cat?!

-He was very angry, and naturally began grumbling to himself while trying to head home.

-This was where you found him, meowing sadly like the poor little kitty he was.

-Of course, you brought him home, and began treating him like your adopted child, unaware that this was actually your boyfriend.

-You poured out your soul to this harmless kitten, venting about everything that upset you, including how Vergil's continuous absence saddened you.

-When Vergil returned to normal (which took a few days), he decided not to say anything about it. He simply couldn't bear to tell you he, the MOTIVATED one, had been changed into a cat. Instead, he took more time off for you, surprising you with his sudden change of schedule.

□ Nero □

-Nero didn't really understand how this happened, but hey, it's not all bad!

-While laughing about it to himself, he saw you crossing the street, and decided to meow to get your attention.

-Your attention he got indeed; the next thing he knew, he was being given a bath at home, and then a lot of pets and scratches behind the ears.

-He also got to listen to you talk about your day, in far more detail than you ever told him. It made him kind of jealous. A cat was getting to know more about you than your own boyfriend did.

-When you started talking about how your boyfriend (him) was hardly ever around, it all clicked into place. You felt neglected! Aw shit, Nero really fucked up this time.

-Once he turned back to normal, he set out to change things, even promising out of the blue that he'd put more time into your relationship. When you asked him why, he ended up inadvertently revealing he had been that kitten you so adored all this time.

● V ●

-V was just a few seconds too slow to avoid this demon's beam of magic, and ended up getting turned into a cat.

-Oh, this was so distressing. Griffon and Shadow were no longer around, so V was all alone. When cats are frightened and alone, what do they do? Meow.

-You happened to hear this meowing as you were out and about looking for him, and being the kind soul you are, rushed to help the terrified kitty.

-V was then given a glimpse of how royalty lives. He was pampered, doted on, petted almost every 2 seconds, and waited on hand and foot.

-He also got to hear a lot of your secrets, including how you felt lonely without him around. You missed him much more than he realized, V realized, and made a mental promise to fix that once he was human again.

-You were dismayed to lose your kitten, when that eventually happened, but overjoyed to have your boyfriend back. It was then when you were informed that he never left. V was the cat all along, and from that moment onward, he would make more time for you.

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late-to-the-party-81 · 1 year ago

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Power Play - Chapter 1

AN: And here is Week 5 of HBS and the start of a new multi-chapter fic, this one a Bucky x Reader story, cos I like to give you all some variety. This also strays into Soft!Dark! Territory, cos, you know… Mob! Bucky. Thanks @buckybarnesevents for the inspo.

I’ve chosen the prompt When I first met you... Electricity

Beta’d by @buckysbarne

Dividers by @firefly-graphics and banner by me. Pictures of Seb courtesy of https://sebastian-stan.com/

Master list | Hot Bucky Summer Master list

Summary: Waking up in a mobster’s house the morning after the night before was not how this was supposed to go…

Relationship: Mob! Bucky x Undercover Agent! Reader

WC: 2.3k

CW: Kidnap, Manipulation, Soft!Dark! Bucky, Alcohol consumption, Reader briefly believes Bucky will force her against her will (use of R word once), kissing, Russian Pet names as mangled by Google translate (all variations of sweetheart/darling except Pchelka, which is explained.)

Your head was foggy and your mouth grainy as you opened your eyes, blinking against the harshness of the late morning sun coming through the window.

“Good morning, Pchelka.” Strong fingers gripping your chin and pinching your jaw harshly, brought you out of your stupor, and you looked up at the owner of the gravelly voice.

“Did you sleep well? I slept like a log. I’m going to say that it was because of the connection we made last night.” He chuckled darkly. “Did you feel it, sladkiy? The electricity when I first took your hand in mine? Because I did.” His body shivered at the memory, and you felt a fission of fear travel down your spine.

His eyes were blue - cool and chilling - and you wished you were looking at them under different circumstances. Wished you were here with him under different circumstances, because although he was your enemy, you weren’t blind.

James Buchanan ‘Bucky’ Barnes. Revered head of the New York Mob, and so sinfully handsome it was no wonder that men and women swooned at his feet.

“Are you going to answer me, Pchelka?”

His brow was arched, amusement still playing at his lips. Challenging you to defy him.

“I’m not your ‘little bee’. And I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He let your face go with a snort that told you that he knew you were lying. Because you were. How could you not have felt it, when your slim hand had been completely engulfed by his when you’d been introduced? When he’d raised your hand, gently turning it to press a kiss to the fluttering vein in your wrist.

You should have known then that you were fucked. Should have called the whole thing off and got out of there.

But no. You’d decided that you had to stay - had to pull your big girl pants up, get a hold of yourself and prove to everyone else that you were capable of carrying out this mission. You wondered if your colleagues, your fellow agents, were trying to actually rescue you, or were they laughing at your ineptitude?

Barnes crossed to the far side of the room, a classic dark wood office with floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with leather-bound tomes. Turkish wool rugs covered the wooden floor that matched all of the furniture. He picked up a decanter, poured a hefty measure of amber liquid into a matching tumbler and brought it up to his lips. You didn’t even realise that you were watching him that intently until he smirked.

He walked back over to you, power and grace showing with every move of his body. He sank into a crouch before you, dipped his finger into the alcohol and then painted it over your lips. Instinctually you licked it away, and the whisky burned on your tongue.

“They think you’re dead, by the way.” That got your attention, making you halt with your mouth part open, tongue tip still midway through catching the errant drops he’d applied. His finger returned to the glass, then back to your lips once again as you sat, stock still.

A sudden anger burned through you, and you tried to leap to your feet, but you hadn’t counted on the bonds that tied you to the chair. You struggled against them, hands curling into fists and feet ineffectually kicking as you let out a wail of frustration.

“Tsk tsk.” Barnes admonished you for your reaction as he stood and backed up to rest against the edge of his, no doubt antique, desk. “And here I was thinking you’d be more grateful. If you’d continued in that job you’d have died of boredom, milyy. Just think. I’ve actually saved you.” He took another sip of his drink, observing you and you wanted to shrink under his gaze - you had to look a mess.

Your evening gown, which had looked stunning on you when you’d gotten ready for this op, was now torn and filthy. Your nail polish was chipped, a couple of the nails torn, and no doubt your makeup was smeared across your face. Somewhere along the line, you’d lost your shoes, or had they been taken from you? Admittedly a lot of it was a blur and you’d also been unconscious for some time, only waking up once you were here, tied to this chair, a smirking Barnes looking down on you.

Conversely, he looked so put together it should be illegal. Last night he’d smouldered in a dinner suit, but this morning he exuded power and danger. His shirt was black, with two opened buttons, showing off the silver rope chain around his neck. His suit jacket and pants were also black but covered with a wide pinstriped check. He had a large signet ring on the pinky of his left hand, and silver and black onyx ring on the adjacent ring finger, and it was hard to take your eyes off them. His pants were tight across his crotch, leaving little to the imagination, and he’d finished off his outfit with a pair of patent black boots and a pair of blue-tinted sunglasses, perched on his head. In a nutshell, he was sex personified and you needed to get your head back in the game before you did something you’d regret.

“You’re deluded, you know that?”

“Focused, Pchelka. Not deluded. I didn’t get where I am now without knowing what I wanted and taking it. And I want you. I think you want me too.”

It was your turn to snort, and you didn’t bother to hide your derision. “In your dreams!”

He was back in front of you in an instant, his beringed fingers curling into the leather chair back, his face millimetres from your own.

“I don’t think I imagined how you trembled when you were in my arms, lyubimyy. When I led you around the dance floor and you felt as though you were made to fit in my embrace. I don’t think I imagined how you sighed and leaned against me as I spoke soft words in your ears.”

Heat burned your cheeks and you tried for some bravado.

“All an act, I assure you. As you know, you were my mark.”

His mouth broke into a feral grin and, for the first time, you were worried. Worried about what he had in store for you… and worried that you might like it.

“You keep telling yourself that. I don’t think you’ll be able to maintain that lie when you’re screaming my name later.”

“I didn’t know your name was Rapist.”

He moved one hand from the back of the chair to rest at the base of your throat, fingers applying just enough pressure to remind you who was in control here.

“Don’t insult both of us, Pchelka. When I take you, you will welcome it. Want it. You will be begging me to make you mine. And I think it will happen sooner than you think.” His voice was a hypnotic whisper, and you could feel yourself spiralling, enchanted by the power that he exuded from every pore, so when he kissed you, you were unprepared.

Barnes used the thumb of the hand he had around your neck to tip your chin up. His pink, sinful lips demanded entry efficiently and you were powerless to resist. His mouth explored yours, tongues tangling, and when he teasingly broke the kiss you were horrified to find that you were whimpering.

Your captor just continued to smile, animalistic and condescending.

“Electric, as I said. You betray yourself without even meaning too. It’s a good thing that I’m a nice man, and I’m not torturing you for information. You wouldn’t last five minutes.”

Feelings of anger, shame and embarrassment rose within you. He was right, god damn it. You weren’t cut out for this work. You knew it. He knew it. The people you worked with knew it. Backroom paper shuffling was where you excelled, but there was no way you could’ve turned down the opportunity for undercover work, because success would have meant a level of recognition and respect that you could never have hoped, to gain otherwise, even if the op was a classic, and somewhat demeaning, honey-trap.

You closed your eyes and willed the tears not to fall.

“Please, Mr Barnes. Just let me go. I don’t know anything. Nothing has happened here that can’t be forgotten.”

“Call me Bucky, lyubimaya. And I don’t want to let you go, or forget you. Stay here with me. Leave those narrow-minded idiots you work for. I would treat you with the respect you deserve. And you wouldn’t just be on my arm and in my bed, you would be by my side. You have useful skills that shouldn’t be wasted.”

Your eyes snapped back open and looked at him in surprise and confusion. “What do you mean?”

Barnes - Bucky - ran the knuckles of his left hand down your cheek, the coldness of his rings a balm to your heated flesh. Tattoos peeked out from under his sleeve, twisting and winding down his skin, and onto his fingers. Vines and flowers and thorns. Letters of the Cyrillic alphabet.

“You think that I would bring you here, to the seat of my power if I didn’t already know every… little… thing… about you? I know what your role was before you started this ill-advised op. I know where you lived. I know what cereal you like for breakfast and what your regular coffee order is. You’re always flitting too and fro, concentrating on work. Busy as a bee.”

You weren’t sure why you weren’t shocked, but you asked him all the same. “There’s a mole inside my unit?”

“Of course, Pchelka. There’s always a mole. Always someone who is more than willing to trade loyalty for power and money, or someone who is so desperate that they can be easily persuaded. Desperate people do desperate things, and tell themselves they aren’t really the bad ones, it’s just their circumstances.”

Both his hands had now settled on your waist, the size of them making you feel smaller than you often thought of yourself. Bucky himself was still on his knees, between your bound, spread legs, his torso virtually pressed against your inner thighs. You absently noticed that the knife you’d placed in a thigh holder was missing. No doubt Bucky or his men had found it almost straight away once you’d been rendered unconscious. You hoped it had been the man in front of you - the idea of being touched in such an intimate place by someone other than him was abhorrent. A part of you wondered why you didn’t think that him touching you was also horrifying.

“And which one do you think I am? Disloyal or desperate?” You arched your brow, trying to ignore the way his fingers were branding you through the satin of your dress.

“You, milyy, are a secret third thing. You are an intelligent woman, who makes decisions based on all the information available. It’s not disloyalty if you’ve been betrayed first. It’s also not desperation that would make you join me if I have no pressure point - no sick aunt, no cousin in debt to a loan shark, that sort of thing. If you joined me it would be because you wanted to. Because you saw the merits of such an action.”

You had to admit, his offer was tempting. You hated your job and you hated your co-workers. It was still a ‘boy’s club’ and all the inclusion and diversity training in the world couldn’t counteract the toxic masculinity that the job attracted. You hated that, despite putting up with this job for so many years, you were still living in a crappy apartment with too long a commute to work.. You hated that, despite the fact you never even got around to taking your PTO, you also weren’t making any decent deposits into your savings account. Okay, you weren’t quite living paycheck to paycheck, but you were by no means where you thought you’d be by now.

The long hours also meant little time to socialise, and the friends you’d once had, had all dropped away one by one as you’d cancelled one social engagement after another. This also meant that your love life was, as the song goes, DOA, and after a while, all the toys in the world failed to satisfy. Which also meant that the feeling of soft, expensive wool, encasing a warm, hard body, rubbing against your inner thighs was upsetting your equilibrium quite a bit.

Then, as if he knew exactly what he was doing to you, his face dipped closer again, his breath, tinged with whisky, fanning over you.

“Imagine how it would feel, Pchelka. The power. The pleasure. You’d want for nothing. Every need would be met. Every whim indulged.”

It was your turn to shiver and as your eyes fluttered closed again you heard him chuckle.

“You want it, don’t you. You want me and everything I can give you. It’s okay to want those things. I want things as well. I want you, lyubimyy. I’ve waited a long time for a Queen.”

“You don’t know me…” Your denial was whispered, and even you didn’t believe what you’d said.

“But I do. I know exactly what you need...”

His lips captured yours once more, but this time you didn’t even pretend not to respond. You drank him in as though he would quench your thirst and you only remembered your bonds again when your body strained against them. Your knees managed to dig into his waist though, and you felt him smile against your lips.

His hands slid from your waist, to one wrist and then the other, freeing them. You threw your arms around his neck, not even trying to get away. In any case, your ankles were still bound.

Your fingers brushed over the short hair on the sides and back of his head, the strands prickling your skin. His own hands were now cupping your face as he continued to kiss you, and you knew what was going to happen. You were falling under his spell.

Chapter 2

Tag list: @jobean12-blog @bucky-bucky-bucky-bucky @tuiccim @sidepartskinnyjeans @flordeamatista @bodeckersdiamonddoll @goldylions @luxeavenger @wheezy-stucky @doasyoudesireandlive @chemtrails-club @seitmai @peaches1958 @pono-pura-vida @writing-for-marvel

#hot bucky summer #bucky barnes x fem!reader #bucky barnes x female reader #mob!bucky x reader #mob!bucky #late writes

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mariacallous · 2 months ago

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Eric Adams wanted to see the world, to see it in style. But he wasn’t a rich man, just a former cop and rising politician in a largely ceremonial job, Brooklyn Borough President. Luckily for him, there were a number of benefactors who federal prosecutors say were ready to help him travel in a manner benefitting the position he was angling for: mayor of New York City.

According to a sprawling, 57-page indictment unsealed on Thursday, there was the chairman of a Turkish university; a promoter “whose business includes organizing events to introduce Turkish corporations and businesspeople to politicians, celebrities, and others whose influence may benefit the corporations”; and a senior official in the Turkish government, who, prosecutors say, “later steered illegal contributions and improper gifts to Adams to gain influence with and, eventually, to obtain corrupt official action from Adams.”

Adams in the summer of 2017 went with his son and a staffer to Nice, Istanbul, Sri Lanka, and Beijing, flying business class the whole way. In October, he went again to Istanbul and Beijing, and then on to Nepal. Those tickets were, all told, worth $51,000. But he got it all for free.

The relationship deepened from there, as Adams began to run for mayor in earnest. The Turks allegedly funneled money to his campaign through false entities, or “straw donors.” Accepting such donations is against the law — and Adams allegedly received public matching funds based on these contributions. Adams allegedly returned the favor, in part by pressuring the fire department to allow the opening of a $300 million, 36-story glass tower to house the Turkish consulate, just off of First Avenue and 45th Street, without an inspection and “in time for a high-profile visit by Turkey‘s president” — a diplomatic coup for a man who’s functionally a dictator.

Adams has vigorously denied all of the charges. And at least one Adams ally I spoke with in the immediate aftermath breathed a quarter-sigh of relief — this person was expecting even more, and more serious, charges. “It’s obviously not great but this is weaker than I thought it would be,” the source tells me.

But that exhale assumes that the federal charges against Adams begin and end in this document. They almost certainly do not, with at least four more federal probes reportedly targeting his inner circle and FBI agents searching the mayor’s residence shortly before the indictment was announced. It also assumes that the Turks were the only government to allegedly turn Adams into an unregistered foreign agent. That, too, could prove to be a dangerous supposition — especially given the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn’s pursuit of Chinese influence in New York.

In the last four years, that federal prosecutor’s office alone has charged a dozen separate criminal cases of covert Chinese government interference in U.S. politics, business, and civil society. An aide to New York’s governor was indicted as a foreign agent on Sept. 3. An ex-corrections officer got 20 months for harassing an artist who lampooned Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Two more men were arrested for operating a secret Chinese police station out of the Manhattan headquarters of a group for expats from Fujian province.

The examples spiral out from there.In July, a federal jury in Manhattan convicted Robert Menendez, a Democratic U.S. senator from New Jersey, of taking bribes and acting as Egypt’s agent. In August, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged a hitman with trying to assassinate Donald Trump, allegedly on Iran’s orders. In September, prosecutors in Manhattan revealed an alleged Russian plot to funnel $10 million to MAGA influencers. This is a partial list. A snippet of a list, really. And all of these developments happened in just the last few months, just in and around this one metro area, where a wide array of foreign actors are looking to turn New York into something like Spy City.

The 20 experts, officials, and activists I spoke to couldn’t agree on whether these cases represent a major escalation in this covert activity, an increase in Washington’s willingness to combat it, or both. But they all agreed that such efforts are widespread and being directed by countries across the globe. And while it might be tempting to speculate about what this says about the various foreign policy strategies in foreign capitals, the clear takeaway is that malicious actors around the world see America as pliable, and influence as something that can be bought on the cheap. In other words, the most disturbing part about these covert foreign pressure campaigns is what it says about our politics, our society. About us.

ONE OF THE MORE disturbing foreign influence cases to recently come to light begins 35 years ago, in Beijing. Yan Xiong was a student activist there, jailed for being part of the big Tiananmen Square protests. When he got out, he made his way to America, enlisted in the U.S. Army, and eventually served two tours as a chaplain in Iraq. By 2021, Yan was running for Congress in lower Manhattan. He could tell that something was off. He’d show up to candidate forums, and then wouldn’t be allowed to speak. He’d try to raise money, no dice. There was an old man who wouldn’t stop taking pictures of Yan’s campaign. Yan would go out to his driveway late at night and find a car there, headlights blazing. It was unnerving, but Yan was used to looking over his shoulder.

Nevertheless, Yan was shocked when, in March of 2022, federal prosecutors revealed that he was being targeted by the Chinese government. The goal: to surveil and sabotage the chaplain’s long-shot campaign. “Go deep and dig up something. Right? For example, past incidents of tax evasion… if he used prostitutes in the past… if he had a mistress,” a member of China’s Ministry of State Security allegedly told a private investigator here in the U.S. If the private investigator couldn’t come up with — or make up — any dirt, the P.I. was encouraged to use other means to take Yan out of the race: “In the end, violence would be fine too.”

In the end, Yan’s campaign netted him only 750 votes — not great, but 50 percent more than former Mayor Bill De Blasio received. The P.I. hired by the Chinese government never found any dirt on Yan, or physically attacked him. But the attempt to ratfuck Yan’s campaign continues to leave a wound. Yan’s getting ready to move for the fifth time in two years — in part “for safety, for psychology.” In August, prosecutors unveiled another layer to the alleged plot against him. The old man who’d been taking all those pictures? He was a former Tiananmen Square veteran, too — one who was now accused of working as an unregistered agent for Beijing. To Yan, he’s another “victim” of a regime that’s all-too-willing to extend its reach here. “It’s a tragedy, that’s my opinion,” Yan tells me.

And Yan’s case isn’t the only one in which there seem to be shadowy figures just out of frame. Shujun Wang, another longtime Chinese dissident, was convicted in late August of working as Beijing’s spy. The other day, I called his lawyer to ask about a member of the defense team, a man listed in court documents as a paralegal, who was, in fact, a Florida realtor, recently acquitted of rape. What was he doing there? Who was he? “He is nobody,” the lawyer answered.

These influence campaigns by foreign governments, prosecutors allege, reach all the way down to the lowest levels of state and local government. Take Linda Sun, who started in 2012 as one of the more junior aides out of 200 or so in Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office. The former beauty pageant contestant and Barnard grad, who had come to New York from Nanjing when she was a kid, put in the work as a liaison to the borough of Queens and the state’s Asian American community. She’d help connect constituents to government services, make appearances at Lunar New Year events, write up proclamations, and liaise with foreign consulates. Over the years, she gained leverage. Cuomo’s communications shop — described by one former colleague as “95 percent Caucasian” — relied on Sun to tell them how a state proclamation or press release might resonate in Asian communities.

“She did her job. She went home. Didn’t cause any trouble, never caused any drama. But in hindsight, [there was] a lot of trust in that particular position. Because when you ask her opinion about how something plays, we were asking how it plays in, you know, [the Chinese American neighborhoods of] Sunset Park and Flushing. Not how it played in Beijing,” that source tells me.

By 2015, Sun had a willing ear in Kathy Hochul, the new Lieutenant Governor, who was iced out of Cuomo’s inner circle — and eager to build up her own political constituency. Hochul made sure to attend Chinese American community celebrations and events to promote trade with Beijing. (A Hochul aide notes that she interfaced with all kinds of foreign officials, including a half-dozen such meetings just with the Canadians in 2016.) Sun made sure there were all sorts of meetings Hochul wouldn’t take, wouldn’t even know were offered. For example, prosecutors allege, when officials from the rival government of Taiwan tried to get together with Hochul in D.C. in mid-2016, Sun scheduled talks with Beijing’s representatives instead — and then bragged to the Chinese consulate about what she had done. Hochul began to be quoted favorably and often by Beijing’s official state news agency. Sun started to receive gifts from Chinese officials, prosecutors say: tickets to Carnegie Hall, then a wire transfer for $47,895 for travel expenses.

As Sun’s responsibilities increased, her profile grew. She worked with legislators when Korean American nail salons were revealed to be serially underpaying their workers. She helped steer money to Asian American groups as threats to them rose during the pandemic.

By 2021, Hochul was governor. Sun had a bigger title, deputy chief of staff, and was displaying sharper elbows. “She felt very emboldened with making sure that there was a focus [on] protecting mainland China’s agendas,” State Assemblyman Ron Kim, who previously held Sun’s community liaison job, recalls. “That was universally understood, because when myself and other[s] carried certain resolutions to celebrate U.S.-Taiwan relations, I got calls from the governor’s office letting me know that the Chinese consulate is very upset with you, and they would prefer if I don’t do such resolutions again.” (Sun has pleaded not guilty to charges she acted as an agent of the Chinese government, and her attorneys declined to comment for this story.)

This might seem arcane and sort of small-ball. Who cares if some local pol doesn’t issue a Taiwan proclamation? But it’s part of a strategy, says Bethany Allen, author of Beijing Rules, echoing the sentiments of several U.S. officials. “If this is done extensively, consistently, quietly across many states, many state capitals, many state governments, local governments,” Allen tells me, “it can shape the debate. Have a strong downward pressure on the things that China wants to quiet.”

And it’s a strategy that Beijing is willing to pursue over the long haul — to influence people at the lowest levels of local government, and let those folks rise over time. Back when she was a reporter, Allen broke the news of a suspected Chinese spy in California who cultivated relationships from the political to the romantic with city councilmen, small-town mayors, and at least one Congressman. The spy’s true motivations weren’t uncovered until that Congressman, Rep. Eric Swalwell, was on the verge of joining the House Intelligence Committee and gaining access to some of the nation’s better-protected national secrets. (Swalwell denied any romantic relationship, and a House ethics panel decided to take no action against him after a two-year investigation.)

Linda Sun’s case never reached that kind of crisis point. But her value to Chinese officials was clear. The wire transfers were in the millions by 2021. The Chinese Consul General in New York — a sharp, genial diplomat named Huang Ping — sent Nanjing-style salted ducks to Sun’s parents, a half-dozen at a time. According to one source, she started showing up with a fresh tan and a new, high-end handbag to every community event. “People were definitely talking about how she went from rags to riches overnight,” Kim tells me. “Her parents lived in a one-bedroom apartment… She was trying to get a mortgage to buy a condo in Flushing, and she could barely get that. But all of a sudden, now she’s living in a mansion.” And in a sweet vacation home, too. Around the same time Sun and her husband bought a $3.6 million home in Manhasset, New York, they also, according to prosecutors, purchased “an ocean-view condominium on the 47th floor of a high rise building in Honolulu, Hawaii, currently valued at approximately $2.1 million.”

SUN AND ADAMS ARE the first local officials to be charged with acting as agents of a foreign power. They probably won’t be the last, or even the last in New York. (“What you saw with the governor in New York, that’s going to be scratching an itch that tickles in a lot of different places,” Bill Evanina, who spent seven years as the federal government’s top counterintelligence official, tells me.) The place has long attracted spies and clandestine power brokers, and not just because of the UN, or Wall Street, or all the corporate headquarters. America’s best city is, not coincidentally, also its most diverse; more than three million of the eight million-plus people living here are foreign-born. Those diasporas are often of intense interest to the countries from which they spring, especially if the countries in question are ruled by authoritarians. The revolutionary movements that took down the Czar, the Chinese Emperor, and the Shah were all incubated overseas.

These diasporas also can wield outsized power in local politics, too. New York’s election laws are so labyrinthine and complex, with elections held on off-years and on strange dates, that they’re practically designed to keep people from voting. (Ron Kim has 115,000 people living in his district in Queens, for example; fewer than 3,200 of them voted in his contested primary race, which is the only race that matters in a one-party town.) So if any one group gets behind a single candidate, or gins up turnout, or dumps in a lot of money, it can swing an election. Kim faced off against a primary opponent backed by a well-known local community leader who is openly supportive of the Chinese Communist Party. They each poured more than $600,000 into that tiny-turnout primary race. “I felt this was a clear effort to get a political seat for a person who is loyal to their agenda,” Kim says. “This isn’t about lawmaking in [the state capital of] Albany, but it’s about being the power broker of Flushing that will give them credibility and access.”

This is all happening in a place where the politics are — there’s no other way to put this — corrupt as fuck. The five federal investigations reportedly swirling around Adams and his closest associates involve everyone from the police commissioner to the schools chancellor to his top fundraisers to a pair of deputy mayors. Adams’ immediate predecessor, de Blasio, dodged indictment for violating campaign finance laws, but not by much. After leaving office, former mayor Rudy Giuliani took money from a North Korean gangster and then worked with a man he admitted was likely a Russian spy. Long Island’s George Santos was expelled from Congress after less than a year; he recently pleaded guilty to identity theft and wire fraud. One of Santos’ bigger Republican critics on the Island, Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, was just exposed for giving Congressional jobs to his lover and his fiancée’s daughter.

You get the idea: plenty of politicians with their hands out; elections practically designed to be swayed by small groups; those small groups susceptible to foreign infiltration and pressure, because they’ve all got family back home. “New York would be at the top of the list in terms of foreign governments, foreign regimes wanting to target,” says Casey Michel, author of the newly published Foreign Agents. “Especially New York City. I don’t think it’s any surprise that the major investigation into a municipal authority as a target of potential foreign influence is Adams.”

So let’s talk about the mayor. Adams has been ducking corruption allegations — and playing diaspora politics — for more than 15 years. According to the New York Times, a grand jury in July issued subpoenas related to Adams’ ties to six different countries: China, Qatar, South Korea, Israel, Uzbekistan, and, of course, Turkey. In his role as Brooklyn Borough President, Adams attended almost 80 events connected with Turkey, and at least 50 more celebrating China. Some of those events actually upset his Turkish government contacts, according to the indictment. In 2016, a Turkish official told Adams that a community center he used to visit “was affiliated with a Turkish political movement that was hostile to Turkey’s government… If Adams wished to continue receiving support from the Turkish government, Adams could no longer associate with the community center. Adams acquiesced.”

Adams also met multiple times with Huang Ping, the Chinese Consul General who prosecutors later identified as Linda Sun’s handler. And the politicking seemingly continued overseas. Adams took 13 separate trips to Turkey and China, which is a lot of travel to those two specific nations, considering borough presidents don’t really have foreign policy roles. “It’s totally appropriate,” he said after the first of the trips to China, in 2014. “I’m not going to be a MetroCard borough president — I’m going to be a passport borough president.”

City Hall won’t say what all of the trips were for. (They didn’t respond to requests to comment for this story.) The alleged purpose of the Turkey trips, at least, is now less murky after the indictment’s release.When it comes to the others, here’s what we can say for sure: We know that one of Adams’ China travel partners, his longtime Asian community liaison Winnie Greco, had her former campaign office and several of her homes raided by the FBI. We know that Greco and another Adams crony met separately in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province, with the man later indicted for operating that secret Chinese police station out of a Fujianese expat society in Manhattan. We know that Adams and Greco appeared onstage at a gala for that charity — the American Changle Association, named for a famed neighborhood in Fuzhou — shortly before it was exposed as a secret police front bythe New York Post. We know Adams was with Association bigwig Lu Jianwang days before Lu was arrested in the secret police affair. We know, thanks to local news outlet The City, that 121 workers at the New World Mall in Queens, the site of Greco’s 2021 campaign office, made donations to Adams of precisely $249 each, one buck below the limit for eight-times public matching funds. Several donors said they were reimbursed in cash, or had no idea they had been listed as contributors at all. This has all the hallmarks of illegal straw donations, as Adams’ team surely knows.One Chinese billionaire who gave money to Adams (and hosted his 60th birthday party) recently pleaded guilty to such charges.

MAYBE ALL OF THESE connections were on the up-and-up. Maybe Adams’ trips to China and extremely odd donations from his campaign office in Flushing were no more nefarious than the 70-plus flag-raising ceremonies for various countries he’s attended in his two-and-a-half years as mayor. Maybe it’s an accident of scheduling that Huang Ping, the Chinese Consul General, asked him to blow off a banquet with the Taiwanese president and Adams wound up doing just that. Adams may have rubbed elbows with people who were later indicted as foreign agents in groups like the American Changle Association, where voters gather for an old-country meal or speak in their parents’ dialect. There’s hardly an elected official in New York who didn’t make such a visit, or get his picture taken at some point with Huang. Of course they did. Huang was a gregarious, effective, charming diplomat. He may be accused of secretly handling alleged agents like Linda Sun, but chatting up local politicians was most definitely Huang’s job.

You don’t have to be some kind of simp for Beijing to find this kind of criminalization of foreign influence a little hypocritical, given all the governments the U.S. helped overthrow in the past century. You’re not necessarily an abolish-the-police type if you think the feds have gone overboard in their hunt for Chinese agents. “We’re not China. We’re supposedly a free country, and the government should take more care in prosecuting and, in turn, persecuting people,” John Liu, a state senator from Queens, tells me. This is personal for him. While he was gearing up to run for mayor more than a decade ago, the FBI ran a sting on him and his donors, part of a straw-donor probe he says was oh-so-subtly named “Operation Red Money.” They did find some straw donors, and a top aide did go to jail. But Liu himself was only fined $26,000 — proof, he says, that the whole investigation was overheated. Nor is it a one-off. Liu points to cases like Baimadajie Angwang, the cop accused of spying for China, only to have the charges dropped without explanation. By that time, the NYPD had fired him. “You know what? It wouldn’t be so bad if the government pursued these cases, made them as visible as they intentionally make them, and actually had a pretty good record of success,” Liu says. “It bothers me that there’s no accountability of any kind. You know, the government does this, and it doesn’t matter how many lives are ruined [or] the impact on the wider community.”

There’s no question there’s been overreach, including horror stories of Chinese Americans interrogated by the FBI, seemingly for no reason at all. “We should absolutely oppose any effort by any foreign government to undermine our American society, our way of life, our democracy,” says Rep. Grace Meng, who hired Linda Sun when she was in the State Assembly and now represents a large part of Queens in the U.S. Congress. But “there’s a lot of fear right now in the Asian American community,” she adds. “Every day, young, professional Asian Americans are really scared that these harmful stereotypes are being fueled… [by] questions that are asked only of us.”

As overzealous as some prosecutors may have been, though, and as ugly our recent turn toward anti-China and anti-immigrant politics, there are too many of these foreign influence cases, tied to so many different outside actors, to brush off. A former Republican Congressman is under indictment for covertly working for Venezuela’s dictator. A major Trump fundraiser pleaded guilty to doing the same on behalf of the Chinese and Malaysian government officials, in a case so weird and sprawling, a member of the Fugees wound up with a foreign agent conviction as part of it. Things are so bad, the guy that’s supposed to be leading the investigations into these cases in New York — the head of the state’s FBI counterintelligence division — was himself sentenced earlier this year to federal prison for doing the bidding of a sanctioned Russian oligarch. The MAGA crowd can whine all they want about the #resistance obsession with “Russia, Russia, Russia.” Folks on the political left can roll their eyes at what feels like a Trumpy obsession with Chinese influence, or another red scare. It takes a kind of willful blindness not to see a pattern here. Liu, for one, called on Adams to resign after prosecutors unveiled their indictment which showed just how deep the mayor’s ties to Turkey went.

“This isn’t a Republican problem or a Democratic problem — it’s completely bipartisan,“ Michel tells me. “And as we’re now seeing, it’s not just one level of government these regimes are targeting. It’s everyone.”

For half a century, the American government hardly bothered to enforce the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires influence-peddlers to disclose their overseas clients, at least. That changed after the 2016 election, when Trump recruited the O.G. of scummy foreign lobbying, Paul Manafort, to run his campaign and publicly begged for a dictator’s help to win. The Department of Justice went on to prosecute Manafort and so many others — from the Russian troll farm to the white-shoe law firm Skadden, Arps — for breaking that law. Brandon van Grack, who oversaw many of those prosecutions as head of the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act unit, says the apparent surge in cases we’re seeing, eight years later, is a result of that 2016 wake-up call. He credits “greater resources and tools to identify and disrupt those influence operations than an increase in the operations themselves,” adding, “Foreign influence is not novel.”

It’s not exactly dying down, either. A few years ago, you might have thought that prosecuting folks like Manafort would at least serve as a warning shot. The sheer range of regimes trying to influence the 2024 election paints a different picture, and I don’t just mean the fact that Manafort is a free man and doing Fox News hits from the Republican convention. “I would say that a couple things are true in this specific situation. Yes, there are more investigations, because there are allowed to be. And I think our adversaries are more brazen than they have ever been,” Evanina, the former counterintelligence chief, tells me.

There’s a good argument that the number of prosecutions isn’t even the right metric to gauge foreign influence. Registering as an overseas lobbyist — dodging a FARA charge — that’s the easy part. More than 1,000 foreign principals have done so since 2016, spending more than $5.5 billion to whisper in lawmakers’ ears. At least 90 former members of Congress have registered since 2000 to push another government’s agenda. Scores of U.S. generals and admirals have taken jobs with foreign governments in the last decade, with Saudi Arabia alone hiring 15 retired flag officers. Biden talked in 2020 about banning former officials from lobbying for foreign powers. It was just talk.

The Supreme Court in recent years has radically raised the bar on bribery cases, and functionally removed any restrictions on campaign spending. That’s allowed Americans closely aligned with foreign governments to make enormous investments in shaping U.S. policy. The best known of these are the lobbyists pushing the agenda of Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who gave over a million dollars to the now-convicted Sen. Menendez, even after he was indicted, and spent millions more on successful primary campaigns to knock out two of Israel’s few critics in Congress. None of this violates any laws. But maybe that’s beside the point. The real foreign influence scandal, Michel tells me, is how much of it is “perfectly legal.”

If you’re mad at outside actors for exploiting America’s system, don’t be. The United States is still the world’s biggest power; of course every other nation is going to try to pull us in their direction. Try directing your anger a little closer to home. All of these politicians on the take, we voted for them. The bullshit China or Iran pumps out on TikTok? It’s downright factual compared to the nonsense we Americans push one another. And if you think a guy like Eric Adams is an outlier with his, shall we say, open-minded approach to campaign finance and outside influences, allow me to introduce you to the Republican nominee for president and his inner circle. The Congress we elected has bottled up nearly every attempt to close these foreign-funding loopholes. The campaigns we supported went along with the Supreme Court’s decision to make elections a feeding frenzy. This is a choice. Collectively, we made it.

IN THE HOURS AFTER Linda Sun and her husband were charged as Chinese agents on Sept. 3, Gov. Hochul urged the U.S. government to expel Sun’s alleged handler, Consul General Huang Ping, and a State Department spokesperson claimed that Huang had “rotated out of the position.” Yet on the night of Sept. 5, at Manhattan’s storied Plaza Hotel, Huang Ping appeared onstage at the China Institute’s $2,500-per-ticket Blue Cloud gala, looking rather dapper in a well-tailored tuxedo. Pictures were posted to the consulate’s website two days later. “Consul General Huang Ping is performing his duties as normal,” read a statement sent out to reporters.

A few hours after he was indicted, Huang’s longtime interlocutor Eric Adams promised to do much the same. “My attorneys will take care of the case, so I can take care of this city,” he said. “My day to day will not change.”

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zvaigzdelasas · 1 year ago

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Article published 2021

The U.S. has a habit of ignoring its own laws when it comes to arming and supporting authoritarian regimes. The latest example of this came last month when the Biden administration waived Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act, which was created to block U.S. military assistance to Azerbaijan during and after the first Karabakh war.

One administration after another has issued this waiver since it became available in 2002 in the name of counter-terrorism cooperation, but events in the last year have made the usual rubber-stamping of supplying weapons to the Aliyev regime much more controversial, and rightly so. Azerbaijan’s aggressive military campaign in Karabakh last year was exactly what the original cutoff in military assistance was intended to discourage, and the assault on Karabakh proved that Baku’s commitment to diplomacy was a lie. Issuing the waiver in the wake of the second Karabakh war is indefensible. Doing so shortly after recognizing the Armenian genocide is a slap in the face to the Armenian-American community, and it makes a mockery of the Biden administration’s pretensions to making human rights central to its foreign policy. Azerbaijan is just one of many client governments whose war crimes the U.S. has ignored in order to keep military assistance flowing. Enabling further aggression against the people of Karabakh and Armenia is a particularly obnoxious and shameful example of how our government’s partnerships with corrupt authoritarian states puts innocent lives in jeopardy. Within weeks of the administration’s decision, there were already reports of new incursions by Azerbaijan’s forces into Armenian territory.[,,,] Specifically, members of Congress should insist that Secretary Blinken explain why he signed off on this when the government of Azerbaijan is putting its war crimes on display in its appalling Military Trophies Park, complete with “ghoulish displays of helmets and caricatured mannequins of Armenian soldiers.” The dehumanization of Armenians has become a major feature of Azerbaijan’s official ideology, and by supporting Azerbaijan’s government the U.S. is giving its stamp of approval to a regime that both denies the Armenian genocide and threatens to commit another one.[...] It is no accident that the amendment that created the waiver for Section 907 was passed just a few months after the September 11 attacks. Our government’s “war on terror” has spawned a host of destructive policies, and establishing a closer security relationship with the dictatorship in Azerbaijan in the name of combating terrorism was one of them.[...] There are some hard-liners in Washington that were cheerleading for Azerbaijan during its aggressive war in Karabakh, and they are no doubt pleased with the Biden administration’s decision to ignore Azerbaijan’s many crimes. According to the hard-liners’ view, backing Azerbaijan is not only tolerable but necessary to counter Russian and Iranian influence in the region.[...]

Presented with the opportunity to undo Trump’s decision to recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, Biden has demurred, and it now appears that no reversal of that decision will be forthcoming. Given the chance to block an unjustifiable $23 billion sale of advanced weapons to the United Arab Emirates, Biden has let it go ahead. Issuing the waiver for military assistance to Azerbaijan makes the same kind of mistake. If Biden and Blinken want to make good on their rhetoric about emphasizing the importance of human rights in their foreign policy, they should begin by cutting off all military assistance to Azerbaijan. U.S. and Turkish support for Azerbaijan have served to create a menace in the Caucasus. The least that the U.S. can do is to stop aiding that menace as it threatens the stability of the region.

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itstokkii · 4 months ago

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aph kazakhstan hcs

kazakhstan!!! my starboy

- kazakhstan is the baby of the gang 👶 he looks like he's in his early 20s, a charming young man! he and his older sister uzbekistan were initially together under the uzbek khanate before breaking off and forming the kazakh khanate. to some extent, uzbekistan's still salty about it to this day...

- he may be the baby but he's the breadwinner of the family!! he has the highest gdp among all of central asia, and his other siblings are floored whenever they visit astana and almaty. he's a hustler!

- he tries to get his siblings to be cooperative and stop fighting all the time(specifically uzbekistan tajikistan and kyrgyzstan) through ~regional unity.~ the results? there certainly were some...

- kyrgyzstan and uzbekistan dote on him a lot while also being jealous of his massive economic gains lol

- kazakhstan is asexual. I see him immensely valuing his small group of friends and family, but I don't see him pursuing any relationships in an intimate manner. he may still have fleeting crushes from time to time, and so may be alloromantic to some extent.

- he gets along well with kyrgyzstan, his older brother, in terms of language! they both belong to the qipchak language family, and having both been nomadic for longer have restored a lot of nomadic tradition than the couch potato over there(uzbekistan).

- the qipchak languages have less persian influence than qarluk, so this means kazakhstan and kyrgyzstan(as well as karakalpakstan) don't have many issues speaking in their language towards turkey. they both know turkish fluently anyway.

- when they speak to tajikistan they revert to russian or have uzbekistan translate.

- he's also very close with uzbekistan, as mentioned before with them both being under the same roof once. kazakhs are quick to support uzbeks in times of need or celebration, like diyora keldiyorova's gold medal winning in judo(the first uzbek woman to win in judo)! kazakhstan admires how hard working, mannered and thoughtful she is towards the people she loves and cares about, and even towards strangers as well! he also loves her cooking, and in the meantime uzbeks admire how outspoken kazakhs are, and how quick they are to fight against injustice. uzbekistan wishes she could be as outspoken as her brothers too, to forcefully enact change instead of waiting in fear...

- also she loves her lil bro's chocolate and candy!! bayan sulu my beloved...

- @ any kazakhs who see this...I KNOW there was a chocolate with lemon filling I just don't remember the brand name...PLEASE DM me if you know 😭😭

- uzbekistan also has the 2nd biggest gdp of central asia. the 2 hustle together to be the faces of central asia!

- whenever he tries taking her out to skate she clings onto him for dear life while screaming. he tries taking her on hikes too because "the mountain air is good for your health" but she INSISTS a lady shouldn't exert herself too much...once you become sedentary it's over for you ig 💀

- mongolia is closest to kazakhstan out of all the central asians! they're neighbors, and in bayan ulgii, there's a sizeable community of kazakhs that have lived there since fleeing the russian occupation. they've kept all their traditions intact, and kazakhstan pays them a visit from time to time! he's grateful to mongolia for letting them seek refuge and keep their culture intact after all these years.

- kazakhstan was a successor to the golden horde, and a lot of kazakhs can trace their ancestry to then! hence, mongolia is something like.. a grandpa...?

- mongolia takes the time to tease kazakhstan like "hey isn't it past your bedtime little man?" just to see kazakhstan go all red in the face. mongolia also checks on him from time to time to see if he's doing alright. it's kind of sweet tbh 🥺

- this one time in a horseback archery competition france came in FIRST??? while mongolia and kazakhstan came in 2nd and 3rd. they probably sobbed abt it and drank together 😭

- now all the central asians use some russian words when speaking, but kazakhstan does this the most. he's trying(successfully) to phase russian out when he could use a kazakh word in place of it.

- kazakhstan has kept the tradition of falcon taming and hunting! he handles falcons really well, and will sometimes be on the tv as he walks the audience through handling a falcon. kazakhstan also rides horses the best! there's a lot of mountainous regions an hour or two's drive away from almaty where you can ride horses and admire the freshwater streams and the vibrant green grass...what a dream..

- kyrgyzstan and kazakhstan were also one of the founding members of the turkic union! for the first few years it must have been hard to listen to turkey yap about turan...

- kazakhstan is also the coldest central asian country. the weather can hit as low -30 to -35 degrees! before washing machines, he'd hang his laundry outside and check on them the next morning to try and fit a stiff scarf through the doorway. when roads freeze over, he pulls out his skates and simply skates to work. he'd open his door in the morning after a snowy night only for the snow to have taken the shape of the door.

- uzbekistan may be the best cook as declared by her siblings, but kazakhstan is a close second and this is because of his beshbarmaq and baursak. it is such a banger and hits EVERY TIME. uzbekistan loves his cooking ❤️

- also makes a mean kazy! bro is NOT lazy with it. he doesn't buy from the store! not when he could make his own.

- he also makes qurut as well. qurut is like dried yogurt in the shape of a ball, and you suck on it because mm salty. thing is, uzbekistan's qurut is much harder and therefore takes a longer time to go through compared to kazakhstan's! his is softer and more creamy, less salty, and it gets my vote <3

- he loves playing hockey, skating, riding horses, hiking in his mountainous ranges...he's very active! he also likes going to concerts and raves, and coming home late lol

- his interest in space was kickstarted by uzbekistan, who took him to see ulughbek's observatory. then years later a major space operations hub was placed in baikonur during the ussr period, and since then he's developed his own space program and he loves keeping up to date with space related news! just say the word and he'll explain it to you!

- due to constantly being tormented by russia, and for a while having to bend to his needs(a long while...) he does have unhealthy coping mechanisms. he picked up drinking and smoking during the ussr and still does it, though his siblings are trying to get him to cut down on it.

- he, like all the central asians, absolutely DESPISES russia. he can just conceal his feelings better than his siblings when he makes economic deals. this was especially so in the early aughts to 2010s as he insisted it was "all for my economy's sake..."

- when he's working on something late at night, he likes going to CU to grab a bite to eat! korea's been to his CU a few times when he's showed her around and she noticed how there were some products that weren't in korea themselves! CU regularly sells binggrae vanilla flavored milk, though in korea it's not on the shelves at all!

- this one time in 2022 the power shut off in uzbekistan kazakhstan and kyrgyzstan, and all the governments blamed each other lol. talk about the spiderman meme

- also in my opinion...kazakhstan has the best drip lol. both in terms of tradition and modern fits I see people wear in the streets of astana

#hetalia #aph kazakhstan #hws kazakhstan #tokki writes #kazakhstan!! i love you!!#i should draw him also...#a lot of these hcs were based after my uzbek-kazakh mom and her family!!#most of these were uzbkazkyrgyz relationship hcs because kazakhstan has stronger bonds with them over tajik and turkmen..😭

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misfitwashere · 8 months ago

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Putin's paranoia (updated)

Terror, delusion, and self-destruction

Timothy Snyder

Mar 29, 2024

A week ago, four men associated with Islamic State attacked civilians in a concert venue near Moscow known as Crocus City Hall. Islamic State (IS-K) claimed responsibility for the horrifying mass murder, and released videos recorded the terrorists' perspective (don't watch them). Russia has since apprehended four men, who seem to be the perpetrators.

Russia has been engaged with Islamic State for some time. Russia has been bombing Syria since 2015. Russia and Islamic State compete throughout Africa for resources. All four of the accused are Tajiks, a people subjected to discrimination inside Russia.

These are the facts, subject to further verification and interpretation -- and inherently unpredictable, as facts always are. What was entirely predictable (and predicted) was that, regardless of the facts, Putin and his propagandists would place the blame for the attack on Ukraine and the United States. On the internet (and in the Russian and Serbian press) this version is present.

It is not hard to see why. If Ukraine and the West are guilty, then Russian security services do not have to explain why they failed to stop Islamic terrorists from killing so many Russians, because Islamic terror vanishes from the story. And if Ukrainians are to blame, then this would seem to justify the war that Russia is prosecuting against Ukraine.

Aftermath of Russian ballistic missile strike on Kyiv, 25 March

Russian officials make a highly circumstantial argument: the terrorists' car was stopped near Bryansk, which is in western Russia, and so vaguely near Ukraine, which means that the four Tajiks in a Renault were intending to cross the Ukrainian border, which means that they had Ukrainian backers, which means that it was a Ukrainian operation, which means that the Americans were behind it. The reasoning here leaves something to be desired. And the series of associations rests on no factual basis.

The suspects were in a car near the west Russian city of Bryansk. This much seems to be true. The first version of the story was that they were headed for Belarus, which would make more sense, given the route. Anyone with local knowledge would make a still more telling point. Because of the special relationship between Russia and Belarus, the Russian-Belarusian border is porous. Once inside Belarus, it is relatively easy to pass into the European Union, because the Belarusian regime enables human smuggling into Lithuania and Poland. Four Tajiks in a Renault would have been, in this sense, welcome in Belarus. They would have had a decent chance to pay a smuggler to get them into the Schengen zone and thereby escape.

The idea that the suspects were headed for Ukraine seems to be entirely invented and is extremely implausible. As of this writing, none of the suspects seem to have said anything about Ukraine, despite the fact that they have been tortured, presumably with such a confession in mind. And the notion of a Ukrainian escape route makes no sense. The Russian-Ukrainian border is a place where Russian security forces are concentrated. It is a site of combat. It is the last place terrorists would want to go. Four Tajiks in a Renault would have needed some very, very high-level Russian protection to get anywhere near the Russian-Ukrainian border.

Russian propagandists have told the population that it was not Islamic State but Ukraine who is to blame. ISIS is just a "fake." The propagandists need not give reasons, and don't. In the press, one finds the wildest chains of association. Britain is to blame for the attack (goes one claim) because one of the suspects was once in Turkey and the Turkish president knows the head of British foreign intelligence.

Only Putin is permitted to set the theoretical tone for the argument for Ukrainian involvement, and yesterday (25 March) he gave that a shot. His version went like this: Ukrainians are Nazis; Nazis do bad things; a bad thing happened; therefore Ukraine is to blame. One does not have to be a logician to find the holes. They are disturbingly large. While it is true that Nazis do bad things, it does not follow that all bad things are done by Nazis.

And the factual premise is empirically false. One should not have to say this at this point of the war, but the Ukrainians are not the Nazis in this conflict. The Ukrainian far right has never done well in elections, and is far less prominent than in any European state you care to name, let alone the United States. Ukrainians have an active civil society, a vibrant press, multiple political parties, and freedom of speech. Ukraine's president won a free and fair election. He is also, incidentally, Jewish. The Ukrainian minister of defense, for that matter, is a Muslim. The commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces was born in Russia, where his parents still reside. This kind of political and social pluralism is unusual by any standards.

A Kyivan looks out the window after the 25 March Russian missile strike.

In Putin's version of the Russian language, of course, the word "Nazi" has no meaning beyond "what I wish for you to consider as the enemy." If we are going to pursue the question of who the fascists in this war are, however, it is worth knowing that Russia has none of what Ukraine has. Putin has never won anything like a plausible election to any office. His regime has crushed civil society, political parties (except his own), and the press. Putin runs a single-party state where the only principle of the single party is his personal status as its Leader. He rules at home by terror and prosecutes a genocidal war abroad, in Ukraine, with the help of Russian soldiers who ever more often openly identify as fascists. Putin himself espouses what is unmistakably a fascist ideology.

Calling the Ukrainians the Nazis while being the Nazis is not itself a problem within this system, since being the fascists involves living within a big lie. The challenge to such a system is that reality sometimes intervenes in a way that is hard to control -- as when Islamic State carries out an act of terror. This brings in a whole set of political and social realities that are usually suppressed in Russian propaganda: the bombing of Syrian civilians since 2015; the bloody resource wars in Africa; the oppression of Tajiks.

In Russia's system, it is not simply political convenience that adds the big lie of Ukrainian jihadism to the big lie of Ukrainian Nazism. It is the deeper need to make reality, or at least psychological reality, conform to the story told by the state. In the psychological project, more killing is necessary. Russians are engaged in the project of killing Ukrainians. Russians in Ukraine torture Ukrainians for being loyal to Ukraine, deport Ukrainian children for assimilation to Russia, and persecute and execute local elites who they regard as threats. Russians fire some combination of shells, glide bombs, drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles at Ukraine every single day, for no reason that communicates with reality. Yesterday, for example, multiple Ukrainian cities were struck by fifty-seven Russian missiles and drones.

It is the killing itself that makes the lies true, in a psychological sense. Russian soldiers who have killed Ukrainians believe they are fighting "Nazis," whatever that means. And now Russian soldiers write "for Crocus" on he shells they fire at Ukrainians. Yesterday (25 March) Russia fired two ballistic missiles at central Kyiv, even as Russian authorities announced that the terrorist attack means that they are permitted to kill high officials of the Ukrainian state.

Rescue workers prepare to help victims after a Russian ballistic missile hit the Kyiv Academy of Decorative and Applied Arts and Design. Photo by Kostiantyn Liberov/Libkos/Getty Images)

Among Ukrainians, all of this generates a weary shrug. It has been a kind of Western parlor game these last two years to ascertain the "rational" motivations behind Russia's war of atrocity in Ukraine. Such a debate is attractive in the West, because if one can identify a Russian rationality one can then defend a policy of doing less, or doing nothing, to help Ukraine win the war. If Russia is rational, then surely some compromise can be found. This is a Russian leadership, however, that interprets the fact of American warnings about the attack as a reason to blame the United States for it: as the puppetmaster of Ukraine, which is itself the puppetmaster of Islamic State.

For Ukrainians, being identified as Islamists as well as Nazis is just one more detail in what is for them a war of self-defense and survival. And of course, as Ukrainians will remind you, for different audiences the Kremlin also characterizes Ukraine as the center of gay civilization, as an element of the Jewish international conspiracy, and as a Satanist cult. So (the memes are out there) Ukraine is now a gay Jewish Nazi Islamist Satanist regime.

The Kremlin goal of identifying Ukrainians as terrorists might matter in the war. It can be used as an excuse to continue, to mobilize, to commit new kinds of war crimes. This is one way this will certainly go. But it is not certain that this development will be stable.

It might matter to Russians that Putin's big lie about Ukraine is growing whiskers. Once forced into gay-Nazi-Jewish-Islamist-Satanist territory, Russians just might be reminded of the late Stalinist purges directed against supposed Zionist-Trotskyite-fascist-imperialist (etc.) conspiracies. Or, more simply, people inside the regime, backed into a corner by Putin's escalation of unreality, might just realize that the Ukrainian scenario makes no logistical sense, and lacks any evidentiary basis.

This can undermine Putin's authority, and the sense that his story is a useful one. Judging by yesterday's appearance, this is no longer the nimble post-truth Putin who is capable of changing out one lie for another as necessary, with a wink to the insider along the way. This now seems to be a Putin who actually believes what he says -- or, in the best case, lacks the creativity to react to events in the world. His speech yesterday was grim for everyone, including to Russians who would like to think that their leader is ahead of events.

Putin's Ukrainian theory could make Russia more vulnerable to terrorism. The Crocus City Hall attack was more likely because Putin has chosen to use his security apparatus against Ukraine and the opposition. It is typical of his priorities that, on the very day of the Crocus City Hall attack, the regime defined international LGBT organizations as "terrorist." When Putin publicly ridiculed the United States on 19 March for warning of an Islamic State attack, he was signaling to the security apparatus that this was not a real danger. In conflating Islamic State with Ukraine now, he is doing the same thing at a higher level. That cannot be helpful in the practical work of preventing another attack.

Nor can, surely, Putin’s idea that Islamic State takes orders from the Jewish president of a European state, and that its actors are nothing more than pawns of American masters. I am not going to claim any expert knowledge of how Islamic State works or its leaders think, but it seems like it would not be best practice to ignore it and insult it at the same time. Publicizing the photos of the tortured suspects, as Russia has done, almost seems like goading Islamic State.

And although the official Kremlin position is that Kyiv and Washington and London are to blame, Russians have reacted (to the attack, and presumably also to the photos) by treating migrants and minorities aggressively. Because Putin denies that Islamic State is the actor, he cannot tell Russians that Islamic State is one thing and Muslims in Tajiks in general are another. He has created the impression, instead, that Muslims and Tadjiks are the enemy because they work for the West.

#timothy snyder #thinking about...

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iheartchv · 9 months ago

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Hello! I hope you are doing/feeling good and everything in your life goes how you want! If im allowed to, can i request a COD matchup?

-Im Turkish and i have Russian roots from mom's side. -Im learning 14 different languages including my native. (Im not fluent in all of them, im just learning them all) -My height is 5'5" (164cm) and i weigh 116lbs (53kg) -Im brunette and i have brown eyes -I used to do bodybuilding but i had to quit due studies -I have scoliosis (not high degree, thanks to studies and stress) and i use glasses (myopic-astigmatism) -Mostly calm but sometimes i get energy explosions and dont know how to sit still -INFJ 5w6 -Im Electrical and Electronics Eng. student -I have 3 close friends, others are friends but we arent close. Im picky when it comes to human relationships -I dont talk much but if i talk (especially if im excited) i wont stop

Thank you for reading this. Dont forget to take care of yourself. Stay safe!💜

//yes im alright, thank you, you too😊 ofc, hope you like your match

🤔 I'll pair you with...

Simon "Ghost" Riley 💀

Ghost would fall for you

He doesn't mind if you want to chat his ear off

He's more or less a listener

But will speak if spoken to

He can deal with Soap, you're no problem

Secretly he would rather be in your company than Soap most days

He knows what you mean by being picky with who you interact with

He's not much of a people person so he keeps to himself

I think that's why he felt comfortable around you after some time

You understand him

He will join you on a walk or do something, anything just to be near you

Soap knows what Ghost is doing and teases him

He'd only roll his eyes while secretly stealing glances at you

Toward you, he won't be much of cold hearted jerk that everyone else sees him as

You're breaking his shell, tearing down his walls, little by little

Eventually he won't care what anyone thinks about

All that matters is you

Ghost is actually a caring person in his own way

But if you want him to do something, tell him, show him, and he will

He's a man of his word

He keeps promises

And he promises to protect you, even at the cost of his life

With you he trys to be soft, gentle, and sweet

Sweet kisses

Gentle loving arms around you

Loves it when you have your arms around him

He feels peaceful for once

Its then that he knows that you're his world

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noemilivv · 9 months ago

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I was waiting for an opening as I saw you had match ups available and would love to see who you'd put me with.

Preference for male characters from Hazbin Hotel

About me: You can call me Claire. I'm AFAB she/her, 5'3", panromantic demisexual. I'm Tim Burton pale, brown eyes, messy curly bob brown hair, glasses with glasses chains usually, chubby but strong, dress either romantic gothic feminine or butch cryptidcore, like no in between, never wear make up because sensory hell.

Some type of neurodivergent but not diagnosed specifically. I tend to know a little about a lot of things due to jumping from focus to focus. Queen of Dad jokes, rather blunt since I'm not subtle. Aside from English can speak Latin, some Gaelic, some Spanish, a little bit of Turkish/Arabic, Church Greek and Slavonic, and random phrases in Russian, German, and Italian. I'm ENFP, Ares cabin from PJO if that means anything.

I teach preschool, love children as they're so fun to be around and the possibilities they have ahead are wonderful. I also bake, sew, knit, read tons of books, collect rocks and other nature stuff, tend to the gardens, I sing in my choir, and like to listen to music. Not specific music genres that I care for, more vibes, but been into some Bauhaus lately, along with SJ Tucker and The Dead South.

My faith is important to me, I even am considering pursuing becoming a religious sister at a convent, like a nun.

I do love horror, romantic gothic poetry (Think Poe and the like), analog horror(DOAI, Mandela Catalogue), Dr. Who, bad b movies (think Redletter media level bad), animation in general, HB HH, stuff like that, I read everything and anything so long as the narrative is interesting or the subject is a hyperfixation of mine, such as Religions, Mythology, History relating to late Medieval to Elizabethan, textiles, fantasy, or speculative biology (like thought potato on youtube). I also do dress in character for the Renaissance Festival, people assume I work there as I have season passes for the last 5 years and attend all weekends from open to close.

I tend to be a sweet tooth, love any chocolate, baked goods with richness or chocolate flavors, drink lots of coffee, tea, sweet red wines, mead, rum based cocktails or dark malty beers if we're going alcohol, though I tend to be the driver if I'm going to party somewhere. My giving love language is touch and words, along with acts of service. My receiving love language is words, touch, and gift giving. I love to cook or make gifts for others, usually don't expect it in turn.

I'm loud, maternal, weirdly dark yet wholesome, and able to lift a toilet with my bare hands up two flights of stairs. I tend to talk either like a southern grandma or terminally online weirdo with random swears. When friends have a bad breakup I'm like do you want a hug or does someone have to die?

In relationships I can be very talkative, but also in a sense the less dominant partner. Like, I handle the day to day, but not great at organizing the dates, the stuff like that's more romantic. I'd hope my partner could handle that part. I'm also romantically easily flustered. Like squeaking and burning red in the face from genuine good flirting.

So hope you can find someone right for me, God Bless you dear.

hello claire!! i decided to pair your with…

Lucifer !!

First of, he loves your love of kids, and let’s be real, he probably has a love of kids as well, as much as Charlie is an adult, he would probably eagerly introduce you to her after finding out this tidbit of info

Honestly, to him, you give off very strong, emotional support wifey vibes and honestly he is all in for it haha

Lucifer doesn’t mind that you can be very talkative, infact, he enjoys it.

He tries to make it fairly easy when it comes to planning dates for you, so most of the time, you both just stay in

Also, Luci is definitely someone who gets flustered easily, so you both just end up giddy and smiley at eachothers shy little flirty comments and it’s the most heart warming thing

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deathmetalunicorn1 · 1 year ago

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hello! can i request a nikola tesla and the other scientist x male reader (plotonic with albert einstein,galileo & Alfred

as male! reader would see them as a father/grandpa figure's but with the othes scientist would be a poly relationship

[with Issac Newton, thomas Edison, Marie curie & Nikola Tesla]. if you don't want too or your not comfortable with it, it can be just a Nikola Tesla x male reader)

(this is kind of a "long" request but half of it is just information)

(alright to the the actual request)

Nikola and the other scientist with an m!s/o that acts dumb and oblivious but is basically william james sidis who is the smartest man to have ever lived and the man who had the IQ of 250-300 maybe more?and has a little tragic past?…like imagine the surprise of the others

(if you don't know who William James sidis.that's fine as i found facts about him that explains him and his discoveries and life in short with out writing a whole paragraph(which it still kind of is) so here you go(ps.if you want to know more information just type his name and you'll find it on Google♡︎:

facts:

William James Sidis

Said to be the smartest person who has ever lived, William James Sidis is the benchmark for child prodigies. He was reportedly able to read the newspaper aged just 18 months and entered Harvard University aged 11, graduating at 16

Why was William Sidis so smart?

Both his parents were highly educated, with his father being a prestigious psychiatrist and his mother graduating from Boston University in medicine. Williams's main areas of interest were mathematics, linguistics, and as an inventor. He was said to have known 25 to 40 languages

he actually went to harvard at 11 or 12 year's old… and knows around 25+ languages and dialects, including Esperanto, Latin, Greek, Russian, Yiddish, German, French, Hebrew, Welsh, Turkish, Armenian, and Sumerian, and he invented another

which he called Vendergood.In his work, The Book of Vendergood, Sidis essentially merged elements of Latin, Greek, French, German, and other Romance languages to create a new language.

his IQ has been estimated to be between 250 to 300+ or even more. And he's also known for

the book. The Animate and the Inanimate, that he published in 1925 (written around 1920), in which he speculated about the origin of life in the context of thermodynamics.

Sidis predicted the existence of regions of space where the second law of thermodynamics operates in the reverse temporal direction of our local area.

and By the time William Sidis was two he could read English and, at four he was typing original work in French. At the age of five he had devised a formula whereby he could name the day of the week for any given historical date. At eight he projected a new logarithms table based on the number twelve. He entered Harvard at the age of twelve and graduated cum laude before he was sixteen. Mathematics was not his only forte. At this age he could speak and read fluently French, German, Russian, Greek, Latin, Armenian and Turkish. During his first year at Harvard University the boy astounded students and scientists with his theories on "Fourth Dimensional Bodies."

The "man behind the gun" in this boy's amazing intellectual attainments is supposed to have been his father, a graduate in psychology at Harvard and a close friend of William James, after whom the boy was named. Dr. Boris Sidis believed in awakening in the child of two an interest in intellectual activity and love of knowledge. If you started early enough and worked intensively, Dr. Sidis claimed that by ten a child would acquire a knowledge equal to that of a college graduate. The boy’s father published articles urging other parents to follow his methods. He castigated the school authorities for their "cramming, routine and rote methods," which he said, "tend to nervous degeneracy and mental breakdown."

Sidis pointed to his son, William, as a successful example of his methods. He wrote: "At the age of twelve the boy had a fair understanding of comparative philology and mythology. He is well versed in logic, ancient history, American history and has a general insight into our politics and into the ground-work of our constitution. At the same time he is of extremely happy disposition, brimming over with humor and fun?"

Whether or not his childhood life was psychologically normal, William's life after Harvard was a series of unhappy incidents. He engaged in obscure mechanical jobs because, it was reported, "he did not want to think." At the age of twenty-four he estranged himself from his parents and to his last days the gap between parents and son remained unreconciled, though toward his sister he always felt a brotherly love which was expressed by a bond of friendship and mutual interests. Toward the press, William Sidis bore an everlastingly strong hatred.

From this story the newspapers and the general public drew some ill-formed conclusions about William Sidis and genius in general. Newspaper writers pointed out that his "genius had burned out," that he was "tired of thinking." By comparison it was stated that musical geniuses are less likely to burn out. The father’s system was held responsible for making the boy a prodigy. The parental pushing was blamed for the mental breakdown and antisocial attitude. From his desire to keep out of the limelight and taking obscure jobs that would pay for his subsistence, William Sidis, the boy prodigy, was made out to be at the time of his death a lonely, eccentric, prodigious failure" whose intellect had deteriorated.

so when m! reader got to Valhalla that's why he acted so oblivious and dumb as he was actually so tired of thinking back when he was alive but now since he was in Valhalla he can finally do whatever he wanted when he wanted and finally rest but it did take him a year or two to get back to his genius self Back.

(to the surprise of the others who first met him as a "obvious man and Dumb man" so there very VERY surprised seeing his theories and achievements he had at such a young age that he kept secret from them while he was finally relaxing only wanting a time where he didn't have to think all the time)

(and how did they find out? they accidentally walked in on

m!reader casually solving a problem they we're having trouble with so they just look at him in shock as he was known to be oblivious and being not so smart to say…they also did get confused when m!reader speaks in Vendergood)

(and i thought it would be funny to see nikola's and the other scientists finding out that nikola's/there

M!s/o who is known to be oblivious and dumb is actually more smarter than them cause why not)

-Valhalla was a place of peace for you- a place where you could just relax, enjoy yourself, there was no pressure to do more- to be the best- no people breathing down your neck, watching your every move, wanting to know how you were so smart.

-You made friends, good friends with other geniuses throughout history, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Galileo, Isaac Newton, and Thomas Edison- and you enjoyed watching them work, but not for any goal they had specifically in mind- no they did it for fun.

-You kept quiet on how smart you really were- not wanting to relive what you had to live through on earth, being pressured by your parents, your teachers, everyone around you- to be a genius.

-You remember the pain well, when you finally broke, unable to handle their pressure- their expectations, and you turned away from science and knowledge, just wanting to be a normal guy!

-That’s why you hide your intelligence in Valhalla, pretending that you weren’t as smart as the others around you- you were afraid of their expectations of you if they were to find out, afraid of their questions because in actuality you were smarter than all of them.

-You adored your friends, growing close with all of them, they were like brothers or father figures to you, real father figures who just sat and talked with you over coffee and cake, asking about your day, the weather, and other random topics.

-They never made you feel inferior however, never looking down on you that you were not as smart as them, they made you feel welcomed, asking for your opinion, or rambling on about their newest discovery, as you would sit there and listen to them without a care in the world.

-You loved watching them work, seeing their joy- their passion, in the pursuit of knowledge, wanting to know more and more. It reminded you of when you were young on Earth, you were so full of hope and joy, only to be snuffed out by pressure.

-You walked in with a large box from the bakery you all enjoyed, “Food!” and heads turned from all over the lab, seeing you there, heading over to the large, mostly empty table that was half taken up by Marie’s own research.

-You looked over at the problem they had been researching for days now, each of them taking turns being in charge, each of them researching the factors and theories that went into the equation, but with nothing adding up.

-The equation looked simple, but you could see errors all over, which was the reason why they weren’t getting any results.

-You ushered all of them away from their work, pushing on Nikola’s back, “Go take a shower and get something to drink- I got everyone’s favorites!”

-Not wanting to leave their work, they did as you told, all of them leaving the lab to clean up, as you told them it might help to take a break then come back with fresh eyes and with baked goods in their belly.

-Once they were gone, you got to work, helping clean up their dirty dishes around the lab, straightening things up like their paperwork, but for the most part leaving everything alone.

-You then looked at the massive blackboard you saw Thomas and Nikola working on and you bit your lip lightly, looking at the mistakes, before looking at the closed door.

-They had been all working so hard and you could see their frustration mounting, you felt bad as you worried about them, before you sighed softly, “If I can be quick!”

-You grabbed the chalk and the ladder Thomas was on before you ascended, going to the top of the board, where the first mistake was, and you corrected it, before you noticed that due to that mistake, everything was now messed up.

-You looked back at the door, before you quickly started erasing, filling out the correct formula, turning it into a race to be done before your friends got back.

-You reached the bottom, going into zone before you pulled back, setting the chalk down, “Finished!” a mug hitting the floor had you leaping out of your skin, turning to see Thomas pointing up at the board, seeing the corrected formula, ending with the solution, as he had been the one to drop his mug.

-You blanched, terrified and they could see the terror before you were quickly scooped up by Isaac, “Y/N this is amazing!!” you cried out, being spun around before you were sat down, your eyes twirling around in your head.

-You were nervous as the others quickly, Nikola wrapping an arm around you, pulling you close, all of them elated that you solved the problem so easily!

-You twiddled your fingers bashfully, “You’re not mad?” Galileo turned, taking your hand before leading you to the box of treats you had gotten, “Mad? Why would we be mad? This is amazing! We knew you were smart but this is…” he trailed off, just in awe.

-Marie giggled softly, pinching your cheek as you looked shocked, “Didn’t think we didn’t know about you, right Y/N? We’ve known since we met you- but we saw how nervous you looked- for good reasons- so we never pushed you.”

-You felt foolish, your cheeks growing red which made them all poke fun at you, teasing you harmlessly before Nikola looked up at the board, “How did you figure out where we went wrong?”

-You pointed at the point of the chalkboard where you started writing, “That math equation there was calculated wrong, so it gave you the wrong answer, and with the wrong answer going all the way down, you would have never gotten the correct solutions.”

-They all gaped up at you, blinking owlishly before it was your turn to playfully tease them, “And that’s why I tell you all to take breaks!” laughter quickly filled the room, research done for the moment, as you sat with your friends, enjoying your snacks in this rare quiet moment, your fear and anxiety now gone.

#record of ragnarok #ror x reader #ror nikola tesla

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