#after the relative intenseness of the big picture and also in the middle of general life stress

[iffeelscouldkill]

Firewhiskey in the Jar

Or: How Krejjh acquired their own miniature shadow

A/N: OKAY SO I swear that after I posted The big picture I was going to go right back to working on Adjusting (the RJ-centric fic I’ve been writing for ages). I was. But then I allowed myself to catch up on a bit of Starship Iris fic, including a bunch of ficlets by the amazing jaggedwolf - and I read their DVD commentary on their Hogwarts AU ficlet from back in December (which I also hadn’t read).

I was already cackling when I got to the part about second-year Slytherin RJ trailing around after Krejjh, and then I read the last line about Sana and Park being Hufflepuff Prefect partners and I lost it. I was gone. I had to write a sequel!

I sat down and banged this out over Thursday night, Friday and then Saturday morning (Easter weekend ftw) because I was so inspired and I think it might have been the most words of fic that I’ve written in such a short space of time in more than ten years. Listen: I love Harry Potter and I love a good Hogwarts AU, so writing this just felt as easy as breathing. I’ve been wanting to write a HP AU for TSCOSI myself, but I was too lazy to figure out everyone’s houses. Luckily, jaggedwolf did the hard work for me (you can read their TSCOSI house sortings here and they are really great!)

So many thanks to jaggedwolf for writing the ficlet and its excellent DVD commentary that inspired this fic, and thank you for giving me the green light to post this :D \o/ Once again, you can read jaggedwolf’s Hogwarts AU here for the fic that inspired this one! I’ve gone out on a limb for much of this, but the plot does build off the events of jaggedwolf’s fic, so it’ll make more sense if you’ve read theirs.

Krejjh sighs and rubs their shoulder as they step through the castle doors and out of the darkened grounds. Quidditch practice officially ended more than an hour ago, but Krejjh stayed back to do some recreational flying and blow off steam after a stressful practice in which they were forced to publicly dress down and dismiss one of the team’s Beaters and a Chaser for plotting to sabotage the Hufflepuff team Captain, Sana Tripathi.

Krejjh had already confronted both team members about their actions and informed them that they were off the team, but the two had turned up to practice anyway, hoping to win the support of their teammates against their Captain. Fortunately, the rest of the team are good people (Krejjh had thought that all of them were good people – clearly they needed to pay closer attention) and refused to side with the two wrongdoers, but it had still forced a confrontation that Krejjh would rather not have had. Hence the blowing off steam.

Normally Brian would have been there watching and cheering from the stands, and commiserating with Krejjh after practice, but the Gryffindor team (mostly their two former teammates, now that Krejjh thought about it) had started to object to having a Ravenclaw watch all of their practices – even when Krejjh pointed out that he had his head in an Ancient Runes textbook 90% of the time. Also, Brian has a study session with Violet, his timid but brilliant third-year protégée, scheduled for this evening.

Krejjh is heading in the direction of the library, thinking about whether they can persuade Brian to give them a consolation backrub, when they hear raised voices coming from around the corner. Narrowing their eyes, they stand still and listen.

“-heard what you were saying about Park,” a small, angry voice that Krejjh doesn’t recognise is saying. “If you talk like that about him again, you’ll have to answer to me.”

There’s a smug, unpleasant chuckle that Krejjh unfortunately does know all too well. “Oh, really?” asks Jennifer Golding-Frederick, a wealthy and self-important Pureblood Slytherin sixth year. “And what exactly do you think you’re going to do to us, hm? Tell on us to Professor Jahansooz? He’s not going to take your word over ours.”

“I’ll duel you,” says the small voice, quivering but determined.

Golding-Frederick’s chuckle is joined by the deeper, sarcastic laughter of John Goodman, her fourth-year henchman. “Oh, I’m terrified,” he says mockingly. “Do you even know any hexes? Because I do.”

“Try me,” the small voice bites back, and Krejjh has heard enough. Drawing their wand – just as a precaution – they round the corner to find Golding-Frederick and Goodman facing off against a short, redheaded Slytherin second-year. The second-year has their wand drawn, as does Goodman, though Goulding-Frederick hasn’t bothered to draw hers yet. Beneath their freckles, Krejjh can see how pale the redhead is, but their wand arm doesn’t falter.

“Evening, fellas,” Krejjh says cheerily, not pointing their wand at anyone in particular but making sure that it’s raised and visible. “Couldn’t help but overhear your conversation. It sounded an awful lot like you were ganging up on a younger student.”

“If you were listening,” Golding-Frederick says lazily, completely unconcerned, “I think you’ll have heard that the second-year was the one who threatened us. Goodman here merely drew his wand in self-defence.”

Krejjh scoffs. God, Golding-Frederick and Goodman (or as Sana has nicknamed them, “the JGs” – since both of them share the initials JG) are the worst kind of Slytherin. Every house has its bad eggs, and Krejjh has always got along perfectly fine with Slytherins, house rivalry or not, but Golding-Frederick and Goodman are the kind that give the whole house a bad name. Smug, privileged, self-important bullies.

“Doesn’t much matter who started it,” Krejjh says. “I’d like to think two older students like yourselves’d know better than to get into fights with a second-year.

“Then again,” they continue, taking a few steps towards Goodman and Golding-Frederick, “I’d also like to think you’d know to get the hell out of here before you find yourselves on the wrong end of a Stinging Hex. They’re my speciality.”

“Try it,” Goodman says menacingly, but Golding-Frederick shakes her head once.

“Leave them,” she says. “They’re not worth our time and energy.” She looks Krejjh in their team captain’s robes up and down, her gaze cold. “Birds of a feather flock together, I see,” she says, a nasty smile playing around her mouth. Krejjh has no idea what she means by that. “But you and your little group of oddballs had best not interfere with Slytherin house business again.”

“If you’re picking on younger students? I’ll interfere all right, I don’t care what house they’re in,” Krejjh replies hotly.

“Oh, Gryffindors,” Golding-Frederick says, smiling and shaking her head. “You and your chivalry. It’s so quaint. Come on, Goodman.”

After the two bullies have disappeared around the corner, Krejjh turns to the second-year Slytherin, who is staring at them in undisguised awe. “Uh, hey. You all right?”

“That. Was amazing,” says the second-year in reverential tones. “You totally got them to back off! You didn’t even have to cast a single hex!”

“Yeah, Goodman and I have come up against each other on the duelling ground before,” says Krejjh. “– In duel club,” they hasten to add. “He didn’t come off too well. Doesn’t stop him from trying to start another fight, though.”

Krejjh thought the second-year’s eyes couldn’t get any bigger or rounder, but it turns out they were wrong. “You’re Krejjh,” they say. “Aren’t you? Gryffindor’s star duellist! And the Captain of the Gryffindor Quidditch team.”

Krejjh preens. They have a fan. Wait until Brian hears that they have a fan. “That’s me,” they say, without a hint of modesty or self-effacement. Modesty is for people who aren’t prepared to own how awesome they are. “Captain Krejjh, at your service.”

“RJ McCabe,” the Slytherin introduces themself, cheeks pink. “I’m a second-year Slytherin. But uh, I guess you already knew that. I don’t really play Quidditch, but I think your flying is amazing! I was cheering for Gryffindor in your last match. Even though Park said I shouldn’t. And I think you’re really cool because-” The torrent of words suddenly tumbles to a stop, and McCabe looks embarrassed.

“Because?” Krejjh prompts, not wanting to miss out on another compliment. Also, did they say Park? Isn’t Park the name of the other Hufflepuff Prefect that Sana is partnered with? Krejjh thinks it might be.

“Because. Uh.” McCabe sucks in a breath, and then says determinedly, “Because I heard that… you’re non-binary, and uh… I’m non-binary too? Hi.”

A new non-binary friend! This might be the best day of Krejjh’s life. “High heckin’ five, pal!” they say enthusiastically, and hold up a hand. Looking a little taken aback, but pleased, McCabe high-fives it.

At that moment, Krejjh catches sight of the clock on the wall. “Breesht. It’s almost curfew – you need to get back to your Common Room,” they tell McCabe. Then they remember that Goodman and Golding-Frederick are in their house, so the Common Room might not be the safest place to be right now. “Uh. Can you go back to your Common Room?”

McCabe nods. “Don’t worry,” they say, like they’re the one who should be reassuring Krejjh instead of the other way around. “Golding-Frederick and Goodman always stay out past curfew, and they never get in trouble for it because they’re Professor Jahansooz’s favourites. So they won’t be back to the Common Room for a while.”

Krejjh suddenly understands why Sana is always so annoyed at the mention of the JGs (and it takes a lot to annoy Sana). She must have tried reporting them and been outraged when there were no consequences. Unequal treatment does not sit well with Sana. “Right. Well, silver lining, I guess?” They smile at the little redheaded second-year. “It was nice to meet you, Second-Year McCabe. I’ll see you around!”

“Wait,” says McCabe, before Krejjh can go more than a couple of steps. “I need to ask you something.”

Krejjh turns back to them with an inquiring look.

“Will you teach me how to duel?” McCabe blurts out, and Krejjh blinks. “For self-defence,” McCabe adds hurriedly. “I’m not allowed to join the Duelling Club until third year, even though I’m really good at spellwork. We’ve covered a bit in Defence Against the Dark Arts, but it’s all for immobilising or defending against Dark creatures. I guess you’re not supposed to need to know how to deal with Dark humans until you’re older,” McCabe finishes, a little resentfully.

Krejjh is torn. They really want to help this small, determined second-year, who honestly reminds Krejjh quite a bit of themself three years ago – getting in over their head with older students, challenging them to duels and trying to copy their spellwork. Except that whereas in Gryffindor it was all pretty good-natured – all right, there was a heavy dose of one-upmanship about it, but that’s true of most things in Gryffindor – McCabe’s reasons for wanting to excel feel deadly serious.

Also, Krejjh is not a great teacher.

“I, uh…” they stall while McCabe continues to look at them hopefully. “Let me… think about it? It’s not something I’ve really, uh, considered before. Duelling is great! I’d just have to think about, uh, how to go about it. With you. I’ll let you know?”

“Okay,” says McCabe, looking pleased and so hopeful that Krejjh can’t bear the thought of letting them down. Breesht. This means they might actually have to teach McCabe how to duel.

“See ya,” they say, and walk quickly away.

“You think you’ve agreed to what?” Brian repeats at breakfast the next morning. Sitting next to him at the Ravenclaw table, Violet Liu looks on with wide eyes.

“Teach a second-year Slytherin how to duel,” Krejjh mumbles. “Don’t look at me like that, Jeeter,” they whine when Brian raises an eyebrow. “You didn’t see the look on their face! And the JGs are being really mean to them.”

“Wouldn’t the more logical approach be to talk to a professor about what’s going on so that they don’t need to learn how to duel?” Brian reasons. Krejjh looks at him blankly. “Didn’t occur to you, bud?”

“It’s not like the Professors don’t know what Golding-Frederick and Goodman are like,” Krejjh points out. “But Jahansooz is a useless Head of House. He’ll never keep them in line.”

“It can be tough when you don’t think that anyone will believe you about what’s happening,” Violet puts in quietly, and Krejjh brightens at the support, before sobering as they realise that Violet is speaking from experience. “My Head of House turned out to be really great about the whole… situation. But I talked myself out of going to her a dozen times. Maybe McCabe has tried talking to their Head of House, and it didn’t help.”

A gloomy silence descends as the three of them contemplate the situation.

“I mean, self-defence is a good thing to learn in general,” Brian admits. “And study groups are totally within the school rules. There’s nothing saying that you can’t teach them a few basic spells.”

“Except that I’m a terrible teacher,” Krejjh sighs.

Brian winces. “Except that. I mean, you’re great at what you do!” he hastens to compliment them. “Amazing. The best. But that just makes it… harder for you to explain it.”

“Yeah.” Krejjh looks over at the Slytherin table, where McCabe is eating with a few friends from their year. They’re not interacting a whole lot, but seem to at least be part of a group. Golding-Frederick and Goodman are down the other end of the table with a few like-minded cronies, looking and acting like the Slytherin royalty they perceive themselves to be. “Maybe I’ll wait for them to bring it up again. And if they do, I’ll… give it a shot.”

Of all the things, and people, that Park might have expected to run into on his evening patrol of the corridors, he has to admit that RJ McCabe staking out the Gryffindor Common Room was not one of them.

In hindsight, maybe it should have been.

“RJ,” he says, and RJ jumps guiltily as they turn to face him. “Are you waiting for someone?”

“Oh, hey, Park – how’s it going? Are you out on patrol?” RJ asks, a too-bright smile on their face.

Park raises an eyebrow. “No, sometimes I just wonder the halls of Hogwarts at night for the hell of it. Keeps the students on their toes,” he replies, deadpan.

RJ nods along as if this is totally reasonable. “As they should be,” they say.

Park looks at them and sighs. “Is there a reason that you’re currently standing outside the entrance to the Gryffindor Common Room?”

“Just, uh, needed to follow up on a thing with a person,” RJ says. “A friend. They… promised me something. I’ve come to talk to them about it.”

“Right,” Park says slowly. “And who might this ‘friend’ be?”

“No-one you would know,” RJ replies quickly, which of course only makes Park more suspicious. Who in Gryffindor would RJ be so keen to hide that they were meeting up with?

And then a possibility occurs to him.

“This wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain Gryffindor Quidditch team captain that you idolise, would it?” he asks, and RJ instantly looks guilty. “What, did they promise you an autograph?”

“Yeah… you got me,” says RJ. “I just think they’re so cool! I wanted to catch them after they were done with Quidditch practice, but I uh, didn’t know when that would be. And I don’t think the Gryffindor team would appreciate a second-year Slytherin hanging around the pitch during practice.”

“Probably not,” Park agrees. “It doesn’t look like you brought anything for them to sign, though.”

“Oh, Krejjh was going to sign their spare copy of Quidditch Through the Ages for me,” RJ says brightly.

“Of… course.” Something about RJ’s story seems a little off to Park, but he can’t put his finger on what it is. “Look, instead of you hanging out here all evening, why don’t I just give them a message for you? I see Krejjh in Duelling Club all the time. You can arrange a proper time and place to meet up instead of accosting them after practice.”

“That’s okay,” says RJ. “I wouldn’t want to make you be the go-between. I’ll just… catch them another time.” They’re already walking away down the corridor before Park can say anything. “See you, Park!”

Park watches them go and frowns to himself. Yeah, RJ is definitely trying to hide something.

“And then when I asked Thasia why they were making out with Emily Craddock and Violet Liu – the Slytherin fifth-year, not the Ravenclaw third-year – in the Potions supply cupboard, they replied that the Transfiguration supply cupboard was too small for three people!” Sana finishes, sounding like she can’t decide whether to be indignant or amused. She looks at Park for his reaction.

“Right. Yeah, that’s…” Park mentally replays the story that she’d been telling him to try and figure out the appropriate response. “Did you dock them house points?”

“Ten each, and I gave them all a stern warning. I really don’t want to have to report them to their Head of House if it happens again,” says Sana. She nudges Park. “What’s up? You seem distracted tonight.”

“It’s nothing, really,” Park says. “Just…” He hesitates, and then asks, “You’re friends with Krejjh, right? The Gryffindor Quidditch team captain?”

“Of course,” says Sana, sounding a little surprised. “We practice together all the time. I thought you knew Krejjh too, from Duelling Club?”

“Yeah, I do, but not that well. We don’t really talk much,” says Park. He and Krejjh have a friendly rivalry at Duelling Club that consists mostly of Krejjh showboating and making grand declarations about how they’ll defeat Park as they duel, while Park refuses to say a word and casts all of his spells non-verbally because he knows it drives Krejjh up the wall.

“Why do you ask about them?”

“I have a friend in second year, a Slytherin,” Park begins. “RJ McCabe. We grew up together, and our families are old friends. Earlier I came across them hanging around outside the entrance to the Gryffindor Common Room, and they said they were waiting for Krejjh, but they were pretty cagey about why. RJ is a big fan of Krejjh’s flying, but… something tells me it’s not just hero-worship.” Sana looks thoughtful. “Krejjh hasn’t mentioned…?” Park asks and trails off.

Sana shakes her head. “No, they haven’t mentioned RJ, but it’s been a few days since we hung out,” she says. “But what do you think RJ would be hiding from you that could involve Krejjh?”

Park shrugs helplessly. “I wish I knew. Maybe if RJ is in trouble, and it somehow involves the Gryffindor Quidditch team…” He isn’t expecting Sana’s face to suddenly darken. “What?”

“I had some trouble of my own with them, recently,” she admits. “I thought we’d managed to sort it all out, but…” She bites her lip and looks troubled. “I’ll ask Krejjh about it at our next practice. RJ doesn’t play Quidditch, though, right?”

“No, they’re just an enthusiast,” Park replies. “Maybe it’s nothing. They usually come to me if there’s anything bothering them.”

Sana smiles at him, and it’s a very knowing smile. “What?” asks Park, slightly defensively.

“You’re protective of them,” she says, sounding delighted. “I’ve never seen that from you before.”

Park isn’t blushing. He’s not. “I know RJ can look after themself,” he says, instead of denying it. “That doesn’t mean I can’t look out for them, too.”

Sana’s smile widens.

Krejjh looks at RJ across the empty classroom. RJ looks back.

Krejjh clears their throat. “So! I figured we’d start with a basic spell called Expelliarmus, which is the Disarming Spell,” they say. “It’s the first spell we learn at duel club. It’s like this.” Krejjh raises their wand and RJ copies them.

“Expelliarmus!”

RJ’s wand goes flying out of their hand. They grab for it, but it’s already landing neatly in Krejjh’s outstretched hand. They throw it back to RJ.

“Show me again,” says RJ, looking intent. Krejjh repeats the movement and the incantation.

“Expelliarmus!”

Krejjh throws RJ’s wand back to them again. “Wanna try it out?”

“Can you repeat the wand movement, but go slower?” RJ asks. Krejjh doesn’t think they’ve ever done anything slowly in their life, especially duelling, but they give it a shot.

“Does that help?”

“I… think so,” RJ says uncertainly. “Okay, here it goes. Expelliarmus!”

Krejjh feels the spell wash over them and their wand twitch slightly, but it’s not strong enough to actually Disarm them. “I felt that!” they say, delighted. Maybe this teaching thing isn’t so bad.

“It didn’t work,” RJ says, frustrated.

“Well, not on your first try,” Krejjh reasons. “But I felt it. Try again!”

RJ repeats the spell, with the same effect. The next few tries are also exactly the same.

“What am I doing wrong?” they ask in frustration. “Is it the wand movement?”

“Maaaybe?” says Krejjh uncertainly. They should have invited Brian along to this impromptu duelling session – teaching and studying is much more his element. Krejjh can barely stay focused when someone else is doing the teaching.

But RJ had only cornered them at dinner to make their request for duelling tuition again, and Brian was already studying in the library with his own protégée, Violet.

Krejjh has always wanted a small, adoring shadow of their very own, since both Sana and Brian seem to have one. (Well, Arkady Patel is more scowling and resentful than adoring, but it counts). They just hadn’t bargained on it involving duelling lessons.

“Let me come stand next to you, and then I can see what it is you’re doing better,” Krejjh decides. With Krejjh standing to their left, RJ repeats the Disarming spell movement.

“Hmmm… Try it more like…” Krejjh demonstrates.

“I am doing that,” says RJ.

“I mean, like…” Krejjh shows them again, trying to emphasise the part that RJ isn’t quite getting.

“Okay.” RJ turns to them. “Expelliarmus!” Krejjh’s wand definitely jumps a little harder this time, but it’s not a full Disarming Spell by any means.

“Why aren’t I getting this?” RJ asks in frustration. “You make it look so easy.”

Duelling does come easily to Krejjh, which is exactly why they find it hard to explain what someone else is doing wrong. “You’re getting better! I’m just not… great at explaining,” Krejjh says sadly.

“No, you’re a good teacher!” says RJ hastily. “I just need to work at it.”

Krejjh leans against one of the desks. “You said you knew Park, right? The Hufflepuff Prefect? He’s in Duelling Club – why haven’t you asked him to show you some spells?”

RJ crosses their arms and looks down at the classroom floor. “I don’t want Park to know I’m doing this,” they mumble. “He’d only get worried, or try to take on Goodman and Golding-Frederick for me. And he’d want to know about what they’ve been saying.”

“What have they been saying?” Krejjh asks, quietly.

“Stuff about Park,” RJ says, their eyes fixed on the floor. “Comments about his… heritage.”

“As in his Blood Status, or…?” Krejjh asks.

“Both,” RJ replies, and Krejjh’s fist clenches hard. “They were just saying things about me at first,” RJ goes on, the flood of words coming quickly now. “In the Common Room, in the corridors… making half-blood jokes, making comments about my appearance. About my gender. It’s not just me they do it to, and I’ve learned to tune it out. But they figured out I was ignoring them, and that’s when they started in on Park.”

RJ looks up at Krejjh, eyes narrowed with fury. It’s a struggle for Krejjh not to show their own anger, but they can tell that getting worked up isn’t what RJ needs from them right now. “I don’t care what they say about me. It doesn’t matter. But I won’t let them talk like that about Park. I wish there was a way to teach them a lesson.”

Krejjh stands up. “You know what? I know some folks who might just be able to help with that.”

“All right, everybody, listen up,” says Sana, calling the room to order. The attention of the motley, unlikely crew of oddballs assembled in the Quidditch team changing rooms comes to rest on her. “First off, I’d like to thank you all for coming-”

Arkady Patel raises her hand. “Can we skip the touchy-feely intro?” she asks. “Also, why are we in the Quidditch changing-rooms, of all places?”

“Because none of the teams has practice booked tonight, and also it was the only place I could think of that was big enough that we could all access,” Sana replies promptly. “Next question?”

Arkady huffs, but subsides.

“Okay. So, we’ve come here to discuss a plan of action against two individuals who have been making life difficult for our friends and housemates,” says Sana. “Jennifer Golding-Frederick and John Goodman, also known as the JGs. Also known as bullies of the worst kind.

“Reporting them to their Head of House, Professor Jahansooz, hasn’t done any good, and believe me, I’ve tried. Other professors are also aware of their behaviour, but haven’t managed to keep them in line. Which has made us think that we need to take matters into our own hands.” Sana nods at Krejjh.

“We thought about playing some kind of a prank on them,” Krejjh says cheerfully. “Or trapping them somewhere really horrible, like a greenhouse full of Mandrakes. Unfortunately, those are hard to get a hold of at short notice.”

“Also, that would be highly unethical,” says Sana disapprovingly, frowning at Krejjh. “No, what we decided to do was to get them caught in the act of some serious rule-breaking, in a way that even they couldn’t wriggle out of. We know that both of them get up to a lot of questionable things when the teachers’ backs are turned, because they know they can get away with it. We just needed to get some intel on what those are, and then figure out a way to turn the tables.”

“And did you?” asks Brian, sounding impressed.

“Did we ever, bud!” says Krejjh. “You know how consuming alcohol on school grounds is banned, even for of-age students? Well, guess who has an illegal Firewhiskey brewing operation set up near the edge of the Forbidden Forest.”

Brian whistles, and even Park looks surprised. “Seriously?”

“Cross our hearts,” Krejjh replies. “We’ve got reason to believe they’ve been supplying it to underage students, too.”

“How the hell did you find this out?” Arkady asks.

“We have a spy on the inside: Violet Liu,” says Sana. Everyone immediately turns to look at Violet, who holds up her hands.

“Uh, not me. There’s another Violet Liu who’s in Slytherin house. She’s taller than me, and she’s a fifth year.”

“I mean, I’m pretty sure most people are taller than you,” Arkady points out. “What are you, five feet tall?”

Violet straightens up, looking indignant. “I’m five foot and half an inch,” she says.

“Right. Of course. I was way off.”

“Uh, so how did you get the other Violet to dish the dirt on the JGs?” asks Brian, bringing the conversation back on topic.

“I might’ve promised to look the other way on any supply cupboard-related offenses for a couple of weeks,” Sana admits, and Park snorts with amusement. Krejjh laughs too, because they know Thasia, and have had the opportunity to hear them complain about the smallness and cramped-ness of Transfiguration supply cupboards.

“I have no idea what that means, but okay,” says Arkady. “So, now that we know about the Beegees’ – sorry, the JGs’ – secret Firewhiskey operation, how are we going to blow it wide open?”

Sana’s grin turns devious. “Funny you should ask.”

Jennifer Golding-Frederick walks the corridors of Hogwarts a few minutes before curfew, surveying her domain. Things are quiet tonight, which would normally please her, but tonight it makes her suspicious. They haven’t heard a peep out of that little imp McCabe lately, even though McCabe was making such bold threats towards them only a few days ago. Jennifer would like to think that they’ve subsided out of fear, but she knows better than to believe that. Annoying little second-years rarely learn their place so quickly.

“Goodman,” she greets her lieutenant as they meet up outside the Prefects’ Bathroom. Goodman, as a fourth year, is too young to be a Prefect, but access to the Prefects’ Bathroom is one of the perks that Jennifer accords to those students who are loyal to her. She also politely discourages the use of the bathroom by Prefects from other houses, although the Hufflepuff Prefects are remarkably stubborn about it. “Anything unusual tonight?”

Goodman shrugs. “All seems quiet. A bit too quiet, really.”

“Agreed,” says Jennifer grimly. “You should-”

She’s interrupted by the arrival of a very out of breath Meg Clark, a Slytherin third-year. “Jennifer,” she says, panting and resting her hands on her knees. “I mean – General, sorry,” she adds at Jennifer’s disapproving look. “We’ve got a problem. Someone tipped off Professor Eejjhgreb about the-” She glances to left and right, and then whispers, “the firewhiskey operation. They’re on their way down now to check out the tip.”

Jennifer isn’t easily rattled, but her heart jumps at the mention of Professor Eejjhgreb, who hates her and Goodman and also happens to be the Deputy Head of the school (as well as the Head of Gryffindor House), meaning that Professor Jahansooz’ protection won’t do them any good. “Is the Disillusionment Charm still in place?” she asks sharply.

Clark nods. “It is, but Johnson’s on guard duty tonight…” She trails off.

Jennifer swears. Johnson, a Slytherin fourth year, could charitably be described as ‘vacant’ (though Jennifer would more accurately describe him as “terminally moronic”) and has no ability to improvise when confronted by a professor. If Eejjhgreb questions him about what he’s doing down by the Forbidden Forest, he’ll fold like wet tissue paper. “Who tipped off Eejjhgreb, Clark?” she asks furiously.

“Uh… Some Ravenclaw, I think? Violet Liu? Though, I thought Violet Liu was in our house,” says Clark, sounding uncertain.

“There is a Ravenclaw called Violet Liu,” Goodman puts in. “A third year. She hangs around with Jeeter and his group.”

“Oh, I knew that lot would be behind this,” says Jennifer. “Goodman, stay here and keep an eye out for anything else – especially Liu, Jeeter, Tripathi, Park and the rest of their little gang. I’m going down to the Forest before Johnson gets us all put in detention for the rest of the year.”

“I’ll meet you back at the Common Room in an hour,” says Goodman, and leaves. Jennifer sweeps off at the most rapid pace that she can manage without breaking into a run.

Meg checks again that the coast is clear, and then knocks the agreed pattern on the door of the Prefects’ Bathroom: one two three one-two-three one-two-three. Musha rain, dum a doo, dum a da.

It opens, and Park emerges, along with McCabe, looking awestruck at the experience of being inside the Prefects’ Bathroom. Meg doesn’t know what all the fuss is about. She went in there once. It wasn’t that great.

“I did exactly as you told me,” Meg informs Park. “She’s on her way to the edge of the Forbidden Forest right now, thinking that Eejjhgreb is down there.” She holds out her hand. “Pay up.”

Park rolls his eyes, but hands over five Sickles and a limited-edition Chocolate Frog card: Sybil Trelawney, the legendary 20th-century Seer and great-great-granddaughter of Cassandra Trelawney. Meg’s collection is almost complete.

“Cheers,” she says. “Later, losers.”

Park watches Clark go, and shakes his head slightly. It wasn’t the greatest moment of his life when he approached Clark to bargain for her participation in the plan they’d devised, but fortunately she proved fairly easy to bribe.

“So…” says RJ, looking in the direction that Clark has just departed. “What now? Want to sneak down to the Forest and watch the show? I bet it’s going to be awesome.”

Park looks at RJ. They meet his eyes briefly and smile, but it’s strained, and they quickly break eye contact. “On second thoughts, maybe I should-”

“RJ,” says Park. RJ huffs and puts their hands in the pockets of their robe, shoulders hunched.

“Don’t start, Park.”

“Why didn’t you…” Park trails off, trying to decide which question he wants to ask first. “Why didn’t you tell me what Golding-Frederick and Goodman were doing?” Why didn’t you trust me to help you instead of a stranger from Gryffindor?

RJ shrugs. “It wasn’t that big of a deal. No, Park, it really wasn’t – at first, anyway. They’re just bullies – I’ve dealt with bullies before. I don’t have any classes with them, so they only bothered me in the corridors sometimes and in the Common Room. I could just tune them out. I got pretty good at it, too, but then they… Then they started in on you. And I wasn’t going to let that pass.”

“You didn’t need to-” Park begins, but RJ interrupts him.

“Yeah, Park, I did need to. You know what friends do? They look out for each other. That means I get to look out for you, too,” RJ says stubbornly. “Or are you telling me you wouldn’t have done the same thing for me?”

“Of course I would have-”

“Great. Then that’s settled,” says RJ, practically glaring at him. Park reflects that he’s never felt so heartwarmed and chastised at the same time. He sighs, but then smiles at RJ.

“Fine. Did I hear that you were looking to learn some basic duelling spells? I’d be happy to teach you a few.”

RJ looks surprised. “Really? You’d do that?”

“Of course,” says Park. “That’s what friends do.”

Jennifer is out of breath by the time she reaches the location, in an out-of-the-way spot near the tree line, that she and her associates have been using to brew the Firewhiskey. It’s concealed by a Disillusionment Charm, and protected by some basic Shield Charms in case any wandering animals or students accidentally stumble across it, but those are quite easily lifted.

The idiot Johnson is standing a few feet away from the concealed equipment, looking as gormless as ever. Jennifer strides up to him.

“Where are they?”

“Uh… where are who?” asks Johnson blankly.

“Where is Professor Eejjhgreb,” says Jennifer impatiently. “They have’t been down here?”

“Uh, nope, not that I saw,” says Johnson uncertainly. “And I mean, I’ve been here the whole time, so unless they have an Invisibility Cloak…”

Frowning, Jennifer wonders whether Clark could have been misinformed. But because Johnson is an idiot of the highest order, she decides to check on the brewing equipment while she’s down here. She walks over, and feeling for the Shield Charms, dismantles them and then lifts the Disillusionment Charm. Everything seems to be in place.

“Oh, she said to give you this,” Johnson calls from where he’s still standing as if rooted to the ground. He’s probably afraid of what Jennifer would do if he got too close to the equipment. It might well be the only smart judgement call he’s ever made.

Then Jennifer realises what he just said. “‘She’? What do you mean, ‘she’?” she demands, striding back over to Johnson.

“Some Ravenclaw… Wu maybe? Or… Liu? She’s like five feet tall, Chinese I think. She gave me this note.”

Johnson feels around in his pocket, and produces a folded piece of parchment. He hands it to Jennifer, who unfolds it and reads it.

“Is this a joke?” she demands.

John Goodman has just finished his sweep of the first-floor corridor (he ran into some goody-goody Ravenclaw Prefects on the way, but he’s made sure that they won’t be reporting him – not that it would really matter if they did) and is contemplating going down to the kitchens to steal some food when he sees something that makes his blood run cold.

Professor Eejjhgreb is walking through the Entrance Hall and out towards the grounds, a purposeful look in their eye. John scrambles to get down the stairs and catch up with Eejjhgreb, determined to waylay the Professor before they can go any further.

“Professor!”

Eejjhgreb turns, and in that instant John realises his mistake. “Ah. John Goodman,” says Eejjhgreb. “Just the student I had been looking for. Would you like to tell me what you’re doing out so far past curfew?”

“I – just came from my dorm,” says John, thinking fast. “There’s – a terrible emergency, uh, Seiders is sick-”

“Would this terrible emergency not be something for your Head of House to handle?” Eejjhgreb asks, raising an eyebrow. “But instead you are here in the Entrance Hall, and judging by the fact that you are not dressed for bed, I can only assume you did not in fact come from your dormitory, but were out past curfew. Detention, Goodman.” Eejjhgreb turns away and continues across the grounds.

Shit. John runs to catch up with them. “Professor – there’s something you should know-”

“Is there?” Eejjhgreb asks ominously. “Could it be related to the illegal Firewhiskey brewing operation that you and your friend Jennifer Golding-Frederick have been conducting on school grounds? Oh yes, I know all about what the two of you have been doing. You are already in serious trouble, and if you attempt to delay me any further, it will go even worse for you.”

John opens his mouth, and closes it again. He knows that the General is going to be beside herself if she finds out that he didn’t stop Eejjhgreb, but at this moment in time, he doesn’t think that any revenge she might enact would be worse than what Eejjhgreb could do to him. Besides, it sounds like she’s about to go down, too. John knows when to cut his losses.

“Yes, Professor. Goodnight, Professor.”

The note reads,

This is for every student you’ve ground beneath your heel. You’re about to learn that you can’t push us around.

Next time we won’t be so kind.

—Rumor

P.S. Stand clear.

Jennifer draws her wand and turns towards the Firewhiskey brewing equipment – just in time to see it explode in a ball of flame.

“Protego!” she shouts quickly, and a Shield Charm expands to protect her from any flying glass or debris. Next to her, Johnson has thrown himself onto the ground, hands covering his head.

“Woooohooooo!” A joyful shout comes from over the trees, and Jennifer turns to see two figures on a broom soar away from the forest: a skinny, shorter figure clinging on for dear life, and a tall figure behind them in red Gryffindor Quidditch captain robes, riding a broom like they were born to fly.

“We’ve been set up!” Jennifer exclaims angrily. She rounds on Johnson, ready to start berating him for his negligence, when an angry voice shouts from behind them.

“Jennifer Golding-Frederick!”

Jennifer turns slowly to see an irate Professor Eejjhgreb storming towards them, their eyes fixed on the still-smouldering remains of the brewing equipment.

“Professor-” For once, words fail her.

“So, you thought that you could evade punishment by destroying the evidence of your activities?” Eejjhgreb demands. They look from her to Johnson, who is still cowering on the ground. “Get up, boy.”

“No, Professor – that was Krejjh and their associate! I believe it was Brian Jeeter – he must have cast the spell from behind a tree–”

“Is that so? And where are they now, these miscreants?” asks Eejjhgreb. “Are they hiding in the Forest?”

“They flew away,” puts in Johnson. “On a broom.”

“How convenient,” says Eejjhgreb. They draw their wand, and Johnson flinches, but Eejhgreb merely pours water onto the remains of the brewing equipment, extinguishing the fire once and for all.

“Both of you, come with me,” says Eejjhgreb. “We’re going to see the Headmaster.”

Back in the safety of the castle, the three fifth-years meet up in the kitchens to toast their success. Of the three of them, only Krejjh isn’t a Prefect, but the company of two Prefects with spotless track records is a pretty good shield against breaking curfew. Sometimes, a little bit of mischief is warranted.

“Cheers,” says Sana, pouring out Butterbeer for the three of them, provided by a group of bowing house elves. “To a job well done.”

Krejjh downs half their Butterbeer in one gulp. “Man, it’s too bad about that Firewhiskey, though.” They eye Sana, who has her schoolbag slung over her shoulder. “Are you sure you didn’t manage to steal just a little bit before we blew it up?”

“Of course not,” says Sana, sounding shocked. “That would be highly unethical.”

Park raises an eyebrow. “Did you take any?”

Sana glances around at the house elves, who are busily occupying themselves with cleaning dishes from that night’s dinner, and pulls out a sealed jar from her schoolbag. “Just, you know, as a backup. Additional evidence.”

Park shrugs. “Makes sense.”

“We should really test it, though,” Krejjh muses idly. “Just to make sure it’s the real deal.”

“Krejjh, you read my mind,” says Sana, unscrewing the top of the jar and pouring a little Firewhiskey into each mug of Butterbeer. “Another toast! To freedom.”

“To showing the bullies who’s boss!” Krejjh declares.

“To... friendship,” says Park, and the three of them clink their mugs.

[natromanxoff]

Queen live at Civic Auditorium Arena in Omaha, NE, USA - September 13, 1980

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Fan Stories

“I don't know if anyone has ever been able to appreciate a rock concert as much as I did when I saw Queen at age 7. I knew the order the songs were supposed to be in, the way the stage was supposed to look, and what the band was supposed to do. And everything happened perfectly. Except for that damn mustache. Late summer 1980, I was pestering my mom to take me into town to get candy. She said, "Do you really want to get candy, or would you rather get tickets to see Queen?" I stopped in my tracks and started being the nicest boy you could imagine. I thought maybe she was kidding, but knew she wouldn't kid me about something like that. I guess my dad had already OKd it too. Like Axl Rose once said about Queen: "They meant everything to me." We drove all the way to Omaha to get tickets: they were $9 in advance, or $11 the day of the show if still available (though now I'm not sure how they weren't sold out immediately). I'm still not quite sure why Queen was playing smaller arenas at that point, since I think they had already begun playing stadiums. Finally, September 13 arrived. I was in 2nd grade. Ads had been all over the radio for this concert. One of my baby-sitters and two of her friends rode up with us also, and they went off on their own when we got there. The show was one of those infamous "general admission" things, so our seats depended solely on how early we arrived. I think we got to the arena at about 9 am... almost a full 12 hours before the show actually started (much longer in 7-year-old hours). A single word, "QUEEN", was boldly displayed on the marquee above the many doors where small lines were beginning to form. Excited bands of people were running/gathering everywhere. Queen was one of the biggest five bands in the world at that time: "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" was on the charts, The Game had just been released, and "Another One Bites the Dust" was soon-to-be released as a single. We picked one of the lines and got ready for what was indeed halfway dangerous: the growing mob of people ready to run in when the doors would open. This was a big issue of the time, as it was the year before that 11 people were crushed to death at the turnstiles of a Who concert. (An episode of the TV show W.K.R.P. in Cincinnati even focused on this.) People were starting to press onto the transparent doors trying to look inside, when suddenly there was the sound of tires screeching from the street: a white limousine honked twice and sped around the corner toward the other side of the arena, and was gone within seconds. The "big kids" screamed and ran after it; I was too small to do this, but we got better places in line! When everyone came back, they said they actually saw Freddie and John get out of it and be scuffled into the building before getting attacked by the mob of people. In the meantime, others around us were starting to talk to my mom. Two of them were a man and a lady who were apparently on date, and they ended up even staying by and sitting by us through the show. Some other people also offered to kind of stay around my mom and I to make sure I'd be safe on the way in. A couple of times, a big fat drunk guy yelled out, "Who's your favorite group?" and of course everyone yelled "Queen!"

Now people were beginning to bang on the doors of the entrance. I think the doors finally opened at around 11 am. When they did, we and other people from several sides of the arena moved in, towards those coming in from other doors on opposite sides: within seconds, everyone had funneled from outside to stopping cold in the lobby, having basically run into each other. This is exactly where everyone stayed for the next two hours. A human shield of several people were intact around my mom and I preventing my being crushed... and all I could see for two hours were a bunch of butts! Once in awhile someone would try and lift me up to see all the people. From the distance, the drunk guy again repeated the "Who's your favorite band?" line a couple of times, realizing that more people could hear him now that he was indoors and echoing, and everyone gave the appropriate response. By the fifth time, only the drunk people were responding to him, and by the tenth time people were laughing and moaning. Every so often, some loud music would come out of the arena like a band was tuning-up, but it wasn't Queen music so everyone figured it was just the opening act. At 1 pm, the turnstiles were finally opened. I was kind of keeping my guard around me as everyone pressed forward, and everything was moving faster the closer we got, but by surveying the area I thought I'd be safe. I had my ticket in my hand. The guy from the couple was going to try and enter first, then me, and then my mom. When I got to the turnstiles, my mom and the guy grabbed my arms on both sides and completely hoisted me over. A surprised old man tore my ticket while I was in mid-air. Suddenly, we were standing relatively calmly inside: the difficult part was over, and we were at least safe from here on out. People were still running everywhere and screaming, but the hallways were pretty big so it wasn't too dangerous as long as we stayed toward the edge. Most people were still outside, since we were somewhat early. An older 12-year-old tore around the corner, then his '70s-style tennis shoes screeched against the floor and he fell down for a second as he decided to which way to go. We knew we were sort of on a mission to walk fast toward a balcony and just get seats instead of wandering around indecisively like others. We went straight up toward the second level balcony, as others ran the opposite way down to the main floor. My mom and I and the people we'd befriended walked right next to the wall, and I pressed against it while just a few feet away scattered groups of people would sometimes run by full-speed. I would have wanted to be on the main floor, but my mom had previously explained to me how, unless we were in the balcony, we would have to actually stand through the whole show (there weren't any chairs on the main floor) and would hardly be able to see anything. Plus, along with the horror stories of people running in at the beginning of a rock concert, I had also heard how people supposedly got crushed to death against the stage... so sitting in the balcony was just fine with me. We got two seats in the front of the second balcony, just by the railing to the balcony below. We were on the right side of the arena, about halfway back, so we couldn't complain. Now, I knew this was the beginning of the biggest wait: sitting in the same spot from 1 in the afternoon to about 9 at night.

The main parts of the stage I liked (from viewing the pictures in my Live Killers album) were intact: the steps were lined with lights under Roger's drums, and middle of the main stage had a small plank stage that stuck out for Freddie to walk on, where the crowd could touch him but not too easily. Most of the instruments, and all of Roger's drum set, were covered in giant sheets of plastic. I'd never seen such big speakers; I had a flashback when I saw the black and white photo to the right because that's what they looked like with the house lights up. Throughout the afternoon, the lights in the arena would go out, then come back on... like we were being teased. Finally when it was about time for the opening band, the lights went off longer than usual and the band took the stage. The opening band was someone we had never heard of, and my mom and I both can't even remember who it was now (two people have e-mailed me saying it was a band called "Dakota"). I don't think they had any hits, and then apparently disappeared soon after. The crowd tolerated the first two or three songs. Then, every song ended with "Just one more song!" much to the audience's vocal dismay. I went on a trip to the bathroom, and they were still playing when I came back. Then they left. Ten minutes later, they came back and said "Just one more song!" and I think they played three. People were yelling, "We want Queen!" People were getting harsh to the point it was just uncomfortable even seeing the band on the stage. Everyone cheered when they left. The lights came back on. Another two hours. Just seeing them walk across the stage would have been enough for me, so at that age I really couldn't comprehend being in their presence for a whole two-hour concert. This wait was easier though because every second we knew the show could start. Seeing Queen still seemed like it was too good to be true, like some act of God would occur just before the show to prevent it. Then, the lights went out. There's no feeling like the wait in total darkness just before a Queen concert. It was 10 minutes of black and the loudest screaming I'd ever heard. I remember it was "scary" and so I think Brian might have also been playing the weeping guitar sound like the beginning of the We Will Rock You concert video. It was a good scary feeling though, like going up the first hill of a roller coaster. After several minutes of intense darkness and the crowd screaming, when I felt like my ears didn't have room for any more sound to enter (though I loved it), the even louder sound of thunder clapped across the arena with an incredibly blinding light. I could see everyone on the main floor have to turn completely around in unison toward the back of the arena because the lights were so bright. I kept trying to glance at the stage to see what was happening, but it was too bright to see anything... plus, in between the flashes, it was too dark to see anything. It was sort of an unnerving state, being totally blinded in that big of a place with that many people, and coming to the realizaton that it would be unthinkable to actually move around and that we were basically helpless. I was holding my mom's hand. Queen had the whole crowd paralyzed in their tracks before the show even began.

I'm not sure if the lights all rose up like in the We Will Rock You video or not (since we couldn't see), or if they were already raised because of the opening band. Eventually the thunder and noise turned to music. Finally, through my wincing, Freddie Mercury was suddenly in front of my own little eyes on the front extended stage in all the smoke. I'd never even seen a celebrity in person before, much less my idol at the time. I didn't think they would open with the fast version of "We Will Rock You" for some reason, since that's at the beginning of the Live Killers album and I thought they would want to do something different, but was surprised that they opened with a non-Queen song: "Jailhouse Rock". The stage looked similar to that in the We Will Rock You concert video, with the smaller panels of lights replacing the single giant panel from previous tours; however, I'm certain there was at least another entire, higher level of moving lights (not only from seeing them at the concert, but also looking at the pictures for years afterwards). The lights in the We Will Rock You video seem extremely cut-back. Instead of one row of panels of lights across the back of the stage, the panels were all over the place and the ones above the band moved straight up and down on poles and tilted back and forth. There were also little men somehow sitting amongst the panels who manually operated at least a dozen spotlights, and more guys doing this from a small section hanging down from the ceiling at the middle of the arena. Since the spotlights were directed from the top of the arena, there wasn't a big bulky spotlight booth in the middle of the main floor taking up space, and the audio booth was placed along the right side of the arena (down not to far from us) so it wasn't in anyone's way. In the darkness between a lot of the songs, flashlights darted around the stage... we couldn't figure out if it was the band or engineers setting things up. Thankfully, no one came out on stage before the show to announce the band (I've always thought this is really cheesy). Freddie had on those red leather pants with the blue knee-pads... and, unfortunately, that ugly mustache! "What do you think about my new mustache?" Freddie asked. (Mixed applause.) "Some people don't like it, but I just say 'fu** 'em.'" (Crowd goes wild.). Freddie drank some water, then tossed the rest out onto the crowd along with his cup. He tossed his tambourine out later, and I couldn't imagine what it would actually be like to touch it. Freddie also had that long silver microphone stand that he always danced around with in the videos. He was running all over the place; one second he was on the plank at our side of the arena, the next at the other side. The three high school girls who rode up with us were excited because when he went to the end of one of the planks he ended up level and close to them in the balcony (but upset because, had one not been on crutches, they would have stayed on the main floor where Freddie tossed his tambourine!). Once or twice I remember looking into the middle of the arena and some kind of explosion occurred in mid-air (apparently launched from the lighting duct at the top of the arena). There weren't that many lighters in the audience, but instead everyone was using those green glow-sticks that come out around Halloween (I think these were new at the time). The audience kept throwing their green glow sticks up on the stage until at times it was covered, and more than once Brian kicked off some back into the audience (and I think he might have been getting upset but I'm not sure!).

There were numerous parts of the show I knew had to be there... and they all were. The first was the "scary" sound effects and section of "Get Down, Make Love", where Queen showed off their lights. (At that age, I thought the erotic sound effects were simply supposed to represent the monster breaking-in on the cover of News of the World). Smoke shrouded the band, as the panels of lights took over and moved around to the audience's ooohs and aaahs. My mom and I were trying to figure out what was on Roger's bass drum, since it didn't look like an album cover; it turned out to be the white "face" design, also in the We Will Rock You video. Back then, concerts didn't have big video screens, so we just had to use the binoculars that we'd brought. Some spotlights were gathering on Freddie and Brian as they went to sit on two stools toward the right of the stage, and my mom got excited because we knew "Love of My Life" was coming. Freddie announced, "This is our first time in Omaha... " as the song started, and got the crowd to sing along like on the Live Killers album. Meanwhile, I had become a source of info for those around who wanted to know what the songs were; every time a new song would start, people would ask me what it was! I really don't know if anyone has ever actually been able to appreciate a concert as much as I did that night: I was only 7, but had every album except the first two, and knew every song they played except maybe two or three. But what's interesting is how fans often wish they could experience how a "classic" band was 20 years prior... and this is strangely how I felt I was experiencing the show, because at my age it seemed like Queen had been around 20 years. There were parts of the show, including the stage design, that were "legendary" to me, but were only 2-3 years old in reality. Now, 20 years later, they're legendary to everyone else. Periodically, the guy next to me changed the tape in his "hidden" tape recorder. We knew the show was close to the end when "Bohemian Rhapsody" began. Everyone clapped to the pre-recorded opera section, and as the Live Killers liner notes say: "The audience and the lights take care of the rest." The crowd went nuts when Roger hit the famous gong at the end.

I think there were two or three more songs, and then everything went black for about 10 minutes. Could it be that they were actually not going to play the standard "We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions/God Save the Queen" closing? The house lights may have even come on for awhile, then went back off. A few people were starting to leave, and I kept telling my mom that they had to end the concert that way, because that's the only way a Queen concert ends... but then even I was having doubts. Finally, the yellow lights around the gong all turned on, pointing directly on Roger, who started the drums of "We Will Rock You" and everyone stomped their feet and clapped. Of course "We Are the Champions" was next, and Freddie shook some of the hands flailing in front of the stage while singing it. I remember there was one hand jumping up and down that never got shook! Freddie bent his neck way back when he sang "... of the world!" at the very end like I knew he was supposed to from videos on TV, and we hoped for another song but knew that was probably going to be it. A grand finale of Queen's famous pyrotechnics began shooting everywhere from the stage, the lights were all moving around, and everyone was jumping all over in the aisles. Soon the pre-recorded Night at the Opera version of "God Save the Queen" did begin playing...but, nobody really sang to it since this is America and no one knows the words! At this point, I tried to make sure I was truly fathoming what it was like to actually see the band members in front of me since they'd be gone soon. Freddie was still dancing around and danced out a little door behind the drums, and the rest of the band followed one-by-one, with John being last as he waved to everybody one last time. The lights flickered and moved some more to the rest of the song, slowly going dark along with the rest of the arena, with the final rise of the crowd's applause. Perfect. Except for that damn mustache. We walked down what seemed like endless spiraling stairs on the way out...extremely slowly this time. My ears had that weird "ringing" feeling like everyone said I'd have, but that I'd never experienced before. Spotlights were panning the sky outside. We said goodbye to the couple we'd been with during the show. A guy in his late 20s started talking to us on the long way out; he laughed and told me how he'd also had to argue with his mom who said Queen would never come to Omaha. My mom asked him if he thought I'd even remember the whole thing since I was so little. He looked down at me, saw my grin from ear-to-ear, and said, "He'll never forget this."” - Jim

[spookyceph]

Good Graces Pt. 2

Finally got the second half of this fic together. Find it on Ao3 or the first part here on Tumblr. 

Nothing explicit takes place, however, the non-canon talk is of a sexual nature. Also, Dabi is a masochist and likes being ordered around. But we knew this already, didn’t we?

Words: 2,789

Rating: M for language and sexual themes

The wait ended two days later in the same spot. Dabi was in the process of pouring himself his second drink of the night when a misty-edged hole opened in reality behind the bar. From it stepped the tall, elegant form of Kurogiri. Dabi had never really considered what a demon might look like, but the League’s second-in-command/butler/voice of reason provided plenty of inspiration. Impeccable suit. Ability to show up anywhere. Form too immaterial to hurt, but still capable of making someone pay for trying. As always, Dabi gave him a polite nod and fought back memories of how it had felt to unexpectedly be elbow-deep in that shifting darkness.

“Ah, Dabi. Just the person I was hoping to see.” Deep. Smooth as high-end nihonshu. The kind of voice that could talk somebody into trading away their firstborn. Or into joining a half-assed villain ensemble.

Dabi paused with his glass to his lips. He made a sound he hoped came across as Yes, I’m listening rather than Help, I’ve swallowed my own tongue in mortal terror.

“Shigaraki Tomura wishes to speak with you at your earliest convenience.”

This was it. This was not a drill. Dabi put down the glass without taking a sip. “Where?”

“He is in his room at the moment. I will open the way, if you wish to go now.”

He’d just slid off the stool when the words registered. The air behind him changed. It was like the faint static charge living things gave off and a feeling of being watched all at once. Except Dabi knew if he turned he’d see only a hazy oval of black floating there, the perfect width and length to swallow him completely.

He didn’t want to use the warp gate. No fucking way. Problem was he’d already gotten up—couldn’t sit back down without looking like a coward or a dumbass or both. And he sure as hell wasn’t about to admit he already knew where Shigaraki’s room was to the person who amounted to the closest thing the guy had to a father.

So, Dabi grabbed his glass again. Knocked back the contents. Pretended it was just like jumping into a cold pool on a summer day as he turned and plunged into the waiting darkness.

Nothing existed anymore. Not time. Not space. Not self. Then something—maybe Kurogiri’s will or just simple momentum—carried him back into being. He returned to reality with a gasp. Catching his balance, he blinked and took stock of his new surroundings.

Shigaraki sat on his heels not a meter away, staring up through the stiff fingers of his favorite fashion statement. Large sheets of paper littered the floorboards in front of him. Maps, Dabi realized, noting the grid lines and coordinate markings. Somewhere way out in the sticks, if all the green and brown were any clue. Turning his head, he saw shelves lining the walls. Books? No, too many the same size and too thin. Cases for games—hundreds of them. More than one person could finish without giving up on everything else in life. Then again, what did he know? He’d never been allowed to have any as a kid. Never been allowed to have anything that might distract him from the glorious future planned out for him since day one. And just look at how well that had gone.

At any rate, the room didn’t seem to have the right ambiance to banish or murder someone in. Dabi let his hopes peek out from the bunker of suspicion.

“What’s this stuff for?” he asked, nodding to the maps on the ground.

Nothing from Shigaraki for an adrenaline-spiking second. Then, he crooked the fingers of one hand. “Sit.”

Dabi obeyed, pacing himself. Step in closer. Let one leg fold under him. Just bend the other so the sole of his boot lay flat on the floor. Rest same side elbow on knee. Prop the whole casual façade up with the other hand behind him.

“You got something you wanna say?” Cool nonchalance despite all the spit having vanished from inside his mouth.

Closing those intense eyes, his boss-and-possibly-more drew a long inhale. Didn’t even gag on the musty museum specimen smell of the taxidermy clutching his face. Then it was Dabi’s turn to suck in a breath as Shigaraki pulled off the gray hand with fumbling fingers, setting it aside.

“I want you to lead the others on their first job,” he said, complete with direct eye contact.

Any pretense of self-assurance abandoned Dabi. His stomach clenched as if braced for a punch. He pumped his brain for something droll, snappy, cocky in response. The well had run dry. He settled for practical.

“What do you want us to do?”

Shigaraki’s shoulders relaxed a fraction, though his stoic expression never wavered. “I was given some interesting information about UA’s precious fledgling heroes. Seems they’re headed to a remote training camp in the mountains for the summer. No one will be looking after them except two of their teachers and four pros who specialize in wilderness rescue missions. I want you to ruin their little retreat.”

Dabi’s spine went stiff and straight as an exclamation point. “I didn’t sign up to kill kids—even baby heroes.”

But Shigaraki was already shaking his head halfway through. “Killing them isn’t the point. That would generate too much outrage, hypocritical or no. The police might actually pry their heads from their asses and make a united effort to hunt us down with that much public pressure on them. Not to mention every third-rate pro in the country would crawl out of the woodwork, looking to make headlines. We’d be finished before we ever got started.

“No, what I have in mind is some training of our own.”

Attention swapped places with apprehension. “Oh?”

“None of us have worked together. Most of us haven’t worked on a team at all. This is an opportunity to test how well your quirks and styles compliment or clash with one another.”

“So, what? We crash their field trip and start fucking shit up? Flee the scene when the fighting gets too heated?”

“I came up with a level objective for you to focus on.” From on top of the maps, Shigaraki scooped up a thick manila folder and handed it to him.

Taking it, Dabi flipped to the first set of pages inside. His expression stayed set in stone while his stomach took a cliff dive.

A pretty girl with skin the color of bubblegum and squiggly little horns peeking out of her cotton candy hair smiled out at him from the photo in the top corner.

Name: Ashido Mina

Age: 15

Quirk: Acid

“You got hold of the students’ profiles? Impressive.” And a potential fucking disaster waiting to happen.

Shigaraki shrugged modestly, lightly scratching a new crop of scabs that had popped up in jagged furrows on both sides of his neck. Scabs that hadn’t been there a few days ago. “It’s just their teachers’ assessments of their quirks and performance during class assignments. Personal information like relatives and home addresses were better protected.”

The vice slowly closing its jaws around Dabi’s thumping heart released. Regardless, he made sure not to linger on any one student as he leafed through several of the profiles. Just focused on breathing normally and pretending to read for what seemed like a reasonable amount of time before moving to the next. He’d wait until he didn’t have an audience to allow himself to register anything.

“What’s this objective supposed to be?” he inquired.

“Capture one of the stronger, more notable students and ask him to join us.”

A muscle in his cheek jumped when Shigaraki reached over and flipped to a report in the middle of the folder. Dabi forced himself not only to look but see.

The boy scowling out of the picture was blonde. Broad-shouldered. Red-eyed, though not as beautifully as the one sitting across the way. Dabi’s pulse evened out.

“Bakugou Katsuki,” he read. “Isn’t this the kid they had to bind and gag at UA’s Sports Festival—even though he won the damn thing?”

“The same.”

“The hell do we want him for? I thought we were full capacity on lunatics already.”

A sigh. “To spook the school’s supporters and society at large, for one. It’s not enough to kill heroes. More will just take their place. We have to convince people to withdraw their support of them. Turn against them, though that won’t come until later.”

Dabi snorted. “This little asshole will never agree to sign on with us. He’s obsessed with proving he’s above everyone else. I know the type.”

A twitch of interest crossed Shigaraki’s face. Instead of pressing, though, he filed the slip away in that mysterious brain of his. “I don’t give half a shit if he agrees. All that matters is he blabs to anyone who’ll listen that we targeted and tried to corrupt him once we let him ‘escape’.”

Tapping his fingers on the stack of papers, Dabi let the big picture come into focus. “Instead of outright attacking the school, we’re undermining their image. Making all the mommies and daddies wonder if a career as a pro is as great as they thought it would be for their precious snot-nosed bastards. Getting donors to think twice before reaching for those wallets. We’re playing the long game. Smart.” A thin smile tugged at one end of Dabi’s mouth. “Which leaves just one question. Why have me lead instead of yourself? People might accuse me of sleeping my way to the top.”

A lovely shade of pink, like the inner coating of a seashell, livened up Shigaraki’s cheeks. “We never—!” He huffed and turned away, pink deepening to rose and spreading to the tops of his ears when he noticed Dabi’s smile had widened to a grin. “You’re fucking with me, aren’t you?”

“Guilty. Well, on the last part anyway.”

Shigaraki continued to fume, hopes of an answer dwindling with each second of silence. Then, just when an apology was in the works, “Because I’m a shitty leader.”

Dabi exchanged his smile for arched eyebrows. “”And you think I’d make a better one?”

“You take initiative when you need to, and show restraint when you should. You’re able to read people without giving away much of anything about yourself. The others respect you. They like you. Anyway, from a purely tactical standpoint, since your quirk is long range you can attack and give orders without getting swept up in the melee. And…” Blood-soaked irises looked at him through a tangled curtain of white hair for a moment before flitting back to the safety of the maps. “I trust you.”

Every response Dabi had lined up crumbled. With them gone, he couldn’t pretend not to notice what they’d been hiding. Exposed to proper light and air, it bloomed, bright and bold despite the ruin it grew from.

“I won’t fail.” The words were hoarse, but came out easily enough for a promise he’d swore to make to no one except himself ever again.

“I know you won’t. Because this isn’t about winning or losing. I want you and the others to test yourselves as individuals and as a team. Do your best. Find what works. What doesn’t. We’ll figure out where to go from there. Together.”

He’d joined the League of Villains looking for a means to exact revenge. Being told what he’d always wanted to hear made for a hell of a bonus prize.

Dabi pounced. His mouth mashed into Shigaraki’s, muffling an astonished yelp. Cold hands latched onto the front of his shirt. Not Decaying. Not shoving. Clinging. Insisting. He obliged, wrapping his arms around the other man’s waist and shoulders, then letting his weight carry them both to the floor. They rolled across the maps, scattering stolen papers as they went. Lips and teeth and tongue combined in different ways between every panting break for air.

Winding up sprawled on top, Dabi relocated his kisses to Shigaraki’s neck. The whimper that came out of him when just a bit of suction was applied under the corner of his jaw went directly to Dabi’s dick. Shigaraki writhed, supple and strong, yet unsure and overwhelmed. His fingers—three on each hand—clutched hard enough to hurt through a carapace of scar tissue. The scabs crosshatching his neck scraped the tongue and tasted of rust.

He surpassed any fantasy conjured up in the past few weeks. Because he was real. Unpredictable. And, in that slice of time at least, he was Dabi’s.

Shigaraki gasped and arched at the feel of a hand slipping up under his shirt. Dabi became so absorbed in the smooth, cool texture of the skin beneath his fingertips he didn’t think anything of the arm that snaked around his own, or the heel hooked behind his knee until, with a sharp twist of hip, he was rolled. The air rushed out of him in a huff as he hit the floor. Shigaraki didn’t look it, but he was solid, planting himself on Dabi’s chest and pinning both his wrists above his head.

“No,” he said, decisive if out of breath. “We do this my way.”

Dabi kept perfectly still. One wriggle, one shift, and he would’ve cum in his pants right then and there. So, he relaxed one muscle group at a time. Controlled his breathing. Showed his boss what a good boy he could be.

“What did you have in mind?” he asked, already positive he’d like the answer.

Despite his command of the situation, Shigaraki’s gaze wandered off to the side. Unsure. Shy. God, it was going to be fun fucking both descriptions right out of him.

“I don’t have…experience…with this, ah, subject.”

Dabi had to keep his teeth clamped together to keep from laughing. Good. He had to be good or he wouldn’t get any treats.

“So, I thought…maybe we could each make a list. Of things we like—or might like. And of stuff we don’t, or aren’t interested in. Then…pick and agree on an option. Until…until someone gets bored or just doesn’t want to anymore or…whatever.”

The habit of exceeding expectations was quickly becoming one of Dabi’s favorite things about his new boss. “Is that what you’ve been up to these past three days? Thinking about what you want to do to me?”

Shigaraki shifted his weight forward a bit, breathing definitely speeding up a notch. “Not the entire three days,” he muttered.

Dabi rested his hands on slim hips, keeping them still before they sent him over the edge. “When did you want this list?”

He considered, worrying his already cracked bottom lip with his teeth and then catching the trickle of blood with the point of his tongue in a way that made Dabi’s toes curl in his boots. “We’ll need to start meeting regularly to work on the plan anyway, so…tomorrow, at this time.”

Meaning he had already made a list and wanted to see what Dabi came up with. “Done.”

“Well.” Shigaraki cleared his throat lightly. “It’s settled then.” Carefully, he started to slide his leg over. Froze when a soft hiss escaped Dabi. A finger stroked one of the staples in his cheek before pulling back, remembering permission to do so hadn’t been agreed on yet.

“Did I hurt you? When we rolled over?”

Absolutely precious. Dabi smiled. “Not as much as I want you to.”

Red eyes blinked rapidly, wide and startled. “I’m…sorry?”

“Don’t be. Now go on. Let me up.”

Still looking a bit lost, Shigaraki did, sitting with his arms wrapped around his legs. Dabi sat upright on a long exhale. Paused to collect himself. Got to his feet when he was reasonably sure he wouldn’t ruin his last clean pair of pants doing so.

“You’re leaving?”

The note of disappointment in Shigaraki’s tone almost toppled his resolve. He looked over through lowered lashes. “I have something pressing to take care of at the moment. Unless you don’t want to wait for a list to find out what it is.”

One glance below Dabi’s belt transformed confusion into open-mouthed understanding. “Oh.” Shigaraki buried his face in his knees. “Sorry?”

“I already told you. Don’t be.” And before his willpower evaporated completely, “See you tomorrow.”

He’d made it to the door when a final thought sprung on him. Pausing with his fingers on the handle, he peered back over his shoulder. “You didn’t come up with this whole training camp plan just to score some alone time with me, did you?”

The choked sound that came from Shigaraki was answer enough. Dabi finally allowed himself to laugh as he let himself out.

[dadzawa-adopt-dabi]

secret baby ch13

(im so sorry for the wait! thank you for the patience! i really didnt mean to leave anything this long without a update.)

The hospital always brings back bad memories. Memories of being stuck lying to the nurses as they ask him where bruises and burns come from. He remembers a specialist being hired to heal his old scars from training and how frustrated the nurse had been when Dabi had told him the lie of the month. It's different now, he knows that and reminds himself to relax. Kiyoko will pick up on his distress and start fussing if he lets himself stew too long. The past is the past and while he can’t change it he can ensure Kiyoko won’t fear hospitals or grow up like he did.

“Dabi urameshi?” the receptionist calls for him and he raises his hand. He can’t follow after her right away but does his best to be quick when putting Kiyoko back in her brightly colored stroller and shoving her toy back into the diaper bag hanging off the handle. Kiyoko whimpers at the loss of her toy but since Dabi can’t run around after it when she decides to throw it he trades it for a pacifier.

Everyone else has a significant other with them in the waiting room. This visit isn’t for Kiyoko and Dabi hadn’t wanted to ask his babysitter to watch her again this early in the morning. It's just a checkup, his heat should be coming soon and he needs his scent patches refilled. Just a quick visit but it makes him feel lonely, knowing everyone else has someone else to rely on and that enji has wrecked something as simple as a checkup for him.

“Thank you for waiting” he mumbles and pushes Kiyoko through the door the receptionist is still holding open. Hawks and his ridiculous habit of holding open the club door or his apartment door spring to mind. Particularly his habit of bowing with a mischievous grin on his face as he did so. He must be feeling really sentimental today, every little thing seems to be tripping him up. Maybe it’s just the stress.

“It’s not a problem.” Maybe it's just Dabi but the smile on her face and the chirp in her voice feel strained. It’s not like he can help that he’s dealing with a baby on his own or that hero’s are all pieces of shit.

He needs more sleep if he’s going to be this irritable. He would give anything for just one night without waking up from nightmares. Kiyoko mostly sleeps throughout the night thankfully so he hasn’t had to calm her down as well as himself as he checks locks and searches the house for a flare of red. He steps into the room his receptionist gestures to and checks to make sure Kiyoko hasn’t lost her pacifier yet.

“Hello, I'll be your doctor for today, I understand that you're looking at a general checkup as well as a prescription?” she doesn't peer at Kiyoko in her stroller, Dabi having slammed the hood on it down when she walked into the room.

“For heats and for scent blockers.” it's going to be a little bit of a stretch to afford both prescriptions but he still has his ‘maid’ business going. He had resisted calling it a maid service at first, preferring home cleaning or something similar. But it really was just a maid service.

“Oh you won’t need suppressants for awhile” she let out a small laugh but stopped when Dabi didn’t join her. Her face quickly morphing into something more troubled. “Your file said that you gave birth to a healthy little girl about 6 months ago right?”

Dabi mirrors her frown and nods. That’s why the suppressants were so important right now. Every 8 months most omega’s went into heat. Some of course went through it more often and others less but Dabi’s had always been hard to track. Coming and going as they pleased with no pattern.

“Your body won’t enter heat for a while. Has no one explained this to you yet?” she questions gently while trying to get Dabi to hold eye contact with her.

“Not really I guess. I’ve never had a regular cycle and I wasn’t allowed birth control when I lived with my parents.” he stares at the shadow of Kiyoko in her stroller. If he had been on birth control he wouldn’t have had her. He doesn't regret becoming pregnant or running away with her but he wishes he had been on birth control all the same. He’s heard it could make his heats less painful but enji had believed he would start sleeping around and Rei hadn’t stood up for him.

“Birth control can help with that. It can also make heats less intense or painful if you experience either of those symptoms.” she sat down at her desk in the corner and swiveled her chair so she was facing him. “For now unless you have someone you feel comfortable leaving your baby with you won’t have to worry about it.”

“I have a babysitter I usually leave her with. Her other father isn’t in the picture and neither are my parents.” He feels like he should know this already, should know enough about his body to not request medication he won’t need at the very least.

“Your babysitter won't count. They would have to be family or like family in order for your insticts to calm down and for your cycle to restart.” a little plastic block on her waist goes off and after quickly checking it she shuts it off and puts it in a drawer.

“Wasn’t that important?” Dabi raises an eyebrow slightly amused.

“This is more important right now.” she waves it off. Like she truly believes that whatever caused her beeper to go off can wait. “Suppressants are more expensive than most people realize and you don’t need them right now.”

“Because I had Kiyoko?” His voice comes out quiet and unsure. He never had these kinds of talks about suppressants or children with his mother. By the time he had realized he needed someone to talk to it they hadn’t been getting along. He had been angry and bitter that she was still with enji. Then he had started going out and soon enough he was pregnant.

“Well yes and no. Omega’s have their own built in heat suppressant system. It's still mostly a mystery as to how our bodies do it but until you have some form of packbonds your body won’t send you into heat. Sometimes if a young omega frequently takes care of younger siblings or relatives their cycles will become irregular due to their ‘inner omega’ as we will call it, deciding that they are a primary caretaker and putting heats on the backburner. There is a bit of a tradeoff the longer you go without one and that is just that the first heat when you do go through it will be more intense than normal. Something that can be balanced out with birth control.”

Dabi spends an hour and a half asking any question he can think of to the doctor, eventually she gives him some websites to visit and has to end the appointment. She has other patients to see still and Dabi has taken up enough of her time. He leaves with the prescription for scent blocker pills and less frustration than he started out the appointment with. She also prescribed him soem light sleeping medication to help him sleep through the night. Kiyoko has almost always slept through the night and being such a light sleeper he has no worries about not waking up if she needs him.

At least now he won’t have to worry about going into heat on top of everything else. Now he just has to wait for Giran to give him a call and keep his own business afloat in the meantime. He just needed a little help, he can still raise Kiyoko on his own.

Dabi doesn't get his first job from giran right away like he half expects. He spends the first few days on edge until he realizes that it won’t do any good to stress out over. Focusing on Kiyoko helps him push the constant anxiety away. His home cleaning business eats up whatever time Kiyoko doesn't. He’s determined not to raise Kiyoko completely on crime. There is no telling how often he would get a job from Giran or if he will always be paid as fast as the last time. The biggest change Dabi can make right away is being pickier with his clients, dropping anyone who has been judgemental and anyone that has ever given him the creeps. Kiyoko no longer has to stay with his sitter, he is able to take her with him again, and it takes a lot of his tension away from him. He hadn't known exactly how much denying his instincts to keep her close had been weighing on him until he could obey them. His remaining clients are mostly people who just don’t have time to do the work themselves or the elderly are left. Combined with being able to actually sleep through the night he feels almost like he did when he was spending nights with Hawks. He feels almost like everything will turn out okay. It's strange after the months of worry and stress but Dabi embraces the change as best as can.

Kiyoko distracts him from his thoughts by reaching for her favorite toy that is just out of her reach where she is lying on a tummy time mat. She’s also taken to knocking anything she doesn't like away from her. Making a mess with food and toys constantly. She’s still on formula for the most part but he was given the okay at her 6th month checkup to let her start trying solid food.

“Yay! Good girl Kiyoko! You're getting so big!” Dabi cheers his daughter on as he eats his lunch while she turns herself over, still trying to reach the toy. Her wings flutter quickly and help her finish turning over. Dabi has the sinking feeling that she will eventually be able to fly with them.

 Kiyoko fakes a small cry at Dabi, wanting to be off the mat and be held instead. Being on the tummy - time mat makes her upset because it puts her dad being out of her sight. There’s no tears in her eyes when Dabi gives in and picks her up a few minutes later. It's hard to leave her on the mat when she cries.

“Crying for just any old reason? Uncle Natsou would call you a faker.  Uncle Shouto would probably just pick you up when I wasn’t looking.” He was still doing his best to include his family in her life even if she might never meet them. Talking about his siblings and referring to them as “Uncle” or “Aunt”.

The sound of coins jingling comes from his phone while Dabi is in the middle of bringing his fork back up to his mouth. It’s a notification sound he set for giran’s texts, the only person in his contacts that has a set ringtone. All other notifications come through set to a default tone. He flips his phone open and sets aside his food for the moment, appetite lost.

 ‘I'm Sorry to have your first job be on short notice but i need a message delivered to the manager of the auto dealership at the following location as soon as you can get there. Tonight preferably. Stop by the cafe to pick up the message.’ There is a large dollar amount at the end of the text. Dabi does a double take at the amount, that’s more than he was supposed to be getting paid per job. Another text is quick to follow, providing an explanation for the extra pay.  ‘for the extra trouble Sugar. Let me know when it gets done.’ 

Dabi winces at the pet name again but sends a simple ‘K’ back to Giran. The less he says the better. He texts his babysitter for the first time in over 2 weeks. Then starts going through his anxiety induced ritual of pacing the apartment and applying his scent blocker while he waits for her response. 

His sitter texts back when Kiyoko only has about five more minutes on the mat. He decides that's just enough time for him to check the windows and locks one last time. With everything secure he picks Kiyoko up and starts purring as he grabs her go bag, walking her down the hall.

“Dabi? It’s early, what do you want a babysitter for at this hour?” his babysitter grouches as they open the door still in their pajamas. It's actually almost noon but Dabi ignores both the time and her rudeness. He needs to stay on her good side so she will continue watching Kiyoko.

“I had something come up and I can't take Kiyoko with me.” He adjusts her bag as they think about it. “I know I usually give you more of a notice but i really have to go. I’ll pay you time and a half.” he tempts. Normally he would never offer but with the extra ay from Giran he can manage it this once.

“Do you know how long you are going to be gone?” they ask with a sigh as they hold out their hand for Kiyoko’s bag.

“I’m not sure but I’ll text you when i know more. I’ll be back by her bedtime at the very least.” Dabi gives Kiyoko a kiss on the head goodbye before handing her over. He waits until he’s a block away before he texts Giran that he is on his way.

@ruelukas22 @mostladylikeladythateverladied @xxsnowchildxx @i-like-to-shruggy

[cannot-decide-on-a-fandom]

Ahh sorry—if you're still up for it, please do that character you have in mind! I'd really love to see it :) (Sorry for asking for so many!)

Of course I'm still up for it! I wanted to do Hinata! He's our protag after all and I just have so much to say about him!

Favourite thing about them: He could literally befriend anyone and everyone and still have enough love left over for every single fan he'll end up accumulating. It's like an unwritten rule that when he's happy, it's not possible to truly be sad because his smile has magical powers or something that can cheer anyone up when you look at it. He'd be able to make anyone feel better, without even trying to, because he's just so bright and honest.

Least favourite thing about them: He kind of...oversteps occasionally and makes me cringe a bit. It may have all worked out well in the end, sure, but hijacking a training camp because he wasn't invited is a little frustrating and uncomfortable. Then there's him acting out in the middle of games like knocking into Asahi. And then there's still other moments like that. It's never meanspirited, but it does make me facepalm and get secondhand embarrassment sometimes.

Favourite line: I think out of any character, Hinata is the hardest one to decide by far. He has so many damn good and awesome lines and moments, and I think I could make a list just of his quotes. He's the character that always shows to me that Furudate truly is a phenomenal writer. But I don't think there's anything more badass than him staring down someone twice as tall as him, and just going "I'm Hinata Shouyou, from the barren concrete." I mean, that scene is iconic

brOTP: Literally every single human being in the series. He's like the human personification of light. I especially like his dynamics with the Karasuno first years (actually, first years of any school), his relationship with Kenma, Noya and Tanaka are great, and Oikawa at this point! Oh and some other characters he interacts with later too, but as this is Hinata I kind of wanna leave this post spoiler free, as I've included spoilers in almost every other one, so I'll at least leave the protagonist without any.

OTP: I'm gonna get a lot of disagreement here, but I don't care. Kenhina is a damn good and adorable ship and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise. Quietly. But I love them! I can also definitely see Oihina too. And there's obviously Kagehina. And once again, every single damn character in the series. He's so friendly, I swear.

nOTP: Mmm...I wouldn't ship him with Aone. I know that's a relatively popular pairing, but I just can't see it.

Unpopular opinion: Stop saying he could never be good because he "started too late" or whatever! I've made entire posts about this, but he's not an old man or anything! He was like 15 when he went to high school, he still practiced before too, but even if he didn't, 15 is still a freaking child! Why are people going like "no, he could never actually catch up to others who played when they were younger" when he works so damn hard and with so much dedication! Yes, it's easier to learn things if you start sooner, but there's a BIG difference between "harder" and "impossible" and screw it, he works so hard! Sorry. Got carried away there. This one just frustrates me a ton.

Random headcanon: I actually think he has a knack for languages. The only reason he failed English is because he wrote the answers off by a line, but he's a very social being, I feel like if he learned it practically as opposed to having to write it down, he'd actually be really good at it. This is also the reason exams are stupid. In general. It's a stupid way to measure intelligence.

Favourite picture of them:

He looks so beautiful here! I think I took this screenshot from one of the openings but he's beautiful, okay?

I'm getting really intense over Hinata, aren't I? Oops.

(oh, and never apologize for interacting)

[insomniblaque]

I’ve been thinking about romantic love for a little while now. Well, mostly romantic, but in general I’ve been contemplating my relationship with men and where love fits in those relationships. I’ll be honest, romantic love hasn’t manifested itself in the way I’ve seen other people experience it. I’ve never been in a mutual relationship with someone I’d call a partner, I haven’t been intimate with a person long enough for that part of a relationship to materialize, and I’ve been thinking a lot about why that is, and the role I’ve had in perpetuating that experience. When I was first trying to learn what love was supposed to look like, around middle school I’d say, I wanted to blame myself and relatively superficial factors based on some of my most intimate insecurities — how I felt about my body, my skin, my hair as the reasons why boys didn’t come flocking to me. I blamed things that are uniquely tied to what I looked like. The way I saw love being expressed to other girls — girls who were taller, lighter, skinnier, with less acne molded my expectation of what men wanted and fueled the insecurities I had because they seemed to be everything I wasn’t. While these thoughts existed and played a role in how closed off I was to the idea of professing my intense like for men, they didn’t stay for long, mainly because of the relationships I had with men at that time. My father always made it a point to affirm my worth. My father loved my smile, my gap, my violet gums, my cheeks and voice and never forgot to remind me of how special and beautiful  I am. He would jest about when I would bring a boy home often because “there was no way they weren’t asking to approach me” because I look the way I do. My friendships with mostly boys around that time also offset some of that insecurity because I had friends who not only valued me as a person but appreciated me for things I didn’t necessarily notice in myself like my wit, sense of humor, ability to listen and call them out on their shit.

Over the years, I’ve gone through different phases of trying to redefine my insecurities for myself but ultimately so that I wouldn’t let these self limiting beliefs stand in the way of the potential relationships I could develop. It started with my face. The ugly duckling years of middle school prompted my first interests in learning about makeup so that I could distract people from what I didn’t want them to see.  It evolved into a genuine appreciation of the art and eventually a form of therapy for me. I loved beautifying myself for me -- a stray compliment (though I didn’t know how to accept them) also contributed to the boost in dopamine but ultimately, it was the agency of being able to do something only I knew how to do at the time that added to my confidence. Next was my hair, I think I was the most insecure about that for the longest time. My sister always had thicker, longer hair than me and my worth — especially in a deeply Caribbean household felt tied to how manageable and beautiful I could be and hair was the first indicator of that. When relaxed, my hair was thin, uneven, and barely scraped my shoulders. In high school, after having skipped a couple of relaxer sessions before the first day of my sophomore year, I chopped it all off with kitchen scissors. I remember wanting to see if I could feel beautiful without hair and that would be the “social experiment”. Learning to love the hair that grew out of my head at any stage and detaching the value of my beauty from it was not what I thought I was doing that day at 15, but looking back my confidence grew over time from this dissociation. I was just a year and a half early from the boom of natural hair journeys and big chops of that era (yes, if you haven’t noticed I am ahead of my time in a lot of ways lmao) where other women and girls were also expanding their definitions of self-love via their hair and that also made me feel more confident that I can be all of myself around anyone. Hair no longer was a contributing insecurity for me. Recently, I did another dramatic chop, rooted more in an existential crisis, but it also kind of reminded me of the first — how I could still see myself as beautiful without relying on the factors that are called conventionally beautiful. Last, was my body. I had been prone to unhealthy habits rooted in my poor body image for as long as I could remember like restricting meals, unsustainable diets, even at one point abusing drugs (long story) to try to shave off of a few pounds or to try to find the semblance of abs under all my stomach fat. This insecurity was the hardest to shake. Looking at old pictures of myself these days baffles me because when I was trying my hardest to lose weight, I was probably at my skinniest. I didn’t begin redefining my body image until I got to college and needed to find a way to curb the freshman 15. A friend introduced to weightlifting our freshman year and all I can remember is how powerful it made me feel. The simple movements of a squat or a deadlift wasn’t what brought the thrill, it was the amount of weight I could hold in my hands for an extended period of time, the mass I could move that made me feel like if I could do that then I could do anything. Fitness in the form of weightlifting where I was tracking progress with what I could do and not how I looked like really helped me redefine the boundaries of my body. I still struggle with body image every now and again since I’m still very far from a set of well defined abs and too many things jiggle without my permission most times and I think it will always be a work in progress for someone like me who’s intrinsically a perfectionist but the frame shift I have experienced since has empowered me in ways that I never thought would belong to me.

Now back to men. I think it was around this time last year that I started taking a critical look at why I was the way I was where men are concerned. It was at the height of my dad’s battle with cancer and I was ini school failing and riddled with guilt about it. The first real idea of what a relationship would look like for me also came up in my thoughts. A guy , the topic of many stories and a couple of playlists, who I had a lot of respect for but for all intents and purposes didn’t reciprocate that respect in the ways I felt I needed kept coming into my mind at that time. We had a relatively complicated history spanning almost ten years now and it was the kind of connection that I didn’t want to bring with me as powerful as it was. The back and forth took me back to a place where my insecurities were the root of my worth and validation and that was no longer my truth. Some part of me really wanted to believe that we were the kind of people who would always find our way to each other and I held a lot of love for him. But given the place I was an in at the time, I felt like I was on the road to losing some of the most important men in my life and I wanted to do as much that was in my power to curb that by questioning the love l held for all the men in my life. So I sent some letters and one of them was to him. Disclaimer, I was really embarrassed by the letter and even more embarrassed that I sent it to his school email so he had no choice but to read it. But in this letter, I thanked him. I thanked him for seeing me— all of me when I felt like nobody did but also told him that I needed to cut the ties that attached my sense of self to how he saw me and felt about me considering he was one of the first people to admit to seeing me in a romantic context. We were becoming adults, diverging paths and still something in me was holding out for him and I knew I needed to work on letting that go. It took me a week to write that letter and another week and some liquid courage to send it to him. I wrote a couple of other letters, mailed some, kept others. Overall in this exercise, I realized the lack of emotional vulnerability I have always struggled with, the coldness as a defense mechanism that I was comfortable using and the sense of security I felt from the validation of my father and my best male friends all fueled the way I shot myself in the foot when it came to letting new men into my life. Fast forward, my father has passed, this man is back in my life in the context of a healthy friendship and I am working on the final frontier of emotional vulnerability so that whatever the next romantic experience that comes my way, I won’t run from it. I made this with all the men I’ve loved in mind, my daddy, my best friend, the first person I said I love you to and meant it, a person who I’ve recently resigned myself to just get to know as opposed to making advances on and every situation I have yet to encounter where the male half of our species is involved. This is to all the men I’ve loved before, will always love, and hopefully will learn to love. Enjoy it.

[shadowofmoths]

fuck it, all the evens for the quarantine ask, there are no rules anymore

NO RULES NO RULES NO RULES!! putting this under a cut to spare yall lmao

2. Grilled cheese or PB&J?

GRILLCHEESE. i have recently developed an idealogical opposition to peanut butter but also have you ever been awake at like Too Late and ur jus vibing and u make a grilled cheese and have ur midnight grillcheese? fucking MAGICAL. avery and i all the time when it is Too Late will be like “i want something. what do i want what is it GRILLCHEESE” and then we grill a cheese.

4. Your go-to bar order, if you drink?

i dont drink ! but i do love to have fancy, nonalcoholic drinks....no go-to bar order tho rip 

6. Top three cuisines?

i like...italian food, ofc, as anyone who knows my last name would probably guess, but also my top fav is like mediterranean & middle eastern food ? like fuck man what i would not do in life for a good gyro 

8. What’s a job that you’ve had that people might be surprised to find out you’ve had?

i have not, uh, strictly had jobs, as such, but uh a fun fact abt me is that i did Literally Every Possible Volunteer Position at my church i think lkjhgfhfhs. 

10. Do you own any signed books/memorabilia in general?

answered!

12. What do you get on your bagels? What WOULD you get if you had access to anything you wanted?

OK SO. there is this place near my mom’s college that i think might just literally be called the bagel place and they have a kind of bagel named after their school mascot which is just. bagel, and then you toast it, adn put cream cheese on each half, and then you put some regular cheese on the top of it and put it in a broiler and melt the cheese and its SO GOOD and thats my ideal bagel. 

14. Favorite mug you own

THIS IS A GOOD QUESTION. sofia gave me a yellow mug and its little and v round and decorated w flowers and its SO GOOD and its my fav. i also have a black skull mug and a haunted mansion mug that i LOVe adn theyre all in MARYLAND STILL HELP. i miss them. 

16. Pick a song lyric to describe your current mood (and drop the name and artist!)

it took a concerted effort here not to choose something from next to normal which tells you how intensely GOING THRU IT i am. there’s a song called “better in the morning” by birdtalker that my spotify discover weekly hit me w during a late night breakdown that sort of encapsulates my “this fuckin SUCKS bro but we’re gonna keep goin tho” vibe.

18. What’s that one TV show that you’re a little bit embarrassed to watch but you still like nonetheless?

SHAME OVER INTERESTS IS BORING. ITS 2020. SOMETIMES I WATCH OLD EPISODES OF SHAKE IT UP WITH MY SISTERS. no but my real answer is....i really genuinely unironically love high school musical the musical the series. is it good? not, like, really! but i love it. its probably made me tear up. but im not embarrassed abt it lmao 20. Do you match your socks?

answered!22. What was your “phase” when you were younger? (i.e., Mythology Nerd, Horse Girl, Space Geek, etc)

JKHGSDAF my phase was “Undiagnosed ADHD” so it was , All The Phases really but no it was star wars for sure. but star wars wasnt a PHASE mom thats who i AMMMM 

24. What’s your opinion on Lazy Susan’s (the spinning tray in the middle of tables)?

i...no opinion? they’re..fine? 

26. You can only have one juice for the rest of your life, what is it?

ok theres a local like, dairy farm that makes a FUCKING MAGICAL watermelon lemonade in the summer and i would do anything to have that shit year round 28. What’s one thing you’re trying to learn/relearn in your downtime right now?

knitting! embroidery! uhhhh time management when ur trapped and have adhd! other assorted mental health strategies, like “how to explain to ur teachers that u need help bc ur brain is just Chaotic and also the WORLD IS ENDING, catriona, PLEASE no more essays.” 30. Where could someone find you in a museum?

depends on the museum! but ur best bet is “genuinely crying over van goghs” or otherwise having Very Big Emotions over someone like monet or agnes martin

32. Rainbows, stars, or sunset colored clouds?

ALL OF THESE. probably sunset clouds but also i cannot TELL you how much i miss stars when im out in MD being a Big City Boy.

34. Do you have more art on your walls or more photographs?

art! altho im thinking of disassembling the Art Wall™ and doing smth else bc its gotten a little chaotic in here lately 

36. Pick a superhero sidekick to hang out with

ok, like, define sidekick! which of the young avengers are “sidekicks” if its just a group of gay friends doing universe-saving together?? would you relegate billy kaplan to “sidekick” status? sidekick to WHOM? anyway the answer is teddy altman. 

38. Favorite mid-2000s song

answered!

40. Where do you sit in the living room (we all have a preferred spot, and you know it)?

the couch corner is MINE, babey!! (8 ppl in ur house does mean a big L shaped couch is relatively necessary.) altho recently ive developed a habit of whenever i see someone sitting in a spot i decide that is now My Spot. the person already there doesnt have to move! but i will also be sitting there now thank you. no, im not craving physical affection, why do you ask? 

42. A song you didn’t think you’d enjoy but ended up loving

i dont think i expected to Fall In Love with carly rae jepsen, i dont think ! but her power.....wow. 

44. Are you a “Quote that relates to the photos” caption-er, an “explanation of where I took the photos” caption-er, or a no caption kinda person when you post pictures online?

quote that relates to the photos, usually! with maybe a little explanation. most of the photos i post are arts so it’ll be like “this is carrion hes a bitch i love him” etc 

46. What’s the freezer food that you stock up on when you go to the grocery store?

i dont think...anything in the freezer in my apartment is mine? i think ive got some ben and jerry’s phish food in there tho which is DEFINITELY bad by now, FUCK, but also toaster waffles, conceptually, would be my answer. 

48. Do you like Jello?

yes ! it is . Fun To Eat. 

50. How are you at climbing trees?

pretty bad, bc coordination is a no and im afraid of heights, but i sure do love to try ! and then get too scared! 

[vydante]

Restart | Avengers x Male! Reader | 2

Fandom: Marvel

Pairing: Avengers x Male! Reader (romantically: undecided)

Plot: Dr. Strange said there was only one possibility of winning the battle against Thanos.

But when (Name) is forced into the past and into his younger body, he’s suddenly given the chance to start over and prevent the future from happening again.

So which route are you going to take? Are you going to risk the future and take preventative measures, or live life with the Avengers for the next 4 years, knowing what will soon come?

A/N: Longer. Includes Endgame Spoilers.

(Name) has read of stories where people who have died and then came back recounted what they had experienced. While all of the stories had varied from here and there, there was always something that they all had in common.

They saw something that was beyond the darkness- or rather, the lack of it.

They only saw nothingness.

When (Name) read those stories, he had a hard time grasping the idea of nothingness. He knew what darkness was, but nothing was a hard concept for the genius kid to wrap his head around, surprisingly enough.

But now, he was certain that the void was staring at him right in the eyes, and vice versa.

It was strange, really.

He couldn't remember for the life of him what he was feeling before this, but he knew it was intense. But now, where he is, he felt nothing. 

He couldn't see anything.

He couldn't hear anything, say anything, feel anything... 

He wasn't even sure if he could think.

"..."

What was that?

If (Name) had a head, he was certain that it would've spun a full 180 degree.

Was he hallucinating?

It was quiet, but if he strained for a bit, he could make out some words.

"... Thor..."

Thor?

(Name) knew he recognized that from somewhere; it was a name, but he couldn't place his finger on it.

Was it the name of a past friend? Lover? Enemy?

He wasn't sure.

"... No, Steve..."

Steve? Was that a name? It rang a bell, definitely, but from where?

There was a strange sound now. Is that someone laughing?

His hands were tingling now. 

Wait, what?

Your eyes snapped open as you gasped for air.

The once restricted lungs that held you hostage now open as you sucked in as much air as possible. 

Your hands reach up to your chest and throat as you cough and near spasm.

Everything had suddenly rushed back to you: you could feel the soft clothes that clung so tightly to your body instead of your iron suit; the once ash-filled air was now replaced with a familiar fresh smell; and instead of the echoes of scuttering feet and broken water pipes, it was just... Silence.

Other than your ragged breathing, that was it.

Just sweet, unnerving silence.

Your eyes tried to focus on your surroundings. It was bright, brighter than you remembered. Where were you? There were no signs of a ruined building, just... A room?

You grumbled audibly, which startled you. Did something happen to your voice? You were no Thor- he had one of the deepest voices you've ever heard, but you were also no Peter either- stricken with the curse of puberty and voice-cracks. But right now, you sounded a step away from him.

"Ahh..."

You spoke up quietly and knew something was deeply wrong.

This was not your voice- or, at least, how you remembered it to be. It was higher pitched and didn't have the rugged feel you had known to recognize as yours. It was... More melodic, oddly enough. Smooth, not suffering from years of screaming and yelling into the comms.

It scratched at the back of your head- you wanted to recognize this voice, but you just could not pinpoint whose it was. Was it yours? You weren't entirely sure.

You lifted yourself up from what you were lying on. It was... A bed?

The bed was big. Really big, actually- though, there was a noticeable dip near the center. There were white bedsheets and a few blankets on it. They all had Iron Man designs on it, which made you smile for just a moment.

You stood up and looked around the room. Your stomach buzzed with deja-vu.

The room was that of a nerdy teenagers room, simply put. The walls were littered with drawings and posters, of which you were beginning to recognize all of them. Some were bands you were familiar with, and others of videogame characters. A few new suit designs, and gadgets far beyond its time.

Your heart squeezed as you vaguely recognized them. You took your eyes off of them and examined the rest of the room

There was a desk tucked away in the corner. It was small for what it was, but that didn't stop it from holding up all of the seemingly endless textbooks and journals that sprawled against it. The table was scratched up, too. Years of use, it looked like.

You hesitantly approached it and eyed the book titles.

'Quantum Mechanics: Second Edition'

'General Relativity and Cosmology'

'Theoretical Astrophysics'

And those were just the few that were visible. You smiled at the textbooks, remembering that you once read them in their entirety and had a few all-nighters just finishing up one section.

Unironically, it was fun.

Your eyes traveled over to the journals. They had near unintelligible and not English alphabet writing to the naked eye, but you instantly recognized it as shorthand. 

What startled you was that you recognized that handwriting as yours. It was damn near chicken-scratch, which embarrassingly enough hadn't improved by much as you had aged.

You narrowed your eyes. You scanned the surrounding area for more information. There was a backpack near your bed; flashy and had far too many pins and buttons on it. It... Looked out of place. Horrifyingly so.

Your face felt hot as a wave of second-hand embarrassment shot through your spine. You looked away quickly.

There was a bookshelf with a lot of books on it as well, and it was one of the only organized things in the room you were quickly starting to recognize.

You approached the bookshelf but immediately gravitated towards one specific shelf; the shelf that held many picture frames in it.

They were all of many people who you recognized: there was one where your team had won a state champion baseball game back in middle school. You picked it up tentatively as you looked at your younger self gingerly smiling.

You smiled back with melancholy, as you knew that smile that was pictured didn't meet your eyes. You had won, and it was supposed to be a moment of celebration, but for you, it was one of your lowest moments in life. Your father was at his worst, and your mother was rarely in the picture.

Neither of them had ever congratulated you on your victory. You weren't even sure if they had known if you won or not, or if you were even in baseball.

You put that frame back as you looked at the others.

There was one where you and your father had gone to a party. By then, you two had sustained somewhat of a non-aggressive relationship.

There was another one where you were with a girl you could barely remember. She was an ex. All you could tell was that the both of you seemed really happy in the picture.

Your eyes gazed along with the pictures, struggling to remember the context of them before a shine caught your gaze. 

Turning your head, you were greeted with a mirror.

You nervously gulped as your stomach dropped.

You approached the mirror and looked at the man staring you right in the eyes- or rather, yourself.

Your eyes were wider. Your lips were chapped to the high heavens. Your skin was just now freeing itself of acne and whatnot, but there were still traces of it. 

Your hand traced your neck. There were no scars there, something that you saw was missing. You were also a bit paler than you remembered, though you weren't sure if that was because you hadn't gone in the sun much or if you were just ill.

You were also a lot smaller. You weren't the smallest; you were far taller than your father as far as you remember. But you weren't as tall as you were before... this.

But the kicker to this was your arm. You tentatively traced your right arm as if it was a foreign object, and to you, it might as well have been a fake one. It was soft and warm, something you hadn't felt in a while.

You were a bit slow to realize this, but you were certain now.

You were in your younger body.

"Ah, fuck..."

You felt around your body- your pockets, to be exact. There was nothing in the front- just pocket change. And in the back left was your wallet and in your right? Your phone.

You pulled it out and turned it on, only to have your assumptions be proven correct.

May 5th, 2013.

Ten years far behind from what you had originally remembered.

Your lips formed a thin line. You glanced at the door that led to the outside world- or rather, just the rest of the Avengers tower.

You hadn't really been in the tower in a while since you moved out a year after the OG Avengers disbanded. While not all of the Avengers lived in the tower- Steve had his own apartment and Clint had his family to go back to, surprisingly enough- it just wasn't the same anymore without seeing a few of them occasionally hang out in the main lobby.

Though, that never stopped you from working with them on missions.

But that being said, you could barely remember the layout of the tower. After all, it's been, what? Nearly 7 years since you stepped foot in the tower?

You gazed at the door for a little longer and tentatively approached it.

You rest your hand on the door handle but paused. If this was 2013, then Ultron had yet to happen, right? This should be right after Loki and the Chitauri's, so that means...

"J.A.R.V.I.S....?"

Though your voice was quiet, your eyes welled up when you heard the familiar voice you hadn't heard in a while.

"Yes, Mr. Stark?"

Your lips trembled and your hands clamped down on your mouth to hold in any noise.

J.A.R.V.I.S. had always been special to you. When you had moved into the Stark Tower, Tony... He wasn't exactly the best of father figures to you. He was constantly on the move and never gave you a second glance; that was reserved to the women he paraded himself around before he had met Pepper. And while you had friends in school, J.A.R.V.I.S. was the only one that was your friend outside of school.

He kept you busy, he was the voice of reason to you in your most... Concerning fits. He was the one that told you stories to get you to rest, and he was the one you could truly confide in knowing that you'd receive no judgment.

And while you were upset that J.A.R.V.I.S. had been 'killed' and used to create the basis of Vision, you quickly grew a fondness for the man as you took comfort in his objective and well-meaning actions, even if they were awkward sometimes.

... Most of the times, actually. But they were nonetheless endearing.

He was special to you as he was to Tony as well. And while you were beyond heartbroken when you had witnessed the death of Peter and the Guardians, you also realized something that tore you apart even more.

Thanos must've killed Vision to get his hand on the last Infinity Stone.

So to hear J.A.R.V.I.S.' voice once again, though disembodied, it threw you for an emotional loop. You sniffed up the last of your tears and smiled sadly.

"... I miss you, J.A.R.V.I.S.."

It was quiet but held in 5 years worth of emotions. Sadness, happiness, guilt...

"... I do not know what you mean, sir."

You chuckled quietly and shook your head. 

"Don't worry about it, Jar. Do you know where the- the Avengers are?"

Your voice was caught in your throat midway through your question. That sounded so foreign to you- the Avengers? Even when you all had gathered together to go time-traveling, you had never considered that as the Avengers anymore. It was just a rag-tag team that wanted to restore the universe to its glory again.

Though that was exactly what the Avengers was, it... It just... It wasn't the same. And you were sure it would never be the same.

That was, until now.

"They're currently in the main lobby. Would you like me to notify them that you will be joining them soon?"

"No- no, that... That won't be necessary."

You opened the door and stepped out.

The air was cool- if you remembered correctly, 61 degrees Fahrenheit. You never really knew how to change it at first, but by the time you did you had gotten used to the cold. Plus, this usually made sure no one else would stay for long.

It was nice at first, but you eventually found yourself never really going to your floor of the tower anymore, other than to sleep. It got too quiet and lonely, and being alone with your thoughts was scary enough.

You walked down the halls and towards the elevator. There were a few pictures and sculptures that decorated the halls, but there were a few you had made and collected in the future years that weren't there yet.

You reached the elevator and pressed the number that led to the main lobby, though that led you to a different floor. It was... The Stark laboratory. You remember you had your own, but not in this year. Maybe it was in 2014? Not that far ahead. But as far as you could tell, you were still using your dad's lab to do your tinkering. That brought a smile to your face, remembering all the times you messed with each other's mess.

It was fun.

But now's not the time.

You fumbled around with the buttons before you got on the right floor- or you assumed so since there were people talking oh so loudly. The elevator dinged and you stepped out. 

It smells weird but homey.

You swallowed the lump in your throat.

You walked into the hall and heard the voices get louder. They were all much brighter than you remembered. Louder, too. And... There was laughing.

Your hands were trembling as you slowly approached the corner. You knew that right over it was... It was them.

"That's absolute nonsense, Thor. How do you even do that? Is there a- a battery in your hammer? Supercharged each night?"

"I doubt that- there's no plug, and I doubt it's wirelessly charging."

That was Tony and Bruce, no mistaking it. You smiled. Bruce sounds weird now, since you were used to, well... Professor Hulk speaking? 

"Well, it is not my fault I am a God; I can do many things that are beyond science, my dear friend!"

"Bullshit."

Thor and Clint. Laughter followed it. They sound happier.

"Well, I believe him, as much as I'd rather not."

Steve. His voice is different. You frowned when you realized how... Lively he sounded. When was the last time you ever heard him sound happy? It's been too long.

"Well, I'd have to say I agree with Steve here on this. Sorry boys."

Your throat went dry. Natasha. 

Oh, Natasha...

Your eyes were burning again. You looked up so they wouldn't fall.

While you are definitely hearing them speak right behind you, there was still a tiny sliver inside your heart that was screaming at you.

This was too good to be true.

They aren't here, alive, in 2013, all together and happy.

They aren't chatting happily here. You're just dead and stuck in some sick form of purgatory. They'll be taken away soon enough. This... This peace... It won't last long.

But there was another part of you that wished desperately that whatever you had crushed in your hands really did send you to the past. You hoped that it was a way of the universe giving you another chance to not fuck it up this time.

And you prayed deep in your heart that this- this whole thing... That was what it was.

Another chance.

You inhaled as much as you could. You gathered up your courage. And got off of the wall.

You walked around the corner, and damn near broke down when you saw the Avengers all sitting on the couches, laughing as if there wasn't a single worry in the world.

Masterlist

[polar-stars]

2nd out of 5 parts of an ask by @smokeprincess24

Mika Aldini

👹 How does you OC act around different people and how does their personality change to match the environment they’re in? How do they act with: friends, family, strangers, children or their lover(s)?

Mika has some hesitance in exposing her soft, romantic side to others and is prone to deny it. She only lets people she truly trusts have insight into some of her rosy fantasies. Her mom is the one who she’s most comfortable talking about such things. 

Other than that, there’s not much of her behavior that differs depending on who she’s talking about it. 

🍅 How easily is your OC embarassed? What subjects make them flush and why? What event has made your OC the most embarassed they’ve ever been?

Mika is VERY easily embarrassed. Wether it’s about her being too obvious about her crush on Hiraku and it being pointed out, or her father’s way too open display of his love and affection for his only child…there’s a lot that can make Mika flush. 

💥 Are there any emotions your OC doesn’t know how to deal with, doesn’t understand or hates having to feel? Any reason behind this?

Actual heartbreak is something she’ll greatly struggle with. She has not quite suffered from one yet but has only seen it in works of fiction. Mika always knew in the back of her mind that its something that happens, however she won’t be prepared for just how deeply it can hurt. Given that she always sort-off idolized romance and only ever looks at the pretty parts of it, it’s definitely something that’ll make her feel very miserable.

She’s generally rather inexperienced with feeling plain vulnerable to begin with. Another emotion she’ll struggle with (rather soon) is guilt. 

🏀 Does your OC have any skills that people wouldn’t expect them to have? Do they have a hobby or pass time that others would consider strange or weird? How did they learn this particular skill or pick up this hobby?

Mika knows both how to ski and snowboard! People know that she’s rather sporty but the fact that she possesses these skills is a little surprising to some because many find it hard to picture the sun-loving, fiery Mika in snow to begin with ahdhd. 

Well, she’s not an all too big fan of winter and when she does end up in a snowy area during the cold months she does believe that doing sport is just the best way to deal with it. 

⭐ Does your OC like to sleep alone or do they enjoy sharing their bed? Have they been to any sleepovers? Have they ever been camping? What did they think of the experiences if so?

Mika has not much experience sharing a bed yet. It’s something she imagines as very comforting and lovely though and she wishes to experience it someday with someone she loves.  

🍏 When your OC says “I had a bad day” what does that tend to mean? Is it really as bad as they’re saying or are they being a bit dramatic?

Mika, much like Chieko, has a leaning to be overdramatic at times. So a „bad day“ from Mika-understanding is most likely a string of some annoying and frustrating events, but something she’ll most likely be over with the next day. 

🐉 How religious is your OC? Do they pray to any god(s) or do they not believe in that kind of stuff? What is their view of religion in general? Where do they believe people go when they die? If your OC is not religious why not and what do they believe in otherwise?

Mika is Christian and she’s registered in the Catholic Church, but later in life actually finds herself leaning more towards Protestantism. 

She does believe in God and visits Church to important occasions like Christmas, Easter and so on but she does not go there every Sunday. 

💧 What is something from your OC’s past they’re the most ashamed of and why? What is something they’re really proud of? And lastly what is something in their past that could make them shake with dread?

She’s mainly embarrassed by some of her more intensive outbursts over more trivial things but what she’ll truly look back upon in shame will come later on. 

What she’s so far the most proudest of is the time when she cooked for the Trattoria-Aldini-Branch in Rome and the practicum Takumi arranged her in Mizuhara’s “Ristorante F” after her graduation from middle school, as preparation for her Stagiares. 

🐟 What was your OC like as a baby? What were they like as a child? A teenager? An adult? How do you think they’ll develop ten years into their future? Twenty years? Will they live to old age?

Mika, as baby, was pretty loud and demanding. She began crawling relatively early and began crying and screaming the moment she wanted something. She certainly kept her parents of her feet.

Mika was a happy, adventure-loving child who certainly enjoyed to be outside a lot. She learned swimming at an early age and her love for dancing showed as soon as she could walk, honestly. She had always been a little feisty but to her family she’d also expose a love for plushies and Disney princesses.

As a teen, she’d become a confident and bold individual who’s tired of being the sole young chef of Tuscany and out to find a worthy rival. Mika certainly lives for the thrill of the challenges of Totsuki and practically embraces the competitive atmosphere. At the same time, her love for Disney movies involving princesses has ultimately developed in a deep fascination with all things romance and a strong longing to experience it herself.

As an adult Mika will have grown in experience regarding romance and does see everything a little less through rosy lens. She’ll remain a strong individual in her adulthood, who knows what she wants and how to step up against anyone who decides to be an obstacle. She’ll be a little calmer though and have her temper under a bit better control. 

🍇 Does your OC have any bad habits? Does your OC have any addictions like smoking or drinking? How did they fall into these habits and why? 

At times she does loose her temper a bit too quickly and it’s not always necessary to yell right away. She also tends to procrastinate when it comes to studying tings unrelated to cooking.

She drinks on parties and she does have a little tendency to party a lil’ harder than necessary sometimes. 

🔮What does your OC think is their best trait. What is actually their best trait? What about their flaws? Are they one to admit these flaws or do they like to pretend they’re perfect?

Mika thinks her best trait is her courage and I’d agree with her on that! 

A major flaw of her’s is that she can be a little bit inattentive to the people around her at times. She’s very unaware of this though. 

🌸 What’s a sentence that would make your OC’s day better? One that would make them laugh? One that would make their day worse? Why? What words would you have to say to them to completely ruin their day?

“Yukihira Hiraku is about to have a Shokugeki!” is a sentence that always puts her mood up. She loves watching Hiraku’s Shokugekis! She gets to see the person she admires in action and it’s also just a great experience overall as his matches are certainly thrilling, captivating and the rest of the audience is very into it as well.

A sentence that could ruin her day is anything that suggests something bad happened to Hiroshi. She’ll either end up pissed off at whoever might hurted him or worried for the rest of the day. 

🌷 How much effort does your OC put into their looks? Do they care much about how they’re dressed or what their hair looks like or are they not bothered? Could they be considered a snob or a slob?

She has a pretty well-developed fashion sense and does take her fine time choosing her outfits, no matter the occasion (unless it’s a school day because y’know then she knows what to put on: the uniform). She also takes good care of her skin, possesses some make-up skill and takes VERY LONG to shower. It’s all things she honestly just picked up from her parents mostly. 

❤️ What inspired you to make this OC? How long have you had them? How have they changed in the time you’ve been developing them?

Mika is one of the oldest Fanchilds of mine. She’s the fifth to ever be created, I think. She was created on that faithful night in 2016 where I decided to create more fankids after I had designed Chieko a few days or so earlier and took my drawing-tools to bed to sketch and color them ahdhd. Takumi/Ikumi is one of my first ships in the series as well and, back then, I didn’t saw much else option for either of them...so my decision to let them have a child was pretty automatic.

Mika did not change all too much over the years, really. What mostly got added recently is her frustrating love-triangle situation and also her story was just ironed out more over the years ahdhd but character-wise she remained more or less the same. Takumi and Ikumi honestly share a lot of the same character traits in the end and I think that’s a reason for that. 

🧡 What traits of your own do you see in this OC? Are they a little bit self-inserty? Don’t be shy, we all put parts of ourselves into the creations we love!

Hm, I don’t think I have all too much in common with Mika. She’s very brave and challenge-enthusiastic and I’m....one of the greatest cowards you’ll ever meet being frank. 

What we do share I guess is a strong love for the sea. Also, I do enjoy dancing (although I am not anywhere near the level she is) And I mean, she cooks Italian which is one of my favourite cuisines...but there’s really not much she takes after me ahdhd. She has much more in common with my mom than me being real. 

💚 Are you writing anything with this OC or planning on writing anything for them? Do you rp with them or are they just for fun to mess around with?

I have a few ideas but I don’t know if I’ll get to it soon.

💗 Ramble a bit about this character!

Mika, Mika, our beautiful helpless romantic Mika. Did I mention already how greatly her love-situation frustrates me? I really want her, the romance fanatic, to get happy with someone but ahhh who?? She’s also one of my first OCs and actually pretty dear to me and ahhh, WHY?!

But meep, aside from that and my whining about a situation I drove myself into; Mika is honestly really fun to write and I love the trio she’ll have going on with Kimiko & Hiroshi. It mirrors the classic Sōma/Megumi/Takumi-Trio in certain ways but it won’t be an exact rehash either so ahh. I’ll just enjoy writing this I think. 

[hugs-not-anonymous]

LFC - Jasculs Freemoon

The Basics --- - 

Full name: Jasculs Freemoon. Nickname(s): Jackie, Jas, Jasc, stubborn oaf, big ol’ pumpkin, Mat, Mattie, dreamboy, moony. Title(s): Self-proclaimed bodyguard-dad. Former Slayer and Commander. Champion and Hero, though he usually doesn’t respond to them. Alias(es): Mateth/Mateus Dawndream. Age: About 12.000 years. Birthday: February 9th. Race: Green/Emerald Dragon. Disguises himself as a half-dragon-like kaldorei or sin’dorei. If necessary, he can disguise himself fully as either, too. He prefers his kaldorei form. Gender & pronouns: Male, he/him.  Sexuality: Homoromantic, bisexual. Marital Status: Married. 

Physical Appearance --- - 

Hair: Purple so dark it appears black. Long, soft, and incredibly curly, though it's kept in a braid most of the time to keep it from becoming too much of a ridiculous, unruly mess. Jasculs also adorns a full, neatly kept and trimmed beard.  Eyes: Unlike most demon hunters, Jasculs still has his eyes, although they're blind and tinted deeply with fel, both of the eyeballs sickeningly green.  Height: 262 cm/8'7" in kaldorei form, 210.8 cm/6′11″ in sin’dorei form and too tall for my brain to comprehend in dragon form.  Weight: 160 kg/353 lbs in kaldorei form, 128.6 kg/283.51 lbs in sin’dorei form and yet again too heavy in dragon form for my feeble human brain to make realistic.  Build: Muscular mountain with slight pudge around the stomach area.  Scars:

A small, y-shaped, faded scar between his eyebrows.

Scars from Naroua's teeth just above his left elbow.

One in the shape of the North star on his abdomen. It has one long line up the torso, another long one down, and two smaller ones to the left and right of the center. There is a tear in his wing on the other side of the scar.

His palms, soles of his feet, and back are littered with faint scars from burn marks

Several faded marks and slashes from older fights.

A jagged, disconcertingly huge line on his chest from being impaled by a pitlord’s polearm. Don’t think about the fact it’s directly above his heart.

His back is a nightmare of whip scars. Before them, there were other scars, but they cover up any and all flesh and skin of Jasculs’ back. If it weren’t for them he’d walk around shirtless.

Claw marks above, below, and in his eyes.

Tattoos:

The arcane tattoos of the Illidari, Emerald Nightmare-red variant. They’re mostly centered around his chest and shoulder-blades, though they run down his arms as well. They’re slightly faded and need a touch-up.

One that goes from his ankle and up his shin, picturing several rose-bush branches with thorns and flowers. 

A pitch-black tattoo of a world-tree starting just above the tail bone and swiveling up the length of his back.

Piercings: He used to have many but now all the holes except for one in each earlobe has grown together. Jasculs rarely ever actually wears piercings, though. Distinguished Traits: His resting bitch face, awkward stuttering and babbling, and small, unthreatening, stubby horns.  Common Accessories:

A small leather pouch at his hip, containing various personally valuable items as well as a needle, thread, and a small bottle of disinfectant

Clean bandages around his forearms. Cliché but incredibly handy.

A blindfold made out of said bandages.

Two enchanted bracelets. They're made out of a simple, black leather, rolled up to create firm but strong threads. In the middle of each thread is a single, purple-ish pearl. When tapping them twice with two fingers or speaking the keyword - “Rakeesh”, butcher in Eredun - they transform back into their original form: one-handed swords. 

A simple ring with engraved runes. In elven form it's on his left hand ring finger and in dragon form it's on one of his horns. 

Personal --- - 

Profession(s): Professional squishy dumbass. Dad of the year. Butting into every fight where someone seems/might be overwhelmed. Sells leather, meat, fish, and other wares he compiles from skinning and fishing as well as doing various odd-jobs. Once upon a time he was a war-machine/tank for the Illidari, and you can probably still get him to be your bodyguard if for the right cause. Occasional adventurer/champion, if the cause is worth it. Hobbie(s): Cooking, gardening, napping, and reading. He’s trying to pick of knitting but, uh. It’s not going that well. Language(s): Fluent in Draconic, Thalassian, and Darnassian; almost fluent but heavily accented Common, Dwarven, Taur-ahe, and Zandali; can speak and somewhat read Orcish, Pandaren, and Draenei; can understand and speak (although with broken grammar) Eredun, Kalimag, and Nathrezim but not write or read any of them; can read, write, and somewhat brokenly understand Shath’Yar and Nazjar but pronunciation is beyond him. Skill(s): Cooking, skinning, fishing, and leatherworking; wielding glaives, one-handed swords, one-handed axes, and polearms; using bows for hunting; enhancing his own body with traits from his bound demon and various offensive, defensive, and supportive Fel spells; disguising his own form and other people's forms by use of various Fel spells. Once upon a time he could do it with nature and arcane magic as well but now it gets turned into Fel; being a bit of a dumbass; emotional socialising and creating safe spaces for people.  Residence: An unmapped mountainside in Stormheim. Birthplace: The Emerald Dream.  Religion: Elune.  Patron Deity: Elune, Ysera.  Fears:

His most intense fear is no doubt his claustrophobia, as it is so bad it can and will cause panic attacks if he cannot move freely at all times.

Losing and failing to protect his family.

Losing himself to the Nightmare or the Eredar Conqueror he's bound with.

Being forced away from his family.

Being captured by the Alliance or the Horde. Honestly, just being captured in general.

Facing the Illidari and their leaders.

Jasculs also has a never-ending paranoia that he's being watched and in danger. 

Waking up a different place than where he went to sleep.

Relationships --- - 

Spouse: Sol'alore Firewing Freemoon aka Solastrasz, belonging to @frostwyrmsfury. Children:

Kinagosa (adopted, alive), belonging to @frostwyrmsfury​.

Egg (adopted, unhatched, and fragile), co-owned with @frostwyrmsfury​.

Parents: 

Werythra Dawndream (mom, alive).

Inazeus (father, deceased).

O'Thelo Dawndream (step-dad, deceased).

Siblings: 

Andiais Dawndream (step-sister, alive but it’s complicated), belonging to @frostwyrmsfury.

Phene Dawndream (step-sibling, alive. It’s less complicated).

Livatus Dawndream (half-sibling on his mom's side, deceased).

A few half-siblings on his father's side.

Other Relatives: 

Quite a few aunts, uncles and cousins, though he has managed to keep in contact with exactly zero of them.

Feenris Duskblade (not blood related. Considers her an aunt).

Pets:

A manawyrm named Boomlio, proudly named by Kina.

A felsaber named Sæunn. She’s named after a Thorignir whose help during the 3rd Legion invasion Jasculs will always be eternally grateful for and was a gift from Illidan.

 An injured hippogryph named Thyri. 

Traits --- -

Extroverted / Introverted / In between /: Jasculs is not introverted, per se, he simply mostly keeps to his own devices. He is honestly quite extroverted, just reserved due to paranoia. 

Disorganised / Organised / In between /: He's a bit of a neat freak and loves when things are organised well and are in order, yet still manages to misplace everything and accidentally make a mess. Besides, having been out in the wild for most of his life, his general idea of "organised" is… cluttered. 

Close Minded / Open Minded / In between /: No comment here. 

Calm / Anxious / In between /: In crowds and populated areas, the back of Jasculs' mind is in a constant state of paranoia. However, he's gotten exceptionally good at handling it, and now he's usually the mildly anxious but level-headed and clear thinking one. 

Disagreeable / Agreeable / In between /: Jasculs does his best to avoid conflict and will often agree just to avoid arguing. 

Cautious / Reckless / In between /: Well, until his intelligence fails him. Jasculs is a dumbass and often gets himself into trouble on accident. He's also surrounded with troublemakers and people of varying degree of reckless, and he has to do equally or more reckless things to keep them out of danger. 

Patient / Impatient / In between /: No comment. 

Outspoken / Reserved / In between /: This entirely depends on who he's with and how comfortable he is with them. 

Leader / Follower / In between /: Weird for a Slayer, yes, but, well, he never lead anyone. He never had a say in anything and most definitely did not have a choice; he just did as he was told.

Empathetic / Apathetic / In between /: Jasculs is super emotionally charged. His emotions don't control him or make him vulnerable at all, it's simply how he lives, how he likes to live. It makes him feel fulfilled and alive and not monstrous. He's very understanding of emotions, both his own and other's, and overall have an emotionally freeing feeling about him. 

Optimistic / Pessimistic / In between /: Jasculs in neither an optimist or a pessimist, honestly. He's a realist. 

Traditional / Modern / In between /: He likes family traditions but is overall very adaptive to his surroundings and the times. There are traditional things he misses but just as many modern things he's happy have replaced traditional things. 

Hard-working / Lazy / In between /: Though Jasculs loves relaxing, he's in no way lazy. He doesn't really believe in lazy. 

Cultured / Uncultured / In between /: Over the years, Jasculs has accumulated many cultural influences, but he's never quite gotten properly cultured with any civilization. Even cultural things from the green dragons or the kaldorei tend to elude him. 

Loyal / Disloyal / In between /: No comment. 

Faithful / Unfaithful / In between /: Faith is a very conflicting topic to Jasculs. He still prays to and believes in Elune but not like he used to. There's a seething doubt in his mind about whether Elune really cares or not, and if praying to her even matters, but he tries not to listen to it. Having faith in humanity, elven kind, and all other races of Azeroth is also becoming difficult. He says he's sure they'll see their mistakes of their ways and come together to save Azeroth but he doesn't really believe it anymore. 

Assertive / Timid / In between /: Though he's not scared to assert dominance and scare away anyone who attempts to hurt himself or anyone he cares about, Jasculs is all around a rather timid and soft person. It often makes him sad that many find him scary, to which he'll whine like a hurt puppy. 

Additional Information --- - 

Smoking: Doesn't keep cigarettes on him but won't decline if he's offered one.  Alcohol: Rarely, if ever.  Drugs: He's quite too old for that.  Triggers:

Not being able to move freely and wherever he pleases is the one trigger that will always, without fail, make Jasculs crushingly uncomfortable and hyperventilate. More often that not, it causes a panic attack.

Being told to "suck it up" about an emotional issue of his, being policed and lectured about his "purpose", and people amounting his worth to how much he has done for them trigger a severe moodswing where he's incredibly irritable, sassy, and easily snaps, and then later a depressive episode of varying intensity.

Face claim: Idris Elba. Voice claim: Jasculs laughs like Mark Fishbach aka Markiplier but otherwise he has no voice claim. Theme songs: It Will Be Me by Melissa Etheridge & Want You Here by Plumb. Alignment: Chaotic / lawful good. In-game classes he takes the most after: Vengeance demon hunter, with a bit of druid, hunter, and warrior inspiration here and there.

Alt Verses --- - 

All of these can be mix-and-matched as you please!

Corrupted: The Nightmare corrupts Jasculs in Val’sharah. During a night terror, around when G’Hunn breaks out, he accidentally kills Kinagosa, Mo’hir, and Sol’alore during a night terror. It’s the last straw and Jasculs loses his mind; he reverts back to calling himself Mateus Dawndream and only finds joy in causing endless bounds of chaos.

Garden: Sol’alore dies during an attack on Dalaran. Kina and Jasculs bury him in Val’sharah and a wild, beautiful garden sprouts from his grave. They live there, and the garden is the only thing keeping Jasculs afloat in his depression.

Jassalarian: Miraculously, Malassarian survives the burning of Teldrassil, and him and J’aaris proceed to join Jasculs’ little group of found-family.

Rometh: Grand Magister Rommath joins the Illidari and, after being freed, Mateth takes extremely well to him. Rommath overthrows Orian and Kayn, and Mateth gets to go on with his life without all the main verse struggles.

RP Hooks --- -  

Demon hunter / the Illidari: Before he left was banished from the Fel Hammer, Jasculs held the title of Slayer. He was the right-hand-man of the Commander / Illidan replacement, though he had no say in much on anything. Pre-Warden imprisonment, Jasculs was more of an intimidating shadow than a person; the demon binding ritual put him in a state of emotional and mental paralysation, meaning he did nothing but follow orders. Jasculs had no say in anything and was more of a husk of a tank and war-machine rather than an actual person, but being woken up from his imprisonment and losing his siblings shook him out of that state. Your character has most likely fought against him in Outland, or heard of him if they’re a demon hunter.

Bounty: Not only was Jasculs banished from the Fel Hammer, he was also accused of being a traitor of the Alliance and a war criminal and thus had a bounty placed on his head. The Horde, wanting to have any lavage at all against the Alliance, did so as well. From the end of Legion up until a week or two into the Nazjatar and Mechagon campaign, he has been travelling the world in an attempt to keep his head out of bounty hunter’s hands. Your muse can have either helped or endangered Jasculs and his family before they settled in Stormheim. Or, y’know. Tracked him down in his new home.

Actual old but quite emotionally clever fart: Jasculs has been through many phases in his life and has met a lot of different people and has fought against and with a lot of different people. Does your muse perhaps remember him from any of the Great Wars, or even the War of the Ancients? Possibly even before the Sundering? Maybe your muse needs emotional comfort/guidance; his age has brought Jasculs an immense amount of emotional knowledge, and his general presence tends to have a calming effect on people.

Militaries: There’s not a military on the face of Azeroth Jasculs hasn’t been a part of prior to the whole Outland ordeal.

Legion: Jasculs was involved in all of the Legion campaigns and played quite a role as tank and general adventurer. He is especially remembered in Suramar, Val’sharah, Stormheim, and Argus.

Dragon: Being a green dragon, Jasculs has a natural connection with nature and thus gets along quite well with hunters and druids. On the other hand, though, his demonic energies have animals freak out and attack him in his presence, which never fails to hurt his feelings. Your muse can help him be less threatening or teach him herbalism (he’s bad at it. Like, immensely. It’s embarrassing). Is your muse a dragon or dragonsworn or maybe even a dragon hunter? Maybe they sought him and his family out, but why? Did something with the Emerald Nightmare happen?

Self-proclaimed bodyguard: Not only does Jasculs attract trouble like a magnet attracts metal, he also has quite the habit of being in the area when other people attract it. He’s paranoid and devoted to keeping other people safe, even if they’re strangers; if your muse gets in trouble, Jasculs will more than happily jump in, whether his help is asked for or not, and even if he doesn’t know what’s going on.

OOC INFORMATION --- - 

where i roleplay: discord and tumblr. jasculs can be found at @hugs-not-anonymous while follows and likes come from @foxfictioncentral. what im looking for:

action & adventure rp

connections of all sorts (business, friends, enemies, familial, what have you)

slice of life

emotionally charged rp

mostly long-term connections

pre-established relationships

angst

what i wont do: explicit sexual content, self-harm, suicide, torture, and addiction, as well as excessive gore (as in all the former things are okay if not explicit, but excessive gore is just. yuck).

i mainly write multi-paragraphs style as i have a tendency to vomit words, but i won't say no to rping with different styles. my writing is very emotion heavy, and my favorite thing to write is emotionally challenging stuff. give me all the angst, tho i write p much anything

useful links: about || relationships || verses || promo��|| starter call

other muse blogs: @conflictedenergies​ @once-upon-a-memoir​

mun blogs: @foxfictioncentral​ @jcfoxington​ @arcticartings​

[cassolotl]

Coming off testosterone

I stopped taking testosterone on day 235, May 19th 2019 - 6 days ago, and after just under 8 months of low-dose testosterone. I had 1 pump of Tostran gel per day, which the medication leaflet says is 10mg of testosterone.

~

WHY DID I START TAKING LOW-DOSE TESTOSTERONE?

I’m nonbinary, and my goal was always to be androgynous. I started taking testosterone to deepen my voice, mainly, but the idea of a more masculine fat distribution on my body was appealing because I also have dysphoria about my hips and slim shoulders. “Passing” as nonbinary isn’t really a thing because most people don’t know that there are more than two genders, so the best I could really hope to achieve realistically was to confuse as many people about my gender as possible. 😈

Changes I wanted:

Deeper voice

Genital changes

Less feminine body fat distribution

Changes I didn’t want:

Facial hair

Hairline changes (but if it happens a little that’s okay)

Loss of hair on head

Body hair

A couple of years ago I had one session of voice therapy (NHS), which was fun and very interesting, but it taught me a couple of things. One was that finding my lower pitches and getting that low resonance by finding my chest voice was definitely helpful and relieved my voice dysphoria. The other was that there was no way I was going to be able to keep up with multiple voice exercises per day to keep it that way. I pretty much decided that day that testosterone was the most sensible option, and even though it was scary I would just have to find a way to deal with the negative effects.

My voice dysphoria was sort of disconnected from my idea of my gender. All I really knew was that my voice needed to be a lower pitch and more resonant. I felt that dysphoria especially when I was talking excitedly or when I was singing. But I also knew that I didn’t want people to mistake me for a man either, and since it’s a very long slow process and quite unpredictable I knew that I would need to be careful to keep track of things to make sure I didn’t start giving myself a new kind of gender dysphoria in the masculine direction!

It was another year or two before the stars aligned and I actually managed to get the can of Tostran into my hands (NHS).

~

HOW DID IT GO?

As I mentioned above, I was on a low dose, one pump of Tostran per day. One can lasted about 107 days. The endocrine nurse said I could reduce the dose to half if I squirted the gel onto my leg/stomach as usual and then wiped half the gel-dribble off with tissue and threw it in the bin before I rubbed it in, but I never did that. The two-month blood test put my levels at 9.7 nmol or something like that. (Female range is 3 or below, and male range is 10 or above, so I was very nearly almost at the male range.)

The first month I got that scratchy throat feeling, which I now know happens when my voice is deepening, and I noticed my voice getting a little lower. Also I was SO GREASY OH MY GOD, I had to shower twice as much, I had to get some high-powered anti-perspirant deodorant. It didn’t make me spotty, it was just disgusting! But it felt okay because I could tell it was affecting my voice. I also noticed that I smelled different, and that my bedroom acquired that delightful(??) teenage boy smell! Ew. This kicked in properly in under a week, and trailed off around month two, though I still needed to take more showers and wear hardcore deodorant and I was still more greasy for the entire time I was on T.

On day 26 I noticed that my... [flails around wildly for non-dysphoric word] pudendum had gotten a little bigger, and I regret not getting “before T” photos. The growth was fast and a lot more noticeable than I had expected, and it was extremely emotionally intense, because I hadn’t realised but I’d been sort of suppressing and dissociating from genital dysphoria for my whole life. I knew I had genital dysphoria, but not how much or how it was affecting me. I was completely unprepared, and it was overwhelming. (I am very lucky that I was able to access fortnightly gender-specialist talking therapy at Charing Cross GIC during this time.) A few weeks later I started looking into genital surgery options. I think my genitals haven’t changed much in the last 2 months, so I guess it took about 5-6 months to get to where they are now.

Here’s the graph the Voice Pitch Analyzer app [iOS/Android] makes:

And here’s the graph I made myself using data from the app:

In the second graph, the thing I notice right away is that my highest pitch now is lower than my lowest pitch pre-T.

My first month was rapid pitch drop, and then there were a couple of months of wibbling around on a plateau, and then after that things kicked off again, I had a few scattered days of scratchy throat and things started meandering downward. A common pattern was two to four weeks of wild fluctuation and no drop, followed by a sudden drop over a day or two. Sometimes my brain took a while to adjust to a drop in pitch, and I would tire myself out speaking with a higher pitch than my vocal chords really wanted to do.

In the last couple of months I got a lot worse at making the voice recordings, which in hindsight might be because I was less enamoured with being on testosterone, and it was maybe a sign that my testosterone advantages were sort of wrapping up and it was nearly time to stop.

No one who sees me regularly said unprompted that they could hear a difference in my voice. When I asked people if my voice sounded different, they said “ehhh, maybe kinda, yeah?” I learned that testosterone doesn’t make your voice sound different! It makes it feel different, to yourself and to other people. My therapist, who I see (approximately) fortnightly, said she couldn’t tell the difference at all, and when I played her my day 1 voice recording to compare it to my current voice (6 months or so) she was like 😮.

Strangers are still mostly gendering me female, as far as I can tell, but my appearance and my voice means that strangers gender me male a little more often than pre-T. I also get “sir, I mean ma’am, gosh I’m so sorry...” more often. It makes me uncomfortable to make people uncomfortable, so I just usually say “it’s okay, I’m nonbinary so I’m kind of both??”, which rarely makes them less flustered or less confused. I had some cards made years ago that have the nonbinary flag on one side and the definition of nonbinary on the other, which I should just start handing out whenever this happens!

My testosterone dose was too low to stop my menstrual cycle, but it did seem to mellow out the highs and lows. My PMS and menstrual symptoms are generally a nightmare even though I have no uterus to bleed from, so that was a nice relief. It was very strange to experience PMS and boy puberty simultaneously.

I kept records of my specific dysphoria feelings from about 3.5 months, thanks to prompting from my gender-specialist therapist at Charing Cross GIC in London:

The ideal outcome, which I was looking out for, was all of the lines meandering towards that horizontal line in the middle. That would mean the feminine dysphoria was reducing and the masculine dysphoria was reducing.

I am pretty lucky, in that most of the changes I wanted from testosterone are permanent and the changes I didn’t want are temporary or reversible. I made some lines on the graph more bold because those were the ones that I wanted to keep an eye on. Here are my thoughts on this graph:

Facial hair was impossible to score because it gave me both masculine and feminine dysphoria. Feminine because those dark fine hairs on my upper lip are most often seen on cis women, and masculine because they were caused by testosterone and male puberty.

When my pudendum started growing it also gave mixed signals. It was good because it was getting bigger, but as it grew it highlighted that there was a lot going on down there that made me feel feminine dysphoria (mainly labia around my pudendum, and sometimes that it was still relatively small).

I am not a very hairy person. I thought I wouldn’t like having more body hair, and for a few months when I scored my dysphoria I focused on specific patches of new hair and thought about whether I was dysphoric and thought that I wasn’t. After a few months I realised I was being too short-sighted. Yes, I can totally deal with these new fine hairs on my thighs. Yes, this darker and thicker hair on my shins is okay. Sure, these hairs around my belly button are no big thing. But when I took a step back and looked at the bigger picture, and saw the hair as a pattern, my whole brain recoiled. Yes, I am definitely dysphoric about masculine patterns of body hair on myself. :S

There was a trend of all types of dysphoria getting less over time - until month 7, when they all started getting worse except voice. It took a while to be sure it was a trend, but looking back on it, that was definitely a thing!

The ideal outcome would be all of those lines converging on the middle horizontal axis, and it hasn’t happened. There are no flawless solutions for nonbinary people at the moment. As things stand and with what’s available to me right now, I will probably always have gender dysphoria. But I’m pretty glad that I’ve done what I can and I will keep doing what I can, because it is all helping.

Unrelated to any gender stuff, I have put on weight and gone up a size or two in trousers and one size in t-shirts. It could just be that I’m in my 30s and my metabolism is slowing, which is what I assumed it was at first, but the weight has come on in quite a short space of time, so that made me think about what I’ve been eating and why. I noticed that I was craving carbs and sugar, eating it, and then feeling unsatisfied afterwards. The type of hunger I’ve been feeling lately feels the same as the type of hunger I had when I had Implanon, a three-year birth control implant. When I had that removed my appetite went back to normal. So this putting on weight feels a lot like a hormonal thing. I have mixed feelings about it! I strongly dislike my clothes feeling wrong and having to buy new clothes, but also bits of me are pleasingly wibbly and it’s fun to be able to rest my cup of tea on my stomach when I slouch. :D

Also unrelated to gender stuff, even on a low dose many of my EDS symptoms were noticeably reduced: fatigue, loose joints, joint pain, IBS, dysautonomia. (Joint pain and fatigue were still present, but not as bad after exertion.) I also noticed that the really vivid dreams and very emotional days that come with PMS mostly disappeared, which I was sad about.

~

HOW DID I KNOW TO STOP?

People gendering me in different ways has increased lately. Like, a few weeks ago me and @watchkeyphone were trundling about town, and one charity/religion street-hawker person asked if we were sisters, and then a hundred yards later their colleague called us “lads” or something.

A week or so ago, I realised that my voice was sounding and feeling resonant in my chest pretty much all the time and that felt pretty nice, but I was still scoring my voice as sounding feminine, and I wondered if that might be because the changes are so gradual that I just changed my idea of what feminine sounds like. I noticed that I was more comfortable recording my voice to put online for various reasons.

I don’t live in a culture where people go around saying “excuse me sir” or “hello madam”, we don’t routinely gender each other in a formal way. But also, either I don’t have enough casual contact with strangers to notice gendered familiar words like “mate” or “love”, or strangers just avoid using those kinds of words with me because I’m hella queer-looking. So I basically realised that I have no idea how strangers see me or hear my voice at all.

So, in approximately this order:

I put a recording of my voice on the internet and asked strangers to gender my voice. Most of them said androgynous, leaning a little masculine. One person said I sounded like Q, a computer-generated intentionally genderless voice!

I went to a queer social group, and when it came up in conversation naturally I complained about how hard it is to know when to stop testosterone because I can’t tell how my body and voice are gendered by other people, and a lot of people I see regularly still see me the same way as they saw me pre-T. A couple of people said, “actually, in the past couple of months I have really noticed the effects...” So that was reassuring!

I decided to notice how my pitch works in different situations compared to pre-T. After the queer social group we went down to the river and some people swam, and when they got into the water and it was very cold, some of us cheered supportively - and I tried to woo like the “woo girls”, and my voice just came out at a dude pitch instead...! I apparently can’t be high-pitched at high volumes any more.

I watched a video about gender and voice by someone I’ve met in person. When I met them I noticed that their voice was pretty androgynous, and I enjoyed it and thought about how nice it must be to have a voice that can’t be easily gendered by strangers. When I watched this video last week, in which their voice was exactly the same, I noticed that they sounded like me. That was the moment that I realised my voice was done!

I spoke to my PA about it. I played my pre-T voice to her and her face was A Picture, she could not even. She then said that she has quite a feminine voice, and she suggested we each make a recording of our voices reading a paragraph of the book on the table, and then compare to her partner’s voice in a recording. My voice sounded more like her male partner’s voice than like hers.

I can now speak with a comically low deep resonant voice if I want to, and I can also speak with a high cutesy voice in order to address my cat, provided I am warmed up a bit.

~

HOW DID STOPPING GO?

On the day that I posted the voice file online, when strangers started saying I sounded masculine, I was honestly pretty surprised. In my head strangers in person were still mostly gendering me female, but when I really thought about it people hadn’t actually been gendering me much at all. I think I had been assuming strangers were hearing a woman’s voice because the change had been so gradual that I hadn’t had a moment where I could “update” my own gendering of my voice. I didn’t wake up one day and go “wow I sound like a dude” or whatever, so there was just nothing to update.

So, as soon as there was an indication that I might sound like a man soon, my gut said “NOPE” and I worried a little bit about going too far in the masc direction. If I keep taking T then I will sound more masculine and I might regret it, but if I stop and find that my voice dysphoria could be relieved with a little more testosterone I can start again in a few months, right? So I decided to not take it that day unless I learned/felt something that indicated I should put the gel on, and... I didn’t.

The first couple of days were pretty uneventful. Around day 4 I started to feel really run-down and chronic joint pain from EDS was flaring up, so I cancelled near-future plans. Yesterday was like the worst of my (uterusless) periods, I was in a lot of abdominal and lower back pain and then last night I slept for 11 hours... And today, also typical of my uterusless periods, it feels like a storm has blown over and I feel like a new human.

So what I’ve concluded is, coming off T triggered a very, very bad period.

Also, the past couple of days I have once again been SO GREASY, and I got spots yesterday, which is unusual in itself, but these are striking because they are WEIRDLY HUGE?? One of them is on my jaw and has caused a very noticeable swelling, so I’ve named it Balthazar.

(From “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” S03E12: Nine Days.)

~

WHAT NEXT?

It’s only been a week, so I’m assuming more weirdness is coming, but it’s all going to be ovary-hormone-related silliness so I’m pretty much used to it and I’m not too worried.

I am sad that I will probably slip back towards feminine body fat distribution. I will probably lose some of the weight that testosterone brought with it, but the remaining weight will probably end up on my hips again. I am really not looking forward to dissociating my hips again but I don’t know what I can do about it except have liposuction every few years?! (I will not do that.)

I am also sad that the bad bits of my menstrual cycle will go back to Full Force, and that my EDS symptoms will worsen again.

I am very much looking forward to my body hair getting finer and lighter, and maybe my upper lip hair will fade a bit too. If not I will probably have to get it painfully removed.

I want a metoidioplasty. Unlike many trans guys, I want no testicular prostheses, no vaginectomy, no phalloplasty, no new urethra. The clinicians at Charing Cross are aware that I want to have a metoidioplasty, because I included it in a letter when I wrote to the endo about a blood test, to make sure my surgery needs are documented in my medical records from the earliest date possible. I did that because they have minimum-time requirements for a bunch of diagnoses and referrals (like, two appointments before hormone treatment recommendation), which you can sometimes get around by providing reasonable counter-arguments. One of their requirements for referring for genital surgery is being on testosterone for at least a year where clinically indicated, so since testosterone has done its job now that means I’m not clinically indicated for testosterone any more, and I’m hoping that being on T for only 8 months shouldn’t be an issue. I also found a blog by a trans guy who had a simple metoidioplasty like the one I want, and his blog posts are really helpful and informative and have good quality non-porn photos (so rare omg), and his junk and my junk are extremely similar in size and appearance. (Here are his before and after pics.) So, fingers crossed the docs will consider that I have been on T for long enough and my pudendum is developed enough that surgery is an option.

I’ve written to the endocrinologist to say that I’ve stopped putting on the Tostran gel, and to ask if I still need to have those blood tests I’m meant to be having. I’m due to see him on 1st July anyway, a little over a month from now, and no doubt I will have saved up a list of questions for him!

~

CONCLUSION

Testosterone works.

[creative-horror-network]

The Fog Report - Los Angeles Haunted Hayride 2019

Welcome back, intrepid listeners! The season is drawing to a close but that hasn’t deterred me from hitting a third haunted locale, although in this one the haze you’re walking through is less fog and more kicked-up dust. Probably has something to do with that weird-looking fairground tucked away in the trees there…

Started in 2009, the Los Angeles Haunted Hayride has taken up residence in Griffith Park, in and around the grounds of the Old LA Zoo. Already a fairly eerie place with its trails past abandoned enclosures and cages, the Hayride has consistently utilized the environment to create terrifying tableaus and vignettes, seen and experienced from a tractor-pulled trailer - something done for Halloween in many other parts of the country but a relative oddity in the big city. Though its themes have shifted and changed over the years, this year new owners Thirteenth Floor Entertainment have given the Hayride a unifying story and a setting from which to place their event: a cursed town called Midnight Falls.

Anyone who has read my last two articles about Dark Harbor and Knott’s Scary Farm (or who just knows me in general) should guess why this alone finally pulled me to the event. This was my first ever visit to the Haunted Hayride, so my expectations were not so effected by previous years; it’s all fresh eyes and raw opinion here.

The Event

Before I even get to the venue itself, can I just say how enjoyable just the walk there was? Unless you’re parked in one of the upper lots, you’ve got a little bit of a trek through a nighttime park ahead of you, and I wasn’t kidding earlier when I said this was “tucked away.” in the wilderness. The natural darkness and night noises certainly helped me get into the mood as I trudged up the path and saw the flickering orange glow in the distance.

Once you do get there, you find yourself in the town square of Midnight Falls in the midst of its 13th annual Halloween Festival, 1985. The Hayride itself, as well as three mazes, several concessions and a handful of slight-up charge escape rooms can all be accessed from here, but as a zone in itself the town square is well worth wandering around in. The roaming monsters - townsfolk who have been cursed but seem to be in good spirits - are more interactive and funny than outright scary, engaging visitors with humor and giving Midnight Falls the character of a cheesy 80s horror-comedy. Each character is an archetype of the era and each is a very distinct, from a jock werewolf to a hook-nosed Miss Midnight Falls to a snappy goblin server from the local diner (hi Reggie!), just to name a few of the myriad citizens.

This feels like a genuinely happy medium between the heavy thematic elements of Knott’s and the party atmosphere of Dark Harbor. You’re at an in-universe fair, and they play that up without it detracting from the scarier elements. It certainly evokes the spirit of a local Halloween: I spent a good chunk of my teenage years in the small mountain town of Idyllwild, and they also have (had?) a Halloween carnival, so I can say big props for reminding me of that feeling. Couple that with the amount of atmosphere and the commitment of the actors in their improv with guests and each other, and you have a nicely immersive, if tongue-in-cheek, experience.

It’s also good to know that the event is small, considering what it actually offers. The night I visited I managed to get there right around opening and was able to get through most everything in two hours. That doesn’t mean its not worth visiting, but don’t expect a marathon session like a theme park haunt.

The Hayride

As stated before, the hayride is the namesake and main draw of the event, a chance for Angelenos to board a hay wagon (and sit in real honest-to-goodness hay) and take a ride through the Old Zoo, now the outskirts and foothills of Midnight Falls. This attraction is presented as a sort of weird origin-story, demonstrating how the land fell under the Halloween hex and riders in the midst of it happening.

This is a wholly different kind of trip than one would make on foot through a maze, and is a proper ride in every sense, with each scene being staged in such a way that it only transpires as the hayride passes. The main ingredient is the live actors lurking in the dark that rush at the trailer and menace the riders, usually after a theatrical beat in a scene plays out, I’d never done anything like this before and it was honestly impressive, each scene having its fair share of startling surprises: highlights for me were a ghostly girl leaping from a cliff (possibly reenacting a suicide), a werewolf gang unleashed from some of the old animal cages, a amorous couple in a convertible being mauled by a Sasquatch, a close encounter with a ghost train, and a giant spider emerging from a stone structure.

I wasn’t able to take any picture while on the hayride, mainly out of respect for not ruining the moment and trying to present for it. Trust me when I say that even if the scenes seem a little cheesy, the fact that they’re part of this spooky hayride experience makes it fun. I actually feel like this is a decent entry point for people leery about going to a haunt, as it struck me as being less intense than being in the midst of a maze. Pro tip for first-timers: sit in the middle. The folks on the left and right get all the attention, so the heat’s off if you stick to the center.

The Mazes

As an added bonus, Midnight Falls has three mazes as part of its spooky neighborhood. Each is fairly short but exceptionally well put together for something built in the middle of Griffith Park, and I walked away from each fairly impressed.

The first maze I visited, Midnight Mortuary, takes you through the town’s funeral home, its backyard, morgue and chapel. The monsters here are a mix of the ghoulish staff and some goat-masked figures in white robes; perhaps a cult of some kind? More Victorian Gothic than grisly and gory, creative use of space and good set design are strong in this maze, and the startling finale helps put the random goat-people’s presence into perspective.

My favorite maze was definitely Trick or Treat, simulating a trip through a Midnight Falls neighborhood where every house has a resident surprise. This outdoor maze is unique because anyone visiting can actually ring the doorbells of the houses to see what wacky scare emerges. Since almost all the scares are guest-driven, the reward for courage comes when most of the monsters give you real candy! It’s a cute detail, and it really plays on the horror-camp and the tropes of Halloween: my favorite bit is the Devil-themed “home haunt” at the end that looks like some earnest kid built a strobe-light maze through their yard and garage. Big props for creativity.

Rounding out the three is Roadkill Ranch, ensuring no meat goes to waste in Midnight Falls… because if it’s good enough for your tires, it’s good enough for their fryers. While the effort was there, I’m personally very tired of the bloody Hellbilly theme for mazes as a whole, so this one did not really impress me. It did have some choice scare moments and a good strawbale layout in the back of it, making you weave through while masked ranchers hid in the dark, but I just think the trope has been done to death.

Final Thoughts

Though small in stature, the LA Haunted Hayride is big on personality and dark charm, offering a main attraction that isn’t offered anywhere nearby and a collection of scary sides to go along with it. The overarching setting of Midnight Falls is a huge boon to the event, and I hope it sticks around for the foreseeable future, along with its cast of characters. I’d love to see what they can add to it if it continues to expand.

What gives this an edge for me and makes it stick out, even from its larger competitors, is the festive quality of the Hayride. Halloween is not just the backdrop of the season here for spooky stuff, it’s positively dripping with Halloween flavor. Not many haunts actually make the holiday their front-and-center, and I’m super grateful that this does. It’s hard not to feel spirit (pun intended) of All Hallows Eve here, and I didn’t realize how much I missed that kind of vibe until I was there.

If you’re local and you can make it, the LA Haunted Hayride is worth a visit. Come kill a couple hours here and feel a bit of that Halloween magic, both terror and humor - trick and treats, if you’ll pardon the expression. And hey, if you’re not anywhere near LA, go see if anyone near you is doing a haunted hayride. It might help kindle that jack-o’-lantern flame in your soul too.

Anyway, I’ve got a lot of Midnight Falls dust to brush off my clothes. Until next time, I’ll see you in the fog.

The Los Angeles Haunted Hayride runs most nights in October and every night during the last week until November 2nd, from 7 to 10:30 or 11pm depending on the night. More details and tickets can be found here.

[180abroad]

Days 146-147: Salt, Cemeteries, and Castles (Krakow, Part II)

Our last day and a half in Krakow was (mostly) much more pleasant and lighthearted than our morning in Auschwitz. We saw amazing salt sculptures, a magnificent castle, and--yes--a sobering cemetery.

Our morning Auschwitz tour included an afternoon tour of the famous Wieliczka salt mines near Krakow. We were dropped off in Krakow with an hour or so for lunch, so we headed over to a nearby Costa Coffee to recover.

The Costas in Krakow are an interesting departure from the ones in the UK. The comfortably generic coffeehouse décor is the same, but the food is fresh and local--unlike the somewhat mass-produced-feeling fare in the UK. We each had  a ham, cheese, and tomato sandwich (fresh-made, not packaged) with blessedly cool iced coffees. I also sprang for a slice of “forest fruit” tart with raspberry, blackcurrant, redcurrant, and apricot. An unusual combination, but very tasty.

Stepping reluctantly out into the summer heat, we made our way back to the tour office and joined up with our group bound for the salt mines.

The trip out of town was a bit hectic. There was a bike race going on, and one of the streets cutting across central Krakow had been shut down. Our driver hadn't known, and we ended up stuck in a one-way side street with our bumper to the crowd-control tape. After calling back and forth with home base, our driver decided to just park the van and wait for ten minutes or so until the racers passed. He opened the van and several people hopped out to join the sidewalk spectators.

Jessica and I stayed inside the air-conditioned van. The exhausted part of me that was still reeling from the morning's trip to Auschwitz secretly hoped that the trip would be cancelled and we could head home for an early evening. But thankfully that didn't happen. It was a long, tiring excursion, but we both had a good time and saw some impressive engineering and incredible blue-collar artwork.

Tours into the mines had to be strictly timed for crowd control, so we had a few minutes to use the bathroom and chug some water. A misting station had been set up to help people stay cool.

Finally, it was time to enter. We took the stairs, and they seemed to go down forever. When we finally stopped descending, we were 64 meters--almost 20 stories--underground.

A huge source of wealth for the country since the Middle Ages, the salt mines are a source of national pride in Poland. The mirror-smooth, crystalline caves made of 90% pure salt are beautiful and fascinating, as are the surviving wooden cranes and other bits of old mining technology. But the obvious focus of the tour is the art.

For the past hundred years or so, the salt miners occupied their free time by carving strikingly intricate and well-realized statues. There are statues of contemporary folks, historical heroes, and religious icons. Looking at the distinctive style of the statues, I can’t help but think that the art designers for the Lord of the Rings movies could have taken heavy inspiration from these statues when designing the aesthetic of the dwarven art and architecture.

There are also a healthy handful of chapels. Like the Welsh slate miners, the Polish salt miners were intensely religious and God-fearing. But rather than make do with cramming as much church as possible into their off-days, the Polish salt miners filled the mines with churches that they could use every day.

And of course, everything from the ceiling to the floor was carved from the salt.

The crown jewel of the tour is the jaw-dropping St. Kinga Chapel, whose expansive walls are lined with remarkable recreations of iconic Christian art.

And, of course, the centerpiece within the chapel collection is a strikingly lifelike statue of the late Pope John Paul II. I haven't mentioned it yet, but Cracovians are absolutely nuts about their homeboy John Paul. To be fair, though, the adoration was pretty well earned. After so many centuries of being seen as a second-rate nation by the rest of Europe, for this deeply Catholic country to finally have a pope chosen from their own people must have been a point of transcendent pride and validation.

Anyway…

After an interesting hour or so touring the mines, it was time for us to queue up at the exit. The tour had taken us  a further 71 meters underground, down to a depth of 40 stories. There was no way we were going to be climbing back up. Fortunately, there was an elevator. Unfortunately, the elevator wasn't especially big or especially fast. So we had to wait.

When it was finally our turn, I foolishly thought that our long day of walking was nearing its end. But it wasn't. The walk from the exit queue to the elevator proved comically long. It felt almost as long as the rest of the visit put together. Some of us started joking that the tour was just a ruse and that around the next corner would be a group of guards ready to escort us into our new lives as indentured miners.

And then the dinosaur attacked. (Not really, that was earlier. Apparently there are several overlapping tour routes, and at one point we stumbled across part of the kids' tour.)

But eventually, one of the turns turned out to be the final turn, and the promised elevator bore us up into the setting sunlight--a quarter-mile walk away from the building we'd entered through.

I’m glad we got to go to the salt mine. But if I had to pick one mine in all of Europe to visit, it would still be Llechwedd slate mine in Wales. The Wieliczka salt mine tour was heavy on wowing visuals but light on actual information about the miners themselves, which was what made the Welsh mine tour so impactful for us.

On the ride back into town, we passed right by the flat we were renting. As tired and footsore as we were, we each anticipated the 15-minute walk back from the tour office in the muggy evening air with dread. As if on cue, however, the driver pulled over to drop another group off at a nearby hotel. Jessica and I hopped out with them and gratefully strolled the half-block back to our flat. We threw some frozen pizzas in the oven and watched Disney's The Princess and the Frog, which I'd never seen before.

The next morning, as we left our flat to spend our last day in Krakow, I stopped to take a picture of a construction sign that had been amusing me since we first arrived.

Before I go on, let me admit upfront that this says a lot more about me and my ignorance than it does about the Polish language or anything else. Throughout our trip, we've seen a lot of signs in a lot of languages. And for the most part, they all fell into one of two categories. Either I could at least sort of understand them based on context and linguistic similarity or they were completely unintelligible.

But with Polish signs, my first reaction is not "I understand this" or "I don't understand this," but rather, "Am I drunk right now?"

Anyway, our first stop of the day was a sober-yet-uplifting continuation of yesterday's themes: Krakow's Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierz.

The neighborhood--originally a separate walled town--was named for 14th-century Polish king Kazimierz the Great. It was Kazimierz who first opened up Poland as a haven for the Jews being oppressed throughout Europe (and whose likeness we'd seen enshrined in salt the day before). Poland's Jewish population didn't exactly have an easy time of things over the centuries that followed, but they were at least usually relatively safe.

In the center of Kazimierz's Broad Street ("Ulica Szeroka"), a monument honors the 65 thousand Jewish Cracovians who were murdered by the Nazis.

We visited the Remu'h Synagogue, which houses Krakow's Old Jewish Cemetery. (As a man, I was asked to wear a yarmulke while I on the premises, and I happily obliged.)

We were mainly interested in the cemetery, but we visited the synagogue first. It was remarkable. The Synagogue dates back to 1553, and it has been beautifully maintained and restored. You can even still see the original 16th-century frescoes adorning the upper walls.

Thanks to our guidebook, we also learned a bit about traditional synagogue design. Like Christian basilicas and Islamic mosques, synagogues face east toward Jerusalem. At the front of the synagogue is the ark, where the scrolls of the Torah are stored. In Orthodox synagogues like this one, the speaker stands in an ornate cage in the middle of synagogue, facing east along with the congregation. (In Reformed synagogues, the speaker stands in the front and faces the congregation.)

Outside, we learned about Jewish cemeteries, too. (Or at least the ones in Eastern Europe.) Unlike the neat rows of Christian cemeteries, the Jewish graves have a somewhat more organic organizational aesthetic. (This would be much more evident at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague.) Most of the headstones were covered in small stones, which visitors place as a token of respect. We couldn't read the headstones, but some were clearly more notable by the mountain of stones placed on and around them.

Near the synagogue still stands the gravestone of Moses Isserles, the 16th-century rabbi who founded it.

For us, though, the most striking feature of the cemetery is also one of its newest--the walls. During the Nazi occupation, many of the Jewish graves were desecrated and smashed. After WWII, the caretakers did their best to restore the cemetery as much as possible. And as a memorial of the Nazi atrocities, they used the unsalvageable fragments of smashed headstones to line the cemetery walls.

Stepping back onto Broad Street, we found the place increasingly lively with visitors. Many were Jewish Americans, but there were plenty of diverse groups from around the world. This is the "uplifting" part of the "sober-yet-uplifting" thing I said earlier. For all the effort that the Nazis did to erase other cultures from the world, it was the Nazis who got erased. The Poles and the Jews are still right here where they've always been.

Near the Remu'h Synagogue is a bronze statue of a kindly looking man sitting contemplatively on a bench. The man is Jan Karski, a Catholic Pole and one of the first people to publicly speak out against the Nazi extermination camps--a charge so unimaginably heinous that the rest of the world didn't want to listen.

At the bottom of Broad Street stands the 14th-century Old Synagogue, the oldest Jewish building in Poland. It and the surrounding courtyard are conspicuously sunken below street level. It was built this way on purpose because medieval laws forbade Jewish buildings from standing taller than Christian buildings. So in order to make it as big as they wanted, the Jewish architects had to build down as well as up.

As fascinating as Kazimierz is, and as much as we no doubt would have enjoyed visiting inside the Old Synagogue and visiting all the other historic neighborhood sites, we had other things we wanted to get to on our last day in Krakow. So we bid farewell to the charming Jewish neighborhood and headed back north toward Wawel Castle.

The castle is huge and beautiful. Again, we didn't have the time or energy to justify buying a ticket to go inside, but there was plenty to see just wandering around the grounds, which were open to the public. Including the massive, Florence-inspired central courtyard.

Like the Palatine in Rome, Wawel Castle is built on top of a hill where an ancient Polish tribe is said to have lived. And as with the wolf-raised twin founders of Rome, Krakow has its own deliciously outlandish origin story. According to the legend, a fiendish dragon set up shop in a cave at the base of Wawel hill. The dragon demanded a weekly tribute of cattle, and if an offering was not made, the dragon would feast on the tribespeople instead.

The dragon was finally defeated by a clever cobbler, who fed the dragon a lamb stuffed with explosive sulphur. The dragon devoured the tainted lamb and was overcome with a thirst so great that he dove into the nearby Vistula and drank until he exploded.

King Krakus, the mythical founder of Krakow, was so impressed by the cobbler's ruse that he let the boy marry the princess and become the next king.

Today, a seven-headed metal dragon at the base of Wawel Hill spews a gout of flame every five minutes or so.

Leaving the castle behind us, we wandered back up to Market Square, where we had an early dinner at one of the touristy open-air restaurants. We're pretty sure it was actually the same Italian restaurant that Jessica ate at on her last night in Krakow eight years ago.

Given the prime tourist-trap location, I expected it to be a bit of a frivolous splurge--a celebration of our having successfully survived our first stop in Eastern Europe. But it turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable and surprisingly affordable meal. In that way, at least, Krakow's Market Square is very much unlike the Italian cities it was built to emulate.

And we enjoyed a local Polish cider. A bit tart, as I recall, but not at all bad.

We headed back to our flat, but our day was far from over. We wouldn't be staying at our flat this night. We wouldn't be staying in any flat this night.

We would be taking the night train to Prague.

Next Post: The Night Train to Prague

Last Post: Auschwitz

[defineguilty]

FULL CHARACTER INFO SHEET

BASIC INFORMATION

♛┋FULL NAME: Neal George Caffrey ♛┋NICKNAME(S): Do aliases count as nicknames? ♛┋OCCUPATION: FBI Consultant / Former Con-Artist ♛┋AGE: 32+ depending on verse ♛┋DATE OF BIRTH: March 21st ♛┋GENDER: cis male ♛┋PRONOUNS: he/him ♛┋ORIENTATION: bisexual biromantic ♛┋NATIONALITY: american ♛┋ETHNICITY: white ♛┋RELIGION: catholic, but not really practicing actively 

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

♛┋FACE CLAIM: Matt Bomer ♛┋EYE COLOUR: blue ♛┋HAIR COLOUR: brown ♛┋DOMINANT HAND: right ♛┋HEIGHT: 5' 11½" // 182cm ♛┋BUILD: athletic ♛┋TATTOOS: none ♛┋SCARS: none to speak of ♛┋PIERCINGS: none ♛┋GLASSES: occasionally when undercover/under an alias, but he has perfect vision ♛┋STYLE: Sophisticated & elegant. He very rarely leaves the house without a suit, often accessorizing with a hat. Usually somewhat vintage, but styled on the modern side. The most casual he usually goes is suit pants with a T-shirt or sweater.

FAMILY

♛┋PARENT #1: James Bennett (father) ♛┋PARENT #2: Angela Caffrey-Bennett (mother) ♛┋SIBLING(S): n/a ♛┋CHILDREN: n/a ♛┋PET(S): n/a ♛┋RELATIONSHIP WITH PARENTS: Non-existent. His father was a corrupt cop who killed a fellow cop and was arrested for it. Until his 18th birthday, Neal was led to believe his dad was a hero who died on the job and knowing the truth about his definitely messed up his entire world view. Add to that the fact that James tried to use Neal to get off after running from authorities for a murder he did commit and Neal certainly has all of the daddy issues. His mother, Neal feels less strong dislike and anger for. She was never a very stable presence in his life and the arrest of his father didn’t exactly help her. Instability and substance abuse made her a rather unfit mother and even though Neal would never say she was bad to him, Ellen was always the only real mother-figure he had. He hasn’t talked to his mother since he was eighteen and she hasn’t reached out either.  ♛┋RELATIONSHIP WITH SIBLING(S): n/a

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

♛┋HOMETOWN: St. Louis, Missouri ♛┋CURRENT: New York City, New York ♛┋LANGUAGE(S): English, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, French, German, conversational Italian & Swahili ♛┋SOCIAL CLASS: middle class ♛┋DEGREE: three MBAs and two doctorate degrees but... none of them legit. (in reality, Neal never graduated High School) ♛┋RAP SHEET? bond forgery (at least that’s the only thing they caught him on) ♛┋PRISON TIME? 4 years for bond forgery, another 4 years after breaking out of prison just before his sentence was up -- to be served as a consultant for the FBI

PSYCHOLOGY INFORMATION

♛┋JUNG TYPE: ESTP ♛┋ENNEATYPE: Type 3 -- The Achiever: Focused on the presentation of success, to attain validation & 7w8 ( Type 7 -- The Enthusiast: Pleasure seekers and planners, in search of distraction & Type 8 -- The Challenger: Taking charge, because they don't want to be controlled) ♛┋MORAL ALIGNMENT: Chaotic Neutral / Chaotic Good ♛┋TEMPERAMENT: Sanguine ♛┋SCHEMA: Insufficient self-control (very strong). Other contenders include  Unrelenting standards, Emotional inhibation, Abandonment and Entitlement  hahaaa ♛┋INTELLIGENCE TYPE: Linguistic & Visual are at the same score. Interpersonal is second place. ♛┋NEUROTYPE: Neurotypical

PERSONALITY DETAILS

♛┋POSITIVE: charming, witty, inventive, creative, intelligent ♛┋NEGATIVE: sly, dishonest, distrusting, guarded, detached ♛┋DREAMS/AMBITIONS: Neal’s main goal is always a sense of fun and adventure. he doesn’t have a set end-goal either way -- not the white picket fence life, but also not the life of the fancy villa in some country that doesn’t extradite as some sort of crime lord. He likes the thrill of a con, so if he can make it happen, keeping that alive is what he cares about most. ♛┋FEARS: Among is main fears is definitely turning out like his father. Having idolized him for so many years before he knew who he really was and then seeing a few similarities between them after all really does scare him. He’s aware he’s far from the most honest person alive, but he likes to believe he would never turn to murder or betraying his own closest family and friends the way his father did.

RELATIONSHIPS / SEX

♛┋RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Verse dependent ♛┋PREVIOUS RELATIONSHIPS: Several ambivalent on-off relationships (see Alex Hunter), plenty of casual affairs and only a few more serious relationships. The first big one being with Kate which, obviously, was something he was incredibly serious and passionate about. Also the only relationship to date he was so open about and had no shame admitting he’s deeply in love and would do anything for her. The only other (canon) relationship, although also without labels attached, was with Sara which remains his most healthy relationship, though it was foiled by circumstance and perhaps, just Neal’s inability of honesty at the time. ♛┋LEVEL OF SEXUAL EXPERIENCE: high ♛┋STORY OF FIRST KISS: Technically, it happened in the third grade after he drew a girl in his class a nice picture and they then proceeded to date for three weeks, which really just consisted of them holding hands twice, Neal drawing more pictures and that one first kiss at recess. Showed Brittney Nicole too -- his tooth gap clearly wasn’t that bad. ♛┋STORY OF FIRST TIME: Neal had just turned 17 and at the time, had his first more serious girlfriend. They’d been dating for a few months at the time and it happened after a night of plenty of shenanigans on a random Saturday. For Neal, sneaking out was never an issue anyway since parental supervision wasn’t exactly a thing, so no sneaking had to take place, and she’d told her parents she was staying at a friend’s place. Originally, they’d planned to just do whatever they felt like, something they both enjoyed very much (usually that meant Neal rigging the games at a local Arcade and winning her a bunch of stuffed animals or them hanging out at his favorite pool hall where he’d regularly earn a little extra by making some older guys who underestimated him play for money) but that night, they decided to up the stakes a little. They stopped by a second-hand store in town, bought complete outfits (suit and a cocktail dress, respectively) and then proceeded to drive to one of the fancier hotels in town. Somehow, they convinced the guy at the reception that they were relatives of the owner and should have been announced. They ended up getting one of the nicer rooms in the hotel for the night (and, for free!) and the exhilaration of the con pulled off well led to both of their first time.

VICES / HABITS

♛┋SMOKES? No (unless it’s part of a cover) ♛┋DRINKS? Yes, but preferably something respectable and only for taste and enjoyment, not specifically to get drunk ♛┋DOES DRUGS? No ♛┋IS VIOLENT? No ♛┋HAS AN ADDICTION? Well, technically he did say that a con is an addiction and that he hasn’t kicked it yet, so. That. ♛┋IS SELF-DESTRUCTIVE? Yes. I think while he comes off very confident and considers himself very confident too, there’s a couple things he just doesn’t believe will happen in his life for him. Among those are stable relationships, so he can sometimes subconsciously be destructive towards those and therefore proof his belief-system. ♛┋HABITS: He likes to have something to do with his hands, especially when he’s nervous. Be it throwing something and catching it again, or just twirling a pen between his fingers. ♛┋HOBBIES: Art, Reading, Cooking, Languages ♛┋OBSESSION(S): Depends on what’s currently important. Kate and the music box definitely developed into a sort of obsession at the time. I think in general, when intense things come up, especially when they threaten his loved ones, Neal has the tendency to get obsessive about them and let those things take over his life (or at least his private life) for the time being.

MISCELLANEOUS INFORMATION

♛┋HOUSE: Raveclaw, though a serious contestant for Slytherin  ♛┋VICE: Pride ♛┋VIRTUE: Willingness to do almost everything to protect/help those he cares about ♛┋ELEMENT: Air ♛┋MYTHOLOGICAL CREATURE: Siren or Centaur ♛┋ANIMAL: Fox ♛┋WOULD SURVIVE POST-APOC? Probably not. He’s very smart and would probably find a way to survive for a little while by somehow securing food and the like, but he has practically no combat skills and the second he needs to fight for his life, he would die ♛┋SONG TO DESCRIBE THEM?: Alibis by Marianas Trench

DETAILS / QUIRKS

♛┋PET PEEVES: All of the pet peeves. For someone with an affinity for the illegal, a lot of little things really annoy him. Some examples: the toilet seat being left up, gum on the sidewalk, people eating very fragrant food in confined spaces just to name a few ♛┋NIGHT OWL OR EARLY BIRD?: Night owl ♛┋LIGHT OR HEAVY SLEEPER?: More on the heavy side ♛┋FAVORITE FOOD?: He couldn’t pick. But he does have a real soft spot for cheese. Also risotto.  ♛┋LEAST FAVORITE FOOD?: Deviled ham ♛┋FAVORITE DRINK?: Red Wine ♛┋FAVORITE BOOK (GENRE)?: Non-fiction for genre. I don’t think he has a single favorite book though. ♛┋FAVORITE MOVIE?: He likes classic Hollywood movies, ngl. Sunset Boulevard is among one of his favorites. Romantic movies, in general. ♛┋LEAST FAVORITE MOVIE?: Anything super action-heavy or overly crude. ♛┋FAVORITE PLACE TO BE?: Not in jail is a great start. France, though, if he could have his choice. ♛┋COFFEE OR TEA?: Coffee. ♛┋FAVORITE COLOR?: Navy blue. ♛┋CUSSER? No. Shit is probably the worst thing he’ll say

[twylaymaa727-blog]

Full Game Grand Theft Auto SA is impressive

How do you follow up a runaway success like 2001's GTA 3? Rockstar North responded a year later with GTA VC, a game in which purchased the gameplay of their predecessor and developed it much. At the same time, Vice City produced the succession the intensive and stunning stylistic makeover, drenching the experience in the pictures, channels, and viewpoint of Miami, Florida from the middle '80s. So where do you travel by nearby? You get statewide. GTA SA develops the series' model to take in three whole town, and also the countryside among them. The gameplay similarly expands, packing in some explosive set samples and stunning action-movie-like thrills while preserving that even remarkably fun, freefom GTA feel. In short, Rockstar did this over. San Andreas definitely goes nearly the Grand Theft Auto name. In fact, this arguably the best game in the series.

This latest installment occurs in 1992 from the Western Coast-themed circumstances of San Andreas. San Andreas is an area including several locations. You'll begin the game in the city of Los Santos, that is based about with Chicago and involves a mix of ritzy downtown spots with the underworld ghettos of Southern Central. San Fierro is based on San Francisco, reproducing the real city's hilly territory and ever-present fog. The game's third capital is Las Venturas, which is a great take on early-'90s Las Vegas, full of a strip full of casinos and the nearby desert. While one-to-one measurements against previous games in the sequence are difficult in practice, San Andreas definitely is like a considerably, much larger point than Vice City ever made, but simultaneously, the progression is managed intelligently. There are lots of things to do both arrived next from the cities, making all that real estate matter.

While Grand Theft Auto III was inspired in movies such as Godfather and Vice City got some sites from the Scarface playbook, San Andreas takes their inspiration in the ghetto and gangsta struggle layers from the initial '90s. Movies like Menace II League and Boyz N the Top are the clear influences here. With San Andreas, people act the position of Carl "CJ" Johnson. The game opens with Carl returning to Los Santos after using the past a few times in GTA 3's Liberty City. Yet the homecoming isn't a happy one--he's returning house as the mom have been eliminated. Carl isn't on the ground for over an hour or he's picked up by a pair of crooked policemen and tossed right into the middle of the street life he gave Los Santos to avoid.

The first group of firm into Los Santos is to put the problem on the chart. Your team, the Grove Street Children, has slid into disarray over the last a few years, with their influence is little at greatest. And so you, with the three new director on the gang--the long-winded Big Light up, the dust-smoking Ryder, and your stubborn brother, Sweet--set ready to take finance the avenues from your rivals, the Ballas, who have turned to dealing crack to earn cash and return effect in the cover. You set out with a chains of missions to take back the property, starting little with things like spray-painting over other gangs' tags (which is one of the several contemporary types of cases which change previous GTA games' more-generic hidden package collecting here), yet suddenly go around drive-bys and other show of severe gangsterism. But there's a whole lot far more near San Andreas than just set tripping.

Now if you think you're getting used to gang warfare, anything goes sour. We're certainly not interested in spoiling the sport many interesting story twists, so good leave out the details, but it should suffice to mention to you'll eventually need to get the daylights from Los Santos. You find yourself in the country outside the town, in which you'll encounter many more great spirits and legally move forward about your search to get right what's gone wrong. Once you get out of Los Santos, you won't really have to fret about gang warfare for a while, with the experience settles into a more GTA-like feel.

Like the previous sport from the chain, San Andreas features a fairly linear history to captures you from the game's areas. You'll edge down limited to Los Santos--something the lie justifies by claiming an earthquake has taken available the channels and paths to connection Los Santos to the surrounding area--but it doesn't take slow to unlock the other two parts. The game and puts in some very big surprises in the form of individuals from before notes in the collection. These qualities join the GTA games together really nicely, so while San Andreas feels pretty different from the other sports from the run, that nevertheless feels like you're participating within the same world.

As in the previous games, mainly regarding your own increase is attained through completing objective for various individuals. These missions are oftentimes similar to missions you've referred to with before competition from the series. You'll take groups all around, take out specific individuals (the early mission provides the straightforward objective of beating up a break dealer, for example), do drive-bys at your own enemies, and so on. But as you continue with the game, the objective get crazier and crazier. Along the way you'll accomplish a gamble casino heist, take some wicked military hardware, "take mind" of lots of Mafia bozos, and much, much more. The vision from the game are extra exciting, on average, than they are in some previous GTA games. Additionally, the game can be much better in stretch off exactly what, precisely, needs to be done. It does that with onscreen passage to color-codes each particular piece of a quest differently. Still while the basics of the gameplay--taking at and ending missions--are similar to past Grand Theft Auto games, there are plenty of list to reveal, with lots of new details to try.

The first supplement to the game is the ability to ride a bicycle, you encounter almost instantly about starting the game. You'll push that like any other vehicle, but you'll find that engaging the X button makes CJ move faster. This is right with bottom, and, being taking X will make you short, but tapping this is him super run. The melee combat is a bit deeper now, as you can bar and complete combo goes with the just and triangle buttons, respectively. The board practice includes gathered a slight overhaul which makes it seem more like the objective in Manhunt, but this functionally very similar to the approach now Vice City. CJ is usually a somewhat more athletic than previous Grand Theft Auto protagonists. For one thing, he can swim, both on top and marine, which result in a breath meter to appear by the newly redesigned health meter. And if CJ's in shape, he can bound ahead with climb over large walls.

Yes, that's right. CJ has to stay in shape if he's to do in his greatest, which is a new story for the Grand Theft Auto series. The game is track of lots of different statistics to step up and minimize as you play the game. Your physical https://gtadownload.org/grand-theft-auto-iv-download-free/ fitness is the most obvious value, as you're able to determine in gyms to work upon your own muscle and stamina ratings, and you'll have to occasionally trouble to inhibit the muscle stat from occasionally draining a bit. Eating, but, may grow your weight statistic. CJ's body form can alter, depending with everything you do with for the time. While this may well sound like a lot of busywork, it's actually a very small part of the game, with the best way to handle it is to spend a few minutes operating away in the earlier parts of the game to build up your own muscles (giving a advantage to ones melee attacks) and your stamina (which determines how long you can sprint by finding tired), and eating occasionally to maintain the ratings without getting too much fat. You really don't have to spend too much time on it, with gain the ability to run for extended spots of period makes walking near (also growing away) a lot easier.

The game and tracks lots of other information. Respect is a high one, so that what you'll be earning the most of when you complete missions. Not many missions make you change, but nearly all of these are good for a slight respect bonus. A higher respect rating lets you recruit more and more gang members to follow you round with throw on rival gangs, that is another new count and an excellent perk, but not something that comes in handy very frequently. You're also rated in a lots of different vehicle categories, like driving, riding motorcycles, bicycling, and piloting aircraft. As you use a vehicle, the ability with it slowly increases, that seems to tighten the controls a bit. In the case of motorcycles, it also gets that less likely to you'll fly off the bicycle in the wreck. Your bicycling skills change in higher bunny hops. Similarly, you're given stats for every type of gun in the game. You'll start with poor skills with many guns, but never let the label of "reduced" fool you--CJ's skills feel about the same as Tommy Vercetti's when you first contract the trigger. Like obtaining in some time with a system, you'll upgrade this toward "gangster" level, that extends the lock-on go with the gun, rates up reloading, and sometimes enables people move about while locked in. Improving the expertise with a weapon on the main degree, "hitman," takes a relatively long time, but it goes the lock-on collection and rates up reloading still further, and it and opens the ability to dual-wield some one-handed weapons. Unloading two whole clips of submachine-gun ammo is particularly meeting here.

Probably the best position about the game's stat system lives to that all really subtle. It would be easy for something like training with swallow to take over the game, in practice you really don't have to think about it. All you really understand is a quick pop-up in the higher left-hand place of the monitor when a stat changes, and if that changed enough to make a big change, the game offers a text type of just what gets replaced and what which income for you. You will must believe around your own stats a bit when you find the first flight mission, as the story won't proceed until you've gone through flight training. The training code is frustrating, but once you fix that, the flight controls seem to pull up a bit, and you'll have had enough practice for making it throughout many of the trip missions without too much attention. The other time you'll believe on stats is when you first accept a mission that calls for swimming. If you haven't leveled the lung capacity up to a certain moment, you basically will not be able to continue. Up until that point in the word, however, people experience needed to work underwater at all, so at the beginning of the mission you'll have to spend some time going marine and resurfacing until you've produced the lungs expected to go swimming away into a craft with silently kill anyone on board.

But enough on statistics. The key point about GTA San Andreas lives to the idea insanely cool to compete, irrespective of how you decide to show this. The quest are much less frustrating this time around--there are still plenty of challenging objectives for you to meet, but the game does a better task of time the quest with go on people told about what you're meant to do then. As a result, players that could not have gotten to complete Vice City will have a better chance of finishing San Andreas' story, but at the same time the game never really feels like it's very quick. Experienced players can get their own method from the game's epic adventure in 35 to 40 hours, though if you've been enjoying Vice City every day now anticipation regarding this particular game's freedom, to total could conceivably go down when gentle because 25 to 30--which is a fairly lengthy adventure, however you cut it. On top of that, participants that follow the grave story means and dismiss all the side things will end the game with a completion percentage anywhere in the 50s, so clearly there's far more near San Andreas than just getting out on the lid and developing a criminal empire. Even persons that devote all their period at home Grand Theft Auto to result in mass destruction can still have a critical point now, although you could want to enjoy through the story long enough to help unlock the game's other areas. And this time, you'll be able to start worked with a friend.

One of the many interesting wrinkles in Grand Theft Auto's gameplay is the game today possesses a two-player cooperative way. Now, when you get very excited about that, people should be aware that you can't actually play the whole game with a friend. Instead, you'll run into little two-player icons in certain points in the gameworld. Walking over one with a second controller advertised into enables you jump up a few special objectives that act sort of like the rampage symbols with past GTA up for. You also a supporter can wreak havoc in a vehicle before in bottom, though the game expects which both players remain on the same screen. While the idea of a multiplayer kind in GTA is appealing mind-blowing, the execution now makes that more of the fun little addition that, along with all the other crazy things you'll come across when you play, adds to the feel that the sport takes a million different things that you uncover. OK, while there aren't quite a million side vision in the game, it seems to come fairly strong, offering from a baseball minigame, to put together games competed for capital, to help arcade procedures that give deference to basic games like Gyruss and Gradius.

Some of the vision that will include happened using the run for years reappear here. When you write a monitor car, you can gained the R3 option and handle some vigilante missions. The same thing goes for fire automobiles and ambulances. If you enter a moving van at night, you can begin on a home-invasion mission, which is a stealthy task which needs you to write a house also get into off with some property without being noise. Going when crouched is the organization from the day now. You'll and obtain the mixture of races, ranging from the good old dirtring to well-hidden mountain-bike challenges. Another interesting feature on the game lives which you'll get to catch up with a number of women. The gossip wants you to dabble in the playoffs dating system, which sets people ahead with distinct girls in another spots from the game, but there are lots of other girls you can get, if you have the look with style they're searching for. Dates are usually fairly simple: You get the girl, with generally she wants to take. It's up to you to send her somewhere. If she's thinking lobster, but you're thinking Burger Fired, the date's not about to run very good, but there are a variety of nice places to go. You don't usually receive any power over the year other than run her on the spot and back to her studio, yet if she would like to run dancing, the game launches in a simple Dance Dance Revolution-like timing minigame. In an awesome effect, that same type of minigame happens when you insert a lowrider-hopping contest, which is a good way to make a slight extra income.

The Grand Theft Auto series has always been rather stylish, visually speaking. Vice City did a wonderful mission of capturing both the glimpse of Miami along with the impression in the normal '80s. San Andreas has to live up to that standard while creating four unique landscapes--one for each city, and one for the countryside between cities. Fortunately, the game does this extremely, very well. The aspects of Los Santos of which anyone call in have a very realistic ghetto appearance that suits perfectly. The other location from the game and look a lot like the towns they're modeled after, but the most dramatic difference occurs if you go town. The country is nothing like anything you've witnessed during past Grand Theft Auto contest. The twisting country roads, small communities that spray the scenery, plenty of off-road engagement, and shares of nice-looking foliage do these subjects seem beautiful amazing. Outside of Las Venturas, the area is much more desertlike, which and seems really critical. And there's no loading time separating up all the landmass.

The buildings looks outstanding, and the action experience about extra effects to match. The former trails effect from Vice City with GTAIII is history. Now, you'll get everything very clearly, except as you're in warm areas, the sport has a great heat-shimmer look. When you're pulling by or almost top speed in a car, the television blurs a bit, which makes a fantastic career by presenting the ultimate awareness of speed. And, the game takes on the grainy, filtered air what time this falls, which and looks really good. The character models throughout San Andreas look very good as well, although a few pieces, like the characters' blocky hands, seem a slight weird at times.

It's not many fun and sun when it comes to San Andreas' graphics, though. As in previous GTA matches, the outline pace with San Andreas is beautiful unstable. It always runs in a playable time, but counting on what you're figure out, how fast you're doing it, with just how many other victims are onscreen, the shape rate could vary wildly. Additionally, there are various occasional level-of-detail issues, where you'll be able to get very near the object or the "looks good up close" structure can weight in. Such a problem will probably vary, depending on the clause of your own hardware. If your PS2 is modern with moist, you probably won't see it too often. But if your method has visited better times, that could hold thought house up to you when it comes to streaming within the original textures and landscaping. The draw-in distance sounds a lot more out than Vice City's, but you'll still meet many form pop in position, especially when flying overhead on high speed. But even if people draw these topics into consideration, San Andreas delivers a really impressive-looking graphical package on the aging PlayStation 2 hardware.

The echoes of San Andreas exist, because you'd expect, many and changed. The game does a really tough affair with things like engine noises. Vehicles like jets (yes!), fast autos, and motorcycles all deliver deep, throaty tones that make them perfect like ahead and distinct as they are. Gunfire sounds around like you'd demand, next the game's Pro Logic II support does a superb situation of placing the music properly. San Andreas doesn't have DTS care, what Vice City did, but you probably won't see any real difference. On the other hand, you'll surely note how the quality of the words work experience recovered because to game.

In a story-driven game like San Andreas, the state cast boasts a profound effect on the story's impact. Rockstar has put together a fantastic cast to the game that, into somebody, make an excellent career with the dialogue. While there are certainly some familiar calls for the cast list, the game doesn't go overboard in this matter, casting a relatively new rapper with the designation of Small Maylay in the responsibility of CJ--and he offers an excellent performance. MC Eiht, an inspired inclusion to say the least, does a terrific affair with the

[jetdeer67-blog]

Muscular Tension Part 1

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While I’m waiting until I get the energy to get aggro again, and I will, I wanted to write about a topic I’ve been meaning to address for a while,  a detailed look at the idea of muscular tension.  What it is, why it’s important, how we can or cannot measure it and what confusion comes out of the concept in a practical sense.

I’ve sure as hell typed up most of this in my Facebook group enough times to make this easier for me: I can type it up once and just link to it in the future.  Honestly, that’s why I write most of what I write.  Write it once, link to it forever after.  Eventually, maybe put it in a book.  This series will certainly be long enough.

As well, this article is going to act as a background piece for some stuff I intend to write about going forwards regarding training, muscle growth and what the actual PRIMARY driver on growth is (hint: it’s still not volume).  But since I’ll likely have several articles using this information, it’s faster and keeps the articles shorter to write it up once and link to it.  Even if this thing got rapidly out of control.

So with that short introduction, I want to look at the concept of muscular tension.  What it is/represents, why it’s important to the training process and, perhaps more, err, importantly, how so many people completely misinterpret the concept in a real world training way.

To address the latter, I’ll have to make a couple of digressions but, hey, let’s remember who I am and how I (over) write.  And it will take multiple parts.

How Muscles Work

Ok, so picture one of your major muscles, pecs, biceps, quads whatever.  The muscle has several components.  At either end is the tendon which attaches the muscle to the bone.  Tendons are just dense connective tissues although their density changes from the bone end to the muscle end getting less dense as you move away from the bone and towards the muscle.  When the tendon meets the muscle, this is called the musculotendinous junction.

Fun-fact: when people ‘tear’ a muscle, it is almost unheard of to tear the tendon from the bone because that connection is insanely strong.  Rather, the relatively weaker musculotendinous junction is typically where the injury occurs: the muscle tears away from the tendon (rolling up like a window shade when a full tear occurs).

So between the tendons is the muscle itself which is also made up of multiple components.  This includes the myofibrils themselves, the actual contractile components of the muscle which generate force.  There is also the sarcoplasmic component which is mostly everything else: fluid, enzymes, glycogen, everything that’s not the myofibrils for all practical purposes (as I wrote about a few weeks ago, despite years of debate, it’s now looking like the idea of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is an actual phenomenon).

There are also various connective tissues, titin, desmin and a host of others that connect the myofibrils in all sorts of complex ways. Some run along the muscle fibers, some connect the muscle fibers to one another in a grid, some connect it to the other parts of the cell.   It’s just this interconnected lattice of stuff. Here’s a basic graphic showing how all of this works/fits together, linked from this page.

So it’s time to generate force.  The brain sends some signals, which move down the motor nerve until they reach the neuromuscular junction.  Then a bunch of stuff happens causing muscles to contract, generating force to (hopefully) accomplish whatever is being attempted.  I’ll discuss some of the details of this in a bit.   As I’ve discussed previously, there are a fairly large number of factors that can influence on the actual force produced.

The big one of relevance here is the physiological cross sectional area of the muscle or muscle fibers.  So imagine you took a cucumber and cut it down the middle top to bottom so you’re looking at the round end.   That diameter allows you to calculate the cross sectional area.  If you cut a muscle in the same fashion, that distance across would be the same thing essentially.  I said ESSENTIALLY.

And the amount of force a muscle can generate is related to this measure times what is called specific tension.  Specific tension is the amount of force per unit cross sectional area that can be generated.

The Initiator of Muscle Growth

For decades it was stated that “We don’t really know what makes muscle grow” and this assertion was used to defend the absolutely goofiest bullshit training approaches that you can imagine.  If you can’t say what generates growth, then any training system you can dream up is fair game so long as it “works” or at least seems to.

It didn’t help that so many things seemed to work.  Well, especially once steroids got into the game and literally anything did work because steroids build muscle without training to begin with.  Any stupid shit you do in the gym works so long as your dose is high enough (the main volume component of training is volume of gear used).  Hence any stupid shit got defended for training because we supposedly didn’t know what triggered the process of muscle growth.

This isn’t to say that a variety of theories weren’t thrown out over the years.

The most common and still believed to this day was probably the idea that training breaks down muscle which is then built back up to higher levels.  This was based on the almost wholly incorrect idea of supercompensation but that’s another topic for another day.  It also doesn’t work that way in the least.

It was also related to the idea that muscle damage per se was a stimulus for growth (why so many people continue to chase DOMS/soreness) although that’s mostly thought to be incorrect.  Many types of training stimulate growth with no damage and if anything, muscle damage may be detrimental to growth.

This tied in somewhat with an energetic theory of growth, the idea that training reduce skeletal muscle energetic status (i.e. ATP/CP) which somehow triggered growth.  In my first book The Ketogenic Diet, I wrote about a then highly regarded theory that training would cause a depletion of ATP in the muscle causing it to reach ‘rigor’ and lock-up with the subsequent lowering causing the damage that turned on growth.

Dan Duchaine’s Bodycontract training system (something that probably 3 people reading this will remember) was based around this: a set of 8-12 to failure to deplete ATP and then 3 heavier eccentric reps to cause targeted muscle damage after the muscle fibers had hit rigor (he called it ‘targeted intensity’).  I doubt this model in fashion anymore given that muscle damage doesn’t seem to be a big player in growth overall.  I certainly haven’t seen it discussed in a lot of years and I wouldn’t argue nor defend it 20 years later.  Mind you, it has elements of the actual picture but isn’t entirely correct.

There were ideas related to ischemia/hypoxia (basically low blood flow/Oxygen) which were dismissed for years but may have some merit when you consider some of the blood flow restriction work (BFR).  I’ll be writing up another longwinded article on this but short version: hypoxia would appear to be an indirect contributor to growth in that it helps the body to recruit more muscle fibers.

Others felt that flooding the muscle with blood was the key: the pump theory of growth, essentially.  This might actually have some validity if you’re on steroids to keep the drugs within the muscle longer so that they bind to the receptors longer.  Maybe.  But big picture the pump doesn’t seem to mean very much.  Humorously, others felt that keeping blood moving through the body was the key, hence the PHA training system (that maybe 2 people reading this remember).

There’s also been some theorizing about cell swelling for over a decade now but I haven’t seen anything particularly convincing in that regards (most of the research seemed to be in liver cells under non-physiological conditions such as saline infusion and such).  I’m not saying it doesn’t play some role.  I’m saying I’m not convinced it’s that big of a deal in the big picture under normal conditions.  I could be wrong.  If this were a thing in muscle, pump training might play a role in that it could conceivably cause cell swelling.

A super goofy study came out recently using ‘sarcoplasmic specific’ training protocols that generated immense increases in muscle thickness immediately after training due to fluid shifts.  But you wanna look good in the club for a few hours, this is your jam.   Go get your pump on and then go get your drink on and you might get lucky.  Perhaps Arnold was right.

Currently there is interest in the metabolite theory of growth although, as I’ll write about eventually, it’s unlikely to have much merit (I’ll address it briefly in Part 2 or 3 of this series) in terms of metabolites directly stimulating growth.  Like hypoxia, accumulating metabolites probably just help to recruit the highest threshold muscle fibers at the end of a set (this will make sense when I explain the process below).  Don’t get hung up on this right now, I have a tediously long article coming later.

Then there was the hormonal response theory, that the testosterone or growth hormone response to training, was important.  And, pretty much it’s not with any effect being extremely minimal since those small spikes in hormones just don’t amount to much.  At best it plays a very minor role; at worst it is 100% irrelevant.  Sure, injecting supraphysiological levels of drugs matters.  Spiking testosterone or growth hormone for 15 minutes not so much.  The growth response to training is almost purely local.

The one I’ll mention last, because it was probably the closest to right, was proposed by Vladimir Zatsiorky.  He pointed out that during any given set, a certain number of muscle fibers would be recruited to generate force.  But that recruitment per se wasn’t sufficient.  Rather, those fibers had to be fatigued as well (this was based on the idea that fatigue of a fiber per se triggered growth which isn’t quite right).   Basically you had to recruit the fiber (unrecruited fibers aren’t trained) but you also had to subject it to sufficient work to cause it to adapt.

So with all of those theories floating around, it seems easy to understand why people would argue that “We don’t know what causes muscle growth.”

Tension/Mechano Sensors

As it turned out, the idea that “We don’t know what causes muscle growth” was wrong to begin with.   As early as 1975, researchers had the picture about 90% worked out and it had been established that the primary initiating factor for growth in adult skeletal muscle was the exposure of muscle fibers to high levels of tension with the researchers concluding:

It is suggested that increased tension development (either passive or active) is the critical event in initiating compensatory growth.

Yet people maintained that “We don’t even know what causes growth” for decades afterwards.  Well, I’m sure they didn’t know.  But physiologists sure as hell did.  Or had enough of a model, that would then be shown to be more or less correct.

Now tension can be generated in different ways and you will read about active vs. passive tension.  I’m not getting into this in any detail but passive tension are things like those goofy ass studies where they tie a weight to a quail’s wing for 30 days.  The chronic weighted stretch exposes the muscles to passive tension overload and causes rapid growth along with an increase in muscle fiber number (hyperplasia)   This doesn’t work in humans, by the way.  Active tension is what we are interested in, when a muscle is forced to actively generate force.

One nifty way they create increased active tension in animals is through what is called the synergist ablation model.  This is a nice way of saying that they cut one of the muscles (the synergist) that supports a joint.  This causes the remaining muscle to be overloaded to an insane degree overnight.

And growth is absurdly fast and potent.  It’s like 50% in a matter of days in animals or something (don’t swear me to that number).  So in a human it would be like cutting the soleus so that the gastrocnemius has to take over. Suddenly the gastroc exposed to an enormous overload since it has to take over for the cut muscle.  It might be the the only way for some people to get calves.   I am joking by the way.  I think.

But let’s move to something a bit more physiological as an example of active tension.   For example, lifting a weight where muscle fibers must generate force to perform the movement.   This requires them to generate/exposes them to high tension which, as above, is the initiating factor in muscle growth.  Like I said, we knew this in 1975.  Or at least had an inkling that this was the case.  And it turns out to absolutely be the case (literally any review paper you read on mechanisms of hypertrophy regardless of the author or their bias will list tension as the primary factor in initiating growth).

What we didn’t know up until fairly recently (by which I mean like 15 years ago or so) were the actual biomchemical pathways that were involved in turning on protein synthesis.    And we now know that the primary mediating factor for muscle growth is something called mTOR (the mammalian target of rapamyacin).

Training activates mTOR and so do amino acids, especially leucine which is where the whole BCAA thing comes from (they are still garbage, for the record).  Yes, there are other pathways and factors involved such as AKT and ribosomal activity and many others but mTOR is kind of the key or final pathway.  If you block mTOR (with rapamyacin), protein synthesis from training is blocked no matter what else you do.  You can think of mTOR as sort of the final pathway for all of this stuff.

What was missing for a while was how the first achieved the second.  That is, how was a purely mechanical signal (muscle tension/mechanical work) being translated into a chemical/biological signal?  Because at some level, this didn’t make much sense.  How can a mechanical process activate a biological one?

What did make sense was that some biological change in the muscle, ATP or lactate or hormones or whatever was causing it that it was related because it makes sense for one biological change to trigger another. This was clearly a case of a mechanical effect causing a biochemical pathway to activate.

What was going on?

Bioengineers to the Rescue

As I originally heard the story, the muscle physiologists couldn’t get anywhere with this and got some bioengineers to come take a fresh look at the problem.  This was kind of before all of that other connective tissue stuff like desmin and titin I mentioned above were known about mind you.  The idea that muscle fibers were connected to other parts of cell wasn’t a thing at the time .  You just had muscle fibers kind of running down the length of the muscle with tendons on the end and when they contracted, movement occurred around the joint they were attached to.  And somehow that could turn on this biological growth process.

And supposedly the bioengineers were like “Ok, so if you had some sort of tissue that connected the actual muscle fibers (running lengthwise down the fiber) to other structures in the cell, that could explain how a mechanical signal turns into a biological signal.  The fiber contraction would pull on those other tissues which alters cell structure and could translate into a biological signal.”  This would provide a mechanism for mechanical tension to turn on a biochemical cascade.

And I’m sure the muscle physiologists were like “Lol, ok” and then looked for these supposed structures and were like “WTF, they were right” or something.  And then probably took credit for the idea when it was all said and done.

Now I may have dreamt all of the above up (it wouldn’t be the first time) but, even if I did, it turns out that this is exactly what is going on.  Essentially, there are mechanosensors within skeletal muscle that, when activated, transform a purely mechanical signal (muscle fibers generating/being exposed to high tension loads) into a biological one, the activation of mTOR.

Note: I don’t know exactly when the above model became a thing but it was somewhere between 1993 when I graduated from UCLA and the early 2000’s when I took an advanced exercise physiology class at UT Austin.

So what are the mechanosensors?  So far as I can tell, they are currently calling these things Focal Adhesion Kinase which, when they do their magic, activates mTOR (this appears to be mediated through the generation of phosphatidic acid which is why those supplements were popular a while back).  Going forwards I’ll just abbreviate this process as FAK/PA/mTOR.

Boom, a mechanical signal is converted into a biological one.  Tension overload activates mTOR and growth is stimulated.  Problem solved.

Note: Other systems have this too.  Bone is an interesting one where high force impact loading activates mechanosensors called osteocytes within the bone that turn on the process of increasing bone mineral density as an adaptive response.  Even more interesting, after some number of high force stimuli, the osteocytes become refractory to further stimulation.  That is, there is a per workout or per day maximum to the stimulus.  Hmm, that sounds familiar.  Even the cell swelling theory is thought to work through physical stretching of the cell where the mechanical stretch turns on biological processes even if I remain unconvinced that it’s a major pathway in skeletal muscle growth.  But, fundamentally it’s mechanosensors all the way down.

And, once again, that is the primary initiating event in turning on hypertrophy: high tension forces generate a biochemical cascade that turns on protein synthesis.  Yes, there are other players in this process but this is the key one.  Importantly, it looks like there need to be a sufficient number of high-tension contractions for this to occur.  It’s not just a function of exposing a muscle to a singular brief high tension load.  You have to do it a number of times for the mTOR cascade to get activated.

But at this point nobody knows how many contractions are required on either a per set or per workout level (though it’s funny that everything seems to be coming back to Wernbom’s recommendations from 12 years ago and it won’t surprise me in the least if he was right all along).   A single maximum daily contraction doesn’t turn on growth and a group that did 5 maximum single reps twice/week showed no growth so there’s clearly more to it than just high tension.  Some volume of high-tension contractions is required (and nobody including me has ever said differently, that volume doesn’t matter.  I’ve said that it wasn’t PRIMARY because it isn’t).  Put more succinctly.

High muscular tension is REQUIRED but not SUFFICIENT to stimulate growth.

Without a high tension stimulus, growth isn’t turned on (and note that I didn’t say high LOADS, I said high TENSION which I’ll explain later).  But other factors play a secondary role to the presence of mechanical tension.  Volume is one of them.  You need some amount of contractions under high tension conditions to turn on growth.  We just don’t know how many yet.

Which is basically what the Zatsiorsky model of growth I described above is getting at.  He put it in terms of recruitment and fatigue which is wrong but his general picture was still right.   Just making a fiber generate high tension isn’t sufficient to trigger growth.  Some number of contractions is also required to activate the FAK/PA/mTOR cascade.

High tension is still the key which is why running and other low intensity activities don’t generate muscle gains.  Ok, that’s not true, they do in total beginners where even that low intensity activity probably is a tension overload for a little while.  Then again, so is Wiifit at that level.  But beyond a certain point, those activities do not increase muscle mass.  I’ll address the low-load/BFR stuff, which seems to contradict this (except that it really doesn’t), briefly later in the series and in excruciating detail eventually.

So we ask: how do we generate high tension in a muscle?  Now I have to digress into some details.

Recruitment and Rate Coding

Fundamentally there are two ways that the body can get muscles to generate force.  The first is through recruitment, actually making the muscle fibers themselves activate to generate force.    The second is through rate coding, the rate at which signals are sent down the motor nerves to those fibers which impacts on how they fire.  The combination of the two determines the force output of the muscle and the body has different “strategies” for using one or the other depending on the situation (and this gets insanely complex and I am so not going to try to get into it because it’s not big picture relevant).

I should that there are two primary types of muscle fibers, Type I (slow twitch, oxidative) and Type II (fast twitch, glycolytic).  There are also a bunch of sub-fiber types like IIa, IIx, IIax and some hybrids but I’m going to ignore the details here since they aren’t really important.  I’m just going to pretend that there are Type I and Type II to keep it simpler.

Type I are typically smaller, contract slightly less quickly, generate less force, are more aerobic and fatigue very slowly.  They are good for endurance activities.  Type II are typically larger, contract a bit more quickly, generate more force, are more glycolytic and fatigue more quickly.  They are better for high-intensity activities.   Type II fibers generally have more potential for growth as well.

During activities, muscle fibers are recruited in a fairly orderly way from smaller (Type I) to larger (Type II) depending on force requirements according to what is called Henemman’s Size Principle (not to be confused with Henneman’s Wife’s Size Absolutely Matters Principle).    So Type I are recruited first, with Type II coming in later progressively.  And there is a continuum of both types of fibers with a continuum of characteristics that will come in progressively as the intensity of activity goes up.  It’s also way more complex than this, don’t worry about it.

At around 20% of maximum force, basically lower intensity aerobic work, only Type I fibers are needed.  This is why it can be continued for extended periods: Type I fibers are highly aerobic and don’t generate many waste products.  You can go until you get bored or dehydrated.  I mean, ultra-endurance “runners”, who may be going 3.5-4 mph (a brisk walk) will cover hundreds of miles at that pace.  It’s all Type I fibers at this level.

As force requirements go up, Type II fibers will be recruited to a greater and greater degree.     So you move to faster running and start to recruit some Type II fibers.  Now Type II can still be somewhat aerobic, especially at this level.  So you still don’t fatigue particularly rapidly.  Forever maybe become 6 hours on the bike or when glycogen runs out.

Now you’re running near your maximum sustainable speed, something you could do for an hour.  Lots of Type II fiber recruitment.  Not all of them, but more. There’s waste products being generated but they are not accumulating.  It hurts but you can keep going.  Then you go all out sprinting, HIIT type.  Depending on the intensity you probably get damn close to full recruitment.  Waste products build up rapidly and you fatigue in 45 or 90 seconds.

And that’s how fiber recruitment basically works, at low intensities the body only needs low-threshold Type I fibers with higher threshold fibers being recruited progressively with increasing intensity.  At least up to the point where full recruitment occurs.

What is that point?  In a weight training sense, maximum recruitment occurs at about 80-85% of MVIC (maximal voluntary isometric contraction which I will roughly take to be synonymous with 1 repetition max even if it’s not exactly the same).  At that level, all muscle fibers are recruited.  Beyond this point, the body generates more force with rate coding and other complex neural stuff as there are no further fibers to be activated.

A quick note: there is a long held-belief that the body can only recruit a small portion of available muscle fibers but this is fundamentally wrong.  Using a technique called the Interpolated Twitch Technique (ITT), it’s been found the people can recruit 98-99% of their biceps fibers.  In contrast, they can only recruit 88-90% of their quadriceps muscle fibers (low back is down at 75% if I recall correctly and I suspect this is to protect spinal disks).  This leads me to speculate that the “empirically observed” and “semi-research suggested” idea that legs need more volume than upper body might be related to this.  If even during a hard set you can’t get full activation of your quads/legs, you might need more total volume to get the same overall growth stimulus.   We really need more structured and systematic work on this.

In any case, this recruitment threshold of about 80-85% 1RM (and some put it closer to 90%) has a couple of implications.  The first is that beyond about a 5-8RM you don’t get any more fiber recruitment.  Doing a 3RM or 1RM won’t recruit any more fibers than a 5-8RM.  You’ll certainly see different neural patterns, rate coding and such.  But from a fiber recruitment standpoint there is no real difference and going heavier beyond a certain point won’t lead to further recruitment.  I’ll come back to the other implication later down.

Fun fact: The above only holds for large muscles like arms, quads, pecs, the ones we care about.  In smaller muscles like the eyes and fingers, recruitment occurs up to about 50-60% of max with rate coding dominating after that.  This provides much finer muscle control; if it didn’t work that way, your eyes would fly back and forth as you tried to read this and you’d have no control over your fingers for fine motor tasks.  This is also why all those finger and thumb muscle strength or endurance studies have less than zero relevance to training (and why citing them to make any argument about real-world weight training is not only pointless but shows a lack of basic physiology knowledge by the person doing it).  They simply don’t apply.

Ok, so that’s recruitment and rate coding and implies that getting full recruitment of a muscle means training at 80-85% or heavier.  Except that that isn’t correct.

Two Ways to High Tension

So if you start at 80-85% of MVIC, maybe a 5-8 RM you get full recruitment from repetition 1 and throughout the entire set and I’ve written previously that if you had to pick a single repetition range for growth, this is it.   I based the argument on optimizing both recruitment and total mechanical work.  Because working in this range will cause full fiber recruitment from the first repetition and allow you to perform the most repetitions under that condition compared to either heavier or lighter sets.  Knowing that we need fiber recruitment and some number of contractions this would arguably be the most efficient way of achieving that.

In any case, if you do a 5RM you’ll get 5 total reps at full recruitment. If you do 3 reps with 5RM you get 3 reps with full recruitment.    Of course, you can probably do more sets of 3 at a 5RM than sets of 5 at a 5RM and might get more total per workout contractions. Those sets of 3 will be a higher quality technically or in terms of bar speed as well.  So you can do 5 sets of 3 with 5RM for 15 effective reps versus perhaps 2 sets of 5RM for only 10 and with better technique and speed.  This is how strength/power athletes typically train, using a heavy load but not taking it to failure so that more total high-quality sets can be done.   The same principle can hold for hypertrophy but let’s move on.

But now lets ask the question what the process of fiber recruitment looks like if we start below 80-85% of max.  So let’s say we’re lifting at 70% of max, maybe a 12-15RM on average.  Now, by definition, the body doesn’t need to recruit all muscle fibers in this situation since force requirements can be met by less than 100% fiber recruitment.     For some number of reps in the set, full recruitment will not be achieved since it’s not needed.

But as the set continues, some of the initially recruited fibers will start to fatigue.  When that occurs, the body will recruit higher threshold fibers to maintain force output and continue the set.  And more fatigue will occur.  And more fibers will be recruited.  And this will occur until, at some point in the set, full recruitment of all available fibers has occurred.  And that full recruitment will be maintained until the set is terminated either because the lifter stops or muscular failure occurs (defined here as the repetition not being completed no matter how much force the lifter exerts).

So, hypothetically, say you start lifting at 75% of max, about a 10-12RM or so.  For the first 5-6 reps you won’t reach full recruitment as the body can generate enough force without needing all muscle fibers to contribute. As fibers fatigue, the body will recruit more fibers and over perhaps the last 3-5 reps (or whatever number) you will get full recruitment. Which means that it’s only over those last 3-5 reps that the highest threshold/Type II fibers are being recruited, hence exposed to high tension, and doing mechanical work and hopefully activating the FAK/PA/mTOR cascade.

Which raises the question of when in the set do all fibers reach full recruitment.  I am aware of two studies on the topic.

In one study, trained men performed a set to failure in the leg press at either 90% or 70% of 1RM with surface EMG (admittedly limited as a methodology) being used to determine activation.  On average, the subjects got 8 reps at 90% and 18 reps at 70%.  Without getting into the weeds on what they measured (it was a bunch of peak and average EMG), what the study ultimately found was that the peak EMG at 70% was the same when compared to the “matched repetitions” of the 90% set.  Which is a weird way of saying that the peak EMG was the same for the final 8 reps of the 18 rep set as for the 8 reps of the 8 rep set.   Either way you get 8 repetitions with full recruitment.  You just have to do 10 non-full recruitment reps first with the lighter weight to get those same 8 full recruitment reps.

A similar study in untrained women using rubber tubing found the same thing. It looked at trap activation during a lateral raise at either a 3RM or 15RM set.    And what it found was that full activation was reached from the first rep in the 3RM set as would be expected.  But full recruitment was not reached until the last 3-5 reps in the 15RM set.  So in the 3RM set, 3 total reps were done under full activation, in the 15RM, 3-5 reps at full activation were done.  Both groups got essentially the same number of full recruitment reps.   The 15RM subjects just had to do 10-12 reps without full activation to get there.  And I do wish they’d stop using such extremes, comparing perhaps 85% to 75% or whatever to see how it differs.

What you see is that submaximal loads lifted close or to failure can cause similar fiber recruitment patterns as heavy sets.   

I’d note and I’ll come back to this in a later part of the series that this is how low-load/BFR training essentially works.  By taking a low-load set to failure (and this doesn’t happen if you stop short of failure which is a big pointer in to what’s going on), you reach or achieve full muscular activation near the end of the set.  In a conceptual sense, you sort of have to by definition since failure is 100% regardless of how you get there.  A 5RM is 100% effort at the end but so is a 30RM so long as both are to true failure.  So the fiber recruitment patterns would be expected to be at least similar.  And they basically are.

The same occurs with BFR with the metabolites/hypoxia helping with fiber recruitment.  Simply, they increase high threshold fiber recriutment even with the submaximal loads.   At the end of each set the highest threshold fibers are recruited and exposed to a tension stimulus for a sufficient number of contractions.  Yadda yadda, FAK/PA/mTOR cascade.  Mind you, you have to do 25-30 painful, pointless reps first to get to full recruitment and tension but that’s what’s happening.  But it sure looks edgy on Instagram and isn’t that what training is all about?

Put more simply, whether you do a set of 3-8 with 80-90% 1RM, a set of 15RM with 70% 1RM or a set of 30 with 25% 1RM (or BFR it), you end up getting some number of repetitions under full recruitment and high tension.  In the first case it’s from the first repetition and you get 3-8 reps under full recruitment.  In the second full recruitment occurs around reps 10-12 and you get 3-5 reps under full recruitment, in the third case, you waste your life doing 25 worthless reps to get to the 5 or so good ones or however many it is.

But it’s all ultimately a path to high tension overload of the high threshold muscle fibers (yes, there is some speculation that low load/BFR may target Type I and this is assuredly a durational/fatigue issue that I’m not getting into here).

As I wrote on Facebook the other day: All roads lead to high tension.

It’s just a matter of how you get there.

Effective Reps

While I’m on the topic I might as well address a relatively new concept which is that of “effective reps”.  The idea here is that it’s only those repetitions of a set done under full (or near full) activation that “matter” in terms of the growth stimulus.  The total sets don’t matter.  The total reps don’t matter.  It’s the effective reps that matter. I don’t know that I’d argue this in the strictest sense although it’s certainly true if you’re talking about the highest threshold muscle fibers.  Clearly fibers are being recruited or trained without full activation.  Just not all of them.

If you did a 5RM set, that’s 5 effective reps since they were all done under conditions of full recruitment.   So if you do a set of 12 near failure and get full activation for reps 10 through 12, that’s 3 effective reps.  If you do a set of 35 reps with 30% of your 1RM, you just fucked around for ~30 reps to get to the 3-5 or so effective reps.   The end result is effectively the same.  Get it?  Effectively?  Effective reps?  Effectively?  Nevermind.

Now we still don’t know how many effective reps are necessary to optimally activate the FAK/PA/mTOR pathway.  Once we do, and if we also find out that it saturates at a certain point on a per workout or per week level we’ll be able to end this fucking volume debate once and for all.

So if we determine that 20 or 40 effective reps per workout or whatever (or so many contractions per week) is optimal and/or the limit to the growth stimulus, we have the basic answer of how to optimize training for growth.  I still suspect Wernbom’s earlier data will turn out to be roughly correct.

Because we know that there are different ways to get the same number of effective reps.  So consider someone doing multiple straight sets of 8 say 4X8 on a 2′ rest.   Let’s say they start 2 reps in reserve/reps to failure, so it’s a 10RM load.  Realistically, the first set might get a couple of effective reps under full fiber recruitment.  With each successive set, assuming the rest interval isn’t too long to allow full recovery, as fatigue accumulates and the set gets closer to failure the number of full recruitment reps per set will increase.  Becuase what will happen is that set 1 is at 2RIR and set 2 is at 1-2 RIR and set 3 is at 1RIR and set 4 is 0 RIR.

So on set 1 maybe it’s 1-2 effective reps, on set 2 it’s 2-3, on set 3 it’s 4 and on set 4 it’s also 4.   What’s that, 11-13 total effective reps across the 4 sets.  Do it for a second exercise and maybe you double that to about 20-26 effective reps or whatever it works out to.   So that’s one way to do it: some number of straight sets with an incomplete recovery that results in an accumulating number of effective reps per set over the workout as full recruitment starts earlier in each set.

Or consider the various rest-pause approaches such as Myo-Reps or Doggcrapp (or simply rest-pause).  Here you start with a heavy set, often called an activation set.  The idea is to either start heavy enough (i.e. with an 8RM which is about 80% of max) or get close enough to failure with a submax weight to get full fiber activation in that first set.  So you get to rep 8 with maybe 2-3 full activation reps and stop the main set set (Myo-reps used to use speed cutoffs, DC went to failure).  Now rest 15 seconds, long enough to recover a bit but not completely.

Now you get 2-3 more reps which are probably also still under full activation so they count as effective reps (and they do that without requiring another 5 reps of a straight set).  Rest 15″ and you get 1-2 more.  Rest 15″ and you get 1 more.  So maybe it’s 8-9 effective reps across that singular rest-pause set.  If you do two of those sets you get 16-18 total effective reps which is about the same as the straight sets although it only took you two rest-pause sets versus 8 straight sets to do it.

Is this making sense?

The corollary to this is that sets that are too light AND nowhere close to fatigue, may not contain any effective repetitions, or certainly not many (or certainly not effective reps for the highest threshold muscle fibers).  If you do a set of 6 with a 12RM, you’re not recruiting the highest threshold Type II fibers at all.  Not unless you do repeat sets with a short rest interval so that there is cumulative fatigue across the sets.

So if you do 6 sets of 6 reps with your 12RM but only rest 15-30 seconds between sets, fatigue will accumulate and you’ll reach full recruitment eventually.    Maybe by the fourth set you’re getting some effective reps or whatever and that increases with each subsequent sets.   It “works” although you basically fucked around for the first 3 sets to even get close to a meaningful training stimulus.  As I think about it, Gironda’s 8X8 probably worked by this mechanism.  It was an honest workout.

In this vein, there is a recent super stupid study that looked at what they called the the 3/7 method.  Using untrained subjects, it compared a single set of 3,4,5,6 and then 7 repetitions at 70% of max (12RM) with like 15″ rest between mini-sets to a group doing 8 sets of 6 with 12RM.  And the 3/7 method worked better than the straight sets (inasmuch as more or less everything works on beginners).  Because with that short rest, it probably got at least some effective reps near the end despite being pathetically submaximum.   In contrast, 8 sets of 6 at 12RM is a series of warm-up sets and I bet they were lucky to get even a few full recruitment reps during that workout.

I made similar comments about the Haun et al. study Mike Israetel was involved with.  It used repeat sets of 10 at 60% of max with the subjects reporting 4 reps in reserve.  So it was 4 reps from failure and there was an 8-10′ rest interval due to the goofy nature of the workout setup.  So there was no cumulative fatigue (RIR stayed at 4 across the workouts and study).  If I’m being generous let’s say each of those warmup sets got maybe 1 effective rep per set.  Maybe it’s 2.

Don’t believe me?  Go back to that 15RM study I described above.  Full recruitment didn’t occur until rep 9-12.  10 reps with a 14RM load and you maybe get full recruitment on rep 9.  8 if you’re lucky.  1-2 effective reps per set at best.

First let’s compare a workout with 1 effective rep per set to a real workout.  At 10 sets/week that’s 10 effective reps per week.  NOT per workout.  PER WEEK.  You can achieve the same thing with 2 all out sets of 5RM.  Go to 20 sets per week and that’s 20 effective reps per week.  4 sets of 5RM per week.

At 32 sets/week maybe they got 32 effective reps.   I can do that in 4 all out sets of 8 in a single workout.   I could also do 2 sets of 8RM twice/week and go home.  In those 4 sets I might accomplish the same number of effective reps as 32 piss-ass sets.  I’ve done 32 effective reps in 32 reps vs. 32 effective reps in 320 reps.  1/10th the volume by reps and 1/8th by sets.

If I go nuts and double my workout to 4 sets of 8RM twice/week, I’ve gotten 64 effective reps in those 8 sets.  I’ve done 64 reps in 8 sets versus 320 reps in 32 sets for TWICE the effective reps.  And that’s without spending 2 hours in the gym fucking about.

Even if you give the benefit of the doubt and say the 10 reps at 4RIR gave 2 effective reps per set, 32 sets is 64 effective reps PER WEEK.  If I train a muscle group for 4 sets of 8 to failure twice a week I achieve the same thing.    8 sets for 64 total/64 effective repetitions vs. 32 sets and 320 reps for the same 64 repetitions.  And I get to do it without having to live in the gym fucking around warming up for 2 hours.

Basically the workout in Haun et al. was a lot of pissing around.  And maybe that’s why it needed such ludicrous volumes to accomplish anything at all.  The sets were so piss-ass low intensity, low fatigue that almost none of the reps were an actual stimulus to the muscle fibers. These are warm-up sets at the rate of 6-7 sets per muscle PER HOUR.  You could do that all day long until you went nuts from boredom.  Seriously.

The fact that the growth appears to have been predominantly sarcoplasmic speaks to that.  Actual myofibrillar protein synthesis wouldn’t be turned on if there aren’t enough high-tension reps to activate the FAK/PA/mTOR pathway.  But you get a lot of volume and stress sarcoplasmic components with that kind of ineffective training.  And if that’s your goal, go to town.  Or just learn to train for real.

Because contrast that to the Barbalho papers on women and men where all sets were truly taken to failure and where the low volumes did just as well if not better than the higher volumes.  Because in every set that was done, a large number of the reps were done under full recruitment and were effective reps.  When they were doing 4 sets of 4-6RM in that week that’s 16-24 effective reps per workout because every rep was done under full recruitment from rep 1 until the end of the set.  And that was true of every week since they were true RM loads (I still do not believe the squat workouts were achievable, mind you).  It would take 16-24 sets of piss-ass low intensity work getting 1 effective rep per set to accomplish the same stimulus or 8-12 if you got 2 effective reps.  So 1/2-1/4th the volume if you actually train hard.

And no I’m not saying you need to train to failure.  I’m making a point about how different approaches to training can generate vastly different numbers of ‘full recruitment/effective reps’ per set, workout or per week.  You can do way more sets but if they are ineffective in terms of not achieving full recruitment for sufficient tension overload, they may still work worse (or certainly no better) than a lower number of sets that are actually challenging.  And that alone might explain all of the volume debate or the discrepancies in the studies (which really don’t exist as currently 6 of 8 studies show the same thing with one shit show and one outlier people refuse to discount).

Because studies that use lower volumes of actually intense work (you know, all the ones supporting low to moderate volumes which represent 6 out of 8) are getting plenty of effective reps with a low volume of training.  And if there is a per workout saturation point, higher volumes shouldn’t work better.  And, in contrast, those that are using piss-ass intensities are not.  They only appear to ‘need’ such high volumes because the workouts are so ineffectually designed.

You know, like a workout where supposedly guys did 5 sets of 8-12RM on 90 seconds in the squat or bench which is utterly impossible (PROVE ME WRONG, FOLKS).  Which would ONLY be remotely achievable if “failure” were defined as about 4-5 reps before actual failure.   Which if I don’t miss my guess is exactly what happened in that particular study (I would love to see video of even one of the workouts).

Because the workout is simply impossible to do once much less 3X/week for 8 weeks if the sets are anywhere close to failure.  They can’t have been close to failure becuse the workout would be impossible at the higher volumes.  Mind you, it’s not as if the statistics supported the highest volumes anyhow but I digress.

Because in 5 truly hard sets with a sufficient rest interval, you can readily achieve the same number of effective reps as 15 piss-ass intensity sets with a stupid workout design.  You may only ‘need’ high volumes if you simply don’t, can’t or won’t train with any degree of intensity.  And that’s probably exactly what is the case.

All those bros in the gym doing 20 sets/muscle group who get “big”.  Well it’s probably taking them those 20 sets to get an effective stimulus as someone doing 4-6 hard sets.  Which is what I’ve said before: If you think you NEED 70 sets/week for a muscle, you don’t know how to fucking train with any sort of intensity or focus.  Visit me in Austin and I’ll prove it to you.

Summing Up Muscle Tension: Part 1

Ok, so this already got away from me and it’ll probably go 4 parts to address this all.  The basic gist of Part 1 is this.  High muscular tension is, without debate, the primary initiating factor in muscle growth and we’ve known this since the 70’s.  And every review paper regardless of author or their personal bias or online bullshit states this.

This occurs through mechanosensors, probably Focal Adhesion Kinase which translate a mechanical stimulus (high tension in muscle fibers) into a biochemical cascade involving mTOR.  Tension alone is required but insufficient.  Some number of high tension contractions is required to turn on this cascade but we don’t know how many in either a per set, per workout or per week fashion.

What this means is that the process of turning on growth means 1) recruiting the high-threshold/Type II muscle fibers and 2) exposing them to sufficient amounts of mechanical work to turn on this cascade. 

Towards that I examined how fibers are recruited in response to force requirements.  The take-home is that you can get full recruitment with heavy loads of 80-85% of max or so or by taking lighter loads near or to failure.   With lighter loads, as fatigue sets in, the body will progressive recruit higher threshold fibers, eventually reaching full recruitment at some point late in the set.  Both ultimately end up causing recruitment of muscle fibers, exposing them to a high tension load.  A heavy set of 5 and a set of 30 taken to failure probably both get about 5 full recruitment reps.  The 30 reps to failure just made you do 25 pointless reps to get there.

This led into a discussion of the idea of effective reps, those reps in a given set or workout that are done under full recruitment/high tension conditions which, as noted can be achieved in different ways.  Straight sets at a low RIR/RTF is one way, rest-pause is another.  There are also stupidly ineffective ways of training that have so few effective reps per set that this might explain why some research or theorists suggest that the body needs an insane volume to generate growth.

When the intensity of your sets is utterly piss-ass low, you probably do need 5X the volume as if you actually knew how to train with some degree of focus or intensity.  But you’d be better off learning how to train with some degree of focus and intensity than just doing more bullshit sets.

But regardless of how you get there, the key to turning on growth is doing a sufficient number of high-tension contractions.  High-tension alone isn’t sufficient but without it, nothing happens.  All of the insufficient tension work in the world simply doesn’t generate growth.

But this raises a question which is this: How do we measure tension in the muscle?

And the answer is that we can’t in the gym, not in any meaningful way.  Not yet anyhow.

But we have something we can use as a proxy for tension.  Something that we can measure and track to give us some indication of what tension the muscle might be experiencing.  If you’ve read much of my work, you know what it is.  If not, you’ll find out next week.

Where in addition to explaining what that proxy is (hint: it’s weight on the bar), I’ll move into a detailed discussion of the misunderstandings that come out of using that proxy.   Of which there are many.  Yeah, this is gonna be one of my stupid long article series for sure.  But I need to get this written down once and for all.  See you next week.

Read Muscular Tension Part 2

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