#also fun to speculate what are exaggerations(or even out right lies) and what are just straight fact

[elisedonut]

one really fun way to come up with fic ideas imo is to pace around your house and pretend your gossiping about the situation

like I just spent 10 minutes pretending to be Pansy while walking around my house gossiping about a crashed wedding and Draco's dad attempting to murder Percy

"And then you will never guess- Percy was not Percy-"

"what do you mean Percy was not Percy"

"It was his brother using polyjuice"

"Polyjuice??"

"Yes- ok so It turns out that it was just a distraction and Draco was already out of the house and heading with him to France."

"No!"

"Yes!"

"How did Lucius react?"

"He was fuming- it was absolutely hilarious. He brought it on himself from what I understand."

[fivekrystalpetals]

What exactly is the information that Sigma took from Atsushi in exchange for the location of the Page?

This question has been haunting me from quite some time; now thanks to @vampireonastick ‘s amazing saga of Mastermind!Ango (annnd since this saga has given me major trust issues about every character in the series lol XD) I finally formed enough coherent thoughts to put this in words. Of course, I might be looking too much into it but this was fun to brainstorm :)

To start with, from almost the first chapter of the series, the spotlight has always been on Atsushi or more correctly, the tiger within him. In the Introductory arc, Akutagawa, Higuchi and Kyouka were introduced and we did have glimpses into the abuse and upbringing that made them into the people we know today but don’t forget that the underlying skein was the huge bounty on Atsushi and the mystery of who could be behind it. Even the deal Dazai made with Chuuya in the underground interrogation cellar was based on this—

Right?

Well, eventually the bounty method failed and we cut to the ‘rich sods’ behind this lol (why this was cut from the anime idk)

The next Arc was the Guild Arc—the motive hasn’t changed yet. The Guild members attacked Yokohama with the intention of incinerating the city and kidnapped Atsushi once again. And, Fitzgerald says to Atsushi: (who is the prophesy ability user I wonder? The origin of all this trouble)

Is what this guy says but Fyodor doesn’t seem to mind lol

In the end, the Moby Dick plan failed too. And then, our hurricane of chaos steps onto the main stage and takes the story in a thousand different directions.

Okay but before that, we have the Dead Apple Arc which... also majorly features a brutal experiment on little Atsushi. How Fyodor knew about the tiger before it even fully manifested within the boy is beyond me—maybe he gets it from the prophecy ability user, maybe he gets daily hot news from his partner-in-crime, his ability Crime and Punishment or whatever but my point is that Atsushi was continuously targeted for three consecutive arcs.

And then, boom, a 360 deg turn after Dostoyevsky started his full-scale operations. Taking both the Cannibalism Arc and Decay of Angels Arc as stage 1 and stage 2 of the same plan— (yes I added this coz look how cute these three are in this chart!)

—I have to point out that not even once has the spotlight been on Atsushi like in the previous arcs. Yes, he is still the protagonist and yes, we still see the story from his point of view,,, but where is the constant attempt and abduction on him? He has been completely pushed to one side in favor of razing down Yokohama itself with no concern for the ‘tiger-beetle’’s safety. Why?

At first, I wondered whether Fyodor simply exaggerated Atsushi's importance to Shibusawa and Fitzgerald so they would attack Yokohama. Which... might still be the case ofc, because I can’t trust anything that comes out of the guy’s mouth. Every word is a well-crafted lie lol

But I think the correct answer lies in the yet truthfully unanswered question: why exactly was Sigma left in the Casino after his one use to locate the Page from Taneda?

The question Dazai rightly put forth to the guy on three different occasions and for which he continually used the first rule of a conjurer—Misdirection.

(The rest is just hc and speculation on my part and might be right or not but will def go long lol so I will put under the cut—)

Well, the answer Fyodor gave to the last one was yet another misdirection—he changed the question to pretending to be offended about comparing ‘levels of Sigma and the Hunting Dogs’, explained how Sigma was created from the Book etc. etc. which all might be true...

But he still didn’t answer the actual question, did he?

Going back to the Cannibalism Arc, Dostoyevsky pitted the two main protecting forces of Yokohama against each other to test the loyalty and trust among the members. A lot of things happen but what I want to highlight is how Atsushi has started to actively fight for the place he now thinks of as home instead of running away like he used to do in the beginning. Remember, how the first time he came to know of the bounty on his head, he ran away believing that him not being with the others will protect them from the Port Mafia? He didn’t think the Agency would be able to stand on their own against the Mafia. But now, he trusts in them and fights with and for them. Well, at least to some extent (coz he still freezes up when he is alone against an adversary but that's understandable)

Then comes the DoA arc and what is the true outcome of this arc? Every member of the ADA has been named a terrorist, either arrested or forced into hiding. Except for Atsushi (and Kyouka) who has been running from place to place, seeking help from various sources to clear the name of the place he has finally come to call home.

Which... exactly is Fyodor’s MO. Using the weakness of a person against themselves. Breaking them with their own weakness. (Just like how he did for Kunikida)

By making Atsushi feel like he is the only one who can save the ADA, he is actually playing right into the enemy’s hands. He is the one who needs to be protected the most bc of whatever connection he, or rather, his tiger has to the Book and yet he is the one on the center stage, most vulnerable to the enemy’s traps. The Agency members who continually came to his rescue in the first two arcs are now unable to provide him any help.

Finally comes the Sky Casino Arc.

Okay, to be very honest, I always agreed with what Dazai said about Sigma. I felt Sigma is indeed no match to the Hunting Dogs (no matter how profound his resolution is.) True; Sigma fought tooth and nail but in the end, in spite of having a gun lol, he really was no match to Teruko. Just as she asked: why do you think you’re the only one who houses that power?

See? Exactly. Say, if geniuses like Ranpo, Dazai or Fyodor (and others in this series) become truly ‘desperate’? Honestly, Ranpo fits in his classification of ordinary man is the strongest, doesn’t he? Someone without an ability or influence but desperate to defend the one thing he cherishes the most in his life? Even the latter two...they actually use their abilities so little—most of what they do are complete intellectual activities. So, whether or not Sigma was created from the Book, I don’t think he’d hold a candle to these men if and when they become ‘desperate’.

That’s why I think the real reason Sigma was placed at the Casino was not to fight the Hunting Dogs head-on (I think Dostoyevsky meant it when he said Sigma was free to run away if he faces the Hunting Dogs)

—or to protect the secrets of the terrorist Casino (the coin bombs are meant to be discovered by the Hunting Dogs so that they can pin the accusation on the ADA even more, so what’s there to protect? See, even that plane contains those coins—they are everywhere!)

—but to come in contact with Atsushi and co., so he can use his ability on Atsushi and extract whatever it is that Fyodor needs to locate the Book (assuming the Book is an actual physical blank novel and not a metaphor/allegory for something else)

Or, rather, I should probably put this as shooting two birds with one bullet.

Fyodor, as many people have pointed out, has a totally different aim (that is not World Domination)—he is seeking out the Book to destroy the sins of abilities and ability users. (However he might lie, I believe he did say the truth to Dazai in that panel coz of the framing.) He merely crafted a plan for Fukuchi for Fukuchi’s aim of World Domination. A plan that he didn’t plan out to perfection because ‘perfect is so boring’ (Who entrusts planning to this guy anyway? He is chaos incarnate)

To put it shortly, I think he sneaked in his own agenda disguised as steps-unto-world-domination. The coin bombs from the Casino were meant to be distributed all-round the world for bringing about an economic recession and tightening the rope of accusation around the ADA’s neck (this for Fukuchi). He moved his pieces in such a way that Atsushi is the one that escapes from the Wretched Chair Arc, is the one that comes to the Sky Casino so that Sigma can come in contact with him (this for himself). And then, Sigma gives away the information about the Page held by Kamui. Resulting in the Vampire Outbreak and the One Order and whatnot (this for Fukuchi)

Now, mayyybe, Fyodor will pull the plug on Fukuchi? Seems likely coz if he’s got what he needed, he no longer needs the guy’s powerful influence. Maybe, he will wait out till Fukuchi sinks lower and lower, till he is completely exposed and arrested/defeated etc. etc.. He must have some sort of firewall so his name won’t and can’t be dragged into the mess and so he can continue his Plan -insert letter- in peace allied with some other (next) influential personality (I am guessing The Order might be his next plaything. Hope Agatha Christie is skilled enough to not trust this guy with plans.)

Well, tl;dr of this post is once again—what exactly is the information that Sigma took from Atsushi in exchange for the location of the Page? I still don’t have a proper answer to this lol.

[whitehotharlots]

Andrea Long Chu is the sad embodiment of the contemporary left

Andrea Long Chu’s Females was published about a year ago. It was heavily hyped but landed with mostly not-so-great reviews, and while I was going to try and pitch my own review I figured there was no need. Going through my notes from that period, however, I see how much Chu’s work—and its pre-release hype—presaged the sad state of the post-Bernie, post-hope, COVID-era left. I figured they’d be worth expanding upon here, even if I’m not getting paid to do so.

Chu isn’t even 30 years old, and Females is her debut book, and yet critics were already providing her with the sort of charitable soft-handedness typically reserved for literary masters or failed female political candidates. This is striking due to the purported intensity of the book: a love letter to would-be assassin Valerie Solanas, the thesis of which is that all humans are female, and that such is true because female-ness is a sort of terminal disease stemming not from biology but from one’s inevitable subjugation in larger social contexts. Everyone is a woman because everyone suffers. Big brain shit.

But, of course, not everyone is a female. Of course. Females are females only some of the time. But, also, everyone is a female. Femaleness is just a title, see. Which means it can be selectively applied whenever and however the author chooses to apply it. The concept of “female” lies outside the realm of verifiability. Suggesting to subject it to any form of logic or other means of adjudication means you’re missing the point. Femaleness simply exists, but only sometimes, and those sometimes just so happen to be identifiable only to someone possessed with as a large a brain as Ms. Chu. We are past the need for coherence, let alone truth or honesty. And if you don’t agree that’s a sign that you are broken—fragile, illiterate, hateful, humorless.

Chu’s writing—most famously, her breakthrough essay “On Liking Women”—establishes her prose style: long, schizophrenic paragraphs crammed with unsustainable metaphors meant to prove various fuzzy theses simultaneously. Her prose seems kinda sorta provocative but only when read on a sentence-by-sentence level, with the reader disregarding any usual expectations of cohesion or connection.

This emancipation from typical writerly expectations allows Chu to wallow proudly in self-contradiction and meaninglessness. As she notes herself, explicitly, meaning isn’t the point. Meaning doesn’t even exist. It’s just, like, a feeling:

I mean, I don’t like pissing people off per se. Yes, there is a pleasure to that sometimes, sure. I think that my biggest takeaway from graduate school is that people don’t say things or believe things—they say them because it makes them feel a particular way or believing them makes them feel a particular way. I’ve become hyper aware of that, and the sense in which I’m pissing people off is more about bringing that to consciousness for the reader. The reason you’re reacting against this is not because it contradicts what you think is true, it’s because it prevents you from having the feeling that the thing you think is the truth lets you feel.

And so she can get away with saying that of course she doesn’t actually believe that everyone is a female, the same as her idol Valerie Solanas didn’t actually want to kill all men. The writers, Chu and Valerie, are just sketching out a dumb idea as a fun little larf, to see how far they can push a manifestly absurd thought. If they just so happen to shoot a gay man at point blank range and/or make broader left movements so repulsive that decent people get driven away, so be it. And if any snowflakes complain about their tactics, well that’s just proof of how right they are. Provocation is justification—the ends and the means. The fact that this makes for disastrous and harmful politics is beside the point. All that matters is that Chu gets to say what she wants to say.

This blunt rhetorical move—which is difficult to describe without sounding like I’m exaggerating or making stuff up, since it’s so insane—papers over Chu’s revanchist and violent beliefs. Her work is soaked with approving portrayals of Solanas’ eliminationist rhetoric—of course, Chu doesn’t’ actually mean it, even though she does. Men are evil, even as they don’t really fully exist since everyone is a woman, ergo eliminating men improves the world. Chu goes so far as to suggest that being a trans woman makes her a bigger feminist than Solanas or any actual woman could ever be, because the act of her transitioning led to the world containing fewer men. Again: big brain shit.

I’ll leave it to a woman to comment on the imperiousness of a trans woman insisting that she is bestest and realest kind of woman, that biological women are somehow flawed imposters. I will stress, however, that such a claim comes as a means of justifying a politically disastrous assertion that more or less fully justifies the most reactionary gender critical arguments, which regard all trans women as simply mentally ill men (this line of reasoning is so incredibly stupid that even a dullard like Rod Drehar can rebut it with ease). Trans activists have spent years establishing an understanding of transsexualism as a matter of inherent identity—whether or not you agree with that assertion, you have to admit that it has political propriety and has gone a long way in normalizing transness. Chu rejects this out of hand, embracing instead the revanchist belief that transness is attributable to taking sexual joy in finding oneself embarrassed and/or feminized—an understanding of womanhood that is simultaneously essentialist and tokenizing. When asked about the materially negative potential in expressing such a belief, Chu reacts with a usual word salad of smug self-contradiction: 

EN: You say in the book that sissy porn was formative of your coming to consciousness as a trans woman. If you hadn’t found sissy porn, do you think it’s possible that you might have just continued to suffer in the not-knowing?

ALC: That’s a really good question. It’s plausible to me that I never would have figured it out, that it would have taken longer.

EN: How does that make you feel? Is that idea scary?

ALC: It isn’t really. Maybe it should be a little bit more, but it isn’t really. One of the things about desire is that you can not want something for the first 30 years of your life and wake up one day and suddenly want it—want it as if you might as well have always wanted it. That’s the tricky thing about how desire works. When you want something, there’s a way in which you engage in a kind of revisionism, the inability to believe that you could have ever wanted anything else.

EN: People often talk about the ubiquity of online porn as a bad thing—I’ve heard from lots of girlfriends that men getting educated about sex by watching porn leads to bad sex—but there seems to me a way in which this ubiquity is helping people to understand themselves, their sexuality and their gender identity.

ALC: While I don’t have the research to back this up, I would certainly anecdotally say that sissy porn has done something in terms of modern trans identity, culture, and awareness. Of course, it’s in the long line of sexual practices like crossdressing in which cross-gender identification becomes a key factor. It’s not that all of the sudden, in 2013, there was this thing and now there are trans people. However, it is undoubted that the Internet has done something in terms of either the sudden existence of more trans people or the sudden revelation that there are more trans people than anyone knew there were. Whether it’s creation or revelation, I think everyone would agree that the internet has had an enormous impact there.

One of the things I find so fascinating about sissy porn is that it’s not just that I can hear about these trans people who live 20 states away from me and that their experiences sound like mine. There is a component of it that’s just sheer mass communication and its transformative effect, but another part of it is that the internet itself can exert a feminizing force. That is the implicit claim of sissy porn, the idea that sissy porn made me trans is also the idea that Tumblr made me trans. So, the question there is whether or not the erotic experience that became possible with the Internet actually could exert an historically unique feminizing force. I like, at least as a speculative claim, to think about how the Internet itself is feminizing.

Politics, like, don’t matter. So, like, okay, nothing I say matters? So it’s okay if I say dumb and harmful shit because, like, they’re just words, man.

Chu can’t fully embrace this sort of gradeschool nihilism, though, because if communication was truly as meaningless as she claims then any old critic could come along and tell her to shut the fuck up. Even as she claims to eschew all previously existing means of adjudicating morality and coherence, she nonetheless relies on the cheapest means of making sure she maintains a platform: validation via accreditation. This is all simple victimhood hierarchy. Anyone who does not defer all of their own perceptions to someone higher up the hierarchy is inherently incorrect, their trepidations serving to validate the beliefs of the oppressed:

I like to joke that, as someone who is always right, the last thing I want is to be agreed with. [Laughs] I think the true narcissist probably wants to be hated in order to know that she’s superior. I absolutely do court disagreement in that sense. But what I like even better are arguments that bring about a shift in terms along an axis that wasn’t previously evident. So it’s not just that other people are wrong; it’s that their wrongness exists within a system of evaluation which itself is irrelevant.

Chu has summoned the most cynical possible interpretation of Walter Ong’s suggestion that “Writing is an act of violence disguised as an act of charity.” Of course, any effective piece of communication requires some degree of persuasion, convincing a reader, listener, viewer, or user to subjugate their perceptions to those of the communicator. Chu creates—not just leans on or benefits from, but actively posits and demands fealty to—the suggestion that her voice is the only one deserving of attention by virtue of it being her own. That’s it. That’s what all her blathering and bluster amount to. Political outcomes do not matter. Honesty does not matter. What matters is her, because she is her. 

This is the inevitable result of a discourse that prizes a communicator’s embodied identity markers more than anything those communicators are attempting to communicate, and in which a statement is rendered moral or true based only upon the presence or absence of certain identity markers. Lived experience trumps all else. A large, non-passing trans woman is therefore more correct than pretty much anyone else, no matter how harmful or absurd her statements may be. She is also better than them. And smarter. And gooder.

Designating lived experience and subjective feelings of safety as the only acceptable forms of adjudication has caused the left to prize individualism to a degree that would have made Ronald Reagan blush. And this may explain the lukewarm reception of Chu’s book.

While they heaped praise upon her before the books’ release, critics backed off once they realized that Females is an embarrassingly apt reflection of intersectional leftism—a muddling, incoherent mess, utterly disconnected from any attempt toward persuasion or consensus, the product of a movement that has come to regard neurosis as insight. The deranged mewlings of a grotesque halfwit are only digestable a few pages at a time. Any more than that, and we begin to see within them far too much of the things that define our awful movement and our terrifying moment.

[mocarena]

post of Chu2 rambles and predictions

i realized i actually needed to make this now that S3 is knocking me down with anticipation

blabla this thread is long as heck and incomprehensible so aha good luck if youre actually trying to read thru it. i just wanted a place to write my predictions down to see how right or how utterly wrong i am! whole thing’s under a read more cuz its a lot

spoilers for S2, the RAiSe! manga, and small spoiler for Film Live

Exhibit: Songs

I’m starting off with talking RAS’ songs because they give me a good basis to talk on several things regarding the band & Chu2.

There might be mentions of other songs, but I will focus on 2 in particular.

Takin’ My Heart

Imo, the most important piece in regards to Chu2 and her character.

That is due to Radio Riot #7 having revealed that the song is literally about Chu2’s beliefs/feelings.

It is also written by her in the Bandori canon (as all RAS songs are since she is the producer, but we know for sure with the Radio confirmation & also how the song came out past Season 2 that this is a song written with Chu2’s perspective in mind).

Raychell even said that she once cried singing the song during her own practice time.

Information source: Iviachupichu on Twitter, a faithful translator who often talks about the contents of Radio Riot episodes. Link https://twitter.com/iviachupichu/status/1106469855757164544!

TL of the song taken from http://www.rizuchan.com/bang-dream-cardfight-vanguard-takin-my-heart/ !!

Long falling down again I’m immature, building up lies and distancing myself from others I feel all torn up; I hold my heart Try to fake a smile… hey, my cheeks hurt

Cry… I hide my rusted eyes Cry… I want you to notice Oh, Come here, Please…

Takin’ my heart Does my voice Takin’ my heart Reach you now…? Takin’ my heart I don’t want to vanish pathetically Takin’ my heart Into a sea of loneliness I’ll just keep crying out to you Today, tomorrow, and for a long time after (Without giving up) I hope my feelings reach you…!

^ not the full TL, just a taste of the beginning

Clearly I don’t have to point out how heartfelt that song is, the lyrics speak for themself and aren’t very subtle (which is very much the point since she’s asking for her feelings to be reached after all).

I’m stupidly annoying when it comes to talking about Takin’ My Heart, I absolutely need to emphasize on the fact that these lyrics are Chu2’s honest feelings.

Expect parts of this song to be brought up throughout this a whole lot.

2. UNSTOPPABLE

Now this song has no confirmation on being composed with Chu2 in mind, considering it’s a very early RAS song and has been sung before we even got the reveal of the RAS characters.

However, I believe it DOES hold significance:

-I have no doubts that the introduction of RAS characters together with the band were in mind early on already, due to how early Bushiroad plans things months in advance.

-RIOT, the first RAS original, has very clear tones of it having been written by Chu2 in Bandori canon (a very arrogant sounding song, sure of its music and it almost seems like it’s directed at Yukina). Thus I wouldn’t put it past the production team having formed Chu2’s character around RIOT and UNSTOPPABLE, or they already had her type of character in mind when first composing these songs.

-It’s not far-fetched to say this song might have some ties to Chu2’s feelings since we’ve got the even more blatant song Takin’ My Heart.

I won’t copy paste all of the lyric translations, it’s simply too long, but here are several parts that stick out to me:

———————

The emptiness springs forth like I'm helplessly thirsty

My back droops... I put too much hope in each day

(Hurry up)

「Don't let me down」, I'm always told

(Hurry up)

Cornered, mouth covered, difficulty breathing

I'm caught in a trap

Please indulge in my annoying ramblings

I just won't stop seeking approval every day

Me, I'm my own accomplice,

with a fake me, dance! Dance! (Lullaby)

Doubt and worry stick their tongues out,

pointing at and ridiculing me

Are you enjoying? Are you excited?

Yes? Do you really get it?

Then that's fine

———————

Please ignore my annoying ramblings

I'll just abandon seeking approval every day

———————

My belief of UNSTOPPABLE still having an intended Chu2 connection also lies within the lyrics:

“Please indulge in my annoying ramblings, I just won't stop seeking approval every day”

From what we’ve seen in the anime, Chu2 definitely seems very attention and approval-seeking, specifically when it comes to Yukina.

I will talk about more specific parts of these songs (+ other one-liners from RAS lyrics) within the rest of this big time ramble.

————————————————

Exhibit: Chu2’s Past….?

A big emphasis on the question mark at the end, as we barely know anything about her past. One thing we know is that due to her excellent grades, she is in her first year of high school despite being only 14 & she studies/studied(?) in an international school, explaining her use of English.

However, based on RAS songs + some bits of the anime I can try to theorize on her past. It might be completely wrong, or I might just get it right, who knows, this is just for fun & speculation.

Family Situation

The anime made a point of how luxurious of a building the studio Chu2 works and has band rehearsals in, there’s even a ~50 seconds scene of Tae just staring at the building and the insides of it in awe.

Now whether or not that building entirely belongs to Chu2’s family, or only the studio, or it’s only being rented out, it still is clearly very expensive either way. The studio is often being used after all, too.

What that very glaringly hints at is that Chu2 is wealthy. Well, not Chu2, but moreso her family, who we know virtually nothing of.

Now that could mean that her family situation isn’t of significance at all like how it is with a lot of characters in Bandori. But that could also not be the case, considering that Bushiroad does dip into family stuff with a few characters (Saaya, Ran and Yukina come to mind).

Chu2 is 14 years old, so having her lyrics be based off of feelings regards her family/overall social situation isn’t that far fetched.

I’ll go ahead and say that personally I theorize that this might fall into the tropey category of “Kid of rich parents gets practically anything but barely gets attention from their parents”.

I can easily believe that Bushiroad would want to take a route different from this, but there’s a lot of freedom for theorization and I think going with the common route is a pretty safe bet for a theory.

Unlike Betadori they don’t dip into territory that is too angsty, it seems, but it’s not like they’d need to be blatant about something like that either.

「Don't let me down」, I'm always told

———

Please indulge in my annoying ramblings

I just won't stop seeking approval every day

———

Please ignore my annoying ramblings

I'll just abandon seeking approval every day

^UNSTOPPABLE lyrics

I think it’s important to point out the difference between the last two bits. The lyrics first start out as a plead for listening to her and approving of her achievings, later in the song that part changes to ‘just ignore me please’.

Those lyrics also explain Chu2’s personality pretty well, in my opinion.

Even after being rejected by Yukina she kept trying to get her to watch her band, basically asking for approval from someone whose talent she looks up to.

I also believe that Chu2 might be an unhealthy perfectionist, which seems like a thing that might rise the tension within the band, but more to that later.

————————————————

Exhibit: Chu2 in the Present

The childish child who won’t let herself be a child

Now if that ain’t a mouthful of a title, but hopefully I can explain my thoughts well enough so it’s somewhat understandable.

Chu2 clearly has a bratty personality and throws tantrums when she doesn’t get what she wants, but to me it doesn’t seem as shallow as that.

The official website describes her as a professional who is arrogant at times, but not rude.

Need I remind you that this girl’s just 14?

Here’s what I think:

Chu2 is a child at heart. But she doesn’t want to let that part of hers show too much due to how she wants to be treated: like a professional.

But she’s clearly an excitable child, as it was shown with how excited she got over the studio when she came to talk to Popipa in Arisa’s basement. For that moment she lost herself and probably could’ve gone on for a while Maya-style if Pareo hadn’t reminded her of her “official greeting”.

What I think is that Chu2, due to wanting to be treated with high respect   as a producer, doesn’t want to appear childish, so she holds herself back unless the heat of the moment gets her or she feels like she can express her excitement without it damaging her ‘professional’ manners. Like when she got pumped after a RAS live, for example.

A quote that could be overlooked but might actually have a little bit of relevance if the words were carefully chosen was the following:

“She thinks playing “band” like a bunch of kids is better than being in my group?!”

Tbh this literal child using the phrase ‘like a bunch of kids’ for something like…well, a band of friends being a band, just makes her seem like she wants to take herself incredibly seriously compared to other bands. To show that they’re not “kids” like the others.

In addition to that, she skipped a grade. In an international school. She seems to be really set on providing the best grades and world-changing music to appear worthy without letting herself indulge all that much in living a childhood. I could totally be exaggerating things, but I think it’s not too far-fetched of a thought.

Tantrums

Not a subject I’ll talk long about, but I think there’s things worth pointing out.

She’ll wait until whoever she’s angry at is out of her sight.

With Yukina she started yelling once Roselia was completely gone.

With Otae it’s a bit of a different case. This time she verbally even told her to get out of her sight before letting off steam, though Popipa weren’t completely out of hearing reach either.

2. She looks genuinely distressed.

The purpose of pointing out #2 is that she seems to have deeper reasonings as to why exactly she’s this desperate to have the perfect band/band members. Especially paired with the line of “I finally found what I’ve been looking for…”, she clearly isn’t doing this stuff just for fun and has got some sort of inner turmoil dealing with the fact that things aren’t going her way to which she responds, well, like that.

She’s not entitled to any bands or like anyone else obviously, and she needs to deal with that fact more maturely in the future.

But still, something HAS to be the root of exactly why she feels like this, to finally have found something.

It’s of importance to her, but why…?

I’d throw out the theory of seeking for approval again. She wants the perfect band that could make impact on the world. Maybe she wants the approval of someone (not Yukina, as she’s been searching for a while and clearly already felt this way before even seeing Roselia), probably someone older and personal to her. So I’d bet it on parents again, it IS the easiest answer after all, but who knows. There just seems to be someone (or more) she wants to impress.

Probably related to her bc it seems personal, if not maybe someone else she looks up to.

---------

Exhibit: I wrote all the above way before I’m writing this part

I genuinely haven’t revised the above at this point of time, the 7th of January. So some stuff might be outdated, but I kinda wanna leave it like that, to see what past me has come up with. I vaguely know and have skimmed, but I wanna write more beyond this point now without knowing the details.

Aka I might repeat a lot of things here now!

CHU2 is actually very much in tune with people’s feelings & desires...when they express them through music.

Now I’m pretty sure this is something I haven’t talked about (or at least not much). Chu2 doesn’t strike one as a very empathetic character, as one has seen with how she was still willing to get Otae back into her band, despite Popipa’s deep bond.

But hear me out. This girl actually can understand other’s feelings well, under specific circumstances. And the RAS manga “RAiSe!” proved that.

With each RAS member, it seems like she just knew their desires upon hearing them play. It’s not yet confirmed with Pareo due to Pareo’s 2nd chapter not having been published yet at this point of time, but chapter 1 already leads up to what I think is Chu2 confronting Pareo (online invitation first), and understanding that Pareo holds her true self back.

With Layer she knew she was unhappy- she knew she didn’t want to keep playing support. She knew she didn’t look very happy, especially for someone who played at Budokan. And through that knowledge she was able to persuade her to listen to her music and to imagine what it’d be like in a band together with other members who’d give it their all.

Very much the same with Masking. Masking’s drumming is intense, and she feels like she cannot express herself well outside of drumming. Her desire was to have fun in a band with others on her level, where every member gave it their all on their instruments. Once again, Chu2 was able to convince her to join her band, she let her listen to her track, and Masking did improv drumming on it, in turn also impressing the producer.

Pareo’s desire is to be accepted for who she is. Since she was small she hid her true self that loves cute things, and kept her distance from classmates, pretending to be the perfect student in the eyes of them, her teachers, her parents...and when she first saw Pasupare on TV, she cried due to seeing how much support they got, something she didn’t feel like she received. She found joy in uploading videos of her doing keyboard pasupare covers online without showing her face. The simple prediction here is that Chu2 finds her covers, meets with Pareo in one way or another, and is able to tell that she hides her true self. Somehow she convinces her to change that and embrace her true self, and that she’ll be supported by the band.

RAS songs often are about going against the norm- RIOT for example symbolizes a rebellion. Masking heard the demo song Chu2 gave her, and got the impression that it made one feel like you want to declare war against the world. That it seemed like “that girl” was trying to raise hell itself with her intense music. Even short bits like in DRIVE US CRAZY, one lyric line goes “Never Say Never Crazy”. RAS is a band about expressing your true self. And Chu2 very much could be putting those kinda desires and feelings into these songs.

A little thought here about Chu2 watching Popipa performances on two occasions with very different reactions. When Popipa played a supporting band at Roselia’s self-sponsored live, Chu2 was shown to be very disinterested in them. Whilst Popipa was great, Chu2 might’ve felt the anxiety that Popipa had in them at that point of time and thus had that disinterest. At the Popipa self-sponsored live at the end of S2 however she showed a completely different reaction, dancing happily along to Dreamers Go! and being embarrassed upon Pareo noticing. Maybe at this point she truly felt Popipa’s real confidence, and the bond that they share.

Not to mention she admitted to having felt moved by Popipa later on.

Chu2′s got something big coming. Hopefully in S3. Maybe later on. (Cough RAS in game COUGH)

There’s just a whole lot of signs pointing to that. Especially since Lock, the future RAS guitarist, really is an opposite to Chu2′s own ideals. All Lock wants to do is have fun in a band with anyone at any level of playing instruments, as long as she feels the dokidokis. Chu2 is very profession-oriented. It also has a great potential to be a little bit of a Roselia parallel, since that was the band Chu2 originally wanted to be the producer of. And Roselia had their struggles with the just-pro approach, learning that forming strong friendships within the band very much are beneficial.

A little step towards that I feel is already hinted with the Film Live, in which she appeared backstage with the rest of RAS, bringing flowers together with Pareo.

Even if she is huffy about it and it’s hard to admit for her that she does want to be nice and that she had been in the wrong regards past issues, it’s a step in the right direction.

Chu2 will have great development, and a lot of depth behind her character will be revealed.

[ryouverua]

Kokichi Ouma FTE - (Kaede #2)

I laughed when I first read this and I’m still laughing now, damn.

insert Kaede!shocked-pikachu face

HE’S SUCH A LITTLE SHIT OMG

He loves being chased!!! He just loves it when he gets attention - not necessarily bad but confrontational and engaging at the very least, hence how he was poking, prodding and trying his best to irritate K1-b0 - and I’m just saying between Kaede and Kaito he got plenty of that...

and again because I just keep talking about how similar they are, note that it’s always Kaede and Kaito specifically who chase him. That’s not a coincidence.

Also in the love hotel his whole set-up is basically him being ‘cornered after a chase’ in that area so I mean.... yeah.

Also, fun fact that when I went to replay this in the extra section it actually used the song ‘Despair Searching’ instead of ‘Becoming Friends’. There’s another FTE that deliberately changes the song in an interesting way and I’ll bring that up when it comes, but I thought it was an interesting choice and does change the atmosphere a bit.

- because Kaede was finally able to catch him after an incredibly obnoxious 15 minutes of tag where Kokichi sang all of Kaede’s favourite overtures off-key.

You know what? Kokichi ended up being one of my favourites and that is still a totally valid reaction, Kaede.

KOKICHI WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS

I really did miss this synchronization we had, Kaede. 

Must... resist.... swatting... the child....

D-Does your clown posse need a personal pianist or something?

Wait, as in she can’t help him until she gives up the title or that she can join him once they’ve graduated? They don’t lose the title once they’re older, right? One of the few things I remember about the anime...

I don’t know if she necessarily represents Japan as much as herself? It’s not like there’s a musical competition of that level that I know of. wait is that a thing, someone please inform my uneducated self

This is unusually pessimistic of her. Does she not buy into the hype of being an Ultimate? Does the ‘piano freak’ label bother her that much? But I don’t think she’s let it really get in the way of embracing her talent...?

Pause because Kokichi is openly complimenting her and not following it up with a backhanded insult or an ‘it’s a lie’ statement. Hello??? Hello, media??? Someone???

yes. thank you. flattery will get you everywhere.

He is totally building on that story from last time. I guess he always liked to spin his organization as an underground secret evil intelligence organization? Even in all of his stories about them, he’d say things like ‘send them to Siberia’ or ‘have people killed’, but he noticeably never went into great detail about violence - which makes sense, honestly. Correct me if I’m wrong, but unless right in the middle of a trial or a situation where someone had been killed, he usually didn’t go into gruesome details. It’s an interesting contrast to someone like Tenko who would freak out and go into some pretty wild, vivid details about how she ‘didn’t want to be squished like toothpaste’ or something or Korekiyo, who was more than happy to threaten to ‘tear out your nerves’. He does seem to fancy that classier Bond villain-esque style, complete with espionage, etc? And considering what his lab ended up looking like, and how it was supposed to be designed to his liking...

It’s funny that Kaede is so mad right now because Kokichi has been extolling her virtues and basically complimenting her. She’s so used to him messing around that she doesn’t recognize that....

He has literally just hinted at espionage and just dropped it there, letting her fill in the blanks with all the ‘evil things’ he’ll have her do as part of his organization. It’s kinda... scary.... how good at this he is. 8′)

Mind you, he is saying stuff like this.

You are such a big talker, honestly.

WHAT IS THE SO-CALLED EVIL PLAN YOU ARE RECRUITING HER FOR YOU ARE GOING INTO NO DETAIL WHATSOEVER

you just want her to play with you that’s literally what this is

he can’t even openly ask her to be friends

they’re joining forces skdflj

He has spoken so much and yet given so little detail, yeah. 8′) Just throwing around evil-sounding vague concepts, words and catchphrases at this point to.... test her? See if she’d ‘accept’? Or play along?

About that.....

Ah, I kinda miss back when I was speculating about this. I thought it was a lie or massively exaggerated too. And yet somehow, when the reveal actually happen, I still wasn’t ready.

to be fair the ratio of lie to truth from you is heavily stacked on the wrong side -

On the one hand, Kaede ends up being right about him it’s not what he says it is at all and it definitely isn’t evil but on the other hand.... he has the talent for a reason, and we do see it in underhanded full force during the game.

Maybe it’s just because I recently listened to a DR1 play-through, but this really reminds me of that whole Byakuya line of ‘not assuming your way of thinking is the same as others’. Something similar to that, anyway. It’s slightly different in that he’s using ‘right’ as opposed to ‘the same’, though. Kokichi is basically telling her that she’s going to be in trouble if she goes into every situation assuming her way of doing things has to be the right way and...

...... well shit, he ended up being right here, didn’t he?

And for that matter, the way he operated often gave everyone else a chance to try out their plans? He let them try the escape tunnel multiple times before trying to speak up, he offered up his plan in Chapter 5 as an option for them to take or leave, and just generally let everyone speak their minds in order to hear all the options. He wanted to hear everyone’s ideas of ‘common sense’ before making his move, even if he could be incredibly cruel in how he shut people down.

And even though in some ways that’s not true, in this ‘world’ they’ve been crafted for, it might as well be.

This is definitely hinting at what happened in the escape tunnel. By the end of that, Kokichi had flipped the ‘common sense’ idea of the protagonist succeeding through the power of ‘never giving up’ and maintaining the moral high ground. It seemed right on the face of it for the class to keep trying until something gave, but in the end...

Ah, if only he didn’t deliver these hard truths with such smugness.

but they didn’t

Actually, that’s an interesting point. The Ultimate Imposter was probably the closest we’d get to an Ultimate Liar. Kokichi could have gotten that as his proper talent, but he didn’t. I’d like to think that’s because his leadership skills are better than his lying skills. And aren’t they? His bald-faced lies are laughably see-through, and his truths are disguised as lies based on how he says them, and how he follows them up!

I actually think he does, too.... that’s the worst part of all this.

Man, Kokichi would probably regret those words and not following up with her if this was V3 canon.

He seems more disappointed than upset, and it clearly isn’t just to mess with her? Man, hindsight is a bitch.

F..... Friendship.....!

Well, that would be a hell of a note to end things on with his FTEs full pun intended

Including this FTE, I’m pretty sure Kokichi has attempted to team up with nearly half the class by the end of the game and only truly succeeded in a start-to-finish team up once (Kaede, potentially considered Rantaro and K1-b0, Gonta (twice), Miu, Shuichi, and Kaito). 8′) I’d say it was nice he finally managed it in the end, but considering how things ended up, well.........

[apparitionism]

Mercury 10

Here’s some more Mercury. I’ll keep this short: there were previous parts—nine of them, in fact!—and they are easily findable on my tumblr. In the story so far, stuff happened, and people said words. Obviously I lied about part 9 being the penultimate part, as you’ll see from the “TBC” at the end of this one. Turns out I wanted people (in particular, two people) to say more words (mostly to each other) than I had originally planned. What a surprise.

Mercury 10

“This is very very bad,” Pete reaffirmed. “The thing works! So why didn’t neutralizing it do anything? People believe what you say through it, so it’s obviously artifacty, and it got that way because people believed what Orson Welles said through it. Right? What’s the problem?”

Helena’s eyes widened, her shoulders fell, and she tilted her head—clearly struck by something consequential. She drew in a huge breath, and her exhale was “But Pete!” Myka had never heard her say his name with that much enthusiasm. “They didn’t believe it. They didn’t. The press exaggerated—even, one might say, invented—the supposed panic. Charles said it, that in England no one imagined that the Americans would be so foolish as to fall for such a thing, and haven’t they ever heard of Halloween, because people know there isn’t a ghost. They believe it, but only for fun.”

Myka couldn’t hold back an eye-widened head-tilt of her own. “Wait—Charles said it?”

“I may have...” Helena cleared her throat. “I may have done a bit of research. Regarding myself.” She flicked her gaze to Ida, who closed her eyes and whispered “laudanum.” Helena cleared her throat again. “Myself, who of course was not myself as myself, but rather myself as represented by Charles. In this salient case, during a radio interview in which he participated with Mr. Orson Welles. “

“Egomaniac!” Pete coughed.

“My ego notwithstanding, he is—was—my brother. Hearing his voice. Ghosts... for some reason, I didn’t expect ‘H.G. Wells’ to sound like him, yet... it was Charles.” She shook herself. “But listen to me, Pete: the microphone works as it does, with whatever downside it has, but there must be another component. Most people didn’t believe in the invasion. But they believed that others believed in the invasion.”

“You’re making my head hurt,” he complained.

“I read about that,” Myka said. “There really couldn’t have been any kind of huge panic, because almost everybody in the country was listening to the Chase and Sanborn Hour that night, not the Mercury Theatre.”

“About which I’m somewhat offended,” Helena said, but her tone was warm.

Myka smiled.  “You would be. Anyway, right, there was a lot of sensationalist newspaper coverage of the supposed panic, but it was really just a good story.”

“Oh, now you think it’s a good story?” Still warm. Affectionate.

“The story of the panic, not aliens with the flu,” Myka said, and that she could respond to that tone with these familiar teases was also movement in the right direction. “People like it when other people get overexcited. It makes them feel superior. ‘I didn’t panic, but the gullible people did.’”

Pete said, “I don’t feel superior right now. I thought I had it. I mean, I believe that you believe that there’s another part to the thing, but what would it be?”

“Something press-related?” Helena tried. “Newspaper-related? The papers sold the story to the public.”

Now Pete was the one with widening eyes. “Wait. Really? Press, newspapers, Orson Welles. Seriously?”

“I’m speculating, but yes, I’m serious—”

“Ohmygodohmygod!” he exclaimed, then yelped at Ida, “Tell me, tell me, tell me! It’s gotta be here. I’ll bet a zillion dollars that it’s here. And I’m right, so don’t take that bet!”

“Don’t take what bet? What’s here?” Ida asked.

“Imagine me in a snow globe.” Then he said, low and slow, “Rosebud.”

“Oh,” Ida said. “I see. And that’s ironic, what with all that not-seeing, earlier.”

“Spielberg loaned it to ya, didn’t he? For the centennial, didn’t he? Good old Orson’s hundredth birthday. Rosebud!” His face was barely wide enough for his grin, and it occurred to Myka that this really was close to being Pete’s dream case. All it needed now was a few comic books and a stripper... a Pete-voice in her head said, “That’s what every case needs.”

Outside Myka’s head, Helena said a confused, “A flower?”

“No,” Pete said, “no, no no!” His clear glee at being able to make this reveal stopped Myka from jumping it to do it. “Not a flower. A sled!” Helena’s expression indicated that she didn’t find the reveal very revealing. “Citizen Kane, Hearst, newspapers!” he shouted. “You’re five thousand percent right! Ida, what’s the key to everything in the movie?”

Ida nodded. “Rosebud.”

“Unlocking some next-level microphone mojo, I bet,” Pete said, and Myka had to admit that it made a certain amount of sense, at least from the usual inside-out-pretzel perspective demanded by artifacts, which, if he was right, really did get together for canasta parties, or their equally-arcane-rules-equivalent, after all. “That’s what we gotta bag,” he said. “Do you know where it is?”

“Of course I do,” Ida said. “The Welles exhibit at the museum.”

“Then off we go!” He was gesturing with the Farnsworth, waving his other arm too, a windmill of excitement—obviously he wanted to see the prop even more than he wanted to bag it in any sort of artifactual sense.

Helena caught his flailing Farnsworth hand. “Wait. Before we do. As there’s been this... delay. I must ask a favor. Disconnect the Farnsworth.”

“That’s a favor to me too,” Claudia said from it, “because I’m getting seasick from the view.”

Pete said, “I was gonna hang up anyway, but if you want it to be as a favor, I—”

“That is not the favor,” Helena said, and she’d lost all her animation of moments before. She’d also formalized her voice, and that difference make Myka’s hands and feet chill with worry, even as fight-or-flight agitation heated her gut.

Pete closed the Farnsworth and raised his eyebrows at Helena. “So what’s the favor?”

“You used the artifact,” she said, and Pete gave her his “duh” head-shake. “Thus the first use does not result in some desperate desire to disappear.”

“Here’s looking at me, kid,” Pete agreed, and Helena gave him her... well, whatever the opposite of a “duh” head-shake was. “Sign you up for a seminar on everything Hollywood, check. So?”

“So,” Helena said, “I would like to. Also. Myself. Use it.”

Of all the things Myka might have expected to hear... “Use it?” she asked. “Why?”

Helena kept her eyes on Pete. “To resolve. A situation.”

“A situation...” he began, but then he snapped his fingers. “Got it. The bad kind of leading-ladies tension.”

“I refuse to let anybody say anything else to me through that thing,” Myka declared.

Now Helena did slide her gaze at Myka. “I don’t want to use it on you. I want to use it on her.”

“Me?” Ida said. It was the first time Myka had heard her sound genuinely alarmed. “Is it because I asked for the leading-lady distraction? I didn’t mean—”

“No, no,” Pete said. “Another her. I get it for real now. It’s an ex-girlfriend thing. Sort of. Somebody else’s girlfriend, when you really think about—”

“Not for personal gain,” Myka muttered, but that wasn’t even true. Pete played with artifacts all the time, and if that wasn’t—

“Now you don’t get it,” Pete said. “I’m pretty sure this is H.G. trying to be a standup guy, letting her down easy.”

“Seems like that would be for Helena’s benefit too.” Now Myka was the one actively not looking at Helena.

Pete said, “It really isn’t. Or if it is, the Warehouse probably knows it owes her. Owes them both.” What about what it owes me, Myka wanted to say, but Pete was busy telling Helena, “My only problem with doing you this favor, which really isn’t even a favor, is the logistics. We don’t even know if she’s here at the fair anymore.”

“Or we do,” Helena said, with an apologetic wince at Myka.

The wince gave Myka impetus: “No matter what the Warehouse owes anybody, it isn’t ethical and you know it. You’d be doing to her exactly what they did to you.”

“It is in no way what they did to me. This would be to give her peace, not to punish her.”

“It’s you taking away her agency. Thinking you know what’s best for her. If that’s okay, why shouldn’t I use it on you instead?” That earned her the opposite-of-duh head-shake. “To give you peace. Turn you back into pure, sainted Emily Lake, because that would make both of them, Emily Lake and her girlfriend, feel a lot more peaceful. And you could go and be her. You wanted us to kill you anyway, and let her live.”

She shouldn’t have said that, and she knew it, viscerally, when Helena’s jaw froze. “You acquiesced to that plan,” she said, at her most cold, “and with only a token protest. Don’t blame me for that.”

And Myka hadn’t known how ready she was, how she had for some time been so very ready, to say cutting words about martyrdom and people who melodramatically wanted the last thing they saw to be the sky, but Pete broke her train of thought with a musing, “We do convince people that they did mushrooms all the time. We think we know that’s what’s best for them.”

“She deserves peace,” Helena pressed, her jaw still tense. “The punishment was never meant to be hers. It was mine.”

“Ours,” Myka threw, thinking of the sky and the martyrdom and what had and hadn’t seemed possible. Only a token protest... Helena wasn’t wrong. Myka had let herself be persuaded, and the memory of it haunted her, as did the thought that she’d given in as she had because Helena had been only a hologram. Only an idea. But that wasn’t good enough, because people took drastic steps to protect ideas all the time. Why hadn’t she taken such steps instead of offering her token protest? Burning down a library with a friend inside... as if the library were just as important as the friend... as if her use of the mealy, insufficient word “friend” hadn’t itself been cowardly.

“Ours,” Helena echoed, looking remarkably like her ready-to-be-martyred self. With that same nod, same set of lip, she continued, “I could eliminate your punishment as well. Make you forget anything you’ve ever felt for me. The ultimate pardon.”

“I don’t deserve it.” I believed in you and I was right, she had insisted, but she was a hypocrite. I believed in you until I couldn’t touch you anymore. Only a token protest. As if ghosts—all of them—weren’t real. “And what is it you’d tell me to make all that forgetting happen? What would I have to believe? What do you intend to tell her?”

“I intend to tell her what she would have, given the chance. The chance she was not given.”

“You don’t know what Emily Lake would have told her.” And then Myka braced herself for another apologetic wince from Helena, an admission of “Or I do.” It didn’t come. Myka, hugely relieved, said, “Besides, what if it wears off? And remember, Ida figured out the rabbits weren’t real. We don’t know how the coin really worked, and we don’t know how this does either. So it’s the easy, and maybe even temporary, way out: for her heart, but also for your conscience.”

Helena stiffened again at the word “conscience.” “My feelings are not material. How was she to know what she was letting herself in for, falling for a Wyoming schoolteacher, one so... unpolluted? One who nevertheless looked like me?”

“How’s anybody supposed to know?” Myka asked. A rhetorical question if ever there was one... “We fall how we fall, we get from that what we get; sometimes we keep it, sometimes we don’t. I didn’t think I’d ever get you back.”

“That’s the question, then: if you hadn’t, would you have wanted to remember it differently? Or, better, not at all?”

That wasn’t rhetorical, so Myka said the most explanatory thing that came to her: “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind made me literally ill.”

Helena’s face relaxed into puzzlement, and she began a slight smile, as if being baffled represented a reprieve. “I can make no sense of that utterance other than I know it ends with you in fact retching, because you are careful with language.”

“It’s a movie,” Pete said. “Myka’s talking about a movie.”

“There’s no need to be condescending. How was I to know that?” Helena asked.

“I’m not condescending to you, I’m condescending to her.”

“I have talked about movies before,” Myka told him.

“Never when I could hear you.”

“Our tastes don’t align, Pete.” She turned to Helena. “It’s about erasing memories. Felt like a twisted horror-movie version of the way my brain works—or I guess I mean the horror I’d feel if my brain ever stopped working the way it does. The idea that I might volunteer for it? I didn’t sleep for three days because I was terrified I’d dream about it and wake up screaming.”

Pete tapped her shoulder. When she looked at him, he crossed his eyes. “It’s about love, you dope. Toldya you didn’t know the difference between horror movies and soap operas.”

“Anyway,” she said, and she was tempted to cross her eyes back at him, but her father had always said that was dangerous, and now that she thought about it, maybe he’d been talking through the Welles microphone at her since she was born, “how was I supposed to know it was some kind of nightmarish foreshadowing instead.”

“Retching included?” Helena asked. Rueful: now her tone said We should not be fighting; we had stopped fighting, but here we are again, where we should not be.

“I don’t want to find out. Don’t make me.” And Myka hoped her own tone said You’re right. She tried to keep it that way as she continued, “How did you leave it with her yesterday? Never mind the artifact; you clearly aren’t done.”

“I don’t know what ‘done’ could mean in such a context. I listened far more than I spoke, and I left it, we both left it, as a situation of not knowing. One with an unknowable outcome.”

“Well, that sounds familiar.”

“Are you forbidding me to use the microphone?”

“Like that’d work. What I’m saying is I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Do you have a better one? I could simply disappear, as she did.”

Yes please, was Myka’s immediate thought. But she said, “That seems like cheating. Also mean. And you’re a lot of things, but I don’t think you’re mean.”

“Then what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to fix everything with a wave of your hand,” Myka said. “Because honestly, I’m human.”

Helena smiled: large, calm. “I did ask,” she said. “All right, what do you think I should do? Because, also honestly, I’m every ounce as human as you are, and this is about the two of us as well.”

What did Myka think H.G. Wells should do, in an impossible situation? She resisted a slightly hysterical urge to joke, Come down with a case of the flu. “I think you should tell her you’re sorry,” she said first, and slowly, “because I think that’s true—I think you regret that something you did helped to create the whole situation. I think you also should apologize for the cat being imposed on her.” That was edging the wrong way. She stopped, regrouped. “But I think you should do all of it as you, because you are you, and you shouldn’t presume to speak for Emily Lake. Because no matter how much you look like her, Emily Lake isn’t here.” She wanted to get this part right, and she probably wasn’t going to, but: “Everybody else’s body makes them who they are. They can rely on that; it’s basic and real. But the Warehouse stole that reality from you. Twice. First with bronzing, then with the coin. I think you should take it back and be yourself. That’s what I think you should do.”

Helena’s calm smile had dissolved as Myka spoke, replaced by an even softer aspect. Her eyes usually glittered like cut gems, their sparkle crafted, if not calculated. In this minute, however, they offered the random, gentle glints of sunlight on water. “All right,” she said.

And so Myka found herself—accompanied by Pete and Ida, because Pete had proclaimed, “If we don’t go with you, you’ll lurk,” and he was probably wrong, but the sliver of doubt Myka herself felt made him just enough right—delivering Helena into the company of Emily Lake’s girlfriend. Girlfriend, or more? Myka was still desperate to know the specifics, even though at the same time she did, in fact, feel the appeal of Eternal-Sunshining, or Welles-microphoning, herself free of the very idea of her, of them, of all of it. Hypocrite, she accused herself again.

She and Helena spotted the girlfriend, still some distance from them, at the same time. The girlfriend then spotted them, and she raised her hand—a vague gesture, but clearly intended for Helena. Not for Emily: in that case, the wave would have been surer. Like the chin-poke, Myka thought, shaking jealous salt into her wounds, even while knowing it for a stupid self-provocation.

Helena touched Myka’s arm and said, “Do you want to kiss me?”

Was Helena reading her covetous mind? “What? Why? Didn’t you get your PDA fix at the pie palace?” Pushing the covetousness onto Helena. Nice, Bering.

“To demonstrate ownership,” Helena said. She was matter-of-fact.

Myka tried to match her: “I’m not demonstrative.”

“But I am,” Helena said, and now there was something else there, something Myka couldn’t quite get her hands around.

“You’re the one who wanted to unpunish her,” Myka said. “Don’t twist the knife instead.” But then a possible “something else” hit her: “Unless this is like the hotel room last night? Something you need? Something it would be selfish of me not to let you have?”

“I meant it for you. Because she knows that I am—no, that she was. Demonstrative. So if I can demonstrate, in front of her, in this circumstance, that I would direct at you the same, or rather, more—”

“That isn’t what I need,” Myka said, and she meant it. Whoever Emily Lake’s girlfriend was, she wasn’t someone Myka needed to perform for, or to make Helena perform for. Yesterday, maybe; probably even this morning. Not now. “I’ll tell you what I need. Or I’ll try to.”

“So will I?” That was easy for Myka to get her hands around: it meant I did try, and it didn’t work.

“I’ll try to listen better when you do,” Myka said. “I promise. Now go be a standup guy.”

Helena gave her that soft sunlight gaze again. Then she walked away, toward Emily Lake’s girlfriend... toward a past, regardless of bodies, that was not her own.

Pete knuckled Myka between the shoulderblades. A big-brother gesture.

Ida didn’t touch Myka. But she did say, “I don’t understand exactly what’s happening, and I understand that I shouldn’t understand. But I do know you shouldn’t let it distract you. I lost my husband three years ago.”

A jolt. “I’m so sorry,” Myka said.

“We weren’t like Paul and Ginny—we had friction. Strife. I think you might know what I mean.”

“I apologize for not being able to keep it to ourselves. Our... strife.”

“I think I would have known anyway. Or maybe I’ve just convinced myself that I’m observant.”

That was either an obvious request for praise or totally unjustified self-deprecation. It didn’t matter which; Myka said, “You’re so observant that if I could personally offer you a job, I would.”

“I’m happily retired,” Ida said. But she smiled, practically Pete-wide.

“Someday I hope I get to say those words,” Myka told her. “Sincerely. Because right now, nothing makes anything else any easier.”

“Would you accept a piece of advice?”

“Faster than Pete would accept a piece of pie.”

“Doubtful,” Pete said.

“It’s really just another observation. The temptation to say you’ve had enough... it’s tempting.”

Myka nodded. “It is. I try to, but it doesn’t take.” She sighed. “In fact I keep volunteering for more instead.”

Ida sighed too, a lovely, knowing sound. “That’s my show,” she said. Now she did touch Myka: she took her by the shoulders and turned her so that she faced away from Helena and Emily Lake’s girlfriend. Myka couldn’t help smiling, but Ida then turned businesslike.  “I have to leave you two for a little while—putting my own judge hat on.”

This perked Pete up. “Really? Is it something exciting? Something like food?”

“Something exactly like food. Fruit spreads: jams, jellies, marmalades, preserves, conserves, and butters.”

“I could be very helpful with that,” Pete told her. “If you needed any help.”

“Tell me the difference between preserves and conserves,” Ida challenged him.

He thought for a moment, then said, “One starts with pre-, and one starts with con-,” with a flourish, like he’d just solved the Riddle of the Sphinx.

When Ida didn’t respond immediately, Myka said, “You have to give it to him, on some level. He isn’t wrong.”

“I don’t think the spread-makers would appreciate that level,” Ida said. “But because of the spreads, I can’t take you to the museum now. You won’t go without me?”

“No way,” Pete assured her. “I don’t know why I thought we could just up and go; we gotta be sneaky. Wait till they close.”

“That won’t be till much later. Can you restrain tall, dark, and less-broody-than-she-was-this-morning by yourself for a few hours?”

Pete said, cheerfully, “Not a prayer. But I think she’s good. You good?”

“Define ‘good,’” Myka said. She kicked a rock, mostly for show.

Pete nodded. “She’s good.”

Once Ida had gone, Pete said to Myka, “So what’s the difference?”

“Preserves and conserves? How am I supposed to know? And don’t say ‘because you’re a girl,’ or I’ll—”

“I was gonna say ‘because you know everything’”—at that, Myka snorted—”but fine, I’ll look it up,” he said, and to Myka’s astonishment, he was in an instant reading aloud from his phone: “Conserves are a combination of fruits, usually citrus fruits and nuts, and sometimes raisins or coconut, with a consistency like jam. Traditional fruit preserves consist of small, whole fruits and uniformly sized pieces of larger fruits in a very thick sugar syrup and slightly jellied juice. Very thin slices of lemon or lemon juice may have been added.”

“I didn’t know any of that,” Myka admitted.

“Then this has been a really educational trip for both of us.”

“I wish that could’ve been the only thing we learned.”

“Don’t get all broody again!” he commanded. “It’s like you keep forgetting we’re at a fair! And don’t say you wish you could forget we’re at a fair, because you can’t, so let’s do some fair stuff. Besides, all that reading was hard work. It made me hungry. Also it was about fruit, so I’m even hungrier.”

So they did fair stuff. Or rather, Pete did fair stuff while Myka watched: primarily, he bought food and ate it, but he also dared Myka to get her face painted “so H.G.’ll call you a savage.” She declined. A while later, he dragged her to a booth that featured a game in which players shot water guns at ducks to drive them around a twisted river of a track; he challenged her with, “If you win, I’ll lay off you and H.G. for, like, a week.” Myka said a flat no, and he wheedled, “I’ll even make sure Claudia knows I’m supposed to give you a really easy time,” which was a slightly attractive kicker, so she asked him what he would win, in the unlikely event that he did. It took him a minute to come up with a decent forfeit, but he settled on, “If I win, you and H.G. have to come with me to the demo derby before we go to the museum!”

She reluctantly took him up on it, not because she really believed he’d knock off the grief even for a day, let alone a week, but because of marksmanship, and hers being objectively better, and she did like to prove it.

An hour later, she was still grumbling that both her water gun and her duck were clearly defective, given that she had never lost a shooting contest in her life, and certainly never to Pete, given that she practiced, unlike some people, such as Helena but also Pete. “It’s a fair,” he said placidly. “Nobody ever said anything about the games being fair.”

“We shouldn’t have to go to the thing with you, though,” Myka said, “if the game wasn’t fair.”

“The bet was fair,” he told her. Then he whooped, “Look! Up in the sky!”

“It’s a bird, it’s a plane. Right?”

Pete took another slurp of a concoction that had been billed as an “Elvis milkshake” as he answered, “Iss th’pocalypse!” He pointed, and Myka looked up. She blinked. Blinked again. Couldn’t think of anything to say. “What?” he demanded. “I’ve always been pretty sure H.G.’s one of your fancy horsemen, plus she’s on the Ferris wheel, eating a corn dog. If that doesn’t say ‘end of the world,’ I don’t know what does.”

Myka sighed. “You have clearly not spent enough time with her when she’s hungry. The things she’ll eat...”

“Do you listen to yourself ever?”

“I gave that up. Nobody else listens to me, so why should I?”

“I’m pretty sure some ex-supervillain just went and did a thing she really didn’t want to do. On your say-so.”

“I can’t make any sense of that,” Myka admitted, her eyes on Helena. “Of anything, really.” The ex-supervillain who inexplicably did things on Myka’s say-so was gazing contemplatively into the distance, over the fairgrounds, as her open cabin crested and then began to descend the wheel’s arc. She was eating a corn dog as if she had never had a nefarious thought in her life. She could have been Emily Lake; she could have been the historical H.G. Wells. At a fair. On a ride. Eating food.

They waited for her—waited for the ride to end—and Myka didn’t really know what to make of the fact that this was what Helena had done, after whatever conversation she had had with Emily Lake’s girlfriend: bought a corn dog and gone for a ride on the Ferris wheel. Myka did, however, find herself absurdly comforted by both the fact and the sight. Discomfited, a little, yet comforted.

Helena disembarked, discarded the corn dog’s stick. Saw Pete. Then saw Myka, whereupon her face lit up... but not fully. “I apologize,” she said.

“For what?” Myka asked, embarrassed at not being able to hide her slight panic at the restraint in Helena’s eyes.

Helena smiled. “I should have waited until you could join me,” she said, and just like that, Myka’s panic dissolved.

Pete mumbled, “Gotta throw this cup away and I think I better walk a little while to a place where they’ve got trash cans that isn’t here.”

Myka watched him jog-trot through the crowd, and she counted the trash cans he passed. She was up to eight when Helena said, “I should have contacted you, and I should have waited.”

“It’s okay,” Myka said. “I’m not a huge fan of corn dogs.”

“That wouldn’t have been my first choice, but I needed sustenance. In a physical sense, hence the food on a stick. But also... something from the distant past. My own basic and real past, much of which is distant.”

“Something like pie judging?”

“Mr. Ferris’s wheel was always similarly slow. Measured.” Helena paused, gave that light-up smile again. “But if I had waited, you could have sat beside me and held my hand. So I should have waited.”

If they had been in private, Myka would have kissed her. Leaned forward, taken that reward. Instead, she let her face relax into what she suspected was a light-up smile of her own. “Okay,” she said.

“And speaking of shoulds,” Helena said, with a set of jaw that wasn’t forbidding but nevertheless conveyed I feel compelled to say this, “I should never have taunted you in the hotel room this morning.”

As if it had been her fault. Myka said, “I deserved it. I should never have acted like you betrayed me. Like you wanted to.”

“Why not? It’s what I do,” Helena said, with a shrug that was not the yes I was a supervillain dismissal she often threw at Pete; this one was more a shouldering of guilt. This one, she offered to Pete only when Kelly was his subtext.

“Not like that,” Myka told her, because even though she’d flung “slept with someone else” at Helena, that was entirely undeserved. “And besides, it’s not what you do, it’s what you did. We shouldn’t forget the past, but it doesn’t have to force us into anything. What happens next isn’t inevitable.” Well. Except. She sighed; she did have to say it sooner or later, and maybe it would help. “Except for we have to go watch cars hit each other in a little while.”

It did help: Helena laughed. “We have to?”

“I lost a bet,” Myka said. Helena grinned, and Myka went on, “But you know you want to.”

“I suspect you want to as well.”

“Maybe a little,” Myka admitted, and for that second, the tuning between them was crystal-clear.

When Pete rejoined them, he asked her a surprisingly quiet, “Better now?”

“Better now,” she agreed. And she knuckled him between his shoulderblades.

TBC

I’m putting minimal tags on this part, in hopes that Tumblr won’t decide to make me invisible again. But what I would want to convey in a tag essay this time around has something to do with the version(s) of history we receive and accept: e.g., the alien-invasion panic ostensibly caused by the Mercury Theatre’s War of the Worlds broadcast. I recommend A. Brad Schwartz’s Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News for, first, his exhaustive research into the actual-fact contours of the situation, but second, his analysis of the broadcast and the spectrum of responses to it as part of the culture’s way of working out the possibilities, and perceived dangers, of radio as a mass medium. This debate of course recurs with each new information-delivery system... does television have too much power? Are we overly susceptible to the lures and lies of social media?

Obviously, history is intricate, with competing stories and versions of stories and purposes for versions of stories. But I think we’re obligated to work to deepen, rather than to obscure, that complexity.

Also Orson Welles really liked that the supposed panic added to his notoriety and made him seem like even more of a genius. Cui bono? That’s a useful question to ask in a lot of contexts.

P.S. If you want a link to the Welles/Wells radio interview, feel free to message me, but it’s pretty findable on YouTube.

[jade4813]

A Lie, Told Often Enough, Chapter 10

Author Notes: Inspired by @fallinginloveinaflash‘s AU prompt. All credit for the idea goes entirely to her.

Title: A Lie, Told Often Enough

Rating: NC-17

Synopsis: Iris just landed her dream job at a PR firm and her first assignment is reforming the bad boy image of celebrity artist Barry Allen. He’s overly cocky and well-known for being a playboy, but Iris has never met a challenge she couldn’t handle.

Chapters: 10/?

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

“So, is there anything I should know before we do this?” Iris asked, shifting the weight of her overnight bag in one hand as she looked at the front door in dread. Nora and Henry Allen had invited them over for dinner, but Barry had suggested they spend the night while they were there. As he explained, he liked to take the opportunity to get away whenever possible. Unable to come up with an excuse to decline, Iris had reluctantly agreed.

Barry smiled and squeezed her hand. “You don’t have to be nervous. They’re going to love you, you know.” Then, after a pause, he added reassuringly, “They know the truth about us, remember?”

Though she nodded, his words did little to reassure her. His parents may have been told that their relationship was a sham, but unless they had never heard of the Internet, they also had to have seen the speculation about the two of them that morning. It wasn’t unusual for women to change dresses between the Prescott dinner and private birthday celebration. However, more than one eagle eyed fan had noticed that Barry had also changed shirts, and that had led to a flurry of speculation and innuendo.

The fact that the speculation was more or less accurate didn’t help Iris’s nerves. She had no compunction against lying to Mason as she had that morning, pretending that it was all part of her plan. It seemed underhanded, though, to do so to Barry’s parents.

Though it would probably be more mortifying to tell the truth.

It seemed silly to tell Barry all of that, however, so when he asked if she was ready, she put on a brave face and nodded. Before she could second-guess her decision, Barry threw open the door without so much as a knock and escorted her inside. “Mom! Dad! We’re here!”

“Barry!” An attractive older woman with auburn hair turned from the table and rushed towards them, pulling her son into a tight hug. An older man with a warm smile finished placing a serving bowl in the center of the table and then followed. Iris hung back, dropping her bag in the corner. She was unwilling to intrude on the moment, but when she thrust her hand forward to shake her hosts’ in greeting, they pulled her in to a hug instead.

When the immediate chaos died down, she found herself being herded towards the table by Barry’s mom, while Barry was engrossed in conversation with his dad. Scrambling for her manners, she finally offered, “Ah, you have a beautiful home. Sorry we’re late, by the way, Mrs. Allen.”

“Nora, please,” her hostess corrected her warmly. “And I’ll tell you a secret. Henry and I are well aware that our son has never been on time to anything in his life. We always tell him to come over a half hour earlier than we need him to be here. If you ever need him to show up anywhere on time, I highly recommend you try it – though don’t tell him I said so.”

Iris smiled. “I’ll bear that in mind, though he’s better with that than he used to be. When we first met, getting him to show up on time for an appointment was like pulling teeth. He’s gotten pretty punctual lately. Well, except when it involved work,” she amended with a chuckle.

“Oh, really? Well, you must be a good influence, then,” Nora remarked as she showed Iris to her seat. “Henry? Barry? Come sit! The food is getting cold!”

Iris lapsed into contented silence as Barry took his seat next to her. She was more than happy to let him take charge of the conversation, spending the next few minutes catching up with his parents. It wasn’t long, however, before his mother redirected the conversation back to her.

“So. Iris. Tell us more about yourself. Did you always want to be a publicist?”

She shook her head. “No, actually. If you can believe it, I used to want to be a cop. But, well…” Trailing off, she gestured at herself. “As you can see, I don’t exactly meet the minimum height and weight requirements. Then I thought I might want to go into journalism, but that isn’t exactly a growing field right now. Being a publicist, well…it allows me to do what I love in telling other people’s stories. Just in a different way.”

“Have you been in the business long?” Nora prompted as she passed Henry the mashed potatoes.

Iris shook her head, shifting slightly under the weight of Nora’s regard. “Not too long, I suppose. I interned with Mason – my boss – in college, and I’ve been working with him officially for a little while now. But actually, Barry’s my first real client.” Belatedly, she realized that she’d intentionally not told him that, but she simply threw him a small smile and an apologetic shrug. It wasn’t like he could exactly fire her now. He simply rolled his eyes at her in an exaggerated motion and shook his head.

“And how do you like it so far? Being a publicist, I mean.”

Before Iris could answer, Barry laughed and asked in a teasing tone, “Mom, do you want to lighten up a bit? I’ve heard less intense interrogations than you’re putting Iris through right now.”

Nora snorted. “It is not that bad!” she protested.

“Are you sure? Because I’m about to go get the lamp from the living room so you can shine it directly into her face and really give her the full experience. Do you – do you want me to go get it? I’ll go get it,” Barry offered, rising partway to his feet.

His mother laughed and shook her head. “Well, maybe if you brought women by more often, I wouldn’t be so out of practice!” she chided him.

Barry snorted. “You’ve never invited another woman over before now,” he pointed out.

“If I’d ever thought any of the women you dated before now were special to you, I would have!” she protested. Iris stiffened slightly, and when Barry threw his mother a wide-eyed stare, she continued quickly, “Not that you and Iris are really dating, of course. Your friends are always welcome. You know that.”

“This chicken is fantastic, honey. You really outdid yourself this time,” Henry interjected, smoothly deflecting the conversation from the peculiar nature of their son’s relationship. Iris felt herself relax at the change of subject. Over the remainder of the meal, the conversation shifted to Barry’s upcoming tour and newest album.

After dinner, however, when she reached to take the plates into the kitchen, Henry quickly moved to intercept her. “Oh, no you don’t. In this house, when one of us cooks, the other cleans. You go have a seat in the living room and relax.” Raising his voice pointedly at his son, he joked, “I’m going to see if my son still remembers how to wash a dish or if he’s gotten too spoiled in his life as a superstar.”

Barry raised his voice in mock affront, but when Iris hesitated, wondering if she should argue the point, Henry winked at her. “Nora doesn’t bite. I promise.”

She laughed good-naturedly. “I’m not worried,” she lied, letting him shoo her into the other room. Once in the living room, she paused long enough to peruse the photos hung on the walls. “You have a beautiful family,” she remarked to the older woman as she entered the room.

Nora glowed with maternal pride as she followed Iris’s gaze. “Thank you,” she murmured. “I worry sometimes about the life Barry leads, but his father and I are very proud of him.”

Iris threw his mother a quick glance over her shoulder. “It’s a different kind of world he lives in, I know. But you don’t have to worry. Barry’s…he’s wonderful. I doubt celebrity has changed him that much.”

She could feel his mother’s eyes on her as she replied, “No, I suppose not. But I worry sometimes that it’s made him closed off. Lonely. He’s never had the easiest time letting people in. These last few years…I’ve worried it’s gotten harder for him. I wish he could find happiness, but I wonder if he’d even let himself. I think he doesn’t think it’s even possible, with the life he leads.”

Iris didn’t know how to respond to that, so she simply turned her attention back to the pictures. “Did he always want to be a musician?” she asked, staring at a picture of a little tousle-haired boy with a too-large guitar on his lap.

Nora made a soft sound. “Oh, no. He used to talk about being a physicist. He and Cisco started their band in college, as just a way to blow off steam. They had just started getting some attention when Cisco sold his first invention and decided to pursue a career as an engineer. Of course, he still helps Barry out with the music when he can. They still write songs together. But I think sometimes Barry misses those days in college, when it was just the two of them, having fun together.”

Iris mulled over his mother’s words as she stared at a photo of Barry and Cisco side by side in their graduation gowns. He looked so carefree and happy. Iris had never seen that smile on his face before – at least, she hadn’t until he walked through his parents’ front door. Watching him joke around with his parents, she realized she was seeing a side to him she’d never seen before.

The next picture made her laugh – Barry at around seven years old, dressed in a superhero cape as he threw the camera a cheesy smile. “This one’s my favorite,” he remarked.

His mom chuckled. “If you like that, I have some others you should see. Hold on. I’ve got Barry’s baby book around here somewhere –”

Eager to see Barry as a little boy, Iris moved to the couch, where she sat and waited to get a glimpse of her pseudo-boyfriend as a little boy. A mischievous grin crossed her face when she pictured the expression on Barry’s face when he saw what she and his mother had been up to while he was otherwise occupied.

“So, Iris seems nice,” Henry remarked in a mild voice as he passed his son a soapy dish.

Barry shot him a look out of the corner of his eye. “We’re not really dating, you know,” he reminded his father.

“Are you sure about that?” Throwing Barry a quick look, he explained, “I’ve see the way you look at her.”

He sighed. “I’m sure. I mean, I like her. But she’s made it pretty clear she has no intention of falling in love with me.” At his father’s laugh, he frowned. “What?”

The older man shook his head. “Just remembering that there was once I time I felt much the same way. I was planning to go to medical school, and love presented a complication I was sure I didn’t need.”

“So what happened?”

Henry grinned. “I would like to see anyone resist your mother. I was in love with her before I even knew what hit me.”

Barry snorted. “Yeah? Well…Iris doesn’t seem to have that problem.”

His father lifted one shoulder in a slight shrug. “If you say so. But, like I said. She seems nice.”

Uncertain if he wanted to push the point, Barry let it go and changed the subject. However, he was still thinking about their peculiar conversation a few minutes later when he walked towards the living room, eager to see what Iris had gotten up to in his absence. When he saw the baby book spread open on her lap, however, his jaw dropped.

“Mom, I – Iris has barely been here for an hour and you’re already showing her my baby book?” he demanded in feigned indignation. Stepping closer, he saw that Iris was laughing at a picture of him as a little boy, dressed in nothing but a t-shirt as he pouted over a bowl of oatmeal. “Oh my god,” he breathed, feeling his face go crimson.

“You were an adorable little boy!” his mom protested.

“Do you still eat breakfast without pants on?” Iris asked with an overly-innocent grin.

Barry huffed. “You know, I’ve worked very hard to craft a certain image. Ten minutes at home, and my mom completely obliterates it.”

Iris snorted. “No don’t be silly! I –” Looking at a picture of him at the height of his awkward teenage years, she cracked up. “Nope. Sorry. I can’t do it. I can’t lie. Your image as a rock god is totally shot. I’m never getting this picture out of my head.”

“That’s it,” Barry growled, pulling his baby book off her lap before sweeping her into his arms. “I’m getting you out of here before mom shows you my naked baby pictures. Mom, Dad, if you need us, we’ll be watching movies in the guest room until Iris forgets the horror she has just seen.”

Iris gasped, though she only put up a token protest as he carried her towards the guest room. “You have naked baby pictures? I want to see! Henry, distract Barry! Nora, bring me the naked baby pictures!”

“Don’t listen to her! She’s delirious!” Barry shouted over his shoulder, over the sound of Iris’s shrieks of protest. They were both laughing when he tossed her onto the bed, falling onto the mattress next to her. “I can’t believe she did that,” he huffed, though his smile belied his irritation.

“What? Those pictures were adorable! The one of you dressed like a zombie for Halloween -?”

He groaned. “Don’t remind me.” Throwing his arm over her, he pinned her to the mattress. “Keep this up and I’m going to have to do something drastic to distract you.”

Iris tried to throw him a grave look, but the corners of her lips still twitched with mirth. After a moment, she giggled and shook her head. “Nope. Sorry. Can’t do it. I know you’re trying to be all grumpy and serious, but that image is ruined now.”

Barry thrust his lower lip out in an exaggerated pout. “No! Don’t laugh! I’m intense and filled with angst! And arrogance! You’re supposed to fear me! Fear me, darn it! I’m a rock god!”

It was enough to send her over the edge, and Barry couldn’t help but grin down at her as she laughed until tears came to her eyes. Once she finally caught her breath, she lifted one hand to his cheek. “You know, I think I finally found him. The real Barry Allen.”

His smile falling, Barry stared at her with guarded eyes. “And what’s the verdict? You want to be his friend?”

Iris bit her lower lip and her eyes were troubled as her gaze swept her face. Finally, she gave an almost imperceptible nod and scraped her teeth against her lower lip. “Yeah,” she agreed in a voice barely above a whisper. “Yeah, I do.”

Unable to resist, Barry ducked his head and brushed a kiss against her lips. They had agreed they would keep their relationship professional this evening, but surely she wouldn’t begrudge him one small slip. Indeed, she let out a deep sigh and melted into his kiss, pulling him closer.

Before things could progress any further, Barry pulled away and rolled off her, distracting the both of them as he turned on the television and flipped through the channels until he came across an old black and white monster movie. Iris curled up against his side, resting her head on his shoulder. Comforted by the steady rise and fall of her breath against his side, Barry felt his usual stress and tensions seep out of his body. He stroked one hand lazily up and down her spine as they settled in to watch the movie.

Later that evening, when it was time to turn in, Barry shifted to pull away, intending to return to his bedroom. However, before he could move, Iris wrapped her fingers in his shirt and held tight. “No,” she breathed. “Don’t go. Stay here with me tonight?”

Barry caught his breath. “Are you sure?” he murmured, almost unable to believe his ears.

Her hand trembled slightly against his heart, but her gaze was steady when she nodded. “Yeah. I’m sure. Just for tonight. Stay with me?”

Unable to trust himself to speak, Barry simply nodded and leaned back against the pillows. He couldn’t deny her this. He suspected he couldn’t deny her anything.

The next morning, Iris awoke to the warmth of cotton against her cheek. She froze, suspecting she knew what she would find when she opened her eyes. For this last moment, she wanted to embrace the fantasy. But eventually, she had to face the truth, and so she opened her eyes.

And found herself in bed alone.

Her heart lurched, her stomach twisting into a knot, when the bedroom door opened and Barry walked in. He was still dressed in the worn t-shirt and sweat pants he’d changed into before bed the night before, his hair still rumpled from sleep. In his hand, he carried two large mugs of coffee. “Morning. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

Her heartbeat returning to normal, Iris breathed a heavy sigh. “Oh, thank god,” she groaned as she grabbed for the coffee. “You’re a lifesaver.”

Barry quirked his eyebrows up at her, holding the coffee mug just out of reach. “And a rock god?”

Iris laughed and lunged for the delicious black brew, both surprised and pleased to find he’d fixed it just the way she liked it. “We’ll see. The jury’s still out. Your mom isn’t done showing me pictures.”

“Oh, my god. I knew introducing the two of you was a mistake,” he grumbled as he lowered himself on the mattress next to her. “They asked if we wanted to spend the day with them, but I’m not sure I want to risk it.”

“Aw, poor Barry. You –”

Before she could continue, there was a knock on the door. Henry stood in the doorway, looking far more alert at this early hour than either Iris or Barry could so much as contemplate. “Hey. There’s a Mason Bridge at the door? He wanted to speak with the two of you.”

Iris went from amused to anxious in less than a heartbeat. Feeling slightly nauseated, she threw a quick glance at the clock. Mason was there to see them before eight in the morning? That couldn’t possibly be good. Had something happened? Was she about to get fired? Not daring to look Barry’s way, she threw Henry a tight smile. “Oh. Thank you. Let him know I’ll be right there.”

Whatever had prompted this visit, it couldn’t possibly be good.

[elizas-writing]

Animated August, Day 12: Corpse Bride

Touching back on stop motion animation, this time with one of the most creative visionaries of my time: Tim Burton. Usually his name is associated with films like The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach, despite just being the producer and not the director of those two. Well, this is the first of his stop motion animated films where he’s actually the director, bringing his own flavor of quirkiness to the production. Here is Corpse Bride!

In a Victorian era village, Victor Van Dort is in an arranged marriage with Victoria Everglot, so both of their families will finally be well-to-do and avoid poverty. However, Victor is too socially awkward for his own good, especially at the idea of marrying someone he’s never met. After screwing up his vows during a wedding rehearsal, Victor runs off embarrassed into the woods to practice. Yet he accidentally marries, no duh, a corpse bride, who rises from her grave and takes him to the Land of the Dead as her new husband. Despite the otherwise horrifying circumstances, the bride, Emily, is a sweet young woman who just longed to have someone to love after being murdered on her wedding night. Unfortunately, Victor just doesn’t feel the same, and there’s still the fact that he’s alive and she’s dead. Meanwhile, Victoria’s parents grow antsy of the groom’s disappearance and plan to wed her off to some mysterious newcomer who may have more dastardly intentions. And it’s up to Victor to figure out where his new home will be, and where his true love lies.

The animation and designs carry through Burton’s creepy artistic style with exaggerated features to make the characters distinct. Most of the sets are in shadows and grays, but whenever color comes in, it just pops. There’s also a fun contrast between the Lands of the Living and the Dead as the former is more drab and glum-- like everyone’s ready for a funeral-- while the latter is more energetic. It plays a lot with assumption of the undead being evil, but when you get to know them, they’re actually pretty cool people who aren’t bummed out about where they’re at; they have nothing else to lose, so might as well party it up and have some fun, celebrating the creepy and macabre.

This contrast is best highlighted when we first meet Emily, voiced Helena Bonham Carter. We see her through Victor’s initial shock of a dead woman rising from her grave, complete with eerie whispering and Danny Elfman’s wonderful music. But in the next scene, she’s cracking jokes and is nothing more than a young, hopeless romantic trying to love again. There’s a sweet, childlike innocence about her which makes you feel sorry for her tragic situation and understand why she acts the way she does.

And being a Tim Burton film, we also have Johnny Depp as Victor. I’m used to seeing Depp in super-eccentric roles, so it’s a bit unusual to see him play the every-man. He’s incredibly shy, soft-spoken, and kind-hearted, but he’s a work in progress in figuring out what he wants in a relationship and how to communicate, which works well in a Victorian setting given the ultra-conservative mindset around romance and marriage at the time. In any other film like a rom-com, this miscommunication would seem like an annoying cliche, but these two characters come from understandable backgrounds on why one can’t commit and why the other will throw herself to anyone asking for her hand. They hurt each other, but they eventually come to realize what they did wrong and want to set everything right so they’ll both be happy, even if what they need isn’t what they want. It’s a bittersweet and hard-hitting take on what love is and exploring the little ways a relationship can be unhealthy. And Victor and Emily are a wonderful pair to take that journey and overcome their own problems.

Despite the themes and macabre imagery, the tone is a lot more subdued than Burton’s usual work. There’s still plenty of eccentric side characters and their unique designs, a hell of a voice cast, and of course, the stop motion animation is amazing. Most of the humor is very dry, and it doesn’t shove a whole lot of plot details in your face. It keeps to very simple points, but has enough character and imagery to allot for audience speculation and interpretation. And even though there’s kinda a goofy villain who’s obviously evil from the get go (like who shows up at a wedding rehearsal he wasn’t invited to where no one knows his name), the focus of the story isn’t on good versus evil. You’re mostly with Victor and Emily as they figure their shit out, and that’s all you need.

Corpse Bride is a beautifully grim tale of romance and the boundaries of life and death. It’s everything you love from Tim Burton with an excellent cast, stylized macabre elements, an always wonderful soundtrack by Danny Elfman, and an odd, bittersweet dive into romance on what it means to be happy in a relationship. If you’re a fan of his work, this is one you won’t want to miss.

Day 11 >> Day 12 >> Day 13

If you enjoyed this review and what I do here, consider buying me a ko-fi to show your support!

[redrobin-detective]

The Long Way Around 20

Here we are, thrown back into excitement after a relatively calm couple of chapters. Torino is once again my favorite bad grandpa and catch my quiet Young Might speculation theories. I drew my thoughts on Izuku's costume here if you're interested

AO3

Chapter Twenty: Midoriya and Quirk Society

Gran Torino quietly opens the door to the boy's room and peeks inside. There he is, as peaceful as a babe with his arms tucked neatly under his pillow and his legs all askew. Midoriya's face is serene as he breathes softly, the picture of contentment. It's nostalgic, having a boy in this room again. Toshinori had never looked as serene as Midoriya did now but both boys laid pretty much the same way. It's nice, Torino decides. Almost as nice as what he was about to do.

"What the hell are you still doing in bed? It's already 4 in the morning and daylight will be here soon! Get up or go home, ya bum!" Torino shouts, bouncing off the ceiling and onto the mattress. Midoriya sits up with a jump, his eyes wide. He starts to go for an instinctual punch but Torino grabs the wild fist and pushes the boy back down.

"If you're not downstairs in your hero costume in 5 minutes, you're out, do you hear me?" Bright green eyes stare up at him as he leans in real close. Torino jumps off the bed and stalks proudly out of the room, ignoring the frantic scrambling behind him.

Yes, it sure is nice having a boy in the house again.

"Torino-san," Midoriya asks some time later when they've arrived at their destination. He looks tired and confused but ready for whatever hell he's going to be put through. "Why are we at a junkyard? I thought we were going to work more on my martial arts like we have the past few days. Is this about using my environment to my advantage?"

"Good guess but no. Two days of fighting one person will give you bad habits. We're doing something different today. See that?" Torino points at a dilapidated refrigerator. "Move it over there by that broken car," he says, gesturing to an old car about 20 meters away.

"What? That's got to be a 100 kg, I can't move it that far!" Midoriya says, looking between the fridge and him.

"Then what kind of hero do you expect to be?" The boy just blinks, good grief does he gotta explain everything? "You've got brains and you've got skill but what you need at this point is the muscle to back that up." He kicks at Midoriya's skinny little leg. "Look 'atcha, you've hardly got any meat on your bones; villains would break you in two. You can't only practice what you're good at, ya gotta work on the other things if you want to be a well-rounded hero."

Midoriya straightens at that and looks down at his hands, deep in thought. Torino takes a moment to look over the boy's costume. It's plain to be sure, like the kid, but his experienced eye can see the practicality of it. It's green and black material with some dark grey soft armor plating covering his shoulders, chest and elbows. There's a mouth guard hanging around his neck. He has a belt with several pouches strapped securely around his waist and Torino can see the boy's staff poking from behind his back. He's got on gloves similar to what he wore in the Sports Festival and sturdy looking knee high boots. Gotta admit, the boy is actually starting to look like a hero.

"Don't be a one-trick pony," Midoriya mutters to himself before steeling himself. "I understand. So you want it over by that car?"

"If you please," Torino grins, this kid is a riot. Midoriya works quickly through a few warm-up stretches before silently making his way over to the old fridge. He walks around it for a minute, probably thinking of the best way to move it. Torino patiently waits for him to ask about the rope and other tools they'd packed up this morning. Oh well, let the kid suffer a bit first.

He chuckles as Midoriya gets behind the fridge and attempts to move it only to lose traction and fall flat on his face. To his credit, the kid gets right back up and tries again, this time succeeding in moving the fridge a few centimeters. Not bad for a skinny little thing.

"You're almost there," Torino can't help but tease. "Just a little bit more there, sonny."

"Laugh now but I'll get that fridge over there," Midoriya responds with determination lighting up his eyes. "I'll get it over there and move anything else you need. If that's what it takes to get stronger, then I'll do anything I have to." He says before saving his breath for moving that fridge.

Torino lets out an amused snort. The kid has stones, he has to give him that. It's really more amusing than it ought to be, watching the boy struggle and slowly, oh so slowly, make progress. Eventually he does figure out about the supplies and the work goes much quicker after that.

He'd lied a little bit earlier, the boy has muscles all right but they were lean and toned from rigorous martial arts training. If Midoriya is going to inherit One for All, he needs to bulk up a bit more to ensure the quirk didn't blow him to pieces.

The sun rises and Midoriya has moved that fridge a little more than halfway, he's sweaty and his face is red from exertion but he doesn't look like he's slowing down any time soon. Torino thinks about calling Toshinori and telling him to come watch this immensely entertaining display but in the end he decides not to. It's that idiot's own fault for not seeing the perfect candidate right under his nose.

Torino is going to have his fun but already he's planning on how to convince both knuckleheads that Midoriya is the best person to inherit All Might's power.

XxX

"Oh look, a new microwave. My old one stopped working on me suddenly so I had this one delivered." Izuku hears Gran Torino say cheerily as he unpacks the new microwave. Or at least he can only assume that's what the old man's doing. Izuku himself is lying face down on the kitchen table, fairly certain he'll never move again.

He thought he knew pain from his sessions with Rikimaru-shishou, but that's nothing compared to the bone deep ache he feels everywhere from all his pushing and heavy lifting. He'd been so invigorated by the challenge his sponsor had put before him that Izuku probably went a little overboard. Still, there'd been a proud feeling in his gut when he'd seen just how much he'd been able to move with his own two hands. Not bad for a quirkless Deku.

"Here ya are lad, wake up, I got a nutritious lunch for you." Izuku groans as he sits up and is greeted with a large plate of taiyaki and a glass of milk. He squints, the milk he can understand but taiyaki? "Go on, unless you'd rather take the afternoon on with an empty stomach." Izuku takes the offered plate and munches into it without thinking. It's sweet but the sensation reminds him how hungry he is.

"So what is the afternoon plan?" Izuku asks, finishing the first fish pastry and starting on his second when his mentor joins him at the table with his own plate.

"Well no more moving garbage if that's what you're asking, not today anyway." Gran Torino says and he begins his lunch. "Strength building doesn't happen in one day as I'm sure you're aware. We'll continue to do exercises like that every morning for the rest of the week and, when you leave, I'll give you a training regimen to follow so you can continue to work at it." Izuku nods as he stuffs another pastry in his mouth.

"For the first part of the afternoon, I want to pick your brain on your strategy and work on that some. You already show promise and, even with the strength training, your brain will always be your most important asset. All Might sometimes forgot that and just solved things with his fists. I expect better than that from you, ya got that boy?"

"Yes, I understand," Izuku says before nervously looking down at his plate. "So um you taught All Might in school, right?"

"He told ya that, did he?" Torino says with an amused smirk. "What else did he say?"

"Just that you were his homeroom teacher. He said you were tough and impatient but that I'd learn a lot from you. He uh also seemed pretty afraid of you."

"Ha!" Torino barks, slapping his hand on the table. "That kid always was a complainer. You know he used to sleep in that same room upstairs? Had to curl up just to keep his stupidly long legs on the bed. You both startle the same though, like little rabbits." Izuku's mouth drops open. All Might was close enough to Torino to sleep here? He slept in that dirty old room too? Izuku's heart stops, he'd possibly been sleeping in the same bed as All Might? That sweat he smelled, had that been-? He feels dizzy with euphoria.

"Close your mouth boy before you choke," Torino grumbles. "I take it you're a fan of his?"

"I know everything about him," Izuku says before he can stop. "He's been my hero for as long as I can remember, All Might's been as much a constant in my life as my own mother. He's the reason I wanted to be a hero, everything about him is just perfect. The way he's so strong and powerful but also is so open and friendly with everyone he meets. He's both an unreachable pillar and the warmest person I've ever met. Since working with him at Yuuei, my admiration has only grown, he's-"

"Right, I get the picture," Torino waves him off with an exaggerated eye roll. "Go on, eat up, there's more where that came from if ya need it."

"So how do you know him so well?" Izuku asks through a mouthful of food; Torino gives him a look and Izuku swallows before speaking again. "I mean, All Might mentioned you were his homeroom teacher but for him to be here long enough that he needed to stay the night, clearly there was more to the relationship."

"Nothing gets by you, does it kid?" Torino says in a, dare he say, almost fond voice. "But you're right, I knew him before he even started at Yuuei. To be honest, I only took the position so I could teach him. He slept here because I was training him outside of school and sometimes he was too tired to leave, the bum. There's a great deal I can't explain, not now at least, but I can say that your hero started off something of a disaster. He was a firecracker, spirited like you, but angry and directionless." Torino sighs and looks past Izuku's shoulder at memories only he can see.

"But I had a friend who believed in him, convinced me to believe in him too. She put everything good into that boy's thick skull and then up and died, leaving him all alone with a power he couldn't hope to control." Izuku looks down at his now empty plate, trying to imagine the Number One being, well, a little bit like him. "The last thing she did was wrestle a promise from me that I'd turn that knucklehead into a hero. Took plenty of lessons where I left him puking, but he got there eventually."

"So that's why he's scared of you," Izuku says with a sad smile. It's weird, getting such a personal insight into his hero. It makes him feel like if All Might of all people could have such humble origins then maybe even he could-

"Well that's enough of boring old people talk," Torino announces with a flourish as he stands up. "We're here to help you improve, so you don't make the same mistakes your teachers did."

"Uh I actually was really enjoying it but ok," Izuku says as Torino takes his plate. "You mentioned we'd be working on strategy for the first part of the afternoon, what about tonight?"

"We're going out," Torino says with a grin. "You and me are going to head into the city and fight some criminals. You sure pounded on those boys in the Sports Festival, you'll do just fine."

"What!" Izuku yelps, his anxiety spiking. "Is-isn't that illegal? I know you're a licensed hero but I don't even have a provisional license and I've only been in the hero program for about a week and-"

"Quit your bellyaching," the older hero scolds. "You can't grow if you keep standing in one place. You either gotta man up or head back to Gen Ed with your tail between your legs." He points his finger right in Izuku's face. "So what's it gonna be?" Izuku frowns at the accusatory finger, so reminiscent of teachers and bullies in the past, pointing out the useless quirkless kid. He's tired of standing still, the only way now is forward. "Yeah, that's what I thought."

Izuku ends up falling asleep about five minutes into Torino's lecture on improving his strategy. He'd been horribly embarrassed at first only to realize the old man had put a blanket over him sometime while he'd slept and overall didn't seem too bothered by his impromptu nap. Izuku had the sneaking suspicion that the hero had deliberately set him up so he'd fall asleep and maybe, just maybe, Gran Torino was a bit of a softie himself underneath his gruff exterior. Not that Izuku would ever say that out loud, he liked his face arranged the way it was.

By the time he wakes up, it's almost twilight and Torino is still insisting they head into the city and fight villains. Izuku still isn't sure about this. Yes, he was able to perform well in the Sports Festival but that's a lot different than actual villains. As much as he wants to move forward, he couldn't help but feel like he's being thrown in without adequate prep-

"Will you stop it with your damn muttering boy? I'm old, not deaf!" Torino snaps at him, leveling a punch to Izuku's hip as they board the bullet train. "You need some damn confidence boy and this will help. Don't get too worked up over this, I'm asking you to take down small time thugs not the Hero Killer." The old man grumbles as the train begins to speed forward. "Relax, it'll be fun, kid."

"You sound like my master," Izuku sighs as he looks out the window. As fast as the train is, they likely won't arrive in the city until after sunset. He frowns at the mention of the Hero Killer and pulls out his phone.

"He sounds like a good man then," Torino adds with a grin. "Typical teenager, playing on your phone the moment you get a scrap of free time." The man teases but Izuku isn't listening.

He's got Iida's contact information out. The last exchange had been last Friday night when Izuku questioned where Iida was going for his internship. He'd only responded with the agency's name and hasn't said anything since. There have been so many moments these past few days when Izuku has wanted to text the other boy, just to see how he's doing. He worries his lip as he debates if it'd be okay to bother Iida.

'Please hold on, we will be making an emergency stop' the intercom announces just as the train is shaken by a loud crash and a costumed man breaks open a hole in the side and lands unconscious in the seats. A second later, a hideous beast with long, ungainly limbs, multiple eyes and an exposed brain screeches from the open hole. Izuku freezes up, staring at the monster. What the hell is that thing?

"It's a Noumu, stay back kid," Torino yells, holding his arm out to stop Izuku from getting out of his seat. Izuku starts, a Noumu? Like the creature that attacked 1-A at USJ, what was it doing all the way out here? He grabs his sponsor's cape to ask more questions when the hero jumps out of his seat and speeds towards the monster... with Izuku still holding onto his cape.

His eyes water from the immense speed as he clutches onto the thin material for dear life. He can see the city up ahead is on fire and the sounds of chaos can be heard even this far away. What was going on? Were there more of these creatures? Gran Torino curses as he wrestles with the monster.

"Let go for a second kid!" Izuku is pretty sure this is the exact wrong time to make a joke. "I'm serious, just trust me!" Izuku squeezes his eyes shut and releases his grip on the cape. The sensation of falling is the most terrifying thing he's ever felt. He instinctually scrambles at the air in a blind panic.

Torino is still fighting the Noumu but he slams into the monster, forcing the screaming creature down to the ground which, speaking of which, is approaching very, very quickly. When Torino hits the asphalt, he leaps back up and grabs Izuku about 3 or 4 meters above the ground. The hero cracks the pavement beneath him as they land.

Izuku slides bonelessly out of Torino's arms and is shaking on the ground. Everything is dull and muted around him and he feels about ready to throw up. The only thing he can hear is the pounding sound of his own heart in his ears, reminding him that he's still alive.

"What the hell did you think you're doing, kid?" Torino shouts, pulling back to reality. The smoke, the screams, and the monster are suddenly all back in his peripheral vision. "Shit, I don't have time to deal with you right now." Torino shouts, speeding off and crashing back into the Noumu. "Go find an evacuation center and stay put! I'll find you when this is done!"

"I thought we came here to fight villains." He mouths off, still dazed as he shakily gets back to his feet.

"Does this look like a damn purse snatcher to ya?" Torino yells back and he gets in a few good kicks to the creature's face. As if to prove his point, the Noumu pulls back and screeches something that sounds inhuman. "Find the local heroes and let them escort you to safety."

"But-"

"Just go!" Torino shouts as the Noumu dives forward, looking to grab at Izuku but Torino forces it back. His mentor is too busy protecting him to effectively take on the creature. Izuku is just getting in his way standing here gaping like an idiot. He spins around and races back towards the center of the city where, hopefully, he can get some help. He feels sick, running from a fight and leaving an old man in his place but his presence was just making things worse. Izuku may be stubborn but even he knows that some things are too big for him.

"What are you doing here, boy? Don't you know it's graceful for someone like you wear a hero's uniform in public?" Izuku feels the heat from Endeavor before he actually sees the man himself, looking as angry and imposing as always.

"You have to help Gran Torino!" Izuku says in a rush, there's no time for anger or indignity. Endeavor is still the Number Two Hero and Torino is a retired old man. Who knows how long he can fight that creature alone? "He's a pro hero and he's fighting a monster about a couple of blocks that way. I think it's one of those creatures from USJ."

"Another one huh?" the flame hero says with an annoyed sneer. "We've seen a couple of those monsters running around tonight." He glares down at Izuku, "Well? What are you waiting for? Get to one of the shelters. No one, not my son and especially not me, has the time to cater to a quirkless boy pretending to be a hero." Ouch, that hurt.

"Todoroki-kun is here?" Izuku asks.

"Yes, but he's actually contributing to rescue efforts instead of wasting valuable heroes' time," valuable heroes? "Don't seek him out, you'll only distract him again." Endeavors growls as he storms off, thankfully, in the direction where Gran Torino had been fighting. "Follow Arakawa street north, there's an open shelter still accepting civilians last I checked." With that said, Endeavor begins to jog over towards the commotion caused by Torino and the Noumu.

Izuku pulls out his bō and scans the area. Both Torino and Endeavor had told him to go to a safe shelter. But there are probably still people who need help, people the pros didn't have time to deal with. This is why he decided to become a hero in the first place and no way is he going to hide when he has the power to do something. The sound of a scream propels him forward.

If anyone asks, he just got lost.

He finds a young woman and her child being backed into a corner by some thugs, clearly looking to take advantage of the chaos to cause trouble. Well what do you know, he gets to fight purse snatchers after all.

"Give me your bag, lady and I won't have to scar up your pretty face," one guy sneers as he pulls out a knife. "Or even your cute little daugh-" Izuku cuts him off by whipping the bō in his face. He ducks down to avoid a retaliatory blow as the creep glares down at him with his broken nose.

Izuku freezes as his fear level is dialed up from 1 to 100. His hands start trembling and he's pretty sure his heart is going to explode out of his chest. Someone grabs his shoulder and he responds with a vicious elbow into his attacker that definitely breaks some ribs. He tries to calm down the panic button but it keeps on going up.

His mind goes hazy with adrenaline as he begins to beat in on the hoodlums, only vaguely aware of the damage he's causing. He swipes left, knocking one in the knee and using him to topple one of the others. Another tries to rush him with smoke filled hands but Izuku slams the bō hard into his groin, putting the man on the ground and out of the fight.

"S-shit, let's get out of here, a couple of yen isn't worth it!" One guy says, speeding off. Izuku can't afford to pay attention to him while he's still fighting, trying to keep his head clear through the distracting, choking feeling of fear.

The last thug standing is tall and mean looking as he attacks with the knife. A few of the hits glance off him but Izuku's armor protects him. He avoids another swipe from the knife and jumps using his staff so his foot knocks into the thug's face. Izuku lets gravity carry them down until he slams the man's head into the ground. Izuku can tell he's unconscious by the fear suddenly letting up like a bubble popping.

"Are you," Izuku begins hoarsely, "are you both okay?" He asks, turning to the young family. The woman is shaking and nods slowly, pulling her daughter behind her. "There's uh a shelter, on Arakawa, was it? You should probably go now while it's clear." He says, leaning heavily on his staff. The adrenaline is wearing off reminding him that he's been through three exhausting days of training. Still, he thinks with a bit of pride, not bad for his first official fight. Maybe he'll be able to pull this hero thing off after all.

"Th-thank you," the woman whispers in a hush, pulling her daughter into her arms and running away. Izuku looks down at the two men on the ground. He pulls some zipties from one of his pockets and restrains them so they don't start harassing anyone else. "Watch out for the Hero Killer!" He hears the woman call back hesitantly before continuing on.

The Hero Killer? That's right, the train was derailed early so they were probably in Hosu. Is he responsible for this? Izuku looks around at the fire and sound of raging monsters in the distance. No, this isn't the Hero Killer's style, he was about death and dismemberment in darkened alleys, like with Iida's bro- Izuku freezes, the vestiges of the thug's quirk pounding loud in his ears as his mind jumps to the worst case scenario.

Iida's brother was the first person attacked by the Hero Killer in Hosu who usually killed multiple heroes before moving cities. Iida had chosen quiet Hosu, out of all of the agencies that had nominated him, to spend his internship. He thinks of how off Iida has been the last week, how unsettling he'd looked when they'd separated at the train station. No, he wouldn't, he... Izuku thinks of his mother and what he would do if someone ever hurt her.

Goddammit Iida.

Izuku stands up and looks around at all the potentially dangerous alleyways where Iida might be hiding. Where something evil could be lying in wait. It was just a theory, a crazy theory probably caused by lingering fear, but he can't let it go.

This is too big for him, Izuku pulls out his phone and types a quick message to the only other person he knows in the area. He stashes his bō behind his back and starts running despite the exhaustion. There's got to be a hundred alleyways in Hosu; he can't search them all but he can search some. Maybe he'll run into Iida doing normal, hero work. Maybe he'll find the Hero Killer has broken his pattern and left Hosu. Maybe-

XxX

Tenya had imagined many times his encounter with the Hero Killer during this past week but somehow he never envisioned this. He's being held down on the ground, both by the killer's boot and by the katana imbedded in his shoulder. The pain is intense, unlike anything he's ever felt but he's too full of anger to properly acknowledge it.

"My brother gave me a dream! He was an amazing hero and you took that away from him!" Tenya screams himself raw, "I'm going to make you pay for what you did!"

"If you're such a great hero, then why didn't you save him first?" The Hero Killer grinds out in a raspy voice. Tenya turns to see the hero Native still slumped up against the side of the building. Oh. He'd... forgotten that the other hero was there, that he'd interrupted Stain's attempted murder.

"A real hero wouldn't act for his own sake, he'd prioritize the rescue of others above all else. Instead you let your anger overwhelm you and you turned to selfish desires. You're just as much trash as all the other so called heroes." Stain rips the katana out of his shoulder and drags his tongue along it. Tenya feels his whole body freeze up, he can't even move his fingers. What is this? Is this his quirk?

"And that's why you'll die right here, before you can infect the masses." Stain brings up his blade again and it glints in the pale moonlight. True terror seizes Tenya. He didn't tell anyone where he was going. There's some other disaster happening out in the streets so no one would be looking for him. He's really going to die here. The blade comes down and slashes open his cheek, just barely missing splitting his skull, and imbeds in his prone left hand. He yells but his body won't respond to him, won't allow him to run from the agonizing pain.

"Actually, before I kill you, I want you to see something. I want you to see that your selfishness has a cost, child." Stain turns towards Native, a sadistic grin visible in the pale moonlight. "Look at what you could have prevented, had you not let rage blind you."

"N-no, stop," Tenya wheezes as the killer steps closer to the limp hero.

"G-get up, kid, run away while he's distracted. Go, get help," Native whimpers softly as Stain hovers over him. He screams when Stain stabs the katana into his gut and it freezes Tenya's blood. On an ordinary day, the noise would draw attention but with the chaos happening outside of this alley, it might as well be silent.

"Stop it! He's done nothing to you! Please!" Tenya begs, tears watering his vision as he watches the agony play across the pro hero's face and the growing bloodstain blossom on his uniform as the blade is pulled out with agonizing slowness.

"He's just another symptom of the disease, a no good hero who uses the oppression of a marginalized people as a damned costume." With another quick slice, the katana cuts through Native's neck causing a gush of blood to spill out. Native eyes widen and then dull as his head falls unnaturally to the side.

Tenya can't contain the force of his horrified sobbing. That man is dead because of him, because he couldn't control his anger long enough to see the danger the other hero was in. He squeezes his eyes shut. He's tossed aside everything his brother stood for. He doesn't deserve his name or costume, maybe he doesn't even deserve his own life.

"Now it's your turn, boy," Stain says. "It's not truly your fault, you're just another product of his unholy society that worships power above all else. Because you are young, I will make it quick. Then I will see what hell that Shigaraki child has been causing." Native's blood dribbles into his hair as Stain holds the blade just above the crown of his head. "Goodbye, Ingenium."

"Iida! Move!" A shout comes from outside of the alley and Tenya hears Stain step back a few paces as he observes the newcomer who has dashed protectively in front of Tenya. It takes him a moment or two to place the familiarity of the voice, when he does, his heart sinks.

"Midoriya! You need to leave right now! You don't stand a chance! Go get help, tell them the Hero Killer is here!" He shouts. Tenya likes the other boy but no amount of cleverness will protect his quirkless classmate from the Hero Killer's wrath. He's already watched one person die today, he won't let his friend be another victim of his own ineptitude.

"The Hero K-" Midoriya's breath catches as he spots Native's body. This close, Tenya can see him shaking but, instead of running like a sensible person, Midoriya stands his ground. "No," He begins resolutely, "I'm not leaving without you."

"Midoriya huh?" Stain drawls out lazily, "I know you, you're one of the Yuuei students Shigaraki wants to kill. The quirkless kid who showed everyone up at the Sports Festival." The man grins something vicious, "I was impressed by your determination to stand up to the corrupt system. Tell me, do you think that by fighting me you can continue to crawl your way up the blood soaked ladder of pro heroes?"

"This has nothing to do with you, just go!" Tenya screams again, wondering how Midoriya could be so smart and so foolish all at once. He should know that he doesn't stand a chance without a quirk.

"Shut up Iida!" Midoriya shouts with more venom than he's ever heard from the boy before. "I know you think I'm crazy, trying to fight. But you're my friend and I'm not going to leave you at the mercy of a killer." He falls into one of his fighting stances. "If this is it and this is my last battle then so be it but I am not going to let him hurt you or anyone else as long as I can still fight. Even someone useless like me can make a difference if I can save even one life!" He screams with such tenacity that Tenya almost believes it.

He looks up at Midoriya's back, he's scared, yes, but he's also strong.

Todoroki's words from the train station come back to him with sudden intensity. How had Todoroki described him? Right, Todoroki had said Midoriya made him feel safe. Lying on the ground, probably moments away from being killed, Tenya can almost believe in the quirkless boy from the sheer conviction in his voice. He hears a light tapping sound and he can see from this angle that Midoriya is typing on his phone behind his back.

For the first time since he was pinned down, Tenya feels hope.

"Look at you!" Stain shouts gleefully. "I misjudged you, hero! I thought you were just another attention seeker but you!" He points his bloodied katana at Midoriya. "You, who've been mistreated by the system more than most, have more heroism in you than all of the pros I've had the misfortune of meeting. It would be a waste to cut down someone with so much promise," he says with sickening sincerity. "But your friend is already lost and it is my duty to eliminate him from this world. If you get in my way, I will make sure that you join him."

"You're not going to touch him, not as long as I'm alive," Midoriya shouts, racing forward with his staff poised to strike. Tenya watches with horror as Midoriya and Stain begin exchanging blows, moving quicker than he can accurately track. He can only hope Midoriya's message gets out soon. Stain is only going to humor them for so long before he gets serious.

[polarwandersea]

Proof of a right wing conspiracy. Gennifer Flowers.

This is going to be the first of a series of text posts that will offer information on several Clinton scandals. All of the quotes and information cited are coming from the sole source of the book: The Hunting of the President. The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton by Joe Conason & Gene Lyons. I’m doing these text posts because this book offers a lot of insight on the scandals that I did not know at first and a lot of facts that are not put out there for people to know. This may be lengthy but it’s worth the read. That being said this first post is going to be on the Gennifer Flowers scandal.

Larry Nichols In order to Understand the Gennifer Flowers scandal it is important to introduce  the man who was at the heart of this scandal and helped construct it. That man is Larry Nichols. Nichols had a grudge against Bill Clinton. This is due to the fact that in 1988, Nichols (who was from Conway Arkansas) had landed a new job as a marketing consultant for the Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA), the state’s centralized public bonding agency. Now this is important, the ADFA was created by Clinton Legislation over the strong opposition of Stephens Inc (this will come into play for another scandal.) Nichols’s brief career at ADFA was ill-fated from the start. Several things happened: 1. When Betsey Wright, heard that Nichols had been hired by the agency’s director, and that he had invoked her name to get the job, she was furious. She had instructed personnel directors at other agencies who had asked about Nichols over the years that he was a dangerous con artist and political opportunist. 2. Nichols was preoccupied with issues more global than the marketing of Arkansas bonds. He started telling other ADFA employees that he was a CIA operative working on behalf of Nicaraguan contras. The CIA part was false but the claim wasn’t altogether false because he had gotten involved with the Collation of Peace Through Strength, an organization headed by the retired general John Singlaub-one of marine lieutenant’s colonel Oliver North’s secret money conduits in the Iran-Contra affair. What ended up happening was that “for five months, Nichols devoted himself to the contra cause while drawing a state salary, until the Associated Press discovered he had taken his politics to work. In September 1988 the AP reported that since coming to ADFA, Nichols had placed 642 long-distance telephone calls, at state expense, to Contra leaders and politicians who supported them. “ 3. Due to all this, Bill had to fire Nichols.  “Although Clinton was traveling abroad on a trade mission when the phone-call story broke, Betsey Wright made sure he learned about it immediately: “I woke him up in Asia in the middle of the night and told him to fire Nichols.” The next day state officials forced Nichols to resign. This part is important: he left protesting his innocence and complaining about the “knee-jerk liberal reaction from Governor Clinton.”

Gennifer Flowers So what does Nichols have to do with the Flowers scandal? It seems as though everything. He had the motive and revenge seeking after being fired and humiliated. Fast facts: 1. Larry Nichols called a press conference at the Arkansas state capitol on October 1990. He handed out copies go a $3million libel lawsuit against Bill Clinton. He complained that he had been wrongly fired from his state job as a “scapegoat” in order to conceal the “the largest scandal ever perpetrated on the taxpayers of Arkansas.” Nichols accused Governor Clinton of having misused ADFA funds for “improper purposes.” Nichols also presented a list of 5 alleged Clinton mistresses upon whom those funds had supposedly been spent. 2. Among the women listed was Gennifer Flowers. This is important as well: Flowers turned out to be the only one of the five women who Nichols knew personally. The two had recorded advertising jingles together and still used the same booking agent. And there was one more interesting coincidence: In early October, about two weeks before Nichols’s press conference, Gennifer Flowers had called the governor’s office seeking help in finding a state job.

Now a bit more of a profile on Gennifer Flowers herself: Musicians and club owners who had worked with Flowrs described her as manipulative and dishonest. Her resume falsely proclaimed her to be graduate of a fashionable Dallas Prep school she’d never attended. It also listed a University of Arkansas nursing degree she’d never earned and membership in a sorority that had never heard of her. Her agent told the Democrat-Gazette that contrary to her claims, Flowers had never opened for comedian Rich Little. A brief gig on the Hee Haw television program had come to a bad end, the agent would later confirm, when Flowers simply vanished for a couple of weeks with a man she’s met in a Las Vegas casino-and then concocted a tale of having been kidnapped. She had never been Miss Teenage America. Even her “twin sister Genevieve” turned out to be purely a figment of Flower’s imagination.

Given all this so far it is easy to conclude that the Gennifer Flowers scandal was one incited by revenge for Nichols and fame for Flowers. But what about the tapes you may ask? There are holes in that “evidence” as well.

The Tapes: It is important to note that each of the four taped conversations between Bill Clinton and Flowers revolved around the same topics: Larry Nichol’s accusation’s and Flower’s supposed fear and loathing of the tabloid press.

Now here are some quotes between Bill and Flowers that poke more holes in her claims of having a twelve year affair:

“Gennifer,” he said, “It’s Bill Clinton.” His voice was muffled and for a longtime lover, oddly formal. Flowers remarked that he didn’t sound like himself. Did he have a cold? “Oh it’s just my….every year about this time I.. My sinuses go bananas.” Bill’s allergies affect him every spring and fall. His voice gets hoarse and his nose swells and reddens. Anyone intimate with him for more than a decade, as Flowers insisted she had been, might be expected to know that.

Once again she launched into a tale of woe. Parties unknown, she said, had broken into her apartment and rifled the place. “There wasn’t any sign of a break-in,” she explained,” but the drawers and things. There wasn’t anything missing that I can tell, but somebody had…” “Somebody had gone through your stuff?’ Bill asked. “But they didn’t steal anything. “ “No..I had jewelry here, and everything was still here.” This is possibly why Flowers never reported the any break-in to the Little Rock Police Department. Years later, she would pin the rap for this alleged burglary on Bill Clinton himself. It is also important to note that at no point on any of Flower’s tapes did Bill Clinton say anything that indicated a long-term sexual relationship with her. During one of their earlier talks, Clinton had told her about his joking response to Bill Simmons, a Little Rock AP reporter who had read him the bimbo list over the phone.” I said, ‘God Bill, I kinda hate to deny it. They’re all beautiful women.’  I told you a couple of years ago when I came to see you that I’d retired. Now I’m glad I have, because they (his Republican enemies) have scoured the waterfront. And they couldn’t find anything.” This quote you just read is the full quote. Often times on Youtube channels, they will cut the audio at the end of the ‘they’re all beautiful women part.’

Most probable relationship of Bill and Flowers affair: 1. The account that probably came closest to the truth was a column by the Democrat-Gazette’s John Brummet, a respected political analyst and frequent Clinton critic. His sources said Flowers had mentioned to friends fifteen years earlier that she was “having a fling with Clinton,” but “they say they heard nothing from her after 1979 about a relationship with Clinton and were surprised and skeptical upon reading her assertion in Star magazine of a twelve year affair that only ended in 1989.    “They are also dubious about her assertion that she was in love with Clinton all those years, dreaming of marriage. They say that she had other relationships in Dallas and Little Rock during that time.. They speculate that she doesn’t like men generally and probably enjoys using them. Their instinctive reaction to the Star article is that her vivid, detailed account probably contains truth, exaggeration and fabrication, not necessarily in equal parts.”

2. Her ex-room mate Lauren Kirk told CNN corespondent Art Harris, that she believed Flowers had lied for revenge and money. “She just can’t accept the fact that he (Clinton) came, wiped himself off, zipped up and left.”

Concluding: If Bill and Flowers did have an affair it was the typical affair of a few sexual encounters but not a twelve year or loving relationship.

Aftermath: On the morning of the Clinton’s 60 minutes appearance, a very curious item appeared on the front page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Larry Nichols announced that he was dropping the liberal suit trumpeted in the Star only a week earlier. “The feud is over,” he said. “I want to tell everybody what I did to try to destroy Governor Clinton.” In a one-page statement distributed to the Little Rock press, Nichols claimed that his only motive had been to avenge his wrongful firing four years earlier. “The media has made a circus out of this thing and now it’s gone way too far,” he wrote. “When the Star article first came out, several women called asking if I was willing to pay them to say they had an affair with Bill Clinton.”

Honorable mentions: 1.Gennifer Flowers once boasted about the many married men she’d seduce for fun and profit: “I usually throw them back. I don’t want to keep then. Let the wives have them back.” 2. The agreement between Flowers and the Star stipulated that no one would ever be allowed to examine her original tapes. 3. Flowers never produced a single photograph, valentine, or birthday card as evidence of her twelve-year affair with Clinton; no witness ever came forward who had seen them together. 4. Flowers had claimed that between 1978 and 1980, she and Bill had enjoyed many trysts in Little Rock’s Excelsior Hotel. The Excelsior Hotel wasn’t built until 1983.

If you read this all the way through thank you and I hoped it shed more light on the Flowers scandal as it did for me. This and my future posts for this text post series will be found under the hashtag:proofofarightwingconspiracy.

[relieity]

█ ▌ CHARA STUDY ! ┊♞┊  PHANTOM THIEVES !

A COMMON THEME with Ouma’s character are his associations with notably ‘EVIL’ or at the very least, ‘morally-grey’characters and themes. He himself, is incredibly morally-grey, and there’s no disputing it. What CAN be disputed though, is his strongest association: PHANTOM THIEVES.

His actions align almost PERFECTLY with the morals and mindset of a ‘true phantom thief’. In fact, his Love Hotel event–his fantasy–is based on him BEING one. What I’d like to look at specifically, are the MAIN CHARACTERISTICS of them, and how they correlate. I’ll get into his FASCINATION with them later. some mild spoilers ahead!

First off, let’s look at the CHARACTERISTICS listed under the trope of ‘Phantom Thief’.

-STEALS ITEMS THAT ARE NOT MERELY VERY EXPENSIVE BUT OFTEN PRICELESS: FINE ART, UNIQUE GEMS, HISTORICAL ARTIFACTS.

While it’s not seen outright, it is implied pretty heavily (especially in his motive video) that Ouma is, in fact, a thief. ‘Petty crimes’ almost certainly has theft and thievery in its mix, and although it’s inconclusive as to what he stole, he certainly FANTASIZES about completing grand heists. He even says it himself, directly to Saihara!

“BUT I WON’T SPILL THE HIDDEN LOCATION OF THE STOLEN JEWELRY! NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU TORTURE ME, IT’S USELESS~!”

Sure, it’s a fantasy–but the fact he thinks up situations that are far more grandiose than he achieved in reality, breaking his usual ‘logical’ mask momentarily, says a lot.  

-LEAVES A CALLING CARD FOR THE INTENDED VICTIM.

It’s not exactly a calling card by definition, but the message he leaves on the stone outside–both later being a red herring and evidence in its own right–meets enough standards to classify.

“THIS WORLD IS MINE, KOKICHI OUMA.”

Technically, it can be argued that he didn’t write this message. There has been a lot of debate on it, but as far as I’m concerned he DID add onto it. The style of writing matches close enough, and it aligns with his plans in Chapter 5 to make him appear as the mastermind. By the time the message is complete, he’s already painted a target on his back, and very few if any trust him–it’s all according to plan, and leaving that ‘message’ for the rest of the cast to find has the effect it needs to.

-IS A MASTER OF DISGUISE.

Also not entirely relevant canonically, but in his research lab, there are various outfits, masks, and general accessories. Given other aspects of his character, it wouldn’t be surprising for Ouma to be skilled in other areas of this as well.

-USES TRICKERY AND ILLUSIONS TO ESCAPE UNDETECTED.

‘TRICKERY’ by far is one of the KEY POINTS of his character. There are multiple points in the game where both the protagonist and current cast genuinely have no idea where Ouma is. Whether he ran off and ‘disappeared’, or is just missing for long expanses of time, it’s a pretty common theme that he seems to ‘vanish without a trace’. Not that others usually care most of the time, but when they do, it’s met with CONCERN. Thanks to his lies and his ‘tricks’, him being missing in action is definitely something to worry over. He’s almost ALWAYS up to something.

-HAS A RIVAL IN THE FORM OF A GREAT DETECTIVE OR A STUBBORN POLICE INSPECTOR.

S/AIHARA S/HUUICHI. Fantasy aside, where Saihara keeps his talent, Ouma does play the primary ‘rival’ role in N/DRV3. Just as with Naegi/Togami and Hinata/Komaeda, Ouma stakes his place next to Saihara pretty frequently, and counters him just as much. With Saihara’s truths, you have Ouma’s lies, so on and so forth. Even with outfit design, they’re stark contrasts, and perfectly capture the Detective/Thief trope.

-HAS A STRICT CODE OF HONOR, RANGING FROM REFUSING TO COMMIT MURDER TO OUTRIGHT ANNOUNCING HEISTS IN ADVANCE.

DICE’S MOTTO, or at least key rule is just that: they forbid murder. Breaking this even in the slightest way in Chapter 4 hurts Ouma pretty greatly, at least emotionally. As much as he plays the villain, and as much as he doubts the possibility of DICE being real, the fact he essentially broke the most important rule they had is…distressing, to say the least.

What Ouma wants to do, be it in a roundabout way, is HELP the others in the killing game by ending the game once and for all. While he did what was necessary to put his plans into motion, it still stings–but the rule still applies nonetheless.

-STEALS FOR REASONS OTHER THAN PERSONAL GAIN, SUCH AS PERSONAL CHALLENGE, BEING A TROLL OR VIGILANTE JUSTICE.

Another thing mentioned in the Love Hotel, and also implied with his character: he HATES boredom. For the most part, playing the role of a phantom thief is ‘entertaining’, but in his event, he notes this, specifically:

“THE STEALING PART WAS TOO EASY, AND I DIDN’T FEEL ANY EXCITEMENT AT ALL…”

He’s sort of a thrill-seeker, or at the least, seeks to easehis boredom. Thefts of such a grand nature are simply an attempt to ALLEVIATE that, albeit unsuccessfully.

Also in-canon, he shows GREAT FINESSE in thievery: lockpicking aside, he was able to form a plan (The Insect Meet-and-Greet Meeting) to make breaking into the cast’s respective rooms to ‘steal’ their Kubzpads. As well as ‘stealing’ key items from crime scenes to store in his room, the mess we see in Chapter 6 is evidence enough for that.

-MAY OR MAY NOT ACTUALLY BREAK THE LAWS OF PHYSICS OR THE COMMON SENSE ALTOGETHER TO ACHIEVE THEIR GOAL.

this is where it gets iffy. This is purely SPECULATION, but the fact he seemed at least somewhat aware of Amami’s talent/the code to the vaults in Amami’s research lab PRIOR TO discovering it leads to the assumption that he knew some way around the campus/area surrounding them, even past the ‘blocks’ put into place. It’s a canon fact he investigated on his own terms–but to what extent?

For lack of information, I like to personally assume he found ‘secrets’ within the walls of the academy, more specifically, he found more HIDDEN PASSAGES to get from one way to another. Basic moral decency kept him from discovering the mastermind’s secret passage in the girl’s bathroom, but there were likely others around that he quickly learned to navigate with little to no suspicion. Given the fact the passage we’ve seen leaves it difficult to determine if someone was present, it can only be assumed these ones were the same way, making it a PERFECT route to and from certain areas of the school.

-IS MEANT TO BE EITHER ADMIRED BY THE AUDIENCE OR AT THE VERY LEAST RESPECTED FOR THEIR WIT, AUDACITY AND ADHERENCE TO SELF-MADE RULES.

He definitely did play up the ‘character’ he was given, a ‘villain’ through and through. By Chapter 2, he had already speculated that there was an audience present somewhere. Why else would Monokuma stick so strictly to the rules put in place if they were the sole survivors? At this point, he further EXAGGERATES what personality he had before. This only progresses throughout the time he’s alive, and it’s easy enough to admit that we, the audience, did respect his ‘wit’ through sly remarks and every lie he told. (Including, too, the ‘white lies’, the ‘half-truths’.) Ouma is a character you either love or hate, and he lived up to that.

Enough about characteristics though, let’s get into his FASCINATION.

To keep it brief, their morals are exactly what he stands for. Seeking thrills without harm, or at least as little harm as possible–but definitely without murder. What Ouma seeks constantly is ‘ENTERTAINMENT’, and in a direct quote, he “LIVES TO ENTERTAIN.” A Phantom Thief is little more than an aspiration and an inspiration, they’re not entirely ‘good’, sure, but they’re ‘good’ enough, AND they’re fun to boot!  In becoming one, it’s almost certain that he’ll be seeking out grander and grander challenges, more difficult feats to overcome, and he’ll almost always be entertained. neverbored.

Knowing he has a DETECTIVE always after his trail (in his fantasy: SAIHARA), it just adds to the excitement. When, if ever, will he be caught? Can he lie his way out of conviction? So on and so forth. In every way, shape, and form, a phantom thief is exactly what he wants to be, and what he wants from his life.

This sort of thought process seeps into the appearance of DICE, as well. If not only mildly, it’s never explained why or what they do in vivid detail, but masking their faces is a common thread with thieves, or at least criminals in general. (For a more recent reference: the phantom thieves in P/ersona 5, hiding their identities whenever they go into the metavers/e.) They’re all a group of criminals, seeking their own entertainment, their own thrill–even if it’s through theft, pranks, vandalism, or whatever ‘petty’ crime they decide to commit, it’s all for the thrill of it.

[apparitionism]

Helicobacter 13

Previously on Helicobacter, Myka called Helena on the phone. In the middle of the night. Because nobody was asleep. And this part is what ensues during that call. It’s not salacious, so I guess you can take “don’t worry” or “sorry” from me on that as you prefer. (I’m in fact not sorry at all.) As for who Myka’s boss is, I didn’t even try for anything new or interesting there; that’s definitely a “sorry.” Another “sorry” is that in this part, I got lazy with regard to tags and actions—you’re seeing only Helena’s side of the phone conversation, and I could have worked harder to move her around in the space, make her pick objects up and put them down, all the things we do when we’re alone and talking to someone who isn’t present. There’s no excuse for laziness, so I’m calling it what it is. There also may have been some slothfulness in part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, and part 12. Just to remind you, THIS IS A VERY SILLY STORY.

Helicobacter 13

The idea of Myka working on an idea—well, that provoked in Helena yet more heart-hammering, accompanied by nervous speculation: who would be pretending to have what relationship with whom? For whom would the pretending take place? And who would be presumed, possibly erroneously, to have foreknowledge, or no foreknowledge, of the relationship that was being pretended but was also most likely real? Helena leaned her upper body forward, onto the counter, beside her telephone, hoping that the cool of the manufactured stone against her torso might calm her...  it was no help. “I wish you wouldn’t,” she lied.

“I don’t believe you. Like I said, we have to make this work.”

“We don’t have to,” Helena said. Not a lie, but close.

“How can you say that? It’s practically a religious obligation at this point.”

Helena heard herself make Charles’s question-noise.

“You’re awfully cute,” Myka said, and did that have to do with the noise itself or with what she saw as Helena’s dimwittedness? “Call it karma if you want, but honestly, why would any god who’d sell me your undergraduate city planning textbook and give me cancer and make me throw up on you and put Rick in the hospital they took me to even bother to get up in the morning after all that if the point weren’t for us to at least try to be together?”

“Why indeed.” Helena had to grant that it all did incline one to, in the manner of Myka’s mother, sigh and say words about destiny.

“I mean even if we’re going with karma, we have to help bring about that inevitable result. So I’ve been thinking a lot about ethics.”

Helena turned her back to the telephone, so she could pretend that Myka was there with her, standing behind her. “I have too.”

“But I bet,” pretend-Myka said, “you’ve been thinking about them as barriers. Like fences. Glass to keep somebody under. Right?”

“Hmph” was all Helena could muster, because of course Myka was right. The sound of Myka’s voice, which in the manner of mobile phones faded and strengthened, cutting out then back in, made her envision Myka’s image, there behind her, as a ghostly flicker... here, immateriality was the barrier. Entirely paradoxical. Would Myka come up with something similarly paradoxical with regard to ethics? Ethics as the absence of morality?

Myka answered this unspoken question with the non sequitur of another question: “Do you know what a circumstance actually is?”

Model trees, was Helena’s immediate thought, but the real memory-echo in her head was “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She asked, with some trepidation, “What do you mean?”

“Circumstance. The word. Its etymology.”

“Circum. ‘Around,’ obviously. And stance... I don’t know.” Shameful to admit. “Something to do with one’s position?”

“Don’t sound so embarrassed; I didn’t know either. It’s from the Latin stare, means ‘to stand.’ So the circumstance is everything standing, everything existing, all around us. That’s the barrier.”

“The circumstance.”

“Exactly. Not some mayoral rule governing it that says I can’t kiss you. So the circumstance is what has to change. And here’s the good news: it already has.”

She made it sound so appealing, and even better, so true. Helena, trying to be the voice of realism, said, “No it hasn’t.”

“Don’t be so sure. You can’t step in the same river twice, right? I’m pretty sure that a circumstance plus time becomes a different circumstance. We need the right people to recognize that. That’s why I’ve been working on this idea.”

Helena tried to gird herself with cynicism as she said, “All right. What is the idea?”

“What if I got sick again?”

That seemed yet another non sequitur of a question. “I don’t see how that is anything but the present circumstance minus time. I also don’t see how it is an idea.”

“I don’t believe anybody’s heart is made of stone,” Myka then said.

You have importuned her to say things you don’t expect, Helena reminded herself. “I’m not completely certain I agree, but I am completely certain I don’t understand what that has to do with any circumstance at all.”

“See, let’s say I have a relapse.”

At that, Helena whirled around to face the telephone—but Myka could not see her indignation, so Helena barked, as firmly as she could, “No. You will not ingest H. pylori intentionally. You have nothing to prove, about ulcers or anything else, and there can be no benefit to putting yourself in that bullet’s path again. Absolutely not.”

“I’d say I’m pretty sure you’re worth the risk—and I am pretty sure—but that wasn’t what I had in mind.”

“I am genuinely afraid to ask.”

“I don’t really have a relapse. I have a fake one. And you find out about it, and you come racing to be by my side.”

“You’re proposing a deathbed—or, I hope, sickbed—confession of some sort?”

“Right, because here’s the kicker: in front of my boss.”

“I don’t see how this solves the problem.”

“We are going to melt her not-made-of-stone heart.”

“First, you are making an unwarranted assumption,” Helena said, and Myka made an exaggerated version of the interrogative noise. As if she wanted to make fun of both Helena and Charles—though of course she could not have wanted to make fun of Charles. But Helena gave a response of the sort she would have given to her brother: “That her heart is made of some substance with a melting point lower than that of some unspecified stone.”

“I see that my actual unwarranted assumption was the notion that you could just leave the poor metaphors alone.”

“You’re the one who mixed them,” Helena noted. “But second, if Jane Lattimer is one to be moved by sentiment, why can’t we melt her heart, whatever its composition, by pleading our case? Saying that we want to be together?”

“Because then she’d know we’ve been sneaking around behind her back since that first hospital incident.”

“But then why would we declare our love in this second hospital incident? If I haven’t seen you since the first?”

Myka said, greatly smug, “Because I know something you don’t know. Well, two things. No, three—or wait, four—”

“This comes as no surprise. And I’m sure you should continue counting.”

“The first thing is, you’ve been emailing me. Privately.”

“No I haven’t.”

“Yes you have.”

“No I haven’t.”

“You need to listen to me really carefully: yes you have.”

Helena squinted at the telephone. Could that prompt it to make Myka’s words make more sense? “I have? Aren’t I far more ethical than that?”

“You haven’t done it as you.”

“I’ve done it as... whom, exactly?” She dreaded the answer.

“Rick.”

“I’ve been emailing you, but as Rick.”

“Right.”

“And so,” Helena said, turning her back once again on the telephone and the voice of absurdity emanating from it, “the logical conclusion to be drawn, regarding myself, is that I have lost my mind.”

Myka, cheerful: “If you look at it right, that’s basically the plan.”

Helena looked over her shoulder. “The plan is that I have lost my mind.”

“Over me! See, what happened was, you found me irresistible. In the hospital, that first time.”

Which prompted Helena to picture Myka in her hospital bed. Pale, vulnerable—the tempt-fate notion of pretending their way through it all again made Helena consider refusing to participate, no matter what Myka wanted. She could in such a way give Myka her protection one last time... but of course what Myka had said about being irresistible was true. Feeling very much at war with herself, Helena acquiesced, saying, “That, I can affirm.”

“Good. Certain parts of this conversation had me thinking maybe you’d changed your position. But so, mind lost, and after that... I haven’t quite worked this part out yet, but I think you ran into Rick. And of course the topic of me came up.”

“Of course. My poor lost mind wandering where it would.”

Helena could hear, and picture, the smile Myka wore as she continued her description of the “plan”: “You’d been trying to find a way to stay in touch with me, despite being so very very ethical and never wanting to do anything that would put livelihoods at risk. You said something romantic about that, and he was feeling guilty about how he did me wrong, so he agreed to facilitate you emailing me as him. Just so you could keep hearing my voice, even electronically.”

“Have you noticed that you and your charms are the stars of this story? Why haven’t you been emailing me as someone else because I’m so irresistible?”

“I’m sorry, whose plan is this?”

“Point taken. Carry on.”

“Okay, so you’ve been emailing me as him. And here’s the part where you get to be the awesome one: I think I’m falling for him again.”

“I don’t see how I’m notably awesome in that scenario. I don’t see how I’m notably part of that scenario.”

Myka exhaled with noise, and she dropped her voice. “On the basis of your words.”

“Oh.”

Myka said, returning to her jaunty “plan” voice, “History repeating. It’s elegant.”

“It’s... something. So how does this resolve?”

“I have a relapse. I go back to the hospital. Rick ends up being my doctor again, and I say, ‘No, he can’t treat me; we’re in love.’”

“In front of Jane Lattimer.”

“Correct. And Rick, who in this show is a quick thinker, says, ‘But it’s not me you’re in love with. I’ve called Cyrano; she’s on her way over.’ And then you bust in.”

Charles would love this, Helena reflected. In his honor, she asked, “Have you composed an appropriate soundtrack? I can’t imagine a melodrama like this without the swell of strings cueing the audience’s emotions.”

“If you can’t sell this without strings, you don’t deserve me,” Myka pronounced.

“I’m not sure I do deserve you. In any of the ways that might be taken.”

“And so then what you do is, you declare your love.” The smile was still there as Myka said, “If you still feel like it, you undeserving meanie.”

Helena couldn’t help but smile in response as she said, “So according to your plan, we are in the hospital in front of your superior, having declared our love for each other.”

“Right.”

But now Helena stopped smiling. “Whereupon we swear to fall out of love instantly, so as to remain gainfully employed? I don’t see how this indicates any change in circumstance.”

“That’s where the second thing I know comes in.”

“I am on tenterhooks.”

“I’m more productive at work when I’m happy. And my boss knows it.”

“Aren’t most people? And don’t most people know it?”

“That isn’t the thing I know.”

Helena sighed. “Again: tenterhooks.”

“I know that she remarked on it,” Myka said, smug again. “How happy I’ve been lately. How productive.”

“I’ve been miserable! How have you been happy?”

“Pay attention! I’ve been setting this up.”

Helena sighed again. She suspected she would be sighing a great deal more. “How is your duplicity not the stuff of legend?”

“Just waiting for my own personal Homer. And then Emily Wilson can translate tales of my duplicity from the Greek.”

“Why would anyone write about you in Greek?”

The telephone emitted its own exaggerated sigh. “Which problem do you want me concentrating on? How to convince someone to write about me in Greek, or how to get my boss to say it’s a good idea for us to be together? I can’t do everything at once!”

“But again, why don’t we just go to her and explain?” Helena asked.

“I would love to go to Emily Wilson and explain that someone needs to write about me in Greek, or even better that someone actually did, but sadly I think you mean my boss, which leads me to ask you, are you being dense on purpose? It’s so that I can be innocent!”

“What does that make me?” Helena asked. She had not been attending to her pot of coffee, but it was now ready. She was grateful for the distraction, grateful to be active as Myka conceded, “Well, it makes you guilty,” and followed that up with, “but not in the worst way!”

“Imagine my relief,” Helena said.

“Because you were trying to be good too. You didn’t reveal yourself to me.”

“What ethical paragons we both are.”

“The idea,” Myka said, speaking slowly again, “is that I wouldn’t have influenced your getting that library contract, because I thought I was in love with Rick, not with you.”

“Did you influence it?”

“Of course not. I mean, I have to confess: what I wanted to do was commandeer the committee and force them to advise the city council not to give it to you.”

“That is the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me,” Helena told her. She turned away from the telephone again, coffee in hand. She imagined Myka standing behind her, holding coffee of her own, as if this were a nonparticular morning. “I didn’t want to bid on it, by the way,” Helena added. “It’s my employees’ fault.”

“Ditto on the most romantic,” Myka said. If her voice seemed to move closer, that was of course Helena’s hopeful imagination. But what a ridiculously dramatic heart-swell it caused. Myka went on, “And on the basis of that, I’d say we both need to get out more, but I’d really rather neither of us did.”

“That is also romantic, and if we were in the same space, I would show you how very much I would rather stay in.” Even in the early morning. Or: especially in the early morning. Helena considered the two of them in this kitchen, sharing space well or poorly, perhaps running into each other unintentionally... although this was quite a large space, so here any collisions would most likely be intentional. On every available surface, Myka had said—Helena remembered it distinctly—and kitchens had many, many surfaces. Helena closed her eyes, to prevent herself from looking at, from considering, those surfaces, and she cleared her throat. “However, we were speaking about your ‘idea.’ To recap: you feign a relapse.”

“Bloody, like before,” Myka enthused.

“Really? The blood too?” It wasn’t that Helena minded blood as such, but Myka’s production of it had been so surprising. And so prodigious.

“Don’t be squeamish. It’ll be fake blood, and it’ll be all over Abigail instead of you. I’ll be water-gunning it at her—I’d originally been planning to water-gun it at you, to make it even more like last time, but she talked me out of it. Helped me come up with a scenario that makes it pretty easy to get Jane to the hospital with us. So you should thank her.”

This at least did not seem to be Abigail in her “goading” persona. But it was also not, or did not seem to be, Abigail in her “protect Myka” persona either. Some hybrid of the two? “Bloody bloody Abigail Cho—she knows already? About this... idea, if that’s what we’re calling it?”

“I needed somebody to get me intel about whether the ‘act happy and productive’ part of my plan was working.”

“Intel,” Helena echoed, and she said it again, with even greater disbelief: “Intel.” And at that point, she did ask herself, If this works, can you accept all of it? Can you in good faith maintain that this woman will not make you want to throw that book of koans, or perhaps that preposterously proposed pie, at her? She answered herself No, and then she said aloud, “I have never before in my life entertained the notion that I might not be able to refrain from throwing a pie at someone.”

“Then it’s about time. And I’m glad you chose me for that, too.”

“I didn’t say it was you at whom I might not be able to refrain from throwing a pie.” If Myka wanted to engage in don’t-be-dense pedantry, Helena could certainly return fire.

“I think you need to listen really carefully again: karma, destiny, and I did not come up with all this just so you could go and throw pies at someone who isn’t me.”

“You and karma and destiny sound like a singing group.” That was too flippant. “I wouldn’t pre-apologize to anyone else for it.”

“That’s a little better.”

“I feel that I should pre-apologize to Jane Lattimer, however.”

“What for?”

That could not possibly have been a genuine question. “Perhaps for her having to witness a ridiculous play, whatever the outcome? Also, I should apologize in traditional after-the-fact fashion, for having set this entire thing in motion with my textbook.”

“Right, another thing I know. First, your textbook got her me, and she loves me. Particularly, as Abigail confirms, happy and productive me, as opposed to fatigued and overworked me. So that’s point one for you.”

“Is there a point two?”

“Point two is that your textbook got her me, but it also got her you. And she loves you too.”

“She does?”

“I got the intel on that.”

Helena registered the pride in Myka’s voice. At this accomplishment. Someone who sounded very like Charles whispered, deep in Helena’s cerebral cortex, Helena, can you in good faith maintain? “Intel,” Helena repeated.

“Listen to me,” Myka said with some urgency, as if she really thought there were some danger Helena would not listen, “point three is that she’s outcome-driven above all else, and I told you, an initial circumstance plus time—plus time and, particularly for you, accomplishment—becomes a different circumstance. I know you haven’t interacted with her directly all that much, but she raves about your work, how smoothly the neighborhood project went, so the situation is, she wants to keep me, because I’m blameless and also productive, and she wants to keep you, because you’re effective and also professional, and she’ll want to find a way to do both those things at the same time.” Myka took a loud breath, which she no doubt needed. “Plus she’s all in on the library.”

“Well. It is a library.”

“It is. So what do you think I think about it?”

Upon hearing that utterance, Helena became very aware that she and Myka would need to negotiate some ceiling on the number of times per conversation that Myka was allowed to drop her voice for effect. Given that the effect was so ridiculously assured, it seemed an unfair advantage. As if her discursive deck of cards had an extra ace.

And then Myka threw yet another ace onto the table: “I’d love to be showing you, right this minute.”

Helena choked out, “That the construction of a library can put that note in your voice...”

An entire deck of aces, these played with another of those audible smiles: “There’s a reason for our being in love. With each other, no less.”

The proceedings did still seem to be shining. Despite their having spent only short, limited-in-number spans of time together. Because of their having spent only those spans? “Wait,” Helena said. “In love. Why haven’t you and Rick met up?”

“When?”

“At any point while you were... re-falling in love with him.” It pained Helena to say it, nearly as much as it had pained her to hear Myka speak of it. Even as a façade.

“That’s a surprisingly good question,” Myka said, and Helena didn’t know whether to be pleased or offended by that “surprisingly.” “It hadn’t crossed my mind... because of course I’m not really, so why would I have?” (Pleased.) “Maybe I was worried because of how it ended before? Maybe the epistles were just so great, I didn’t want to spoil anything? Look, parts of this, we’re just going to have to sell it, okay?”

“Why do you think I can do any such thing? I really am a terrible actor, faux-engagement performances notwithstanding. Not that they convinced anyone in any case. Rick quickly discerned the reality. So did your mother.”

“You’re being so negative about this, plus you’re reconstructing history. Rick needed a paramedic’s help, according to you, to get anywhere near the reality, and I’m the one who told my mom the whole truth. But anyway, it doesn’t matter, because you’ll have some semi-pro backup: speaking of my mom, she’s going to come help, and she used to do community theater.”

“That’s... surprisingly unsurprising,” Helena said. “And speaking of not being surprised, or possibly amazed, so did Steve. Do community theater, that is. In fact that’s how he and his boyfriend met.”

“More help! Steve and his boyfriend, I mean! This is great!” Then her voice drooped a bit. “If they have time.”

Helena snorted. “‘If they have time.’ As if you didn’t know that anyone and everyone who knows you or me would find time—would buy tickets!—to see this ridiculous enactment of... whatever it is. And none of this is ‘great,’ by the way. This is hell, it has been for months, and yet you are proposing to set it on fire.”

“Isn’t hell always on fire?”

That was not a non sequitur, and Helena nodded a concession, despite Myka’s inability to see it. “I admit I didn’t think that through. But it certainly has the potential to make everything worse.”

Myka didn’t accuse her of being negative again, but she did begin to speak more slowly, using her you are being dense voice. “Big conspiracies are way more believable than small ones, so the more people we have... plus it means you’ll have fewer lines. Can you at least convincingly say you love me? And don’t use that terrible American accent to try to throw me off, either.”

“I love you? Is there much difference between English and American versions of that?”

“Either way, I didn’t find that persuasive, but instead of getting offended, I’m going to chalk it up to you needing practice. You’ll get some, and fortunately pretty soon, because I’m having everybody over to my place to make sure we’re all on the same page for the big show.”

“What? When?”

“Saturday. Rick said that he should be able to get the hospital staff to play along with my ‘relapse’ on Monday, so my mom’s flying in on Friday.”

“How long have you been planning this?”

“Would you believe me if I said ‘my whole life’?”

“No.”

“How about ‘since the elevator this afternoon’?”

“Yesterday afternoon. We’re well into tomorrow. And also no.” But Helena did entertain a brief question-mark of possibility.

“Okay,” Myka said. “Since a few months ago. My heart jumped every time I saw your name on an email or a piece of paper, and I figured that meant we’d better get to work.”

“I love you,” Helena said, because it was the truth of the matter. She could most likely have chosen a more ideal moment to say the truth than while drinking coffee alone in her kitchen, not facing a telephone, but if she was not going to contrive to stand in a fountain quoting a koan while brandishing a lobster, then there was most likely no need to waste time on overinvestment in the particulars.

She was rewarded with, “That was better.” This time, Myka’s voice made Helena think not of extra aces, but rather of exactly why she was willing to go through whatever hell-intensifications Myka cared to set in motion. Then Myka, changing gears as she would, said, “I think you’re a method actor. Also, your brother.”

And back to the non sequiturs. “You think my brother is a method actor? Why would you think anything at all about—”

“No, I think your brother called me. Said you kept refusing to wreck my car, so I had to do something.”

“My brother.”

“Some guy who called himself Charles Wells, anyway, who claimed to have a sister named Helena who was for some reason acting weirdly out of character so she’d deserve me.”

“Oh god.” She added “avenge myself upon Charles in a way most painful to him” to the list of things that she would, in that ideal world of fountains et cetera, contrive to do.

“So you see why I think you can probably manage without the string section. In which he was so invested. You two are really, really related.”

“He stopped haranguing me about you. It was terrible: I thought that he genuinely believed I should be able to reconcile myself to the... circumstance. That I would.”

“No, it was because I told him to quit making you feel bad about trying to be noble. That I was in fact cooking this up.”

“I’m sure he was over the moon.”

“Other than being totally disappointed that he hadn’t come up with it himself? Yeah. He does a kind of cute giggle-snicker thing when he’s pleased. You do it too—even though I haven’t heard it in a while—so maybe it’s genetic? I did have to talk him out of flying over to help.”

“I am astonished you were able to convince him otherwise.”

“Neither of us could figure out a good reason why your brother would show up with you when you came rushing to the hospital. Charles was convinced he could pull it off, but ‘he just happened to be visiting’ seemed too contrived to me.”

Helena was sure her imagination was incapable of projecting the full hamming horror of what Charles would have got up to. “That seemed too contrived,” she said.

“You may not be aware of it, but you just giggle-snickered.”

“I did not.”

“To repeat: ‘You may not be aware of it, but.’”

“I am aware of wanting to be kissing you now.”

Myka made a giggle-snicker noise of her own. “To shut me up?”

“I suppose that would be an acceptable side benefit,” Helena said.

“For future reference, I wouldn’t mind you shutting me up like that.”

“I know you well enough to know that depending on your mood, you might find some way to mind it.”

“Just for that, now I want to try to find that way. To prove you right.”

“You are perverse.”

“You know you want to try to prove me wrong.”

Helena set her coffee cup down, simply so that she could raise her palms heavenward... a pointless gesture, in that it was perceived by neither Myka nor, most likely, any other celestial being. “Congratulations. I have now forgotten the difference between right and wrong. Speaking of ethics. Why do I feel as if this has been part of your plan all along?”

“The thing is, you actually do remember the difference. And so do I. And maybe, just maybe, the ridiculous place I work is starting to remember it too. Because I know one more thing that you don’t. And this is the real intel.”

“Is it.” Helena braced herself, literally, against the counter.

“Seriously. Saving the best for last here: I saw a draft memo that I wasn’t supposed to see.”

Now Helena glanced upward, a Really? eyeroll of which she was in this case glad Myka was not aware. “Skullduggery regarding memos. Excellent. Honestly, given your love of intel and other espionagery, I don’t see why you didn’t write me some clandestine ‘eyes only’ memo about all of this. One that would have self-destructed.”

“You didn’t want to hear my voice?”

After another look up, Helena told the truth. “I want to bathe in your voice. But it reminds me of what I can’t have.”

“Yet. What you can’t have yet. By the way, Charles said to make you sweat about whether he’d told me about the achieving of a grail.”

“I certainly won’t sweat one drop over that. He would never have been able to refrain from telling you.”

“You two know each other really well, in addition to being really related. I don’t actually mind having been achieved, but we need to get you past this counterproductive renouncing idea.”

“Lancelot renounces the queen, not the Grail,” Helena grumbled.

“He said you’d say that. But I’d like to point out that you’re not in fact Lancelot—also, I’m pretty sure I’m not a bejeweled cup. Or a queen, so if you could maybe come up with a different story.”

“Charles came up with it in the first place, and haven’t you already found a different one? Aren’t I Cyrano?”

“I was just shorthanding. There’s got to be something better then both of those. Come on, you’re the one building a library.”

“Will that still be true, after Monday’s events?”

“It will. And here’s why.” Myka paused, clearly for effect.

“The suspense,” Helena said. “What, oh what, will you reveal.” She suspected Myka was having more fun than she should, with her striptease of a plan, her “saving the best for last.”

“Funny you should put it that way. There’s going to be—wait for it!—a sunshine initiative. For which we are going to be the poster children if we play all of my setup cards right.”

This woman, and cards, and the playing of them... “What?” Helena said.

“Because now the idea is that disclosing conflicts of interest is maybe even better than not having them.”

“I hate to be repetitive, but: what?”

“The best I can figure is that the administration’s political opponents seem to be getting suspicious about the fact that there aren’t any. Conflicts, I mean. It all seems too perfect, particularly as a change from the old regime.”

“It is not too perfect.”

“Right. Exactly. But this is why this is perfect: we’ve suddenly realized there’s a conflict. Jane can go to the mayor and say ‘Look! Blameless adorable girls! Let’s shine the sun on them!’”

“Blameless adorable girls. Upon whom the sun will be shining.” Helena shook her head, then vocalized it: “I am shaking my head at you. Do you really think the circumstance is that different now?”

“I really think there’s only so long I can pretend to be happy.”

Helena refilled her cup. Perhaps it was the drinking of coffee that heightened feelings of guilt... Myka should not have had to pretend at all. “Then find another girl with whom to be adorable. And the sun can shine as it wishes on the truly blameless two of you, initiatives aside.”

“I’ll rephrase: I really think there’s only so long I can pace back and forth in my hallway before I get in my car and come try to explain this to you yet again, but in person this time. What do you really think?”

“I think that your threat to explain in person is so tempting that I’m inclined to play extremely dumb,” Helena said, and Myka laughed. “But what I really think is that it all depends on every single thing falling correctly into place, including Jane Lattimer being magically persuaded to herself perform some persuasive magic. How likely is that?”

“I can’t believe you just asked me a question about the likelihood of events, Ms. Textbook.”

And indeed, Helena thought, she should have been brandishing a lobster while standing in a fountain. Or atop a model of one that would not be built. The likelihood of events. “Point taken, Ms. Helicobacter. I should have realized the paradoxical absurdity as the words were leaving my lips.”

“Oh, thanks a lot. That’s what I’ll be thinking about all day now.”

“Paradoxical absurdity?”

“Your lips. I really, really wish you’d been willing to be fast, there in that elevator.” And her tone teased, As fast as you know I know you can be.

“I don’t think that would have helped every single thing fall correctly into place.”

“Would’ve brought about an inevitable result, though. Anyway I’ll see you Saturday. I was going to call you tomorrow, or I guess I mean today, and tell you about all of this, but then the elevator, and I couldn’t sleep, and I hoped that you... I was trying to be all self-assured about it, but you weren’t really asleep, were you?”

If Helena had thought herself charmed by Myka before—and of course she had been relentlessly charmed by Myka before—the idea that Myka would hope, with just that plaintive edge... Helena was lost. “Of course not,” she said. When she herself spoke low, what was the effect?

Initially, it seemed to make Myka businesslike: “Invite Steve, tell him and his sweetheart to show up about six fifteen. But you get here at six.”

“Pardon?”

“Fifteen minutes, beautiful cheapskate.” Businesslike, but to a nonbusiness purpose. “Way more time than we’d have had in the elevator.”

“You said your mother would be there! And while I believe you now know at least some of what I’ll do when she isn’t watching, I assure you that I will absolutely not—”

“Fine,” Myka said, and now she was the one who was obviously rolling her eyes, “I’ll be on good behavior. I’ll just kiss you and kiss you and kiss you.”

“That’s good behavior?”

“Okay, maybe it’s not good behavior... maybe it’s just good.”

And Helena could not keep from envisioning being kissed and kissed and kissed, even for the proposed fifteen minutes, and she knew that it would be more than “just” good. She laughed at herself for knowing it, her laugh a small analog vibration of pleasure, one transformed into a digital electrical signal that traveled over its relaying frequency to Myka’s telephone, which translated it back into what Helena was sure Myka would hear, correctly, as pleasure.

All of that, in a fraction of a second, so why had Helena been surprised by what could happen in a day in a hospital? In a few noncontiguous hours of intimacy, pretended and real? “Very good,” she agreed, because that too was true.

“For that,” Myka said, “but not only that,” and she continued, quite persuasively, “I love you too.”

TBC