#and so we close out in February/March

[todayisafridaynight]

now that it’s valentines day here’s a reminder that mine and daigo got to share one last valentine’s (and maybe also white) day together before mine game ends himself

[tokkishouse]

(Nsfw) Time of the Year

Characters: Tighnari x fem!Reader

Warnings: (n)sfw -- minors dni!!!, Tighnari is insatiable, he's a fennec fox during mating season-- do the math lol (breeding, knotting, a little manhandling), little dacryphillia, hair pulling, reader is implied to be a fellow forest watcher and has a vision, bit of a long set up (pwp?), NOT PROOF READ, i kinda...blacked out when i wrote this LMAO

WC: ~3.4k words

There were many things about Tighnari that intrigued you. How a hybrid like him came around was the major one-- you had only seen one other hybrid like him before and that was General Gorou all the way in Inazuma.

His mannerisms also caught your eye-- the constant grooming of his tail and the nesting habits where he'd hoard all the warm blankets in his abode. While endearing, it never failed to earn your attention and curious stares.

What you really wanted to understand was where exactly your fearless leader went during the entire month of January and February. During all the years you were under his instruction as a forest watcher, without fail, Tighnari would be on a leave of absence from January 1st until the end of February. March 1st would roll around and there he was, picking up his responsibilities as if he wasn't gone for two months.

When you inquired about it to the others, they'd brush it off and dance around the subject. Some would scold you for being too curious while others would bluntly say it wasn't your business. And maybe it wasn't-- if it was crucial for everyone to know, Tighnari would've made sure everyone knew.

Too bad you were always determined to find the answer to your deepest questions.

After a long day of exploring Avidya Forest and clearing out any withering zones, you longed to take a nice relaxing bath and sink into your bed as you escape to dreamland. Tasks had gotten a tad harder recently with Tighnari gone, but everyone managed to make do, especially thanks to you and Collei assisting with your visions.

"That Tighnari...I wonder how he's doing," you mumble under your breath as you make your way back to your hut. You just finished taking a bath as evident from the dull drip drip of the water falling from your hair. You stop at the intersection between everyone's huts and you look down the path to Tighnari's.

"I didn't see him leave the forest. Maybe he's still here?" The desire to check if your leader creeps into your brain. You recall everyone's hesitance to explain Tighnari's absence and without thinking, your legs carry you down the path to his home.

His closed door greets you, and there's a sign hanging from the hook. It reads, 'Do not Disturb-- Please Come Back March 1'. You click your tongue in frustration. Why on earth would you request an absence and still stay here in the forest?

You raise your fist to knock on the door, the desire to ignore all warnings stronger than ever. It hovers right in front of the door, and no matter how much you seem to want to knock on the door, you can't bring yourself to do so. You let out a defeated sigh, letting your hand drop to your side.

"Let's not be an ass. I'm sure Tighnari has his reasons. We can always ask him later." Despite your aching curiosity, you decide to respect Tighnari's privacy, and you turn on your heel to leave. Before you can leave though, a loud groan catches your attention. It sounds pained, and you whip your head back around towards the door.

"Tighnari...? Are you okay?" you call out to him, concern lacing your voice. Silence fills the air, and you almost move away, convinced you misheard the sound in the first place. Another groan sounds from behind the door, and it sounds more strangled this time. Instincts kick in, and you immediately grab the doorknob, twisting it as you walk in.

You take time to let your eyes refocus on the sudden burst of light in your eyes, nearly blinded by it. When your vision clears, your jaw drops at the sight in front of you.

Tighnari is propped up against his couch, limbs sprawled out as if they're made of jello. His face is flushed and his bangs cling to his head from the sweat that's dripping down his face. His usually bright and focused eyes have taken on a glazed look, and his pupils have contracted, giving him a more animalistic look. What really catches your eyes are his clothes, or rather-- his lack of clothes.

The hybrid has stripped down bare in the middle of the room, his clothes strewn around in a haphazard way. You're unable to fully react to the sight of him gingerly palming his erect cock. It stands up straight, blushing a bright red at the tip. Precum leaks from the head, smearing around the shaft from his languid motions. He lazily turns his gaze to you, a small glimmer of recognition shining in his eyes.

"Y/n...what are you doing here?" he manages to breathe out. He doesn't stop his hand, letting out a quiet whimper when he presses down hard on his sensitive length. You can feel your brain short-circuit as you stumble over your words, trying to form an excuse for the invasion of privacy.

"I-I heard you groan and I thought you were in pain, so I thought I'd come in," you explain, and you can't help the fact that your gaze lowers, once again entranced by the sight of Tighnari touching himself. You weren't blind-- Tighnari was a handsome man. His personality was welcoming, and his features were easy on the eyes. You weren't the only person to have felt this way, and the sight of such an attractive man pleasuring himself, almost pathetically, sends a tingling sensation down to your core, and you feel yourself grow damp.

Tighnari catches on easily, the scent of your blooming arousal sends his mouth watering. He can't help his more animalistic urges-- no matter how much he tried. You see, he had also found you attractive, and the first year that he had a rut with you as a ranger, he nearly tore off the head of one of the male rangers who flirted with you. Unaware of your feelings for him, he opted to instead request a leave of absence. Two months out of the year he'd be gone, and then he'd come back perfectly fine, and you would be unaware that you were the reason for his choice of isolation.

However, smelling your arousal and recognizing the signs of want, of desire as your gaze remains steady on his weeping dick, he knew that the feelings were mutual. A fire was lit in his stomach, and any feebleness he felt from the onslaught of hormones washed away as he adjusts himself to sit up properly. His hand remains on his shaft, switching to a pumping motion.

"Are you getting off to seeing your leader a lewd mess? I didn't take you for that type of person," he teases, and he grits his teeth, a shock of pleasure shooting up his spine with the squeeze of his hand. You feel your cheeks burn in embarrassment and you finally manage to peel your gaze away from the angry dick, choosing to find the ceiling more interesting.

"I-I'm sorry! I'll leave right away. Forget you saw anything. I'll-"

"Forget I saw anything?" Tighnari laughs, and your legs feel like lead. His laugh is incredulous-- and you don't blame him. How does one just forget the sight of their subordinate walking in on them jacking off?

"The fact that you didn't run out of here leads me to believe that you find me attractive and that the sight of me pathetically trying to get myself off turns you on. Am I wrong?" He's not, by any means, and the growing wetness between your legs is further proof of that.

"Why don't we help each other out?" He suggests, watching you through his long lashes.

The air is thick with sexual tension as you both stare at each other. Despite his exposed position, Tighnari holds all the power. He's giving you an out, and you can tell he's genuine. You could just run out of his home, and pretend the situation never happened. But the yearning inside you is too high. You've desired a chance like this ever since you joined the Forest Rangers. And of course, you were curious.

What was it like to fuck a hybrid?

✦✧✦✧

Exhausting. That was your answer. The moment you gave Tighnari his approval, he pounced on you. His claws made quick work of your clothes as he flung them around the room. You barely had time to react before his mouth latched onto one of your breasts, his hot tongue painting shapes on your skin. You keen at his touch, whines and moans tumbling out your lips as he leaves love bites all over your chest.

Alternating between the two, his mouth suckles on your nipples, painting drool and spit coating your breasts. When Tighnari pulls away, they feel sore and you hiss as the air feels cool in contrast to the warm saliva and the heat that rushes to the surface of your skin.

He wastes no time as he pulls you into the desired position, his animalistic strength making it easy to get you on your hands and knees. Clawing at your ass, he bites his tongue and hisses as he catches sight of the slick gathering on your inner thighs.

"I won't have to waste time prepping you. Good, because I don't want to wait any longer." Your cunt clenches around nothing, and you whine in anticipation. In an attempt to hurry him, you wiggle your hips to entice him. All that earns you is a harsh slap to your ass, and you yelp in surprise. The fox kneads the skin soothingly, as if in apology before lining his dick with your entrance.

The tip kisses your folds, splitting them apart as some of your essence coats the head. He nearly cums right there, his nerves lighting up like fireworks at the warm feeling of your slick coating his cock. He manages to restrain himself, just enough to give more instructions.

"The safe word is 'bloom'. I intend to have you as I please and I won't stop until I'm satisfied. Even if that means you can't hold yourself up." You clench again, this time catching his tip and he nearly crumbles. "If you need me to stop, you will have to say it. I will not stop unless you say 'bloom.' Do you understand?" he manages to finish.

Why on earth you would ever stop him from ravaging you is beyond you, but you appreciate the communication. You nod and wiggle your hips again, taking on a desperate tone to your voice.

"Hurry up and give me a reason to use that safe word, 'Nari."

Like lighting a match, his restraint burns away and his grip on you becomes bruising. In one smooth push, he fully sheathes himself inside you, hissing at how tight and warm you feel around his cock. The sudden intrusion has you trembling and you almost fall over. Your cunt is quick to grow wetter in an attempt to provide more lube. The stretch is mind-numbing, and you whine pathetically as he brings you to the hilt. You feel something slightly bulbous push against your folds, and your mind scrambles to try to make sense of it.

You don't have time to focus on the sensation, and moans slip between your lips as Tighnari slowly pulls his cock out, only leaving just the tip in. The emptiness you feel is hallowing, and you realized you've already become addicted to the feeling of his cock inside you. He doesn't leave you dissatisfied for long, thrusting back into you shortly after.

He picks up a steady rhythm, pulling you back against him with each thrust. You sob with each thrust, digging your nails into your palms. Every time he pulls out, he catches sight of his cock coated in your juices from your sopping pussy. A creamy ring forms around the base of his cock, and he bites back a growl that reverberates in his chest. After years of only being able to get off with his own hand, he'll never go back. Hearing your squeals and watching the way that your essence drips out around his length with each thrust was intoxicating, and he can't get enough.

His thrusts get more violent, his clawed hands digging more into your hips, you find yourself struggling to keep yourself propped up on your hands. Heavy balls slap against your clit, adding extra stimulation that makes your cunt squeeze around Tighnari's cock deliciously. He snarls in your ears with each squeeze, your reactions spurring him on to continue his assault on your dripping heat.

"T-Tighnari...p-please, slow down..c-can't," you plead, slightly turning your head to gaze at him with bleary eyes. Your cheeks are flushed, heat radiating off of your body, and drool dribbles down the corner of your mouth as you struggle to meet his gaze. You flinch at his unwavering stare, and let out a squeal when he reaches one of his hands up to place it on your back between your shoulders.

"Are you going to say the safe word?" he questions, slowing down his thrusts. His gaze remains unchanged but you can hear concern sewn into his words. He's offering you another out. As much as it hurts, you didn't want to slow down anytime soon. You've wanted him for as long as you've worked with him and there was no way you were going to stop halfway. You shake your head, clamping your mouth shut. That's all the permission he needs before he gives a forceful shove and pushes you down onto the floor, forcing your body into a deep arch and your head to the floor as you let out a pornographic moan.

"If you can't hold yourself up, just lie there and take it. I won't have my fill for a while," he hisses out, the edge in his voice coming back. He continues his previously brutal pace,

The new angle has you feeling him so much more, and you swear he's able to fuck into you deeper. His name rolls off your tongue in chants as you press yourself against the floor, submitting to the position you've been forced into. A new burn aches through your body from the harsh angle but the way that Tighnari's cock bullies itself into your cunt brings pleasure crashing down in its wake.

The feeling of a coil tightening in your stomach grows, and as it grows tighter and tighter, your vision blurs as your eyes roll to the back of your head. Your moans dry into pathetic whimpers, stifled by the rubbing of your face against the hardwood floor. The friction stings, causing tears to well up in your eyes, much to Tighnari's delight.

" 's too much, hm? Are you crying because you can't take it? I told you I wouldn't be nice," he mocks, slowing down his pace to a more intentional one, sharp thrusts rutting against that spongy spot in your walls. You wail at the new pace, missing the vigor behind Tighnari's thrust but craving the grinding of his dick against that sensitive spot.

" 'm gonna cum...'nari, I'll cum!" you whine, gathering all the strength you can to try and push your body up, hoping to be able to meet his thrusts. Sharp pain rings through your head as Tighnari grabs a fistful of your hair and yanks you back, causing you to yelp. Your back is pressed against his chest, and he quickly adjusts his hand so his arm wraps around your torso to hold you upright.

Your breathing picks up as gravity forces you to drop down on his cock at a more direct angle, and more pathetic sobs slip off your tongue. He bucks his hips up, forcing you to bounce in his lap. His knot, now rising and more shapely kisses your folds, parting them more and more with each thrust. The wet slaps of skin against skin, the splats of your fluids dripping onto the floor-- you've become hyperaware of the erotic scene unfolding around you. Something damp and fuzzy wraps around your leg and presses against your clit, and that coil inside starts to tighten more. You manage to spare a glance and whine when you realize that Tighnari's tail has started rubbing against your sensitive nub.

"Go on, cum. Cum all over me," he commands, and your body listens without hesitation. Loud, purely pornographic wails fill the room as you gush all over Tighnari's cock. He groans into the crook of your neck, melting at the feeling of your walls spasming around him. He almost gets swept up by the sensation, nearly cumming inside you. But he instead bites down on your unblemished skin in an attempt to ground you, and you arch your back from the pain of his canines digging into you.

Your vision dots with white, and you feel you curl your toes in pure euphoria. The crashing waves of your orgasm keep rolling, powered by the persistent stroking of your captain's tail stroking your clit. In a brief moment of clarity, that fact rings bells in your head: your captain. Your superior. You just came on your superior's dick. There was no coming back from this. Your relationship with Tighnari has changed, for better or for worse. A twinge of worry shoots down your spine, culling your orgasm almost instantly. But you don't have time to dwell on your fears-- a sharp bite to your jaw brings you back to reality.

"Don't think I'll let you go just yet. We still have plenty of the rest of the month to go," Tighnari scolds under his breath, and you squeal as you come back to the fact that you're still bouncing on his cock, taking all of it, inch by inch, with little resistance. Your cheeks darken when you glance down at the growing puddle of milky fluids underneath the two of you.

You can feel the head of his dick swell, and you realize he's about to cum. Tighnari's tightening grip and more erratic groans are all you need for confirmation. Crescent moons form on your hips as his claws dig in drawing a little blood. You can barely focus on the increasing pace, gasping every time he bottoms out fully inside you. His knot pops in and out, the only shred of resistance despite the copious amounts of essence dripping everywhere.

The faint, reasonable part of your mind is screaming at you to ask him to pull out, to cum on any part of your body that wasn't your pussy. The more prominent, more needy, and desperate part was far louder-- you craved to feel his cum inside you. You don't know if a hybrid can get a regular human pregnant, and a part of you wants to find out. A risk that results in Tighnari's warm cum filling you up? You clench at the thought and he growls in appreciation.

His thrusts get sloppier, more intent on slamming your hips down against his in an attempt to catch his knot. His efforts are initially fruitless, his knot just barely slipping out. With one rather harsh thrust though, he manages to force it in with a wet pop, and you keen as you both cum at the same time. The tightness of your cunt aids in keeping his knot plugged inside you as he cums.

It's warm and thick and flows inside you like a turret. Tighnari continues to bite and tug at your neck, lapping up any blood that spills when he breaks the skin. Your mind goes blank, and you feel like you're floating on clouds. His cum leaves you feeling warm and full, and you feel limp as you rest against him.

A few moments of stillness pass, and as you feel your strength return, you try to shift to get off. Tighnari is quick to grab your waist and keep you still, letting out a warning growl.

"Don't. Move. Not done yet." A shiver runs down your spine and you manage to voice out your confusion.

"Done..? But you came..and," you trail off, too embarrassed to discuss the literal knot inside you. He chuckles at this, and slides a hand down to palm your overstimulated bud, causing you to whimper in protest.

"I told you-- we have the rest of the month. I'm not finished with you yet." He lowers his voice to barely above a whisper, his next sentence making your stomach flip.

"By the time I'm through, I'll make sure you have a kit or two inside you."

Happy Valentine's Day and thank you for 750+ followers!

@scarasweetheart For u ❤️

Requests (both sfw and nsfw) are open~!

[gguk-n]

Chapter 3- Behind The Helmet

Arranged For Love (Carlos Sainz Jr x Reader)

Series Masterlist

Summary- Everything was moving to fast. They weren't sure they wanted this. Yes, they were closer now but not close enough to get married to each other, yet.

Y/N sat there on her bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting for Carlos to call. This had become a regular occurrence now. Initially, they had started by only texting each other and then slowly progressed to a couple calls in a month. Now, Y/N's day wouldn't end without talking to Carlos. She felt empty not to talk to Carlos. Both their days began and ended with a text to the other. It was a nice constant in this turbulent times.

Carlos called, as soon as he was able to find a quite place. The pair could be heard giggling and laughing as they conversed. There were whispers going around the paddock; everyone was a busy body trying to find out what was going on with who but they were equally nosy. Lando was the first to notice; Carlos would constantly be smiling at his phone or talking to someone in his driver's room. When asked; he would brush Lando off saying that it was just a friend. Lando knew something was up so he took it upon himself to pester Carlos. He had began teasing him but Carlos wouldn't budge. "Come on mate, who's the lucky girl that has you giggling like this" Lando asked insistently. "Just a friend of my dad's" Carlos finally replied. "Didn't know you were into older woman" Lando smirked. "She's my dad's friend's daughter" Carlos palmed his face. "OOOO" Lando cooed wiggling his eye brows. "It's nothing like that" Carlos groaned. "Sure" Lando replied sarcastically, walking away.

Anika had noticed the soft smile that would play on her grand daughter's lips. She had only hoped that they would speed things along since her health hadn't been doing to well and she felt like she was holding on by a thin thread.

So, Anika did what she thought was best. She spoke to both Ivan and Carlos senior to start wedding preparations for the spring of next year. She could only hope to make it that far. The two men hadn't broached the subject, after that dinner they all had together, with their children. Ivan wasn't even sure if the two had kept in touch. So, he sent in his wife, Rose to gauge the situation.

From what Rose learnt after a mother-daughter bonding session was that they had kept in touch, much to their delight. But she wasn't sure how she would tell her daughter that her grandmother had picked a date for her wedding in the spring of next year.

It was at dinner when they broke the news to Y/N. "So, we were thinking" Ivan began looking at the family at the table, "you and Carlos can get married in February or March" he finished. "What?" Y/N almost spat her food out. "We aren't even that close? What do you mean by married?" she said trying not to choke on food. "I'm not getting any younger darling. I think March would be great but if you would like February I don't really mind" her grandmother said. "Obviously you don't mind. I'm the one getting married." she sighed. She left the table and went to her room. "It went better than I expected" Y/N's younger sister said. "Yeah, I was expecting a couple broken plates" her younger brother laughed. The 3 elders sighed and continued to eat their food.

Y/N had expected Carlos's reaction. What she didn't expect the pang in her chest when he went no contact for a couple days. She knew she needed the time to process everything but not having Carlos around felt like shit, she felt like she needed him. She wasn't sure in what way but she needed him.

Carlos couldn't believe what he had read. He knew the intention behind their introduction but he didn't expect her grandmother to decide something on her own or fix a date this early. Carlos had thought that they would be able to naturally get to know each other, even though the circumstances under which they met were not favourable, then they would eventually maybe remain friends or turn into something else in the long run. He had thought her grandma was just trying to play cupid. He didn't expect this, at all; and this had thrown him in for a loop.

As soon as he could, he spoke to his father about what Y/N had told him. It seemed that him and his mother were aware of it. They hadn't expected Carlos to ask them or find out before they decided to say anything. "Dad, I can't believe this." he said running a hand through his hair. "I mean, I thought, you guys would at least ask us, ask me. But it's like everything is already set in stone" Carlos junior spoke. "It was decided when we asked you to meet her. She is going to be you wife and that is final" senior replied sternly. "You've never forced me to do anything in life. Why are you being like this now?" junior asked. "She is a good girl, you'll never find anyone like her" senior defended. "You don't even know her" junior sighed. "If I don't remain married to her forever, or we have a shitty life, that's on you guys" junior stated and left.

Carlos's emotions were all over the place. It took him a few days to collect himself. He soon realised how bad it must've looked to Y/N when he suddenly stopped texting her. In his defence, he was shocked. He was sure, something similar must've happened with Y/N too. He did like her, he knew that for sure; did he like her enough to marry her with in half a year of knowing her, that was something he wasn't even sure about.

Carlos and Y/N spoke on call for a really long time and they finally came to the consensus that they didn't really want a huge wedding, maybe in the future if they felt like what they had was something real, something that would last. Right now, they didn't mind just making Y/N's grandmother happy. They did tell their parents that they didn't mind doing what they wanted but it to be a small affair. They didn't really want to tell too many people which their parents agreed. With the COVID restrictions only easing up slowly, the pair were happy they could get done with it in a small and intimate setting.

They only told a few very close friends and relatives. The wedding preparations had to start soon. Y/N's grandmother was a traditional woman and wanted the whole nine yards. Getting married was stressful as is, getting married to someone you met a couple months ago was anxiety inducing.

Taglist- @herexpertcollector @redrevvedup @chaostudee @larastark3107 @jovialpainterunknown @vip-access @sugarvibez @champomiel @inarabee @virazeeee @seonghwaexile @champ15ns @ajthefujoshi @musicheaux @npcmia @marvel-ous-miss-maisie @mochipatch @gleeblegnarp @formula1-motogpfan @taliya8346282844eliviahdgdajs @dying-inside-but-its-classy @iamfreeeeeeeeeeeesblog @boiolay @pausmoon

[concreteangel92]

Acting up

Noah Sebastian x fem!reader

18+

Warnings: spanking, clit spanking, dom/sub relationship, oral (m&f receiving) PiV sex, over simulation, aftercare of course

A/N: so I got this idea into my head last week and just had to bring it to life!

Apart from the small writing I uploaded the other day, this is my first proper one shot and deffo the first smut I’ve done in about 7/8 years so I felt incredibly rusty and have prayed that this turned out ok haha I’ve re-read and changed things so many times in the last week 😂 but after finally feeling more or less happy with it, here we are and I hope you enjoy!!

Masterlist

You knew you were in trouble, you’d been winding Noah up all day at an important work event.

Noah hadn’t long been home from yet another tour, but he’d hardly paid you any attention over the last couple days, he was either sleeping or working in his studio and although you love and support everything he does and you understood work has to come first sometimes, you were feeling incredibly needy now.

So you started off small, you wore a dress that left little the imagination. I’m talking bending over too far and everyone sees everything kind of dress to which Noah wasn’t impressed.

“You’re not wearing that to the event.”

“Yes I am.”

Noah’s eyes locked with yours and he had an irritated expression on his face.

“No, you’re not! I’m not having every persons eyes on my girls ass all night because she can’t be bothered to dress appropriately. The car is already outside, I’ll meet you in there. Go change, now.”

You turned away and headed to your shared bedroom with a small smirk on your face, he was too easy to wind up. Instead of changing the dress, you put a long coat over the dress to give the impression you’d changed and jumped into the car.

Noah, having been on his phone texting the whole journey, didn’t seem to notice anything until you arrived at the party, it was full of his management team, the rest of the band, friends, crew, you name it and they were there. Drinks were being served, music was blasting out and everyone appeared to be having a good time already.

You slipped your coat off when you walked into the main room, all eyes were immediately on you but Noah’s became dark.

“What did I say back at home?”

“Can’t remember to be honest”

Noah stood very close to you and put his hand firmly on your upper arm. “I need you to behave yourself tonight.”

All you heard in your mind was “test me more.”

You smiled up at him sweetly, playing the innocent and said “I always behave baby, especially at such an important event.”

Noah gave you a firm look but relaxed his grip on your arm and he let his fall around your waist to guide you around while he mingled.

The night seemed to go well, Noah became a bit more relaxed and was enjoying himself and never strayed too far from your side, often you felt yourself leaning into him, his hand always rubbing small circles on your side absentmindedly. Noah wasn’t someone who displayed massive amounts of affection in public but he loved to always have you in touching distance. And he probably wanted to hide how short your dress was from prying eyes as best as he could.

You let Noah do his thing for a few hours before you started to become impatient, and you knew Noah better then anyone and knew he would be drained by now, he doesn’t do well in big crowds of people and avoids them unless he has to for work, so you decided it was time to start upping the game.

A few throw away comments or jokes at his expense is how it started, your particular favourite was when you offered to grab a drink for him and Jolly but only returned with two and you started to drink one yourself.

“Did you get my drink babe?”

“You have legs right? Do what comes after February….March”

Noah tensed next to you every time and then when you both walked over to both the Nick’s and Jolly who had excused themselves to the sofas, you knew it was time.

You said hello and sat yourself right next to Jolly and Folio which meant Noah had no choice but to sit with Nick opposite you on the other sofa, Noah looked a bit disappointed as there was room for both of you but that look didn’t last long.

After glancing around and making sure that Ruffilo wasn’t watching, you uncrossed your legs and opened them up just enough for Noah to realise that you hadn’t got any underwear on tonight. Noah’s face instantly hardened and he glared straight at you, you couldn’t help but smile and giggle quietly to yourself as you knew this was it, Noah would never let you get away with this, you could feel yourself growing wetter just at the thought of what he’s going to do when you’re alone.

Jolly turned to you after hearing your giggle and said “what’s got you giggling?”

You crossed your legs back over and replied with “oh….erm I was just thinking that if it rains tonight, I don’t have a hood or umbrella so I’d end up getting very wet tonight”

Jolly looked ever so slightly confused but commented back that he didn’t believe it was forecasted to rain. You looked back over to Noah with a smile and you watched as his jaw clenched and his eyes were dark, he gave a very menacing look in your direction at the comment you’d made, he suddenly cleared his throat and jumped up.

“On that note guys I’m not feeling very well, I think I’m going to call it a night now, come on y/n.”

Ruffilo looked concerned “you alright man?”

Noah didn’t take his eyes off you “bad headache”

You stood up and fixed your dress, you smiled at the guys and said goodbye, Noah made certain to pass you your coat and grabbed your hand very firmly and said under his breath “we’ll talk about this at home.”

The ride home was silent, Noah’s grip hasn’t left your hand, and although it was starting to hurt slightly, it was simply causing you to ache elsewhere. You knew Noah was extremely angry, you’d technically crossed a line and was playing up in front of his friends which he doesn’t like but you couldn’t help it, he looked very attractive to you right now.

Not a word was said until you both walked into your house, you went to turn around and then found yourself pinned up against the door with Noah’s hand wrapped around your throat.

“What the fuck was that?”

“What was what baby?”

“Don’t play innocent with me, you knew exactly what you were doing, you’ve been acting like a brat all day and at one of my work events, are fucking serious?”

You stared up at him with big eyes, between your thighs was already wet and his hand became just that bit tighter which made your breath hitch.

“I just wanted some attention off you for a change.”

Noah ran his thumb over your bottom lip, pulling it down slightly.

“Is that so?”

Without any warning he stuck one of his fingers into you and your mouth fell open with a silent moan, head falling back onto the wall.

“You’re so wet for me baby, been thinking about this all day eh?”

“Ye-yes.”

“You want me to make you feel good?”

You nodded while he moved his finger slowly but then removed it, take a moment to clean it off with his mouth.

“Too bad, you think after your performance tonight that you can just get what you want? I don’t think so. Get up those stairs and into our room, only good girls get rewarded.”

Your brain felt fuzzy with excitement as you followed his orders, you went up to your room, Noah not far behind you closing the door and then he sat himself on the edge of the bed.

Noah then stretched his neck from one side to the other, as if preparing for what was about to happen and watching him do that, you practically came on the spot.

“Lay across my lap.”

You went to remove your dress but he stopped you

“Leave it on. You wanted to wear it so badly.”

You walked over to Noah and got comfortable across his lap and he pulled the dress up so he had complete access to you.

“Now for your punish today, I think 15 will do, count each hit and if you miss then we shall start again, understand?”

You nodded in response.

“Use your words angel”

“Yes I understand”

“Remember your safe word?”

Your heart swelled at that as he asks every time he knows he’s about to be rough.

“Yes I do”

“Good girl”

That phrase made your pussy throb, as much as you love being a brat, you also adored his praise.

Noah ran his hand over the back of your legs, he gently parted them slightly and saw the slick coating on the inside of your thighs. Your heart rate increase and you could feel yourself clenching around nothing.

“My dirty girl is looking forward to this huh?”

You were going to respond when out of nowhere he spanked you hard and you let out a deep groan.

“One”

He spanked you again, on the opposite cheek, making sure to keep his hand slightly cupped and not to go to high up so not to hit your lower back.

“Two”

“Are we starting to learn our lesson yet?”

You smiled even though he couldn’t see it. “No.”

“Very well”

Noah was then smacking your bare behind multiple times in a row and you done your best to keep up calling out the numbers with his fast pace, all while you could feel the beautiful stinging pain begin the more he spanked you.

“Ten!”

“That’s my good girl, you’re going a beautiful shade of red baby, shall we take it up a notch for the last 5?”

“Yes sir”

Noah hummed in approval of the name you used, the pain was coming through more now but Noah started to rub you down to soothe you. His hand pulled away briefly and you felt it be replaced with your leather paddle that you didn’t even realised he’d got out ready.

“5 hard smacks angel and then it’s over, you’re doing so good for me.”

You squeezed your thighs together more to try and get relief from the aching you felt, you prayed Noah would reward you soon.

He smacked the paddled down extra hard then he normally did and you cried out and called out “el..eleven!”

“You know what that was for, you get your reward when I say so.”

You nodded and moaned and your body jolted when he then continued the last 4 smacks on you.

“Fifteen!”

You relaxed down on his lap, your backside feeling hot to the touch and was no doubt bright red but you felt his soothing touch as he rubbed over his work for a minute.

Noah gently brought you up and gave you a soft kiss

“You took that so well baby, almost made me feel bad seeing how red you’ve gone, that will definitely bruise later.”

You leaned in and kissed him harder, now straddling his lap and feeling how hot your whole body was. You could feel his erection through his trousers and you started to grind yourself down until his hands stopped you.

“Oh no you don’t angel, we haven’t finished yet”

You stared at him and he brushed your hair out of your face.

“You may have taken your punishment but I don’t feel like I’ve had a proper apology yet”

“I’m sorry Noah…”

“On your knees.”

You dropped down onto your knees immediately, wanting nothing more than to please him however he wanted.

“Suck my cock baby and then maybe I’ll forgive you for acting up today in front of my friends, show me how sorry you are.”

He pulled his boxers and trousers down his hips and legs, just enough to give you access. You watched as his dick fell back onto his stomach, a small amount of precum already leaking out. You wasted no time and licked up his shaft before taking him completely in your mouth and hollowing out your cheeks

“F-fuck baby that’s it”

You grabbed his base with one of your hands while you bobbed your head up and down, no teasing tonight, you cupped his balls with your other hand and gently massaged them making Noah throw his head back letting out guttural growls that you’d normally only hear on the stage while his hand came to rest in your hair guiding you up and down on him.

Next thing you felt was Noah pulling you off him and he brought you in for a kiss, while lifting you onto the bed and pushing your thighs apart so he could rest between them.

“You really are so perfect for me angel”

Noah gave no warning before he dived straight in. A choked cry fell from your lips and he sucked onto your clit and parted your lips with his fingers, to then move down and push his tongue straight in for a taste. Noah was the type of guy who could be between your legs for hours, he was like a thirsty man in a dessert, and he was very smug that he was the first man to ever make your legs shake uncontrollably while eating you out, man is a munch for a reason.

You reached your hand down into his hair and pressed his face into you, trying to grind onto him as you felt yourself getting closer, Noah pulled back and slapped your clit which caused you to jump and moan out.

“Don’t forget your place tonight baby”

You nodded in response but clearly that wasn’t good enough as he delivered another spank down.

“Words”

“Yes Noah, I’ll be good I promise”

You were desperate to cum now, you’d been on the edge for ages and those last two spanks nearly sent you over but you had a feeling Noah wasn’t done with you yet.

Noah kissed your shaky thighs gently, he then gripped your hips down and went straight back in, his face being literally buried in your warmth and your hands are gripping the sheets beneath you while he groans against you, still licking and sucking all over you like you’re his last meal

You could feel your orgasm building up again, your thighs started to shake more and as Noah was sucking on your clit, you felt his fingers at your entrance. Your back arched as he pushed one in, your walls finally having something to hold onto, your cries getting louder and louder. Noah continued as he was, almost with no need for breath, his mouth and fingers working together while he grounded your hips down on the mattress.

“I’m so close Noah”

Noah then pulled away once more with a devilish smirk while you let a choked gasp.

“Have we learned our lesson yet princess?”

You had tears in your eyes, he couldn’t be serious, you were nearly there but Noah loved to edge you as a punishment, he loved to see you beg for him.

“Noah, please I’m so sorry, I won’t ever be a brat in front of your friends again. Please, please let me cum, I’ll be so good for you I promise!”

Noah leant forward, wiped a tear away that had slipped out and gave you a sweet kiss.

“Shhhhh it’s ok baby, I’ve gotcha you”

Noah ran his hands down your sides and settled himself back, he licked a big strip from your opening up to your clit and attached his mouth there while he pushed two fingers back in, Noah wasn’t playing this time, he relentlessly brought you back up to your high, legs shaking, back arching and tears forming in your eyes as you cried out

“Please don’t stop Noah”

And he doesn’t, the arm that’s been holding your hips down, he moves his hand onto your lower tummy and pushes down while he curls his fingers up inside and that’s all it takes for you to feel your orgasm wash over you with a scream.

He doesn’t pull away from you until you’re whining and crying from the overstimulation, you push his head away as the aftershocks are still shaking your body every few seconds and Noah crawls up from between your thighs with his face drenched in your juices. He held you while you came back around, placing small kisses around your collarbone.

“Colour?”

“Green, so green”

Noah let out a small laugh “ok baby, you ready for me?”

You could feel him hard against your thigh, you nodded and leaned up to him for a kiss which he returned. He pulls away and gently removes your dress up over your head and quickly removes the rest of his clothes.

“Turned around, ass up for me.”

You rolled onto your stomach and Noah helped positioned your hips up for him, he ran one hand over your cheek which was definitely sore now but that was forgotten when you felt his head at your entrance. Noah pushed in with no resistance and bottomed out straight away with a loud moan.

“Fuck baby, you feel so good”

Noah held onto your hips and then started a fast, unrelenting pace which caused you to cry out and push back into him. You swear you could feel his tip hitting your stomach with every thrust and Noah wasn’t shy about letting out his own growl’s and groans. You felt your walls closing on him again, your head pressing into the sheets as you called his name. You could only imagine how beautifully sinful he must have looked right now. Noah reached around and started rubbing your clit again.

“One more angel, give me one more, I know you can do it”

Practically screaming you felt yourself crash over the edge and Noah soon followed, his body coming down onto yours, both sweaty and breathless.

You felt Noah pull out gently and rolled you into him, he held onto you as you snuggled into him, your body sore but beautifully spent.

“You ok baby? I’ll be back in a minute ok?”

You nodded as you curled up on the bed, Noah came back in a few minutes later with a glass of water and a warm wash cloth. He gently cleaned you up in between your legs, made you drink some water and then got some cream out of the draw and he rolled you back over to gently rub it over the bruises that were already starting to appear.

You scrunched up your face a little bit, something Noah didn’t miss.

“You done so well for me tonight princess”

Noah got out a comfy t shirt for you and he put on a pair of sweats and then got you both under the covers.

“Is there anything else I can get you baby?”

“No, all I want is a cuddle”

Noah smiled “I think I can manage that”

You curled up into side and he wrapped his arms around you, you felt so warm and safe with him.

Thinking back to the last few hours you let out a small giggle.

“What’s funny?”

“I should play up in front of your friends more often.”

[pparacxosm]

something borrowed

(dearly beloved part 2: electric boogaloo ! ; tashi duncan x fem!childhood best friend!reader x patrick zweig ((x art donaldson?? a little?)); nonlinear narrative; playing fast and loose with tenses; where do i start; patrick and reader are their own trigger warning; tw pregnancy and childbirth; major major tw for talk of abortion; tw depression and antidepressant talk; cw breeding kink centric smut; more artashi wedding scenes; baby lily !! ; art donaldson #dadding out; grammy donaldson mentioned ! ; tw vomit again i’m so sorry lol; cw more menstrual talk; tw adultery but i mean come on; baby names; lasagna; we all have annie’s reblog to thank ((blame)) for this)

‘ JESUS: Judas—

JUDAS: You forgave Peter and bullshit Thomas—you knocked Paul of Tarsus off a horse—you raised Lazarus from the fuckin’ dead—but me? Me? Your “heart”? . . . What about me??!! What about me, Jesus?! Huh?! You just, you just—I made a mistake! And if that was wrong, then you should have told me! And if a broken heart wasn't sufficient reason to hang, THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE TOLD ME THAT, TOO!

JESUS: Don't you think . . . that if I knew that it would have changed your mind . . . that I would have?

Pause. ’

Stephen Adly Guirgis, ‘The Last Days of Judas Iscariot’

“Is it one of those ugly ones?”

You’re not special; you, too, hate hospitals. Not the least because your parents ralphed up all that cash for med school and you tanked like a castiron anchor. But there’s so much else to feel guilty for. You feel guilty for being alive while people are dying. You feel guilty for wanting to die while people are being born. You feel guilty, and nauseated, by this sickly visceral fume of birth and babyflesh, and the fact that you’re so upset.

You’d marked it on your calendar, is the thing.

March seventh, Doomsday, the purge, the end times.

Tashi Duncan’s Caesarean section.

Timely and clinical, fittingly so. You’d bought a little beanie for the occasion. The beanie is soft and grey and pink. It has a cartoon flower embroidered on the side of it.

But then this is the spawn of Art and Tashi Donaldson. The baby is inherently desperate, and eager, in that order.

It’s February twentyeighth.

It’s probably for the best, you think, while you and Art are on either side of the hospital bed, and he’s grasping Tashi’s hand more tightly than she is holding his, even though she is the one whose innards are being shat out. You don’t believe she could take another scar.

You grimace as she crowns. Art is sobbing and sniffing. He looks at Tashi like he’s getting to watch God populate the world with greenery. It makes your mouth tug sharply to one side, and you close your eyes, briefly, escaping the bright white light.

You watch the papery sheets go redder and redder with every gush from the cavity of her torso.

The baby is not rosy pink so much as she is carmine. Before this, as an idea, she’s existed mostly in black and white. Aminocentesis results on a MacBook screen. The sonogram on their coffee table. The concrete wall of your abject jealousy. The living colour of her, it shocks you more than her glass-shattering screech.

Art holds the baby first, of course, since Tashi is somewhat incapacitated. You soothingly caress her damp hairline.

“What was that like?” you whisper, wincing down at her.

Tashi sheds a few tears and manages a smile that’s part relief and all agony. “Remember…” she croaks, “Remember when Tre fuckin’… like, roundhouse kicked you up the crotch?”

You blink, quirking your brows. Then you snort in surprise, grinning. “Oh my God, yeah,” you giggle. “When Yas and Matteo got that trampoline.”

Tashi nods weakly, her desiccated mouth twitching at the memory, her eyes shivering gently closed.

The baby is tiny against Art’s body, cradled so carefully in his arms. He’s counting all her toes and fingers.

“Hey there,” he murmurs to her, like they’re the only two people on this earth Tashi made. Then he sinks down onto the stool by Tashi’s head, and holds this tiny, beautiful thing out toward her. “Say hi to momma,” he says, his voice soft as gauze.

Tashi reaches out. Her hands are trembling but all of her is trembling; both you and Art tried to get her on the epidural, but fuck if she’s not stubborn. She crooks the tip of her index finger into the fleecy receiving blanket, pulling it down just a little so she can see the baby’s entire pink face.

The baby opens just one bleary eye, only halfway, but it’s enough for her to see you, for you to feel yourself being seen.

Tashi sobs and Art sobs and you wonder, momentarily, if her obstetrician can reach up the cavity of your body, too, and tug out your heart.

So, of course you hate hospitals, and of course you feel guilty. For many reasons. Chief among them being how, the very moment your dear, gutted friend conks out, you’ve stolen to the hall to ring her ex. And he’s asking you, hopeful, if her fucking newborn is one of those ugly ones.

You sigh into the receiver, shaking your head all solemn. You’re sure any passersby think you’re delivering horrific news. “She’s beautiful,” you confess sadly.

“Fuck!” Patrick says forcefully, like he’s just stubbed his toe.

You can hear the hum of the highway on his end of the line, and he’s definitely a bad enough driver that he shouldn’t be calling you right now, because you don’t want to be back here at his bedside when he’s in a fullbody cast after a nearfatal accident—and you would come to visit, actually, if he were in the hospital; maybe that’d just be the guilt again—but this is pretty urgent.

You frown, tucking your hand under your armpit and managing a smile at a passing couple cautiously rolling their precious trolley to the NICU. “They named her Lily.”

Patrick scoffs. “Those fucking assholes.”

“Right?”

You appreciate his company in your deplorable sorrow. There’s a special corner in the firescape for the two of you, but at least it’ll be the two of you.

“That’s a beautiful name for a baby girl,” he says, practically insulted.

You sigh again. “I know,” you pout.

They’d planned the wedding, as they did all other things, a bona fide team. A well oiled unit. Art and Tashi. A&T. Handing off tasks with practiced efficiency, like another one of her hyperintensive drills, wherein he would sooner keel over heaving than drop the ball. The wedding planner was effectively ornamental once they really got into it.

And they really got into it.

Tashi was one of those little girls who stuffed a stream of toilet paper in her ponytail and pictured the vinyl flooring of her home’s warmly lit passage as a ceremonial aisle on the Amalfi Coast at sunset. Here comes the bride, aluminium foil wedding band, ramshackle wildflower bouquet picked from the backyard, et cetera.

Most times, she’d have you play groom.

But you don’t internalise that too much. Because she had you play a lot of things. And sometimes she’d have their senile Mastiff Mutt, Franklin, play groom, too. Really, the most important part was her having you at all.

And, apparently, as a little boy, Art used to page obsessively back and forth through the decrepit scrapbook of his grandparents’ Peoria union, the pictures frayed and hued dandelion. So it’s great that they found each other, and so many dreams were coming true, and everything was fine. Everything was better.

You’d been happy she was happy, really, you had. You hate big endeavours in your name. If she’d married you, you’d have made her elope to Puerto Rico.

And now she was all sprawled three-ring binders, pen behind each ear, Game Face On. And Art was there, talking place settings in full sincerity, so yeah. It’s fine. Better, even.

She let him intercalate all the mawkish, ubercorny bullshit—the Fleetwood Mac, the garter toss, the pictures of his grandmother at the centrepiece of every table. Because they were a team and it was his wedding as much as hers. And you’d told her, too. You’d told her that she’s going to have a mawkish, ubercorny bullshit wedding to a mawkish, ubercorny bullshit guy. But she’d waved you off with a dismissively sentimental smile. I just want to marry him, she’d told you, which had felt like a million and one serrated spurns all over.

A getaway car, really? you’d deadpanned. Then, leaning closer to her phonescreen, eyes narrowing at their shared twodozenpage Pinterest board, incredulous and disgusted, Are the cans really necessary?

Apparently so.

You were standing at the foreshore, toes all grainy, shoes in hand, pistachiorose and Patrick Zweig on your tongue, your ass still seadamp. Art and Tashi pulled up in front of you, cans rattling, like a justmarried Lyft order.

When you climbed into the backseat, they were in the middle of sharing in dulcet laughter over something or the other. Something that did not concern you. Which was fine, and better, and the flower arrangements were spectacular. And, anyway, you’re busy trying not to get sand on this vintage carpet.

“Shouldn’t you two be honeymooning?”

Art looked back at you, his arm outstretched, wrist resting on the bend of the wheel. He gave you this smile you couldn’t discern, which most of his smiles were, and are. He blew a raspberry from his rubicund mouth and tsked.

“What, without you?” he scoffed, wry but playful, and you realised that, though he teased, and wanted you to know as much, his goodnature was sincere.

And your fingers twitched to wrap his seatbelt—because he was wearing the seatbelt—around his rosy throat five or six or seven times and tug hard.

Tashi threw her head back and laughed into the humidity of the night, of their wedding night.

Tashi squirmed in the leather passengerseat of the ivorycoloured 1960 Ford Thunderbird convertible.

You were leaning over in between them from the back, straddling the armrest. And she watched Art turn his head and kiss you. His hand looked huge on the messy, delicate bone of your jaw. It felt cool and clammy, you remember. Tashi sucked in a breath. You two broke apart after a moment, laughing, your palm coming down on his forearm like he’d just made a joke.

“That,” you said, making a puerile face as he absently brushed a thumb over your cheek, “Was too far.”

Your eyes were still shining with tears.

Art nodded, grinning, slipping his hand from your face and running it through his sweaty shoresand hair. “Anything for you, baby, but maybe not that.”

Tashi was flushed and florid and tamping her thighs tighter together and she wanted you both to put your hands on her.

Her arm slunk across the centre console to press her palm into his chest. And she ran her nails along the tender skin of your inner arm. And Art looked back at you like he was asking for permission, which was the first time in a long time he’d done that. And probably the last time since. And you don’t know why you nodded, but you did.

He gave you another strange, cursory kiss on the corner of your mouth, then leaned across the centre console and nipped at Tashi’s earlobe. The whetted burst of pain sent a visible shiver through her bones. She bit her lip and sighed.

“Mrs Donaldson,” he’d murmured, all husky and low. His white buttonup was all sweatrumpled and unfurled. He looked handsome and disheveled like a fallen angel or those illustrations on the covers of erotic paperbacks.

You swallowed, overwhelmed by it all.

You pressed the seam of your lips to the skin where her neck met her shoulder and her lithe fingers encircled your wrist and guided it between her legs.

You and Art are friends—good friends, by now—but sometimes you feel more like business partners. Cofounders of Keeping Tashi Duncan Happy and Okay Inc.

So, when he cannot stomach all the vomit—so, so much fucking vomit—for all his earnest, anguished, tearful trying, he calls you. Because he and his hairtrigger loins can’t help her right now.

And you don’t tease, or berate, or say it should’ve been you.

And he doesn’t protest, or control freak, or remind you it wasn’t you, it was him.

He dips out to stock up on crackers and barley sugar sweets, and you stay with Tashi and stand sentry on emesis duty.

You hadn’t known that any one thing was capable of maiming her this way. Tashi Duncan, your impenetrable infanta. Fast to get up, faster, still, to dry her tears. But this baby is wringing her bone dry. She’s feeble, swollen, and practically debilitated.

You feel her spine shift as she shakes and heaves into the toilet. You hate her like this. At mercy to her bones.

You can’t help the archaic scorn. None of this, none of any of it, would’ve happened, had it been you. But it wasn’t.

You cradle Tashi’s feverish head in the bend of your knee. You thread your knuckles through her sweaty curls. You rub your fingers into her collar, tracing her bones where they have been swallowed by her plummy sallow skin. In college, you used to give each other lymphatic drainage massages.

You’re on Virginia Key Beach with T and her brothers, at the edge of the ocean. You’re, like, fourteen. Tevin’s mouth is a comically fluorescent shade of blue as he topes down a Slurpee. Tre hops over waves. Tre keeps saying the sharks will get you, they’ll smell it, blood in the water, blood in the water and Tevin keeps holding the Slurpee so high that the ultramarine of it obstructs the sun. And Tashi is yelling I’m not even on my fucking period! even though she is red and wet between her thighs, and give it to me, Tev, it’s mine, you took mine! as she reaches and reaches and reaches, unable to grasp what she wants.

There are some women unmoved by such trivialities as their own blood. Eightinch stilettos, eight months in. People will assume Tashi Duncan, pulchritude and powerhouse, to be one of these women.

But you’ll know better.

She’s so good at the tennis, ultimately, because she listens to her blood. She lets it move her. Lets it give her power. She is a mesmerising glass carafe of red.

But when it spills, it pours. When she breaks, she shatters.

Art Donaldson’s child writhes inside her, swills her blood. And you watch.

Patrick takes you home from the hospital. You were planning on sinking into the void of your couch while forking miserably into a whole tray of lasagna by yourself, but you feel bad. You feel guilty and lonely. So you invite him in.

You thunk your stoneware roaster on the granite of your peninsular countertop. He’s sat on a barstool and you’re standing across from him, and he wastes no time tucking in. You nudge at the broiled cheese with your fork.

You’re crying, which he doesn’t mind, but it’s a little distracting while he’s trying to eat, is all. He peers up at you, circumspect, as he chews.

You roll your eyes at him. “Please don’t make me cry alone,” you tell him.

He chews, swallows, licks some pasta from his gums. He rests the fork against the edge of the tray and dusts his hands off.

“I don’t cry,” he says, shrugging like it’s out of his hands. The corner of his mouth quirks up as you fix him with a sullen glare.

“I’ve seen you cry,” you say pointedly, dropping your own silverware.

He shrugs again. “Yeah,” he says, “One time. That was the only time I’ve ever cried. Ever.”

He has this way of saying things like he absolutely means them. This hamfisted sincerity, serrated deadpan. And, when you’re emotional like this, all husked and raw, it’s unfortunately an extremely effective way to make you laugh. His eyes gleam with victory as you duck your head and giggle wetly.

“You feel special?” he smirks.

You roll your eyes again, tears still trickling pools into the tender shadowed skin beneath your eyes. “I feel especially depressed,” you reply thickly.

He flits his eyes back and forth between the both of yours a few times. You’re reminded of the abject tedious torture of sitting through one of Art’s tennis games. “Are you really? Or are you just moping?” he asks you.

You reach into your pocket and pull out your little Effexor prescription vial, rattling it twice, and tossing it his way. It’s a sloppy underhand, but he catches it easily.

“Huh,” he muses, turning it between his fingertips. “That’s why you look so different? I thought you were just putting on sympathy weight.”

Your lips wobble, and your eyes burn and blur again, your throat swelling shut like fucking anaphylactic excoriation, and you catch your face with your hands and cry.

“Don’t be mean right now,” you blubber.

Patrick blinks, sobering with a smart, the humour seeping off his face and replacing itself with an almost comically disturbed frown.

“Okay, okay,” he says, his voice light with a culpable urgency reserved for a triggered, irate straitjacket patient. He reaches over the lasagna, the savoury brume warming his forearms, and he takes your wrists and peels your fingers from your eyes. “Hey, I’m sorry.”

You hiccup breathlessly. Your tears slithering down your cheeks in rills.

“I’m sorry,” says Patrick. He presses his thumbs into your pulsepoints, like he can quash your distress through your radial arteries. “You look hot, okay? Really, you do.”

For his part, he seems genuinely contrite, and utterly concerned, and he probably means it. He is rarely insincere, even when his tongue is in his cheek. But your sulky inner voice says he’s bargaining. How about I quit being an ass and you stop with the ugly crying and I can finish this pasta and hotfoot it out of here? But this is your house. And your pasta. And you think you should get to mourn his exgirlfriend’s womb, if you so choose.

You sob harder, shoulders quavering. His brows raise in quiet alarm when you wrest your arms from his fingers.

You snuffle and swallow. “Please stop,” you moan sadly.

Somewhere between the cake cutting—which walked that revolting, quintessentially Art and Tashi line between sweet and sexy; she daubed some frosting on his nose, he licked it off her finger—and your purloining of a slice or two for your and Patrick’s beachside bitchsesh, the speakers are thumping with ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’.

Everyone is wasted.

You don’t even mean to, but one of Art’s cousins, who is clearly eking out his fraternity days that have long since started mouldering, keeps ordering you shots from the open bar. And you keep downing them, one after the other. He’s wearing a practically lurid red polo that really errs on the ‘optional’ side of Black Tie Optional, but he has a really charming smile, the light glistering off the white of his teeth as you dance.

And—fuck it—he’s hot. And he’s looking at you like he wants to kiss you in the middle of this dance floor, grinding against you like you’re teenagers at a CYO dance.

The lights are scintillating technicolour and the music is so loud you can feel it in your rib cage and it doesn’t take long for the room to start spinning like the world’s trippiest ferris wheel.

Cody—or Connor, maybe—goes to the bathroom to piss, and you track down the newlyweds on the other side of the room. Tashi’s beautiful eyes, already aglow, light up even more when she sees you.

“Hi, baby!” She kind of has to yell over the music. God, it’s been a while since you’ve seen her let loose like this. Either of them, really. They’re having a great fucking time. The Happy Couple. It makes you feel sick. “You good?”

“I’m fucked up,” you smile blearily, because all of a sudden the room’s spinning has increased in velocity.

You fight the urge to grab for her hand for some fleeting sense of stability. Because, if you do, you’ll tackle her to the ground and kiss her until someone hauls you off.

And her husband’s right there.

“Me too,” says said husband. He is flushed in the face, grinning elatedly, his eyes drunkenly disfocused, Tashi’s glossy, nudepink lip-print on his cheek.

Tashi, as ever, seems appreciably more put-together than Art looks and you feel. All silken and nitid. Art’s holding her with the desperate adoration of someone who knows, in the far far end of his bevvied mind, what you’re thinking right now. You narrow your eyes at him. Then,

“Do you wanna dance?” you ask on a whim.

“Sure,” Art shrugs, a sloppy smile curving on his lips. And by now Tashi’s turned to exchange polite smalltalk with some or other extended family member, so he impishly adds, “Let me ask the missus.”

He and Tashi have a short conversation that you can’t quite hear, and then she’s pulling you in by the wrist to whisper in your ear,

“Don’t let him drink anymore, okay?”

She pecks a kiss onto your cheek before you have time to question this rule, but you know her well enough to know she’s also surreptitiously telling you to slow down. You spitefully nab another shot on your and Art’s way to the dance floor.

Art’s a good dancer. You would certainly not have pegged him as one, if asked. But when he’s twisting and moving his feet and putting his hands on your waist in a halfway facetious impression of a slow dance, you realise it’s true.

“Congratulations, by the way,” you shout when you get close enough to his ear. “Happy for you.”

He winces at your volume, raising his fingers to his ear and laughing and looking at you and shaking his head. “No you’re not.”

Patrick watches you sob for a few more moments before smacking his hand against the counter.

“Let’s make one,” he says, declaratively.

You snivel and sweep some tears away, looking up at him. “What?”

“Let’s make one,” he repeats, more urgently now, “If we make one right now, it’ll show up before the end of the year, and we can still weaponise it. Come on.”

He’s sliding off the stool and reaching across the counter to grab your hand and tow you out of the kitchen.

“Patrick,” you whine in demurral, stumbling after him.

But he pulls you along even harder, making a decisive path toward the hallway. “Come on!” he insists, “I’m serious.”

“You’re broke.”

Which is true. He’s been snipped off from the trust fund, which you’d thought was purely the stuff of Murdochian nightmares. But he whipped out his Chase Mobile app and showed you the negative balance to prove it. He’d rather bum it out than suit up and schmooze. So he’s not spoiled for funds right now, nor is he spoiled for wins, and you aren’t equipped with great confidence in a potential future as his baby mama.

“They’re pissed, they’re not cruel,” he tells you, effectively shoving you into your room and kicking off his shoes. “I’ll be back on the payroll with a kid on the docket, I promise. My mom would love it, actually. My sister just had a hysterectomy, this’ll be like a family miracle. You’ll have the child support of a Kardashian.”

He grabs your head and kisses you sloppily—he tastes like tomatoes—clumsily walking you back into the bed.

You think he’s too old to be fingering you the way he is. Rubbing your clit all clumsy, like a faulty button on an old remote. You’re a little sticky, but not enough for what he plans to do here. He sighs and leans back.

“This isn’t working,” he says, all pensive, sitting back on his heels. It’s a little difficult, though, to take him seriously, when his cock is on the front end of halfmast and still rising.

When Tashi first started seeing him, you remember her barrelling into your room all stiff and saucereyed and clamorous. As though a particularly warhankering pigeon had just been elected president, or an alien society had been discovered in the thick of the Amazon. But no. She held your shoulders and shook them wildly and yelled, I’m telling you, it’s fucking huge!

She made a point to you that she’d never be caught dead gushing about his dick to his face. She said it was important to humble him.

So you want to maintain that tradition.

And, anyway, it’s a big dick, not the cure to cancer. You don’t even know what he needs it all for. It’s probably all he has left. You can’t imagine it even gets him very far.

People have frontiers. Parameters. Limits. To their patience, to their bodies. Patrick used to kill the sprinting drills, back in school. He likes going end to end, reaching those limits. But once you start pissing someone off and/or ramming into their cervix, everything else is probably a nonstarter.

You sit up, drawing your knees to your chest. “Uh, yeah. It isn’t.”

“Well, is there something I can do? Should I act like her? Will that get you going?” He asks, but he doesn’t wait for your answer. He huffs and crosses his arms and imitates Tashi’s angry moue.

And his dick is still hard, harder now, so you splutter into laughter. You laugh really, really hard. Then he guides your legs back open and swipes his fingers between them again.

And he grins and says, “Bingo.”

You got really into Pilates for about a month or two mid last year. You’re starting to think you should have kept at it. Your knees are hooked over his shoulders, the undersides of your thighs pressed to his chest. Your hips ache, but it feels, regrettably, really fucking great otherwise.

It’s eminently uncomfortable, sure. For your part, it hasn’t really occurred to you to let a man fuck you raw. Your lingering childishness still recoils a bit at the very idea. And it feels strange, that gauche drag of skin on skin. You’d need to be really wet for this to be working, and that hilarious necessity makes you wetter in response, and then he’s slipping in and out and fucking you raw and he doesn’t even seem to be trying too hard.

He’s a little relieved. You’re letting this happen and taking it like a champ and your pussy’s deep enough to give him room to work.

So he does. Because he knows how. He knows how to work things from here.

He’s had more sex than you’ve attended pilates classes.

The thought of you, splayed and tensile across a reformer, gets him pretty hot. Very hot, actually, and he can tell because the surface of his skin is bloomed pink, and your fingers blench away from his shoulders like he’s caught aflame.

He knows by now how tremendously warm he runs in these moments. He usually asks about a girl’s AC before things get going.

Should he say that aloud, or will it piss you off?

You probably see your appending to the convoluted list of unfortunate holes to sheathe the great penis of Patrick Zweig as a little beneath you.

This is his chance to remind you that Tashi Duncan doesn’t go back on her word for just any heavy pair of balls.

He angles your hips to get deeper, experimenting with ways to evoke a reaction. He’s working you like you’re paying him.

You’re trying really hard not to say anything too nice about his dick. But he’s plunging hard and fast into you, rolling his hips with all the dexterity of fucking Magic Mike, and—well—you wouldn’t be able to, even if you wanted.

The words you’re saying are not in the dictionary. You’re sweating, panting, tugging a little mercilessly at his hair. Patrick bends your legs and hoists your pelvis. He can’t keep a trainer right now, but some adrenalinefueled strength is allowing him to support your body like it’s nothing. He wasn’t bluffing about you looking hot. He’s groping you all over with the ferocious depravity of a necrophile.

There’s some real blasphemous perversion slipping off his tongue. Ersatz porno shit that should be giving you early onset morning sickness, but he’s going all Daniel Day Lewis with it, and you’re kind of buying it.

Fucking come-slut… fuckin’— fuck… gonna breed you… gonna put a baby in you.

You’re audibly wet. The air around you grows practically mephitic. You’re losing your fucking mind. If this shit falls flat, and he can’t get you pregnant tonight, and you dump and block him and never want to speak to him again, he at least hopes you remember this for a long time.

And—you know what—fuck it if that wasn’t memorable enough, he thinks, feeling his cock twitch as he slooshes molten litres into you. Because he’s pulling out, flipping you over, and hiking up your hips. Maybe this’ll be.

He fucks you, he comes in you. A lot. He needs a second to replenish.

You steal to the kitchen. Your inner thighs are chafed and viscid. You cover the lasagna dish and cache it away, and take a second to scoff at some vapidly controversial Twitter thread. You yelp when you feel his arms around you again, lifting you off the tile and carrying you back to the bedroom.

Patrick’s never really thought too hard about his come. It’s an ancillary deluge. A mess to clean most often. Maybe he’s considered meliorating his diet when someone’s gleaned a taste and gagged.

But right now it’s serving a purpose. And he is, among other things, relieved for that, too. He’s not gonna sit around and mourn this while it happens and ask you if you’d really have his child. He’d rather look you in your beautiful, milky pussy than a gift horse in the mouth.

He refuses to waste a drop of himself. He makes sure to coat your insides with it.

He lies sheathed inside you for many minutes after he comes, gripping your hips harshly to him, groaning like this were the real orgasm.

Afterwards, he holds your knees to his chest and lifts your ass and presses his palm to your cunt as if sealing an entrance, making sure nothing escapes. He’s trying to give his guys a fighting chance.

You were, at first—as in, after two or three rounds—a little amused by this stupid, elaborate routine. Something out of an old maid’s pastel mommy blog. You were amused, and frankly weirded out, by what seemed like a laughable lack of dignity on his part.

Now—now you’re feeling aroused by it. Because being aroused disrupts the dumb ritual and kind of annoys him.

When he is holding your knees up and your cunt twitches, he rolls his eyes.

“You already got off,” he chuckles, shaking his head. He sounds a bit spent, too. He’s usually flaked out by now, in his actual customary postcome routine. “Just stay still for a second.”

The fact that he doesn’t want you to come makes you almost desperately want to. He holds his palm over your cunt but he offers no friction.

The simple touch is enough, though. You can find your own internal rhythm.

Your head falls back against the pillow.

“Oh fuck.”

And maybe you’re being particularly loud and lewd in this moment, while he’s trying to be serious, and get something done. Because you’re still doing this longcon in calling his bluff. You don’t think he knows what he wants.

You don’t want to believe that you two are really so bitter as to start a life out of spleen.

You still don’t know if he knows whether or not he actually likes you.

“What the fuck?” he laughs, “I said don’t.” He squeezes your cunt like he wants to tear flesh from bone, trying to render you still again.

But it only makes you moan louder.

“Oh, fuck, that’s so good,” you mewl indecently, smirking a bit, because you’re joking, but you also sort of mean it, “It feels so good having your come inside me, I can already feel your little fuckass kid crawling around in there. He’ll grow up loving bagels, I just know it.”

These taunts are supposed to disgust him or hurt his feelings or simply turn him off, and Patrick does sort of look like wants to throttle you. Because he’s tired and a little grumpy and he knows you’re not letting him stay the night. But a part of him has always found you funny. So he just ends up getting hard again. Your crude, glib moaning brings him to such a pitch of want that he yanks you into his lap and fucks you roughly, gripping your jaw.

And you grin as he brings your head close. You feel it’s some kind of victory.

Even though you’re just prolonging this dumb, bitter, unfulfilling farce. Making sure there’s more of him inside you.

You two should not be parents.

By the eighth or ninth round, he starts getting conversational.

“I was one of those babies that never shut up,” he tells you, fucking up into you in cowgirl. He grunts and makes a thoughtful face. “Colic? Is that what it’s called? Yeah, I think I was a colicky baby.”

You make a face down at him. “I thought you said you’ve never cried,” you pant, rocking your hips back and forth.

He rolls his eyes again.

“Yeah, obviously I was lying. I cry all the fucking time.”

You consider this, your hips stilling, your palms resting against his hairy hotplate chest.

“Over what?” you ask, “Tashi?”

He blinks, scowling a bit, like he thinks you’re making fun. Then his grips your hips and starts to move you on his dick again. He doesn’t answer. Your pussy feels warm and raw.

Geez, how long have you two been at this?

He asks, absently, about baby names.

“I thought every girl had, like, a whole fucking list of them,” he says, pushing his semen back into your used cunt with his long fingers.

You don’t entertain that presumptuous conversation, but you don’t underestimate his commitment, either.

He’s back the next day, and the next, like clocking into a shift. He brings supplies. Sliced pineapple, fresh honey, ground cinnamon, cough syrup, two boxes of ClearBlue.

“I read acupuncture helps too,” he says.

“Absolutely not,” you say, but you let him feed you baby aspirin while you ride him in reverse on your couch watching Selling Sunset.

He feigns disinterest, but keeps tilting to look past your shoulder whenever the arguments start riling up.

“Ugh, Nicole’s a bitch,” he mutters.

Then he grunts and comes inside you, grasping your hips to sink you down and hold you still.

Her name, for the better or worse part of the first and second trimesters, was actually Stella.

Art’s grandma used to love that Philip Sidney poem, and Pam’s favourite film is Streetcar. It’s just that Tashi got sick of the name, and all other things, at a stage. So it didn’t stick.

They were oscillating between Lily and Rooney towards the end, and only made the final call when they saw her.

But, for a while there, she was Stella.

Stella’s craving peanuts, Stella’s the size of a rutabaga, Stella’s a kicker. And, boy, was she.

She’d ram her foetal feet into Tashi’s ribs over and over like she was on a treadmill. Which Tashi was starting to think of as karmic consequence for all the times she’d have Art doing cardio until he fainted.

You crouch down between her knees, resting your head against the amorphous motion of her distended stomach.

“Hey hey, Stella girl,” you whisper, “You wanna stop giving your mom a hard time?”

Tashi chokes out a wounded laugh from above you.

“That’s how Art talks to her.”

“Ugh, don’t ruin it,” you frown, moving to stand up.

But she sticks her leg out to halt you, grabbing your hand and tugging you back down, shifting her hips and spreading her thighs further apart.

You never could resist her sweet face when it was all crumpled up in asking. Because she got all soft and wet, like a flower caught in a gale.

She looks even softer now, over the horizon of her bloated body.

You gently tug her cotton shorts down and put your mouth on her and Stella stills.

“One more,” you say anxiously, eyebrows knitted in concern as Patrick sighs and unboxes a another pregnancy test—the fifth one—and you quaff down another glass of water to get your bladder teeming, because no way.

No way, right?

You’ve been taking him raw at all angles, and swigging shots of cough syrup, and weaning off the antidepressants, but no way.

“I don’t know what you thought was gonna happen,” he calls from beyond the bathroom door as you’re pissing on stick number six.

It’s just that you don’t feel anything.

You think you should be feeling more.

You think of Tashi, writhing and groaning like a bullet victim, miserably clutching her turgid body. You think of newborn Lily, her cottonsoft, tiny eye peeling open and seeing you. Deep steeped coffee, gleaming in the sterile light. Tashi’s eye. Tashi’s hair. Tashi’s baby. That tender absorption, that vivid creation.

If this kid is taking nothing from you, it’s gonna come out all Patrick. And—just—you don’t have the bandwidth to contend with such a prospect right now.

He drives you to the clinic every time. Every single time. One night, you rouse sharply from a morbid dream punctuated by the squall of wailing children. You call him. It’s 2 AM. He answers, and comes over, and drives you to the clinic, and tries not to nod off as you’re filling out the medical paperwork for the dozenth time. He also tries not to express any overt reaction to you changing your mind again.

Is it a kindness, to tease a man with the brutal decimation of his unborn progeny? No, of course not. His mum’s already preemptively enrolled the thing into a fancy German daycare.

But you hate that he’s given you an ultimatum and put it inside you. That’s the worst place, in relation to you, for an ultimatum to be.

If you tell Tashi, either he’s in, or you’re out. And those aren’t really odds you’re keen on rolling.

There are all sorts of ways to be a shitty friend. You opt for evasive gambits via claims of hectic work schedules and immovable errands. Any retching you do is that of guilt. You’re loathe to lie to her, to house this wretched zygote, to stay away. But she used to be able to tell when you’d changed your shampoo. She’d sniff him on you, in you, in a second. She’d just know. And she shouldn’t. She can’t. And if you could just unearth this presentient betrayal and toss it in a petri dish, she doesn’t have to.

You don’t know what matters more.

He drives you to the clinic. Teary teenaged girls, redcapped pickets out front. The receptionist knows you two by name by now.

Patrick slumps beside you. He’s still slogging through the first chapter of Last Child in the Woods. He’s pretty sure he’s never sat and read an actual, physical book to completion before in his life. But he’s too easily abstracted for Audible. So he’s working on it.

You’re groaning frustratedly and thunking the clipboard repeatedly against your skull. He absently slips a hand over your forehead, shielding the next few collisions before you huff and drop the board and turn to face him. He looks at you askance.

“You can change your mind,” he shrugs. Again, he generously omits.

You scoff at him, incredulous and a little irked. “I’m not gonna change my mind,” you grumble.

He shrugs again. “Okay.”

He knows what it’s like to have a mother in sackcloth and ashes. To be less of a son than a sentient thing of regret with little arms and legs. To not know what to do with that, or yourself. He wouldn’t do that to a kid.

You watch him thumb through Richard Louv for a few more moments.

Then, “You’re probably sick of me, aren’t you?”

He smiles a bit before schooling it stoic, slowly lowering the book and fixing you with this wry but incongruously tender look. “Of course I am,” he tells you.

“Get mad at me, then.”

He smiles again.

He knows what that’s like, too. Dad mad at mom. Stilted five course dinner. Dad telling him and Saskia what a goddamn headache mom is on the drive to school. Of course he’s sick of you, he’s always sick of you. But he likes you. And his head feels fine.

He turns back to the book, shrugging.

“Can’t,” he says simply.

You feel for baby Lily. She’ll never be able to get away with anything.

It’s Art who sniffs it on you, in you.

Tashi’s asleep upstairs when, after a fortnight and a bit, you rally up the guts to come over. Art opens the door and looks surprised for mere moments, and there is perhaps a flicker of concern, but then he smiles. And there’s only very mild ire there. The rest is fatigue and goodnature.

“Hello, stranger,” he smirks, turning to filch a set of keys from the marble catchall in the foyer. He is wheeling Lily out in the thirteenhundred dollar stroller he had lost six nights of sleep picking out. “You coming?”

So now you’re on a walk.

Lily lays on her soft belly in the stroller. The walls around her are a breathable mesh, and she fights to hoist her head and gawp at passing trees. This is, apparently, the only way she’ll do tummy time.

“And the only time she gets any sleep,” Art adds, jutting a finger over his shoulder in the general direction of their home down the street.

Lily’s wearing a ruffly lavender romper. Her skin is a healthy shade of linen and her hair is dark. Her fists have tiny moony fingernails that—when you comment how, Her nails are long. Like, sharp—Art explains how he keeps trying to cut them with a pair of tiny silver scissors. But they make Tashi nervous, their sharpness and its proximity to Lily’s fleshy hands.

“She said she wants her to get a grip on the world,” Art chuckles.

You snort, and you have to skip a bit to keep up with his brisk strides. “Oh, that’s definitely what she said,” you confirm.

Lily tosses and turns a bit in the strollerbed. She gurgles an impressive spit bubble, by Art’s standards. Most things she does are probably impressive to him, quite frankly. He tells you how, the other morning, she had thrown up breakfast onto his shoulder with such verve and accuracy that they’re already talking tennis lessons.

“Oh God,” you grimace. Not at the story, but at the memory of his nauseous pallor in the throes of Tashi’s own gravid sickness. “How’s that been for you?”

Art flashes a selfdeprecating simper. “I’m managing.”

When she casts her little coral taglet security blanket curbside, Lily scrunches up her face, grasping, gearing up for the Big Scream. Art sighs and says, “No, please?” as he stops to pick it up and give it back to her, and his arm, when he sticks it in, blooms with little ruddy strings as she claws at him.

He looks more than a little surprised she isn’t crying.

Apparently, in that meantime, you had jutted your fingers into the cot and offered her a pinky as a peace offering. Versailles-style, like you’ll be punished later.

But he seems content with how she’s chewing you and figures you guys can stop here, for a bit, beneath these treemottled springtime sunbeams. In the garden of the home in front of which you’re standing, huge orange bougainvillea loll their petaltongues in the breeze.

“I just…” Art flounders for his words, then scoffs a not unkind, but vaguely embittered, sort of laugh, shutting his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. “Why him?”

You groan. “Don’t ask.”

“How is he?”

“He’s—” you waver, then shake your head, before finishing, “Ugh.”

“Patrick’s ‘ugh’? Patrick? Wow. Should we call all the outlets? I mean, that’s never happened before. Patrick. Ugh. You’re blowing my mind.”

You snort, and Lily laughs, and Art informs you that that is a very hard reaction to glean. And he rubs his temples, because all the wails sort of tremor at that same migrainous pitch. No matter if they’re amused or rabidly apoplectic. But you can enjoy it, the laughter.

“Can you just tell her for me?” you frown helplessly up at him.

That flicker in his tired eyes that wants to agree is purely paternal, but he sighs and shakes his head. “You know I can’t.”

He’s genuinely sympathetic.

“She’ll forgive you,” he tells you. You roll your eyes and hang your head, kicking piteously at the wheel of the stroller. He intercepts your foot with his, lightly shoving it away before bending to search for your gaze. “Hey,” he says, “She really will.”

You huff. “She’s never had to.”

You instinctively press your fingers into your womb, through your shirt. You feel the strange sensation of something starting to swell beneath the flesh.

“You’ll be a good mom,” says Art.

It’s a small relief, for you, to feel your face screw into its shut-the-fuck-up-Art expression. It’s something you know how to feel, a well trodden path. Maybe, once they drop you like a bad habit, he’ll still send you those furtive pictures he likes to take of Tashi sleeping. And you and Patrick can dualmasturbate to them, pretending your swollen belly isn’t in the way.

What you like about them, all three of them, is that they have all always loved you so simply. Tashi is severe, and Patrick is flippant, and Art is occasionally insincere. But they each care about you, to varying degrees, in their own ways. And they do so without reservation, even when you’ve been an ass.

You think that’s how you’re supposed to love your child.

You should probably figure out how he does it in the next five to ten seconds.

You ask, “What makes you say that?”

And his eyes flick down to where Lily is still gumming your knuckle like a dog with a bone, then back up to you, and he gives you one of those smiles. Your face screws. Shut the fuck up Art. Then, he tells you, “You love harder than you give yourself credit for.”

Lily gags around your pinky.

[hedgehog-moss]

Update on May 1st protests and how the french goverment handled them?

^ The May 1st protests were pretty violent esp. in Paris; two cops were set on fire (they're ok, one has 2nd degree burns), lots of destruction in city streets, and hundreds of injured protesters. The French gov is sticking to its M.O. of denying any police violence against protesters, emphasising protesters' violence and portraying it as mindless anti-democratic savagery rather than the result of their own anti-democratic policies.

There were more people protesting in the streets on Monday than at any other May Day protest in the past 20 years (by a large margin—7 to 10x more people than usual.) And the numbers are still impressive in terms of this current social movement—there were about 1.2 million people at the first protest against the pension reform in January, 900K at one of the February protests, around 1.1M on March 7 and I think 1.2M on March 23rd... We're in May and there were 800K people in the streets on Monday (using the police's probably low estimate). The first marches earlier this year were peaceful; people started destroying shit in March after the 49.3 (=the gov not letting elected representatives vote on the reform); in the following weeks we saw a brutal escalation of police violence + suppression of just about any means of non-violent protest, which results in more violence.

The vast majority of protesters are still peaceful, but in terms of providing context for the increased violence, well—people protested peacefully, peaceful protests got banned. People banged pots and pans, pots and pans got banned and confiscated. People started a petition on the National Assembly website which got a record number of signatures, the petition was closed before its deadline and ignored. MPs asked (twice!) for a national referendum on the reform to be held, their requests were denied. Electricity unionists cut power in buildings Macron was visiting, now he travels around with a portable generator. Unions tried to distribute whistles and red cards (penalty cards) to football supporters before the French Cup finale last week, so the ones who wanted could use them if Macron showed up (he ended up hiding and greeting the footballers indoors rather than publicly on the stadium lawn); the police prefecture tried banning union members from gathering outside the stadium to distribute these items (although the ban was struck down by the judiciary as it was illegal, like most bans these days...)

Confiscating saucepans was already so absurd it felt like a gratuitous fuck you, but now they're trying to prevent the distribution of pieces of red paper. Cancelling petitions that would have had no real impact anyway. Prosecuting people for insulting Macron. Arbitrarily arresting hundreds of nonviolent protesters to intimidate them out of protesting (guess who's left then?). The French gov is systematically repressing democratic or nonviolent means of making your opinion heard, and when people get more violent they're like "This is unacceptable, don't these terrorists know there are other means of expressing dissent??" Where? This week a 77-year-old man was summoned to the police station and will be forced to take a "citizenship course" for having a banner outside his house that read "Macron fuck you" (Macron on t'emmerde). Note that he would have been arrested (like the woman who was arrested at her home and spent a night in police custody for calling Macron "garbage" on Facebook) but they decided not to only because of his age.

So that's where we're at; on Monday two cops caught on fire (well, their fireproof suit did) after protesters threw a Molotov cocktail at them. (The street medic who tried to help them with their burns ended up getting shot by a cop's riot gun a few seconds later—with French police no good deed goes unpunished!) The media talked a lot more about this incident than about the fact that the cop who got most severely injured on that day (broken vertebrae) was injured by an explosive grenade that a colleague of his meant to throw at protesters (you can see it at the end of the video below). If police with all their protective gear get so badly injured by their own weapons, no wonder the worst injuries have been on the protesters' side. (nearly 600 injured protesters on May 1st, 120 severely, according to street medics.) I'm not including images of these incidents in the video but on May 1st a protester had his hand mutilated by a police grenade + a 17 year old girl was hit in the eye by a grenade fragment, may end up losing it (during the Yellow Vests protests, Macron's first attempt at repressing a social movement, 38 protesters lost an eye or a hand).

What you see in the video: cops charging the front of a march to tear a banner off people's hands then retreating and drowning the street in tear gas when protesters throw paint bombs at them (protesters have umbrellas because of police drones); at 0:30, a journalist saying "They're not even arresting him, just kicking him when he's down—they kicked him right in the face!" then police spraying with tear gas protesters who try to fend them off; at 0:46 when a protester being arrested asks a journalist if he's filming and starts reading out loud a cop's ID number, another cop shoves the journalist and throws him to the ground; at 0:54, an Irish journalist runs away from the police tear gas grenades that you hear going off, at 01:08, the incident mentioned above when a cop drops a grenade he tried to throw, which explodes in his group, breaking another cop's vertebrae. There's a lot more I'm not including, like how CNN said "there's so much tear gas in Paris, our foreign correspondent can barely breathe", how another journalist was hit by a sting-ball grenade (he was also bludgeoned on the head so hard it broke his helmet—even though cops know the people wearing helmets are journalists...), and yet another journalist who was calling out a cop for aiming at people's heads with his riot gun (which is illegal) ended up having the guy aim the riot gun at his head from 2 metres away (getting shot with this "less lethal weapon" from that distance would be lethal.)

All of these videos are from May 1st (most of them from this account monitoring police violence.)

So yeah, nonviolent protests followed by violent police repression and bans of nonviolent means of protesting result in more violent protests. The French government responds by a) pikachu surpris, b) condemning violent protesters and praising violent police to the skies, c) continuing to ban everything they can think of. Confiscating saucepans didn't work but confiscating pieces of red paper will do the trick! Let's prosecute people for bashing or burning an effigy of Macron, because banning symbolic violence always works to prevent actual violence! And this week after the May 1st protests we learnt that the gov is thinking of making street barricades illegal, because that'll definitely solve everything. It's going to be interesting for history teachers to teach students about the 1789 revolution that allowed us to take down an absolutist regime and become a republic, under a government that banned barricades because they see them as terrorist anti-republican structures.

^ Statue symbolising the French Republic (on Place de la République in Paris) dressed with a 'Macron resign' shirt by protesters on May 1st.

[lees-chaotic-brain]

Shouto gets hit by a quirk, causing him to do some unexpected things...

WC: 3.2K

CW: Swearing, miscommunication, AFAB reader (reader has breasts), fluff

Note: Loosely inspired by that one scene in the Secret Garden K-Drama where Ju-Won makes Ra-Im cuddle with him, and Love Potion No. 9 by @daycourtofficiall!! Special shout-out to @andypantsx3 for beta-reading this for me. Tysm!!

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Your Valentine’s Day started like any other. The quiet beeping of your alarm cutting through the cozy silence of your bedroom as you stirred beneath your perfectly warm covers. Blearily, you reached out hitting snooze before slipping back under your blankets. After a few minutes, your alarm went off again, and this time you threw back your sheets.

The wooden panels of your bedroom floor were cold against your feet as you padded to your bathroom to get ready. Half an hour later, you were ready to go, grabbing a jacket to protect yourself from the sharp February chill as you headed out the door.

As always, you walked down the block to your favorite cafe and ordered your usual, chatting with the barista as she made your order. Once your coffee was acquired, you ventured back out into the crisp winter air and began the quarter mile walk to the hero agency you worked at.

Walking along the sidewalk, you sipped your coffee, savoring its warmth while you observed couples all around you exchanging flowers and chocolates. That was right. It was Valentine’s Day. A little snort escaped you as you thought about the hordes of teenage girls that were bound to swarm Shouto today. February 14th, the one of the year people had absolutely no boundaries when it came to the attractive duo-toned hero.

Finally reaching the agency, you hustled inside, a warm gust of air brushing over you as you stepped through the door. Nodding at the security guard lounging at his desk and shooting the secretary a warm smile you got on the elevator. On the way up, you closed your eyes, leaning against the wall as you enjoyed the quiet, interrupted only by the periodic dings informing you that another floor had passed. Pressure beneath your feet told you the elevator was slowing, and it dinged a final time before the doors rolled open. 

Stepping out, you wound your way around your coworkers, smiling and returning polite greetings before retreating to the relative peace and quiet of your office and settling in at your desk to go over some PR documents from the day before. A couple hours passed, and the documents were done so you were in the process of putting together an agenda for the day when a harried intern burst into your office startling you.

“Shouto got hit with a quirk!! We don’t know what it is, but he’s insisting he’s fine and refusing to get checked out.”

Sighing, you shut your laptop and quirked an eyebrow at the frazzled teen.

“And what, exactly, do you expect me to do about that?”

Watching him flounder for an answer, you felt a little bad for adding to his torment, so you agreed to go. Shooting your half-finished coffee one more mournful look, you stood and followed him out, closing your office door behind you. Sometimes you wondered if the handsome pro hero’s good looks were just there to balance out his complete lack of both tact and common sense. Either that, or his goal was to make the life of you, his manager, as difficult as possible. 

Realizing that the intern was taking you in the direction of the infirmary you had installed in the agency primarily for Deku, you sped ahead, irritation coursing through your veins. Was it really that hard for him to just do what he needed to do and not throw a temper tantrum? Your irritation only increased as his deep monotone floated out through the open door to meet you in the hallway. Even from just the little snippets you did catch, you could tell he was arguing and being his usual incorrigibly obstinate self.

The beat of your chunky heels on the polished linoleum announced your presence as you marched in, the rhythmic thumps heralding the storm of your incoming temper. The sight of Red Riot and Chargebolt speaking in hushed voices welcomed you. Chargebolt shot you a flirtatious wink, and Red Riot greeted you with a sheepish smile before stepping aside and gesturing behind him to where Shouto was clearly arguing with your friend Aimi, who was the agency’s resident quirk specialist, and Ingenium. Nodding at Red Riot with a small smile you strode over to the trio. At least, you tried to. 

Shouto noticed you before you could reach them and the next thing you knew your cheek was pressed against a firm pectoral. What? The addictive and unique scent of Shouto filled your nostrils as strong arms wrapped around your waist and back, crushing you against a muscular torso. Again, what? 

It took you a few seconds to process that it was Shouto who was gripping you in a tight embrace. Shouto, the current number three hero, your boss, and also your long-time not so little crush. His cologne swirling in your nose muddied your thoughts, mixing them into a cesspool of intrusive thoughts and vague confusion. After an embarrassingly long five seconds you managed to pull yourself together and jerked away. 

“Hey! What’s going on? What was that for…”

A pair of intense heterochromic eyes bored into your own, causing you to trail off as the dual toned man leaned down to peer into your face. There was an awkward pause, and the entire room seemed to be holding its breath. 

“Your eyes truly are gorgeous. They might be my favorite part of you. I could gladly lose myself staring into them.”

The deep, even timbre of his voice filled the room, his words causing you to choke on your own saliva. You stared at him incredulously, unsure if you were having a hallucination due to a lack of caffeine or if he really said what you thought he did. You floundered, and just as you were finding your words he struck again.

“Although, your breasts are enjoyable to look at as well."

Your lungs officially gave up and attempted to forcibly exit your body through your mouth. Aimi spat out her mouthful of coffee all over her crisp white coat, mouthing ‘girl what’ at you with wide eyes while Ingenium’s scandalized gasp rang through the room. On the other side of the room, Red Riot and Chargebolt leaned against each other cackling. 

A small, almost nonexistent frown appeared on Shouto’s face and his eyebrows furrowed slightly, his face perplexed.

“I…did not intend to say either of those things out loud. I-”

The overly obnoxious blare of Chargebolt’s ringtone filled the room, cutting Shouto off. Mouthing that it was Bakugou, the electric blond answered, holding the speaker several inches away from his ear to protect his eardrums. All eyes except for Shouto’s were on him as he spoke to the explosive hero.

“Wassup?...Oh you got her to explain her quirk to you? That's great man…mhm…symptoms? Uh, hey! Shouto! Feel weird at all?" The last part was directed at the man in question as he lowered the phone.

“I’m telling you I feel fine. I’m just a bit light headed and dizzy. It’s nothing to worry about.”

Was that a hint of irritation in Shouto’s voice? Chancing a look over at him, you noticed a slight downward tilt to his lips, which for him was the equivalent of a pout. Kaminari nodded and relayed the information.

“Yeah, he says he’s fine other than that. He has said some weird shit though. Anyways, what did the girl say her quirk was?”

There was a beat of silence as Kaminari listened to whatever Bakugou was saying, his eyes opening comically wide. His reaction and prolonged speechlessness was just beginning to make you feel uneasy when he began snickering.

“There’s no way. That’s fucking gold…yeah…how did it even happen?...You’re joking…that’s the best thing I’ve heard all year…Did she say how long it lasts for?...between one and six hours? That’s not too bad. I feel a little bad for Y/N though…Yeah, anyways see you later…yep will do…bye.”

He ended the call and turned to face all of you, barely suppressing his smirk. Alarm bells were ringing in your head. What did ‘I feel a little bad for Y/N’ mean? Why was the situation so funny? All you knew was that whatever he was about to say was not going to be conducive to the peaceful day you were hoping for.

“It seems our perverted ice prince here got hit by something of a love quirk.”

The room was silent for a moment as everyone tried to process what he was saying. 

“A…love quirk? Is that why he’s been acting so weird towards me today?”

While you were glad that nothing serious was wrong with Shouto, a small part of you stung at the idea he only said what he did because of a quirk. But you were just being wishful. There was no way that a man like Todoroki Shouto, Japan’s unofficial hearthrob and number three hero would ever say, or even think something like that about you. You were just his normal -almost boring, really- manager with no special talents or characteristics to speak of. You shook your head, clearing your thoughts.

“Oh, but I wasn’t finished talking.”

Chargebolt gave you a look that told you he could sense your slight disappointment, a gleeful gleam in his eyes.

“What I didn’t get to say before you oh so kindly interrupted me was that it isn’t a normal love quirk. Instead of making someone fall in love, or acting as an aphrodisiac, it merely makes it so the affected can’t control their impulses around the person they have feelings for.”

You processed what he said, unsure if you heard and understood him correctly. If it only affected his impulses in regards to the person they had feelings for then that would mean-

No. You shook your head, resolutely stomping out the butterflies that came to life in your stomach at your train of thought. There was no reason to get your hopes up. You were reading too much into this. Todoroki probably just got confused because of the quirk and mistook you for the person he actually had feelings for. That made a lot more sense. Finally, Iida broke the quiet, his boisterous voice shattering the palpable disbelief.

“Todoroki’s personal feelings are none of our concern. Our main priority should be deciding what to do with him until the quirk wears off. Bakugou said one to six hours, correct?”

He spoke briskly, then turned and gestured at Todoroki, who had laid down on the cot in the center of the room sometime during the phone call. Whether it was because he merely got bored, or because his lightheadedness was finally getting to him, you were unsure. As all of you turned to stare at the man curled up on his side facing away from you, Aimi pushed her thin wire-framed glasses up on her freckled nose and cleared her throat.

“Erm, well for a quirk like this my recommendation would be for him to stay here until it wears off. Due to the lightheadedness and dizziness, I do think it would be best for him to remain laying down or seated so as to avoid falling and potentially injuring himself worse. We’ll also need to periodically check if the effects have faded, so we will need Y/N-.”

She gulped and threw you an apologetic glance. You thought you knew where she was going with this, and you were not exactly a fan of it.

“-Y/N to stop by every couple of hours so we can reevaluate. Is that okay with all of you?”

She mouthed an apology at you, and you sent her a glare that promised revenge. Oh she was so on her own the next time her crush, Deku, came in with some extreme injury and refused to get treated. Smiling, you angled your body, ensuring the rest of the room was unable to see you flipping off your so-called "friend."

“That’s no problem! Now, why don’t we all get back to work and leave Shouto to rest?”

Not waiting for anyone else’s answer you tried to make a beeline for the door so you could go crawl under your desk and attempt to process what the hell just happened. Unfortunately, something hindered your hasty escape. Specifically, a large, unfairly pretty hand hindered your hasty escape. Just as you had taken your first step towards freedom (and your coffee), long fingers reached up and grasped the back of your shirt, giving it a hard yank.

Caught off guard, you stumbled backward, your ass hitting the edge of the simple white cot in the center of the room. The simple white cot that the man currently gripping your shirt inhabited. Taking advantage of your momentary imbalance, Shouto smoothly pulled you over his body and onto the cot next to him, draping an arm and a firmly muscled thigh across your frame to keep you pinned snugly to his side. 

The soft strands of his two-toned hair tickled your cheeks and nose as he buried his head in the crook of your neck, nuzzling into you like some sort of attention-starved cat. What the fuck? You blinked at everyone else in the room over Shouto’s head, flabbergasted. Weren’t you just walking away not even two seconds ago? Unfortunately, you were unable to think clearly, the addictive feel of Shouto’s body pressed against yours forcing a hard restart on your brain. It took two (or was it five?) torturously long seconds for your brain to reboot and finish loading. 

Once it did, you began squirming because firstly, this was not appropriate at all. You were at work for heaven’s sake. Second of all, you were enjoying cuddling with your boss a little too much. Any longer and you might never be able to go back to living the way you did before discovering Shouto cuddles. You might even become an addict, unable to live without them. However, Shouto did not appreciate your feeble thrashing, or share any of the same concerns because he just pulled you tighter against his frame. 

“Stop moving. ‘M trying to nap.”

You could feel the vibrations of his deep voice all across your body and unfortunately it did things to you. All of your muscles turned to jello and you relaxed into his warm embrace, suddenly unable to think straight. Over his broad shoulder you could see Kaminari and Aimi ushering everyone out, giggling and shooting sly glances over their shoulders at you.

Snapping a final picture, the two of them finally got everyone out and closed the door behind them, abandoning you. Just for that, next time you saw Deku you were going to tell him that Aimi had just fought a villain with an unknown quirk and needed help identifying it. 

Wait, nothing about your prior thought made sense. The firm press of Shouto’s body against yours paired with the deliciously masculine smell of his cologne reduced you to a mindless idiot. Melting against him your eyes slowly fluttered shut, the beat of his heart a metronome counting out an uniquely Shouto lullaby that lulled you to sleep.

When you opened your eyes next, the room was awash with bright mid-afternoon light. Unsure of where you were, you tried to sit up, only to find you couldn’t, for there was some large object around your waist pinning you to the bed. Disoriented, you rolled over, and found yourself face to face with the one and only Todoroki Shouto, pure contentment emanating from him. 

“Wha-?”

You made an embarrassingly vague and confused sound, staring at him agape with drool and sleep lines on your face. Lifting your wrist, you checked the time. It was three thirty?? That meant you had slept for six hours? Oh my god why hadn’t anyone woken you up? You jolted up, then realized something. 

Wait, so Shouto had been hit by the quirk around eight o clock, which was seven and a half hours ago. And the longest it was supposed to last was six hours, so that meant the quirk should have worn off an hour and a half ago. Turning to Shouto accusingly, you opened your mouth to speak but he just pouted at you, and gently tugged you back down so you were laying beside him again. 

“Hold up.” You said, pushing him away a bit so you could see his face. “The quirk was supposed to wear off over an hour ago.”

“And?” He raised an eyebrow as if you had said something stupidly obvious.

“Well, it obviously didn’t so you should’ve woken me up so we could get you looked at and-”

A large, warm palm covered your mouth.

“Who says it didn’t?”

You opened and closed your mouth at a loss for words. Wait, if it had worn off, then he had no excuses and-

You punched him hard in the chest and sat up.

“Todoroki Shouto! What about the girl you like? This isn’t fair to her. At least before you could excuse your behavior because the quirk disoriented you, but what about now? You-”

This time he wasn’t as gentle as he practically tackled you back onto the thin mattress of the cot and firmly pressed his mouth against yours. All thoughts immediately evacuated your mind, leaving only Shouto. And despite any and all common sense you thought yourself to possess, you found yourself kissing him back, tangling your hands in his hair to pull him closer. When he finally pulled away to catch his breath, he rested his forehead against yours, panting.

“Now do you see?”

His breath fanned across your face, and you had to fight to form any coherent thoughts when his gorgeous eyes were boring into yours so intensely.

“Uh, that you're kissing me even though you have a girl you like? Yeah I-”

He let out a low growl of annoyance and kissed you again, this time with more passion, pouring all of his frustration into the kiss. This time you pulled away. 

“What, what are you doing? Like, obviously you’re kissing me but why? You just got confused because of the quirk and mistook me for the girl you have feelings for.”

He looked at you quizzically.

“I didn’t confuse you for anyone.”

What? Oh. Oh. Your eyes widened in realization as you stared at him.

“Oh. Ok. So, uh, you like me, and I um, I like you too, fyi, but uh why? And also, why did the quirk make you want to take a nap with me?”

“I have a confession.” He leaned in close, his lips brushing against your ear as he spoke. “The quirk wore off while Kaminari was on the phone with Bakugou.”

You gaped at him while you did a quick mental calculation. Hold up. That meant-

“You were back to normal when you manhandled me into taking a nap with you!!

He just gave a completely unabashed look, nodding his head. You-he-! You couldn't believe him.

“So you pretended the quirk was still affecting you, and used it as an excuse to cuddle with me?”

Again, a nod, not even a hint of remorse on his gorgeous face. Wow. He was completely unabashed. Evidently tired of this line of conversation, he leaned in and resumed kissing you. And you let him, because fuck this, you could talk about your mutual feelings and his shameless behavior later.

After he finished kissing you senseless.

[carigm]

SPOILERS FOR ST5 FILMING THIS WEEK+ A THEORY

Okay, I’m going to try and break down all the filming leaks we got this week and put them together into a theory.

In case you don’t know yet, ST’s production has moved back to Stone Mountain, GA this week. This is a woodsy area that’s been used before in the show to film all the UD forest scenes as well as just the regular forest scenes in the show.

On Monday of this week, someone who lives close to the area came upon a set. And it was the Castle Byers pictures we got. I’ll add them here too.

Some observations. To me this version of castle Byers doesn’t look like the original one we first saw. That one was much fuller and looked more stable. It also doesn’t look like the version Will left behind after destroying it in S3. We know the UD is stuck on the time Will was there, so imo the version of castle Byers we are seeing here is the one that was damaged by the demogorgon when it grabbed Will, back in S1.

Based on this pic and a little video of the set, we all speculated they could be filming something related to Will, perhaps even a flashback. Here’s where it gets interesting.

I was looking at the castingtaylormade insta page (they post all the casting for extras and photo doubles needed for the show) and I came across this.

Production was looking for a minor photo double and “adult” one to work on the 20th (aka Tuesday of this week) as well as some other dates in February and March.

Now, we know they were filming at the castle Byers set the same day that this minor photo double was needed. I don’t think I need to spell it out here. They were looking for a child, so younger Will scenes are basically a guarantee to have been filmed this week. As for the adult photo double filming the same date, well there’s quite a few options. If it’s a little Will flashback/vision we’re gonna see, perhaps the adult photo double is gonna be older Will himself. Maybe we’ll get current Will having visions of his younger self and his time in the UD, and we’ll see both versions of him. Let’s not forget he was able to shift to the UD in S2 without physically being there.

Another option for the adult photo double could be Vecna. Will and Vecna are bound to share scenes this season, so perhaps we’ll see whether Vecna was involved from the get go in Will’s disappearance.

Now it gets even more interesting, because today we got new pics of the “UD” set from this week. There’s a lot of fog, and a very poignant blue and red lighting mix.

We know the UD usually has a blue tint, but there’s been instances where it has looked red, especially in S4. However, the most red we’ve ever seen in the UD was when Will was having his S2 visions of the MF, remember how he would appear in a cloud of hellish red and lights would flash? Yeah. Another big use of red in this show has been for visions, like Will’s UD ones but also El in Billy’s mind in S3. And ofc more notably Max’s Vecna vision in S4.

I want to specifically focus on one picture.

As you can see, there appears to be a figure walking along the tree path, with perhaps a taller figure on the left but that is hard to tell because it could just be part of the tree. Stranger Things Spoilers was the account that got these set photos and look at the comment they just liked on Insta.

I think it’s safe to say they’re hinting that the figure walking is Will.

Which basically ties this whole week of filming together and seems to be pointing at the fact that Will is gonna be exploring his UD connection and that’s a major component of this season (duh).

I personally think we’re gonna see Will have visions of his time there as a child, but also he will be able to go there mentally like he did in S2, perhaps this time being taunted and brainwashed by Vecna. “He spies back”.

So there you go folks, it seems like our beloved Will Byers is gonna be greatly suffering from supernatural horrors beyond our comprehension, once again.

I wonder what will be able to pull him back from all this mental deterioration he’s surely gonna face again.

Could it be the power of family love and perhaps…gay love?

The Duffers did say to rewatch S2 🤷‍♀️

[green-with-envy-phandom-event]

Welcome to Green With Envy's second year, folks!

The first one went so spectacularly and had so much support that we're back at it again!

~~~~

For those of you who didn't participate or spectate last year, this is an artist event that comes in two parts.

Part one is the chill half of the event, aimed at people who love to draw but hate to color. Over the next two months, a form will be open for anyone to drop Danny Phantom themed line art at the event's doorstep. Which we will promptly "ooh" and "ahh" over before hoarding away.

Part two is the competitive half of the event, aimed at people who love to color but hate to draw. This is where things get spicy~ After being divided into small pods of 3 to 8 people, colorists will compete for points by taking brushes to as much line art as physically possible!

But this competition has a twist. What line art you color and when completely changes how many points your team gets! It's all about strategy, and if you aren't careful, another team may just come in and Poach your precious lead away from you!

All are welcome regardless of skill level for both halves of the event.

~~~~

The official hashtag for the event this year is #greenwithenvy2024 

In-depth Rules can be found here and some things have changed this year, so make sure to look!

Tutorial can be found here

FAQ can be found here

The discord server for this event is here

~~~~

Line Art and All Sign-ups Due: Sunday, February 25th (02/25/24) 11:59 pm, Pacific Time Zone

Coloring Starts: Friday, March 8th (03/08/24) 8:00 pm Pacific Time Zone

Coloring Due: Sunday, April 7th. (04/07/24) Pacific Time Zone

Sign-ups for line artists are here (closed)

Sign-ups for colorists are here (closed)

Line artist submissions go here (closed)

Colorist submission form can be found in the Discord.

P.S. Remember when looking at the dates to account for your daylight saving's time. What day it happens on depends on where you are in the world!

~~~~

We are so excited to bring this awesome event back to the Phandom, and we can’t wait to see you all there!

Big shout out to @foxyteah for letting us use their bootylicious line art from last year's event to make this year's banner! And to @ectoblastfromthepast, @weshney, @englandamericaitaly and @tytach for coloring it!

~~~~

Looking for links to last year's stuff?

2023 Free-To-Color Line Art

2023 Event Decal?

2023 Masterpost?

[nieded]

#RAINBOWROAD for Rainbow Railroad Charity Drive Redux Pre-Orders are open!

I am so excited to announce that I am taking preorders for copies of the entire #RAINBOWROAD trilogy starting today! Preorders will be open starting today, February 14th (happy Valentine's!) to March 13th. It will close at 11:59 MST.

Please reblog so we can spread the news!!!!

>>PRE-ORDER HERE<<

This past summer, I did a print run of the first part of the series, Sit Tight, Take Hold and printed 94 copies for charity. Many readers asked for books 2 & 3, and I had many others express interest in a 3-part bundle who missed the first run. I've spent November, December, and January prepping the next parts for print, and I'm so excited to share them with you.

So, what is included?

Option for a 3-book bundle including:

Book 1: Sit Tight Take Hold 424 pages on matte 80lb text paper, color printing throughout. Cover has matte lamination in color. Dimensions of the book are 6x9x.93. Weight ~2 lbs Art by Blairamok (See cover art above)

Book 2: How do you solve a problem like Ezira?, Accept a Little Spin, and Oh, there's a long way to go 408 pages on matte 80lb text paper, color printing throughout. Cover has matte lamination in color. Dimensions of the book are 6x9x.93. Weight ~2 lbs Art by DustandHalos (cover art below)

Book 3: Fools Rush In and bonus content, 0-60 in 3.5 468 pages on matte 80lb text paper, color printing throughout. Cover has matte lamination in color. Dimensions of the book are 6x9x1.06. Weight ~2lbs Art by Pyracantha (cover art below)

PDF copies of all three parts

Option for a 2-book bundle including only Parts 2 & 3 + PDF copies. This is an option for people who already own the first book.

Limited option for Part 1 discounted damaged books (15 available). This does not include PDFs. These books have cosmetic damage to the covers from shipping. Damage does no affect the print quality of the text.

Limited postcards that were extras from the first run (only 8 available)

Remaining Corvette Crowley posters, including A/B grade options, 12x18".

$20 PDFs of all stories that will include all the formatting of the print run and cover art! (Screenshots from the PDF proofs below)

Where are the proceeds going?

Rainbow Railroad is a North American-based organization that works globally to ensure safety and asylum to LGBTQIA+ individuals. This is the same charity we donated to last time, and it was a resounding success. Last time, we were able to fundraise $1,600!

Continued FAQ below:

How much does shipping cost?

For US residents, bundles will cost a flat fee of $10. They will ship via media mail through USPS.

For anyone outside of the US, shipping has been estimated through the cheapest carrier, either USPS or UPS minus $10. Unfortunately, I cannot control the cost of shipping, and I know that it is extraordinarily high. The bundles will weigh anywhere between 4-6+ lbs, which is expensive to ship.

Wait, I'm from the US. Why am I paying more for Media Mail?

While Media Mail typically would cost $4-6, the increased price is to offset international orders, whose shipping will cost anywhere from $20-60 with the discount. I hope you understand. I want to make this as accessible as I can without personally eating any costs. I am not making any profit off of this project.

When do orders ship?

Once pre-orders close on 3/13, I will order the books. There is typically a 2-4 week turn around for them to be printed and delivered to me. I then have to package and ship everything from my house. I hope to have everything shipped 1 month after pre-orders close, but I am only human.

US mail should take 2-8 days. International orders can take anywhere from 2-4 weeks, so please be patient.

If you are only ordering a damaged copy or postcards, both of which have already been printed, I will ship those out sooner.

When do I get my PDFs?

The PDFs and book proofs are the same, and they are 90% done. PDFs will be delivered via email by me once pre-orders close. I am still doing small changes and edits to make sure they are perfect!

If I order a bundle, do I also need to order PDFs if I want digital copies?

NO! PDFs are included with the bundles and only the bundles. You will not have access to them immediately, only once pre-orders close and I email them to you! Like I said, they are 90% finished, and I am stilling making small adjustments. (Kerning, I loathe you!)

What percent of proceeds are going to Rainbow Railroad?

100%! This excludes the cost of printing and shipping. For reference, the first print run cost $1,254 for the books alone, not including shipping and packaging supplies. Anything remaining goes directly to charity. I am not keeping any costs for labor or making any profit on this.

Wait, there's bonus content?

Remember when I said I was done after the trilogy? Well, @tut557 popped into the Discord server and said, 'Hey, what if they played Mario Kart...' This spiraled into a long conversation about all the different media promos they might do, and then I spent this past November writing another 50k of the #RAINBOWROAD universe for NaNoWriMo. This is also available on AO3, and I will be posting weekly while preorders are open. You can find it here.

[podcast-bookclub]

Podcast Jam!

The PBC’s 2024 Podcast Jam is a collaborative event running from early February to May for anyone interested in creating an audio drama, both prior creators and newcomers to podcasting. Inspired by game jam events, teams of writers, voice actors, editors and artists will collaborate to create the pilot episode of a fiction podcast from start to finish, with the last weekend of the event dedicated solely to recording and editing of the episodes.

We know that, while the barrier of entry for podcasting is low, it can still be intimidating to jump into a show alone without any experience in the field. Thus, we hope this event will encourage new folks to try their hand at creating in a relatively low-stress, community-based environment, alongside giving current podcasters a fun change of pace from their ongoing shows. Though only a pilot will be created for the jam, participants are welcome and encouraged to continue their show beyond the event if so desired (we would love to have some new shows to keep up with!)

Event Schedule:

Sign-ups: February 5th - March 23rd

Team Submission Form Deadline: March 30th

Team Announcements: April 6th

Project Withdraw Date: April 20th

Jam Weekend: May 3rd - May 6th

Episode Submission: May 6th

Public Episode Release: May 25th

Jam Closing Ceremony: June 1st

To join the event, please fill out the Participant Sign-Up here. The jam will be hosted through the Podcast Book Club Discord - if you are not already a member, you can join the server here. For existing members, be sure to grab the Jam Participant role from the role selection channel to gain access to the PodJam chats! Additionally, we've set up a sideblog, @podcastjam, that you can follow to keep up with the event here on Tumblr!

[mareastrorum]

I think Zemniaz fell before Aeor. I can't prove it, but I can throw massive doubt on the information we've been relying on to conclude that Aeor fell first.

Brennan's said twice now that Aeor was the last flying city to fall. At first I thought maybe Brennan was leaning on qualifiers like "last great city." I wanted to sort out whether Brennan was retconning this, but considering that he's worked SO closely with Matt to prepare Downfall, I couldn't help but feel like we must have missed something.

Zemniaz has been discussed very few times in the stream. In C2E110, the Nein discussed the city after the dinner with Trent Ikithon (Beau's conspiracy board scene):

Other than that it fell sometime during the Calamity, Matt didn't specify when Zemniaz crashed into the Zemni Fields.

Then In C2E125, the Nein interrogated Halas in an effort to learn more about Cognouza and Aeor. He's not very cooperative given that the Nein didn't help him out of the gem when they first found him.

At the beginning of the conversation, Halas claims that Aeor fell "before my time." Straightforward information that no one did an insight check on. After that, Caleb suggests that if Halas answers three questions, he'll see about answering more questions in "different circumstances," implying that he'll help Halas out of the soul gem he's trapped in.

Halas said that he's from Zemniaz, he grew into the belief that he could only rely on himself, and then he abandoned Exandria -- presumably to live in his Heirloom Sphere. He also makes no mention of the city's destruction, but that makes sense given that the Nein were asking about Aeor.

Now, if we stopped there, then we could conclude that Zemniaz fell during the calamity after Aeor. But you know what?

Halas is a fucking liar.

In Episode 125, Matt responded to Caleb's 19 insight check:

Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, Chapter 1: Story of Wildemount, Section 1: History of Wildemount, Subsection: Age of Arcanum, Page 12:

Powerful Archmages such as Vecna the Whispered One and Halas Lutagran began to carve their paths into history during this era of unbridled magical experimentation.

"Before my time" my ass. He was already a prominent mage in the Age of Arcanum, before the Calamity even started, and certainly before Aeor fell. This fucking fucker lied to us and we all took him at his word.

I don't have an answer whether Matt intended for that to be misinformation or if it was an unintentional contradiction. The Explorer's Guide to Wildemount came out on March 17, 2020 and Episode 125 aired on February 11, 2021 -- nearly a year later. Episode 83 (when the Nein met Halas) aired on October 31, 2019. I don't think that Matt would make that mistake given that he had been done or nearly done writing EGtW when Halas first showed up. I'm leaning on the side that it was probably intentional misinformation. After all, Halas was exceptionally distrusting, and he couldn't know why anyone would ask him about Aeor. He knew Aeor had been destroyed by the gods; do you think a hermit archmage is going to trust random bozos who found his gem and started pestering him about it?

Information from Halas can't be trusted, so it doesn't inform us one way or the other. Thus, I wouldn't say that Brennan is retconning so much as clarifying an unknown. And giving us more reason to realize Halas is a fucking liar.

In conclusion, if any of the lore you're relying on came from Halas, maybe add an asterisk to it.

[hotguycalendar]

The Hotguy Calendar 2023!!

(header art by @applestruda​) 

Hello everyone! The 2023 Hotguy Calendar is now up and running! 

If you want to order the physical calendar already designed by our team from Mixbook, fill out this form and submit your email to receive an invitation to order the calendar. The form will be open for two weeks, and will close on March 20th at noon EST. If you want to preview the physical calendar, check it out here on Mixbook. 

If you want the digital calendar you can download the Digital Calendar PDF from this folder. This is a 14-month calendar with the same basic designs and dimensions as the physical calendar, with a few bonus details. 

If you want to design and print your own physical calendar through a different website, use this Images for Print folder, where you can download the same images we used. You are welcome to use a different website or photo printing service to create your own Hot Guy Calendar. 

If you want to download any of the cool images for fun, you can find the files in the Images for digital download folder. 

The links to our artist’s socials and FAQ links are below the cut! Please give our team a lot of love! They’ve worked hard and done so much incredible work on this project. 

HotGuy 2023 Calendar: Instructions and Q&A 

Thank you so much to the team of incredible artists and mods that made this project possible! Go and give them some love! 

Artists: 

January: Kkoct-ik on Tumblr 

February: Mattastr0phic on Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram   

March: Kazehita on Tumblr, Instagram, kazehita_ on Twitter  

April: Scarring-lust on Tumblr  and Alfstar on Boosty ( both 18+) 

May: Goodtimeswithgrian on Tumblr   

June: Cloudy-video on Tumblr 

July: Evenmoreevil on Tumblr, Mothbutevil on Twitter 

August: Panidanya on Tumblr and Twitter 

September: Cocoabats on Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram   

October: Closet-thing on Tumblr 

November: Stiffyck on Tumblr  

December: Floweroflaurelin on Tumblr, sabiralangevin on Twitter 

Front Cover/January 2024: Applestruda on Tumblr  

Back Cover/February 2024: mumblesplash on Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram    

Mods:

Teahound on Tumblr 

Medusa on Tumblr

Chrysalizzm  on Tumblr

Lumberjack-Halt on Tumblr 

[wintfleur]

STELLA HUGHES DISCOGRAPHY

🎤 ━━━ 𝒶n inside look 𝓲nto STELLA HUGHES discography , the 𝑔irl who unintentionally took the music 𝒾ndustry by 𝓼torm !

THE PILOT

━━━ ‘ stella hughes has her offical debut in the music industry with her first ep ‘the pilot’ with three tracks . october 2022 .

TRACK 001 MESS IT UP (orig. gracie abrams)

TRACK 002 FEELS LIKE (orig. gracie abrams)

TRACK 003 SCARED OF MY GUITAR (orig. olivia rodrigo)

GOODBYES

━━━ ‘ stella hughes drops her second ep ‘Goodbyes’ with six tracks . march 2023 .

TRACK 001 WE CAN’T BE FRIENDS (orig. ariana grande)

TRACK 002 I KNOW IT WONT WORK (orig. gracie abrams)

TRACK 003 BAGS (orig. clairo)

TRACK 004 CEILINGS (orig. lizzy mcalpine)

TRACK 005 FAVORITE CRIME (orig. olivia rodrigo’

TRACK 006 WHERE DO WE GO NOW? (orig. gracie abrams)

DISTASTEFUL

━━━ ‘ stella hughes drops her debut album ‘distasteful’ with eleven tracks . december 2023 .

TRACK 001 ALL-AMERICAN BITCH (orig. olivia rodrigo)

TRACK 002 STAY (orig. gracie abrams)

TRACK 003 THATS SO TRUE (orig. gracie abrams)

TRACK 004 BALLAD OF A HOMESCHOOLED GIRL (orig. olivia rodrigo)

TRACK 005 SO AMERICAN (orig. olivia rodrigo)

TRACK 006 OUT OF LOVE (orig. alessia cara)

TRACK 007 FRIEND (orig. gracie abrams)

TRACK 008 TEENAGE DREAM (orig. olivia rodrigo)

TRACK 009 I SHOULD HATE YOU (orig. gracie abrams)

TRACK 010 I KNOW YOU (orig. faye webster)

TRACK 011 FREE NOW (orig. gracie abrams)

PLEASING

━━━ ‘ stella hughes once again takes over the music industry by dropping another ep ‘pleasing’ with four tracks . february 2024 .

TRACK 001 FEATHER (orig. sabrina carpenter)

TRACK 002 NONSENSE (orig. sabrina carpenter)

TRACK 003 RISK (orig. gracie abrams)

TRACK 004 PACKING IT UP (orig. gracie abrams)

CLOSE TO YOU

━━━ ‘ stella drops her first single ‘close to you’ . june 2024 .

TRACK 001 CLOSE TO YOU (orig. gracie abrams)

TOO MANY SORRYS

━━━ ‘ stella hughes drops a heartbreaking but beautiful album ‘too many sorrys’ with fifteen tracks . october 2024 .

TRACK 001 I MISS YOU, I’M SORRY (orig. gracie abrams)

TRACK 002 PLASTIC PALM TREES - FT TATE MCRAE (orig. tate mcrae)

TRACK 003 BECAUSE I LIKED A BOY (orig. sabrina carpenter)

TRACK 004 BITTERSUITE (orig. billie eilish)

TRACK 005 BLUE (orig. billie eilish)

TRACK 006 MAKING THE BED (orig. olivia rodrigo)

TRACK 007 BLOCK ME OUT (orig. gracie abrams)

TRACK 008 CHIHIRO (orig. billie eilish)

TRACK 009 BIRDS OF A FEATHER (orig. billie eilish)

TRACK 010 BELLYACHE (orig. billie eilish)

TRACK 011 EVERYTHING I WANTED (orig. billie eilish)

TRACK 012 L’AMOUR DE MA VIE (orig. billie eilish)

TRACK 013 THE DINER (orig. billie eilish)

TRACK 014 IDONTWANNABEYOUANYMORE (orig. billie eilish)

TRACK 015 LOVE YOU, I’M SORRY (orig. billie eilish

au masterlist - you can find everything under #👩🏻‍🎨 ͡ ꒱ Stella Hughes!

𝓻oros note. this is along overdue!! omggg I had so much fun working on this and I really hope you guys enjoy it !! please send in some asks, asking stella what certain songs mean for her when she wrote them!!

more will be added as times goes !!

˖ ་ taglist : @cixrosie @toasttt11 @lovings4turn @bunbunbl0gs @petite-potato4 @winterbarnesblog @yoontwin @iceflwers @dancerbailey3

©️WINTFLEUR

[raymantogether]

Rayman Together Community Spotlight #4 - MarkedAsUnreal

Introduction:

Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc was published by Ubisoft Paris and released on February 21st, 2003, in Europe and in March 2003 worldwide. That was almost 22 years ago. Feeling old yet? Well, Ubisoft did release Rayman 3: HD in 2012, but we won't talk about that. Rayman 3 is undoubtedly a fan favorite in the series thanks to its whimsical but very risque adult humor. The game is also critically acclaimed thanks to its very fun and diverse 3D platforming and its exceptional cast of characters and enemies. Nothing has ever come close in the series to the success of Rayman 3, in my opinion. And while I wait in hope for Ubisoft to bring back Rayman to his core 3D roots, I can't help thinking, Why doesn't Ubisoft just remake Rayman 3. 

Fortunately, this is no longer an issue. For this latest Rayman Together Community Spotlight, I have the pleasure of interviewing Marked As Unreal, a Rayman fan from Poland who is working on the Rayman 3 Fan Remake on YouTube. This ground-breaking development blog focuses upon reimaging Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc using Unreal Engine 5. The development process has been fascinating to watch, and this has become undoubtedly a favorite fan project of mine. The results have been spectacular, and the game looks simply incredible. You can see the results for yourself below from these comparison shots.

(Rayman 3: Unreal Engine Fan Remake)

(Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc)

(Rayman 3: Unreal Engine Fan Remake)

(Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc)

So sit back and relax as this latest community spotlight takes you into more detail about the genius behind the Rayman 3: Fan Remake and a more personal insight into this amazing community project. 

Spotlight:

1. Please introduce yourself.

"Hi! I’m Mark. I’m a gaming enthusiast from Poland who dreams of making his own small indie title one day. To help me achieve that goal, I’m currently trying to learn game development and Unreal Engine by remaking one of my favorite games of all time, Rayman 3. I didn’t have much coding or Unreal Engine experience prior to this project, but I did work as a 3D artist for almost 4 years. The most notable project I’ve worked on as a 3D artist was “The Medium” by the Bloober team. What was really awesome about this project is that its art style is based on Zdzislaw Beksinski’s paintings, who is a painter that I am a big fan of."

2. What do you do for a living?

"For most of the year I work at a campground doing maintenance, but in the summer I work at an ice cream/waffle shop."

3. What do you enjoy doing in your spare time

"I often play games and watch various shows when I’m looking to have a chill time. There are many games which I would consider my favorites, but to name a few (besides Rayman of course), there are the old Halo games, the Dead Space series, Old School RuneScape, Subnautica, the Bioshock series, Portal 2, Undertale, from software games, or the Respawn Entertainments Jedi series. As shows are considered, I lately find myself really enjoying anime. My favorites are Vinland Saga, Attack on Titan, and Jojo’s bizarre adventure. Jujustsu Kaisen is also really sick. Regarding more active ways to spend my free time, I really love bouldering (it’s a type of rock climbing) and snowboarding."

4. What got you into the Unreal Engine project on Rayman 3?

"Learning game development by trying to recreate one of my favorite games just seemed like it could be a ton of fun (and I wasn’t wrong, because it is a blast!). And I decided to go for Unreal Engine because I really wanted to try out the new features everyone was talking about (Nanite and Lumen). The fact that many AAA companies use Unreal Engine to make their games also made it feel like a better choice than Unity."

5. Tell us about your experience on the project with Rayman 3.

"The hardest part was the start, of course. I didn’t really know Unreal Engine, so doing the simplest things was a challenge. Every step required me to go through a tutorial first. Also, I started this project with the most complex part, while still having very little programming knowledge, which was coding in the characters movement and collision. On one hand, this was maybe not the wisest thing to start with, but on the other, I wanted to start with the hardest and most important part, to know if there is even a point in trying to make this game in the first place. Otherwise, I was at risk of doing something easy for half a year just to hit an unpassable wall. But you know, the greater the challenge, the greater the satisfaction once you overcome it. So, satisfying and fun are two main words that I would use to describe my experience working on this.

What’s also an amazing feeling is to have this complete freedom and agency over the project. I can make it look however I like, I can work on whatever I feel like working at the moment, and I can work at a pace that I feel like working at. It’s an amazing luxury that’s only possible because this is a passion project.

I’d also like to mention how cool of an experience it was working on the Teensie highway part of the level. Because of how surreal and random that part is, working on it felt very fresh and different. Not to mention that it was a nice way to see how much I’ve grown since I started this project, because while coding in all the logic for the surfboard Rayman, I could see how much easier this was for me to make in comparison to the regular Rayman that I was making when starting the project. Granted, the surfboard Rayman is much simpler in terms of complexity, but still, I felt like I could see a noticeable difference in my skill level. 

Finally, I can’t leave this question without mentioning what a great laugh I had when putting in all the drunken Teensies around the Heart of the World area. I love those guys, and creating all those little stories (like the two teens fighting on a ledge) was such a fun experience."

6. How has it been for you personally revisiting Rayman 3?

"To be honest, this doesn’t really feel like I’m revisiting the game, because I replay Rayman 3 fairly often, so it kind of feels like this game is never far off."

7. Are you planning to recreate the whole game in Unreal Engine?

"I’m sorry to say that no, I am not. It’s like I said in one of my first videos: this was always meant to be a learning opportunity for me, as well as a way to get a grasp on what project scope seems realistic for one person or a small team. If I had unlimited time, then I would love to recreate the whole game, because I love working on this. But the sad reality is that I'd probably be well in my 40s before the whole game would be remade. I’d like to be younger before I start working on my own games.

I’m not yet sure where exactly I will stop, but I am going to finish the fairy council level and share it, so everyone will have a chance to play it.

I haven’t really ever mentioned, though, what my plans are for the project; once I decide, it’s time for me to move on, so let me reveal them right now. My plan is to share the whole project for anyone to download and create a Discord server that will act as a hub for the project. I will be there to assist and help anyone who would like to make something using my remake (like continue from where I left off, make their own custom levels, or even just use some parts of it to create something else entirely).

8. Has anyone at Ubisoft or within the gaming industry approached you during your time sharing your development blogs on YouTube?

"No, no one has."

9. Are you planning to do any other Rayman games or any other videogames in Unreal Engine in the future after you have finished with Rayman 3?

"After the Rayman 3 remake, I will start making my own title. I already have a pretty clear idea of what that game is going to be; however, I’m not going to share that information yet. There is a lot of work left in this project, even just for the first level, so I’m still keeping my focus on the remake."

10. You are also a fan of the Unity Engine; can you tell us why?

"I just really enjoy working in it. It’s really cool that anyone can just download this software and start creating a game. I really like how the software is structured. I feel like it's really daunting at first, but once you get the hang of it, using it just makes sense. Nowadays, I don’t really need to revisit many tutorials on how to do some things because I find the whole user experience pretty neatly organized and logical. What’s also really cool is that a lot of features are pretty cutting edge and yet still free to use (this is a bit of a double-edged sword, however, as new features are often pretty risky to use as they are not yet properly tested for production)."

11. How did you get into the Rayman series?

"My first Rayman game was Rayman 1 on the PS1. I was probably around 4 years old or something like that, so I think that it goes without saying that I didn’t beat it back then (and still haven’t, but I never really went back to try). Then, if I’m remembering correctly, I found Rayman 2 lying in a supermarket on a heap with other games and managed to convince my mom to buy it. I was probably around 6. This one I did manage to beat, but it took a long time. Some parts were really challenging back then. Also, it was really hard for me to figure out that I needed to backtrack in order to help Clark. Then I think I got Rayman 3 around the time it came out, so I was probably like around 8. So old enough to beat this one without too many issues. This is also the one that I liked the most at the time. I vividly remember how the first time I booted Rayman 3, I had this weird bug where the left key didn’t work, and I thought that maybe this was intended. I figured that since Rayman doesn’t have his hands (because Globox runs off with them), he has problems with keeping his balance, and that explains why I can't run left. Let me tell you, trying to catch that barrel without the ability to run left was pretty impossible, haha. Luckily, rebooting the game fixed the issue."

12. What is your favorite Rayman game and character?

"My favorite game is either Rayman 2 or Rayman 3, depending on my mood. Both to me have their respective strengths and weaknesses, but both are absolutely amazing. Rayman 2 is unmatched in its atmosphere and level design. Rayman 3 has really fun combat encounters, and I like the characters (design and writing) much more. And the whole Knaaren desert level is just so awesome! When I was a kid, my favorite character was straight up Rayman, but now it’s definitely the teensies. Though Globox from Rayman 3 is a close second place. Whenever I play Rayman Legends, I usually play as a teensie (but if I don’t feel like playing as a teensie, I always go for Rayomz)"

Thank you so much for being a part of my community spotlight, Marked As Unreal. It was a pleasure to read and see some of the creative processes behind the Rayman 3: Fan Remake. I look forward to seeing everything once it's complete. I wish you all the best with the development and in your future projects. 

Please don't forget to support Marked As Unreal. If you are eager to see more, I have included links to their social accounts below. Have a good weekend, Rayman fans. See you next time. 

MarkedAsUnreal Links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marek-holubowski/

Rayman The Boardgame:

Rayman fans, don't forget Rayman: The Boardgame Kickstarter campaign ends on October 8th. There isn't much time until the end of the campaign. If you haven't already, don't forget to pledge and don't miss out on this amazing board game and some amazing bonuses. 

[aroyallybigbangrwrb]

A Call to Join the Royal Court 📯

A decree to everyone in the kingdom of the Red, White and Royal Blue fandom to join us for A Royally Big Bang -  an event where we welcome all of you, but first:

What is a Big Bang?

A Big Bang is a fandom wide event in which authors and artists are paired up. Authors will write a work within the parameters of the timeline proposed and the Artists will transform said work into a pairing piece of some kind within the timeline as well. The works are then posted together in harmonious union. 

Who can participate?

We invite all authors and artists and betas over 18 to be a part of the festivities. We welcome all forms of transformative work here. As an artist, paired pieces are only limited by your imagination, let it be a podfic, a gifset, a playlist, a moodboard, visual art, etc!

When is this happening?

👑A ROYALLY BIG BANG STARTS RIGHT NOW!!! 👑

AUTHORS: Sign ups for Authors start (today!) February 1st and will close on February 22nd. 

You can sign up in three tiers according to minimum word counts and posting dates. This “Big Bang” has three different tiers (see below) for all authors' creative needs. The bigger the size, the longer the timeframe you have to write.

ARTISTS: Sign up will start on February 23rd and run until March 8th. You will be able to rank your top choices based on summary and tier.  

BETAS: Sign up dates will start on February 23rd and run until March 8th. You will be able to share what you are and aren’t comfortable to beta based on tag restrictions and tier. 

What do tiers mean?

🎂Tier 1 - Mini Bang: 10k+ words. Posts May- June

🎂Tier 2 - Medium Bang: 30k+ words. Posts July - September 

🎂Tier 3 - Big Bang: 50k+ words. Posts October - December 

Works within Tier 1 are expected to be a minimum of 10K words leading up to 30K words. If your work is over 30K words it is within Tier 2, and so on and so forth. 

SO… ARE YOU READY? 

✍️AUTHOR SIGN UP FORM IS HERE

ARTIST SIGN UP FORM (coming Feb 23rd) 

BETA SIGN UP FORM (coming Feb 23rd)

But what if I have more questions? 

You can check out our original FAQ here and our new Live FAQ here and if that doesn’t answer your questions you can send us an ask here on Tumblr, A DM on Twitter, or an email at royallybigbangrwrb@gmail.com and we will get back to you as quickly as we can! 

P.S. Once signups are completed and pairings created all authors and artists and betas will be invited to the RBB Discord server for easier direct communication with the mods, support from other participants and to make this a royally good time!