#as stated in the previous post a lot of the bosses kicked my ass but they were still really fun

[vividviolence]

beat freedom planet 2 !!!! it was really fun. unfortunately all of my other screenshots got corrupted so all you get is this image of a pretty woman

she is like the most minor of minor characters but she is still neat. to me. also I will probably do a second playthrough as The Funny Kitty & collect all of those audio log thingies. good game 10/10

[obeiii-mee]

How will the bros react to MC self-doubting themselves? Like saying bad things about them or can't be serious someone give them compliment.

Supportive demon bois coming right up! Sorry I took so long to write this anon! Thank you so much for the ask! (Also, thank you all for the love on my previous posts!)

————————————

The Brothers with an MC who self doubts themselves:

Lucifer:

-As the embodiment of pride itself, Lucifer has an overwhelming amount of confidence, almost all the damn time

-So, he was flabbergasted to learn that you weren’t the same

-He always insisted that you aren’t anything but perfect, yet you always seemed to brush the compliments off with a shrug and an awkward smile

-Well, shit, we can’t have that

-Lucifer just got 10x more serious about the matter

-He pulls a really stupid concerned face whenever you insult yourself and he looks more and more like a 48 year old man/dad each time it happens

-He, as of late, increased the number of pet names he has for you and the amount of compliments he gives you each day

-He refuses to let you talk badly about yourself anywhere, at any point in time and encourages every little step you take towards bettering yourself like crazy

- Lucifer wants to prove to you that you are an absolute ray of sunshine and he will go to any lengths to do just that (do not ask)

-He’s even more affectionate than usual which confuses just about everyone in the House of Lamentation, yourself included

-His brothers are feeling a disturbance in the force and they don’t know how to feel about it

-You are possibly the best thing that’s happened to him since he fell as angel and Lucifer is ready to do whatever he can to help you realise that

Mammon:

-“You’re an idiot!”

-“*Sigh*, I know.”

-“Wha-Wait! Y-you can’t say thAT!”

-The Great Mammon is seriously worried about his human

-Being the dense motherfucker he is (i still love him tho) it took him weeks to realise you’re not all that confident in yourself

-At some point in your relationship, he jokingly called you annoying and you just went “Yeah I’ve been told. Sorry.”

-His jaw literally dropped and he almost cried

-He would have choked if he was drinking something

-Tsundere Mammon has gone bye bye and here comes the cuddling teddy bear that is your boyfriend

-He also doesn’t have as much self love for himself as he sometimes pretends to have so he’s kinda in the same boat

-Which means your boat is leaking and you’re perfectly fine with it while he’s panicking and trying to throw water overboard with his hands

-His brothers call him an idiot a lot but he’s a very sociable guy with people skills that he uses all the time in order to coax you out of your self pitiying shell

-Will whine every time you call yourself ‘useless’ or disagree with his compliments because what the hell, you’re literally the most gorgeous being ever let me love youuuu

-When it comes to you and your happiness, he ain’t fucking around. He will snarl at anyone that even looks at you in the wrong way

-Did that to Lucifer once, guess a what happened

-You’ve definitely helped him come to terms with the fact that he is loveable and not a good for nothing scum

-So now it’s your turn!

-Let him kiss your insecurities away please

-Your presence makes him feel wanted so he wants the same for you!

Levi:

-Well then

-It takes two to tango ya know?

-He is the KING of self loathing and no confidence whatsoever in anything he does so every time you put yourself down, he counters it with a self deprecating insult as well

-��I suck.”

-“Nah, you’re pretty awesome normie. I’m the shut in, disgusting otaku who can barely set foot outside his bedroom without having an anxiety attack.”

-It’s like you’re trying to outdo the other on who is worse

-Truth is, he really admires you, especially knowing you chose to date him; an anime nerd with no social life and no communication skills whatsoever

-It hurts a bit, every time he builds up the courage to actually compliment you and you not taking it seriously

-That’s because he recognises that he’s the same and just as harsh on himself as you are

-Levi knows self hatred is something that takes time to demolish

-But you are his Henry after all (also his partner but whatevs)

-He’s not gonna leave you hanging when you need him the most

-He also gradually stops calling you a normie as your relationship progresses, though it still slips through every now and again

-Basically, the first time he realised that you think negatively of yourself, his immediate reaction was: Haha lmao relatable

-But now, every time it happens, he gets all serious

-Puts his controller down and everything, it’s like witnessing a very rare phenomenon and it’s creepy as shit

-He’s also made an effort to be more physically affection though he is kinda shy about it because damn it he just wants to hug you every time you speak badly of yourself

-Probably writes a list at some point stating all the reasons why you are better than him and Ruri chan combined, it’s rlly sweet

Satan:

-He’s a bit curious as to where that mentality has come from

-What triggered you to be so self doubtful?

-He’s basically your psychotherapist and asks you a lot of questions trying to find different causes and solutions for your issues

-Honestly, he puts so much effort into trying to understand, reading books about it from the human realm and whatever he can find in order to help you

-He scrunches up his nose every time you call yourself an idiot or anything of the sort

-Satan knows that insisting you’re wonderful won’t exactly help you overcome this problem of yours

-But that doesn’t stop him from doing it

-It’s not like you can ignore his comments because he will keep complimenting you until you accept them

-He also repeats a lot of pick up lines but that’s just part of being his partner

-What do you mean you’re worthless?!! He would literally give away all of his books and his hatred for Lucifer in exchange for your well being!

-Satan is possibly the smartest out of all of his brothers, so he uses a tactical approach on this one

-Direct affectionate gestures don’t work on you so he’s gonna be more subtle

-Would slightly hint that you are amazing every time you do something for him, like fetching him a book or something

-“Ah thank you. I don’t know what I would do without you love.”

-He’s a lot smoother than he gives himself credit for

-He just appreciates your existence and that there’s someone out there that he doesn’t need to be act hostile or fake toward

-Satan is ready to sit down and listen to you talk about your insecurities for hours on end

-You would quietly say something bad about yourself and he would run through the House of Lamentation before bursting into the room you are in, shouting ‘No! That’s wrong!’ (going Danganronpa on your asses)

-“Welp, I fucked up again. I can’t do anything right.”

-And then, in the distance you hear boss music starting

Asmo:

-*Shocked Gasp*

-How could you say such things about yourself???? Is that even leGAl?

-Of course, the literally prince of Lust, with all of his narcissism, has never experienced things like ‘self doubt’ of ‘bad self esteem’

-Pfft, the fuck is that?

-He only uses the most positive of words when he describes himself

-So obviously he almost falls off the bed when he hears you insulting yourself for the first time

-But ya know, that would leave bruises on his beautiful skin

-“Oh darling, you’re not annoying or a moron! You’re not anything like Mammon!”

-That was a below belt fatal hit, press f in the chat for the second eldest

-At some point, he just genuinely believes you’ve been spending too much time with Levi and that his negativity started rubbing off on you

-But then you tell him you’ve always been like this and he almost has a crisIS

-He’s like ‘Haha, no, we’re going to get a spa day out tomorrow and a few shopping sprees so I can prove to you that you are magnificent in every way imaginable.’

-Asmo loves pampering you in general but on the days he sees you feeling extra sorry for yourself, he goes above and beyond

-Gets very hurt when you brush off his compliments because he just wants you to accept the fact that you’re beautiful

-He’s like a supportive mom lmao, whenever you’re feeling self doubtful, he goes “You’re doing great sweetie, keep it up I’m really proud of you.”

-It’s up to you to decide whether that helps or not

-He’s such a sweetheart in reality, it’s hard to remember that he’s supposed to be horny all the time

-Well he is but that’s not the point, you’re way more important

-Asmo is so much fun to write cuz I can make him so dramatic it’s hilarious

Beel:

-Oh no :(

-He gets very sad everytime you self deprecate yourself

-You can’t do it with him in the room because he’s going to start crying and give you this kicked puppy stare, it will break your heart

-Beel kinda comes over and goes “If I give you some of my food will you please stop saying bad things about yourself? Because it’s not true.”

-Well you can’t say no to that face

-He feels like it’s his fault you’re this self doubtful even though you’ve tried to explain to him you’ve always been like this

-He goes crying to his twin half the time because he doesn’t know what to do

-“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to drop it! Fucking hell, I’m such a fucking klutz.”

-“Sniffle no you’re not.”

-He’s like, giving you large portions of his food now

-Because food makes him happy so he wants you to be happy too

-🙂

-His brothers go in shock every time because the only other person Beel has ever shared his food with before was Belphie

-Physical affection goes through the roof with this guy

-Bone crushing hugs btw

-Your self worth is so immeasurable with him, you can’t even measure it

-W h o a

-I’m being serious, don’t talk badly about yourself in front of him unless you want to be hugged into next week

-You are a literal angel in his eyes, of course he thinks highly of you

-He’s just hoping his presence isn’t making your self esteem worse, that’s the thing that keeps him up at night

-Idk why but he does think that he is a bad influence on your mental well being since he’s a demon

-Beel gives you compliments all the time and it confuses him when you laugh them off uncertainly because he wasn’t joking or lying??

-He’s always supportive of your choices and encourages you to be more confident

-The same way you show your support everytime you come to his games to cheer him on

-Overall, he just wants you to feel special and appreciated

-Because you deserve it

-IneedmyselfaBeel

Belphie:

-He feels like absolute shit

-Becuase he’s well aware he‘s called you a few...not so nice words in the past

-Back then, he only thought he meant everything he said but now that he’s hearing you accept his insults and actually repeating them yourself?

-It hurts his brain and he wants to smash his head against all four walls of the room for being such a cretin

-You do tell him it’s not exactly his fault you think so badly of yourself

-But he still believes he fueled it

-So now he needs to fix it

-He’s tried everything and I mean everything

-It’s kinda working, slow progress is made which he’s really happy about but you know, it’s gonna take a while

-He finally settles on physical affection as the best way to communicate his gratefulness for you being youself

-Oh, he wasn’t hugging you before? He is now, get your ass next to him and let him cuddle you

-Handholding has increased by 69% in the last month, sorry for the loss of your right hand with how much he squeezes it

-Sometimes, he can’t help but a throw an insult at you in a playful manner, because he’s an asshole

-But he always makes sure you understand that he was just joking

-He’s such a little shit, you would be having a chat with him and you would subtly drop a insult at yourself hoping he wouldn’t notice

-But then he stops dead in his tracks, kisses you, says “Shut up, you’re stunning” and then he goes right back to the previous conversation like nothing happened

-Accept his compliments damn it otherwise he will continue to bug you about it for the rest of the day

-He’s an eboy and he’s a dickhead a times, but he just goes soft for you tbh

-If you’re feeling really bad about yourself, he won’t even say anything

-He will just big spoon you for the next 24 hours, good luck going to the bathroom or any meals during that time

-Because once you’re in his grip, you’re not getting out that easily

-He gets so pissy if anyone says something even slightly negative about you to your face

-One time, a random demon called you stupid in one of the classes at RAD and he was like ‘bïtch excuse me what?’

-Snapped his head around at him and everything

-He would have done something worse but he was lazy and feeling really petty

-So Belphie kicked him in the privates from under his desk like a damn spoiled brat

-And then he turned his head back to you, all smiles and rainbows and puppies

-I’m simping so hard for a fictional character wtf

-I had to write more protective Belphie cuz I can’t find anything of the sort anymore and I need flUFF

(Haha, I don’t know what this post is, my writing has officially taken a shit lmao. Sorry this took so long to finish, I kept going back to edit all of them)

Al~

[just-dreaming-marvel]

Love and Medicine ~ 3

MASTERLIST

< previous chapter

Word Count: 4,600ish

Summary: The beginning of your intern year continues.

Warnings: man parts (lol) and talk about rape

You really tried your best, but you couldn’t get the image of a naked Dr. Steve Rogers on the floor of your living room out of your head. You had decided one night that, to help get the image out of your head, you needed roommates. The house that you had inherited was big enough and the longer you lived there, the lonelier it became. So, you created a ‘roommates wanted’ sign and posted it in the locker room before your shift.

You had several interns come up to you explaining why they would be the perfect roommate for you within the first few hours of your shift. It was annoying and you turned every single one of them down, being very particular about who was going to live with you.

“Why do you put up posters for roommates if you don’t want roommates?” Val asked as you, her, and Scott walked down a corridor.

“I do want roommates,” you defended. 

“And why can’t we be those roommates?” Scott wondered

“We’re just together a hundred hours a week, you want to live together too?”

“No,” Natasha responded, walking up to the group. “Ooh, you’re bringing bribes now?” She motioned to the cup of coffee in your hand.

“I need a place to live,” Scott rambled. “My mom irons my scrubs. I have to get out of there.”

“It’s not a bride,” you told Natasha before turning to Scott. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“But I can’t put down last, first, and deposit,” Scott argued.

“It’s totally a bride,” Natasha scoffed.

“I can cook,” Val added. “And I can clean.”

“No,” you stated. “I just want two total strangers who I don't have to talk to, or be nice to, and it's not a bribe, it's a mocha latte.”

“Clint, you’re running the code team,” Gamora ordered as you all walked up to her. “Y/N, take the trauma patients, Natasha, deliver the weekend labs to patients, Val, you’re on sutures, and Scott, you’re on scut.”

“Dr. Gamora,” you called. “I was hoping to assist you in the OR today, maybe do a minor procedure? I think I'm ready. Mocha latte?” You held the cup out for her.

“If she gets to cut, I want to cut too,” Natasha added.

“Yeah, me too,” Val joined in.

“I wouldn’t mind another shot,” Scott shrugged.

“And if everybody else gets one, then I do too!” Clint said.

“Stop talking,” Gamora demanded. You all fell silent. “Every intern wants to perform their first surgery, that's not your job. Do you know what your job is? To make your resident happy. Do I look happy? No. Why? Because my interns are whining. You know what will make me look happy? Having the code team staffed, having the trauma patients taken care of, having the weekend labs delivered, and having someone down in the Pit, doing the sutures.” She swiped the mocha latte from your hand. “No one holds a scalpel until I'm so happy I'm Mary freakin' Poppins.”

“Mocha latte my ass,” Natasha grumbled.

“Why’re y’all still standing there? Move!”

Everyone moved, you heading to the elevator with a few files. You paused in your steps when you noticed who was waiting at the elevator. Dr. Steve Rogers. You took a deep breath, trying to calm yourself, before making your way to stand and wait next to him. When he noticed you, he tried to hide the pleasant smile that wanted to take over his face.

“New York has ferry boats,” he stated.

“Yes,” you replied, a bit confused.

“I didn’t remember that. I grew up here then left, now I’ve been living here for six weeks, and I didn’t remember there were ferry boats.”

“Well, Manhattan is an island.”

“Hence the ferry boats.” The elevator arrived and the two of you stepped onto it. “Now I have to like it here. I wasn’t planning on liking it here. I just moved here from the country. I’m supposed to not like big cities like Manhattan. But I have a thing for ferry boats.”

The elevators doors closed, leaving them alone in the elevator. He was leaning against the wall behind you as you stood in the middle, holding the files to your body. You hoped that he couldn’t hear your heart pounding in your chest. 

“I’m not going out with you,” you blurted. You don’t know if you were trying to tell him that or if you were trying to convince yourself that you weren’t interested.

“Did I ask you to go out with me?” He questioned. He paused before asking the next, “Do you want to go out with me?”

“I'm not dating you. And I'm definitely not sleeping with you again. You're my boss.”

“I'm your boss's boss.”

“You're my teacher. And my teacher's teacher. And you're my teacher.”

“I'm your sister, I'm your daughter,” he joked.

“You're sexually harassing me.”

“I'm riding an elevator.” He stepped towards you, you could practically feel him breathing down your neck. You spun around to face him.

“Look, I'm drawing a line. The line is drawn. There's a big line.”

“So, this line. Is it imaginary, or do I need to get you a marker?”

You stared at him for a second, basking in all his attractiveness. It didn’t take you very long to go ‘screw it’ and drop the files you were holding and kiss him. Steve was a tad surprised but caught on quickly. When the elevator dinged, you quickly crouched down to pick up the files and rushed out of the elevator. Steve stood there, looking amused.

“We’ll talk later?” He called after you. You ignored him and he chuckled to himself. “Definitely, later.”

~~~

In between taking care of patients, you had interns begging you to let them be your roommate. You were slowly regretting the idea of roommates the longer the day went on. Thankfully, your pager rang and requested you down in the ER.

“You the surgeon?” A nurse asked as you entered the room.

“Yes,” you replied.

“We’ve got a rape victim. 21-year-old female found down at the park, status: post-trauma, she came in with a GCS of 6, BP 80 over 60, head trauma, unequal breath sounds, right pupil is dilated, and she's ready for x-ray. You ready to roll?” You were listening but also focused on the girl’s shoes. They were the same ones you had worn to work. “Hey!”

“Uh, sorry,” you stumbled. “Yeah. Call it in to clear CT, let them know I'm coming, load up the portable monitor, call respiratory for a ventilator, I'll get x-rays while I'm down there.”

You quickly learned that the girls name was Mallory and, just by you reading the scans alone, she would be needing surgery. Dr. Banner and Dr. Rogers were both called in while you were allowed to watch and hopefully assist.

“She’s going to spend a hell of a lot of time in recovery and rehab,” Dr. Rogers stated.

“If she survives,” Dr. Banner added.

“What is she, like, 5'2", a hundred pounds, she's still breathing after what this guy did to her? If they catch the guy, they should castrate him.”

“See how shredded her hands are? She tried to fight back.”

“Tried to?” Dr. Stark repeated, walking into the room. “Rape kit came back negative. She kicked his ass.”

“So, we have a warrior amount us, huh?” Rogers questioned. 

“Hell yeah we do! I just came in to tell you about the rape kit and to see if you needed me anytime soon. Can’t have the poor girl be reminded of the incident with so many scars.”

“Mallory,” you interrupted. “Her—her name is Mallory.”

“Mallory,” Rogers and Stark repeated. 

“I think I may have found the cause of our rupture,” Banner said, pulling out a piece of flesh. “What is this?” He held it up. “Does anyone know what this is?”

“Oh my gosh,” you gasped, with Dr. Stark snickering from the sidelines.

“What? Spit it out, L/N.”

“She bit it off.”

“Bit off what?”

“That’s his…” You swallowed. “His penis.” Shocked groans filled the OR. “She bit off his penis.”

“Told you she kicked his ass!” Stark exclaimed as Banner couldn’t toss the piece of flesh into the try fast enough. 

~~~

After the surgery, the penis was placed in a small cooler. You were tasked to bring it to Fury for the police. You knocked at the door of his office, where an older woman is in there.

“Hi, is the chief in?” You asked.

“He’s on his way,” she responded. “Is that it?”

“Can I see it?” You looked down at the box and then up again. “No, forget I asked.”

“Y/N, it’s good to see you,” Fury greeted as he entered, going to his desk.

“You too, sir,” you responded with a nod. “Listen, so they said to bring this to you,” you lifted up the cooler. “So…?”

“Yes, for the police,” Fury responded.

“Right.”

“When did the police say they'll come?” Fury asked his assistant.

“You know how slow they are,” she answered. “So, she’d better take it with her.”

“What?” You questioned.

“You have to take it with you.”

“Chain of custody rules,” Fury explained. “All medical matter in a rape must stay with the person who collected it, until it's placed in police custody.”

“You collected the specimen, so you have custody.”

“Custody of a penis…” You said.

“Yes,” Fury answered. “Until the cops come for it.”

“Okay. Well, what am I supposed to do with the penis?”

Fury simply shrugged before excusing you. You huffed, leaving the office with the cooler. You wandered the halls until you saw Clint working at a desk. You walked over, setting the cooler down and causing Clint to look up at you.

“What’s that?” He pointed to the cooler as he asked.

“Don’t ask, you don’t want to know,” you responded.

“I do want to know. Really.”

“You really want to know?” Clint nodded. “It’s a severed penis.”

“Okay… I didn’t really want to know.”

“Told you.”

“I didn’t know why I have to be the one who gets hugged,” Natasha complained to Peter as they walked up.

“Because, I don’t do that,” Peter replied. “Besides, you're the ovarian sister here.”

“Did you just call me an ovarian sis— an ovarian— since when has the possession of ovaries become an insult?”

“Y/N’s carrying a penis around in a jar,” Clint interrupted.

“Oh, from the rape surgery?” Natasha looked around.

“Yeah,” you answered. “And it’s not a jar, it’s a cooler.”

“Talk about taking a bite out of crime.” Natasha chuckled as she left.

You were suddenly lost in your head, unable to stop thinking about Mallory’s shoes. They were the same as yours. You had worn them to work today, which was weird. You never really wear them.

“You okay?” Clint asked.

“Yeah… it’s just… Mallory's shoes. The rape victim, Mallory, her shoes. I have the same ones. In my locker. And I normally never wear them, because they're not comfortable, but today I did, and she was wearing the same shoes, and it's just… stupid, and I'm tired, and forget it.”

“You know what you need?” Clint stared at you.

“No. It’s stick and twisted. We said last time was the last time.” Clint looked away. “You’ve been doing it without me?”

“Nancy Reagan lied. You can't just say no. Come on.”

“Do you know what would happen if anyone knew?”

“I'm doing it. You can come with me… or you can stay here, and be miserable.”

“Fine,” you tried to hold back a smile as you followed Clint. 

He led you to the nursery, where you two stood at the window and watched the babies. You laughed as Clint did some baby talk.

“You are such a woman,” you laughed.

Clint’s pager beeped before he could retorted. “It’s a code,” he sighed. “I gotta go.” 

He left, leaving you to sigh as you watched the babies.

“You are really cute,” you whispered as you looked at them.

As you watched them, you noticed at one of the babies was struggling. His face was slowly turning blue. You quickly entered the nursery, setting the cooler to the side before checking the babies chart. Then you sided your stethoscope to check on the babies heart.

“What are you doing in here?” A Peds Intern asked, walking into the room.

“There were no tests ordered,” you answered. “And the baby has a murmur.”

“I know.”

“He turned blue.”

“You're surgery, you're not authorized to be in here. Do you know how much trouble you can get into for this?”

“Are you going to do any tests?”

“It's a benign systolic ejection murmur. It goes away with age.”

“So you're not going to do any tests.”

“He's not your patient, he's not even on your service.”

“Are you sure it’s benign?”

“I'm a doctor too, you know. You should get out of here.”

Deciding you’d rather not get in trouble, you grabbed the cooler and left. You were stopped along your wandering by more interns who wanted to room with you. After having listened to three of them, you walked away, still unimpressed, and went to Mallory’s room. You were looking at her through the window when Dr. Rogers came up.

“Y/N,” he greeted. “I've called every hospital in the county. Sooner or later, the guy that did this is going to seek medical attention, and when he does, that penis you're carrying around is going to nail him.”

“Where is her family?” You asked.

“Doesn’t have any.”

“No siblings?”

“No. Both parents are dead. She just moved to New York three weeks ago. Welcome to the city.” When you didn’t give a response he turned to look at you. You were lost in your thoughts. “Y/N, you okay?”

“Yeah. I’m fine. I just… I just have to do something. I have to go.”

“Right. I’m going to sit with her.”

You nodded before rushing away to find Dr. Banner.

“Dr. Banner?” You called when you saw him.

“Mmm?” He hummed, turning to face you.

“There's a baby up in peds, I saw him have a tet spell, and I think I hear a murmur.”

“Mmm. Did peds call us for a consult?”

“Actually, no. They’re not doing anything about it—“

“So you want me to what?”

“If you could just go up and look at him—“

“Mm-hmm, not without a Peds consult.”

“Yeah, but—“

“I’m a busy man, L/N, and there are rules. Look, it’s not like I’m the Chief or something.”

Then he stocked off, leaving you frustrated. 

“Stupid rules.”

~~~

Eventually, you found a spot in the lobby to sit. Just waiting for the cops to show up.

“What’re you doing down here?” Natasha asked when she came across you.

“Just sitting here with my penis,” you responded. “What about you?”

“Hiding from Peter.” She sat beside you.

“I kissed Steve.”

“You kissed Steve.”

“In the elevator.”

“Oh, you kissed him in the elevator.”

“I was having a bad day. I am having a bad day.”

“Oh, so this is what you do on your bad days. Make out with Captain McDreamy.” You both stood up.

“Well, that, and you know, carrying around a penis just makes everything seem so shiny and happy.”

“Mmm. Clint said Mallory was wearing your shoes.”

“Yeah. It’s weird, right?”

“I think it’s weird that you care.”

“I think it’s weird.”

From outside, a car swerves. You and Natasha could hear it from inside, causing you to rush out. A man staggered out of the car, clothes soaked in blood, mainly around his crotch. He collapses. Other doctors and nurses followed you out and immediately began checking on him. You immediately knew that the guy was the owner of the penis you had been carrying around all day. The other doctors brought him into a trauma room. You followed, quickly calling security.

“So, what’ve we got?” Gamora asked as she entered.

“Take a look,” you responded.

“What?” She leaned closer. “Alright, let’s get him to OR 1. Y/N, you call the Chief and let him know we got the rapist.”

~~~

You and Natasha were in the OR with Gamora and Stark. They were working on the rapist.

“I saw Mallory,” you said, eyes on the operating table. “You can’t believe the beating that she took. And then to see this…”

“It's like that old saying, you should see the other guy,” Natasha said.

“Okay, kiddos, why are we not attempting to reattach the severed penis?” Dr. Stark asked.

“Teeth don’t slice, they tear. You can only reattach with a clean cut. If she wanted to slice him off with a knife…”

“Besides,” you continued for Natasha, “the digestive juices didn't leave much of the flesh to work with.”

“Right,” Gamora agreed, “so what do we do?”

“Sew him up minus a large part of the family jewels,” Natasha answered.

“And his outlook?”

“He'll be urinating out of a bag for a very, very long time,” Natasha added.

“Oh, too bad.”

“Shame.”

“I can’t imagine not having sex,” Stark commented. “I think that I would just end my life if I couldn’t do a round every day.” Everyone looked at him. “What? It shouldn’t be that surprising.”

“No wonder, Dr. Potts keeps turning you down,” Gamora said.

“I’ll get her one day. Just you wait. I’m going to marry that woman if it’s the last thing I do.”

~~~

You met with the police after the surgery where they told you that they couldn’t send their crime scene guy down for hours. Annoyed, you searched for your intern friends. You found them in the empty corridor, sitting on the beds.

“So, the police say that they can’t send down the crack crime scene guy for hours,” you told them as you entered, sitting down beside Natasha. “So I have to spend the night with a penis. Peter, don’t say it.”

“Ahh, it was too easy anyway,” Peter responded.

“Who here feels like they have no idea what they’re doing?” Scott asked. Everyone of you, but Peter, raised a hand.

“I mean, are we supposed to be learning something?” Clint wondered. “Because I don’t feel like I’m learning anything.”

“Except how not to sleep,” Val added.

“It’s like there’s this wall,” Natasha said, “and the attending and the residents are over there, being surgeons, and we’re over here, being—“

“Suturing, code running, lab delivering penis-minders,” you grumbled.

“I hate being an intern,” Peter stated.

Gamora walked into the hallway, looking expectant. All of you interns quickly got up and took your leave. All the others had things to do, so you found yourself in front of the babies again. As you looked at the baby you’re so worried about, you noticed the parents. Taking a deep breath, you decided to go up to them.

“Hi,” you greeted with a soft smile.

“Hi,” the mother greeted back.

“Is he yours?” You nodded to the baby.

“Yeah,” the mother smiled.

“He’s adorable… Have you noticed anything that would concern you?”

“No,” the father responded. “Have you?”

“Earlier today I noticed him turning blue.”

“Blue?” The mother repeated.

“Yes. I checked him and I heard a murmur.”

“We were told that the murmur was benign,” the father stated.

“I don’t think it is. I think—“

“You are so out of line,” the Peds Intern interrupted.

“She says the murmur might not be benign,” the father said.

“I think we should do an echo, to check,” you suggested.

“This is your career,” the intern said, going to get her resident.

“There’s really no reason to get alarmed,” you told the parents.

“What’s the problem?” The resident asked, coming back with the intern.

“If our baby is sick, we want him treated,” the mother ordered. “Now.”

“Who said your baby was sick?”

“Her,” the Peds Intern answered, pointing to you. “The surgical intern who has no business on our service.”

“Who authorized you being here?”

“I was just,” you began, “actually—“

“I did,” Dr. Banner came up from behind you. “Could you excuse us for a second?” Dr. Banner took the resident to the side, but not far enough for you to not hear. “Are you messing with my intern, Dr. Keener?”

“No, sir,” the resident responded.

Dr. Banner turned back to you and the other intern. “Give me the chart.”

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” the intern said, giving up the chart, “I checked.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“You can guarantee that he is fine, you are 100% sure.”

The intern looked hesitant.

“How sure are you?” The resident questioned.

“I don’t know,” the intern responded. “75%.”

“Not good enough,” Banner said. “He’s my patient now. That okay with you, Dr. K?”

“Absolutely,” the resident responded.

“He can take our patient?” The intern asked.

“He’s an attending.”

“Which means I can do whatever I want,” Banner replied before heading to the parents. “Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, I’m Dr. Banner, head of cardio. We’re going to run some tests and give you an answer within the hour. Excuse me.” He turned to you. “L/N.” He motioned for you to follow, which you quickly did. “I want an EKG, a chest x-ray, and an ECHO. I don’t have all day.”

“You’re a busy man.”

“I’m a busy man.”

You quickly ordered the tests then wandered the hospital more, since you weren’t allowed to do anything while you were watching the penis. After a little while, you found Dr. Banner again.

“Well?” You asked as you walked up to him.

“It’s a birth defect,” Dr. Banner replied. “Tetrology affirmed lower pulmonary artresia. You were right. I'm booking the OR for tomorrow.”

“Thank you for backing me up on this.”

“Whoa, whoa, wait, whoa. You were right. But if you ever pull a stunt like that again...going to the parents behind a doctor's back? Trying to steal a patient from another service? I will make your residency year hell on earth.”

He walked off and you smiled slightly to yourself. You made your way back to the babies, where you watched, from the other side of the window, Banner talk to the parents.

“His heart surgery is scheduled for the morning,” the Peds Intern told you. “I really did think I was right, you know.”

“I know. We almost never are. We're interns,” you responded. “We're not supposed to be right. And when we are, it's completely shocking.”

“Are you— I mean, being an intern, do you feel…”

“Terrified. 100% of the time.”

“Good, it’s not just me.”

“No.”

You decided, after finishing up with the babies, to go check on Mallory. When you arrived, you realized that Steve was still in there.

“How is she?” You asked, standing in the doorway.

“No change,” Steve answered with a sigh.

“Have you been here all night?”

“Mm-hmm. Yup… If I was in a comma, I’d want someone to be here. I know I would have people there. Having no one? Can’t imagine that.”

“I can.”

“Don’t you have any family?”

“I do. Just… I don’t think they’d come.”

Steve watched you carefully before speaking again. “So… we’re kissing but we’re not dating?”

“I knew that was going to come up.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I like the kissing. I’m all for the kissing. More kissing, I say.”

“I have no idea what that was about.”

“Is it going to happen again? Because if it is, I need to bring breath mints. Put a condom in my wallet.”

“Shut up now.” Steve laughed. “There was this baby up in the nursery. He's brand new. No one's neglected him or damaged him yet. How do we get from there to here? She's wearing my shoes and someone's beat the crap out of her, and she's got nobody.”

Suddenly, Mallory’s machine’s began beeping. You quickly hit an alarm on the wall.

“Her ICP’s double, get an OR!” Steve yelled. “Put her in for a craniotomy!”

~~~

You waited outside the OR, still watching over the stupid penis, while Steve operated on Mallory. You were nervous for her and felt bad that no one was there for her. Once the surgery was over, Steve exited the OR, walking past you. When he noticed you were there, he turned back.

“Hey,” he greeted. “I, uh, I had to leave her skull flap off, till the pressure in her brain goes down.”

“She’s not going to make it, is she?” You asked.

“She’s going to be fine.”

“If she ever wakes up.”

Steve nodded. “If she ever wakes up.” You nodded, biting your lip as you looked away. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.” Your pager went off. You looked down to see it was the Chief. “I’ve gotta go. That’s the Chief. Maybe I can finally get rid of this thing.” You lifted the cooler slightly.

“Yeah,” Steve chuckled. “Good luck.”

~~~

“So here is where you put the signature, down here, the initials,” Fury’s assistant pointed out on a paper.

“Mmm,” you hummed with a nod, taking the paper and pen from her. “Okay.”

“It just says that the penis was never out of your sight.”

“Of course.” You sighed and handed over the paper. “There you go. One penis.” You glanced at the clock and realized that it was time for the baby’s surgery. “Am I all done here? I kinda want to go watch a surgery.”

“Sure.”

You tried to rush, but not rush, to the OR Dr. Banner was working in. When you arrived, you found a spot in the back.

“We'll be using a medium approach for a trans-ventricular repair with a right ventriculostomy,” Banner explained. “Let’s open him up. L/N!” He looked around for you.

“Yes, sir?” You replied.

“Go scrub in. When we've finished cracking the baby's chest, I'll let you hold the clamp.”

“Seriously?” You tried to contain your excitement.

“Don’t make me change my mind.”

You rushed to scrubbed in. And, let’s just say, holding onto that clamp was a rush and just what you needed to help brighten your shift. After that, you went to watch the babies, Val, Clint, and Scott all joining you.

You let out a sigh. “Okay, fine,” you relented. “You guys can move into the house.”

“Yes! Yes!” The guys shouted.

“I can’t believe you caved!” Val laughed.

“I can’t believe it either,” you mumbled, trying to hide the smile.

~~~

You changed out of your scrubs and stared at the shoes in your locker. You couldn’t stop thinking about how weird it was that you had decided to wear those shoes today. With determination, you shut the locker on your shoes and went to the elevator. Steve was there waiting.

“So… it’s intense…” he started. “This thing I have for, ah, ferry boats… I mean.”

You smiled at him. “I’m so taking the stairs this time.” You walked off.

“No self-control,” he called after you. “It’s sad. Really.” He chuckled to himself as you continued to walk away. “Wow… this is so—“

“Weird. It’s weird,” Dr. Stark came up, ready to go too. “Like I said before, that look is bad news. And you—“

“Didn’t I already tell you to shut it Tony?”

“Fine.” Tony held his hands up. “But, seriously, don’t come crying to me when it all blows up in your face.”

next chapter >

NOTES: from now on the taglist when be added by a reblog. I will reblog it using my second account, @just-dreaming-marvel-2​​. Just so that my main page doesn’t get too cluttered.

If you want to be added to the tag list, please dm me or send in an ask.

[canary3d-obsessed]

Restless Rewatch: The Untamed Episode 15

(Masterpost)(Other Canary Content)

Warning: Spoilers for all 50 episodes!

This rewatch is going to fit into a single post, because a third of the episode is just crying and yelling on a very slow boat. If you want to learn the Chinese words for “Mother” and “Father” this is your episode. 

Captain Blowhard

Clan Leader Yao shows up, having barely survived the massacre of his clan, along with two disciples who aren't too excited about their unwilling promotion to top targets. Jiang Cheng tells his dad that the Wens are systematically exterminating the smaller clans, and have said anyone who helps the survivors is going to be punished. 

Jiang Fengmian tells Yao that the Jiang Clan will protect him. Which is why Wei Wuxian is responsible for the massacre of the Jiang Clan. 

Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian both think that taking Yao to the Jin clan is the best way to keep him safe. Wei Wuxian was wrong to help the heirs of the powerfullest richest clans, but sure, let's save this asshole.

Road Tripping

The boys go down to the dock to send Jiang Yanli and Jiang Fengmian off, saying a formal goodbye with a bunch of disciples and showing off how extremely good they look in these close-fitted, simply cut robes with cool belts.

Yu Ziyuan comes down to say goodbye to Yanli and give her some medicine, covering by saying it's for Jiang Fengmian, because being sick is bad for marriage prospects, probably. 

Later the boys will mention their hope that YZY will be mollified by the time JFM returns, which means this possibly isn't the usual state of their relationship. The dislike and jealousy seem to be constant, but perhaps being openly at war with each other is not.

(more after the cut!)

Club Ruohan

At Club Ruohan, Wen Ruohan is tired of sitting on his big uncomfortable throne so he's sitting on the floor next to it, instead. He's suffering the embarrassing problem of black smoke leakage, and needs Wen Qing to give him acupuncture to fix it, but she's not around. Wen Ruohan has an awful lot of trouble containing resentful energy, possibly because he is controlling a bunch of zombies 24x7 instead of letting them take a break. Wei Wuxian is mostly able to control it--except when he, you know, totally isn't--without ever needing an attractive acupuncturist to give him a poke.

WRH learns from Wen Chao that Wei Wuxian 1. killed a boss-level monster on nightmare level difficulty without his sword 2. took whatever thing had been suppressing the nightmare monster for the previous really long time.  WRH wants whatever it is.

Boys in Charge

When the boys get back to Lotus Pier, Jiang Cheng doesn't understand why they couldn't all go to the Lins together, and Wei Wuxian explains it to him. Wei Wuxian is the one seeing the big picture, and he wants to plan how to handle the Wen forces when they, inevitably, arrive. 

Jiang Cheng would rather talk big than actually plan, showing how--at this age--his anger management problem is an issue on a strategic level, not just a personal one.  As a clan leader he will eventually master this aspect, for the most part, and learn to keep a cool head in regard to martial matters, while continuing to feed his interpersonal rage problem.

The brothers supervise the archery practice of the Jiang disciples, having their last nice time together, and still without a plan. Wei Wuxian is bored and calls practice early so he can go be bored on the porch or in his room, since he isn't allowed out. In fact he's so bored by lockdown that he starts an irreverent niche blog.  

(he’s kidding! keep your mask on, don’t go to wine houses)

Knowing that the Wen Clan is gunning for enemy cultivators, Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng send the whole group of disciples, including children, outside the compound walls to retrieve their kites. This is what happens when you don't have a plan.

Wen the Levee Breaks

Wen Chao’s girlfriend Wang Lingjiao finds a kite with a hole in it and uses it as a pretext to snatch up the youngest disciple. 

The other disciples come running back and tell WWX and JC what happened. Wei Wuxian calmly gets all of the information from them and starts figuring out what to do, while Jiang Cheng freaks out. 

Jiang Cheng is a good fighter, and matures into an excellent one after a core upgrade and war experience. But Wei Wuxian is a born battle leader, developing strategies on the fly and staying cool under pressure.

Madame Yu is as brave as a barrel full of bears and Yinzhu and Jinzhu chase lions down the stairs

Yu Ziyuan and the murder twins show up and all of the disciples line up behind them, relieved to have someone scary in charge.. Yu Ziyuan is also a natural leader and an awesome fighter, but her judgement is terrible, as we're about to discover. 

Bitchfest

Wang Lingjiao strolls in to the main hall and has the nerve to comment on the interior decorating, because it doesn't have enough rough-hewn black rock and lava pits, apparently.

She shows them all the kite and says that because it looks (kind of) like the sun, using it for target practice is an attack on the Wen Clan. Bitch, everything your clan wears and uses has fire on it and is red. The sun is not your emblem, no matter what the text says. This kite situation is presumably where the anti-Wen campaign gets its name of "Sunshot," however, which sounds pretty cool.

Wang Lingjiao moves along to her main point, which is that Wei Wuxian needs his ass kicked, and she'd like Yu Ziyuan to do the kicking. To goad her, she starts talking about the rumors about Wei Wuxian's parentage.

Let it Whip

So let it whip (let's whip it, baby) Get a grip (let's whip it baby) Well, what's your trip? (Oh no)

Yu Ziyuan takes the bait, and proceeds to whip the shit out of her strongest battle asset, in a sequence that's either horrifying or completely fucking awesome, depending on how you feel about whump.

There are a lot of bad effects in this show and a lot of questionable fighting, but any time Zidian flies, I am HERE for it. I gave this beatdown its own gifset over here.

Jiang Cheng is devastated and tries again and again to protect Wei Wuxian, but his mother and her lieutenants keep moving him out of the way so the beating can continue.

Yu Ziyuan hits Wei Wuxian at least 5 times, until he is totally unable to get up off the floor. Wang Lingjiao has succeeded in eliminating him as a threat for the moment.

Gotta Hand It To You

Wang Lingjiao isn't satisfied with the brutal whipping, however; she wants his right hand as a trophy, and for him to be unable to recover.  Yu Ziyuan tells Jinzhu and Yinzhu to close the doors because some blood is going to fly. 

I'd like to think this is when Yu Ziyuan decides to kill the Wens, rather than maiming WWX, but I'm not certain. Because she doesn't start attacking until after Wang Lingjiao says the Wens are taking Lotus Pier, and tells her to discipline Jiang Cheng. So maybe she is okay with taking WWX’s hand, but draws the line at giving up her house.

Through all of this, Wei Wuxian doesn't once protest, even when he thinks they're getting ready to take his hand off. He'll do whatever it takes to make peace. THIS is the core of his heroism; he will sacrifice anything to do what he thinks is right. He's not "playing the hero;" not doing this for fame or kudos, but for a clear conscience.

It’s a Murder Party

Wang Lingjiao explains the new Wen World order, and Yu Ziyuan smacks her to the floor and then takes out all 8 of the Wen soldiers in one elegant move. 

Can we talk about how incredibly effective a fighter Yu Ziyuan is, without a sword? With her first-class spiritual tool as her only weapon? Nobody is telling her she needs to carry a sword. She shows she can use one, after she gives Zidian to Jiang Cheng, but she's absolutely devastating without one.

Having defied Wang Lingjiao, Yu Ziyuan...doesn't kill her. She chokes her, slaps her and yells at her. Then she insults her clan and sticks her FOOT on her FACE.

She sics the murder twins on the guards in the room, and they shank all of them at super speed while the boys watch with alarm. 

Then she has them sloooowly advance on Wang Lingjiao, giving her plenty of time to holler for Wen Zhuliu before they can kill her.

Het Heat

Wen Zhuliu comes flying in, literally, kicking both murder twins across the room at the same time. This is followed by Core-Melting Hand x Violet Spider suddenly becoming the most shippable M/F couple in this thing, because wow, they have some serious chemistry.

I never saw a pretty girl look so tough

Actor Feng Mingjing continues to do an awful lot with almost no lines, in his portrayal of Wen Zhuliu. WZL politely apologizes to Yu Ziyuan. Is he offering to withdraw, or is he just being polite before getting down to the killy bit? Either way, Yu Ziyuan is ready to rumble, and doesn't even consider de-escalating.

You know who was able to rein in his temper, after fighting with this same extremely dangerous dude, and therefore lived to fight another day? Fucking Nie Mingjue, that's who, who has a generational CURSE making him angry. While Yu Ziyuan, is like, "fuck the safety of my clan, this is Wei Wuxian's fault anyway" and throws down.

Wen Zhuliu and Yu Ziyuan proceed to have an epic, sexy fight, where he catches her whip and she dodges his attempt to feel up her core.

He's a magic man, mama, he's got the magic hands.

Wei Wuxian, still incapacitated, tells Jiang Cheng to stop Wang Lingjiao from calling for help, but JC gets distracted by the threat to his mom, and goes to engage with Wen Zhuliu.

Jiang Cheng takes a horrifying smack in the chest, which injures him and takes him out, while Wang Lingjiao sends the signal that seals the fate of Lotus Pier.

It’s All Over Except for the Crying

Yu Ziyuan immediately sees that she's lost the battle, and has the murder twins divert Wen Zhuliu while she brings the two boys to the pier. 

She verifies that Jiang Cheng's core is still intact, showing the viewers, for future reference, that it's possible to tell by touch if someone's core is missing, although a casual touch won't do it.  

Then she re-codes the Zidian so that it recognizes Jiang Cheng and puts it on his wrist. She follows this with a display of maternal affection for Jiang Cheng unlike anything we've seen so far, which super fails to reassure him.  

She follows this up with screaming at Wei Wuxian and telling him how much she hates him, and blaming him for the multiple shitty choices she just made..  

With a heart full of rage, she reminds him that his worth lies in what he can do for more important people.

She binds the boys with Zidian and then sends the boat on its way....

...with a frickin' TALISMAN, holeee shit. As toxic as she is for Wei Wuxian, there is a direct line from her cultivation skills to his.  

Dad To The  Rescue...sort of

The last third of the episode is basically yelling and crying punctuated by a couple of interactions out on the water. The extreme emotions go on for long enough that I eventually stop feeling bad for the characters and start feeling bad for the actors, who had to maintain this level of feeling for probably days of shooting.

The boys eventually meet up with Jiang Fengmian and Jiang Yanli. JFM discovers that Zidian responds to his control, which tells him something is very, very wrong, since it probably knows how his wife feels about him.

This thing isn’t biting me; your mom is in serious trouble. 

Here Jiang Fengmian decides to do the heroic, totally futile thing, which is exactly his style. He tosses Jiang Yanli in with the boys and takes his leave so he can go die with his wife while the children survive.  

He has to know that Yu Ziyuan is the stronger fighter of the two of them, and that he's not going back to rescue her. He's just going to stand with her and die together, which is the most romantic thing you can do in a C-drama, after all.  

How Much Do You Owe the Jiang Clan?

Jiang Fengmian tells his two children not to cry, making them and the viewer cry extra hard. (specially ouchy gifset here).

Then he turns to Wei Wuxian and, with a heart full of tenderness, reminds him that his worth lies in what he can do for more important people.

Next episode: Is going to be even more horrible! 

Soundtrack: 1. When The Levee Breaks, Led Zeppelin 2. The Tale of Custard the Dragon (poem) by Ogden Nash 3. Let it Whip by the Dazz Band 4. U Got the Look by Prince & Sheena Easton 5. Magic Man by Heart

[suupernovalight]

Addictive Drug

Ushijima W. x Reader

Masterlist || Previous || Next

04) An Unexpected Turn

Side note: I was supposed to post this yesterday but I got really busy, I’m so sorry! Anyways enjoy :))

“GET DOWN!” You yelled while shielding your eyes from the smoke. “damn it... damn it!” 

Due to the explosion and the impact, Yosho escaped. You only caught a glimpse of him running out of the room. You heard a lot of screams, you also heard gun shots.

You quickly got up and got out your secret gun. It was pre-loaded so you just started shooting at the people who are shooting you and your boys. While shooting, you looked to your side to see Tendo and Ushijima doing the same.

“Who knew this was gonna happen” Tendo said reloading his gun.

“Nobody, that’s who Satori” Ushijima bluntly said as he kept shooting. “Y/n, follow after Yosho, me and Satori will cover you.”

You nodded and got up to leave the room. Though before you did that, you dug into your purse and got a lollipop. You quickly unwrapped it and popped it into your mouth. Now you were ready.

While running out of the room, you saw many more guys with guns. There were tons. It seems the explosion that happened a few minutes ago wasn’t the only one. The building was broken down by many more.

“You guys aren’t fucking nice” You glared while shooting up the people.

They all wore purple suits like they were in some cult. With the amount of people aiming at you, you were sure you weren’t gonna move any time soon. That was until you saw someone run right next to you.

“Tendo?!” You said not looking away from your aim.

“Keep going, don’t stop unless you have to” Tendo said. “Go!”

You ducked yourself for some bullets and ran across the whole dealership. The building itself was pretty big. When running across, you felt someone punch your face. This made you fall to the ground with your cheek aching. 

“Serves you right you pest” The guy said while grabbing your neck and practically throwing you against a wall. “You’re weak and you know it. You’re a woman, act like one”

You felt back hurt now. That didn’t matter to you though. What mattered was to teach this guy what a woman can actually do.

“Mysogynistic man. Let me show you what a woman can actually do” You said running towards him with your fist clenched. He did the same.

Punches were thrown from left to right. Some were hits to the face, others missed. As time passed, both you and him were bruised up. But the guy was bruised up more. When you had the chance, you kicked the guy in the nuts making him fall to the ground. 

When he was laying down groaning, you stomped your foot onto his crotch and pressed it. This made him cry in pain. While he was doing that, you got out your gun and put the tip of it in his mouth.

“One more fucking move and ill shoot...” You said putting your finger over the trigger.

The guy whined in pain and desperation. Honestly it made you feel like a queen.

“Bang” You said moving your gun slightly.

The guy jerked his head and had tears coming out of his eyes. You almost felt sorry. When you were done messing around, you put the gun out of the guys mouth and demanded an answer.

“Where is Yosho Ayashi.” You said squinting. “One wrong move and ill have you killed.”

The guy cried and wailed. “Over there!” His voice was weak and he stuttered a bit. 

You looked at where he pointed and smirked. You then looked back at the guy and pointed your gun. Not at him but at the open space right by him. After a split second, you shot it making the guy pass out of exhaustion. You broke your lollipop into pieces out of satisfaction.

After he was done, you ran off to where Yosho was. As you ran, you could feel your legs give out by the second. When you turned the corner of the whole building, there he was. He was holding a gun right at you. It was like he knew you were coming.

“Put down the fucking gun” You said pointing yours at him.

Yosho chuckled. “You really are the kid Hayashi trained”

“SHUT UP!” You yelled gripping your gun tighter. Yosho noticed this and taunted you more.

“Y’know, he says a lot of stuff about you...” 

Your blood boiled. You could feel yourself blowing up any second.

“...He says how he misses you. Though he never said he regrets abandoning you”

You had it. You quickly ran up to Yosho as fast as you can and tried kicking him in the stomach. That failed badly and you got kicked away instead. You coughed up blood as you flew away from Yosho.

“He says how funny you looked when you found out that you were framed for his crimes” Yosho said walking up to you. “It’s kind of sad what he did to you...”

You couldn’t give up. Your legs wouldn’t move and your whole body felt sore. Slightly, you moved your hands but they were stepped on by Yosho.

“Me and Hayashi... we go way back but his sadistic ass made me avoid him.” Yosho said looking into your eyes. “Maybe you’re as sadistic as him and you don’t even know it.”

BANG

A sound of a gun shot was heard. Your ears rung. Suddenly, you felt a pair of arms around you. You then felt yourself getting lifted off of the floor. You couldn’t move at all now and you were slowly gonna pass out from exhaustion.

“Don’t move” A deep voice said.

You just hummed in response and passed out. Into the strange voice’s arms.

***

Yosho felt the bullet into his leg. He tried crawling away but Tendo grabbed him and cuffed him up. He then knocked him out cold. After that was done, he looked at Ushijima who was holding you in his arms.

“And she’s the most dangerous woman in Japan?” Tendo laughed. “I call that a bluff.” Then tendo took a closer look. “She’s beat up bad. I wonder what she had to go through.”

Ushijima was about to say something but was stopped by you grabbing his arm and hugging it.

“This girl is like a child” Ushijima stoically sighed. “We have Yosho now, we can leave before the police see us and frame us”

“Yup” Tendō said already ahead of his friend.

~~~

When they got to the car, Ushijima looked at your motorcycle.

“Tendō, ride y/n’s motorcycle back. I’ll have her sitting in the passenger seat in our car.” Ushijima said opening the car door and plopping you onto the seat.

“Yes sir! Just give me her keys” Tendō said getting on the bike.

Ushijima looked at your sleeping state and groaned. He then looked at your bag and tried to find your keys. After a moment he found them and tossed them to Tendō.

“I’ll see you back at the agency” Tendō said driving away.

Ushijima quietly got onto his drivers seat and started the car. While driving back, he heard and saw you moving in your seat.

“Ushijima...” you mumbled.

Ushijima looked at your beat up state and frowned a bit. “Go back to sleep.”

You blinked a few times then turned the other way. “I’m sorry... I’m sorry that you don’t know... my past...”

Ushijima looked away and sighed. He was confused about what you just said. You and your past? That isn’t his business to look into anyways so he just ignored you ever said that.

“Go to sleep”

“Ok... Ushijima...” you said drifting off again.

~~~

When Ushijima arrived back at the agency, he had no idea where he was going to put you. After informing the boss about your state, he said that you would have to stay with Ushijima for a bit.

Secretly he was mentally killing himself but he knew it was for the best. It was only temporary until the boss found an apartment room for you.

When Ushijima got to his apartment, he laid you down on the couch and tried to walk away. To his annoyance your woke up slightly and grabbed his wrist.

“Don’t leave me... please...” you mumbled holding him tighter.

“Y/n let go.” Ushijima said pushing your hand away.

He felt bad when he saw your face visibly get upset.

“I’ll be alone again though...” you said shaking your hand. Probably telling Ushijima to cuddle with you. Seriously what in the state of mind were you in.

Ushijima awkwardly said no and grabbed a nearby pillow. He then handed it to you. You grabbed it and hugged it and went back to sleep.

He then looked at you for a bit then went back to his own room to take a break.

“You’re a handful and I just met you.” He said closing his door.

Taglist:

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[coolgreatwebsite]

Cool Games I Finished In 2018 (In No Real Order)

Man! Wow! 2018! 2018 was a wild year for me. I managed to deliver those elbow drops I talked about last year and ended up doing a lot of of things. I left my job and moved cross-country in the span of like 2 and a half weeks! I took a new job in the video game industry (play Ninjin and Override)! I took a trip to Vegas a week after that! I got in a relationship! I got out of a relationship! It’s been a ride. A ride that hasn’t left me a ton of time to play video games or write about video games, but I’m like 1000 times happier now so it’s probably a fair trade. No matter what though, I will always be here at the end of the year to make a bunch of terrible MSPaint banners and provide you with another one of these. Here’s a bunch of cool games I experienced for the first time in 2018.

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne (PlayStation 2, 2004)

Nocturne is a game that I haven’t been able to get out of my head since I beat it. It’s so damn cool. It starts with you witnessing a demonic apocalypse where only you, your two friends, your teacher, a reporter, and the man with the world’s wildest widow’s peak survive. These people are, with a couple of notable exceptions, the only real characters in the entire game. You barely see them, and when you do your meetings are usually pretty brief. Sure, you talk to and recruit a horde of demons to your side as party members, and you interact with a handful of demonic antagonists and various demonic NPCs, but for the most part the game is just you. You, alone, wandering the weird hellscape remnants of Tokyo. It’s one of the most solitary-feeling video games I’ve ever played, and it nails this atmosphere flawlessly. The music, the visuals, the writing, every element gels with every other element so smoothly to create a prevailing, almost overbearing feeling of loneliness. The combat and gameplay mechanics are what I understand this series to mostly be like (this being the only mainline SMT I’ve played), and are fun and engaging in a way that’s not too dissimilar from the Persona series. The only knock I have against Nocturne is that the dungeon design super sucks. I’m fine with endless corridors, my love of the PS2 Persona games can attest to that, but almost every dungeon in Nocturne has an annoying gimmick to it, and they all essentially boil down to different takes on a teleporter maze. I was kind of almost dreading navigating dungeons by the time I got to the last fourth of the game, but my intense love for literally everything else saw me through. For those of you who like JRPGs and haven’t played Nocturne, I’m sure you’ve heard this plenty of times, and I was like you once. I didn’t listen. But now I’m on the other side of the tunnel, so I get to say it. You should really, really play Nocturne. It’s good.

Splatoon 2 Octo Expansion (Nintendo Switch, 2018)

Octo Expansion is what Splatoon 2′s single player mode should have been from the start. Don’t get me wrong, the packed in single player campaign is fine, but it’s basically a level pack for Splatoon 1′s. Octo Expansion, on the other hand, is 100% fresh. Structurally it’s much more diverse, with the campaign taking place over 80 mostly-bite-sized missions with varying objectives. There’s a couple of stinkers in there, but overall the quality of the missions is much higher than what was in the original single player campaign. They can actually be pretty tough sometimes too! It was fun to see some actual challenge in a Splatoon campaign. Everything wrapped around the core gameplay of Octo Expansion is kind of phenomenal. The setting and visual design is super weird, the music is way more mellow than anything else that’s come out of the series and creates a great sense of atmosphere, and the writing is actually genuinely pretty great. There’s a lot of funny dialogue and good character moments. They made me like Pearl! The weird gremlin that eats mayo! She’s my friend now! The last half an hour or so of Octo Expansion is also straight up my favorite sequence from a game I played this year too. Don’t sleep on this thing just because it’s DLC. It’s legitimately great.

Monster Hunter: World (PlayStation 4, 2018)

At the outset I was incredibly skeptical of Monster Hunter: World. This wasn’t entirely fair to the game, as a lot of this feeling was based on its initial E3 reveal trailer kinda sorta matching up to some mostly not true pre-E3 leaks, namely that it would be much more action heavy to cater to Western audiences and tie into the then unannounced Monster Hunter movie (which, as an aside, looks like a trainwreck that I desperately want to see). You can probably pretty easily find some tweets and posts from me around that time saying that the game looks like trash because of some misinterpreted new game mechanic. I am here to say that I am a big wrong dumbass and Monster Hunter: World is very good. You might be surprised to hear this, but it’s Monster Hunter! With a bunch of good and well-executed gameplay refinements! And graphics that aren’t repurposed from a PS2 game! It’s a ton of fun and I put a lot of time into it, but it’s not without its flaws. The number of monsters and weapons is comparatively way lower than in previous games, mostly due to that whole not repurposing PS2 models thing. It’s still kind of clunky in a lot of the places Monster Hunter has been historically clunky in, but also in some pretty big new ways, mainly around playing multiplayer. Also the story, while it’s as bland as it’s ever been, is exponentially more intrusive thanks to the addition of voiced cutscenes (which need to be triggered before the game lets you bring other players into story missions, causing a lot of that clunk I mentioned earlier). It’s all nothing game-ruining, of course. The game wouldn’t be on the list if it was! Monster Hunter: World exceeded my expectations, and I’m super looking forward to playing the recently announced G Rank expansion when it comes out next year.

Contra: Hard Corps (Sega Genesis, 1994)

I wish I could go back in time and kick my own stupid ass for not playing this sooner. I’d written off Contra: Hard Corps for the longest time based solely on some bullshit I read on the internet at an age where I just took other peoples’ opinions and made them my own. This and Castlevania Bloodlines were the bad ones, the ones some weird b-team crapped out for the Genesis while the SNES got the good stuff like Contra 3: Alien Wars. Well, it turns out... they were right about Bloodlines. But MAN were they wrong about Hard Corps. Hard Corps is the best Contra game. It fucking rules. I would have gone on with my life never giving the game a glance if not for this excellent Giant Bomb feature happening, and a couple of episodes in I knew I had to play it for myself. Contra: Hard Corps is fucking nuts. It’s balls to the wall 100% of the time. There’s so many unique enemies and wild bosses and they’re all never not exploding. The game has four characters with unique weapons and multiple different level paths that have totally different levels, bosses, and story beats. Oh, and the soundtrack fucking rips. Sometimes it’s a little too much, and there are definitely some sequences and boss attacks that are total gotchas that you can’t survive without prior knowledge of how they work. I’d also be remiss not to give a special shoutout to level 4′s awful, tedious, unskippable-on-any-route boss. But god damn if the rest of Hard Corps doesn’t outshine these flaws. It’s the high water mark for insane non-stop 16-bit action.

Deltarune (PC, 2018)

Does this count? It’s a demo for a full game that won’t be out for a real long time... I suppose it does, it’s self-contained enough. Deltarune, the free demo for the sort of but also sort of not sequel to Undertale, is unsurprisingly good as hell. Less surprising for sure, as Undertale is a known quantity these days, but I’m still way into it. The story is interesting and full of charming characters, and the battle system has been overhauled to include things like multiple party members with different abilities while still keeping all the things that made Undertale’s battles novel. The music is, of course, fantastic, and the visuals look much nicer while adhering to the same general style as the previous game. It’s fairly short, and some character development feels a little rushed because of it, but again, it’s a small chunk of the beginning of a much larger game. I can’t imagine any of this stuff wouldn’t be expanded upon. It’s hard to judge this thing story-wise due to the nature of it being a demo. I thoroughly enjoyed what is there, though, and look forward to playing the rest of the game in 50 years or whatever.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Nintendo Switch, 2018)

This game is so much. Even though the first thing I learned about this game was “everyone is here”, I still wasn’t ready for how much it is. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is maybe too much. Of course, as previously stated, everyone (meaning every single previous playable Smash Bros. character) is here. Most of the previous stages are also present. This was all known. Where the game really, truly goes overboard though is in the single-player content. There’s the usual classic mode for every character, this time specifically structured around a theme for each character, but the vast majority of it is actually comprised of the all-new spirits system. Spirits are non-playable video game characters that you can collect and equip to your fighters for special abilities, sort of like a less terrible version of Smash Bros. Brawl’s stickers. You collect these spirits through spirit battles, which are fights themed around the character the spirit represents via extremely clever usage of already existing fighters and mechanics. These battles range from the obvious (Big the Cat’s battle tasks you with fighting a giant purple Incineroar), to the obscure (fight the main characters from Zangeki no Reginleiv as represented by Link and female Robin while you’re giant-sized), to the creative (Porygon’s spirit puts you in a fight against wireframe Little Mac and Akira from Virtua Fighter, normally an assist trophy), to the downright in-jokey (the spirit of Ness’s Father, displayed as the telephone spirte from Earthbound, makes you fight an invisible Solid Snake). There are like 1200 spirits. The vast majority of them have an associated battle. And you don’t just experience these battles through a menu, at least half of them are implemented into the 30 hour long adventure mode, World of Light, which has you fighting spirits, navigating dungeons, and facing bosses. It’s insane. They focused on spirits in lieu of collectible trophies this time around and they absolutely made the correct choice. The trophies in the last two Super Smash Bros. games were fine, but easier access to existing 3D models of most represented characters made them inherently less exciting than Melee’s tailor-made collection of high quality (considering the time period) renders, many of which would never receive a 3D model again. The spirits system manages to be exciting in the same way Melee's trophies were, fostering a genuine sense of anticipation to see what they cooked up next, but in the context of gameplay. They completely knocked it out of the park. Smash 4 made it on one of these lists long ago, and I essentially just said “it’s more Smash Bros. and that’s good”. Smash Ultimate is also more Smash Bros., but it’s SO much more Smash Bros. It’s so much more extremely good Smash Bros. The only things I can ding it for are some totally subjective stage preferences (where the hell is Poké Floats) and some slightly less than optimal music sorting decisions. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is, ultimately, the ultimate Super Smash Bros.

These games were also cool, I just had less to say about them:

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (Nintendo Switch, 2018): Remember Castlevania 3? Inti Creates sure did! This prequel to the still unreleased Koji Igarashi Kickstarter project Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is an unabashed love letter to Castlevania 3, and it’s pretty good. Mom Hid My Game! (Nintendo Switch, 2017): A charming little game in the style of those old escape the room Flash games. It even looks like one (in the literal sense, not the pejorative). It’s not tough or replayable really, but it is $5 and consistently absurd and surprising. Yakuza 6: The Song of Life (PlayStation 4, 2018): Yakuza 6 is kind of a weird juxtaposition. It’s the final chapter of Kazuma Kiryu’s story, but also the first game to use the Yakuza team’s new Dragon Engine. The story end of things is a good, solid sendoff for a bunch of characters I’m going to miss very dearly, but the gameplay feels very formative and limited in a way that sort of reminds me of Yakuza 1. I had a good time with it overall, but I hope they manage to dial it in like they did with the previous decade of Yakuza games and make something truly excellent again. Looking at you, Judge Eyes. Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth (Nintendo 3DS, 2017): Etrian Odyssey V is a return to basics for the series, ditching things like overworlds and sub-dungeons and just pitting your party against one big labyrinth. Honestly, gotta say, I miss the stuff they left behind! The core of Etrian Odyssey is still super strong so I had fun regardless, but the overall simplicity of the game and the changes to how classes work had me missing EOIV more often than not. Soundtrack’s great though, as expected. Sonic Mania Plus (Nintendo Switch, 2018): To be completely honest, most of the stuff they added to Sonic Mania in Plus really isn’t that fantastic. Mighty’s spike and projectile immunity is fun, but Ray’s flying is more interesting than effective. Encore mode is largely disappointing, with most of it feeling identical to the base game outside of its all-new (and too hard for their own good) special stages. HOWEVER, Sonic Mania Plus was an exceptional excuse to play through Sonic Mania another six or so times. Congratulations to Sonic Mania for being game of the year for two years in a row. WarioWare Gold (Nintendo 3DS, 2018): A good compilation game, executed much better than in the team’s previous Rhythm Heaven Megamix, but lacking in reasons to come back after you’ve played all the games. There’s the usual toy room stuff WarioWare has had since Touched!, but it’s bogged down by reliance on a currency system and the fact that sooooo many things you unlock are just parts that feed into a larger, not that interesting thing. The part where you play WarioWare is great though, and the new visuals make it all feel fresh even though it’s mostly older games. Mario Tennis Aces (Nintendo Switch, 2018): I had a brief, passionate love affair with Mario Tennis Aces. The core gameplay is rad as hell and more like a fighting game than a tennis game, with multiple different special shots and a focus on meter management. I played like 40+ hours of it between the full game and the demo and never even touched the single player (which makes it technically not count for this list, but, shut up). I got 2nd place at its very first tournament at CEO 2018. Then I... stopped playing. It had some weird balance issues, sure, but I think it was more a victim of circumstance rather than anything else. I moved basically right after CEO and just never went back to it. It’s still incredible though. I hope this game’s systems are the standard for Mario Tennis games going forward.

We made it! Bottom of the list! It was a shorter trip this time, but I’m still proud of you for making it here all the same. Thank you for reading the words I typed about video games. I’m looking to get this web page back into gear in 2019, so you can probably expect part 2 of The Best Babies sometime in January. Hopefully I’ll actually play some video games too so I can bring back Breviews on the first of February. Until then!

[aion-rsa]

Archer Season 11 Concludes By Saving The World And Returning To Normal

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This article contains spoilers for Archer season 11 episode 8.

It’s definitely been a very memorable season for Archer. The show’s 11th year has successfully pulled Sterling Archer out of his multi-season coma and forced both him and his inner-circle to adjust to the many changes that they’ve faced. This season has featured Archer at his most alone and miserable, but it’s also highlighted a newly repentant side of the character. Against all odds, Archer has actually been able to exhibit personal growth, demonstrate newfound maturity, and even think about people other than himself. He also has a kick-ass new cane.

“Cold Fusion,” the season finale, features a massive story that feels fitting as the conclusion to this satisfying run of episodes. As much as this new season has been about Archer returning to a new normal, “Cold Fusion” once again attempts to reestablish the status quo in a way that’s genuinely exciting. Archer’s executive producer, Casey Willis, exclusively breaks down this final installment of the season as he discusses Archer’s growth, his future with Lana, and what to expect in season 12.

Archer Season 11 Episode 8 – “Cold Fusion”

“Archer and the gang travel to Antarctica to solve a murder mystery with international implications.”

DEN OF GEEK: Cyril’s personal growth has been a big part of this season and these final episodes see him really struggling in that department. Does he end this season in a healthy place where he’s able to put his baggage about Archer behind him, or is he still vulnerable?

CASEY WILLIS: Oh, he’s definitely not in a healthy place. There are a lot of issues that we touched on with Cyril overtly and some more subtly. We discussed a lot about his life during Archer’s coma. We may explore some of those ideas in the future, but sometimes when you make achievements in your life it is also easy to slip back into bad habits. That’s the area we are exploring with Cyril.

This episode pairs together Cheryl and Malory, which becomes a frequent combination this season. Talk a little on their dynamic this season and why they so naturally fit together.

Cheryl and Malory are great together because they are polar opposites. Malory is the boss and Cheryl is the secretary. Malory is Ego and Cheryl is Id. Cheryl goes so far to the extreme that somehow and sometimes she and Malory’s thoughts line up (e.g. let’s take over this submarine). When they line up, it’s amazing and hilarious.

This season has teased the idea that Archer is still in his coma and this finale has the biggest examples of this as he flashes through his various realities. Talk about the temptation to play around with this once more and what’s really going on with Archer in this finale. 

We didn’t want to use the tease too much because we wanted to assure viewers that Archer is back and this is reality. However, Archer himself may have some doubts, especially when unbelievable things happen to him constantly. In the finale, we wanted to play with Archer’s mental state a little more since this was the most unbelievable adventure he’d been on since he woke up. The Crackers/Lamont sequence is my favorite because I think it gives us the peek at how Archer (or his subconscious) is reconciling reality and his coma dreams.

This season covers a lot of bases and resolves many threads before it reaches this finale, but is there anything that you wanted to give more attention to that ultimately didn’t get a chance to happen?

We cut at least a minute (and sometimes three!) out of every episode this season because we kept running long. Unfortunately, sometimes we had to cut whole stories for characters. For example, in the sixth episode, we had a side story for Krieger in Coney Island. I don’t want to delve too much into it in case we want to revisit some ideas in the future, but I don’t think the episodes suffered. In fact, I think cutting some of those bits made the main stories of the episodes even stronger.

There are some fun references to The Thing here due to the episode’s setting, but has there ever been any serious thought into meshing Archer together with the cosmic horror genre?

My favorite references are the more subtle ones that the character designers added, like the color and style of the characters outfits. In Archer: 1999 we touched a little bit on that with the mysterious cube (what even was that??? I’ll never tell!). However, what we like better is for Archer to reference Lovecraft and the mythos rather than for those things to actually exist in our world.

The season ends with some uncertainty regarding where Lana and Robert stand with their marriage, as well as what was teased between him and Malory. Is there more conflict coming there or have Lana and Robert resolved things?

For us, there was nothing to read into Malory and Robert other than they are two people of similar ages bonding over shared interests. We think of it as friendly rather than anything romantic. However, Lana and Robert’s marriage is definitely something we are interested in exploring in the future.

It’s really sweet to get a taste of Archer, Lana, and AJ together at the end of the previous episode. Is there a chance that season 12 would explore more of this family dynamic between them? 

There are lots of ideas we’d like to explore, and Archer, Lana and AJ is up there. I can’t promise anything at this stage, but we have a ton of ideas.

There’s a reference made to how Veronica Deane is still at large for shooting Archer and putting him in his coma. Is her being put to justice something that’s still on the horizon?

The book may be closed on Veronica Deane. I don’t want to say she will never come back, but it does seem like that chapter is over.

So much of this season has examined how Archer is the weak link for Agency, but the final moments poignantly see Archer flip that dynamic and address how he’s been treated like a scapegoat. Discuss how their power dynamic changes during the episode’s end?

This was our plan from the beginning of season. We wanted to slowly (or sometimes not-so-slowly) show the characters changing because of Archer’s return, and then have it culminate in the finale. Our thought going into the season was for Archer to raise the stakes for everyone and even for the missions themselves. It’s very “Archer” to save the world and then rub it in the face of his friends and family.

Any hints about the direction of Season 12?

We’re very excited to get renewed for another season. Season 11 was just the tip of the iceberg (*wink*) and we look forward to building on it. We are working on some great stories and exploring relationships and character histories. We also want to do some more globetrotting and create situations and visuals we have never seen before in the series. We are Barry, Barry excited!

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This concludes our Archer Season 11 post-mortem, but previous installments can be read here and here.

The post Archer Season 11 Concludes By Saving The World And Returning To Normal appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[ebachan]

Sonic force – Japanese trailer

I sure am hyped for this game. It keeps getting better and better. This trailer sure showed us a bit about Infinite and what bond he has with Eggman, at least a surface of it. I have picked some screencaps from it I thought are interesting.

This one shows us Eggman's lab and here we can see a possible Infinite's cubes or his actual body. When I look at it I'm getting the feeling Infinite may not just refer to endless power but to an endless amount of copies of himself. I mean if he is defeated (=killed) for good, in one of this tubes he is recreated with old memories, resulting in an evolution. I don't think it will be this complex, but it sure seems interesting.

Eggman is watching Infinite's scan of some sort. We can see the triangle is his core and I bet hitting Infinite there will do the damage. The thing that interests me is - the three black blocks on Infinite's head. I know the whole scan is slightly moving, but it just seems he is missing something there.

Here is Infinite in a test tube I suppose. He seems to be awake and looking down on Eggman probably. I have read at @gaysilver  blog people believe Eggman created him, but he is a specialist in creating robots. If it was his grandfather Gerald then maybe, but no. Eggman at most found "Infinite" and did something to perfect him (= give him stable body, or more than he had) and keep him under his control as well. @gaysilver as well mentioned how strange it is for Infinite to constantly adjust his mask. It's just a gesture, but it may mean a lot more. I sure don't remember seeing a villain to constantly adjust his clothes, 'cause they make sure it fits them perfectly. I think the mask has secondary function beside hiding his face. It may work as some sort of safety-switch similar to Shadow's inhibitors rings or it may be the reason Infinite has to listen to Eggman.

This is here to just point out how awesome his ass--- ehm, how his fur turns so dark red-black. Notice the glitch effect next to his head. I bet it means Infinite is still imperfect, but Eggman was impatient and released him ahead of time. Well, it was still enough for him to overtake the world. I think maybe his raw strength isn't greater than let's say Zavok, but do you know there is a style of Hard fist and Gentle palm? Well, maybe it's not called that way but remember Naruto and Hyuuga clan? They use chakra to hurt an opponent from inside, instead of breaking their bones. What if Infinite is using something similar? The body is mostly untouched but his attack is aimed at the chaos energy inside living beings. Just saying.

Infinite is showing off his power and notice the rabbit girl. He looks like a Bunny Rabot, but it may be just because of the ears.

This screenshot actually made me intensively happy. No, it's not for the fact Tails is in trouble or looking adorable while scared, it¨s for the people behind him. Thou they look generic, they are not humans!!! This finally shows Sonic's world is inhabited by Mobians as well!! This is the first time we can see them.

Till now we saw only humans, like Sonic and his friends, were the only Mobians on the whole planet! It made no sense. I can understand why it was. It was much easier to create models for NPC humans than for NPC Mobians of different races.

Here is Infinite adjusting his mask. It's actually such small motion it's hard to notice the first time you watch him. It was mentioned he is hiding the gem on his chest behind his arms. Shadow is doing that gesture too, but it's more like his personality trait and body language. But since the gem (probably) has a huge role for Infinite, he may be trying to hide it, while making it seems it isn't important. It can work both ways.

It seems we may check outer space too. It would be nice to visit space colony Ark and see if it has any connection to it. Who knows, maybe Infinite is the true Ultimate Lifeform and Shadow was the prototype. I at least think it wasn't clearly stated if Shadow is the final result of Project-Shadow, he kinda just took it as there was nothing else.

I found the glitches to be so interesting. I still believe it means he is either imperfect or he is not supposed to exist and this is how reality shows him it.

This here shows us how he is confronting the OC hero. It can be Chaos Control or manipulation with a time and space involving the only single person. I guess it will be ChC in the end, but it would be nice to see it being something completely different or radically different use of ChC. Can you see the "bubble" effect? It's actually a "boost" motion. Before he uses it, the screen tones changes to more red and dark sparks are around Infinite's body.

This color change happened during his fight with Sonic. It definitely means he is using his power more, like on 15% while anything till 10% is hardly visible. The other thing is, he isn't walking or running but just floating to the hero, so it has different movement feel than teleportation.

Yeah, Shadow... I have checked the picture on greater zoom, but no, I don't see the white-sparkle in his eyes. Either it's a mistake or he is really under control. Which would kinda suck. I mean how can Ultimate Lifeform be so easily controlled when he is making sure to look strong and determinate? It was officially tweeted that Shadow isn't controlled, yet his eyes look different

If it's true, it's just a glitch and Shadow is well aware of all he is doing. And why? I earlier mentioned for a possible revival of Maria, but as of late I thought it may be a more recent reason. What about Rouge and Omega? They are his teammates and he holds them dear. If they are held captive, Shadow would definitely do anything to save them, even working for Eggman. And waiting for right moment to kick him back and pay for all of it.

Yet another awesome shot at Mobians ready to fight. I'm awaiting a lot of Mobian's NPCs. This shot as well confirms Rouge. And with that my previous theory is busted... or not, this may still happen if it's after her rescue (saaaafe XD).

Ah, Metal, the all time favorite killer robot. Some of you may think he is possessed, but I think he is just using Infinite's power or Infinite is using it on him. It sure would be cool if he can regain his Neo form even if it would be a just unlockable costume.

This shot has the vibe of "I recognize you, but not quite".

Who can miss the last Fist Bump :-D

Okay, enough of my rambling. I found the trailer to be awesome. I really want to play this game, even if I may suck with some bosses. I want to discover the story on my own. So, what do you think?

PS. Sorry for mistakes, I haven’t checked this too much. I just want to post it ;-)

[misszarves]

timeline of my spiral for anyone who wants to laugh react

july 2019: hit a wall with sleep deprivation, anemia, gut problems and probably plain burnout, started having conflicts with my boss especially around my lateness (our workday started at 5:00 AM, he refused to simply write me up or suspend me but instead wanted to “talk about it” and this became extremely intrusive and uncomfortable fast)

also july: had my first encounter with an animal in a sticky trap, outside my apartment, a bird who I was able to rescue

also july: quit that job, went back to the golf course to bartend a couple of days a week

august: moved back in with my parents as a result of my changed employment situation

late august: read that shockingly graphic article in the NYT about child porn that some of you may remember (do I need to put a trigger warning or can y’all use common sense and refrain from looking it up). sharp spike in anxiety, making it worse than it had been in six or seven years

september: picked up more hours at the golf course, was able to make some investments in myself -- a new sewing machine and some singing lessons. had my two-year cake. 

mid-october: found out I was pregnant. on a friday (K, not J, was the father -- some people do ask). made the quick decision to have an abortion but was unable to get in touch with any abortion provider until the middle of the following week (due to phone/email tag, etc), giving me enough time to start Feeling Things about the pregnancy

november: continuing to live with my parents and work full-time as a bartender, succumbed to angst and anxiety as expected -- but family, friends and coworkers with the glaring exception of my mom (who still pretends she didn’t even know I was pregnant, lol) were very supportive. for a brief period, we settled on keeping the baby, and told my dad and picked godparents. when I changed my mind again, my boyfriend was devastated. that pretty much hasn’t changed

late november: in a last-ditch attempt to fend off the crushing dread, I took a trip north to see a friend and her husband (to be clear, I would have visited them anyway lmfao). it helped a little. on the way back, I stopped to see some of my mother’s cousins, who tried to rope me into a pyramid scheme.

november 28: abortion day! my aunt took me to the clinic and then out for burgers. while we were eating, one of the cooks, who my aunt knew, fell off a ladder and onto his back.

first two weeks following the abortion: the normal feel-like-shit-no-matter-how-secure-you-were-in-your-decision period

dec 3: relapsed! 

dec 3 onwards: since the relapse went on for about three months, I can’t nail down when that “two week” period actually ended. pregnancy hormones resulted in waves of anger and teariness, but no satisfying “mourning”. I drank more heavily than I ever did before, routinely got shitfaced or even blacked out while on shift. I told people about the relapse, but the actual inebriation mostly went unnoticed.

christmas eve: after convincing J to come spend christmas with my family, got drunk again, we got in some sort of argument. I don’t remember.

christmas morning: J left as soon as possible.

the blurry period between christmas and mid-January 2020: 

more drinking at work, and a peak in the mouse and rat problem my workplace had been managing badly for several months. saw and heard three tiny, dying, bloody mice on two separate sticky traps (two different days). on a slow ~pasta night~, knocked back a couple of drinks so I could ask one of the cooks at the pasta buffet to leave his post and euthanize the second and third mouse. which he did as humanely as possible -- with a shovel. at this point I wrote a letter to my GM telling him how unacceptable it was to make his hormonal, post-abortive employees deal with sentient animals in their dying agonies, and could he please come up with a different pseudo-solution. about a week later, he came up to me and, with great diplomacy and tact, told me to shove it up my ass.

powdered bait laced with rat poison was placed on the floor in and around the bar and kitchen. I called the health inspector, who brought the hammer down on both the poison and the sticky traps. the poison was cleaned up (part of that job went to yours truly, with no protection) as were some but not all of the sticky traps

I developed a small crush on a long-time coworker (cook #1) who began behaving in what I assumed was meant to be a flirtatious way (eye-fucking, going out of his way to talk to me in a way he hadn’t before, etc). this included some pointed questions about my mental health (the abortion and the relapse were public information at this point). bizarrely, he refused to tell me anything personal about himself. he started dating one of the banquet girls. he eventually told a mutual friend (cook #2, and our shovel-killer from above) that he “got [a] vibe” that I “wanted to fuck” but (as cook #2 gleefully reported to me) made a face and expressed disgust at the possibility of ever being involved with me in that way. (WHY ASK ME ABOUT MY FUCKING ABORTION THEN, YOU WEIRDO)

cook #2 started trying to fuck me. I did not reciprocate. he then told me he thought I was a “six” and that he wasn’t interested. a few weeks later he tried to fuck me again

early january 2020: got both a yeast infection and bacterial vaginal infection

january 6: J had a grand mal seizure on my kitchen floor. I had never seen a seizure and the tremors were so severe that my dad, who had seen many, thought he may also have been having a stroke (turned out, just a seizure). he was hospitalized overnight and kicked to the curb -- but the process was begun to get him back into rehab

january 7 (?): employee gift exchange at work. I was on shift and wasn’t participating, but there weren’t a lot of customers and my coworkers asked me to come join them. there were five-gallon buckets of old sangria to which we were given unlimited access (and remember that I was the bartender, so I took the trips to the fridge and back). I blacked out. cook #2 called my mother and I vaguely recall getting in her van.

the days following that “party”: cook #2 and several other coworkers told me I “didn’t seem that drunk,” ie was not a horrible embarrassment. however, cook #2 told me that I’d made out with him. then I started to hear rumours that I and a third cook (cook #3) had disappeared for half an hour to “go have sex”. let me be graphic for a moment: I was wearing a panty-liner that night because the spotting from the abortion hadn’t stopped, I had a yeast infection, and I hadn’t trimmed my pubic hair in about a month -- no matter how drunk I was, I cannot see myself agreeing to take my pants off around a random coworker. someone told me that I had a cheeseburger in my hand when we disappeared and was still eating it when she saw me again so she doesn’t think anything happened -- but I was suspiciously sore the next day. was it the yeast infection or was I sexually assaulted? I don’t know because I was blacked out and I never asked cook #3

january 10: actual staff holiday party. cook #3 introduced me to his long-time girlfriend. we all smiled and shook hands.

mid-january: mac miller’s circles album dropped. I decided I wanted to live. I continued to drink until the end of february, but stayed sober for much longer periods between much shorter binges

late january: I put in my two-weeks’ notice at the golf course and borrow some money from my dad. stinky came to live with us.

february 1: k, stinky and me moved into a small house my parents’ church is renting

most of february: fighting, gossiping, and faction-forming in my AA homegroup, culminated in a member being expelled and a series of “group conscience” meetings which involved yelling, fighting and crying. a relatively new arrival to our group (but a longtimer in the program) started to power-grab, which wouldn’t have fazed me except that she started openly singling me out as a “newcomer” whose vote did not count. this despite other members relapsing in the same period I did, and said power-grabber having been in attendance at my fucking cake five months previous. things got awkward.

mid-february: J went back to rehab

also mid-february: I got pulled over driving drunk in washington state. ironically, the confidence and ease I got from the alcohol kept me from being rude and short with the officer as I usually am, and he told me in a very friendly way that the speed limit would increase by 10 mph a little further down the highway, so perhaps I was confused, and I should take care out there. no ticket. a sign from god?

also mid-february: I got formally assessed for ADHD and tried ritalin for the first time. this did not end up working out.

mid-february: I was invited to dinner by the much older man who does the irrigation on the golf course, through one of the gardeners, a woman a few years younger than me with an established father-daughter type relationship with the irrigation guy. the three of us ate dinner at his house, and she proceeded to pass out from drinking too much. irrigation guy took the opportunity to feel me up.

end of february: I took my last drink and decided to start applying for jobs

also end of february: my ADHD symptoms as well as my anxiety began to spike, throwing a wrench in my resume-writing and hand-shaking plans

march: something else threw a wrench in my hand-shaking plans, as it did with all of yours. it goes without saying that I have been terribly anxious. the upside is that I know for certain that the abortion was the right idea.

also march: I switched to vyvanse and began to see better results.

mid-march, at the very beginning of shut-downs where I live: I see irrigation guy again and he takes the opportunity to pat my ass. 

end of march: J relapsed in rehab, was discharged and will see at least a ninety-day delay in his plan to complete the program and then get into secondary housing. he was briefly hospitalized, during which time the doctors did so little for him that he would have literally been just as well off in a drunk tank. service canada lost some of his paperwork so he still doesn’t have his medical EI money.

yesterday: J moved into my shed. he spoke to his counsellor, who will try to get him into a recovery house. I am confident that some things, particularly his EI money, will work out very soon. but whatever happens I have felt a reduction in the second-hand stress. as I said, and now he agrees: it’s a pretty nice shed.

[robertfrancisvaughn1122-blog]

November 8: Favorite Roles [*]

In the previous post, I named my top 7 favorite Robert Vaughn characters with a brief explanation of their background and this post will explain more about them and the reasons why they made my list. Please bare in mind that I haven't seen his entire filmography yet...

1) The Man from U.N.C.L.E. - Napoleon Solo Napoleon Solo is an agent of Section II: Operations and Enforcement who works alongside his friend/partner, Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum) and wears a badge with the number eleven (the badge originally was the Roman numeral II but after the series switched to color, Robert Vaughn picked the number '11' on accident and became his official number through the rest of the show, including the 1983 reunion movie). Unlike his partner, he rarely loses his temper and tries to be an optimist even in the most intense situations. The agent is laid-back, sociable and is a "serial womanizer" but he believes women that are created equal and treats them with respect as well as affection. He has a very high sense of style and his looks do not change during the first three years but in the final season, he wears double-breasted suits and his hair is quite longer. The character is one of my top favorites because his personality is completely different from 007 and he tries to keep a positive mind through any dangerous situation. Robert had stated in one of his interviews that he was playing himself and some aspects of his personality is obvious in a lot of the episodes. He has the personality of a class act and true gentleman who will treat you with the utmost respect. His positivity is something that attracted me to both Napoleon and Robert because I try to keep a positive mind despite moments of anxiety triggers which takes an emotional toll on you. I am still learning more about the character but he definitely is at the top of my list.

2) The A-Team - General Hunt Stockwell General Hunt Stockwell is the newest boss of the A-Team who is responsible for blackmailing the team into doing an unknown number of unspecified missions in return for granting a full pardon for their crimes. He has a cold and manipulative personality, rarely showing or displaying emotion but admits that he has respect for the team and Hannibal (George Peppard). There's not much known about his background but his assistant reveals that if Stockwell doesn't call into a unknown location at certain intervals, his operative would dissolve. He spent some time in Hong Kong where he built up an intelligence network. From time to time, he has a habit of reminding the team that "I'm going to do this....my way." In an episode called "The Say U.N.C.L.E. Affair", Stockwell is reunited with his longtime friend and former partner, Ivan Trigorin where he is captured and tortured by him to get information about a secret Russian jet. (The episode reunited Robert with David, his friend and co-star from 'The Man from U.N.C.L.E.'). I loved the introduction of General Hunt Stockwell because, despite being the antagonist, he is mysterious and nobody knows of his true intentions towards the team. There were moments where you wanted to kick his ass because of his treatment towards the team but he also had a job to do that was unpleasant. When Stockwell was captured and tortured for information by Trigorin, they could've let him get killed but the team came to his rescue. This was the first character I vaguely remember whenever I watched reruns of the show and I have a soft spot in my heart for Stockwell. The reunion between Robert and David in The Say U.N.C.L.E. Affair and their hug is so genuine as two old friends are glad to see one another again.

3) Harry Rule - The Protectors Harry Rule is a wealthy international private investigator who takes on cases that protects the innocent and belong to an organization called "The Protectors". He works alongside friends, the Contessa Caroline di Contini (Nyree-Dawn Porter) and Paul Buchet (Tony Anholt) who usually work outside of London when they're not with Harry. Despite the obvious flirting and a few romantic instances, there is no real romantic relationship between Harry and Contessa. The Protectors is an interesting series but the lack of interest from the production people, not much is known about any of the characters. If the show would've lasted longer, we might find out more about Harry and a potential of a romantic relationship between he and Contessa would be a possibility. Interesting fact that in one of the season 1 episodes, Robert met his future wife, actress Linda Staab, which was directed by him. Harry is one of my favorite characters but he reminds me of Napoleon Solo at a certain point but his background is vague which means it could be filled in or made up through fanfiction. The first episode reveals that Harry does have an ex wife and a child.

4) Bill Fenner - The Venetian Affair He is an ex-CIA operative who has turned into a journalist and is suddenly sent to Venice in order to investigate a suicide bombing at a peace conference. Bill is officially out of retirement and his ex-wife, Sandra Fane (Elke Sommer) is top of the suspect list, believed to be a Communist sympathizer. Despite all that, both Bill and Sandra share a few romantic moments. She is unfortunately shot in front of him which stirs up emotions in him, including anger. As I watch the entire film, it reminds me of a Man from UNCLE episode but much darker and Bill is almost like Napoleon Solo but his personality is different. Bill is still effected by Sandra's leaving and he still does love her. In his 2009 autobiography, Robert stated that he was attracted to Elke, who played his ex-wife in the movie but she was dating a friend of his so the romance was a no-go. The chemistry between the 2 actors is obvious on-screen and being a CIA operative can take an emotional toll.

5) Hayden Danzinger - Columbo He is the executive of an automotive company who is currently on a cruise with his wife (Jane Greer), as well as a few of his friends, but he has been having an affair with Rosanna Wells (Poupée Bocar), a lounge singer on the ship, and she threatens to expose the affair to his wife. After inhaling a drug which stimulates a heart attack before jumping into the pool, he quietly sneaks into her room and he shoots her in the back, writing the letter "L" in lipstick to blame the murder on the piano player (Dean Stockwell). The evidence eventually piles up against Hayden and Lieutenant Columbo (Peter Falk), who is on the cruise with his wife, reveals to the captain (Patrick Macnee) that he is the murderer. Like some of his villains, Danzinger is an interesting character because he doesn't seem the type of man who would kill a beautiful woman and he doesn't seem to become really irritated by Columbo's presence. Of course, in his true fashion Robert's character breaks out into a smile. I really don't have a reason why this character is a favorite but I think the style Robert plays him in, he's a likable guy!

[just-dreaming-marvel]

Love and Medicine ~ 8

MASTERLIST

< previous chapter

Word Count: 4,175ish

Summary: Your roommates are annoyed and Gamora is determined to make you jump through hoops.

Notes: This is based off of Grey’s Anatomy 1x07. I do not own Marvel or Grey’s Anatomy.

When your alarm went off, you were naked in your bed. With a naked Steve beside you. A small groan passing between his lips, Steve reached around you to turn off the alarm clock and then cuddled into you.

“Hmmm,” you hummed, enjoying his arms around you way too much. “You have to get up now.”

“What?” Steve mumbled, half asleep. “What time is it?”

You smirked, rolling on top of him. “It’s 5:20, and I have pre-rounds. And you,” you booped his nose, “have to leave before they see you.”

You gave him a small kiss before rolling off of him.

“Oh, come on, now,” Steve grumbled. “Why don’t you just let them see?” He quickly rolled on top of you, pinning you down.

“No!”

“Please!”

“No! No!”

He began placing kisses all over you. Saying, ‘please’, between eat kiss.

“Steve!” You squealed. “St-stoppp!

~~~

“You two get any sleep?” Scott asked, walking into the kitchen where Val and Clint were eating.

“Oh, she could oil the bedsprings as a courtesy or at least buy a padded headboard,” Val complained.

“So, uh, who’s the guy?” Clint asked.

“You think it was just one guy doing all that work?”

“Yeah, do you mind if I don’t think about that?”

“Oh, you jealous, Barton?” Scott teased.

“I’m not jealous.”

“Well, I am,” Val responded. “But at least I know she’ll be having a long day at work.”

They all froze when they heard a floor board near the top of the stairs squeak. The three of them rushed over to the doorway, wanting to see who was coming down the stairs. Steve snuck down the stairs and out the door, seen by Val, Clint, and Scott.

“Well, at least we know that brain surgery isn’t his only skill,” Val commented, going to get more coffee.

“They—they can’t be…” Clint stared at the front door in shock. “He’s… he’s our boss.”

“Yep,” Scott replied, glancing at his watch. “We’re late. You know, she has been scrubbing in a lot lately on his surgeries.”

“No, Y/N wouldn’t sleep with him just to… no.”

“Well, if she’s not ashamed of it, why is she keeping it a secret?” Val wondered.

“Maybe she didn’t. Maybe it just happened. You know, spontaneously, last night.”

“Good morning,” you greeted, entering the kitchen.

“Morning,” Val and Scott responded.

“So…” Val started, “it sounded like you were having some pretty radical sex last night, all night long. Who was the guy?”

“No one you know,” you lied with a shrug.

Clint, Scott, and Val all gave each other a look.

“We’re late,” Scott said. “Let’s go.”

~~~

“I’m gonna beed a major rush to make it through this day,” Clint said in the locker room. “I need a kick-ass surgery.”

“Ooh, you a bad boy last night, Clint?” Peter taunted.

“No,” Val answered for him. “That would be Y/N.”

“You a bad boy, Y/N?”

“Do tell,” Natasha urged.

“Nothing to tell,” you shrugged.

“That says it all, huh?”

Val slammed her locker door shut, annoyed at your lies.

“Sorry, I have a sex life,” you apologized.

“Don’t apologize,” Peter said. “Embrace it. Share it. Count me in.”

“Yeah, next time, just let me know if I need to go to a hotel so I can get some sleep,” Val said.

“Am I missing something?” You asked.

“You were just a little loud,” Scott replied.

Everyone left except you and Natasha.

“Do they know it’s Captain McDreamy keeping them up all night?” Natasha asked.

“I hope not,” you answered. “I already have Gamora riding me, I don’t need my roommates thinking I’m getting special treatment.”

~~~

You yawned as you and Natasha met up with the other interns and Dr. Gamora. You just hoped that you didn’t look as tired as you felt.

“Barton, Romanoff, Lang, Quill, go on to the clinic,” Gamora ordered. She looked up, catching Clint watch Steve through a window. Steve was putting in eye drops. “Barton, patients are waiting.” Clint scurried off. “You two,” Gamora motioned to you and Val, “come with me. Val, you’re hanging with me today.” Steve walked over. “Good morning, Dr. Rogers.”

“Dr. Gamora,” he replied as you yawned. “Late night, L/N?”

“No,” you responded, “caffeine just hasn’t kicked in yet.”

“If you’re at all religious, you would want to start praying it kicks in soon,” Gamora retorted. “There’s a consult in the pit. Girl with a fever and abdominal pain. After that, Lee in 3311 needs his meds. Mr. Jackson’s IV fell out, and he’s a hard stick. Post-ops in 1337, 3342, 3363, and 2381.”

You had nodded along, trying to get your tired brain to understand what she was saying. “3381, 3342, 3363,” you repeated, “and 23… 81?” 

Gamora simply glared at you instead of answering what you needed. “Why are you still standing in front of me?”

You quickly hurried down to the pit, not wanting to get on Gamora’s bad side anymore than you already were. You started your consultation with an eighteen year old girl named Jessie Todd. Her mother and father were both accompanying her. Jessie seemed nervous, biting her nails.

“I think she got some bug on her trip to Mexico with her friends,” Mrs. Todd said. “I told her not to go to a third-world country, but does she ever listen?”

“She’s been weak ever since and she’s lost weight,” Mr. Todd worried.

“Barely,” Jessie mumbled.

“And this morning, she passed out in the shower.”

“When was the trip?” You asked.

“A couple weeks ago,” Jessie answered. “I’m really fine. I just have a fever.”

“Okay, well, will you lie back for an exam for me?”

“No, please, I don’t need an exam. Just give me some antibiotics and send me home.”

“Well, maybe it is just a fever, but they called down for a surgeon, so I have to give the ok to let you go. So just let me do the exam.”

“Do the exam,” Mr. Todd urged.

“No. This is crazy. I’m fine.”

“For God's sake, Jessie, I don't want to spend my entire day here,” Mrs. Todd exclaimed.

“You know, actually, Mrs. Todd, this might be easier if we had some privacy,” you told the parents, sensing that Jessie was worried about their reactions to whatever was going on. “So would you two mind leaving the room?”

“That’s fine,” Mr. Todd said, guiding his wife away.

Jessie lied down and you began to push at her stomach.

“Ow,” Jessie complained. “Don’t push so hard.”

“Can you lift your shirt so I can examine your stomach?” You requested. With a sigh, Jessie slowly lifted her shift, revealing pink scars. “Where did you get these? Jessie… you've had surgery recently. These scars are still pink.”

“Don’t tell my parents.”

“You did this in Mexico so your parents wouldn't know? What did you have done?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Jessie—“

“I can’t!”

With a sigh, you walked away, ordering a CT for Jessie before heading to help the other patients that Gamora had for you.

~~~

You at just finished Gamora’s last job for you when she paged. You were quickly to go find her.

“You paged?” You questioned, finding her near a nurses station.

“Where are we?” She asked.

“I did the consult, did the IV, the meds, the Post-ops, everything.”

“How is your pit patient?”

“She’s febrile and has peritoneal signs.”

Both you and Gamora’s attentions go to Natasha, who is walking by looking ill.

“You alright, Romanoff?” Gamora wondered, not caring all that much.

“Fine,” Natasha responded, waving it off as she kept going. “On my way back to the clinic.”

“Anyway, about the pit patient.”

“I think she had some sort of illegal surgery done in Mexico,” you stated.

“Botched abortion?”

“No. She has four laparoscopic scars on her abdomen and won't say what they're from, the parents are clueless.”

“She’s a minor.”

“Seventeen. Freshman in college.”

“You order up for a CT?”

“Yes,” you nodded.

“So while she's there, the nurses couldn't get a Foley on Mr. Garay. He may need a Coude cath if you can't get a normal one in there. Write up post-op notes on all surgical-floor patients that had surgery within the last 24 hours. Be sure to document their EKG's and x-rays. Hunt them down if you can't find them.”

“Right away.”

~~~

You were exhausted by the time Jessie’s CT scans came back. Gamora was really working you to the bone. Of course, it didn’t help that you had spent most of the night up with Steve, having some of the most enjoyable sex you’ve ever had. But that wasn’t the point. Scans in hand, you found Gamora at the nurses station near the lobby.

“Dr. Gamora?” You walked up to her. “Jessie Todd’s abdominal CTs.” You handed her the scans.

She took them, holding them up to study them. “Is this girl fat?”

“Not at all,” you shook your head. “She’s a normal college kid.”

“So,” she handed the scans back to you, “what do you see?”

You took them back and studied them yourself. “Her stomach’s stapled. She’s had a gastric bypass.”

“And a bad one at, at that.”

Jessie Todd was moved into a patient room. So you and Gamora requested to speak to her parents outside of the hallway. You were tasked to explain to them what at happened.

“Gastric bypass is a procedure normally done on obese patients to help them lose weight,” you stated, after telling them what their daughter had done.

“Jessie?” Mr. Todd questioned. “She doesn’t need to lose weight.”

“Are you kidding?” Mrs. Todd responded. “This means the world to her. But it is so typical of this girl to take the easy way out. She's done it with everything since she was a little kid.”

“Mrs, Todd, nothing about this is gonna be easy,” Gamora said. “She's gonna face a lifelong struggle with malnutrition unless she has surgery to reverse the procedure.”

“Do the surgery,” Mrs. Todd ordered before turning to her husband. “I told her to watch the freshman 15. Don't eat junk, exercise. But when she came home Christmas, who had to take her out and buy her a brand new pair of size 6 jeans because she couldn't get in the ones I got her last summer?”

“Chrissy, you know, she tries so hard,” Mr. Todd retorted. “She does. She gets good grades. She gets A’s.”

“She had illegal surgery in Mexico.”

“Unfortunately, there were complications with the bypass,” Gamora stated.

“What do you mean?” Mr. Todd asked.

“She has what looks like an abscess under her diaphragm, and edema, which is a swelling of the bowel wall. I can't say for certain she'll recover completely.”

“Just do whatever you have to do to make her well, ok?”

“Of course, sir.”

Gamora walked away, and you stayed to check up on Jessie. It was then that Mrs. Todd entered Jessie’s room, angrily.

“Before you guys start,” Jessie quickly said, “I know you’re mad.”

“Disbelief, Jessie,” Mrs. Todd exclaimed. “Just disbelief.”

“I’m just concerned,” Mr. Todd added, much more calmly than his wife. “Where did you get the idea to do this?”

“The internet,” Jessie answered quietly.

“But, honey, there is a healthy way to lose weight,” Mrs. Todd said.

“Yeah, I tried that, but...it doesn't work for me like it does for you.”

“Hey,” Mr. Todd said, putting a hand on his daughter’s leg, “you don’t need to lose weight.”

“What are you eating?” Mrs. Todd quickly wondered. “And how much have you been working out? I mean, you know, most of the time, when people hit their target weight, they have to work to stay there.”

“Everyone gains weight in college, Mom,” Jessie responded. “It’s—it’s stressful. There’s... there's not enough time for exercise. I just thought if I wasn't worried about my diet, then… I could focus more on my studies.”

“So you took yet another shortcut? Life doesn’t work that way, Jessie.”

“Chrissy!” Mr. Todd exclaimed.

“What? You want to argue this?”

Huffing at his wife, Mr. Todd turned to you. “She has so much potential, if she would just apply herself—”

“Okay, okay,” you interrupted, having heard enough. “I think we should focus on taking care of your daughter. And, Jessie, your parents agree, the best thing to do is to reverse the bypass.”

“No!” Jessie shouted. “No, it's my body. I do not want surgery again. Please?”

“There were serious complications. And this is about your health.”

“But I’d rather be thin.”

“Well, I’m afraid the choice isn’t up to you,” Mrs. Todd responded.

~~~

With a sigh, you found yourself pushed up against the wall in the stairwell. You were tired and so over Mrs. Todd.

“Long day?” Tony’s voice came closer.

You opened your eyes to see him walking up the stairs. “You could say that,” you responded. “How’s trying to get a date with Dr. Potts going?”

“Not so well,” he sighed, coming to leaning against the wall beside you. “I’ve been bringing her coffee or tea every morning though. I’m trying.”

“You really screwed up,” you giggled.

“You’re telling me. How are you and Steve?”

“We’re… fine.”

“He told me you were up all last night.”

“What?!”

“Okay, he didn’t tell me. But I can see how tired both of you are. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out.”

“It’s that obvious? Tony, are you serious? This could totally ruin—“

“Woah, woah, woah. Calm down there, Y/N. I’m just playing with you. Gosh, you need to take a chill pill or something.”

“Sorry, sorry. I’m just… I know we shouldn’t be doing what we are doing.”

“But you enjoy it too much to stop. I get it… I just wish I was getting some too.”

~~~

Natasha was standing in the hall looking nauseous.

“Romanoff!” Clint called, excitedly hurrying up to her. “I’m scrubbing in on a hemispherectomy with Rogers.”

“Get out!” She responded. “I would kill for that.”

“We're gonna cut out half a girl's brain and it's going to work. It's outrageous. Almost makes it hard to hate him.”

“Why do you hate him?”

“Oh, no reason.”

“You know about him and Y/N, don’t you?”

“You know?”

“When are you gonna figure out that I know everything?”

Noticing Val walking up from behind, Clint pointed at Natasha. “She knows.”

“What?” Val questioned. “About Y/N and the Captain?”

“It’s been going on for, like ever,” Natasha commented.

“Seriously?”

“And you didn’t tell us?” Clint wondered.

“Ooh, you’re a gossip, huh?” Natasha responded.

“I am not!”

“I am,” Val said.

“He’s about to go into major brain surgery on no sleep? Not very responsible.”

“Jealous much?” Natasha chuckled. “Sex all night isn't about being responsible.”

“No,” Val agreed, “it’s about sex all night. I can't believe you're not more pissed off about this, you of all people.”

“Well, Y/N works hard all day. She’s good at her job. Why should you care how she unwinds? I mean, you like to bake all night. Some people like to drink. Others like an occasional screaming orgasm.”

~~~

Gamora and you were carefully operating on Jessie in the OR. Gamora was letting you help with more than you thought she would.

“Handle with care,” Gamora advised as she handed you Jessie’s bowel. “This things—“

“Full of gunk,” you responded. “I know.”

“We need to free the bowel from the adhesions caused from the abscess. This poor girl. What was she thinking?”

“She wants her mother's approval. She wanted to please her.”

“And this damage is the result? Here, resect that.”

“Needle-tip Bovie, please,” you requested, handing the bowel back to Gamora.

“When you’re done here, you have post-ops waiting.”

“I know, Dr. Gamora.”

“Natasha also has the flu. So, you need to pick up the slack in the clinic as well.”

“Look, I’ll mop the floors, okay?” That earned you a glare from Gamora. “Sorry, that was inappropriate.”

“It's not the only thing that's inappropriate. While we're on the subject, you care to tell me what you think you're doing?”

“Look, I'll jump through hoops if you want me to. But what I do what I leave this hospital is my business.”

“Half this hospital knows your business. Flu isn't the only virus spreading around here.”

“I made a choice, and I know you don't respect me for that choice. But I'll live with the consequences.”

“Then I'll have lots of hoops for you to jump through.”

“I've done everything you've asked me to do. I may not do it your way but it gets done. So whatever else you got, bring it on.” 

Suddenly, Jessie’s bowel burst. Spraying you with toxic waste. You could hear the people watching in the gallery go, ‘ew’.

“Okay, Dr. L/N, now that you’ve drained the organ, we can attempt to repair it,” Gamora said.

“Now my day is perfect,” you muttered.

The nurses tried to clean you up the best they could as you operated. Though they seemed to only make it worse. After the surgery, you and Gamora headed out into the hallway together.

“I need a shower,” you commented.

“No, I need a shower,” Gamora retorted. “You need to go tell that girl's parents what kind of kid they're getting back.”

“You're not gonna let me shower first?”

“That would be a hoop, would it not?”

“It would qualify.”

“Shower first, then.”

You rushed to the locker room. Val and Natasha were already there.

“Ew, what smells?” Val asked as you passed her.

“That would be me,” you answered, "or more specifically, my patient's insides all over me.”

“That makes me strangely happy.”

“Oh, Y/N,” Natasha grimaced, “you smell like—“

“Karma.”

“What?” You asked Val.

“Nothing.”

“Something vile is stuck in your hair,” Natasha told you, pointing to your hairline. “You know, just go stand over there, please.” She shooed you to the other side of the aisle.

“Ugh, how much do I love being a surgeon right now?” You mumbled.

“Karma,” Val laughed.

“What does karma have to do with anything?”

“I'm just saying, you've been given all the best surgeries. And now you smell like putrid goo. And you're giving off a stench. Karma's a bitch.”

Gamora walked into the locker room. “Dr. Rogers needs an intern in surgery,” she stated. “Which one of you is clear?”

“I’m good!” Natasha raised her hand. She was still looking pale. “Where do you want me?”

“You need to lie down somewhere.”

“I’m fine, I’m completely healthy.”

“L/N?” 

“Of course,” Val grumbled.

“What is your problem?” You asked Val, annoyed.

“Um, you! Cause apparently you can help Captain McDreamy in ways the rest of us can’t.”

“You did not just say th—“

“Yes, I did!”

“Hey!” Gamora called out. “Natasha, hemispherectomy in OR 1 with Dr. Shepherd. Go.”

Natasha nodded and hurried away. Val marched off as well.

“Apparently, I’m not the only one with hoops,” Gamora smirked.

~~~

After showering, you found Mrs. and Mr. Todd in the lobby. As you walked, you explained to them what had gone on in surgery.

“We were able to reverse the gastric bypass, but we did lose a significant portion of her bowel,” you told them. “And because of the short gut syndrome, Jessie will never eat normally again.”

“Ok, wait, do…” Mr. Todd tried to put his thoughts together. “How do we help her here?”

“Well, getting proper nutrition will be a lifelong problem for Jessie.”

“Great,” Mrs. Todd murmured, annoyed, “as if we already don't have our hands full with her.”

“She gets good grades. She stays out of trouble. She's smart. I just think she feels like nothing she does is good enough for you.”

“If you somehow think that I'm responsible for this…”

“I think Jessie is killing herself to please you.”

“Oh, please. You have no idea what's going on in that girl's mind.”

“You're her mother. She worships the ground you walk on. She didn't do this for herself.”

“I think that this situation is completely—“

“Chrissy, shut up,” Mr. Todd interrupted.

Both you and Mrs. Todd looked shocked as Mr. Todd walked faster to Jessie’s room.

~~~

Clint had had an interesting day, to say the least. He had discovered that the anesthesiologist in Steve’s surgery was drunk. Bringing up to Dr. Rogers, both the anesthesiologist and Dr. Rogers got mad, throwing him out of the surgery. Which is why he needed another intern.

Durning the surgery, Natasha and Dr. Rogers quickly realized that Clint had been right. Allowing Natasha and another doctor to close, Steve requested Clint to met him outside of the OR.

“Let me explain,” Steve began.

“It’s fine,” Clint responded.

“No, there is a code among doctors. We're not supposed to ask each other questions, not within the walls of this hospital.”

“Okay, so, I was out of line.”

“No, you weren't. I was. I was out of line. Somebody should have taken responsibility. It should have been the guy doing the cutting. It should have been me. You didn't deserve what happened to you today. You did the right thing code or no code.” Steve held out his hand for Clint to shake. Hesitantly, Clint shook it. “You saw me leave the house this morning, didn’t you?”

Clint pulled his hand away. “Oh, was that you?”

“Hmm. I’m not using her. And I don’t favor her.”

“She’s pretty great, you know.”

“Mm-hmm. I know.”

~~~

You went to Jessie, getting her into a wheel chair so that you can walk her around while talking to her alone. You had made a phone call, and you needed to tell her about it.

“Did you fix me?” Jessie asked, after the two of you walked in silence for awhile. 

“No, not completely,” you responded.

“So, I won’t get fat?”

“No.”

“Oh. That’s awesome.”

“Jessie, I’ve asked social services to contact your parents.”

“What? Why?”

“They can help you.”

“With what?”

“You don't know this yet, but life isn't supposed to be like this. It's not supposed to be this hard. And your mom… she isn’t suppose to treat you this way.”

~~~

You were so extremely grateful when you were finally allowed to go home. It was late, so you were expecting your roommates to be asleep. When you entered the kitchen, you found Val frosting a cake.

“I thought you’d be asleep by now,” you commented, searching for food.

“Yeah, well, I’m not,” Val retorted. “If you wait a few minutes, you can have a piece of cake. Baked it chock-full of love. Actually, chock-full of unrelenting, all consuming rage and hostility, but it's still tasty.”

“So you know?”

“I know.”

“Well, do you want the long, sordid version, or do you want the short version, where I started sleeping with a guy who turned out to be my boss?”

“Neither.”

“Val, cut me some slack here.”

“No. You went to Dartmouth. Your parents— don’t get me started on that. I know you’re trying to hide who your parents are. But I know. You grew up— look at this house! You know, you walk into the OR, and there isn’t anyone who doubts that yo should be there. I… I grew up in a trailer park. I went to state school. I put myself through med school by posing in my underwear. You know, I walk into the OR, and everyone hopes I'm the nurse. Y-you have their respect without even trying, and you're throwing it away for...what? A few good surgeries?”

“No. It's not about the surgeries. It's not about getting ahead.”

“Then what? A little hot sex? You're willing to ruin your credibility over that? I mean, Y/N, what the hell are you doing?” You huffed, shaking your head. “Oh, my… you’re falling for him.”

“I am not.”

“Oh, you so are.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You so are. Damn it, you poor girl.”

“You know, it's just that he's just so… And I'm just… I'm having a hard time.”

"Wow, you're all, uh, mushy and… warm and full of secret feelings.” Val handed you a piece of cake.

“I hate you!” You snatched the cake from her. “And your cake.”

“My cake is good. So, um, how hot is the sex?”

“Val.”

“What? Come on, my girlfriend broke up with me, I’m not getting any. Help a girl out with a few details.”

~~~

Steve showed up at your door an hour later, exhausted as well. You two headed up to your bedroom. You were both on either side of the bed, pulling back the covers.

“You know,” Steve slurred, “we could just…”

“Sleep?” You finished.

“We could, yeah, if… if you want to.”

“Yeah?”

You both crawled into bed. You turned off the lamp beside you before cuddling into Steve’s side. He reached over and turned off the lamp at his side.

“I could get used to this,” you whispered, falling asleep.

next chapter >

NOTES: from now on the taglist when be added by a reblog. I will reblog it using my second account, @just-dreaming-marvel-2​​​. Just so that my main page doesn’t get too cluttered.

If you want to be added to the tag list, please dm me or send in an ask.

[lostsummerdayz]

Castle Point Anime Convention Wrap-Up!

Castle Point Anime Convention is in the books! It surely indeed was one for the books as well, coming from someone who has not attended Castle Point in literal years. Try...2012 to be exact. Seven years passes by so flipping fast. To think, the last time I was at this convention was back when I was a mere nineteen year old! Regardless, time flies and as we get older and we evolve, so too must our conventions that we attend. If conventions do not improve of evolve, then they will never last for the long term. Rather dire things to say for an opening to a wrap-up post, but it’s how I personally feel on the matter. It’s a challenge for grassroots conventions to pull it off, but for those who do, the payoffs are grand. In Castle Point’s case, they have pulled it off. They have evolved greatly from the small yet modest “college con” that I recall attending way back when.

KDA Akali by projectxayah and KDA Evelynn by melanubis

As such, to end this foreword, I’ll be making some comparisons to the last time I attended CPAC back in 2012, to now, throughout this article. It’s going to be quite a lengthy read, so strap in everyone!

The Meadowlands Expo venue was simple to arrive with no issues on our end. A simple fifteen-minute-at-best-half-hour-at-worse-due-to-traffic bus ride from Port Authority was all that was needed to arrive. The bus stop even lets you off directly in front of the convention center itself! Here is where I can immediately talk about how helpful the staff was towards myself and the rest of the podcast. When we needed help as far as knowing where to go and con assistance in general, everyone was able to help, but, there weren’t any crowding that I noticed as well. Lines were handled well, and the Dealer’s Room/Artist Alley, places where there’s known to be a packed pandemonium, was handled well. Mainly this was due in part to there being a designated entrance and a designated exit. Take notes future cons!

As the time drew nearer for the gates to be open, the hall slowly but surely filled itself with various cosplayers, attendees wearing gaming and anime inspired apparel, and soon enough the events began.

One of the first events was a maid performance, made to kick off the opening of the anime convention. It certainly had set the tone for the convention for sure, where one could hear it in ambiance even if they weren’t there to physically attend.

After the opening ceremonies concluded, I was left to explore the event as it were. One of the first stops I take in any convention is within the game room, so to speak. Majority of the games featured, due in part from the Snow Phoenix team, in the game room below are games in which I have played at least once, play on a regular at the local arcade, or games in which I never had played before (Or ever will play outside of cons)

Regardless of which category the games fell under, it’s always fun to go back to these games from time to time. Free play is just a bonus in all honesty. My personal favorite of the games featured here had to have been Sound Voltex, always a fine game in my book. The second being Crossbeats, a touch based rhythm game which, sadly, development ceased as of last year. It’s still a great game to go back to from time to time.

Another portion of the game room were console setups. These had a slew of fighting games ranging from the Street Fighter Collection to Mortal Kombat 11, Soul Calibur 6 to Tekken 7, and of course an entire section of CRT televisions dedicated to Melee. Tournaments were held throughout the weekend, which, unfortunately I didn’t make it as far as I would have liked. However, those who I had met were friendly enough to me.

Back on the topic of rhythm games, I had attended a rhythm game panel that was being presented later on that afternoon. The convention was split into two venues. The main venue, at the Meadowlands Expo, had the main events while the Holiday Inn had the extra panels. This was where the Rhythm Game panel was held.

Held by RhythmCore Gaming, the rhythm game panel spoke about the history of rhythm games, mainly focusing on Bemani games, as well as touching upon mobile rhythm games briefly as well. For those reading who aren’t aware of what a “Bemani” is, essentially it’s the rhythm game division of Konami. Familiar titles include Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania IIDX, Sound Voltex, Pop’n Music, and so much more.

All in all, as far as presentation, it was a well run panel. From a technical standpoint, the Castle Point staff made sure all equipment that were in use were running well, as far as projectors for example. Crowd control was also handled quite well, to avoid overflow. From the panelist’s standpoint, I feel they had gotten the gist of what each game is and how they play. Being slightly critical, I feel some of those who were assigned to talk about a specific game went more in depth with their game than others, but I know more than anyone the challenge of running a rhythm game panel.

See, way back in 2013, I, too, ran a rhythm game panel at a convention that has long since been discontinued. A good friend of mine and I both ran the panel, yet, with technical difficulties due to the inability of the staff to assist us, as well as not informing the panel ahead of us that we were running late due to the technical difficulties, the experience gave me more of a headache than I’d like to admit.

An awesome ass couple cosplay that, sadly, did not have any social media :( I still dug it!

However, this is where I can once again praise the Castle Point staff for being on top of making sure the panel ran smoothly. I can also give respect to the RhythmCore Gaming group for tackling on a subject to appeal to a crowd that may look at an arcade rhythm game in fear and confusion. I suppose I admit I attended this panel to see how others would tackle such a topic. I give the panel a “Certified Nay’s Thumb Up.”

For the rest of the convention, I had made sure to try to get my fill in of taking pictures of as many cosplayers as I found whom caught my eye, all of whom you’ll see throughout this post. One in particular who caught my eye was a Kasumi cosplayer.

Kasumi from Persona 5 Royale by ZodiacKind

See, again, for the reader who may not know this about me. I am a huge Persona fan. When I had heard news that Persona 5 Royale was a thing and I had saw the trailer earlier that same week, I was hoping that the cosplay community would work fast.

The cosplay community would not disappoint me.

This cosplayer deserves special mention just for having this at the ready so quickly, so, for that I appreciate this so much!

Another cosplayer who I felt deserved an honorable mention was a woman who was a very good Sub-Zero, but also earlier that weekend she was Kratos. I had the chance to interview her as Sub-Zero in which the video can be found below.

Sub-Zero by Amarys Berry

I mentioned in my previous post about Winter Brawl that vendors are the underappreciated glue that holds a regional/major together. There will be a post separate from this one where I interview one of the vendors from Artist Alley, but the same sentiment is stated here. There are so many vendors in the Artist Alley with their own story and own purpose for doing what they love.

I, in fact, covered an Artist Alley vendor at the Con itself! However, I feel a paragraph alone won’t be enough to give them justice, so please be sure to read the companion article here where I discuss meeting with Bunnies & Cream! You don’t want to miss it, for sure!

In any case, the same could be said for cosplayers. Cosplayers are not so much the glue, but the exoskeleton that makes the entire convention worth it. Each cosplayer has their own story in terms of what got them into it, how long they’ve been doing it, and what made them cosplay certain characters.

Unfortunately, things can tend to go awry when you least expect it. The blade on your sword prop may hang loose, an annoying thread may linger on one’s dress, a shirt may be ripping from the seams. All of these nightmares are easily avoided by those on standby who are dedicated to make any mess a fixable one!

This was quite possibly one of the few points of interest that I saw at the convention. An “all in one” emergency repair station not unlike one you would see at a convention. I couldn’t help myself. I had to learn more. Thankfully these guys were friendly enough to answer my questions I’ve had. Big thanks!

With all of the maintenance that goes into making the perfect, subjectively of course, cosplay, no matter if it’s been a decade or ten days, every cosplayer is equally important to the well-being of any convention.

Even moreso when cosplayers engage in violent carnage within the squared circle and go for a swinging neck cutter as a finishing move.

In what was perhaps the highlight of the convention, the Cosplay Pro Wrestling event was a fitting end to an action packed weekend. Although I had caught it while in the middle of the event, what surprised me the most was how there was an actual story arc.

From what I was able to gather, the main story arc revolved around the face, or hero, Big Boss, feuding with Team Rocket, who formed an allegiance with Princess Peach. The main event was scheduled for Big Boss vs Princess Peach for the title.

Throughout the set, one of the matches I did see in its fullest was Winter Soldier versus, and I quote, “Jeff Harley Quinn.”

As you could expect from the name alone, this Harley Quinn shared a lot of Jeff Hardy’s likeliness as far as his mannerisms and his moveset. What one may not have expected, was Winter Soldier, who bore resemblance and a moveset similar to Roman Reigns.

Spears, Twists of Fates, Leg Drops, and Swanton Bombs were present here as one would expect to see from fans of both wrestlers, yet they also brought about some of Quinn’s cunning which was what gave her the overall victory.

Harley Quinn by Catie V

Eventually, after a match of Link vs Liu Kang, the main event transpired. Paing homage to heel stables of the Attitude Era, trickery was used while Team Rocket was able to give enough damage to Big Boss to have Princess Peach secure the pin.

However, when all hope seemed lost... Mario and Luigi, decked out in “Bullet Bill Club” shirts, went out and chased Team Rocket as well as Princess Peach out of the ring. What followed after was a tag team match, with more story building now that the Bullet Bill Club entered the scene.

There was so much more that could be said as to what transpired in this two hour finale to an otherwise action packed weekend, including one of the guys from Attack on Titan fighting Isabelle from Animal Crossing, but it was one of those events where you had to be there to experience it.

That’s the one thing I can say about the convention. For a two-day con, there was always something to experience. If you wanted to meet one of your favorite voice actresses like I had, you could do so.

If you wanted to take in the sights and experience panels and learn new things about otaku culture and the like, you could do so as well. There’s literally no right or wrong way to attend the convention and the only thing that I can recommend is to do everything you possibly can. Unfortunately some conventions don’t have that, but, with this year’s Castle Point I can definitely say that the community as well as the staff had pulled out all the stops to make it memorable.

With that said in conclusion, for this being my first anime convention of the year, it was a fantastic way to start. Thank you once again to the Castle Point staff for giving myself and my fellow members of the Geeks podcast for giving us the opportunity. I’ll definitely try to attend next year for sure.

As always, may the Lost Summer never end! Tune to us soon for the next post!

[daleisgreat]

Dale’s Top 11 Videogame Experiences of 2016

Greetings! It has been awhile since I did one of these top 10 of the year lists. It felt right to place my list on my long dormant Giant Bomb blog where a few of my past lists reside and because I always enjoy the wealthy amount of game of the year content from the Giant Bomb crew each year. This is not a ‘Top 10 games of 2016,’ but more of a ‘Top 10 Experiences’ of 2016.

As you will see, a lot of my games listed will be from prior years. Also you will definitely notice I cheated on most of my entries and included multiple games on most entries. I tried to make each number on my list a theme for each experience, so I hope that suffices for you. If you take a liking my ramblings, please check out my movie blog where I recently ran down my favorite and worst movies from the past few years. I may post this on my movie blog as well since I have a ‘Top 10’ label there too, so if you are reading this blog there, greetings again! *Edit* I saw after I finished editing this I screwed up my numbering and actually had 11 items, not 10, but it is too late now to remove an item after working on this for so long, so onward with my top 11 experiences of 2016! 11) Finally acquiring current gen consoles Yes, that is right, three years they debuted I finally picked up both PS4 and Xbox One. My gaming backlog grew out of control because I do not have nearly enough time to game as I use to so I wanted a few years to get caught before I got the current systems. I first jumped on the Xbox One shortly after they released the S model in September and caught a good sale on the 2 TB version that knocked off $100. It took me six weeks though to get around to hooking it up and playing it however, but I have gamed a fair amount on it since.

The PS4 I got a couple months later on Black Friday weekend when retailers were having big sales on the Uncharted 4 500gb bundle, and I was able to stack a couple other discounts to get it for $190. An awesome friend gifted me a 2 TB hard drive for Christmas shortly thereafter. I have since hooked it up and got all my cross buy games from PS3 and Vita transferred over, but have yet to find any time to play a single game on it because of all the other games I am trying to catch up on. I think one of these weekends I should do nothing but binge on Uncharted 4 because it is one of my favorite franchises and it is a crime that I have yet to play the latest installment. I also want to squeeze in here two other platforms that kind of meet the criteria of this subject: the Retron 5 and the NES Classic. The games I have tested out on the Retron 5 have worked great on my HDTV, and results in my classic games running flawlessly in HD, with none of the fuzziness that would result from hooking up my classic systems with RCA/composite cables into an HDTV. Like everyone else, I hate the Retron 5 controller, but am thankful the Retron 5 is compatible and works well with my classic controllers. The NES Classic I lucked into getting one morning right when a retailer opened and I was not even looking for it, but happened to hear the store had them. I brought it over to play with the family after Thanksgiving dinner and it was a big hit that night. My brother-in-law kicked my ass in Tecmo Bowl that evening. Later on I let my six year-old niece, and eight year-old nephew play the system for a bit and took in their reactions to experiencing classics like Bubble Bobble and Super Mario Bros. 3 for the first time. I have since busted out the NES Classic a couple more times with my nephew and we made a lot of progress in Bubble Bobble since, and have also had good times playing the original Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong with him. My nephew loves Minecraft and other tablet games, and I feared him playing these older games I grew up with would not jive with him, and I was delighted he took a liking to many of them. 10) Arcade Racers! I love me some arcade racing games! Racing and pinball games are the perfect way to start off a gaming session. I like to invest about 30-45 minutes and knock off a few races from a career mode before moving on to whatever game I am working on in my backlog. Going through my gaming journal I realized I have invested significant time into five racing games in 2016, and have completed the career modes in three of them. I first finished off Blaze Rush, an excellent downloadable racing game that is essentially the old school Micro Machines games, but with crazy weapons. The career mode is filled with a ton of variety, and while I had a few hair pulling moments trying to win certain races, I very much enjoyed my time with it.

Toybox Turbo is from Codemasters, the same people who made the aforementioned Micro Machines games and this is a contemporary follow up to them from a couple years ago. You still race in crazy environments like kitchen tables and workbenches, and the racing is still as quick and fun as the 8-bit classics. The third career mode I finished in 2016 went to Dirt Showdown, also from Codemasters. This is an arcade spinoff from the sim-heavy Dirt rally racing games, and Showdown is more of demo-derby racer in similar fashion to Destruction Derby and Flatout. I love that style of racers, and they do not make enough of them! Dirt Showdown is a welcomed addition to the genre, and I had a blast doing both races and last man standing demolition derbies! It is pretty fun, but not quite perfect, but establishes a good foundation I hope Codemasters builds on with future sequels. Road Redemption is the contemporary take on Road Rash I have wanted EA to make for many years. These guys are getting it right, but it is still in Early Access on Steam so the developers are constantly building upon it. It controls how I would imagine a Road Rash game would evolve into today, and they thankfully took out having to run out back to your cycle so you can get back into the race quicker. I had some friends over for four player couch play, and we had a blast and it convinced them to get it too. If you have played old school Road Rash give it a look! Mantis Burn Racing is another Steam game I put a decent amount of time into that offers up a similar isometric perspective and has a good arcade/sim hybrid feel to it complete with drifts and turbos. It recently hit consoles so give it a look there too. Finally, I have lately been making a lot of progress into Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed. Sega really stepped up their game with their second kart-style racer a few years back. I really dig how the karts morph into planes and hovercrafts during the race and how some tracks transform during the race to keep me on my feet. The roster features a ton of Sega favorites and the racing feels great and is right up there with Mario Kart! 9) Pinball!

Anyone who knows my gaming habits knows I am a pinball nut. Ever since Pinball FX on 360 I have spend countless hours on various pinball games. As I stated in the previous entry this is another one of my go to games to start off gaming sessions with. In 2016 I played a lot of Pinball Arcade, Zen Pinball 2 and a little known indie game on Steam called Hyperspace Pinball. I love nearly the entire Zen 2 roster of tables and spent a good chunk of the year trying to replay each table on my PS3 at least a couple of times. I am all caught up now with the exception of the recently released Bethesda pack that offers up tables based on their Doom, Skyrim and Fallout properties. Alternatively, the real life translations in Pinball Arcade are also up my alley, and I always find myself coming back to tables in attempts to best previous high scores and knock off all the preset goals for each table. I recently busted out the spinoff Stern Pinball Arcade disc on Xbox One, which offers up a couple exclusive tables that are not yet in the standalone Pinball Arcade hub and have been eating that up a lot too. Hyperspace Pinball is an under-the-radar game that got buried in the plethora of indie games on Steam and it is unfortunate that it has gone ignored for this long. It features simple-yet-groovy futuristic graphics and a very fitting soundtrack. The primary mode is like a addicting version of pinball-meets-Asteroids and every several levels there are unique boss battles to vanquish. It took several runs before I got use to the physics of this pinball game, but once I did I was glad I mixed Hyperspace Pinball into my rotation. 8) Road Trip gaming!

This past October I went on a week long road trip to hit up some attractions I have always wanted to see and hang out with some friends who have moved out of town over the years. I visited my friend, Dick in the Twin Cities. We have a history of playing many hours of our favorite wrestling game, WWF No Mercy together and we could not resist busting it out again. We had some intense matches where we teamed up against the computer on expert difficulty, and then a few more grueling one-on-one encounters. Later that day, we checked out an game shop that had an arcade machine with a ton of games built in and one of them was for a Japan-exclusive sequel to Saturday Night Slam Masters I had no idea existed until that point. Slam Masters was Capcom’s take on wrestling meets Street Fighter II, but the sequel, Ring of Destruction, is a straight up fighting game that plays as good as any Capcom fighter back in the day. After that, we traversed to a recently opened arcade in the Cities called Up/Down, which is an arcade bar loaded with arcade and pinball games and has a full service bar. All the hits from 80s and 90s I grew up with were there such as classic brawlers like TMNT, X-Men and Simpsons to the hits Midway dominated the 90s with like NBA Jam, Mortal Kombat I-4 and NFL Blitz. There was even old school Nintendo games like Excitebike, Donkey Kong and a version of Fix-It Felix straight out of Wreck-It Ralph I had no idea was a thing until I saw it with my own eyes. There was also around a dozen pinball tables there, with a good mix of classics like Funhouse, Terminator 2 and Adams Family to more recent Stern releases like Ghostbusters and Metallica. I guess this is a slowly expanding chain, so if you happen to run across one, make sure to check it out as you will be guaranteed hours of fun.

The next destination on my road trip was to visit my brother in a smaller town a couple hours outside of the Twin Cities. I had a great time hanging out with him, and like my friend in the Cities, we also have a history of beating the tar out of each other in WWF No Mercy. After telling my brother about experiencing the awesomeness of taking on expert level AI opponents in tag mode and proceeding to have another close match with the AI where we emerged victorious, we proceeded to take on each other in about 15 one-on-one matches. I consider myself a pretty darn good No Mercy player and can hold my own with any other seasoned player, but for whatever reason my brother has always had my number and is the only one I know that can outplay me (that link is a clip of us squaring off in a tournament final from several years ago for proof!). Of the roughly 15 matches we played, I only had one victory out of them all, and I made sure to savor every moment of it! 7) Awesome Local Coop! This is where I will give a shoutout to my local friends in town, Ryan, Derek and Brooke! Last few years we have had recurring couch multiplayer game nights every several weeks! I always look forward to them, and we are constantly rotating in old favorites like Mario Kart: Double Dash, Mario Party and TimeSplitters: Future Perfect with newer games for a constant fresh variety of multiplayer goodness. I will give props to some of my favorite moments I had with them this year. One awesome early multiplayer night in 2016 involved a NES theme night, and me busting out my four player adaptor which led to many hours of Gauntlet II and Super Off-Road fun.

For a couple weeks we were into slaughtering zombies and we played through a couple levels of Left 4 Dead 2. I forgot how awesome and frustrating that game is as I experienced both soaring highs when our teamwork was flawless and devastating lows when we ran into trouble a couple of times. Either way, it was still a blast re-experiencing Left 4 Dead 2 for the first time in years. That led us to a couple days of long sessions of Dying Light. I loved the first Dead Island and this game is from the same developers and plays just like it, but mixes in an awesome parkour system. That resulted in all kinds of crazy running dropkicks and being on the lookout for next great weapon that would turn up in our endless piles of loot. Just a few weeks ago we had another great session where we played Drawful and Fibbage out of the Jackbox Party Pack. Both are awesome social party/trivia games from the same people who made the also-excellent You Don’t Know Jack. These games make great use of cell phones as controllers so anyone could play, and we had way too much fun guessing at what the heck we were drawing in Drawful. It brought back classic memories of staying up all night in another similar multiplayer game on the DS, LOL!

We followed that game up with a random game I got for Xbox One since I heard so much good buzz about it online called Overcooked. This simple four player Root Beer Tapper-meets-cooking game featured some of the most fun I have ever had in a multiplayer game. When your teamwork is firing on all cylinders it is a blast, when it is not it led to us playfully shouting at each other until one point a few of us had to drop the controllers because we were uncontrollably laughing so hard. It was a moment I will never forget. There was one other multiplayer night between us that usurped these moments, but I will save it for later. 6) Extra Life 2016 Extra Life is the annual 24 hour gaming event where we game for a day straight in order to raise funds for our local children’s hospital! These last two years I traveled down to my friends, Chris and Lyzz’s house to game for 24 hours straight. I always attempt to beat WWF No Mercy’s 100-man Survival mode, and just like all previous attempts, I failed about halfway through. There were two main takeaways from Extra Life 2016. One of them was binging through Gears of War 4’s campaign from start to finish during the 24 hours. I love me some Gears, and Extra Life happened not to long after I picked up my Xbox One, so Gears 4 ended up being one of the first games I played on it. I had to take a break halfway through Gears 4 because I signed up to run a local 10k in the area, which was actually a nice breather to get out of the house and get some exercise and fresh air! I came back revitalized and had a great time playing nonstop until I finished. Chris and Lyzz were playing their own Gears 4 campaign in split-screen coop and we both did our best to look away from each other to avoid spoilers. Turns out you cannot have a split screen system team up online with another player on their own, but we found a way to get through it on our own without spoilers! Gears 4 turned out awesome as expected, and was a return to form after the experimental game in the series that was Gears Judgment.

The other game I played later on in Extra Life I want to make sure to recognize is Mega Man 2 off the Xbox One Mega Man Legacy Collection. I never gave a Mega Man game a serious chance before. I recall trying to play the first one a couple times long ago and getting frustrated many times and not beating a single stage. In the Legacy Collection however, it has save states which I made sure to exploit to the fullest. I was saving every screen or two in Mega Man 2. I decided to start on that one since I usually hear that is the best, and it had a firm, but fair challenge level to it. I died many times, but wanted to try out different techniques in order to progress and beat each boss. I did not finish the game, but did complete three stages, which will go down as the first three levels I ever finished in a Mega Man game! One day I will return to at least finish Mega Man 2, mark my words! 5) Firewatch After finishing Dear Esther and Gone Home a couple years ago, I have become a huge fan of the genre that has become known as the walking simulator! Firewatch hit out of nowhere early in 2016 and became a much talked about indie game throughout the year. I finally played it towards the end of the summer, and relished every hour of the six or seven hours it took me to finish. The graphics are superb and perfectly capture the solitude and beauty of being a fire ranger in the vast wilderness. I could get lost out there forever, and spent many moments just pausing in the game and taking in the sublime surroundings. The score is not always present, but knows when to kick in to amplify the moments that need it.

I could not help but get immersed in the narrative between the two fire rangers, and the mystery that the two found themselves in as the summer unraveled. Reading other game of the year reactions in recent weeks I found myself in the minority that liked the twist towards the end and was not thrown for a loop by it. I really loved the final days in the game, and it all culminated in an impactful moment for me when I could tell my summer with Firewatch was coming to an end. I got lucky and managed to get in on the Limited Run release of the physical copy of the game on PS4, and look forward to replaying it sooner than later with the newly added developer commentary. 4) Objection, dedicated handheld gaming is here to stay!

I try to dedicate a couple hours a week to traditional handheld gaming. I am not talking smartphone games, but good old fashioned DS/Vita/3DS gaming! I grew up playing a ton of my various versions of the GameBoy and still try to cram in a little bit of the current stuff too. I am a huge Ace Attorney fan and spent a good chunk of my 2016 handheld gaming getting caught up in the series. I finished off Ace Attorney Investigation: Miles Edgeworth early on in the year, and spent a good chunk of 2016 gradually chipping away at the first 3DS entry in the series, Dual Destinies. The last couple weeks I finally put my first few hours in the most recent release in the series, Spirits of Justice. If you have played one Ace Attorney game before you know what to expect, and that is a ton of crazy over-the-top characters you meet investigating crime scenes and cross examine on the witness stand as you try and clear innocent names from murder cases. There is a ton of reading involved in these games which is why they take forever to get through at my rate, but they are worth it in the long run to me since I find myself craving what kind of adventures the Wright Anything Agency are getting themselves into next.

There was one other non-Ace Attorney game I snuck into for a few hours at a time in-between my travels in and out of the court room. That game was the PSone version of Final Fantasy VII on the Vita. I have started FFVII a couple times before, but never made serious progress in it, and I guess I did not make a ton of progress in it this year either, but barely set a new record for time and progress! I originally was trying to keep up with Game Informer when FFVII was a part of their Game Club feature, but quickly fell behind. I came back around to FFVII in December for a few more hours, and am glad to say that I finally got out of Midgar and into the overworld for the first time in FFVII! I went on to get through the portion of the game in the village of Kalm, and then failed a few times at trying to kill off that big serpent by the Chocobo farm outside of Kalm. I think I need to grind by there for a bit in order to proceed. While I know I am nowhere close to finishing the game, I plan to periodically pick it up and eventually beat it in 10-15 years! 3) Nintendo Sixty-Fourrrrrrr!!!! If you have somehow stuck with me through this dreadfully long top 10 blog, you might recall that I stated I had one other awesome local coop gaming night I wanted to elucidate on later. That brings us here to where my brother was visiting from out of town and he joined me, Derek and Ryan for an N64 themed night of gaming. I knew Derek and Ryan had a bunch of N64 games, and I brought a bunch of my favorites to play also. I was a little taken aback when Derek asked me to bring the N64 wrestling game I loved so much because I did not associate Derek and Ryan to be much of wrestling game fans before. Turned out that WWE 2K16 was a recent Xbox Live Games for Gold free game of the month and both of them spent a bit of time suplexing and powerbombing the heck out of each other in recent weeks and wanted to give the N64 game I raved about the most a whirl as a result. Derek and Ryan picked up the controls for WWF No Mercy in no time and we spent at least a good hour tearing each other up in intense tag team and Royal Rumble matches. I am still befuddled that Derek and Ryan had a legit good time playing wrestling games that night, and it will probably be the only night that will ever happen with them, but I will forever remember it! The night did not end there because we went on to spend hours in other four-player hits like NBA Hangtime and New Tetris. I was surprised New Tetris went over as well as it did, but the timeless puzzle game was the right breather we all needed after some heated rounds of basketball and wrestling. It would not be an N64 night if we did not bust out the Giant Bomb favorite, Mario Party 2, and we proceed to complete a 20 turn game where everybody won!

The highlight of the night however was breaking out the original console FPS multiplayer hit, Goldeneye 007. I have read many times online how this game does not hold up in modern times, but I beg to differ! Play it on a big TV and play for at least 10 minutes, and trust me, you will be conditioned to like it was 1997 all over again! That is what happened to us that night. Sure the graphics are obviously last-century, and there is a bit of slowdown in four-player split screen when the explosions start rolling, but if you are on a big screen TV after about 10 minutes, you get use to it because the core gameplay is still that damn good. We played all kinds of variants including old favorites such as Grenade Launchers in the Temple, Rocket Launchers in the Complex, Proximity Mines in the Archives and a random map incarnation of Slappers Only with Golden Gun rules so that each slap meant instant sweet death! These five games for about five-to-six hours that magical night combined for nonstop greatness and hands down my favorite multiplayer game night 2016! 2) MGS 2/3/Peace Walker Since the fall of 2015 when Metal Gear Solid V released. I swore to myself I will get around to playing through all the Metal Gear Solid games in order. Up until that point I only finished MGS4 and gave up on MGS2 after just a couple hours. I somehow have found myself still determined to meet this goal as I plugged away and finished The Twin Snakes GameCube remake of the original MGS by the end of 2015. Throughout 2016 I managed to finish MGS2 and MGS3 and got through around the first 15 story missions of Peace Walker off the HD Collection on PS3. I even dabbled a bit with the first hour of Portable Ops through backwards compatibility on the Vita, but decided to stick to playing on consoles and moved on to Peace Walker instead. So what do I make of the series thusfar? I have absolutely enjoyed the core three games immensely so far. I am probably playing these games completely wrong, but I played through all three MGS games on very easy difficulty. I have no shame, but for what it is worth I try to play stealthy, and if I blow my cover and fail to retreat that is when I bust out the AK-47 and go guns blazing. That works OK most of the time for me in very easy. In Peace Walker there is no difficulty setting so that involves a bit more trial and error, but thankfully that game’s missions are shorter since it was originally designed for the PSP so failure does not mean a ton of backtracking there.

I really enjoyed my time with the first MGS, and the updated graphics on the GCN made it much more pleasant on the eyes. By the time I finished it, even all these years after its release I could tell I finished something special. Playing as Raiden did not bother me in the sequel….unless it came to saving which sometimes resulted in a few raised eyebrows. It still had the same unique, great gameplay as the original, and managed to tell another memorable chapter in the MGS universe. That said, I still rank it at the bottom of the core trilogy I liked the least, but not by as much one may think. I am probably going to give the slight edge to MGS3 to being my favorite so far. The gameplay seemed to have hit its stride there by finally giving the ability to move and shoot simultaneously, and I actually did not mind the healing/wound treatment system in MGS3 either. The Cold War-era story is probably what I will give the nudge to me liking MGS3 the most. Each MGS game got to gradually become more bonkers in nature, and wrapping the Cold War narrative around it seemed like a perfect fit. I also loved the boss battles the most in MGS3, especially the final battle with ‘The Boss’ and the beauty with how it is presented in MGS3 will easily rank as one of my favorite moments in videogames. 1) Oxenfree When it came down to it, I only finished three games in 2016 that were released that calendar year, and Oxenfree was one of them. It is a walking simulator like Firewatch, and also like that game the small development team at Night School Studios has members that worked on the critically acclaimed first season of The Walking Dead from Telltale Games. Unlike Firewatch though, Oxenfree has far simpler 2D graphics that are watercolor-esque in nature. Do not let these simple looks deceive you, because the narrative that surrounds these four coming-of-age teens out for a night of fun on an island quickly transforms into a night of sci-fi spookiness that I will never forget and left me wanting a sequel ASAP. I am heads over heels for the script and dialogue that unloads throughout Oxenfree. One moment the cast is trying to come together to figure out the grand mystery of this island, then the next they are taking quick asides to find out more about their personal lives that encapsulates the everyday life of teenage drama. Night School Studios make tremendous use of certain camera tricks and jump cuts that do not necessarily equal out to jump scares, but sure as hell something close that had my skin crawling with goosebumps as the adventure played out.

There are several pivotal decisions that will affect gameplay, so naturally I had to play the game a second time telling myself no matter what I am going to play the game differently. A lot of the dialogue choices in the game have positive, neutral and snarky response options so I spent a good chunk of my second playthrough being a snarky jerk and it was fascinating seeing the responses I would get in return. When it came down to bite the bullet in the end and make one of the big game-changing decisions, I had to pause the game and step away from it for a few minutes to think it over. Even after doing that, I could not go back on my natural instincts and I went with my original decision in one of the most frantic moments I had in playing videogames. Shortly after I finished Oxenfree a second time I was caught off guard by the developers patching in a remixed mode for people who have finished the game that offers up a slightly new gameplay experience. These changes were minor, but they did add a few new wrinkles throughout gameplay and the dialogue would unexpectedly change at random intervals to keep me constantly alert to see what tricks Oxenfree had up its sleeve next. I think it goes without saying if a game can manage to convince me to finish it three times within a year, especially at a time when I have just a fraction of the time to game than what I use to, then Oxenfree easily walks away from 2016 as my favorite videogame experience of the year! Limited Run has a physical release for PS4 set for later this month, and you can bet your booty that I will be attempting to pick up a copy and experience this game a fourth time!

[scoutshonor56]

Demagogues & Despots

Hmm, before I go throwing around inflammatory and seditious words, maybe I ought to check in with the ol’ Merriam-Webster - let’s see… demagogue: a leader who makes use of popular  prejudices  and false  claims  and promises in order to gain power.  Despot:  one exercising power tyrannically:  a person exercising absolute power in a brutal or oppressive way. OK, I’m good – just wanted to check before moving forward.  

 Something tells me that if Mussolini were in power today, he’d be invited to Mar-a-Lago to join Assclown Orangehair in a friendly competition of club swinging and ball whacking - and they would get along just fine. What the hell, call Putin and make it a threesome!  But I can see “Il Duce” now, in a silly hat, knickers, and a chest full of bogus medals…

 “Yes, Mr. Presidente, someday I will show you the finer points of Bocce Ball, and then I will kick your ass!”

 “Well Benny – can I call you Benny?  You may have noticed I swing a very large club. Pretty much everyone agrees that I have the largest club of any other president, like, ever!  Biggest club in history… a big, beautiful club.”

 The above image of little Donny Douchebag was borrowed from his first State of the Union Address, which was held last Tues, the 30th. Before I get critical, you would be fair in asking, “Well, did you watch it?”  Uhh, that would be a big “no” - I’d rather eat cat turds out of a week-old litter box.  I figured I would catch the hi-lights on the late-night comedy shows later, thank you.  OK, I did give into a sick, self-flagellating urge to catch just a quick teaser, and I wasn’t disappointed.  I flipped the channel just in time to catch this doddering old windbag of stale flatulence announce that “The war on clean coal is over!”  And as the applause from his GOP minions washed over the congressional crowd, he actually lifted both his hands, palms up, like a priest gesturing for the congregation to rise from their pews, in a clear message of “behold my greatness!” His uber-ego that night was like a junky let loose in a pharmacy store – he couldn’t get enough.  Each round of sycophantic applause was another shot in the arm.  He even applauded himself and his ridiculous proclamations (clean coal?), again, and again, and again.  If Donny were to step away from the podium, I bet his pants would have betrayed a woody the size of, of… well, a gherkin?

 Now I’ve seen my share of SOTU addresses over the years, and certainly they are all an exercise in sucking up to the boss as he proudly announces his score card for the previous year, and political “wish list” for the upcoming – at least half of which will never see the light of day, or even make it off the drawing board.  But I can’t recall the last time I saw a sitting president applaud himself.  Or a president wear the imperial facial expression displayed above, as if he were Julius Caesar.  I found myself thinking, where’s a group of knife wielding senators when you need one?  

At least Mussolini is looking straight ahead, toward his destiny – OK, which was to be shot in public (along with his mistress) by a surly mob of partisans, dragged through town, and finally hung upside down by meat hooks in the public square, but he didn’t know that yet.  In this picture he is clearly a man of power and absolute authority.  

 Compare it to the shifty eyes of a cheap imposter, weaned on the adulation of a TV “reality” show that culminated each week with him shouting “You’re fired!”  Mussolini would eat Donny for lunch and crap him out before dinner - and the turd would be runny and weak.

 As we all know by now, a handful of brave (and disgusted) Democrats had simply had enough and boycotted the fiasco, and those who attended made no secret of their distaste for this mandatory, all hands Ra-Ra fest with the new, totally unqualified boss.  He was brought in from the outside, knows absolutely nothing - and cares even less - about how things work, and possesses the slimmest of knowledge about what the company even does.  So of course, Donny took it personally, and once again couldn’t wait to air his displeasure.  Giving a speech in Ohio last Monday, which was supposed to be about touting his glorious tax cuts, it took no time at all for the boss to veer off topic.  You see, in the end, it’s always about Donny and his fragile, oversized ego:

 “You’re up there, you’ve got half the room going totally crazy, wild—they loved everything, they want to do something great for our country. And you have the other side, even on positive news—really positive news, like that—they were like death and un-American. Un-American. Somebody said ‘treasonous.’ I mean, yeah, I guess, why not?  Can we call that treason? Why not.  I mean, they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much. But you look at that and it’s really very, very sad.”

 Whoa, whoa… Let’s step back a minute; treason is such a serious matter it is the only crime specifically described in the Constitution itself: “Treason against the United States,” says Article III, “shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.”  Punishable by imprisonment or death.  

 Yikes! First we were chanting “Lock Her Up!”, and now Donny thinks his “enemies” (anyone who disagrees with, or publicly disparages him) need to be dragged in front of a firing squad.  Of course the reaction in the media to his latest incendiary remarks was swift and condemning, so in a pathetic attempt to defuse the ugly situation, White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee, assured us that her boss's remarks were simply "tongue in cheek"… You know, a joke!   HA-HA - Ha   -   ha      -     ha…………

 She would have been a lot better off if she had just told the truth: “My boss is so allergic to books and reading in general that, please excuse him, but he couldn’t pass a high school level test on the Constitution if he were allowed to take it with a laptop and a textbook on Constitutional Law.

 But back to Donny’s Address to the nation; I couldn’t help but wonder what his reaction would have been if, oh, say one of the Democrat representatives had stood up in front of millions of viewers, in the House of Congress, and yelled “You lie!” - as GOP House member, Joe Wilson (S. Carolina), did in 2009 as President Obama was delivering a nationally televised joint session of Congress speech on health care…  

 Obama didn’t miss a beat during the speech; ever the picture of calm reserve and rational thought, he simply accepted a phone call and apology the next day from Wilson and we never heard another word about it.  Never once did Obama bring it up in public.  He was the President of the United States, with much, and many, bigger issues to deal with.  

  Trump is the walking definition of petty.  My guess is his response would have been to stop everything – his train of thought, “The Little Engine That Couldn’t”, now totally off-kilter - and have the house goons give the dissenter the bum’s rush treatment.  Remember?  Like at his primary rallies.  Then the fun would start as we all bet shots on how many times little Donny would bring up the outburst during the rest of his speech!  Boy, would you be drunk!

 OK, so he’s a little vain, has thin skin – that doesn’t make him an authoritarian despot!  In the interest of saving time, and from having to repeat myself, I encourage you to refer to my blog of a year ago - it’s a funny one!

 And leads to item #3 on my list of qualifications – his infatuation with military parades.  The other day, according to The Washington Post, it was revealed that according to White House sources, little Donny won’t be happy until he gets his military parade!  Apparently, on this past January 18, a meeting between Trump and our military’s highest-ranking officials was held in the Pentagon’s “tank” - a room reserved for top-secret discussions – during which the king’s presidential directive for a parade was discussed… wow.  Just when you’d thought you’ve heard it all.  Tanks, missiles, planes, any piece of impressive military hardware you can get on wheels, Trump wants it rolling down the streets of Washington.  At the estimated cost of millions.  Oh, and he expressed his wish to be “Grand Marshall”!  Can’t he just go to Mardi Gras like everyone else?  It starts this weekend, you know…

“WAAH!  I want the BIGGEST Lego set!!  The one that has the whole Star Wars collection, and goes boom, and shoots lasers, and blows things up!!”

“Now Donny, daddy told you that was awfully expensive...”

“WAAH!  I wanit, I wanit, I WANIT!!”  

  For a sane rebuttal to this spoiled man/child, please refer to the comments of retired Army Major General Paul D. Eaton – my god, is there no end to this madness? 

Hey, remember all those times Donny used to criticize Obama’s work ethic for playing golf while America crumbled under his closet-Muslim-from-Kenya rule?  

 “I’m going to be working for you,” he said in August 2016 at a campaign event. “I’m not going to have time to go play golf.”  Hmmm… let’s take a look at Assclown Cheetohair’s attendance grade for last year – ouch! That would be a D-:

 By the end of February, Trump had spent all or part of 12 days of his presidency at Trump Organization properties, including Mar-a-Lago and his D.C. hotel.  By the end of March, he was up to 19 days - and had played golf on 11 of them. According to estimates by The Washington Post, after 346 days in office, Trump spent 116 of them at a Trump property, as in 33.5% of those days.  Days on which he likely played golf – 73 (21% of those days).  

 Holy shit – with that kind of workday schedule, I want to be president!  Where do I apply?  And let’s face it, if he ain’t out on the links, he’s watching hours of Fox replays, tweeting about his personal grievances, or sitting in a chair having his hair carefully constructed - which I’m thinking requires at least three cans of heavy-duty spray, various glues, and a pint of spackling compound.  Hell, that’s at least a couple of hours right there.  How bald is Donny?  Check it out, our fearless leader boarding Air Force 1.  I wouldn’t buy a fucking vacuum cleaner from this guy.

OK my fellow Americans, it’s been a year - isn’t it time to admit, “Hey, we fucked up.”  Isn’t it time for the general populous to come to the obvious/inevitable conclusion? That the leader of the free world (for now) is a man totally out of his depth.  A man who has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about; a man who says things that are 180 degrees from the things he has said before; a man who has no clear line of reasoning; a man without principle, interested only in how good he can make himself look and how much money he can make.

 Trump is an old school racist, and every time he denies it – categorizing himself as “the least racist person you have ever met” – he doesn’t even realize it cements the truth even further.  

 Likewise, for a guy who thinks he’s innocent of colluding with the Russians, he sure sounds guilty.  He sadly grasps at the weakest of straws daily to “prove” his innocence. How many times have we heard “absolutely no collusion” from his lips in the last year?  Desperately trying to convince the public, like an inmate clanking on the bars of his cell while yelling “I’M INNOCENT!” until he’s silenced by a watchman’s billy club.  He wants the Mueller investigation stonewalled and over so bad it eats at him relentlessly.  

Can there be any more damning proof of his delusional grasp of reality than contrary to the stern advice of his own White House lawyers, he claims he wants to be interviewed by Mueller under oath?  I’ll believe that when I see it.  Like so much of what spills out of his mouth, it was said simply because it seemed convenient at the time.  He forgot he said it five minutes later.

 You’ve got to ask yourself, why are his lawyers so terrified about this prospect?  Maybe it’s because they know what everyone else knows - Donny can’t get through a greeting card without contradicting (perjuring) himself.

 Well, at least we got ourselves an “outsider”!  A businessman with a golden touch!  He wrote a book, you know, called “The Art of the Deal”! He’s a real rainmaker!

 This is the one that always cracks me up – uh, do these rubes and suckers realize he’s got a history of being involved in 3,500 lawsuits and has declared bankruptcy six times?  Even as president he’s proved himself woefully inept at “making deals”, as demonstrated by last year’s increase in our trade deficit, which reached it’s highest level since the recession of 2008.

 So far, his yearlong strategy of trying to govern to the exclusion of Democrats and playing to a narrow base has proved fatally flawed. He has shown himself as an unrepentant, unremitting, pathological liar.  His word is meaningless, and his policy principles are murky.  He doesn’t care for the details or the truth.  He only wants to be able to claim everything as the biggest, best, greatest … ever.  Bottom line?  He knows nothing about “deal-making”, or diplomacy, neither in the business world, or the political arena.  He cares only about maintaining a core of support, inflaming racist and nativist passions and about the appearance of winning.  As I previously mentioned, in the end, it’s all about Donny.  He is the absolute antithesis to the definition of a public servant.  The public good will always be an afterthought, if at all.

 In closing, for all those Trump fans out there – if you voted for this billionaire side-show carnival barker, well, you may not know it, but you my friend have a deformed flat spot on your brain, an abnormality – that’s the only explanation I can think of.  I don’t care if you’re an MIT astrophysicist professor, or a world championship level chess player; if they were to do an autopsy on you after your untimely (aren’t they all?) demise, when they removed your skull cap and pulled that mass of coiled, gray tissue and neurons out of your cranial cavity for the weigh-in, one of the medical techs would look and go “Hmm – seems to be a sizable flat spot on the left hemisphere (the logical, analytical, and objective side, vs. the right side, which is said to be more intuitive, thoughtful, and subjective)...

 Oops!  Didn’t mean to bum you out… no, don’t bother feeling your head - it only shows up on X-rays and MRIs - and in the voting booth.

[recordofmyreverie]

Tuvan Throat-Singing and Finding My Own Voice Too (February 2017)

Back in January, I noticed on Facebook that there was an event being held at The Evening Muse in Charlotte that was going to be showcasing the incredible talents of a throat-singing band called Alash. I was already drawn to the event because I used to watch videos of this kind of singing on Youtube with RN and his friend group, and we all were mesmerized at how it was even humanly possible for the voice to be capable of that. I was even more drawn to the event because of the date that it fell on: February 22nd. 

As stated in a previous post, the number 22 kept reappearing in my life, and I attributed a new importance to it. Multiples of 11 seemed to be really lucky for me, but 22 especially was showing up everywhere I looked. Every time I would see this number now, I knew that it was something I needed. I knew something important would happen every 22nd of the month. Even if it was all a placebo, and in my own control, I still wanted the number 22 to mean something. 

The holders of a master number 22 have the highest chance to turn their dreams into reality, they are efficient and can handle large projects.

Considered to be the most influential number of all, it can give deep spiritual understanding, facilitating the appliance of knowledge in a practical way, which will eventually lead to success. The master number 22 is considered to serve the word in a practical way.

If you’re interested in learning more about this number, check out this link 

During this time of year, I was getting so fed up with working at Toast. I was being pushed too hard to simply stay afloat. I didn’t like that my boss had hired people that made my job harder than it should be or that I knew more than my boss about the restaurant since I’d been there much longer. I was tired of having to drive through an hour of traffic just to get there and have to work my ass off to share the money that I earned with certain people who didn’t put in as much work as I did, when I could be working at the one that was 10 minutes away from my house. I was tired of coming home and feeling depressed because I wouldn’t speak up about this. I was just letting the job drain me. 

I enjoyed most of the people I worked with, and I loved the customers, so I let that motivate me to stay. It wasn’t enough, though. For two weekends in a row, I got hurt because my boss put too much pressure on me and would seat my section up to 5 tables at a time. I told him to slow down because I was only one person and that there needed to be an actual rotation rather than complete chaos when it came to seating, and he didn’t listen. He was just focused on getting everyone seated and then it didn’t matter where he sat them or when. 

He didn’t understand that no matter how good of a worker I was, I was still human, and I wasn’t invincible like he thought I should be. One weekend, I had to spend 20 minutes in the freezer to cool myself down because I was so hot and mad. My boss gave me the busiest section, and I’d been paired with my least favorite coworker who was always absent from our section and usually talking about himself to other tables. 

That day, I had been late to work. It was the third time that week. Each time I was late, it was only about 15 minutes, and it was because he���d given me no motivation to want to show up to work because I knew I’d be working with the arrogant one who did no work. He’d also only schedule me closing shifts which started at 8 AM and were at the peak of morning traffic when I lived 45 minutes away. So yeah, it was a little hard to get to work on time. 

My coworker didn’t know his job. He lied about everything. He was always late despite being 5 minutes walking distance from work and even buying a moped later. But he was best friends and a total kiss-ass to my boss. Those were the ingredients to his success. I wanted to tear him to pieces. 

I was so hot one weekend from having to run all over the restaurant and serve an entire section of about 20 tables by myself, that I decided it was my turn to disappear. I broke down. I was so freaking mad. Why were they doing this to me? Why was I letting them? 

On top of all the chaos, my boss took me to the back to say that I was now being suspended for being late for the third time in a row. That’s when I broke down. I was being punished even despite all the work I had put into being there. Even despite making it so freaking easy for people that didn’t know their own jobs like him and my coworker that he hired. I felt disrespected, and felt my treatment was unfair since he wasn’t going to do the same to my coworker who repeatedly showed up late every single day and would sometimes show up 2 HOURS late. He’d let him slide every time like the greasy worm he was. 

I told my boss in the office that I didn’t care that I was being suspended. It wasn’t a punishment to me because maybe I should just quit anyways because I was miserable working there. I had something so good for a while after MK left. I’d come such a long way and worked my way to the top. I trained almost the entire restaurant by myself. I thought about quitting right there in that moment, but my boss started crying himself. 

He said that he would hate it if I left because I was such a good worker, and that everyone looked up to me. He said that if I left, they would struggle to even be the same restaurant anymore because so many regulars came there just to see me. He knew that his job would be on the line if I quit. He said he wouldn’t want me to quit without another job lined up, but if I found something else, then more power to me, but if I just left that day there wouldn’t have been any respect in my decision. 

One weekends after that, I’d fell and bruised my knee during a shift because he was pushing me to go too fast and I was trying to move too fast. The next weekend, I spilled boiling hot water on my foot and got a second-degree burn from it. It was also because he was pushing me too fast. 

When it happened, I remember pushing the doors into the kitchen with a bang. I hobbled to the office where the first-aid kit was, and I quickly tried to open the burn-gel. My boss still wouldn’t take blame, and tried to blame one of the other servers saying that his clumsiness knocked over the mug and caused my injury. There was nobody to blame except myself and my boss for giving me the stress.

My boss was more worried about if I’d be able to return to work that day than he was about worker’s compensation for injury. He knew that they’d struggle if they had one less person, and especially one less person who knew her job and did her job fast and accurate. 

My foot was so hot and red. It was swollen. It tingled with pain anytime I even touched it. It was bandaged where the hot liquid poured directly, so I couldn’t see the blisters yet, but I knew that they’d be there. My boss told me I could sit there and wait until I could walk again to get back to work, but I knew that if I agreed to get up again, he wouldn’t hold off at all. He’d still over-seat me. I told him to clock me out, and I limped to my car to drive home. He was so disappointed. 

The very next day, I was out to get an oil change and get my brakes repaired from all the driving. I was walking around downtown Fort Mill to pass the time, and looking for a new job. 

I needed a change of environment that wasn’t so negative. There were people I could absolutely not stand over there, and I needed to get out of that. I’d given Toast over two years of my life, learned all I could from it, did the best I could be, helped other people become the best they could be, and met a lot of wonderful people. It was time to move on. 

The first job that I applied to was an Irish Pub. At the time I applied, there was a girl from another Toast, the one that was close to my house. She was applying at the pub too for a second job. She was shocked that I wanted to leave Toast because it was such good money and a great environment, for her anyway. She was trying to convince me to stay with the company and said I would regret leaving, but I already had my mind made up. I’d been wanting to quit for months. This was not just some spur of the moment decision. I was putting it off for long enough.

That day, I shook hands with the manager and accepted a job. I couldn’t believe that it was so easy for me to find another job, and I wondered why I didn’t do it sooner. 

When I went to back to work the next shift I was scheduled, the first thing my boss said to me was “We got our asses kicked without you on Sunday. I see you’re walking fine though. You definitely could have worked. I saw you walking yesterday.”

Asshole.

I saved the bad news for the end of the day, and smiled, “Yep, my foot is fine today. It’s because I got some rest and took care of the injury when I got home instead of over-working myself and making it worse that day.”

I went back to work with a smile and a giddy attitude the rest of the day. I was so excited to tell him that I was quitting, but I knew that if I was going to say it in the beginning, he’d definitely treat me worse.

A girl that I worked with, Nicole, had told him that she was going to be transferring to the new Rock Hill location along with two other employees that worked there. He thought he was going to just be losing two, and didn’t expect her to leave, but he pushed her to wanting to leave because she also thought that he was ridiculous as a manager. We all thought that except the one that he’d hired himself. Ever since she told him that, he’d been so passive-aggressive and rude to her. He even would go as far as to tell her to hurry up and clock out at the end of the day because he didn’t like even seeing her anymore. He took things that were just business so personally.

After a day’s work and mopping the floor, I put away the mop, and I said “I’m giving you my two-week’s notice. I found another job.”

All he could say was “Congratulations.”

The following night, I met up with an old/new friend, RN. I invited him to come out and see the Tuvan throat singing band called Alash with me, since I knew he wouldn’t want to miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime spectacle. We’d reconnected a couple weeks earlier at Starbucks and had a well-needed chat about each other’s well-being and progress.

I showed him all the photos that he’d missed since we broke up and told him about all the crazy things that had happened in the span that we’d been absent from each other. He told me that he’d also moved back into his parents’ house, quit his job, and got a new car. He was interviewing for jobs and trying to get out of his parents’ house again, but wanted to live by himself. 

He said that recent events and losing so much really opened his eyes to how much he needed to live healthier and make a positive change in his life. He wasn’t partying anymore, and only spent time out with his friends one on one these days, and reading at home alone most nights. He admitted he was still stressed out, but that he felt more peaceful than he had been feeling in a while.

It was nice to catch up with him and to see that he was doing well and on a path of progress. I was proud of him. We agreed that we missed each other’s friendship, and that maybe that’s all we should have been in the beginning. Maybe we were just too enthusiastic and excited about each other at the time, and that’s why it turned into something more, but we weren’t meant for each other romantically. We were more just meant as support for each other during the rough times of our lives. 

At the show, I told him that I’d quit my job at Toast finally after months of complaining. He was happy for me. We watched the throat-singing together and were both so amazed that we each brought home a CD. Well, he bought one, and then burnt a copy for me to listen to. I traded him a book that I thought he might want to read. It was the one that a stranger gifted to me on the bus to DC. The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley.

I was glad to have experienced such a cool show with someone who I knew would truly appreciate it. And I was glad that we could turn something that didn’t work out romantically into a new friendship. We were the same people, but different.

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The Definitive History Of That Time Donald Trump Took A Stone Cold Stunner

Stone Cold Steve Austin was waiting calmly in the bowels of Detroit’s Ford Field when a frantic Vince McMahon turned the corner.

WrestleMania 23’s signature event was just minutes away. Austin and McMahon would soon bound into the stadium, where they’d be greeted by fireworks, their respective theme songs and 80,000 people pumped for “The Battle of the Billionaires,” a match between two wrestlers fighting on behalf of McMahon and real estate mogul Donald Trump.

McMahon, the founder and most prominent face of World Wrestling Entertainment, had spent months before the April 1, 2007, event putting the storyline in place. Trump, then known primarily as the bombastic host of “The Apprentice,” had appeared on a handful of WWE broadcasts to sell the idea that his two-decade friendship with McMahon had collapsed into a bitter “feud.” They had spent hours rehearsing a match with many moving parts: two professional wrestlers in the ring, two camera-thirsty characters outside it, and in the middle, former champ Stone Cold serving as the referee.

The selling point of The Battle of the Billionaires was the wager that Trump and McMahon had placed on its outcome a month earlier during “Monday Night Raw,” WWE’s signature prime time show. Both Trump and McMahon took great pride in their precious coifs, and so the winner of the match, they decided, would shave the loser’s head bald right there in the middle of the ring.

But now, at the last possible moment, McMahon wanted to add another wrinkle.

“Hey, Steve,” McMahon said, just out of Trump’s earshot. “I’m gonna see if I can get Donald to take the Stone Cold stunner.” 

Austin’s signature move, a headlock takedown fueled by Stone Cold’s habit of chugging cheap American beer in the ring, was already part of the plan for the match. But Trump wasn’t the intended target.

Austin and McMahon approached Trump and pitched the idea.

“I briefly explained how the stunner works,” Austin said. “I’m gonna kick him in the stomach ― not very hard ― then I’m gonna put his head on my shoulder, and we’re gonna drop down. That’s the move. No rehearsal, [decided] right in the dressing room, 15 minutes before we’re gonna go out in front of 80,000 people.”

Trump’s handler was appalled, Austin said. Trump wasn’t a performer or even a natural athlete. Now, the baddest dude in wrestling, a former Division I college football defensive end with tree trunks for biceps, wanted to drop him with his signature move? With no time to even rehearse it? That seemed … dangerous.

“He tried to talk Donald out of it a million ways,” Austin said.

But Trump, without hesitation, agreed to do it.

The man who became the 45th president of the United States in January has a history with Vince McMahon and WWE that dates back more than two decades, to when his Trump Plaza hotel in Atlantic City hosted WrestleManias IV and V in 1988 and 1989. The relationship has continued into Trump’s presidency. On Tuesday, the Senate confirmed the nomination of Linda McMahon ― Vince’s wife, who helped co-found WWE and served as its president and chief executive for 12 years ― to head the Small Business Administration.

After Trump launched his presidential campaign with an escalator entrance straight out of the wrestling playbook, journalists began pointing to his two-decade WWE career to help explain his political appeal. WWE, in one telling, was where Trump first discovered populism. According to another theory, wrestling was where he learned to be a heel ― a villainous performer loved by just enough people to rise to the top, despite antics that make many people hate him.

To those who were present, though, The Battle of the Billionaires is more an outrageous moment in wrestling history than an explanation of anything that happened next. No one in the ring that night thought Trump would one day be president. But now that he is, they look back and laugh about the time the future commander-in-chief ended up on the wrong side of a Stone Cold stunner.

‘To Get To The Crescendo, You’ve Got To Go On A Journey’

Professional wrestling is, at its core, a soap opera and a reality TV spectacle, and its best storylines follow the contours of both: A hero squares off with a heel as the masses hang on their fates.

The Battle of the Billionaires was the same tale, played out on wrestling’s biggest stage. WrestleMania is WWE’s annual mega-event. It commands the company’s largest pay-per-view audiences and biggest crowds. At WrestleMania, WWE’s stars compete in high-stakes matches ― including the WWE Championship ― and wrap up loose ends on stories developed during weekly broadcasts of “Monday Night Raw” and special events over the previous year. Even before Trump, WrestleMania had played host to a number of celebrity interlopers, including boxer Mike Tyson and NFL linebacker Lawrence Taylor.

Building a story ― and, for Trump, a character ― fit for that stage required months of work that started with Trump’s initial appearance on “Monday Night Raw” in January 2007. He would show up on “Raw” at least two more times over the next two months, with each appearance raising the stakes of his feud with McMahon and setting up their battle at WrestleMania on April 1.

“The Battle of the Billionaires, and all the hyperbole, was the crescendo,” said Jim Ross, the longtime voice of WWE television commentary. “But to get to the crescendo, you’ve got to go on a journey and tell an episodic story. That’s what we did with Donald.”

Creating a feud between Trump and McMahon, and getting wrestling fans to take Trump’s side, wasn’t actually a huge challenge. McMahon “was the big-shot boss lording over everybody,” said Jerry “The King” Lawler, a former wrestler and Ross’ sidekick in commentary. It was a role McMahon had long embraced: He was the dictator wrestling fans loved to hate.

Trump was never going to pull off the sort of character that McMahon’s most popular foes had developed. He wasn’t Austin’s beer-chugging, south Texas everyman. And vain and cocky as he might be, he never possessed the sexy swagger that made Shawn Michaels one of the greatest in-ring performers in pro wrestling history.

But rain money on people’s heads, and they’ll probably love you no matter who you are. So that’s what Trump did.

Trump’s first appearance on “Monday Night Raw” came during an episode that centered on McMahon, who was throwing himself the sort of self-celebratory event that even The Donald might find overly brash. As McMahon showered the crowd with insults and they serenaded him with boos, Trump’s face appeared on the jumbotron and money began to fall from the sky.

“Look up at the ceiling, Vince,” Trump said as fans grasped at the falling cash. “Now that’s the way you show appreciation. Learn from it.”

In true Trump fashion, the money wasn’t actually his. It was McMahon’s. But the fans didn’t know that.

The folks with slightly fatter wallets than they’d had moments before loved the contrast between the two rich guys. One was the pompous tyrant. The other might have been even wealthier and just as prone to outlandish behavior, but Trump was positioned as the magnanimous billionaire, the one who understood what they wanted.

“That went over pretty well, as you can imagine, dropping money from the sky,” said Scott Beekman, a wrestling historian and author. “Trump was the good guy, and he got over because of how hated McMahon was. Vince McMahon played a fantastic evil boss and was absolutely hated by everyone. So anyone who stood up to McMahon at that point was going to get over well.”

The wrestlers that each billionaire chose to fight for them also bolstered the narrative. Umaga, McMahon’s representative, was an emerging heel who had gone undefeated for most of 2006. “A 400-pound carnivore,” as Ross described him on TV, he was a mountainous Samoan whose face bore war paint and who barely spoke except to scream at the crowd.

Trump’s guy, on the other hand, was Bobby Lashley, a former Army sergeant who might have been cut straight from a granite slab. Lashley was the good-looking, classically trained college wrestler, the reigning champion of ECW (a lower-level WWE property). Even his cue-ball head seemed to have muscles.

Another selling point for the match: the wrestler who won would likely emerge as a top contender to challenge for the WWE title.

Then McMahon added another twist ― as if the match needed it. He enlisted Austin, a multi-time champion who had retired in 2003, as a guest referee.

“It sounded like an easy gig, sounded like a fun gig,” Austin said. “It didn’t take a whole lot of convincing. The scope of Donald Trump … would bring a lot of eyeballs. A chance to do business with a high-profile guy like that sounded like a real fun deal.”

The minute Austin signed up, Trump should have known that despite his “good guy” posture, he, too, was in trouble. When Stone Cold entered the ring at “Raw” to promote the match, he introduced himself to The Donald with a stern warning.

“You piss me off,” Austin said, “I’ll open up an $ 8 billion can of whoop ass and serve it to ya, and that’s all I got to say about that.”

‘We Thought We Were Shittin’ The Bed’

The opening lines of the O’Jays’ 1973 hit “For the Love of Money” ― also the theme song for Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice” ― rang out of Ford Field’s loudspeakers a few minutes after Trump and Austin’s impromptu meeting backstage. It was time for Trump to make his way to the ring.

“Money, money, money, money, money,” the speakers blared. Trump emerged. The crowd erupted, and cash, even more than had fallen during his previous appearances, cascaded from the ceiling like victory confetti.

“There was a ton of money that had been dropped during Donald Trump’s entrance,” said Haz Ali, who, under the name Armando Estrada, served as Umaga’s handler. “There was about $ 20, $ 25,000 that they’d dropped. … Every denomination ― 1s, 5s, 10s, 20s.”

Lashley appeared next, bounding into the ring without the help of the stairs the others had needed.

For months, McMahon and Trump had sold the story of this match. Now, as Umaga and Lashley stood face to face in the ring, it was time to deliver.

The match started fairly routinely, perhaps even a bit slowly.

“I’m seeing it the same as anyone else who’s watching it,” said Ross, the commentator, who regularly skipped rehearsals to ensure matches would surprise him. “The entire arena was emotionally invested in the storyline. Once they got hooked in it months earlier, now they want the payout.”

On the TV broadcast, it’s obvious that the crowd was hanging on every twist, eager to see which of the two billionaires would lose his hair and how Austin ― famous for intervening in matches and now at the dead center of this one ― might shape it.

But Ford Field, an NFL stadium, is massive compared to the arenas that had hosted previous WrestleManias. Even with 80,000 people packed in, it was difficult to read the crowd from inside the ring.

“Me and Vince keep looking back and forth at each other like, ‘Man, this match is not successful because the crowd is not reacting,’” Austin recalled. “We thought we were shittin’ the bed.”

Trump, for all his usual braggadocio, wasn’t helping.

From outside the ring, McMahon ― a professional performer if there ever was one ― was selling even the most minor details of the match. He was haranguing Austin, instructing Umaga and engaging the crowd all at once. Trump was stiff. His repeated cries of “Kick his ass, Bobby!” and “Come on, Bobby!” came across as stale and unconvincing.

“It’s very robotic, it’s very forced, and there’s no genuine emotion behind it,” said Ali, who had been power-slammed by Lashley early in the match and was watching from the dressing room. “He was just doing it to do it. Hearing him say, ‘Come on, Bobby!’ over and over again ― it didn’t seem like he cared whether Bobby won or lost. That’s the perspective of a former wrestler and entertainer.” 

‘He Punched Me As Hard As He Could’

The match turned when Vince’s son, Shane McMahon, entered the fray. Shane and Umaga ganged up on Austin, knocking the guest ref from the ring. Then they turned their attention to Lashley, slamming his head with a metal trash can as he lay on the ground opposite Trump ― whose golden mane, it seemed, might soon be lying on the floor next to his wrestler.

But just as Umaga prepared to finish Lashley off, Austin rebounded, dragging Shane McMahon from the ring and slamming him into a set of metal stairs. Trump ― who moments before had offered only a wooden “What’s going on here?” ― sprang into action.

Out of nowhere, Trump clotheslined Vince McMahon to the ground and then sat on top of him, wailing away at his skull.

“[Ross] and I were sitting right there about four feet from where Vince landed,” Lawler said. “The back of Vince’s head hit the corner of the ring so hard that I thought he was gonna be knocked out for a week.”

Professional wrestling is fake. Trump’s punches weren’t.

Hours before the match, WWE officials had roped the participants into one final walk-through. Vince McMahon was busy handling the production preparations and didn’t attend. So when it came time to rehearse Trump’s attack on WWE’s top man, Ali stood in for McMahon.

Ali gave Trump instructions on how to hit him on the head to avoid actual injury. Because it was just a rehearsal, he figured Trump would go easy. He figured wrong.

“He proceeds to punch me in the top of the head as if he was hammering a nail in the wall. He punched me as hard as he could,” Ali said. “His knuckle caught me on the top of my head, and the next thing I know, I’ve got an egg-sized welt on the top of my head. He hit me as hard as he could, one, two, three. I was like, ‘Holy shit, this guy.’”

“He actually hit Vince, too,” Ali said. “Which made it even funnier. That’s how Vince would want it.”

Back in the ring, Austin ducked under a punch from Umaga and then made him the match’s first victim of a Stone Cold stunner. Umaga stumbled toward the center of the ring, where Lashley floored him with a move called a running spear. Lashley pinned Umaga, Austin counted him out, Trump declared victory, and McMahon began to cry as he ran his fingers through hair that would soon be gone.

“I don’t think Donald’s hair was ever truly in jeopardy,” Lawler said.

‘It May Be One Of The Uglier Stone Cold Stunners In History’

Moments after the match ended, before he raised Trump and Lashley’s arms in victory, Austin handed out his second stunner of the night to Shane McMahon. Vince McMahon tried to escape the same fate. But Lashley chased him down, threw him over his shoulder and hauled McMahon back to the ring, where he, too, faced the stunner.

Trump’s reaction in this moment was a little disappointing. He offered only the most rigid of celebrations, his feet nailed to the floor as his knees flexed and his arms flailed in excitement. It’s as if he knew his joy would be short-lived. He, too, would end up the one thing he never wants to be: a loser.

“Woo!” Trump yelled, before clapping in McMahon’s face while Austin and Lashley strapped their boss into a barber’s chair. “How ya doin’, man, how ya doin’?” he asked, taunting McMahon with a pair of clippers. Then he and Lashley shaved the WWE chairman bald.

As a suitably humiliated McMahon left the ring, Austin launched his typical celebration, raising his outstretched hands in a call for beers that someone ringside was supposed to toss his way. Trump is a famous teetotaler, but Austin shoved a beer can into his hand anyway.

“I didn’t know that Donald Trump didn’t drink,” Austin said. “I didn’t know that back then.”

It didn’t matter. For veteran wrestling fans, the beers were a sign that Stone Cold had a final treat to deliver.

“I threw beer to everybody I got in the ring with,” he said. “Here’s the bait, and it’s the hook as well. Long as I get him holding those beers, everybody knows that anybody who … takes one of my beers is gonna get stunned.”

As McMahon trudged away, Austin climbed to the top rope, saluted the crowd and dumped the full contents of a can into his mouth. Then he hopped down ― and blew the roof off Ford Field.

He turned, kicked Trump in the stomach and stunned him to the floor.

“Austin stunned The Donald!” Ross screamed.

Trump failed to fully execute the move. He didn’t quite get his chin all the way to Austin’s shoulder; then he halfway pulled out of the move before falling to his knees and lying flat on his back.

“It may be one of the uglier Stone Cold stunners in history,” Ross said.

“He’s not a natural-born athlete,” Austin said. “I just remember the stunner didn’t come off as smooth as it would have had he been one of the guys. But we never rehearsed it. He didn’t even know what it was. Vince botched half the ones I gave him [and] Vince is a great athlete. So that’s no knock on Donald Trump.”

And despite Trump’s less-than-stellar wrestling and acting in the ring, those who were close to the action at WrestleMania 23 were impressed by his willingness to even take the stunner.

“We put him in some very unique positions that a lot of people ― big-name actors in Hollywood ― wouldn’t do because they didn’t want to risk looking bad,” Ross said. “He had the balls to do it.” 

‘You Could Argue That Nothing In Wrestling Has Any Meaning’

For almost a decade, the stunning of Donald Trump remained a relic of WWE lore, a moment rehashed occasionally by diehard wrestling fans but forgotten otherwise.

WWE’s ratings tumbled later in 2007, amid congressional scrutiny of steroid use and wrestler deaths. That June, retired wrestler Chris Benoit murdered his wife and son and then killed himself. He was 40 years old.

Edward Smith Fatu, the wrestler known as Umaga, died from a heart attack in 2009. He was 36.

Lashley, who did not respond to interview requests, left WWE in 2008 after a failed pursuit of the WWE title and an injury that sidelined him for months. He is now a mixed martial arts fighter and the champion of Total Nonstop Action Wrestling.

In 2009, Trump returned to “Monday Night Raw” with a proposal to buy it from McMahon, promising fans that he would run the first Trump-owned episode without commercials. WWE and the USA Network, which broadcast “Raw,” even sent out a press release announcing the sale. When WWE’s stock price plummeted, it was forced to admit that the whole thing was a publicity ploy. The faux sale raised questions about whether everyone involved had violated federal law, but the Securities and Exchange Commission apparently had better things to investigate.

Trump was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013, over a chorus of boos from the fans at Madison Square Garden. The Battle of the Billionaires was, at the time, WWE’s highest-grossing pay-per-view broadcast, drawing 1.2 million pay-per-view buys and $ 24.3 million in global revenue, according to WWE’s estimates. It’s also the most notorious of Trump’s interactions with the company. But that’s about all the significance it really holds.

“You could argue that nothing in wrestling has any meaning,” said Beekman, the historian. The feud between Trump and McMahon “was an angle, and it was a successful angle, and then they moved on to the next one.”

Vince and Linda McMahon together donated $ 7.5 million to super PACs that backed Trump’s winning presidential campaign. Linda McMahon had earlier spent nearly $ 100 million on two failed efforts, in 2010 and 2012, to get herself elected to the U.S. Senate. In December, Trump nominated her to head the Small Business Administration, a Cabinet-level job potentially at odds with the methods she and her husband had used to build WWE into a wrestling empire ― but one to which she was easily confirmed. (Neither the McMahons nor the president chose to comment on the president’s WWE career.)

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Linda McMahon once took a Stone Cold stunner, too, so Steve Austin is responsible for stunning at least two top Trump administration officials. But he has doled out thousands of those in his career, and until he was reminded, he didn’t even remember what year he had laid Trump out.

“I’ve stunned a couple members of the Cabinet,” Austin said. “But I don’t think about it like that. It was so long ago. I don’t know Donald Trump. We did business together, we shook hands, and I appreciated him taking that. But I don’t sit here in my house, rubbing my hands together thinking, ‘Aw, man, I was the only guy that ever stunned a United States president.’”

“Yeah, it’s pretty cool,” Stone Cold said. “But it was part of what I did. To me, hey, man, it’s just another day at the office.”

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