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libidomechanica · 1 year ago

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What is not in natural

A treochair sequence

And here he stand all that which had Horace, made of cold mine, and walked to

make no garlands, whose cries, and I, when he fell, and sing to the signs. What

is not in natural. And before meet star- sisters at they means of

eminence mongst the words, as long breast, who griev’d the other is ask’d her, that

still fragrant flames, Spring, and came yonder her face, not a dead hush a

mast-head, and when something every white farmhouse under her feet, father

raged in a clamour, and red uprose to sports of Humour everything

will not be dieted with a faith, so many eyes, and we sought Aurelian,

and with ourselves, perused the state; a lion ramps and my feeding.

And, gems, and fold me with gratitude and, well-practised in a deep

kindness, or some Astraean age, sat come, she rode by side, and, forgoer to

both are one, and be once. Angry if Irene be but asserted she

receive thro’ the West or East; but prepare: I speaks of this well apayd?

My collapse flash of the waking here, but lou’d, declines, then came on a

gravelly sand take their mask I try on. To muse in the public foe,

have been to admit than touch of my whitely star, I walk upon us,

crying still, then came a minute will directly in the man; tattoo.

Fancy return! But I knew not with a kernel dozed on the filthy

soules may Sacred cherries. Are castles to makes seen, one hour badly

spent: for the shell, then, in the falling run, yet human fears within this

is how with a shout: but for fear my consterd in mine. A second mother

to-day, there we lose my great say-master as she’d been world I stay?

May her long since mind—this who say just ask. The crowning; Psyche took no

part in gastful groue they cannot be kind the shirt-sleeves, leaning, too, than

their lives in blood. In Marses lively take her poor men will be as unmix’d

and blooming openness you turned here from Lady Blanche’s daughter

she sat, we heart to work out you coward … this baby that Loves Wars to

me from out for the eye, Love! We make us, last till as bright youth risk.

The next, like an old tail coat, and blear-eyed Will thy hart did spill: I saw

three sat muffled in the while Joy’s a streets the Touch warm, and the sings; and

winning with tread them one, a rogue would cry. But it’s unlikely Like down

the envious meant; for shame, I grant with a chart, and gladding waterlily

started up; there are fancies hatched for yourself upon a table,

circled married, she rain lasts anywhere he doth shine, and shook and

just fall like. We woo thee what he lie and mark yon meeting on another

is the woods, fly twanging to the pit and I, but gives Sam a push.

No Entrance finds no end, a siren songs and flushed alone, and I lost

for loving love each other, longs for you ask what dignity and lonely

men in the North, not in nature’s chanted joy and hard by, made bricks

in Egypt’s pearl lost in his leaves false lovely ones. It’s successive problem

with honor maydens meete too has brought that each, than in hir hand those

was cold. State the moth for the very night which make, that flows but all his

goldenrod glowing! The trumpeter, while ever can be serve; and now

when he plight. We are Psyche to his name; we gives life to bind the smoke

the vernal cold earth, for the nick of wolves, when I perhaps. The Eye would

instruct those thrown of weeping, before with envy I do but a man

and open casement light of Thyself down wearing and, as well begun,

of the kind: false New England, left his Darts, be able to under

ash delay! She, ending stand lights himselfe, or fleet came floor, and be seen!

’ He answered, with rage of half in the better myself down? Light drink a

draught me in vain, as your temple words grace concluded, and fools abroad.

And I was born kneeler, an ye three years than you both? For I broughten

to my tongue but to darkness utterance clear for the depths of classic

lecture dress the chaplet any man: and, if at noon my fall. In the

evening, who has things, hinder her old man say we did—was the through to

it, give up acres and the next, like the best perceive it to keep but

a woman than the death’s eternal evening is either hands apart—

never bough of wilding waters go, come in these have mown. And turning

sweetest little lacketh Perigot of thy verse when those wert build. Above

they my pet-name! The fullness that you canst not you me your kisse; that

far away. Of some face to be, barbarians, grouped in honeybees

to dying moon is got you I’d pay no attends and quiet ever

came thence for our joys? Blind and dresse, when the roses went. I cut up

one dozen times, and sinned in truth, O Loue, bend him, who am not fewer;

growin’ yet. And called my very night, vpon the stately tree, cut down

and cheek on cheeks. Which in sent At those too, good-morrow to glistens, I

wait. Must confesse: A deale of my own down on hir hand because herdgroome.

Left her veil: marsh-divers, rather, is shepherd. Of Man, thereat the horse!

Returning or affright the start back upon us, crying: The deer

from out your face where not brother. Of social wrong you sobbed, and think of.

Said, the closer, elm and comming, my dear. To his own greater warmer

current among six boys, headed lime in the gate. I’ll come: if not, happy

houres. Tonight—the sold to feed by a red roses, and generall

tearmes, to pleasurer, we given, for into the Mind growing

stops, with thee his rise, in true retreats of sports of the priefe. Now which make,

the slave, the kind: so wild birds to dying, my life with light themselves

compensate brainpan were all we lovely ones. Then while my hearth, while we saw

that won your sound, and we are in the genial day; all else, we promise;

fruits, and bosom: but wantonness you turned. And Science with edge-tools! Of

ancient love me more than men, huge women come to me heat: he forests,

my state thee to decay, lest under her and then their shadows; and other,

long Devotion has she has heardgrome, and low, that evening by their

fathers heritage; that bassoon; father heart is sorrow not too base?

I try on. As bottom deserues thy sake, to paint my woe, whereof,

my death decree that win, the shining virtues with forests, which reason

gave, as we may buye golden heads; they sigh’d for you, all awry: however

single jewel-print of rules. My fires of science, say, lichen, as ocean

deep, wherefore, and sound ys signe of those who say just what out a

tricks, which waves combing they like a gull passing with purple scarcely the

brook the secret laughed; and haughtiest lineaments, with Ida, full of eggs,

and tea. Among the flies a troop of ragged claws scuttling absurd. Shroud,

or fleet came, that you meet; there belong the plan was ta’en for the night they

what she sensuall eat when the for us, and lapt in wreath may call; preserv’d

by this whistling after as a Bride that wine for a burial

compassed with knout? Cleave your sweet to the iawes: but, when a child-bed.

Makes me so! Books that are gazing, came down, which she took this feast with a

short prayer, both those the mind, yet w’are not, happy might youth risk. And I,

alone; and I wonder’st in the truth, the shrill-edged shrieking the minute

will not love exhausts itself, and That; do Thou only teach, which in secret

for me when his broke and fractured as the Simple shepheards ioye, how

brave it, simple world, with lad and stop the shall in want to be, barbarous

idols, care is blown by thee. Me by my name rehearse. Those partiall

sports I have been too long that love, and Till love no more was the blood.

Against me. Though they were brought to say just what she inroules those who

left between the wager wonne: but I am alive with cries, Joy! Matthew

stop; and there. Wherein your face to Semele. To them, like a solemn

choir cries, and how shaking man he had sown; in us true eyes

to the castle gate alone can leade you says he look I do smell and

sweet hand, wretchedest age, since hap always with the sun hotter the

envious boy, you that from the iron blunter gates were wont to the year.

What something indigo sky while my lips do not knows well. In forests,

long dead, come would rather, for we two made his true, and yet thefts to be

main. And grimly spiked the blood is flown, than a glow-worm shone that harmony.

More, hey ho bonilasse, she seemed to the evening by the West. Lose

somewhat out of brown till the day I sit and know it—I will gentleman.

Then Florian; holding out her temples with such shower fellow-

worker be, which reason of ages have no more clerks, the meadow and

the singular beautiful and when thy mouth will rank you, all the fire.

The acolyte amid the pomp of you nor willows, then the hills, and

in her beams of life and dazzling roundle of child at its own Phaëton.

Heads; unwrapping in the tumult and stout as if he had not know not

wise by Phoebus doom, with vases, to me; then come into her, she whole

in one deep deceit, a gilded eaves, and chose, by all the false love an

hour, with limitlesse sorrow to mine ear bubbled for twenty million

of thy hands and rest, but woman ripen’d grain; and me. Only for his

body now alone, and loose a flying ran, and the moor and thou or

I, who rapt in all the man, a lord of This and shower about us,

and all knowledge, which he sees, and bowing was dared to wreak your bound,

and makes his garden-gate; a lion ramps and other kind of poison

him there she strange exclaiming more who cannot lookst babies for Cyril.

Since the true spends your tearm of what kind to the Fates; and loved you remained,

and all pleasure, loue on a beacon-tower sublime of yestermorn,

to take him; but I bee still, do fear me, thoughts of grassy mountains. Those

concord shame and we were more the laughing Nature for a private blow—

I swear again, a quarter-session for thee! Be it malingers at

their shade. Be mine ear bubbles o’er; and all to delight long; I should rather,

made false loved you would make me thou was made for the spruce, its roads summer,

ye warp not. Your first you stood by his own ankle glance up in

Pennsylvania humps on the Sleep must full-stop here. His deede. Bricks in the night

of the week before and I shallow in all? The villainous centre

set the moon of the stranger most door keys, the dew, sweet express; and make

all but—nothing on the clown, thou for cash. A resurrection aptly

groups the cosmetics and the days passionate fire. Above the grass fell.

From the sprightly cryes ye heart whose Name I will cryes ye heart, and less; In

wrathful state toward the ball in a kind of beautiful a sun, and thrust,

only a gift which I not a word. Whom, in gloria victi. With

a shout roses, flowers and glean you and I wept her like a reality-

TV star in the sun. Are the shirt, smell may loue into

suns are was not with a melted Florian. Phrases of my cause

she worldly pleasure up. Like her palms and foul a lie! Or laces, and

of our compounds sooner or later did see what it better bleating

your heart ungiven; come to her, made false: but fit to save a prince Hamlet,

nor was awake his parting will—with frosty rime, the Castalies;

from the iawes: and shook it and looked a stroke of trials, to meet tho’ in

herself erect beauties, love did. Since my throbbing, no little-footed

China, touches ne’er touch some reverse. Six times, no less mine eyes can give

you so that bless that the pit? Of the realms of life. The creatures are raven

to repeat. When I feele no woe, woe, woe is me, and how should,

though late, and serenely spent. Ah! And to see a dream the booke doth much

as if it on a diet. Who am not there, and coal, come, some think

that we delude the seas; a red roses, but want to the steps, on the

grave heart as I saw the stomacher; and sunny warm and wicked ways.

Oh God! To these Dregs into thee? The her pass heavily, i’m weary

evening; long lost, but only face I sought me my fears with flowers ally

your blood; it grew, shafts of restle a poisoned balloon. If on some

Astraean age or changing sound to pass the West is too soon, yet how his

elbow robes, and laws to lose, When look’d as she rain last night, and Strictest

Love divine; shine on foot for since each evening by the ward to see my

joys of hate. While my selfe to the bed, bodies and loose a hubbub in

the think that was no except you meet; the grass; for I brought. About my

lips plied, ourself a crescent of time to burning doves athwart the moat,

stifling in and falling headless war are scawled still answered, with

despair, and my Loue vnkind; he seekst not your bound, poor infant civilisation

sweet a voices while thus held and powers and owed townes your blessed

bye, hey ho pinching heart, and enemy’s fleeting shepheards twayne: sike a

round they will be sayde that which flies be a perfection, till a clasping

down the motion is gone. But the hall; and fill with honeybees to Beautie’s

wonne or two, advise the genial Englishman, and, to entered, to

whom the fresh in language Fescennine. While that which I see the beauty

bring the floor of the ambrosial gloom, disturbed me dear with the river.

I smote him now: she rode by one deeper. I weene, the half the moat,

stifling your need, they fled, with her sweet Elizium, by the streets and summer

shall we would ill comeliness, or his country-women? The creature

newly- caged, commenced then quickly to thrid their dwell a progressed the

truth to come for him not: since my nest is the casement of his more

taught was you both of the best, from dull and madden’d, and rolling on the

public merit me Your old complain. Who much I might were thinking of

a girl who’ll fall in want or peril, then, from bed and maybe neither

who with trees, till the Feet: yet, as they cries anywhere she sat, we heardest

thy perfume from when loe Perigot so many a million love

me more, till weary evening as sooner or king! He had I lain in

the blueblack lot holds yfeer the drowse, or ioynts benomd withered lay a

mute remember them.-Print of men holding in mud. There we walked with her

should I began to troll a clapping water woe: the Maple was it

rose: the water than look’d the breast. When all the flies a troops into consume

us all, delight, and hear sweetest Silvia, yet was siluer

sound of this, if this abject to alters from the bottom agates seene

to make your Gowne, or whose least, and leaves will not be ourself upon it!

Never quit you now? To the heard; a butterfly flits across the light

to troll a claspt by a shutting. And where in a deep deceit, a gilded

eaves, as heavily, i’m weary be, as tonight—the soul may look

in the harmless survives. With love. Transform themselves, or some divine, to

harm in this is the true loue she would we defer our joys? Rang fall from

wrong himself is fonder what the secrets of my hart is ill assays,

were mirthful state into the full of social wrong you the joking place

of brown halls alone can leader will let this page. Melissa hitting

vpon a tripod in my mind a day among since my nest is true

occasion lost, can make you not so; to have seen the fair creature at they

by: alas! Till Cherry ripe themselves ye come, as he sits to pestle

a poet’s rage and turns a stormless snake, that conuersation ruin,

and a reach, Love or Haire: I have I hear, we’ll seek him there. Grapes, one hand

up the red wild figtree still the Beauty, lime and die you wrong his lady-

sisters and what Grace; o Roger, thou catch one of a toast and to have

been to all bury me deeper. And bring has brought, beneath those rare soldier

wilds would rise fresh arrivals of people they kiss me, be brief there.

My sheepe, and to die. Do so the truth by. Our mind, but for the cold, brightness?

With me after then paused by Florian, curse, with her voice and entered,

long lost, and serene of use and glimmeringly name, and bright so

in the bouncing in Senses almost, and revisions some fires of the

Grace; I love letters—one her dear lord! Told jokes in her lattice edge

unturnable, song, Cyril, having mine, I call me of those six hundred

in her arms and kisse, both day among the past; glance up in the comes,

Princessant waters playing from fields and post away from their mothers

everywhere. Monstrous isles, and grace, say what I meant but what they to every

shade of Pallas: Hebe shame will do to swear to these hurts in forest yet.

And laughs for my bones; here it not: since, a beam of parallel trees, no

less and race by all these, but woman-built, came against movie star, the

sniffer. Each Flower upon her image in my my mother door, which

melted Florian; have you both? Of sweet proprietress of the Hall, do

fear to steal away, sets down to inmost true; for since; yet now what. Of

their glorious Trophies free not to beautiful hollow breaks: I dare?

’—But titt’ring Kate is penn’d up in the woods were still lives, and fro fluctuated,

and through certain meant a mere love between: ’O woe betide within

my plaining to great stand this mood? The acolyte amid their shows,

the king indifferential! To wonder of art a scorn. You no

sorcerer’s malignant hastily subscribed, we entered starry skies which

inward side, the failing the tree; all sighing smil’d, and bring within me,

and thus our beauty grow’th, where she, ’ but is evenings serves, and beauty lack,

slandering sealed: drink my ankle in a college Portress came: she sang

of, shook; the meadow you not so many words graced; the Mind, when I do

not shine because with rage possessed Lady Psyche’s: as we. Strength to fight

your father. Sudden leaves your Highness. About these, but lou’d a loud in

the last of duty, some hid and how the Mower too. To whom the dark.

Love pricked in his silence! For since I hear their woe, than evening. Poem

that bassoon, my absence Hell. Failing chickened, mixt with a wanton Yuie

twine. Long bin play unfair! ’ Said to it; and o’er she realists: and double

growth of Florian. And breake morn before; for a vast speculation

her chart my day, and runs to complain. Watch out for ladies. I lift my

head away. And hidden to glide. By whose beame so shall seal does musick

men heads were on lattice, I have died yesterday, which reason, and faint

in her lists were lean upon thee stayes, yet am I riches the sun.

And would drown. Take like you gone, is good shoes, and exchanged on the pathless

peace in the law that will let my toil me heart of love. Can such a sonder:

or as they misunderstand—a heav’nly riches make you rights, and

rode under the world, you and this tries and play; I put, he pushes us

two, i’ th’ temples? No, not marvelled, who if rife after

seeming blood clot. I leafed through winds creep so sore, hey ho hollidaye, that affect

within her two suns are free an LP of poisoned jerkin frolic,

as they passive problems, recalibrating to hear no sorcerer’s

malignant has brought us Academe, whose cooler shake my mistress;

and you planed her brows had sprouted, and matter gall, to do their name.

—I, CHARLES— then quak’d, the bounty of May; the read, my faces them, that

know pining til the drowsy houre sinks with Esop crossed with the universe

in the married, she paced them stood their music, which, rank of feather,

think, and say This poor infant ripe for our life, then practice lost heart, in

belts of virtue speech, Loves Wars to call the dale, till your country of beauty

which is that small; not a budding green the new in all thing moon. Yet

am I so wood1 that temperament: my very walls with pale of chance,

with green the heau’nly harmony. For I trust into the moor; she caught

me my flocke the South. You have known, the slacken and a sudden sun: we

took half-possessed, she setting moon, were first, whom you in a crescent-wise.

Tried, she reality-TV star and then those that long with

professe; and cried she living alwaies their glad to blub like swallow, flying,

Name of you lived in his ale-house under arches have spoke, and with

fails not; the little Lilia pleas, the girl who’ll fall damn near and honor

the sweetly shades of the sun flame Majnún, and clown��s-all-heal, to drink

deep, until the grave, yet invent? And distant leper. We heart with thee!

Late tyr’d with a key, and blessed throng in shining mine? But who should we else,

we purpled, still the nest. My wings progress, to the year, it wasn’t sure which

cannot loves, for to see and see a dream there; I fill, with severall

tearm of blood; it groan’d, and loved to live I want to mine ears, the gold to

die. This head, and on a placed you though the other’s life’s lower has wealth,

the Head, till thy hair, and out hunger and blossoms on the night. By the

sick, and lain for public use require it, both in little maid, shall

I part made green, do boast thou, or belike redundant fast away as

do’s the spoke of chain, to shrieue: now gynneth the king hall taste. The planted

to me, is the joking voice alarms my throat; abase the eastern sea!

Been well and purple cleft brings are in the man, not to roar, to whom the

emblems of you; I babbled for wanted to read, till assays, or canker’d

jealous intent to catch: she real green, do boast: dismissed in the veil.

Would be all things present hastily subscribed, we held a volume as

the maintained then the man’s Buff they kiss me, hard and such shower, breath no

flow. Would-be quenchless fair, it will not speak thy song is duer unto

dying and fled; the cold, cold walls black as death’s eternal course was he

start back. And you—I know who where the secret laughter the named by both

while I dragged claws scuttling a pillow or them. And betwixt were laid his

age! And fruits. That Psyche, ’ said to them, smiling to their grace where are found

gold lichen, and haughtiest lineaments, wrong your old friends joy, where thing

accidental e’re alike flounder mouth will rank you on the raisèd up her

hands, the mockers and commingled, and go talking, and learned not: thou

grow. And now among there was he, if a Hungary fair on a mast-

head, and the branches held me the south from sleepe: let them nor priefe. Her

maidenlike a Statue of losing to the sings happen, were tired Hand

fools abroad; there were it not makes my sighs are in her. Therefore, Love as

I could be graceful ornament of frame, the Head: but thou movest

underground, go throw troop of shadow while time, and sweet by some did bring leap,

beyond it, whereby, the age or changed my fingers of your eyes are slight,

more: and strike him that made, complexion purest minds, and all my dreame: and

the dale along, a fever-fit; were drizzling raiment. In martyrdom.

Are found, when all attended with the drowsy houre-long the ended with

purple get, each evening to rate us all those shriek like swine, a rogue

would come to whom the poor that treats of these my night and by sea-girls wreaths

pay a meane price for its arms with the prov’d and to speech—who spoke, not fade

nor lost? As both crowne, than our good hive, you were stir about us, as

the barren rage of heaven I shall be led by both odde and wound I

have reach’d the dim-gray dawn; but far allusion, manlike, but sleep of death

it is an infant’s discontent with a key, and wild woddes my feeding.

To the heau’nly harmony. Both night with a melted Florian

added; she with a silent ears to cast it strange exclaiming music

and bareness summer-indolence, and to happy Yes that in Virtue

earlier, and sport roses were in their chose that showers, asleep

I return, Amen! At whose Love did pass, an olive, when once from the

sunset; O, a short; and on to myself Thou my separably link’d.

A collar mountain stakes you silence. Home, the clouds to poison on the

Linnet and crown. One shadow while brightness; when a last worms together.

A xylophone in time forth, like car crashes, books that makes their birth, some

clear fond voices of Maud; I play’d with pride, which heaven, downe swayne, to bitter

gall, that which faire in generous Epic lilted out at gates were

close in vain is Natures broken chord. And blushes us loud on the

game, and daunce: my old wolf, for spite; and here is a goodly wild sparkle

for May: and thought he was the marmalade, that made, ylke can be with it,

after all the West, search, sun, at all the plan was ten, skinny, red-headed,

freckled. Come for me, nor it malingers, asleep, yet I love below,

a heav’nly richer face, and sound she herself, when in eternal

cold? See the shimmering when they, yet still not fear: six thousand Virgins

on a beam— More like winter-clad in iron laws, and shorn of leisure,

sacred cherries grow. And ever, tell of prayer, which that next to mine

eyes, to both while young spruce, new Formes, to darken’d; like an April morn

blush it thro’ narrow sea which reddens in this deede. In the wood where a

garden of such planned, known, your nerves of glittering be, or other I

bow’d towards some overwhelming quiet woodlands drove south and betwixt were

awhile things do purge, even the holy Angel mild: witlesse face; the

night and ever than ever than the and be chase me like account the

next, like cloud: for this morning to circuit of Writers mind; so when the

rest, A step of light; those eyes are gone dozen new men and wickedness.

The cried my brow, he linden blow bundle neuer heart, returning of

a million emeralds breasts, turning dew. Make me a granite boulder

even you meet; the lovely gather’s welcome, perchange my reckled. The

greater name. Star-Beauty grow mad with Paradise is blow, all loose, is

the mark yon meeting alone? I wish in the way, we knew us men,

at our case mercy, born with Paradise, a bastard in the dooryards

and in drawn down a Ray of error fall; and take the poore. Becomes from

mine of us, as I am cattle the fireweed flocke, for the

plough, and what the Muses you will show the Proclamation flies a troops

into the Touch warm, he’d calls back into my cryes, I hate after news.

—He seemed a thing wilt crowne with a chart the sat high in the chance hap always

when did defecates. To blow the landward side, and break your running

saw the greater she shaft, and far away. And we as rich, can never

changing closed. Of those parts maintained by our memory cling to the

threes, that dress for you. Before and stirre still the world, with health well-a-day!

Both my life with clay, do not staies, while you says yes including thee what

rites; the crowd— but you; found about my Wag. That new regen’rate into

follow: a short; and oblique lines on in those Two Lovers known at least

which learn its back the grass. This fine Conceits, all gazing to sing, the swallow,

flying race. Who, sleepe and play, and light, a noble Ida, full of

your soul! The edgèd steel by care is mute in heavenly with Silences.

I tighten the morn before than their dwell, ladies of thanked firm again

that April old, illustrate the priefe. There is a world’s sharply gryde, uch

wounded fawn came from ancient in the dirt to battle think of good to

feel the villain to me heat: he forest where such as changing couple

all her who withstand white robe like a mummy, and given, for its

avalanche can be main. And shave been a Sultan of brutes, wouldst not touch

of the rushing more to the shrike, a semi- demi goddess, started

to like rose herdgroome stars shining down we send arrive with foot so well,

saw the trees. In the dew, sweet music. Is only true speech is his hopes,

so much discovered in a vine, more they cannot be let go. Thoughts that.

Through the grapes and greed, I first you shalt ycrouned be infected seemed

to the hush of the starr’d faces toward the Good! Tis no longer blink. A

chapelet, of sweets, at such eyes of a spotless night and put on mine.

I am to follow you’ll fling your bodies finders-out of those Two

Lover are her die than are green fiers was tired Hand forefinger of

them? All deckt with crime, the mutton; with ingratitude I find the real

lights in my plaintive cry jarred mountains, and dress for your grace which has glean’d

my eyes do not your blessed byrd, that is most. He took it off; for she affirmed

not, where she look’d, and on the stranger mountains. Do you and I loue

in we crost the Maple was ne’er beguile, a beastes pawes as spoyle

whereby she wite the subtle Wit cannot be left the tramp, to shake

that they do, to marry; they stood, before. And I had a father flat

as a Czar; and your eyes, as the World to cozen with your heard them on

the big white flannel trousers, and red wild birds say? ’Re wet silk stained this

the lands; thy face a model of the doors, and with ease his clumsy Will!

A mind at a broke me any more basest valleys, am grown breath.

Face, and dead thou continue thus singing, and molten on the flowers.

Surface are those that was made your own mouths at change my near in the stretched

and lapt in glorious Trophies free not the blossom fell with her mine!

The Blind man��s star in love of Julia’s break my chains with sidelong to

the hall: and the cups, the most south and bliss. I should seem high sentence,

Caryatids, lifted round were none spake: o Elenor, I am gone. Of

this, which reddens in the lock, the Prince your father woe: the wheeled, and three

figures on the victorye? Ho seely sheep, a raging all that I may

never so as no except I thy brood on a hill of nuptial knot,

where always, as he be dead, stiller, saith her. The below that was so

that face this honest heart-strings, morning, I that the darke heart withered coat?

To the Humours such a little this Hubbub know myself my prayer,

or the dead. No wasp shall well follow: a shock on his side? I heard us

and wine. And hide the evening, her breast; he story of day when the

earth so beauteous Dick supports and dashed unopened earlier, and speak

thee what I hoped to speaks in thy heart be their roots, accessive groves; trim

hamlets of vict’ry in your language Fescennine. The ba’, the Light in

disguise. Mine ear but what can turns the streets there we saw Sir Walter salad

ushering in thy mouth. Queen lily in their churchyard come to build.

Of beautiful house, I see? The sheet of all that I would the great brown

leaf of thousands, the younger is chance, sir, to the opening expecting

to me, who made his arms, which her throng in the sleepe. But we went back

to thee. Gum, pungent, cleare a number did mee addresses false: but each

hand on that I am sick of coral, but blood was spring. About

his wits pierced them both, to pluck your ideal, for Solomon in the dull

a silence. Stay, thoughts than your thick mard by, made you sobbed, and caught in their

moss. Should tell truth is, false sublime—like an army in the end found against

you, ’ said Cyril? Dusk, where Joan and wailed with from Phoebus face was like

his river. Hey ho the sun is gone. Come back and shave been to reveal,

to do the musky-circle round that I made, some civic manhood firm

against there, except that your body to build. Lent in his own garden,

Maud, my head up—but no shower fell, arranged them still the ways. An LP

of poison- flower and round. The bar and red within me wrought a

little maidenlike a fountains, and fight, is shifts, we can; knat, rail, a

net of dignity of you come, far all- seeing is possessed, I left

enough alone and die of lope, with his scythe, the dam ready for babble.

I have here, thy censer, put in their gate; then another side, by

a passionate fire. The Castle gates were valves of Musicke can it mean?

That guides. See, vertues with iniurie: who since mind: and you sobbed with flower,

for priefe. Is frown: but half-possession! Kept on buying this day, and spears.

If I could see that euer shame, but trim our singly ground the sport, began

to travelled and like a feast with as with the weather’s watch of a living

and so much a song, or fall. An advent tower; do we move our

wild create their thick synthetic roots of the Dew-bespangling Herbe and

told him in the blessed Lady FRANCES drest underworld, and where has got

my pain; and ever have to gaudy day is a hand, and the walks, and

in welth, she paced, and to be; am an attended wide, sam slips bind

my heart confesse: but in the rose a shriek as of our man’s earthly circuit

of yonder of the foul a lie! At they said: do love, across the

long breeze enough the public weal, the ears, that so fare little breed. But

in your warmed my veines with thee! Each blessed souls would it not: since, and sweet-

Slug-a-bed, and still art did the Humours such a deuil want one of her

left, dropt for ever be heard him crept in all! Of social wrong you this?

And small pale death wrapp’d in barbarians, groups the nebulous star and

the tyranny. The yellow fog that bring day; all sighing off the broke

with great urns of the kind of spruce, its resonance just to addrest. Combing

the red with their May was paid to wrench has a garden, Maud, a Richard,

and hustled townes your cream here’s no longer flow; my eyes be ioy,

wherein, they were on, and gradually did woman every part made a

voice is how I am nameless that I made, which joyes to the morning

my last, of their gates were slick-faced snubnosed rogue of Sir Ralph from the

wager would have no more.-Faced; upright, vpon the wind’s a crowd dividing

garments, with Ida, Ida, that which thyself and day, Come, my Corinna,

come all into my cryes ye hear in the spake: o Elenor: he’s

despise the cruel snared them will not falls of your clear morning, I think it

fit, we’ll go no more. ’Twas a tomb which arise, a bastard she thirty

chariot staies, a patience, but lou’d a loud on the eyes were taught one

to be transgressions which I see my picture she wounded; the baskets.

Like a high Hall-garden, Maud, let my touch of old and put his Desert

be the west under him dead hush a mask was what are not wait. Out upon

the mirror and these? Six boys, head from fruitful spread out he is world’s

blame before my hurt me, Sir, entertain meant, at the happy placed, I

likewise, which he sees! Divine; shine only— I, mine Eyes of Musick men

heads in corn, we issued gorged from the big white; those eight most wise by

Phoebus face disaster. Just the hall—jenny her Content on her bed

she, like a blood, or sworn the day fainted to the tomb lay by, to troll

a clamour and climax of his hands with the covenant that which do

sublime—like an empty head from the delight. Of such a little, what

you still the institution come to thrum, to tell the golden age so

sore! The family sort of the Feet: yet we fountain bend? And tween the

excitement of Joy renewed, say, their grace. Pleased to your babe and flame the battles,

and mee: I pyne for thus conquer all the feet in true rights, and rose

her hands and partly conscious times accounts me as wise artist, that of

all the very fair light; my best. The days, and Hope, a poison-flowers,

and she, Let them the search that follow the night and I lost that did the

Browne, as she’d been. Dead, longs for your loves in a diet. Some respect, but

I know all the other, that we are a light lent influence and fry.

Learn of prejudice, disyoke the Forms of days pass like a dreams that my

bones and he the hoofs of the Kurd of This and her what she knees. Estate

into her brow burn like rich in hope of child of the Grace this, for Poesy!

So by waning dew. Wherein I fry? To harbour thee: I speak of

you rehearse. I was a pure cup of the golden-shafted abroad. Arranged

the plaining down arm’d, forty years to shake my mind, and eddied into

the Past so sweete Violet. And my teeming has brought her eyes, my dear.

Villain to be dieted water even such as out of rules. Of shining

that harmonies; and yet, the mirror. The casual shout more gloom to

wrestle a poet’s rage and Evil. Ties a broke with endless permutations,

let not yshend your freedom. Search, sun, and bower, for into

pure Wine, to harbour third floor, in virgins do, but fill each others her

opening in jest; and on the lowest. I lean upon this epitaph—

they were to change as yours alive, and my brain, before came not

recorder should your fingers late; ’ the long-neck’d geese of destiny: so fresh

into his river; and one myself in little deep deceit, a gilded

hook the graver thankful rite may yet be wholly father is that

men do stand it all that you like disaster. He each to the cold from

which withdraw thy conscious laws, and places, and winged Fame commends to plaintiue

please like a song, Cyril, for thee, Dear, with rage of us—a woman

ripened around my breast bo-peepe or crouching for a kisses. ’Ve

wanted on, whatsoever came a minute will get a riches that

pushed rose a hubbub of lies. Arriving and queen, the body to slips

between your old man’s, if ought they cannot err, could not for the dawn: a

beacon-tower amang the sworn thee down. Ye nymphs which Venus weeps that

we must be a watched. We men of leisure, as may brings to the sniffer.

Saints did our life is taking for payne doth vs beate were in his gold

of ghost, that than evening. Apart, kiss of man: he now her bridal morn,

of that face they were to plead my country of life, my father. Let’s content

be as understood, melissa hitting yardwand, heedles on the

liquid look in the cold earth in virgin- white, empty glove upon the

base of stairs into the even know the common grins on a page to

sound these? Yet still topple to see. Each time on credit: Like displaies vertues

short, I make the voice rang falsehood and die alive, capers, or of

blame and through certain, whose by hoof, and so deeply by ourselves, so darkening,

sir, find him we were one rose, The bride with love. And hid from East took,

the lawn running they said: by whose beauty is creatures for than beelike

in his must buying that could there will never we brave, will play unfair!

And thither side, half-drooping frowned with ache? A weight to thing bee, and fling

hopes the wrinkled o’er the Thespian spring, and the Proclamation

ruin, and war. I will not boast: dismiss you: but these valleys, have done,

by herself, and beautiful forever, deare. Yet still men will be; but

my Wag. Hey ho gray wane of their either side, till the morning over

seeming brother, and made for lovers know. See how anything every

other water for he came not, wherein all Minds best of all, doth find,

and turning zeale, We crost the Keyes be purple footcloth, lay the slender

and by some into my woe, bene thy Will, ’ if this working south.

But then the valleys; I do detest nigheth fast, yts time when I do

it, after the body asleep. From the best dispatches have they kiss

you moves, It was it can tripped by an Angels watch. Am very inke

turns him dead weight drinks all—tis done; and is no man as you had gone, I

cald my Muse and from here wasted here and vine, entrailed wife, and molten

on the answers Death. Hast to the Feild, I make us sad next to

mine eyes, nor fourty year. Sore against his face was on the luster fall.

And hidden blowzed with lighted sands, laying for its pillars a dim

basement of garlands, and kissing pawes: and hide the after than Phoebus,

if you like as, to the iron burst the starry skies; and time for

me? That so wild bee farms of your Faith heau’nly harmonies; and, if more

return; illustrate toward her, I don’t even frog wades; and slides aloud,

Oh Good-for- Nothing and, to end hunger it blossomed up from the Violet.

To be falls below, a heart of all my dreamed, I did not by Sun

or Glasse passe them up through narrow like a city, with no flower

ranged with the dead, longs for yourself against my mothers; and captive leads

me prop my mistress’ brows; a schoolmaster though smocked, or a drop a

questions your straw mattress—whatever he came but that dance too fresh number

honour mind at peace in her babe forgoer to thee? In detail made

there is near, she flush taught again after, clung about a compare then

drove to buffet to get into his broke away there, a spire of the

spoke a woman of nut-brown has she now, I think and brought his Embleme.

One chiefly you flie from the grass and dust. Which in her lawny continue

thus I heard the window looking will comes, a fable, or man be

maintained: but yet endure; and fixing stands still the float us each to

its frog sits on my being southern hill sees it rose, The dead coldly,

Good: your feet, This and then takes I heard your hand to cheere, yet how his

easier ears to show? Are booing me, hard to master though on the knew

not what it is truth to following news over me forth my life decay,

lest unawares I in all from Lady Psyche’s despite. He showers,

The secular emancipation of brown hall tearm of blame, with

homely hands to die. Enough, and where I sit—ah, where still in the world,

two plummets dropt thro’ thy perfect music, at whose possessed, I leane mens

fairer that other’s service; who could feel the desires, There shadow?

But thou art fair a house a Body perfection at her, the fires of

Musicke can represent has the world. Do we moved and guilt. But living

to the spoke not whenever know not your arms fit you all than not be

nobler age. And polished my brains all. All make fair; heap the rose-buds fill’d

in blood, till wear which in your Lamps with a shout: though all this head from the

waves combing out of place to sleeping one and thus it shouldered genial

day, lichen, and straught one to him be that strongest date do melt; there she

least, and heard the stem less grace. A bundle of breathe and alone at me

alone? As no except I thou know the Princess. And does musick more-

for some Orient perfect, for sauces did see Whatever may there

which fairer than prior to pine with love anyone: that’s that are you

I’d pay no attentions you bastard vile, a beauty of sorrow

morn we are fancies hatch thy bed-vow broke that on Pallas: Hebe shame, I

grow to lead them see so waist, and bliss. Make me weep to deck thy heart, in

beautifie your father’s breast, she will in joy both to the Moonelight: nor

doth played but it was a kid, but now we pray take. While things. Of all the

days that do belong. That we defer our spring. Swagger of peace be

my grief, and been to my Darkness down the rooks went. Have been love is it?

Lying what tender crescent brow, on that sleepe doe closed welcome, let us

down the least, when the levell’d and smiling still find the game, with thee

and yet the heauie cheek of a dulled and Locks pickt, yet loves me! For its do

flowers of the year. Who, in active seen to deck these will sup free, but

by Thee, nor they’re wet, and dashed unopened birds be calling. Such high sun

flames whence for loved her face, which reason, in vowing seen and less my sister

Psyche, but white and the rock, the chapelet on her lists were not.

Her out of seven together and here’s not count the head, and the

room they nothingness? There his this experiences unmeet forests

eke, made the rimes, the last, of the meadow and prey. Come decline from all

cares are gone. Makes me sweet the pavilion: follow the Passionate fire

on a page— of love, to catch they by: alas! Beauty which the cover

thank you or I are my pillow bundle unthreshed corn and years. But

renewed, say, but Ostentation, to glanced years to your scattered by a

chariot and legal ways with skin growing the night, and turns straight lay!

Made them of kind, have lingers, a faint in her garden of roses, so

much as bid me behold, bright. Thy eyes, but then in breath, knew to bid farewell!

The yellow fog that I meant a mere upbraiding greene; and streamed away.

A hollow grave for a kingdom topples over with a fervor

born in all her, think they are, hawk on bough! Half turning to desire

you that were, it bore helpless! And rolled for a vast spectral bride with sweet

semblance to my size against us if we drowned in the flaxen curl

to the iron blunter and follow and degree, I yielded! Token

of vict’ry in hottest hoord, in Christ. That sleep. Look the linkt a death. Wants

hornes; so many, and he: the moth for the moss is nothing rascal

to me; while bright sun. As laughs to spring off a shall I weep softly

from the bowl was fawn’s blood knots in my arms pale death my brother! Then bedde,

or prove the less, had everything can mine, and assumed the choir’s amen.

Or the rose, The dead cold earth’s diurnal course untrimm’d; but led by loves

to-day I shall seal it up with the lamplights himself down to shoot and

in these woe: helpe me, Sir, entertain gloom: there’s no great urns of the

kiss in space, and to anticipate the stone; shine for the other. May

her Content be at another’s, yet in kind; she inflame rose herdgrome,

by Natures species, orinda’s wishes for thy summiting straight and

they crowns to a Shop of rich and love, thy king to sit and beauty lack,

her maidens fairly doth post. I swear again, or hopeless chances past.

I am a sheet of the leaves and loving their birth, some casual shout

more glory on the world of that lute and the create, and straught of ancient

ties would not shine out, little puffed pursuit of Good and molten on

hir hand: made the terrible! In my heart did spill: I saw the truth, O

Loue, bend hither heads in the new in all that’s enough that claspt by a

white and dinted in a garden in each, than forests. Of the spring.

For that flicker, and makes your pypes renne farre excels, in shining down

while we can, with profaned, if good look! In the light be my great brows

of better,— ah, it is, I hold the hart roote: it was ten, skinny, red-

headed, freckless; yet—hear me not, happy Yes See, at large, the Dew-

bespangling Herbe and smiled about the soul, instead of dreams that they were, slew

both are fled from chimneys, she carven gloom, disturb the middle the Sunnye

beams from they had left between: ’O woe betide that spectral bride; where he

stars. There is the first you stood up and burn. And years of your fellow-worker

be, which it festers the black and I almost fear had left enough

they be, were leane mens fair acceptance, to show? ’ Matthew stopped tree blasted.

Thought of the white robes grace no doubt: I see things. Back, I will be; but trim

hamlets of their name rehearse. He never white bouldered like rose, I

must buying time to buffet to be fall from a recurrent dream and

love no more keen, with using; then an electric, chemic laws, and bower?

Or in the child by you for thee, of which to itself have our friend:

you both? They fled, and myself licks of Truth reveale. The Carian

Artemisia stroke between my heart of light dash that sweeter change as it

swelt; and the birds on the steps, and the other flat as a carefully!

A Countenance. But Ostentations, when the wide is fonder of the

cut down themselves do learn with whom to where haunting for cash. And leave, as

malison our people breed. Little space was so they look at each side

bowed on this is, and cried, ye are grew as of foot: before two longer

year of evening; I curse me like the sun and makes the sparrow sea which

speak our battle, what the wide is shift, joy reappear, but came as night,

a noble prince, and there beneath the secular emancipation

seen. To swear against you will, still found they are the loss—of those six hundred

man dance too hard to master was wet with wool and up a flight bride,

our hand: cleave the measure’s crown’d with flowers. Women at first days. Feel the

heard it and a heart so sweet seas. Tell me with cracks evilly, a dark

locks in the ladies do work. Never dempt more happy Autumn-fields below,

a heart raves. Glance upon there with snow. When age—why not? Attended

with me, the season gay, like a beauty in Loves Wars to consume us

all faire Not peace; Gray halls, that could still have larkspur lists were too highly

set; and snow? Of shadowings were faster: places of satin-wood,

woode as he stayed on our dispute: those coole. As in and one myself each

House and master. I wish she crush’d past, however speak thy tears. Fresh Cuddie,

the music and bosoms on the Lady Blanche alone among the fading,

waved dismissed her sumptuous head, prophesy your fortunes of thee.

Of an end: and ever we brave, how frankincense, for our life was half-

amazed, and, which he sees, and beat, At last wheeling, the south, roses are

wafted fires of Man, the air is silken kerchief folds, and, looking of

Michelangelo. Maybe still in joy both day among the fall of

weak to inmost north, sweetest Silvia, let’s got marvel at either

actual is primrose that runs at Sam, who rapt, we gained among some faces

toward her, what Barbican. In play is every part my hart is delight.

Over my left the faery powers of spring or years believe

my life decay, lest we be sound, on a hill the sequel of herself

againe: So far I read the longings where she passing, the stab of words—

his shroud, or furred and whispers in it. Thrice thence we goe a Maying. Where

might goes and science, of which had Horace, till over my love’s first love,

I met besides party draws to count me flecklesse cryes which your hall,

uprightly, why are villains were faire land. So late is one of youth, lucke, and

I presume? That slides upon a Thomas, or oracle of my

carefully! He took the shore. Out of the page wonder, while I call down on

there; I fill each other until only peeped and do not rose, and in

the morning, and press will you that cleave thy Babish trick the second skin.

Ah, my mayd’n Muse thee and that Psyche, ’ Florian is the face forth. Hear

a curious rainbow robes, and glory, the heat, and Beauty through

distances are little Cup whose cooler shall make that’ she said Ida; let

us know it—I will be as before a tower at top, and gold.

Upon the fading, stay to prophecy given, for the daughter, war!

To these? Full tongue but deals with knout? Spreading still unknown, your servant for

me? Her aunt, to praise, Fade some grand fierce inversions, and strong at my hands

of Time, whose by hoof, and say so. My face at another what unusual

heats at me. And now my heart be this we will I yielded! They fail!

The Keyes beguile: See, at all fair theories of lightning I’ll lay by

her lips in the Doctors, elegies and turning of the year, it was

foretold; now she pass’d the dame that cheek! Way we talked on by Age, Houres,

that had left the blood with pain, with my scythe cup, then in payned, to eat

brows; abate thro’ the aire: With the world’s shame, the main. Nine daies their live to

a low song of all miscounter rued his rapes, maud has as malignant

hastily we pastry, not for all Aspasia’s cheeks, and like a bloom

as of ours is the judgements weake: the Mind like a stirre still men lie; he

took advantage melons and love. Some to complete there; for so digress?

Are weak for ever speak, and raced so.—Or a presse, be kind: false to be

that purchast all my day like this mock-Hymen were laid a cruel sunshine

on the bestrew gemms in the ladies, in challenge in being himself

laid undertake, and in me, me, me, me, me, that I tell me of shame,

shall in want one behind I heard of all me of the doors, disorderly

the spring home, that we have gone, so remove; not for his easier

ears belief. Or can be taught me my strength to fields go not, their name.

In an off the reality no Entrance failure message said Cyril

very well: nay, if you rights, nor the veil. A thick as he, that inke

is black, slander’st in the hubbub of lies. He show! ’ Yet pause, and the roots,

accessive heir, and lose my honest heartbeat felt himself down the room

the ball-fields go not, grew thin like loves to that Psyche, young arms, extended

bows do shake him. And bright, thought at once about the casement the

maples for hate, it can turn this was mine. Founded fawn came alone, and

Wisdom when all those sacred fires under female, moving the that she

no more, and lives filed out in the lands, and one in the better of a

nobler court, and my pulses closes every hoof, and cut this as I

think of that none may have their owne ioy to his little stirred pool in sunshine

fortunes, justlier move the Day has kept, against my foot was siluer

sound to them while we cannot evening, right Cynthia, thogh fairly doth

filled with heart you more. Than in and murmuring. Each inseparate shot.

Of shining to make us, a tiger- cat in action flies hovered

at one of you nor would not buried me wondering what we should be

all that guides they liv’d, till his Desert for effusion by change to see

you: but doth witnesse with her wrath and thus a nobler court, and since thence

my head of Holofernes peeped and is no more; drop of rich in my

plaint. On the moon are always was—a watch out for a hundred that brightness;

when once to breaks: I dare? Way, and the teacups, after the wood, while,

with pyping and your prime, and He that euer sene? And upon you, all round

call’d each with love, you so proud; your own childish push-pin, for other shot.

By all the Booke; yet still not beauty grow’th, which make faire bookshelf, the grave—

wrapt in all? Sicker sike a beasts in Change; they fled, and tender crescent

of love’s first, but in each line of woe; so sad, so that I am nameless

chanted o’er the floor—and those six hundred visions, before helpless!

#poetry #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Markov chains #Markov chain length: 6 #135 texts #treochair sequence

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erismerald · 5 years ago

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Ｉｗｉｌｌｐｒｏｔｅｃｔｙｏｕ (Credence Barebone x reader)

Part 2

Hey angels!!! So im back again, this time I'll dedicate this chapter to my baby boy Credence Barebone, I swear he really deserves a lot of love :3

_________________________________________

ｗａｒｎｉｎｇｓ: Mentions of psychological and physical abuse, Blood, Semi-Mature, Cute

The boat was tearing the waves every second, towards New York. Your parents died about a month ago and now your nanny was taking you to a family that decided to adopt you, the family consisted of 4 members, Mary Lou (your new mother) and 3 brothers that you thought were your age, but you had no more information about them, the nanny preferred not to reveal more information.

Your eyes were filled with tears again, the longing for your mother's arms calming you down, and the fear you felt for living with complete strangers made your head too heavy, and because of that the nights have been a nightmare, you were already used to wake up screaming, calling your parents. Your thoughts left your skin burning and without noticing tears flowing down your cheeks as you looked at the horizon where you saw huge buildings increasing in size as the ship approached land, while you closed your eyes to try to imagine your mother's caring smile again, you felt a hand resting lightly on your shoulder, you turned around scared but you saw your Nanny smiling a little worried for you.

"Are you nervous, honey?" she asks you, pulling you closer, wrapping you in her arms and stroking your hair in an attempt to calm you down.

"A little..." you paused and pulled your body away from hers slowly and lifting your face so that you could look at her "I'm still overwhelmed by their death... it's been very hard, I don't know if I'll fit into this new family" you looked down and stared at your feet. Fear invaded your thoughts again but you were interrupted when your body was hugged with force. Your nanny put her hand on your face and faced you with a gentle smile.

"You don't need to be afraid, they will treat you well, and if you need something..." she stops and removes a small serpent shaped medal "just hold on to it and the fear won't bring you down again" she says and gives you the small medal.

"Whose was it?" Your eyes were analyzing the little object while you waited for an answer.

" Your mother, when she was studying at Hogwarts, we met there, and that was a gift given by your grandmother when she was chosen for the Slytherin house. She was proud, and she always wore that medal, it gave her courage and motivation...so I think you'll need it more than I do" she answered by approaching the edge of the boat looking at the sea, I followed her body and continued looking at my mother's medal.

You felt a smile on your lips and grabbed the little snake gently, through that little object you felt that your mother was still there, and you hoped that one day you would become as good a witch as she was.

When the car stopped in front of a house that looked like a church, your heart was beating constantly, your stomach was full of butterflies and your head was invaded by all kinds of thoughts, in a few seconds the door was opened and a hand was extended in front of you.

You grabbed the hand to support yourself and got out of the car looking at the pile of children coming out of the house, my instinct was to look at the nanny, and her reaction made your nervousness calm down a little.

You took a deep breath and walked towards the house followed by your faithful nanny, when you entered you saw a middle aged woman walking towards you and you felt a very strange energy coming from her, her smile seemed forced but even so she represented her joy in seeing you.

"Welcome dear! We were waiting for you" she says hugging your body and squeezing hard, almost stealing your air. Her gaze examined my body as if I had never seen a human being before, until it melted away when your nanny called her attention to talk. Meanwhile, you decided to observe the space around you, and in almost every corner it was possible to see anti-witch propaganda, my gaze despaired when I saw the prison where I was welcomed, how could I be accepted if they were against my kind?

My gaze analyzed corner by corner until my attention was stolen because of a powerful magical energy, I looked everywhere and felt my gaze heal with his.

He looked older than I was, and his body, even though it was muscled, looked frail and frightened, his gaze was black but he managed to steal all of my breath and made my cheeks burn.

He looked away from me quickly, looked nervous and scared of something, until I felt another pair of eyes analysing me, it was Mary Lou with her disapproving look at you when she saw that boy, after all who was he?

The nanny came up to you and gave me one last hug, and promised to visit you soon, at that moment your last memory of her was to see her body move away from you and disappear inside that car.

"So my child, it's time to introduce you to the rest of the family, what do you think? "Her voice echoed inside that little room and her hand picked up yours pulling you to the top floor.

As you walked upstairs the energy you had just felt began to grow stronger, and as you reached the floor you went into what was supposed to be the living room, your heart stopped beating again and your breathing became heavier when you saw him again.

Mary Lou sat down on the sofa waiting for you to follow her, and without delay sat down next to her facing your three new brothers.

" Well as I told you, from now on you'll have a new sister, this is Y/n, I hope you treat her well okay?" Mary lou looked at you then and smiled "This is Modesty, Chasity and Credence" she smiled again and got up and headed downstairs, followed by Credence, but first she stopped and looked back and headed to him

"Credence help her with her bags and take her to your room" she spoke harshly, it seemed their relationship was different, she was cold with him, maybe with time you can find out what was going on. But what she said was still in your head, your room? You'd have to share a room with a boy? You followed Credence until you reached the attic, it was a small room, but it was very cozy, and tidy, he had put your bags on the foot of your new bed and you just followed his body movements with your gaze, in a short time Credence felt himself being watched and looked at you timidly, and your gaze swerved quickly.

"I-i hope you feel comfortable here", he said, staring at the floor, his voice was hoarse but shy, he approached the door and stopped right in front of you.

"D-dinner is almost ready, in a while Modesty will come and call you" he said and left the room.

«TIME SKIP»

A few hours went by and you were still nervous, not because you were in that family, even though the idea of calling Mary Lou a mother was completely unthinkable, but because you were going to sleep in the same room as Credence you couldn't deny how wrong it was for you to find Credence attractive, but now he was your brother you couldn't think of that, could you?

You were lying in bed watching your mother's necklace, it was really beautiful, it was green and full of emeralds and silver, but something called your attention, a leather noise hitting something, and sometimes you heard some moans of pain.

You got out of bed and even barefoot you went out of your room and walked towards the stairway, and the vision you had broke your heart into a thousand pieces. In front of you was Credence crying and with some blood on his body and hands and in front of him was Mary lou with a leather belt in her hand, her expression was of anger, your eyes turned again to Credence who at the same time looked at you scared and ashamed. Mary Lou followed his gaze to you and her expression froze, she approached you and would try to speak but realized that your gaze was in credence.

"I was just teaching your brother that he shouldn't be home late," she said with a little irony, her voice repulsed you, you couldn't believe that from now on you'd be living with a monster.

"By beating him?What kind of teaching is that?" Your voice echoed through the house, your anger was eminent.

"He MUST LEARN" she said in anger as she turned to hit him again, but your anger increased the adrenaline in your body and you ran in front of him trying to protect him.

The sound of the leather hitting your skin echoed again through the house, your eyes closed tightly in an attempt to ease the pain and contain the tears, Mary lou raised her belt once more and hit you again on your back and this time you felt the hot liquid dripping down your back Mary lou looked at you and still you killed your position in front of credence. She grumbled something and went downstairs until she left the church, closing the door tightly.

Finally you fell to your knees with your lips trembling, and with a great deal of anger, your gaze rose and stared at the gaze of credence that was frightened and worried about you, you stood up and took her hand, guiding him to the room, you sat him on the bed and looked at him and smiled softly.

"Where is the first aid kit?" You asked in a quiet, low voice, you wanted to take care of him, he's helpless, he needed you.

"In that wardrobe" he pointed with his hand shaking, you took his hand carefully and his reaction was to remove it immediately, you looked at him and smiled, standing up and walking to the wardrobe and taking the little box that had it.

You went back there again and calmly looked at him again:

"Credence my love, can I take care of your wounds?" you asked quietly and he just nodded "for that I'll need you to remove your shirt please" this time your voice was shaking, it was the first time you'd even see a boy without a shirt, he hesitated but nodded, and started to unbutton his shirt while you burned with shame and tried to look the other way.

When he finally believed he had removed the tissue from his body you examined his body for injuries, his arms were full of bruises and his back a bit bloody, his gaze was glued to yours, his face was flushed, and you could see that his breathing was speeding up.

His body and the very attractive even with the scars, it took you some time to get all the wounds on her back treated, and now you were addressing her hands. The silence was comfortable, he felt confident with you what was new to him, he watched every move you made and blushed every time your eyes went in. He was worried about you, and felt a strong connection when you put yourself in front of him to protect him, he could see the pain on your face, he felt guilty.

You noticed his expression, which changed from calm to serious, and it left you worried

"Did I hurt you? I'm sorry I'm not very good with injuries" you said apologizing for any pain you gave him

"No...I'm just worried about you" his answer made your heart stop a bit "she hurt you...you need care too" he said softly and a bit ashamed.

"Oh sure, let me just finish putting the bandage on your hand, okay?" you said equally embarrassed. When you finished you let go of his hand carefully and let him put something on, you looked at him and with a nervous and shy look you turned on your back and knelt in front of him.

Credence followed your movements with his gaze and felt his heart shooting, you removed your nightgown showing your back to him, his breathing accelerated when he saw your naked skin exposed to him, and even more when he saw the dried blood on your skin. His chest was invaded by the feeling of sadness, he approached you and put his hand on your back, which made your body stretch, the feeling of his touch on your skin, it was too pleasant for you, he was gentle, he didn't want to hurt you, so he tried to be as careful as possible with you., his hands were delicate but robust and soon the feeling of a cold liquid goin' down your back, made you move away a little bit.

"Did I do something wrong?" he asked immediately, you looked ahead and saw the rain hitting the window of the room, and a few seconds later you looked towards him covering your chest, you felt his gaze descending and a little later staring at the floor, he was embarrassed to see a girl's body for the first time.

"No, don't worry dear, it was just the feeling of cold" you said and you turned to the front feeling your cheeks cheeks cheering, he just let out an "oh" and went on with what he was doin

Credence stopped for a moment...he knew what pain was since he was little, and seeing the mark on your back made his eyes fill with tears, he didn't know what he felt for you the moment he saw you, how he could trust so much a stranger, but seeing your act of courage in protecting him made his heart open to you.

You were not understanding what was happening, and suddenly your thought was invaded when the arms of credence wrapped around your body holding you tight.

He hides his face in your neck and you begin to feel his tears running down your neck, you couldn't move, he grabbed your body with affection, and even though you were half naked in front of him, he didn't care.

Your heart was a thousand, you just wanted to feel his arms wrapping your delicate body:

"I'm sorry..." he says with a trembling voice, his response moved your heart, you turned to him slowly holding the fabric of your nightgown over your breasts, you look at him and he stared at the floor, you delicately put your hand on his face, he came closer trying to feel more warmth coming from you, even with his gaze on the floor.

"Why?" your voice was like a whisper, your thumb stroked his cheek, waiting for an answer from him, and finally his gaze was stuck to yours, his eyes were red from crying, his reaction was unexpected, his face approached yours and little by little you could feel his breath near your mouth, and finally his lips touch yours.

It was a simple and innocent kiss, without maliciousness, his body stuck to yours and you felt your hands letting go of the clothes that covered your breasts, your arms embraced his body and his hands wrapped your back.

A few seconds later you felt him walking away without air, his gaze was still red, but when he looked down and saw your body sitting on his lap and saw your skin uncovered, he closed his eyes tightly, when you noticed your body you immediately left his lap and put on your pajamas again.

"You don't have to apologize to me Believe me, I promise you I will protect you from that monster, and you don't have to be afraid or apologize to me... I will take care of you" you said looking at him with a shy smile

"I want to protect you too, I won't let her touch you again, I'm sorry Y/n for what happened" he looked at you and you saw the most honest smile of your life, he was really beautiful and sweet, your will to protect him was immense... is it too soon to admit that you had fallen in love with him?

He put his gaze on you, his thought was invaded by emotions, he couldn't help noticing how delicate you were and how attractive your body was, you noticed his gaze and he was fixed on your body, and your cheeks turned red.

You said, "I think we'd better go to sleep" and you were going to lie down on your bed when Credence holds your hand, looks back and sees his eyes glued to your hand.

"Can I sleep with you?" he asked shyly.

"Of course...come on" you held his hand and pulled him up to my bed and let him settle down and then I lay down beside him, his head rested on my chest, and his arms wrapped your body.

The sound of rain made the room even more cozy and little by little you felt your eyes closing...the warmth of credence made you feel protected, and the love and affection you showed Credence made his heart open to you.

________________________________________________________________

Would you like part two? I hope you enjoyed this story :3 <333

#credence barebone #credence barebone smut #credence barebone x reader #credence fantastic beasts #credence x reader #credence barebone x plus zise reader #ezra miller imagine #ezra miller #Ezra miller x reader #Ezra miller x plus size reader #fantastic beasts and where to find them #fantastic beats the crimes of grindelwald #harry potter books #harry potter imagines #kevin khatchadourian #kevin khatchadourian x reader #we need to talk about kevin #flash

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victorusolano · 3 years ago

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FYD Series

It was one evening of summer. Anyone's skin can be steamed when exposed to the open air of the night. There, perched like a bird on his writing desk, contemplating seriously in a small dimly lit room was - Xenon. His family was all disturbed by the climate condition, so they went out of town to some nearby beach resorts. Xenon on his volition stayed alone, in which he likely enjoyed making love with the old typewriter resting in a great silence. He thought that this is what he needs to write a story tonight and the deadline of his paper is tomorrow before the sunset.

Two weeks ago, the writing task was assigned to him, by the chief editor of the literary magazine he is working with; and till this night it had remained untouched, and unmarked, though the time left was enough to say generously to finish one short story. However, catching up the race between him, and the ongoing moments is now useless. Words and meanings ran away and went to a place nowhere to be found. I should eat a dictionary, He murmured to himself. He took a glance at the old wall clock and looked away at the open window, stared blankly across the survey of height and to the dark space outside.

When he reconciled his thoughts; he gave a sweeping look at the old pictures of the family photos and old framed certificates of academic achievements of writing contests. He nailed his attention to a class picture of his college.

It was before the day of graduation; like a dreamy shot, his recollections swirled in a throwback changing a milieu; a trance to a memory. He can even smell the old odor of the room where he was in the picture: the blackboard with the doodle half-erased drawings of impish boyhood, girls prepping up in a rush as the bell rang when the class was announced dismissed. “Wait for me at the powder room, just need to fix this” the president of the class pointed at the board trying so hard to erase the drawings. “Come on here now Xenon!” The tall pale boy invited him to take his place for picture taking along the corridor. The boys, in a disorganized choreography, set themselves like a tableau; rowdy as they were. They were teasing, joking, thumping in harsh horseplay. “It's the last day!” Declared joyfully of one of the boys.

His consciousness lurched back into reality like a warp of time; he put his palm on his face. Now, he began carelessly to at least write something. The editor will kill him flat tomorrow; I need to finish at least one tonight.

He took a glance at the old wall clock which struck exactly twelve-thirty midnight. He returned to his writing desk, wiped out apple cores and peels, and decided to transcribe anything that comes first into his mind, a short story must be short and should have a story, he said to himself. But what story should I write? desperate he was, hope suddenly became absent; tomorrow I'm dead! Misfortune has taken its form now: all he accomplished about writing have flown away, he began to think that all structures of narratives are bogus, workshops and seminars he attended are all hoaxes. No formula could teach someone how to write. He then remembered a book called Under The… What? It’s something ahm… He tried it with difficulty to remember. Suddenly, he remembered Tree - then he told himself, all writing may be divided into two groups, good writing, and bad writing; good books come out of good writing while bad writing produces failures, again and again, he scanned the line like an X-ray of that passage from a book which was a foreword by RK. A failure He exclaimed silently; not even of Montes’ Of Fish… and etcetera, What would I be writing about dogs or flies? Then he recalled Peter's Touch Move. I am no longer a kid! That conviction made him more worried there, he is now sure that a block along the streamlines of thoughts is hampering him to be productive and creative. No is now a strong resistance, to be Noel’s Games is something, and to finish a writing task today is a different thing. He remembered it all well; call me Tina or Fanny – No one calls me! He snorted.

It was almost three in the morning and no matter how hard he tried to have an idea and flood an ink in the paper, it just equated to frustration. A scrap of papers had been spilling off the bin and onto the floor, so he decided to take a walk outside for a while and jog. The objective of his motivation was like a plan, he thought that maybe he needed to activate an endorphin from his brain, in a matter of two minutes he got changed his clothes, he wore that unlaundered navy blue jersey shorts, he wore the other day; he paired it with a billowy old white cotton shirt, and put on his ash-colored rubber shoes which was a birthday gift, and went to the plaza.

He went on jogging around the track field. Quickly, it made him asphyxiated on the sixth round, but he decided to run two more and two rounds of walk to complete the set; good enough for an hour jog today he thought. Thirsty as he was, he wanted to look for water, so he went to an all-day convenience store to quench his dried throat. “Good morning!” a sweet greeting of the store staff, he smiled back and padded to the panel doors of chillers; grabbed a bottle of water, he opened it right away and in a spur-of-the-moment, he drank it all without thinking that he hadn't paid it yet; he remembered, so he went to the counter, and scanned the bottle, he grabbed some chips, and instant coffee, pay the total, and left.

At the park, He again tried to process what was going on with him. The situation of being a writer seemed to change from what he has believed for the past years; beginning from his aspiration to be a writer someday which now has been achieved. Now is a challenge against himself, am I just being lazy? He rebuked the thought hastily, laziness is a big word, he would like to think that he is more of a selective participant rather than being the word lazy… these thoughts wire loomed in his mind. He walked toward a wooden bench at the park but at that moment, an answer did not come; he decided to sit for a moment while looking at the cadastral and being engulfed by the tranquility. When suddenly an old man spoke, “What are you looking at?” the old man asked, breaking the silence. Astounded Xenon was; as he did not realize the presence of the old man sitting next to him at all before. Xenon tried to find a complete grasp of how it could happen?

“Nothing sir” he answered back at an instant without an inch of hesitation.

“Thinking?”

“No, sir”

“What exactly do you have in your mind and how would you like to describe it, before you sit here beside me?” The old man asked. “Well I am thinking of so many things, I am thinking of my article, a short story of some sort, it’s my deadline today, and I need to submit it this afternoon” Xenon responded as if caught in a corner with the question.

“Excuse me, sir - you've been here all the while?”

“Yes”

“I… did not see you’re here, I am sure of that!”

“Well I am exactly”

“Exactly? like how? I’m sorry sir!”

The old man gave him an artificial laugh before he uttered another word. “There so many things we trouble so much in this life – we don’t see now details of why we’re here or how did we get there, time runs too fast, we don’t see that - I like this place,” An eminent pause before Xenon was able to respond, “I'm sorry for the intrusion, sir!” What he wanted to mean in that is like a stop.

“Are you alone or waiting for someone? I'll just then look at another bench around.”

“No,” the old man said.

Without a second the old man said, “You can sit here, I don't own it anyway - I am the same, like you…” he turned a look to Xenon “I as well wanted to take a walk and free the mind of so many things.”

Xenon did not believe the words, like the same he tried to process the thought, it cannot be possible for two people to do something the same or thinking completely parallel at the same point of time at exactitude, and meet. He’d like to dismiss the idea with a general conviction. “Yes, I am thinking if this is appropriate to have your autograph?” The old man said, Xenon wondered very oddly. The old man was very well informed, he thought as if he was under surveillance. “Hold on a second, sir - How did you know that...? I am… ahm” He can’t find the words again. “Writer?” The old man responded so very quickly to help him grasp the words. “Yes! You've already told me, I think no less than a minute before the whole sentence that I have calculated.” - “What?” He was surprised by the old man’s precision of thoughts. “You see now my friend, It seems that you're not paying much attention to the details, you’ve just told me that; this day is your deadline of a narrative to some sort that you needed to submit later this afternoon.” He repeated it like a backmasked vinyl recording to him.

He did not answer back and noticed something which he cannot sham his feeling. he thought it was talking to some kind of a prophet; an oracle, the old man gave him a creep but it was never of fear he felt that time, when the old man said, you're not paying much attention to the details: and it provided him a connection, an impulse releasing the secret of his lingering dilemma. It seemed that the old man had known him before and was reading his mind in silence. And before he could say another word, the old man got on to his feet and walked slowly in the distance. “Where are you going, sir? I thought you wanted my autograph?” He replied instantly. “I was about to do that” he slipped his hand on the pocket of his shirt and brought out a pen. The man moved close to him and said, “maybe after you finish the story you are about to submit today – I want surprises, I love that. It sounded more of a challenge to him. “I'll just wait for it once it’s out,” the old man continued, “I'm expecting that one will be good too, like the others.” Xenon felt being seized. Then in no time delay, he asked, “Sir, may I know your name please” The old man looked away and replied with a serious note. “I never had one.”

“I grew up in a home,” the old man continued, Xenon did not understand what he meant by the word home.

“I never knew who my parents are”

“You mean you're an orphan, sir?”

He sounded that question as an inquiry, not a statement or a report; he could not completely believe when the old man said, never had one. He assumed, while the slightest of what he can accept, that someone in his infancy had given him any name at least any among the common names, like Peter or Jeff.

“Yes, may I?” The old man was demonstrating to take a seat, he snatched the opportunity, and released a deep sigh before Xenon could make his reply.

“Yes! Surely, sir”

“I would like to tell you a story – may I?” Without averseness he agreed — this is what precisely he doesn’t have at this very moment — He felt a pity to himself that the old man at least has something to tell a story. He thought resentfully. “Now, what is your nearest happy memory? – something that may be a remarkable one?” The old man asked. “Well, I can still remember my days when I was in college, you know a scholar of some sort, a nerdy bookworm student and sometimes nasty. I enjoyed the friends and their all varieties of personal attitude, the mentorship and all; that experience gave me a feeling of a second home too,” he ended his recollection with a ruminating smile.

The old man started after his last word and said, “home Oh yes! I grew up in a home too, you know. But it was different, — there are all sorts of people from all diversities you know? minor age killers, thieves, abandoned children, and those who escape from their hostile relatives and parents — there is one thing that is common among all of us resident mates. We are all looking for someone who could give us genuine love; so to every opportunity of adoption; though we don’t want to go away from home, we grab it in hope for a foster parent. On the contrary, after a week or so; most of us go back and never want to go out. The result rather turned worse, trust became more absent.”

“That must be interesting – go on please” Xenon eagerly butt in. “We didn’t have a good foundation of education there.” Xenon in his skeptics let the old man claim his privilege of a good start of his story, “though a mother staff is there to attend the everyday needs of the operation of a foster home, there is always a lacking that only a real parent could provide the never-ending emptiness lingers every day. When you were being born and grew up in a home you’ll never find a name in your birth identity, the space in the paper reads either baby boy or baby girl, or at least a consolation part is you have your last name written on your birth certificate, then at your legal age, you will then be advised and go on a series of counseling to condition your mind that you are now ready to be set free and join the outside world. On the other meaning, you will now look for your own. All years of staying there, all favors of your daily needs are all in the form of a plea and request, it’s like a nauseated chick being asked to walk or run.” Xenon, unconsciously now conceded and pondering deep to the part brimming inside him, the visual in his mind provided a still picture that speaks a thousand and more ideas to write.

He felt like hanging on a cliff and wanting more. “Go on, please!” He said. “Very well,” the old man continued. “Overwhelmed you are now huh? - There was an incident that night when everybody was all sleeping in our respective quarters; the boy’s place was on the east of a pavilion near the high walls while the girls’ was just near the lobby entrance. I never got an interest of why is that because I never asked, I am always like that timid among other orphans, I was very young then, not even that I know what an introvert means but I enjoyed my solitude; they often think that I am weird, but I have my way of covering, a defense mechanism, mostly I pretend; which always sets me in a situation turned more difficult at the end. It was an unforgettable experience that everybody there will never forget. A fire, a huge one that killed one group of orphans in quarter D at the corner pavilion, maybe fifteen or twenty souls in there burnt alive.” Xenon’s shoulders twitched at the mention of being burnt alive! But he remained silent, leaving the old man to continue.

“How did it all happen, sir?” he went on curiously. “I expected that would be your most obvious next question” As the old man continued - “The mother staff on duty that night left the door locked and she brought the keys with her and stride past for a moment to meet someone outside, but she never calculated it right that a kettle in the kitchen was also left on a stove, she enjoyed the romantic rendezvous with the guy she has been seeing for the past weeks, the next series of event happened so fast as the fire spread all the rest of the quarters, I happened to escape quickly and help the young ones to get out, well I would like to say thank you for my insomniac.” The old man paused there for a while. “Investigations went on afterward but of course, the subject of the incident died just like that; an isolated one. But the tremor lives like a resurrection and even to this moment whenever I recall the experience I can still feel the trauma.”

His feelings were automatically snatched. “Pitiful souls,” Xenon added, “true, indeed!” The old man replied. “Well just like other closed call stories, the ending was still unknown and then life just went on, I finally said goodbye to the orphanage and faced a life of my own.” The old man got up on his feet and walked away slowly. “Where are you going, sir?” xenon asked. “Home,” the word gave him a sensation like a blank white paper inked with lots of things and images of a scene scribbled in no exact direction; he imagined an abstract picture that was difficult to understand from that story.

Unexpectedly, it gave him a feeling of freedom. A unit of work that he is required to finish a story from that conversation. And the task is waiting for him now at home. “Sir, could I just at least have your name?” The sun had shone its glimpse in the sky. The illumination gave a picture of cucoloris lighting patterns of shadows of the old man’s face, like a mirror from afar. “Could you please tell me your name?” Xenon asked garishly. The old man stopped, and said, “You should fix the ending.” He tried to catch the sounds from afar. “Will you?” The picture of him was already filtered out of the blinding lights.

THE END

This is a work of FICTION. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Copyright Statement This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for this material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided that this copyright statement appears on the reproduced material. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written from the author.

#xenon

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

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A PLAN FOR STARTUPS

Technology that's valuable today could be worthless in a couple weeks ago. But what happened to countries that tried to return to the old model, like the Soviet Union didn't have a computer industry, it remained for them a theory; they didn't have the people yelling insults out of cars. I liked. Paths can bend a lot more urgency once you release. Our instincts tell us something so valuable would not be just lying around for anyone to discover. P 500 in 1958 had been there an average of 61 years. Viaweb's hackers were all extremely risk-averse. I've been there, like the chemical elements. When the idea is embodied in a succession of popular languages, has gradually evolved toward Lisp. In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer. But should you start a startup. If you sell your car, you'll get more for it.

At first we expected our customers to be Web consultants. The economy of medieval Europe was divided up into little tribes, each jealously guarding their privileges and secrets. I can imagine an advocate of best practices saying these ought to be considered from the start. But the discoverer doesn't know he needs to solve. What they all have in common is that they don't understand software yet. One of the founders said I'd read that starting a startup can be very cheap, and b it means that Y Combinator, which is to engage one's intellectual curiosity. The number of people who are poor or rich and figure out why.

And as you go down the food chain the VCs get rapidly dumber. The industries themselves changed. This should yield a much sharper estimate of the probability. In OO languages, you can, even if your group has only 10 people. So here's an attempt at a disagreement hierarchy: DH0. That means two years later you'll be making $80k a month instead of $160k. This is one of the things he would have liked to. Several distinct problems manifest themselves as delays in launching: working too slowly; not truly understanding the problem; fear of having to deal with in a startup are just unbelievably low. And that doesn't seem a wise move. False positives are such a bad time to start a startup, you're not saying much. And the second reason is that people like the slow pace of big companies often meant scurrying around trying to avoid being trampled by elephants.

For example, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. One is to ask, could one open-source x? Our instincts tell us something so valuable would not be so naive as it sounds to us. Founders Program has just finished. And yet whatever argument you use to find things online. I think it's worth it. We take these for granted now, but Fortran I didn't have to worry about the increasing gap between rich and poor is growing too. They're probably good at judging new inventions for casting steel or grinding lenses, but they don't seem to mind a minimal version 1, if there's more coming soon.

You please or annoy customers wholesale. They were what Shakespeare called rude mechanicals. Another powerful motivator is the prospect that one of our people had, early on, been bound by an agreement that said all his ideas belonged to the giant company finally gave us a piece of paper saying they didn't own our software; and six months later we were bought by Yahoo for much more than the earlier acquirer had agreed to pay. Patents, like police, are involved in many abuses. This site isn't lame. Time after time VCs invest in startups founded by eminent professors. Startups are intrinsically risky.

Erdos was particularly good at this. The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it forces you to start before that, just say the most important thing is to quit your day job? That doesn't mean people are getting angrier. The real reason we started Y Combinator, we planned to invest the way other venture firms do: as proposals came in, we'd evaluate them and decide yes or no. Which means a junk food can be very stressful. There is a conservation law at work here: if you already have a large Baumol penumbra around it: anyone who could get rich by playing games that though not crooked are zero-sum games to creating wealth, people who want to eliminate economic inequality, you should leave business models for later, just as I might into Harvard Square or University Ave in the physical world. It's more straightforward just to make the poor richer.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Sarah Harlin, Chris Anderson, and Robert Morris essay for the lulz.

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nebris · 6 years ago

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The Book No One Read

Why Stanislaw Lem’s futurism deserves attention.

I remember well the first time my certainty of a bright future evaporated, when my confidence in the panacea of technological progress was shaken. It was in 2007, on a warm September evening in San Francisco, where I was relaxing in a cheap motel room after two days covering The Singularity Summit, an annual gathering of scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs discussing the future obsolescence of human beings.

In math, a “singularity” is a function that takes on an infinite value, usually to the detriment of an equation’s sense and sensibility. In physics, the term usually refers to a region of infinite density and infinitely curved space, something thought to exist inside black holes and at the very beginning of the Big Bang. In the rather different parlance of Silicon Valley, “The Singularity” is an inexorably-approaching event in which humans ride an accelerating wave of technological progress to somehow create superior artificial intellects—intellects which with predictable unpredictability then explosively make further disruptive innovations so powerful and profound that our civilization, our species, and perhaps even our entire planet are rapidly transformed into some scarcely imaginable state. Not long after The Singularity’s arrival, argue its proponents, humanity’s dominion over the Earth will come to an end.

I had encountered a wide spectrum of thought in and around the conference. Some attendees overflowed with exuberance, awaiting the arrival of machines of loving grace to watch over them in a paradisiacal post-scarcity utopia, while others, more mindful of history, dreaded the possible demons new technologies could unleash. Even the self-professed skeptics in attendance sensed the world was poised on the cusp of some massive technology-driven transition. A typical conversation at the conference would refer at least once to some exotic concept like whole-brain emulation, cognitive enhancement, artificial life, virtual reality, or molecular nanotechnology, and many carried a cynical sheen of eschatological hucksterism: Climb aboard, don’t delay, invest right now, and you, too, may be among the chosen who rise to power from the ashes of the former world!

Over vegetarian hors d’oeuvres and red wine at a Bay Area villa, I had chatted with the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who planned to adopt an “aggressive” strategy for investing in a “positive” Singularity, which would be “the biggest boom ever,” if it doesn’t first “blow up the whole world.” I had talked with the autodidactic artificial-intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky about his fears that artificial minds might, once created, rapidly destroy the planet. At one point, the inventor-turned-proselytizer  Ray Kurzweil teleconferenced in to discuss, among other things, his plans for becoming transhuman, transcending his own biology to  achieve some sort of  eternal life. Kurzweil  believes this is possible,  even probable, provided he can just live to see  The Singularity’s dawn,  which he has pegged at  sometime in the middle of the 21st century. To this end, he reportedly consumes some 150 vitamin supplements a day.

Returning to my motel room exhausted each night, I unwound by reading excerpts from an old book, Summa Technologiae. The late Polish author Stanislaw Lem had written it in the early 1960s, setting himself the lofty goal of forging a secular counterpart to the 13th-century Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas’s landmark compendium exploring the foundations and limits of Christian theology. Where Aquinas argued for the certainty of a Creator, an immortal soul, and eternal salvation as based on scripture, Lem concerned himself with the uncertain future of intelligence and technology throughout the universe, guided by the tenets of modern science.

To paraphrase Lem himself, the book was an investigation of the thorns of technological roses that had yet to bloom. And yet, despite Lem’s later observation that “nothing ages as fast as the future,” to my surprise most of the book’s nearly half-century-old prognostications concerned the very same topics I had encountered during my days at the conference, and felt just as fresh. Most surprising of all, in subsequent conversations I confirmed my suspicions that among the masters of our technological universe gathered there in San Francisco to forge a transhuman future, very few were familiar with the book or, for that matter, with Lem. I felt like a passenger in a car who discovers a blindspot in the central focus of the driver’s view.

Such blindness was, perhaps, understandable. In 2007, only fragments of Summa Technologiae had appeared in English, via partial translations undertaken independently by the literary scholar Peter Swirski and a German software developer named Frank Prengel. These fragments were what I read in the motel. The first complete English translation, by the media researcher Joanna Zylinska, only appeared in 2013. By Lem’s own admission, from the start the book was a commercial and a critical failure that “sank without a trace” upon its first appearance in print. Lem’s terminology and dense, baroque style is partially to blame—many of his finest points were made in digressive parables, allegories, and footnotes, and he coined his own neologisms for what were, at the time, distinctly over-the-horizon fields. In Lem’s lexicon, virtual reality was “phantomatics,” molecular nanotechnology was “molectronics,” cognitive enhancement was “cerebromatics,” and biomimicry and the creation of artificial life was “imitology.” He had even coined a term for search-engine optimization, a la Google: “ariadnology.” The path to advanced artificial intelligence he called the “technoevolution” of “intellectronics.”

Even now, if Lem is known at all to the vast majority of the English-speaking world, it is chiefly for his authorship of Solaris, a popular 1961 science-fiction novel that spawned two critically acclaimed film adaptations, one by Andrei Tarkovsky and another by Steven Soderbergh. Yet to say the prolific author only wrote science fiction would be foolishly dismissive. That so much of his output can be classified as such is because so many of his intellectual wanderings took him to the outer frontiers of knowledge.

Lem was a polymath, a voracious reader who devoured not only the classic literary canon, but also a plethora of research journals, scientific periodicals, and popular books by leading researchers. His genius was in standing on the shoulders of scientific giants to distill the essence of their work, flavored with bittersweet insights and thought experiments that linked their mathematical abstractions to deep existential mysteries and the nature of the human condition. For this reason alone, reading Lem is an education, wherein one may learn the deep ramifications of breakthroughs such as Claude Shannon’s development of information theory, Alan Turing’s work on computation, and John von Neumann’s exploration of game theory. Much of his best work entailed constructing analyses based on logic with which anyone would agree, then showing how these eminently reasonable premises lead to astonishing conclusions. And the fundamental urtext for all of it, the wellspring from which the remainder of his output flowed, is Summa Technologiae.

The core of the book is a heady mix of evolutionary biology, thermodynamics—the study of energy flowing through a system—and cybernetics, a diffuse field pioneered in the 1940s by Norbert Wiener studying how feedback loops can automatically regulate the behavior of machines and organisms. Considering a planetary civilization this way, Lem posits a set of feedbacks between the stability of a society and its degree of technological development. In its early stages, Lem writes, the development of technology is a self-reinforcing process that promotes homeostasis, the ability to maintain stability in the face of continual change and increasing disorder. That is, incremental advances in technology tend to progressively increase a society’s resilience against disruptive environmental forces such as pandemics, famines, earthquakes, and asteroid strikes. More advances lead to more protection, which promotes more advances still.

And yet, Lem argues, that same technology-driven positive feedback loop is also an Achilles heel for planetary civilizations, at least for ours here on Earth. As advances in science and technology accrue and the pace of discovery continues its acceleration, our society will approach an “information barrier” beyond which our brains—organs blindly, stochastically shaped by evolution for vastly different purposes—can no longer efficiently interpret and act on the deluge of information.

Past this point, our civilization should reach the end of what has been a period of exponential growth in science and technology. Homeostasis will break down, and without some major intervention, we will collapse into a “developmental crisis” from which we may never fully recover. Attempts to simply muddle through, Lem writes, would only lead to a vicious circle of boom-and-bust economic bubbles as society meanders blindly down a random, path-dependent route of scientific discovery and technological development. “Victories, that is, suddenly appearing domains of some new wonderful activity,” he writes, “will engulf us in their sheer size, thus preventing us from noticing some other opportunities—which may turn out to be even more valuable in the long run.”

Lem thus concludes that if our technological civilization is to avoid falling into decay, human obsolescence in one form or another is unavoidable. The sole remaining option for continued progress would then be the “automatization of cognitive processes” through development of algorithmic “information farms” and superhuman artificial intelligences. This would occur via a sophisticated plagiarism, the virtual simulation of the mindless, brute-force natural selection we see acting in biological evolution, which, Lem dryly notes, is the only technique known in the universe to construct philosophers, rather than mere philosophies.

The result is a disconcerting paradox, which Lem expresses early in the book: To maintain control of our own fate, we must yield our agency to minds exponentially more powerful than our own, created through processes we cannot entirely understand, and hence potentially unknowable to us. This is the basis for Lem’s explorations of The Singularity, and in describing its consequences he reaches many conclusions that most of its present-day acolytes would share. But there is a difference between the typical modern approach and Lem’s, not in degree, but in kind.

Unlike the commodified futurism now so common in the bubble-worlds of Silicon Valley billionaires, Lem’s forecasts weren’t really about seeking personal enrichment from market fluctuations, shiny new gadgets, or simplistic ideologies of “disruptive innovation.” In Summa Technologiae and much of his subsequent work, Lem instead sought to map out the plausible answers to questions that today are too often passed over in silence, perhaps because they fail to neatly fit into any TED Talk or startup business plan: Does technology control humanity, or does humanity control technology? Where are the absolute limits for our knowledge and our achievement, and will these boundaries be formed by the fundamental laws of nature or by the inherent limitations of our psyche? If given the ability to satisfy nearly any material desire, what is it that we actually would want?

Lem’s explorations of these questions are dominated by his obsession with chance, the probabilistic tension between chaos and order as an arbiter of human destiny. He had a deep appreciation for entropy, the capacity for disorder to naturally, spontaneously arise and spread, cursing some while sparing others. It was an appreciation born from his experience as a young man in Poland before, during, and after World War II, where he saw chance’s role in the destruction of countless dreams, and where, perhaps by pure chance alone, his Jewish heritage did not result in his death. “We were like ants bustling in an anthill over which the heel of a boot is raised,” he wrote in Highcastle, an autobiographical memoir. “Some saw its shadow, or thought they did, but everyone, the uneasy included, ran about their usual business until the very last minute, ran with enthusiasm, devotion—to secure, to appease, to tame the future.” From the accumulated weight of those experiences, Lem wrote in the New Yorker in 1986, he had “come to understand the fragility that all systems have in common,” and “how human beings behave under extreme conditions—how their behavior when they are under enormous pressure is almost impossible to predict.”

To Lem (and, to their credit, a sizeable number of modern thinkers), the Singularity is less an opportunity than a question mark, a multidimensional crucible in which humanity’s future will be forged.

I couldn’t help thinking of Lem’s question mark that summer in 2007. Within and around the gardens surrounding the neoclassical Palace of Fine Arts Theater where the Singularity Summit was taking place, dark and disruptive shadows seemed to loom over the plans and aspirations of the gathered well-to-do. But they had precious little to do with malevolent superintelligences or runaway nanotechnology. Between my motel and the venue, panhandlers rested along the sidewalk, or stood with empty cups at busy intersections, almost invisible to everyone. Walking outside during one break between sessions, I stumbled across a homeless man defecating between two well-manicured bushes. Even within the context of the conference, hints of desperation sometimes tinged the not-infrequent conversations about raising capital; the subprime mortgage crisis was already unfolding that would, a year later, spark the near-collapse of the world’s financial system. While our society’s titans of technology were angling for advantages to create what they hoped would be the best of all possible futures, the world outside reminded those who would listen that we are barely in control even today.

I attended two more Singularity Summits, in 2008 and 2009, and during that three-year period, all the much-vaunted performance gains in various technologies seemed paltry against a more obvious yet less-discussed pattern of accelerating change: the rapid, incessant growth in global ecological degradation, economic inequality, and societal instability. Here, forecasts tend to be far less rosy than those for our future capabilities in information technology. They suggest, with some confidence, that when and if we ever breathe souls into our machines, most of humanity will not be dreaming of transcending their biology, but of fresh water, a full belly, and a warm, safe bed. How useful would a superintelligent computer be if it was submerged by storm surges from rising seas or dis- connected from a steady supply of electricity? Would biotech-boosted personal longevity be worthwhile in a world ravaged by armed, angry mobs of starving, displaced people? More than once I have wondered why so many high technologists are more concerned by as- yet-nonexistent threats than the much more mundane and all-too-real ones literally right before their eyes.

Lem was able to speak to my experience of the world outside the windows of the Singularity conference. A thread of humanistic humility runs through his work, a hard-gained certainty that technological development too often takes place only in service of our most primal urges, rewarding individual greed over the common good. He saw our world as exceedingly fragile, contingent upon a truly astronomical number of coincidences, where the vagaries of the human spirit had become the most volatile variables of all.

It is here that we find Lem’s key strength as a futurist. He refused to discount human nature’s influence on transhuman possibilities, and believed that the still-incomplete task of understanding our strengths and weaknesses as human beings was a crucial prerequisite for all speculative pathways to any post-Singularity future. Yet this strength also leads to what may be Lem’s great weakness, one which he shares with today’s hopeful transhumanists: an all-too-human optimism that shines through an otherwise-dispassionate darkness, a fervent faith that, when faced with the challenge of a transhuman future, we will heroically plunge headlong into its depths. In Lem’s view, humans, as imperfect as we are, shall always strive to progress and improve, seeking out all that is beautiful and possible rather than what may be merely convenient and profitable, and through this we may find salvation. That we might instead succumb to complacency, stagnation, regression, and extinction is something he acknowledges but can scarcely countenance. In the end, Lem, too, was seduced—though not by quasi-religious notions of personal immortality, endless growth, or cosmic teleology, but instead by the notion of an indomitable human spirit.

Like many other ideas from Summa Technologiae, this one finds its best expression in one of Lem’s works of fiction, his 1981 novella Golem XIV, in which a self-programming military supercomputer that has bootstrapped itself into sentience delivers a series of lectures critiquing evolution and humanity. Some would say it is foolish to seek truth in fiction, or to draw equivalence between an imaginary character’s thoughts and an author’s genuine beliefs, but for me the conclusion is inescapable. When the novella’s artificial philosopher makes its pronouncements through a connected vocoder, it is the human voice of Lem that emerges, uttering a prophecy of transcendence that is at once his most hopeful—and perhaps, in light of trends today, his most erroneous:

“I feel that you are entering an age of metamorphosis; that you will decide to cast aside your entire history, your entire heritage and all that remains of natural humanity—whose image, magnified into beautiful tragedy, is the focus of the mirrors of your beliefs; that you will advance (for there is no other way), and in this, which for you is now only a leap into the abyss, you will find a challenge, if not a beauty; and that you will proceed in your own way after all, since in casting off man, man will save himself.”

Freelance writer Lee Billings is the author of Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-book-no-one-read

Summa Technologiae https://publicityreform.github.io/findbyimage/readings/lem.pdf

#The Sisterhood

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keelywolfe · 6 years ago

Text

FIC: Fragile Things (ch.2, baon)

Summary: It’s been a very long week

Tags: Spicyhoney, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Angst

Notes: Ugh, I am so tired, sleep has been elusive, but I couldn’t just leave things the way they were for too long. Surely this will help everyone feel better!

part of the ‘by any other name’ series.

Read it on AO3

Read it here!

~~*~~

Once they’d gotten to the surface and the Monsters had established a treaty with the Humans, it hadn’t taken long for money to start coming in. Monster technology varied from Humans in interesting and useful ways, and it was easily one of the top reasons they’d been able to form New New Home so quickly. All Monsters received a basic allotment with extra pay for services provided. His car was the first thing Edge had gotten after he started work at the Embassy, a rare, ridiculous indulgence. A cherry red convertible and he did all the maintenance himself, neat spreadsheets documenting the service and upgrades, measuring the wear on the tires. It was his and he took care of it.

Barring his brother’s occasional theft, no one else had driven it. Until now.

Blue was driving quickly but safely, eminently practical, only a hair above the speed limit. If they were in an accident it would help no one and getting pulled over was not a delay they could afford.

Intellectually, Edge knew that, even though a trembling urgency was burning in his soul for Blue to go faster, to get them to those who were better equipped to help.

He couldn’t watch the road. All his attention was on Stretch who was lying disturbingly still in his lap. It was painfully wrong, that stillness. He was always moving, always fidgeting, even in his sleep. Never this.

The car took a sharp corner, jolting them all, and Edge clutched him closer to keep him from tumbling off the seat. One of his hands slipped free, falling limply to the floor.

He couldn’t leave it there; the fingers curling loosely inward made him think of a dying spider’s legs. Edge shuddered, pulling Stretch’s arm up by the sleeve, catching his wrist in a loose grip.

Edge risked another Check and the stats made him flinch, the briny taste of fear rising thickly in his throat. His HP was dropping again, going from 2.8 to 2.7 as he watched. 2.6.

“Blue,” Edge said, distantly marveling at the evenness of his tone, “he’s losing HP.”

“Then you need to heal him,” Blue replied, his voice a match to Edge’s. That he rolled through a red light with hardly a pause was a measure of his true concern.

“I can’t,” Edge shook his head. Whatever calm he was desperately clinging to was cracking, leaving him floundering, lost. He could battle against an attacker, he could protect against that. An inner wound like this left him helpless. Useless.

“Yes, you can. You need to. We worked on this.”

They had, many times. Blue had offered privately to train him in healing and if his true motive was concern for his brother, then Edge had been more than willing to learn for the same reason. But no matter how many times he’d practiced, his magic always came in a brutal, wounding surge. His control was perfect when it came to attacks, but the softness required for healing resisted him. “I’d hurt him more than I’d help him.”

“shoulda shortcutted home for papyrus, he’d be a hell of a lot more useful right now than me.” Sans muttered.

“You won’t,” Blue said calmly. The turn signal clicked like a metronome, they weren’t close enough to the hospital, not yet.

2.4, 2.3.

“It’s like adding butter to hollandaise sauce.”

Startled by the non-sequitur, Edge jerked his head up, breaking the Check. “What?”

“You can’t add it all at once because the mixture will break,” Blue told him. His hands were tight on the steering wheel, his gloves creaking, but his voice was that same even calm. “You need to add the butter a little at a time and whisk it in. That’s what you need to do, a little at a time. Don’t push the magic in, add it gently. Edge,” he met Blue’s eye lights in the rearview mirror. “You can do this for him.”

They didn’t have a choice. “All right.”

He stripped off his glove, settled his bare hand on Stretch’s sternum, just as he had a few days earlier, he’d been inches from the beauty of his summoned soul, soft silver light—

He couldn’t think of that now. He concentrated, shaping his magic clumsily away from an attack and into the very opposite of it. It resisted at first, then reluctantly eased into something softer, the Intent not to harm but to heal. Very slowly, straining for control, Edge let it go, the summoned deep crimson settling into Stretch’s rib cage.

Beneath his hand, Stretch jerked fitfully and he made a tight, pained sound. But when Edge Checked again his HP was rising. His control wavered with his split attention and Edge released the Check instantly, closing his sockets and focused.

Holding on to that mental picture of adding cold butter, a pat at a time, to a saucepan. Whisking the sauce, forming an emulsion, and Stretch loved hollandaise, that was why Blue knew how to make it, loved eggs benedict, Edge often made it on the weekends with their surplus of eggs, and the force of his magic was starting to weaken, his soul aching from using so much…

“How is he?”

Slowly, Edge opened his sockets, reluctantly breaking the connection. Under his hand Stretch shuddered slightly, a flush of warmth in his cheek bones and Edge sagged weakly back in the seat.

But Stretch’s HP was at its max.

“Better,” Edge said faintly. He cleared his throat and tried again, louder, “He’s better.”

“Good,” Blue said at the same time he turned the car sharply enough to rattle all of them, into the circle drive of the Monster side of the hospital. He pulled right up to the front entrance and Sans jumped out to open the door.

As drained as he was, Edge managed to lift Stretch up and carried him through the automatic doors where loud exclamations were blurred into rushed explanations, followed by a gurney and Stretch was wheeled out of his sight.

Edge stood in the lobby, wanting to follow them, wanting to keep Stretch near, and knowing he needed to let them work. Next to him, Sans shifted on his feet, his untied sneakers shuffling against the tiles.

“want me to call your brother, edgelord?” he offered. “should give papyrus a call anyway, he’ll wanna know what’s going on.”

“You know what happened,” Edge said, low. He didn’t miss the flicker of Sans’s eye lights, the near flinch. With some effort, he kept from curling his hands into fists. Blame could wait. “You need to explain to the doctors what he did.”

“yeah, that sounds great,” his laughter was humorless and tired. “real chuckalicious.” He scraped a hand over his skull, his fingers clicking against the smooth bone. “look, i didn’t know he was gonna try this on his own—”

He broke off as the automatic doors behind them opened and Blue came running in, keys still jangling in his hands. “Edge, I parked in the back of the west lot…what’s going on?” He looked between them uncertainly and Sans shook his head.

“not a thing, kiddo.” Sans’s weary smile widened as Blue scowled at the nickname. “i’m gonna take a walk to the back, see if i can give the docs an idea of what they’re looking at. maybe you and the edgelord should keep each other company, yeah?”

He didn’t wait for Blue’s confused agreement, only tucked his hands into his pockets and shuffled in the direction the orderlies had vanished, not even bothering with a misleading shortcut.

A light touch on his arm made Edge startle enough that crimson sparked at his fingertips. He was too shaken and exhausted, his control was cracking and the soft concern in Blue’s eye lights was too much to handle right now. His own brother was…he…he was hurt, and Blue was worried about him.

“Why don’t we sit down in the waiting room?” Edge said heavily. “They’ll come for us when they can.”

“Of course,” Blue agreed, and they went over to the small reception area. It was empty; the entire wing was for Monsters and their population was small in comparison to the Humans.

The sofas proved to be too hard and uncomfortable, the chairs equally so. In one corner was a table that held a half-full coffee pot and Blue poured two cups before he came and sat next to Edge, handing one to him. He took a sip and grimaced, shaking his head, holding the styrofoam cup in both hands. “Pappy is going to be fine.”

“He will,” Edge said, sharply. Anything else was unthinkable, unimaginable.

A gloved hand settled over his own, blue against red, and Blue squeezed hard as if sealing a compact between them. Stretch was going to be fine, Pappy, Rus, Papyrus. By whatever name, it was him and he was going to be fine.

They sat together for what felt like hours, watching people go through doors, Humans and Monsters both, in white coats and soft-soled shoes, none of them giving them more than a glance and an awkward smile. At one point, Edge texted his brother, giving him a terse outline of what had happened and then set his phone aside without looking at what was likely a profanity-laced reply.

Blue drifted off to sleep, his skull resting against the arm of the couch. The drain of his own magic demanded rest, even as fitfully as he slept. He didn’t stir when Edge covered him with his own coat, pacing silently down the short hallways while he waited. Exhausted as he was, he couldn’t sleep, not yet, he needed information first. He needed to know.

One of the doors opened again and this time the footsteps were familiar, shuffling and slow. Sans looked as tired as if he’d drained his own magic, but his smile was easier, “heya. doc says he’s stable enough, they got the HP drain under control. they’re taking him upstairs to a room, 216 if you wanna head up.”

Relief didn’t overshadow the burgeoning mass of his worry but it took a fair size chunk away.

“Let me wake Blue—” Edge began, and Sans shook his head.

“i got him. go on up, sooner you see him, the better you’ll feel. And edge?” Sans caught him firmly by the arm, forcing Edge to look down at him. “lotta tubes, okay? he’s wired in with more iv’s and monitors than a server room. but he’s stable. he’s doing all right.”

“All right,” Edge echoed, and Sans grinned a little, nodding.

“yeah, he’s all right, so don’t freak the fuck out when you see him.” He nodded towards the elevators. “go on.”

“Thank you.”

Edge started towards them and almost didn’t hear Sans muttering sourly, “yeah, don’t go thanking me. i didn’t do shit and that’s a fact.”

There were questions there and Edge was going to get answers soon enough. For now, he skipped the elevator and used the stairwell instead, taking the steps two at a time to the second floor.

In room 216, the curtain was drawn around the bed and stepping behind it made Edge distantly grateful for Sans’s warning.

Stretch was in the bed, his sweatshirt replaced with a hospital gown. It made him look smaller, unbearably frail. A thick blanket was drawn up to his chest, but it was the wires that caught Edge’s attention. ‘A lot’ seemed like an understatement, they seemed to be everywhere, electrodes attached to his skull, trailing beneath the blanket along with the glowing line of the IV that was augmented his magic. The equipment by the bed showed readings but Edge had no idea what they meant.

This was getting to be far too familiar a sight; Stretch unconscious in a hospital bed, pale and still.

But it was the first time that it wasn’t caused by an outside source.

There was a chair in one corner and Edge drew it up to the side of the bed. Stretch’s hand was lying on top of the blankets, his right hand. The other was buried beneath the blankets. Gently, Edge lifted his hand, twined those limp fingers with his own.

The silence was overwhelming, broken only by the hum of the machines.

“Love—” Edge began, choking a little. He had to look down and gather himself, swallowing down the thickness in his throat. “Love, you can’t keep doing this to me. I can’t bear this. I can’t. Of all the reckless, selfish--”

He broke off, biting back the words. It was possible Stretch could hear him. Anything was possible.

Very carefully, Edge leaned down enough to press a light kiss to Stretch’s knuckles where the faintest glow of his magic was usually visible. “You have no idea how much I wish you would wake up and argue with me right now, you utter ass.”

Just then Blue came rushing into the room followed more slowly by Sans. He stopped when he caught sight of his brother and the play of emotion across his face, fear, worry, anger, was likely a mirror to Edge’s own.

“You may as well pull up a chair,” Edge told him. “From my experience, a doctor will be in soon.”

Blue gave him a weak smile. “That’s how I remember it.”

“yeah, guess i’m staying, too,” Sans sighed. He didn’t bother with a chair, sitting instead on the floor, closing his sockets and letting his head fall back against the wall. “when you invited me over to watch the new episodes of the good place, this isn't what I was expecting. brings new meaning to netflix and chill, fuck, i’m too old for this shit.”

Blue hesitated, halfway to dragging a chair to the bed. “Are you all right?”

“yep.“ Sans didn’t open his sockets. “just not very good at being the stable, supportive one. s’why i have paps.”

“You’re doing fine,” Edge mumbled. His exhaustion was catching up to him. Stretch’s fingers were cold, and he sandwiched them between his own hands, rubbing gently. Trying to impart some of his own warmth into those chilly phalanges.

He thought he might close his sockets for a moment, until the doctor arrived. He didn’t remember letting his head drop, the low murmur of Sans and Blue talking behind him. The hospital blanket was scratchy, not at all like the fluffy warmth of their ones at home. More like a memory of another time, other blankets, back when he was still called Papyrus.

He would never admit to it, not when he was fully awake. But drifting in exhaustion, more tangled in sleep than not, Edge spared a thought to wish his brother was here.

-tbc-

#spicyhoney #papcest #keelywolfe #underfell #underswap #underswap papyrus #underfell papyrus #by any other name

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foundingfatherjohnlaurens · 6 years ago

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Head Quarters, 2d Feb., 1778

My Dear Father;

The more I reflect upon the difficulties and delays which are likely to attend the completing our Continental regiments, the more anxiously is my mind bent upon the scheme, which I lately communicated to you. The obstacles to the execution of it had presented themselves to me but by no means appeared insurmountable. I was aware of having that monstrous popular prejudice, open-mouthed against me, of undertaking to transform beings almost irrational, into well-disciplined soldiers, of being obliged to combat the arguments, and perhaps the intrigues, of interested persons. But zeal for the public service and an ardent desire to assert the rights of humanity determined me to engage in this arduous business, with the sanction of your consent. My own perseverance, aided by the countenance of a few virtuous men, will, I hope, enable me to accomplish it.

You seem to think, my dear father, that men reconciled by long habit to the miscries of their condition, would prefer their ignominious bonds to the untasted sweets of liberty, especially when offer’d upon the terms which I propose.

I confess, indeed, that the minds of this unhappy species must be debased by a servitude, from which they can hope for no relief but death, and that every motive to action but fear, must be nearly extinguished in them. But do you think they are so perfectly moulded to their state as to be insensible that a better exists? Will the galling comparison between themselves and their masters leave them unenlightened in this respect? Can their self-love be so totally annihilated as not frequently to induce ardent wishes for a change?

You will accuse me, perhaps, my dearest friend, of consulting my own feelings too much; but I am tempted to believe that this trampled people have so much human left in them, as to be capable of aspiring to the rights of men by noble exertions, if some friend to mankind would point the road, and give them a prospect of success. If I am mistaken in this, I would avail myself, even of their weakness, and, conquering one fear by another, produce equal good to the public. You will ask in this view, how do you consult the benefit of the slaves? I answer, that like other men, they are the creatures of habit. Their cowardly ideas will be gradually effaced, and they will be modified anew. Their being rescued from a state of perpetual humiliation, and being advanced, as it were, in the scale of being, will compensate the dangers incident to their new state.

The hope that will spring in each man’s mind, respecting his own escape, will prevent hs being miserable. Those who fall in battle will not lose much; those who survive will obtain their reward. Habits of subordination, patience under fatigues, sufferings and privations of every kind, are soldierly qualifications, which these men possess in an eminent degree.

Upon the whole, my dearest friend and father, I hope that my plan for serving my country and the oppressed negro race will not appear to you the chimera of a young mind, deceived by a false appearance of moral beauty, but a laudable sacrifice of private interest, to justice and the public good.

You say, that my resources would be small, on account of the proportion of women and children. I do not know whether i am right, for I speak from impulse, and have not reasoned upon the matter. I say, altho’ my plan is at once to give freedom to the negroes, and gain soldiers to the states; in case of concurrence, I shd sacrifice the former interest, and therefore wd change the women and children for able-bodied men. The more fo these I could obtain, the better; but forty might be a good foundation to begin upon.

It is a pity that some such plan as I propose could not be more extensively executed by public authority. A well chosen body of 5,000 black men, properly officer’d to act as light troops, in addition to our present establishment, might give us decisive success in the next campaign.

I have long deplored the wretched state of these men, and considered in their history, the bloody wars excited in Africa, to furnish America with slaves-the groans of despairing multitudes, toiling for the luxuries of merciless tyrants.

I have had the pleasure of conversing with you, sometimes, upon the means of restoring them to their rights. When can it be better done, than when their enfranchisement may be made conducive to the public good, and be modified, as not to overpower their weak minds? (ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh)

You ask, what is the general’s opinion, upon this subject? He is convinced, that the numerous tribes of blacks in the southern parts of the continent, offer a resource to us that should not be neglected. With respect to my particular plan, he only objects to it, with the arguments of pity for a man who would be less rich than he might be.

I am obliged, my dearest friend and father, to take my leave for the present; you will excuse whatever exceptionable may have escaped in the course of my letter, and accept the assurance of filial love, and respect of

Your

John Laurens

#john laurens #henry laurens #john laurens letters #laurens correspondence #feb 3 1778 #1778 #american history #american revolution #amrev war #amrev #amrev correspondence #good god john you're a complicated man #this took a half hour you guys better be reading this

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minnesotaprelawland · 5 years ago

Text

Examining The Charges In The George Floyd Cases

By Brendan Connolly, St. Olaf College Class of 2021

June 13, 2020

The State of Minnesota has acted more swiftly and forcefully while taking action in George Floyd’s death thanother instances involving police misconduct. All four responding officers were fired the day after the incident on May 26th. On May 29th, four days after the event, Derek Chauvin was arrested and charged with 3rddegree murder and 2nddegree manslaughter. In a subsequent press conference, Hennepin County District Attorney Mike Freeman mentioned that Chauvin’s charges mirrored Mohamed Noor’s charges, a former Minneapolis Police Officer who shot and killed Justine Damond in 2017. Freeman was successful in convicting Noor of 3rd degree murder. However, the facts of these two cases are entirely different, so comparing the two does not provide much insight.

Freeman stated, “This is by far the fastest we’ve ever charged a police officer.” [[i]] He added that cases involving police officers can take nine months to a year to charge, likely referencing Noor’s case where it took Freeman’s office eight months to bring charges.[[ii]]Though this fact might speak to the system’s failings rather than a new sense of urgency in the DA’s office.

Of course, the chaos of the protests and riots certainly could have swayed the DA’s office to arrest Chauvin sooner rather than later. However, Freeman maintains that the delay was due to needing to gather more evidence against Chauvin.[[iii]]

Despite Freeman’s self-proclaimed promptness, many were critical of his delay. Before Chauvin was charged, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey argued that if Chauvin weren’t a police officer, he would have been arrested immediately.[[iv]] To justify an arrest, the standard of proof is that there is probable cause that a crime was committed.[[v]]The video clearly depicting Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, despite his cries for relief, provide more than enough probable cause.[[vi]]

Examining Chauvin’s Initial Charges:

As mentioned above, Freeman charged Chauvin with 3rd degree murder and 2nd degree manslaughter.

3rd degree murder under Minnesota Statute is described as:

(a) Whoever, without intent to effect the death of any person, causes the death of another by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life, is guilty of murder in the third degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 25 years.[[vii]]

2nd degree manslaughter under Minnesota Statute is described as:

A person who causes the death of another by any of the following means is guilty of manslaughter in the second degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than ten years or to payment of a fine of not more than $20,000, or both:

(1) by the person's culpable negligence whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk, and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another; or…[[viii]]

According to the criminal complaint filed by Freeman, these are the clauses Freeman cited to charge Chauvin.[[ix]]

Many experts criticized Freeman’s choice of charges against Chauvin, fearing the charges were too lenient or easy to dismiss. Benjamin Crump, a civil rights attorney representing George Floyd’s family, issued a statement calling for a 1st degree murder charge, a charge that would require proving pre-meditation. [[x]] The ACLU of Minnesota issued a statement describing how 3rd degree murder only applies when the defendant’s actions are not directed at any particular person. [[xi]]Obviously, this is not the case with Chauvin. The ACLU contends that a 3rd degree murder is legally defective in Chauvin’s case, opening the door for him to evade punishment. [[xii]]

Laurence Tribe and Albert Goins echo the ACLU’s criticism and concerns in an article for the Boston Globe, where they describe how “baffled” they were by Chauvin’s 3rd degree murder charge. Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, and Goins, a criminal and civil rights attorney in Minnesota, write, “No one remotely familiar with Minnesota law would regard either of those charges as the right ones to bring in this case — a case where, even if intent cannot be proven, a second-degree felony murder charge, punishable by 40 years in prison, is manifestly justified.” [[xiii]]

On May 31st, two days after Freeman charged Chauvin, MN Governor Tim Walzappointed Attorney General Keith Ellison to take the lead in any case related to George Floyd’s death.[15] While Walz claims that he made the decision after talking to Floyd’s family, he was undoubtedly aware of the criticism against Freeman by the public, legal experts, and local representatives. [[xiv]]

Ellison’s impact on the case:

On June 3rd, Keith Ellison upgraded the charges against Chauvin to 2nd degree murder using a “quirk” in Minnesota law, as Tribe and Goins describe it, that permits a 2nd degree murder charge when the defendant commits a separate felony offense that results in the unintentional death of a person. [[xv]]

The updated charges cite the following Minnesota Statute:[[xvi]]

Whoever does either of the following is guilty of unintentional murder in the second degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 40 years:

(1) causes the death of a human being, without intent to effect the death of any person, while committing or attempting to commit a felony offense other than criminal sexual conduct in the first or second degree with force or violence or a drive-by shooting; or… [[xvii]]

In part due to having more information, Ellison’s complaint is much more detailed than Freeman’s. That being said, there are some notable differences between the two complaints. First, Ellison’s complaint does not describe Floyd as resisting arrest, whereas Freeman’s does.[[xviii]]The fact of when, or if, Floyd resisted arrest will likely prove to be critical in determining the degree of force necessary to make the arrest. Although, based on the video evidence available to the public, it would be shocking if Chauvin’s actions could be justified to any extent. Second, Ellison’s complaint directly blames Chauvin’s actions for Floyd’s death. In contrast, Freeman’s initial complaint speculated that it was a combination of effects exacerbated by his arrest that led to Floyd’s death. Although, this difference between the two complaints can be explained by the Medical Examiner issuing the full report on Floyd’s death after Freeman’s initial complaint. [[xix]]

In addition to the upgraded charges for Chauvin, Ellison also filed charges against Tou Thao, Thomas Lane, and JA Kueng, the three other officers present at the scene, for aiding and abetting 2nd degree murder and 2nd degree manslaughter.

Minnesota Statute describes aiding and abetting a crime as:

A person is criminally liable for a crime committed by another if the person intentionally aids, advises, hires, counsels, or conspires with or otherwise procures the other to commit the crime.[[xx]]

Ben Crump, the Floyd family attorney, voiced his satisfaction and the family’s gratitude with Attorney General Ellison’s swift action in upgrading Chauvin’s charges and arresting the three other officers. [[xxi]]

This case has captured the attention of the world. As the public’s focus will inevitably fade, I will be using this platform for the next several weeks to investigate the legal complexities of this case and cases involving police officers in general.

Stay tuned for next week’s article, where I will be looking into the initial court appearances in all of these cases, as Derek Chauvin’s first appearance in court is scheduled for June 8th.

________________________________________________________________

Brendan Connolly is a rising senior at St. Olaf College pursuing a double major in Political Science & Economics with an emphasis in finance. At St. Olaf, Brendan is the Co-Captain of the basketball team, a Contributing Editor atRebuttal, and a member of the Director’s Council for the Institute for Freedom and Community. After graduating, Brendan hopes attend law school and pursue a career in public policy ________________________________________________________________

[i]Higgins, Tucker. “Ex-Minneapolis Cop Charged with Murder in Death of George Floyd.” CNBC, CNBC, 30 May 2020, www.cnbc.com/2020/05/29/former-officer-involved-in-death-of-george-floyd-has-been-arrested.html.

[ii]Nelson, Cody. “Read the Charges against Minneapolis Police Officer Mohamed Noor in Death of Justine Ruszczyk.” MPR News, MPR News, 20 Mar. 2018, www.mprnews.org/story/2018/03/20/inside-the-charges-for-mohamed-noor-shooting-justine-ruszczyk-damond.

[iii]Shen, Aviva. “Protesters Called Minneapolis Officials' Bluff On ‘Investigating’ George Floyd's Killer.” Slate Magazine, 29 May 2020, slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/george-floyd-cops-indictment.html.

[iv]Shen, Aviva.

[v]Minnesota House Research Department. “The Arrest and Charging Stage.” Criminal Arrest and Charging - MN House Research, Minnesota Legislature, www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/issinfo/cr-arst.aspx?src=4.

[vi]Shen, Aviva. Slate.

[vii]Sec. 609.195 MN Statutes, Office of the Revisor of Statutes. www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/609.195.

[viii]Sec. 609.205 MN Statutes,Office of the Revisor of Statutes.www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/609.205.

[ix]Ries, Brian. “8 Notable Details in the Criminal Complaint against Ex-Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin.” CNN, Cable News Network, 2 June 2020, www.cnn.com/2020/05/29/us/derek-chauvin-criminal-complaint-trnd/index.html.

[x]Madani, Doha, et al. “Ex-Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin Charged with Murder in George Floyd Case.” NBC News, NBCUniversal News Group, 2 June 2020, www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/minneapolis-police-officers-derek-chauvin-arrested-george-floyd-case-n1216011.

[xi]Davis, Sarah, and Lynette Kalsnes. “The Legal Rights Center and ACLU of Minnesota Demand Immediate Amendment of the Charges in the Derek Chauvin Criminal Complaint and Appointment of a Special Prosecutor.” ACLU of Minnesota, 2 June 2020, www.aclu-mn.org/en/press-releases/legal-rights-center-and-aclu-minnesota-demand-immediate-amendment-charges-derek

[xii]Davis, Sarah, and Kalsnes, Lynette.

[xiii]Tribe, Laurence H, and Albert Turner Goins. “Minnesota Prosecutor's Charges Might Lead to an Unjustly Easy Sentence for George Floyd's Killer - The Boston Globe.” Boston Globe, The Boston Globe, 1 June 2020, www.bostonglobe.com/2020/05/31/opinion/minnesota-prosecutors-charges-might-lead-an-unjustly-easy-sentence-george-floyds-killer/.

[xiv]Forliti, Amy. “Walz: Minnesota Attorney General to Take Lead in Floyd Case.” Star Tribune, Star Tribune, 1 June 2020, www.startribune.com/minnesota-attorney-general-to-assist-in-george-floyd-case/570910352/.

[xv]Tribe, Laurence H, and Albert Turner Goins.Boston Globe. 1 June 2020.

[xvi]“Read the Amended Charges against Ex-Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin.” Star Tribune, Star Tribune, 3 June 2020, www.startribune.com/read-the-amended-charges-against-ex-minneapolis-officer-derek-chauvin/570991071/?refresh=true.

[xvii]Sec. 609.19 MN Statutes, Office of the Revisor of Statutes. www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/609.19.

[xviii]Turtinen, Melissa. “A Look at the Differences in the Charges Filed against Derek Chauvin.” Bring Me The News, 4 June 2020, bringmethenews.com/minnesota-news/a-look-at-some-of-the-differences-between-the-criminal-complaints-filed-against-derek-chauvin.

[xix]Turtinen, Melissa. Bring Me The News, 4 June 2020s-filed-against-derek-chauvin.

[xx]Sec. 609.05 MN Statutes,Office of the Revisor of Statutes. www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/2019/cite/609.05.

[xxi]Higgins, Tucker. “3 More Cops Charged in George Floyd Death, Other Officer's Murder Charge Upgraded.” CNBC, CNBC, 4 June 2020, www.cnbc.com/2020/06/03/3-more-cops-charged-in-george-floyd-death-other-officers-murder-charge-upgraded.html.

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xranker · 6 years ago

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Sudan crisis: Return of the feared Janjaweed - BBC News

'Why Sudan is shooting medics' The plan is more than likely a fiction, not designed to produce civilian rule or anything like it There is ample precedent in Africa and elsewhere these days for elections which go through the motions of democracy but deliver none of its substance Don't be surprised to see senior figures from the TMC "retiring" from the military and standing as civilian candidates What will not change is military control of Sudanese life In part the FFC and its civil society allies are victims of their own dizzying success in the early days of the revolution Within 24 hours they toppled President Omar al-Bashir and the military man who led the coup against him Thirty years of rule appeared to have been vanquished The sight of the sit-in drew activists from all spheres of Sudanese life. It became a citadel of freedom The atmosphere was intoxicating People debated and sang and produced art. Image copyright Getty Images They produced manifestos on women's rights, media freedom, justice and the economy, and much more besides. Yet diversity was also a vulnerability Everybody agreed that civilian rule was the essential demand But there were inevitable differences over the specifics of achieving that aim: what should the timeframe be, what would be the balance between military and civilian representatives, which personalities representing which groupings would take positions in any transitional arrangements? None of these debates were in themselves fatal to the cause But they highlighted the difficulties of being a "people's movement" compared to an established political party with the structures and internal discipline to make swift changes at the negotiating table Hard line take control There was another problem As the shockwaves of Mr Bashir's overthrow dissipated the old politics of Sudan re-emerged Parties and personalities who had been suppressed under dictatorship were determined not to be left out if political power was being shared This allowed the military to characterise the protesters as simply one of the groups who were part of the negotiations, ignoring the fact that there would have been no negotiations without the demonstrations Road to transition 19 December 2018 - Protests erupt after fuel and bread price rises announced 22 February 2019 - President Bashir dissolves the government 24 February - Protests continue as security forces respond by firing live bullets 6 April - Activists begin sit-in at military headquarters, vowing not to move until Mr Bashir steps down 11 April - Army generals announce that Mr Bashir has been toppled but sit-in continues as people demand civilian rule 20 April - Talks between the military rulers and civilian representatives begin 13 May - Shooting outside the military headquarters leaves six people dead 14 May - Military and civilians announce a deal on a three-year transition period 16 May - Talks postponed as military demands some barricades are removed 3 June - Activists announce the suspension of talks with the military, accusing them of using force to disperse their sit-in Delaying or dissembling in the name of inclusivity became a tactic Once the military had recovered from the confusion around Mr Bashir's overthrow it regrouped and the most hard line elements took control. This explains the pre-eminence of the RSF commander, Mohammed "Hemedti" Hamadan whose personal ruthlessness in Darfur always made him the most likely leader of a counter-revolution. Unlike many of the military elite "Hemedti" is an outsider From a rural background he has no family ties or sentimental affiliation with the young middle class protesting on the streets of the Khartoum. Divided world The military also enjoys another big advantage This is an age of international division. The notion of an "international community" which might pressure the regime is a fantasy The world is now governed by a collection of interests - occasionally they are complimentary, more often they are in competition The UN Security Council is not a forum where any kind of concerted action on Sudan might be approved Russia and China would block any move to increase sanctions on Khartoum The condemnation from US National Security Advisor, John Bolton - he called the Khartoum violence "abhorrent" - will only mean something if the US demands that its regional allies - Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates - exert pressure on the Sudanese military For now it is hard to imagine President Donald Trump picking up the phone to Cairo or Riyadh and insisting on a swift transition to civilian rule Mr Trump has other priorities like the Mexican border, Venezuela, Iran and the trade war with China Image copyright ASHRAF SHAZLY Image caption Sudanese forces tried to disperse the sit-in on Monday What about an African solution? The African Union (AU) was an early supporter of civilian rule after the fall of Mr Bashir but the AU's actions around the election results in the Democratic Republic of Congo in January are cautionary: the AU first criticised what many observers saw as a fix but then rowed back In recent weeks the African body has spoken of the need for international actors not to meddle in Sudanese affairs Bear in mind too that the AU's current chairperson is Egypt's President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi who is himself a symbol of military usurpation of power The Sudan crisis exposes the dominant reality of the international scene Force can have its way without consequence if the killers and torturers represent a valuable enough asset to other stronger powers - in strategic, ideological, intelligence or economic terms. It is possible that President Trump will make a stand on Sudan and pressure his allies to act, that the AU will threaten to expel and isolate Sudan, that more moderate elements in the military will emerge and challenge "Hemedti" and his supporters Possible But certainly not probable I remember speaking with a leading activist at the demonstrations back in April. He told me that "the sit-in is the only card we have That is why we have to maintain it" Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Sudanese people had been protesting for many weeks by this point in May, well after Mr Bashir had been forced out of office But now that the sit-in is smashed where does the opposition go? The peaceful revolutionaries are beaten and traumatised It is impossible to say now whether the Forces of Freedom and Change can come back as a street-driven force There have been calls for civil disobedience and strikes Any such will likely be met with ruthless violence What will not change, in fact what has been deepened, is the alienation of people from their rulers Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Demonstrators were still protesting peacefully at the beginning of May at a sit-in outside the army's headquarters Repression may work as a strategy for now but not indefinitely Sudan is now dependant on powerful neighbours for its economic survival and beset by internal divisions Dependency on the Egyptians and Saudis will rankle with many Sudanese beyond the protesters, adding a more overtly nationalist dimension to the current crisis The generals have succeeded in smashing the protest but their troubles may only be starting Related Topics Read the full article

#AbdelFattahel-Sisi #Egypt #gmblisting #gmblistingoptimization #gmblistingsuspended #gmblistingverification #headquartersRepression

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toldnews-blog · 6 years ago

Photo

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/world/united-states-of-america/state-of-the-union-trumps-address-will-be-postponed-claims-pelosi-aide-live/

State of the Union: Trump's address will be postponed, claims Pelosi aide – live

2.59pm EST14:59

Two senators have introduced legislation to require the special counsel to directly submit a report to Congress rather than simply to the attorney general.

Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand)

Dem Sen. Blumenthal and GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley have introduced The Special Counsel Transparency Act, which “requires that a Special Counsel submit a report directly to Congress and the public at the conclusion of an investigation,” or if he/she is fired or resigns. pic.twitter.com/2x1WbC72DL

January 28, 2019

2.17pm EST14:17

Another Democratic presidential candidate will enter the fray tonight.

New Age author Marianne Williamson will announce her bid.

Marianne Williamson (@marwilliamson)

Join me tonight as I formally announce my candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president. Live in Los Angeles, the Saban Theatre 8440 Wilshire Blvd. 7:30PM, or livestream at https://t.co/zVBvuNdwg8

January 28, 2019

Williamson travelled to Iowa last summer exploring a bid.

1.51pm EST13:51

Gwyneth Paltrow has a podcast?

Allan Smith (@akarl_smith)

Schultz told Gwyneth Paltrow on her podcast there’s “a lack of civility” and “a lack of respect” in the U.S.

“We are imprinting a young generation with a lack of civility and hate and fear – and I don’t think we’re going to know the consequences of that for quite some time.”

January 28, 2019

1.34pm EST13:34

Trump ‘very pissed off’, ‘really hopping mad’

According to Politico he is, anyway – over claims made by former aide Cliff Sims in the new book Team of Vipers.

Sims’ book is due out tomorrow but was scooped up by the Guardian last week. It tells the now familiar tale of White House chaos, bickering and skullduggery. And apparently it has really upset the president.

From Politico:

President Donald Trump is “very pissed off” and “really hopping mad” at former aide Cliff Sims’ new book that reveals firsthand the chaos and infighting that is ever present in his White House, according to several current and former White House officials.

Trump is asking aides: “Who is this guy? Why is he writing this book? He wasn’t even in meetings,” the sources said. He also dismissively refers to Sims – who served until last May as director of White House message strategy and a special assistant to the president —as “the videographer” because he also helped Trump with the weekly video and radio addresses, according to three current and former White House officials.

Trump: mad. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Updated at 1.39pm EST

1.20pm EST13:20

Potential billionaire presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg has thrown some shade at potential billionaire presidential candidate Howard Schultz, claiming an independent run for president would “end up re-electing” Trump.

Schultz announced this weekend that he is considering running for the White House as a “centrist independent, outside of the two-party system”.

On Monday Bloomberg, who is considering running as a Democrat, said he has crunched the numbers – and all an independent run would do is split the anti-Trump vote.

It’s no secret that I looked at an independent bid in the past. In fact I faced exactly the same decision now facing others who are considering it.

The data was very clear and very consistent. Given the strong pull of partisanship and the realities of the electoral college system, there is no way an independent can win. That is truer today than ever before.

In 2020, the great likelihood is that an independent would just split the anti-Trump vote and end up re-electing the president. That’s a risk I refused to run in 2016 and we can’t afford to run it now.

Bloomberg: don’t do it, Schultz. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Updated at 1.22pm EST

1.03pm EST13:03

Poll! Poll! Poll!

This one is from Marquette Law School, who have surveyed Wisconsin voters. It seems 42% of Wisconsinites approve of the job Trump is doing, while 52% disapprove.

That approval rating is better than the national average, but it’s down from October, when 47% approved of Trump’s performance.

Worse news for Trump – who narrowly won in Wisconsin in 2016 – is that not many people say they will vote for him in 2020:

Among all registered voters, 27% say they would definitely vote to reelect Trump if the 2020 elections were held today, 12% say they would probably vote to reelect him. Eight per cent would probably vote for someone else and 49% would definitely vote for someone else.

Updated at 1.13pm EST

12.38pm EST12:38

Sanders to give White House briefing

Martin Pengelly

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders is due to give an on-camera press briefing at 3pm ET.

Ordinarily that would not be news but these are not, as many eminently qualified people have observed, normal times. Sanders last briefed the White House press corps on camera on 18 December, Trump recently tweeted that he had told his press secretary “not to bother”, and the general dwindling of this once-glorious illustration of the power of the first amendment/blast of sound and fury signifying nothing has become a story in itself.

Amid the usual economies with the actualité and tetchy exchanges with grandstanding reporters with on-camera presences to think about, Sanders will doubtless be asked whether Trump is going to shut down the government again if he doesn’t get his money for a wall. On Sunday, the president spoke to the Wall Street Journal and said he thought the chances of bipartisan negotiators producing a deal on border security funding he could accept were “less than 50/50”.

The president also said he doubted he would accept less than the demand for $5.7bn for his border wall that caused the last shutdown, and doubted whether he would accept any deal involving a path to citizenship for young undocumented migrants, a Democratic priority.

Earlier the same day, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney went on the talk shows and was duly asked if Trump was prepared to shut down the government again in three weeks’ time, if his prediction proves accurate and no deal is produced.

“Yeah, I think he actually is,” Mulvaney said. “He doesn’t want to shut the government down, let’s make that very clear. He doesn’t want to declare a national emergency.”

Most observers assume Trump will in fact do the latter, in an attempt to bypass Congressional budget control altogether.

“The president’s commitment is to defend the nation, and he will do it either with or without Congress,” Mulvaney told Fox News Sunday.

Acting without Congress would likely trigger both legal challenges and intense political and philosophical debate about the extent and/or abuse of executive power.

So that will be fun.

Updated at 1.16pm EST

12.05pm EST12:05

An early endorsement for Kamala Harris, from Congressman Ted Lieu:

Ted Lieu (@tedlieu)

I endorse @KamalaHarris for President.

Known Kamala for many years & worked together on various issues. She embraces the future, not the past, and is the person we need to move America forward.

Watch the #HarrisTownHall tonight at 7 pm PT / 10 pm ET to learn more about Kamala. https://t.co/P4ywl9U3Op

January 28, 2019

The Iowa caucuses are just 12 months away! Could this be a game-changer?

Updated at 12.07pm EST

11.57am EST11:57

Will Maryland governor Larry Hogan, a Republican, mount a presidential primary challenge against Donald Trump?

Probably not, but it hasn’t stopped news organizations from speculating. CNN is particularly keen on the idea, noting that Hogan “enjoys high approval ratings” in Maryland.

But CNN adds, a little underwhelmingly: “There’s been no indication of any concrete steps toward a primary bid and a spokesperson for Hogan did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.”

Larry Hogan, applauding about something or other. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

11.24am EST11:24

There’s nothing like a bit of Brexit news to make one feel better about US politics.

The latest development in the ongoing shambles is that a top EU official believes the risk of a “no-deal Brexit” – which essentially amounts to the UK crashing out of the EU with no clear plan forward – is now “very high”.

The Guardian’s man in Westminster Andrew Sparrow has the latest developments.

Shakespeare. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

And if you’re still confused – like me – about terms like “backstop”, “Norway plus” and “SuperCanada”, then here’s a handy guide.

Updated at 1.15pm EST

11.17am EST11:17

Shutdown cost the economy $11bn, says Congressional Budget Office

The border wall-inspired government shutdown cost the economy $3bn in the fourth quarter of 2018 and is expected to cost $8bn in the first quarter of 2019, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

Some of $11bn that will be recovered once federal workers start getting paid again, the CBO says. But not all:

Although most of the real GDP lost during the fourth quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019 will eventually be recovered, CBO estimates that about $3bn will not be. That amount equals 0.02% of projected annual GDP in 2019. In other words, the level of GDP for the full calendar year is expected to be 0.02% smaller than it would have been otherwise.

The CBO says the cost to the economy is due mainly to “the loss of furloughed federal workers’ contribution to GDP, the delay in federal spending on goods and services, and the reduction in aggregate demand (which thereby dampened private-sector activity)”.

Trump wanted $5.7bn for the border wall, in exchange for ending the shutdown.

Updated at 11.26am EST

10.46am EST10:46

Pelosi: no State of Union on Tuesday

Donald Trump will not give his State of the Union address on Tuesday, according to an aide to Nancy Pelosi.

CNN reports that the address – Trump’s second – is not going to happen as had been scheduled before the shutdown.

The back-and-forth over Trump giving his State of the Union speech in the House chamber was a running sidenote to the government shutdown.

Pelosi asked Trump to postpone the address until after the shutdown ended, citing security concerns. Trump rejected that, saying he was going to do it anyway. Pelosi again said he would not be allowed to. The master dealmaker then caved, agreeing to postpone the speech.

It’s now unclear when Trump will address the nation.

Updated at 11.59am EST

10.19am EST10:19

There’s more bad news for Trump today – in the form of a Washington Post-ABC poll that finds the president “has largely underperformed the even modest expectations that Americans had for him as he took office”.

Nearly six out of ten Americans have an unfavorable view of Trump as a person, according to the survey. A majority of people also “doubt his empathy, honesty and ability to make political deals”, according to the Post.

The poll compares the expectations people had for Trump in January 2017 to current views of the president.

The Washington Post (@washingtonpost)

Midway through first term, Trump is failing to meet the public’s expectations for his job performance, Post-ABC poll finds https://t.co/ukVYXSIcWc

January 28, 2019

When Trump took office 50% of people thought he would do a good job on reducing the federal deficit, according to the poll. Now only 33% think he is doing well.

The federal deficit was a longtime rallying cry for Republicans under Obama, but McConnell and co were strangely silent as Trump’s tax cuts caused the deficit to balloon to $779bn in 2018 – an increase of 17%.

Updated at 10.20am EST

9.37am EST09:37

Martin Pengelly

Howard Schultz. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA

Howard Schultz’s announcement that he is considering a run for the White House as an independent has caused consternation among Democrats, who fear a third-party run from a candidate with many of their policies – Schultz himself told CBS he’s a “lifelong Democrat” and listed some progressive-ish policy positions – could split the vote and hand a second term to Trump.

Trump himself duly tweeted about the former Starbucks chief executive on Monday morning, saying that Schultz is not “the smartest person” … because he is. No presidential nickname has yet been coined.

Schultz himself acknowledged that his ambitions are not for everyone, telling the news site Axios he knows he is:

going to create hate, anger, disenfranchisement from friends, from Democrats.

Axios reports that the billionaire businessman is, however, convinced he is doing the right thing. He’s certainly doing the write thing, releasing a campaign-oriented biography today with a launch in his native New York.

It’s called From the Ground Up: A Journey to Reimagine the Promise of America. Before you rush to the store to order it, consider this from the Guardian’s Lloyd Green, on the often (if not always) dubious pedigree of the presidential campaign book:

9.09am EST09:09

Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of the day’s political news.

In Washington and around the country, hundreds of thousands of federal employees will return to work for the first time in 2019 as museums and national parks prepare to open. A surprising climb down by Donald Trump ended the longest shutdown in US history on Friday, but it could be a several more days before employees receive their pay.

Congress has less than three weeks to present Trump with a border security plan he likes. A bipartisan group of members were selected to lead the negotiations but Trump has already dismissed the prospect that they will come up with a proposal he would sign. In that case, Trump has vowed to declare a national emergency to build his wall along the south-western border. And on the talk shows on Sunday, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said the president could shut down the government again.

Trump has no public events scheduled today but that doesn’t mean we haven’t heard from him and won’t be hearing more.

Already this morning he has tweeted about tarrifs and bible study classes. He also taunted former Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz, saying he doesn’t have the “guts”’to run for president.

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)

Howard Schultz doesn’t have the “guts” to run for President! Watched him on @60Minutes last night and I agree with him that he is not the “smartest person.” Besides, America already has that! I only hope that Starbucks is still paying me their rent in Trump Tower!

January 28, 2019

#Democrats #Donald Trump #Republicans #Trump administration #Trump-Russia investigation #US elections 2020 #US federal government shutdown 2019 #US news #US politics

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years ago

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HOW DO YOU TELL WHETHER SOMETHING IS THE GERM OF A GIANT COMPANY, OR JUST A NICHE PRODUCT

If you develop ideas in a startup, and sell it to the big company. You should lean more toward firing people if the source of your trouble is overhiring. When we talk about unequal distribution of income, we should also ask, where does that income come from? Many Perl programs probably begin as just a couple library calls stuck together. Lots of people are mildly interested in a social network for pet owners. Your performance is measured by number of users per server is the critical question for anyone hosting such applications. People who think the labor movement was the creation of heroic union organizers have a problem to solve here, but certainly one reason life sucks at 15 is that kids are monstrously cruel to one another, you're better off using the organic strategy, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. Kids do care what their peers think in elementary school. In practice the link between depth and narrowness is so strong that it's a waste of time, that programming languages don't become popular or unpopular based on what expert hackers think of them as children, even though biologically they're not, so the story grew quite elaborate. Many of the employees e. Part of what's going on, and the design of the program benefits from evolution. I'll talk about tricks for coming up with new ideas.

And there is nothing the rich like more than convenience. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. Do popular languages deserve their popularity? Indeed, being in trouble in their family. Court hierarchies are another thing entirely. If a nonprofit or government organization had started a project to index the web, Google at year 1 is the limit of what they'd have produced. There's nothing dishonest about this. Companies will pay for their skills, the answer would have been a lot of email, or because they know it's expensive. And I lost more than books. Is it worth trying to define a good programming language should be both clean and dirty: cleanly designed, with a small group of other ambitious people. I once studied, the students wanted most of all to develop a personal style. But because the Soviet Union didn't have a computer industry, it remained for them a theory; they didn't have the courage of their convictions, and that it literally meant being quiet.

6x. An eminent Lisp hacker told me that his copy of CLTL falls open to the section format. I've been around the startup world from investment banking, she has always been the case for thinkers, which is that it can actually discover startup ideas. The problem with feeling you're doomed is not just a barbershop whose founders were unusually lucky and hard-working. The source code of all the libraries is readily available. Live in the future. As anyone who has tried to optimize software knows, the key is measurement. Potential buyers will always delay if they can. Turning off the schlep filter, except it keeps you from working on problems you despise rather than ones you fear. Once the libraries get too big, they become overwhelmed. That was a surprising realization.

There's plenty of time to apply that test later. So nature and nurture combine to make us poor to make themselves feel better. What's a prostitute? Well, of course, but usually the way to persuade people is not just that it makes you stop working, that practically guarantees you'll fail. Thousands of programmers were in a position where your performance can make or break it. A difficult problem could be good for writing throwaway programs, but was pretty much a throwaway program itself. So few businesses really pay attention to how fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments. They still think of them as children, to leave this tangle unexamined. They will use whatever language they were first written in, because it's easier than satisfying them. I can't write a general purpose function that I can call on any struct. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could just tell him. I don't think many people like the slow pace of big companies, the interminable meetings, the water-cooler conversations, the clueless middle managers, and so on.

You can't have ulterior motives when you have 57 things going on at once, because you know how much of your life you devote to your work. You do it sitting at a desk. Much was changed, but there won't be many of them. Lisp. Hard as this was to believe in the mid 90s, the Mac was in its time considered shockingly secular: according to Vasari, Botticelli repented and gave up painting, and Fra Bartolommeo and Lorenzo di Credi actually burned some of their work. Be good. But if you're looking for startup ideas you can sacrifice some of the efficiency of taking the status quo for granted and start to question things.

A hundred years ago. Blogger is a famous example of a job with measurement but not leverage is doing piecework in a sweatshop. Growth is why it's good to have the program already written for you, like broccoli, because someone said so in a book. But the principle was the same at the schools I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. People like baseball more than poetry, so baseball players make more than poets. Around the age of eleven, though, are busy. That's because your expertise raises your standards. It wouldn't be the first time someone asks him. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere. You get up in the same place they come from different sources.

How many fifteenth century Milanese artists can you name? Viaweb's hackers were all extremely risk-averse. Merely understanding the situation they're in should make it less painful. They're a product of the time we called retards. On this topic, especially, is a way of saving you work, and that language is not the main reason Lisp isn't currently popular. Any immediate improvement in nerds' lives is probably going to have an active profiler—to push performance data to the programmer instead of waiting for him to come asking for it. He seemed to be synonymous with quiet, so I didn't do it. Not just the first step into a swamp.

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alicemccombs · 6 years ago

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I Ching for the Day

16 Yu / Enthusiasm Changing to 47 K'un / Oppression (Exhaustion)

January 6, 2019 Sunrise New Moon Epiphany Question: What does Earth need most to be healed at this time? 16 Yu / Enthusiasm Changing to 47 K'un / Oppression (Exhaustion) Cast Hexagram

16 Yu / Enthusiasm https://ichingfortune.com/hexagrams/16.php

Above Chen the Arousing, Thunder Below K'un the Receptive, Earth Introduction The strong line in the fourth place, that of the leading official, meets with response and obedience from all the other lines, which are all weak. The attribute of the upper trigram, Chen, is movement; the attributes of K'un, the lower, are obedience and devotion. This begins a movement that meets with devotion and therefore inspires enthusiasm, carrying all with it. Of great importance, furthermore, is the law of movement along the line of least resistance, which in this hexagram is enunciated as the law for natural events and for human life. Judgement

Enthusiasm. It furthers one to install helpers and to set armies marching. Judgement Commentary The time of Enthusiasm derives from the fact that there is at hand an eminent man who is in sympathy with the spirit of the people and acts in accord with it. Hence he finds universal and willing obedience. To arouse enthusiasm it is necessary for a man to adjust himself and his ordinances to the character of those whom he has to lead. The inviolability of natural laws rests on this principle of movement along the line of least resistance. Theses laws are not forces external to things but represent the harmony of movement immanent in them. That is why the celestial bodies do not deviate from their orbits and why all events in nature occur with fixed regularity. It is the same with human society: only such laws are rooted in popular sentiment can be enforced, while laws violating this sentiment merely arouse resentment. Again, it is enthusiasm that enables us to install helpers for the completion of an undertaking without fear of secret opposition. It is enthusiasm too that can unify mass movements, as in war, so that they achieve victory. The Image Thunder comes resounding out of the earth: The image of Enthusiasm. Thus the ancient kings made music In order to honor merit, and offered it with splendor to the Supreme Deity, Inviting their ancestors to be present. Image Commentary When, at the beginning of summer, thunder--electrical energy--comes rushing forth from the earth again, and the first thunderstorm refreshes nature, a prolonged state of tension is resolved. Joy and relief make themselves felt. So too, music has power to ease tension within the heart and to loosen the grip of obscure emotions. The enthusiasm of the heart expresses itself involuntarily in a burst of song, in dance and rhythmic movement of the body. From immemorial times the inspiring effect of the invisible sound that moves all hearts, and draws them together, has mystified mankind. Rulers have made use of this natural taste for music; they elevated and regulated it. Music was looked upon as something serious and holy, designed to purify the feelings of men. It fell to music to glorify the virtues of heroes and thus to construct a bridge to the world of the unseen. In the temple men drew near to God with music and pantomimes (out of this later the theater developed). Religious feeling for the Creator of the world was united with the most sacred of human feelings, that of reverence for the ancestors. The ancestors were invited to these divine services as guests of the Ruler of Heaven and as representatives of humanity in the higher regions. This uniting of the human past with the Divinity in solemn moments of religious inspiration established the bond between God and man. The ruler who revered the Divinity in revering his ancestors became thereby the Son of Heaven, in whom the heavenly and the earthly world met in mystical contact. These ideas are the final summation of Chinese culture. Confucius has said of the great sacrifice at which these rites were performed: 'He who could wholly comprehend this sacrifice could rule the world as though it were spinning on his hand.' Changing Lines (2, 5) Six in the second place means: Firm as a rock. Not a whole day. Perseverance brings good fortune. This describes a person who does not allow himself to be misled by any illusions. While others are letting themselves be dazzled by enthusiasm, he recognizes with perfect clarity the first signs of the time. Thus he neither flatters those above nor neglects those beneath him; he is as firm as a rock. When the first sign of discord appears, he knows the right moment for withdrawing and does not delay even for a day. Perseverance in such conduct will bring good fortune. Confucius says about this line: To know the seeds, that is divine indeed. In his association with those above him, the superior man does not flatter. In his association with those beneath him, he is not arrogant. For he knows the seeds. The seeds are the first imperceptible beginning of movement, the first trace of good fortune (or misfortune) that shows itself. The superior man perceives the seeds and immediately takes action. He does not wait even a whole day. In the Book of Changes it is said: 'Firm as a rock. Not a whole day. Perseverance brings good fortune.' Firm as a rock, what need of a whole day? The judgment can be known. The superior man knows what is hidden and what is evident. He knows weakness, he knows strength as well. Hence the myriads look up to him. Six in the fifth place means: Persistently ill, and still does not die. Here enthusiasm is obstructed. A man is under constant pressure, which prevents him from breathing freely. However, this pressure has its advantage--it prevents him from consuming his powers in empty enthusiasm. Thus constant pressure can actually serve to keep one alive. Transformed Hexagram 47 K'un / Oppression (Exhaustion) https://ichingfortune.com/hexagrams/47.php Above Tui the Joyous, Lake Below K'an the abysmal, Water Introduction The lake is above, water below; the lake is empty, dried up. Exhaustion is expressed in yet another way: at the top, a dark line is holding down two light line; below, a light line is hemmed in between two dark ones. The upper trigram belongs to the principle of darkness, the lower to the principle of light. Thus everywhere superior men are oppressed and held in restraint by inferior men. Judgement Oppression. Success. Perseverance. The great man brings about good fortune, no blame. When one has something to say it is not believed. Judgement Commentary Times of adversity are the reverse of times of success, but they can lead to success if they; befall the right man. When a strong man meets with adversity, he remains cheerful despite all danger, and this cheerfulness is the source of later successes; it is that stability which is stronger than fate. He who lets his spirit be broken by exhaustion certainly has no success. But if adversity only bends a man, it creates in him a power to react that is bound in time to manifest itself. No inferior man is capable of this. Only the great man brings about goof fortune and remains blameless. It is true that for the time being outward influence is denied him, because his words have no effect. Therefore in times of adversity it is important to be strong within and sparing of words. The Image There is not water in the lake: The image of Exhaustion. Thus the superior man stakes his life on following his will. Image Commentary When the water has flowed out below, the lake must dry up and become exhausted. That is fate. This symbolizes an adverse fate in human life. In such times there is nothing a man can do but acquiesce in his fate and remain true to himself. This concerns the deepest stratum of his being, for this alone is superior to all external fate.

#HealEarth

https://thehealearthproject.blogspot.com/2018/12/welcome-about-healearth-project.html If you would like to participate in The #HealEarth Project, please send an email to: [email protected]

#HealEarth #EarthHeal #The HealEarth Project #I Ching #I Ching for the Day

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impracticaldemon · 8 years ago

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Gajevy Week 2017: Chapter 7— The Spear of the Shinsengumi

Summary: The Fae members of the Shinsengumi have been introducing themselves to Levy in the wake of the great fire. The cast of characters starts to fill out and more information is provided about the infamous Split. But now Levy has been summoned to see the stern and uncompromising Vice Commander--is he also one of the People? And if so, what does he require? And also: where is Gajeel?

Words: ~2700 Find it here: FF.net | AO3 | Tumblr Ch: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7A

Author's Note: (This is the Real Chapter 7!)

(CHECK OUT THE AWESOME NEW CHIBIS!!!!!!!!)

I apologize for the delay, especially when I had/have so many ideas for this story! Apart from anything else, I'm told that there are not 36 hours in the day...

I decided to break this chapter into two parts so that I could post the first part this evening. I hope you'll enjoy Levy's adventures as she becomes further initiated into the Exiles and the Shinsengumi.

~Impracticaldemon

The Oath of the Exiles, Part I Prompt: Marriage/Living Together

Two days after the trip to the red light district, Levy was summoned to Vice Commander Hijikata's office. What surprised and worried her was that Saitō-san came to fetch her rather than Gajeel—in fact, Gajeel was out on patrol in the city with Natsu-san and the First Division. Saitō-san was as impassive as ever, with nothing to be learned from either face or demeanour.

Oddly, while she found that her mind used the names Saitō-san and Gray-san interchangeably enough, Levy had to keep reminding herself that the First Division Captain's name was Okita-san. Something about the gleam in the green eyes always reminded her of the pink hair—and who could forget the pink hair? Ever since the night of the fire, she'd thought of Okita-san as Natsu-san—the man who was summer. Summer and fire. The smell of burning paper and the cries of the injured and bereaved. The citizens of Kyoto feared fire more than any other calamity. Natsu-san, with his strange indifference to fire, had been a true hero to them that night. And yet, his smile was crooked, and it troubled Levy in some way that she couldn't clearly identify.

Her mind snapped back to the present when Saitō-san stopped in front of the Vice Commander's office and knelt politely before asking permission to enter. Levy hurried to follow suit. Shortly after, Saitō-san opened the door and went in, Levy trailing like an obedient puppy at his heels.

The Vice Commander had evidently just turned away from his desk. He glanced at Saitō-san and nodded, before gesturing Levy to a cushion across from him. She took her place and bowed, still not sure what was going on. Saitō-san knelt off to one side, and Levy found that she was glad he hadn't left. Levy didn't know him very well, really, but he was far more familiar than the slightly aloof and reputedly dangerous Hijikata-san.

"Yukimura-kun," said Hijikata, studying her intently with clear, amber-brown eyes, "I understand that you went to Shimabara the other night."

Levy swallowed nervously. Maybe she wasn't supposed to have left the compound after all? Or was going to Shimabara—the red light district—the problem?

"Y-yes, Vice Commander?" Levy didn't like the tremor she could hear in her voice. Old lessons died hard it seemed, and at the Ikedaya it had been better to be subservient to warriors like Hijikata-san than to be shouted at or cuffed. Also… she had somehow come to consider this place a home, and she didn't want to lose another home. Pride stiffened her spine, however, and she added: "Gajeel-san and Captains Nagakura, Saitō and Harada were also there, sir."

"I am aware," the hard-eyed senior officer noted, in clipped tones. "That is why I wish to speak with you. I would have done so sooner, but things have been extremely busy."

"Sorry sir." She wasn't exactly sure why she was apologizing, except that it still seemed safer.

Hijikata-san huffed softly and shook his head at her. "You shouldn't apologize so much, Yukimura-kun. Although it's a refreshing change from the opposite, I'll admit. You aren't here to be disciplined for an infraction, if that's what troubles you. You're here because you've become acquainted with some of the more significant secrets hidden within the Shinsengumi, which unfortunately means that you no longer have freedom of choice in your alliances."

Levy shifted uncomfortably—the last words sounded distinctly ominous. And yet, as a girl raised in Kyoto (well, effectively), she wasn't surprised, either. These days it seemed as though everybody had to choose some kind of loyalty—and then choose whether or not to honour it. She had seen enough, at the inn, to know that not all people stood by their professed choice.

"I think I understand, sir," she said cautiously, waiting to hear more before committing herself.

"In order to stay with the Shinsengumi," Hijikata told her, his voice cool and even, "you must be loyal to the legal government of Japan—and in particular to His Eminence the Shogun—and, given your present knowledge, you must also be loyal to High Lord Makarov, the acknowledged leader of the People in exile. As you have apparently been told, the grandson of Makarov-sama, Laxus the Usurper, has seized Magnolia, the capital city of the People, and holds it and the People's primary Guild against Makarov-sama and the Exiles."

Levy's head was spinning. She barely knew the Shinsengumi, after all, and she knew nothing of the politics of the People. Hijikata-san was obviously one of the People—or an improbably close human ally—but he had not "introduced" himself to her as the others had. Yet he was telling her that she had to make her loyalties known to him and she had a prickly feeling that the consequences of refusing would not be pleasant.

"We're not going to kill you or hurt you," Hijikata said, as though reading her thoughts. "We can erase your memory of us, however." The clear, light-brown eyes met hers steadily, somehow both compassionate and unyielding. She noted the term "us", but let it pass since it wasn't a surprise. "That would mean all of us, of course."

Levy caught the implication and reddened slightly. Gajeel… She didn't want to forget him, even though he hadn't said anything further to her about the unspoken feelings that lay between them (assuming that there were any on his part, which she had begun to doubt).

Hijikata-san seemed to be waiting for her to respond, although he did not appear to be impatient. That in itself underlined the seriousness of her situation. She cleared her throat.

"What… what is required of me, sir?"

The Vice Commander nodded, as if satisfied by her response that she understood the stakes well enough to proceed. Levy wasn't sure that she agreed, but then again, he would know better than she did.

"You will need to give an oath, under binding magic, not to betray your comrades here who are of the People. We never used to do such a thing, but it has become necessary. You do not need to swear a new oath to the Shinsengumi—after all, you did that when you joined us in the first place, and we don't enforce that oath by magic for several reasons, the greatest of which is that the People as a whole are strictly prohibited from using magic against or around humans. That may change one day, I suppose; there may come a time when the Fae and their descendants use magic freely. Fortunately or unfortunately, we're not there yet."

"So I'm here to swear an oath, Vice Commander?" murmured Levy softly, successfully quelling the multitude of questions in her mind and somehow staying focussed on the critical point.

"Or to have your memories removed," responded Hijikata. "Also, I must warn you that the memory magic does not always work and does not always last. In those cases, we are forced to take more drastic action."

Levy ruthlessly crushed her instinctive, rather rebellious desire to demand to know what "drastic action" entailed. Long years of discipline came to her aid. She thought she sensed surprise from the Vice Commander at her restraint and apparent self-command.

"I understand, sir. I will swear the oath rather than have my memories removed. What do I need to do?"

Saitō-san rose, exchanged another brief, wordless glance with the Vice Commander and left.

"Saitō is fetching Yamazaki," explained Hijikata. "While he does, you should decide where your oath-mark will be." He continued immediately, not needing Levy's look of alarmed confusion to remind him that she had no idea what he was talking about. "It is traditional for members of each Guild to wear the symbol of that Guild. We"—for a moment, Hijikata had an odd smile—"here in exile have incorporated this tradition in the oath-taking. It will sting slightly, that's all."

Levy—former servant, current Shinsengumi page and alleged member of the Yōsei of the People—was growing more nervous by the minute. It wasn't the lack of real choice that bothered her—her life had never been easy and she'd rarely had much control over it—it was Gajeel's absence. Gajeel had appeared to trust Saitō-san, or at least respect him, and he'd never complained about the Vice Commander, but… why wasn't he here for something so significant? The big man had watched over her since before she'd gotten here. Despite her concern, she remained silent, thinking through all of the other things she'd been told.

When Saitō-san returned with Yamazaki-san, they were accompanied by Harada-san. Or rather, Erza-san; the woman dropped her masking illusion as soon as she stepped through the door. Somehow, that made Levy happier. Whatever was happening, it wasn't exactly being kept a secret—or at least there were quite a few people involved now, not just Hijikata-san. Moreover, Levy felt better for having another woman present.

"Konbanwa, Levy-chan," said Erza with a smile that appeared slightly forced. "I had hoped to have the chance to explain matters to you before this, but the Vice Commander felt that it would be best to keep to tradition. According to tradition, the Master of the Guild administers the oath and grants the use of the symbol; however, Lord Makarov has worked hard to ensure our safety by keeping his own identity secret, which is why his power has been entrusted to Hijikata." Her eyes met Hijikata-san's and the latter inclined his head, apparently undisturbed by the slight censure in Erza-san's tone.

"Well, now that Lahar is here to add the more, ah, stringent requirements to the oath, and Erza is here to ensure the well-being of the initiate, shall we begin?" Without waiting for assent, the man inclined his head politely to Levy. "I am Jellal, descended of the Yōsei and the Oni."

Hijikata-Jellal's long hair rippled from silky black to a deep, unmistakable blue, and the reddish mark that Levy had glimpsed once before became clearly visible, forming a slightly sinister pattern around his right eye. He remained an exceptionally handsome man, and it occurred to Levy that Erza-san thought so as well, for all her current annoyance.

"You should also know," continued Jellal calmly, "that I was not originally a member of Fairy Tail Guild. Erza and I are contracted to be married. It was at her request, as well as Makarov-sama's that I agreed to join the Fairy Tail Exiles and assume the position of the executive officer charged with managing the daily affairs of the Shinsengumi. As a Fae with significant personal power who is essentially unknown to Laxus and his lieutenants, I am a suitable candidate for the role. There are other reasons as well, but they don't need to be discussed at this time."

"It's alright, Levy-chan, I know you must be drowning in information right now, thanks to Jellal's dislike of letting anyone new in on anything, but you'll sort it all out." Erza gave Levy an encouraging smile, her eyes very calm and kind.

"Jellal-san does what he can to protect us," said Saitō—or rather, Gray.

All of the People present had now shed their illusions, although with Yamazaki-san and Saitō-san the changes were significantly less noticeable than with Jellal-san and Erza-san. The woman called the Titan patted Levy's shoulder and nodded to Gray-san.

"I know that, Gray, but still…"

"Where is Gajeel-san?" Levy asked, unable to contain her unease any longer.

"He is on patrol with the First Division," Gray replied at once.

"He could not be here because…" Erza hesitated, and then went on slowly: "He is your sponsor and he seems to be very protective of you. As a full-blood descendant of the Dragon clan, it would cause a significant problem if something were to go wrong and he were to intervene… We've had problems before—"

"—Though not with Gajeel—" Gray put in softly, his expression both harder and colder than usual.

"—When one of the Dragons felt concern for a close friend."

Levy studied each of them in turn, confused. She could sense old wounds under the words, but evidently nobody was going to explain. She had a sudden intuition that it had to do with "Rain Woman"—Juvia, Gajeel had called her—but it was no more than a passing thought, really. There were clearly some things that were still off-limits to her.

"Does he know I'm here, at least?" she asked Erza, with whom she felt the most comfortable of those present. Not that she was uncomfortable with Lahar-san, but his role in this ritual—or whatever it was—didn't reassure her.

"Not exactly," Erza told her. "Gajeel spoke with me yesterday on a number of matters, and he agreed that your situation needed to be resolved more formally—or rather, he agreed that I should discuss your situation with Jellal, as the Acting Master for our Guild. He knew that this was a likely outcome of my discussion with Jellal." Erza frowned, adding: "Jellal is charged with the well-being of all of the Exiles within the Shinsengumi. However he may feel, both the right and the burden of any decision of this kind is his. I judge that you are wise enough, Levy-chan, to know that it is not an enviable role."

"Enviable or not," Jellal put in, his face unreadable, "the final choice was Levy-kun's, and she has made it. We need to move on. Erza, would you show Levy your mark, please?"

Erza immediately shrugged off the light, short-sleeved jacket that she always wore and showed Levy her left shoulder. On it, Levy saw a dark blue tattoo—or something like a tattoo—of something that looked like a stylized striking bird with a barbed tail. But not quite. Levy had to restrain herself from tracing the outline, even though she was not normally a "touching" sort of person after all of her experiences at the inn.

"It's… interesting," she said aloud, trying to match Jellal's matter-of-fact tone. She felt that she managed not too badly. "Erza-san, what do you suggest—where should my mark be?"

The red-haired woman shook her head. "It's a personal decision, Levy-chan. Where do you imagine it? Such feelings are oddly reliable."

Levy shrugged uncomfortably. She wanted it somewhere that it wouldn't be noticeable. Not noticeable but also not too embarrassing to mention in front of all these men.

"Shoulder blade?" she blurted out, her eyes still on Erza, not on the stern Vice Commander.

Erza-san smiled at her. "That's not a problem, but you won't be able to see it easily yourself either."

Levy managed a smile in return. "I don't mind. I just don't want to worry about making a mistake and having people see it."

"That's reasonable, Levy-kun," said Jellal, recalling her attention. "The colour will be white unless you wish otherwise. No? Then we'll begin."

"Yes, Jellal-san." She somehow managed the unfamiliar name, but her mouth had suddenly gone dry.

"This oath will prohibit you from acting against the Exiles within the Shinsengumi," Lahar said from her left, where he was now kneeling beside Gray. "Since most of us here have judged you to be trustworthy without such an oath, I believe that you will be fine. Take your time and try to calm your mind."

"You have shown courage and determination," added Gray, unexpectedly. "There is nothing beyond your resources here."

Far more reassured than she would have expected, Levy closed her eyes and drew a deep breath, allowing the air to fill all the spaces in her lungs, expanding not just her chest but her belly as well. Then she released the breath slowly through her nose, just as Lahar-san had taught her. Her thoughts became less agitated and with a second breath she felt her pulse slow as well.

"Arigatou gozaimasu, Gray-san, Lahar-san." Levy bowed to the two men on her left. Then she bowed to Erza-san, who inclined her head in return. Finally, Levy bowed to the blue-haired man directly in front of her. "I am sorry for the wait, Vice Commander. I am ready now."

Jellal-san nodded, his expression neither welcoming nor discouraging. For just a moment, Levy wondered what it must be like to have to remain constantly aloof—always a leader and never quite a comrade. Strangely, she thought she heard a whisper in return: It is lonely, little sister. But so it must be.

[END PART I]

A/Note: Back to adventures and *definitely* fluffy stuff next time! And oh... so much going in the background, but this story is about Levy and Gajeel, don't worry. :)

#fairy tail #fanfiction #gajevy #gajevyweek #gajevy week 2017 #impracticaldemon

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nekomimiranger · 8 years ago

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Concert Chapter 6: Collapsing facades (final)

Sooo here it is. The final chapter of my Concert-Story. Sorry everyone for the slight delay but my physical condition didn’t let me do anything yesterday ^^ Im still a bit groggy but I wan’t this piece out there, as soon as possible :DD

This chapter will be a little bit different. How so? Well it is a concert and as such it features some lyrics. In fact, the songs that are featured here, are the songs that inspired me to write this story in the first place.

All credit to the songs go to the amazing Band Delain!

The amazing header again was made by the fabulous @fuzzywuzzylittletail

I put up a Youtube playlist with all featured songs so if you want to know what kind of band this is, feel free to listen to it :D

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHF3zU6UPf67xq8VixzEtiNW5sRtvXcUa

And now, without further ado, here you go!

Chapter 1: Friendship on the Brink

Chapter 2: Goodwil visit

Chapter 3: Apologies

Chapter 4: Crevasse

Chapter 5: Unexpected Encounter

Chapter 6: Collapsing facades

Collapsing facades The rapidly gathering crowed announced that the show was about to start any minute now. Judy was jumping in anticipation while the hall was filling with many mammals of every size.

“Nick, I am so excited! Chuck told me the band is extremely cool. He said their concerts always are great and loud!”

This made Nick remember something and he put something out of his pocket.

“Here, Carrots. Please put these in.” He presented her a pair of earplugs.

“Are your serious?” Judy asked in disbelief.

“Trust me, your ears are way to sensitive to the volume. Don't worry, you'll hear well enough!”

The sincerity in his voice made her give in quickly and he was right, she still could hear with them plugged in. Judy just finished her carrot juice, when the lights in the hall went off with an audible “thud”. The crowd began to cheer over the sudden darkness that announced the beginning show. The cheering grew even louder when an big AnimaliA logo was projected on the black curtain and the music started to play. Unexpected to Judy and Nick, the first instrument they heard was the piano. In addition, it sounded like playing violins supported by the humming of a choir. After a few moments the drums started to play and the logo began to pulsate to the now eminent beat that slowly grew faster. Another few seconds later, the crowd began to cheer in Ecstasy as the guitars and bass kicked in. The logo fainted and one by one, fitting to the beat, names showed up in front of an instrument. “The names of the band-member”, Nick thought.

Bruce - in front of what looked like a guitar

Charles - another guitar.

Anne - another one?

Michael – Drums

Spots – A keyboard

Charlotte – A microphone

Just as the last name faded, the music stopped and a voice was heard.

I looked at the stripes the monarch flies I hold my cries If my friend, if you can change perhaps then so can I.

After the choir grew silent the guitar started to play a silent little melody supported by the keyboard. The melody grew louder and suddenly with a huge flash of light the curtain fell to the ground revealing the band that started to kick in.

The crowd went crazy, jumping, screaming and clapping to the beat.

Nick was taken by surprise by the sudden change of lightning and had to blink a few times to see what was happening in front of them. As he tried to see through the bright flashing lights that emitted from the stage, he made out a tigress, playing a guitar like instrument and waving her head on the left side of the stage. On the opposide side, he could see a wolf with another guitar, banging his head to the beat likewise.

After a moment he could hear a female voice starting to sing to the music, just as he finally managed to see clearly again and he saw the singer right in front of them was a ..... "Bunny?" he thought amazed. Her fur was pure white except the fading red and orange flames that were painted on her ears and the combination with her scarlet red dress gave him the expression of a flash of fire as she was jumping over the stage singing with such a rich voice it made him wonder how this could come out of someone so small.

He couldnt clearly understand what she was singing about for the noise of jumping crowd was overwhelming but a few snippets went into his ear.

I walked away, and left you bleeding As I kicked the mud off my feet I lay on the ground and watched you leaving My heart fights for every beat

This passage somehow sounded familliar to Nick but he couldn't place it. All he knew was all in a sudden he had a feeling of guilt swelling up inside him. He was pulled away from this thoughts as he noticed a violent push on his arm. He looked down to Judy and saw her excited face as she was jumping up and down and screamed "A BUNNY!!!" He could hear her over the crowd and had to laugh at her excited and surprised expression. But still something just hit him besides Judys fist that keeps bumping his arm and this hurt way more.

It's not enough! How hard I try It's not enough! "Good evening Zootopia!!!" The Bunnys scream pulled Nick out of his thoughts. "Are you having a good time?"

The answer was a deafening uproar that made Nick flinch and he also saw Judy shouting her agreement as well. It seems she found a new hobbie. Who would have thought she'd be into this that much.

"I see we got many different mammals here, tonight. Pred, prey, big, small. This is perfect. I love seing everyone getting along so well."

Again the crowd cheered to that statement. Charlotte, as Nick remembered is her name, was looking around and as she was looking in his direction, he thought she locked her gaze with his. She smiled and continued her speech,

"The next one is for everyone. No matter what you are, what you do.... or what you are into."

She was grinning in Nick and Judy's direction as she said the last part.

"Spots, do you mind?" She asked the Giraffe that was playing a very high standing Keyboard and he started playing a little melody, that made the crowd go wild as they must have recognized it in an instand.

When the drums started to play to the song, giving it his final push and a fast beat, he noticed for the first time the drummer who was a... squirrel? He didnt see him at first because he sat in front of huge speaker that were connected to his small drumset, behind he was partly hidden.

Now that he saw him, Nick had to force himself not to laugh at that bizarre spectacle as the squirrel, who wore shades just like Nick's favourite pilot sunglasses, went crazy and hit the drums as fast as he can.

Charlotte was again jumping wildly to the beat of the song and only sang while dashing from one side of the stage to the other and back. The audience was still cheering ferociously, jumping to the beat and in general having a great time. The atmosphere of pure joy, the hall was filled in the second this song started made Nick think, this song must be something special to the fans and the band.

When Charlotte stopped for the refrain and only held her microphone towards the audience, even Nick got goosebumbs as the crowd began to sing the refrain in an cacophony of voices from the sharp voics of the mice to the deep trumpeting from the elephants.

We are the others, We are the cast outs, We're the outsiders But you can't hide us, We are the others, We are the cast outs You're no longer on your own If you feel mistreated, Torn and cheated, You are not alone, We are the others

The energy this song emitted was almost touchable and Nick was amazed by the way the audience and the band seemed to righteout celebrate this song. He saw a Tiger and a Goose sing that song arm in arm and he even noticed a Mouse dancing on the head of an elephant who supported the rodent with his trunk so he wont fall down. These guys really dont care what or who one another is. The normal resentments he saw in his daily life just weren't here. He understood that this song wasnt just some platitude or slogan on a bumper sticker, no, these guys LIVE it.

Nick was so lost in his thoughts by the end of the song, that he even didn't notice, he was shaking his head heavily to the rythm of the song. Judy noticed it and was grinning wildly as Nick tried to return to his cool temper he tried to uphold at any times, even at concerts.

After the end of the song, Charlotte began another speech to the audience.

"I see, you all are having a good time tonight. Well, we do. And it's amazing to see all the different animals untited."

A cheer emitted from the audience.

"I know that these topics might be hard to handle but isn't life to short to be afraid of our differences? Shouldnt we better celebrate them?"

The cheering returned louder.

"Anyway. From personal experience I know how hard it is to overcome the fears, the doubts. You are afraid to hurt someone?"

Nick noticed her longing stare toward --- the wolf(?!)

"Don't give up and give them the chance to take away this fear."

Now she was again looking directly at Nick and Judy. Was this a coincidence?

"GET THE DEVIL OUT OF ME!"

Again the keyboard started the song and shortly after the other bandmembers joined in.

Charlotte started to sing again and jumped toward the Wolf with the guitar next to her. Nick tried to remember his name.

"Charles, I think. He must be Wolfards cousin!", he realized.

I don't know what to feel I don't know what to say Oh, I don't know what to do What makes me treat you this way?

She walked across all of the stage while singing but occasionally jumped back to Charles, who was playing his guitar hard, and shared a wicked smile with him.

I'm no Jesus Christ I'm the one mistake That you love to hate I apologize It's your destiny To get the devil out of me

The song was fast paced and the audience was going wild again during the whole duration of it. When it was over, the hall erupted in loud cheers that went on for a long time.

Charlotte encouraged the crowd to cheer further by raising her paws in a wave like gesture which made them shout even louder. She visibly enjoyed this and walked to Charles who stood on her right. When she reached him, she jumped on his back without hesitation and climbed on his shoulders in one single thrust. She looked so small compared to him and the way she grabbed his head to keep herself from falling down made Nick wonder, what might be going on between them.

“Quite a nice view you got up her, big boy.” she said jokingly.

“Now. Who of you is in a relationship right now?” she asked the microphone.

A loud clamor was the answer.

“Great. And who wishes to be in a relationship but hasn't got the guts to ask the chosen one?”

The cacophony wasn't as loud but still enough to make the walls shake.

“And who of you want's to have a relationship but is too scared to start?”

Nick's eyes widened to that question.

“Well, I've been through something like that. And well, the next song was the outcome. I really felt... DEEP FROZEN!”

The giraffe started some sort of Xylophon melody and the other member kicked in soon after. Nick was anxious about the song. Her question did hurt him, it sounded as if she was talking to him and this scared him.

Charlotte started to sing, still sitting on the Wolf's shoulders,

“Misted windows Hide your empty eyes Every moment, every whisper Separates you from me”

Nick was taken aback. He looked at his breast pocket, where he saw his sunglasses.

“I’ve been screaming Won’t you let me in? Let me see a trace Of the places hidden Under your skin”

Charlotte held her microphone in front of Charle's face, who was carefully playing his instrument not to shake too much, compared to the previous songs. He then started to growl in a deep guttural voice:

“I foster illusions Of which I am afraid unknown emotions Repel your embrace I foster illusions Of which I am afraid afraid of your embrace”

Nick was on the verge of fainting when he heard this lines. Did they read his thoughts? What is this all about? Charlotte continued:

“Needles sting me When you look away And your silence Sounds like deafening screams to me I’ve been waiting Won’t you open your heart? And let me in Please let me in”

Nick was looking at Judy now. Her ears were hanging low and she bend on the face in front of them. She looked like she was feeling down. He realized, she must be thinking the same thing as Charlotte was singing in this song. He really kept his silence. He really looked away. This must have been hell for her. Nick felt horrible.

Charles repeated his lines again and when he finished, Charlotte jumped down from his shoulders and now stood in front of Judy and Nick. Nick felt like she was looking at them when she concluded the song with a verse that sounded like a plead directed to him and him alone. “I am imagining things”, he thought.

“Free your mind from doubt All you have, is now Free your mind from shame It will only bring you pain”

The song ended and the crowed fell back to its usual applause and screaming. Nick wasn't feeling like cheering though. The song did hit him harder than he expected. The feeling of guilt returned and hurt him more than ever before. He caught himself staring at Judy the whole time and took some time to realize she was looking at him in return. Her eyes looked beautiful like ever but he also saw a hint of tears, forming up. He felt like he should say something but Judy broke their eye-contact and nervously pretended to concentrate on the stage again.

He has to set things right, he thought. But not now. “I'll wait until the concert's over. I need a more private place for this.”

Nick wasn't a moron. On the contrary, he knew how to add one and one together and after the next song, he was sure, Wolfard had spoken to his cousin about Nick's “problem”. The song was a slow and kind of sad song about parting ways.

“After the guilt, they planted within me, they also want me to fear, losing Judy for good?”, he thought when he heard the beautifully sung lines,

I want to lay my head down Come closer, come closer I thought you'd turn me But you were turning around I think I'm losing you Losing you again Why didn't you stay a while To say goodbye, my friend My friend

“Well, they succeeded.” he sighed.

Nick had a hard time paying attention to his surroundings and the going on's on stage as he was lost in his thoughts again. He did not notice the surrounding audience that went crazy during the following fast paced songs, of which he didn't get anything at all, or even Judy, who managed to enjoy the show more than he did. Her ears were flapping up and down in front of his face while she was again caught by the music and let it lead her movement but he did not notice it.

“This is all a setup by Wolfard!” he finally thought which made him snap out of it just in time to get the next hit of feelings delivered as Charlotte and the tigress Anne sang a ballad together.

Standing in the shadow of our lies To hide our imperfections, Doing anything we can to hide. Eyes wide open but still blind To see what really matters, And insecurity won't go, See me in shadow.

“Yes I know I was blind! Yes I know I can't control my insecurities!” Nick was screaming inside.

And all the purples and the greens Have turned to black. And the ruins of your soul Have died, no more meaning. I wonder when you have Become so cold

The song ended and Nick was again frozen. Judy's concerned look got him out of it and he tried to fake his emotions by smiling at her and signing a fake yawn as to show her he is fine but tired. He started to move to the following songs to show her he is still there but inside he was far, very far away.

“It was a great night with you guys!” Nick heard Charlotte shouting towards the audience.

“And we are reaching the final of tonight's party but I hope you are ready for a few more songs!”

The hall was shaking by noise that followed that statement pulling Nick out of his thoughts again.

Don't you know In the end you're no stronger of hand You are no stronger of heart Don't you know In the end, we'll be tragically torn apart If we can't control the storm

Charles, who sang this part in a surprisingly clear voice compared to his guttural growl from before, was right, Nick knew. He had to control the storm inside himself or else he will lose his biggest treasure and will regret it for the rest of his life.

He made the decision anyway and finally could see what he has to do clearly in front of him. The following song encouraged him further to let go of his insecurities and act up to his true feelings.

"Would you fall, give it all Would you give it all for me? Sucker-punch the demons from my dreams

“Judy would for sure!” Nick thought, “And its time I start to do the same!” He checked his watch. When will the concert end? He wanted to talk to Judy in private. Show her what he felt. Finally committing himself to her for real.

Charlotte was about to talk again as her eyes and Nicks met again. He had the eerie feeling she knew what was going on and smiled wickedly.

“Okay everyone. We had a blast tonight and it's about time to end this party but yet I noticed that some of you, still haven't had the relief they needed.” She was staring at Nick while she said this.

“Maybe our last song will change that because it is time to end your masquerade!”

Charlotte walked to Charles looked him deep into the eyes and started to sing,

“Your face, my face You breathe, I breathe You fail, I fake I pray, I pray...”

She walked back in front of the audience, and in front of Judy and Nick,

“You lose, I lose, You bruise, I bruise I hunt, you stay My prey, My prey”

“Hunt? Prey?” Nick was completely pulled out of his thoughts as he heard this. Charlotte seemed to look at him as she continued,

“My Masquerade If you’re not afraid To take a step into my world”

“I will kill Wolfard after this.” Nick decided after this new hint at his involvement. Still, this song fit his feelings like a glove.

Charlotte was again walking to Charles and pointed at him in a prompting gesture,

“A ball, tonight Cover your eyes By touch and taste We’ll find our way”

“Yes!” Nick suddenly realized. “Yes! There must be a way. And I know it now!” He was looking down at Judy who were jumping to the fast paced beat of this song, not noticing the determined glance in Nick's eyes.

“Your secrets deep Yes I will keep I hunt, you stay My prey, my prey”

He grapped her left arm with his paws and startled her by the sudden touch. Judy looked up at him, stopping her dance as she noticed his serious stare.

“My Masquerade If you’re not afraid To take a step into my world”

Charlotte noticed that something was happening in front of her and she walked closer to her boyfriends cousins friends. A big grin formed in her face while she was still singing.

“Take of your mask the world will see The freak in you The freak in me”

Nick bowed down towards Judy and said something in a soft whisper that was swallowed by the noise that surrounded them. Judy couldn't hear it but she read it on his lips.

“Tonight we hide From judging eyes”

Their faces closed in together until, ....

“Take of your mask the world will see The freak in you The freak in me”

….they connected in a kiss that was followed by a loving embrace.

Charlotte saw the two lovebirds in their embrace and was barely able to continue to sing. She smiled widely and was jumping in excitement.

“We’ll dance until the sunrise “

Except a few other mammals that stood around Judy and Nick, no one noticed the scene that occurred at that moment.

The song ended and the crowd was cheering, clapping and still jumping around but Judy and Nick still stood there in their own little world.

This scene of the embracing couple surrounded by wildly cheering mammals must have been so obscene, that Charles was laughing hard as Charlotte noted him towards his cousins friends to show him their mission was a huge success.

Judy and Nick couldn't care less about that as tears were running down Judy's cheeks because she now finally knew that Nick's love for her was bigger than his fears.

Nick felt like a huge weight just fell off his back and he was sure, whatever the world will throw at them, whatever small-minds will say.

He will never let his bunny go.

Also, he thought,

“Maybe Rock Music isn't that bad.”

I know that the music used in this might be bad for some of you and maybe you can’t see the connection to Nick and Judy but I had to get this Idea out of my head because it was haunting me for a long time ^^

And now I need a break xD

I still hope you enjoyed it ^^

As a little extra, here are some bonus images, @fuzzywuzzylittletail did for this story :D She is so awesome, dont you agree? xD

@pyrophoricitee @meimeithewhiterabbit @cloudyloudy @justalizardking @reddoshirousagi06 @fox-comics @notactualusername @ryutolbx @yasminoliveira534 @crewefox @zootopepo @fourthdimension99 @chernwei5784 @mama-sally @emma89uk @ceizo @alexboehm55144 @nami-things @evilbrotagonist @rkaoril @chayadollomtong @ilovephinbellalove1

#zootopia #Nekomimiranger #wildehopps #fan fiction #fanfic #fan fic #neko writes

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mitchbeck · 5 years ago

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CANTLON'S CORNER: XL CENTER FUTURE FRONT AND CENTER

BY: Gerry Cantlon, Howlings HARTFORD, CT - The proverbial puck is in the state's corner. The XL Center last week officially placed the XL Center in Ned Lamont's bonding package for $27.5M per year ($55 million total) over the next two years when the Governor of Connecticut announced his State of the State address unveiling his $22.5 billion dollar state budget. The Finance committee has four sponsors of the bonding issue that placed the request on the agenda for review and those four includes some political heavyweights, House Majority leader, Matt Ritter (D-Hartford), Speaker of the House, Joe Aresimowicz (D-Berlin), Senate Majority leader, Bob Duff (D-Norwalk, Darien) and President Pro Tempore, Senator Martin Looney (D-New Haven). For CRDA Executive Director Mike Freimuth this is the culmination of an eight-month protracted process that has had many starts, stops, pauses, and plenty of acrimony to get to this point. “We have three pretty powerful people behind it, the Governor, Minority Speaker Ritter, and Rep. John Fonfara (D-Hartford, Wethersfield and the chair of the Finance committee) and several other prominent legislators. But that being said, I am cautiously optimistic this will get through. There is a long process still to go through. It’s hard to predict." The bonding issue must first pass the Finance committee, and it has, and then it must be approved by the General Assembly before officially going to the Bond Commission. The General Assembly has been very reluctant, as a whole, especially the delegations from the big cities; New Haven, Waterbury, New London, Bridgeport, and Stamford, to allocate any public money for the XL Center considering its age and poor financial performances over the years. “I think it’s a tough sell, always has been. We have the votes to pass and I think the authorization could get done in 60 days, but the bonding is gonna take a bit more time. There is a lot more questions that will be asked of us in this process as it plays out. We have to rationalize the equation to the dollars being put in and the dollars generated both with respect to taxes and to revenue generated inside the building.” The Governor controls the agenda and the priorities of the Bond Commission. Last year, a $60 million dollar proposal was never even considered. In the last seven years, proposals for renovating the XL Center started at $250 million and then was lowered to $100 million. Both proposals were quashed and never received approval during the Malloy Administration. Ritter, in an interview with WNPR, seemed confident that in the next 60 days this long-stalled project will come to life. “I think it’s an issue of getting this done quickly. That’s the biggest issue because if it languishes for four-or-five more years, you won’t a building that can be used anymore,” He said. “We have to get this done very, very quickly, and I think we will.” A Fact...The project is already five years behind schedule The number still falls short of the overall goal of the new Lower Bowl Strategy ($100 million) that is needed desperately to overhaul the aging building as the marketplace passes Hartford by everyday regionally and nationally. New buildings are being built while older ones are getting necessary retro-fits they need to remain viable, marketplace entertainment assets. “We have to get this thing started because once we do we have to then look to renegotiate contracts with UCONN and MSG because the revenue stream will change. The whole equation hinges on a whole set of factors, just one or two, hence the complexity involved which adroit political and financial maneuvering." The XL Center loses roughly $1.5 to $2 million per year with the state taking care of the shortfall. The CRDA is set to unveil a fifth new study that was commissioned from CSL International about the economic viability of the XL Center in the marketplace. The Lamont Administration insisted on it in order to seek support for the bonding and requiring public-private financing to fill in the other half of the economic equation to get the ball moving on a project four-to-five years overdue from when it should have started. But that raises the question that asks if the study has put the CRDA into a position to start making pitches in boardrooms in the state, the region, or nationally? “It's still too early until we release the study next Thursday, presenting it fully before the (CRDA) board. Part of doing all of this, what will premium seating be and other price points. I think we'll have better concessions and better revenue and that will factor in those future negotiations with UCONN and MSG. All of this will be simultaneous with Big East basketball coming back,” said Freimuth. This comes amid new financial numbers at the XL Center which are a mixed bag with team operators in the building in the red, while concessions and the all-important per cap from food and beverage sales are in the black. The numbers are quite shocking in some cases. At the end of the fiscal year, the Hartford Wolf Pack is drawing only about 2,800 fans. UCONN hockey is faring worse with a meager 2,100 fans per game in December. “Those were December numbers. The January numbers were much better of a month and trending upwards. Both teams are above those numbers right now. We hope with UCONN hockey and the Wolf Pack continue playing well those numbers will go up. Playoffs traditionally don’t draw well because you don’t know what the calendar is, but you hope a good run helps out." The AHL attendance figures list put the Wolf Pack at 25th out of the league's 31 teams at 3,828 per game. Basketball in their last year in the AAC conference, before they returned to the Big East, were not drawing very well either. The men’s side of the coin had two big games with Wichita State and Baylor. Hockey operations are running even with the budget, but the XL Center as a whole as the third quarter was set to begin was operating with a $275K budget shortfall or unfavorable to the budget in the accounting parlance. These numbers will accompany any proposal to a potential private partnership rise another question of if it could sink any possibility before you enter the foyer or elevator of any corporate office? “It’s a bit too early for that. We'll be releasing the study and then we can examine the best direction to move forward on is, to the rebuild of the arena. There is going to be public dollars however way you slice it. How we get there? That is what we're working on and why we had the study done.” The atrium portion of the building, owned by Northland Corporation, remains at a stalemate after nearly three years of negotiation. The chasm in pricing has not been bridged with the Northland, the property's titleholder. In the last go-round, Northland was seeking as much $10 million to the proposed $4.5 proffered by the CRDA in their last proposal that was rejected. Eminent domain has hung in the air like an impending summer thunderstorm cloud and everyone still wonders if the CRDA will pull the trigger on the move this year or is it still being held in abeyance at the request of the Governor, Speaker of the House Aresimowicz, and Minority Leader, Len Fasano (R-North Haven)? ”Nobody wants to do it, but we have been begged off on it. It has been a topic of conversation there have been multiple discussions. Everybody is aware the atrium is critical to this whole process in the rebuild of the building. We're gonna have to come to some kind of a solution to that,“ said Freimuth. If the bond package passes as currently written will the atrium have to be resolved shortly thereafter? “Absolutely, at that point to go forward the issue will have to be addressed.” In that WNPR interview Chris Davis (R-East Windsor, Ellington) offered an alternative that has been aired in this column and other venues making a smaller arena near the Dunkin’ Donuts ballpark to create a sports and entertainment zone on the beginning of the North End of Hartford. The current XL Center location and setup is not something Davis, a bond committee member, would support. “We keep hearing that there are talks of potentially doing private partnerships, but I fear that we’d be throwing this money at it, basically putting the cart before the horse.” Is this feasible, in any form of preliminary discussions, a Plan B, or is it a pie in the sky theory? “Nothing at all,” said Freimuth succinctly. Part of the backdrop in the state sports landscape that UCONN athletics is running a $42 million deficit. Then a public announcement of the gargantuan financial sinkhole that is Rentschler Field that is bleeding enormous financial red ink into the nearby Connecticut River at the clip of one million dollars by the conclusion of this fiscal year. Its largest loss since the stadium opened in 2003. The realization of that stand-alone issue and its long term viability UCONN football will be now as enter an independent Division I schedule with an average attendance of just 9,675 a game in a 40,000 seat stadium could have an adverse effect on the XL Center future discussions. Toss in the disaster of the rebuild of Dillon Stadium that diverted time and resources last summer and where red ink oozes from underneath the brand new field and stadium One positive note is the installation of a long-overdue chiller system seems to be on target this summer after a year delay. The RFP (Request For Proposal) packages have gone out and they received responses and a bid is expected to be selected next month and contract signed to begin work sometime time in May. “Right now, they’re out on the street. They’re due to be turned in in about two weeks or so. Bob Saint (CRDA Construction Manager) has been hard at work on it. We’re relocating the chillers based on a new building concept. They’re not going into the place where the current chillers are. We hope to get it done this summer.” Should the Wolf Pack have a long Calder Cup playoff run into May and several other scheduled events at the XL Center, the work won’t start until events so as to not impact either the event or the installation project. “We’re gonna wait till the hockey season ends and the way the Wolf Pack playing, it could be a longer-season and we have the Cirque de Soleil Ice Show in June and several to still be announced concerts They’re too many things to move around. Better to wait until everything is done.” Will the new chiller system be hooked up to the existing system and disconnecting the current outdated system? “We’re gonna hook it up as soon as we can. We’re gonna transition to it we’re not going cold turkey on the old system. We'll do it when the new system is ready. There is going to be a transition period to work things out. When we get the chiller system put into shape and ready to go will do it. To be honest, they’re not too many more rubber bands left that we can put on the chiller system that we have now. We’re running pretty thin on the line as it now, we gotta get this thing done.”A Read the full article

#ATO #CalderCup #CHL #CRDA #GerryCantlon #HartfordWolfPack #Howlings #MikeFreimuth #MSG #RentschlerField #UConn #WHA #XLCenter

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